Piercing the Horizon. Sunny Tsiao
Merry Christmas, which I know
is better here than in Sasebo!
Next Christmas, and the ones to come,
I hope all hands will spend at home.
Let’s hope and pray that ne’er again
must we spend Christmas killing men.
That peace will reign beyond our time,
no guns compete with Christmas chimes.
Let’s offer thanks for where we are,
for Christmas time not spent at war,
and honor those who gave their lives,
while we head home toward our wives.
Commander J. M. McDowell, U.S. Navy
Commanding Officer USS Ex-HIJMS I-400
After refueling at Eniwetok, they embarked on the last leg of the journey to Hawaii. On January 6, 1946, they arrived at Oahu and entered Pearl Harbor. As they glided quietly by the sunken hull of the USS Arizona, the crew solemnly dipped the US and Japanese ensigns.
There was immediate curiosity about the colossal aircraft-carrying submarines. But the interest waned considerably after some initial investigation. The twin-hull design was unconventional and impressive, but the Americans did not find the Sen Toku nearly as advanced as they had thought when they first received word of them. Paine, however, was not ready to give up. He thought that the subs were a marvelous feat of maritime engineering. He prepared a highly detailed, classified briefing for his commanders and briefed anyone who would listen. He urged the Navy to refit the submarine so its diving and submerged performance could be evaluated. Paine relished the thought of taking her down and seeing how well she would perform at operational depth.
But after finishing their initial assessment, naval intelligence was no longer interested. After they got all the information they needed, the I-400 was towed out to sea and scuttled unceremoniously with four torpedoes. (The other two boats met the same fate.)7 The Cold War was now on the horizon, and the Navy knew that the Soviet Union would be just as curious about the Japanese secret weapon as the US had been. As far as the Americans were concerned, the wartime relics were best left at the bottom of the ocean.
On their long voyage home, Tom Paine had told McDowell that it would be his last submarine command. He had decided not to reenlist. He could have stayed in the Navy, however, and in fact, had a few different options available. After his fifth war patrol on the Pompon, he had applied for postgraduate studies in naval architecture at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey; he was selected as an alternate for the assignment. At the time, he wrote in his service résumé that, “I am interested in the regular Navy as a career.”8 On his discharge papers, McDowell recommended that Paine be promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. While he would have been in line for his own command, he told McDowell that peacetime training would probably be a big letdown. McDowell understood; he did not disagree.9
Writing to his parents from Oahu while recovering from a reaction to his second cholera shot, Paine said that he was ready to come home. He wanted to go back to school and learn about all the new technologies that had come out of the war. “When I get back to the [S]tates, I’m going to decide, in a general way, the things I want to start at after the war. … It will probably involve more school, perhaps at Cal Tech? We’ll see.”10
In February, he sailed on the USS Boarfish (SS-327) from Pearl Harbor to San Diego. From there, he went home to Seal Beach. On March 24, 1946, Tom Paine was honorably discharged from active military service. During his two years in the Pacific, he had earned the Submarine Combat Insignia with Two Stars and a Pacific Fleet Commendation Ribbon with Combat Clasp for Performance in Action. For the next fifteen years, he remained on inactive duty and served in the Naval Submarine Reserve on the Scientific Reserve Units of San Francisco, Schenectady, and Boston. On December 1, 1961, Lieutenant Paine ended his seven years, two months, and twenty-two days of service in the United States Navy.11
Trained as a secretary, Barbara Helen Taunton Pearse had joined the Royal Australian Air Force when she was just eighteen. The future Mrs. Paine grew up in a working-class Australian family. Her mother, Marguerite Jones Pearse, had died at the age of forty. Her father, Henry William Taunton Pearse, sent what little money he could from working days and nights in horrible conditions as a lighthouse keeper on barren Rottnest Island, a longtime penal colony off the coast of Western Australia.
She had spent most of the war supporting the New Guinea campaign as a plane spotter and ground controller.12 Barbara and Tom had met in Perth in 1943 when Paine was first stationed in Fremantle. But he had been unable to go back to Australia after the Pompon left the base on her fourth war patrol in February 1944. When he reached Guam after the surrender, he asked naval command there to help him find a way back to Perth so they could marry. But McDowell told him that all US nonessential operations in Australia had been halted. He wrote Barbara the disappointing news: she would have to find her own way to America. He wrote home to his parents that “Barbara and I are determined to wait forever if need be.”13
Following the war, there was an enormous waiting list of Australian war brides who were left to anxiously apply and make their way to the United States. After being discharged from the RAAF on October 2, 1945, she waited a year and a half before her name was finally called. With the money she had saved from the war, Barbara Pearse caught a Matson Line steamer to America in the fall of 1946. With the polished samurai sword he had buccaneered on the I-400, Tom and Barbara Paine cut their wedding cake on a sunny southern California Tuesday afternoon, October 1, 1946, in a traditional naval ceremony at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.14
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.—Arthur C. Clarke
The panorama along the winding curves of the Pacific Coast Highway stretched on for miles. Going from Seal Beach north to Palo Alto finally gave him a chance to relax, gather his thoughts, and move on. The war that he had fought on the other side of the ocean was behind him. Like others who had endured and lived, he was still readjusting to life back in the States. The young were coming home to a changed postwar America filled with more hope, opportunity, and optimism than ever before. Tom Paine was ready for the challenge.
Returning from the Pacific, he applied to several graduate schools around the country: Brown, Columbia, MIT, and in-state at nearby Cal Tech and the University of California at Berkeley. He wanted to really understand engineering, but thought also of architecture. Although his undergraduate grades at Brown had only been fair, his wartime service record and recommendations had been sterling. It was enough to gain him admission to Stanford University. In the fall of 1946, he enrolled in the School of Engineering and entered the mining and metallurgy program. In October, Barbara joined him. They moved into a one-room apartment in an old Palo Alto hospital near the campus. With an influx of postwar students enrolling on the GI bill, the school had converted it to a dormitory for childless, veteran couples.
Highly technical courses such as Mining, Geology, Industrial Process, and Pyrometry filled his days. He liked these subjects, and received mostly As and Bs. Others, like Russian, were not quite as appealing. Although it was a difficult language to learn (he received a C), he recalled thinking that knowing some Russian might turn out to be useful in the world of international commerce after the war.1
He immediately began work on the Navy’s early nuclear reactor program as part of his research. In the years following World War II, the US Navy was in a tight race with Great Britain and the Soviet Union to develop the first wholly contained nuclear reactor. A reactor sealed inside a pressure vessel could theoretically power a ship or submarine for decades. Such a vessel would be able to stay at sea for years without refueling. The security