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Submarine
Hero - John Philip Cromwell
by Edward C.
Whitman
 CAPT
John Philip Cromwell was the most senior submariner awarded
the Medal of Honor in World War II and one of the three
submarine officers who received it posthumously. In some ways
similar to his fellow honoree, Howard Gilmore, Cromwell
consciously chose to sacrifice his own life to safeguard the
lives of others in a tragic incident that took place in
November 1943. And then, the tragedy of his death on USS Sculpin
(SS-191) was further compounded by an irony of fate that is
still pondered sadly today.
John Cromwell was born in
Henry, Illinois, on 11 September 1901 and graduated from the
U.S. Naval Academy with the class of 1924. He served in the
battleship USS Maryland (BB-46) and in several
submarines, eventually commanding USS S-20 (SS-125). At the
beginning of World War II, he was on the staff of Commander,
Submarines Pacific, running Submarine Divisions 203 and 44.
Later he was also assigned command of Submarine Division 43,
with additional duty in command of Submarine Division 44,
flying his pennant in Sculpin.
By mid-1943, the tide had
clearly turned in the Pacific War, and the Allies had begun to
fight their way back westward across the island chains to
Japan. The tactical and torpedo problems that hobbled the
Submarine Force in 1942 had nearly all been solved, and the
unrestricted submarine warfare campaign against both enemy
merchants and warships was sinking impressive totals of
Japanese tonnage. A key factor in this success was the
significant code-breaking advantage enjoyed by the United
States. This is a fascinating story in its own right, but
suffice it to say here that by late 1941, Navy cryptologists
were able to read the principal Japanese naval code, JN-25,
and decrypted enemy communications were disseminated regularly
to higher echelons of the U.S. Fleet as highly-classified
intelligence, code-named ULTRA.
These ULTRA intercepts, which
revealed Japanese intentions and corresponding fleet movements
well before the fact, were a major contributor to the American
victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 against
overwhelming odds. Further, they were of enormous value to the
U.S. submarine warfare campaign in predicting the tracks and
positions of Japanese convoys and combatants, thus
facilitating focused search efforts and concentrated attacks.
Relevant ULTRA information was encoded and radioed from the
operating authorities at Pearl Harbor and Australia to
submarines on patrol. Security was so strict that only the
Commanding Officers were allowed to decode the ULTRA messages,
and the information they contained was restricted to target
cues, without reference to their source. In particular, the
fact that the United States was reading JN-25 - and other
Japanese codes - was very close-held, and despite several
near-leaks, was never compromised.
In the fall of 1943, following
the successful conclusion of the Solomons campaign, the United
States made preparations to invade the Gilbert Islands in the
Central Pacific, an operation code-named GALVANIC. GALVANIC
was scheduled to commence on 20 November with the invasion of
Tarawa and Makin Islands by U.S. Marines, closely supported by
powerful carrier striking forces. To interdict potential
Japanese counter-moves, a force of 12 U.S. submarines - ten
from Pearl Harbor and two from Brisbane - was sent west and
north of the Gilberts to patrol off the major enemy bases at
Truk and Kwajalein. Among the boats stationed around Truk were
Sculpin, USS Searaven (SS-196), USS Spearfish
(SS-190), and USS Apogon (SS-308). Sculpin was
commanded by LCDR Fred Connaway, making his first war patrol,
but CAPT John Cromwell was also onboard in case conditions
warranted forming up a wolfpack with Searaven and
either Spearfish or Apogon under his direction.
As a senior officer, Cromwell was completely familiar with the
plans for Operation GALVANIC and knew a lot more about ULTRA -
and its source - than anyone else on Sculpin. It was
his first war patrol also.
After a brief overhaul, Sculpin
left Pearl Harbor for her ninth war patrol on 5 November 1943.
After refueling at Johnston Island on 7 November, she departed
for her assigned station northeast of Truk. On 29 November,
COMSUBPAC radioed Sculpin to order CAPT Cromwell to
activate the wolfpack. When Sculpin failed to
acknowledge the message, even after several repetitions, she
was assumed - correctly - to have been lost at sea. It wasn't
until after the war that the details of her loss - and that of
John Cromwell - to enemy action became known from both
Japanese sources and surviving crewmembers who had been
prisoners of war.
 Sculpin
had actually arrived on station on 16 November and made radar
contact with a large, high-speed convoy on the night of the
18th. After making a fast surface run to get ahead of the
quarry, LCDR Connaway submerged for an attack at dawn. As he
started his final approach, however, his periscope was spotted
by the enemy, and Connaway was forced to take Sculpin
deep and allow the convoy to pass overhead. Then, he surfaced
again to attempt another end run in broad daylight.
Unfortunately, the Japanese destroyer IJS Yamagumo had
lagged behind the convoy specifically to counter such a move
and after forcing Connaway to make a quick dive, dropped a
pattern of depth charges that - unbeknownst to the crew -
damaged the depth gauge. Sculpin went deep and laid low
for several hours.
Around noon, Connaway attempted
to bring Sculpin back to periscope depth, seeking
another opportunity to attack. However, while coming up, the
broken depth gauge stuck at 125 feet, confusing the diving
officer, and causing the boat to broach the surface in full
view of Yamagumo, which was still patrolling the area.
As Sculpin crash-dived again, the Japanese destroyer
dropped a string of 18 depth charges, severely damaging the
boat and causing temporary loss of depth control. Numerous
leaks developed in the hull, and so much water came onboard
that the submarine was forced to run at high speed to maintain
depth. This invited a second Japanese attack that did even
more damage.
At this point, Connaway
concluded that the only chance of saving his crew was to come
to the surface and fight it out there. Sculpin
surfaced, and with decks awash, her crew manned the deck guns.
The result of this uneven contest was hardly in doubt. Yamagumo's
first salvo hit Sculpin's conning tower, killing the
entire bridge watch team, including Connaway and his executive
and gunnery officers. The gun crew died almost instantly from
shrapnel. The senior ship's officer surviving, a reserve
lieutenant, ordered the boat scuttled and the crew to abandon
ship.
This action left CAPT Cromwell
facing a fateful choice. With his personal knowledge of both
ULTRA and GALVANIC, he realized immediately that to abandon
ship and become a prisoner of the Japanese would create a
serious danger of compromising these vital secrets to the
enemy under the influence of drugs or torture. For this
reason, he refused to leave the stricken submarine and gave
his life to avoid capture. He and 11 others rode Sculpin
on her final plunge to the bottom, where her secrets would be
safe forever.
Meanwhile, 42
members of Sculpin's crew - three officers and 39
enlisted men - were pulled from the sea by the Japanese,
though one of the latter, badly wounded, was thrown back. The
41 survivors were taken to Truk and interrogated for ten days
by Japanese intelligence officers. Then, the group was divided
in half for transport back to Japan on two escort carriers -
21 on IJS Chuyo and 20 on IJS Unyo. Those on Unyo
arrived in Japan in early December and spent the rest of the
war working in the Ashio copper mines, after which they
were repatriated to tell their story. The Americans on Chuyo,
however, were further victimized by the malicious hand of
fate.
Four and a half
years earlier, in May 1939, Sculpin had played a key
role in the rescue of surviving crew members from her sister
ship, USS Squalus (SS-192), which sank during a test
dive off Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was Sculpin that
discovered the location of the sunken boat and stood by to
assist the rescue team under "Swede" Momsen that
eventually saved 33 crewmen from a watery grave. [Ed. Note:
See the review of Peter Maas's The Terrible Hours in
the Winter 1999 issue of UNDERSEA WARFARE.] After the rescue, Squalus
was raised in a challenging salvage operation, refurbished,
and renamed USS Sailfish. Under this name, she joined
the Submarine Force of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet in March 1941
and eventually survived the Pacific war with 12 war patrols to
her credit. On 17 November 1943, Sailfish departed
Pearl Harbor for her tenth war patrol, which took her south of
Honshu. There, on the evening of 3 December, 240 miles
southeast of Yokosuka - with some help from ULTRA - she
intercepted a fast Japanese convoy consisting of several
carriers and their escorts. In three separate attacks,
starting shortly after midnight on the 4th and in the midst of
a howling typhoon, Sailfish's Commanding Officer,
Robert E. M. Ward, succeeded first in crippling, and then in
sinking one of the carriers. As fate would have it, the paths
of Sculpin and Squalus had crossed again. The
victim was Chuyo, and only one of the Sculpin
prisoners onboard survived.
When the story of
John Cromwell's heroic sacrifice was revealed in the accounts
of the Sculpin survivors, COMSUBPAC VADM Charles
Lockwood nominated him for the Medal of Honor. The award was
approved and presented posthumously to Cromwell's widow after
the war. Nearly a decade later, the Dealey-class
destroyer-escort USS Cromwell (DE-1014), commissioned
in November 1954, was named in his honor.
Dr. Whitman is Senior Editor
of UNDERSEA WARFARE Magazine.
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