Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  She pushed north, into the heavily trafficked waters of the Yellow Sea—a shallow inshore lobe of the Pacific, enclosed on three sides by China, Manchuria, and Korea. Prevailing northerly winds swept an Arctic cold front into the region, and men standing watch on the bridge at night wore heavy wool coats, hats, and gloves. They could see their breath in the moonlight; they stamped their feet and clapped their hands; the skin on their faces grew red and raw, and they were relieved frequently by their shipmates.

  Morton had cruised in these waters before the war, and had studied the charts and intelligence reports. He expected to find a wealth of targets on the routes linking Tsingtao and Darien to Nagasaki and Shimonoseki, and he was not wrong. In a five-day romp between March 19 and March 25, the Wahoo sank five cargo ships of more than 2,000 tons. The new torpex warheads packed a terrific wallop: several of the targets were observed to simply disintegrate when hit. Debris was ejected hundreds of feet into the air, and the remaining intact sections of hull usually sank in two minutes or less. Survivors were often seen clinging to wreckage. Since the sea was only a few degrees above freezing, few of the castaways would survive. But Morton was determined not to leave witnesses who could “tell on us.”15 On March 21, after sinking the freighter Nitu Maru off the Shandong peninsula, Morton ordered the Wahoo up to the surface and the deck guns manned. He conned the ship to run over one of the lifeboats, knocking the survivors into the frigid sea. A 20mm gun quickly killed the swimmers. A Wahoo sailor recorded in his diary: “So the Nitu Maru & her entire cargo & crew are now where the rest of the Jap Navy will soon be.”16

  About one-third of all torpedoes fired by the Wahoo in the Yellow Sea failed to function as intended. This was an endemic problem throughout the first two years of the Pacific War—American torpedoes ran off course, or ran under their targets, or bounced off an enemy ship’s hull without exploding, or exploded prematurely, or sank, or circled back toward the submarine that had fired them. At dawn on March 25, partly because of Morton’s frustration with malfunctioning torpedoes, the Wahoo surfaced and took on a small freighter with the submarine’s 4-inch deck guns. Morton enjoyed using his deck guns in this way, and certainly they were much more reliable than the torpedoes: but the weapon was arguably a bit too large to be mounted on a 1,500-ton submarine, and its muzzle blast played havoc with the topside works. One sailor remembered watching as the deck planking was torn away by the concussions. Nonetheless, the gun systematically tore the 2,500-ton freighter to pieces, until it sank from sight. Some of the Wahoo’s crew taunted the surviving Japanese sailors, as they clung to the wreckage of their ship, shouting, “So solly, please!”17

  The Wahoo’s patrol report observed of this encounter: “Anyone who has not witnessed a submarine conduct a battle surface with three 20mm and a 4-inch gun in the morning twilight with a calm sea and in crisp and clear weather, just ain’t lived . . . it was truly spectacular.”18

  Staying on the surface even as the light came up in the east, the Wahoo ran down and destroyed another freighter and several smaller vessels. Speeding away to the south and submerging, the Wahoo tracked a 7,000-ton naval auxiliary and fired three torpedoes at it. One struck near the bow, crippling the ship but not sinking it.19 Morton did not claim a sinking; but postwar analysis showed that this victim had indeed sunk after fleeing to the north.

  The Wahoo’s rampage set off alarm bells in Tokyo. IGHQ assumed that an American wolfpack must be operating in the Yellow Sea. Patrol craft converged on the site of the recent sinkings, and reconnaissance airplanes crisscrossed the sky overhead. For all his bravado, Morton was not a cowboy. O’Kane was a voice of reason, urging prudence in light of the dangers inherent in this patrol. The Yellow Sea was really just a flooded continental shelf, too shallow to accommodate the deep-diving evasive maneuvers that were a submarine’s best defense against depth-charge attacks. Morton referred to the sea as a “wading pond,” and his patrol report noted, “we have to be careful with our angle on dives to keep from plowing into the bottom.”20 Some of the ubiquitous sampans and junks were probably military patrols; several were observed to mount large radar arrays and radio transmitters that one would not expect to find on a fishing boat. Surface-and-destroy was a fine tactic when it worked, and thus far it had worked—but any harmless-looking trawler might have a deck gun concealed under a tarp, and a direct hit by a mid-caliber shell might be enough to destroy a submarine.

  Firing faulty or dud torpedoes often served only to announce a submarine’s presence. On the afternoon of March 25, after Wahoo’s run of sinkings earlier in the day, a Japanese destroyer bore down on the submarine. The angle on the bow was manageable, and the Wahoo might have maneuvered for a good torpedo attack on her adversary. She had two torpedoes left. In Wewak, two months earlier, she had destroyed an enemy destroyer with an audacious “down-the-throat” torpedo shot. In this case, Morton and O’Kane agreed to play it safe. The Wahoo crash-dived to 150 feet, rigging for depth charge. The destroyer passed out of range, apparently unaware of the submarine’s presence. According to the patrol report, the Wahoo “did not dare tackle this fellow with only two torpedoes aboard from late experience would likely be prematures. It hurt our pride to have to hide in our shell and crawl away.”21

  Farther south, the next day, the Wahoo fired a single torpedo at a 4,000-ton freighter laden with coal, probably bound for the steelworks in Kyushu. The fish struck amidships and the ship went up with a mighty thunderclap, launching a mushroom cloud of coal dust that left the air unbreathable for a few minutes. The Wahoo continued working south, stalking the main shipping route to the southern territories, and let her last fish loose at a freighter on March 28. She sank in two minutes.

  With all torpedoes expended, Morton ordered the Wahoo to the surface. She charged back into Sampan Alley, terrorizing small craft with her deck guns. On the morning of March 27, the Wahoo ran down a trawler with a large radio antenna, which Morton suspected was a Japanese military patrol craft. Three deck guns blasted away as the trawler began to founder. The 20mm guns overheated, and their barrels were dunked in barrels of seawater. One crew member noted that the guns were so hot that they boiled off the water in the barrels. A “commando team” of divers went across to the sinking wreck to search it for documents, but found none. They finished her off with a few of the Molotov cocktails contributed by the marines on Midway.

  That night, as the Wahoo withdrew toward Colonet Strait, the crew listened to Radio Tokyo, and were amused to hear the announcer declare that no American submarines would dare approach Japanese waters.

  The Wahoo’s fourth patrol had been another triumph. In nineteen days in the Yellow Sea, often remaining on the surface, she had sunk nine ships, a trawler, and two fishing sampans. She had penetrated into waters that the Japanese had previously thought safe, taking full advantage of the element of surprise. Morton claimed eight ships, and was credited for eight; the postwar reckoning raised the score to nine, which made it the best single cruise of the war as measured by the number of enemy ships destroyed. His rampage through the Yellow Sea confirmed Morton’s status as the “most valuable player” in the Pacific submarine force.

  The Wahoo had run up her fearsome tally despite the malfunctioning of at least six torpedoes, one-quarter of her total. Her failure to sink a fat oil tanker on March 24 was especially galling. Morton had fired four torpedoes at this high-value target, and none had functioned as intended. Two had detonated prematurely; a third was knocked off course by those two untimely neighboring blasts; and the fourth had begun “porpoising”—diving and surfacing in a sine-wave pattern—and gone careening off course. Morton gave Admiral Lockwood an earful about the problem, and Lockwood did not doubt a word of it. By the summer of 1943, he was convinced that the Mark 14 steam torpedo was a lemon, and he was raising a ruckus in Washington about the problem. On June 24, he received Nimitz’s permission to deactivate the magnetic exploder on all torpedoes, pending further investigation. That same week, Lockwood told Admiral King th
at torpedo failures had probably reduced the effectiveness of his Pacific submarine fleet by at least 50 percent through the first eighteen months of the war.

  The trouble was aggravated by the scandalously slow response of the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, which had designed and built the Mark 14. The weapon had not been adequately tested prior to the war, partly owing to a lack of sufficient funds. Certain influential officers and engineers at the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island seemed to take all complaints about the weapon personally, and insisted that any failures must be attributed to mishandling and poor maintenance practices at Pearl Harbor and aboard the submarines themselves. Confronted with such a response, the submariners redoubled their commitment, “babying” the weapons while on patrol, and firing them only in ideal conditions. Many boats began keeping the torpedo tube doors closed until moments before firing, so that the weapons would not be prematurely exposed to saltwater.

  But the failures continued. The causes were numerous, and one cause tended to mask others, which tended to make them more difficult to identify and correct. Many were related to the “magnetic influence” detonator, a device intended to trigger a torpedo’s warhead by detecting a target ship’s magnetic field. This technology, highly advanced in its time, was a product of one of the most secret U.S. weapons programs of the prewar period. It was designed as a countermeasure to the hull “blisters” that were a common feature of most heavy warships. (Blisters were double hulls that bulged out at the waterline, shielding the inner hull against conventional torpedoes fired on the surface.) The idea was that a torpedo would run under the ship and explode directly beneath the keel. Such a blast, directed upward into the unprotected bottom, would do much greater damage to the target. But the magnetic influence trigger often went haywire in combat, resulting in a high percentage of duds and prematures. Eventually it was found that the designers had failed to account for magnetic variability in different regions of the world, and that the technology needed fine-tuning for longitude and latitude.

  It was also found that the Mark 14 tended to run deeper than set, by a margin of about 10 or 11 feet. This problem was relatively easy to correct, but it was not finally identified until June 1942, six months into the war, when more than eight hundred of the weapons had already been fired in combat. Moreover, the problem was not uncovered by the Bureau of Ordnance, despite many complaints—it had fallen to Lockwood himself, then commander of the submarine force in Western Australia, to conduct a series of tests in King George Sound. The tests showed that the weapons were running (on average) 11 feet deeper than their settings. At first the Bureau of Ordnance held that Lockwood’s tests were unauthorized and the results inaccurate. Only two months later, after Admiral King had “lit a blowtorch” under the bureau, did it concede (based on tests conducted in Newport) that the Mark 14 was indeed running deep and that the mechanism had been inadequately tested prior to the war.

  Yet a third problem was masked for over a year by the other defects. The Mark 14’s contact exploder, a conventional alternative to the magnetic influence exploder, had an excessively fragile firing pin that was often crushed on impact, failing to trigger the warhead. This problem was not identified until 1943, when Lockwood ordered the magnetic detonator deactivated on most boats. Soon came reports of torpedoes running directly into the hull of a target ship, striking at the optimal 90-degree angle, and simply bouncing off without detonating. The most notorious episode of the war came on July 24, 1943, when Captain Dan Daspit of the submarine Tinosa attacked a Japanese cargo ship west of Palau. With Daspit watching through the periscope, Tinosa fired eleven consecutive torpedoes at close range in near-perfect conditions. Torpedo after torpedo struck the ship and then sank out of sight. One bounced off the hull, leapt up out of the sea like a fish with a hook in its mouth, and then dove back into the water and vanished, like a fish that had spit out the hook. With one torpedo remaining, Daspit gave up trying to sink the target; he would carry that last weapon back to Pearl Harbor for a close examination.

  Lockwood had done the Bureau of Ordnance’s job a year earlier, with his tests in Australia. Now he repeated the act with a series of tests in Pearl Harbor. The faulty contact exploder was quickly identified, and the problem was easily corrected by reengineering the firing pin using a sturdy aluminum alloy. “This at last broke the back of the torpedo bureaucracy,” said Edward Beach, a submarine officer of the era, “which was now willing to concede that expending a few extra torpedoes in laboratory tests was better than expending them impotently in combat.”22

  In September 1943, the Pacific submarine force was informed that the Mark 14 was finally “fixed,” and aggregate statistics pointed to improving performance in the following months. However, reports of misbehaving torpedoes continued through the end of the war. The most dreaded malfunction was the “circular run,” when a weapon’s rudder jammed and caused it to turn back, fully armed, toward the submarine that had fired it. Several U.S. submarines experienced this horrifying mishap, and escaped narrowly by diving or maneuvering evasively on the surface. Two boats were known to have been destroyed by their own torpedoes, because someone on the crew survived to tell the tale. It stands to reason that others were sunk in the same manner, with the loss of all hands, but posterity can only wonder.

  The next-generation Mark 18 Westinghouse electric torpedo, which left no visible wake of bubbles or exhaust, was being introduced into service just then, in the fall of 1943. The weapon was sent to the NTS in Newport for testing and trials—but the “Newport guys,” as one submariner observed, were largely uncooperative. Having designed and built the Mark 14, the NTS engineers resented the Westinghouse product as a usurper. Goat Island (the island in Newport Harbor that was home to the NTS) was possessed by a “not invented here” syndrome. Officers of the submarine Lapon, supervising trials in Newport, were dismayed by the attitudes they encountered. “Maybe sabotage is too strong a word,” said Eli Reich, the Lapon’s executive officer, “but they weren’t helping one bit.”23 Reich told Lockwood’s deputy in Pearl Harbor: “I don’t think these people are war-minded.”24

  WAHOO RETURNED FROM HER FIFTH PATROL, which had taken her up into the icy northern latitudes of Japan’s Kurile Islands, on May 21, 1943. She had sunk three ships, a good score given the nature of her mission—but Morton told Lockwood that he could have sunk six, and would have done so had the torpedoes behaved properly. The Wahoo was overdue for a major overhaul, so she was ordered back to Mare Island, California, the place where she had been born eighteen months earlier. Dick O’Kane was promoted to command his own boat, a Balao-class submarine to be called the Tang. She was under construction, also at Mare Island, just a short stroll down the riverfront from the Wahoo’s berth. The Tang would be launched in August 1943; O’Kane and a skeleton crew would oversee the final stages of her building and fitting out. Meanwhile, the Wahoo was considerably rebuilt, to the extent that her profile was dramatically different when she left for Pearl Harbor in July 1943. Morton had taken on several new officers and a largely new crew aboard the new Wahoo. As she maneuvered into the Napa River on July 21, the skipper bid his friend and long-standing executive officer good-bye. It was the last time they would meet.

  Morton wanted to take the Wahoo into the Sea of Japan, the nearly landlocked body of water separating Japan from the Asian mainland. Lockwood granted his star skipper’s request. This represented, in a sense, the “last mile” of the undersea campaign; it was the only major area that had not yet been penetrated by U.S. submarines. It was full of ships plying the waters between Japan and its Asian territories. Because it was so self-contained, the Japanese had not previously taken any special antisubmarine measures in it. If the Yellow Sea had been “virgin territory,” the Sea of Japan was almost as inviolate as the sacred soil of Japan itself.

  There were only three viable routes into and out of the Sea of Japan: the straits of Tsushima, between Kyushu and Korea; Tsugaru Strait, between Honshu and Hokkaido; and La Perouse (or So
ya) Strait, between Hokkaido and Sakhalin. All were potentially deadly chokepoints. All had been mined; all were guarded by coastal artillery; and all were heavily patrolled by antisubmarine patrol boats and airplanes. Getting in would be dangerous, but getting out would be even more so—because once the Japanese were tipped off to the presence of enemy submarines in the Sea of Japan, they would redouble antisubmarine measures at the exits. After studying the problem, Lockwood and Morton agreed that La Perouse Strait was the best option, both for entry and escape.

  The Wahoo ran the La Perouse Strait on August 14, 1943. She went in on the surface, on a dark night, at about eighteen knots. She was tracked on radar, and a lighthouse flashed recognition signals, which she could not answer because she did not know the applicable codes. But she was through before the Japanese could react, and vanished like a ghost into the Sea of Japan.

  As expected, the sea was swarming with high-value shipping, and Morton looked forward to another rampage. But her torpedoes failed her. In the week between August 15 and August 22, the Wahoo stalked and attacked a dozen freighters, but she was plagued by duds, deep runners, prematures, and fish that ran off course and disappeared. Morton decided to hurry back to Pearl Harbor and demand attention to the problem. In his patrol report for this brief, abortive cruise, Morton quoted the famous old naval slogan, first coined by Admiral David Farragut during the Civil War, but with an ironic twist: “Damn the torpedoes.”