The story of the USS Flier has all the elements of a classic World War II survival tale: sudden disaster, physical deprivation, a ruthless enemy, friendly guerrillas, and an intricate escape. The eight men of the Flier became the first Americans of the Pacific war to survive the sinking of a submarine and make it back to the United States. It was rare for anyone from a lost submarine to ever be heard from again. Most often, submarines went down with all hands, and there was usually scant information about their last hours or days. The exceptions were the four submarines (S-36, S-27, S-39, and Darter) destroyed after running aground; in each case the entire crew was rescued. With the loss of fifty-two submarines and the death of more than 3,500 crewmen, the submarine service had the highest casualty rate of any branch of the U.S. military. There were known survivors from only eight submarines sunk during the Pacific war, and apart from the eight men of the Flier, all these survivors spent the remainder of the war in Japanese captivity.
At the end of the war, Tom Paine of the USS Pompon was one of the officers who assisted in repatriating these submariners from Japanese prisoner of war camps. As the men passed through the American base at Guam, Paine was appalled by both their pitiful condition and their small number. Among his class at the Naval Academy, thirty-five men had volunteered for service on submarines, and seven of them had been lost at sea. The death rate was about the same throughout the submarine service. Paine had been best man at the wedding of one of those lost with the USS Herring, and he had been introduced to his future wife, a member of the Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force in Perth, by a former Annapolis classmate lost with the USS Lagarto.1
The Flier’s skipper, John Daniel Crowley, was among the handful of men who escaped the sinking submarine and evaded capture in enemy territory. He also survived a naval judicial system notorious for its ruthlessness—twice. Earlier, the Flier had suffered a serious mishap on its first war patrol when it ran aground at Midway, resulting in the death of one crew member. Following a detailed inquiry into the incident, Crowley retained his command. After an extended period of repair, the Flier resumed its patrol, sailing from Pearl Harbor to the submarine base at Fremantle, Western Australia. The Flier was still in the early part of its second war patrol when it sank in Balabac Strait, this time leaving most of the crew on “eternal patrol,” as the sailors put it. Despite a second formal inquiry after the Flier’s loss, Crowley would later be given another submarine command.
The naval inquiries, along with the Flier’s checkered history, open a rare window on the inner workings of the wartime “silent service.” After the attack on Pearl Harbor, submarines became the first branch of the military to carry the fight to the enemy's doorstep. Although the major battles of the Pacific war were fought by aircraft carriers, U.S. submarines strangled the Japanese supply lines. Submariners represented less than 2 percent of U.S. Navy personnel, but they were responsible for more than half of Japan's shipping losses. In 1944 alone, U.S. subs sank nearly 500 Japanese ships, totaling well over 2 million tons.2 This effectiveness was due in part to the fact that the activities of the submarine service were closely guarded secrets.
Although some of the Flier’s mysteries remain hidden beneath the sea, its fate reveals the vagaries of both underwater warfare and naval protocols. At one level, the Flier’s story suggests a high degree of cooperation among submariners, coast watchers, and guerrillas in the Philippines. At another level, it illustrates the infighting and personality clashes within the submarine command. The ordeal of the Flier’s crew and their loved ones also highlights the trauma and personal tragedies of the Pacific war, which were often obscured by acts of heroism.
1
The Aleutians
Lieutenant Commander John Daniel Crowley had paid his dues. Before being given command of the newly minted USS Flier, he had spent nearly two years in charge of an antiquated S-boat, popularly known in the navy as a “pigboat” or “sewer pipe.” Conditions on the S-boats were atrocious. There were no showers on board and only one head for nearly fifty crewmen. Without air conditioning, the boats accumulated an incredible stench during prolonged dives. Once the submarines surfaced, the sudden burst of oxygen could render the crew giddy. Even so, the sailors who served on S-boats took a certain pride in having the grit to withstand such discomfort for extended periods. As one writer put it, “An S-boat was a great leveling agent; all suffered equally.”1 To add to Crowley's suffering, he was assigned to some of the most inhospitable waters in the world.
Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on 24 September 1908, John Crowley attended local schools before entering the U.S. Naval Academy in 1927. A classmate described Crowley's passage through the academy as “fairly easy sailing,” and he loved sports.2 When he graduated four years later, commissioned an ensign, Crowley became part of a group renowned for its social as well as military exclusivity. Nevertheless, it was a career characterized by relatively low pay and slow advancement. Like most new graduates, Crowley served on a succession of ships, including the battleships Maryland and Arkansas and the cruiser Minneapolis. On 25 June 1934 he was commissioned a lieutenant junior grade, and two years later he began instruction at the Submarine School in New London, Connecticut. It is possible that Crowley, like many other naval officers, viewed the submarine service as a shortcut to early command. After a period of postgraduate study at Annapolis and service on more surface ships and submarines, that ambition was finally realized.3
On 26 July 1941 Crowley assumed command of the S-28, built by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company at Quincy, Massachusetts. At the time, the S-28 was nearly twenty years old and was one of twenty-six S-boats still in operation. As a lieutenant with some ten years’ experience, Crowley was typical of the men given command of such boats.4
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the S-28 was undergoing a much-needed overhaul at the Mare Island Naval Yard north of San Francisco. After the work was completed on 22 January 1942, the S-28 headed for the Underwater Sound Training School at San Diego. Several months later the S-28 was ordered to the less salubrious latitudes of the Aleutians, and it left San Diego on 20 May in the company of three other S-boats, headed for the American base at Dutch Harbor in Unalaska Bay.
The S-28’s deployment was in response to an anticipated Japanese attack on U.S. bases at Midway and in the Aleutians. The Aleutian Islands, extending southwest from Alaska in a forbidding necklace of rocks and shoals, became American territory when the United States purchased Alaska from the Russians in 1867. The ultimate Japanese strategy was to occupy the Aleutians and thus block an Allied advance in the northern Pacific and prevent the islands from being used as a base for long-range bombers. The more immediate objective was to create a diversion from a planned attack on Midway, an island group in the central Pacific. The Americans were well aware of the Japanese plans, however. A signals intelligence team at Pearl Harbor under Commander Joseph J. Rochefort had managed to crack the Japanese Fleet's general-purpose code used to transmit operational orders.5
Even with this knowledge, service in the Aleutians proved to be frustrating. Because of the anticipated Japanese strike, the S-boats were diverted from their original destination at Dutch Harbor and ordered into attack mode. On 2 June the S-28 received a directive to attack enemy forces approaching Cold Bay on the Alaska Peninsula, but it was unable to make contact. The following day a Japanese task force under Vice Admiral Hosogaya unleashed its carrier aircraft on the American base at Dutch Harbor; more than a dozen fighters strafed the harbor and shore, followed by bombers.6 Several days later, on 6–7 June, Japanese landing parties took possession of Attu and Kiska at the western end of the Aleutian chain. Although these islands were barely populated, they constituted additional losses for the Allies, who had already seen the fall of Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.
Still