By James Heinz
It started with the Star Spangled Banner. Then came the invocation. The names of 88 men were read, with a bell tolling after each name. A prayer was said, and then a bouquet of flowers was dropped upon the water. The command was given, “Gentlemen, bring the boat to life”. The radar began rotating, right next to the broom signifying a “clean sweep.” The foghorn sounded. The engines coughed and sputtered, at first refusing to start. Smoke pulsed out of the exhaust ports as someone said, “Hey folks, she’s 80 years old. You have to give her a few minutes. Not bad for eighty years.” The engines finally started.
It was May 7, 2022. The place was the Manitowoc River, right next to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum. The boat in question was the World War II submarine USS COBIA. The event was the Museum’s annual USS LAGARTO memorial service, held for the last 15 years, ever since the US Naval History and Heritage Command designated the Museum as the historical site for the Manitowoc built World War II USS LAGARTO. The service commemorates LAGARTO, and the other missing Manitowoc boats that never returned and which still remain On Eternal Patrol.
Museum executive director Cathy Green told me that the Museum was chosen as the historical site for the LAGARTO because the Museum had helped lead the ultimately successful search for the LAGARTO.
As I noted in a previous WMHS blog post on the USS RASHER, during World War II the US Navy decided to build a total of 28 Gato and Ballao class submarines at Manitowoc. After launching and commissioning, the boats were sailed down Lake Michigan to Chicago, where they were put on barges and transported down the Mississippi to New Orleans. At New Orleans they sailed for the Panama Canal and then into the Pacific.
And so began the Ballao class USS LAGARTO (SS-371). Launched on May 28, 1944, and commissioned October 14, 1944, she reached Pearl Harbor on Christmas Day 1944. There an additional 5 inch gun and two additional 40mm guns were added to her deck.
She departed Pearl on January 24, 1945, in company with USS HADDOCK. They sailed to Saipan together, conducting daily drills and practicing attacking one another on alternate days. While at Saipan two of LAGARTO’s officers and three of HADDOCK’s officers were incapacitated by an automobile accident.
Commanded by Navy Cross recipient Frank Latta, LAGARTO, HADDOCK and USS SENNET formed a “wolf pack” called Task force 17.13 or “Latta’s Lancers” that left Saipan on February 7, 1945. Arriving in the target area of the Bonin Islands on February 11th, the next day LAGARTO coordinated a surprise gun attack with the other two subs that sank two Japanese picket ships. Another attack the next day damaged another picket ship. After that the three subs split up and headed to their respective patrol areas.
On February 24th, LAGARTO alone torpedoed and sank the Japanese submarine I-173. After she and HADDOCK failed to sink another Japanese sub on March 13th, LAGARTO sailed to Subic Bay, Philippines.
On April 12th, LAGARTO left Subic Bay with orders to patrol the Gulf of Thailand. On March 2nd, she and USS BAYA conducted an unsuccessful combined attack on a Japanese convoy. That night the skippers of the two boats rendezvoused and planned another attack on the convoy the next day. That is the last time anyone saw LAGARTO. She did not respond to BAYA’s radio messages the next day. LAGARTO was declared lost on August 10th. Postwar examination of Japanese records shows that their minelayer IJNS HATSUTAKA had attacked a submarine in the same area on May 3rd. This could have only been LAGARTO.
In an incredible coincidence, HATSUTAKA would have encounters with two other Manitowoc boats.
Wikipedia tells us: “On 14 May Hatsutaka was escorting Tottori Maru. At 0737, USS Cobia fired five torpedoes at a ship misidentified as “Yaeyama”, but missed. At 0745, Hatsutaka dropped six depth charges, followed by four more at 0755. At 1147, Hatsutaka sighted the periscope of Cobia, and launched nine depth charge runs, causing severe damage.” HATSUTAKA was sunk by the Manitowoc built USS HAWKSBILL on May 16.
LAGARTO’s story was not yet over, however.
The Wisconsin chapter of the US Submarine Veterans of WWII adopted LAGARTO and contacted a British wreck diver living in Thailand named Jamie Mcleod. They asked him to find LAGARTO. Like many Great Lakes wreck divers, Mcleod heard from local fishermen about some large object they kept snagging their nets on that was near LAGARTO’s last known position. In 2005, McLeod found a US submarine on the bottom of the Gulf of Thailand, 100 miles from land and 225 feet deep.
The next year the US Navy dove the wreck and discovered the word “Manitowoc” on the propeller. LAGARTO was the only Manitowoc boat lost in the Gulf of Thailand. In 2007 the Wisconsin Maritime Museum sponsored an expedition to the wreck. Noted shipwreck hunters Richie Kohler and John Chatterton made four dives on the LAGARTO.
They found her sitting upright on a sandy bottom with one of the Thai fishermen’s nets that led to her discovery wrapped around her stern. The rudder is at hard to port. All dive planes are at the maximum downward position, indicating in Chatterton’s words, a “radical dive, a radical turn, clearly a very extreme evasive maneuver.”
There is a large 8 foot by 16 foot hole on the port side outer hull near the officer’s quarters and forward torpedo room. The hole does not penetrate the inner pressure hull but pushed the pressure hull three feet inward. One of the starboard bow torpedo tubes is half open. The tube is empty, indicating LAGARTO had gone down fighting, firing one of her torpedoes at the Japanese.
If the pressure hull is not breached, why did the sub sink? Kohler and Chatterton theorize that LAGARTO fired the starboard torpedo and before they could close the outer door, the depth charge detonated, blowing open the inner tube door, and sending a jet of water 21 inches in diameter shooting into the sub. All the hatches are closed and there is no evidence of an escape attempt.
An American flag attached to the wreck by Mcleod still waves in the current.
The discovery led Wisconsin Marine Museum sub curator Karen Duvalle to spend 12 years locating the families of all 86 LAGARTO crewmen, the subject of the Emmy award winning documentary, “Lost and Found: The Search For USS LAGARTO.”
On May 9, 1943, the Gato class USS ROBALO (SS-273) was launched in Manitowoc. Commissioned on September 23, 1943, she proceeded to the Pacific in the usual way.
Patrolling out of Pearl Harbor, in February 1944, she launched an unsuccessful attack on a Japanese convoy. Upon return from her 57 day patrol, 36 of which she spent submerged, her commanding officer was relieved of command and replaced by Lt. Cmdr. Manning Kimmel.
ROBALO was sent to the South China Sea to interdict Japanese oil tankers. On April 24, 1944, she was bombed by a Japanese aircraft and lost both periscopes and her radar during a plunge to 350 feet which she almost did not survive because her main induction valve had not been closed properly.
The damage might have discouraged another skipper, but not Manning Kimmel. In what was described as a “wildly aggressive” 51 day patrol, Kimmel launched a total of 20 torpedoes in 4 separate attacks on Japanese ships, unfortunately scoring no hits. Upon his return to base, his commanding officers seriously considered relieving him of his command for his own safety. Why would Manning Kimmel be so aggressive?
Kimmel was the son of Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who had the misfortune of being the commanding officer of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The senior Kimmel was relieved of command and reduced in rank after the attack, and retired from the Navy in 1942. Manning Kimmel may have been trying to redeem his family’s military honor. His own commanding officer commented, “Anybody else would have come home long before. I worried that Kimmel was a little too anxious to put the name of Kimmel high in Navy annals.”
Allowed to remain in command of ROBALO, on June 22, 1944, Kimmel left Freemantle, Australia. He was ordered to patrol off Indochina by way of the Balabac Strait between Palawan and Borneo. The area was known to have been mined. Kimmel was given the locations of the minefields and how to avoid them. On July 3, 1944, he radioed a contact report with a Japanese battleship.
After that, nothing.
USS ROBALO was stricken from the Naval Register on September 16, 1944. The families of her crew were notified that she was lost with all hands.
Even though the Navy knew that was not true.
Her story would have gone the way of other submarines that simply disappeared without a trace except that on August 3, 1944, a note was passed to an American POW from a cell window of the Japanese military police prison on Palawan. The note was later passed to the Philippine Resistance, which passed it to US authorities.
The note stated that the ROBALO was sunk on July 26, 1944, two miles west of Palawan by an explosion in the vicinity of her rear battery compartment. Only four men of her 81 man crew survived the sinking. The four men swam ashore and made their way through the jungle until captured by the Japanese. One of the men was able to pass the note to the American POW. Even though the Navy knew this, the families were still told the ship had been lost with all hands. Why would they do this?
They may have been trying to be kind.
There are two variations on what happened to the ROBALO survivors. One version, which is the version the Wisconsin Marine Museum believes, says that an ensign and three enlisted men swam ashore. They are believed to have been taken aboard a Japanese destroyer and then to have simply disappeared.
The other states that Manning Kimmel and three enlisted men swam ashore and were captured. After an air strike on Palawan, the angry Japanese pushed Kimmel and the other survivors into a ditch, poured gasoline over them, and set them on fire.
At the time the Navy believed the second scenario. Kimmel was the son of one Navy admiral and the nephew of another and Navy officials who knew the Kimmel family did not want to tell the families what they believed to be the truth, allowing them to believe that their son had died a relatively painless death.
The wreck of USS ROBALO was found in May, 2019, in the Balabac Strait at the east coast of Balabac Island at a depth of 230 ft. The U. S. Navy confirmed her identity in 2020. Video of the wreck can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whNrzuPp5x8
Although there is a large hole in the outer hull on the aft starboard side, the inner pressure hull there seems intact. The entire aft torpedo room is simply missing. This indicates a massive explosion in that compartment. This is aft of the battery compartment. The entire stern of the vessel is gone, except for a bent prop shaft and damaged propeller protruding from the sand.
Given what we know, we can reconstruct what happened to ROBALO. Since the position given in the note is significantly different than where the wreck was found, it appears that ROBALO was on the surface but not where she thought she was, and she sailed into a minefield. One of whose mines hit the aft torpedo room, causing the torpedoes to sympathetically detonate, destroying the aft end of the ship and sinking her immediately. The four survivors, whoever they were, were probably on the bridge when this happened and the sub sank out from beneath them.
USS GOLET (SS 361) suffered from an identity crisis before she was even launched. It was intended that she would be built as a Balao class sub, but the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company had not received the plans for that class of sub, so she was instead completed as a Gato class sub. Her construction was financed by war bonds purchased by the citizens of Shreveport and Caddo Parish, Louisiana.
She was launched on August 1, 1943, and commissioned on November 30, 1943. She proceeded to the Pacific and left Pearl Harbor on March 18, 1944, assigned to patrol off northern Japan. She saw only one torpedo worthy target and achieved no results.
On May 28, 1944, GOLET left Midway Island to patrol off northern Japan. Nothing else was ever heard from her. She was declared lost on July 26, 1944.
The website On Eternal Patrol states, “Japanese records examined after the war disclose an antisubmarine attack on 14 June 1944 at 41° 04’N, 141° 30’E. This attack is considered to explain GOLET’s loss, since the report states, “On the spot of fighting we later discovered cork, raft, etc., and a heavy oil pool of 50 by 5,200 meters.” The wreck of GOLET has not been found.
The last missing Manitowoc boat is the most mysterious. Balao class USS KETE (SS 369) was launched on April 9, 1944, and commissioned on July 31, 1944. She sailed from Pearl Harbor on November 4, 1944, for the East China Sea. Plagued by heavy weather and malfunctions, she sailed to Saipan and departed there on December 24, 1944, to patrol off Okinawa, where she searched for downed American aviators and broadcast weather reports. On the night of March 9/10, 1945, she attacked a Japanese convoy and sank three merchant ships totaling 6,881 tons. On the night of March 14, she tried but failed to sink a Japanese cable laying ship.
With only three torpedoes left, on March 19 she was ordered to return to Midway. The next day she sent a weather report. After that she was never heard from again. She was presumed lost on April 16, 1945.
What happened to her remains a mystery. Although she had sailed through mined areas, her final position report put her well clear of any minefields. Japanese submarine RO 41 was later found to have been in the same area as KETE’s last position report, but RO 41, which was herself sunk three days later, did not report sighting or sinking any American submarines. USS KETE vanished without a trace.
There is a memorial to USS KETE in the place where she was financed, Metairie, Louisiana.
The missing Manitowoc boats are just four of the 52 American World War II boats and their 3,630 crew members who remain “On Eternal Patrol”.
Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s Blog for USS RASHER
Photo at the top of page: Launching of the LAGARTO, May 28, 1944. Great Lakes Marine Collection of the Milwaukee Public Library and Wisconsin Marine Historical Society.
Other photos:
____________________________________
James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
