On shore, several Monterey peninsula residents had unknowingly witnessed the chase. A story in the Monterey Herald that evening said, ‘Scores of golfers playing seaside courses reported today they had observed the tanker with huge clouds of smoke pouring from her funnel, fleeing toward Santa Cruz and zigzagging wildly, but most of them thought little more about it.’

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On the morning of December 22, 1941, the Standard Oil Company tanker H.M. Story was off Point Arguello, some 55 miles north of Santa Barbara. Submerged less than two miles off the treacherous point, Japanese submarine I-21, under the command of Captain Kanji Matsumura, had been lying in wait for two days.

Walking the lonely beach of Point Arguello that morning was a woman–whose name was later withheld by the Navy–who, along with Jack Sudden, a young high-school student from nearby Lompoc, witnessed the encounter between Story and I-21. Both saw a torpedo fired from I-21.

Sudden, who was rabbit hunting along the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks at the time, said that around 8:30 a.m. he ‘heard a dull explosion and saw smoke arising from the sea. At first I couldn’t tell what it was, but a few minutes later heavy smoke began to settle over [the] water like a smoke screen. To the northwest of the screen and about three miles from shore I could see the tanker speeding up the coast.

‘I later saw a long dark object leave the smoke screen heading in the general direction of the ship. Watching the object–that must have been a torpedo–it closed the gap between itself and the ship and at times came to the surface and kicked up a white spray. The last I could see of the torpedo, it passed in front of the ship.’

The explosion that first attracted Sudden’s attention had come from I-21’s deck gun, but the heavy smoke screen put out by the fleeing tanker made it impossible for Matsumura’s gun crew to see the target, forcing him to submerge and use a torpedo.

The other witness, who had binoculars, could see the submarine plainly. ‘It was between the tanker and the shore when I saw it,’ she said, ‘less than two miles away. I saw what I thought were two torpedoes fired from the submarine at the ship, but they all went behind it. The tanker then went full speed ahead, with heavy black smoke pouring from her funnel.’ Not long after that, planes arrived and dropped several bombs. ‘They were so heavy that when they exploded they shook the ground where I was standing,’ the woman continued. ‘The explosions raised great columns of water.’

On the morning of December 22, the Japanese submarine I-21, after failing to sink H.M. Story off Point Arguello, headed north in search of another target. At 3 a.m. the next day the sub spotted the Richfield Oil Company tanker Larry Doheney, and Captain Kanji Matsumura fired his 5.5-inch deck gun at her.

Some six miles away in the little beach community of Cayucas, Calif., on the northern edge of Estero Bay, Mrs. Roy Genardini, wife of the town’s constable, was awakened by the noise of the shot. Twenty seconds later a second shot was heard.

On board Doheney, no one was asleep after the first shot. Captain Roy Brieland, the skipper of the empty tanker, was already on the bridge directing the maneuvers of his ship when the second shot came. Both missed, and Brieland frantically zigzagged his 20-year-old oiler into the night.

A few minutes later, on board I-21, Captain Matsumura was about to call off the chase, thwarted by the darkness and Doheney’s fishtailing maneuvers, when a lookout picked up the tanker inside 200 yards with its port side exposed. The Japanese commander quickly ordered a torpedo fired.

Still in her bed back in Cayucas, Mrs. Genardini was just about convinced the shooting was over when she was suddenly jarred by an explosion that, in her own words, ‘nearly threw me on the floor.’ The explosion was the concussion from a Japanese Long Lance torpedo that had exploded after missing Larry Doheney. With that, Matsumura broke off the chase and submerged. His frustration at being outrun by two American tankers in two days, however, would be more than made up for in less than two hours.

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