the club would test their skills out past Nantucket Sound in the scenic surroundings of Cape Cod Bay. Tom’s four years of college were quite ordinary, by all accounts. In May 1942, George and Ada watched their son receive his bachelor’s degree in engineering.11
He was ready for MIT academically and had been preparing for graduate studies there while he was still at Brown. The country, along with most of the other industrialized nations, was finally beginning to work its way out of the mire of the great global economic depression. But the US entry into World War II had changed his plans. The rest of the world had already been at war for several years. In Asia, decades of skirmishes had exploded into a full-scale, all-out conflict after the Empire of Japan invaded the Republic of China in 1937. Two years later, the German Third Reich plunged Europe into apocalyptic war with a blitzkrieg attack on neighboring Poland. The United States assisted China and Great Britain with supplies and volunteers, all the while trying to stay out of the conflict. But December 7, 1941, changed everything, as war came unannounced to the country’s doorstep.
We’re going out to sink enemy ships, but we are coming back.—Stephen H. Gimber, Commanding Officer of the USS Pompon
The Brown Daily Herald was just about to go to press when the news hit. He took his coat off and sat back down in the university newspaper office. They needed to stay late and get the paper’s first extra edition out as soon as they could. He glanced at the clock. It was almost five in the afternoon on the East Coast. In Hawaii, it was not yet noon. The attack had already been over for two hours. By now, the Associated Press wire service out of Washington had confirmed the news.
December 7, 1941, changed people’s lives. The morning after Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Tom and a group of classmates from Brown took the short train ride to Boston. Classes were not very important that day. They had something more pressing to do. At the War Department recruiting office, most signed up with the Army Reserve. He and his best friend from the yacht club applied for admission to the US Naval Reserve Officers Training Program.
Paine was just finishing up the first semester of his senior year. His intention to serve in the Navy had not diminished since the time he was dissuaded from applying to the Naval Academy due to his poor eyesight, and America was now at war. The Navy had no problem with him this time around and quickly processed his application. On January 8, 1942, he was notified that he had been accepted as a Class V-7 Seaman Apprentice in the reserve midshipman program. The armed forces needed numbers quickly, and this was one way, a very common way, for college graduates or men who were about to complete college to enter wartime service as apprentices.1
In a twist of irony, the Navy assigned him to Annapolis. After graduating from Brown, he reported on September 11 for three months of intensive basic training at the academy. He was one of dozens enrolled in an accelerated program that would give him a Navy commission in just a few months (the so-called “90-day wonder”).
Eighteen months of curriculum were packed into three short months. Classes in basic naval indoctrination, fitness training, and military tradition were required. There was also chapel at noon every Thursday. After a month, he was commissioned as a midshipman for Engineering Officer Training. His class notes on electrical engineering, thermodynamics, and navigation were neat and exact. Radio communications that stressed “accuracy, security, [and] speed” he found especially engaging. His natural penchant for mathematics gave him good marks at the academy. He had been sailing since he was ten, and coursework in ocean navigation came easily to him. It was all not too different from the studies he had completed only three months earlier at Brown. Two months later, he graduated from midshipman training. Paine was now an ensign, E-V(g), in the US Naval Reserve.2
With a Bachelor’s degree in engineering, the Navy appointed him to the line of general engineering services. He accepted this, but there was only one assignment he wanted. For as long as he could remember, he had been deeply fascinated by submarines. Growing up near the San Francisco Bay had fostered that desire. There, he had watched with wonderment as submarines maneuvered across the Napa River from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. On some days, he would watch for hours. It had stirred his imagination of life in the steely beasts of the deep. Through his spectacles, the boy’s marveling blue eyes would patiently survey the choppy surface of the water for any hint of a slow-moving periscope or ripples from a subtle wake.
The first use of underwater, iron war vessels in modern times was in the American Civil War. Both the North and South had experimented with crude, man-driven, leaky submersibles that they used to ram unsuspecting ships with explosives at night. Almost all became lonely coffins of steel. Revolutionary advances took place over the next fifty years. Diesel-electric boats had become a staple of the modern war arsenal by the turn of the century. They had a deadly impact during the Great War; victims of the German U-boats numbered in the thousands. With the lessons of the war, the technology of submersibles grew and advanced quickly. By the 1920s, the United States had moved steadily to match and then exceed the capabilities of the U-boat.
The Navy granted Tom’s request for submarine duty. Ten days after completing the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program, he reported for service. His first assignment was as a student officer at Submarine Division 12 in Key West, Florida. The USS R-14, a small, rather unimpressive old boat, as he recalled, became his first submarine. The R-class had entered service just after World War I, but had been used only to train new recruits since 1930. (The R-14 was, coincidentally, one of the “old rust buckets” that the elder Paine had been stationed on in 1921, doing deep submergence testing off the coast of San Francisco.) It performed “clockwork mouse” duty, repeatedly diving and surfacing all day long in the warm, calm waters off south Florida. There, he got his first taste of how to run a submarine.
During a refit of the R-14, he transferred to the R-10. It, too, was a World War I–era vessel that needed a lot of work. For nearly three months, he learned the ropes of surface and submerged boat handling and underwater navigation. He confided in his journal of his anxiousness one day in the first tense moments upon seeing a spurting rivet pop like a firecracker just feet away, and the feel beneath the soles of his shoes of the hull creaking as if about to split open on his first dive to 200 feet below the surface. He learned and relearned the intricacies of operating the Kingston engine valves and recognized the unmistakable shrill of the balky air injection engines. That basic knowledge would one day save his life in the Pacific.
From Florida, he headed north to the Atlantic Naval Submarine Base at New London, Connecticut. It was home to the country’s vast Atlantic Fleet. When he reported for duty on March 29, 1943, it was his last stop before deploying to the Pacific. At New London, he received his qualification in the next class of boats, the S-class. It was a much more difficult class to operate than the R-class. The S or “Sugar” boats were larger and had much greater dive endurance for a more realistic simulation of combat conditions. The three months of intensive training off Long Island Sound came and went quickly. His next stop: the war in the Pacific.3
The tide started to turn by 1943. When Japan invaded Manchuria in July of 1937, it had triggered the Second Sino-Japanese War. This led to the attack, four years later, on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II. Encountering no effective opposition at the beginning, the powerful Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) expanded quickly eastward. By the summer of 1942, it controlled nearly the entire Pacific west of Hawaii. Then things began to change. Allied forces scored strategic victories at the Battle of the Coral Sea and at Midway. The momentum continued in the hard-fought and drawn-out Solomons Campaign throughout 1943.
Following Pearl Harbor, the United States initiated unrestricted
