Piercing the Horizon. Sunny Tsiao
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 would be over, Paine and the others still clung to the hope that they might return home to San Francisco and see “the Golden Gate in ’48.” By July, however, an unmistakable quietness had swept across the sea. Japanese shipping had dwindled and soon stopped entirely. Marine forces had completed their costly island-hopping campaign toward the Japanese homeland. Preparations for Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese homeland planned for the spring of 1946, were already well underway by then. The relentless bombing of the once sacred and untouchable Japanese soil by B-29s continued—then suddenly stopped, followed by word that the Empire of Japan had surrendered unconditionally.
The fighting may have been over, but for Paine, more exploits and a historical encounter awaited him in the Pacific. Three weeks before General Douglas MacArthur accepted the surrender of Japan on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor, Paine received orders discharging him from the his duties on the Pompon. The Navy had him stay behind on Guam, however. His job was to record the time, place, and circumstance of every US submarine sunk by the Japanese. The paperwork was all quite necessary. There was still much to do to clean up after the war.
In the days following, he began sifting through the Japanese records with the help of a translator. After reviewing just a few files, he concluded that the written records were of very little use. Throughout the war, the IJN had greatly exaggerated its successes. The Japanese had documented some five hundred sinkings, but only fifty-two Allied boats were known to have been lost. Part of his duty was to set the record straight. He also debriefed the captured American prisoners of war who were now being released from camps in Japan. He recalled that it was impossible to predict who or how many would show on any given day, or where they would come from. For many days, no one came. Then five or six would show up.
The US Navy had to prepare, as quickly as possible, a list of all known survivors from submarines that were lost in action. All personnel had to be accounted for, and the Navy wanted to know how each boat was lost. Paine wrote of this deeply sobering experience and his silent rage over the atrocities committed at the hands of the enemy as told to him by the survivors of the lost boats. Many friends and former shipmates were among the missing, including seven of his thirty-five classmates and several instructors from Annapolis.19
Among them was his best friend, Ben Phelps, who had introduced him to the future Barbara Paine when they were all stationed in Perth. He, Phelps, and Bill Mendenhall had become inseparable after they arrived in the Pacific. They went everywhere together. Just before the Pompon left on her fifth war patrol, Mendenhall had transferred to the USS Lagarto (SS-371). Before embarking, he had asked Paine to hold on to his dress white uniform and keep it clean until he got back. It would stay at the bottom of Paine’s duffel bag for the rest of the war. Neither Mendenhall nor Phelps made it off the Lagarto when she went down in action