Rudy Linenbroker USS Narwhal |
The houses in Rudy and Fern Linenbroker's Honolulu neighborhood were built close together and the walls were thin. Their next-door neighbor was washing his car and had turned the car's radio on. So it was no surprise the noise awoke the Linenbrokers that Sunday morning. What did surprise them was the alarming news coming over that car radio: Hawaii was under attack by Japanese war planes. Rudy, 25, and Fern, 20, had been married only since Oct. 11, but two days after their wedding Rudy was back on his submarine, USS Narwhal, sailing to Wake Island under secret orders. The boat had just returned to Pearl Harbor a few days before the attack. Now the honeymoon was over again. Rudy and Fern turned on their own radio and heard what they already expected: This is no drill; all servicemen are ordered to return to their ships immediately. They could hear sirens in the distance. Rudy pulled on his uniform, jumped in his car and made the 20-minute drive to the Pearl Harbor submarine base. He could see and hear the planes bearing the Rising Sun flying overhead. "By the time I got there, the second attack was coming on," Rudy remembers. When he arrived at the Narwhal, Linenbroker grabbed a Browning sub-machine gun, stood on the bridge and began firing at the Japanese planes. The crew of the Narwhal and the USS Tautog, tied up next to it, already had together downed a plane. "I got off a lot of rounds," he said. 'I don't think I hit anything. Nothing went down." "They were flying pretty low, they weren't way up in the air," he recalled. "You could see the pilots." Linenbroker was up on the bridge for at most 20 minutes, he said, when the attack ended. The Narwhal escaped damage or injury to the crew. "The pilots were ordered to hit the planes at the air bases and those battleships," he said. "They didn't want to waste any bombs on a submarine." It was days before Linenbroker could get word to his wife. Hawaii was placed under martial law. The afternoon of the attack, Fern said, a man came by and told her and others in the neighborhood not to drink the water because of fear the water supply had been poisoned. Someone else told her the Japanese had landed on the other side of the island, which turned out to be a rumor. Houses were ordered to be kept dark at night. And through it all, she worried if anything had happened to her husband. "I was pretty frightened that first night," she said. "I could hear all these noises, like someone had come into the house and walked around and just left." Residents had been ordered not to horde food. But she went to the grocery store the next day and the shelves already were bare except for things like navy beans and split pea soup. "I was just getting over being frightened and a friend of mine asked if she could come stay with me because she had been evacuated from her home," Fern said. "So I said yes, and she started frightening me all over again, telling me she heard someone in the house." Fern worked for the government's Central Identification Bureau, which she said had been set up a few months before the attack to fingerprint and record a personal history of everyone who came on the island. In the wake of the attack, she was required to work seven days a week. But the job meant she would not be shipped back to the states, like some other military dependents. Four or five days after Dec. 7, Fern finally learned that Rudy was all right, she said. He was able to come home for a short time before the boat set to sea for war, and many long periods of anxious separation for the Linenbroker's and many other young families. "But I don't remember anyone complaining," Fern said. "Everyone just accepted it; I think we were all just so upset about what had happened." She remained in Honolulu until Rudy ultimately was transferred stateside near the war's end. The Narwhal sank two ships on its first war patrol, and on its second patrol participated in the Battle of Midway, a turning point for the U.S. in the war in the Pacific. Rudy also served aboard the submarine USS Halibut during the war, and a total of seven subs during his 22-year career. But he said his most frightening moments came during the beginning of the Cold War. He served aboard the submarine USS Tusk, and was aboard when six of his shipmates and one civilian were swept overboard and lost in rough Arctic seas. The Tusk crew was attempting to rescue the crew of the USS Cochino, which caught fire during one of America's earliest submarine spy operations monitoring the development of the Soviet atomic threat. |
Information provided by Rudy and Fern Linenbroker |
