Home : World War II : The Navy In WWII :Three For Three
Batfish had more enemies at sea than the destroyers and smaller escort vessels of the Japanese Navy. Aircraft were a constant threat in the waters off Japan, Formosa, and the Philippines, although Captain Fyfe was surprised by the number of hostile aircraft that came close to the submarine but did not attack. The captain attributed this lack of vigilance in part to American air power. Japanese aviators, he thought, probably spent "as much time looking up as looking down," for fear of American planes. Those same friendly aircraft, however, were sometimes a mighty trial to Batfish. Eager American aviators were occasionally wont to attack anything that looked like a submarine, without wondering long to whom the boat belonged. Three times, Tex Davis recalls, U.S. aircraft bombed Batfish. On one occasion, he remembers, the boat was attacked by American aircraft when the submarine had two rescued American pilots on board. At another time, a friendly airplane dived on them while Batfish was talking by radio to the offending pilot's squadron leader. On at least one occasion, an American aircraft dove on Batfish while the submarine was operating her IFF (identification friend or foe) equipment. Surviving not so friendly fire, in October 1944 Batfish was part of the massive submarine cordon around the Philippines during the long-awaited invasion. In the next month, she was part of a wolfpack led by the submarine USS Ray, attacking a convoy in Lingayen Gulf. Captain Fyfe got credit for two freighters on this occasion, but the best was yet to come. It happened in February 1945, as Batfish was on her sixth combat patrol. Batfish returned to Pearl Harbor to refit after her fifth patrol, traded in her 4-inch gun for a 5-incher and added a 40mm antiaircraft gun. Some 67 alterations, read additions and repairs, were undertaken during the boat's 16-day refit, and even then there was not enough time to fully finish up everything necessary to get Batfish up to her top fighting trim. But the Pacific War did not wait for repairs or much of anything else, and after a brief training period, Batfish announced her readiness for sea on December 30, 1944. The year 1945 would be a banner year for Batfish. She was working the area of Luzon Strait, off the Philippines, when American codebreakers picked up a message that four Japanese submarines were bound for Luzon. Their mission was to run ammunition into the Philippines, and on the return leg to evacuate Japanese aircrews and other critical personnel to Formosa. American naval intelligence had even deciphered the submarines' sailing dates and the routes they would take. The Japanese boats were sailing straight into the teeth of a waiting American picket line composed of Batfish, Plaice, Scabbardfish, Archerfish, Blackfish, and Sea Poacher, all deployed across Luzon Strait. Batfish was combatworthy, but she had developed some defects her commander looked forward to repairing during the next refit. In addition to some more minor problems, both of the boat's periscopes leaked badly, and the once quiet boat had developed a serious noise problem. "Now any speed over 3 knots," wrote Captain Fyfe, "and we sound like a freight train." But even with these and the other nagging problems, she was about to have her finest hour. About 10:15 on the night of February 9, the submarine's radar watch picked up signals on the sub's APR gear, emissions from somebody else's radar, somewhere out there in the blackness of the night. Not long afterward, the submarine's own radar picked up a blip, a vessel some 11,000 yards distant. But was the vessel friend or foe? Fyfe radioed the other American boats in the pack to which he belonged, asking each her position. Crewmen remembered the answers coming in one by one, "not me, not me." Once all the friendly boats had answered, Fyfe was virtually certain that the contact was not a friendly ship and assumed it to be one of the Japanese submarines making for Luzon. He was right, but even then he would not shoot until he gained visual contact and made sure the target was an enemy. At last the captain saw what radarman Jim Callanan and Tex Davis remembered as the characteristic hump forward of the conning tower in Japanese I-class submarines. Fyfe was sure of his quarry now and set up his torpedo attack. The night was gloomy, dark and overcast, and there was no moon, excellent weather for a surface attack. Captain Fyfe positioned his boat to take advantage of the darkness, so that he approached his target from the east with the deepest of the gloom behind him. Just before midnight, Fyfe fired at 1,850 yards, but all of his torpedoes missed. He was still in the game, however, for the Japanese vessel did not dive or otherwise react, but went steadily on its way. Apparently nobody on the target's conning tower had seen the track of the American torpedoes, and her crew had obviously ignored the explosion of Fyfe's torpedoes at the end of their unsuccessful run. And so Fyfe reasoned that the Japanese radar was either designed solely for antiaircraft detection, or terribly inefficient, or maybe both. So, Fyfe recomputed his attack, deciding that the enemy's estimated speed for the first attack had been two knots too slow. He then closed to 990 yards and fired three more fish just after midnight. The first ran hot in the tube, ejecting on the second try but running erratically off into the night. The third also missed. But the second torpedo ran true. In a "brilliant red explosion that lit up the whole sky," the Japanese boat exploded and sank quickly, and Fyfe's radar watch saw the target blowing apart. Crewmen thought they had heard an "air fish," a compressed air torpedo, rush past their hull in the water, as if the Japanese boat had fired about the same time Batfish did. Because Fyfe's crew heard he had spotted the hump forward of the conning tower, and Fyfe noted in his log that he had seen an I-class boat from his bridge, the Japanese boat was almost surely I-41. Various authorities have later theorized that the submarine might have been either one of two RO-class boats, but the RO boats had no such distinctive bulge. Fyfe rigged a searchlight and searched for survivors and debris, but found neither. There was only a heavy stench of oil and a thick oil slick, but nothing more. Fyfe sensibly called off the search, realizing, as he wrote later in the ship's log, "We were advertising ourselves needlessly and accomplishing little except ruining the night vision of the bridge personnel and probably drawing airplanes."
The sinking was a substantial success, for the Japanese boat was almost surely inbound to Formosa from the Philippines, loaded with Japanese aviators or other VIPs, perhaps even bullion or other wealth destined for the imperial treasury. But Batfish was not finished. The next day aircraft flew toward Batfish. They might have been friendly, although Fyfe was convinced the offending planes were using Japanese antisubmarine tactics. Batfish was still on the surface, and the appearance of the aircraft drove her under, spoiling Fyfe's plans for a surface reconnaissance, losing the advantages of better speed and better visibility that surface cruising would have given his boat. He came to periscope depth later in the morning, but again approaching aircraft made him dive, and this time they dropped a torpedo, which fortunately missed. It was, wrote Fyfe, "a tender moment, and if these actually prove to be blue planes [American] a most unfriendly act." But he stayed on station, even though Japanese aircraft remained active deep into the night. Fyfe's persistence paid off again on the very next night, February 11. As Batfish surfaced to recharge her vital batteries, the APR again alerted the radar watch. Once more, something was out there in the night, its radar looking, searching, reaching out its long, probing fingers in the gloom. Batfish's own radar picked up her target at about 8,000 yards. On the conning tower, Batfish's officers and lookouts strained to pierce the darkness ahead through their binoculars ... and there she was, some 1,800 yards away, moving at only about seven knots but zigzagging. Fyfe went to battle stations and Batfish closed to 1,200 yards. At that range the American lookouts were sure. They were stalking a Japanese submarine, apparently somewhat smaller than their last victim. It was RO-112, outbound from Formosa. Fyfe again had perfect weather for his attack, an overcast, moonless night, and he began his approach on the surface with rain squalls behind him, shielding his boat from the Japanese lookouts. Before Fyfe could make his range and speed calculations and shoot, his quarry disappeared. He could not tell whether she had seen him on her radar or made visual contact, or whether she was simply making a routine dive. Either way, his disappointment was intense, and Fyfe wrote in his log that he blamed himself. "Signal on APR went off and target dove. Changed course to left and speeded up, in the meantime trying to reconcile myself to the fact that I had lost this one by trying to wait for the theoretically perfect set up." Then, only half an hour later, Batfish's sonar equipment picked up the characteristic sounds of a submarine blowing its ballast tanks, the Japanese radar resumed operating, and RO-112 was on the surface again, working her radar but obviously seeing nothing on it. Her blindness would be fatal. This time Fyfe dove to radar depth at about 6,000 yards and was able to close the range to less than 900 yards. From that distance, at about 10 PM, he fired a spread of four torpedoes. The blackness of the night erupted in a garish yellow fireball, and RO-112 was finished. As she began to sink, two more torpedoes exploded, detonated either by fragments of her hull or by the water turbulence caused by the first torpedo. Her death was spectacular, maybe a byproduct of a cargo of ammunition, for she was headed for the Philippines, where ammo was in short supply. As Fyfe wrote, "The target literally blew apart and sank almost immediately." Two more heavy explosions followed as RO-112 went down, capped by a third colossal blast and the sounds of escaping air and strucrural collapse. The Japanese boat was gone, and Batfish's sonar men listened to the secondary explosions as she went down, and to the ghastly death rattle of a sinking vessel breaking up as she drifted into the terrible pressures of the great deep. Batfish could find no trace of her enemy left on the surface of the dark water, only a monstrous oil slick. Two in a row. No American boat would surpass that record throughout the war, and only one other boat, USS Tautog, would even equal it. But only one night later, early on the morning of February 13, Batfish would break her own new record in spectacular fashion. Before another night was out, she would have a crack at still another submarine of the Imperial Navy. The next night the faithful APR again warned the skipper and crew of Batfish. This time it was a little past midnight when the apparatus picked up hostile radar emissions far out in the night, almost 11,000 yards away. Although she could not pick up her enemy with her own surface radar, Batfish circled slowly, zeroing in on the Japanese signals with her own anti-air radar. Fyfe got a bearing on the Japanese transmission and followed it through the darkness. And then, at about 2:15, Fyfe's own radar picked up the target. This time it was RO-113, another of the Formosa boats, again bound for the Philippines to deliver supplies and ammunition and rescue critical Japanese personnel. Fyfe began his stalk. As Batfish closed to about 7,000 yards, but before Fyfe could set up to shoot, the target dived as her sister had done during his last attack. Fyfe moved his boat to a position flanking the track of the Japanese submarine, ready to attack if she reappeared. Tension ran high in Batfish, for the crew knew that if the Japanese boat had spotted them she would have a good shot at the American hunter. But then, more than an hour later, the quarry surfaced again some 9,600 yards away; this time Fyfe had time to close, compute, and fire. With only two torpedoes left forward, he swung his boat to bring the aft tubes to bear. Batfish's crew had their hands full stabilizing the boat's depth and bearing against a tidal rip, but Fyfe managed to fire three torpedoes from about 1,500 yards. The first torpedo struck home, and his quarry disintegrated, blowing apart and slashing the night with a "large yellow ball of fire," probably the result of a cargo of ammunition for the battered Japanese forces in the Philippines. The Japanese submarine was gone in 10 seconds, its image on the radar screen torn into "a wide diffusion of pips as the vessel went to pieces." On the radio equipment, Callanan had been listening to the Japanese radar man "keying" his set, listening to the signal rising, then fading away. Callanan heard the Japanese apparatus quit abruptly, as if it had been cut off, and shouted, "We got him! I knew our torpedo had hit," he told this author, "at almost the same instant as the lookouts did." Batfish closed in to the scene of the sinking and used her spotlight to look for survivors, without success. This time Captain Fyfe stayed in the area until daylight, hoping to recover something useful from his sunken foe. In the midst of a large oil slick, the crew recovered books and papers and a small wooden box about 14 inches square and about eight inches deep, a box that held Japanese navigation equipment, including navigation tables and a battery. From the contents of the box, Captain Fyfe learned something about his late opponent. "From the positions listed in the work book, it looks like this guy went from Nagoya to Formosa before he headed down to Luzon to join his ancestors." Batfish's sixth war patrol had been spectacularly successful and would earn her crew the Presidential Unit Citation for "extraordinary heroism in action against enemy Japanese combatant forces." Sometimes medal citations can err on the side of hyperbole, but in this case the Navy's recognition of the crew's "courage, superb seamanship and gallant fighting spirit" was right on the money. At the time of that sixth patrol, there were no more than four Japanese submarines in the waters around the Philippines. Batfish had sent three of them to the bottom. No compliment rings truer or means more than a tribute from an enemy. The Japanese submarine force recognized courage and efficiency when they saw it. "American submarine crews were very well trained, skillful, and brave," says Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Miwa, who commanded the Japanese undersea fleet. "We did not expect such skillfulness." Batfish had survived dozens of Japanese depth charges, hostile bombs and friendly ones, and the guns of a Q-ship. She had overcome grounding on a volcanic crest 240 feet below the surface when her chart said she had 400 feet of water beneath her keel. Now it was time for quieter days and nights, for rest. Her war over, Batfish was decommissioned in April 1946 and retired to the mothball fleet at Mare Island Navy Yard in California. Altogether, American submarines sank 25 enemy boats in the Pacific, including two German U-boats. For a single submarine to sink three of the enemy is extraordinary and speaks volumes for the efficiency and drive of Batfish's captain and crew. It is easy to attribute successes like these to luck, but it is also well to remember that Jake Fyfe and his crew not only managed to find three enemy boats, but efficiently stalked and killed all of them. You cannot argue with three for three.
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