Between the years of nineteen forty-three and nineteen forty-five, seven submarine officers earned this nation's highest military honor, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Let me take a minute and tell you a very little about each of them. Here they are in no particular order:
Captain John Cromwell
Captain Cromwell was a senior naval officer aboard the submarine Sculpin in November of 1943. He was ordered aboard Sculpin to take charge of a group of submarines (called a wolf pack) that was sent to attack Japanese shipping north of the island of Truk. It was during one of these ninety-day patrols that Sculpin was attacked by a Japanese destroyer and driven to the surface as a result of some damage to her depth gage. The Destroyer's deck guns pounded the submarine continually causing enough damage to force one of the remaining officers on the deck to order "abandon ship". Captain Cromwell possesed vital information about the dispositions of all of our submarines operating in the Pacific and fearing this information could possibly fall into enemy hands if he were tortured, elected to "go down with the ship". He was awarded the medal posthumously
Commander Sam Dealey
Commander Dealey is a legend in the submarine navy. He was killed in August of 1944 while commanding the sixth war patrol of USS Harder. In the fourteen months between June 23, 1943 and August 22, 1944 Commander Dealey sank a total of sixteen Japanese ships. What made this feat remarkable was that three of the ships were Japanese destroyers. You should know that destroyers are used to hunt down and destroy submarines. Here is a case of the fox chasing and killing the dogs. Sam Dealey became famous for his "down the throat shot". He would leave his periscope on the surface so that the enemy ship could see it protruding just above the surface. As the destroyer charged in for the attack, Dealey would fire a spread of three torpedoes. One directly at the bow and one more on either side of the bow. We do not know how Harder was lost. She was supposed to join the submarine Hake for some joint operations but never showed up. Sam Dealey was awarded his Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously
Commander Eugene Fluckey
Gene Fluckey earned his medal while serving as the second captain of the submarine USS Barb during a two-hour period in January of 1945. While in the process of following a couple of potential targets he maneuvered Barb into the Japanese harbor Namkwan during the early morning hours just before daybreak. Since the water was very shallow he had to stay on the surface as he entered the harbor where he found approximately thirty Japanese ships anchored in three columns. Commander Fluckey fired all ten of his remaining torpedoes at the anchored ships and then turned to get out to the deeper water as soon as possible. One hour and twenty minutes after the first torpedo was fired Barb crossed the twenty-fathom curve (120 feet) and dove. The Japanese left no record of the number of ships sank that morning and Fluckey didn't hang around in the harbor to count the number still floating, but he did see each torpedo hit an enemy ship. In submarine circles this exploit became known as the "Namkwan smash up" and earned him his medal along with a Presidential Citation for the rest of the crew.
Commander Howard Gilmore.
"Take her down". These were the last words of Commander Howard Gilmore, as he lay wounded on the deck of USS Growler.
During the fourth patrol of Growler, Captain Gilmore located and plotted a convoy of Japanese ships. The visibility conditions were very poor as he closed in for a surface attack A Japanese gunboat assigned to protect the convoy turned towards Growler and in the poor light collided with the submarine "head on" at seventeen knots. Growler heeled over from the collision and as it righted its self in the water the gunboat opened fire with its fifty-caliber machine gun killing all the people on the deck and mortally wounding the Captain.
The executive officer was below in the conning tower. He immediately took over command and took the submarine down following Captain Gilmore's last order. Growler came to the surface about thirty minutes later to find the damaged gunboat gone along with the rest of the enemy fleet.
Commander Richard O'Kane
Commander O'Kane was skipper of USS Tang in October of 1944 when a circular running torpedo he had just fired came back and sunk his submarine. Tang was leading all submarines in the number of ships sunk when that accident occurred.
On October twenty third nineteen forty-four he had attacked a convoy and hit seven ships with his torpedoes. The next day, on the twenty fourth another convoy appeared and once again O'Kane went in for the attack. His first shot hit a tanker; the second hit a troop transport and stopped her dead in the water. A third shot hit a destroyer trying to protect the other two vessels.
With two torpedoes left in the tubes Captain O'Kane went in on the surface to finish off the crippled troopship. The first torpedo headed straight for its mark but the second made a hairpin turn and headed back towards Tang. O'Kane called for a hard rudder and emergency speed, but it was too late. The torpedo struck Tang in the stern sending the Captain and other deck personnel into the ocean, and the submarine to the bottom in 180 feet of water.
A total of five people survived the sinking. They were picked up by a Japanese destroyer escort that was retrieving survivors of the ships Tang had just sunk. The submarine survivors were clubbed and beaten unmercifully. Commander O'Kane and the other survivors spent the remainder of the war in various Japanese prison camps.
Commander Lawson P. Ramage
Captain "Red" Ramage earned his medal on July 23,1944 by driving into the center of a well protected Japanese convoy in the middle of the night and shooting at everything that was floating. He had torpedoes coming out of both the bow and stern tubes of USS Parche. There was so much confusion that some of the Japanese ships were shooting at each other. The battle lasted for a total of forty-six minutes and ended when four Japanese ships went to the bottom and another steamed away seriously wounded.
Commander George Street
Commander Street took command of the brand new submarine USS Tirante in the autumn of 1944. She left Pearl Harbor on March 3rd and returned on April 25th after attacking twelve enemy vessels and sinking half of them, along with shooting up the rest. On April 14th Street earned his medal by steaming into a Japanese harbor and shooting every torpedo he had at the enemy ships moored there for safe keeping. He entered the harbor on the surface after having traveled many miles through shallow water where he could not dive, and through minefields the Japanese had laid to protect the ships in the harbor. On the way home he shot up a 100-ton ship with gunfire and picked up two downed Japanese aviators that he brought back as prisoners. Tirante did all of this in a fifty-two day period.