‘[Then] the miracle happened. The torpedo went directly beneath us, didn’t even touch the hull and continued beyond. A short distance away it exploded. There was a huge shower accompanied by smoke and flames. Fragments from the torpedo also fell on our deck.’

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A combination of three things saved the freighter and her crew. Two were the darkness and the torpedo’s explosion away from the ship. Nishino, unable to see whether the torpedo had hit the ship, moved in closer to check it out. In the dim light, with the Japanese sub less than 15 feet away, the third bit of luck came into play. ‘Shortly after the attack,’ said Sinnes, ‘the sub hove to about 40 feet away. Visibility was extremely poor and I couldn’t make out the flag or anybody on board. There was a shout: ‘Hi ya!’ from the submarine. I replied, ‘What do you want of us?’ There was no answer. Then it disappeared, evidently thinking that we were sinking on account of our heavy port list.

‘The list was due to the fact that the engineers had been shifting water in the ballast tanks,’ Sinnes explained. ‘We also lost our No. 1 lifeboat a couple of days before in a storm, part of which was still hanging from its davit. He evidently thought…[we were] sinking on account of this and left us alone.’

Sinnes was right. Captain Nishino did radio the flag submarine, I-15, off San Francisco, that he had sunk an American merchantman. Samoa hove to until daybreak at 7 a.m., then headed at full speed for San Diego, making port two days later.

On December 20, two days after his attack on Samoa, Captain Nishino got his second chance at an American merchantman. Around 1:30 that afternoon, the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company’s tanker Emidio, returning empty from Seattle to San Francisco, was about 20 miles off Cape Mendocino when a report came down to the captain that a sub had been sighted about a quarter of a mile off the stern and was closing.

Captain Clark Farrow, after first attempting to outrun the enemy raider, ordered ‘full speed, and dumped ballast, but…had no chance to escape. We were rapidly overtaken. The sub was making 20 knots. I tried to get behind her but [the sub] reversed course and kept after us.’

Realizing the situation was hopeless, Farrow ordered his radio operator, W.S. Foote, to send an SOS, which he did, accompanied by the words, ‘Under attack by enemy sub.’ No sooner had the message been tapped out over the wireless than I-17 opened up with its deck gun, the first shot carrying away the radio antenna. Two more shots from the sub struck Emidio, one of which destroyed one of the lifeboats hanging in its davits on deck.

Farrow stopped the engines and hoisted a white flag, then ordered the crew to take to the lifeboats. ‘Three of the crew–R.W. Pennington, Fred Potts and Stuart McGillivray–were attempting to launch one of the boats when a shell struck it, spilling them into the water,’ said one of the crewmen later. ‘Other lifeboats were put over the side to search for the three missing men, but we couldn’t find them.’

With the exception of four men still on board and the three lost over the side, the remaining members of the 36-man crew quickly rowed away from the imperiled ship. About 10 minutes later, after a parting shot in the direction of the lifeboats, I-17 abruptly submerged. A couple of minutes later the reason for its sudden disappearance became apparent. ‘It may have been 10 or 15 minutes after the SOS when two U.S. bombers came roaring overhead from the coast,’ said Farrow later. ‘To us in the lifeboats it was a welcome sight. One of the two planes, circling where the sub had gone down, dropped a depth charge. We couldn’t tell if it hit it or not.’

The depth charge did not damage the sub. On board I-17, in fact, Captain Nishino had decided to risk attack from the American planes in order to take one torpedo shot at the abandoned tanker.

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