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One thing submariners making
guerrilla runs to the Philippines learned quickly was to expect the
unexpected. No two missions were exactly the same, and very few
were performed exactly according to plan…
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Soon after submarines
started making regular guerrilla runs to the Philippines, a way was found
to ameliorate the lack of a strong, relatively-unified command for the
native Filipino forces. The solution took the form of one Charles “Chick”
Parsons. Parsons was a young American businessman living and operating
out of Manila. He was also a Lieutenant Commander in an Intelligence Unit
of the U.S. Naval Reserve who had remained behind in the city to collect
intelligence on the Japanese occupiers. Fluent in several of the over
70 native dialects, intimately familiar with the islands, and a good
friend of MacArthur from their days together in Manila, Parsons was just
the man the General was looking for to act as a go-between with the
Filipino guerrillas.
After being called to
Australia to meet with MacArthur to discuss the situation, Parsons
accepted the position. In late February 1943, he was spirited to Labangan
aboard the submarine USS Tambor (SS-198), captained by LCDR S.
H. Ambruster. His mission was to deliver $10,000 in cash and two tons of ammunition
to Army LT COL Wendell Fertig, one of the guerrilla leaders in the
region. Parsons also carried ashore a substantial amount of radio
equipment for use in setting up a spy network, codenamed “Spyron.”
Parsons’ first clandestine visit back to the Philippines lasted until
July 1943. During that time, he criss-crossed several islands on foot,
horseback, and canoe, always at great personal risk of capture or death
by the Japanese, meeting and coordinating with guerrilla leaders, setting
up coast watchers, taking part in ambushes, rendezvousing with other
submarines to pick up supplies and men, and making contacts for future
Spyron stations. He would later make at least four more secret trips to
the Philippines to bolster the guerrilla effort and, ultimately, pave the
way for the U.S. invasion.
One thing submariners
making guerrilla runs to the Philippines learned quickly was to expect
the unexpected. No two missions were exactly the same, and very few were
performed exactly according to plan, whether due to mechanical problems,
enemy interference, weather, or simply no-shows on the beach. One of the
greatest fears the submariners had were airplanes, even friendly ones.
One never knew when a pilot, friend or foe, would take a submarine for a
target and open fire. As a result, the submariners kept a vigilant watch
on the skies and dove at the first sign of any aircraft.
The two transport
submarines, Narwhal and Nautilus, finally entered the
guerrilla game in 1943, and the next year Nautilus, commanded by
CDR George Sharp, had an interesting run-in with patrolling aircraft. In
late July, Nautilus was ordered to deliver one Navy officer, 22
enlisted men, and 10 tons of supplies to Mindoro; two Filipino Army
enlisted men and 30 tons of supplies to Bohol; and two U.S. Army enlisted
men and 30 tons of supplies to Leyte. At dawn on the very first morning
of her mission, radar detected an airplane at five miles and closing. The
plane was immediately recognized as friendly, but the pilot was less
observant. He dove towards the submarine and dropped a bomb, which
luckily landed harmlessly in front of the ship. His ensuing strafing
attempt was also unsuccessful, missing his target by 100 yards. With
that, the pilot inexplicably broke away, and was never seen or heard from
again.
Later that same day Nautilus
detected several more air contacts, causing the submarine to constantly
dive quickly and then cautiously return to the surface to continue with
the mission. Finally, the drop-off at Mindoro was completed successfully.
The delivery to Bohol was called off due to the sudden arrival of a
Japanese occupation force, so Sharp proceeded to Leyte. The submarine
failed to make contact with the guerrillas there, so Sharp proceeded to
the alternate site, where security signals were successfully exchanged
with one of the guerrilla leaders, LT COL Roberto Kangeleon. With the
goods safely on the beach, Nautilus headed for home, but not
before another accuracy-challenged bombardier attacked with a bomb that
exploded wide and well above the slow-diving submarine. The plane
harassed Nautilus all day, keeping the submarine below water
until nightfall, when she was finally able to continue on her journey
home to Fremantle.
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Colonel
Ruperto Kangeleon, Philippine guerrilla leader, reporting to General
Douglas MacArthur in Tacloban, Leyte,
on 23 October 1944, three days after American forces re-invaded the
Philippines there. Early on, the various guerrilla groups on the islands
fought each other as frequently as the Japanese, with one of the worst
situations on Leyte. Chick Parsons resolved the issue on that island by
convincing the much-respected Kangeleon to come out of retirement and
assume leadership of all local guerrilla factions.
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At first, most
submarines on secret missions to the Philippines delivered supplies and military
personnel before heading off to perform more traditional wartime patrols
in search of Japanese ships to sink. In the spring of 1944, this began to
change as pressure from the United States pushed the Japanese back into
the western Pacific. This drive kept the submarines too busy to supply
the Philippines on their way to the theater, but many were tasked with
picking people up from the islands on the return leg of a deployment. USS
Crevalle (SS-291), commanded by LCDR F. D. Walker, Jr., was
ordered to pick up 25 evacuees on Negros. Upon arriving at the designated
location, Walker discovered the expected 25 evacuees in one boat, plus 16
others with baggage in another. Many children were among those escaping
the island, and Walker accepted both boatloads. During the return trip to
Australia, the refugees were fed in the galley, requiring them to pass
through the control room for each meal. The children were fascinated by
the lights and switches there and couldn’t resist trying to play with
them. In the words of Walker, “the Chief of the Watch solved this by
putting a sign on the switchboard reading, ‘Any children found in the
control room without their parents will be shot.’ The mothers read this
gravely to their kids, who seemed to take it as a matter of course.
Considering that some of them could not remember when they were not
fugitives, perhaps this is understandable.”
In addition to the
new underage menace within the ship, Crevalle and her passengers
still had external threats to worry about before reaching the safety of
Australia. After being forced to dive twice by aircraft, the submarine
detected a large Japanese convoy. Walker set a course to cut off the last
ship in the group, but the convoy suddenly changed course and bore
directly down on Crevalle. Walker’s superiors later attributed
the convoy’s maneuver to an alert by the second aircraft encountered
earlier. Whatever the case, Crevalle suddenly had no option but
to dive. As the convoy passed 90 feet above the submarine without
incident, Walker ordered the boat to level off and maintain depth.
Moments later, two groups of two depth charges exploded close aboard,
knocking out the sonar in what Walker described as the worst depth
charging he had experienced. When the sonar was fixed, the crew found the
attackers still searching directly above them, and the submarine crept
away as quickly and as quietly as possible. Although heavily damaged by
the depth charge attack, Crevalle reached Australia with all
hands.
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The
transport submarine USS Nautilus (SS-168) is shown here
returning to Pearl Harbor in August 1942 after transporting part of the
Marine Corps’ 2nd Raider Battalion – “Carlson's Raiders” – to Makin
Island to divert Japanese attention and supplies from the battle for
Guadalcanal ranging over 1,000 miles to the southwest. That mission
foreshadowed her later clandestine runs to the Philippines, transporting
men and supplies to anti-Japanese guerrilla fighters there.
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In all, 19 submarines
participated in a total of 41 secret missions to the Philippine Islands,
beginning with Gudgeon’s run in late December 1942. The last
officially recorded guerrilla run, by USS Stingray (SS-186) on New
Year’s Day, 1945, took place between the re-invasion of the Philippines
at Leyte Gulf on 20 October 1944 and the liberation of Manila on 4
February 1945. Of the conventional submarines, only Stingray
participated in more than two runs (her total being five), and the two
transport submarines, Nautilus and Narwhal, were the
true workhorses of the operation, with six and nine operations
respectively. In the course of the campaign, U.S. submarines delivered
331 people, evacuated 472, and delivered some 1,325 tons of supplies to
the Philippines.
Parsons’ network of
spies and coast watchers proved invaluable not only to the liberation of
the Philippines, but also to the Pacific war effort as a whole. In one somewhat
amusing example of their effectiveness, on 4 August 1944 USS Cero
(SS-225), commanded by CDR E. F. Dissette, torpedoed a tanker and
observed it breaking up but was forced to dive beneath the tanker’s
attacking escorts to escape. After dark, Dissette surfaced to send his
action report, but before he even got on the air, he received a message
from headquarters: “Nice work CERO. Coast watcher reports sub
sank 10,000 ton tanker off coast your assigned area. It had to be you.”
Several months prior to that incident, the coast watchers were also the
first to alert Southwest Pacific Headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, to
a massing of Japanese naval power in the islands. This information led to
a submarine net being thrown around the Japanese, tracking their every
move, and eventually resulted in the U.S. Navy gaining a major victory in
the Battle of the Philippine Sea – the so-called “Marianas Turkey Shoot.”
In every radio
broadcast he made from Australia to the Japanese-occupied Philippines,
General MacArthur had famously insisted, “I shall return,” a
morale-boosting promise heard by many Filipinos on radio equipment
brought to the islands on “guerrilla” submarines. When the tide of the
war fully turned in favor of the Americans, and MacArthur was finally able
to liberate the Philippines from the Japanese, those U.S. boats had
already played a major role in making preparations on the ground.
Mr. Holian is an
analyst with Anteon Corporation in Washington, D.C.
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The
transport submarine USS Narwhal (SS-167) during trials off
Provincetown, Massachusetts in July 1930. During a 1943 mission with Chick
Parsons aboard, Narwhal encountered two Japanese patrol ships while
running on the surface. The boat’s near miraculous escape from the
ensuing stern chase led the captain to dub the boat’s four ancient and
rickety diesel engines “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John” – the four
Apostles.
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