“Dozens of Japanese survivors and two other American POWs were clinging to the bobbing raft. It was the second time in two weeks that Rocek had survived a warship’s sinking.”

By Stephen L. Moore

SECOND WORLD WAR submarine sailor George Rocek is probably one of the only Americans to survive the sinking of two warships in a two-week period. His reward for this inconceivable feat was spending nearly two years as a prisoner of war.

Rocek’s first tragic experience ensued on the morning of November 19, 1943. His submarine USS Sculpin, battered by vicious rounds of Japanese depth charge attacks, was finally forced to surface. Unable to dive their crippled boat again, the Sculpin crew had one final option to survive: fighting a surface gun battle with a superior Japanese destroyer. It was a hopeless fight from the start, as the IJN destroyer Yamagumo quickly punctured Sculpin’s hull with numerous five-inch shell hits.

A tall, athletically built 23-year-old who had made all eight prior Sculpin war patrols, Rocek was in the forward engine room during his boat’s final battle. Growing up in Cicero, Illinois, his childhood friends called him “Moon.” On Sculpin, the nickname stuck. 

Rocek survived a string of violent explosions that had killed many of Sculpin’s crew. As the barrage continued, word was passed that anyone still alive was to abandon ship. Amid the scramble to get off the stricken vessel, valiant sailors opened Sculpin’s dive vents and prepared to send her on her final plunge. Scuttling the submarine would prevent the Japanese from capturing it. Rocek clambered topside amidst shell explosions as Sculpin began to slip beneath the waves.

A direct hit to Sculpin’s conning tower knocked the sailor down and peppered him with small shards of shrapnel. Rocek jumped into the ocean in time to watch his beloved submarine disappear.

During the next half hour, Rocek was among the 42 American survivors plucked from the ocean by the enemy destroyer Yamagumo. The Japanese tossed one badly wounded submariner back into the water but hauled the other 41 POWs to the Japanese naval base at Truk Atoll. For 10 days, Moon Rocek and his comrades endured interrogations, beatings and near-starvation diets. The scant medical attention that was offered to the Sculpin POWs was horrific at best. Rocek was present when Japanese medics crudely amputated limbs from three badly wounded Sculpin sailors without the use of anesthesia.

On November 29, the Sculpin prisoners were loaded onto two Japanese auxiliary aircraft carriers, Unyo and Chuyo. Each were converted cargo liners that had been reconfigured with flight decks and the capacity to carry up to 30 aircraft.

Displacing about 20,000 tons each, Chuyo and Unyo departed Truk the following day in company with the carrier Zuiho, a cruiser and four destroyers.

On board Chuyo, Rocek and 20 other shipmates were kept locked in a small compartment below decks that had no ventilation. 

During the voyage, U.S. intelligence teams had decoded Japanese intercepts detailing the voyage of this important convoy. Coded alerts were soon going out from Pearl Harbor to American submarines patrolling the region between Truk and Japan to converge on the vessels. During the first days of the voyage to Japan, the American submarines pursuing the carrier convoy managed to launch torpedoes. Not struck home.

By December 3, the Japanese ships were battling violent seas whipped up by a nearby typhoon. Then in the early morning hours of December 4, the convoy came under torpedo attack from the American submarine USS Sailfish.

It was bitterly ironic; the Sailfish was a recommissioned submarine formerly known as Squalus. It had sunk off the coast of New Hampshire in 1939 during a training dive. Her location was pinpointed by her sister submarine, Rocek’s own lost sub Sculpin. In the ensuing pre-war rescue operation, 33 Squalus men were brought to the surface via a special diving bell. Squalus was eventually raised from her grave, towed into port and recommissioned as Sailfish in 1940. Three and a half years later, the Sailfish crew was toiling to sink a Japanese carrier. They had no idea that men they knew from their sister submarine Sculpin were imprisoned on the warship they stalked.

At 0010 on December 4, the first Sailfish torpedo exploded on Chuyo’s port side, below her bridge. Rocek and his comrades were seated on the deck in their prisoner compartment, which was near the site of the hit. Without warning, the POWs were flung several feet into the air. Their shouts to be released went unanswered. During the next hour, Rocek heard loud voices, hammering, and pounding as Japanese damage controlmen labored to shore up Chuyo’s hull with timbers. Hours passed as the American prisoners remained locked in their inner compartment.

Around 0600, more chaos ensued when another torpedo spread from Sailfish rocked Chuyo. This time, the explosions were more distant from Rocek’s location, but the effects were felt in other ways. The carrier’s engine rooms and boilers wrecked. Powerless, the large vessel coasted to a halt and went dead in the water. In pitch blackness, Rocek soon found smoke seeping into his compartment and water creeping into the hold. 

“They’ve abandoned us!” Rocek thought.

He and his Sculpin shipmates assaulted the hatch door to their compartment. Using a steel pump handle as a pry bar and their own strength, the POWs finally managed to bust the hatch door off its hinges. The 21 men now faced a new test—navigating a smoke-filled darkened carrier’s inner passages to find their way topside. Chief Signalman Weldon “Dinty” Moore, the former Sculpin chief of the boat, organized his shipmates for the tricky journey.

Motor machinist’s mate Harold Laman, who had served on battleships before World War II, was tapped by Moore to help navigate through the darkened capital warship. Rocek and his companions held hands to prevent themselves from becoming separated in the dark. Special effort was made to assist the three Sculpin amputees. More than once, the group was forced to backtrack after reaching smoky passageways with dead ends or damage that halted their progress.

Rocek feared how the POWs would be treated by any Japanese sailors they might encounter. Fortunately for the Americans, their captors were busy trying to save the sinking carrier and paid them no attention. The Sculpin POWs groped their way up a steel ladder to a higher deck, where they found a compartment containing hundreds of life jackets hanging on the bulkhead. Rocek and Moore helped strap jackets around the amputees after donning their own. Moving aft in search of a ladder to the flight deck, they next stumbled into a Chuyo galley.

Rocek and others hastily gobbled food and chugged Japanese sodas to replenish their malnourished bodies. A Japanese guard soon found the American prisoners and put them to work carrying materials to construct makeshift life rafts. Afterward, the Sculpin survivors were brought topside, stripped of their life jackets, and made to sit in a circle on the flight deck. For the next hour, Rocek stared out to seaward as Chuyo rolled in heavy swells. 

During this time, the submarine Sailfish was making her third torpedo approach on the damaged Japanese carrier. Skipper Bob Ward fired another spread and at 0942, two Mark 14 torpedoes exploded in Chuyo’s forward section. Within minutes, the carrier’s bow began settling below the waves as her stern section rose from the sea. As Chuyo began sinking, Moon Rocek and Dinty Moore scooted to a nearby searchlight on the flight deck. They clung to it in desperation as the carrier began nosing down rapidly. 

Japanese sailors and other Sculpin POWs tumbled down the canting flight deck into the ocean. As the flight deck rose higher on the starboard side, Rocek finally shouted, “Let’s go, Dinty!” 

Releasing his bear hug on the searchlight, Rocek began skidding down the flight deck. The rough wooden planking ripped out the back side of the blue Japanese Navy trousers he had been issued. Seconds later, he was in the ocean, fighting to swim away from the powerful downward-suction effect created as Chuyo disappeared beneath the waves. The current pulled Rocek down, causing him to swallow sea water while he clawed for the surface. The force of a mighty pocket of escaping air finally pushed Rocek free, where he coughed up salt water for some time.

Minutes later, he was able to swim to a Japanese life raft. In short order, dozens of Japanese survivors and two other Sculpin POWs were clinging to the bobbing raft. It was the second time in two weeks that Rocek had survived a warship’s sinking. Once again, his only chance of survival lay in an enemy’s desire to rescue him and the thick, oily sea in which they struggled was filled with more Japanese than Americans. Rocek clung to his raft for hours as a nearby Japanese destroyer raced about in search of the submarine Sailfish, the cause of all the chaos.

It was well after noon when the Japanese destroyer Urakaze arrived to recover some of the Chuyo survivors. As his life raft reached the side of the warship, Japanese sailors began climbing up rope ladders to safety. Rocek was knocked into the water as he struggled to grasp the Jacob’s ladder. A wave pushed him back against Urakaze’s slick steel side, where he managed to loop his left arm through the rope ladder. For minutes, Rocek hung helplessly, occasionally plunging beneath the surface as the ship rolled in the swells.

And then he felt himself rising from the water as Japanese sailors began hauling the rope ladder back on board Urakaze. Rocek flipped onto the steel deck and rolled over facedown, panting heavily. Wearing Japanese undress blues and smeared in thick, black oil, the American looked like any other pitiful survivor. Rocek prayed that his latest captors would take pity on him once his identity was discovered. 

For the moment, Moon Rocek was unaware that he was the only American prisoner from the sunken Chuyo to be plucked from the sea. Twenty of his Sculpin comrades had not been as fortunate. When the destroyer sailors recognized Rocek to be an American, he was wrestled to the destroyer’s fantail to be tossed overboard. Good fortune shined on Rocek once again when a senior Urakaze officer ordered the sailors to retain the American as their prisoner.

Rocek realized that only time would tell how fortunate he was to still be alive.

Stephen L. Moore is the author of Strike of the Sailfish: Two Sister Submarines and the Sinking of a Japanese Aircraft Carrier, available Dec. 5. He is the author of 20 books on World War II and Texas history and has contributed articles to a number of historical journals.