Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [189]
A key factor in submarine operations, as in so much else, was the flood of information gathered by intelligence, through enemy signals decrypted at the magnificent Naval Joint Intelligence Center on Hawaii—“the Salt Mines,” or “the Zoo,” as it was known to its 1,800 staff. By 1944, working seven days a week, in three shifts around the clock, JICPOA was monitoring and translating a high proportion of key Japanese naval and military signal traffic. Most movements of enemy warships and merchantmen were known at Pearl within hours, and were passed to American boats within range. The Japanese submarine I-29 provided a spectacular example of target tracking. In July 1944, U.S. signals intelligence located I-29, on the last leg of a long passage from Germany carrying scientific instruments, moving from Singapore through the South China Sea. Three American submarines took up ambush positions, and I-29 was dispatched by Sawfish. “It was an impersonal war533,” wrote Cmdr. Pete Galantin, skipper of Halibut. “Naval warfare had evolved to the point that sailors no longer saw their enemy as people; they saw only the steel or aluminum vehicles in which their enemy sailed or flew, trying to bring their own weapons to bear…In war at sea, only rarely does one see the human flotsam marking the scene of battle: the oil-soaked survivor, the burned seaman, the scalded boiler tender, the drowned soldier.”
After the surge as a salvo of torpedoes left the tubes, there was an agonising wait, an officer monitoring a stopwatch, until crews heard either the thud of distant explosions, the horrible sounds of a ship breaking up underwater, or the silence which indicated failure. By 1944, American submarines were sinking a ship for every ten torpedoes they fired. Old compressed-air types travelled at forty-five knots. Their Mark 18 electric successors were slower, but emitted no telltale streams of bubbles. Occasionally, the firing submarine experienced the nightmare of a “hot run,” a live torpedo jammed in its tube, which demanded immense delicacy to unload.
When an attack went right, it was extraordinary how much havoc a single boat could wreak. For instance, on 8 January 1945, Barb’s Cmdr. Eugene “Lucky” Fluckey tracked a big convoy for five hours in the north Formosa Strait. After destroying several cargo ships in his first attack, he hastened preparations for a second: “Can feel aggressiveness surging through my veins, since the escorts are more scared than we are,” wrote Fluckey. “…Destroyer suddenly turned towards us!…Aggressiveness evaporated. Assumed deep submergence at 140 feet.” Barb finally surfaced to launch a second salvo, with Fluckey on the bridge: “Three hits observed534, followed by a stupendous earth-shaking eruption. This far surpassed Hollywood, and was one of the biggest explosions of the war. The rarefaction following the first pressure wave was breathtaking. A high vacuum resulted in the boat. Personnel in the control room said they felt as if they were being sucked up the hatch.” A little cluster of men on the bridge gazed at the carnage they had wreaked upon the Japanese: “We alternately gawked and ducked.”
After an attack, a submarine either fled at full speed or, if in danger of being pinpointed by escorts, went deep. A destroyer could move at least fifteen knots faster than a submarine using its diesels on the surface, more against a submerged vessel dependent on electric motors. Submarine captains were told: never try to fight it out on the surface. A single manually trained deck gun was woefully inadequate against almost any Japanese