Amethyst went down for a ‘look-see’ but did not locate the enemy sub. Although
I-19 had missed Barbara Olson, four hours later she would have another chance at an American ship. By 10 a.m., I-19 had moved to new hunting grounds a few miles north off Point Fermin. Entering the Catalina Channel some five miles north of the waiting enemy sub was the McCormick Steamship Company’s 5,700-ton freighter Absaroka, also on her way south with a load of lumber.

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By 10:30, the freighter was off Point Fermin, whose famous 77-year-old lighthouse was clearly visible less than a mile away. Manning a coast artillery gun position on the point just below the lighthouse, Army Sergeant James Hedwood and his crew watched the ship as it passed. ‘We were looking at the lumber schooner when suddenly we saw a fountain of water spout 100 feet into the air at the stern,’ Hedwood recalled. The boat spun around some 220 degrees from the force of the blow, ‘ending up with its stern to sea and its bow facing toward land.’

On board, Seaman Joseph Scott was the first to see the sub that got Absaroka. ‘It was midmorning and all hands were up, when I looked off to starboard and saw a whale,’ he recalled. ‘At least I was about to say ‘look over yonder, a whale,’ when I changed my mind and yelled, ‘There’s a Jap submarine!’

‘She was coming head-on. Then her periscope went up and she shot a torpedo. I’ve seen torpedoes coming at me before. ‘They’ve wasted that one,’ says I. Sure enough it went wide, but right on its heels came another. ‘Oh, oh, that’s bad,’ says I, because I could see this one was going to get us.’

Scott’s reference to previous experience with torpedoes was no exaggeration. At sea since his early 20s, the 48-year-old veteran had had four merchant ships torpedoed out from under him on four consecutive voyages during World War I.

‘In those other torpedoings, as I recall ‘em, there was always a bang or blast and a bump,’ Scott continued. ‘But this one was a sort of slow jar, with nothing but a rumble because she hit well below the waterline.’

Four men–Harry Greenwald, Marshall Mansfield, Herbert Stevens and Joseph Ryan–were working on the starboard side of Absaroka, routinely checking the lashings on the particularly heavy deckload of lumber she was carrying, moments before the torpedo struck. One of them glanced up in time to see the wake. ‘Torpedo!’ he yelled, pointing toward the stern of the ship. ‘I knew [it] was going to miss us and broke into a grin,’ said Greenwald. ‘But my grin froze, because the second fish followed the first one quicker than it takes to tell it.’

The second torpedo struck with tremendous impact about 50 feet aft of the beam, knocking three of the four men into the sea. The fourth, Ryan, was able to ride out the blast, which, according to one observer, threw tons of lumber into the air ‘as if a man were throwing matchsticks around.’

Amazingly, within a matter of seconds, Greenwald was back on deck after being thrown overboard. As he struggled to the surface after his sudden dunking, the rail over which he had just been hurled came close enough for him to grab. ‘The ship [rolled] over so far from the explosion that her deck went underwater,’ said Greenwald. ‘I grabbed the rail as the ship shuddered and righted herself [and] was carried up as she swung back.’ Mansfield pulled himself back on board by a rope.

The third man, Stevens, whose leg had been injured in the blast and his subsequent fall into the sea, began yelling for his shipmates to help. Ryan located him and dashed to the deck rail, picked up a coil of heavy mooring line and tossed it toward Stevens’ bobbing head. Ryan had begun pulling Stevens toward the ship when the next disaster struck. The explosion had snapped the lashings anchoring the deckload of lumber behind Ryan. As he was leaning over the rail drawing his injured comrade toward the side of the ship, a 10-foot wall of lumber teetered and then fell, instantly killing Ryan and tumbling his body overboard along with hundreds of board feet of lumber.

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