Lesson from the Shark

Beneath the earth's seas moved hundreds of the deadliest craft ever devised: perhaps 500 submarines playing their part in the greatest naval war in history. Manned by the picked men of seven navies, they lay in wait for the kill from the South China Sea to the California Coast, from Long Island to Malaya.

Stalking men of war they kept submerged, sharklike, getting off their wicked torpedoes by sound or at periscope depth. To strike at waddling merchantmen and tankers they often disdainfully surfaced, and opened fire with deck guns almost before the green water had run off their rounded backs.

Always they operated with dash and independence that is characteristic of submarine men the world over. Because their young commanders were on their own, because they dared not use their radios--and also because of censorship--their activities were mysterious, little known.

U.S. subs were on the prowl as well as those of the enemy. Tokyo's radio announced last week that 20 of them had "encircled" Japan. Admiral Thomas Charles Hart, Commander of the Asiatic Fleet, had warned that reports on their activities would be slim for a long time to come. But by week's end, he had progress to report: his subs had sunk two Japanese transports and probably a destroyer.

U.S. citizens, who had given little thought to submarines since the almost-forgotten U-boat raids off the Atlantic coast in 1918, began to see them as menaces once again. From Washington came an announcement that enemy subs were active off both coasts. But Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox announced that in the Atlantic the Navy had "probably sunk or damaged at least 14 enemy submarines." In the Pacific, he added, "our naval forces have already effectively dealt with several Japanese submarines." Off the Pacific Coast, 200 miles north of San Francisco, a submarine sank the tanker Emidio by gunfire and torpedo a few miles off Blunt's Reef, then sank three lifeboats as the crew fled. The Navy said 22 crew members were missing. Farther south the tanker Agwiworld, 20 miles off Santa Cruz, was attacked by a submarine which appeared 500 yards away.

The Agwiworld radioed a warning to the Navy, then ran for cover. The sub fired eight shots from a deck gun, one severing a halyard and the rest whistling overhead, before giving up the chase. Said Captain F. B. Goncalves, safe in port: "If we had only had a gun. ... It was a beautiful target for us." More than the raid on Pearl Harbor, the attacks on the tankers brought to many an unimaginative citizen realization that the U.S. was at war. That war was more tangible than it seemed even on the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941.

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