“Only one question troubled us,” recalled George. “The word had spread that we were going to lose one of our officers. New submarines were coming off the ways at a rapid rate back in the States, new submarines that required crews and experienced officers.”
When the news of his transfer arrived, George was disappointed. He had been assigned to be executive officer of the USS Pollack (SS-180). “I groaned…. Built in the 1930s, she certainly would be a comedown from the Wahoo…. Instead of a new boat, I would be on an old one. It was a promotion, but it wasn’t worth it.”
George was replacing Gus Weinel, an old classmate from the Naval Academy. As George arrived on the Pollack, Weinel was just leaving, holding a box with a sextant he’d won at the Academy for being first in his class in navigation. George couldn’t help envying his friend, who was taking command of a new submarine, the USS Cisco (SS-290).
“I never saw him again,” said George. The Cisco was lost on her first patrol.
“I left the Wahoo with great sadness,” reflected George later. “A fighting craft becomes more than a place to live and work for the men who serve on her. She has a personality of her own, and especially in wartime her men develop attitudes toward her which are grounded far more deeply in emotion than in logic.
“To those of us who had made three patrols on her, the Wahoo had become part warrior comrade, part glorious Amazon … a burly, confident, reckless wench with a touch of coarseness and an overwhelming and often exhausting claim on our emotions.”
George took some treasures with him, however, including “the homemade chart of Wewak harbor, created with such frantic zeal during the early days of the third patrol.”
How did he end up with this lucky prize?
“A big controversy over who should keep the chart had arisen a few days before we returned to Pearl, and Mush, who never pulled his rank in such matters, had suggested that we deal a cold deck with the chart as a prize,” George said. “I drew a flush.” (After the war, George Grider donated the map to the US Navy Submarine Force Library and Museum in Groton, Connecticut.)
Dick O’Kane and Mush Morton continued as a dynamic team on Wahoo’s fourth and fifth patrols, from February through May of 1943, where the submarine’s successes and daring exploits became legend.
Dick himself was promoted to command his own submarine before Wahoo’s sixth, unsuccessful patrol in the Sea of Japan in the summer of 1943. It was a patrol that put skipper Mush Morton in a very bad mood.
“Mush was boiling mad,” reported Charles Lockwood after hearing the captain’s report of his fruitless patrol in the Sea of Japan. “He had found plenty of targets but a combination of deep running and duds [torpedoes that ran too deep or did not explode] had broken him down.”
Torpedo problems still plagued the older fish, but new, more reliable ones were becoming available. “All Morton wanted,” recalled Lockwood, who was now commanding Pacific Fleet submarines at Pearl Harbor, “was a quick turn-around, a load of our new torpedoes, the Mark XVIII [Mark 18] electric, and an area in the Sea of Japan.”
Mush wanted to go back and get another crack at all those ships he had missed. So Lockwood agreed to send Wahoo (now on her seventh patrol) and the USS Sawfish (SS-276), under Lieutenant Commander E. T. “Gene” Sands, to the Sea of Japan in September 1943.
Yeo Sterling had enjoyed his recent leave so much he was still sore from the sunburn and blisters he’d gotten at Waikiki Beach. Before their departure from Pearl Harbor, he returned early to Wahoo to take care of official correspondence. Among the letters that had arrived was one with his name on it: He’d been approved to attend stenography school, a step that would allow him to be promoted. The course would start in November.
Yeo was eager to go, and he also wanted a break from the long weeks of war patrols. He rushed to show the letter to Mush Morton in the wardroom. His heart sank at the captain’s next words.
“ ‘Yeo, I’m going to ask a favor of you … Howsabout you making one more patrol with me? We’ll be back in October. When we get in, I’ll get you plane transportation back to the States.’
“ ‘Captain, your word is good enough for me. I’ll get back to work.’
“He grinned at me. ‘Thanks, Yeo, I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’ ”
Just before Wahoo left Pearl Harbor on September 5, 1943, Mush Morton pulled up to the dock in a jeep, a special passenger beside him. As part of his job, Yeo started to ask the visitor for his name and address. Then he stopped and stammered, “ ‘Why, you’re Gene Tunney—sir!’ ”
Commander Gene Tunney, heavyweight boxing champion of the world from 1926 to 1928, would be traveling as far as Midway Island on the Wahoo. Yeo was still on deck when he heard Tunney telling Mush his plans for improving the physical fitness of submariners, who, he said, simply didn’t get enough exercise. He went on to share his recommendations, which included daily exercises and drills instead of long hours on the beach (and needless to say, no beer) when submariners were on leave.
Yeo could imagine what his crewmates would have to say about that. “I thought, Oh brother, and this is the great Gene Tunney! No wonder he became a world’s champion heavyweight boxer, but he sure don’t know anything about submarines.”
Mush grinned at Yeo. “ ‘The Commander has a fine idea, don’t you think so, Yeo?’ ”
“ ‘The men will receive it with great enthusiasm, sir,’ ” Yeo replied. (It’s pretty safe to assume he had a hard time pulling off that response with a straight face.)
Wahoo’s schedule called for less than a day spent at Midway en route to patrol the Sea of Japan. In the few hours they were there, Yeo sensed an unexpected tension in his fellow crew members. One sailor lost a good luck ring. Another, whose wife was expecting a baby, confided in Yeo that he had an attack of nerves, and feared he’d never hold his son or daughter in his arms.
At about two thirty in the afternoon, as the weather was getting drizzly, Mush stuck his head into Yeo’s office on the Wahoo. He asked if Yeo had his orders made up to leave the submarine to attend that stenography course. Yeo hadn’t, but assured the captain he could get the paperwork finalized in a hurry.
Mush announced, “ ‘We’ve got an hour before we sail. Let’s go up to the Squadron and get you a relief.’
“We went topside and over the gangway together,” said Yeo. “I crawled into a jeep with him, and he drove along the dock recklessly. I still thought he was joking, and that when we got there, I would find a clerical job that needed attending to.”
It was not a joke. Mush had, for reasons Yeo never fathomed, changed his mind. As the paperwork was being filed, the captain remarked that he was giving up the best yeoman he’d ever had. Yeo felt himself bursting with pride. “I had been complimented by the best submarine skipper in the Submarine Fleet.”
At that point, everything happened quickly, so as not to delay Wahoo’s departure. Once a replacement yeoman was found, Mush and Yeo returned to the Wahoo, where Yeo cleaned out his locker and stuffed his seabag with his belongings. Fellow crew members filled his pockets with hastily written notes and letters for loved ones back home.
Near the dock, a jeep waited to give him a ride, but Yeo said he would make his own way back to headquarters. He wanted to watch the Wahoo as long as he could.
“I heard the diesels come to life, and helped push the gangway in toward Wahoo’s deck. Then there was just the bowline left, and when the Captain ordered it thrown off, I pushed the line handlers away and pulled the bight [loop of rope] clear of the bollard [post on a wharf] and heaved it into the water. Wahoo’s fog horn sounded a loud parting blast and a whistle on the bridge sounded shrilly … Wahoo drifted away from the pier and began to move away slowly.
“Captain Morton’s voice came across the widening water. ‘Take care of yourself, Yeo.’
“ ‘Good hunting,’ I shouted back.”
Yeo waved at everyone still topside on deck as the Wahoo pulled away. He sat down on his seabag on the planks of the
dock. And he stayed there while the Wahoo drew away, became smaller and smaller, a tiny silhouette on the horizon. Then she headed into a rain squall and was lost to sight.
The date was September 13, 1943. Forest “Yeo” Sterling was the last man to see her.
Mush was scheduled to make an update report to headquarters on October 26. “Days dragged by and still no word came,” wrote Admiral Charles Lockwood. “It just didn’t seem possible that Morton and his fighting crew could be lost.
“As time went on—Admiral Nimitz allowed me a week’s margin on reporting losses—I finally had to send the dispatch which added Wahoo’s name to the list of ‘overdue, presumed lost.’ The entire Submarine Force was saddened by the news that she, one of our most valuable units, would never come steaming in again with a broom at her masthead and Mush Morton’s fighting face, with its wide grin, showing above the bridge rail.”
Records credit Wahoo with sinking four ships in the Sea of Japan on her last patrol. “This makes her final total 20 ships for a total of 60,038 tons,” said Lockwood. “Postwar reports indicate she was sunk by depth charges from a plane in La Pérouse Strait [or Soya Strait, a body of water off the northern part of the Japanese island of Hokkaido] on October 11, 1943.”
Lockwood immediately stopped activities in the Sea of Japan.
Dudley “Mush” Morton became a symbol of a new breed of submarine skipper. Pictured here is a sinking Japanese cargo ship seen from the periscope of the Wahoo.
George Grider’s last meeting with Mush Morton had taken place a few months before, in April, when his boat, the Pollack, had docked at Midway beside the Wahoo. Mush and Dick O’Kane were there to greet him.
“We had run into foul weather that delayed our arrival, and my old shipmates on the Wahoo, knowing I was navigator, had read the dispatch announcing the delay with great glee,” recalled George. “As we pulled alongside, Mush and Dick were standing on the dock, looking up at me.
“ ‘What happened, George?’ Mush asked innocently. ‘Forget about the International Date Line?’
“ ‘Aw, Captain,’ Dick explained, loud enough for every man aboard the Pollack to hear, ‘he just got lost again.’ ”
In speculating later about Wahoo’s final days, George felt that the loss of his most experienced officers had an impact on Mush Morton. Dick O’Kane and George himself, who had been part of Mush’s team, had both been transferred to other boats. Another senior officer, Roger Paine, had gotten an attack of appendicitis the night before the Wahoo set off on her last patrol.
George said, “By now virtually all Mush’s old associates in the conning tower were gone, replaced by men who naturally thought of their great and famous skipper as infallible. I believe that, on previous patrols, Mush had come to rely subconsciously on his officers to tell him what not to do, and with the loss of Roger this safety factor disappeared.
“Here was a man whose valor blazed up so brightly that at times he could not distinguish between the calculated risk and the foolhardy chance, and now the men who knew him well enough to insist on pointing out the difference were gone.”
The Wahoo would not be forgotten. Ned Beach captured what many in the Submarine Force felt: “I like to think of Wahoo carrying the fight to the enemy, as she always did, gloriously, successfully, and furiously, up to the last catastrophic instant.”
In October 2006, the US Navy reported that an international team of divers and experts had found the wreck of the Wahoo near the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Historical records indicate that on October 11, 1943, the Wahoo had been spotted by Japanese planes; it appears Mush Morton and the crew likely sank four ships before being attacked and sunk.
Sixty-four years later, the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park in Honolulu, Hawai’i, held a memorial ceremony for the Wahoo on October 11, 2007. Over two hundred people attended.
JANUARY 2: As part of Allied efforts to take back Papua New Guinea from Japanese control, the village of Buna is recaptured.
JANUARY 20: Bob English, commander of submarines at Pearl Harbor, is killed in a plane crash; Lockwood is named COMSUBPAC, commander of the Pacific Fleet subs, at Pearl Harbor.
FEBRUARY 7: Japanese depart Guadalcanal; Allies claim victory there on February 9.
MARCH 2–4: Japanese troopships incur heavy losses in Battle of the Bismarck Sea, in the Southwest Pacific.
APRIL 18: Pearl Harbor mastermind Isoroku Yamamoto is killed in an attack through the efforts of US code breakers.
JULY 4: Admiral Charles Lockwood sends first three submarines into the Sea of Japan but attack results are disappointing.
AUGUST–DECEMBER: US and Allied forces adopt “leapfrogging” attack strategy across Pacific islands, including the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, with the goal of reaching and invading Japan.
OCTOBER 11: Wahoo is lost on a patrol in the Sea of Japan.
DECEMBER: Submarines end the year with approximately 350 war patrols, about the same as in 1941–1942; subs are credited with sinking 335 ships for 1.5 million tons, a 100 percent increase over 1941–1942.
USS Tang.
It is one thing to be an executive officer and an entirely different thing to be the man one step higher, who must make the final decisions … It was a glorious feeling … but it was also a lonely feeling, and a disquieting one.
—George Grider
O’Kane is the fightingest naval officer I have ever seen.
—Dudley “Mush” Morton
Submariners are always asked about claustrophobia. ‘How can you exist in such a small enclosed space? I’d go stark raving mad,’ people invariably say. The answer is simple. Submarine sailors don’t want ‘a view.’ They don’t want to see through glass windows around them. They feel much safer inside thick, strong steel. Besides, you don’t only see the stuff of the mere ship around you.
In the Navy, your mind is far away, on your job, on the condition of whatever it is you’re responsible for; you feel that your hands are not attached at the ends of your arms, but out at the limits of consciousness, the perimeter of your vision, through the periscope maybe, or the throttles of a big diesel engine, reaching for the controls of your destiny.
—Edward L. Beach Jr.
Tang under construction at Mare Island Navy Yard in California.
USS TANG (SS-306)
USS Tang, in her short but brilliant career identified herself as one of the U.S. Navy’s most fightingest ships.
—Office of Naval Records and History
Ships’ Histories Section
Navy Department
In May 1943, after five patrols as executive officer on the Wahoo, Dick O’Kane got his own command. Before he left, Wahoo’s crew presented him with an engraved silver cigarette case. As Dick walked away, he had a lump in his throat. He would never set foot on Wahoo again.
Dick heard the news about Wahoo that fall, while he was headlong into shakedown preparations for the brand-new USS Tang (SS-306). “My beloved Wahoo was indeed ‘overdue and presumed lost.’ This would add an extra note of seriousness and determination to our final training.”
Dick had no time to sit around and grieve—he had weighty responsibilities before him. With nine years of sea duty in various ships and three patrols with Mush Morton as his skipper fresh in his mind, Dick knew he was as prepared as he’d ever be. To Dick’s relief, his new boat was in good shape as well. “Tang had no bugs. She performed as if she’d been at sea a year, and it was rather up to us to catch up to her.”
Tang would make her first war patrol on January 22, 1944, almost a year to the day when, in an unknown harbor called Wewak, Mush and Dick had made their famous “down the throat” shot on a destroyer.
Now Dick had his chance to live up to Mush’s complete confidence in him and carry on the fighting spirit of Wahoo. That would mean sinking every enemy ship encountered. It also meant ensuring that his crew members were happy and well fed.
That’s why Dick was determined to get an ice-cream machine for his new submari
ne. “ ‘Why, only the Chief of the Bureau of Ships could authorize such an installation!’ ” Dick was told when he brought up the matter officially.
“It was the answer I had expected from the shipyard commander,” Dick recalled.
However, a man who had faced a destroyer in a “down the throat” shot wasn’t about to be stopped by a little bureaucratic red tape.
Dick knew there was an ice-cream maker available. In fact, one of his men had it on good authority that the officers’ wardroom of the battleship USS Tennessee (BB-43) was just about to get one—unless, of course, Tang nabbed it first.
Dick got on the phone to the man in charge to make his case, assuring him that the installation would not at all affect the submarine’s refrigeration system. Dick got his way, and the men of the Tang got their ice cream.
Dick had another essential improvement in mind for Tang: to convert a useless warming oven into a baking oven for pies and bread. “If a steward became adept at making pies and pastries he could very nearly write his own ticket in the navy, and I’d never been averse to sampling their experiments.”
Dick was successful in the baking-oven mission too. Both devices became popular during Tang’s first patrol in warm tropical seas, though the ice cream always seemed to win out. Said the new skipper, “I had to shake my head … as I watched the beautiful wedges of pie being smothered with globs of ice cream, but all hands seemed to like it that way.”
In his cabin during the last night at Pearl Harbor before Tang’s maiden patrol and his own first outing as a commanding officer, Dick reflected on how many people had helped to bring the new submarine to this point, from the many workmen who’d built her, to the friends and family who’d gathered at Golden Gate Bridge to wave the boat off with good wishes and prayers.
All that hard work had been worth it: The submarine was ready. Tang was, Dick reflected, “a vibrant ship, performing without flaw under the most critical eye. She surely would not be found lacking during our coming endeavors against the enemy.”
Dive! World War II Stories of Sailors & Submarines in the Pacific Page 15