clung to the hope that they might return home to San Francisco and see “the Golden Gate in ’48.” By July, however, an unmistakable quietness had swept across the sea. Japanese shipping had dwindled and soon stopped entirely. Marine forces had completed their costly island-hopping campaign toward the Japanese homeland. Preparations for Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese homeland planned for the spring of 1946, were already well underway by then. The relentless bombing of the once sacred and untouchable Japanese soil by B-29s continued—then suddenly stopped, followed by word that the Empire of Japan had surrendered unconditionally.
The fighting may have been over, but for Paine, more exploits and a historical encounter awaited him in the Pacific. Three weeks before General Douglas MacArthur accepted the surrender of Japan on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor, Paine received orders discharging him from the his duties on the Pompon. The Navy had him stay behind on Guam, however. His job was to record the time, place, and circumstance of every US submarine sunk by the Japanese. The paperwork was all quite necessary. There was still much to do to clean up after the war.
In the days following, he began sifting through the Japanese records with the help of a translator. After reviewing just a few files, he concluded that the written records were of very little use. Throughout the war, the IJN had greatly exaggerated its successes. The Japanese had documented some five hundred sinkings, but only fifty-two Allied boats were known to have been lost. Part of his duty was to set the record straight. He also debriefed the captured American prisoners of war who were now being released from camps in Japan. He recalled that it was impossible to predict who or how many would show on any given day, or where they would come from. For many days, no one came. Then five or six would show up.
The US Navy had to prepare, as quickly as possible, a list of all known survivors from submarines that were lost in action. All personnel had to be accounted for, and the Navy wanted to know how each boat was lost. Paine wrote of this deeply sobering experience and his silent rage over the atrocities committed at the hands of the enemy as told to him by the survivors of the lost boats. Many friends and former shipmates were among the missing, including seven of his thirty-five classmates and several instructors from Annapolis.19
Among them was his best friend, Ben Phelps, who had introduced him to the future Barbara Paine when they were all stationed in Perth. He, Phelps, and Bill Mendenhall had become inseparable after they arrived in the Pacific. They went everywhere together. Just before the Pompon left on her fifth war patrol, Mendenhall had transferred to the USS Lagarto (SS-371). Before embarking, he had asked Paine to hold on to his dress white uniform and keep it clean until he got back. It would stay at the bottom of Paine’s duffel bag for the rest of the war. Neither Mendenhall nor Phelps made it off the Lagarto when she went down in action in the Gulf of Siam on May 4, 1945. The fate of his friends’ boat was not known during the war. On August 10, 1945, the Navy pronounced it overdue from patrol and presumed lost. Reconstruction of events after the war showed that it was most likely sunk by depth charge from the minelayer Hatsutaka in 180 feet of water. Discovery of its wreckage in May 2005 confirmed this.20
Another close friend was Bill Hoffman. They had taken their last R and R leave together on Waikiki Beach. Paine had been best man at Hoffman’s wedding. Hoffman’s boat, the Herring (SS-233), had rendezvoused with the Barb (SS-220) on May 31, 1944. No one ever heard from them again. Postwar reconstruction of events determined that the Herring was likely sunk by Japanese shore batteries off Matua Island on June 1, 1944. In all, one out of every five in Paine’s class was killed in action.21
He pondered the human consequences of it all, consequences that were all too often deadly for the men and their unseen enemy. The US submarine force sustained the highest mortality rate among all branches of the military during the war. Fifty-two vessels were lost at sea; one of every five submariners was killed in action. Paine wrote in his journal of the unmistakable highs and lows of being a wartime submariner: “The days were dull,” as war patrols became all the same, with long periods of monotonous waiting punctuated by the sudden danger of violent and deadly action. “To me it was all fascinating—getting to know the boat, the people, the routine. The romance of piracy under Oriental seas combined with the technological complexity of submarine operations fascinated me. I never got over it.”22 But the disillusionment of war appalled him; it shaped him profoundly.23
Ah! The good old time, the good old time.Youth and the sea. Glamour and the sea!—A quote in Tom Paine’s wartime journal from Joseph Conrad’s Youth
Standing on the pier of Apra Harbor, he saluted his captain goodbye. The scenic natural port on the west coast of Guam provided a picture-postcard setting for Tom Paine’s last glimpse of the USS Pompon. She was heading home to Pearl Harbor. Her job in the Pacific was done; the war was over. He waved one last time to the crew standing on the bridge. Steering clear of the wreck of the cargo vessel Tokai Maru lying on the bottom, the submarine cleared the harbor and headed out to sea. He fixed his gaze on the conning tower until it slowly disappeared below the distant horizon. He turned around, walked back up the pier, and went back to work.1
For Paine, the tedious work of cleaning up after the war continued. Through the fall of 1945, the pace of US occupation of Japan intensified. The defeated enemy still had a very viable military, and the US was overseeing its stand-down. The IJN fleet of submarines now needed to be completely demilitarized, and he was ordered to remain behind and make sure that it was done.
He left Guam a few days later on the submarine tender USS Euryale (AS-22) and steamed for the Japanese mainland. Now, only days after the surrender, they entered Sasebo Harbor on high alert with weapons ready. He carefully surveyed the port. Through his binoculars, he saw the extent of its destruction, wrought by the thousands of bombs dropped from B-29 Superfortress bombers. The sight and smell of the wretched, burned city and its oily, messy harbor littered with the twisted wreckages of many ship skeletons underscored, for him, the tragedy of the war. Writing in his journal he wondered what insanity had led the leaders of this hidden and now shattered empire to believe that they could take on the mighty United States of America.2
Going ashore with the first tender of marines, no one quite knew what to expect. The Japanese had just surrendered, and although hostilities had officially ceased, wartime anxiety was still clearly in the air. He and the other officers all carried sidearms, escorted everywhere they went by the Shore Patrol. Kamikaze resistance, diehard fanatics, snipers—anything was possible. No trouble materialized, however, as the days went on. Only a brief encounter with a small, rogue patrol boat one day interrupted their work. It was quickly squelched by the Japanese officers themselves.
Paine was in Japan to seize a sample of every torpedo that his team could find. It was a priority order that came directly from the Pentagon. During the war, the US had learned the hard way to respect the Japanese torpedoes. While many of the early models had used old German designs, later indigenous variations developed by the IJN were by far the most advanced torpedoes of the war. The search and seizure turned out to be quite successful. Several torpedoes that his team collected are still on display as historical artifacts at the Navy submarine school in New London.
The Euryale then sailed from Sasebo and around Kyushu through the Inland Sea to the port of Kure. They sailed along the picturesque, pine-clad coastline that looked like a watercolor painting from a Hiroshige print. It was an eerie sight now, marred by the burned hulks of ugly wrecked ships. Midget-subs abandoned under construction were scattered about the dry docks. Hundreds of bomb craters from American B-29 air raids littered the shoreline. The once impenetrable naval stronghold was now
