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Since 12-22-04

Sub Museum To Open New Exhibit Honoring Medal Of Honor Recipients

By ROBERT A. HAMILTON

Day Staff Writer, Navy/Defense/Electric Boat

Published on 12/6/2004

Groton - When the Submarine Force Museum opens its newest exhibit this week on the eight submariners who received the Medal of Honor, two of the local guests will have first-hand knowledge of what it takes to earn such a distinction.

Ronald E. Williams of Mystic and Carl Kimmons of Waterford were both crewmen on the USS Parche, SS 384, on a summer day in 1944 when then-Cmdr. Lawson Paterson Ramage attacked a heavily armed Japanese convoy.

Both men earned the prestigious Presidential Unit Citation for their role in the mission, as well as recognition from Ramage in the form of a hand-written note on paper embossed with the Medal of Honor. Ramage, in the note, said the medal “was accepted from the President of the United States as the nation's tribute to a fighting ship and her courageous crew.”

Ramage remained on the bridge by himself during the attack, frenetically maneuvering the Parche into firing position and trying to avoid return fire. At one point, a ship in the convoy tried to run him over. He heeled the ship over sharply, passing within 50 feet of the enemy and directly into the path of a larger cargo ship. He fired three torpedoes at the ship, damaging it, then turned Parche around and fired another torpedo that sent it to the bottom.

Ramage's brazen tactics took the enemy completely by surprise. The Japanese ships, unable to lower their gun barrels enough to hit the submarine that passed so close between them, damaged each other. Parche emerged from the fray 46 minutes later without a scratch.

“I don't think he was reckless,” said Williams, who, as a machinist mate, reloaded the stern torpedo tubes during the battle. “I think he just had great confidence in his ability.”

Kimmons said he prefers not to talk about the war, and since he was not on any of the torpedo reload teams, he doesn't remember much about it. He said that not long after Ramage died in 1990, he visited Ramage's grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

•••

The museum, normally closed Tuesdays, will open this Tuesday for a by-invitation-only unveiling of its newest exhibit commemorating the submariners who have earned the nation's highest military honor.

The exhibit has been in the works for years, as the museum negotiated to acquire artifacts it could put on display.

Only one enlisted man ever received the Medal of Honor, Torpedoman 2nd Class Henry Breault of Putnam, who risked his life to rescue a fellow crewman on Feb. 20, 1924, when the submarine O-5 collided with a cargo ship off Panama. Breault's was also the only Medal of Honor awarded to a submariner before or since World War II.

Two of the men earned the award posthumously: Capt. John Phillip Cromwell, who knew the United States had cracked Japanese military codes and went down with the USS Sculpin when the rest of the crew abandoned ship after a battle; and Howard Walter Gilmore, captain of the USS Growler, who was badly wounded in a surface battle and could not make it to the hatch, but ordered the ship to submerge anyway so it could be saved.

The other Medal of Honor recipients were:

•Rear Adm. Richard Hetherington O'Kane, responsible for sinking 31 ships on five patrols as skipper of the Tang before he was taken prisoner.

•Cmdr. Samuel David Dealey, skipper of the Harder, who sank five Japanese destroyers in five close-range torpedo attacks in a two-day period.

• Capt. George Levick Street III, who as captain of the Tirante snuck in close on the surface to reach an island off Korea where the Japanese held a harbor. He sank an ammunition ship and put torpedoes into a frigate and another ship that pursued him as he headed for deep water to submerge.

• Adm. Eugene Bennett Fluckey, who as captain of the Barb snuck into a Japanese harbor where 30 ships lay at anchor, and launched 10 torpedoes into the assembled craft, scoring eight hits on six ships, including a large ammunition ship that damaged everything around it as it blew up.

•••

Williams said at the time of the battle, nobody was thinking about medals, only about getting through the next few minutes alive.

Williams grew up in western Pennsylvania and joined the Navy in 1940 because the Army would not take him at 17 years old. He was originally assigned to the USS Stack, a destroyer first deployed in the North Atlantic and, after the war broke out, in the South Pacific.

He decided to volunteer for Submarine School because he wanted a chance to visit again with his girlfriend, Helen - they were later married - and Parche was his first and only wartime submarine assignment.

The thing he remembers most about the battle in July 1944 was the captain ordering the tubes reloaded in the midst of the fight.

“It had never been done before,” Williams said. “Before that, submarines would dive to calm water before they would reload. But we did it right in the middle of the action.”

Ramage wanted to fire more torpedoes at the targets around him. The reload crews, though, had to worry about wrestling 600 pounds of high explosives in bulky metal pipes into a firing tube. One misstep, and they could have sunk the ship themselves.

“You didn't think about it at the time, because everyone was too busy really,” Williams said. Though he wouldn't learn until hours later during a briefing what Ramage had accomplished, he knew the ship was being maneuvered wildly - the men in the rear-facing torpedo room could barely stand the ship was whipping back and forth so violently.

“You had to hang onto something all the time,” Williams said.

When they finally learned what had been done, the entire crew broke into a cheer ... though Williams slyly suggests that at least part of the reason for the celebration was that the ship had to head back to Pearl Harbor to reload with torpedoes, which meant two weeks of rest and recreation.

Williams stayed with the Parche through the rest of the war. By the time he got off the submarine, he had earned two Bronze Stars and his Presidential Unit Citation.

He later made the transition to nuclear submarines, serving as chief of the boat on the USS Seadragon during its first Atlantic-to-Pacific crossing over the North Pole, and then earned a commission. He retired in 1971 from his last job as test director of submarine missile firings at Cape Kennedy, having risen to lieutenant commander.

Today, two models of Parche form the nucleus of his submarine service mementoes. Hanging on the wall of the room where he keeps his collection is the note from Ramage, who wrote that every member of the crew has an equal share of the Medal of Honor, “which he holds in trust for you with great pride and respect.