In May 1939, the U.S. Navy submarine Squalus sank in a diving accident. Half the crew died; the rest were rescued, in part due to their sister submarine Sculpin. Squalus, refloated and refurbished, was recommissioned as Sailfish. In December 1943, Sailfish became the first U.S. Navy submarine to sink a Japanese aircraft carrier.
The Misadventures of Two Submarines
The book opens with Squalus’s sinking. A test dive accident flooded the aft half of the boat, drowning the men there. Mr. Moore describes the rescue, including the role Sculpin played in finding Squalus and marking the wreck site.The wartime careers of Squalus and Sailfish follow. Mr. Moore shows how the two subs were like kids on a teeter-totter. When one was up, the other was down. Up until November 1943, Sailfish was down, a hard-luck boat. Some considered it jinxed by its past, nicknaming it “Squalfish.” Regardless of the reason, it had a lackluster career until Robert Ward became skipper. He commanded Sailfish on its tenth war patrol, determined to break the jinx.
Sculpin, by contrast, had a productive war. Then in November 1943, through a combination of bad luck and bad decisions by its captain, it was trapped and sunk. The survivors were taken to Truk, a Japanese-controlled atoll in the Pacific Ocean. After brutal questioning, the survivors were split between two of three carriers heading to Japan together. One was Chuyo.
U.S. signal intelligence detected the carriers’ departure. Submarine Command, Pacific sent several submarines after the ships. Only Sailfish caught up with it. The climax of the book follows Sailfish’s attack on the convoy, which culminated in sinking Chuyo.
Sailfish attacked in a typhoon, amid adverse conditions for both sides. Mr. Moore describes the tenacity of Sailfish’s skipper. It took three attacks to sink Chuyo. In the first two, he never saw Chuyo. Attacking at night by radar, he shot at the biggest target. Both times he hit it; both times, he was driven deep by Japanese destroyers. Both times he evaded the destroyers and reloaded torpedo tubes to finally sink it on the third try.
“Strike of the Sailfish” uses accounts by the participants to tell a story that reads like an adventure novel. It happened, though. It is an exciting and true story of World War II in the Pacific.
