Strike of the Sailfish: Two Sister Submarines and the Sinking of a Japanese Aircraft Carrier

by Stephen L. Moore

During the early morning hours of December 4, 1943, Lieutenant Commander Bob Ward and his submarine USS Sailfish relentlessly stalked a Japanese carrier convoy. Provided their course via U.S. intelligence Ultra reports, Sailfish approached the enemy fleet in the midst of a howling typhoon. Battling monstrous seas and high winds, Ward conned his boat to a firing position.

No targets could be seen through the periscope. Sailfish’s firing data was obtained by radar ranges called out by surface-search radar operators Bill Dillon and Frank Dieterich. Dillon, a teenager who hailed from Pennsylvania, was making his third war patrol. Today, Dillon at age 99 is the last surviving crewman who participated in the sinking of the carrier Chuyo. It was only after World War II that Dillon would sadly learn the carrier his submarine destroyed had been carrying POW survivors from Sailfish’s sister submarine USS Sculpin.

Within Sailfish’s crowded conning tower, Dillon calmly called out critical target range information on the greenish pips appearing on his radar screen. Shortly after midnight, Sailfish blindly fired a spread of torpedoes toward the largest pip on Dillon’s screen. At least one hit was registered, but the submarine was forced deep to evade enemy depth-charging attacks. More than an hour later, skipper Ward brought his boat back to the surface to continue stalking the carrier convoy.

In this excerpt from Strike of the Sailfish, Bill Dillon and his shipmates are making their second torpedo attack approach on the Japanese carrier force.

It was 0158 on December 4, when Sailfish returned to the surface. Bob Ward stood on the bridge, gripping a railing with one hand as colossal waves towered above his boat. It was less than two hours after he had fired four torpedoes at the Japanese warship convoy. Still unaware of what he had hit, the skipper was intent on running down the cripple and finishing it off.

The diesels roared to life and Sailfish charged in the direction in which the convoy had last been seen on radar. For the time being, the PPI scope in the conning tower presided over by Frank Dieterich and Bill Dillon was blank.

Ward ran up the enemy’s track for half an hour. On the bridge, binoculars proved to be useless in the dark. Blinding rain soaked the men and howling winds made footing treacherous. “Unable to make much speed without shipping black water,” Ward noted.

At 0230, Dieterich announced, “Radar contact! Range eight thousand four hundred yards.” The target pip showed a bearing of 310 degrees True, just 10 degrees off the course the convoy had been steering when first encountered hours earlier.

Ward called his tracking party back to the control room and urged his engineers to make their best speed toward the contact. Ten minutes later, Dieterich and Dillon noted that the target on their radar appeared to be circling. The pip was small, but Ward found it hard to believe that a small destroyer could be picked up four and three-quarter miles away in this kind of weather. Sailfish eased in closer as the radar pip was monitored closely. “At times the pip has an edge on it, giving a momentary indication of another target very close to the one we are tracking,” Ward logged.

Two hours passed as Sailfish steadily narrowed the range to the targets. Bud Richardson, as Ward’s assistant approach officer, found the process of properly tracking the enemy ships to be “a peculiarly difficult process.” The Japanese ships presented erratic courses, and one destroyer moved about the group in circles, presenting a number of challenges. During that time, the contacts ceased circling and settled onto a northwesterly course. Their speed appeared to track at between 2 to 5 knots. “Radar pip now looks like we may have two targets very close together,” Ward logged at 0430.

By 0550, morning twilight began to improve the visibility. Although the rain had stopped, water was still spilling over the bridge from tall waves, some of it cascading down through the hatch. The targets being tracked were now down to 3,500 yards and their speed was varying between 1 and 3 knots. Ward felt he must fire soon, as the skies were growing lighter. He decided he would fire three bow tubes on the surface and then attack again by periscope, making a quick reload during the approach.

“Open the forward doors,” Ward ordered. The word was quickly relayed to Mendel’s forward room.

Pat Murphy’s final TDC solution showed the target vessel to be making only 1 knot. With the range down to 3,200 yards, Ward ordered a slight spread on his fish, and settings at ten feet—two feet shallower than her original spread against the convoy. The gyros read 002 degrees, with an estimated track of 148 degrees starboard.

“Fire one!”

Bud Pike relayed the word to the forward room. Twelve seconds later, Tube No. 2 was fired, followed another twelve seconds later by Tube No. 3. The sea conditions were rough, but each Mark 14 was set to run on high speed. Signalman Troy Ray counted down the runs on his stopwatch, expecting intercepts in about two minutes.

At 0557, Ward observed and heard two torpedo hits. “First hit looked like a momentary puff of fire,” he wrote. “Second hit looked like and sounded on the bridge like a battleship firing a broadside—even with the locomotive rumble so characteristic of sixteen-inch shells.” Ward commenced swinging Sailfish to bring the stern tubes to bear. He and fellow officers Dutch Wetmore and Shorty Evans enjoyed “quite a thrill” in seeing their torpedoes explode against an enemy ship for the first time.

In the engine room, John Good had been counting down the seconds until they heard a boom. “It was a solid hit!” he recalled. “We grinned in the knowledge that we had done our jobs well.”

Topside, things were becoming dangerous for the men on the bridge. Brilliant red star shells streaked skyward and streams of heavy antiaircraft tracers cut through the predawn scud. Ward estimated at least a dozen enemy guns were firing toward the direction from which they believed the torpedoes had been launched. Clearly the Japanese had no clear view of Sailfish. To him, his enemy “didn’t seem to know where we were because the shooting was directed everyplace but towards us.”

Chief Lester Bayles, a Sailfish plank owner, was standing duty in the control room near the air manifold. He was amazed at the boldness of his new captain. “I could see daylight coming down through the conning tower hatch. I had never seen that before in a surface attack,” Bayles remembered. “I knew this skipper was different.”

For the first few minutes of firing, the bright shells were more of a visual hindrance than a hazard. The intense flashes ruined the vision of Ward and his topside comrades. A minute later, the situation changed. The destroyer had likely picked up Sailfish on radar, as red tracers shells began streaking toward her. By 0600, Ward found “plenty of them” zipping overhead dangerously close.

“They made quite a show of it,” Ward recalled. “I believe that there was a major ship there that fired a full salvo broadside, because we got the terrific broadside salvo noise and flash, and the rumble of heavy shells in the air.”

In the potentially deadly situation, Ward found humor in the moment. As the heavy shells thundered overhead, Lieutenant (jg) Wetmore ducked behind the thin steel bridge railing to take cover. Out of pure instinct, the skipper ducked down behind Wetmore, a useless effort that provided many laughs later in the Sailfish wardroom.

It was time to play it safe and get below.

Ahoogah! Ahoogah!

Two raucous blasts of the diving Klaxon were followed immediately by Wetmore shouting, “Dive! Dive!” The three lookouts, skipper Ward, Wetmore, and Shorty Evans dropped through the conning tower hatch as Sailfish began to nose underwater.

In the forward torpedo room, Mendel’s crew was already in the process of using their block and tackle to swing three more tor­pedoes into the empty tubes. Three minutes after diving, radioman Bob Johnson reported the first of four depth charges exploding. Thankfully, they were distant, as the enemy warships apparently had no lock on Sailfish.

“From veteran submariners, we learned that this depth-charging was a snap,” motor machinist John Good remembered. The next half hour of silent running was still unnerving for some of his newer ship­mates. In the forward engine room, Good noted that Chief Montie Walkup had in tow a green teenager who seemed to take comfort in remaining on the shirttails of this veteran engineer. “Fear plays strangely upon the emotions of man,” Good later wrote. “Another fellow busied himself eating anything and everything he could get in the mess hall during the depth- charge attacks.”

Ward remained at periscope depth and continued driving in toward the convoy.

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Author Stephen L. Moore takes readers inside the nine-hour duel, narrating the action aboard both the Sailfish and the doomed carrier, where the American POWs fight against all odds to save their own lives before the ship goes down. Employing a wealth of new information, including long-lost survivors’ accounts, fresh interviews with the last of the sub’s crew, and official patrol reports, Strike of the Sailfish is the thrilling story of this strange chapter of naval history.

You can purchase Strike of the Sailfish here.

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