The Sacrifice and Rediscovery of the Submarine USS Grayback

The “Silent Service,” i.e. the U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet, made many impressive contributions to the American victory over Imperial Japan during WWII, ravaging the latter nation’s merchant marine fleet and Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) warships alike.  

However, the Silent Service’s many magnificent achievements came at a terrible price; a total of fifty-two USN submarines were lost during the war, with a combined 3,506 commissioned officers and enlisted sailors killed in action – a death rate of 21.9 percent of the total USN submarine manpower in WWII. Among those valiant boats lost was the USS Grayback (SS-208), whose tragic tale I was inspired to write about after stumbling across an article on War History Online by Ian Harvey titled “Found: USS Grayback, Final Resting Place of Eighty Entombed Sailors.” 

USS Grayback (SS-208) Initial History and Specifications 

USS Grayback was built by the famous Electric Boat Company, now General Dynamics Electric Boat, laid down on April 3, 1940, launched on January 31, 1941, and commissioned on June 30, 1941. It was less than six months before the Pearl Harbor raid dragged the U.S. into WWII. 

She was a Tambor-class boat, the USN's first fully successful fleet submarine class, and was named for the lake herring, commonly known as the Cisco. The warship’s specifications and vital stats included: 

• Displacement: 

• Submerged: 2,410 tons 

• Surfaced: 1,499 tons 

• Beam Width: twenty-seven feet three inches (8.31 meters) 

• Draft: fourteen feet 7.5 inches (4.458 meters) 

• Speed: 

• 20.4 knots (thirty-eight km/h) surfaced 

• 8.75 knots (sixteen km/h) submerged 

• Test depth: 250 feet (seventy-six meters) 

• Crew Complement: six officers, fifty-four enlisted 

• Armament: 

• Ten 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes 

• Six forward, four aft torpedo tubes 

• One 3-inch (76 mm) / 50 caliber deck gun 

• Bofors 40 mm and Oerlikon 20 mm cannon 

Grayback’s Combat History and Tragic Fate 

At the time of her commissioning, Grayback was assigned to the Commander, Naval Submarine Force, Atlantic (COMSUBLANT), but America’s official entry into WWII affected a shifting in priorities of much of the sub force, and thus she was transferred to the Pacific counterpart entity, COMSUBPAC, which at the time was led by the late great Vice Admiral Charles Andrews Lockwood. 

She departed for her new home port on January 12, 1942, and arrived at Pearl Harbor on February 8, of that year. 

She ended up conducting a total of ten war patrols. Her first patrol was a successful one, as she sank the 3,291-ton cargo ship Ishikari Maru off Port Lloyd, Chichijima, Bonin Islands, on St. Patrick’s Day 1942. 

According to Keith Wheeler in his 1981 book “War Under the Pacific” – part of Time-Life Books’ excellent World War II series, the USS Grayback sank a total of fourteen enemy vessels with a total tonnage of 63,835 tons; this ranked her twenty-fourth in terms of number of enemy ships sunk and twentieth in terms of tonnage. 

Some of her other kills included:  

--On her eighth war patrol, she bagged the fleet tanker Kozui Maru on October 14, 1943, the 9,100-ton transport Fuji Maru (a shared kill with the Gato-class sub-USS Shad [SS-235]) on October 19, and the converted light cruiser Awata Maru on October 22. 

--On her ninth patrol, she sent freighter Gyokurei Maru and escort Numakaze to Davy Jones’s Locker and damaged several others in a surface attack between December 18 and 19 1943; two nights later, she sank two more freighters, and, as the proverbial icing on the cake, even with all of her torpedoes expended, sank a “good-sized fishing boat” with her deck guns on December 27. 

Grayback served as a lifesaver as well as a lifetaker: on January 5, 1943, her fifth war patrol, whereupon she served as the beacon ship for the naval bombardment of Munda Bay, she saved six survivors of a downed B-26 Marauder bomber. 

This guardian angel mission earned the boat’s skipper, Cmdr. Edward C. Stephan, the Navy Cross.  

It was on her tenth war patrol that Grayback met her untimely fate. 

She embarked on this mission on January 28, 1944, and was due to return to Midway Island on March 7, but as you dear readers have undoubtedly surmised by now, she never made it home. 

In-depth research of IJN records conducted by Yutaka Iwasaki, a Japanese amateur researcher, revealed that the ship was sunk by a 500-lb. bomb from a Nakajima B5N, which was primarily used as a torpedo bomber but was also employed as a high-level bomber. 

The Wreck of Grayback is Found 

Mr. Harvey picks up the story from there “Iwasaki found that the coordinates on the tape did not match the U.S. Navy coordinates…It seemed that when the translation was initially done in 1949, the last known latitude and longitude of the USS Grayback was mistranslated or incorrectly recorded by one digit, resulting in the location of the submarine being wrong by 100 miles. The recording included the coordinates of the location of the submarine. Iwasaki found that the coordinates on the tape did not match the U.S. Navy coordinates…After Iwasaki found the discrepancy, an expedition led by Project 52’s Tim Taylor, used drones to search the seabed to physically locate the wreckage based on the new set of coordinates…She was found fifty nautical miles south of Okinawa, lying at a depth of 1,400 feet…Finding the remains of the submarine has solved another of the mysteries of World War II and has given closure to the eighty families that waited seventy-five years to know where their loved ones were.” 

The discovery of Grayback’s wreck took place on November 10, 2019. May she and her heroic crew rest in peace. Fair winds and following seas, sailors, we have the watch.  

Christian D. Orr is a Senior Defense Editor for National Security Journal (NSJ). He is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch , The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security, and Simple Flying. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS).

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