Another man, oiler James O’Brien, who had been positioned a little farther forward when the torpedo hit, said that the blast ‘knocked me off my feet and made me goofy for a minute. Because the sub had the glare behind her, we couldn’t have had a chance to escape. She had a perfect target.’

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Radio operator Walt Williams, in the communications shack on the aft end of the boat when the torpedo exploded, was thrown out of his chair onto the floor by the blast. Seconds later, Williams recalled, ‘Captain Louie Pringle notified me to send out the SOS signal and the message that we’d been torpedoed. Two messages I didn’t have to be told to send.’

Out on deck, crewmen had already lowered the lifeboats. There was no need to wait for the order to abandon ship. Within minutes, Absaroka had already settled up to her main deck.

Not long after Williams’ distress call, planes showed up and dropped bombs near where the sub was last seen. On the heels of the bombing, Amethyst arrived on the scene and began dropping depth charges. Despite the effors to retaliate against I-19, neither bombs nor the pattern of 32 depth charges showed results.

As the day wore on, seven of the 33-man crew rescued from Absaroka, including Captain Pringle, had come back on board. Seeing that the old lumber ship was not in any immediate danger of sinking, Lt. Cmdr. Hans B. Olson tied on his U.S. Navy tug, and Absaroka was gingerly towed in and beached on a strip of sand below Fort MacArthur.

One month later, in the January 26, 1942, issue of LIFE magazine, movie actress Jane Russell was featured in the full-page ‘Picture of the Week,’ standing in the tremendous hole in Absaroka’s hull created by the Japanese torpedo. In the picture she is holding a poster that warns: ‘A slip of the lip may sink a ship,’ with the words ‘may sink a ship’ crossed out and the words ‘may have sunk this ship’ written in.

As a finale to the seven days of attacks on west coast shipping, early on Christmas Day all eight Japanese subs (I-9 had been ordered to Panama on December 20) were to select a choice mainland target and fire all of their 5.5-inch deck gun ammunition at it, then withdraw to the Marshall Islands. That did not happen. According to a postwar Japanese monograph, orders from Combined Fleet headquarters in Tokyo canceled the operation for fear of retaliation by U.S. anti-submarine forces, which they announced had become ‘very severe’ within the past few days. Only I-17 carried out such an attack, shelling the oil refinery near Santa Barbara late in February.

This article was written by Donald J. Young and originally appeared in the July 1998 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!

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