Death at a Distance: The Loss of the Legendary USS Harder

By Michael Sturma

Only seven U.S. submariners earned the Medal of Honor in World War II. Sam Dealey, the USS Harder's commander, was one of them. His honor was awarded posthumously after the entire crew was lost off Bataan during a depth-charge attack in August 1944 by a Japanese convoy. The Harder's fighting spirit is legendary, and its record of sinking a total of eighteen enemy ships (with a tonnage in excess of 55,000) made Dealey one of the top five submarine skippers in the war. During a single patrol his crew sank five enemy destroyers in five short-range torpedo attacks —an unprecedented feat. In addition, the Harder played important roles in rescue missions, extracting secret operatives deep in enemy territory and saving downed pilots. Drawing on previously untapped sources, Michael Sturma, an Australian teaching at Murdoch University, details several daring missions, one that involved the heroic Australian commando Bill Jinkins, and puts the Harder's action in the context of the overall Pacific campaign. In do so, the author adds not only significant information to the Harder's story but also provides a fresh perspective on the submarine war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781612514321

Book preview

Death at a Distance

Death at a Distance

The Loss of the Legendary USS Harder

Michael Sturma

NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS

Annapolis, Maryland

The latest edition of this work has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2006 by Michael Sturma

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-61251-432-1 (eBook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Sturma, Michael, 1950–

Death at a distance : the loss of the legendary USS Harder / Michael Sturma.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Harder (Submarine) 2. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations—Submarine. 3. World War, 1939-1945—Naval operations, American. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Pacific Area. I. Title.

D783.5.H3S78 2006

940.54’510973—dc22

2005037971

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

14131211109876987654321

First printing

To the memory of R. A. Rudy Sturma

CONTENTS

List of Maps

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Presumed Lost

1Retreating Asiatic Fleet

2Construction

3Sam Dealey

4Unfriendly Fire

5Mush

6Pearl

7Lifeguard Duty

8Ralph Christie

9Fremantle

10Python

11Special Mission

12Departure

13Exmouth Gulf

14Attack on the Minatsuki

15Attack on the Hayanami

16The Pickup

17Attack on the Tanikaze

18Reconnaissance

19Battle of the Philippine Sea

20Darwin

21Admiral on Board

22More Commandos for Submarines

23Apotheosis

24Wolf Pack

25Last Attack

26Medal of Honor

27War’s End

Notes

Bibliography

Index

MAPS

1Western Australia

2Borneo

3Philippine Islands

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my long-time American buddies and naval enthusiasts, Ben Mark and Ken Davis, for listening to my initial ideas. My Australian and British mates Gavin Daly and Mike Durey helped keep up my morale throughout the process of research and writing. I am especially grateful to my colleague at Murdoch University, Mike Durey, for regular advice and for courageously offering to read the manuscript.

I thank Charles Hinman and Nancy Richards at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum at Pearl Harbor for their guidance and hospitality. Sue Cox and Norman O’Neill offered assistance at the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Fremantle. Alan Powell of Charles Darwin University generously made available research material used for the preparation of his book War by Stealth. My wife, Ying, provided encouragement and excellent IT support.

Death at a Distance

Prologue

PRESUMED LOST

The news sent a shudder through the submarine service. Sam Dealey and the entire crew of the USS Harder were dead. In official parlance, they were overdue, presumed lost. Much was left to be presumed when a submarine disappeared without a trace and left only a residue of false hopes and speculation about its fate. In the case of the Harder the evidence appeared unequivocal.

The Harder’s last days and hours were well documented. On 24 August 1944 the submarine, part of a wolf pack, waited for prey off the west coast of Luzon at Dasol Bay in the Philippines, in company with the USS Hake. At 6:47 AM the Hake spotted the Harder’s periscope and saw a Japanese vessel bearing down on it. A short time later the Hake heard a series of exploding depth charges. No one heard from the Harder again.

When Rear Adm. Ralph Christie heard the news back in Fremantle, Western Australia, he described it in his diary as the most ghastly, tragic news we could possibly receive. Only weeks earlier he had hosted Sam Dealey at his home and discussed his future in the service. Christie later spoke at a commemoration ceremony for the Harder crew on the submarine tender USS Otus. This is one, he told his audience, we can’t bear. He added that he had believed Sam Dealey indestructible.¹

The same sense of shock reverberated through the entire submarine force. When the USS Jack returned to Fremantle from patrol in late September 1944, the loss of the Harder was all that submariners talked about. One of the Jack’s officers, James Calvert, professes: I can still remember where I was standing and how I felt when I heard this news. It came as the worst shock of the war. Not only had I lost good friends and men that I admired, but our finest, our most aggressive, our most battle worthy submarine had fallen to the Japanese. I could not believe it.²

In a letter dated 3 October 1944, Gen. Douglas MacArthur sent his own commiserations to Admiral Christie: "I am deeply grieved at the loss of Dealey and the Harder. Theirs was a great record that will long be remembered. I hope against hope that we may recover them."³

A short time earlier Dealey and Harder had appeared indestructible, as Christie put it. The Harder’s fifth war patrol had become one of the most legendary of World War II. In that single patrol the Harder had successfully carried out a dangerous secret mission and had claimed the destruction of five Japanese destroyers. Some called it the most brilliant patrol of the war.

Following the fifth patrol Dealey’s fellow submarine commanders presented him with a special plaque. It featured a woodcut of a sinking Japanese destroyer and described Dealey as the Destroyer Killer. Within the competitive fraternity of U.S. submarine skippers, such enthusiastic acknowledgment was rare. The presentation to Dealey had some of the usual comic air associated with submariner get togethers, but no one doubted that the Harder’s commander had achieved genuine hero status. In 1945 Dealey posthumously received a Congressional Medal of Honor, one of only seven conferred to World War II submariners.

While Admiral Christie was instrumental in pressing Dealey’s case for the Medal of Honor, at least some in the submarine service blamed him for the Harder’s loss. Christie was personally responsible for extending the Harder’s fifth patrol in dubious circumstances. Had he needlessly contributed to the fatigue of Dealey and his crew? Should he have known that Dealey was not fit to undertake another stressful assignment so soon after the rigors of his fifth patrol? While such questions can never be definitively answered, speculation and debate on the loss of the Harder continue to this day.

1

RETREATING ASIATIC FLEET

From a Fremantle artillery emplacement, with 6-inch guns loaded and ready to fire, a group of shirtless Australians in slouch hats watched a large craft approach. It looked like a surfaced submarine. When they saw through their binoculars an American flag flying from the conning tower, they jumped up and cheered. ¹

The first U.S. submarines arrived at Fremantle on 3 March 1942. For the remote area on the Western Australian coast, closer to Asia than to Sydney, the arrival of Americans was most welcome. Australia had followed Britain into the war in 1939, so the locals were familiar with the dangers and privations of war well before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Germans sank the Australian light cruiser Sydney off the Western Australian coast on 19 November 1941. All 650 crew members disappeared without a trace. Still, Japan’s entry into the war brought a new and palpable vulnerability. The fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 marked a psychological turning point as much as a military failure. Nearly twenty thousand Australians were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner of war.

America and its allies suffered yet another disaster only days before the first submarines reached Fremantle, in what came to be known as the Battle of the Java Sea. Nearing Sunda Strait not long before midnight on 28 February 1942, the heavy cruiser USS Houston, along with the Australian light cruiser Perth, named after Western Australia’s capital city, stumbled into the middle of a Japanese amphibious invasion force. For the first time, an American and an Australian ship fought together side by side. The results were not auspicious.

In the melee that followed, the Japanese heavy cruiser Mogami fired what one writer calls perhaps the most effective torpedo salvo of the war.² Unfortunately for the Japanese, the torpedoes missed their intended target, the Houston, and went on to destroy five Japanese vessels, including the flagship of Gen. Hitoshi Imamura, who was directing the landing! Even with this unexpected help, the Houston and Perth were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. Short of fuel and ammunition, they fought valiantly, but both the Perth and Houston went down with most of their crews. In 1943 a bronze plaque would be placed in Perth’s Town Hall to commemorate the loss.³

In 1942, as one U.S. officer put it, Australia’s western coast lay as wide open as a dead clamshell.⁴ The same day the first U.S. submarines reached Fremantle, Japanese Zero fighters attacked the town of Broome on the northwestern coast. Flying from bases in Timor, nine planes roared in low over Roebuck Bay at 9:30 in the morning. As they destroyed twenty-three Dutch flying boats and American bombers based at the local aerodrome, a pall of thick black smoke covered Broome’s harbor. As many as one hundred people were killed.⁵

Thousands of refugees had already arrived in Perth fleeing Singapore, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. Shirley Joice, a Western Australian who had been living in Malaya with her new husband, had fled alone to Singapore when the Japanese invasion began and left Singapore by ship two days before Christmas. She lived in dread of being torpedoed at night by a Japanese submarine, a fear accentuated when they heard that a freighter they had passed at Bali had been sunk a short time later in this fashion. It would be another three months before Joice learned that her husband, a mining engineer, was still alive.⁶

A correspondent described Perth as full of stories of escape and shipwreck. Reflecting the views of many, the same writer reported, The West is out on a limb and may be left there.⁷ The fact that Australia’s prime minister, John Curtin, was a Western Australian and the elected representative for Fremantle in the national legislature at least gave some hope that the West would not be abandoned. As the nation’s wartime leader from October 1941, Curtin was expected to be sympathetic to the concerns of his constituents.

Others prepared for the terrifying possibility of Japanese occupation. Frank and Ettie Pearce lived with their three daughters at 65 Mount Street in a fashionable section of Perth. Near the top of the sloping street, where it intersected with Cliff Street, their front door was literally a stone’s throw from lush King’s Park. To the rear of the house the Swan River spread out like a majestic lake. The Pearces’ son had already enlisted, after begging them to sign the forms allowing him to join the army at age seventeen. More recently, they had heard stories of nurses and other women raped and tortured by the invading Japanese. One day Frank Pearce gathered the family and told them that he had bought a gun. His wife and daughters gave him permission to kill them rather than risk capture if the Japanese arrived.⁸

The arrival of Americans appeared to offer salvation. In Fremantle, Doris Mollie Gilbride thought that the arrival of the Americans was wonderful. So did her husband. The day the Japanese bombed Darwin, their son had come home from school and told them to get into the air raid shelter.⁹ Perth had numerous false alarms in the form of warning sirens and compulsory blackouts. There were sightings of Japanese submarines in Western Australian waters and even rumors that Japanese subs loitered off Cottesloe beach to listen to the dance music coming from shore.¹⁰ Many people, especially those with small children, evacuated the coast to go inland, where they felt protected. Greater resources would be directed for the defense of the Fremantle-Perth region, which was an important submarine base.

For their part, the Americans felt overwhelmed by the hospitality they received. Corwin Mendenhall, an officer on the USS Sculpin, recalled, They couldn’t do enough for us.¹¹ Thomas Parks, having experienced two months of war on the USS Sailfish, declared, coming to Fremantle and Perth was like entering Heaven.¹² Many of the visiting Americans were soon adopting Australian slang and pronunciations.

On liberty from the submarine USS Sargo soon after it arrived in early March, Bart Bartholomew went to the small bar of the Adelphi Hotel. They didn’t have Coca Cola to mix with his rum, but the barmaid, Carol, wouldn’t have let him pay for his drinks anyway. At one point she asked him if he had sunk any Japanese ships. He lied and said a few—then added that he couldn’t talk about it.¹³

In truth, the Sargo was nearly sunk itself—by an Australian airplane. On 4 March, just a day after the first U.S. subs reached Fremantle, a RAAF Lockheed Hudson dropped a bomb off the Sargo’s port side. The submarine lookouts spotted the plane approaching from about five miles out at 2:38 in the afternoon. The skipper ordered a dive, but in heavy seas the submarine struggled to submerge. The first bomb rolled the submarine on its side and threw the stern out of the water. As the sub reached a depth of fifty feet, another bomb exploded over it amidships. From the Australian pilot’s vantage point, the explosion hurled water twenty feet into the air. The submarine appeared to wallow and then sink out of sight, leaving large patches of oil on the surface. Inside the submarine, lightbulbs exploded and the sub began to dive out of control. The crew managed to level it off before they reached crush depth. The Sargo’s conning tower and both periscopes were severely damaged, and the explosion blew out three of the heads. When the submarine reached Fremantle, her overstressed skipper, Tyrell Dwight Jacobs, asked to be relieved of command.¹⁴ All of this Bartholomew kept to himself as he talked to the barmaid at the Adelphi Hotel.

The Australian pilot who dropped the bombs had not been informed of the Sargo’s course for Fremantle. This would be one of many incidents of American submarines almost destroyed by friendly fire. In this case, the plane was searching for a Japanese submarine that the American destroyer the USS Whipple had reported to be in the area. The Whipple reached Fremantle the same day as the Sargo, its decks crammed with survivors from two ships sunk by the Japanese.¹⁵ Although the arrival of the Americans brought new optimism to the Australians in Perth, the morale of the U.S. submarine service was low. To say that their efforts against the Japanese were ineffectual seems almost charitable. In the first two months of the war, the Asiatic Fleet had lost three of its twenty-eight submarines and only managed to sink a half-dozen Japanese freighters in return. The disheartened submarine crews often referred to themselves as the RAF, short for retreating Asiatic Fleet.¹⁶

U.S. submarines had been on the run since the Japanese attacked the Philippines. When Japanese bombers attacked the Manila waterfront in December 1941, they killed fourteen hundred people and sank the submarine USS Sealion, which was being overhauled at Cavite Naval Yard. To prevent the Sealion from falling into Japanese hands, the Americans finished the sub off by detonating three scuttling charges on board on Christmas Day. Commissioned only two years earlier, the Sealion became the first U.S. submarine loss of the war.¹⁷ The bombing of Cavite Naval Yard also meant that there was no longer a major repair facility for submarines in the Far East. With the loss of the Philippines came a loss of spare parts for submarines and most of their torpedoes.

The U.S. submarine command moved from Manila to the Dutch base at Surabaya on the island of Java. Once the Japanese began pounding Surabaya with air attacks in early February 1942, the submarine command began looking for a base in Australia. Darwin and Exmouth Gulf were considered and quickly rejected as possible headquarters; the decision was made to move to Fremantle. By 10 March 1942, ten American submarines had made the retreat from Java to Fremantle. Eventually twenty-five would arrive.

Even at Fremantle, though, the Americans were kept on the run. Fears of another Pearl Harbor–style attack prompted orders for part of the submarine fleet to move farther south to Albany on 15 March. The submariners tied up at Albany’s deepwater jetty and took over the local quarantine station as a barracks. On leave from the submarine tender USS Holland, Homer White convinced some of the nursing sisters from Albany Regional Hospital to make their first glass of iced tea.¹⁸

In Fremantle, the local authorities were unprepared for the rowdiness that often characterized servicemen on leave. The town quickly earned a reputation as the worst police posting in the state. At any one time there were only two policemen on patrol, doing their rounds on foot or by bicycle. In July 1942 the Fremantle force was augmented by a special squad to deal with vice. The constables spent much of their time confronting young females found hanging around the streets at night or in the company of servicemen and suspected of spreading venereal disease.¹⁹

Police also faced the wrath of drunken soldiers. In Fremantle’s High Street, site of most of the town’s pubs, brawls became common enough for police to invent an imaginary decoration called the High Street Star. Rosa Townsend, the newlywed wife of one of the local policemen, helped him recover from a bad bashing. Her husband, however, seemed as intent on keeping an eye on his new wife as arresting potential miscreants. When Rosa took a job selling tickets at the local Hoyts picture theater, her husband beat her if he saw her talking too long to American patrons.²⁰

In the vacuum created by absent Australian men fighting overseas, the American submariners quickly made an impression on Western Australian women. Within a couple of months of the arrival of the Americans, a local doctor was writing to the American Consulate in Perth about his young wife’s infatuation with a submarine officer from the USS Swordfish. He was desperate to find out if the U.S. officer was married, presumably to nip a budding romance.²¹

Many other stories of romance, threatened marriages and sexual misconduct circulated. One of the most audacious originated from the same street where the Pearce family had once contemplated suicide. According to the story in a local tabloid, the Mirror, women at a party in Mount Street dipped their naked breasts in champagne. One young woman had to be rushed to the hospital after having her nipple bitten by an overly keen sailor. Girl’s Cry of Pain Halts a Mount Street Party, proclaimed the headline. A gullible public created even more evocative imaginary headlines such as, Tit Bit in Mount Street and Thanks for the Mammary.²² The story remains an urban myth today.

Literally within days of arriving some Americans found Australian sweethearts and began making marriage plans. The Sculpin arrived at Fremantle on 3 March. When the submarine departed next, on 13 March, already a few of the crew stated their intention to marry Australian women when they returned from that war patrol. By the middle of the year, a number of the Sculpin’s crew had indeed married, and several more were engaged.²³

Even though the Harder had not been built yet, the early months of the Pacific war began a ripple of consequences for the submarine and its commander as ironic as they would be fatal. On the night of 19 February 1942 the destroyer USS Stewart was damaged during action in Bandung Strait, as American and Dutch ships tried to break up a Japanese invasion of Bali. Originally built in Philadelphia after World War I, the Stewart was completed in September 1920. The ship was 302 feet long and weighed slightly more than 1,500 tons. With all four boilers on line it could make 26 knots. The Stewart was placed in dry-dock at Surabaya on 21 February 1942. The already damaged Stewart was further incapacitated in dry dock. Local workers did not position the ship properly on the keel blocks, and when the dock was pumped dry the ship rolled to port at almost a 40-degree angle. The port propeller and shaft were broken.

As the Japanese bombing of Surabaya intensified, it became obvious that the Stewart could not be repaired before the evacuation. The Stewart’s torpedo officer, Francis E. Clark, received orders to strip the ship of anything useful and then blow it up. The final order to destroy the ship came through on 1 March. Clark and a party of four men found the dry dock slowly sinking as the result of a Japanese bomb dropped earlier that morning. The ship’s engine room was already gutted. They set their demolition charges on the ship and retreated for Tjilatjap.²⁴

Only later in October 1945 did the U.S. occupation forces at the Kure-Hiroshima area discover the fate of the Stewart. The Japanese had managed to salvage the ship after the capture of Surabaya and completed repairs in September 1943. They renamed it Patrol Boat No. 102. This same ship would eventually be involved in the sinking of the Harder.²⁵

2

CONSTRUCTION

The Harder (SS 257) was a submarine literally forged in war. The Electric Boat Company laid the keel a week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It would be another nine months before the submarine’s launch at Groton, Connecticut, on 19 August 1942. The navy officially commissioned the Harder on 2 December 1942, exactly a year and a day after the laying of the keel.

The Electric Boat Company was one of five building yards that constructed submarines for the U.S. Navy during World War II. Electric Boat had ways for constructing up to twenty-one submarines at any one time. At its wartime peak the company employed 12,500 men and women. After the keel was laid, submarines would usually spend about ten months on the ways before being launched, and then another three months in the fitting-out basin. Electric Boat’s record for building a submarine from keel to commissioning was 317 days. The submarines built by the navy at Portsmouth were generally thought to have more cutting edge technology, but the consensus was that Electric Boat produced the better finished craft.¹

The Harder was one of the seventy-seven Gato-class boats built. The plates of Gato submarines