September 1943

Jack Miller was transferred from the Greyfish to the Growler while she was in port after her fifth patrol. When he returned from his first patrol on the Growler he learned the Greyfish hadn’t returned from her sixth patrol.

Forty seven men he had lived with were gone with her. He and about thirty others had been transferred to other boats after the sixth patrol.

The Batfish report on the patrol held the answer to what happened to the Greyfish. The Batfish and the Greyfish had been patrolling off southern Japan and were on the surface charging their batteries about twenty miles apart. A Japanese aircraft had dove on the Greyfish, dropped a single bomb and she went down. The aircraft hadn’t been spotted until it was too late. The Batfish saw the plane, dove and wasn’t spotted. Later she surfaced and picked up seven survivors. Three submarines had been sunk in this area without a trace in recent weeks. Apparently the Japanese aircraft were able to accurately track the boats and sink them. Over the next month, two more boats were lost in the same area. Jack Miller was transferred from the Growler after two more patrols. His new station was on the crew of the Harrisburg, a new submarine, the first of her class. She was a beauty but was so different from any of the boats he had seen before. Her hull was entirely different. The Growler was obviously a submarine but it had a hull much like a surface ship. This isn’t surprising to anyone who knows submarines, before the Harrisburg, the name submarine wasn’t accurate, the boats were really just submersible. They spent most of their time on the surface, submerging only for protection and stealth. The Harrisburg’s shape was more rounded than the Growler, in fact it was shaped more like a whale than a boat. Like the Growler, it had four diesels, however they produced nearly half again the power of the ones on the previous boats and the electric motors were almost twice as powerful and over ten percent more efficient. The battery compartments were much larger and had the latest in battery design. Jack arrived after the boat was launched, in fact just before her fitting out was completed. It was wartime, her sea trials would take only two weeks. The very name Harrisburg for a submarine signaled one of the differences between her and her predecessors. She was nearly a third the size of a cruiser and packed a punch nearly as great. Her underwater radius and speed while on batteries was nearly twice the previous boats because of her shape and improved equipment. In addition, unlike her predecessors, she could come to periscope depth, raise a telescoping tube and run her diesels to recharge her batteries or drive the boat. In this mode she could travel faster under water than the Growler could on the surface. The only penalty for this underwater speed was less stability and speed on the surface. The innovation that allowed her to run her diesels under water was a Dutch invention, one that the Dutch inventor had not been able to sell to his military during the pre-war years.