Surface and Destroy: The Submarine Gun War in the Pacific

10 Survivors

10 Survivors The German U-boat skipper Reinhard Hardegen once observed, “We were waging war against merchant ships, not against the crews, and there is a great difference.”1 No doubt many submarine commanders agreed, but there was also a great difference between not actively trying to kill survivors and doing something to assist them. Acts of compassion tended to be selective and fickle. Commander Otto Kretschmer of the U-99 once became so haunted by the sight of a single man on a raft that on the following day he backtracked his submarine until he found the man. His crew provided the survivor with warm clothes and brandy, then transferred him to a lifeboat stocked with food and water.2 Such singular attention to an enemy’s survival, however, was rare. In both the Atlantic and the Pacific most survivors of submarine attacks had to rely on being rescued by their compatriots or sheer good fortune to stay alive. Even rescue by friendly ships could be in doubt, since those traveling in convoy were routinely instructed not to stop to help torpedoed merchantmen.3 In the Atlantic theater over 30,000 British merchant mariners perished during the war, a higher fatality rate than any of the armed services. The odds of survival tended to improve the longer the war lasted, because of innovations such as protective clothing and life jackets with lights. Much depended on how long a ship took to sink and the conditions of the sea; a slow-sinking ship on a calm sea during daylight in warm latitudes provided the optimal situation for survival. At least the last condition was much more likely to prevail in the South Pacific than in the North Atlantic, but while one might be less likely to die from hypothermia in tropical waters, the prob- 132 Surface and Destroy lems of thirst and sharks were accentuated. By one estimate, 116,000 seamen in the Japanese merchant marine were killed or wounded, with 70,000 casualties the result of U.S. submarine actions.4 Since submarines typically went deep to avoid counterattacks after firing their torpedoes, their crews tended to remain oblivious to the death and human misery left in their wake. Charles Andrews, skipper of the USS Gurnard, claimed never to have seen a Japanese survivor.5 As with many other modes of mechanized twentiethcentury warfare, a distant torpedo attack made killing easier and more impersonal. In contrast, gun attacks and boarding parties frequently brought submariners face-to-face with their victims; how they reacted in such situations illustrates a range of attitudes as well as the vagaries of naval warfare. More than was true of other warships, the lack of space on submarines and their vulnerability on the surface provided two obvious disincentives for rescue operations.Admiral Chester Nimitz, in a statement to the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, emphasized the lack of room for passengers, while rescue operations could cause “undue additional hazard” and interfere with a submarine’s mission.6 German submariners made a similar case for not assisting survivors, emphasizing that they faced the added dangers posed by the Allies’ effective use of radar and long-range aircraft patrols.7 Arguments about lack of space were in fact somewhat overstated , since submariners frequently managed to cram considerable numbers on board when rescuing comrades and allies. For example, after the USS Sealion and the USS Pampanito sank two Japanese transports in a convoy from Singapore in September 1944, the crews discovered that most of the passengers were Allied prisoners of war. The men of the Pampanito managed to pull seventy-three Australian and British survivors from the water and add them to the eightynine crew members already on board. The Pampanito’s skipper, Paul Edward Summers, noted the problem of habitability with so many men on board, but they were able to berth most in the after-torpedo room. Saving these men would be remembered as one of the Pampanito ’s most illustrious actions of the war. Summoned to the scene, the Survivors 133 Sealion, Barb, and Queenfish assisted in the rescue, picking up over 100 more survivors despite the threat of an impending typhoon.8 The evacuation of soldiers and civilians from behind enemy lines also involved transporting considerable numbers of people by submarine. In April 1942, for instance, the USS Searaven evacuated thirty-one Australian aviators from Timor.9 The USS Gato under Bob...