Another close friend was Bill Hoffman. They had taken their last R and R leave together on Waikiki Beach. Paine had been best man at Hoffman’s wedding. Hoffman’s boat, the Herring (SS-233), had rendezvoused with the Barb (SS-220) on May 31, 1944. No one ever heard from them again. Postwar reconstruction of events determined that the Herring was likely sunk by Japanese shore batteries off Matua Island on June 1, 1944. In all, one out of every five in Paine’s class was killed in action.21
He pondered the human consequences of it all, consequences that were all too often deadly for the men and their unseen enemy. The US submarine force sustained the highest mortality rate among all branches of the military during the war. Fifty-two vessels were lost at sea; one of every five submariners was killed in action. Paine wrote in his journal of the unmistakable highs and lows of being a wartime submariner: “The days were dull,” as war patrols became all the same, with long periods of monotonous waiting punctuated by the sudden danger of violent and deadly action. “To me it was all fascinating—getting to know the boat, the people, the routine. The romance of piracy under Oriental seas combined with the technological complexity of submarine operations fascinated me. I never got over it.”22 But the disillusionment of war appalled him; it shaped him profoundly.23
Ah! The good old time, the good old time.Youth and the sea. Glamour and the sea!—A quote in Tom Paine’s wartime journal from Joseph Conrad’s Youth
Standing on the pier of Apra Harbor, he saluted his captain goodbye. The scenic natural port on the west coast of Guam provided a picture-postcard setting for Tom Paine’s last glimpse of the USS Pompon. She was heading home to Pearl Harbor. Her job in the Pacific was done; the war was over. He waved one last time to the crew standing on the bridge. Steering clear of the wreck of the cargo vessel Tokai Maru lying on the bottom, the submarine cleared the harbor and headed out to sea. He fixed his gaze on the conning tower until it slowly disappeared below the distant horizon. He turned around, walked back up the pier, and went back to work.1
For Paine, the tedious work of cleaning up after the war continued. Through the fall of 1945, the pace of US occupation of Japan intensified. The defeated enemy still had a very viable military, and the US was overseeing its stand-down. The IJN fleet of submarines now needed to be completely demilitarized, and he was ordered to remain behind and make sure that it was done.
He left Guam a few days later on the submarine tender USS Euryale (AS-22) and steamed for the Japanese mainland. Now, only days after the surrender, they entered Sasebo Harbor on high alert with weapons ready. He carefully surveyed the port. Through his binoculars, he saw the extent of its destruction, wrought by the thousands of bombs dropped from B-29 Superfortress bombers. The sight and smell of the wretched, burned city and its oily, messy harbor littered with the twisted wreckages of many ship skeletons underscored, for him, the tragedy of the war. Writing in his journal he wondered what insanity had led the leaders of this hidden and now shattered empire to believe that they could take on the mighty United States of America.2
Going ashore with the first tender of marines, no one quite knew what to expect. The Japanese had just surrendered, and although hostilities had officially ceased, wartime anxiety was still clearly in the air. He and the other officers all carried sidearms, escorted everywhere they went by the Shore Patrol. Kamikaze resistance, diehard fanatics, snipers—anything was possible. No trouble materialized, however, as the days went on. Only a brief encounter with a small, rogue patrol boat one day interrupted their work. It was quickly squelched by the Japanese officers themselves.
Paine was in Japan to seize a sample of every torpedo that his team could find. It was a priority order that came directly from the Pentagon. During the war, the US had learned the hard way to respect the Japanese torpedoes. While many of the early models had used old German designs, later indigenous variations developed by the IJN were by far the most advanced torpedoes of the war. The search and seizure turned out to be quite successful. Several torpedoes that his team collected are still on display as historical artifacts at the Navy submarine school in New London.
The Euryale then sailed from Sasebo and around Kyushu through the Inland Sea to the port of Kure. They sailed along the picturesque, pine-clad coastline that looked like a watercolor painting from a Hiroshige print. It was an eerie sight now, marred by the burned hulks of ugly wrecked ships. Midget-subs abandoned under construction were scattered about the dry docks. Hundreds of bomb craters from American B-29 air raids littered the shoreline. The once impenetrable naval stronghold was now a dilapidated mess of concrete and iron rubble. He was now in the heart of the imperial war machine whence such horrible death and violence came.
His orders were clear and precise: locate and disarm the remaining Japanese fleet, interrogate the crews, search their records, study the materials, and, when the time came, scuttle the boats. To do this effectively, he had to register and disarm each of the submarines that were slowly making their way back in from the Pacific.
One by one they came. Some looked like they had seen little action. Others were so heavily damaged that, as an engineer, he marveled that they were able to make it home at all. Most were of the Kaiten (“Reverse the Destiny”) type that carried suicide torpedoes. (The Japanese had turned to these in the last months of the conflict in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of the war.) He watched with compassion as the malnourished crew of each boat climbed ashore one at a time, disgraced and humiliated, and surrendered.
Days turned into weeks. His paperwork was almost complete when a submarine designated as the I-58 appeared on the horizon. As the duty officer on watch, he gave permission for the boat to enter. As it moored at the dock, it looked like most of the others that he had seen, distressed but not heavily damaged. He assembled a boarding party and boarded the sub. They walked by the crew, who wore blank stares as they lined up in their oily uniforms. When they reached the bridge, the commanding officer, whose uniform was cleaner, introduced himself in highly accented but understandable English. He told Paine his name: Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. Saluting sharply once, Hashimoto then turned around and led Paine’s party below to the wardroom. Once there, he and his senior officers bowed low and laid their swords on a table that looked to have been hastily covered with a white tablecloth.
Other captains had offered their commands to him in surrender before, but not like this. Paine refused, by protocol, Hashimoto’s offer to surrender his sword. He explained, using the bit of broken Japanese that he had learned while on Guam, that he was onboard only to issue disarmament instructions.
He asked Hashimoto to tell him about the I-58’s operational career. The proud Japanese commander stared at him and immediately became irritated, Paine later recalled. After a long, very awkward silence, he looked puzzled, mumbled something in Japanese, and declared that he had been expecting them. This was the submarine, he said with no more pauses, that sank the American warship that carried the atomic bomb.
Paine was dumbstruck. He exchanged a look of bewilderment with his lieutenant and asked Hashimoto to repeat his claim. Atomic weapon information was classified. All, by then, knew of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had ended the war. But details such as which ships had transported the components for the bombs had not been revealed to anyone, much less the enemy.
As he began to question Hashimoto, the captain’s mood changed. He eagerly unveiled a chart and was soon describing, most animatedly and in great detail, the events of that night. Using a mix of English and Japanese, he told Paine how he had sighted, approached, and attacked the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35) in the early morning of July 30, 1945. He had readied the Kaiten suicide torpedoes. But