Wreck of SS Emidio

 Second World War 1939-1945, marine, place with historical importance, shipwreck

Laid down as the commercial tanker Hammac in 1920 for the US Shipping Board at Bethlehem Steel’s San Francisco Shipyard as part of a World War I-era effort to bolster American and Allied Shipping, the Hammac was delivered for service in 1921 and placed under charter carrying petroleum goods of the US Government. Serving in this role for less than a year, the tanker was sold to the General Petroleum Corporation in 1923 and renamed Emidio for service along the US West Coast and Pacific trade routes.

Operating for General Petroleum for the next eighteen years without significant event, the outbreak of the Second World War found Emidio and her crew of 36 engaged in shuttling operations between North Pacific Port and the oilfields of Southern California, a duty which took on greater importance as US Industry and US Armed Forces moved onto a wartime footing. After completing one such voyage to Seattle on December 18th, Emidio and her crew immediately turned back for Los Angeles via San Francisco in ballast and proceeded alone down the coast, her Captain maintaining wartime dark ship requirements and posting extra lookouts. Two days later as the ship was passing Cape Mendocino at 1330hrs an alert lookout sighted what appeared to be a large Submarine roughly a quarter of a mile off the Stern, which was clearly closing on the Emidio and bearing two large Japanese characters on its sail. Emidio’s Captain, Clark Farrow, ordered his ship to flank speed and dumped off her ballast water in an attempt to outrun the Japanese sub but the slow-moving tanker was quickly overhauled.

Realizing that escape was all but impossible, Farrow ordered his radioman to send an SOS and for all crew to abandon ship just as the deck crew aboard Japanese Submarine I-17 opened fire with the sub’s 5.5-inch deck gun. The first round to strike the Emidio carried away her radio mast, followed by a second round which struck and destroyed one of the ship’s lifeboats and blowing three crewmen over the side of the ship to their deaths. As a third shell slammed into the base of Emidio’s hull, a group of 29 crew clambered into one of the ship’s lifeboats and quickly rowed away from the imperiled ship, watching as the I-17 pumped several more rounds into the hapless tanker before suddenly ceasing fire and diving beneath the surface as an American PBY Catalina Flying Boat roared out of the cloud cover and began dropping depth charges.

Though forced from the surface by the circling aircraft I-17’s Captain was keen to deliver a coup de grâce to the abandoned ship, and promptly sent a single torpedo tearing into the Emidio’s engine room. The torpedo easily punched through the tanker’s thin hull and passed directly in front of Oiler B.F. Moler, still at his station and apparently unaware the ship was under attack, before detonating against the opposite bulkhead and killing two other crewmen at their stations in the engine room. Though badly injured by the blast, Moler managed to climb topside and swim clear of the ship, which was left abandoned and sinking by the Stern as her surviving crew set a course for the Blunts Reef Lightship.

Assumed by all parties to have sank during the overnight hours of December 20th, the Emidio remained defiantly afloat and embarked on a 50-mile sojourn to the North arriving off of Crescent City during the night of December 21st and finally running aground on Whalers Island and sinking by the Stern in the shallow water. After confirming the identity of the mystery ship and confirming that her entire surviving compliment had been safely rescued, the Emidio’s hulk was left in her sad state for over a year on Whale Island until she finally broke in two during a winter storm, allowing her bow section to take one final voyage into Crescent City’s harbor where it grounded and capsized.

While the Emidio’s bow section was scrapped in 1950 and portions used for a shoreside memorial, the tanker’s Stern and the two engine room crew still remain at this location on Whaler’s Island, though time and heavy seas have broken up much of the wreckage.

The loss of SS Emidio and her five crew marked the first of many US Merchant Marine casualties of the Japanese West Coast Submarine Campaign.

www.militarymuseum.org/Emedio.html