In Search of the Batfish

“I can imagine no more rewarding a career. And any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction: ‘I served in the United States Navy.” – President John F. Kennedy

By DAVE BERRY

We were men on a mission. He was a submariner and I was his self-assigned tender.

I took his picture next to the statue of “The Lone Sailor” at the United States Navy Memorial in Washington D.C., and now he was in search of anything dealing with the “Silent Service.”

We were both disappointed. The museum was complete with models, paintings and photographs of battleships, cruisers, PT boats and destroyers. There were aircraft carriers and three-masted schooners. Display cases boasted models of President Kennedy’s PT-109, the Battleship Oklahoma and many lesser-known ships. But no submarines.

Halfway down a curving stairway, we found an etching in the glass wall of different classes of submarines. “No, not that one,” he said. “That’s nuclear.”

Ninety-one-year-old Jim Callanan of Tyler grew up in Massachusetts and pursued his college degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the nation’s oldest technological research university in Troy, NY. When war broke out, the U.S. Navy snapped him up and sent him to electronics radar school.

After the war, he would spend a long and successful career with General Electric and be celebrated on the cover of Engineering Today. But this day, his memories were of the rolling Pacific, of two submarines and their crews, fighting to survive under attack and under the waves in World War II. We were there as part of the sixth Brookshire Grocery Company / Super 1 Foods Heroes Flight in May.

Callanan’s first assignment was aboard the USS Sailfish. An older model, the submarine was originally christened the USS Squalus, which sank during a training dive in 1939. Two-thirds of the crew was rescued, and the boat was raised, renamed and recommissioned as the Sailfish in 1940. The Sailfish crew, aware that 26 men had drowned in the aft torpedo room, was a bit spooked. Their whispers prompted the captain to issue a standing order that any man uttering the name Squalus would be “marooned at the next port of call.” One historian said the crew took to calling it the “Squailfish,” which got them in almost as much trouble.

Callanan joined the sub the day it cast off on its 11th war patrol. He had never set foot on a submarine until that day, his 21st birthday. The Sailfish sank several cargo ships on that patrol. On its 12th and final mission, the sub rescued 13 downed Navy fliers and sank two attacking patrol craft. Bombed, bounced around by a typhoon and pounded by a depth charge attack, it succeeded in damaging several more freighters before returning stateside.

Assigned to a new submarine, the USS Batfish (SS 310), Callanan’s job was in radar. I asked if he was the guy with the headphones listening for the telltale pings. “No, that’s sonar,” he said. “Sonar is underwater. Radar is what we used to pick up ships on the surface. He had undergone special training in radar countermeasures, he told me. “We had two types of radar; they had one.”

He had seen the actual USS Batfish on display in Muskogee, Oklahoma, many times. In fact, he said, he had just returned from the crew’s reunion there earlier that month. “We probably won’t have another. Too many of us are getting too old to travel.” Only five attended this year’s gathering, he said.

I helped him down the stairway to a long row of commemorative plaques. Maybe one of these would celebrate the submarine service. It was clear he was troubled that the museum didn’t have a better tribute to a service that had lost 52 boats, nearly a third of those put to sea, along with 3,506 crew members.

His smile returned when I said, “Tell me about the Batfish.”

“It was a good boat,” he said, recalling the sub’s sixth and seventh war patrols. Its sixth patrol had earned it the reputation of “champion submarine-killing submarine in World War II,” and Callanan quietly recounted his role in the three-day battle that saw the American sub crew take on and sink three Japanese submarines.

He beamed when he talked about the new radar and the radar countermeasures he had been trained on. He recounted how the captain swung the boat in a circle so Callanan could pick up the strongest signals. “We headed in that direction until surface radar picked them up… launched a spread of three torpedoes, and one hit the magazine.” The submarine was destroyed, but he said there was an immediate report of torpedoes coming back at us.

“We fired; they fired. Ours hit; theirs missed.” The concussion was so severe “everyone aboard thought we had been hit too.”

We went looking for the other two, he said. “Again, the captain swung the boat around, and the radar countermeasures I operated were very helpful in finding them.” All three Japanese submarines were sent to the bottom in a span of three days. For that action, the crew was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation.

His memories were cut short by a call to return to the bus. We had to hurry, but now I was as determined as he. I asked the man at the information desk if there was something honoring the submarine service.

“Nothing special on display,” he said. “but there may be something… a painting … just go through the glass doors and down the hall past our offices.”

Dodging Heroes Flight escorts rounding up stragglers, we headed deeper into the museum on a quest to find a sub.

Historic naval paintings lined the hallway, renderings of destroyers, landing craft, battleships, scenes of battle at Midway, Coral Sea, Pearl Harbor and the Marianas Turkey Shoot. But no submarines. We kept walking. The bus was waiting.

Finally, he called out, “There it is.”

It was a submarine at sea. Not his, but one very much like it. He beamed as he studied the familiar lines, pointing to where his radar would have been. A Balao-class, diesel-electric powered sub, it was “like” the Batfish, and that was what counted. It would do.

I snapped his photo by the painting and we hurried from the museum to the street, where the bus was straining to go, its passengers going through the obligatory roll call.

“Callanan and Berry,” called trip organizer Sam Anderson for the second time as we clambered up the steps and found two empty seats. “Here,” he said. “Here,” I answered.

With that, the bus lurched toward its next stop at the Marine Memorial.

Jim went home from the Heroes Flight happy, calling it a “trip of a lifetime.” His daughter Mary recalled that her father was not scheduled to go until October, but pounced on a seat for the May trip when another veteran cancelled. “Dad was a goal-oriented man,” she said. “He wanted to scratch that trip off his bucket list. He came back with plans. He was starting to write his memoirs. He wanted to travel. He was preparing for the next reunion. He still had a lot of living to do.”

But with the stealth of a submarine rigged for silent running, a cancer had crept into Mr. Callanan’s lungs. About six weeks after returning home, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and on July 29, just over two months after our search for the Batfish, he was gone.

Jim had told me there would probably be no more reunions.

Next May 10, (2014), around the time the crew normally musters, I know where I will be. While my wife teaches a class at nearby Tahlequah, I will be in Muskogee, aboard the USS Batfish for the first time.

I hope to sit where he sat, stare into the radar scope he knew so well and say, “Thank you, Jim, I’m glad we found your sub.”

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ADDENDUM: Jim is now among his friends at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. I honored my pledge to attend the next Batfish Reunion in Muskogee, Oklahoma. And, as Jim had predicted, there were no Batfish crew members from World War II present, only sailors who served aboard the sub after World War II, during the Korean War and Cold War eras. There was also a younger group of men who served aboard a nuclear submarine that had inherited the name and tradition of the original Batfish. I read my column as a tribute to Jim and his fellow sailors and we all shed tears during the “Ringing of the Bells,” a solemn tribute to all submariners lost at sea. Then, alone, I ventured out to the Batfish, now sitting tall on a sea of grass. Below deck, I ducked through hatches and explored the old submarine stem to stern. I snapped a few photos, then sat for a time in the cold metal surroundings, trying to imagine life below the waves in time of war. Not possible, I realized. Finally, I located the radar operator’s station and sat for a time where Jim would have sat seven decades earlier. Yes, Jim, I’m glad we found your sub.

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Photos: Top photo – Jim Callanan served proudly aboard the USS Batfish (SS310) during World War II. On his first patrol on the Batfish, the crew sank three Japanese submarines in three days. This photo we found in the Navy Museum wasn’t his boat, but it was close enough.

(Dave Berry is the retired editor of the Tyler Morning Telegraph, Tyler, Texas, where his Focal Point column ran for four years prior to and after his retirement. This was his fourth column, published on Nov. 17, 2013, following the first of his six stints as an escort on Brookshire’s Heroes Flights.