Surface and Destroy: The Submarine Gun War in the Pacific

2 Trouble with Trawlers

2 Trouble with Trawlers The survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor included Thomas Patrick McGrath, a crew member of the battleship USS California, which was sunk by two torpedoes. During the attack, an enraged McGrath had fired a pistol at Japanese dive-bombers from the California’s signal bridge. McGrath later declared, “I want to go out on the first ship that’s going out after those bastards.”1 Even though he had no submarine training, McGrath joined the crew of the USS Pompano when it sailed on its first war patrol on 18 December 1941. At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Pompano, along with the Pollack and the Plunger, was returning from Mare Island after undergoing refit. The submarines were about 125 miles northeast of Pearl when they received word of the attack. On the Pompano , skipper Lewis Parks immediately began pumping water into the trim tanks, previously purged for more surface speed. Parks’s intuition that they might have to dive materialized all too quickly when several Japanese planes, returning to their carriers, appeared, and the Pompano struggled to get underwater as the planes strafed it with machine-gun bullets.2 The Pompano’s initial war patrol, among the first extended submarine patrols of the war from Pearl Harbor, carried out reconnaissance off the Marshall Islands. The patrol proved largely a frustrating round of engine failures and dud torpedoes; the submarine was credited with sinking one Japanese naval auxiliary.3 On 20 April 1942 the Pompano departed for its second war patrol. On the evening of 24 May, cruising on the surface east of Formosa (today Taiwan), the crew picked up a contact. Parks ordered his executive 26 Surface and Destroy The Southwest Pacific officer, Slade Cutter, to man a .50-caliber machine gun mounted aft. The target proved to be a fishing boat, and when the submarine drew within about 300 yards, Parks gave the order to open fire. After the initial burst of bullets, one of the fishing-boat crew held up a lantern to illuminate a Japanese flag, apparently believing the attack to be a case of mistaken identity. He was quickly proved wrong as Parks ordered his men, “Let them have it.” A fresh burst of bullets riddled the craft, setting it on fire. Slade Cutter, once he realized they were firing on a fishing boat, felt uneasy about the attack. When he later said as much to Parks, he found his skipper unrepentant. “Don’t worry about that,” Parks told Trouble with Trawlers 27 him. “They are feeding them [the enemy], and they are fair game.”4 To Parks’s mind, unrestricted warfare meant that the enemy could be killed without mercy. Less than two weeks later the Pompano sank another trawler, again leaving no survivors. Despite his unease about attacking fishing boats, Slade Cutter was certainly not among the fainthearted. At the Naval Academy, where he graduated with the class of 1935, he had gained a reputation as a tough competitor—both as a heavyweight boxer and AllAmerican football star. He was over six feet tall and weighed in at some 200 pounds; one sport journalist described his physique as “mastodonic.”5 He would long be remembered for kicking the winning field goal at the 1934 Army-Navy game. Having completed training at the Submarine School in June 1938, he went on to become one of the most highly respected and decorated men in the submarine service. As described by Lew Parks in later years, Cutter also possessed “moral courage.”6 After serving under Parks on the Pompano for three years, Cutter was detached in November 1942 and sent to the new-construction submarine Seahorse at the Mare Island Navy Yard near San Francisco . Following a frustrating first patrol on the Seahorse as executive officer under Donald McGregor, Cutter assumed command of the submarine on 30 September 1943. Assigned a patrol area in the East China Sea, Cutter determined to improve on the Seahorse’s lackluster performance under McGregor. The Seahorse encountered its first Japanese vessel on 29 October 1943, a fishing trawler estimated at 150 tons. Cutter professed a reluctance to attack the trawler, and later claimed he and his officers spent hours debating whether it was worth sinking. Among the most vocal was Cutter’s old friend Lieutenant Ralph F. Pleatman, who had served with him on the Pompano. Pleatman insisted they had...