SUBMARINE:By Comdr. Edward L. Beach, U. S. N.
Japanese Navy Pinned Hopes on Great Carrier,But the Archerfish Had Some Other Ideas
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I m IKILLER SHlP—Here is the submarine that broke the heart of the Japanese navy—the U. S. S.
! Archerfish, powerful giant killer of the seas. Her thrilling story begins in today’s installment!of “Submarine.” —U. S. Navy Photo, j
i From the size of the pip, the range
> and the speed which the first few
1 hasty moments of plotting show
r this target to be making, there is. no doubt whatever in the minds
1 of any of the crew of Archerfish
• that she is really on to something
J big. The word passes almost in-stantaneously throughout the
’ ship, “Something big and fast!”With the ease and sureness of
j long practice, tracking stationsare manned. On the first word i
‘ of radar contact the officer of thedeck had turned the bow of
! Archerfish directly toward the i• contact, and had stopped. This;’ gave the plotting party an imme-
! diate indication of the direction‘of target movement. As soon as• this had been determined Archer-!
: fish roared off in hot pursuit, not;[ directly at the target, but on such)
’ a course that she might have an :I opportunity of getting ahead of' him.
Full Speed, 18 Knots.[ | Within minutes after the initialcontact Archerfish was pounding
; along at full speed, 18 knots,.’throwing a cloud of spray and
from her sharp knifelike, bow as she hurried across the sea. :
j This is w'here the long, monot-onous labor of patrol starts to“bear fruit. Plotting and tracking
k the target is no simple matter.Every minute a range and bear-
ding. Every minute plotting parties ‘. plot the ship’s course and its posi-tion at the instant of the “mark”;’l
CHAPTER XI. ]Archerfish.
Some of the stories of WorldWar II are part of our navalheritage, and will go down in his-tory with stories of Old Ironsides.Thomas Truxton and his Constel-lation, John Paul Jones and BonHomme Richard, Enterprise, andmany others.
Such a story is the story ofArcherfish, the ship which brokethe heart of the Japanese Navy.
The story really begins in 1939in Yokosuka. Japan. The Japa-nese Naval Ministry was holding
secret sessions. The probabilityof becoming involved in the Euro-pean war was growing greater andgreater; the probability of thenfinding their nation pitted againstthe United States was almost acertainty.
How, then, to assure Japan ofa telling superiority? How to fightthat great American sea power inthe Pacific? And how to do away,with the London Naval Treaty,!which limited Japan to an ignom-'inious three-fifths of the war ves-sels allowed the United States?'
There was only one answer. The;treaty already had been violated!—tear it up. Start building in;earnest for the war they know is'coming.
Secret instructions were sent tothe largest shipyard in Japan.Millions of board feet of woodcame from the forest reserves, andthousands of carpenters w’ere em-jployed to build a gigantic yard.:Houses for 50.000 people wererequisitioned and these, too, werefenced in around the fenced navyyard.
Workers Restricted.Finally, one day in 1940, an order
was issued from the commandant’soffice: “From this date hence-forth no one leaves the navy yard.”And so was born the battleshipShinano.
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By the summer of 1942 she was;not quite half finished. This super- !battleship with two sisters Ya-jmato and Musashi, was biggerthan any war vessel ever beforeconstructed in the history of the;world.
Then at the Battle of Midway,!in June, 1942, the flower of theJapanese naval air force met de- :struction. Akagi, Kaga, Soryuand Hiryu—all first-line carriers—were sunk.
The Naval Ministry met again;In secx-et session, and decided that!completion of new aircraft car-!riers was paramount. So Shinanowas redesigned.
Some of the tremendous armor,plate was removed from her side. 1Her huge barbettes, turrets and18-inch guns were never installedand the weight thus saved was putinto an armored flight deck madeof hardened steel four inches;thick. Under this flight deck werebuilt two hangar decks and belowthem another armored deck, eightinches thick. She was capable ofstoring 100 to 150 planes andcould land them and take themoff simultaneously from an airfieldnearly 1.000 feet in length and 130feet in width.
Finally, in November, 1944, Shi-)nano was nearly completed. The'commissioning ceremonies wereheld on November 18: a picture of;the Emperor in an ornate gilded
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; frame was ceremoniously deliv-jered to the vessel and she was!
j turned over to her commanding!officer.
Then the bad news arrived.Japanese strategic intelligence re-1ports indicated that air raids on
-the Tokyo area would become in-creasingly severe, with a good pos-sibility that the brave new shipwould be seriously'exposed at her
! fitting-out dock. The ship mustbe moved to the Inland Sea.
Not Ready for Sea.But Shinano is not ready to go
to sea. True, she is structurallycomplete, her engines can oper-ate and she floats, but she is notquite ready. Her watertight in-tegrity has not been proved. Airtests have been made of only afew of her hundreds of compart-ments. Many holes through vari-ous bulkheads have not yet beenplugged. Watertight doors have!not been tested and it is not knownwhether they can be closed; fur-,thermore. even if they can beclosed, no one knows if they arelacutally watertight.
Most important of all, the crewhas been on board for only onemonth. They number 1,900 souls,but few have been to sea together.Many have never been to sea atall and none have had any train-ing whatsoever on board Shinano.They do not know their ship. Theyare not a crew. They are 1,900people.
J But it is decided, nonetheless,that Shinano must sail to saferwaters immediately.
On the afternoon of November28, 1944, Shinano set sail with herfour escorting destroyers. Sailorsand workmen crowded about herdecks and the gilded frame glit-!tered in the late afternoon sun-light on the flying bridge. Fromwithin the frame the image of theSon of Heaven beamed happily onthis mightiest of warships.
Thus was set the stage for thegreatest catastrophe yet to be-hall the hapless Japanese Navy.
! Work for four years building thebiggest ship of its kind that hashas ever been constructed by man:;put 1,900 men on board; installa picture of the Emperor on the
jbridge, and send her out through!a few miles of water exposed topossible operations of Americansubmarines.
!• There was nothing particularlyiportentous about the laying of thekeel of Archerfish. She displaced1,500 tons, or one-fiftieth the ton-nage of the huge vessel fated tobe her adversary. She was onlyone-third the length of Shinano,and her crew of 82 men and of-ficers was about one-fortieth ofthe 3,200 estimated full designedcomplement of the Japanese ship.
On First Patrol.On December 23, 1943, while
Shinano was still building. Archer-fish departed Pearl Harbor on herfirst war patrol. Too bad shecould not have stayed for Christ-mas, but orders must be obeyed,
and operations seldom take noticeof such things. Besides, her crew
:had been brought up to the feverpitch of enthusiasm. Christmasor no, she was eager to be on herway.
On her first patrol Archerfishand her disgusted crew fought
heavy weather for two solid weeks,but finally she reported radar con-tact with four large and five small-er ships heading in the generaldirection of Formosa. The leadingship was attacked and sunk andArcherfish’s patrol report stated,“We had celebrated the first an-niversary erf our keel laying inright smart fashion.”
Months passed, and she was aveteran. The vast Pacific was herplayground and her no-man’sland. Then, as Joe Enright, herskipper, recorded in the fifth warpatrol report of Archerfish, onNovember 28, 1944, she was pa-trolling submerged to the southand west of the western entranceto Sagami Nada, or outer TokyoBay. No ships had been sighted.No contacts of any kind (exceptfishing boats) had been made thusfar in the patrol, which had be-gun 29 days before.
At 1718 the surfaced, the visi-bility having decreased to suchan extent that surface patrollingwas feasible and desirable.
“Radar, contact! ” These wordsnever fail to bring a shiver ofanticipation to the submariner.
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Polar Flight From U.5.Reaches Denmark
By th« Associated Brass
COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Nov.
21.—Twentieth Century Vikings,!winging their American-builtplane across the Polar icecap,
blazed a dramatic new era of com-merce in a California-Europe
flight ending here last night.
Thirteen crewmen of the Scan- •
dinavian Air Lines plane ArildViking brought their 22 passengersto a landing in a soft Danishdrizzle at Kastrup Airport—just28 hours and 7 minutes after leav-ing Los Angeles.
| They had spent 23 hours, 38
minutes in flying the 5,852 miles.Four hours, 29 minutes were spenton the ground at Edmonton,Alberta, and the United StatesAir Force base at Thule, Green-
then, from that point, they drawrange and bearing, and thus locatethe position of the enemy ship at
jthe same instant.; Your own ship twists and turnsin the dual effort to gain firingposition and to keep range to thetarget so that he will not sighther, or get radar contact on her,but keep close enough so thather radar will have no difficultyin keeping contact on his muchlarger bulk.
After a few minutes of chase*the target’s course is determinedto be roughly 210. The target’sspeed is 20 knots; he is zigzagging,and by the size and strength ofhis radar pip is mighty big andmighty important. Radar also in-dicates four smaller vessels; oneahead, one on either beam andone astern.
The well-drilled crew are re-sponding beautifully and solvingthe problem like clockwork.
Approximately one hour after!the initial contact, the patrol re-port states. “Saw the target forthe first time, an aircraft car-rier! From here on it was a madrace to reach a firing position.”
It is every submarine skipper’sdream to find himself in hot pur-suit of such a target. The jack-pot—an aircraft carrier! Thebiggest game of all! Archerfish,the huntress. Can she bring thismonster down in his own environ-„ment?
| (Copyright. 1952, by Edward L. Beach.Published by Henry Holt & Co., IncDistributed by the Register and Tribune
Syndicate.)
(To Be Continued Tomorrow.)
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land, getting gas for their DC-68.“Just a wonderful pleasure
cruise,” said the Danish chiefpilot, Capt. Povl Jensen, after heset the plane down at 9:47 p.m.,(3:47 p.m., EST).
The flight was intended to blaze ;a direct air trail from sunny'California to Europe, 'with thebleak and frigid Polar regions asthe gateway. It is I.OQO milesshorter and four hours quickerthan byway of New York. Sched-uled service will begin by spring;if both the United States andCanadian governments approve.
THE EVENING STAR. Washington, D. C.rain ay, November «i, i»a2
Careless Motorist Is Loser Also in Irish SweepstakesLanin Payne is in jail today
and police have confiscated theIrish Sweepstakes ticket which hehoped would win him a fortune-all because he forgot to set theemergency brake on his car.
Payne. 26, colored, of the 600block of Keefer place N.W., wa;arrested in Chapel Oaks. Md.,-early today and charged with pos-
session of a lottery slip.
County Police Pvts. J. H. Vin»cent and Robert Duncan foundthe sweepstakes ticket in Payne’swallet when they asked him forhis automobile registration cardafter Payne’s car had rolled bacr«ward 60 feet down a hill, throughja hedge and into a yard at 1111Fifty-seventh avenue.
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