The first explosion was a physical blow, a hammer of God that buckled the deck plates and sent a shudder through the Chuyo that felt like the world ending. The prisoners were thrown against the bulkheads, the sound of tearing metal screaming louder than the wind outside. Water, cold and relentless, began to hiss through the seams. They knew the protocol of an attack; they knew the math of displacement and the speed of a sinking carrier. They were trapped in a steel coffin, listening to the methodical execution of their own demise. There was no way to signal the surface, no way to tell the submarine commander—who was even now adjusting his periscope for a final, lethal spread—that he was murdering the very men who had once saved his ship from the depths of the Atlantic. The ledger of fate was closing, and the ink was the blood of men who had survived the unthinkable only to be claimed by the impossible. Every shudder of the ship, every secondary explosion, was a heartbeat skipping toward the finality of the dark. This was not just a casualty of war; it was a cosmic reckoning, a loop of history folding back on itself with a cruelty that defied logic. As the Chuyo began its final, agonizing list toward the abyss, the twenty-one men of the Sculpin realized the ultimate, devastating truth: the sea does not forget, and it never, ever settles its debts without taking everything in return.
May 23rd, 1939. Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The North Atlantic lay gray and deceptive, twelve miles off the coast, a mirror reflecting a sky that held no hint of the tragedy about to unfold. Fifty-nine men were sealed inside the USS Squalus as she began her sixteenth test dive at 0840 hours. She was a marvel of modern engineering, a brand new Sargo-class submarine, barely three months old and commissioned in March of that same year. She smelled of fresh paint, diesel oil, and the quiet pride of a crew that knew they were operating the cutting edge of naval technology.
Lieutenant Oliver Naquin commanded her with the steady hand of a seasoned officer. His crew ran the dive sequence with the effortless confidence of professionals engaged in a routine drill. There was no reason for concern, no premonition of disaster in the rhythmic call-outs of the watch officers.
“Take her down,” Naquin ordered.
The vents opened, the air hissed out, and the Squalus began her graceful descent into the cold Atlantic. Thirty seconds later, the world ended.
A main air induction valve—a massive, vital opening that provided air to the hungry diesel engines—failed. It was a valve that had to be sealed hermetically before any submarine could safely submerge. For reasons that would haunt engineers for years, it remained open. The Atlantic Ocean did not hesitate. It poured in with the force of a hydraulic hammer.
The weight of the incoming water was instantaneous and overwhelming. It flooded the after-battery compartment and the engine rooms in a matter of seconds. The stern, burdened by thousands of pounds of seawater, dropped violently. Men were thrown from their feet, slammed against machinery as the submarine tilted toward the vertical. The lights flickered and died, plunging the compartments into a terrifying, watery darkness.
“Blow the ballast tanks! All of them!” Naquin shouted over the roar of the rushing water.
Compressed air hissed into the forward tanks. The bow rose, clawing at the surface, fighting the immense weight of the flooded rear. For a few agonizing moments, the Squalus hung in a desperate balance, caught between the air above and the crushing depths below. But the stern was too heavy. The ocean won.
The Squalus struck the ocean floor at 243 feet. The impact was a dull thud that vibrated through the hull. In the flooded rear compartments, twenty-six men were dead within minutes, drowned in the dark, cold machinery they had spent their lives maintaining. Thirty-three men remained alive, sealed in the forward section, trapped in a tomb of steel. They sat in complete darkness, breathing recycled air that grew heavier with every passing minute, waiting for a rescue that had never been successfully attempted at such a depth.
The emergency buoy was released, bobbing to the surface as a lonely sentinel of their distress. The signal went out. Portsmouth Naval Shipyard scrambled every rescue asset at its disposal, but the clock was ticking against the oxygen levels in the forward torpedo room.
A submarine already at sea, running nearby exercises, picked up the faint distress signal. Without waiting for formal orders, she turned immediately toward the Squalus’s last known position. That submarine was the USS Sculpin.
The Sculpin arrived on the scene, her crew working feverishly to locate the buoy. They established the precise position of the Squalus on the ocean floor, providing the coordinates that would make a rescue possible. Throughout the long, grueling operation, the Sculpin remained on station. She was a fixed reference point in the open ocean, the instrument by which rescue teams knew exactly where to descend.
Nobody aboard the Sculpin on that cold May morning in 1939 could have known what the ocean was quietly arranging around this act of seamanship. A debt was being entered into a ledger, a karmic bond forged in the deep pressure of the Atlantic. It was a ledger that would not be settled for four years and seven months, in the middle of a Pacific typhoon, on a night when everything set in motion by this rescue would finally and completely close.
You cannot put a dead ship back to sea without a cost.
The rescue of the Squalus’s survivors entered American naval history immediately. Using the McCann rescue chamber—a sophisticated diving bell deployed in a real emergency for the very first time—the Navy made four perilous descents to 243 feet over the course of seventeen hours. Against all odds, all thirty-three living men reached the surface. Naquin was the last man up, leaving his ship behind on the seabed.
But the Squalus was still on the bottom. Navy divers worked through the long summer of 1939 in near-zero visibility, patching the hull, jury-rigging massive pontoons, and pumping out the flooded compartments. It was a monumental feat of salvage. On September 13th, 1939, just twelve days after Germany’s invasion of Poland signaled the start of a global conflagration, the Squalus was raised and towed back into Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
The engineering verdict was surprisingly clean. The hull was structurally sound. The failure had been a single defective valve—mechanical, isolated, and fixable. With war consuming Europe and the situation in the Pacific deteriorating rapidly, the Navy could not afford to leave serviceable tonnage in a dry dock. The decision was made: repair her and return her to service.
The fleet’s verdict, however, was considerably less clean. Twenty-six men had drowned in those compartments. The water had been pumped out and the steel had been repainted, but sailors know what they know. What they knew was that this submarine had already killed men. She was a “hoodoo” boat, carrying the ghosts of the Portsmouth depths. The phrase moved through the submarine force from pier to pier, from one mess hall to the next.
“That sub already drowned once,” the old salts would whisper. “She’s just waiting to finish the job.”
On May 9th, 1940, almost exactly one year after she sank, the rebuilt submarine was recommissioned. Bureau of Ships records confirm that the Navy changed her name immediately upon recommissioning, an attempt to scrub the stigma of the disaster. She was no longer the USS Squalus. She was now the USS Sailfish.
New name, new chapter. But the hull number remained SS-192. The silhouette was identical because it was the same hull. Sailors who received orders to report aboard and recognized the lines of the Squalus made their peace with it however they could. Some carried charms; others simply didn’t talk about the past. She completed her sea trials. The new induction valves sealed perfectly every time. The Pacific Fleet received her in late 1941, just as the world she was about to operate in changed forever with the smoke rising over Pearl Harbor.
The boat that wouldn’t quit needed a man who wouldn’t quit either. USS Sailfish’s early war patrols out of Pearl Harbor were defined by the same grinding frustration that afflicted the entire American submarine force. The problem was not a lack of courage or a failure of seamanship. The problem was the Mark 14 torpedo.
The Mark 14 proved itself comprehensively unreliable in Pacific combat conditions. It ran consistently deeper than its set depth, passing harmlessly beneath the hulls of Japanese targets. Its contact exploder failed on oblique hits, and its magnetic influence exploder misfired repeatedly in the unique magnetic environment of the Pacific. Submarine commanders filed patrol report after patrol report, documenting perfect attack runs followed by duds, premature detonations, and complete misses.
Ships that should have been at the bottom of the ocean kept sailing. Convoys that should have been broken continued to deliver vital supplies to Japanese forces. For two long years, the Bureau of Ordnance insisted the problem lay with the submariners rather than the torpedoes. This institutional resistance to overwhelming evidence remains one of the most significant failures in American military history.
Under sustained pressure from the fleet—most critically from Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, who conducted his own unauthorized testing to prove the Mark 14’s depth-keeping was fatally defective—the Bureau was finally compelled to acknowledge and fix the problems. The corrections began to trickle through the fleet across 1943.
Commander Robert E. M. Ward took command of the USS Sailfish during this turning point. He was a man of methodical, technical precision, completely uninterested in headquarters politics. He took his boat exactly as she was, ghosts and all. Ward did not share the fleet’s superstitions about the hull beneath his feet. He commanded her with a quiet, lethal competence, and the boat responded.
When the Sailfish departed Pearl Harbor on her ninth war patrol in late November 1943, Ward had corrected torpedoes, a seasoned crew, and a patrol area northeast of the Japanese home islands. He was sailing into the North Pacific, into the onset of winter, and into weather that the Pacific generates in December with the particular indifference of something vast and ancient. He was sailing, without knowing it, into the final act of a story that had begun off Portsmouth on a May morning in 1939.
The shadow of that morning fell first on the USS Sculpin. On November 19th, 1943, the submarine that had found the Squalus on the ocean floor and made the rescue of thirty-three men possible was sunk northeast of Truk in the Central Pacific. A Japanese destroyer, the Yamagumo, attacked her following a brutal surface engagement. The Sculpin’s conning tower took a direct hit, destroying her ability to submerge and leaving her vulnerable on the surface.
Captain John Cromwell was aboard the Sculpin as a passenger. He carried compartmented knowledge of the planned American invasion of the Gilbert Islands and the specifics of American submarine wolf pack doctrine. Cromwell knew he could not allow himself to be captured. The information he carried was too significant; the lives of thousands of men depended on it remaining out of Japanese hands.
“I cannot go with you,” Cromwell told his men. “I know too much.”
Captain John Cromwell went down with the USS Sculpin deliberately, an act of supreme sacrifice. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously by an act of Congress. His citation states he gave his life to prevent the enemy from extracting vital military information. He remains among the very few Medal of Honor recipients whose award was given specifically for choosing death over capture.
Forty-one of the Sculpin’s crew survived the sinking and were taken prisoner by the Japanese. Records confirm these prisoners were divided between two vessels for transport toward Japan. Twenty-one of the Sculpin survivors were placed aboard the Japanese escort carrier Chuyo.
The Chuyo was a Taiyo-class carrier, converted from the pre-war passenger liner Nitta Maru. She was performing convoy escort and aircraft ferry duties, heading toward the Japanese home islands. Her route took her directly through the patrol area assigned to the USS Sailfish.
Commander Ward knew none of this. There was no communication pathway by which he could have known that his brother submariners were locked in the hold of the target he was hunting. The intelligence tracking the Sculpin’s loss and the fate of her survivors operated through channels entirely separate from the Sailfish’s operational orders. Ward knew his patrol area, he knew his orders, and he knew that any Japanese warship he found was a legitimate target.
On December 3rd, 1943, the typhoon arrived. By the early hours of December 4th, the seas in the Sailfish’s operating area were mountainous, a chaotic landscape of white foam and black water. The storm was a sustained assault on every system a submarine depends upon to fight. Maintaining periscope depth required constant, exhausting correction against waves that pushed the hull toward the surface and dragged it down again.
“Maintain depth!” Ward ordered, his voice calm despite the boat’s violent motion. “Keep that radar sweep going.”
Radar picked up a contact. It was large, Japanese, and slowed significantly by the same storm working against Ward’s attack. It was the Chuyo.
Ward began his approach. His declassified patrol report, now held in the National Archives, documents the attack across multiple torpedo spreads. He described the conditions as extreme, the seas so heavy that the Sailfish was broaching to the surface between attack runs, her hull exposed to the enemy. But Ward pressed the attack regardless.
The first torpedoes struck the Chuyo. She was damaged, her speed dropping even further. Ward did not let up. He broke off, maneuvered in the blinding dark and the screaming storm, reloaded his tubes, and repositioned for a second strike. More hits followed. The Chuyo was now critically damaged, listing heavily and flooding.
He attacked a third time. In the early morning hours of December 4th, 1943, the Chuyo sank into the freezing depths of the North Pacific.
In her hold, the twenty-one American prisoners from the USS Sculpin heard the torpedo impacts. They didn’t need to see the explosions to understand what was happening. They were submariners. They knew the sound of a torpedo hitting a hull with a precision no amount of fear could override. They understood in those final, agonizing minutes that one of their own boats—a boat they could not identify, a crew they would never meet—was attacking the ship they were locked inside.
They could not signal through the hull. They could not stop the inevitable. Of the twenty-one Sculpin survivors aboard the Chuyo, twenty were lost when she sank.
Only one man survived. Ensign John Fitzgerald was pulled from the water by a Japanese destroyer and eventually reached a prisoner-of-war camp, where he survived the remainder of the war. His post-war testimony provided the American record of what the Sculpin’s men experienced inside the Chuyo’s hold during the attack. It is testimony that sits at the absolute outer edge of what war asks human beings to absorb and continue living with.
Ward brought the Sailfish home. The sinking of the Chuyo was confirmed and entered into the official records as a significant operational success—an escort carrier destroyed under conditions that made an attack seem nearly impossible. The commendation process began.
Then, the full picture came together. Post-war cross-referencing of Japanese naval records with American prisoner accounts, and most critically, the testimony of Ensign Fitzgerald after his liberation, established the complete sequence of events.
Naval historian Theodore Roscoe documented the connection directly in his 1949 official history, United States Submarine Operations in World War II. Roscoe recorded the Sailfish-Chuyo action and its specific connection to the 1939 Sculpin-Squalus rescue as one of the most striking ironies produced by the entire Pacific War. He did not editorialize; the facts required none.
The USS Squalus, rescued by the USS Sculpin in 1939, rebuilt and renamed the USS Sailfish, had sunk the ship carrying the USS Sculpin survivors in 1943.
The chain running from May 23rd, 1939, to December 4th, 1943, formed a closed loop with a precision no planning could have produced and no fiction writer would have been permitted to invent. Ward had executed his mission correctly. His target was a legitimate enemy warship. His crew had performed with exceptional skill in conditions his own patrol report described as among the most demanding of his entire command.
The mission was right. The outcome was devastating. Both of those things are simultaneously and completely true. The historical record does not attempt to resolve the tension between them because the tension cannot be resolved.
Ensign Fitzgerald returned to the United States and gave his testimony. In no available account did he ever assign blame to Ward or the Sailfish. He was a naval officer; he understood what Ward was ordered to do and what Ward was right to do. The understanding was genuine, but it changed nothing about the twenty men who went down with the Chuyo.
Japanese post-war assessments note the Chuyo sinking as direct evidence of the American submarine force’s willingness to attack in weather conditions that Japanese naval planning had never anticipated as viable. The aggressiveness of Ward’s generation of commanders was a significantly underestimated factor across the Pacific campaign.
The Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee’s post-war accounting credits the USS Sailfish across her ten war patrols with sinking nine ships for a total of approximately 71,000 tons. That number sits in the record alongside Ensign Fitzgerald’s testimony. The record does not explain how to hold both of them at once. It simply holds them.
The Sailfish completed her tenth and final war patrol, survived the entire Pacific War, and was decommissioned in October 1945. She was stricken from the naval vessel register and scrapped. No successor vessel carries her name. No museum preserves her hull. She went quietly, the way ships carrying the heaviest histories tend to go.
Captain John Cromwell’s name was carried forward by the USS Cromwell, a Knox-class frigate commissioned in 1971. His Medal of Honor citation remains one of the most precisely worded documents in the American military record—an official acknowledgment that a man chose death deliberately to protect people he would never meet.
The McCann rescue chamber technology, proven during the Squalus rescue, became the direct ancestor of modern submarine rescue systems. The procedures developed during those seventeen hours off Portsmouth have informed international doctrine for more than eighty years. In that narrow but concrete sense, the deaths of the twenty-six men in 1939 carried forward to save others.
Robert Ward received the Navy Cross for the Chuyo action. He did not seek the platform his record would have supported. He represented a generation of commanders who did exceptional things in impossible circumstances and returned to private lives carrying what they had seen without public discussion and without complaint.
The story of the Squalus, the Sculpin, and the Sailfish insists on something no tonnage figure and no medal citation can fully contain. War produces outcomes that exceed every category available for evaluating them. Ward was right to attack. His orders were lawful. His execution was exceptional. All of that is true, and none of it is sufficient to account for the twenty men in the Chuyo’s hold who heard the torpedoes coming and understood exactly what the sound meant.
The ocean took twenty-six men from the Squalus on May 23rd, 1939. It did not return them when the Navy pumped the compartments dry and changed the name on the hull. The ocean keeps what it takes. It does not negotiate, and it does not wait for the intelligence picture to be assembled before presenting its accounting. What it does, occasionally, with a precision that leaves historians reaching for language adequate to the fact, is ensure that the accounting is complete.
The Squalus went down on May 23rd, 1939, and the Sculpin was there to find her. The Sculpin went down on November 19th, 1943, and the Sailfish was there when the reckoning came. The sea gives back what it takes, and sometimes, in the giving, it takes everything.
