Category: Eternal Patrol

Tolling of the Boats – March

March has a way of sitting quietly on the calendar, wedged between winter’s last bitterness and the promise of spring. In U.S. Navy submarine history, it does not behave quietly at all. It carries a weight that is out of proportion to its thirty-one days, a month that reaches from the experimental infancy of the submarine force to the violent closing chapters of the Pacific war. When submariners speak of March, they do not do so poetically, but they do so knowingly. Too many boats did not come back. Too many men did not walk down the pier again.

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Grayback’s Finale

In the final week of February 1944, the USS Grayback was still hunting, and that fact alone tells you something about the boat and the men aboard her. She had already spent nearly a month stalking the shipping lanes of the East China Sea, slipping between patrol routes and aircraft arcs, rising at night to recharge batteries and diving by day into that dim, red-lit world every submariner understands. The air would have been thick with diesel and machinery oil, the rhythm of the engines as familiar as breathing, the routine of watch rotations steady and practiced. Her tenth war patrol had begun on January 28, when she departed Pearl Harbor under Commander John Anderson Moore, and by mid-February she had once again proven herself to be what the Navy built her to be: a long-range predator operating far inside hostile waters.

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February Tolling of the Boats

February has a way of thinning the ranks. It sits awkwardly in the calendar, shorter than it ought to be, often colder than expected, and in the war years it carried a particular weight for the men of the Silent Service. The United States Navy submarine force never occupied much physical space in the wartime Navy. Fewer than two percent of personnel wore dolphins. Yet by the end of the Pacific War, submarines had strangled more than half of Japan’s merchant shipping. That success did not come cheaply. Fifty-two boats did not return. Thirty-five hundred and six men went on what submariners still call eternal patrol. No other branch of American service lost such a high percentage of its own.

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