8 Bells Lecture | David Jourdan: USS Nautilus and the Battle of Midway

thank you I wonder if these lights shining on the screen can be turned off possibly so thank you I when I came over here someone asked me what time was the eight bells lecture which I think is like asking what color was Napoleon's White Horse or something like that put yourself back to 10:20 a.m. June 4th 1942 the the mobile force of the first air fleet the same force that had six months earlier attacked Pearl Harbor with deadly results was bearing down on the island of Midway Midway was that's by its name the in the middle of the Pacific it was the gateway to Pearl Harbor and the u.s. fleet there and the Japanese fleet was bearing down on it they had already attacked it with aircraft and created quite a bit of havoc on the island and they were getting ready to launch a second attack on the island and at the same time Admiral Nagumo in charge of the Japanese fleet was looking out for the American fleet the Americans had already been fighting back all morning aircraft from Midway Island had been attacking the Japanese some 67 aircraft from Midway had attacked in different waves and none of them whether they were dive bombers torpedo bombers b-24s or b-17s overhead scored any hits Admiral Fletcher who was commanding the three American carriers that were poised to defend Midway had also been attacking and he had sent 151 attack aircraft against the fleet that morning of those 151 by 10:20 a.m. all the thirteen of them had either been shot down had expended their weapons or were lost those 13 and Anna had scored no hits those 13 aircraft were attacking one of Nagumo's four ships the soryu now regardless of the outcome of that attack how successful or otherwise only one Japanese aircraft carrier would have been damaged or sunk leaving the other three poisoned ready to attack Fletcher's fleet and and Nagumo knew where the Americans were so he was ready to strike back and that was the situation at 10:20 a.m. on June 4th 1942 now many of you here are probably very familiar with the Battle of Midway and I won't assume that so bear with me and those of you that have heard many lectures about it also I hope I'll be able to tell you something that you haven't heard before because my focus of my story and my book is on the submarine Nautilus but a little bit of background first a Japanese by the first six months since Pearl Harbor and of course they have been at war for some time before that had accomplished most of their objectives already of their conflict in World War two they wanted to take over the exclusive act the what they called their exclusive economic zone and also I'll stall the colonial powers that they felt were imposing on them and they had done that they had taken Malaysia Singapore had fallen Hong Kong had fallen Manila had fallen and and bye-bye June so had Bataan and the Americans have been kicked out of the Philippines they had attacked New Guinea that even made a raid on Darwin in Australia killing several hundred people a carrier attack they had also occupied American island held islands in the in the Central Pacific including Guam and wake about the only setbacks they had experienced up to that point was Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo in April of 1942 which really caught them by surprise but was not a huge operation in terms of its damage to the he's homeland but certainly psychologically was was massive and also the Battle of the Coral Sea which was in May at the Coral Sea most historians argue that that was a stance tow a stalemate in that battle the Americans lost the carrier Lexington and the Japanese lost a light carrier plus two of their other carriers were damaged as was the Yorktown of the US but the the invasion that they were planning to make was halted but other than that the Japanese were really on quite of a roll and had had control over most of the Pacific West of Midway so the next step was to attack Midway Island this is a a model of the six ships that attacked Pearl Harbor the four on the Left the Akagi kaga soryu and here you were at Midway the other two Shikoku and zuly Kaku were were damaged at Coral Sea actually one was damaged and the other lost all of its aircraft said they were both out of action this model by the way is a pretty intricate and detailed set of models and what makes it more remarkable is that they're miniature models I've seen another picture where there's a quarter laid over two of these flight decks there they're very tiny and of course you you never saw the four ships lined up like that this is a vintage photo of one of the ships the kaga in 1928 kaga was actually built on a battleship hall and they were converting some of their capital ships to carriers at the beginning before the war started here's another photo of that ship they in 1937 in 1930 in 1937 they actually extended the flight deck to cover the whole front of the ship and it became a full-size carrier this is a photo of a cocky the flag ship taken from the tail gunner of a aircraft that's just launched some of you've seen these pictures before maybe and here is the here you and the soar you look very similar they these four carriers together sported 264 attack aircraft which they were hoping to use to neutralize the forces on Midway Island as well as be able to sink the American carriers when they sortied now opposing the carriers were two forces of note one was the Admiral Fletcher's three aircraft carriers basically all we had the Yorktown the Hornet and the enterprise the Yorktown had been repaired from its of several weeks earlier battle at Coral Sea and was back in action and they thanks to our intelligence services they were in position to defend Midway from attack but the other force that was instrumental in this battle where the submarines this is a photo of the submarine Nautilus actually shortly before the Battle of Midway in April 1942 Nautilus was a an old ship that was built in the 30s it was actually built before naval treaties reduced the size of submarines so it was quite large there was a 4,000 ton ship 370 feet long and and and it sported these huge 8-inch caliber I'm sorry six-inch caliber deck guns which were the size that one would normally find on cruisers in fact it was called a cruiser sub Nautilus was on its first war patrol and none of the 94 men on board had ever been in battle before but they were led by captain bill Brockman who was as it turns out one of the top submarine commanders of the war here's a photo of the Nautilus sistership the narwhal which looks identical I don't really have as a great shot like this of the Nautilus but that gives you an idea there was a pretty big ship most submarines in those days were you know on the order of a thousand tons or less the Japanese built some large ones in the 20 500 time range and even later some bigger ones but Nautilus was was huge and I don't expect you to read this but just to give you an idea that in spite of its size you'd think something that's more than a football field long and four stories high would would be rather roomy but the inside was crammed with equipment weapons storage and and tanks and really when you kind of break it down and look at the compartments inside and inside the pressure Hall the yellow area represents the the living space for the 94 men that that were in that ship I calculated that area to be approximately the size of a four bedroom house so if you can imagine ninety four people living in your house for four weeks six weeks eight weeks at a time and of course they had to store all their gear and a lot of their supplies in that room with them the orange part in the top is what in World War Two was called the conning tower in World War two submarines the main pressure Hall had had the most of the equipment and weapons in propulsion but in order to have allow the captain to see farther and have his periscope up higher they put a compartment above the main pressure Hall connected by a hatch and a ladder where the main attack center was and that was also pressurized so it could be occupied when submerged and that conning tower was about 18 feet long in about eight feet diameter and it included sonar gear two periscopes attack computers radio other equipment and eleven men lived and worked in that space for the day of the Battle of Midway I was fortunate in working on this story and researching this background to be able to speak with a fellow by the name of buz Lee who was a second class radio man on the Nautilus during the Battle of Midway and in those days there were no sonar men there was no one that had that designation but he was specifically trained to operate sonars and the Chiefs owner Minh who normally would have been in that conning tower battle stations was sick he had dysentery and that required regular visits to the head and because the captain didn't want obviously the sonar to be unoccupied at any time he had buzz bring up a little folding chair and sit next to his boss and man the sonar so buzz Lee said he had the headphones on his ears the entire day of the Battle of Midway and told us what it was like and I'll get a little bit to that in a minute now why is Nautilus important well the submarines were there in kind of a picket line they were meant to be one of the early warning opportunities for for us to know exactly where the fleet was coming from and if net possible to attack it and do damage the submarine Earth's were told to monitor or guard the radio transmissions from the search aircraft that morning I believe at at 7:00 a.m. a 700 now bill Brockman was not one to be limited by his orders and he realized that the search aircraft would probably be launching at dawn which was around 4:30 a.m. at that place in time and so he had his he came up to periscope depth put his antenna up and listened right away and he was the first to know of all the submarine errs about the approach of the Japanese and was able to put himself in position to intercept them the only submarine that was able to do so so bill Brockman and the Nautilus found themselves smack dab in the middle of the Japanese fleet with the four aircraft carriers battleships cruisers and destroyers and at 8:24 a.m. he wrote in his diary the following entry which I'm going to read to you because I think it's a pretty it's a pretty descriptive little little paragraph he says the picture presented on raising the periscope was one never experienced in peacetime practices ships are on all sides moving across a field at high speed and circling a way to avoid the submarines position ranges were above 3,000 yards the Ginsu Cruiser had passed over and was now astern the battleship was on our port bow and firing her whole broadside at the battery a battery at the periscope flag boys are being made searchlights were trained at the periscope the exact position of the Nautilus may have been known by the enemy at this time because number 9 deck torpedo was running hot in the tube as a result of shearing of the torpedo retaining pin during depth charging so Nautilus was a busy submarine at that point in time bills Brockman's job was to try to cause what damage he could to the to the Japanese fleet and he did fire several torpedoes that day sadly the American torpedoes at that time of the war were not very effective and none of them seems to have caused any damage but nonetheless their presence there caused quite a bit of disruption to the Japanese among these ships that were attacking Brockman and his submarine was the Arashi this is a picture of Hiroshi a destroyer the destroyers were the main threat to submarines because not only did they have so nards which could detect them but they carried depth charges which was the main weapon against a submarine now as part of this project I took an interest in that because Bosley told me what it was like to experience depth charging Nautilus withstood 40 - depth charges that day and I did a little bit of research besides his his personal impressions and it turns out there were a number of studies done including actually putting microphones into submarines and exploding depth charges at different distances to record what it sounded like inside the ship and you can actually in my book I've mentioned a web site where you can go and listen to this when a depth charge explodes this is a this is a an explosive that's dropped with a pressure switch so at a certain depth that will explode it basically creates a bubble of gas in the water and and there's millions of pounds per square inch of pressure created when this explodes now that sudden displacement of the water creates what's called a shock wave that shock wave travels faster than the speed of sound and carries quite a bit of energy with it when that shock wave hits the metal hall of the submarine it's a very sharp pulse of energy and it makes a click or a metallic ping when it hits the hall and some of you who have read about or maybe seen movies of from World War two have heard about this click that that Submariner z' would hear before they heard the explosion of the depth charge I always kind of thought it was a trigger or something but it turns out it's the shock wave and shortly thereafter would come the reverberation of the actual explosion so it's kind of like if you see lightning it gets the delight from it gets to you before the Thunder and of course the farther away you are from that depth charge the longer time between the click and the boom and so submarine errs that didn't hear the click probably didn't return to tell about it because the boom was too close so that pressure that shock wave could in itself caused damage but the next thing that came was the reverberation from the explosion itself that would travel at the speed of sound and the that would be transmitted into the hall and it would of course it would affect any of the equipment or the crew inside and the bubble would then collapse and rebound creating sometimes two or three reverberations inside the ship everything would rattle and maybe you know fall and break and depending on how close if it was close enough the hall could actually rupture but if it was far enough away and it would be horrifyingly no disruptive to your insides and to hear buzz describe it was was harrowing pressures would go up to 130 pounds per square inch inside the ship and sailors actually reported seeing jets of gas that would fly through the air and what was determined from physiological studies what they were actually we're seeing was fluid moving through the retina that was disturbed by the by this impulse of pressure buds lee i have a few quotes from buzz in the book about this of course one of the the safety the way to escape a depth charge was to go deeper than the depth charge would explode that would help that would get you some distance from it but and and the Nautilus was able to dive to 300 foot depths but they often went deeper in depth charging buzz Lee said we didn't give a damn how deep we went I thought I was gonna die I thought it was the end he said there was nothing to be done there was nowhere to turn and there was no way to help a shipmate through the ordeal it didn't help to see the fear in another man's eyes you just you didn't look at anybody else you just held on and sat there what are you going to do you're helpless so they just had to wait and listen to the clicks and the booms until it was over fifty two American submarines were lost during World War two and in fact one one fistic I like to quote is that the American submarine fleet which comprised two percent of the Navy was responsible for 50 over fifty percent of Japanese war losses shipping however it was at a cost they lost 20% of their submarines were lost during the war 3,500 crew and that was the largest attrition of any force in the US military 52 submarines were lost during the war 50 of those were in the Pacific 22 of those were sunk by attacking destroyers with depth charges now one of the safety measures as I said was to go deep and this worked very well in the beginning of the war because the Japanese depth charges were set to go off at a fairly shallow depth of 50 or 100 feet so if you went to 300 feet you could you could kind of get it deep enough underneath that unless it was right on top of you you might be okay and this was it was a tactic that submarines used early in the war well there was a congressman by the name of Andrew May who went to the war zone on kind of a fact-finding tour and he learned of this information and and he felt that that would be kind of a keen thing to report back to his constituents so he held a press conference well as you can imagine within a few months the Japanese were had had modified their depth charges to explode deeper and of the 22 submarines that were sunk by depth charging as many as 10 with loss of 800 crew were probably because of Andrew Mays disclosure now you'll be sorry to hear that he was never prosecuted for this breach of security but he did go to federal prison for bribery and war profiteering now so what does an oilless have to do with this well this is a complicated drawing and I'm just going to focus on a couple of things on it as I said at 10:20 a.m. on that day all but thirteen of the American planes were either shot down had expended their weapons that were lost and in fact among the the the most heroic and and famous of those aircraft were the torpedo squadrons we like to talk about a force being decimated and I think that term is used kind of likely in the case of the torpedo squadron it's quite accurate because 40 of 43 planes were shot down so one in fewer than one in 10 actually survived and none of them were able to score hits however there was another force of 33 planes that was lost but they weren't out of action they still had their weapons and they were still searching that was led by aviator by the name of max Leslie and he was from the enterprise and his 33 dive bombers had gone the the orange circle was where the Japanese fleet was he had gone past it turned to the right and and was flying south of the fleet and was without any other information probably never going to find them but the Nautilus was there having been depth-charged by the Arashi and the Arashi was called back to the fleet to rejoin them and decided to make a beeline in a straight direction for the fleet Leslie saw the Arashi and he decided to line up his 33 planes with the wake and see where it took him and within minutes he reported seeing the Japanese ships so I'd like to credit the Nautilus for being aggressive being at the right place at the right time and pressing on their tax that caused Leslie to have some chance of finding the Japanese what happened after that is is is an amazing piece of history the I like to say many people say that Americans were lucky in this battle and and I guess there's one case where I would agree for the most part I think as I'll argue in the book it was less about luck than it was about relentless and persistent and brave attacks by our pilots and our submarines against the fleet that carried the day but the one bit of luck was that after flying all around like he did love McCluskey I may have said Leslie McCluskey and his 33 dive bombers arrived at the location of the fleet within the minute that Leslie and his 13 bombers arrived coming from the other direction so as a result those 33 targeted two of the other three ships and within the next four minutes three of the Japanese carriers were on their way to the bottom here's a vintage photo of Dauntless dive bomber that McCluskey and Leslie were flying this particular shot is from an attack on the on the cruise on a couple of cruisers that were caught the next day the mikuma and Megami and i don't know one has any photos of the damage done to any of the aircraft carriers but to give you an idea of what that might have been like here's what the mikuma looked like not long before it sank now fast-forward to 1999 and my company not Nauticus was interested in trying to find one of the ships from this battle now by then dr. Ballard had already found the Yorktown and we were keen to locate some of the Japanese ships it turns out that the Nautilus made an attack on the kaga one of those three ships that were sunk shortly before it sunk they didn't sink right away by the way they floated around for many hours and it wasn't until that evening that those three sunk and so by knowing where the Nautilus was when it observed kaga sinking we could calculate where to go search for for kaga which by the way was quite a distance from where it was recorded to have been sunk in the world war two records so we teamed up with a naval oceanographic office and 1999 we set sail on the Sumner with equipment that could search at these depths which approached 17,000 feet now this is probably a good time for a little show-and-tell one of the characteristics of water that deep is the pressure as you know if you've ever dived in even in a swimming pool the pressure increases pretty quickly and you can feel it on your ears and in fact it's one atmosphere for every hundred feet of depth so 17,000 feet the pressure is massive we're talking about more than 6,000 pounds per square inch of scuba bhatta would crush on the outside so we like to demonstrate that fact and and and and have a little fun with it and get a souvenir by taking a kind of a standard Styrofoam cup like this one coffee cup and decorating it writing your name or putting a logo on and then putting it with our equipment as it goes down and the air is all crushed out of it by the pressure and what you get is a little little styrofoam thimble that you can still read all the writing on it I'm going to pass this around you're welcome to the handle it it's not particularly fragile but I do I do want it back this particular one went down in 2002 when we were searching for Amelia Earhart's plane it went down to about 18,000 feet deep so not too many people get to handle something that's been down to that depth of course the equipment has to be built to withstand and operate at that depth a few shots from our expedition this is actually a vintage photo of Midway Island taken during the war and this is another one a famous one showing the the damage done by the Japanese attack as well as the the birds that call Midway their home it's a huge bird nesting island I believe there are something like 800,000 nesting pairs of birds that called Midway their home when we went there in 1999 that most of the birds had left but it was still pretty crowded and they were everywhere Midway today is a bird sanctuary when we went there in 1999 one of the islands was completely off-limits due to fish and wildlife rules the other one had a small remainder of the of the world war ii installation the the BOQ was turned into a small motel and there was one restaurant and a couple of buildings they called the Midway mall which had a bowling alley and a little a little just a couple little shops and it was they had a couple of flights from Honolulu a week that would go there and it was mainly visited by veterans that wanted to see the battle and folks like us to see the sight of the battle fishermen divers and wildlife people now I understand it's it's pretty much closed for the time being to anyone but there wasn't much there this is kind of tongue-in-cheek called the reef Hotel and Casino it consisted of a floating barge with an awning and a couple of kayaks that was it but it was really interesting to go see the island and imagine what had gone on there those years before but here's the equipment that we used in our search this system was built by the for the naval oceanographic office and you can see these big heavy thick bottles everywhere that hold the empty electronics to keep them from the pressure in the front are lights and cameras and on the side the little red bar is a sonar projector so we could use sonar just like Nautilus did in World War 2 to try to detect something on the bottom and find targets we were looking for there was a it was a lot roomier inside our workspace than I'm sure it wasn't a Nautilus and after our successful search there's a very young day Jordan in the middle there we we were grateful to work with a naval the naval oceanographic office and at the same time we were frustrated because they could only spare a few days time and we were quite pleased to be able to find what we were looking for in such a short amount of time what did we find well we found a lot of wreckage the kaga was hit by many bombs and it burned for many hours as I mentioned it was built on a battleship hall so the hall didn't want to sink but the rest of the ship just eroded away and fell off and bits and pieces and this particular piece was was one of the more interesting ones it's about the size of this room and it contained a couple of anti-aircraft batteries on it and it also had this landing light array which which stuck out from the side and helped the pilots land and it was particularly interesting to us because it was unique to that ship so we knew we had found the ship we were looking for some other bits of wreckage there's a bell it's not big enough to be the ship's Bell but it's probably from a launch on the ship we weren't able to or didn't intend to recover anything lots of stuff on the bottom this is one of my favorite shots this shows three things the deep sea out there in that part of the world is covered with these little nodules there between golf ball and softball size of pure manganese and some of the ocean mining efforts over the years have have endeavored to try to scoop them up as a as a resource it's certainly been done impossible which is kind of expensive the the worm trail and the upper right shows you that even at that great depth there's a lot of creatures living down there and I'll show you more about that in a minute and then of course the Japanese sailors boot is left over there from the carnage that happened at that that time during the war when we were when we finished looking over over the whole night at the video of the bottom several of us sat at the side of the deck as the Sun was rising and the sea was calm and peaceful to kind of toast our success Navy ships are dry but someone had smuggled a little bit of vodka on board and so we had a little toast and I'm not saying who it wasn't me and we started reflecting over the circumstances and thinking about that calm and peaceful sea and what it must have been like back in 1942 with men in the water and planes crashing and bombs exploding and and and the twisted wreckage that we saw on the bottom it was it was quite a feeling anyway I'll tell you very briefly I was hoping to be able to show you more images of this wreckage with better newer high-resolution cameras and in fact we we were poised to return to the site back in April with the with Noah who was planning to do some work in the in the marine sanctuary of the Northwest Pacific Islands and they had agreed to give us two days of imaging with high def cameras in the site of the Battle of Midway which is just up in the upper left corner of this picture well and so we were very excited and we said well here's the maps that we did and here's what we think wreckage is and here's a target to look at and we we were really looking to get a lot more of data from this and maybe even find some of the historical vintage aircraft that were sunk there and this is the ship some of you this we were actually gonna operate out of the inner space center right down the road at URI says some of you here may know about that they actually communicate everything back home by telepresence so that big ball on the top is a satellite dish which is gimballed so that regardless of the motion of the ship it still points at the satellite and they can send high bandwidth video back home so we could actually go at the center or even on our home computers and literally conference call with the scientists on board so we had 30 scientists working with the two that were on the ship and seeing real-time and helping to direct what the what the ROV was seeing the robotic vehicle down at the bottom and here's what sort of things they found it was an incredible cameras that that captured these amazing creatures that are down there in some cases deep is 4,000 meters or 12 13,000 feet deep this one is kind of cool this is if you have any of your scuba divers you may have seen sea cucumbers which are kind of dark grey black blobs on the bottom this is a sea cucumber free swimming going along like this with transparent skin so you can see its insides a lot of weird critters down there and one of the most exciting ones was this one here you may have seen him on the news turns out to be a undiscovered unknown species of octopus that's living down there at 13,000 feet below the surface and you can see how good these cameras are compared to what we had to work with back in the so he made the news he was named Casper of course now where it's the problem with working in the ocean is you got to deal with weather and there's where we were hoping to get our dives in and that was what the weather looked like turns out that I wish they had checked with me because I had done some studies and and March February March were the worst time to try to operate in that part of the world and our dives were were canceled so but you know we're on the list to go back so I hope to be able to bring you back some better imagery in the future but before I close I wanted to say a few more words about the Nautilus and the remarkable crew that manned that ship the Nautilus was on as I say on his first war patrol no one had ever been to battle before of the 93 men on board they went on to do 14 patrols during the course of the war and actually if being one of the oldest ships in the fleet was decommissioned and scrapped before the end of the war so never sunk by by the enemy this is bill Brockman he was remarkable fellow he as I said on his first patrol this is when he's receiving a Navy Cross for heroism at Midway Navy Cross is the highest award highest honor the Navy can bestow it's second only to the Medal of Honor bill won three of them over the course of his career and he is this is November 1942 I believe he was 36 or 38 at that time he looks a little older than that I think but and he was a remarkable leader and I judged that by of the seven officers of the Nautilus six of them became commanders of their own submarine and one of the NCOs the chief of the boat was eventually commissioned and became a submarine captain the only one that didn't was killed in action before he had a chance also three of the wardroom became Admirals by the end of the war that's a pretty remarkable tally and I'm going to of course bill Brockman retired as an admiral Rear Admiral at the end of the war and he went on to have a successful career in the chemical industry after back in Baltimore where he was from and he also did a little little promotional work here he is standing for an ad for Camel cigarettes in 24 years I've tried them all nothing beats camels for flavor and he has his Nautilus pin and submarine in front of him and and all that it's I have to check it's in the book he he lived to be into his 80s I believe but I'd have to check that I I've met recently after I published the book his nephew Larry Brockman called me and he said the family was really grateful that I had written the book said because we knew uncle bill was a war hero but he never really talked about it and so I had a lot of information and reports eyewitness interviews with crew members about him that's right yeah I don't know if that contributed a couple of other of the wardroom and I won't take too much more time but I wanted to mention a few of these other heroes of the Nautilus Pat Rooney who was a first lieutenant became after he left Nautilus he became the commander of the Corvina and the Corvina is famous not in a good way as being the only u.s. submarine to have been sunk by a Japanese submarine during World War two and that was on his first patrol as commander of the Corvina and he was one of the 20 percent of American submarine errs that were lost during the war this fellow who was the the torpedo and gunnery officer Ozzie Lynch was a really interesting guy he was a camera enthusiast and he actually had his own still camera and 16 millimeter movie camera and he brought them on board with him and he actually figured out how to hook them up to the periscope and he made he took videos or not videos but film and still photos through the cameras and in fact he was on one of their subsequent two patrols he was assigned to collect imagery of the island of Tarawa in advance of the invasion the cameras that were sent by the Navy didn't work so he used his own cameras and and he got the imagery later Nautilus after the Battle of Midway came back to the port at Midway did a couple of days refurbishment and headed back out to continue their first war patrol and during that they sank the destroyer Yama Kazi and Ozzie took this photo of it sinking which made the photo of the year for Life magazine and many of you have probably seen this photo it's not always accurately attributed but Ozzie Lynch took it I'm I met his daughter Peggy who lives in New Orleans and back when we were doing this project and she shared with me three VHS tapes of Ozzy's fell and they included shots like this torpedoes hitting targets images of Pearl Harbor during VA day or VJ day the crew doing calisthenics on the deck really cool stuff some of it is on YouTube but a lot of it isn't and so when I was writing the book I said you know I wanted to relook at these tapes again but I said to myself I'm not going to look at them before I digitized him and put him on DVD because then that way they'll be preserved so I did that and I called Peggy and I said what I did and I said number one I'd be happy to give you a copy and number two if you can give me the original 16 millimeter film I think today we can do a better job of converting these and she said well I can't because I'm sorry to say they were all lost in Katrina so I may have had the only copy at that point so she asked me to make copies for her sisters and I was happy to do that here is another fellow I wanted to mention briefly Rowley DeFries was the junior officer on board he was the commissary officer and he came from a great naval background his father was an admiral quite old by World War two but he had been a hero in World War one and he was an up-and-coming young officer he was supposed to have been he was class of 42 at the Naval Academy so he should have been at graduation ceremonies in June of 1942 but they graduated that class a year early so he was actually in the Battle of Midway instead of throwing his hat up at graduation he he went on to join the sculpin as a lieutenant and the sculpin is also infamous because it was involved in an attack where it was depth-charged and they lost depth control and accidentally came to the surface and they were damaged by the Abijah Panisse destroyer and unable to submerge the captain sent his Gunners and officers to the topside to try to fend off the Japanese ship and as soon as they got up in place Japanese hit them accurately in the conning tower and killed everybody topside including 23 year old to freeze now the rest of that story so he's the only one that didn't become a commander and I imagine he would have if he had survived the other rest of that story is also on board the submarine was the Wolfpack commander Joe John Cromwell the squadron commander and they had a wolf pack of three submarines and at this point the ship was helpless and the captain decided that there was no choice but to abandon ship so he he ordered that there were 42 men that got off but Cromwell said to himself gee I had no two very important secrets he knew about the upcoming invasion of Tarawa and he also knew about the code breaking secret which was the best kept secret of the war he did not want to be captured by the Japanese and he feared that he would be tortured into telling them something so he chose to stay onboard and go down with the ship of the 42 that escaped 21 of them actually made it through prisoner of war camp and to the end of the war and they reported about Joseph or John cromwell's heroism and he was given the Medal of Honor posthumously for that so one other fellow the last one I'll mention is buzz Lee he's the guy that we have quite a bit of information from he he gave us hours and hours of audio interviews and one of his shipmates read Porterfield the chief of the boat said that that buzz really like to tell a tale and he thought he even believed some of them so I try not to rely on on buzz for facts but I did rely on him for feelings and and I substantiated what he said with with with with logs and records and and that worked out fine here is Buzz as a young first class radio man being awarded the unit citation that Nautilus received as a result of its success at the battle Midway by Admiral Nimitz so Buzz unfortunately has passed away as have just about everybody from the crew I'm not aware of any surviving members of the crew that were on the Battle of Midway although there are some that still survived from the Nautilus later and I'm going to be giving much the same talk at the army/navy Club in Arlington next Friday night for the annual Midway commemoration which I'm very honored to do so that's my story there is a book that details this and I understand they have it here at the museum store and I'll be happy if there's a few more minutes to answer any questions thank you yes there's one in the middle here that's a really really interesting question because in I have in the back of the book a little synopsis of their 14 patrols because I thought it was kind of interesting they did some really amazing stuff in the the subsequent patrol after I believe it was the very next one or maybe the one after they took Carlson's Raiders the marine battalion and to make an island which was an island near Tarawa and they actually provided fire support to the Marines by shelling installations and and some small ships that tried to oppose them so they did use their guns they were with the narwhal which had similar equipment on board unfortunately the Raiders had to be evacuated they they you know we're we're successful in that they pretty much wiped out the Japanese that were there but then the counter-attack caused them to to have to retire Franklin Roosevelt son was an officer in that in that group and was on board Nautilus they also were asked not asked you don't ask in the Navy the but bill Brockman took it that way Admiral English who was a charge of the submarine fleet had kind of a wild plan they they had intelligence and said the Emperor was going to be at his summer quarters on the coast and he wanted to send Nautilus on on their patrol inland to shell the palace and Brockman said no he said it's you know too dangerous we'll never get out of there alive and he talked him out of it actually I think the way I went was he just didn't do it you know he went out on his patrol when he did you know and and no one thought less of him for it he was actually very he became squadron commander and and commanded another submarine and commanded a an oil or later in the war those are two particular instances that I know of that they used them oh oh one other thing the submarine darter was damaged and abandoned and the Nautilus was assigned to go destroy it and so they shelled it with their guns until it broke apart so yes they did use them yes over here say this they send a lot of shipping but most of it was something about the cut and I was also stabbed and realized that they had a six-inch gun I said no this first ammunition yeah it's Deborah two to six inch cannon on board yeah I know that they that they did routinely use their gun two torpedoes were not effective plus they you know they could only carry so many they were very you know valuable weapon to use so if they could I don't think they were atypical but they had bigger guns than any other submarine in the fleet so I couldn't tell you how many ships they sunk by one now of course later in the war the torpedoes became they fixed the problem and they became much more effective there was one in the back there yes there's a there were a couple of instances that that were one was prosecuted as a war crime the other the other wasn't but there were two sets of us aviators that were tortured and killed executed one of them was it's really an interesting story one of them was by the captain of the raashi and ensign Ausmus was the name of the pilot and I'm sorry I don't remember the name of his gunner but they were tortured into giving information about the u.s. fleet and then they were they were killed with a fire axe actually I do his Ausmus that was hit with the fire axe and basically decapitated and thrown overboard it was just him in that case with Arashi there were two other sail of aviators that were picked up by another ship and they were simply had weights tied to their feet and thrown overboard Oh clarity right and there's very good yeah thank you for remembering Midway Airport you'll see the Midway exhibit and you'll see their names of commemorates their clarity very good thank you yeah thanks for reminding me of their names and there was a ship named for Flaherty as well there's also a more to the story about the Arashi and the captain he was also involved in the sinking of the pt-109 his the ship that he was the squadron commander of and he was subsequently sunk and and killed by an American submarine after that so there was some justice in his case at least about how many submarines that we have actively fighting during the Battle of Midway there were I believe there were eleven that were in kind of a picket line and there was a twelfth the cache a lot that was farther out and then there were others at like up in the Aleutians and in different places but there was there was about a dozen the Japanese submarines were this in terms of if you look at the order of battle yes and it's in the book there they're roughly equal numbers the the Japanese submarines had almost no impact on the battle except one very major one and that the submarine I 158 or 168 same number is a Nautilus by coincidence was the one that put the final touch on sinking the Yorktown and that that submarine escaped but the others didn't have any impact in the battle yes another well I know there were 50 that were sunk and it depends on what time of the what part of the war you're looking at as to how many were active at any one time and I don't know off the top of my head the number total that were built it was several hundred but I don't I don't know certainly the rate of attrition for the u.s. submarine forces was terrible but it was nothing compared to the u-boats or the Japanese forces almost all the Japanese submarines that were operating were some three-quarters of them were sunk and the other quarter were were really not in operation so it was was worse on that end yes the construction being completed yeah I think you're referring to what was the Shinano which was a as you may know there were there were two super battleships that Japan built the Yamato and the musashi and these carried the 18-inch cannon the biggest naval guns in ever and they had a third one that was being built and they decided to convert it to a super aircraft carrier and they called it the Shinano and that was that was torpedoed on its way just as you said from in the middle of new construction after it was launched very aggressive and when they didn't pay the bill I don't know about that clever clever any other questions we have a couple more minutes there's one another one in the back there yes correct unfortunately because submarine the depth charges were cleared up the the we have not because it's really in a completely different area and it would be near the Yorktown but that would be an interesting thing to search for I think the the the for at least three of the four Japanese carriers would be kind of our main targets because they're we know we really do know pretty well where they are it was just a question of having enough time to to complete the search and and and investigate the battlefield what I'd also really like to find is that the site of the actual air battles themselves and the torpedo plane attacks because resting on the sea floor there are the remains of torpedo squadron 8 and the other Devastator torpedo bombers which were lost there as I said decimated literally and there are no surviving copies of Devastator torpedo bomber anywhere in the world on dry land there's there's one that was lost in in one of the great lakes for training it's sitting there but there's none of the ones that fought in the war have ever been recovered so it would be awfully historic to find one of those and in particular if we could find George gays playing the survivor sole survivor of torpedo squadron eight that plane was ditched it wasn't exploded or anything it ought to be in in good condition but that would be my my dream scenario to have a chance to find that yes do you guys work with the Japanese Japan arises in in this in this particular case it was very indirectly we did do a documentary on this show that was shown on decline our expedition that was on Discovery Channel back in 2000 but the Japanese NHK and an other word we're not interested there was a not a lot of interest in this after all it was their biggest defeat of the beginning of the war and we have some still some loose connections to the Japanese and if we get to go out on an expedition again we'll certainly bring those back to life and if they are interested then you know we'll be happy to to participate have them participate so I think my time is up I'll be happy to stay and talk to anyone that wants to for as long as you want yes Bob sure I'll be happy to yeah the Dakar you said yeah so the the first book of I published was about the discovery of the Israeli submarine dakar it's a pretty interesting story back in 1968 Israel bought three submarines from England world war two vintage subs and the first one was delivered successfully this is right during the six-day war just after it and the second one was on its way from Portsmouth England where it had been refitted to Haifa and it disappeared in the middle of the Mediterranean almost exactly where by the way the EgyptAir plane went down was last seen and he was last heard from that's a coincidence I'm sure but it's interesting because it's the deepest part of the Mediterranean and in 1999 actually the same time we were doing this expedition we had another team searching in the Med and we found the car and it had sunk in 10,000 feet of water and it it it's sunk by an accident we determined and it actually imploded so it was of wreckage we were able to recover the conning tower which is a 4 ton piece of metal that had detached from the ship and that is now a memorial to the 69 sailors that disappeared on on Dakar but it was a pretty interesting story because we we after 30 years that they were continuing to search for this a lot of it was because of the families of the 69 and wanting to know what happened it's sort of like the Malaysian airliner I'm sure we'll see something similar from EgyptAir where the families really want to know what happened long after the you know the Navy cares anymore because they're not using that kind of ship design and what are they going to learn from it but the the families can keep it up for for a long time and it was very poignant to be able to meet with them afterwards and to see the gratitude for the closure that they got from knowing what happened so it's a so there's a lot to the story and I'd be happy to come back and tell it someday thank you

Channel: U.S. Naval War College

Views: 18,409

Rating: 4.590909 out of 5

Keywords: Naval War College, United States Navy, USS Nautilus, Battle of Midway, Japan, Japanese Fleet, Maritime, World War Two, WWII, Pacific, Pacific War

Id: 9UhVKnqX8Ak

Length: 61min 9sec (3669 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 17 2016