Ehime Maru-Greeneville Lyrics

Morning in Pearl Harbor

Sky is navy gray

The mighty Greeneville submarine

Already underway

Navy brass, sixteen guests

A hundred six in crew

A pleasure cruise for VIPs

To show what she could do

Three hundred sixty deadly feet

Of silent, stealthy steel

An L.A. class fish of war

A black and slippery eel

Volunteers defending frontiers

In seven thousand tons

Off to sea past Diamond Head

And toward the rising sun

Toward the rising sun

The white Ehime Maru

Gleaming like a jewel

The pride of Uwajima

The ship a fishing school

Like ancestors before them

Into Pacific blue

Thirteen boys, two teachers

And twenty in her crew

A month aboard the trawler

Then sea legs on the shore

Aloha Honolulu

To make repairs once more

Then none too soon, they sail at noon

Her schedule to keep

Then off to sea past Diamond Head

Upon the ocean deep

Upon the ocean deep

The Greeneville tossing, turning

Restless in the deep

Prepares to breach the surface

In one titanic leap

Ehime Maru up above

Eleven knots in stride

Her clock reads thirteen forty-three

As destinies collide

The fish's tail, a mighty sword

Cuts the fishing boat

From midship starboard, aft to port

Slit her oily throat

A Mayday from the Greeneville

Men are swimming for their lives

The sub afloat beside her

The fishing vessel dives

The fishing vessel dives

Nine families from Japan

Peer into the deep

Teardrops swirl with those

Of homesick sailors as they weep

Lives cut short by tragedy

Some had just begun

Cherry blossoms on the waves

Husbands, fathers, sons

As for the Greeneville sailors

Their grief is never gone

Because it's true that every crew

Is husbands, fathers, sons

And in the kinship of the sea

All mariners are one

Subject to the tides of fate

When nothing can be done

Nothing can be done