Right Angle: Backstage (07-14-2020)

(For fluidity of reading, our nickname for my grandfather was pronounced “pay-pay.”)

My Grandfather’s “Bad Side”

My grandfather always slept on his right side. He did this because he was deaf in his left ear, and by putting his right ear to the pillow, he could ensure he got some quiet. I remember having to be mindful of “Pepe’s ‘good side'” and “Pepe’s ‘bad side'” growing up. If I wanted to tell him something, I had to be sure that he was looking at me or that I was standing on his right side. The story of how that came to be led me to discover two wartime medals he never received as well as something about his personality those close to him probably already knew.

My grandfather had long dreamt of serving on a submarine by the time the Second World War started. He never had much of an affinity for boats during his childhood in the Bronx (at least until he and my grandmother began taking cruises after he retired), so I don’t know if there was something about submarines per se that fascinated him or if the Silent Service was simply his most preferred branch of a military career option that offered him the most likely way to escape the Bronx. He made no secret of his reason for preferring the submarines. He would always say, “I wanted to come back in one piece or not at all.” One didn’t typically suffer amputations due to combat injuries on a sub. By the nature of the vehicle, accidents and combat damage tended to result in either total escape or total destruction for the entire crew. That’s not to say that permanent injuries were impossible. While he did suffer such an injury, it seems that partial deafness was not the sort of injury about which he had been concerned.

So it was that, on September 12th, 1944, my grandfather’s submarine, the USS Pipefish, slipped past the enemy’s radar and into firing range. Targets were sighted, and the crew went to battle stations. Pipefish crept in closer, but a rain storm had fogged up the periscope. Attempting to make the best of the opportunity, she fired four torpedoes before noticing that an escort was close by and heading for them.  Pipefish dove and rigged for depth charges.

As they sat in silence, over two-hundred feet below the surface, waiting for the inevitable attack, the crew heard two of the torpedoes strike their target. Four agonizing minutes later, the first of two depth charges detonated close by. As the sub continued to silently descend, she suddenly dropped a hundred feet and struck the bottom. Pipefish had entered a different temperature gradient in the water. Twenty minutes after the attack began, there were two destroyers overhead, hunting for the sub. Then, the sonar picked up a third. Then, a fourth.

For the next five hours, the Imperial Japanese Navy depth-charged my grandfather. The seventy plus men of the USS Pipefish sat on the bottom of the sea in complete silence. Now, submarines are built for stealth and speed. They do not have very strong defenses such as heavy armor or hull plating, nor are they offensively strong once the element of surprise is removed (diesel-electric submarines like the Pipefish had six torpedo tubes fore, four torpedo tubes aft, all of which took time to load and fire, and only one gun that could be used on the surface by a man standing on deck). Conversely, destroyers are called “destroyers” for self-evident reasons.

The Pipefish was caught on an underwater hill.  The skipper began moving half the men forward in order to trim the boat with their weight. Pipefish was able to move forward a bit, but two more depth charges caused her to hit bottom a second time, damaging a fuel tank. Again, the crewmen were moved around to create a balance with their weight.  The boat was now moving with an up angle, trying to come up, when the stern struck bottom again, damaging both propellers, necessitating the crew to move toward the bow one last time. The skipper described the damaged boat’s struggles in the log by observing, “We probably looked like a fat duck trying to take off from the water.”

More depth charges were dropped until, just shy of ten hours after first contact was made, Pipefish was able to surface. The damage to the propellers caused excessive vibration in the engines. consequently, Pipefish had to limit her speed and be careful not to make too much noise as she finished her second war patrol and returned to Pearl Harbor for repairs via a circuitous route through the shipping lanes that took her first to Midway.

It was during one such depth charging incident that Pepe lost his hearing. My grandfather never received his Purple Heart for injury in combat. He did not because he never told anyone in the Navy he had gone deaf. He was afraid that if he did, he would be removed from the submarine and forced to finish the war on a surface ship due to the very stringent standards the Navy used for submariners. Pepe served on the Pipefish until it was decommissioned in 1946. He was the only member of the crew to serve on the boat from its launch in 1944 for the duration of all six war patrols to the decommissioning, but he was never interested to keep in touch with any of his crewmates after the war. 

As I type this, I am looking at the flag used during the decommissioning ceremony in a Plexiglas-and-wooden display case my grandfather made to hold it, his signed strip of the decommissioning pennant, and his dolphins. Conspicuously missing from the display of his medals and memorabilia is the Purple Heart the Navy never knew he qualified for and a battle star for participation in the liberation of the Philippines. I know there is no way for me to prove the requirements for the Purple Heart, but I hope to some day get him posthumously awarded his star.

My grandfather would laugh at me if I could tell him that, however. He served, and then the war was over. He wasn’t on the Pipefish to win medals, he never glorified his time in the war, and never wanted anything more from (or to do with) the Navy after he returned home. He was always completely disinterested in public or official recognition for the things he did in the war, and, in reflection, that attitude is not surprising to those of us who knew him.