Pacific Area Resident Witnessed First Shots of WWII – But It Went Unreported for 40 Years

By Pauline Masson

One Pacific area resident had a unique experience in the opening shots of World War II.

On a Navy supply ship heading into the mouth of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941 – two hours before the arrival of Japanese bombers and their surprise attack on the Navy fleet there – the crew of the USS Antares witnessed the sinking of a Japanese submarine.

It was first first shots of America’s entry into WWII but the scope of the attack on the Navy base that lasted two hours and left 21 U.S. ships heavily damaged, 323 aircraft damaged or destroyed, 2,390 people dead and 1,178 wounded, was so stupendous that the report of the submarine sank into history as not even an afterthought. 

The late Bill Ellis, Robertsville, watched through the years as the attack on Pearl Harbor was remembered every December 7 but the submarine sinking was never mentioned. 

Ellis was an eighteen-year-old ships fireman aboard the USS Antares. For over forty years he never read mention of the incident. He could remember it so vividly, but to WWII historians it was as though it never happened. But he knew it did happen.

Troubled by this omission of history, Ellis wrote out his memories of the incident in a twelve page diary. His recollection of the incident was published in a 56 page book USS Antares by Heritage Bookstall, Pacific.

Part memoir, part history, the USS Antares tells the story of the story of a Navy and Marine supply ship that sailed from Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii south to the Canton Islands and the Palmyra Atoll to deliver a cargo of parts and supplies to Naval bases and ships berthed there. 

At Canton Island that December storms created seas so turbulent that the ship had to stay underway, offloading the cargo by winching it onto barges to be taken ashore. The sailors on watch, scouring the seas for other vessels spotted what looked like a submarine a few hundred yards from the ship. 

The Antares radioed the sub to identify itself. Even in peacetime, an unidentified submarine at the entrance to US Navy base was cause for concern. Antares skipper Lawrence C. Grannis radioed Pearl Harbor for an escort and the USS Vestilege soon arrived to escort the Antares the 1100 nautical miles back to home base.  

Several times on the return trip north the submarine’s conning tower surfaced within sight of the watch on both the Antares and the Vestilege, bobbing up like a playful porpoise accompanying the ship, as more novelty than threat. They had no intuition that they were approaching an event that would cause them to question the history books for the rest of their lives. 

Before the arrival of the unidentified submarine, as deepwater seamen stationed in the central Pacific, Ellis and his crew members had memorized the bars and streets of the islands they visited and marked their time from one shore leave to the next.

Approaching the entrance to Pearl Harbor in the pre-dawn hours of December 7, 1941, the most vivid thought crew members had was getting into the home berth at Pearl Harbor and going ashore.

They had originally been scheduled to arrive ten days earlier but the storm at Canton Island had delayed their return, causing the ship to approach the channel leading into Pearl Harbor at 6:00 a.m. The sailors on watch again sighted the submarine conning tower a few hundred yards out to sea. Again the submarine would not answer the radio signal.

An unidentified submarine in the open sea could be watched and tolerated. But an unidentified submarine approaching the entrance to the home port of the American fleet was seen as an act of war. The Antares radioed s warning, the USS Ward and a Navy PBY soon arrived and sank the submarine at 6:30 a.m. An hour and twenty minutes later the Japanese planes arrived and all hell broke loose.

.

The sailors aboard the USS Antares and the USS Ward, who were part of War in the Pacific for the next four years, put the submarine sinking event out of their minds, a tiny event compared with the damage that Japanese bombers did to the US fleet.

In later years, as they read books and saw the movies about the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, they wondered why there was no mention of the sinking of the submarine.

In 2002, divers from the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory on a routine training dive found the wreckage of a Japanese submarine at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The 78-foot submarine was setting in 1,200 feet of water three miles from the entrance to Pearl Harbor.

To the sailors who had served on the USS Ward when it sank the midget submarine and on the Antares, finding the submarine confirmed a story they had been telling friends and relatives for 61 years. It also confirmed what some Navy veterans had contended, that the Ward fired the first American shots of World War II.

The Ward was a destroyer that had been put in storage in San Diego after World War I, but with world tensions mounting, she was put back in service just before the attack on Pearl Harbor and was on patrol guarding the entrance of Pearl Harbor in a five-mile area in which all traffic was banned unless the Ward knew about it.

Sailors aboard the Ward said that two shots were fired, one that missed and one that hit the submarine’s conning tower at the waterline. A little over an hour later, Japanese bombers flew overhead on their way to bomb Hawaii. Two of the planes tried to bomb the Ward but missed.

The submarine led four other Japanese midget submarines to Pearl Harbor before the December 7 attack. All of the subs have been accounted for.