Victory is a dangerous drug.
It makes you feel invincible.
It makes you feel like the laws of physics and chance no longer apply to you.
And on the morning of August 10th, 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy is high on it.
Picture the scene off the coast of New Ireland.
The sun is shining.
The sea is calm.
Four massive shapes are cutting through the blue water in a neat, orderly line.
This is cruiser division 6.
The heavyweights, the Aoba, the Furutaka, the Kinugasa, and the Kako.
They look like iron monsters, 8-in guns, massive super structures.
They are the apex predators of the South Pacific, and they have every reason to be arrogant.
Just the night before, these ships committed a massacre.
In the battle of Tsavo Island, they sailed into the American anchorage at Guadal Canal and destroyed four Allied heavy cruisers in the span of 30 minutes.
It was the worst open sea defeat in the history of the United States Navy.
So, as they sail home to their base at Cavien, the mood on board is not just relieved, it is celebratory.
The port holes are open to let in the breeze.
The crews are on deck smoking cigarettes, talking about the American ships burning in the night.
They are not zigzagging.
They are not flanked by destroyers.
They believe they have swept the ocean clean of enemies.
They think the Americans are running.
They think the Americans are broken, but they are wrong.
Lurking just beneath the surface, waiting in the silence, is a weapon that doesn’t care about their victory.
It isn’t a modern machine.
It isn’t a high-tech marvel.
It is a rusted, sweating, foul smelling relic from the First World War era.
The USS44.
The sailors call it a pigbo.
It lacks air conditioning.
It lacks a modern fire control computer.
It lacks the speed to even chase the Japanese cruisers.
By all rights, this tiny, obsolete submarine should run away from a heavy cruiser division.
It is like a bicycle trying to fight a tank column.
But the Japanese have made a fatal mistake.
In their arrogance, in their victory hangover, they have forgotten the most basic rule of warfare.
The enemy is most dangerous when you think he is dead.
They are sailing in a straight line at a steady speed right across the sights of the pigbo.
And in a few moments, the crew of the heavy cruiser Kako is going to find out that the price of complacency is absolute destruction.
They are about to go from the highest high of victory to the bottom of the ocean in less time than it takes to smoke that cigarette.
To understand the sheer absurdity of this matchup, you have to step off the gleaming deck of the Japanese cruiser and climb down the hatch of the USS44.
If the KCO is a Ferrari, the S44 is a rusted tractor from the 1920s.
She is an S-class submarine.
The sailors call them pig boats.
And the name is not affectionate.
It is descriptive.
These boats were designed shortly after World War I.
They lack the off amenities of modern warfare.
There is no air conditioning.
In the tropical heat of the Pacific, the temperature inside the pressure hull hovers around 100° F.
The humidity is 100%.
The steel walls sweat condensation that drips onto the men’s bunks.
The air is a toxic soup of diesel fumes, battery acid, rotting food, and the body odor of 40 men who haven’t showered in weeks.
It is a miserable, claustrophobic steel sewer pipe.
And her commander, Lieutenant Commander John Dinty Moore, is working with a handicap.
He doesn’t have the advanced torpedo data computer that the new fleet boats have.
He has a stopwatch, a slide rule, and his own brain.
He is doing trigonometry in his head while sweat stings his eyes.
But the S44 has one accidental advantage, a twist of fate that the Japanese could never predict.
Because the boat is so old, it cannot fire the Navy’s newest high-tech torpedoes.
It has to use the Antiques, the Mark 10 torpedo.
This weapon is slow.
It has a smaller warhead than the modern Mark1 14, but it has one feature that the modern torpedoes lack.
It works.
In 1942, the US Navy is plagued by the scandal of the duds.
The high-tech Mark14 torpedoes are failing constantly.
They run too deep.
They bounce off holes.
But the old Mark 10, it is a simple sledgehammer.
It doesn’t have a fancy magnetic detonator.
It has a simple contact fuse.
If it hits something, it blows up.
No questions asked.
So you have this perfect storm of irony.
The Japanese are sailing confident in their modern technology.
And waiting for them is a primitive American submarine armed with primitive weapons commanded by men who are too hot, too tired, and too angry to play by the rules.
Moore is peering through his periscope.
The water is glassy calm.
At 0750 hours, he sees smoke on the horizon.
He doesn’t know it yet, but he is looking at the entire heavy cruiser division.
Four massive ships, 9,000 tons each, moving at 16 knots.
Moore looks at his chart.
He looks at his speed gauge.
The S44 can barely make 10 knots submerged.
He cannot chase them.
If he tries to run after them, they will leave him in their wake.
He has to hope they come to him.
And incredibly, they do.
The Japanese commander, believing he is in safe waters just miles from his home base, is not zigzagging.
He is sailing in a straight line.
He is bringing his four prize ships right across the nose of the pigbo.
It is a parade, a parade of targets.
Moore orders battle stations.
The crew forgets the heat.
They forget the smell.
They load the tubes with the old Mark 10 torpedoes.
They are about to prove that in a knife fight, a rusty blade cuts just as deep as a shiny one.
There is a specific kind of torture involved in submarine warfare.
It is the torture of waiting.
Lieutenant Commander Dinty Moore is glued to the periscope in the conning tower.
His hands are sweating on the handles.
What he sees in the lens is almost unbelievable.
Usually when you hunt a warship, you see a blur on the horizon.
You see a mast.
You spend hours maneuvering, trying to get within two or 3,000 yards for a desperate shot.
But today, the Japanese Navy isn’t making him hunt.
They are putting on a show.
The cruiser division is steaming in a column formation, one ship behind the other, 600 yd apart, precise, orderly, and they are coming terrifyingly close.
The lead ship, the Aoba, crosses the view.
She is less than 900 yd away.
That is pointblank range.
Through the periscope, Moore can see the details of the hull.
He can see the rivets.
He can see the massive turret housings.
He wants to shoot.
Every instinct says shoot, but he can’t.
The geometry isn’t right yet.
The S44 is still maneuvering into position.
If he fires now, the torpedoes might miss the angle.
And worse, if he fires at the lead ship and misses, the three ships behind her will see the wake.
They will turn.
They will accelerate.
And they will hunt him down.
So Moore has to do the hardest thing a commander can do.
He has to let the prize go.
He watches the Aoba sail past safe, unaware.
Then comes the second ship, the Furutaka.
She is huge.
9,000 tons of enemy steel.
She glides across the crosshairs.
Moore holds his fire.
The crew in the control room is watching him, reading the tension in his shoulders.
They can hear the propellers of the Japanese ships thrumming through the hull.
Then the third ship, the Kinugasa.
It is like a game of Russian roulette.
Moore is letting them pass one by one, betting that the formation will hold, betting that the last ship will be just as careless as the first.
Finally, the fourth ship enters the frame.
The Coco.
She is the tail end Charlie, the caboose.
She is sailing exactly in the wake of her sisters.
She isn’t zigzagging.
Her lookouts are likely staring at the ships ahead of them or looking at the coast of New Ireland, thinking about shore leave.
They are not looking at the patch of water 700 yd off their starboard beam.
Moore checks the range.
700 yd.
In naval terms, this is not a long-d distanceance snipe.
This is a knife in the ribs.
At 700 yd, a torpedo doesn’t need to do complex calculations.
It barely has time to arm itself.
It is virtually impossible to miss a target that is 600 ft long at that distance.
Moore looks at the setup.
It is the perfect triangle.
The S44 is positioned perpendicular to the KCO, a 90° shot.
The torpedoes will slam straight into the side of the cruiser, maximizing the damage.
The Japanese have broken every rule of defensive warfare.
They have no destroyers screening their flanks.
They are not varying their speed.
They are relying entirely on the shield of invincibility they forged the night before at Tsavo Island.
They think they are the hunters returning with the kill.
They don’t realize they have become the kill.
Moore steps back from the periscope.
He doesn’t need to see anymore.
The math is done.
The waiting is over.
He gives the order that will turn the KCO’s victory parade into a funeral procession.
Fire one.
In the forward torpedo room of the S44, a lever is pulled.
A blast of high pressure air screams into the tube.
The submarine bucks violently like a kicked mule.
The first Mark 10 torpedo is ejected into the sea.
Fire two.
Fire three.
Fire four.
Lieutenant Commander Moore fires a full salvo.
Four torpedoes in rapid succession.
He isn’t taking chances.
He isn’t trying to disable the ship.
He is trying to erase it.
Now, let’s pause and look at the weapon that is currently racing through the water.
The Mark 10 torpedo is a relic.
It was designed when Woodro Wilson was president.
It runs on a simple steam turbine.
It is slow, barely 30 knots.
Compared to the Japanese Long Lance torpedo, which can travel at 50 knots for 20 m, the Mark 10 is a joke.
But at a range of 700 yd, speed doesn’t matter.
At 700 yards, the torpedo only has to travel for about 40 seconds.
40 seconds.
That is the entire duration of the engagement.
That is the difference between life and death for the 800 men on board the KCO.
As the torpedoes leave the tubes, they begin their run.
Because they are old steam torpedoes, they leave awake.
a thick white trail of bubbles rising to the surface, pointing like a giant arrow right back at the submarine.
If the Japanese lookouts were doing their job, they would see it instantly.
They would scream a warning.
The KCO would turn.
The guns would depress and blast the S44 out of the water.
But the lookouts are not looking.
Moore stays at the periscope.
He watches.
This is the old school way of killing.
There is no sonar ping to guide the weapon.
There is no wire guidance.
There is no homing head.
Once that lever is pulled, it is all physics.
The gyroscope inside the torpedo fights to keep it straight.
The depth mechanism fights to keep it level.
The crew of the S44 stands frozen.
The only sound in the boat is the wor of the electric motors and the heavy breathing of 40 men.
Someone is holding a stopwatch.
10 seconds.
The torpedoes are closing the gap.
They are moving at roughly 50 ft per second.
20 seconds.
On the bridge of the Kako, the captain is likely thinking about the reception waiting for him at Caviang.
He is thinking about the victory sake.
He doesn’t know that 400 lb of TNT is currently 20 seconds away from his engine room.
30 seconds.
The wake of the torpedoes is now visible to the naked eye.
It is streaking toward the starboard side of the cruiser.
Finally, perhaps a lookout sees it.
Imagine the sudden shift in reality.
One moment, peaceful ocean, the next white lines of death.
The lookout screams.
The alarm is sounded, but physics is a cruel judge.
A heavy cruiser weighs 9,000 tons.
It has inertia.
You cannot stop it.
You cannot turn it on a dime.
The Coco is moving into the path of the hammer.
40 seconds.
Moore lowers the periscope.
He doesn’t need to see the impact.
He knows it is coming.
He orders the submarine to go deep.
Because at this range, the shock wave from the explosion is going to be dangerous even to the attacker.
They are too close.
They are practically in the blast radius.
The stopwatch hand hits the mark and then the ocean transmits the verdict.
It starts with a sharp metallic crack, the sound of a warhead hitting steel, and then the roar.
The first torpedo hits the Kako on the starboard side near the number one turret.
The explosion is violent.
It sends a geyser of water and steel hundreds of feet into the air.
But before the spray can even settle, the second torpedo strikes.
This one hits a midship.
It punches directly into the boiler rooms.
And then the third one hits.
Just after the second, three hits.
In the span of a few seconds, 1,200 lb of high explosives have detonated inside the hull of the cruiser.
The effect is catastrophic.
When a torpedo hits a boiler room, you don’t just get an explosion, you get a thermal nightmare.
The boilers on the CCO are pressurized vessels filled with superheated steam.
When the cold ocean water rushes in through the gaping hole in the hull and hits those boilers, they rupture.
The result is a blast that tears the guts out of the ship.
The engines stop instantly.
The electrical systems fail.
The lights go out.
But the most terrifying aspect of the sinking of the KCO isn’t the explosion.
It is the speed.
Usually, a heavy cruiser takes a long time to die.
It is a honeycomb of watertight compartments.
If the crew is at general quarters, battle stations, all the doors are dogged shut.
A ship like this should be able to take two or three hits, counter flood, and stay afloat for hours.
But remember the hangover of victory.
The Kako was not at battle stations.
She was cruising because the Japanese felt safe because they thought they owned the ocean.
They had committed the cardinal sin of naval safety.
The port holes were open to let in fresh air.
The watertight doors between compartments were likely unclamped to allow the crew to move freely.
The ship was wide open.
So when the torpedoes ripped the hole open, the water didn’t just fill the damaged sections.
It rushed through the ship like a tidal wave.
It poured through the open doors.
It gushed through the ventilation shafts.
The KCO begins to list immediately.
1 minute, she is sailing upright.
30 seconds later, she is leaning heavily to starboard.
The angle gets steeper.
10° 20°.
On the deck, the scene is absolute chaos.
The sailors who were sunbathing moments ago are now sliding across the steel plating.
The victory sake is smashing on the floor.
Equipment is breaking loose.
The ship is rolling over.
It happens so fast that they can’t even launch the lifeboats.
There is no time for an orderly evacuation.
There is no women and children first.
There is only gravity.
As the ship tilts past 45°, the massive 8-in gun turrets, held in place only by their own weight, fall out of their barbettes.
They crash into the sea with a splash that rivals the torpedo hits.
Down below, inside the hull, hundreds of men are trapped in the darkness.
The water is rising.
The steam is scalding.
There is no way out.
The unsinkable ship has become a steel coffin falling toward the bottom.
Above the surface, the other three Japanese cruisers are in a panic.
They see the Kako blowing up.
They see the smoke, but they don’t know what hit her because there was no wake warning until the last second.
And because the attack was so sudden, they panic.
They think it might be an air attack.
They start firing their anti-aircraft guns at the empty sky.
They zigzag wildly.
They leave their sister behind.
Back on the S44, Lieutenant Commander Moore hears the death throws of the cruiser through the hull.
He hears the breaking up noises, the screech of tearing metal, the implosion of bulkheads.
He checks his watch.
The first torpedo hit at 0708 hours.
At 0713 hours, just 5 minutes later, the heavy cruiser Kako vanishes from the surface of the Pacific.
5 minutes.
That is less time than it takes to boil an egg.
In that short span, a 9,000 ton warship, a veteran of Pearl Harbor, a victor of Tsavo Island, is erased.
The ocean rushes in to fill the void.
A massive slick of heavy fuel oil spreads across the surface and bobbing in that oil are the survivors.
They are choking on the fumes.
They are clinging to debris and they are looking around in shock.
Just this morning they were the masters of the world.
They had defeated the Americans.
They were invincible.
Now they are castaways.
They have learned the hardest lesson of the war.
The ocean doesn’t care about your medals.
It doesn’t care about your victories.
If you leave the door open, the ocean will come in.
And the little rusty, obsolete pig boat that did this, it is already gone, slipping away into the deep, leaving nothing behind but oil and silence.
When the USS44 limped back to Brisbane, Australia, Europe, when Australia, the crew didn’t look like conquerors.
They looked like zombies.
They were malnourished.
They were covered in boils from the heat.
The boat was falling apart.
But they carried a story that electrified the Pacific Fleet.
Just days earlier, the United States Navy had suffered the most humiliating defeat in its history at the Battle of Tsavo Island.
Four heavy cruisers sunk, more than a thousand sailors dead.
The morale of the Allied forces was in the gutter.
It felt like the Japanese were supermen, unstoppable monsters of the night.
And then out of the blue comes the report from Dinty Moore.
A single obsolete World War I era submarine had stalked the victors of Tsavo and taken one of them down.
It wasn’t a strategic checkmate.
Losing the Kako didn’t stop the Japanese war machine, but psychologically it was a shot of pure adrenaline directly into the heart of the US Navy.
It proved that the monsters bled.
It proved that for all their training, for all their optics, and for all their terrifying night fighting skills, the Japanese could still be killed by a rusty boat with a good aim.
But the real legacy of the sinking of the Kako isn’t about the American success.
It is about the Japanese failure.
Military historians call it victory disease.
It is a psychological condition.
When you win too much too easily, you stop checking your blind spots.
You stop closing the watertight doors.
You stop zigzagging.
You start believing your own propaganda.
The cruiser division 6 didn’t die because they were outgunned.
They died because they were drunk on their own success.
They assumed the war was over just because they won a battle.
The KCO is the ultimate cautionary tale.
She was a magnificent ship crewed by brave men.
But she was destroyed by a lack of respect for the enemy.
They looked at the S44, if they even bothered to look, and saw a pigboat.
They saw a relic.
They didn’t see a threat.
But in war, the most dangerous weapon isn’t the one with the biggest caliber.
It is the one you underestimate.
The S44 proved that technology is secondary to grit.
It proved that you don’t need the newest equipment to win.
You just need the discipline to wait for the enemy to make a mistake.
And the enemy always makes a mistake eventually.
As the S44 docked and the band played and the beer flowed, the message was clear.
The Japanese might own the night.
They might have the faster ships, but the Americans were scrappy.
They were patient, and they were going to make the empire pay for every inch of ocean in blood.
The coco lies at the bottom of the Bismar sea
