I was with Lieutenant Commander Lew Parks for three years in the USS Pompano (SS-181). He took command in April 1939, about a year after I graduated from submarine school. We were supposed to be qualified in submarines within one year after graduation, or else the skipper was supposed to explain why not to the Bureau of Navigation. One year with Parks went by; two years went by, and I still wasn’t qualified. Neither were Penrod Schneider and Dave Connole, my two closest contemporaries in the boat. By 1941, we were pretty unhappy, but there was a reason for the delay.
Parks explained to us that as soon as an officer got qualified for his dolphins, he was pulled off that submarine and sent to new construction. The empty billets were filled with reserves, and he didn’t like reserves. So Parks said, “If I don’t qualify you guys, you won’t get pulled off. We’re going to war, and I want to be ready.” So he just poured stuff into us, worked our tails off, but he wouldn’t qualify us. And he said, “The bureau will never check up on us.” He was right. The bureau didn’t check, and I was bothered because my peers from other boats were going around with submarine pins, and here I was with a clean chest. It kind of hurt my ego.
Despite all this, one of the luckiest breaks I got was going to the Pompano under Parks, because he taught me to be a submariner.
He was an outstanding teacher, because he was very demanding, and he was in an environment where we were all highly motivated. He was a great leader, and the war was coming on. When the Matsuia Maru or one of the other big ships came in from Japan, he used to send me, as the Pompano's torpedo officer and fire control officer, down to the docks at Aloha Tower in Honolulu and look them over. He wanted me to see if there were any features or anything on those ships that would help estimate the angle on the bow and thus be able to determine their courses if we ever encountered them at sea.
As the war got closer and closer, it wouldn’t have done a bit of good to complain about not getting our submarine qualification, so we kept quiet. Then one day, for some reason, our division commander or someone else apparently said. “You’ve got to qualify these people or else.” So Parks made arrangements for a target, 12 to 25 knots, zigzagging. She was the old destroyer Litchfield (DD- 336), and we were going out to fire exercise torpedoes. He had taught us how to solve approach problems in our heads. We never used what is called an “is- was,” which was an instrument to get distance to the track, the gyro angles, and things like that. We couldn’t even use the stadimeter in the periscope to estimate range.
For this test we took our division commander, Commander Merrill Comstock, along to observe. Parks said to us, “I don’t want you to do anything except say, ‘Make the tubes ready,’ and then, ‘fire.’ You can say, ‘Come right or left,’ so many degrees by compass, but don’t give a course.”
Penrod Schneider was first to fire, and he missed. The target zigged on him just as he fired—a tough break. Then Connole fired; he got a hit. I fired, and I got a hit. And Parks, showman that he was, said, “Make ready another tube for Mr. Schneider.”
Schneider fired another one, and he got a hit. Commander Comstock was sitting there, and he didn’t know what the hell had gone on, because the division commanders in those days were unfamiliar with modem fire control equipment. All he knew was that the target signalled back hits, so it was pretty obvious that we were qualified for our dolphins. Normally, you’d get qualified in submarines, and then a year later or so, you’d get qualified for command. But Parks was a showman. He turned to Comstock while we were all right there, and he said, “Commodore, I think these officers are ready to be qualified for command, too, don’t you?”
And we were, so the division commander had to agree after our show. We were qualified for command the same day we qualified for submarines. That was Parks’s moment of glory, too. And he deserved it, because he had worked our butts off and he taught us all these things. We had learned everything from him, not from submarine school. His training helped me a great deal later on in the war. It helped me sink ships.1
Along with the training that the officers and crew were receiving to prepare us for war, the Pompano herself got some improvements. Our division of submarines was sent to Mare Island Navy Yard in late 1941 to get degaussing gear installed and to get the conning tower doors removed. Believe it or not, we had glass windows in our conning towers, and they were taken out and welded shut with steel. We also had some work done on our diesel engines, which were perpetually giving us problems. We were in California for two months, and then we left about the first of December to return to Pearl Harbor in company with the Pollack (SS-180) and Plunger (SS-179).
On the morning of the seventh, at about five minutes after 8:00, the radioman came up through the conning tower and reached up and handed to the officer of the deck a dispatch which read, “Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.” We had aboard two officers we were bringing out to take command of submarines; they were lieutenant commanders. Like Parks, they had served in China, and they got talking about the Japanese: “That’s just like those yellow bastards. They’d do something like that.” And they believed it right away. So we rigged ship for dive to get down.
We were supposed to arrive that morning at 6:00 o’clock at the entrance buoys in Pearl Harbor, which would have put us right there at the time of the attack. But the Pompano had engine trouble, and that held the other submarines back, too. So we weren’t due in until that afternoon. We were 135 miles from Pearl Harbor, northeast of it on the great circle route from San Francisco to Pearl, when we were attacked by the Japanese aircraft. We couldn’t get under, because to make as much speed as we could, we had pumped out all of our variable ballast. As a result, when this message came in, Parks said, "Rig ship for dive and compensate. Get the water back in so we can dive.”
We weren’t done when we got attacked by the first wave of planes, and we were strafed. The other submarines went under. We weren’t damaged. We came up. Norman Ives was the division commander, and Parks sent a message to him over voice radio saying, “You should tell Pearl Harbor we were attacked by enemy aircraft.”
And Ives said, “They’ve got too much on their mind.” And a good thing, I guess, because if anything had been sent after the enemy, it would have been sunk.
After a while, we got a message to proceed to Lahaina Roads, submerge, and stay submerged until the following night when we could surface and would receive a message telling us what to do. The submarine force commander told us to meet the McFarland (DD-237), which was the destroyer that escorted the three of us into Pearl Harbor on 9 December.
When we got into port, there were many people on dock, but we couldn’t get anyone to handle our lines. It was like they were all in a daze. Fortunately, we got some help from a former Pompano torpedoman’s mate named Russell Reed, whom the captain had put in the brig when we left Pearl. I don’t recall what he had done; he was always doing something bad ashore. Parks had disqualified him for submarine duty, and he was through. When we got back, two months later, Reed was on the dock, and he was the one guy who handled the lines. They had let him out of the brig and he was functioning. So he came back aboard, requalified for submarine duty.
Also on the dock when we got there was an ensign named Thomas Patrick McGrath who had been brigade commander at the Naval Academy and a football player. In fact, I’d gotten to know him when I was an assistant coach. All he had on were a .45, a pair of khaki shorts, and open sandals. When his ship, the California, was sunk, all of his clothes were there. He had been sleeping up in the submarine base grounds with a lot of other survivors. He knew I was on board the Pompano, and he came aboard. I invited him to the wardroom to have lunch with us, and he said, "I want to go out on the first ship that’s going out after those bastards.”
The skipper was in his cabin, which was just aft of the wardroom, and he said, “Young man, do you mean that?”
“Yes, sir,” said McGrath.
With that. Parks got up and went to headquarters. He wasn’t gone 15 minutes, and back he came, “Son, you are a member of the Pompano crew.”
On the 18th of December, we left Pearl Harbor on our first war patrol. On the morning of 20 December, we were sighted by a PBY patrol plane, obviously from Pearl Harbor. We were then about 600 miles out, I guess. We dove, because a submarine was fair game.
About 2:00 o’clock that afternoon, I was below and the diving alarm went and shortly after—WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!—three bombs. The carrier Enterprise (CV-6) was then coming back from Wake. A classmate of mine named Eddie Outlaw was the leader of a section of aircraft, from the carrier. They came out of a cloud. We hadn’t seen them, and didn’t have any radar then. The bombs they dropped landed on the far side, but they were close enough to open seams in our main ballast tanks, which were carrying fuel oil, so we left a trail of oil wherever we went for the rest of the patrol.
After that experience, we continued our journey. We didn’t dive for a number of days. The other submarines, practically all of them, would stay submerged all day and run on the surface only at night. Of course, that was stopped very soon, because it took too long to get to the patrol area, staying submerged all day making two knots and then getting up at night. Parks didn’t pay any attention to it; off he went. We steered west toward Ponape and Truk, headquarters of the Japanese fleet. And while we were heading for Truk, we were diverted to go to Wake Island, because they hadn’t gotten any word from Wake, and they wanted to see if the Japanese were there.
When we arrived, the Japanese were on Wake. Parks, of course, got in real close to look it over and he saw the Japanese and the flag flying over the Pan Am building and all that sort of stuff. He was going at dead slow speed; it was a flat calm sea and with just a little bit of periscope up, and we started to go down below periscope depth. So Parks said. “Bring her up, bring her up, goddamn it, bring her up.” He didn’t want to speed up, so he said, “Put a bubble in negative tank.” However, instead of blowing water out of the negative tank, the auxiliary man had his hand on the crank for the bow buoyancy tank instead. He was cranking the high-pressure air and looking at the negative tank gauge, and nothing was happening. So he gave it more and gave it more. He was blowing bow buoyancy by mistake. The next thing we knew, we were on the surface, 400 yards off the beach at Wake Island. So we vented bow buoyancy in a hurry and went all ahead full. We got under, and fortunately, nothing happened to us because the Japanese weren’t looking for enemy submarines.
We didn’t have enough fuel to make it to Truk. You see, everything was theoretical. Before the war, they never tested these things. They never sent submarines that far to see if they could really do it. So as soon as we started on patrol. Parks kept a graph on our fuel consumption and how much we had left, and also on our food. Well, we couldn’t possibly get to Ponape and Truk and get back to Pearl Harbor, no way, even if the tank hadn’t been leaking.
Instead of that, we went down to Wotje in the Marshall Islands. Our job was to reconnoiter for Admiral William Halsey’s raid on 1 February 1942, the first offensive action against the enemy. We reconnoitered Wotje, and Parks did a good job. Then we cleared out of there. The carrier task force came in the day after we sent our report. I don’t know how much damage they did, but it gave a boost to the morale of our forces and the people back home.
One of our tasks during this patrol to the Marshalls was to get any enemy ships we could. On 12 January, off Wotje, we fired at the Yawata, which was a big transport. She was a big luxury liner before the war. She came out of there, and we reported sinking her, because we didn’t know what a torpedo hit sounded like. We heard the hits and saw the splash of water, so Parks assumed that she was going to sink. When we came up after the depth charge attack, there was no Yawata around. She just bailed out, that’s all; she hadn’t been hurt at all. Two duds bounced against her and caused the splashes along the side that Parks took to be hits.
Parks almost made a nervous wreck out of me by his desire to patrol close to the beach, especially since our charts were from about 1895. Whenever we closed in on Wotje, I would have the listening gear lowered and would stop every little ways and listen. We could hear the reef, and when we got close I wouldn’t go any more. We would always be pretty close to where Parks wanted to be each morning, because he didn’t want to have to run in submerged; he wanted to be there. They had two destroyers out one day that we thought were looking for us. I don’t know whether they were looking for us, but they were patrolling the entrance. So Parks maneuvered all day long, trying to get in position to hit them, but they never settled down enough to allow us a good firing position. I was operating the torpedo data computer, and the captain was up in the conning tower. Finally, in desperation, he decided to shoot. We fired two torpedoes, and both of them prematured. Next I heard from Parks, “Range 1,200 yards, speed 25, angle on the bow two degrees port, stand by.” And I put on the solution light, “Fire!” About this time, Parks said over the loudspeaker system, “Slade, did you ever have so much fun before with your clothes on?” I’ll never forget it.
Well, I wasn’t worrying about having fun with clothes on or off about that stage of the game. Looking at this thing on the torpedo data computer, here was this target at 1,200 yards, and he’d be over us in a minute or so. He came, and that’s the first depth charge we ever heard. We had never had one fired in practice; I didn’t know what they sounded like. A barrage came over, and I knew what it was like to face death, right then, because we heard the water rushing through the superstructure. As we learned later, that is normal, but we thought we had been holed. So I thought, that’s the end and you don’t feel anything. We realized very shortly that we hadn’t been holed. And then it was a matter of maneuvering to get away from this guy. We abandoned the conning tower, and to this day I can see Lew Parks on the annunciator controls and the wheel in the control room. He did it. The skipper maneuvered the submarine around, all ahead full, starboard back full and port ahead full, to cut down the turning circle to evade these guys up above dropping their depth charges.
Then he shifted to hand steering to reduce our ship’s noise and had two men turning the steering wheel by hand. Well, that was our baptism of depth charges. And Parks thoroughly enjoyed it apparently. He was having a hell of a time. This was what he had been waiting for and preparing for. (After that, every time we went out on patrol, one of the prepatrol training exercises was to have a destroyer drop one or two depth charges 100 yards away so everybody could hear what they sounded like.)
A number of the prewar skippers turned out to be cautious when the depth charges began falling around them. Parks, who had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1925, was exceptional among many of his contemporaries for this sense of bravery and aggressiveness. He could have been a top skipper at age 50, and it’s just a crime that he didn’t have a good sub with good torpedoes, because he would have made a killing.
After we got back from the Marshalls and spent some time in the shipyard at Pearl, the next patrol we made was to the South China Sea, between Hong Kong and the Philippines. When we got off Wake, an enemy plane sighted us. He came in and dropped one bomb, and we went down to 250 feet or whatever it was. In the after battery compartment we had two toilets, and the discharge for them went through the ballast tank outboard, and air pressure would blow the waste out. Well, where this went through the hull was a flange with a gasket, and the rascals in the shipyard had put in a split gasket. They had done that because it is easier to put on; they didn’t have to take the toilet out, so they just cut it and slipped it around there. A split gasket won’t hold under pressure; it opens. So we were down there, and water was coming in the after battery compartment. It was serious, and we had to do something about it. We were not far off Wake, at night, on the surface, unable to dive, because we had to remove the pipe going through the hull and put a blank flange over the hole with the proper gasket. So we had only one toilet for all the crew after that, which was a problem, too.
While we were on the surface, there was a motor machinist’s mate by the name of Herbert Calcaterra.[2] He was called “Chainfall” because you didn’t need a chainfall with him aboard. He was strong as an ox, and I was pretty husky in those days, too. So he and I were the ones who sawed through that monel discharge line, which is tough metal, with a hacksaw blade held in our hands with a rag. We were putting all we could into it. We were motivated because we couldn’t dive, and were in enemy-controlled waters. We finally cut through it, and they put the correct flange on, and we went on our way.
From there we went out in the South China Sea, and we were on the surface one night when we picked up a contact. So we shut off our engines and put her stem toward it. We didn’t want to be picked up, but the contact saw us and turned toward us. So we turned away again, and he turned toward us. Parks sent for me to man the .50-caliber machine gun we had aft.
And he said, “Put it on them.” We made another course change, and the guy turned toward us again, and Parks said, “Let him have it.” Instead of “commence fire,” he would say, “Let him have it,” so I pulled the trigger. I guess this thing was about 300 yards away. It was a fishing boat, stack aft, and the bridge was aft—good size, probably 20 men aboard. And after that first burst of probably 50 rounds put into it, a guy held a lantern up to show the rising sun on their flag. He thought we were Japanese. The captain said, “Let them have it.” so I opened up again, and that time we just kept firing. And finally the thing caught fire. I guess the tracers set off the fuel or something, and it burned and we got out of there. It was a fisherman. That’s one of the terrible things of war. He was harmless, and he thought we were friends. He was coming over to exchange information or whatever. I was quite upset about that after I found out what it was. But that didn’t bother Parks. They were enemy, anybody. He said, “Don’t worry about that, they’re feeding them, and they are fair game.”
We didn't run into many contacts on that patrol, so it was a frustrating time. Parks did achieve some of the early sinkings of the war, the 900-ton tanker Tokyo Maru on 25 May 1942 and the 8,000-ton tanker Atsuta Maru on 30 May. I should mention at this point that Parks had gotten away from his prewar practice of keeping his attack techniques a secret. Once the war began, he shared everything; it all came in his patrol reports. It was a new ball game. In fact. Parks did a lot of things one probably wouldn’t consider too prudent so he could impress people. For instance, he didn’t let us make trim dives when we began our patrols because he wanted to keep Dave Connole, the diving officer, on his toes.
After those sinkings in late May, we came back from our second war patrol. We stopped at Midway Island in early June, right after the Battle of Midway. We picked up a prisoner there that somebody else had brought in, and we transported him to Pearl Harbor to wind up the patrol. As we came in, we met the destroyer Litchfield, the flagship of Submarine Squadron Four. The skipper was a classmate of Parks, and the exec was a classmate of mine. By then, I was the Pompano's executive officer. I was up on the bridge and the skipper was down below. The skipper of the destroyer got on the voice radio. We were just batting the breeze back and forth, and I mentioned we had a prisoner aboard.
He said, “Mike Fenno [of the USS Trout] came in here last week, and he had a prisoner aboard. It took an hour and a half before they could get the Marines over to take the prisoner off, and they wouldn’t let anybody aboard until the prisoner was removed.” So he said, “I will call [the signal tower] with my 36- inch searchlight and tell them you have a prisoner aboard, and they’ll meet you down there.”
And I said, “Fine, thank you very much, sir.”
So I called down and told the captain that I had exchanged messages with the Litchfield, and they were going to inform harbor control that we had a prisoner aboard. Jesus, the next thing I know, up came Parks, face covered with lather and a towel wrapped around his waist; he had no other clothes on than some sandals. And boy, was he fit to be tied. He really ripped me up one side and down the other and said, “What the hell do you mean by doing that?”
I said, “Captain, what would you have done?”
He said, “That has nothing to do with it. Do I interfere with your operating the internal mechanism of this ship?”
“No, sir.” He didn’t either; he never bothered me a bit.
He said, “I don’t expect you to interfere with the external affairs of the ship. That’s my responsibility.”
Even though he had orders and was due to be detached right after our arrival in Pearl, he was still the captain of the Pompano, and he guarded his prerogatives. Ashore we were on a first-name basis. Lew and Slade, after all these years. That night, we got drunk, as we always did after coming in from patrol. I finally said, “Lew, what the hell would you have done?”
Then he gave me that same thing, “Goddamn it. That isn’t the point.” He would have done the same thing I did, of course, but the point was that I had overstepped my bounds. You would think he would kind of overlook it since he was leaving the next day, but that’s the way he was. That was good training.
This account is an edited excerpt from oral history interviews conducted by Paul Stillwell on 30 November and 1 December 1982. Captain Cutter’s entire 616-page transcript is available from the oral history program’s lending library. The fee is $12.00, plus return postage. For a catalog containing a complete listing of the transcripts in the collection, please send $3.00 to Director of Oral History, U. S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland 21402.
1. As commanding officer of the USS Seahorse (SS- 304) in 1943-44, Cutter was credited with sinking 19 Japanese ships, one of the highest totals for any submarine skipper during the war.
2. Motor Machinist’s Mate Calcaterra was later killed in action on board the Pompano. While manning a 3-inch deck gun, he was fatally wounded on 4 September 1942 by gunfire from a Japanese patrol ship. The USS Calcaterra (DE-390/DER-390) was named for him.