LAST CALL FROM GRUNION

On 30 June 1942, LCDR Mannert L. Abele conned the new Gato-class submarine USS GRUNION (SS-216) out of Pearl Harbor on her first war patrol.  WWII was seven months old, and the first glimmers of success in the Pacific had been recorded weeks earlier at the battles of Coral Sea and Midway.  Efforts to reverse Japanese gains were beginning, in particular, their annoying presence on American soil in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.  GRUNION was to patrol in that area, assigned to the sea lanes north of enemy-held Kiska Island.  Her first action came on 15 July when she fired three torpedoes unsuccessfully at a destroyer and was depth-charged for her efforts.  Later that same day Abele’s crew battled three sub chasers, this time sinking Ch. 25 and Ch. 27 and damaging the third.  She prowled the area for the next two weeks despite increasing Japanese wariness.  On this day, GRUNION reported heavy anti-submarine activity at the approaches to Kiska Harbor, receiving a recall to Dutch Harbor as well.  When nothing further was seen or heard from her thereafter, on 5 October GRUNION was officially listed as overdue and presumed lost.

Her demise remained a mystery, for Japanese records failed to report any sinking around the time of GRUNION’s disappearance.  Then in March 1963 a sailor claiming to have been the superintendent aboard the 8572-ton freighter Kano Maru came forward with the story that on 31 July 1942, the day after GRUNION’s last report, the freighter was steaming in heavy fog off Kiska.  Suddenly two torpedoes streaked toward her, one missing and the other penetrating without exploding aft of her starboard engine room.  Her machinery flooded and her generator and radio were knocked out.  Japanese merchant sailors sprang to their 8cm gun and began firing at a periscope wake to starboard.  Another torpedo passed harmlessly under the keel, followed by three more, two of which struck but again failed to detonate.  Kano Maru’s attacker then broke the surface to port in an apparent attempt to employ her deck gun.  A lucky shot from the Japanese gun riddled her conning tower just as her main deck went dry.  Then a tall spout of water erupted near the submarine, and she slipped beneath the waves.

If the above account truly describes GRUNION’s loss, modern navalists doubt that a single hit to her “sail” would have sunk the boat.  It is theorized that one of her own errant torpedoes may have circled back to strike GRUNION, a dangerous defect of early WWII torpedoes.  In any case, her 70 crewmen remain unaccounted for.  LCDR Abele was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, and before the end of WWII he was further commemorated with the Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer USS MANNERT L. ABELE (DD-733). 

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  5 AUG 25

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 3 “G-K”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1977, p. 170.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 4 “L-M”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1969, p. 222.

Holmes, Harry.  The Last Patrol.  Shrewsbury, England: Airlife Publishing, Ltd., 1994, pp. 24-25.

Morison, Samuel Eliot.  History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol VII  Aleutians, Gilberts and Marshalls.  Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1951, pp. 7, 12.

“Search for the USS Grunion.”  AT: http://ussgrunion.com/blog/2006/ 09/22/whitefish-engineer-returns-from-stormy-bering-sea-with-tale-of-discovery/, 5 October 2006.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  As illustrated above, the Mark 41 torpedo that was in use early in WWII was notoriously defective.  It often deviated from its set depth, and the fusing mechanism failed when the torpedo made a directly perpendicular hit (the desired attack angle).  Modern torpedoes do not arm until they have traveled a prescribed distance to prevent disaster if a torpedo accidentally circles back to its launch point.

In the years since WWII, surviving relatives of LCDR Abele conducted an intensive search for GRUNION.  After months of privately funded, open-ocean searching with towed side-scanning sonar, in August 2006 they announced the discovery of a hard target appearing to be the wreckage of a WWII submarine 2700 feet down off Kiska, just north of McArthur Reef.  This location supports the story of the Japanese sailor from 1963.  The identity of GRUNION’s wreck was confirmed by the Navy in October 2008.  Her 70 crewmen remain aboard.

USS MANNERT L. ABELE was also lost in WWII, falling victim to kamikazes off Okinawa 12 April 1945.

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                                  USS MANNERT L. ABELE (DD-733)

WWII generated a boom in warship construction such that the 23 April 1944 launch of the 42^nd Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer from the Bath Iron Works in Maine hardly attracted unusual attention.  She was commissioned USS MANNERT L. ABELE (DD-733), remembering the heroic skipper of the submarine GRUNION (SS-216), lost off Kiska Island in 1942.  Today’s date found ABELE 70 miles northwest of Okinawa at radar picket station No. 14, standing watch for incoming enemy aircraft.  The dreaded Japanese kamikazes had been striking US ships since the battle for the Philippines, and of late they had become organized into mass “kikisui” raids of hundreds of planes at once.

The first of this day’s attacks came about 1345 when three “Val” bombers dove for the destroyer.  Sailors sprang to their guns and threw up a wall of metal.  Two of the attackers turned away, but the third caught fire and streaked across the sky toward another ship, an LSM(R).  ABELE’s gunners drove her into the sea however, before she could do any damage.

For the next few nervous minutes the skies quieted.

But the radar shack had been tracking a large shadow to the north.  Fifteen minutes had not passed before 20-25 planes appeared on the horizon and began circling station 14’s ships.  Except for a lone bomber that was held at bay by ABELE’s gunners, the formation remained out of range until 1440.  Three suicide “Zeros” then broke formation and dove for ABELE.  One was driven off, another shot down two miles out, but despite a curtain of steel thrown up from the destroyer, the third kamikaze crashed ablaze into her starboard side, penetrating to the after engine room before exploding.  Not a minute later, hardly enough time for bowled-over sailors to regain their feet, a strange and evil missile came screaming in at 400 MPH.  It was a rocket-powered suicide glide bomb–a “baka.”  Its massive 2600-pound warhead exploded at the starboard waterline abreast of the forward fireroom.  The destroyer’s midsection disintegrated in a fireball as sailors were cast into the roiling water.  The suicide attacks broke ABELE’s keel.  The bridge lost power as did the guns and the directors.  The bow and stern sank immediately, 82 of the 336-man crew did not escape.  Nearby LSM(R)’s-189 and 190 fended off strafing enemy fighters until ABELE’s sailors could be rescued.

MANNERT L. ABELE is the only US warship sunk by the infamous “baka” rocket-bomb, a human-guided precursor to our modern anti-ship missiles.  “Bakas” came too late in the war to affect its outcome.  Several “bakas” were captured after the war, one of which is displayed today at the Washington Navy Yard museum.

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  19 APR 24

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 4 “L-M”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1969, p. 222-23.

“Johnson Air Base, Japan.”  AT: http://users.ev1/net/~vmitchell/ JAB.htm, retrieved 6 October 2006.

Morison, Samuel Eliot.  History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol XIV  Victory in the Pacific.  Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1960, pp. 223-24.

Parkin, Robert Sinclair.  Blood on the Sea:  American Destroyers Lost in World War II.  New York, NY: Sarpedon, 1995, pp. 296-99.

Roscoe, Theodore.  United States Destroyer Operations in World War II.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1953, pp. 476-77.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  One of four captured “bakas” stood in front of the 41^st Air Division Headquarters at Johnson Air Base in Japan (the former Japanese Toyo-oka training base).  “Baka” was an American nickname taken from the Japanese word for “fool.”  The Japanese called the device “Okha,” meaning “cherry blossom.”  The missile was carried beneath a twin-engine bomber with the pilot locked in the cockpit.  Near the target the missile would be released, and a 30 second rocket burn would propel it to 405 MPH while the suicide pilot guided it to impact.

The LSM(R), Landing Ship Medium (Rocket), was a general-purpose amphibious landing ship specially modified to fire barrages of surface-to-surface rockets in support of shore operations.  Twelve were commissioned during the last months of WWII, each was 200 feet long and carried a crew of 80.  All saw their first combat in March 1945 off Okinawa.

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