Parsons, Charles Thomas, CDR

Memories
9th patrol ⿿ special missions
The Trout was now under the command of her former executive officer, Lt.Cdr. Albert Hobbs Clark, a "plank owner" (member of original ship's complement). From 27 May to 20 July 1943, Trout performed a special mission during an offensive war patrol. On 9 June, she missed a transport with three torpedoes. She then landed a five-man U.S. Army team at Labangan, Mindanao. On 15 July, the submarine fired a three-torpedo spread which destroyed the tanker Sanraku Maru. She contacted three small coastal steamers on 26 June and sank two of them with her deck guns. On 1 July, she sank Isuzu Maru with four torpedoes. Eight days later, Trout picked up a party of five American officers including Lt.Cdr. Charles "Chick" Parsons and Lt.Col. William E. Dyess at Pagadian Bay on Mindanao and headed for Fremantle.

One thing submariners making guerrilla runs to the Philippines learned quickly was to expect the
unexpected. No two missions were exactly the same, and very few were performed exactly according to plan⿦



Soon after submarines started making regular guerrilla runs to the Philippines, a way was found to ameliorate the lack of a strong, relatively-unified command for the native Filipino forces. The solution took the form of one Charles ⿿Chick⿿ Parsons. Parsons was a young American businessman living and operating out of Manila. He was also a Lieutenant Commander in an Intelligence Unit of the U.S. Naval Reserve who had remained behind in the city to collect intelligence on the Japanese occupiers. Fluent in several of the over
70 native dialects, intimately familiar with the islands, and a good friend of MacArthur from their days together in Manila, Parsons was just the man the General was looking for to act as a go-between with the Filipino guerrillas.

After being called to Australia to meet with MacArthur to discuss the situation, Parsons accepted the position. In late February 1943, he was spirited to Labangan aboard the submarine USS Tambor (SS-198), captained by LCDR S. H. Ambruster. His mission was to deliver $10,000 in cash and two tons of ammunition to Army LT COL Wendell Fertig, one of the guerrilla leaders in the region. Parsons also carried ashore a substantial amount of radio equipment for use in setting up a spy network, codenamed ⿿Spyron.⿿ Parsons⿿ first clandestine visit back to the Philippines lasted until July 1943. During that time, he criss-crossed several islands on foot, horseback, and canoe, always at great personal risk of capture or death by the Japanese, meeting and coordinating with guerrilla leaders, setting up coast watchers, taking part in ambushes, rendezvousing with other submarines to pick up supplies and men, and making contacts for future Spyron stations. He would later make at least four more secret trips to the Philippines to bolster the guerrilla effort and, ultimately, pave the way for the U.S. invasion.

One thing submariners making guerrilla runs to the Philippines learned quickly was to expect the unexpected. No two missions were exactly the same, and very few were performed exactly according to plan, whether due to mechanical problems, enemy interference, weather, or simply no-shows on the beach. One of the greatest fears the submariners had were airplanes, even friendly ones. One never knew when a pilot, friend or foe, would take a submarine for a target and open fire. As a result, the submariners kept a vigilant watch on the skies and dove at the first sign of any aircraft.

The two transport submarines, Narwhal and Nautilus, finally entered the guerrilla game in 1943, and the next year Nautilus, commanded by CDR George Sharp, had an interesting run-in with patrolling aircraft. In late July, Nautilus was ordered to deliver one Navy officer, 22 enlisted men, and 10 tons of supplies to Mindoro; two Filipino Army enlisted men and 30 tons of supplies to Bohol; and two U.S. Army enlisted men and 30 tons of supplies to Leyte. At dawn on the very first morning of her mission, radar detected an airplane at five miles and closing. The plane was immediately recognized as friendly, but the pilot was less observant. He dove towards the submarine and dropped a bomb, which luckily landed harmlessly in front of the ship. His ensuing strafing attempt was also unsuccessful, missing his target by 100 yards. With that, the pilot inexplicably broke away, and was never seen or heard from again.

Later that same day Nautilus detected several more air contacts, causing the submarine to constantly dive quickly and then cautiously return to the surface to continue with the mission. Finally, the drop-off at Mindoro was completed successfully. The delivery to Bohol was called off due to the sudden arrival of a Japanese occupation force, so Sharp proceeded to Leyte. The submarine failed to make contact with the guerrillas there, so Sharp proceeded to
the alternate site, where security signals were successfully exchanged with one of the guerrilla leaders, LT COL Roberto Kangeleon. With the goods safely on the beach, Nautilus headed for home, but not before another accuracy-challenged bombardier attacked with a bomb that exploded wide and well above the slow-diving submarine. The plane harassed Nautilus all day, keeping the submarine below water until nightfall, when she was finally able to continue on her journey home to Fremantle.





Colonel Ruperto Kangeleon, Philippine guerrilla leader, reporting to General Douglas MacArthur in Tacloban, Leyte,
on 23 October 1944, three days after American forces re-invaded the Philippines there. Early on, the various guerrilla groups on the islands fought each other as frequently as the Japanese, with one of the worst situations on Leyte. Chick Parsons resolved the issue on that island by convincing the much-respected Kangeleon to come out of retirement and assume leadership of all local guerrilla factions.



At first, most submarines on secret missions to the Philippines delivered supplies and military personnel before heading off to perform more traditional wartime patrols in search of Japanese ships to sink. In the spring of 1944, this began to change as pressure from the United States pushed the Japanese back into the western Pacific. This drive kept the submarines too busy to supply the Philippines on their way to the theater, but many were tasked with picking people up from the islands on the return leg of a deployment. USS Crevalle (SS-291), commanded by LCDR F. D. Walker, Jr., was ordered to pick up 25 evacuees on Negros. Upon arriving at the designated location, Walker discovered the expected 25 evacuees in one boat, plus 16 others with baggage in another. Many children were among those escaping the island, and Walker accepted both boatloads. During the return trip to Australia, the refugees were fed in the galley, requiring them to pass through the control room for each meal. The children were fascinated by the lights and switches there and couldn⿿t resist trying to play with them. In the words of Walker, ⿿the Chief of the Watch solved this by putting a sign on the switchboard reading, ⿿Any children found in the control room without their parents will be shot.⿿ The mothers read this gravely to their kids, who seemed to take it as a matter of course. Considering that some of them could not remember when they were not fugitives, perhaps this is understandable.⿿

In addition to the new underage menace within the ship, Crevalle and her passengers still had external threats to worry about before reaching the safety of Australia. After being forced to dive twice by aircraft, the submarine detected a large Japanese convoy. Walker set a course to cut off the last ship in the group, but the convoy suddenly changed course and bore directly down on Crevalle. Walker⿿s superiors later attributed the convoy⿿s maneuver to an alert by the second aircraft encountered earlier. Whatever the case, Crevalle suddenly had no option but to dive. As the convoy passed 90 feet above the submarine without incident, Walker ordered the boat to level off and maintain depth. Moments later, two groups of two depth charges exploded close aboard, knocking out the sonar in what Walker described as the worst depth charging he had experienced. When the sonar was fixed, the crew found the attackers still searching directly above them, and the submarine crept away as quickly and as quietly as possible. Although heavily damaged by the depth charge attack, Crevalle reached Australia with all hands.




The transport submarine USS Nautilus (SS-168) is shown here returning to Pearl Harbor in August 1942 after transporting part of the Marine Corps⿿ 2nd Raider Battalion ⿿ ⿿Carlson's Raiders⿿ ⿿ to Makin Island to divert Japanese attention and supplies from the battle for Guadalcanal ranging over 1,000 miles to the southwest. That mission foreshadowed her later clandestine runs to the Philippines, transporting men and supplies to anti-Japanese guerrilla fighters there.



In all, 19 submarines participated in a total of 41 secret missions to the Philippine Islands, beginning with Gudgeon⿿s run in late December 1942. The last officially recorded guerrilla run, by USS Stingray (SS-186) on New Year⿿s Day, 1945, took place between the re-invasion of the Philippines at Leyte Gulf on 20 October 1944 and the liberation of Manila on 4 February 1945. Of the conventional submarines, only Stingray participated in more than two runs (her total being five), and the two transport submarines, Nautilus and Narwhal, were the true workhorses of the operation, with six and nine operations respectively. In the course of the campaign, U.S. submarines delivered 331 people, evacuated 472, and delivered some 1,325 tons of supplies to the Philippines.

Parsons⿿ network of spies and coast watchers proved invaluable not only to the liberation of the Philippines, but also to the Pacific war effort as a whole. In one somewhat amusing example of their effectiveness, on 4 August 1944 USS Cero (SS-225), commanded by CDR E. F. Dissette, torpedoed a tanker and observed it breaking up but was forced to dive beneath the tanker⿿s attacking escorts to escape. After dark, Dissette surfaced to send his action report, but before he even got on the air, he received a message from headquarters: ⿿Nice work CERO. Coast watcher reports sub sank 10,000 ton tanker off coast your assigned area. It had to be you.⿿ Several months prior to that incident, the coast watchers were also the first to alert Southwest Pacific Headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, to a massing of Japanese naval power in the islands. This information led to a submarine net being thrown around the Japanese, tracking their every move, and eventually resulted in the U.S. Navy gaining a major victory in the Battle of the Philippine Sea ⿿ the so-called ⿿Marianas Turkey Shoot.⿿

In every radio broadcast he made from Australia to the Japanese-occupied Philippines, General MacArthur had famously insisted, ⿿I shall return,⿿ a morale-boosting promise heard by many Filipinos on radio equipment brought to the islands on ⿿guerrilla⿿ submarines. When the tide of the war fully turned in favor of the Americans, and MacArthur was finally able to liberate the Philippines from the Japanese, those U.S. boats had already played a major role in making preparations on the ground.



The Tambor's seventh war patrol was a Spyron mission. The boat had embarked Commander Charles "Chick" Parsons, General Douglas MacArthur's "Man in Manila," in addition to three Filipino guerrilla fighters and another officer. On March 4, 1943, the Tambor inserted MacArthur's operatives and their supplies safely and secretly at Mindanao.