Piercing the Horizon. Sunny Tsiao

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      By 8:56, they had made their way directly broadside of the convoy and were in good position to take a shot. But they nearly lost their chance. Only two minutes earlier, with no warning, the Pompon had suddenly lost power. Paine’s quick action on the bow planes stabilized the nose and brought the boat back into the correct firing position. With crewmen Paul Stolpman and Whitey Bevill working the forward torpedoes, he was able to confirm the forward tubes ready just in time. Gimber immediately gave orders to fire. Three torpedoes shot out from the bow tubes toward the convoy 2,300 yards out. Ninety seconds later, the transport ship was gone. Gimber wrote in the mission log: “Bulls eye! One hit amid ship and he literally disintegrated, breaking in half and sinking almost immediately. Numerous breaking up noises were heard; in addition, two other explosions which were probably the other torpedoes on the beach.” After the war, Japanese shipping logs revealed that the captain of this vessel had requested to go around the western side of Japan because he believed that there was too much danger from US submarines on the Pacific side. His request had been denied.¹¹

      After confirming the kill, Gimber had Paine quickly put the boat into a steep dive and level out at a depth of 100 feet. This standard tactic was usually enough to get the submarine out of immediate danger. But to their bewilderment, a Japanese aircraft quickly found them. Three surface ships zeroed in; two more soon joined the hunt and boxed in the Pompon. The team methodically worked the submarine over, helped in part by the Pompon’s own intermittently noisy portside propeller. The Japanese dropped some sixty depth charges over the next eight hours. Gimber had to use all of his experience to keep his men alive. He repeatedly dove the boat deeper and deeper to evade the charges that rattled the men and the machine. The crew listened for the dreaded sound of water bursting through the superstructure as they sweated it out for the next nine and a half hours, life preservers ready. The deadly game of cat-and-mouse continued all day and through nightfall. The hunters finally gave up when the Pompon was able to play dead. It then quietly slipped away with its batteries nearly drained as nighttime befell the waters.

      Naval Intelligence later revealed that the very effective pursuit by the Japanese was one of the first uses in the war of a new magnetic airborne detector. Called the Jikitanchiki, it could locate a submarine hiding as deep as five hundred feet. Paine’s boat nearly became its first victim. The first depth charge dropped by the aircraft had pinned the sub down as ships on the surface took up positions to box her in. The precise operation was almost successful. They were able to survive partly because sonar conditions happened to be poor that day.¹²

      Weeks then passed without any hint of danger. They spent many long hours waiting for the enemy. Paine found that the high anxiety of encountering the enemy could change, in a moment’s time, to the exhilarating feeling of freely sailing the open seas. Between the times of intense action punctuated by sheer terror were long periods of calm and restful serenity.

      At the communications console, he would tune the boat’s radio to the BBC Overseas Far Eastern broadcast. There, he searched the dials to find Dame Vera Lynn poignantly singing “There’ll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover.” Turning on the intercom, the alluring, strong voice of “The Force’s Sweetheart” would echo through the bowels of their steely home-at-sea. He would stop what he was doing, close his eyes, and listen to old favorites like “We’ll Meet Again” play over and over. “Not only did it relieve the boredom, it gave us something to hope for,” he reflected long after the war.¹³

      On August 12, things changed in a hurry. The Pompon had made its way north just off Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Okhotsk. Lookouts had spotted three Japanese ships and their escorts earlier in the day steaming southward along the coast. With visibility very poor, Gimber had decided to wait for the cover of darkness to launch a more risky, but potentially more effective, close-range surface night attack.

      By evening the sea was glassy and calm. Shortly after nine they broke the surface and quietly approached the convoy. Paine began softly calling out the bow angles at 6,000 yards. At twenty minutes to midnight, Gimber ordered three torpedoes out of their tubes in rapid succession. Two lit up the night, striking the number one ship, an 8,000-ton oil tanker that was soon on fire. She turned hard to port to launch another spread of three torpedoes at the number three ship, a 4,000-ton cargo transport later identified as the Mayachi Maru. It sustained two hits, broke in half, and went to the bottom.

      Paine heard a loud, sharp slap at the bow and knew exactly what had happened. One of the torpedoes had gone erratic, made a circular run, and acquired the Pompon as its target. There was not much they could do but keep track of their relative positions. “For the next two or three minutes, I was extremely busy with our own noble experiment in a nip and tuck race until it passed our starboard quarter on a 30 degree track well inside of 200 yards.”¹⁴

      The torpedo meandered unpredictably about the boat like a 3,300-pound blind fish and disappeared. This kind of frightening calamity was not all that uncommon. The US had problems with its torpedoes throughout the war, most notably with the Mark 14 steam turbine model that was standard issue on the fleet submarines. Its technology lagged far behind the Japanese during the war. Paine would later tell New York Times journalist Thomas Buckley that being sunk by his boat’s own torpedo would have been “most disappointing.”¹⁵

      The submarine had, by then, been cruising for some time with a leaky sea valve on her number three sanitation tank. Gimber was hoping that repairs could wait until they reached base back at Fremantle or Midway. But the leak worsened and they could not wait any longer. Given an all clear at the stroke of midnight on August 10, Paine went over the side. Earlier in the day, he had raised his hand when Gimber asked for a volunteer. Wearing a diving suit, mask, and air hose with light only from a bulky waterproof flashlight, he dove deep to seal the valve by hand.

      The Sea of Okhotsk was twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, foreboding, and numbing. Underneath the steel hull was total darkness. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. Without word, the rest of the crew waited nervously, their submarine unable to dive as Paine finished sealing the valve. Forty minutes later, he came up to the surface, exhausted but giving a “thumbs-up.” For this meritorious action, he would receive the Commendation Ribbon from the commander in chief of the Pacific, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Gimber also recommended him as “Qualified in Submarines” to the chief of naval personnel. The qualification was granted by the commander of Submarine Division 43 and entered into his service record on September 25, 1944.¹⁶

      To finish out its seventh war patrol in January 1945, the Pompon made its way to the shipping lanes of the Yellow Sea. On watch one morning as the gunnery officer, he noticed an escort aircraft acting strangely off the boat’s port bow. As the “friendly” got closer, he noticed the sudden gleam of “red meatballs” on the wings of the aircraft as it started its dive. What he thought was an escort was actually a lone Japanese fighter (a Nakajima Ki-43 Oscar) patrolling the coastline. After a couple of passes that left machine-gun slugs spattered across the conning tower, it flew off into the clouds. But their haste to escape the surprise attack caused the boat to go into a dive with a conning tower hatch stuck open. Seawater poured in and the boat was heavily flooded. Several men struggled to secure the faulty hatch. Listing heavily to one side, the Pompon limped to Midway Island thirteen days later, its deck almost awash. The base commander was astounded. As they stood on the dock talking, he told Paine that it was probably the most damaged submarine that had ever made it back to Midway.¹⁷ Of the harrowing escape, Paine would write, “The vague realization that it would be a long, long war, with death never very far away gripped my imagination. Here we were, this was all for real; we were swept up in incalculable violence.”¹⁸

      On July 21, 1945, they rendezvoused with the destroyer USS Herndon (DD-638) and headed to Guam to close out the ninth—and what would turn out to be the final—patrol of the war. Not knowing when the war СКАЧАТЬ