rubble. He was now in the heart of the imperial war machine whence such horrible death and violence came.
His orders were clear and precise: locate and disarm the remaining Japanese fleet, interrogate the crews, search their records, study the materials, and, when the time came, scuttle the boats. To do this effectively, he had to register and disarm each of the submarines that were slowly making their way back in from the Pacific.
One by one they came. Some looked like they had seen little action. Others were so heavily damaged that, as an engineer, he marveled that they were able to make it home at all. Most were of the Kaiten (“Reverse the Destiny”) type that carried suicide torpedoes. (The Japanese had turned to these in the last months of the conflict in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of the war.) He watched with compassion as the malnourished crew of each boat climbed ashore one at a time, disgraced and humiliated, and surrendered.
Days turned into weeks. His paperwork was almost complete when a submarine designated as the I-58 appeared on the horizon. As the duty officer on watch, he gave permission for the boat to enter. As it moored at the dock, it looked like most of the others that he had seen, distressed but not heavily damaged. He assembled a boarding party and boarded the sub. They walked by the crew, who wore blank stares as they lined up in their oily uniforms. When they reached the bridge, the commanding officer, whose uniform was cleaner, introduced himself in highly accented but understandable English. He told Paine his name: Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. Saluting sharply once, Hashimoto then turned around and led Paine’s party below to the wardroom. Once there, he and his senior officers bowed low and laid their swords on a table that looked to have been hastily covered with a white tablecloth.
Other captains had offered their commands to him in surrender before, but not like this. Paine refused, by protocol, Hashimoto’s offer to surrender his sword. He explained, using the bit of broken Japanese that he had learned while on Guam, that he was onboard only to issue disarmament instructions.
He asked Hashimoto to tell him about the I-58’s operational career. The proud Japanese commander stared at him and immediately became irritated, Paine later recalled. After a long, very awkward silence, he looked puzzled, mumbled something in Japanese, and declared that he had been expecting them. This was the submarine, he said with no more pauses, that sank the American warship that carried the atomic bomb.
Paine was dumbstruck. He exchanged a look of bewilderment with his lieutenant and asked Hashimoto to repeat his claim. Atomic weapon information was classified. All, by then, knew of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had ended the war. But details such as which ships had transported the components for the bombs had not been revealed to anyone, much less the enemy.
As he began to question Hashimoto, the captain’s mood changed. He eagerly unveiled a chart and was soon describing, most animatedly and in great detail, the events of that night. Using a mix of English and Japanese, he told Paine how he had sighted, approached, and attacked the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35) in the early morning of July 30, 1945. He had readied the Kaiten suicide torpedoes. But with a clear moonlit sky, a calm sea, and an advantageous position forward of his target, Hashimoto went with conventional torpedoes. Two of the six found their mark. The flagship of the US Fifth Fleet sank in less than twelve minutes, taking with her three hundred souls just past midnight in the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the US Navy. Nine hundred survivors battled the ocean, exposure, and sharks for four days, as the Navy failed to notice that she was overdue. The sinking and horrific loss of life that followed was not a highly guarded secret by the time of Hashimoto’s encounter with Paine. But at the time, few knew that the Indianapolis was the ship that had delivered the radioactive cores for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs to the island of Tinian or that the I-58 was the one that had brought it to the bottom. This was the first time that anyone had heard Hashimoto’s fantastic story in person. Still somewhat stunned, Paine escorted the captain out onto the deck of the boat and briskly walked him over to the base command post, where Hashimoto expected to be questioned some more. Paine never saw him again. After the war, the US would summon Hashimoto to Washington to testify against Captain Charles McVay of the Indianapolis at his court-martial. Hashimoto passed away in 2000. In 2001, McVay was posthumously cleared of all wrongdoing by the Navy.
Days after Hashimoto surrendered his boat, Paine drove to Kure and saw for himself the destruction that the atomic bomb, a uranium fission device called Little Boy, had wrought. In the wink of an eye, it had obliterated the once picturesque, 350-year-old city of Hiroshima and the smaller town of Kure. The ruins stretched on for miles. A ghostly, colorless ash cloaked everything he saw. Even the rain had a strange odor. Occasionally, a sick person would walk by. Another would wander pitifully among the rubble. Some peddled by on bicycles, their shoulders burdened with heavy water jugs. The somber sight was etched deeply in his memory.3
In early November, his new commanding officer, Commander James E. Stevens, had him group all the captured Japanese submarines together at Sasebo. He gave orders for them to be ready to get underway on four hours’ notice. The war had now been over for two months, and most of the Japanese submarines had been either demilitarized or scuttled. Many were, however, still moored in the harbor. The US had yet to decide on their disposition. As the acting division commander of Submarine Division 2, Paine commanded seven of the captured subs.
With his Japanese now slowly improving, he was able to work as smoothly as could be expected with his chief lieutenants, Murayama and Takezaki. Both spoke a bit of English. As the days wore on, a common but wholly unexpected bond formed between him and the Japanese officers. He was learning quite a bit about his former foes. Some information was militarily very important, like the tactics and patrol chronicles that each boat went through. Others were of more human interest. He learned firsthand from Murayama of the overwhelming, tearful emotions that the crew and officers shared as they launched the Kaiten suicide torpedoes. Other stories surprised him. For example, Takezaki admitted that his side had greatly overestimated how well their midget submarines might work in the first hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor. They should have been far more effective than they actually were. He also revealed to Paine the surprising fact that, as far as he knew, Japan never suspected that the US was successfully decoding their messages during the war under the covert Office of Strategic Services program code-named Operation Magic.
As they conversed, both he and the Japanese began using terms like “us” versus “them” to describe submarines versus surface ships—not Japanese versus American. His surprise at how quickly the bond formed from their shared experience so soon after the end of hostilities remained with him long after the war.
Most of the boats slated for scuttling that winter off Goto Shima, just off the western coast of Kyushu, had been gathered and moored in Sasebo Harbor by mid-November. They were mostly of the small, tactical variety that the Allies had seen plenty of during the war. But drawing very high interest were the gigantic boats of the I-400 Sen Toku (“Special Submarines”) class. The 5,500-ton leviathans were 400 feet long and nearly 40 feet high. Each had a crew of 145. Each aircraft-carrier submarine could deploy three M6A1 Seiran (“Mist from a Clear Sky”) specially designed aircraft. These could be folded up like origami and transported inside the thick-walled hangar of the submarine.4
Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of US Pacific submarine operations, had revealed to the fleet squadrons after V-J Day the never-completed mission of these massive super-subs. Parked off the US West Coast, their mission was to infest the North American continent with rats and mosquitoes infected with bubonic plague, cholera, and other agents of biological origin. During the war, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction had been secretly developed by General Ishii’s infamous medical experimentation laboratory in Harbin, Manchuria. There, the Japanese committed war crimes on a wide scale by injecting Chinese prisoners and civilians with awful contagions as part of its laboratory for human experimentation.
In March 1945, the Japanese Army General Staff changed the mission
