1 in the morning, February 7th, 1943.

Southwest Pacific, 70 mi northwest of Rabal.

No moon, no lights, nothing but black water and silence.

On the bridge of USS Growler, Commander Howard Gilmore was watching the darkness ahead.

A Japanese supply ship, 900 tons, moving slowly across the surface.

He gave the order to close in.

Then the Japanese ship saw them and instead of running, it turned straight at Growler.

Gilmore called out, “Hardle left rudder.

All ahead flank,” he turned into it 17 knots.

Growler’s bow tore into the Japanese ship’s side.

The collision threw every man on board off his feet and in that same instant the machine guns on the Japanese ship opened fire.

Two American sailors died on the bridge.

Gilmore was hit.

He could not stand up, could not reach the hatch, could not get below on his own.

60 men were waiting below decks.

The boat was badly damaged at the bow.

Every second on the surface was a second the Japanese could find them.

And the only man with the authority to order the dive was lying on the bridge alone in the dark.

What happened in the next 30 seconds became one of the most referenced moments in the entire history of the American submarine service.

But that night, what did the Japanese sailors on Hayasaki actually see? They had shot the captain of an American submarine.

They thought they had won.

They were wrong.

The boat they let escape that night would come back and come back and come back.

Before we get into this, if your grandfather or your father served in the Pacific or anyone you knew, leave their name in the comments below.

Just their name, their ship, their battle.

Because the men in this story have no one left to speak for them.

But yours does, and that story deserves to be written down somewhere.

Make sure it never disappears.

Howard Walter Gilmore was born in 1902 in Selma, Alabama.

Nothing remarkable about the town, nothing remarkable about the family.

He enlisted in the Navy in 1920, 18 years old.

Two years later, he passed the exam and got into the Naval Academy at Annapapolis.

Graduated in 1926.

He finished 34th in a class of 436.

Not at the top, not a standout record, just a naval officer, one who chose submarines when most of his classmates didn’t want them.

In 1936, while serving as executive officer of USS Shark during the boat’s shakedown cruise in Panama, a group of men attacked him in the dark.

They cut his throat.

Gilmore lay in the street, bleeding far from the ship.

He survived.

Nobody knows exactly why, and he never said much about that night.

A few weeks later, he returned to duty.

In 1941, he took command of USS Shark, an older boat, Porpus class.

December 8th, 1941, one day after Pearl Harbor, he was transferred to command USS Growler.

The boat was still being built at the Electric Boat Company yard in Grten, Connecticut.

Gilmore went to Groten.

He watched every steel plate get welded into place.

He oversaw every system being installed.

By the time Growler commissioned on March 20th, 1942, he knew that boat down to every bolt.

The men who served under Gilmore described him with one word, consistently calm.

When a target was cighted, he didn’t raise his voice.

No speeches, no buildup.

He gave orders the way a man orders coffee.

clear, short, no explanation needed.

That was the man 60 sailors would follow into the most dangerous waters in the Pacific.

There is one more thing about Howard Gilmore that almost no account mentions.

On January 1st, 1943, the morning Growler left Brisbane for her fourth patrol.

His wife Hilda was in a coma.

She had fallen down a flight of stairs.

Gilmore left anyway.

He didn’t know if she would be alive when he came back.

As it turned out, neither of them would have to find out.

And that was the man who, in the last 30 seconds of his life, would give one final order in that same voice.

Growler left Pearl Harbor on June 29th, 1942.

First patrol.

The illusions, cold water, heavy fog, Japanese warships everywhere.

July 5th, Gilmore spotted three Japanese destroyers leaving Kiska Harbor.

Destroyers, not merchant ships, not easy targets.

American submarines were trained to avoid destroyers, not attack them.

Gilmore attacked.

Two torpedoes hit the first two ships.

Kasumi was struck amid ships, badly damaged.

Shiranoui’s bow was blown off.

Gilmore turned toward the third destroyer, Arar.

Two more torpedoes.

The second one hit her amid ships.

Aar went down with most of her crew.

The third target had launched two torpedoes of her own.

One of Growler’s crew recalled later, “They heard the Japanese torpedoes slide along both sides of the hull.

Growler dove deep.

No depth charges followed.

They got out.

Gilmore received his first Navy cross.

Second patrol.

August 1942.

Off Taiwan.

Four Japanese merchant ships sunk.

More than 15,000 tons of cargo on the bottom of the sea.

Second Navy cross.

Third patrol.

October through December 1942.

Solomon Islands.

Nothing sunk.

Gilmore extended the patrol by a week, still looking for targets.

Found none.

On the way back to Brisbane, the number two engine crankshaft snapped.

Growler limped home on three engines.

Australian mechanics worked for 3 weeks.

December 31st, Growler was ready.

January 1st, 1943.

Growler left Brisbane before dawn.

Fourth patrol.

Patrol area.

The truck.

Rabal.

Shipping lanes.

Waters.

The Japanese controlled completely.

Air patrols around the clock.

Destroyers riding with every convoy.

The most dangerous place the Navy could send a submarine.

Gilmore knew that.

He went anyway.

January 16th.

Growler found a Japanese convoy, slipped inside the escorts, fired two torpedoes.

Chifuku Maru, 5,857 tons, rolled to port and went down.

Japanese destroyers and aircraft hit back immediately.

Depth charges shook the hull.

Growler dove deep, waited, and got out.

February 4th, another convoy, a group of ships with two patrol boat escorts.

Gilmore chose a surface attack, came in from behind in the dark.

The lead ship spotted them.

Opened fire immediately.

Gilmore called the dive.

40 minutes.

Japanese depth charges going off around Growler continuously.

A manhole gasket in the forward ballast tank cracked.

Seawater poured in.

The damage control party jammed a rubber sheet into the gap and held it with jacks.

The depth charges kept coming.

Then silence.

Growler got out again.

Night of February 6th.

A message from Australia.

Growler was ordered to relocate to a new patrol area.

Growler ran on the surface at full speed.

Diesel engines loud in the darkness.

This was the most exposed a submarine could be.

On the surface, noisy, slower than any Japanese warship.

1:12 in the morning, February 7th.

A lookout on the bridge spotted a contact.

Small, slow, moving alone.

Hayasaki, a 900 ton Japanese supply ship armed to fight submarines.

Gilmore watched it.

Too small to waste a torpedo on.

He’d use the deck gun.

Close in, open fire, sink it, move on.

Simple enough, except for one thing.

Nobody on Growler had realized a thin layer of haze was sitting on the water and Hayasaki had already seen them.

What happened next took less than 10 seconds.

Hayasaki swung around hard, not to run, to ram.

On the bridge, a lookout shouted.

Gilmore looked ahead.

Hayasaki was coming straight at them.

No time to dive.

Atol class submarine needed at least 30 seconds for an emergency dive.

Hayasaki was less than 10 seconds away.

No time to man the deck gun.

The crew wasn’t in position.

No target lock.

No time to fire torpedoes.

The two ships were already too close for the warheads to arm.

There was only one thing Gilmore could do.

He called out hard left rudder.

All ahead flank.

Growler swung to port.

And that turn drove her bow directly into Hayasaki’s path.

Nobody could have known that would happen.

The two ships hit each other headon at 17 knots.

The collision healed Growler 50°.

18 ft of bow bent hard to port.

The forward torpedo tubes were destroyed.

Hayasaki’s starboard side was torn open.

And immediately the Japanese machine guns opened up at point blank range.

Enson William Williams died on the bridge.

Lookout, Wilbert Kelly died on the bridge.

Two other sailors were badly wounded.

Gilmore was hit.

He grabbed the bridge frame to keep from going down.

Here is what matters.

There was no decision made in that collision.

No choice.

Everything happened in under 10 seconds, faster than any plan could be executed.

But after the collision, with Growler on the surface, badly damaged, Japanese machine guns still firing, Gilmore had time to make one decision.

That is the decision history remembers.

On Hayasaki, the machine gunner was still firing at the American submarine’s bridge.

Their own ship was badly damaged.

Starboard side torn open.

Water coming in.

But the American submarine looked worse.

Bao bent sideways, still on the surface.

No sign of diving.

The gunner kept firing at the bridge where he had just watched Americans go down.

Then he saw something strange.

One by one, the figures on the submarine’s bridge began disappearing below.

One, then another.

until there was only one figure left lying on the bridge, not moving in the dark.

The gunner fired at that figure.

It still didn’t move.

Then the submarine began to sink beneath the surface slowly, inch by inch.

The figure on the bridge still didn’t move.

The gunner watched and didn’t understand.

Why didn’t that man go below? The water closed over the submarine.

It was gone.

The figure was gone with it.

The sea went flat.

The gunner stared at the black water ahead of him.

He had no answer.

He never would.

In the seconds after the collision, Lieutenant Arnold Shade, executive officer, was trying to get to his feet in the control room.

The impact had thrown him down, slammed his head against the deck, left him dazed.

around him.

Pumps running continuously, water seeping in through the cracks, the sound of Japanese machine gun fire coming down from above.

Gilmore ordered the bridge cleared one man at a time.

The wounded came down first.

Shade climbed the ladder, stopped at the hatch.

Above him, only machine gun fire and the sound of the sea.

He called up, “Captain, coming below.

” No answer, just the guns.

He called a second time.

On the bridge, Gilmore lay still.

He knew he couldn’t stand up on his own.

He knew if shade came up to get him, it would take at least another minute, a minute of growler sitting on the surface, damaged, under fire.

60 men were waiting below.

He could have called shade up.

He had every right to do that.

He didn’t.

Gilmore’s voice came down through the dark, steady, clear.

Three words.

Take her down.

Shade held still for one second.

Then he closed the hatch.

Growler dove.

There is something most accounts leave out.

The official report of the incident written by Shade after the boat returned to Brisbane does not mention the order, “Take her down.

” It reads only after the executive officer, the quartermaster, and two wounded men were inside the conning tower.

Approximately 30 seconds passed.

No one else appeared at the hatch.

30 seconds and the hatch closed.

The most famous phrase in American submarine history may never have been spoken out loud.

Or Shade heard it and chose not to write it down.

Nobody knows.

And Growler never came back to tell us.

Growler pulled into Brisbane on February 17th, 1943, 10 days after the collision.

The men on the dock watched the boat come in, bow bent hard to port.

More than 40 bullet holes in the conning tower, hull weeping water in several places.

Shade brought her in without a word.

60 men walked off the boat.

Three didn’t.

The Navy said nothing publicly.

No announcement, no press, nothing.

3 months.

During those 3 months, Australian welders stripped the damaged bow completely, fabricated a new one at the Evans Deacon yard on the Brisbane River.

When the work was finished, the Australian workers made one request.

They wanted to weld two nickelplated kangaroos onto the sides of the new bow.

The Navy said yes.

Growler went back to sea with a new nickname, Kangaroo Express.

May 7th, 1943.

3 months after that night off Rabol, the Navy released the story.

It was front page across the country the next morning.

Not because of how many ships Growler had sunk, because of three words from a submarine captain lying on a bridge in the dark.

August 18th, 1943, the federal building in New Orleans, 10 in the morning.

A small group, naval officers, close friends, family, standing in a quiet corridor.

Rear Admiral Andrew Bennett walked in.

In front of him, Hilda Gilmore, Howard Gilmore’s wife, dressed in black, wearing a morning veil, standing with their two young children, Howard Jr.

and Vernon Jean.

Bennett placed the Medal of Honor in her hands.

She turned and passed it to her son, Howard Jr.

, standing beside her, saying nothing.

After the ceremony, a reporter asked Mrs.

Gilmore how she wanted people to remember her husband.

She said the submarine was his very life.

Howard Gilmore’s body was never recovered.

His name is on the wall of the missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines where they list the men who have no grave to come home to.

And in September 1943, the Navy commissioned a new submarine tender.

They named it USS Howard W.

Gilmore.

His wife stood on the dock and broke a bottle of champagne against the hull.

The ship that carried his name would go on to serve other submarines.

Submarines that would keep doing exactly what he had trained them to do.

May 13th, 1943.

Growler left Brisbane.

Fifth patrol.

Shade in command.

New bow.

Two nickel kangaroos.

The boat the Japanese thought they had finished was back.

June 1943.

Growler found a Japanese transport on the Palao Rabol shipping lane.

Modono Maru.

5,196 tons troops and cargo.

Four torpedoes.

The ship was hit badly enough that the Japanese convoy had to stop and evacuate everyone aboard before scuttling her themselves.

Growler dove, cleared the counterattack, and disappeared into the dark.

Sixth and seventh patrols, July through November 1943.

Limited results.

Heavy Japanese air cover throughout the Bismar Solomon’s area.

Few convoys, constant depth charging.

Seventh patrol cut short, battery and generator failures.

Growler was sent back to Hunter Point, California for a full overhaul.

February 1944.

Growler returned to the Pacific.

Eighth patrol, East China Sea, sank a patrol craft, damaged a freighter.

Ninth patrol, Mariana’s, Philippines, Luzon Strait, sank a large tanker, damaged a destroyer escort.

The Navy was tightening its grip around Japan.

Growler was part of that.

August 1944, 10th patrol.

Growler joined a Wolfpack.

Three submarines working together with USS Celion and USS Pampanito.

September 12th, the Wolfpack found a large Japanese convoy.

In the dark, they attacked from multiple directions at once.

Japanese ships began firing at each other in the chaos.

Growler sank the destroyer Shikami.

Pampanito took down two more ships.

Then a Japanese destroyer spotted Growler and came straight at her.

Shade fired torpedoes at the incoming ship.

The destroyer caught fire and kept coming close enough that the heat from the burning hull scorched the paint off Growler’s bridge as it passed.

Growler got clear.

But that night held something none of the three submarines knew until the next morning.

Two ships in the Japanese convoy, Rakuyo Maru and Kachidoki Maru, were carrying more than 2,000 Allied prisoners of war, British, Australian, American.

When those ships went down, the prisoners went into the water.

The next morning, Growler, Celon, and Pampanito turned back.

In the middle of an approaching typhoon, the three submarines pulled more than 150 prisoners out of the sea.

Men that those same submarines had inadvertently put in the water and then came back themselves to pull out.

Growler ended her 10th patrol with 15 Japanese ships sunk across her entire career.

74,900 tons, eight battle stars.

The boat the Japanese thought they had finished on a February night in 1943 was still afloat.

October 20th, 1944.

Growler left Fremantle, Australia.

11th patrol.

Commander Thomas Oakley in command.

86 men aboard.

They joined a wolfpack with USS Hake and USS Hardhead heading west toward the Philippines.

November 7th.

Growler reported to Hardhead.

The SJ radar had been juryrigged back into service, but they needed spare parts urgently.

A rendevu was arranged to deliver them.

That was the last transmission anyone received from Growler.

Early morning, November 8th, 1944.

Growler made radar contact with a Japanese convoy at coordinates 13° 21 minutes north, 119° 32 minutes east.

Oakley reported to Hardhead directed Hardhead to attack from the convoys port bow.

Then silence.

Hardhead heard two distant explosions.

Hake heard one.

No one heard anything more from Growler.

Hardhead tried to raise her.

Hake tried.

Nothing.

After the war, the Navy went through Japanese records.

No anti-submarine attack was recorded at those coordinates on that night.

The cause of Growler’s loss to this day is listed as unknown.

86 men, no survivors, no wreck ever found.

Growler went into the dark the same way her first captain had gone.

No trace, no answer, nothing left behind.

The Navy added Growler to the list of submarines on eternal patrol.

That is what the silent service calls the boats that never come home.

On Hayasaki, the Japanese ship that had shot Commander Gilmore on that February night in 1943.

The war kept going.

She survived mines, survived air attacks, survived submarines.

Hayasaki was the only vessel in this story still afloat on the day Japan surrendered.

Today, in the seventh wing corridor of Braftoft Hall at the Naval Academy in Annapapolis, there is a plaque on the wall outside room 7046, Howard Gilmore’s room when he was a midshipman.

Every day, hundreds of midshipmen walk past it.

Some stop and read it, some don’t, but the name is still there.

Take her down became one of the most repeated phrases in the history of the American submarine service alongside don’t give up the ship and damn the torpedoes full speed ahead.

The story was made into a Hollywood film in 1951, Operation Pacific, with John Wayne as the executive officer and Ward Bond as the captain.

In 1958, the Navy produced a leadership training film built around Gilmore’s story.

It was shown to every new submarine officer.

But there is a question none of those films ever asked.

Gilmore knew that if he called shade back up, if he asked for one more minute, Growler might still have made it down in time.

Might have.

He didn’t call.

Not because he didn’t want to live, but because he didn’t want to put that question in Shade’s hands.

If Shade came up to get him, and the boat was lost in the process, Shade would have to carry that for the rest of his life.

Gilmore took the choice away from him.

three words and Shade didn’t have to decide.

Shade lived until 2003.

He rose to the rank of vice admiral.

He never said much about that night.

In the official report, he wrote, “There is no take her down.

Only approximately 30 seconds passed.

No one else appeared at the hatch.

” Maybe he heard the order and chose not to write it down.

Maybe there was nothing to hear.

Nobody knows.

And Shade didn’t leave an answer.

86 men went down with Growler on that November night in 1944.

None of them knew they were serving on the boat whose first captain had chosen to stay on the surface so they could live.

They only knew this was Growler.

The boat was still here.

The boat was still fighting.

That was enough.