"Fearless Freddie" Warder

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You could redeem some serious prizes. ChumbaCasino.com. Live the Chumba life. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show. From the arts to sports. And from business to history. And everything in between. Including your stories.

Send them to OurAmericanStories.com for some of our favorites. This next story is a war story. America, well it's made up of great men and women.

And we are as good as the people in our country. And America won the Second World War because of men like fearless Freddie Warder. Whose story we're about to hear.

Here's Greg Hengler. There are many incredible stories of courageous men, incredible battles and heroes during World War II. Rear Admiral Fred Warder, a submarine skipper whose exploits in World War II won him a Navy Cross and a nickname he detested was average sized, possessed firm lips, a determined chin with piercing blue eyes under narrowed lids and a smooth face. Warder graduated from the U.S.

Naval Academy at Annapolis, class of 1925, received his Masters in Marine Engineering at University Cal Berkeley in 1934, was married and the father of four children. Having narrowly avoided the attack on Pearl Harbor, Rear Admiral Warder took charge of the USS Seawolf and set out for the seas of the Pacific to wreak havoc on Japanese shipping and quickly became known as the Artist of Submarining. Warder fought his enemy hard, but he also respected and loved him.

Let's begin our deep dive into this story with submarine warfare guru, John Gorham. I attend a church here in Baltimore, Grace Bible Baptist Church, and one of our church members mentioned that she had an uncle named Freddie Warder. And I said, I said, did you say Freddie Warder? And she said, yes. I said, you mean like U.S. submarine captain Freddie Warder?

And she says, yes. How did you know? Nobody knows that. I said, oh, no. To the contrary, he's the ultimate submarine warrior from World War II.

He's just it. Most people don't know this, but the vast majority of tonnage that was sunk during World War II, enemy Japanese tonnage, was done by the submarine fleet, what's known as the silent service. These men paid the ultimate price, but something like 55 percent of all surface supply shipping to the Japanese, both war shipping and merchant marine, were sunk specifically by submarines.

So these guys, to me, are the heroes. They were very small, efficient crew that punched way beyond their weight. Fred Warder really did punch way beyond his weight, even at family gatherings. Here's Fearless Freddie's cousin, Anne Warder Lynn. I just know that if there was going to be a brawl, Fred was going to punch out the biggest man in the room and he was going to hit him good the first time so he didn't have to go back. Fred wasn't that big, you know, and his brother Frank was big and he had broad shoulders and he was, you know, it looked to me like he was at least a foot or maybe more taller than Fred. And Frank was an FBI agent and Fred just knocked him out.

He got that first punch and that was it. And Fred was gone and Frank was down and out. And my mother said to my father, John, why do your relatives always have to pass out in our room?

And my father said, pass out nothing. That's a KO from Fred. It was. He knocked him out. So it seemed to me that Fred fought with men the way he fought the war.

You know, he was the little guy that had to get the big guy and he had to get him with one punch knockout. Here's another one of Fred's cousins, Hugh Fordyce. Freddie was the oldest of my uncle Hugh's family. They had eight children and he was the oldest. And Freddie was valedictorian of his high school graduating class. I remember him as always having a big smile, always he had a quick wit about him.

His mother was Irish, you know, and he would make jokes about Catholics and even though he was Catholic himself. No one in our family ever called Uncle Fred fearless or Freddie. He was known as the Admiral, Uncle Fred, Fred. And when my grandmother was feeling particularly stern, Frederick, especially when he was teasing her about drinking or about being Catholic or something. Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

Hugh's former aide of Rear Admiral Fred Warder, Don Ulmer. Well, the instructions that came out from the commander of the Pacific Fleet was first off it was the announcement that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and the only instructions they gave was conduct yourself accordingly. And then shortly after a message came out saying, engage a tank and sink, all enemy shipping encountered. And that was it, very simple back in those days. The United States had already tried to stop the Japanese from colonizing and invading the mainland of China and Korea, a lot of misbehavior by the Japanese Empire in these areas that they quote unquote colonized. They basically invaded them and abused the the citizens of the nations of Korea and China. And you've been listening to the story of fearless Freddie Warder, and it's just underappreciated the role that the submarine played in World War Two and beyond, and the risks these guys, mostly guys took. It was all volunteer, always was and is, because it is unique duty, submarine duty, and it's dangerous.

And while only certain types need apply, if you're claustrophobic, it is not a job for you. When we come back, more of the life of fearless Freddie Warder. And we already love the guy, don't we? But wait till you hear the rest of this story here on Our American Stories. Here at Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith and love, stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told.

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Give a little, give a lot. Help us keep the great American stories coming. That's OurAmericanStories.com Leftovers. Or The DMV. Or House cleaning. Or Chumba Casino always brings the fun. Play over 100 different games online for free from anywhere.

You could redeem some serious prizes. ChumbaCasino.com. Live the Chumba life. And we continue with Our American Stories and the remarkable story of fearless Freddie Warder. Let's return to the story and to Greg Hengler. Here's Stephen Trent Smith, author of Wolfpack, the American submarine strategy that helped defeat Japan. In the late 1920s, Fred went to the submarine school in New London, Connecticut. And after that, he was junior officer on a number of U.S. Navy submarines.

And in 1939, he was the commanding officer at the commissioning of the USS Seawolf and remained commanding officer of the boat until 1943. The war clouds started gathering around 1940, and his submarine was sent to the Pacific and eventually to the Philippines, along with a number of other U.S. submarines. His submarine was at the Cavite Naval Yard in Manila Bay in the Philippines on December 8, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the Philippines. They destroyed a couple of submarines not too far away from him.

He got her underway and left Manila Bay and was sent on patrol in the northern Philippines off the coast of Luzon, the east coast of Luzon near a town called Apare. He saw a destroyer outside Apare, the harbor there, and he went to attack it. But then he stumbled on a seaplane tender that was in the harbor, and he decided to attack that. And he made a really good approach.

He had everything all set up. He fired four torpedoes from his forward tubes, and none of them exploded. So he turned tail because the destroyer was going to come after him, but they set up four stern tubes to fire at the seaplane tender, and they fired those, and none of those exploded. And the only thing that exploded that day was Fred Warder, who was furious about the bad torpedoes. And that became a scandal during World War II, that for the first couple of years of the war, the torpedoes did not work reliably.

And he was just fit to be tied about that. Here is Rear Admiral Fred Warder. If we'd had torpedoes, we could have made a damn fine effort, but we did not have the good torpedoes.

Here again is former aide of Rear Admiral Fred Warder, Don Ulmer. So Admiral Warder knew that the torpedoes were not working well. So he actually went into a place called Devel Golf, and there was a ship that was anchored there. But he was firing torpedoes at this ship. So one of the torpedoes went under the ship, went up on the beach, and exploded. So that was one, you see. It's not my fault it's a torpedo's fault. And then he fired two more, and it was against the side of the ship, and they didn't explode.

So that kind of confirmed that. And then another one he fired, and it was an erratic run called a circular run. The rudder's going to lock over in one position.

It makes a circular run, and the circular run would bring it right back to about where the machinery compartment is. It would blow the ship up. We did lose a couple of submarines, by the way, but not to Seawolf.

When Warder anticipated this, and he had sooner people listening, he knew it was a circular run. He went down so the torpedo passed overhead, and came back up again, and he fired a couple more torpedoes, and he finished the ship off. Here again is submarine warfare guru John Gorham. What they did was, the Japanese preset, if you've seen in the movies, they look like 55-gallon drums being rolled off the back of the tail of a Corvette or a Destroyer, and they were just basically loaded up with TNT. They would drop to a certain predetermined level, and the sensor that was used was a depth sensor based on water pressure, and then they would just blow up. If your submarine vessel was nearby when one of those blew up, the shock was such that it could break open the hull or weaken it or wrinkle the skin and do all kinds of damage.

The vast majority of anyone's submarines that were lost during the war were lost to depth charges. He talked to me one time about depth charge evasion, and the way he put it to me is that, well, you've got to understand that what this Japanese destroyer, the enemy destroyer, is doing is he's making a noise and he's listening for the echo. Well, the more aspect that you show that ship, the stronger the echo, so basically what he would always do is to turn and point directly toward the ship, and that gave him the most narrow aspect. And even though it meant that he was going right toward this guy that was trying to get him, the echoes were just coming back strong. They would come back weak, which would indicate that the submarine was much further away. So the guy would go overhead, and he'd go racing out there and bang, bang, bang.

The charges would go off, and that was the time that he would make his course change or maneuver in order to put distance between him and that destroyer. The strategy the United States Navy had with our submarine service was to go after the merchant marine because they were easy targets. They were soft targets. We could sink them.

They couldn't fight back. It allowed our American submarine fleet to last a little longer. It's a little more dangerous when you go after a Japanese warship because they can fight back. And the most deadly warships were corvettes and destroyers because the destroyers are very shallow draft vessels. If you attempt to fire at a torpedo, well, at least at a corvette. A corvette's even smaller than a destroyer. Corvettes are so shallow that torpedoes go underneath.

And you have to be a very good shot to take out a destroyer with a torpedo. The vast majority of American submarine commanders wouldn't tangle with the destroyer, but that's not the case with Friday order. Submarine commanders were a breed apart.

A lot of them had a strong streak of independence. They didn't like being pushed around by admirals or captains. And the submarine service gave them that kind of freedom because when a submarine left port, they had virtually no contact with the admirals and the captains. It was all up to the submarine commander.

They didn't have anybody breathing down their necks. Everybody was required to go on seven patrols. And generally the custom was for a captain not to press his luck. Just like in Vietnam, when a guy was down to his last month, he didn't go out on any scary patrols. You don't want to risk a guy's life. If he's made it through a whole year in Nam, you don't want to push your luck at the last minute.

But Warder is Warder and he's determined to make this very last of his patrols count. He was on his way back from the Palau Islands and he discovered another anchorage or an area where there was a tremendous amount of activity. He sailed in a torpedo and he was able to sink a 3,000 ton ship. Then he sank a transport.

This is very valuable because not only is it tonnage, but it's Japanese fighting troops, men that will never make it to shore and threaten American lives. A 7,000 ton transport. That was a tremendous prize that he got. Then again, he was able to torpedo again on his way coming home. He was able to torpedo another ship to the tune of 3,000 tons. So that means he sank 13,000 tons in one patrol. That's more than the majority of sub captains ever sank in their entire career of seven patrols in the South Pacific. How Freddie Warder got that name, Fearless Freddie? He was the last boat out on patrol, leaving the Java Sea area, very low on fuel, very low on food provisions.

The men were smoking coffee grounds rolled in toilet paper because they'd been out of cigarettes for a while. They're low on torpedoes. But Freddie Warder wasn't about to go back to his base with unspent torpedoes. Ridiculous.

He'd never do that. He found out that the Japanese had invaded the Christmas Islands about 200 miles south of Java. And he took his boat down in that way.

He decided he just patrol the area, cruise around, see what's going on as he approached Flying Fish Cove. That's the one where the Japanese had their anchorage. It was an absolute submariners dream. Four cruisers lined up in a row, lined up in a row. And when we come back, we're going to hear the rest of this remarkable story. 13,000 tons in one patrol. The artist of submarining, the ultimate submarine warrior.

And we're talking about Fearless Freddie Warder. Again, this is our American stories, always telling the stories of our fighting men and women. More after these messages. Or Chumba Casino always brings the fun. Play over 100 different games online for free from anywhere. You could redeem some serious prizes. Chumba casino dot com.

Live the Chumba life. And we continue here with our American stories, and let's return to Greg Hangler and his story about Rear Admiral Fearless Freddie Warder. Here again is submarine warfare guru John Gorham. He found out that the Japanese had invaded the Christmas Islands about 200 miles south of Java, and he took his boat down in that way.

He decided he just patrol the area, cruise around, see what's going on as he approached Flying Fish Cove. It was an absolute submariners dream. Four cruisers lined up in a row, lined up in a row. He got in close and destroyers recognized him right away. He heard the pinging, but he fired off four torpedoes at a cruiser that was about 1000 yards away.

And that's about as close as a submariner will ever want to get to his target. So he fired these four torpedoes as soon as he was convinced that he had sunk that ship. He dove low and his logbook reports that the Japanese were very effective in placing their depth charges. So he stayed low and he waited overnight the next day and he slipped out of the cove. The next day he slipped back in and the Japanese, of course, were alerted to him. They were on patrol, but he was able to maneuver in again and nail a second cruiser. And again, he was depth charged, fled the area, waited until later on that afternoon.

He came back in and he struck a cruiser a third time. Captain Water comes in the very next day again because he wants to finish off this juicy collection. He's down to just two torpedoes left.

They're on attack mode now because they're just absolutely patrolling the area. The water is boiling with ships going back and forth looking for him. He slips in because he's determined to use up his last torpedoes. There's one more cruiser left. It's flying dependent of the admiral of the squadron.

He says, I'm going to take this guy out. So he fires his last two torpedoes at the cruiser and he hits them. But in the meantime, the destroyers got perilously close to him. He dove down deep and he endured nine hours of depth charge from multiple patrol boats. Corvettes, destroyers. Unbelievable. That may be the record for the United States Navy for this submarine fleet.

Enduring nine hours of well-placed depth charging. And he says in his log book, he says, my men were really at the end of their rope. And he realized he had to go and there's no point in staying around. He had no more torpedoes.

He's already taken out all four of the capital ships that were anchored at Flying Fish Cove. And he returned home in victory. And on the way, the men said, I'm going to call you Fearless Freddy from now on after what we saw you do. Here again is former aide of Rear Admiral Fred Warder, Don Ulmer. He later came back as what they call a division commander or a wolf pack commander. And that was after he was relieved by Lieutenant Commander Royce Gross. He went into Christmas Island because they knew the Japanese were going to come there in order to take advantage of the potassium. At the time, there were nothing but Aboriginal people that were there. And to give you some feel for Admiral Warder, he got there before the Japanese did. And there were facilities there, docking, that sort of thing.

And someone suggested that, well, maybe it's a good idea if we go in there and blow all that up. Well, now, you've got to understand these. This is a war going on. And these are just Aboriginal people.

You would think that, you know, who really cares about them? Warder did. And he said, no. He said, we're not going to go in there and blow anything up.

He says, because these people need this to make a living there and we don't want to hurt them. I guess later on, I learned from the person who succeeded him in command of the Sea Wolf, Royce Gross, that he sent a Japanese merchant ship not far from that place. It went down. There were two survivors in the water. And Warder wanted to bring them on board. And one of them blew himself up with a hand grenade. And the other was he just refused to come because the Japanese culture at the time, you didn't surrender.

You died for the emperor. And then Warder figured he needed something. So he actually tossed him a life jacket and a fifth of bourbon, the Japanese acknowledged with a nod. But from what Warder could tell that he was, you know, carried out to sea and ultimately was lost. Here again is Stephen Trent Smith, author of Wolf Pack, the American submarine strategy that helped defeat Japan. When he was patrolling down in the Java Sea area, he sunk a Japanese ship and he surfaced and discovered a lot of Japanese just floating in the water without life jackets. So he had the crew, his crew, throw as many life jackets as they could to help the surviving sailors. He saw them as an enemy.

I mean, the Japanese is truly an enemy because of what they had done, particularly Pearl Harbor. But he believed that your enemy is also your brother. To be a successful captain, you have to have a crew that will obey you. And you have to have a crew that respects you enough to risk their lives because he isn't called Fearless Freddy for nothing. He would take risks that almost no other submarine captain did. Well, some of them took risks and they just didn't live to tell about it, which is understandable.

That's why they call it a risk. But Freddy absolutely earned that title being called Fearless. He absolutely was fearless. And his men would go to the gates of hell and back for him. He had their utmost respect.

Here again is Fearless Freddy's cousin, Anne Warder Lynn. He really did believe in a hard war and an easy peace. He wanted the war to be fought hard and fast and be over with so that humanity could get back to being humanity. Because I never really heard him say an ugly thing about anyone.

I never heard anyone say he said an ugly thing about another person. If you were with him, you just felt like you were the only person on earth. He really made people feel his warmth. I mean, you just really wanted him to be proud of you.

You were proud to be with him and you wanted him to be proud of you. And he's one of my fondest childhood memories, actually. He went on to earn two Navy Crosses. Of course, he got a Legion of Merit.

He got two of those, a Navy Commendation Medal, a Navy Achievement Medal, and then the usual ones, the Victory Medal, the Philippine Service Medal, and the Asiatic Pacific Medal. From what I've read in his obituary and been told by my father, Uncle Fred really didn't like the name Fearless Freddy because he was just as afraid as anybody else on the submarine and his crew. And his crew were his heroes, whom he fondly referred to as his beloved sons of you-know-what. And he felt and said that the real heroes in war are those that give their lives. Here again is Rear Admiral Fred Warder. How'd you get the name Fearless? Well, I don't like it. One, I'm scared to death. Really?

I mean, I should drop it, but I'm scared. Fred Warder became Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Undersea Warfare in 1955. He commanded the Submarine Force Atlantic Fleet in 1957 and retired in 1962, after two years as Commandant of the 8th Naval District in New Orleans. He retired in 1962 and died at his home on February 1, 2000.

He was 95 years old. I'm Greg Hengler, and this is Our American Stories. And great job as always to Greg Hengler, and special thanks to Dang Lin Productions for allowing us access to their one-of-a-kind interviews from their documentary, Fearless Freddy. Check out the trailer and the film at FearlessFreddyMovie.com.

That's FearlessFreddyMovie.com. And what a story we heard indeed. This Annapolis grad class of 1925 married father of four and a leader, and in the end, a soldier underground. He rose above his fear and led anyway. And that's why he was the man he was, the artist of submarine and the ultimate submarine warrior. Freddy Water, Fearless Freddy Water.

His story here on Our American Stories. Are you feeling lucky? No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details.