The USS Underhill DE-682
A DE Loses a Battle to Jap Midget Subs
by Edward Pinkowski
The men on the Destroyer Escort Underhill, 682, knew, of course, that Jap suicide planes were attacking convoys with increased fanatical fury, but what they didn't know, until they were two days out on a run from Okinawa to Luzon, was that the Japs also had suicidal sons of heaven underwater. Their ship was one of six ships escorting a convoy of LST's, when they became educated.
Those in the Underhill's machine shop, for example, took the run thus far as nonchalantly as if they were taking a swim in a quiet lagoon off Kwajalein. They weren't beating their gums, however, as sailors have a habit of doing when there is nothing exciting to hold their interest. The ship's engineering officer, tall, serious, determined Lt. Joe H. Timberlake, and seven enlisted men in his division were busy working on an extractor from the ship's laundry.
Suddenly, the bong-bong-bong of General Quarters pierced the air. The men hustled out of the machine shop, and other spaces, to dog down the hatches and get ready for battle. No one on the 682 was in doubt as to what he had to do.
The 306-foot DE was about 200 miles north of Luzon when its sound gear picked up a contact in the water. It seemed at first like the sound of a wake. It was mushy. But there was, as the CIC officer evaluated, something in the water about 1500 yards off the starboard bow. The CIC officer wasn't sure what it was. "It's no fluke," he said.
The contact wasn't. Another escort in the convoy, a small PC, reported the same thing. But a little later, when the Underhill crew was tense as a tight rope from waiting, the lookouts reported a floating mine off the port side.
Then two things happened close together. The PC that picked up the underwater contact said she was going to drop depth charges on it.
The Underhill, keeping a weather eye all around her, trained her guns on the mine. When she was at close range, she fired at the mine and scored a bull's eye;
but the mine didn't sink or explode. The guns were fired again. Nothing happened. The DE gave the mine up as dead. By that time the PC had dropped enough depth charges to explode a submarine twice her own size, and lookouts eyed the water carefully to be sure that they didn't miss anything. They didn't look long.
"Periscope on the starboard side," a lookout shouted. The Underhill's skipper, 48-year-old Lt. Cdr. Robert M. Newcomb, who was on the bridge since a Japanese snooper was sighted in the sky that morning, turned to look where the seaman on watch was pointing. He was a quick-thinking man, and he didn't waste words.
"Stand by to ram!" he ejaculated.
"Stand by to ram!" the engineering officer, whose battle station was in No. 1 control engineroom, repeated with a shout.
There wasn't enough time to tell the men below decks the action that was going on above to put a submarine periscope out of business. The action moved so fast. As the Underhill turned to ramming position, the periscope slowly submerged. The captain quickly resorted to depth charges, and dropped a shallow pattern on the submerged submarine. It was perfect. The TBS reported that the Underhill sank the midget submarine, as oil and debris came to the surface in the center of the depth charge pattern.
The shock of the shallow depth charges put some of the Underhill's fittings out of order, and some of her repairmen went to investigate the damages inflicted on the ship's structure. Chief Watertender Jack Baker, short, lean Hawkeye of 17 years service in the Navy, found a salt water line damaged in the after fire room and reported it to the Damage Control Officer, towering, 24-year-old Lt. Elwood Rich, then a junior lieutenant, who was at his station in the engineering log room. Rich told Baker to go ahead and try to repair the line. He also sent Chief Boatswain's Mate Stanley Dace to the bosun's locker, up forward, to get fittings and other materials to help Baker.
They were working on the damaged line when the lookouts sighted another submarine periscope cutting through the surface of the water off the DE's starboard beam. Captain Newcomb, who had not seen so much action since he, as executive officer, helped put the ship into commission 21 months before, acted on the bridge like a spark plug. "Increase speed to 15 knots," he telegraphed down to the engineroom, "and standby to ram."
When Lt. Rich heard this, he wondered about the two men working on the pipe line in the after fireroom. Before he could get word to them, he heard the control talker, Chief Storekeeper Larry Cashin, describing the approach of the submarine to the ship.
"He's looking right at us," Cashin said
The 6-foot-2, blue-eyed officer from Burley, Idaho, was as amused at that remark as were the two men to whom he repeated it in the log room. He seemed to hesitate for a brief instant before he braced himself for the ramming. Time seemed to stand still.
Then all hell broke loose. There were two solid bumps under the ship as if someone were trying to turn her over sidewise. Men were thrown to the deck in hopeless confusion. Two explosions, one after the other, rocked the ship in the water and broke her in two at about the officer's country. The bridge sheared its foundation joints and came writhing down in the water. The lights went out The after section somehow managed to keep afloat.
Many men had been given to the sea, among whom was Lt. Cdr. Newcomb and his bridge personnel. Only four officers were reported as survivors. The senior surviving officer was light brown-haired, 178-pound, six footer Lt. Timberlake.
He was holding on to the hand rail of the raised platform near the throttle board when he was pitched into the air. The first explosion raised him off the platform and just as he came down, another explosion scrambled him up in a mass of twisted pipes and plates. Somehow he managed to grasp the braces, and that was all he had for support. The floor plates fell to the lower level.
"Holy smokes," Timberlake shouted to Lowell Thompson, EM1c, the throttle-man, and Chief Machinist's Mate Eugene Goulet, who was also stationed in the control engineroom. "it seems like we have gone right over the top of them."
Thompson and Goulet were scrambling in the darkness on the floor plates where they had been thrown by the shock of the collision. When they got on their feet, shocked but not hurt, Timberlake said, "Let's go to the forward fireroom."
They battled to make their way forward, but the presence of steam and steel rubble blocked their advance. The three men, joined now by members of Chief Baker's repair party, decided to try a different route. This time they got as far as the escape hatch to the fireroom when they ran into steam so thick that no one dared to go near it. Besides, there were other things to do. All power was gone. Timberlake ordered all hands to abandon the engine spaces.
Down in the engineering log room, struggling to rejoin his position, was Lt. Rich who lost his headphones when the explosions sent him reeling across the log room deck. He was down on his hands and knees feeling for the headphones so that he could get in touch with ship control. It was pitch black and water kept seeping in, inch by inch, until it was knee deep.
Rich decided to get out of the log room before it was too late. The two men who had been in there with him had already left. He started up the forward passageway. He got halfway through the wreckage-strewn passageway before he realized that he would never make it. He turned around, groped through dark passage-ways, and finally reached the main desk. He stood there, near the passageway from the engineroom, tense as a fiddlestick. He could hardly believe his own eyes. Before he could look around, Timberlake came up behind him.
"Rich," he said, "we have lost all power in the engine spaces. Notify the bridge."
Rich called to a man on the beat deck and told him to notify the control board that they had no power in the engine spaces. The man looked around for a set of headphones, but he had no luck. Rich then went back to the fantail. He found a set lying on the deck. He picked it up and was trying to get control when someone yelled to him.
"Mister Rich, we have no control."
The blue-eyed Westerner turned his head forward and dropped his headphones.
"My God," he exclaimed, "we haven't!"
The only thing he could do then, it seemed, was to help 21-year-old Pharmacist's Mate 3c Joe R. Manory, who had set up a sort of battle dressing station on the fantail aft the No. 3 gun. Manory and his assistant, Ray L. Wekenmana, S1c, had their hands full.
There were not enough stretchers, just the deck and mattresses, but that would do until the wounded could be moved to rescue ships. The first patients were mostly men who had been in the vicinity of the explosion and had been showered by falling debris. Manory, who had gone below before to the sickbay to get what first aid bandages he needed, improvised
splints and applied them in an expert manner.
Rich meanwhile tried to get everyone busy. He detailed some of the able sailors to take mattresses off the lifelines where they were being aired and lay wounded men on them. Some put life rafts over the side to assist the survivors in the water. Sweaty and tired, most of them gathered among the stretcher cases and comforted the wounded with intimacy born of battle.
To keep their minds off friends killed, they volunteered for any task which came along.
When Timberlake secured everything below, he came topside and saw that there was nothing else he could do to save the ship. It was trimmed down forward. The sea was smooth, and visibility was unlimited. Two PC's which had been dispatched from the convoy to aid and rescue the survivors still had the pocket submarines to fight off. Each time they came alongside only to shove off to make mouse-trap attacks on the suicide submarines.
Three hours later, however, when the subs were pretty well beaten off, the PC's were free to rescue the 126 survivors from the Underhill. Eleven of these were picked out of the water by a PC lifeboat. By 1800 all wounded and surviving men were off the Underhill, whose after section was gradually settling in the water. She was so badly damaged that the two PC's sank what was left of the 21-month-old veteran of the Atlantic and the Pacific.
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