OUR SUBMARINE HISTORY


Mystic man had quite a 'war story' to tell,
but few people ever heard it
By Robert A. Hamilton - The Day, Staff Writer
Featured in the Military section of the NEW LONDON DAY ONLINE   20 February 2001


Before he died late last year, Rudolph W. Velle of Mystic, Connecticut would tell you that he was a motor machinist mate first-class on the diesel-electric submarine USS GUNNEL SS-253, during World War II.

He would never tell you that his most heroic acts came not on the submarine, but after he was knocked overboard during a gun battle with Japanese warships.

After swimming 14 miles to shore, Velle hooked up with a band of guerrillas in the Japanese-occupied Philippines, took part in harassment raids over several weeks, and helped round up downed Allied airmen. They were eventually recovered by another submarine, the USS HAKE.

Retired Air Force Master Sgt. Dennis "Casey" Jones of Phoenix, Ariz., one of the rescued airmen, recalled that as they were going aboard the HAKE he heard a commotion, and it looked as if the submariners were beating Velle. In fact, crewmen aboard the HAKE knew Velle and had heard he had been lost at sea. They were so delighted to see him that they gathered around him, cheering and pounding him on the back.

It was a tale Velle would rarely discuss once he returned home from the war, even with those who were on the GUNNEL at the time.

"You had to pull details out of him," said Bill Stamper of Arkansas, who was a torpedoman on the GUNNEL. "Even as late as the middle-1980s, when we were talking about that patrol during a submarine veterans convention, he just wouldn't talk about it."

"It was the kind of stuff you might read about in a novel, and I was always pushing him to tell his story so he could be recognized for it, but he was a very modest man and didn't want the story told," said Lawrence Crowley of Meriden, who was a Chief Electrician's Mate on the GUNNEL. "But I think it's right that his children and grandchildren hear this story, know what their father and grandfather did."

Crystal L. Park, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, said there are a variety of reasons veterans like Velle choose not to talk about their experiences.

"Some people don't talk about those things because they are too terrible to talk about --- it's a way of numbing out or distancing yourself from it, to just not talk about it," Park said. "A lot of men just don't want to be singled out because they're too humble."

In some instances, it might be a phenomenon known as survivor guilt, a sense of unease that one survived the war when so many others did not, particularly when losses were as high as they were in the submarine force.

"And since we haven't had that kind of experience as a nation for quite some time, some of these men might have a sense that we're just not going to understand what they went through," said Park. "It's hard to know what it might have been, having never talked to this man."

Retired Navy Capt. Gerald Coffee of Hawaii, who was held prisoner in Vietnam for seven years, later wrote the inspirational book, "Beyond Survival: Reaffirming the Invincibility of the Human Spirit," and established himself as an expert commentator on political and social issues.

He said that when he first returned home, he could not bring himself to talk about his experience.

"I didn't know how it would be received," Coffee said. "Then I realized that if I didn't do it, I would be missing an opportunity to talk about the indomitability of the human spirit, a way to bring purpose to what I went through."

Stamper said Velle reported to the submarine R-4 about the same time as he did and that they went through submarine school together. Velle told him he had gone into the Navy before the war and initially served on a submarine hunter, a boat built for World War I that "had a bad habit of turning over once in a while."

Stamper was born in Wisconsin and spoke only German until he started grade school. Velle told him he came to the United States when he was about 6, and he used to joke that Stamper spoke "low German" while he, Velle, spoke "high German," but that was as much as Stamper recalled Velle talking about himself.

"He was strong, really physically strong," Stamper said. "And an expert with any kind of machinery. He could make anything with a lathe."

Velle and Stamper reported to the GUNNEL before it was commissioned, when it was still under the command of Lt. Cmdr. John McCain. In 1944, Lt. Cmdr. Guy O'Neil took command of the GUNNEL and headed into the Philippines for his first, and the GUNNEL's sixth, war patrol.

On the afternoon of Aug. 18, the submarine's crew sighted the masts of what turned out to be six cargo ships about 10,000 yards away. Moving in for the kill, they opened fire with 4-inch and 20mm guns, but a series of errors nearly sealed Velle's fate.

The cargo ships turned out to have heavy guns under tarpaulins that were quickly removed. The GUNNEL's deck guns jammed. O'Neil ordered the decks cleared, and as one of the gun crewmen jumped down the hatch, he accidentally hit the diving alarm.

"All of a sudden I had water coming up over my feet, and you can't stop it at that point," said O'Neil, who now lives in California. O'Neil hustled everyone below as quickly as he could. It wasn't until the hatch was closed and the ship was 50 feet under the surface that someone told him Velle had been knocked overboard by the recoil of one of the deck guns.

Trying to surface, O'Neil found a torpedo boat on the surface waiting for them, and realized that if he tried to recover Velle, he would lose the whole crew. They couldn't go up until 7 p.m. By then, there was no sign of Velle.

It was a mile to the nearest land, but Velle didn't head that way. Instead, he later told O'Neil, he had picked out the peak on Marinduke Island, which towered over the ocean and could be seen even at night, and set out for it. He was concerned that if he headed for an island with a lower profile, he might lose sight of it.

"It was the smartest thing he could have done, but it put him in the opposite direction from where we focused the search," O'Neil said. Though Velle was wearing a life jacket, just kicking that distance was an enormous physical feat, he said.

"I blamed myself, but things like that happen in war," O'Neil said. "I've stewed over that event a lot over the years."

Crowley said after Velle made his way to shore, he encountered a band of Philippine guerillas who were suspicious of his German accent and suspected him of being a spy. They wanted to execute him on the spot, until he showed them his tattoos, which were in English and celebrated the U.S. Navy.

Velle joined the guerillas on take-no-prisoners raids against the Japanese. They moved from island to island, picking up aviators as they went, and eventually came across someone with a radio who could get through to Fremantle, Australia, and organize the pickup.

On that same patrol, O'Neil picked up 10 downed aviators off the island of Panay; he found out later that Velle tried to make that rendezvous, but the guerillas couldn't get him there in time. O'Neil also was ordered to pick up aviators on Palwan, but they never showed up; Velle was in that group, which was later picked up by the HAKE.

Jones said that, for aviators, it was quite an adjustment to bunk on a submarine.

"He was the greatest asset that we had once we got aboard," Jones said. "He knew everything about a submarine and taught us everything from how to use the sanitary to when meals were served. We didn't know how to make coffee or where to sleep, but he set us right up."

The extra 11 people on the already crowded submarine made for tight conditions until they could get back to Australia, where the airmen went into the hospital and he lost track of Velle. Velle returned to the states to put the USS CUBERA in commission.

Crowley was sitting in a barracks building after that patrol, when Velle, with orders to the USS CUBERA, walked in.

"He just walked right in, and what a sight," Crowley said. "We had heard rumors that he was alive, and they were very strong, but frankly it just wasn't very believable. A lot of us figured he was dead."

After the war, Velle left the service for about 10 years, when he worked at Electric Boat. He got special permission to re-join the Navy, and would eventually be promoted to senior chief petty officer and chief of the boat on a nuclear submarine.

Stamper said that years after the war, the children of one crewman decided to put together a few tales of the GUNNEL's patrols, and three or four crewmen contributed anecdotes.

"Rudy just flat refused," Stamper said. "He said, 'I don't want a bunch of people coming around here with cameras and recorders.'

"I don't know if he ever even got a medal or not," Stamper said. "There were so many things done by ordinary people that were heroic, and very few of them were recognized." 

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