By the spring of 1940, only three places in the United States knew how to build a submarine. Two belonged to the Navy, at Portsmouth in New Hampshire and Mare Island in California. The third was a private company, Electric Boat, at Groton in Connecticut. Every submarine the Navy ordered came out of one of those three yards.
That summer, with France gone and Britain holding on alone, Congress began paying for a navy built to fight two oceans at once, and the submarine builders already had more work than they could finish. The Wisconsin Historical Society put it in a single plain phrase: the existing builders could not meet the schedules. So the Navy went looking somewhere it had never looked before. Not on a coast, but far from any saltwater, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, in a town called Manitowoc.
The Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company built lake freighters and car ferries. Its president, Charles West, had gone to Washington in 1939 offering to build destroyers, which he proposed to float down the rivers to the sea on a dry dock pulled by a tug. The Navy sent people to look at the yard, and they came back with a different idea. Not destroyers.
Submarines. One account says the choice came down to the skill of the local craftsmen. Another, from a naval officer who later wrote about the yard, says the management did not much want the job at first and the Navy insisted. Either way, in the fall of 1940, the yard had an order for ten fleet submarines.
Even the date is told two ways. A program printed for the first launch says the Secretary of the Navy signed on November 1, and other accounts give September 9, which may simply be the day the money was voted. Manitowoc would build as a licensed follow-yard to Electric Boat, working from Electric Boat plans, with Electric Boat engineers sent west to teach a freshwater yard how a pressure hull goes together. The two companies never warmed to each other.
Groton could see perfectly well that a yard which learned to build submarines in wartime might want to keep building them in peacetime. The first keel went down on June 18, 1941. A 35-ton section lowered onto the blocks. The boat would be called Peto.
Hulls were built in sections inside heated sheds so the Wisconsin winter could not stop the welding, and the yard rigged a jig that turned the pressure hull like a roast on a spit, so no welder ever had to work over his head. Then there was the river. The Manitowoc River runs through the middle of town into the lake, and it was far too narrow and too shallow to take a 300-foot hull sliding in stern first, the way every other submarine in America had gone into the water. So the yard decided to put her in sideways.
The hull sat broadside to the water on 21 launching ways. The ones near each end stayed fixed. The ones in between were built to tilt as the hull went over the seawall, and every line holding her back ran to a pneumatic guillotine so all of them could be cut at the same instant. If one line held while the others let go, the hull would slew.
It rained on the morning of April 30, 1942. The yard let its men take their noon hour early so they could watch. Thousands stood along the riverbank and up on the bluffs as the shipyard band, which called itself the Submariners, played the national anthem. The rain stopped and the clouds lifted.
The sponsor was the wife of a Navy captain from the Great Lakes training station. At about ten minutes to twelve, the guillotines dropped, and Peto went over sideways into the Manitowoc River, the first American submarine ever launched that way. NBC and Mutual carried it on the radio. Life magazine made a photograph of it, the picture of the week.
The printed program for the day signed off with a slogan: Keep them sliding. Peto ran her trials in November out on open Lake Michigan. An Electric Boat crew took her out with a local man named John Jordan aboard as pilot. Somewhere in the middle of the lake off Sheboygan, she went down to 300 feet and came back up.
When the trials were over, the crew lashed a broom to the periscope shears. A clean sweep. A broom on a periscope is a small sailor’s joke. Tied to that one, it was a freshwater yard with no warship in its past announcing that it had built a submarine from another company’s drawings and taken her deep into its own lake and back.
And she was still in the wrong place. The yard ran around the clock, three shifts, seven days a week. By January 1943, the company newsletter counted hundreds of women on the payroll, most of them in production. They learned to weld in six-week classes at the vocational school, and before they touched a hull, every one of them had to pass the Navy’s vertical butt weld test, the same test the men took.
A photograph from December of that year shows ten of them in a line in coveralls and caps with their names written underneath: Bernice Kissiel, Mary Jachekal, Eleanor Van Eygen, Marian Rush, and six more besides. Now came the part that had been the whole difficulty from the beginning. A submarine finished on Lake Michigan is a submarine trapped on Lake Michigan unless somebody can find her a way to the sea. The way the Navy chose ran south through the middle of the country, and it started in downtown Chicago.
Peto left Manitowoc at four in the afternoon on Christmas Day 1942. She had been decommissioned for the trip, her periscopes and the tall frame that carried them taken off because she had to pass under the bridges of a city. She came down the lake through the night and tied up at Navy Pier at half past ten in the morning. Before dawn she was moving up the Chicago River, past the darkened office towers of the Loop, a submarine in the middle of the second-largest city in America.
At the Western Avenue Railroad Bridge, the lift span could not rise high enough, so the Navy had paid for new lifting machinery, and even then the margins came down to inches. William Nelson, who later wrote the fullest history of these trips, says at Western Avenue she had about six inches of water under her keel. Then came the canals. The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal carried her southwest to Lockport, Illinois, and at Lockport on the day after Christmas she was floated into a dry dock.
A fleet submarine draws about 15 feet of water. Below St. Louis, at a place called the Chain of Rocks, the channel was dredged to nine. So from Lockport onward the boat would not swim at all.
She would ride sitting in a floating dry dock pushed by a river towboat, with a Coast Guard cutter named Fern alongside, and company and police posted on the highway bridges along the way. The towboat was called Minnesota. Her master was a riverman named Russell Arens, and her crew included women who did the cooking and waited tables. Nobody aboard had ever moved anything like this.
Near Brandon Lock, a hard blow pushed the whole tow out of the channel and into a cornfield, and branches came through the glass of the pilot house. Nelson quotes the captain’s complaint word for word: the damned branches were poking holes in all his windows. Further down at Morris, a flood came over the river and the tow had to tie up to a willow tree and wait. The Army engineers closed the Dresden lock and opened the Marseilles Dam, dropping the level of the Illinois River by about a foot to get a submarine through.
Bridge after bridge, lock after lock, the tow kept moving south. It reached the Mississippi in the first week of January and ran from St. Louis to New Orleans in about three days. On January 7, 1943, Peto came into the Chalmette Slip below New Orleans.
There the dry dock flooded down, the boat floated free, and Electric Boat men put her masts and periscopes back where they belonged. Nelson worked out that by the time she reached the Gulf, she was some 580 feet below the level of the lake she was born in. Nine days later she sailed for Panama. The Minnesota turned around and went back north for the next one.
She did that every time. The same towboat met every Manitowoc submarine at Lockport and took every one of them down to the Gulf. The yard got faster as it learned. Peto had taken more than ten months from keel to launch.
By the spring of 1944, Lagarto went from keel to launch in about four and a half. Later boats ran their trials through a Wisconsin winter. A photograph from March 1944 shows Hammerhead coming back in with her bridge sheathed in ice and the yard tug Manitowoc at her stern. Icefish fired dummy torpedoes into the lake.
The yard’s big cranes were good enough that some were shipped out to Pearl Harbor to help lift the battleship sunk there. For a while, the river town on Lake Michigan was putting a submarine into the water about once a month, and the boats came out ahead of the dates in the order and under the price in it, which in a wartime shipyard was almost unheard of. The Navy kept adding to the order, and then in the summer of 1944 it began taking boats away again. Two hulls already started at Manitowoc were cancelled and their finished parts scrapped in the yard.
The last boat, Mero, was commissioned two days after Japan announced it would surrender. Before she went south, she spent the autumn on a publicity tour of the Great Lakes ports. Twenty-eight submarines came out of Manitowoc before it was over. Most reached the war in time to fight it, and between them they sank 132 ships.
Rasher, the fifth boat, finished the war second only to Flasher among American submarines in tonnage sunk. On the night of August 18, 1944, she put torpedoes into the aircraft carrier Taihō and three other ships. Jallao, another Manitowoc boat, finished off the light cruiser Tama at Leyte Gulf. Four of them did not come home.
Robalo was one. Her commanding officer was Lieutenant Commander Manning Kimmel, whose father was Admiral Husband Kimmel, the officer who had commanded the Pacific Fleet on the morning of Pearl Harbor and whom Washington relieved and blamed for it. The son went to sea in a boat built because of that morning. In the summer of 1944, Robalo went down off the coast of Palawan in the Philippines.
A handful of her men got ashore and the Japanese locked them up at Puerto Princesa. On August 2, somebody dropped a note from a cell window there. An American prisoner on a work detail picked it up and passed it to a Navy yeoman named Huff, who got word of it to a woman named Trinidad Mendoza, the wife of a guerrilla leader. The note said there were no other survivors.
The four men named in the prison accounts were moved on by the Japanese, and what became of them is not known. The Navy’s inquiry suggested Robalo had struck a mine or suffered an explosion in her own batteries. The Navy’s own published history of its submarine losses calls the battery explanation doubtful. The admiral who carried the blame for Pearl Harbor lost a son in a Manitowoc boat, and the Navy never settled what sank it.
Lagarto was another. Her sponsor at the launching had been Emily Taft Douglas, a congresswoman from Illinois. She was last heard from on May 3, 1945, in the Gulf of Thailand, and she was lost with every man aboard, Commander Frank Latta among them. For sixty years nobody knew where she lay.
In May 2005, a British diver named Jamie MacLeod found her upright on the bottom in about 225 feet of water. Stamped on her propellers was the word Manitowoc. The next year, Navy divers went down, confirmed her, and left a brass plaque on her capstan, and on the deck of the salvage ship above, the families’ letters were spoken aloud over the water. The four lost boats took 336 men with them.
One local history counts 337, and the sources disagree even on the day Robalo was lost, July 2 or July 26. The wreck of Robalo herself was located only in 2019. The other two were Gollet and Kete. Gollet was probably caught by Japanese anti-submarine forces off northern Honshu in June 1944.
Kete sent her last message from near Balabac Strait in March 1945. Both were lost with every man aboard. Neither has been found. The Navy’s own dictionary of its ships says of Kete only that she was neither seen nor heard from again, and that the cause of her loss remains a mystery.
Of Gollet, it says a door of silence closed behind her.
