A day later, the battery and a Mark1 18 torpedo ca…
A day later, the battery and a Mark1 18 torpedo caught fire in a forward tube.
Reich surfaced, signaled Commander Submarine Force Pacific Fleet, and put it over the side while backing down at 12 knots.
Reich stayed on patrol.
11 days after that, four large echoes came up on a screen at 20 minutes past midnight.
48 minutes past midnight, Sea Lion came up to 20 knots and started running, and she stayed on the surface to do it.
That was not a preference.
A Balau class submarine makes nine knots underwater and nine is a generous number.
It is a sprint.
A boat can hold it for something like an hour and at the end of that hour the battery is flat and a submarine with a flat battery has to come up.
It comes up wherever it happens to be in front of whoever happens to be on the surface.
Running submerged at a speed a boat can actually sustain means two or three knots walking pace.
So a submerged submarine does not chase anything.
It sits and it kills what comes to it.
A battle line does not come to you.
It goes past at 16 knots on a course somebody else picked.
And by the time you have worked out where it is going, you are looking at sterns.
That is the reason that in four years of war, no Allied submarine had sunk a battleship.
It was not for lack of ability.
On one afternoon in June of 1944 in the Philippine Sea, Commander James Blanchard put a torpedo into the new Japanese carrier Taihaho with Albaore.
And a few hours later, Commander Herman Kler hit Shokaku with Cavala and both of those ships went to the bottom before dark.
A carrier has to turn into the wind to fly aircraft off.
And a ship turning into the wind is a ship whose next 20 minutes can be predicted.
A battleship on passage never has to be predictable about anything.
The picture most people carry of a submarine attack is a periscope coming up out of a flat sea in daylight with a man in a backwards cap looking through it.
Nothing that happened in the Formosa Strait that night looked anything like that.
On the surface, a balao makes 20 knots.
20 is four knots better than 16.
Four knots is not much.
Over two hours, it is enough to run down the outside of a formation, get out in front of it, and turn in.
Submarine officers called it the endound.
The cost of it was total.
A submarine on the surface has no armor anywhere.
She is a pressure hull with a gun on top of it.
and one 5-in shell from a destroyer ends the argument and takes the whole crew down with it.
Eli Reich had spent two patrols working convoys that way out in the dark at 20 knots.
Merchant convoys do not have four destroyers in them.
From 48 minutes past midnight until a/4 to 3 in the morning, Sea Lion held 20 knots on a parallel course out in the dark on the port side of the formation, closing the gap four knots at a time.
It took close to 2 hours.
A handful of men were up on the bridge for that run, and everybody else was below.
The men on the bridge had binoculars and open water on both sides of them.
What they were watching for was a destroyer turning out of formation because a destroyer turning out of formation meant the Japanese had found them and a submarine on the surface at 20 knots has nowhere to be after that.
Nobody below could see anything at all.
Down in the conning tower there was a plotting party and a torpedo data computer.
And the computer was being fed a stream of ranges and bearings off the radar, and it was turning that stream into a gyro angle for the torpedoes.
The men doing it were working on a Japanese battle line they had never laid eyes on.
At 46 minutes past 1, she was a breast of them.
The radar picture had cleaned up by then, and it showed three heavy ships in column with three escorts around them, one on either beam and one out on the starboard quarter.
The formation was not zigzagging.
Zigzagging is the oldest defense there is against submarines.
A formation changes course at irregular intervals so that nobody underwater can compute where it is going to be in 3 minutes.
It costs time and it costs fuel.
And by the autumn of 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy did not have fuel to spend on precautions.
Kurita held his course and his speed.
There is one account put together from Japanese sources after the war that says somebody on Yamato’s bridge picked up radar emissions from somewhere off the bow and that Kurita responded by altering course and driving straight through at 16 knots rather than going around whatever was out there.
The American record has nothing in it that confirms this.
Nobody in Sea Lion knew they had been detected, and nothing in the patrol report suggests the formation behaved like a formation that had found something.
If the Japanese account is right, then a battle line with three battleships in it picked up a radar set in front of it in the dark and went at it rather than around it because going around it would have cost fuel and hours.
At a/4 to 3, Sea Lion was ahead of the column.
Reich came off 20 knots and turned in.
The microphone had been hanging in the conning tower since midnight and it was still running.
Down in the torpedo rooms, four of the fish going into the tubes that night carried the names Foster, Okonnell, Ogulvie, and Paul.
2:56 in the morning.
With the range down to 3,000 yd, Reich fired all six of his forward tubes.
He set them shallow, 8 ft, because on the radar the destroyers kept overlapping the big ships, and he wanted the torpedoes that missed a battleship to have somewhere useful to go.
Mark18s ran at about 30 knots.
3,000 yd takes them 3 minutes.
As they went out, a lookout on the bridge said he thought he had seen a pagota mast against the sky.
At 59 minutes past 2, Reich swung the boat around and fired three more from the stern tubes at the second ship in the column.
At 3:00, the first salvo arrived.
Reich wrote in his patrol report that they saw and heard three hits on the first battleship with small mushrooms of explosion showing in the darkness.
Foster, Okonnell, Ogulvie, Paul.
four men who never got to fire a torpedo at anyone and whose names went down a torpedo tube three years after they were killed at a pier.
If that lands with you, take a second and hit the like button.
It carries those four names a little further tonight.
That is all it does, and that is enough.
3:00 in the morning, Reich had aimed his second salvo at the second battleship in the column, and it never reached her.
The captain of Nagato saw the water spouts go up alongside the ship ahead of him and put his helm hard over to port to comb the tracks.
That turn took him out of the water Reich had aimed at.
It also left the stern salvo running on into the path of the destroyer out on the starboard side of the formation.
Urakaz took one in her magazines.
She blew up in a ring of white light and a series of smaller explosions came behind it and she went down with every man aboard her.
Reich pulled away to the west at flank speed.
The Japanese escorts hunted to the east, dropping depth charges into water Sea Lion had already left.
By 10 minutes past 3, the tubes were reloaded and Sea Lion was tracking again.
Reich’s own reading of the situation was that his torpedoes had done nothing worse than dent an armor belt.
Nothing on the radar screen said otherwise.
The formation had increased speed and started to zigzag, which is what a formation does when it is annoyed rather than wounded.
Congo had taken two torpedoes.
One went into the chain locker in her port bow and opened a long gash there.
The other hit after of a midship on the port side under the number two stack and flooded her number six and number eight boiler rooms.
Her remaining boilers still made steam pressure.
She lost fuel and she took on a list and she kept station at 16 knots.
Two accounts exist of how many torpedoes hit her and they have never been reconciled.
Reich’s patrol report written within days says three.
Japanese damage records described two.
Both documents were produced by men who were there that night.
On Yamato’s bridge, Kurita received word that Congo’s damage was under control.
He decided to hold 16 knots and run out of the area rather than slow down for her.
For the next hour and a half, Eli Reich did nothing except follow.
He had a formation zigzagging away from him at speed, a boat that had used most of its torpedoes, and no evidence that he had accomplished anything.
There was a reasonable case for turning north, clearing the area before daylight and reporting a contact.
That is what the situation looked like from inside Sea Lion at 3 in the morning.
He stayed on the surface and he stayed on them and he had no way of knowing that 700 ft of Japanese steel ahead of him was quietly filling with water.
Then the weather turned.
Wind and sea got up in the hours before dawn.
16 knots into a rising sea with a hole in the bow worked on the hole.
Water spread through sprung seams and fractured bulkheads and broken pipe runs into spaces that had been dry an hour before.
Congo stopped zigzagging.
She came down to 12 knots, then 11, 10 minutes to 5.
The formation came apart.
Yamato, Nagato, and the light cruiser went on toward Japan.
Congo dropped a stern with two destroyers and turned for Caung on the north coast of Formosa to try to get into a repair birth.
Reich picked the slow group and went after it.
He had fired everything in his forward tubes and everything in his stern tubes and reloaded once.
The Japanese knew he was in the area.
Depth charges had been in the water for an hour.
The sea was building and it was building against a hull that sits very low, even in a calm.
He put Sea Lion up on the surface and ran around the outside of them a second time.
The first time he had done that, nobody knew he was there, and the geometry was his to build at leisure.
This time, two destroyers were screening a crawling battleship.
They had already been dropping depth charges, and every lookout in both of those ships was looking for exactly what Sea Lion was.
She was on the surface the whole way.
She had to be.
20 knots is only available up there, and 11 knots is only catchable at 20.
He said afterward that he thought the run took about an hour.
It took two, then the target slowed, and then it stopped.
Sea Lion was sitting 5 or 6,000 yd ahead of it.
Reich said that if she had come on by, he would have had her.
She did not come on.
She sat there in the water still.
At 12 minutes 5, Reich slowed and turned in to attack.
At 20 5, Congo was dead in the water.
How far off she was at that moment is a third thing the record does not settle.
Reich telling it years afterward, remembered five or 6,000 yards.
The plot compiled from Japanese sources puts the range at 17,000.
Nobody has reconciled those two numbers either.
24 minutes past 5 in the morning.
The sky lit up.
Reich wrote that it looked like a sunset at midnight.
He wrote that radar reported the battleship’s echo getting smaller and then that it had disappeared and that only the two small echoes of the destroyers were left milling around where the large one had been.
The last line of the entry is five words long.
Battleship sunk.
The sun set.
Eli Reich never fired a second time.
The way this story usually gets told, Sea Lion caught up with a crippled battleship and finished her off.
That is not what happened.
Reich got into position and the ship died in front of him before he could shoot.
The two torpedoes that went in at 3:00 in the morning did the whole of it over the course of 2 and 1/2 hours with nobody helping them.
At 5, Eli Reich stood in the conning tower and looked at a screen with two small returns on it.
Reich and the crew of Sea Lion stayed in the Formosa Strait for another week.
They worked the water between the China coast and the island found nothing else worth a torpedo and on the 28th of November 1944 turned for Guam.
The patrol ended there on the 1st of December.
Congo went down about 60 mi north of Kielong.
Japanese records assembled after the war put the loss at somewhere around 1,200 men.
Her two escorting destroyers fighting a heavy sea took more than 200 out of the water and carried them home.
October 25th, 1944.
Off the island of Samar, 27 days before Sea Lion found her, the Naval History and Heritage Command has Congo firing into the escort carrier Gambir Bay at 10 minutes 8 in the morning.
Kintberger had gone at her about 40 minutes before that, opening fire with 5-in guns at 14,000 yd and closing to torpedo range against a battleship.
He put five in the water.
Congo turned hard to port and every one of them went past her.
Hell was on the bottom by nine with most of her crew.
An American destroyer went at that ship with torpedoes and could not do it.
27 days later, an American submarine did.
Japanese records named two flag officers lost with her.
Rear Admiral Shimazaki who commanded the ship and Vice Admiral Suzuki who commanded her division.
Lieutenant Commander Eli Reich was given his third Navy cross for the patrol.
Three patrols in that boat.
Three Navy crosses.
The citation describes extraordinary heroism in the line of his profession as commanding officer of USS Sea Lion Hull number 315 on the third war patrol of that submarine.
The crew made him a battle flag by hand and gave it to him.
Down in the lower right corner of it, there is a large battleship drawn above a broken rising sun.
Congo had been in commission since 1913, and she was rebuilt twice between the wars, cut open and lengthened and re-engineed until she could hold 30 knots.
October 13th, 1942.
She stood off Guadal Canal with her sister, Haruna, and fired 14-in shells into Henderson Field for over an hour.
The Marines in the holes on that island had a name for that night.
She came out of Lee Gulf, which very few Japanese heavy ships did.
Eight days after Congo went down, Commander Joseph Enight took Archerfish up on the surface off Honshu and ran for hours in front of the largest warship ever built, the carrier Shinano, and sank her four days into her first voyage.
Two American submarines 8 days apart in the same November.
The recording survived, too.
The Navy’s underwater sound laboratory kept it along with a second one the crew made on the fifth patrol.
And as far as anybody has been able to establish, they are the only surviving sound recordings of an American submarine attack in the Second World War.
Everything else that happened in those boats happened once and was gone.
I have listened to that recording and the thing I was not ready for is how ordinary the voices sound.
Eli Reich stayed in the Navy after the war and retired a vice admiral.
In 1978, a man named John Mason sat him down for the United States Naval Institute and asked him to tell all of it from the beginning.
He did.
It runs to two volumes and the sentences in it are short.
Foster O’Connell Ogulvie Paul.
Four men killed in an engine room at a Navyyard on the 10th of December, 1941 aboard a submarine that never got to fire a shot at anybody.
Nothing in the official record required anybody to keep those four names.
They are not in the tonnage tables.
They are not in the citation Reich was given or in the action report or in any assessment of what the patrol accomplished.
They survive because somebody in that torpedo room painted them on and somebody else standing there thought it was worth remembering and told it to somebody and eventually a man wrote it down.
That is how most of it survives.
If your father served or your grandfather did on a boat or a ship or a beach or an airfield, there is probably something he told you one time that you have never seen printed anywhere.
A name, a thing that happened on a particular night, something small that he carried the rest of his life and mentioned exactly once.
Put it below.
Somebody reading these comments is looking for that exact piece.
and there is nowhere else left to find it.
Vice Admiral Eli Thomas Reich told this story out loud one time to a man with a tape machine 34 years after the night it happened because somebody finally thought to ask him.
On the 16th of October 1944, Radio Tokyo told the Japanese people that the American third fleet had been almost annihilated.
11 aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, one destroyer sunk.
Two of the ships on that list were still afloat.
49 days later, one of them was sitting out of the water, dry, up on wooden blocks in a lagoon in the Admiral T Islands, 3,500 m from the nearest American naval shipyard.
What a volunteer party from her own crew found when the water came off her is the reason I wanted to tell you this one.
The strikes had started 4 days before the announcement.
On October 12th, Task Force 38 came up on the coast of Formosa and went to work on the airfields.
The Lee landings were 10 days out.
Before American soldiers walked onto that beach, somebody had to take apart the air groupoups that could reach them, and Formosa held a great many of them.
The fighting ran for 5 days.
Japanese aircraft came at the carriers in daylight and came back after dark.
On the nights of the 12th and the 13th, Hollyy wrote afterward, “Japanese planes burned on the water all around his fleet”.
Now, think about what a pilot sees on a night like that.
He is low.
He is fast.
He is being shot at.
And the sea below him is on fire in a dozen places.
He cannot see the ships.
He can only see the fires.
He has no way on earth to tell a burning airplane on the water from a burning ship on the water.
The men who got home reported what they believed they had seen.
Their squadron commanders wrote it down and passed it up.
At no level in that chain did anyone have a reason to subtract.
By the 16th, the arithmetic had hardened into an announcement.
11 carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, a destroyer.
Tokyo said the American fleet was broken and running.
Newspapers printed it.
The emperor sent his congratulations to the Navy and to the army.
Congratulatory messages came in over the air from Hitler and from Mussolini.
And the praise came from every level of Japanese life.
Cabinet ministers, local officials, a keeper at the Tokyo Zoo who had a message of his own for the American admiral.
I hope we get that man Hollyy alive.
He said, “I have already reserved a special cage for him in the monkey house”.
Radio Tokyo added that the Japanese fleet was on its way down from the home islands to finish what the pilots had started.
There is a second set of numbers in that same announcement and it is the one that gives the whole thing away.
Japan admitted losing 312 aircraft over those 5 days.
312.
And in exchange, Tokyo claimed its pilots had shot down 112 American planes and sunk 17 warships, including 11 fleet carriers.
No air force in the history of aviation has ever traded at that rate.
300 aircraft spent, 100 aircraft destroyed, and an enemy fleet annihilated on top of it.
The figures did not survive contact with a slide rule.
They did not have to.
They had already been printed.
Here is what had actually happened.
The Americans had lost fewer than a 100 aircraft over 5 days of continuous fighting.
Not one carrier had been sunk.
Not one battleship had been hit.
The carrier Franklin had taken minor damage.
And two cruisers had been torpedoed.
The heavy cruiser Cannber and the light cruiser Houston.
Both of them were still on the surface of the Pacific Ocean on the 16th of October at the far end of a tow line moving east at four knots.
Before the torpedo, a word about the ship because her name is not an accident.
She was laid down at Quincy, Massachusetts in September of 1941 and she was supposed to be called the Pittsburgh.
In August of 1942 off an island in the Solomons, the Australian heavy cruiser Hamas Canra was caught in a night action at Tsavo Island and lost.
President Roosevelt wanted the loss marked by the United States.
So the hull at Quincy was renamed before she ever went in the water.
And when she was launched in April of 1943, she went down the ways as the USS Canbor.
She was the first warship in the United States Navy ever named for a foreign capital.
That was the ship steaming off Formosa on the 13th of October 1944, which was a Friday.
Her anti-aircraft gunners knocked down three attacking aircraft that evening before the fourth one got through.
Canbor was hit at 6:35 in the evening on October 13th.
The torpedo came in from a Japanese aircraft and struck her on the starboard side at frame 99 about 6 ft above the line of her keel.
That put it underneath her armor belt.
The armor was above the hit.
There was nothing between the warhead and the inside of the ship except shell plating.
It was a type 91, the standard Japanese aerial torpedo.
The whole weapon weighed 1872 lb.
529 lbs of that was explosive.
It opened her hull from frame 95 to frame 104.
Four spaces flooded.
Number three, fire room.
Number four, fire room.
Number one, engine room.
Number two, engine room.
The Those four compartments are where a cruiser makes steam and turns it into speed.
and all four of them filled with the Pacific Ocean in a matter of minutes.
Roughly 4,500 tons of seawater came aboard.
The number one propeller shaft was driven upward and inboard in a long sweep.
As it moved, it tore holes through bulkhead 90 and bulkhead 105.
A propeller shaft is a solid steel column running the length of the after part of the ship.
The explosion bent it like wire.
Her draft before the hit was 22t 7 in forward and 25 ft 10 in aft.
Afterward, it was 25 ft even forward and 31 ft aft.
She was down by the stern by more than 5 ft, and she was not moving.
23 men were killed.
A fair room on a heavy cruiser is not a large space, and it is not a comfortable one.
It sits low in the hull below the water line well in board with boilers taking up most of the volume and men working the gauges and the burner fronts in what is left.
It is loud enough that watchstanders learn to read each other’s hands.
It runs hot enough that men come off watch soaked through.
It is reached by a vertical ladder through a hatch and the hatch is the only way out.
That is where number three and number four fire rooms were on the evening of the 13th of October.
And that is where the torpedo detonated against the shell plating alongside them.
The report on her damage records the fact in seven words.
There were no survivors from these spaces.
14 more men were burned by the flash that came up out of the machinery spaces.
Canbor lay dead in the water off the coast of Formosa at night inside easy range of the airfields that Task Force 38 had spent 4 days trying to knock down.
Her own aircraft could not help her in the dark.
She could not steer.
She could not steam.
She could not maneuver if another torpedo bomber found her.
Her crew got emergency generators on the line and brought partial power back through the forward fires.
She stayed upright and she stayed on the surface because she had been built with enough reserve stability to survive losing four compartments at once.
That is not luck.
That is a decision somebody made at a drawing board years before about how much weight to spend on subdivision.
[clears throat] At 10 minutes before 7, the heavy cruiser Witchita passed her a tow line, and when Canbor started to move east, the water was still in her.
Number three fire room and number four fire room were flooded to the deck head, and the men who had been on watch in them were still down there.
They stayed down there for the entire journey.
The next afternoon, it was Houston’s turn.
Houston had a name with some weight on it, too.
She was laid down at Newport News in August of 1941 as the Vixsburg.
The following March in the Sunda Strait off Java, the Navy lost the heavy cruiser Houston with most of her crew and the city of Houston, Texas took it personally.
On the 30th of May 1942, a thousand Navy recruits were sworn in together at a ceremony in downtown Houston.
They called themselves the Houston Volunteers.
On the 12th of October 1942, the Hull at Newport News was renamed for the Lost Ship.
19 months went by between that swearing in and the new cruisers commissioning, and the Navy is a large organization that moves men where it needs them.
Of the thousand Houston volunteers, exactly one ended up serving aboard the Houston.
She was a light cruiser, newer and smaller than Canra, and on October 14th, a Japanese torpedo went in under her hull amid ships.
It flooded all four of her machinery spaces and distorted her armored deck.
By some estimates, she took on as much as 6,000 tons of water.
Her engineering officer, Commander William H.
Pototts, died in that hit, along with men caught in the after fireroom.
Burns.
What happened on Houston over the next few hours is worth walking through slowly because it is the kind of thing that does not appear in the operational histories.
She was without power, settling, and being shadowed by aircraft.
Her captain made the judgment that most captains in that position have to make.
If the ship was going down, there was no reason for,00 men to go down with her.
But if there was any chance of saving her, he needed people aboard to do it.
So he split the crew.
776 officers and men went across to the escorting destroyers.
450 stayed.
Through the afternoon, as the flooding was brought under some kind of control and the picture got clearer, more men went off.
By dusk, there were 48 officers and 152 enlisted men left aboard the Houston.
200 men on a cruiser built for well over a thousand.
Six of them were wounded badly enough that nobody was willing to risk moving them.
The heavy cruiser Boston took her under tow.
Two days later, on October 16th, a second torpedo hit Houston in the stern directly above her rudder.
It started a serious fire in her aircraft hanger.
That one came closer to sinking her than the first.
The 200 men were still aboard.
They fought the fire and they kept the ship.
The fleet tug pawne took over the toe that same day.
And that is how the American fleet spent the 16th of October 1944.
The day radio Tokyo announced that 11 American aircraft carriers were on the bottom.
two cruisers, both of them flooded, both of them undertoe, both of them making about four knots in a formation that any sailor in the Pacific would have recognized on site as the most vulnerable thing afloat.
Before we go on, one small thing.
If you have gotten this far, you already know this is not the part of the war anybody makes movies about.
There are no movies about fleet tugs.
There is no monument to a salvage party.
If you would like more of this kind of history on your feed, the like button is the whole mechanism.
It tells YouTube to put this in front of other men who would want to see it.
That is all it does, and it takes a second.
Now, Holly had a decision in front of him, and his first instinct was to sink both of those ships himself.
He said so plainly in his own account of the war years later.
Two crippled cruisers moving at four knots inside the operating radius of Japanese airfields, tying down destroyers and tugs and fleet oilers and combat air patrol that he needed somewhere else.
The Lee landings were coming.
Every hour those two ships spent crawling east was an hour his fast carriers spent babysitting instead of striking.
The clean answer was to take the crews off, open the seox and go.
Two officers on his staff talked him out of it.
Mick Carney, his chief of staff, and Rolo Wilson, who had recently taken over as operations officer.
Their argument was not sentimental.
It was tactical.
Radio Tokyo had just told the world that the American fleet was shattered and fleeing.
Tokyo believed it.
Tokyo was at that moment ordering surface forces south to hunt down the survivors.
So Hollyy had two damaged ships that the enemy already believed were part of a route.
He decided to let them look like one.
The cripples were formally designated division 1.
Around the staff they called it bait div, the bait division.
Rear Admiral Lloyd J.
Wilty was given command of it.
Wilty’s orders were specific.
Keep the tow line moving east and keep the air full of urgent distress traffic in the clear of the kind a fleet in trouble would be sending.
Meanwhile, Holly put two of his carrier task groups into an intercepting position east of the bait, waiting out of sight.
The other two he sent to hit Luzon so that nothing about the picture would look staged.
In Tokyo, Admiral Toyota took the hook.
He ordered Vice Admiral Shima’s fifth fleet out of the inland sea to run down the remnants of the American fleet and finish them.
Shima came south.
And then Shima did something that very few officers do when their own headquarters has just handed them a great victory.
He read the pilot’s reports again, and he decided they were wildly inflated, and he judged that there was nothing down there worth the risk.
He turned his ships around and took them home.
The trap never closed.
But the two cruisers were still afloat, and now they were east of the fighting, and the whole American fleet had gotten a very clear look at what Tokyo believed.
Somewhere in there, Hollyy sent a dispatch up to Admiral Nimmits at Pearl Harbor.
19 words.
It went into the record and it never came out.
The third fleet sunken and damaged ships have been salvaged and are retiring at high speed toward the enemy.
So, the ships were saved.
That is where most tellings of this story stop.
It is the wrong place to stop because saving them was the easy half.
A cruiser with four flooded machinery spaces is not a warship.
She is a very expensive object that floats.
Before she can do anything for anybody, somebody has to get her out of the water, all the way out, keel and all, so that men can stand underneath her hull with cutting torches and welding rigs and put steel back where steel used to be.
That means a dry dock.
And in October of 1944, if you were an American warship in the Western Pacific, the nearest American naval shipyard with a dry dock that could take a cruiser was at Pearl Harbor, 3,500 nautical miles away.
Run the arithmetic the way a staff officer would have run it.
A tow makes four knots on a good day.
Call it 3 and a half with weather.
3,500 m at that speed is better than a month at sea.
and that is only the trip out.
Then you wait your turn for a dock because Pearl Harbor was working around the clock on ships ahead of you, then the yard period itself.
Then you steam 3500 miles back to the war.
You are not talking about weeks.
You are talking about the better part of a year.
And every day of it, the ship is gone.
Consider what that actually means.
Canbor carried nine 8-in guns in three triple turrets, two forward and one aft.
Each barrel throwing a 335lb shell out to 17 m.
12 5-in guns in six twin mounts, dualpurpose, good against ships and aircraft, both radar, fire control.
around a thousand enlisted men and 60 officers, every one of them trained on that specific equipment, most of them for years.
She was designed to displace 17,000 tons fully loaded.
After the torpedo, the Bureau of Ships calculated her displacement at 22,14 tons.
The difference is seawater.
Send that ship home to be fixed, and you have not lost a hull.
You have lost a working organization of a thousand men and you have lost it for the length of an ocean crossing, a yard period and an ocean crossing back.
Japanese naval planning understood this perfectly well.
It was not a secret and it was not a guess.
It was geometry.
Sink an American ship and you remove it from the war permanently.
but damage an American ship badly enough and you remove it from the war for months because the Americans had to take their broken ships all the way home to fix them and home was on the other side of an ocean.
That calculation was sound.
It had been sound in every naval war anyone could point to.
It held together on exactly one condition.
The shipyard had to stay where it was.
In the early months of 1942, with the wreckage at Pearl Harbor still smoking, the Navy authorized and funded something that had no real precedent.
Not a better ship, not a better gun, a dry dock that could be taken apart, towed across the Pacific in pieces, and bolted back together on the other side.
They called it an advanced base sectional dock, absed.
The engineering problem is easier to describe than it was to solve.
A graving dock is a hole in the ground lined with concrete.
You cannot tow a hole.
So, the Navy built the dock as a chain of separate steel sections.
Each one a self-contained floating structure with its own ballast tanks and its own pumps.
Each one able to survive an ocean crossing on the end of a line.
Get the sections to the far side.
Join them side by side.
You now have a single U-shaped basin nearly a thousand ft long, open at both ends.
Flood the ballast tanks and the whole assembly sinks until the floor of it is well below the keel of the ship you want.
Walk the ship in over the top.
Pump the water back out.
The dock rises.
The ship rises with it.
And a vessel that was floating in the ocean 5 hours ago is now sitting in the open air on wooden blocks with her entire bottom exposed in water that is still the middle of the Pacific.
The larger version was built from 10 sections.
Assembled, it ran 927 ft in length with a clear inside width of 133t 7 in and 28 ft from the keel blocks up to the top of the well deck.
Lifting capacity 90,000 tons.
That number is worth sitting with.
90,000 tons is more than any battleship the United States ever built with room left over.
And it was not simply a lifting device.
Each dock carried a traveling crane with a 15-tonon hook and an 85 ft radius.
Six capstands, each one pulling 24,000 lb, 12 ballast compartments per section.
Power plants, machine shops, repair shops, birthing, mess halls, a working Navyyard with a crew that arrived by sea.
58 sections were built in all by five different contractors at six different sites around the United States.
The one this story turns on was built at Mare Island in Vallejo, California, and it was commissioned on the 14th of August, 1943, as ABS did 2.
The officer who put her in commission was a commander named Joseph J.
Rofort.
If that name is familiar to you, it is because of what he was doing 18 months earlier.
Rofort ran the Navy’s codereing station at Pearl Harbor.
He and his people were the ones who worked out that the Japanese objective in the spring of 1942 was Midway.
That is the intelligence that let Admiral Nimmitz put three American carriers northeast of the island, waiting in the right place at the right hour.
After that, in a dispute inside the Navy’s own intelligence organization in Washington, Roshfort was removed from the job.
He never went back to codereing.
He never served at sea again.
He commissioned this dry dock at Mare Island.
The dry dock went to the Pacific.
He did not.
I have been reading about this war most of my life, and I had never once seen his name attached to it.
Getting it there was its own piece of work.
The sections left the United States on the 2nd of May, 1944, and they did not steam.
They were towed in company across the Pacific at the speed a string of unpowered steel boxes will go.
They reached a spiritu santo in the new Hebdes on the 22nd of June, 51 days.
At a spiritu santo, the sections were joined.
Then the assembled dock was moved again north and west to Sadler Harbor.
Seedler is a large natural anchorage on Manis in the Admiral Ty Islands north of New Guinea.
American and Australian troops had taken the Admiral Ties in the spring of 1944 and the harbor behind them was deep, sheltered, and enormous.
The Navy had spent the month since turning it into a fleet base.
From the day the dock was commissioned at Mayor Island to the day it went to work at Seedler was 13 months.
She went into operation on the 13th of September 1944.
That was 30 days before a Japanese torpedo hit the Canra.
Between the torpedo and the dry dock there was the toe.
Canra covered about 1,300 nautical miles from the waters off Formosa to the anchorage at Uli.
