USS Pampanito: Killer-Angel

Naval War College Review,  Autumn, 2000  by William Galvani

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Michno, Gregory F. USS Pampanito: Killer-Angel. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1999. 445pp. $37.95

USS Pampanito (SS 383) made six war patrols in 1944 and 1945, sinking five ships and rescuing a record number of Allied prisoners of war. Decommissioned in 1945, Pampanito survived the postwar years to earn designation as a national historic landmark in 1986. Today the carefully restored submarine is open to the public at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park.

USS Pampanito: Killer-Angel represents a remarkable accomplishment of interviewing and research. Michno, the son of a Pampanito crew member, Motor Machinist's Mate Frank B. Michno, conducted more than twenty-five interviews of his father's shipmates to draw together Pampanito's story from the perspective of its crew. Michno used additional oral-history interviews by Clay Blair. The book's bibliography of published sources is one of the most extensive of recent books about the submarine service in World War II. The result of all Michno's work is a comprehensive account that succeeds nicely in giving the reader a view of life on a World War II submarine as experienced by the men whose often unnoticed contributions were essential to success: torpedomen, machinist's mates, sonar and radar operators, electricians, yeomen, and sailors of a dozen other ratings.

It has been said that no man is a hero to his butler, and this quip applies to the relationship between Pampanito's crew and many of its officers. Pampanito's enlisted men (and a few officers) here speak plainly and directly about the war. Their recollections range from the torpedoman who judged his captain to be too conservative to the disgruntled steward who spat routinely in the commanding officer's coffee.

The book begins with the crew and the submarine at the building ways at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and continues through its training, fitting out, and transit to Pearl Harbor to enter the war. The book covers all six war patrols, some of which were evaluated as unsuccessful. Readers will find the crew's first-person accounts of liberty in ports in Hawaii, Australia, and on Midway Island rollicking and amusing. Michno also notes the hard work and personnel changes that accompanied every refit period.

Pampanito's greatest achievement was its rescue of seventy-three Australian and British prisoners of war from enemy waters, the single greatest such recovery of the war. Michno makes this event the centerpiece of the book. On 12 September 1944, Pampanito and USS Sea lion (SS 315) attacked a convoy carrying war materials to Japan. Unknown to the American submarines, two of the ships they sank had on board more than 1,360 Allied prisoners of war. Michno carefully builds the narrative leading to the sinking, with a well written and heartrending description of the soldiers' original capture, imprisonment, and forced labor on the Burma-Siam railway.

Not realizing that its attack had simultaneously freed and doomed hundreds of Allied soldiers, Pampanito continued chasing the convoy. For some seventy-two hours the oil-soaked men floated on rafts and debris as the number of their dead steadily increased. Pampanito discovered the prisoners only when it passed through the area a second time. As the sub approached the bedraggled survivors, its officers assumed they were Japanese. Michno writes compellingly of their uncertainty about what to do.

The wretches in the water were not the enemy, and Michno's account of their rescue and the care given them by Pampanito's crew offers a clear understanding of the prisoners' condition, the crews feelings toward them, and the instant bond of friendship and caring that developed between survivors and rescuers. Michno makes good use of first person accounts from the crew and the survivors as he describes many emotional encounters.

USS Pampanito: Killer-Angel contains much to recommend it. Michno does a good job of explaining details unfamiliar to nonsubmariners and of providing historical and technical background on everything from diesel engines to ULTRA. In addition, the book includes twenty-seven black-and-white photographs, many taken by the crew. Fourteen maps help the reader locate the sub's patrol areas and visualize its torpedo attacks. The footnotes are excellent.

USS Pampanito: Killer-Angel offers a deckplate view of the life of a submarine' s crew in an account that is well worth reading and owning.

COPYRIGHT 2000 U.S. Naval War College
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning