- 1 week ago
A US submarine surfaced under Japanese guns to save one wounded American pilot, and the rescue became one of the boldest lifeguard missions of the Pacific War. Off Woleai in April 1944, USS Harder was held against a coral reef in daylight, unable to dive, while John Galvin, a 23-year-old Hellcat pilot, struggled ashore after hours in the sea and coral surf.
This military history story follows the lifeguard submarine program, the volunteers who swam a line through breaking waves, and the fighter cover that kept Japanese rifle fire down long enough to pull Galvin aboard. It also shows how this dangerous rescue helped shape later Pacific rescue doctrine, from Wake Island to the carrier strikes that depended on knowing someone would come for downed airmen.
A gripping WW2 submarine rescue story, narrated with the detail of a wartime documentary and the tension of a sea survival tale. Ideal for listeners searching for World War 2 stories, military history narration, Pacific War history, submarine war stories, and historical storytelling about pilots, carriers, and rescue missions.
SEO: WW2 submarine rescue, Pacific War history, military history narration, lifeguard submarine, downed pilot rescue, World War 2 stories, submarine war stories, historical storytelling, carrier airmen, and naval combat history for listeners who enjoy detailed wartime accounts and documentary-style narration.
This military history story follows the lifeguard submarine program, the volunteers who swam a line through breaking waves, and the fighter cover that kept Japanese rifle fire down long enough to pull Galvin aboard. It also shows how this dangerous rescue helped shape later Pacific rescue doctrine, from Wake Island to the carrier strikes that depended on knowing someone would come for downed airmen.
A gripping WW2 submarine rescue story, narrated with the detail of a wartime documentary and the tension of a sea survival tale. Ideal for listeners searching for World War 2 stories, military history narration, Pacific War history, submarine war stories, and historical storytelling about pilots, carriers, and rescue missions.
SEO: WW2 submarine rescue, Pacific War history, military history narration, lifeguard submarine, downed pilot rescue, World War 2 stories, submarine war stories, historical storytelling, carrier airmen, and naval combat history for listeners who enjoy detailed wartime accounts and documentary-style narration.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00On the 1st of April, 1944, at 11.45 in the morning, the American submarine Harder was
00:07sitting on the surface in bright daylight 1,500 yards off a Japanese-held island in
00:12the Western Carolinas.
00:131,500 yards is less than a mile.
00:16Behind that island lay the lagoon of Woolley Atoll, an airstrip 3,300 feet long, a seaplane
00:23base, and the garrison of roughly 6,000 Japanese troops.
00:27A few hours earlier, American carrier aircraft had put 150 tons of bombs into that atoll.
00:35The smoke was still climbing when the submarine came in toward the reef.
00:39And she stayed there, on the surface, in the open.
00:44Hold on to what that means, because the whole story runs through it.
00:47A fleet submarine in 1944 had one real defense—not her deck gun, not her torpedoes.
00:55Her defense was disappearing.
00:57Sixty seconds of flooding ballast tanks and 300 feet of steel is simply gone.
01:03The sea closes over the top of it, and nothing on that beach can touch her.
01:08That was the bargain of the entire submarine service—stay unseen, and you stay alive.
01:15Harder could not take that bargain.
01:18The water was too shallow to dive.
01:20Her captain had run her bow up against the coral of the fringing reef and was holding her
01:25there, working both screws against the swell.
01:29311 feet of hull, 79 men inside her, pinned against an enemy shoreline in the middle of
01:36the day.
01:37The captain holding her against that reef was Samuel Dealey, 37, from Dallas, Texas.
01:44He had failed out of the Naval Academy in his first year and talked his way back in.
01:49By that spring, no submarine commander in the Pacific was taking bigger chances.
01:561145 is the time in the record because that is the moment a lookout on the bridge found
02:01what they had come for.
02:02On the northwestern tip of that island, at the edge of the surf, a man was standing up.
02:07An American, alive, waving.
02:12His name was John Galvin, a Navy fighter pilot off the carrier Bunker Hill, 23 years old,
02:19from Burlington, Iowa.
02:21That morning had been his fifth combat mission of the war.
02:25One man, one pilot, five missions into his war, on a coral beach on an island held by the
02:31Japanese Army.
02:33And for him, the United States Navy was about to put a submarine and every man aboard her
02:38inside rifle range of that beach and hold them there, in daylight, unable to dive, unable
02:45to run.
02:47Why?
02:49If this is worth your time, a like and a subscribe genuinely help.
02:53This channel covers what American soldiers, sailors, and airmen actually did in the Second
02:58World War, and the detail it deserves.
03:01Now the easy answer is that Harder was under orders.
03:04That answer is true, and it explains almost nothing.
03:08There was no order anywhere in the United States Navy that told a submarine captain to
03:14ground his boat on a reef inside the small arms range of a Japanese garrison.
03:19There was no procedure for it.
03:21There was no manual page.
03:23What there was, that spring, was a standing assignment with a strange, almost gentle name,
03:30lifeguard duty.
03:32And inside that name sat one of the most peculiar decisions the American war effort ever made
03:37about its own people.
03:39Because look at the arithmetic for a moment, coldly, the way a staff officer in Pearl Harbor
03:44would have had to look at it.
03:46On one side of the scale, a fleet submarine, one of the most expensive weapons the United States
03:52built, and 79 trained men.
03:56And a war patrol that was supposed to be spent sinking Japanese shipping.
04:01On the other side, one 23-year-old on his fifth flight.
04:06By every rule of cold accounting, that trade is insane.
04:11And the American Navy made it, deliberately, as policy, over and over, for two more years.
04:18There are three separate reasons that happened.
04:20Only one of them appears in the operation order.
04:23The second one is a number that the Navy did not fully understand until 1945.
04:29And when they did understand it, it changed how they planned every carrier strike for the
04:34rest of the war.
04:35And the third reason, the real one, the one underneath, has nothing to do with arithmetic
04:41at all, and you will not see it until the very end of this story, when you find out what
04:46happened
04:47to the men on that submarine.
04:50Remember the name of the man on the beach, John Galvin.
04:54He is going to matter far past the point where most of these stories would end.
04:59Because he did not get taken off harder after the rescue.
05:02He stayed aboard her for 33 days.
05:05And what he saw in those 33 days is the closest anyone ever came to a plain answer to the
05:12question
05:12this whole story asks.
05:14But before any of it, before Dealey pushed his bow into that coral, before the swimmers
05:20went over the side, you need to know where the idea even came from.
05:25Because the idea of a submarine surfacing to save a pilot did not begin at Wolei.
05:30It began about 18 months earlier, off a different island, with a different submarine on the surface.
05:37And it very nearly died there.
05:41An officer went up to that bridge in daylight.
05:44He did not come back down.
05:46Wake Island, the 6th of October, 1943, six months before Wolei and most of an ocean away
05:53from it.
05:54The American submarine Skate was on the surface in daylight, doing exactly what Harder would
05:59later do at Wolei, waiting, in plain view of a Japanese-held island, for American aircraft
06:05to be shot down.
06:07That was the job.
06:08Sit where the enemy can see you, and wait for the worst thing to happen to somebody else.
06:14A Zero came in low and raked her bridge with machine gun fire.
06:19Lieutenant Junior Grade Willis Maxson III was hit.
06:23Skate got under, but Maxson had a bullet in him, and two days later, on the 8th of October,
06:28he died.
06:30They buried him at sea.
06:32Hold that, because it is the first hard fact of this story.
06:36On the day Willis Maxson was shot, the number of American airmen rescued by a lifeguard submarine
06:41was zero.
06:43Not a small number.
06:45Zero.
06:46The idea had cost a life before it had saved one.
06:50The idea itself had been almost an accident.
06:53In December 1942, submarines were posted along the route to Wake as navigation markers for
06:59Army bombers on a long over-water strike, and a staff officer, Captain H. M. Martin, made
07:05a simple observation.
07:07If a bomber goes into the sea near a submarine, the submarine can pick the crew out of it.
07:13By late 1943, Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood, who ran the Pacific Submarine Force, had turned
07:20that observation into a standing assignment.
07:23Lockwood had no illusions about what he was ordering.
07:26He called it arduous and dangerous work that, in his words, seldom gives a submarine the opportunity
07:32to perform its major mission.
07:35Which brings us back to Skate, on the morning of the 7th of October, with one of her officers
07:40dying below decks.
07:42Watch what she did.
07:44She did not leave.
07:46She went back up, closed to within 5,000 yards of the beach at Wake, closer than she had been
07:52the day she was strafed, and pulled two men out of the water.
07:56Lt. Harold Kicker and Ensign Murray Tyler.
08:00They were the first two aviators ever recovered by a lifeguard submarine.
08:05On the 9th of October, Skate took another man aboard.
08:08On the 10th, three more.
08:11Six men out of the sea.
08:13One officer buried on the way home.
08:17And then something happened that matters more than the six.
08:21When the carrier Lexington heard what Skate had done for her pilots, the carrier sent the
08:26submarine a message, anything on the Lexington is yours for the asking.
08:31If it's too big to carry away, we will cut it up into small parts.
08:36That is not a thank you note.
08:37That is one crew telling another crew there is no price.
08:43And buried inside it is the second reason we are chasing.
08:46The one the Navy could not put a number on until 1945.
08:51Because a carrier does not go to war with a hundred aircraft.
08:55It goes to war with a hundred pilots.
08:58Pilots watch each other go into the sea.
09:01And a man who believes nobody is coming for him flies differently from a man who believes
09:06somebody is.
09:08How differently?
09:09That is the number.
09:11I'll give it to you when it can land properly.
09:14But before any of that could work, the system had to solve a problem that sounds trivial and
09:19is not.
09:19But finding one man in the Pacific Ocean.
09:24A raft is a few feet across.
09:26A submarine's bridge stands about 20 feet above the water.
09:30Under those conditions, a raft vanishes at 2 or 3 miles in a calm sea.
09:36So the equipment got strange.
09:39Downed airmen carried a hand-cranked emergency radio the crews called the Gibson Girl.
09:4330 to 40 pounds of it, gripped between the knees while you turned the crank and hoped.
09:50Signal mirrors.
09:52Metal corner reflectors to make a raft show up on radar.
09:55And in January 1944 came a code for positions built out of cartoon characters.
10:01A pilot going down transmitted something like 14 pop-a-bugs, 1-3-5, 14 miles from reference
10:10point pop-a-bugs bearing 1-3-5.
10:14Then the Japanese broke it and began sending false positions to pull submarines into range
10:20of their guns.
10:21The fix is one of those small, cold pieces of ingenuity this war is full of.
10:27The reference points were rewritten so that every one of them contained the letter L, a
10:33sound a native Japanese speaker cannot produce cleanly in English.
10:38If the voice on the radio could not say it, the voice was not American.
10:43All of it—the radios, the mirrors, the code words, the dead officer off-wake—was built
10:50for one situation—a man in the water, in open sea, clear of land.
10:57On the 1st of April, 1944, John Galvin was not in open sea.
11:03He was ashore, inside a Japanese-held atoll, and there was no page in the system for that.
11:09And by the time Harder got word of him, Galvin had already spent about five hours fighting
11:14something that nearly finished him before a single Japanese soldier knew he existed.
11:20The 1st of April, 1944.
11:23The flight deck of the carrier Bunker Hill in the Western Pacific before the sun is high.
11:29John Galvin was 23, Burlington, Iowa.
11:32He had enlisted in the Navy in 1942, earned his wings the next year, and by that morning
11:38he had flown four combat missions.
11:40This was number five.
11:42He was flying an F6F Hellcat, and the target was Woolai.
11:47That strike was the tail end of a four-day operation.
11:50Task Force 58 had spent the 30th and 31st of March tearing up the Palau's, then swung
11:57across to Yap, Lethe, and Woolai, clearing the flank for the landings coming at Hollandia.
12:02On the 1st of April, the carriers put 150 tons of bombs into Woolai.
12:08Over the four days, the American force lost 43 aircraft from all causes.
12:14Galvin's was one of them.
12:16Here is what a strafing run on an airfield actually is.
12:19Galvin went down the strip a few hundred feet up, at close to 300 miles an hour, holding
12:25the aircraft straight and level for several seconds, while every gun on that island shoots
12:29at a target that is not maneuvering.
12:32Galvin went down the strip and put his fire into a Japanese bomber.
12:36A Mitsubishi, the Americans called a Betty, parked there.
12:40Then the anti-aircraft found him.
12:42The Hellcat was hit hard, and so was he.
12:45He was bleeding, and one side of his body was barely answering.
12:50Now do the arithmetic he had to do, in a shot-up aircraft over enemy water.
12:55The task force was over the horizon.
12:58Getting home meant a long over-water flight, then finding a moving carrier, then putting
13:03a damaged fighter onto a deck with an arm and a leg that would not work properly.
13:08He did not think he could do it.
13:10So he chose the other thing, which is to say, he chose the ocean.
13:15He went over the side of the cockpit about 5 miles north of a scrap of land called Taugelap,
13:20and here the system from the last part starts working, quietly and immediately.
13:26His squadron mates did not just watch him go.
13:29They circled, they fixed the spot, and they passed his position.
13:34Somewhere out there was a submarine whose entire job that day was to hear it.
13:40But hearing it and reaching it are different problems.
13:43And while the Navy worked on that, Galvin was in the water.
13:48The sea that day was running about 15 feet.
13:51The wind was around 20 knots.
13:53His flight gear soaked through and started pulling him down, and he was swimming with one
13:59side of his body doing most of the work.
14:01He was in that water for close to 5 hours.
14:065 hours.
14:08Sit with that number for a second, because most people cannot tread water for 20 minutes
14:13in a swimming pool.
14:15And the far end of those 5 hours was not rescue.
14:18It was surf breaking over living coral, which is not rock.
14:23It is a wall of blades.
14:25He went through it, and he came out the other side onto the beach of an island, bleeding,
14:30alone, alive.
14:33And now understand where alive had put him.
14:36Wolei was not a bypassed sandbar.
14:39It was a Japanese base, with an airstrip, a seaplane base, and something like 6,000 troops
14:45on it.
14:45A garrison the Americans had just spent the morning bombing.
14:49Which meant every man in it was awake, armed, and looking for Americans.
14:55Galvin was inside that, on foot, in daylight.
14:59Now turn to the submarine.
15:02Harder had left Pearl Harbor on the 16th of March, on her 4th War Patrol.
15:07Understand what kind of boat she was.
15:08Her crew's phrase for what they did was, hit em' harder.
15:12And her captain had built a reputation in the Pacific for going at Japanese warships the
15:17way other captains went at freighters.
15:20This was a hunter.
15:21And this hunter had been parked off Wolei as a lifeguard.
15:34For a submarine crew, that is a peculiar kind of duty.
15:39You are the most dangerous thing in that water, and you are being asked to behave like a piece
15:44of rescue equipment.
15:47Then the word came through, a pilot down, ashore, alive, on an island west of Wolei.
15:54An aircraft came over to lead them in.
15:57Dealey took Harder toward the beach with American planes working over the island above him, and
16:02at 11.45, the lookouts found the figure at the surf line, and the problem stopped being
16:07theoretical.
16:09Because a submarine cannot go to a beach.
16:12Between Harder and that man lay a fringing reef and heavy breaking surf, and a hole that
16:19draws better than fifteen feet does not cross either one.
16:23The boat could get close.
16:25The boat could not get him.
16:28Something had to make the last few hundred yards through the coral and the breakers, and
16:32there was only one thing aboard that submarine capable of it.
16:36So Dealey did not give an order.
16:38He asked for volunteers.
16:39Volunteers.
16:41Consider what that word is asking on a submarine.
16:45Every instinct these men have been trained into says the hull is life and the water is
16:51death.
16:52Their whole survival doctrine is to be inside a sealed steel tube and to make that tube invisible.
17:00Asking a submariner to get out of the boat and swim toward an enemy island is asking him
17:05to do the opposite of everything the service ever taught him.
17:09Three men went.
17:11Remember these three, because one of them will matter again at the end of this story in a
17:15way you will not want to hear.
17:29Look at that list again.
17:31An officer, an engine room man, and a cook.
17:36Nothing in any of their ratings has anything to do with what they were about to do.
17:41The United States Navy had no specialty for this.
17:45It had three men who put up their hands.
17:49First though, Dealey had to put the boat where they could work.
17:52He brought harder in until her bow touched the coral of the fringing reef.
17:56And then he held her there.
17:58Not anchored.
18:00Held.
18:01With both screws turning against the swell to keep the hull pinned.
18:06That is a piece of ship handling most people never think about.
18:09A submarine's pressure hull is a thin skin by warship standards.
18:14Coral takes paint off, then metal.
18:17Every swell that came through lifted 300 feet of steel and set it back down on the reef.
18:23And while he did that, count the things that could not happen.
18:28She could not dive.
18:29She could not maneuver.
18:31She could not run.
18:33If a Japanese aircraft came out of the sun the way that Zero came at Skate off Wake,
18:39Harder had no answer at all except the American planes circling above her.
18:43That air cover is not decoration.
18:46Hold on to it.
18:47In a few minutes, it is going to be the difference between a rescue and a disaster.
18:52And in 1945, the Navy will finally put a hard number on exactly how much it was worth.
18:58The three men went over the side with a rubber boat.
19:01And here is the detail that makes the whole thing work, and it is worth understanding properly.
19:07The boat was tethered.
19:10A line ran from the raft back to the submarine.
19:13Because getting to the beach is the easy half.
19:16Surf pushes you in.
19:17Tide, wind, and breaking water do not let you paddle back out again, not carrying a wounded
19:22man.
19:23The line was the way home.
19:26Everything that follows in this story turns on that line.
19:30They did not ride in the raft.
19:31They pushed and towed it, swimming, through the same coral surf that had opened Galvin
19:36up an hour or two earlier.
19:38Fifteen-foot sea running outside, breakers on the reef, and three men in the water shoving
19:44a rubber boat toward an island held by the Japanese army.
19:48Meanwhile, the aircraft overhead tried to solve it from their end.
19:52One of them dropped a rubber boat to Galvin on the beach.
19:55He got into it, and he started paddling out.
19:58Understand the state of the man doing that paddling.
20:01He had been shot up in the cockpit, spent five hours in the sea, dragged himself through
20:06coral.
20:06His arms had already done more that day than most bodies do in a lifetime, and one side
20:11of him was hardly working.
20:13And now, the Pacific asked him for one more thing.
20:17Get yourself off this island.
20:20The tide said no.
20:22He made almost no ground.
20:23And the Japanese on that island were watching all of it.
20:27The men on that strip of land had rifles, they had cover in the foliage, and they had
20:32a submarine sitting motionless 1,500 yards offshore, with men in the open water in front
20:38of it.
20:39Fire started coming out of the trees.
20:42The aircraft came down and worked the tree line, and that is the only reason the next
20:46part of this story is a rescue and not a list of names.
20:50The planes could not stop the shooting.
20:53They could only make it intermittent, and inaccurate, and frightened.
20:58That was enough.
20:59Barely.
21:00Step back and look at the picture for a moment, because it is one of the strangest tableaux
21:04of the Pacific War.
21:06A fleet submarine aground by the bow on a coral reef.
21:10Four men.
21:12Three in the water, one in a raft.
21:14Inside rifle range of a Japanese-held beach.
21:18Carrier aircraft strafing the tree line to keep heads down.
21:22150 tons of bombs still smoking on the atoll behind.
21:27All of it, every piece of it, arranged around one 23-year-old who had been in combat five
21:33times.
21:34And at that exact moment, with the swimmers in the surf and the line holding, help arrived.
21:40Another American aircraft came down and landed on the water beside them to lend a hand.
21:45It was meant well.
21:47It very nearly killed everyone in the water.
21:50And the way it did it is the reason four men from that submarine ended the day with
21:55the Navy Cross.
21:56The aircraft was a Curtis Seagull, a single-engine floatplane.
22:00The kind of machine the Navy used for scouting, and for exactly this sort of work.
22:06Its crew saw men in the water and did the brave thing.
22:09They put the aircraft down on a heaving sea beside a hostile beach to help.
22:15And in doing it, they cut the tow line.
22:19No malice, no error of courage, just a float, a propeller, a rope in a moving sea, and the
22:27physics of a landing on water.
22:29The single thread connecting four men in the surf to the submarine that was going to pull
22:34them out parted.
22:37Now look at the position honestly.
22:40Three submariners and a wounded pilot are on the wrong side of a breaking reef.
22:45There is no line.
22:46The tide is running against them.
22:49Rifle fire is coming out of the tree line whenever the aircraft above stop making it dangerous.
22:55And Harder cannot come to them.
22:57She is already as close as a submarine can physically get.
23:00But, aground by the bow, 300 feet of hull grinding on coral, unable to dive.
23:07Every minute that passed made her more likely to be found by something Japanese and airborne.
23:13So the problem came back to the deck of the submarine.
23:16And it came back in the simplest possible form.
23:18Somebody had to take a new line into that surf.
23:23By hand.
23:25Swimming.
23:26Gunner's mate first class Freeman Packet Jr.
23:30From Milford, Connecticut.
23:31A gunner's mate on a submarine looks after torpedoes and deck weapons.
23:36That is the trade he had signed up for.
23:38He went into the water with a line.
23:41Understand what swimming a line means, physically.
23:44A rope in moving water is not weightless.
23:48It drags.
23:49It snags.
23:50It takes hold of you.
23:52In breaking surf, a line tries to pull you backwards and under, while the coral works on
23:57your hands and knees, and the sea decides where you go.
24:01He did it anyway.
24:03Through the breakers, across the reef, to the men on the other side.
24:07And then the submarine pulled.
24:09Men on harder's deck, in the open, hauled that line in, hand over hand, while Japanese
24:16riflemen shot at them from the foliage, and American aircraft came down again and again
24:22on the tree line to spoil their aim.
24:25The raft came out through the surf with five men on and around it.
24:29The three who had gone in, the man who had brought the second line, and John Galvin.
24:34He came over the side of a submarine roughly six hours after he had gone into the sea, shot
24:41up, cut up by coral, salt burned, finished.
24:46The citation written afterwards for the man who brought him out uses a plain word for his
24:51condition, exhausted.
24:54Then Dealey had to get his boat off a reef.
24:58Backing a submarine off coral is its own small nightmare.
25:01You are pulling a hull that has been sitting on rock, in a swell, with screws and rudder
25:08in shallow water where any of it can be damaged.
25:11And you cannot dive to escape whatever notices you while you do it.
25:16He got her off.
25:17He got her clear.
25:18He took her back out to sea.
25:21Four men from that crew, Logan, Ryan, Thomason, and Paquette, were awarded the Navy Cross,
25:28which is the second highest decoration the United States can give for valor in combat.
25:34Dealey received his fourth.
25:36The Navy's own account calls it one of the boldest rescues on record.
25:40And the Navy is not a service that hands out that kind of language freely.
25:45And this is where this story would normally end.
25:48Pilot saved, submarine away, medals in the file.
25:53Except that it does not end here.
25:55And the reason it does not is a piece of plain logistics that nobody plans for.
26:00Harder was 16 days out of Pearl Harbor, in the middle of a war patrol.
26:06There is no ferry service in the middle of the Pacific.
26:09You cannot hand a wounded aviator to a passing destroyer without breaking radio silence and
26:15giving away a submarine's position.
26:16And you certainly do not abandon a patrol to run a thousand miles to a base.
26:23So the Navy did the only thing available.
26:25Galvin stayed.
26:2733 days.
26:29A fighter pilot from Iowa, living inside a submarine on a combat patrol, sleeping in a
26:35spare bunk, eating in that ward room, with no station to go to when the alarm sounded.
26:41Every man aboard had a job when the klaxon went.
26:44He had a bunk and a bulkhead to hold onto.
26:47And that accident of logistics is the luckiest thing that ever happened to this story.
26:52Because it means there was a witness.
26:55One American who had been on the receiving end of the rescue, standing inside the machine
27:00that performed it, watching what that machine was actually for, and what it cost the men who
27:05ran it.
27:07Twelve days after they carried him aboard, John Galvin was inside that submarine when
27:12a Japanese destroyer came at them from 900 yards.
27:16What happened in the next five minutes is the shortest and coldest answer anyone ever
27:21gave to the question this whole story is asking.
27:31A Japanese aircraft spotted harder on the surface and radioed her position to a destroyer working
27:36that patch of ocean, the Ikazuchi.
27:40The destroyer turned toward her and came on.
27:43This is the situation every submarine crew is trained to get away from.
27:46A destroyer is faster than you on the surface, and far faster than you underneath it.
27:52She carries sonar and death charges, and hunting submarines is her profession.
27:57The doctrine is simple and sensible.
28:00Go deep, go quiet, take the beating, hope she gives up.
28:06Dealey did not go deep.
28:08He turned the bow at her and waited.
28:10He let her come to 900 yards.
28:14900 yards is about half a mile, close enough that there is no second chance for anybody.
28:20Then he fired four torpedoes straight down her throat, and inside about five minutes, the
28:26Ikazuchi was gone.
28:28A ship that sinks in five minutes does not get many of her people off her.
28:32Dealey's entry in the patrol report about it is eight words long, and it is probably
28:37the most famous sentence any American submarine captain wrote in that war.
28:42Expended four torpedoes and one Jap destroyer.
28:46And John Galvin was aboard for it.
28:50Twelve days earlier, this crew had ground their bow into a coral reef and put four men in the
28:55surf under rifle fire to bring one wounded stranger home.
28:59Now the same men, in the same steel, in the same working day, killed a warship in about
29:06five minutes.
29:08Those two things are not opposites.
29:10That is the first real answer to the question this video is asking, and it is not a sentimental
29:15one.
29:17Harder did not go into that reef because her crew were kind.
29:20She went in because the United States Navy had made a decision about what its people were
29:25worth.
29:25And that decision was carried out by exactly the same hard machinery that killed the Ikazuchi.
29:31Same captain, same crew, same week.
29:35Rescue was not the soft side of that Navy.
29:38It was the same side.
29:40Now the second reason.
29:42I told you there was a number the Navy did not have until 1945.
29:46Here it is.
29:48When the analysts went back over the lifeguard missions, they compared the calls for help,
29:53where the submarine had fighter cover overhead, with the calls where it did not.
29:58With air support, 51 rescues out of 60 calls.
30:03Without it, 7 out of 75.
30:08Sit with those two fractions for a second.
30:1085% against 9%.
30:14The difference between a man coming home and a man not coming home was almost entirely whether
30:21somebody was flying above the submarine that came for him.
30:25Which means the aircraft that were working over that tree line at Woolai, spoiling the
30:29aim of Japanese riflemen while four men hauled a raft through the surf, were not a nice extra.
30:36They were the rescue.
30:38That is why lifeguard duty stopped being an improvisation and hardened into doctrine.
30:44Where the carriers went, a submarine was assigned, and fighters were told off to cover her.
30:50By the end of the war, American submarines had taken 504 airmen out of the Pacific.
30:56504 men.
30:58That is the visible return.
31:01The invisible one is bigger, and it is the thing the Lexington's message to skate was
31:05really about.
31:07Every pilot on every deck in the Pacific knew the boats were out there.
31:12A man who knows somebody is coming for him presses the attack a little longer, goes in
31:17a little lower, comes back for the second run.
31:21Nobody can put a number on what that was worth.
31:23The Japanese pilots flying against them had no such arrangement, and no such expectation.
31:30Which brings us back to the passenger.
31:3333 days after they pulled him out of the surf, Harder finished her patrol in Australia, and
31:38John Galvin went back to the war.
31:41Before he left, the submariners did something for him that has no official logic to it at all.
31:46They gave him the submarine combat insignia, the pin a man earns by making a successful
31:51war patrol in a submarine.
31:53A fighter pilot from Iowa, wearing a submariner's combat pin.
31:58He kept it for the rest of his life.
32:01Decades later, he described that pin as his prized possession.
32:05A man with distinguished flying crosses in a drawer, and the thing he treasured was a piece
32:10of metal given to him by the crew that went into the coral for him.
32:15So we have two answers now.
32:16The Navy's policy, and the Navy's arithmetic.
32:20Both are true, and neither explains what actually happened on that reef.
32:25Because policy does not put a cook in the water, and arithmetic does not swim a line through coral.
32:31The third reason is the one underneath, and you cannot see it from April.
32:35You can only see it from the 24th of August, 1944, when Harder was in the South China Sea,
32:41and the men who had come for John Galvin needed somebody to come for them.
32:46The 6th of June, 1944.
32:48Off Tawitawi, in the southern Philippines, where the Japanese fleet was sheltering.
32:54Harder went back to being what she was.
32:56Over four days, she attacked Japanese destroyer after Japanese destroyer, at ranges that make
33:01experienced submariners wince.
33:03She was credited at the time with five of them, and post-war accounting confirms at least three,
33:09which is still a record almost nobody in that war came near.
33:13And the effect went beyond the ships.
33:15The Japanese command off Tawitawi concluded there was a concentration of American submarines
33:20sitting on their door, at exactly the moment they were preparing to move their fleet for
33:25the battle that became the Philippine Sea.
33:28That is the boat we are talking about.
33:30The same hull that had been sitting on a coral reef in April, holding still while a cook and
33:36a gunner's mate swam a rope through the surf, was by June the most feared American submarine
33:41in the Pacific.
33:42She sailed on her 6th patrol from Fremantle in Western Australia on the 5th of August 1944,
33:49working with other American boats along the west coast of Luzon.
33:53In the days that followed, they went after Japanese escort vessels and sank them.
33:59Then came the 24th of August.
34:02Before dawn, off Dassault Bay, Harder and the submarine Hake were working together on two
34:08Japanese ships, a minesweeper and a destroyer of Thai origin the Japanese had taken over.
34:15Hake looked them over, did not like the setup, and pulled away.
34:19As she went, Hake's periscope picked up something ahead of her.
34:23Another periscope.
34:25Harder, going in.
34:27That is the last time any American saw her.
34:30What Hake heard next, through her own hull, was a Japanese minesweeper running in and dropping
34:3615 depth charges in rapid succession.
34:39Then nothing.
34:41The Japanese account of that morning records what came up afterwards.
34:45A great deal of oil, wood chips, and cork on the surface.
34:49Think about the men aboard Hake for a moment.
34:52They are submariners too.
34:54They are listening through the water to a boat they know.
34:57The most famous boat in the force, being killed a few thousand yards away.
35:02And there is not one thing on earth they can do about it.
35:06They waited.
35:07They listened for her.
35:09They tried to raise her.
35:12Harder did not answer, that day, or any day after.
35:17Now I want you to notice something.
35:18And it is the hinge of this entire story.
35:22Nobody surfaced for them.
35:24There was no aircraft circling.
35:26No rubber boat.
35:27No line through the surf.
35:30No crew grinding a bow into coral to bring them home.
35:34There could not be.
35:36That is not a failure of the navy.
35:38And it is not cowardice on anybody's part.
35:41It is the physical nature of the thing.
35:44When a submarine dies, she dies in one piece, below, in the dark.
35:50And everyone aboard goes with her.
35:52No rescue system in the world reaches down there.
35:5879 Men
36:00The United States Navy waited, and listened, and finally declared Harder lost on the 2nd
36:06of January 1945.
36:09Samuel Dealey received the Medal of Honor, posthumously, the highest award his country
36:14has, given to a man who was already on the bottom of the South China Sea.
36:19And here, finally, is the third reason.
36:22The one underneath the policy, and underneath the arithmetic.
36:27Every man on that submarine already knew, on the 1st of April, at that reef, what the
36:32men of the submarine service knew from the day they volunteered.
36:35That the deal was not symmetrical.
36:38They were the ones who came.
36:40Nobody was coming for them.
36:42The submarine force was a little over 1% of the United States Navy in that war.
36:46And it suffered the heaviest loss rate of any branch of the American armed forces.
36:52Roughly one man in five who sailed on war patrol never came home.
36:5752 American submarines were lost, with about 3,500 men inside them.
37:03Every man on Harder had done that arithmetic himself.
37:07Quietly.
37:08More than once.
37:10So, when Dealey asked for volunteers off Woleai, he was asking men who understood perfectly
37:16well that the favor would never be returned.
37:19And they went into the water anyway.
37:22That is the answer this story has been building toward.
37:26And it is not a slogan.
37:28A submarine surfaced under Japanese guns for one American pilot, because the American war
37:34effort had decided that the promise to come for its people was worth more than the men
37:40it cost to keep it.
37:42And because the men who kept it did not require the promise to be made back to them.
37:49There is one more thing in the record of the 24th of August.
37:52And it is the reason I asked you, back at the reef, to remember the men who went into
37:56the water.
37:58The Navy keeps a list of the 79 men lost with Harder.
38:03Two of the four who swam for John Galvin are on that list.
38:07Two are not.
38:09Which two, and what became of them, and of the pilot they saved, is where this ends.
38:16Lieutenant Samuel Logan is number 40 on the list of the men lost with Harder.
38:21Freeman Paquette, Jr., the gunner's mate who swam the second line through the coral, is
38:26number 58.
38:28Frances Ryan and J.W.
38:30Thomason are not on it.
38:32They had left the boat before her last patrol, the way men do—transfers, orders, new construction,
38:39the ordinary paperwork of a Navy.
38:41And that paperwork is the whole difference between the four of them.
38:45Four men went into that surf at Wolei on the 1st of April.
38:50Five months later, two of them were dead in 3,000 feet of water off Luzon.
38:56And two of them were somewhere else entirely, alive, going on with the war.
39:02There is no lesson in that.
39:04But there is only the fact of it.
39:06And the man they went in for.
39:08John Galvin healed up and went back to Fighting Squadron 8.
39:12The other pilots gave him a nickname—the one they used for anybody the rescue people had
39:17fished out—Dumbo.
39:20He kept flying.
39:21By September 1944, he had five aerial victories, which made him an ace.
39:26He finished the war with 97 combat missions, several distinguished flying crosses, and a
39:32Purple Heart.
39:33Stop on that for a second, because it is the arithmetic from earlier turning into a person.
39:38The Navy spent a submarine safety and four men's lives worth of risk on a 23-year-old
39:44with four missions behind him.
39:46What it bought was 92 more.
39:50He came home.
39:51He left the Navy a lieutenant.
39:52He became a deeply religious man, and in 1983, he put the story down in a book with a title
39:59only a fighter pilot would choose—Salvation for a doomed Zumi.
40:04He died in Arizona on the 9th of March 1994, at 73 years old, 50 years after a submarine
40:11crew went into the coral for him.
40:13And through all of it—the Aces record, the medals, the 50 years—the thing he called his
40:19prized possession was the submarine combat pin the crew of Harder gave a passenger who
40:24did not belong there.
40:26The men who handed it to him had been at that reef.
40:30Many of them were still aboard four months later.
40:33And the system those men were part of kept going without them.
40:37Nine days after Harder failed to answer, on the 2nd of September 1944, another lifeguard
40:45submarine, Finback, pulled a 20-year-old torpedo bomber pilot out of the water off Chichijima.
40:52His name was George Bush.
40:54He spent 30 days aboard that submarine, watching what submariners did for a living.
40:59And 44 years later, he was elected President of the United States.
41:06By the end of the war, the boats had brought home 504 airmen.
41:11Every one of those men was somebody's whole future.
41:15For 80 years, nobody knew exactly where Harder was.
41:18Then in 2024, an exploration team led by Tim Taylor located a submarine on the seafloor off
41:25northern Luzon, and the Navy's underwater archaeologists confirmed it.
41:30She lies more than 3,000 feet down, sitting upright on her keel, essentially intact, with
41:37damage aft of the conning tower where the depth charges caught her.
41:41Under United States law, she is a war grave, and she will be left exactly as she is, with
41:47all 79 of them aboard.
41:50For the families of those 79 men, that discovery gave them the first fixed point on
41:55a map in 80 years.
41:57Somewhere to put the word where.
42:01So go back to 11.45 in the morning, the 1st of April, 1944.
42:06A submarine grinding her bow on coral.
42:09Four men in the surf, one of them a ship's cook.
42:13A wounded pilot in a rubber raft, 23 years old, unable to make headway against the tide.
42:20Japanese rifles in the tree line.
42:22American aircraft coming down on them again and again.
42:25Hold that picture for a moment, because it is the last one.
42:29Why would a submarine do that?
42:31For one pilot.
42:33Because in the American war, the promise to come for a man was not a reward for being valuable.
42:39It was the thing that made everything else possible.
42:42And the men who kept it that day, kept it, knowing it would never be kept for them.
42:48That is the whole answer.
42:50Logan went, Paquette went, Ryan went, Thomason went, and John Galvin got to be 73 years old.
42:59Thank you for watching this one to the end.
43:01If it was worth your time, a like genuinely helps.
43:04It's what puts a story like this in front of people who have never heard of Harder, or of a
43:09ship's cook swimming a rope through coral.
43:11Subscribe and hit the bell if you'd like more of what American sailors and airmen actually did out there.
43:17And tell me two things below, where you're watching from, and if your father, grandfather, or uncle served, in the
43:24American forces or with the Allies, give me his name and his ship or his unit.
43:30They belong in the record.