The Empire Builders

It is a big day in Pearl Harbor when a black submarine slides in past the green flatlands, past Ford Island and the gaunt wreckage of the Oklahoma and warps into a slip at the Submarine Base. On her conning tower is painted the score of her cruise: a column of rising suns. A Navy band tootles a greeting. Lashed to her periscope is a broom, symbol of a clean sweep in enemy waters.

Ask a battleship or destroyer man where he has been operating and the answer is the Aleutians or the South Pacific, as the case may be; ask a submariner (pronounced submariner in the service) and the casual answer is: "The Empire." The Empire is Japan. Outside of the crews of some B-25s, who did not linger, no other U.S. fighting men have ventured into that area. The submariner regards it as his routine theater of operations.

The black ship is in Pearl Harbor for censored days. One day she is moored at the slip, her deck littered with broken boxes of fruit brought aboard at the moment of her arrival, her crew sprawled around reading mail from home--"sugar reports"--which is priority business. Then she is off again for the Empire.

Details of operation are the darkest of secrets. During that censored number of days when she lies in Pearl Harbor being prepared for her next excursion, yarns are spun at the officers' club ashore and at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, where submariners are quartered between patrols. But few stories leak out to the newspapers. In no other realm of naval warfare is stealth so important, secrecy so vital. Only gradually has the Navy released the names of some of the skippers, the quietly tough young men who run the lean black ships in the tradition of John Paul Jones.

How well and audaciously the U.S. submarine fleet has operated was attested to this week when the Navy announced the sinking, by submarines, of seven more Jap ships making the score for U.S. subs: 346 Jap ships sunk, 36 probably sunk, 114 damaged. Submariners have accounted for 77% of the total enemy shipping sunk or damaged in the Pacific.

The Buccaneers. Skipper of the Flying Fish is slim, quiet Commander Glynn Robert Donaho of Normangee, Tex. He remembers when the Flying Fish ran into an enemy task force close to shore. He scored hits on one ship and was taking a setup on a second when an aircraft bomb dropped close aboard. Things got so hot afterwards that one of the crew broke out all the candy in the stores, declaring, "We might as well eat it up now, we may never have another chance." But the Flying Fish survived, sank or damaged 100,000 tons of enemy shipping in five patrols.

There is soft-spoken Burt Klakring, the man who watched a horse race on the Japanese seacoast through his periscope. He is also known in the Navy as an expert pianist, was described in the Lucky Bag the year he was graduated from Annapolis as "super-sentimental." On a single patrol, mild-mannered, sentimental Commander Klakring sank 70,000 tons.

There is profane and swashbuckling Creed ("Burly") Burlingame, whose favorite procedure is to close with a Jap ship on the surface, damning her fire and sinking her with his deck gun. There is Roy Davenport, Burlingame's onetime executive officer, who prays devoutly, prowling beneath Jap waters with the firm belief that his torpedoes carry the benison of heaven.

There is Commander Bill Brockman who carried part of Carlson's and Jimmy Roosevelt's raiders on the Makin Island raid in the summer of 1942. There are men whose exploits are legendary in the service: "Mush" Morton, big, amiable skipper of the Wahoo, one of four submarines to win a Presidential citation; Commander Frederick Burdett ("Peanuts") Warder, a mild-appearing, silent man whose only regret for his historic rampage in the Java Sea as captain of the Seawolf is that it inspired some writer tc curse him with the nickname of "Fearless Freddie"; Commander Mike Fenno, who took the Trout into Corregidor with ammunition and brought out a cargo oi Manila gold.

Younger men are moving into captaincies as the fleet has expanded--and as heroic veterans have disappeared. Result: not all submarine commanders have the grey hair prized by the Navy as the true mark of maturity.

. Jap Public Enemy No. 1. Boss of the raiders is Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood Jr., who, when he was promoted from Rear Admiral, sent a message to his force expressing pride that the work of Submarines Pacific had brought him the advancement. The Navy's youngest Vice Admiral (53), he frequently rides the subs with his commanders. He has served in submarines for most of his career. His first command was one of the first submarines to go beyond the experimental stage the A2, in 1914. His immediate superior is a submarine man whose son is in the service, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet.

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