Twenty yards off the bow, the sea was breaking white over coral. The submarine’s own patrol report noted that the fathometer had ceased to record. The boat was the USS Harder, and she had driven her bow up onto a reef off a Japanese-held island in the Western Carolines in daylight, with rifle fire coming out of the palms. She was holding herself there to take one man off a beach.
That line about the fathometer was typed at sea and read later at a desk. War patrol reports traveled up the chain to be endorsed, graded, and filed, and almost everything now known about April 1st, 1944, survives because a submarine captain had to account in writing for what he had done with his boat that day. He accounted for it in detail, giving depths, bearings, times, and names. The record on the American side of that reef is unusually full.
On the other side of it, the record is close to empty. The island was Woleai, an atoll of twenty-two low coral islands lying about four hundred miles south of Guam. On the largest of them, the Japanese had cleared the ground end to end and laid a runway a little over three thousand feet long, with a taxiway running off it, a seaplane base, and a small harbor alongside. Around six thousand men were stationed there.
The strip was the only reason the atoll appeared on an American chart at all, and it was the only reason a garrison sat on a place with almost no fresh water. Anti-aircraft guns had been dug in around the field, and they worked. On the morning of April 1st, they hit a Hellcat going after a bomber on the ground, and the pilot, Ensign John Galvin of Fighting Squadron 8 off the carrier Bunker Hill, went over the side at low altitude. He struck the tail of his own aircraft on the way out, which broke something in one side of his body and wrecked his equipment at the same time.
His life vest would not inflate. His raft would not either. He threw both away and went into a sea running fifteen feet under a twenty-knot wind, wearing a flight suit whose bladders were filling with water. The current did not carry him out into open water, where a lifeguard submarine could have reached him easily.
It carried him in over the reef and put him on the sand of a small island, a short walk from the airstrip that had just shot him down. That leaves the question of why a fleet submarine was standing off that beach at all. The arrangement that put her there was seven months old and had started as a favor. In August of 1943, Rear Admiral Charles Pownall, who commanded a carrier strike group, telephoned Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood at the Pacific Submarine Force and asked whether he could borrow a boat.
Lockwood came over with his operations officer, Captain Richard Voge, and found the room full of pilots. What the carrier admiral wanted was a boat lying on the surface near the target through the whole of an air strike, to pick up anyone who went into the water. Lockwood raised the obvious objections, and he was right to raise them. A boat on the surface in the middle of an air battle could be bombed by the enemy, shot at by her own side, or shelled from the beach.
Pownall did not answer with arithmetic. He argued that men flew differently when they knew somebody was waiting out there for them. On that basis, rather than on any calculation of hulls against pilots, the thing was agreed. The first two attempts covered strikes on Marcus and Tarawa that September.
Both boats went out, waited, and came home with nothing to do. Wake Island on the 6th and 7th of October was where it stopped being theoretical. The Skate arrived early to scout the island and send back weather, watched Japanese bombers come and go, and then, on the morning of the strike, did something that runs against everything a submarine crew is trained to do. She stayed on the surface with enemy aircraft overhead.
A submerged boat cannot see a parachute. A plane went down at about a quarter to six, and she started for it, and a Zero came in and strafed her. The captain cleared the bridge and took her under, and it was only below that anyone realized Lieutenant Willis Maxson had been hit. She was bombed and strafed again that day and rescued nobody.
The next morning, at twenty-eight minutes past eleven, three aviators were reported in the water, and she got two of them. Over the following three days, she found four more. Maxson died of his wounds on the 8th. Six men off the water, one man out of the crew.
The Lexington, which had lost the pilots, sent the Skate a dispatch offering her anything aboard the carrier for the asking, adding that if it were too big to carry away, they would cut it up into small parts. The Skate’s commanding officer received a Navy Cross, and an officer and two enlisted men received Silver Stars for going into the water under fire. What came after Wake was the unglamorous part, and it is the part that actually decided what happened at Woleai six months later. A rubber raft rides inches above the water and is made of a material that gives radar almost nothing to work with.
Finding one is close to impossible unless the man in it can announce himself. So the raft got a hand-crank transmitter weighing thirty to forty pounds, which raised its aerial on a balloon or a kite and could be heard anywhere from thirty to three hundred miles out depending on the weather. They got corner reflectors, two-foot squares of wire mesh bent to a right angle so that radar had a hard surface to bounce off. They got mirrors and pieces of metal and anything else that would throw light at a passing aircraft.
Then came the harder problem, which was how a man falling out of the sky tells a submarine where he is without telling the island the same thing. Encrypting a position takes time a crashing pilot does not have. During the planning for the Marshalls in January of 1944, somebody solved it by giving a set of navigation points code names taken from cartoon characters. A pilot transmitted in the clear, in plain English, a distance and a bearing from a named point.
The transmission meant nothing to anyone without the chart. The Japanese identified what the calls were for soon enough and started making them, sending submarines off toward empty water. So the naming rule was tightened, and every reference point from then on had to contain the letter L, which is the sound a native Japanese speaker finds hardest to produce in English. None of this ran smoothly while it was being worked out.
On an earlier mission, the Tarpon reached her station off Nauru a full day late through a misreading of her orders, sat on the surface watching a formation of heavy bombers pass overhead, realized only after returning to Pearl Harbor that the bombers had been Japanese, and wrote it up anyway, recording that her crew had been on the surface cheering them on. The strike that put Galvin on the beach was the tail end of a four-day operation. Task Force 58 had worked over Palau on the 30th and 31st of March, gone on to Yap and Ulithi, and then put 150 tons of bombs onto Woleai on April 1st. Forty-three American aircraft were lost across the whole operation from all causes.
Of the forty-four aircrew who went into the water at Palau, twenty-six came back. Galvin was on the sand with aircraft circling over him, which is how the Harder found him without difficulty. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Samuel Dealey, brought her in to somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 yards and ran out of water. The reef began roughly where he needed to be standing.
He pointed the bow at it and put her against it. He then held her there by working both screws against the surf, because the thing he could not allow was for the boat to slew broadside and go onto the coral along her whole length. Word came up from the forward torpedo room that the bottom was scraping. Three men volunteered to go in, and Lieutenant Samuel Logan, a cook named Thomason, and a machinist’s mate named Francis Ryan went over the side with a rubber boat and a towline, and the rubber boat had no paddles in it.
They swam at 1,200 yards, and it took them half an hour. Partway through, the Harder began backing off to try a different approach. Galvin, watching from the beach, saw the submarine turn away. He had been in the water most of the morning by then, and he thought he was being left.
He went down on the sand. Dealey came back to the first position and started again. By the time the swimmers reached him, Galvin had a raft of his own. An aircraft had dropped him one, and he had climbed into it and was being pushed away from the men coming to get him.
They caught the raft, put him into their own boat, and the Harder began hauling the line back in. A Curtis floatplane then landed in the lagoon to help, and its pilot had in fact been sent to look for a different pilot from the same squadron and had mistaken Galvin for him. Taxiing across to the raft, he ran over the towline and cut it. One of the Harder’s crew had to swim back out to the boat and bring a second line in through the surf.
All of it happened with rifle fire coming steadily out of the tree line. The report records bullets passing over the bridge close enough to be worth writing down. The fire did not stop for the duration, and it hit nobody. How long the whole business took is not settled.
One detailed account gives an hour and nineteen minutes from start to finish. Another puts it at closer to two hours. The patrol report is the clock everyone is working from, and the difference is probably a question of where a given writer began counting. There is a larger hole in the record than that, and it sits on the other side of the reef.
What the Japanese on that beach did is known in some detail because Americans a few hundred yards away wrote it down. They fired for well over an hour at a submarine that had run herself aground on their own coral and could not maneuver. What any of them made of it is recorded nowhere that has surfaced. No garrison diary from Woleai describing that afternoon has come to light in the accessible files.
The officer commanding those guns had just watched a fleet submarine of the United States Navy accept a stranding inside his range to recover one pilot. Whatever conclusion he drew, he kept it. Or it burned, or nobody ever wrote it down. The side that won kept the paperwork.
The value of the arrangement did eventually get measured, and the measurement is more useful than any of the anecdotes. In April of 1945, somebody went back through seventy-four lifeguard missions flown during 1944 and sorted them by whether the submarine had fighter cover overhead. Where the boats were escorted, sixty calls for help produced fifty-one rescues. Where they were not, seventy-five calls produced seven.
That gap is the whole of what happened at Woleai. Galvin came off that beach because Navy fighters were over the tree line the entire time, and because a submarine could therefore sit motionless in shallow water for well over an hour and survive it. The same arithmetic appeared at Truk at the end of the same month. Thirty-five American airmen went down over that atoll during a two-day strike, and the Tang, with fighters strafing the beaches for her, took twenty-two of them off the water.
The other thirteen had come down overland or inside the lagoon where no submarine was ever going to reach them. The Army Air Force, unconvinced until then that a boat could find a ditched Liberator at all, began asking for lifeguard submarines across the whole Pacific. A submarine’s patrol was scored on tonnage sunk, and none of this counted toward it. The rest of Harder’s patrol went the way her captain’s patrols usually went.
She sank the destroyer Ikazuchi on the 13th of April, sank a 7,000-ton freighter near Woleai four days later, surfaced off the same atoll on the 20th to shell the garrison with her four-inch gun, and reached Fremantle on the 3rd of May with Galvin still aboard, thirty-three days after taking him off the sand. She was lost with all hands in the South China Sea that August. The technique kept changing after her. Off Guam on the 13th of June, the Stingray found a pilot adrift so close inshore that the shore batteries shifted onto her as she came up, so she dived, put her periscope out for him to hold, and towed him clear underwater.
The Finback did the same thing off Haha Jima that September, holding seven and a half miles out to stay outside the guns, then going in submerged and coming up beneath a man in a raft. By the end of the war, American submarines had taken 504 airmen out of the Pacific from every service that flew. One boat, the Tigrone, accounted for thirty-one of them by herself. The strip on Woleai took its last aircraft, a flight in from Truk, in October of 1944.
After that, the garrison had a runway and nothing to put on it. Of the 6,426 men counted there when the war reached them, one in four was alive to be counted at the end. The airmen were counted the other way, one at a time, in patrol reports as each of them came over the side.