The Rescue: A True Story of Courage and Survival in World War II

by Steven Trent Smith

Overview

Praise for The Rescue

"Steven Trent Smith grapples boldly with several big subjects: the Japanese occupation of the Philippines; the capture of Japan's 'Z Plan' (the decisive-battle strategy for destroying the U.S. Pacific Fleet); the rescue by submarine of forty Americans stranded in the Philippines; the climactic Battle of the Philippine Sea. Meticulously researched and well written, The Rescue ties these elements together into an epic that is emotionally engaging from start to rousing finish."
-Martin Russ, author of Breakout and The Last Parallel

"Smith's thoroughly researched, detailed account of the brave American and Filipino guerrillas on Negros Island in the Philippines will do much to introduce readers to this little known aspect of World War II in the Pacific. . . . This is a fascinating story well told."
-Elizabeth Norman, author of the award-winning We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese

"The Rescue is a delightful journey with the gallant few who resisted the Japanese occupation of the Philippines and who shaped the larger events wh ich led to victory in the Pacific. Smith's brilliant research and unique storytelling make this account a must for all who enjoy history and a grand adventure."
-Peter Huchthausen, author of October Fury

"With a photojournalist's eye for action and detail, Steven Trent Smith's The Rescue is a remarkable achievement. The incredible mission to save forty Americans stranded in the Philippines reads more like a work of fiction. . . . A must-read for all those interested in one of the great secret submarine operations of World War II and all action adventure fans alike!"
-Richard P. Henrick, author of Crimson Tide and Nightwatch

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780470356890
Publisher:	Trade Paper Press
Publication date:	05/02/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

STEVEN TRENT SMITH is a five-time Emmy Award—winning freelance TV photojournalist and the author of Wolf Pack: the American Submarine Strategy That Helped Defeat Japan (Wiley). He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
Special Mission

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER FRANK WALKER was not averse to hollering orders through the open hatch. "Mr. Mazzone, bring us to periscope depth!" The Navy Department would surely disapprove of his method, but in the cramped confines of a submarine it was a method that worked quite well. "Sixty-four feet, Captain," came the response from below. Walker turned to his executive officer, Lieutenant William J. Ruhe. When Walker gave a slight nod, Ruhe gave a firm tug on the control handle. The shiny periscope slid silently, smoothly upward. Crouching on the conning tower deck, Walker caught the scope's levers as it rose. "Hold it there." Ruhe shifted the lever. With his right eye glued to the optics, Walker quickly crabbed in a full circle. He first checked the horizon, then the sky. "All clear. Take it up." The tube rose again, and with it the captain, his back slightly hunched as he squinted at the world above him. Clicking in the six-times magnifier for a telescopic view, he carefully, slowly panned left, then right, then left again. "I see the beach, but no signals. Range. Mark." "Three thousand double-oh," came the response. "Down scope." Ruhe tugged the pickle-shaped handle again. The scope dropped quickly, leaving the bare metal tube glistening in the dimness of the conning tower.

Walker turned to his yeoman, Al Dempster. "Yeo, what's that security signal again?" Dempster pulled the flimsy from his clipboard and reread the radio message: "Two white panels fifty yards apart, Skipper."

The captain took a few minutes to sip a cup of coffee, brought hot and fresh from the officers' pantry by his chief steward. He called again for the scope. As he swept the horizon he spotted a white speck to the north. In high magnification he could make out a sailboat headed along the coast. He watched it carefully, for Frank Walker had developed an aversion to small boats. Just two nights before, while transiting Balabac Strait--a heavily patrolled passage between northern Borneo and the west-southwestern tip of the Philippines--the crew of the most innocent of outriggers shot flares into the sky as the submarine passed, attempting to alert the Japanese to his presence. He had vowed that night to blast out of the water any boats that got in his way.

Walker turned his attention to the beach. He scanned the shore from north to south and back again. As the periscope plunged into its well, he told his crew there was nothing yet to see. No people. No flags. Nothing. "Mr. Ruhe, post a watch on both scopes and maintain course zero-five-zero." The captain disappeared down the control room hatch. It was nearing eight-thirty on Thursday morning, 11 May 1944, as the USS Crevalle crept silently beneath the dark waters of the Sulu Sea, two miles off the coast of Negros.

When the call for volunteers to man the periscopes squawked over the intercom, Motor Machinist's Mate John Maille jumped at the chance to get away from the tedium of tending the engines and motors. After he climbed up into the cylindrical steel capsule that was the conning tower, he asked Bill Ruhe what they were looking for. Ruhe described the security signal. Maille leaned into the eyepiece of the scope to begin his watch.

Below in his tiny cabin, Francis David Walker Jr. reviewed the orders that three days before had terminated his war patrol, sending him a thousand miles to the north, into the middle of the Visayas. A frown creased his pudgy face as he read:

TOP SECRET. PROCEED TO BALATONG POINT, POSITION NORTH OF BASAY, NEGROS ISLAND (LAT. 9-24 N. LONG. 122-36-36 E.). AT SUNSET 11 MAY OBSERVE SECURITY SIGNAL, SURFACE, AND RECEIVE FROM BOAT FLYING U.S. COLORS TWENTY-FIVE PASSENGERS AND IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS.

"Rescue mission," he muttered to himself. Frank Walker would have preferred to shoot his remaining torpedoes at some meaty target, return to Australia for more, and get on with the job of waging unrestricted war against the enemy.

The thirty-one-year-old Annapolis graduate was a vastly experienced submariner. His war had begun in these very waters, as executive officer on the Manila-based Searaven. With her he had made six desultory war patrols, including his first special mission, delivering fifteen hundred rounds of three-inch antiaircraft shells through the Japanese blockade to the beleaguered garrison at Bataan. But when Bataan fell on 9 April 1942, Searaven was told to dump the ammunition and forget the Philippines. Her crew must have been heartbroken at the lost opportunity to aid American forces. Two days later Searaven's patrol was again terminated when orders came through for a second special mission: rescue thirty-three Australian aviators from West Timor. Though successful, the pickup took five difficult, dangerous days, and on the way down to Fremantle a fire in one of the engineering compartments disabled the submarine. For more than twelve hours Searaven drifted helplessly in the Timor Sea. Another submarine came to her rescue and towed the wounded sub into port. For Frank Walker that patrol was not an auspicious introduction to special missions.

After leaving Searaven, Walker was rotated back to the States to help put Crevalle into commission in June 1943. He made two very successful runs as her exec under the daring Lieutenant Commander Henry Glass Munson. Now the boat was Walker's.

Walker had good reason to feel optimistic about Crevalle's third run. The crew had responded well under his direction. His superiors in Australia would surely approve of his aggressive leadership. Hadn't he already fired eighteen of his twenty-four torpedoes, sinking or damaging three Japanese marus, merchantmen like that monstrous oil tanker? For that there might be a Navy Cross in the offing. But Walker would rather forget the shellacking his boat had taken after putting down the big maru, sixty-one bone-rattling depth charges in a sustained attack that nearly destroyed Crevalle. He must have shuddered when he thought how close to oblivion he had taken his first command. When the special orders ditted and dahed out of the ether, Walker had been preparing to turn his ship homeward, back toward Fremantle in Western Australia. Perhaps en route he would have found some unwary convoy to attack. Perhaps he would have been able to fire his remaining five torpedoes and chalk up another ship. Crevalle was a fighting machine, not a bus. But with receipt of these new orders Frank Walker had reluctantly resigned himself to play bus driver.

His bus was one of ten dozen Balao-class fleet submarines built for the navy during World War II. Each a tad longer than a football field, the fifteen-hundred-ton ships were the successful culmination of forty years of American submarine design and experience. Named after a particularly fierce variety of saltwater jack, Crevalle was a product of the Portsmouth Navy Yard in New Hampshire. Into her cramped interior spaces she packed a crew of eight officers and seventy-two enlisted men, most of them hardened veterans of undersea warfare, all of them volunteers. She carried six torpedoes in her forward tubes, four in her aft tubes, and fourteen reloads. She could dive well below four hundred feet, cruise more than eleven thousand miles without refueling. On the surface her diesel-electric drive could push twenty-one knots. Submerged, running off her batteries, she could sprint at nine knots for an hour, or slug along at two knots for nearly two days. Unlike the aging Nautilus and Narwhal, big cruiser subs now fully dedicated to Philippine cargo runs, Crevalle was a modern fleet submarine. She was not designed to carry passengers; her builders intended for her to sink ships. And Crevalle had already proved she was up to that task. After just three patrols she took credit for sending eight vessels to the bottom. A bus indeed.

Up in the conning tower, motormac John Maille continued his periscope sweeps, scanning the shore for white panels. The seaman had not been told that two dozen American refugees were to gather on the beach at sundown, hoping for deliverance. The captain would withhold that information from his crew at least until those signals appeared, and those people appeared, and a rescue seemed imminent. If no one showed up that evening, Walker was prepared to make another attempt the following night. Then he would leave the refugees to fend for themselves. After all, he thought, what could be so special about these people--and those papers?

Table of Contents

Maps.

Author's Note.

Prologue.

Special Mission.

The Missionaries.

Separation.

The Sugar Families.

The Prisoners of War.

Independence Day.

Planter, Soldier, Oilman, Spy.

The Samurai's Story.

The Seventh Son.

Terms of Exchange.

Converging Paths.

The Rescue.

Precious Cargo.

Freedom.

The Admirals.

Decisive Battle.

Epilogue.

Notes.

Bibliography.

Index.

Editorial Reviews

A television photojournalist who has covered the Iranian hostage crisis, the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, the shooting of Pope John Paul II, various Olympics and Charles and Diana's wedding, Smith has also won four Emmy awards for producing public service announcements. He breaks into print with a taut tale of a forgotten rescue mission in 1944. When the Philippines fell to the Japanese in May 1942, more than 40 Americans living on the island of Negros abandoned their homes and fled inland. Most were missionaries, Silliman University faculty and their family members, who endured two years of hardship as they moved from place to place in the jungles and mountains, evading Japanese patrols sent to capture them. Protected by sympathetic civilians and watched over by vigilant Filipino resistance fighters, these Americans were finally evacuated in May 1944, as the Allied offensive came closer to the islands. But the evacuation by submarine the U.S.S. Crevalle was only part of the drama. On the last day of March 1944, two Japanese flying boats carrying Adm. Koga Mineichi and his staff crashed in a severe storm. The admiral, in command of the Japanese fleet, had just completed top secret plans to counter the next American offensive; these plans washed up on a beach on neighboring Cebu island and quickly found their way to the American commander of the resistance. When Crevalle evacuated the civilians, the plans went along, with mixed results in influencing the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944. Smith evaluates the two admirals and the resulting controversy. (May 18) Forecast: While the subject matter here is certainly intriguing, given Smith's journalistic exploits, one wonders whether a memoir can be far behind this well-reported story. Based on firsthand accounts supplied by surviving refugees and submariners, Smith's account will engross buffs, but won't reach beyond that market. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

On May 22, 1944, the U.S. submarine Crevalle was instructed to go to the remote Philippine island of Negros to pick up some Americans and Filipinos and take them to Australia. Following Pearl Harbor, navy subs regularly landed spies and saboteurs, as well as ammunition, supplies, and medicines for the guerillas. In 1944, the Crevalle was sent to Negros to pick up 25 people but ended up with 40, including 21 women, 12 children, and seven escaped American POWs. Smith, an Emmy Award-winning freelance television photojournalist with a passion for history, begins his study with a long account of the prewar lives of the missionaries at Stilliman University in Negros, the sugar planters, the Filipino Americans, and the soldiers stationed in Panay and Negros. He describes the Japanese invasion and how the civilians coped with living in the jungle for over two years before their rescue by the Crevalle, which also picked up a crate of important secret Japanese documents taken from a captured Japanese admiral. Smith's account of the long, hellish journey to Australia is eminently worth reading and, though perhaps overlong, is a fascinating book that belongs in every public and academic library. Stanley L. Itkin, Hillside P.L., New Hyde Park, NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Television journalist Smith retells a rousing story of WWII resistance to the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, with emphasis on the American players. The events he chronicles took place on Negros Island, the fourth largest in the Philippines. In addition to its Filipino population, the island housed a number of American missionaries, sugar plantation managers, educators, and businessmen, most of whom retreated into the mountainous interior after the Japanese occupied the seaside towns. Smith delves into their backgrounds, explaining how they came to be in the Philippines, then describes how a good number of these men, along with escaped American POWs, joined the resistance forces carrying out hit-and-run operations against the Japanese. It didn't take long for the occupying forces to start reprisals, with a vengeance, and the evacuation of noncombatants was undertaken at great risk to them and to the submarine crew of the USS Crevalle. In a parallel story, Japanese plans for the "Decisive Battle" of the Pacific had fallen into the hands of James Cushing, an American leader of the resistance movement on the Philippine island of Cebu, and these too had to be picked up by the submarine. Smith sets a gentle course for the early pages, providing a wealth of biographical details to give readers a stake in the story, then gets pumping when the action starts in earnest. The writing is trim and unornamented, at times resembling that of a not-so-true adventure magazine (Cushing's "exploits were the stuff of legend"), but this works fine for the stirring events at hand. Smith closes with the Battle of the Philippines Sea, giving readers a sense of the importance of the Crevalle's cargo.Wartime adventure draped with thrills and romance. (b&w photos)

Kirkus Reviews