The tools of war evolve from swords to submarines to drones, but the fatal flaw of human nature remains the same.
Arrogance is the ultimate vulnerability.
And as the nautilus proved, even a dinosaur can kill a greyhound if the greyhound is asleep at the wheel.
But here is the paradox.
The camera that took this picture, the eye that was watching her die, belonged to a submarine that was widely considered a failure.
The USS Nautilus was a relic.
She was a massive, clumsy giant from the 1920s.
She was slow.
She was difficult to maneuver.
She was so old that many commanders considered her a death trap in modern warfare.
In a fair fight, the Yamarakaz should have run circles around her.
The destroyer should have been the cat and the submarine should have been the mouse.
But on this particular morning, the laws of naval warfare were inverted.
The dinosaur ate the shark.
How does a submarine that moves like a drifting continent manage to catch a destroyer capable of 35 knots? How does a piece of obsolete technology manage to ambush the cutting edge of the Imperial Navy right on their own doorstep? This isn’t a story about a lucky shot.
This is a story about what happens when arrogance meets discipline.
It is the story of how the slowest ship in the American fleet executed the perfect trap and snapped the pride of the Japanese Navy in half in less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette.
To understand the sheer insanity of this matchup, you have to look at the machine William Brockman was commanding.
The USS Nautilus, hull number SS168, was not really a submarine in the way we think of them today.
She was an experiment and by 1942 most people agreed she was a failed one.
She was born in the late 1920s, an era when naval planners were having an identity crisis.
The world was trying to ban war, or at least regulate it, and the United States Navy was trying to figure out what a future war in the Pacific would look like.
They came up with a concept called the cruiser submarine.
The idea was ambitious.
They wanted a submarine that could sail all the way from California to Japan without refueling.
They wanted a submarine that could stay on the surface and fight it out with armed merchant ships using deck guns.
They essentially wanted a destroyer that could submerge.
The result was the V-boat program.
And the Nautilus was one of the biggest of them all.
When she was launched in 1930, she was a Leviathan.
She was 371 ft long.
That is longer than an American football field.
She displaced nearly 4,000 tons when submerged.
To put that in perspective, the standard German yubot terrorizing the Atlantic was less than half that size.
She was armed with two massive 6-in deck guns.
These weren’t the little pop guns you see on movies.
These were cruiser artillery weapons capable of sinking a ship without ever using a torpedo.
But in engineering, as in life, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
To get that size and that range, the designers had to sacrifice the one thing a submarine needs more than anything else.
Agility.
The Nautilus was clumsy.
She was heavy.
And worst of all, she was slow.
In the brutal calculus of underwater warfare, there is one metric that determines if you live or die.
Diving speed.
When a destroyer spots you on the surface and turns to ram, you have seconds to disappear.
A standard World War II submarine like the GTO class could clear the bridge and get underwater in about 35 to 40 seconds.
The Nautilus, if the crew was perfect, if every valve turned exactly right, and if God was smiling on them, she might get under in 60 seconds.
Usually, it took longer.
1 minute.
60 seconds doesn’t sound like a long time, but imagine standing on the bridge watching a Japanese destroyer charging at you at 30 knots.
That destroyer covers 1,000 yards every minute.
If it takes you a minute to dive, you aren’t a submarine.
You are a target.
You are a metal coffin waiting to be nailed shut.
And it wasn’t just the diving speed.
The Nautilus was noisy.
Submarine warfare is a game of silence.
You want to be a hole in the water.
But the Nautilus had a superructure filled with wooden decking.
Yes, wood which could rot and creek.
Her massive engines vibrated the hull.
Her sheer size meant she pushed a lot of water, creating a larger sonar cross-section.
She was easy to find, easy to track, and hard to hide.
By the time the war actually started in 1941, the Navy looked at the Nautilus and her sister ships and didn’t know what to do with them.
They were called white elephants.
They were too valuable to scrap, but too dangerous to use in a frontline combat role.
The sailors called them the V-boats, but they said it with a mix of affection and dread.
So when Commander William Brockman took command, he wasn’t stepping into a Ferrari.
He was stepping into a vintage bus that had been retrofitted with machine guns.
He was taking a weapon designed for a theoretical war in 1925 and driving it into the hyperlethal reality of 1942.
The crew of the Nautilus knew the score.
They knew their ship was a dinosaur.
They knew that if they got caught on the surface, they couldn’t dive fast enough to escape.
They knew that if they got depth charged, their massive hull would groan and leak faster than the newer boats.
But they also knew something else.
A dinosaur is still a monster.
It is still dangerous.
And if you could just get this massive beast into the right position, if you could just hide its flaws long enough to use its teeth, it could still kill.
The problem was finding a Japanese captain foolish enough to let a dinosaur get that close.
While William Brockman was wrestling with his mechanical dinosaur, the men he was hunting were suffering from a very different kind of problem.
It wasn’t mechanical.
It was psychological.
It is June 1942.
To understand the mindset of the crew of the destroyer Yamakazer, you have to look at the scoreboard of the Pacific War up to this point.
For the first 6 months of the war, the Imperial Japanese Navy had been unstoppable.
They had crushed the American battleships at Pearl Harbor.
They had swept through Southeast Asia like a tidal wave.
They had sunk the pride of the British Royal Navy, the Prince of Wales, and the repulse in a single afternoon.
They had conquered an empire that stretched from the Indian Ocean to the central Pacific.
They had never known defeat.
In military history, there is a term for what happens to an army that wins too much, too easily.
It is called victory disease.
In Japanese they called it sen shou bo bio.
It is a dangerous cocktail of arrogance, complacency and a belief in your own invincibility.
The yama kazair was a symptom of this disease.
She was a shirraatsuyu class destroyer.
Launched in 1936.
She was a sleek modern killing machine.
She was fast capable of 34 knots.
She was heavily armed with 5-in guns, and most importantly, she carried depth charges and sonar designed specifically to hunt submarines.
In the eyes of her captain and crew, the ocean belonged to them.
They viewed the American Navy not as a peer competitor, but as a nuisance.
They believed that the Americans were soft, that their torpedoes were defective, and that their spirit was weak.
This arrogance led to tactical laziness.
By June 1942, the Battle of Midway had just happened.
Japan had lost four aircraft carriers.
It was a catastrophic strategic defeat.
But the news of that defeat had been suppressed.
The average sailor on a destroyer like Yamar Kaz might not have grasped the full horror of what had happened.
They were still operating with the mindset of the victors.
And so on June 25th, the Yamaha Kazair was doing something that no destroyer should ever do in wartime waters.
She was patrolling alone.
Standard anti-ubmarine doctrine says you never hunt alone.
You work in pairs.
One ship listens while the other moves.
One ship attacks while the other covers.
If a submarine attacks one, the other counterattacks.
A lone destroyer is vulnerable because it can only look in one direction at a time.
But the Yamama Kaz was steaming solo just off the coast of Yokosuka.
This is right at the entrance to Tokyo Bay.
This is the front porch of the Japanese Empire.
Imagine the psychology here.
They are in their own backyard.
They are sailing in waters that have been Japanese lakes for centuries.
They simply did not believe that an American submarine would dare to come this close.
They didn’t believe the Americans had the skill or the nerve to penetrate the inner defense ring.
And even if a submarine was there, they assumed their superior speed and optics would protect them.
The Japanese Navy relied heavily on visual lookouts.
They had the best binoculars in the world and men trained to see in the dark.
They trusted their eyes more than they trusted radar.
So the Ya Maraz steamed along, cutting through the waves, likely not zigzagging as aggressively as she should have.
Zigzagging is annoying.
It wastes fuel.
It makes navigation harder.
If you don’t think there is a threat, you get sloppy.
You sail in straight lines.
You relax.
This is the victory disease in action.
It blinds you to risk.
It makes you think that because you haven’t been hit yet, you won’t get hit.
They didn’t know that the game had changed.
They didn’t know that the Americans were starting to fix their torpedoes.
They didn’t know that American submarine commanders were becoming more aggressive.
Most of all, they didn’t know that a massive, slow, creaking V-boat was lurking just below the surface.
Piloted by a man who had studied their habits and was counting on their arrogance, the Yamakaz was a high-tech weapon system operated by men who had forgotten the first rule of survival.
Respect your enemy.
They thought they were the hunters patrolling their territory.
They didn’t realize that in the silent cold math of submarine warfare, the noisy, confident hunter is often the easiest prey.
They were sailing straight into a trap fueled not by diesel, but by their own hubris.
The Battle of Midway, fought in early June 1942, is often called the turning point of the Pacific War.
It was the moment the Japanese juggernaut was stopped.
But for the men inside the hull of the USS Nautilus, stopped didn’t mean safe.
While the main fleets disengaged and sailed back to their bases to repair and rearm, the American submarine force was ordered to do the unthinkable.
They were ordered to press the attack.
They were sent forward past the picket lines, past the air patrols, right into the coastal waters of the Japanese home islands.
This was a terrifying assignment.
You have to appreciate the geography here.
The Nautilus wasn’t patrolling the vast empty expanses of the central Pacific where you can hide in a million square miles of ocean.
Commander William H.
Brockman Jr.
had taken his massive lumbering V-boat to the waters off Yokosuka.
Yokosuka is not just a port.
It is the heart of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
It is their Pearl Harbor, their Norfolk, and their San Diego all rolled into one.
It is arguably the most heavily defended patch of water in the entire empire.
The ocean floor there is wired with hydrophones.
The surface is swarming with patrol craft.
The air is buzzing with anti-ubmarine bombers.
Sending the Nautilus here was like sending an elephant to sneak into a house of mirrors.
But Commander Brockman was a specific breed of submarine officer.
In 1942, there were two types of captains in the US Navy.
There were the cautionary types, men who had been trained in peace time to conserve their boats, to avoid risks, to prioritize survival.
Many of these men were relieved of command in the first year of the war because they simply wouldn’t shoot.
Then there were the killers.
Brockman was a killer.
He looked at his obsolete boat with its slow diving speed and its noisy engines, and he decided that the only way to survive was to be more aggressive than the enemy.
He understood that in a machine this flawed, defense was impossible.
If he tried to run, he would die.
If he tried to hide, he would be found.
His only safety lay in the attack.
On the morning of June 25th, the nautilus is creeping through the water.
The atmosphere inside the boat is a mixture of boredom and terror.
It is hot.
Submarines in the 1940s didn’t have air conditioning like modern nuclear boats.
The temperature inside could reach 100°.
The air is thick with the smell of diesel oil.
Unwashed bodies and the acidic tang of battery fumes.
Every man is sweating.
Every man is listening.
In a boat as noisy as the nautilus, silence is a religion.
Men walk in stocking feet.
Nobody drops a wrench.
A dropped wrench on a steel deck plate sounds like a gunshot to a Japanese hydrophone operator.
They are operating in a state of suspended animation, waiting for the sound that will either kill them or give them a target.
And then it comes, smoke on the horizon.
It is roughly in the morning.
Brockman raises the periscope.
Through the lenses, he sees a silhouette cutting through the morning haze.
He identifies it immediately.
It isn’t a merchant ship.
It isn’t a tanker carrying oil.
It is a warship.
Specifically, it is a destroyer.
For a submarine commander, spotting a destroyer is a moment of cold, conflicting instincts.
The destroyer is your natural predator.
It is faster than you.
It has shallow draft, meaning your torpedoes might pass under it.
It carries depth charges, barrels of high explosives designed to crush your hull like a soda can.
Common sense says, “Down periscope.
Go deep.
Run away.” But Brockman doesn’t run.
He watches.
He sees the destroyer moving alone.
He sees the arrogance in its course and he makes a calculation that would terrify a lesser man.
He realizes that the Yamakaza isn’t hunting.
It is commuting.
It is moving from point A to point B.
Completely unaware that it is being watched.
Brockman decides to turn the tables.
He decides that the mouse is going to hunt the cat.
He orders the nautilus to battle stations.
The claxon sounds are harsh rhythmic.
A H O O G Ah that snaps the crew out of their lethargy.
Men rush to the torpedo rooms.
The forward tubes are loaded.
The outer doors are opened.
This is the catalyst.
The moment the decision is made.
Up until now, the Nautilus was just a patrol boat.
Now she is an assassin.
Brockman is betting the lives of his 90-man crew on the gamble that he can line up a shot with his clumsy boat before the Japanese captain wakes up and realizes he is not alone.
They are committed.
There is no turning back.
They are going to pick a fight with the fastest knife fighter in the Japanese fleet.
Armed only with a sledgehammer, the chase that follows is one of the most stressful geometric puzzles in the history of naval warfare.
On the surface, you have the Ya Makazer.
She is moving at high speed, cutting zigzags through the water.
She is a predator in her element.
She can turn on a dime.
She can accelerate instantly.
Underwater, you have the nautilus.
And this is where the David and Goliath comparison becomes terrifyingly real.
We tend to think of submarines as these agile underwater sharks.
But the Nautilus in 1942 handles less like a shark and more like a submerged freight train.
She is 371 ft long.
She has massive inertia.
When Commander Brockman orders a turn, the boat doesn’t just snap around.
The rudder bites the water.
The hull groans and the bow slowly, agonizingly slowly begins to swing.
Brockman is trying to solve a math problem that has life or death consequences.
He has to predict where the Yamaraz will be in 10 minutes.
He has to steer his lumbering giant into a position where the paths of the submarine and the destroyer will intersect.
And he has to do all of this while moving at a crawl, maybe three knots, because if he goes any faster, his electric motors will wind loud enough for the Japanese to hear, or his periscope will create a feather.
A feather is the spray of water created by a periscope cutting through the surface.
To a sharpeyed Japanese lookout, a feather looks like a white scar on the blue ocean.
It is the signature of death.
So Brockman is playing a game of inches.
He raises the periscope for 5 seconds.
He takes a bearing.
Mark.
He lowers it.
Inside the conning tower.
The heat is rising.
The TDC, the torpedo data computer is clicking.
This is an analog computer.
A box of gears and dials that calculates the firing solution.
But the machine is only as good as the data you feed it.
Speed.
Range.
Angle on the bow.
Range 4,000 y.
Target speed high.
Making 25 knots.
The crew in the control room is blind.
They can’t see the destroyer.
They can only see the sweat on Brockman’s back.
They can only hear the calm, clipped commands of his voice, but they can feel the enemy getting closer.
Sound travels four times faster in water than in air.
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And on a V-boat, depth charges are a nightmare.
The Nautilus is not a deep diving boat.
She can’t go down to 300 or 400 ft like the German Ubot.
She operates in the shallows.
If she gets caught, she has nowhere to hide.
Her large flat hull is a massive target for shock waves.
A near miss that would just shake a smaller boat could crack the nautilus open like an egg.
Brockman keeps peeking up, down.
The Yama Kazair is zigzagging.
This is the variable that drives submarine captains insane.
Every time the destroyer turns, the math changes.
The firing solution is ruined.
You have to start over.
Left turn.
The destroyer is moving away.
Right turn.
The destroyer is coming closer.
Brockman is maneuvering the Nautilus into what is called the ahead of the beam position.
He wants to be in front of the destroyer off to the side so he can fire a spread of torpedoes across its path.
But the Nautilus is fighting him.
She is sluggish.
The currents are pushing her.
The depth control officer is fighting to keep the boat level.
If she broaches, if the hull pops out of the water, they are dead.
If she dips too deep and the periscope goes under, Brockman is blind.
It is a highwire act performed by an elephant.
The range drops.
3,000 y 2,000 y.
At this distance, through the periscope, Brockman can see the details of the enemy ship.
He can see the white uniforms of the sailors on the deck.
He can see the twin 5-in gun turrets rotating.
He can see the sun glinting off the bridge glass.
This is the intimacy of the ambush.
The Japanese sailors are going about their morning routine, sipping tea, looking at the horizon, completely unaware that a man is watching them from less than a mile away, calculating the exact second their lives will end.
The Yamar Kaz makes another turn, a sharp one.
For a second, Brockman holds his breath.
Is this it? Did they see the periscope? Is this the attack run? If the destroyer turns toward the Nautilus, the profile changes instantly.
The broadside target becomes a narrow knife edge bow rushing forward to ram.
But the Yamaha Z doesn’t accelerate.
She doesn’t sound the alarm.
It is just a routine zigzag.
She turns her broadside to the nautilus.
She is exposing her flank.
This is the mistake.
In his arrogance, the Japanese captain has turned his ship to give Brockman the perfect angle on the bow.
He has essentially parked his car across the railroad tracks.
Brockman looks at the TDC.
The solution is good.
The gyros are set.
The Nautilus has managed, against all laws of probability, to crawl into the perfect killing position.
The Goliath is strutting.
David has the stone in the sling.
The arm is pulled back.
The time is 0852.
The distance between the USS Nautilus and the JN Yamakaz is now closing to under 1,200 yds.
In the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, this is intimate.
It is knife fighting range.
Through the periscope, Commander Brockman watches the destroyer settle onto its new course.
The Ya Maka has just completed its zigzag leg.
She is now steaming steady, broadside on, traveling at roughly 15 knots.
This is the moment every submarine commander spends his entire career training for.
It is the perfect setup.
The enemy is exposed.
The water is calm enough for the torpedoes to track true.
The sun is behind the nautilus, blinding the Japanese lookouts.
But for Brockman, this moment is not just about opportunity.
It is about terror.
You have to remember what he is driving.
He is in a V-boat.
He is currently at periscope depth, which means the massive hull of the nautilus is hovering just below the surface.
If he fires his torpedoes, the sudden loss of weight from the tubes, thousands of pounds of metal and explosives leaving the bow can cause the submarine to lurch upwards.
If the Nautilus breaches the surface right now, less than a mile from a fully armed destroyer, everyone dies.
The 5-in guns of the Yamar Kazair will rip through the unarmored pressure hull in seconds.
They are too close to miss.
And the Nautilus is too slow to dive back down.
So Brockman is standing on a razor’s edge.
He has to fire, but he has to fire perfectly.
And he has to trust a weapon system that up until this point in the war has been famously defective.
The American Mark1 torpedo was a technological scandal.
For the first year of the war, they ran too deep.
They exploded prematurely.
Sometimes they hit the target with a perfect metallic clang.
didn’t explode at all.
They were duds.
Brockman knows this.
He knows that he might do everything right.
He might calculate the trigonometry perfectly.
He might steer his clumsy dinosaur into the exact right spot and the torpedoes might just bounce off the hull of the Yamakaza like harmless logs.
If that happens, the element of surprise is gone.
The Yamaraz will turn.
The hunter will become the prey.
And a V-boat against a Shiratsuyu class destroyer in a depth charge fight is a fight the Vboat loses 10 times out of 10.
But there is no hesitation in the conning tower.
Brockman looks at the firing solution.
Bearing mark range mark angle on the bow.
90 starboard.
The Japanese destroyer is showing her full length.
She is a long gray wall of steel sliding through the crosshairs.
She is completely blind to the danger.
Her sonar is likely deactivated or baffled by her own wake.
Her lookouts are scanning the horizon, not the water 3,000 ft away.
This is the fatal blind side.
The Yamakazair has relied on her speed and her reputation to keep her safe.
She assumes that no American submarine can get inside her guard.
She assumes that if a torpedo was coming, she would see the wake in time to dodge.
She is wrong.
Brockman gives the order.
It is quiet, professional, and final.
Fire one.
A jolt runs through the nautilus.
Compressed air shoves the first Mark14 out of the tube.
The submarine shudders.
The diving officer shouts commands to flood the trim tanks, fighting to keep the heavy bow from popping up out of the water.
Fire, too.
Seconds later, the second torpedo is away.
Now comes the silence.
The crew of the Nautilus freezes.
The engines are stopped or running at bare steerage.
The fans are off.
In the control room, men are holding stopwatches.
Torpedo runtime to target.
Roughly 45 seconds.
45 seconds is a lifetime.
It is enough time to think about your wife back in Connecticut.
It is enough time to regret every sin you have ever committed.
It is enough time to imagine what it will sound like when the depth charges start crushing the hull.
Through the periscope, Brockman watches.
He sees the two wakes streaking through the water.
They are white lines drawn with a ruler on the blue canvas of the sea.
And he sees the Ya Makazi.
She hasn’t moved.
She hasn’t turned.
The white foam at her bow is still cutting a straight line.
The lookout still haven’t screamed.
The captain on the bridge is likely thinking about his arrival in Yokosuka, about a hot bath and a warm meal.
The torpedoes are closing.
400 yd, 200 y.
This is the intersection of two timelines.
In one timeline, the torpedoes miss or fail, and the Nautilus enters a desperate fight for survival.
In the other timeline, the victory disease of the Imperial Navy receives its terminal diagnosis.
The stopwatch hand sweeps past the 40 mark.
The wakes merge with the shadow of the destroyer.
For a split second, nothing happens.
The physics of the collision are taking place underwater, invisible to the human eye.
The detonator is crushing against the steel hull.
The firing pin is engaging and then the universe breaks.
When the first torpedo made contact with the starboard side of the Yamar Kazer, the result was not a hole.
It was an amputation.
The American Mark14 torpedo carries a warhead packed with Torpex.
As we discussed with the Urakaz, Torpex is a ferocious explosive, but the Yamakaz was a smaller ship.
She was a sleek 1,700 ton greyhound built for speed, not for absorbing punishment.
She had virtually no armor belt.
Her keel, the structural spine that holds the ship together, was designed to be light.
So when 600 lb of high explosive detonated directly under her bridge, the physics were merciless.
Through the periscope of the Nautilus, Commander Brockman saw a sight that defies description.
He didn’t see a splash.
He saw the entire forward section of the destroyer disintegrate.
A massive column of water, smoke, and debris shot upwards, obscuring the sun.
The shock wave hit the nautilus seconds later.
The massive V-boat rocked.
The hull groaned, but Brockman kept his eye pressed to the rubber eyepiece.
He had to know.
As the smoke cleared, the horror of the situation revealed itself.
The Ya Maraz hadn’t just been hit.
She had been snapped in half.
The keel, unable to withstand the massive upward pressure of the gas bubble, had failed catastrophically.
The bow of the ship simply fell off.
It pitched forward and slid under the waves almost instantly, taking the bridge, the captain, and the forward gun crews down into the darkness before they could even scream.
But the stern, the stern remained afloat.
And this leads to one of the most surreal and haunting moments of the Pacific War.
Usually, when a submarine captain scores a hit like this, his first instinct is to dive.
He knows that there might be other destroyers nearby.
He knows that aircraft are likely inbound.
He knows that the sinking ship might have depth charges on its racks that could explode as they go down.
The logical thing to do is to run.
Brockman did not run.
He watched.
He saw the stern section of the Yamakazair rising out of the water at a steep angle.
It was bobbing there like a tombstone.
And on the back of that dying piece of steel, the rising sun flag was still flying.
Brockman turned to his executive officer in the conning tower.
The air was electric.
The crew knew they had scored a kill, but they couldn’t see it.
Only Brockman could see it.
And then he gave an order that separates the cold-blooded historians from the mere soldiers.
He didn’t order a reload.
He ordered a camera.
Bring the camera to the periscope.
Think about the arrogance of that.
Think about the risk.
The Nautilus is sitting at periscope depth in enemy waters miles from Tokyo.
The ocean around them is churning with the death throws of a destroyer.
Aircraft could be diving on them at any second.
And Brockman decides to take a picture.
He clamps the camera to the eyepiece.
He adjusts the focus.
The Yama car is sinking fast now.
The stern is sliding backward.
The water is rushing into the engine rooms.
Click that sound.
The mechanical shutter of a camera captured one of the only visual records of a submarine kill in the entire war.
The photo shows the Yamakaz in her final agony.
You can see the angle of the deck.
You can see the davits where the lifeboats should be.
You can see the white water foaming around the sinking hull.
It is a grainy black and white obituary for 227 men.
And then it was over.
The sinking of the Yamar Kazair was not a long drawn out drama like the Titanic.
It was a violent spasm.
From the moment the torpedo hit to the moment the flag disappeared beneath the waves, less than 5 minutes elapsed.
5 minutes.
That is barely enough time to realize you are under attack.
It is certainly not enough time to launch a lifeboat.
It is not enough time to organize a damage control party.
The crew of the Yamarazair didn’t have a chance to fight the water.
The water simply took them inside the nautilus.
The sound man, the sonar operator was wearing his headphones.
He didn’t need eyes to see the death of the destroyer.
He could hear it.
Submariners call it the breakup noises.
It is a gruesome sound.
It is the sound of bulkheads collapsing under pressure.
The sound of boilers imploding as the cold sea water hits the superheated steam.
The sound of loose equipment sliding across the deck and smashing into the bulkheads.
Crunch.
Groan.
Boom! And then silence.
The heavy suffocating silence of the deep ocean returned.
The screws, the rhythmic thrming of the Yama Kazay’s propellers had stopped.
Brockman lowered the periscope.
He looked at his crew.
There was no cheering.
Submariners rarely cheer in the moment of the kill.
They are technicians.
They know exactly what it sounds like when a pressure hole fails because they live inside one.
They know exactly how terrifying it is to drown in the dark.
The Nautilus, the white elephant, the obsolete dinosaur of the fleet, had just erased the most modern destroyer in the Japanese inventory.
It was a victory of patience over speed.
It was a victory of the old, slow, and methodical over the young, fast, and arrogant.
But the Nautilus wasn’t safe yet.
The explosion that killed the Yamakaz was a beacon.
It was a loud violent signal to every Japanese force in the area that a wolf was in the fold.
Brockman had snapped the trap.
He had killed the prey.
But now the rest of the pack was waking up and they were angry.
When a white elephant kills a greyhound, historians have to ask a very uncomfortable question.
How? On paper, the Ya Maraz should have survived this encounter 99 times out of 100.
She had the sonar to hear the nautilus.
She had the speed to outrun the torpedoes.
She had the maneuverability to dodge.
And yet, she is at the bottom of the ocean.
And the Nautilus is sailing home.
This outcome wasn’t a fluke.
It was the result of a specific kind of failure that plagues advanced militaries.
It is called technological hubris.
The Japanese Navy had fallen into the trap of believing that the hardware is the weapon.
They believed that because they had a ship that could do 35 knots, they were safe.
But hardware is not a weapon.
A weapon is the combination of the machine and the mind that operates it.
The primary cause of the Yamaraz’s death was not the American torpedo.
It was the decision to stop zigzagging.
Let’s look at the math of the zigzag.
It is the most basic defensive maneuver in naval warfare.
A submarine torpedo is an unguided projectile.
Once it leaves the tube, it travels in a straight line.
To hit a moving target, the submarine commander has to predict where the ship will be in two or 3 minutes.
If the ship is moving in a straight line, the math is easy.
It is simple trigonometry.
A high school student could solve it.
But if the ship changes course every 7 minutes or every 5 minutes, the math becomes impossible.
The firing solution falls apart.
The submarine has to guess.
And in a game of guessing, the destroyer usually wins.
So why did the captain of the Ya Maraz stop zigzagging? It goes back to that concept of seno bio the victory disease.
Zigzagging is tedious.
It slows down the advance.
It burns extra fuel.
It requires constant attention from the helmsman and the navigator.
After 6 months of crushing victories, the Japanese crews had begun to view these safety measures as unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles.
They thought they were the hunters.
And hunters don’t need to dodge.
They viewed the ocean as their territory.
They forgot that in war there is no such thing as safe territory.
There is only contested territory.
By sailing in a straight line, the Yamakaz essentially volunteered to be a target.
She took all of her technological advantages, her speed, her agility, and threw them overboard.
She turned herself into a stationary object in the eyes of the submarine’s computer.
Now look at the American side of the equation.
Look at Commander Brockman and the Nautilus.
Brockman succeeded because he understood the limitations of his own machine.
He knew the Nautilus was a dinosaur.
He knew he couldn’t get into a running gunfight.
He couldn’t chase the destroyer.
So, he treated the Nautilus not as a submarine, but as a mobile gun imp placement.
He used the one advantage the V-boat had, stability.
Because the Nautilus was so huge and heavy, she was remarkably stable at periscope depth.
She didn’t bob around in the waves as much as the smaller, newer boats.
This provided a rock steady platform for the periscope and the torpedo tubes.
Brockman used this stability to set up a sniper shot.
He didn’t fire a frantic spread of torpedoes from long range.
He waited.
He crept in.
He let the enemy come to him.
He accepted the terrifying risk of being detected to ensure that when he finally pulled the trigger, he couldn’t miss.
This is a triumph of discipline over doctrine.
The doctrine said a V-boat shouldn’t attack a destroyer.
The doctrine said it was suicide, but Brockman had the discipline to wait for the perfect moment, the moment the Yamakaz exposed her blind side and then execute the attack with surgical precision.
And finally, we have to talk about the torpedo itself.
The American Mark1 torpedo is rightfully infamous for being terrible.
But on this day, the laws of probability favored the Americans.
The Mark1 14 had a magnetic exploder, a device designed to sense the magnetic field of the ship and explode underneath the keel.
For months, these exploders had been failing.
They would explode too early or not at all.
But in the case of the Yamakazair, the magnetic influence exploder actually worked exactly as advertised.
The torpedo likely passed just under the hull or hit the BGE and detonated.
When 600 lb of torpex explodes under a ship, it creates a massive bubble of gas.
This bubble lifts the ship out of the water.
The ship is essentially balanced on a bubble of air.
Gravity pulls the bow and the stern down while the bubble pushes the center up.
The result is a hogging stress that no steel on Earth can withstand.
The ship’s back breaks.
The photo Brockman took confirms this.
The bow is gone.
The stern is rising.
The ship didn’t just sink.
It snapped.
So the Ya Marazair was destroyed by a convergence of factors.
A Japanese captain who was too proud to zigzag, an American captain who was too disciplined to panic, and a despised torpedo that finally decided to do its job.
It serves as a brutal lesson in the economics of war.
The Yama Kazair cost millions of yen and took years to build.
It was crewed by highly trained specialists, and it was destroyed by a boat that the Navy wanted to scrap, firing a torpedo that cost about $10,000.
The perfect trap wasn’t about superior technology.
It was about exploiting the enemy’s psychology.
The Japanese assumed the Americans were weak and incompetent.
Brockman proved that an incompetent system in the hands of a competent man is far more dangerous than a perfect system in the hands of a complacent one.
The sinking of the Ya Makaz took less than 5 minutes.
But for the crew of the Nautilus, the day was just beginning.
Commander Brockman had done the impossible.
He had snuck into the enemy’s bedroom and slit the throat of the guard, but now the rest of the guards were awake.
The explosion that snapped the destroyer in half, acted like a dinnerbell for every anti-ubmarine vessel in the Yokosuka Naval District.
Within minutes, the sound of the Yama Kaz’s propellers was replaced by the terrifying high-pitched pinging of active sonar.
Ping ping ping.
The Nautilus was old, she was slow, and now she was being hunted.
What followed was a brutal testament to the accidental genius of the V-boat design.
As the Japanese patrol craft converged, they began to rain depth charges down on the fleeing submarine.
These are oil drums filled with high explosives set to detonate at specific depths.
For hours, the nautilus was hammered.
The hull plates groaned, light bulbs shattered, paint chipped off the bulkheads.
The temperature inside the boat soared as the ventilation was cut off.
But here is the irony.
The very thing that made the Nautilus a failure.
Her massive, heavy, overengineered hull was the only thing that kept her alive.
A lighter, more modern boat might have cracked under the strain, but the Nautilus was built like a bridge.
She was thick-skinned.
She took the beating like a heavyweight boxer refusing to fall.
Brockman and his crew endured the pounding.
They sat in the dark, listening to the explosions, waiting to die.
But the water never came in.
The old girl held together.
Eventually, the Japanese hunters gave up.
They assumed they had sunk the intruder, or they simply lost the trail.
The Nautilus slipped away into the deep Pacific, limping back toward Pearl Harbor.
When she finally arrived at Midway to refuel and then onto Pearl, she carried something far more valuable than the empty torpedo tubes.
She carried the camera.
The photograph Brockman took through the periscope became one of the most iconic images of the Second World War.
You have to understand the psychological value of this picture.
Up until June 1942, the American public had been fed a diet of defeat.
They had seen pictures of the burning battleships at Pearl Harbor.
They had heard about the surrender of Corodor.
And then suddenly, there was this photo.
It was undeniable proof.
It showed the rising sun flag, the symbol of the invincible enemy sinking into the abyss.
It showed a modern Japanese warship, helpless, broken, and dying.
The Navy splashed the photo across newspapers.
It became a propaganda weapon.
It said to the American people, “We are not just defending anymore.
We are hunting.” But for the Japanese, the legacy of that day was silence.
The Yamakaz simply vanished.
Because she was on a solo patrol, and because she sank so quickly, she likely didn’t have time to send a distress signal.
One minute she was there, the next she wasn’t.
The Imperial Navy waited for her to report in.
Days passed, then weeks.
Eventually, they had to accept the reality.
A modern destroyer had disappeared in their own home waters.
The psychological impact on the Japanese high command was profound.
It proved that their inner ring was not safe.
It forced them to divert resources.
They had to pull destroyers away from the front lines to patrol their own coastlines.
They had to acknowledge that the ocean was no longer theirs.
And for the families of the 227 men on the Yamakaz, there was no closure.
There were no bodies to bury.
There were no survivors to tell the story of their final moments.
There was just a notification that their sons had died for the emperor.
The Yama Kazair became a ghost ship erased from the roster by a relic from the 1920s.
The Nautilus went on to survive the war.
She fought in the Battle of Midway.
She raided the Gilbert Islands and she landed marines on Montoll.
She earned 14 battle stars.
The white elephant became a legend.
But her greatest moment remained that morning in June when she proved that in the unforgiving arena of naval warfare, it isn’t the newest toy that wins.
It is the steady hand, the cold nerve, and the discipline to strike when the enemy blinks.
There is a seductive lie that exists in the world of military technology and frankly in the modern world at large.
It is the belief that the best machine always wins.
We are obsessed with specifications.
We look at the top speed, the caliber of the gun, the thickness of the armor.
We put the USS Nautilus and the JN Ya Marazair on a spreadsheet and the math tells us the result is a foregone conclusion.
The destroyer is faster, more modern, and built to kill the submarine.
Therefore, the destroyer wins.
But the ocean is not a spreadsheet.
And war is not a video game where stats determine the outcome.
The destruction of the yarmakaz is a violent reminder of a truth that goes back to the days of swords and shields.
The tool does not matter as much as the hand that holds it.
Commander Brockman was given a bad tool.
The nautilus was a white elephant.
It was a failure of design.
But Brockman possessed a quality that is far more valuable than horsepower.
Adaptability.
This is a core strength of the American way of war.
Though we rarely talk about it like that, we like to talk about our massive industry and our overwhelming firepower.
But the real superpower is often the ability to take a broken, imperfect situation and maggyver a solution.
Brockman didn’t complain that his boat was too slow to chase the destroyer.
Instead, he turned his slowness into stealth.
He turned his heavy hull into a stable gun platform.
He took a lemon and squeezed it into a lethal trap.
Contrast this with the Japanese approach on that June morning.
The crew of the Ya Makaz had the perfect tool.
They had a Ferrari, but they drove it with their eyes closed.
They were victims of the victory disease.
They believed that their technological superiority and their warrior spirit granted them immunity from the laws of physics.
They believed they didn’t need to zigzag because they were the chosen ones of the Pacific.
This is the universal lesson and it applies to far more than just submarines.
It applies to corporations that dominate the market for decades and stop innovating because they think they are too big to fail.
It applies to empires that stretch their supply lines too thin because they have forgotten what it feels like to lose.
When you start believing your own propaganda, when you start thinking that the rules of the game don’t apply to you, you are already dead.
You just haven’t stopped moving yet.
The Yamaraz was a paper tiger in the truest sense.
Not because the ship was weak, but because the system operating it had become weak.
It had become rigid, arrogant, and complacent.
The perfect trap that Commander Brockman set was not just a geometric intersection of torpedoes and steel.
It was a psychological trap.
He banked on the fact that the Japanese captain would be too proud to take precautions.
He weaponized their arrogance against them.
In the end, that grainy photograph taken through the periscope tells the whole story.
It shows the stern of a magnificent high-tech warship slipping beneath the waves.
The flag is still flying, a symbol of pride that refused to strike its colors even as it drowned.
It is a tragic, haunting image, but it is also a warning.
It warns us that the moment we stop respecting the enemy, the moment we stop looking for the white elephant lurking in our blind spot is the moment we become the Yamakaz.
Technology changes.
The tools of war evolve from swords to submarines to drones.
But the fatal flaw of human nature remains the same.
Arrogance is the ultimate vulnerability.
And as the Nautilus proved, even a dinosaur can kill a greyhound if the greyhound is asleep at the wheel.
