I'm trying to follow up a story my late father-in-law told me. He was Indonesian (Javanese), conscripted by the occupying Japanese and at one point assigned to crew a rice cargo boat. In the Bali Strait (ie strait between Java and Bali) he and fellow crew members spotted an American submarine approaching them. The submarine was submerging but just enough of it was out of the water that it collided with their boat, cutting it in half and sinking it. My father-in-law clung to some wreckage and eventually washed ashore on the Java side of the strait. He thought the rest of the crew drowned.
What I would like to do is identify which submarine this was and what it was doing. The US Navy have helpfully allowed war patrol logs to be published online (
https://maritime.org/doc/subreports.php), I guess more succinct than the real ship logs but perhaps easier to publish without worrying about classification. That shows that many US submarines operated first out of Brisbane, on the east coast, and then from Fremantle and Exmouth on the west coast of Australia, heading north to do mischief among Japanese shipping, as well as miscellaneous other tasks like landing commandoes and evacuations. They would have had to pass through the various straits through Indonesia - ie Lombok Strait (between Bali and Lombok), Sunda Strait (Java and Sumatra) or further east past Timor or Papua. You can go via the Bali Strait, however that wouldn’t be preferred for submarines because it’s quite shallow. I’ve taken the ferry across that strait a couple of times, the water does not look deep at all, I rather fancy if a submarine had been in the vicinity at the time I may well have spotted it. So not ideal submarine passage waters - but certainly possible if you had some good reason to go that way.
My father-in-law said the submarine was American, however I do wonder how well he could identify it under the circumstances. There was a small number of Dutch and Australian submarines also operating in a similar way to the American submarines. Unfortunately I can no longer ask him.
Does anyone have any suggestions at all for how I could make more progress on this? I know it’s not an easy case :-), but any clue no matter how small would be appreciated!
