The photograph shows young men, weary but smiling, crowding the deck of the USS Tigrone as she lies quietly in Apra Harbor, Guam. Behind them, the harbor waters reflect the early morning light. Beyond that, the haze of a world still at war. The camera captures aviators in patched uniforms and borrowed gear, the crew of Tigrone standing near them with the same sea-worn posture common to submariners. It’s a moment frozen in time, but the story behind the picture runs deeper than the Pacific waters they traversed.
Just days earlier, Tigrone was hunting something other than enemy ships. She was hunting for life.
It began with radio static and misfires of communication. On June 26, 1945, somewhere in the Pacific expanse, Tigrone tried to raise Pintado, her fellow lifeguard sub. A friendly plane had reported seeing a submarine eleven miles out, but interference jammed the channels. Visual signals were tried. Voices strained across voids. Radar beams scanned, but nothing came through. Finally, a message pierced the silence.
June 27 brought new bearings. Springer reported her position, and Tigrone shifted course. Radar crackled again with interference, a ghostly echo of another submarine or perhaps a foe. But patience and seamanship paid off. A rendezvous was made. Pintado, emerging from the rain like a specter, hove into view. The rescued began to come aboard: Frank Lawrence Jones, Francis Christian, and a host of others from the shattered skies over the Pacific.
Then came Shantung’s lost sons. One by one, the survivors were transferred: Colonel George Mundy, Captain John Lillard, Lieutenants Mathias and Price, Sergeants O’Grady, Carroll, Lynch, and more. Faces burned into the film of that day. Each one pulled from a fate that could have ended in fire or drowning. Each one carried aloft on the steel back of a submarine once designed only for war.
Tigrone would not stop. With her precious human cargo aboard, she received new orders. Guam, not Trepang. And so she turned east. On June 29, she submerged at the approach of a mystery plane and surfaced again when the skies were clear. On July 3, at 0400 hours, she slipped into Apra Harbor with her charges alive, their futures unbroken.
And what became of them?
They went home. Some returned to flight, others to family farms, classrooms, or city jobs. They married, raised children, told stories of rescue that sounded like fiction to those who hadn’t felt the waves or heard the echo of depth charges. Those children had children. Some of them may have seen the photograph, wondering at the moment their grandfather’s life had turned on a signal received, a course corrected, a torpedo tube that stayed silent.
During the final stages of the Pacific War, submarine lifeguard duty was no mere footnote. It was sacred work. These subs were not only hunters of steel and oil. They were shepherds of the sky. Stationed near bombing routes, they waited for the parachute, the splash, the signal rocket. They risked enemy patrols, aircraft, and exposure to bring home one more American son.
To save a single airman was to save a future. Every rescue broke the chain of loss, of telegrams and folded flags. It was the Navy’s answer to a prayer uttered by a mother thousands of miles away.
As the camera clicked on the deck of Tigrone, it caught more than a group of rescued aviators. It caught a mosaic of potential restored. The men may have been half-broken, but they were breathing. And that meant the world had been given another chance to go right.
As the sages say, “Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he has saved the entire world.”
On summer days morning in the Pacific, the crews of US Navy Submarines didn’t just save lives.
They saved worlds.
National Archives. (1945). Deck logs of USS Tigrone (SS-419), June–July 1945. Records of the Bureau of Naval Personnel, Record Group 24. National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
Patrol Reports 
Leave a comment