66 WORLD WAR II
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E^ COMMAND“Subron 50” got its mission based not so much on some grand strat-
egy but on a personal request by British prime minister Winston
Churchill of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Second Wash-
ington Conference in June 1942. At that point in the war, German
U-boats were still taking a prodigious toll on Allied shipping. Churchill
reasoned that intervention by American submarines, with their supe-
rior endurance and firepower, would help level the playing field in the
North Atlantic by taking on the U-boats, freeing up the smaller British
subs for service in the North Sea and Mediterranean. Roosevelt was
game, but his commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, Admiral Ernest J.
King, strongly disagreed with the proposal, arguing that every sub the
United States could build should be sent to the Pacific to help alleviate
a shortage of boats in that theater.
Not surprisingly, President Roosevelt prevailed. On September 3,
1942, Submarine Squadron 50 was established at New London, Con-
necticut, under the command of veteran submariner Captain Norman
S. Ives, 45. American shipyards were only just gearing up for volume
production of f leet-type submarines, so Ives had to cobble his unit
together as best he could. He managed to source six Gato-class boats
already earmarked for Pacific duty. Each was 312 feet long, carried 24
torpedoes, and had a top speed of 21 knots and a range of 11,000 nauti-
cal miles. An ancient sub tender, USS Beaver, would supply logistical
support. On October 19, the first three—Blackfish, Gunnel, and Shad—
set out on their Atlantic crossing. Herring and Barb followed the next
day; troublesome engines kept Gurnard two weeks behind them. In the
meantime, Beaver had gone a head to set up housekeeping at U.S. Naval
Base II, in Rosneath, Scotland, 24 miles northwest of Glasgow.
But before the subs even crossed the Atlantic, the squadron’s origi-
nal assignment of fighting U-boats was temporarily scrubbed for a
more immediate task: supporting the first large-scale amphibious
landings in the European Theater. Dubbed Operation Torch, the A llied
invasion of French North Africa was scheduled to kick off on Novem-
ber 8. An eyewitness to it all was Barb’s Brooklyn-born engineering
officer, Lieutenant Everett H. Steinmetz, then 29. Of medium height,
slim build, and balding pate, “Steiny” was known for his wry sense of
humor. Labeling Torch “an ambitious undertaking,” he noted that it
“called for night landings by inexperienced troops launched from
transports with insufficient training on a coast about which our forces
had little intelligence.”
When the Barb departed New London, it carried five U.S. Army
Rangers. The crew was puzzled by their presence until their skipper,
Lieutenant Commander John R. Waterman, told them about the Allied
invasion and the sub’s assignment to drop the GIs off in Morocco—
then under Vichy French control—at a small port south of Casablanca.
Along with three other subs in the unit, Barb also performed recon-
naissance and patrol duties during the assault. It was a fraught enter-
prise. Amid the confusion of the landings, Gunnel—skippered by
Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain Jr., father of late senator John
S. McCain III—was strafed and bombed by an Allied plane. Fortu-
nately, the damage was minor. (A fifth sub, Blackfish, had been
deployed 1,600 miles south to Dakar, French West Africa, to interdict
any Vichy warships sortieing to aid their Morocco-based sisters.)
On November 8 Herring bagged Subron 50’s first confirmed sink-
ing. That morning Lieutenant Commander Ray Johnson was watch-
ing through the periscope as an unescorted freighter rounded CapeEverett H. Steinmetz’s service aboard the
USS Barb ranged from the waters off
Morocco to those at Hokkaido, Japan.N
ine million square miles. That’s the
size of the patrol zone assigned to
American submarines in the Pacific
Ocean during World War II. From
Perth to the Kurile Islands. From the
Gulf of Tonkin to Tarawa Atoll. It
was an area encompassing coastal littorals,
narrow passages, and open ocean. Within that
vast region, a force of fewer than 230 subs
managed to send to the bottom 55 percent of
all Japanese ships sunk during the war: 1,200
merchantmen, 214 men-of-war, 5,600,000
tons in all—more than twice the vessels sunk
by all other services combined. The subs
helped starve Japan of inbound raw materials
and slowed outbound replenishment of bases
and garrisons across the empire. By any stan-
dard, the U.S. Navy’s undersea achievements
in the Pacific were a resounding success.
On the other side of the world, in the more
confined waters of the European Theater, it
was a different story. American submarines
played only a paltry role in the defeat of Ger-
many—though not for want of trying on the
part of their crewmen. The force never
exceeded the six boats of the single unit oper-
ating there, Submarine Squadron 50, and
spent only eight months on station patrolling
off Western and Northern Europe. The
results there were, by any standard, meager.