On August 28, having already received clearance from Lockwood to return to base, the Wahoo surfaced and fired shots across the bow of a Japanese sampan. When it did not stop, the Wahoo’s guns blasted it to pieces. Six Japanese fishermen surrendered and were taken aboard as prisoners of war. They were given clean, dry clothes and a shot of brandy, which they seemed to relish. They were confined to the after-torpedo room, where they slept on mats on the deck. Relations between the Wahoo’s crew and the prisoners were cordial, even friendly. The prisoners did their own mess cooking and willingly pitched in with routine cleaning jobs.25
At Pearl Harbor, the Wahoo made a quick turnaround. Morton wanted to make a beeline return to the Sea of Japan, and Lockwood agreed. Another submarine, the Sawfish, would sail in company. The Wahoo took on a load of the new Mark 18 torpedoes and the two submarines put to sea on September 10.
In a recorded debriefing session at SubPac headquarters that morning, Morton had given a long, chatty interview. In the transcript, his characteristic cheerfulness and irreverence jump off the page. At 11:50 a.m. he broke off the interview, explaining that his ship was due to “shove off” at 1:00 p.m. Morton promised to sit down again at the end of his next patrol—“and when he returns,” the interviewer says at the end of the transcript, “we will have more of the story of the adventures of the Wahoo.”26
But Mush Morton never returned to Pearl Harbor, and the rest of the story of the Wahoo will never be told. Her seventh cruise was to be her last. She remains, as submariners say, “on eternal patrol.”
Events of the Wahoo’s last patrol can be partly reconstructed from Japanese sources and educated guesswork. She left Pearl that afternoon, with the Sawfish in company. Two days later, she put into Midway Atoll and topped off her fuel. A seven-day run brought her back to La Perouse Strait. The Wahoo ran it again, at night, probably on the surface; the Sawfish followed two nights later. Morton had said that he intended to prey upon shipping in the southern basin of the Sea of Japan, around the western approaches to Shimonoseki Strait, the main western gateway to Japan’s Inland Sea. On October 5, Japan’s Domei News Service in Tokyo reported that a “steamer” had been sunk that day by an American submarine, with the loss of 544 lives. The Wahoo was the only submarine in those waters. The Domei report did not identify the ship, or whether the dead were civilians or military personnel. Postwar records revealed that it was the Konron Maru, an 8,000-ton passenger ship that had been taken into the army as a troop transport. Her loss prompted the Japanese to cancel night ferry service between Japan and Korea.
Postwar analysis concluded that the Wahoo destroyed three more enemy ships of at least 1,000 tons in the week that followed. They went down in locations that could only have been reached by the Wahoo on the given dates.
The Sawfish exited through La Perouse Strait on October 9, two days ahead of the Wahoo’s scheduled passage. Her captain noted that Japanese antisubmarine measures had been intensified considerably; the Sawfish was chased and hunted by several patrol boats and an aircraft. Diving to 200 feet, she was kept down for several hours by echo ranging. Several bombs and depth charges were dropped, but none was close. She transited the strait while submerged and was safely through by the following morning.
The Wahoo, following two nights later, was fired upon by a coastal artillery battery on northern Hokkaido. She may have been damaged by a near-miss. She crash-dived, but could not dive quickly enough to evade a circling floatplane of the Ominato air fleet, which dropped three depth charges on her location. Patrol boats, probably the same ones that had gone after the Sawfish, surged into the strait and scattered depth charges through the area. No Japanese craft obtained a sonar fix on the Wahoo, but they remained in the area for four hours. That part of La Perouse Strait was too shallow to allow for a deep dive. An enormous oil slick, 3 miles long, marked the Wahoo’s final descent to the sea floor, just 213 feet below the surface. Her wreck was located and identified in 2008.
The Americans knew nothing of the circumstances of Wahoo’s demise until after the war. She might have been depth-charged to oblivion in La Perouse Strait, but she could just as well have been done in by an accident, a mine, or a faulty torpedo. On November 9, 1943, SubPac headquarters declared her “overdue, presumed lost.” The news sent a ripple of grief through the submarine force. Morton was the most revered submarine captain in the fleet, and his colleagues had been urged to study and adopt his bold methods. Should they now interpret the loss of the Wahoo as a warning sign that he had been reckless? The possibility was unsettling, but it could not be dismissed. Then again, they all knew that submarine warfare was a perilous business, and that any boat might be lost at any time, regardless of tactics. For the moment, Lockwood put a stop to all penetrations into the Sea of Japan, and that line of attack would not be renewed until late in the war.
When statistics were compiled and revised by postwar analysis, Morton and the Wahoo stood near the top of the submarine force’s “league tables.” His wartime record was given as seventeen enemy ships sunk; postwar accounting raised the figure to twenty, and more recent evaluations have concluded that the figure may have been as high as twenty-four. Despite having been killed at the war’s midpoint, and having been handicapped by faulty torpedoes (a problem much alleviated after his death), Morton was tied for second place in the rankings by number of ships sunk, and again tied for second place in the rankings of the best single war patrol. Perhaps it was a further tribute to Morton’s leadership that his erstwhile executive officer, Dick O’Kane, eventually surpassed him in both categories.
THE FALL OF 1943 SAW A SHIFT in American thinking about submarine deployments. Previously, Lockwood and the submarine admirals in Australia had kept many fleet boats patrolling the sea approaches to Truk Atoll, in the Caroline Islands, which served as the Japanese navy’s largest overseas fleet anchorage. They provided valuable sighting reports and warnings of major naval movements, and had seized opportunities to attack enemy warships as they entered or exited the atoll. Submarines had also been positioned in the Solomon Islands and the South Pacific in support of Halsey and MacArthur’s offensives in the region. As always, subs were also sent yon and hither on various special missions, such as reconnaissance, aviator lifeguarding, and smuggling agents and intelligence into and out of the Philippines. Between October and December 1943, more boats were sent to attack Japan’s interior sea routes in the western Pacific, including the waters pioneered by the Wahoo: the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea. By that time, American submarines were routinely destroying more than 100,000 tons of Japanese shipping each month.
Admiral Ralph Christie’s Western Australia command, based in Fremantle, devoted nearly its entire strength to hunting and sinking Japanese oil tankers plying the waters between Borneo and Truk. Many tankers on this route were double-hulled, which made them tough to sink; but they were slower than warships, which made them easier to hit. The new torpex warheads packed a heavy punch, and the tankers were often filled with relatively volatile unprocessed crude oil, which made them vulnerable to devastating secondary explosions and fires. In the last quarter of 1943, boats operating out of Fremantle sent a dozen tankers to the bottom, enough to disrupt the supply line and arouse serious fears in Tokyo that the fleet would be immobilized for lack of fuel.
In 1944, the submarines achieved peak effectiveness in the tonnage war. Total sinkings of merchant ships (not counting warships) more than doubled, from 1.2 million tons in 1943 to 2.5 million tons in 1944.27 As new Balao-class units entered service, the size of the Pacific submarine force expanded from forty-seven boats in February 1943 to more than a hundred in June 1944. Lockwood and his team began experimenting with wolfpack tactics, deploying three to six boats under one commander. The submarines were equipped with better sonar, radar, optical, and communications systems, more powerful deck guns, and torpedoes that finally worked as designed. The Mark 14 torpedo gave way to the Mark 18, which became a lethal weapon as its defects were corrected. A new breed of
younger, more daring skippers followed Mush Morton’s example by keeping their boats on the surface for most of their patrols. They were sent on long missions into coastal waters off mainland Asia and Japan, to prey upon the enemy’s busiest shipping lanes. At night, using the much-improved SJ radar, they pinpointed the location, speed, and heading of their quarry, and then charged into attack positions at four-engine flank speed, often touching twenty knots. Cryptanalysts in Pearl Harbor broke Japanese shipping codes, and could accurately predict the locations and routes of Japanese merchant convoys. This valuable “Ultra” data was used in assigning patrol locations, and was regularly transmitted by long-range radio to submarines already at sea.
Dick O’Kane and his new Balao-class submarine Tang made her maiden passage from Mare Island to Pearl Harbor in January 1944. During the nine-month career of this deadly boat, with O’Kane as skipper, the Tang would rise to the top of the submarine force’s league tables for total tonnage destroyed, surpassing even the record of Morton in the Wahoo. According to the postwar conclusions of the Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee (JANAC), she destroyed twenty-four ships. Her skipper and others insisted that the total was actually higher, perhaps as many as thirty-three. In any case, there is no doubt that Tang was one of the three most productive boats in the Silent Service during the Second World War.
O’Kane seemed to be on a personal mission to avenge the death of Mush Morton and the eighty souls who had gone down with the Wahoo in La Perouse Strait. His three patrols as the Wahoo’s executive officer had provided the best possible education in this business. Like Morton, O’Kane was a champion of night surface attacks. He considered the crash dive to be a last resort, to be used only in case of emergency. Operating on the surface at night provided exceptional visibility, not only through the SJ radar but also by sending eagle-eyed young sailors to the top of the periscope shears with powerful binoculars. Before each sequence, O’Kane calculated the odds; if he liked them, he initiated daring, slashing attacks. Again and again, the Tang evaded Japanese destroyers and penetrated into the inner ring of an enemy shipping convoy, often sinking multiple ships in a single salvo.
On Tang’s first patrol, to the waters between the Caroline and Mariana island groups, she stalked a large convoy through rainsqualls for two days, sinking three big ships. Two nights later her radar picked up another northbound convoy, and in a two-day game of cat and mouse, Tang sank two more valuable targets, including a big naval fuel tanker, the Echizen Maru. After this red-letter patrol, Tang served as lifeguard submarine during the Fifth Fleet’s first carrier air raid on Truk (Operation HAILSTONE, February 17–18, 1944), and distinguished herself by rescuing seven downed carrier airmen, more than any other boat participating in the operation. Her third and fourth patrols took her into the East China Sea—waters O’Kane knew well, having patrolled there in the Wahoo a year earlier—where the Tang behaved like a one-boat wolfpack. On the night of June 24, 1944, not far out of Nagasaki, she ambushed a column of six large cargo ships with escorts, firing a six-torpedo spread. O’Kane believed and claimed that two torpedoes had found their mark, sinking two ships. According to postwar accounting, however, the salvo had knocked down four big freighters with a combined weight of 16,000 tons. Four ships down with a six-torpedo spread made it the single most lethal submarine salvo of the war. Tang followed that performance with an August 1944 rampage south of the main Japanese island of Honshu, boldly intruding into shallow inshore waters off the most populous coastline in Japan, and destroyed (at least) two more large merchantmen with combined weight of 11,500 tons.
Several other standout submarines and captains were making their names that year. The superbly named Slade Cutter, a former Naval Academy 1935 football star, was a bold, risk-taking captain in the mold of Mush Morton. In four brilliant patrols, culminating with a June 1944 rampage in Luzon Strait, Cutter’s submarine Seahorse sank nineteen enemy ships totaling 72,000 tons. At the end of the war, he was tied for second with Mush Morton in the table of total sinkings (O’Kane was first). Sam Dealey, who made six war patrols as captain of the Harder, sank sixteen Japanese ships totaling 54,002 tons. The Harder’s most famous contribution to the war came in June 1944, just before the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Stalking the main Japanese battle fleet at its anchorage at Tawi Tawi, in the southern part of the Sulu Sea, the Harder sank three Japanese destroyers in three days. Reuben Whitaker was captain of the Flasher, with Chester Nimitz Jr. as third officer; in four patrols around the Philippines and South China Sea, the Flasher sank fifteen ships of 60,846 tons. Gene Fluckey, skipper of the Barb, compiled an exceptional record over seven war patrols in the Luzon Straits and the East China Sea, sinking seventeen ships totaling 96,628 tons. The highlight of Barb’s career came in July 1945, when she landed a party of commandos on the coast of Sakhalin Island, then Japanese territory. The attackers blew up a railroad train. This was the only mission of its kind in the Pacific War, and the only Allied ground operation in the Japanese home islands.
But the Pacific tonnage war did not only depend on the champion performers of the U.S. submarine force. In a “death by a thousand cuts,” each little cut did its part to kill the subject. Most captains and submarines stood well down the scoring tables. But even the middling players, whose names are mostly forgotten, were doing their part. To the Japanese, it mattered little whether their precious remaining oil tankers were sent to the bottom by superstars like the Wahoo, Tang, or Seahorse, or by unsung boats such as (to pick a few at random) the Cod, the Kingfish, or the Barbero. The total number of U.S. submarines on patrol in the Pacific doubled in 1944, from an average of twenty-four boats in June 1943, to forty-eight in June 1944.28 At Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, it was said that a man could walk from Japan to Singapore on the periscopes of American submarines. What mattered in the end was the cumulative result of their efforts.
By late 1944, the submarines were sinking more than a quarter of a million tons of Japanese merchant shipping each month. Sinkings peaked in October 1944, when the eyes of the world were on MacArthur’s return to the Philippines and the great naval Battle of Leyte Gulf. That month, undersea predators destroyed 328,843 tons of Japanese merchant shipping, including 103,903 tons of oil tankers.29 Thereafter, monthly totals declined, but only because there was a relative scarcity of targets. American submarines patrolling the busiest maritime routes found the sea littered with oil slicks and the flotsam and jetsam of previous sinkings. Many skippers increasingly turned their attention to sinking junks and trawlers with deck guns.
The Tang’s last patrol, which began the last week of September 1944, took her to the Strait of Formosa. The cruise coincided with Halsey’s Third Fleet carrier strikes in the area, and the opening moves in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. For two days, Captain O’Kane stalked Admiral Shima’s task force as it headed south (where it would arrive late to the Battle of Surigao Strait). Taking 8-inch fire from one of Shima’s cruisers, the Tang crash dived to safety. O’Kane’s sighting report was received at Pearl Harbor and relayed to Halsey and Kinkaid. On October 23, the Tang intercepted a northbound convoy of three tankers flanked by two cargo ships, heavily escorted by destroyers. Evading the destroyers, O’Kane maneuvered his submarine in for a point-blank night torpedo attack, and sank all three tankers in a single close-range salvo. The explosions momentarily illuminated the Tang, and the remaining cargo ships turned directly toward the submarine, apparently intending to ram her. O’Kane ordered “All ahead emergency,” and with a sudden lunge the boat bolted ahead of the two ships, which were closing in from both sides. The two Japanese ships found themselves on a collision course as both turned in the same direction; they collided, and a moment later both were struck by another salvo of torpedoes fired from the Tang’s stern tubes. The two ships went up in spectacular twin explosions. Tang did not even bother to dive. She had destroyed five valuable targets in the space of ten minutes, one of the most astonishing feats of the war.
O’Kane still had eleven torpedoe
s, and he intended to make them count. On October 24, as the Battle of Leyte Gulf was raging to the south, the Tang’s SJ radar picked up another northbound convoy. It was a big one, perhaps as many as ten ships with escorts. Another slaughter ensued: O’Kane maneuvered the Tang in close and fired a six-torpedo salvo. Two fish connected with two different targets, and both went down quickly. A four-torpedo stern tube shot hit a tanker, which limped away crippled. When a destroyer suddenly loomed off to Tang’s port, O’Kane crash-dived and ran away from the scene, silent and deep. Later, he brought the submarine back to the surface and went after the cripple. The Tang had two remaining fish for the purpose. O’Kane, standing on the bridge, ordered two bow-tube torpedoes prepared and trained on the nearly immobilized, still-burning tanker. The first ran hot, straight, and normal, and hit the target near the bow, sending another pillar of fire into the sky. It was probably enough to be sure of her, but the Tang had only one torpedo remaining, and O’Kane chose to fire it as the coup de grâce.
It was the coup de grâce, but in the wrong sense. As soon as that final torpedo was away, it began porpoising spasmodically and veered left. Its track, a long slick speckled with bubbles and lit by a phosphorescent glow, turned toward the Tang in a wide counterclockwise arc. O’Kane shouted down the hatch: “All ahead emergency,” and “Right full rudder,” but there was not enough time. The torpedo’s rudder had jammed, or its steering engine had malfunctioned; either way it was on target to hit the Tang dead amidships, right under the bridge where O’Kane was standing with eight other men. As the submarine’s engines flared, she bucked forward and began swinging away from the oncoming track in a fishtail maneuver, but the weapon hit and detonated, tearing the Tang’s hull open near the after-torpedo room. The aft compartments flooded immediately, the stern sank, and the bow lifted clean out of the sea. O’Kane shouted down to the conning tower to close the hatch, but it all happened too quickly. The sea poured over the bridge and down the hatch; O’Kane and the other men were swept to sea; and the Tang wallowed helplessly, her stern down and her bow pointed to the heavens. Now the best-case scenario for the eighty men left on board was that the Tang would float long enough to give them a chance to escape, in which case they could look forward to spending the rest of the war as prisoners of the Japanese.
Twilight of the Gods Page 43
