Why U.S. Submarines Strangled Japan — While Japanese Subs Sat Idle-ZZ

The time is 7:30, July 24th, 1943.

[music] Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, 875 yds from a crippled Japanese [music] tanker that cannot move, cannot fight back, and cannot escape.

Lieutenant Commander Daspit is watching through his periscope.

The ship’s name is painted right there on the bow.

He can read it.

He can count the port holes.

The tanker is dead in the water, listening to starboard, going nowhere.

No escort vessels, no threats, calm sea, bright morning sun.

This is the kind of attack that submarine commanders dream about their entire careers.

A sitting duck, a guaranteed kill.

He gives the order.

The first torpedo leaves the tube.

30 seconds later, it strikes the tanker’s hull.

The crew hears it clearly through the steel walls of the submarine.

A sharp metallic clang, like a hammer striking an anvil.

Everyone tenses, waiting for the explosion.

Nothing.

Daspit fires another.

Another direct hit.

Another clang.

No explosion.

He fires a third.

A fourth.

A fifth.

Clang.

Clang.

Clang.

Clang.

The crew in the torpedo room is exchanging looks now.

The fire control team is going silent.

Nobody says it out loud, but everyone is thinking the same thing.

Something is catastrophically wrong.

And yet they keep firing.

Because maybe maybe the next one will work.

It doesn’t.

When the smoke clears, or rather when the smoke refuses to appear, Daspit has fired nine torpedoes from textbook range, achieved nine direct hits, heard nine metallic clangs echo through his submarine’s hull, and watched a 19,000 ton tanker sit there completely undamaged, mocking him from 875 yds away.

He has one torpedo left.

He keeps it.

He orders USS Tanosa to surface and head for Pearl Harbor.

He is not running from the enemy.

He is bringing evidence.

Evidence that for 21 months, the United States Navy had been sending its submarine crews to war with weapons that didn’t work.

And the men who designed those weapons knew it, and they covered it up anyway.

This is not a story about one broken torpedo.

This is the forensic audit of the greatest institutional failure in American military history.

A scandal that let hundreds of Japanese ships sail unmolested across the Pacific, cost the lives of American submariners who deserved better, and nearly handed Japan a strategic lifeline it had no right to receive.

And it is also the story of one admiral who refused to accept the lies, fought the bureaucracy with his bare hands, and eventually built the underwater weapon that strangled Japan’s economy into collapse.

To understand exactly what happened in that periscope that July morning and what it cost, we need to go back to where this disaster was born, not in the Pacific Ocean, in a government office in Newport, Rhode Island in peace time in 1931.

Part one, the weapon that was never tested.

Here is a number that will make your jaw drop.

The Mark1 14 torpedo, the primary weapon of every American submarine that went to war in December 1941, was live fire tested exactly twice before being issued to the fleet.

Twice for a weapon that was supposed to be the backbone of America’s entire Pacific submarine strategy.

Think about what that means.

You are a submarine skipper.

You have just been told the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor.

You are ordered to take your boat into enemy controlled waters and sink as much shipping as possible.

The fate of the Pacific campaign may depend on how much Japanese tonnage you can put on the ocean floor in the next 6 months.

And the weapon you are going to use to do that has been live fire tested exactly twice.

The last time being 15 years ago in 1926.

One of those two tests failed.

Nobody at the Bureau of Ordinance [music] told you that part.

The Mark1 14 was designed in 1931 as a replacement for the aging Mark 10.

It was an impressive piece of engineering on paper.

A 21-in torpedo running at 46 knots on its high speed setting, carrying a 668 lb warhead with a range of 4,500 yd at high speed or 9,000 yd at low.

It incorporated the Mark 6 exploder, a sophisticated dual trigger mechanism with both a magnetic influence trigger and a contact trigger.

The magnetic trigger was supposed to be revolutionary rather than hitting a ship on the side, which required multiple hits.

The torpedo would detect the ship’s magnetic field, pass underneath the keel, and detonate directly below.

One torpedo, one broken back, one sinking.

The problem was the depression.

The Navy had almost no money for testing.

Torpedoes cost thousands of dollars each and budgetconscious officials refused to authorize live fire tests that would destroy them.

So the Mark1 14 went through the design process, was refined over 7 years, and was declared ready for combat, all without anyone ever watching it function under realistic conditions against an actual target.

There was one other problem that the bureau knew about and said nothing.

During development, engineers increased the weight of the warhead.

They never recalibrated the depth sensor.

The heavier warhead caused the torpedo to ride lower in the water.

The bureau’s own internal tests in October 1941, 2 months before Pearl Harbor, showed the torpedo was running 4 ft deeper than its set depth.

This information was not forwarded to submarine commands, not a word.

So on December 8th, 1941, American submarines went to war carrying a weapon that ran too deep, had a magnetic trigger nobody had seriously tested, and a contact trigger that had been examined twice in 15 years.

And the men who designed it sat in their offices in Newport and Washington and said nothing was wrong.

The first man to find out the truth was Lieutenant Commander Terrell Jacobs, commanding officer of USS Sargo.

He was 38 years old, a career Navy man, and on Christmas Eve 1941, 17 days after Pearl Harbor, while most of America was still in shock.

He was somewhere in the Celibis Sea trying to sink Japanese ships.

He fired eight torpedoes at Japanese merchant vessels.

He heard the torpedoes strike the hulls.

Eight solid contacts.

[music] Eight metallic clangs through Sargo’s sonar equipment.

Not one ship sank, not one explosion.

The Japanese ships sailed away undamaged while Jacobs dove deep and tried to understand what had just happened.

He filed a detailed patrol report.

He stated clearly his torpedoes had hit the targets and failed to detonate.

The Bureau of Ordinance reviewed the report, consulted with the engineers who had designed the Mark1 14, and concluded that the problem was crew error.

The torpedoes were fine.

Jacobs had made mistakes in the attack setup.

This single response, blaming the submarine crews, would become the Bureau’s standard answer for the next 18 months.

January 1942, Lieutenant Commander Richard Voge, commanding USS Sailfish, fires 14 torpedoes at Japanese merchant ships.

He watches through his periscope as torpedo after torpedo passes under the targets keels without exploding.

He files a report.

The problem, he writes, is that his torpedoes are running too deep, at least 10 ft deeper than their set depth.

Bureau of Ordinance responds, “The torpedoes are running at correct depth.

Vogue must have made errors in fire control geometry.

” Same month, Lieutenant Commander Lewis Parks, USS Pompano, fires six torpedoes from a perfect position at a Japanese freighter.

All six pass underneath.

The freighter sails away.

Parks reports his torpedoes are running too deep.

Bureau of Ordinance depth setting procedures must have been improper.

Consider what Lieutenant Commander James Co of USS Skipjack wrote in his patrol report from Christmas Day 1941.

He had attacked a Japanese aircraft carrier at close range in the chaos of the earliest days of the war.

He fired four torpedoes.

All four either missed or failed to explode.

Co, a man not given to dramatic writing, put it with devastating precision.

Japanese anti-ubmarine measures were so ineffective that a submarine could practically pursue Japanese ships up the bay and still not sink them not because of Japanese counter measures because the weapons refused to function.

By March 1942, submarine skippers throughout the Pacific were filing almost identical reports.

Torpedoes running too deep.

Torpedoes hitting targets without exploding.

torpedoes exploding prematurely before reaching targets.

The pattern was impossible to miss.

Same failure modes across different submarines, different crews, different commanders in different ocean sectors.

The mathematics was screaming that something was wrong with the weapon.

But the Bureau of Ordinance had a simple answer for mathematics it didn’t like.

The Bureau had designed the Mark1 14.

The Bureau had tested it.

The Bureau said it worked.

Therefore, it worked.

Any evidence to the contrary was by definition incorrect.

Think about the moral weight of that position.

These were not bureaucrats arguing about procurement costs or schedule overruns.

These were officials sending young men into enemy controlled waters with weapons they knew or should have known were defective.

And every time a submarine commander came back with evidence, they chose their institutional pride over the lives of the men using their product.

By mid 1942, more than 800 torpedoes had been fired in Pacific combat operations.

80% had failed in one way or another.

80%.

If you built an airplane that crashed eight times out of 10, you would ground the fleet.

The Bureau of Ordinance kept sending the same torpedo to war and blaming the pilots.

Someone was going to have to fight this.

And the man who would, the one admiral in the entire US Navy, willing to tell the Bureau of Ordinance to its face that it was lying, was on his way to Fremantle, Australia, to take command of submarines in the Southwest Pacific.

His name was Charles Lockwood, and what he was about to do would technically violate every protocol in the Navy’s chain of command.

He didn’t ask for permission.

He already knew what the answer would be.

Part two, the Admiral who went to war with his own navy.

Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood arrived in Fremantle in May 1942.

He was 52 years old, compact, intense, with a career that had been built entirely in submarines going back to 1914.

He had commanded submarines in World War I.

He had spent the interwar years in the boats, learning them the way a craftsman learns his tools.

His submarine crews called him Uncle Charlie.

That nickname tells you something.

Flag officers don’t get affectionate nicknames from enlisted men unless those men believe the admiral actually gives a damn about them.

Lockwood gave a damn.

Within weeks of arriving in Fremantle, his submarine commanders were telling him what Vogue and Parks and Jacobs had already told their superiors.

The torpedoes weren’t working.

They were running too deep.

Torpedoes that hit ships weren’t exploding.

The kill rate was catastrophically below what it should have been.

Lockwood listened.

He believed them.

And then he did something that no other senior officer had been willing to do.

He decided to prove it.

In June 1942, without authorization from the Bureau of Ordinance, without permission from Washington, Lockwood pulled a submarine off combat operations and used it to run his own torpedo tests.

He knew asking for permission would mean months of correspondence, bureaucratic resistance, and almost certain refusal.

So he simply didn’t ask.

He took USS Skipjack to Frenchman Bay near Albany, Australia, submerged a series of fishing nets at precisely measured depths and fired torpedoes through them.

The methodology was almost childlike in its simplicity.

If you set a torpedo to run at 10 ft and it cuts the net at 21 ft, the torpedo is running 11 ft too deep, a child could understand this experiment.

An engineer with a PhD in ordinance development should have been able to understand it before the war started.

The results were unambiguous.

The Mark1 14 was running an average of 11 ft deeper than its set depth, sometimes as much as 15 ft.

Lockwood had his proof.

He compiled the data, wrote a detailed report, and sent it to the Bureau of Ordinance.

The Bureau reviewed his data and dismissed it.

The nets must have been positioned incorrectly.

The submarine must not have been properly trimmed.

The test methodology must have been flawed.

There was nothing wrong with the Mark1 14.

Lockwood ran the test again.

Three torpedoes set at 10 ft.

Three holes cut into the net at 21 ft.

He sent the results to Washington.

The bureau found new reasons why his tests were unreliable.

There was one other dimension to the torpedo scandal that has largely been forgotten, and it is dark enough that it deserves a moment.

In June 1943, while Lockwood was still fighting to get the magnetic trigger deactivated, a United States Congressman named Andrew May held a press conference.

He had returned from a Pacific inspection tour.

Standing in front of reporters, he helpfully explained that American submarines were surviving Japanese depth charge attacks because Japanese depth charges were set to detonate too shallow.

He gave specific details.

His reasoning was that the American public deserved good news.

Within days, Japanese forces had adjusted their depth charge settings.

Naval officers estimated afterward that May’s briefing cost the lives of several American submarine crews.

He later faced congressional ethics charges not for this but for unrelated corruption.

Remember that when we talk about institutional failure.

The Bureau of Ordinance was not alone.

But back to Lockwood in Washington because the confrontation that took place in that conference room matters.

When Lockwood laid out his evidence, test results, patrol reports from dozens of commanders, statistics showing American submarines were firing 10 torpedoes per confirmed sinking when the ratio should have been 3:1, bureau officials suggested his crews weren’t maintaining torpedoes properly, that the magnetic exploders were being damaged by rough handling at sea.

They suggested everything except that their design was wrong.

Lockwood lost his temper.

He told them that if the Bureau of Ordinance could not build a torpedo that hit and exploded, then for God’s sake, the Bureau of Ships should design a boat hook so his submariners could rip the plates off Japanese ships directly.

The room went silent.

Nobody spoke to a bureau chief that way.

Lockwood didn’t care.

He had sent too many men to war with weapons that betrayed them.

But this time, Lockwood had gone directly to Admiral Ernest King, commanderin-chief of the US fleet.

King ordered the bureau to conduct its own tests.

In August 1942, 8 months after Pearl Harbor, the Bureau of Ordinance formally declared that yes, the Mark1 14 ran 11 ft deeper than set.

They had known since October 1941.

They had said nothing, and they had spent eight months dismissing the reports of submarine commanders as incompetents.

The fix to the depth problem was technically straightforward.

Recalibrate the depth setting mechanism to compensate for the heavier combat warhead and move the hydrostatic sensor to a more accurate position along the torpedo’s body.

By late 1942, the depth problem was corrected.

American submariners adjusted their attack settings and finally started getting hits.

And that is when the second more sinister defect became impossible to ignore.

Torpedoes were now hitting targets and not exploding.

The Mark1 14 used the Mark 6 exploder, which had two triggers.

The magnetic influence trigger designed to detect a ship’s magnetic field and detonate beneath the keel, and the contact trigger as a backup.

The magnetic trigger was Buard’s pride and joy.

It was classified at the highest levels of secrecy.

Submarine commanders were forbidden from discussing it even with their own crew.

The bureau believed it was revolutionary technology that would make American submarine warfare dominant.

The problem was that the bureau had only tested the magnetic trigger in the waters off Rhode Island.

The Pacific Ocean has a different magnetic field.

The trigger was calibrated for North Atlantic conditions.

In the Pacific, it activated too early, sometimes hundreds of yards before the torpedo reached the target, detonating harmlessly in open water and announcing the submarine’s position to every destroyer in the area.

Or it didn’t activate at all.

Think about what a premature detonation meant tactically.

A miss is silent.

A miss gives the enemy nothing.

A premature explosion tells every Japanese warship within miles exactly where to search.

Submarine commanders fighting with the magnetic trigger were not just failing to sink ships.

They were actively giving away their own positions.

Lieutenant Commander John Scott, commanding USS Tunny, experienced this nightmare at its most excruciating.

On April 9th, 1943, Tunny found herself in what should have been the defining moment of any submarine skipper’s career.

Three Japanese aircraft carriers were in front of him.

Three, he was 880 yd away, close enough to see aircraft parked on the carrier decks through his periscope.

He had 10 torpedoes, and he fired them all, carefully spread across all three targets.

He heard seven explosions.

For one brief moment, Scott’s crew thought they had just changed the course of the Pacific War.

Then Scott looked through the periscope.

All three carriers were maintaining speed and course.

Not one was damaged.

Not one was on fire.

Not one was slowing down.

All seven explosions had been premature detonations.

The magnetic triggers firing on the carrier’s magnetic signatures from a distance, turning what should have been the most devastating submarine attack in naval history into a spectacular display of fireworks that accomplished nothing except telling every Japanese destroyer where to look for Tunny.

Lockwood had seen enough.

He fought through channels to have the magnetic trigger deactivated.

And on June 24th, 1943, Admiral Chester Nimitz issued the order.

All Pacific Fleet submarines were to deactivate the Mark 6 magnetic exploder and rely solely on the contact trigger.

Finally, the premature detonations would stop, but no one in Washington yet understood what that order had just revealed.

Because with the magnetic trigger dead, American torpedoes were now hitting targets at close range with their contact triggers and still not exploding.

Which brings us back to July 24th, 1943 and to Daspit and to those nine metallic clangs that echoed through the hull of USS Tenosa as the most important torpedo attack in American naval history produced absolutely nothing.

Part three, nine clangs and one torpedo that saved the war.

Let’s go back to that July morning because you need to feel the full weight of what Daspit was experiencing.

He had started the engagement with 16 torpedoes.

His first salvo of four had produced two hits that crippled the tanker.

Tonan Maru number three, a 19,000 ton whale factory ship converted for Japanese naval service.

Two hits.

The tanker stopped dead.

No escorts in sight, Daspit had time, patience, and a perfect target.

He maneuvered into the textbook firing position, perpendicular to the target’s beam, 875 yd out.

The shot geometry could not be improved.

He was so close he could read the ship’s name through his periscope.

The next nine torpedoes all ran true.

Every single one hit the tanker exactly where Dasperit aimed.

The crew heard each impact clang, clang, clang, nine times, nine duds.

The tanker sat there for hours, damaged, but floating, while Daspit stared through his periscope in what he later described as a kind of paralyzed disbelief.

He had one torpedo left.

He kept it.

He surfaced Tenosa and headed for Pearl Harbor.

Lockwood met him at the submarine pier.

He later wrote that he expected Daspit to let loose a torrent of cuss words damning me, the Bureau of Ordinance, the Newport torpedo station, and the base torpedo shop.

Instead, Daspit was barely able to speak.

He was, in Lockwood’s words, so furious as to be practically speechless.

He handed over the single unexloded torpedo like a man presenting exhibit A in a murder trial, which in a sense it was.

The Pearl Harbor Torpedo Shop tore the weapon apart.

They ran experiments, firing torpedoes at underwater cliffs off Kahuli Island, dropping dummy warheads from cranes onto steel plates at various impact angles.

What they found was almost elegant in its terrible irony.

The contact triggers firing pin was too heavy.

When a torpedo struck a target at 90°, a perfect perpendicular impact, exactly the shot that every submarine attack doctrine trained commanders to achieve, the deceleration forces upon impact, exceeded 500 times the force of gravity.

That sudden stop bent the firing pin before it could travel far enough to strike the percussion cap.

The pin jammed in its housing.

The warhead didn’t detonate.

The better your shot, the more likely it was to fail.

A glancing hit at an oblique angle worked because the impact force was distributed over a longer contact time and a smaller deceleration peak, but a perfect 90° hit, the one every skipper had been trained to take since submarine school, created precisely the conditions that guaranteed a dud.

American submarine doctrine had been optimizing for the highest possible failure rate.

Now, let’s pause here and think about what this means in human terms.

For 21 months, submarine commanders had been reporting failures.

For 21 months, the Bureau of Ordinance had told them they were making errors.

Men had gone on patrol after patrol, fired torpedo after torpedo, watched ships they should have sunk sail away undamaged, and been told by desk officers in Newport that the fault was theirs.

Some of those commanders had their careers questioned.

Some had their aggressiveness doubted.

All of them had carried the weight of missions that failed because the weapon in their torpedo tubes was broken in three different ways simultaneously, and the institution responsible for that weapon had chosen reputation over truth.

The fix, when it finally came, carried its own dark poetry.

The torpedo shop needed a lighter, stronger material for the firing pin.

They found it in the wreckage of Japanese aircraft shot down over Pearl Harbor.

The propeller blades of Japanese Zero fighters and other aircraft were fabricated from a high strength aluminum alloy.

Lightweight, hard, precisely the material needed.

American submariners went back to war armed with firing pins forged from the aircraft of the nation they were trying to defeat.

By September 1943, the first submarines departing Pearl Harbor carried torpedoes with the redesigned pins.

By November 1943, all three major defects had [music] been corrected.

Depth control, fixed, magnetic trigger deactivated, contact trigger rebuilt from the ground up.

21 months after Pearl Harbor, American submarines had reliable weapons for the first time.

Now Lockwood could unleash what he had been building because while he was fighting the Bureau of Ordinance, he had been doing something else entirely.

He had been finding his killers.

Not all submarine commanders are created equal.

In the first year of the Pacific War, many American skippers were cautious, perhaps understandably so, given that they were fighting with weapons they couldn’t trust.

Pre-war doctrine had emphasized caution, long range attacks, quick withdrawal, fire from 3,000 yards, and dive deep before the escorts arrived.

It was safe.

It was also nearly useless because a torpedo with a depth defect and a broken trigger had even less chance of working at 3,000 yd than at 875.

Lockwood had been watching patrol reports, looking for the commanders who attacked differently.

He had found one in particular, and this man’s story would become the measuring stick against which every other Pacific submarine commander would be judged.

Part four, the Oneboat Wolfpack.

On December 31st, 1942, Lieutenant Commander Dudley Walker Morton took command of USS Wahoo in Brisbane Harbor.

He was 35 years old, broad-shouldered, with a square jaw and a laugh that his crew could hear from two compartments away.

His nickname was Mush, short for Mushmouth, earned at the Naval Academy for his prominent jaw and his habit of talking continuously.

The name stuck for reasons that had nothing to do with talking quietly.

Before his first patrol as commanding officer, Morton called the crew together and made a speech that no one present ever forgot.

He told them that USS Wahoo was expendable, that their mission was to sink Japanese ships, and that they were going to pursue that mission aggressively regardless of risk.

Any crew member who wanted to transfer off the boat had 30 minutes to request it, and there would be no negative marks against anyone who stayed behind.

Not a single man accepted the offer.

Morton’s third patrol, his first as commanding officer, became one of the most celebrated submarine patrols in American naval history, and it was conducted almost entirely with the defective Mark 14 torpedo that was simultaneously failing throughout the Pacific Fleet.

His destination was Weiwok Harbor on the north coast of New Guinea.

There were no detailed charts of the harbor.

It was entirely in enemy hands and had never been surveyed by the US Navy.

One of Wahoo’s crew had purchased a student atlas in Australia that showed Wiiwak as a small indentation on the coast.

Morton used that atlas as his navigational guide and took a fleet submarine into an uncharted enemy harbor.

Inside the harbor, he found a Japanese destroyer anchored alongside several submarines.

Morton attacked.

His first three torpedoes missed or malfunctioned.

The Mark1 14 doing what the Mark1 14 did.

The destroyer detected Wahoo and turned to attack at full speed, charging directly at the submarine’s periscope.

The standard response was to dive deep and run.

Morton waited.

He let the destroyer close the range, watching through the scope as the bow wave grew larger and larger until a collision seemed seconds away.

Then he fired a single torpedo straight down the destroyer’s throat.

A down the throat shot directly into the charging bow.

The torpedo hit amid ships and broke the destroyer in half.

The ship sank in minutes.

Two days later, Wahu encountered a five ship convoy north of New Guinea.

Morton attacked in daylight on the surface, running a battle that lasted 14 hours.

He sank the troop transport Bio Maru, the freighter Fukquay Maru, and damaged other ships in the convoy.

He fired every torpedo he had.

He used his deck guns when the torpedoes were gone.

He chased ships on the surface in broad daylight.

The Japanese couldn’t catch him and couldn’t stop him.

Wahoo returned to Pearl Harbor on February 7th, 1943.

She had been at sea for 23 days.

Normal patrol length was 60 to 75 days.

In those 23 days, Morton had expended all 24 of his torpedoes with the broken Mark1 14, remember, and had accomplished more than most submarines achieved in two full patrols.

Admiral Nimttz came down to the pier to make the award presentations personally.

Morton got his Navy cross.

More importantly, his example changed the submarine forces culture.

Lockwood promoted the aggressive commanders.

He gave them the best boats and the most dangerous patrol areas.

He had been identifying these men throughout 1942 and early 1943.

Richard O’Ne who had been Morton’s executive officer on Wahoo and would go on to become the highest scoring American submarine commander of the war.

Samuel Dy commanding USS Harder who made a specialty of hunting destroyers, the ships specifically designed to hunt submarines.

and in a period of weeks in 1944 sank five of them.

Eugene Flucky, commanding USS Barb, who in July 1945 landed a demolition party on the Japanese home island of Kafuto and blew up a railroad train, the only ground combat conducted by American submarine personnel during the entire war.

These were the commanders who transformed American submarine warfare from a cautious defensive enterprise into what naval historians would eventually call the most strategically decisive campaign of the Pacific War.

The numbers tell the story in merciless arithmetic.

In 1942, with broken torpedoes and pre-war doctrine, American submarines sank 109 confirmed Japanese ships totaling approximately 580,000 tons.

In 1943, as the depth problem was fixed and aggressive commanders took over, that total more than doubled to over 1.

5 million tons, even with the magnetic and contact trigger defects still active through most of the year.

In 1944, with reliable torpedoes and veteran commanders, American submarines sank over 3 million tons of Japanese shipping, more than double the previous year’s total.

By early 1945, there weren’t enough targets left.

Submarines were struggling to find ships to sink.

The final tally, American submarines sank 1,314 Japanese merchant vessels, totaling 5.

3 million tons.

That represented 55% of all Japanese shipping losses during the entire war.

They also sank one battleship, eight aircraft carriers, 15 cruisers, and 42 destroyers.

All of this accomplished by a force that represented less than 2% of the entire US Navy’s personnel.

And the cost, we cannot leave this part out because the cost was real.

52 American submarines were lost during the war.

3,55 submariners died, a fatality rate of approximately 22%, the highest of any branch of the American military.

One in five men who volunteered for submarine service did not come home.

For comparison, the overall US military fatality rate was about 3%.

Submariners died at roughly 7 times that rate.

Dudley Morton was among them.

His seventh patrol began September 9th, 1943.

Wahoo transited into the Sea of Japan, shallow, heavily patrolled, an area where a damaged submarine had almost no room to maneuver.

She sank four ships.

On October 11th, 1943, Japanese anti-ubmarine aircraft found a surfaced submarine exiting through La Peru Strait.

They attacked.

Wahoo was never heard from again.

Her wreck was found by divers in 2005.

She had been struck in the conning tower by a bomb.

All 80 officers and crew were lost.

Morton was 35 years old.

He was awarded four Navy crosses.

His executive officer, Richard Okaine, survived, finished the war with 31 ships and more than 227,000 tons sunk, the highest total of any American submarine commander.

Was captured when USS Tang was sunk by one of her own defective torpedoes in October 1944.

spent months as a prisoner of war and received the Medal of Honor after the war.

He died in 1994.

But here is the question that the entire American submarine story raises.

What if you had done everything right from the beginning? What if you had working torpedoes from day one? Your commanders were aggressive and you employed your submarines in a sustained campaign against the enemy’s economy.

What would that have looked like? We don’t have to imagine.

We can look at the other side of the Pacific and see exactly what it looked like when a navy did everything wrong.

Not with defective weapons, not with cautious commanders, just with completely systematically catastrophically wrong strategy.

Part five.

The fleet that had everything and accomplished nothing.

The Imperial Japanese Navy entered the Second World War with the most technically sophisticated submarine force in the world.

Not arguably, not by some measures.

Objectively, in nearly every category of hardware, Japan’s submarines were superior to America’s.

Consider the I400 class, the largest conventional submarines ever built up to that point.

Each one displaced 6,500 tons submerged, larger than many surface warships.

Each one carried three torpedo bombers in a watertight hanger with a compressed air catapult for launch.

Range 37,500 m without refueling.

These submarines could leave Japan, cross the Pacific, attack the Panama Canal or the American West Coast, and return home, all without seeing a port.

Japan also built submarines capable of 23 knots on the surface, faster than anything America was operating.

Their oxygen-powered long lance torpedo used on submarines as well as surface ships had no exhaust bubbles, leaving no visible wake and carried a 1,100 lb warhead.

It worked perfectly from the first day of the war.

Japan’s submarines had working weapons, experienced crews, technically superior boats, and exceptional range.

They had every material advantage that American submariners spent two years fighting their own bureaucracy to obtain.

And here is the result.

Japanese submarines sank approximately 184 Allied merchant ships during the entire Pacific War totaling roughly 1 million gross registered tons.

Compare that number to German yubot.

2,840 ships, 14.

3 million tons.

Compare it to American submarines, 1,314 ships, 5.

3 million tons.

Compare it to British submarines in the Mediterranean, 493 ships, 1.

52 million tons.

Japan had better submarines than any of them and accomplished less than the weakest entry on that list.

Why? Not defective weapons, not cowardly commanders.

strategy entirely, completely catastrophically wrong strategy.

Japanese naval doctrine was built around the concept of a single decisive battle.

A philosophy rooted in the 1905 battle of Ssushima, where Japan had annihilated the Russian Baltic fleet in one engagement.

Japanese admirals believed that any future war would be decided the same way.

one massive surface battle between battleships and carriers preceded by attrition through submarine and air attacks against the enemy fleet.

In this doctrine, submarines existed to find American warships, shadow them, report their positions and attack them during their approach.

Not merchant ships, warships.

The submarine’s job was reconnaissance and fleet support.

This doctrine made a certain tactical sense if you believed the war would be decided in a single afternoon.

It made no strategic sense whatsoever against an enemy whose industrial capacity was 40 times yours and who could replace every ship you sank within months.

American supply lines across the Pacific were extraordinarily vulnerable.

San Francisco to Pearl Harbor 2,400 m.

Pearl Harbor to Australia, 4,700 m.

Pearl Harbor to the Philippines, 5,000 m.

Every Allied soldier in the Pacific was eating food, using ammunition, operating vehicles, and flying aircraft that had crossed those distances on slow, lightly armed merchant ships.

A sustained Japanese submarine campaign against Allied logistics would have stretched convoy protection to the breaking point.

It might not have won the war for Japan.

America’s industrial advantage was too overwhelming for that, but it would have extended the conflict by years and cost hundreds of thousands of additional lives on both sides.

Japanese naval leadership never made the ship.

They kept ordering submarines to hunt carrier task forces.

fast radar equipped, screened by destroyers with combat air patrols overhead.

Even when Japanese submarines occasionally succeeded in attacking American warships, the cost was severe and the strategic impact minimal.

American carriers that were sunk were replaced within months.

The war machine kept moving.

Then it got worse.

As Japan began losing territory in 1943 and isolated island garrisons needed resupply, the Navy began diverting combat submarines to cargo missions.

Torpedoes were removed.

Torpedo tubes were sealed.

External cargo containers were welded onto submarine hulls.

Fleet submarines designed to hunt and kill became glorified freighters, surfacing in the dark near island beaches to unload sacks of rice and cases of ammunition.

Then they had to sit vulnerable on the surface while the cargo was transferred.

Slow, unmaneuverable, completely exposed to air attack.

The casualty rate was appalling.

Dozens of Japanese submarines were lost on these missions.

Irreplaceable, experienced crews, men who had trained for years in complex submarine operations, died delivering supplies that could not change the outcome on islands that would be captured anyway.

The army demanded it.

The Navy complied.

Combat submarines were consumed, accomplishing nothing.

Captain Atsushi Oi, a Japanese staff officer who survived the war, wrote afterward with blunt clarity, “Japan failed in anti-ubmarine warfare, largely because her navy disregarded the importance of the problem.

Japan had no unified command for protecting merchant shipping until November 1943.

By that point, the submarine war was already decided.

Even after creating the Grand Escort Command, Japan never built the cheap mass-roduced destroyer escorts that Britain and America were churning out by the hundreds to protect convoys.

The best officers and newest equipment went to the fleet.

Convoy protection got what was left.

The result by 1944 was economic strangulation.

Japan’s oil imports dropped from 1.

8 8 million tons in 1943 to 300,000 tons in 1944.

Think about what that number means.

Aircraft sat grounded on airfields because there was no aviation fuel.

Warships remained in port because there was no bunker oil.

The super battleship Yamato, 72,000 tons of the most powerful surface warship ever built, spent most of 1944 tied to a dock because the Imperial Japanese Navy could not afford the fuel to operate her.

When Yamato finally sailed on her final mission to Okinawa in April 1945, she carried only enough oil for a one-way trip.

Japan did not have enough fuel to bring her home.

She was sunk by American aircraft before she ever reached a target.

Rice shipments from Korea and Taiwan fell by 70%.

Iron ore from China dropped to a trickle.

Japan imported 90% of its oil, all of its rubber, and 88% of its iron ore.

Every ton of those materials had to cross thousands of miles of ocean on ships.

ships that by 1944 were being sent to the bottom faster than Japan could build replacements.

Factories that needed raw materials closed.

Civilians went hungry.

The military couldn’t move troops or supplies from one island to the next.

Japan’s war economy was starving.

Not from bombing, not from battlefield defeats alone, but because American submarines had cut the maritime arteries that kept the entire system alive.

Japan’s own postwar cabinet testimony is unambiguous.

The destruction of their merchant marine was the single greatest cause of their defeat.

Not the atomic bombs, not the island hopping campaign, not the firebombing of Japanese cities, the submarines, the 2% of the US Navy that strangled an island nation’s economy into collapse.

The verdict.

So here is the final accounting, the bill, as it were.

America went to war in December 1941 with a broken torpedo, an institution too proud to admit it, and a set of strategic habits borrowed from peaceime exercises that had nothing to do with the war that was actually being fought.

For 21 months, submarine commanders filed reports, accumulated evidence, and were told by the Bureau of Ordinance that they were the problem.

During those 21 months, hundreds of ships that should have been on the ocean floor sailed unmolested.

Japan received oil, rubber, iron ore, and food that extended her ability to fight.

American submariners went on patrol after patrol with weapons they could not trust, and some of them died because of it.

Japan, on the other side of the ledger, had the world’s finest submarine hardware and squandered every advantage through strategic bankruptcy.

They built submarines the size of small warships and used them to deliver rice.

They had working torpedoes and aimed them at the wrong targets.

They had experienced crews and spent them on missions that were useless from the moment they were assigned.

War is mathematics, not heroism, not equipment.

Mathematics.

America’s submarines, once the torpedo problem was fixed, prosecuted the correct mathematical equation.

Destroy the merchant marine.

Collapse the economy.

End the war.

Japan’s submarines prosecuted the wrong equation.

Hunt fleet units.

Support the decisive battle doctrine.

Ignore the supply lines.

The numbers recorded the verdict without mercy.

American submarines 1,314 ships, 5.

3 million tons, 55% of Japan’s shipping losses.

Japan’s submarines, 184 merchant ships, 1 million tons.

Strategic irrelevance.

But the lesson that should outlast every statistic in this story is what Charles Lockwood did in Fremantle in June 1942 when he was told by the most powerful ordinance bureaucracy in the United States Navy that his submarines were working fine.

And he decided that was not good enough.

He pulled a boat off combat operations.

He bought fishing nets.

He fired torpedoes through them and measured the holes.

He compiled his evidence, sent it up the chain of command, was dismissed, sent it again, was dismissed again, flew to Washington, walked into a room full of admirals who had designed the weapon he was criticizing, and told them in front of their colleagues on the record, without softening a word, that if they couldn’t build a torpedo that hit and exploded, they should build him a boat hook instead.

Nobody had ever spoken to the Bureau of Ordinance like that.

Everyone at that table understood the career risk he was taking.

Lockwood didn’t care about his career.

He cared about the men he was sending into the Pacific in submarines far from home.

Hunting in waters controlled by an enemy that was getting stronger every month.

The torpedoes kept failing.

Sometimes the most dangerous thing on a battlefield is not the enemy.

It is the institution behind you that will not admit its product is broken.

Lawrence Daspit, the man who brought Tenosa home with one torpedo and started the chain of events that finally broke the bureaucracy’s grip, continued commanding submarines after that July morning.

He made four more war patrols.

He survived the war and retired as a rear admiral in 1962.

He died in 1998 at the age of 87.

The single torpedo he carried back from Tonan Maru exhibit A in the case against the Bureau of Ordinance was the physical proof that Lockwood needed to force the contact trigger redesign.

One unexloded torpedo from one failed attack on one crippled tanker changed the balance of the Pacific War.

The tanker Daspit never sank that morning.

She was eventually sunk by another American submarine 4 months later with working torpedoes.

If you’ve spent 45 minutes with this story and found it worth your time, do one thing.

Hit that like button.

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Subscribe if you want to be here for the next audit because the Pacific War is full of stories like this one.

Systems that failed, systems that were fixed, systems that were never fixed at all.

The next one is going to make this torpedo scandal look like a rehearsal.