The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  The war likewise required juggling the men in the top jobs. In March 1942, Nimitz relieved Tommy Withers as COMSUBPAC and gave the job to Rear Admiral Robert Henry English, a former submariner who had most recently commanded the light cruiser Helena. (He had also served as a chief of staff to a previous Pacific submarine commander and had served on the “submarine desk” at Main Navy in Washington.) English demanded aggressive tactics and was hard on skippers he judged to be too timid, even when they had been victims of bad luck or faulty equipment.

  For the first half of the Pacific War, the submarine force was grievously handicapped by bad torpedoes. The weapons ran too deep, passing harmlessly under a target’s keel. Magnetic detonators either failed to explode or exploded prematurely. Torpedoes often bounced pathetically off the hull of a Japanese ship. The flaws were not discovered until the war was long underway, partly because the peacetime economy had precluded live firing tests and partly because apathetic time-servers in the Bureau of Ordnance stonewalled all reasonable requests for study and improvement. Eventually it was discovered (and the bureau acknowledged) that torpedoes ran an average of 10 feet deeper than their settings. The problems with the secret Mark 6 magnetic exploder—which detected the presence of a hull overhead and was timed to explode directly underneath the target’s keel, with the blast force directed upward—took longer to rectify. As more submarine officers became convinced that the magnetic exploder was unreliable, they lobbied their commanders to allow them to deactivate the device and set the torpedoes to run shallower. Admiral Withers refused these proposals, partly because it would require firing three-fish spreads, and the supply of torpedoes at Pearl was dangerously low throughout 1942. In many cases, skippers deactivated the devices on their own and then fudged patrol reports to cover their tracks. But that tended to obscure the problem and further delay an adequate response. At any rate, a torpedo relying on the older contact trigger was also faulty because the poorly engineered firing pin was often crushed on impact and failed to detonate the warhead.

  Diffident captains and abysmal torpedoes tended to eclipse the saving fact that the submarine force was stocked with talent further down the ranks. The executive officers and third officers, most of whom had graduated from the Naval Academy in the early and mid-1930s, would supply the skippers of 1943–45. The “chief of the boat” (senior-most petty officer) was often the oldest man aboard; he might have served twenty or more years in submarines. The submarine service was small and proud, a self-conscious elite that prized their inimitable esprit de corps. Submariners relied on one another for mutual survival and success; they were bound together not only by common interest but by good humor, camaraderie, and respect. The oppressive distinctions of rank faded in importance among the seventy to eighty men living cheek to jowl in a warren of cramped and gloomy compartments. No one saluted or threw his rank around. Officers and men called one another by first names. “It’s a whole different world when it comes to discipline,” said Alan Polhemus, who served on diesel boats for more than a decade. “It was all handled just in interpersonal relationships, persuasion—saying ‘You need to do this, and if you don’t I’m going to kick you where it really hurts.’ One of the reasons why a submarine crew is so cohesive is because there’s constant daily contact. There’s never a day where you don’t rub elbows with everybody at least once.”11 There were no laggards, no malingerers—there was nowhere to hide in a submarine, and anyone who failed to pull his weight endangered the life of every man aboard. Personal rivalries, petty privileges, interdepartmental grievances, antagonism between officers and enlisted men or between reservists and Annapolites—all the inveterate pathologies of naval life were scarcely to be found among the men who served under the sea in a long steel tube.

  IN JULY 1942, IN SUPPORT OF the impending WATCHTOWER landing on Guadalcanal, Nimitz sent a strong force of submarines to the great Japanese fleet base at Truk. The boats were to patrol the sea routes into the atoll with the twofold purpose of providing early notice of enemy naval movements south into the Solomons, and of sinking ships when opportunity offered. Admiral English sent eleven boats to Truk between July and September. One was the Wahoo. It was to be her first war patrol.

  She left Pearl Harbor on August 23. Day after day she ran submerged, with occasional quick periscope observations; night after night she motored on the surface, recharging her batteries, with position checks by celestial sightings. Two weeks passed before the Wahoo sighted an enemy ship, a small tanker of the Hyogo Maru class. Kennedy stalked the target and fired a three-torpedo spread at a range of 1,430 yards. All missed, and the skipper ordered the boat deep to run under the target. Feeling that air patrols posed a risk to the Wahoo, Kennedy declined to attempt a second attack. That decision did not sit well with the other officers. Lieutenant George W. Grider, the third officer, recalled that “it was demoralizing to creep away submerged from that first target.”12

  More than two weeks passed before the Wahoo attempted another attack, this time on a 6,500-ton freighter. After a cautious submerged approach, the Wahoo fired four torpedoes and apparently scored a single hit on the target. Kennedy observed the ship listing to port and settling by the stern. (Postwar records turned up no information on a sinking at that time and place.) The Wahoo played cat and mouse with a destroyer escort and escaped by ducking into a welcome squall of rain.

  The greatest disappointment of this first cruise was a missed opportunity to sink the seaplane tender Chiyoda, which crossed paths with the Wahoo on September 30. The valuable target, first observed by periscope at a range of 12,000 yards, was apparently unescorted. Kennedy made a cautious approach, declining to use full power for fear of running down the batteries. The Chiyoda zigged instead of zagged and quickly went out of position. The missed opportunity was more a case of bad luck than negligence, but it ate away at the crew’s morale. The incident left them “brooding and discouraged,” wrote Grider. “It played havoc with our self-confidence, our faith in our boat, and our aggressiveness in general.”13

  On October 5, Kennedy sighted an even more precious target, a light carrier. She had two destroyers as escorts, and Kennedy chose another conservative approach, holding the Wahoo to one-third speed. The target slipped through their grasp.

  To his credit, Kennedy faulted himself for failing to make a good attack in this instance. His approach, he wrote in his report, “lacked aggressiveness and skill. . . . Watched the best target we could ever hope to find go over the hill untouched at 0800.”14 Admiral English strongly agreed with Kennedy’s self-criticism and amplified it in his endorsement.

  The patrol was marred by several mechanical mishaps, some more critical than others. The SJ radar shaft was misaligned and would not turn properly. Two men had to muscle the hand wheel while a third lubricated each bearing on the shaft with a grease gun. Their efforts were of little avail. The bow buoyancy-tank vent jammed shut, making the boat balky in a dive. A botched routine test left a torpedo partly jammed through one of the bow tube’s doors, with its brass-capped warhead protruding from the hull. The weapon could not be removed from the tube or pulled back in. Would it arm itself? Not likely, but if it did, it might detonate and blow the ship to kingdom come.

  Since there was nothing to be done but hope for the best, the crew resorted to gallows’ humor. Of a subsequent minor mishap, someone remarked, “Well, it doesn’t matter. That torpedo’s going to go off pretty soon anyhow.”15

  Returning to Pearl Harbor, the Wahoo sighted three PBY patrol planes on October 15 and 16 and encountered their escort ship dead ahead on Saturday, October 17. With the boat rigged for surface running, and a section of sailors on deck, they crept down the channel into Pearl Harbor. The skipper conned the ship into the East Loch, around the end of Ten Ten Dock, and approached the submarine base. A navy band and a delegation of officers and sailors were gathered on a pier to welcome her. Kennedy had radioed ahead to request a port-side berth. Either the transmission had not been copied or the request had been
ignored, and a starboard berth had been cleared. The submarine waited in the channel, her diesels rumbling idly, while a signalman sent another message via blinker light. “Have possibly armed torpedo protruding to Starboard. Still recommend port side mooring.”16 The delegation and band retreated to a safe distance as the request was fulfilled.

  IN THE 1930S, JAPANESE ANALYSTS had postulated that Americans were culturally unsuited to the rigors and deprivations of submarine warfare. Luxury-loving layabouts, fond of good food and soft beds, were ill prepared for the mental and physical strain of prolonged operations. So it was said and apparently believed. The crude caricature goes a long way to explain the Japanese navy’s inattention to antisubmarine warfare (ASW). But it is true that the Americans emphasized comfort and habitability in their new diesel fleet submarines, and long-serving veterans thought the Gato-class boats almost absurdly opulent when compared to their predecessors. They were air-conditioned, well lit, and equipped with washing machines and freshwater showers. Well-appointed galleys turned out the best and freshest food in the navy, including ice cream and baked bread. A separate bunk awaited almost every member of the crew. Leather-upholstered benches lined the bulkheads in the wardrooms. Record players and movie projectors provided entertainment. Time would prove the wisdom of such crew comforts, large and small—the crews functioned well in grueling voyages lasting as long as two and a half months.

  Upon putting into port, a submarine crew was given liberty right away, and a relief crew took over the boat. The plush Royal Hawaiian Hotel, queen of Waikiki Beach, had been reserved by the navy for submariners on R&R. For two weeks, the men were encouraged to forget about their recent patrol, about the submarine, even about the war itself. They had nothing to do but immerse themselves in complete relaxation. Each ship was assigned a “refreshment room,” freely accessible to every officer and enlisted man, in which a bathtub was filled with ice and stocked with beer, champagne, and soft drinks. “Whoever established the tradition knew what he was doing,” Grider commented. “It took just about two weeks to get over the strain.”17 Returning to the boat for the next patrol, they found it scrubbed clean, freshly painted, and reprovisioned. Even the mattress covers had been replaced. One sailor remarked that it was like entering a hotel room after maid service. All the “housework” had been done, “except that they didn’t lay any bath towels out.”18

  To Dick O’Kane’s surprise, Lieutenant Commander Kennedy had retained command of the Wahoo even after her disappointing first patrol. Kennedy’s patrol report had been abjectly self-critical, and Admiral English had bluntly seconded those criticisms. But English had softened the blow by remarking that Kennedy seemed to have learned from his mistakes, and credited the Wahoo with one 6,441-ton freighter (postwar analysis disallowed the claimed sinking). Despite the patent frustrations of the Wahoo’s first cruise, the results had been no worse than average for all the submarines sent to Truk.

  O’Kane worked quietly through back channels to have a PCO, or “prospective commanding officer,” assigned to the ship on her second cruise. The PCO was a senior officer, usually with the same rank as the skipper, who was slated to take command of another boat. He would come aboard as an observer, with no duties other than acquiring information and experience prior to being inserted into his own command. The navy’s wry pet name for this slightly clumsy arrangement was “makey-learn.”

  The newcomer was Lieutenant Commander Dudley W. Morton, who had acquired the nickname “Mushmouth” in his plebe year at the academy, later shortened to “Mush.” He was a big, broad-shouldered man with large hands and a powerful handshake. He was gregarious and high-spirited, with a contagious grin and a tendency to roar with laughter. “He was built like a bear,” said Grider, “and as playful as a cub.”19

  Born in Owensboro, Kentucky, Morton had arrived at the Naval Academy with a thick Kentucky drawl. Four years at Annapolis had flattened out that accent, but he was still recognizably a southerner. Some said Morton had been tagged as “Mushmouth” because of that hill-country brogue, although a rival explanation traced the origin to a popular comic-strip character of that name, thought to resemble Morton. In either case, Morton liked his nickname and encouraged his shipmates, officers and enlisted men alike, to use it. He had played football and wrestled at the academy. He loved high jinks and rough physical horseplay, even while on patrol. The crew of the Wahoo soon found that the new PCO might seize a shipmate in a headlock and throw him to the deck. He did not affect the aloof style of a ranking officer; his puckish roughhousing might be sprung without warning on a crew member of any rank. Forest Sterling, the ship’s yeoman, was tending to his paperwork in the yeoman’s shack when “a bolt of lightning landed on my back and drove me into the typewriter.” Wheeling around, with fist clenched to throw a punch, he came face to face for the first time with Morton, towering over him in the doorway. The grinning lieutenant commander pointed to his insignia and said, “Go ahead and strike me.”20

  Wahoo departed for her second patrol on November 8, 1942. Her diesels rumbling and belching blue exhaust, her dock lines were uncleated and thrown back on the deck, and she backed gingerly from her berth. Her piercing whistle sounded. The colors were broken out at the main. She went down the channel and steamed out to sea with an escort vessel in company. She made a trim dive, received an “indoctrination depth charge,” fired her deck guns, and then put them to bed.21 At dark the escort parted ways, and the Wahoo set a course of 230 degrees. She had 3,000 miles to travel to her patrol area in the central Solomons, north of Bougainville. She was to seek out and destroy Japanese ships headed south toward Ironbottom Sound, where the navy and marines were waging their desperate struggle to hold Guadalcanal. Passing over the latitude 7°50' north, the boat entered into the SOPAC domain of Admiral Halsey.

  Spirits were distinctly elevated on this second patrol. Kennedy had agreed to do away with the Dantesque red interior lights that had depressed the crew’s mood on the previous voyage. No major mechanical problems tormented the engineers. A handful of enlisted men began publishing a ship’s “newspaper,” the Wahoo Daily Gazette. It offered a mockingly earnest summary of news gathered from Radio Tokyo broadcasts, along with satirical bits of doggerel and even a comic strip. The wardroom phonograph was sometimes cranked up to high volume, and big-band melodies boomed through the boat.

  Mush Morton’s good-natured and rambunctious presence lifted the crew’s mood. He was none too exacting about his uniform, often walking around the ship in a red bathrobe. Without particular duties, he spent much of his waking hours playing cribbage with other officers in the wardroom. He was also happy to chew the fat with the petty officers and enlisted men. “He was best described as a big, overgrown Kentucky boy who had never been told that adults weren’t supposed to smile,” wrote O’Kane.22 Morton was often found in the engine room, chatting with shipmates while scrubbing his clothes in a bucket of water. He instructed Forest Sterling not to address him as “sir,” a protocol that flew in the face of naval regulations and traditions.23 Morton’s relaxed informality and chumminess with enlisted men was unusual even on a submarine, the most democratic of all naval vessels. It may have had an underlying purpose: Morton was quietly gathering information on the boat and its internal crew dynamics. Later, in Brisbane, he was to argue that Kennedy should be relieved of command.

  In their long discussions of tactics, O’Kane and Morton found that they were very much of the same mind: The Gato-class submarine would achieve its full potential only with more aggressive and determined tactics. A skipper could and should take more risks to sink enemy ships. Kennedy had been too slow to let go of prewar doctrine and ideas limiting the role of the submarine to a “submerged vessel of opportunity.” Custom and etiquette required that the officers steer clear of disparaging their skipper, but the implied criticism was understood. The ship could afford to remain on the surface longer, to make higher and more frequent periscope observations, and to run fast on the surface at night or use maximum
submerged speed in daylight to gain an attacking position in the path of oncoming enemy ships.24 The officers appreciated the belligerent attitude, though Grider wondered whether Morton was too much of a daredevil. “It is one thing to be aggressive, and another to be foolhardy . . . ,” he observed. “Most of us, in calculating the risk, threw in a mental note that we were worth more to the Navy alive than dead . . . but when Mush expressed himself on tactics, the only risk he recognized was the risk of not sinking enemy tonnage.”25

  Operating off Bougainville in late November and December 1942, when the campaign for Guadalcanal was in its climactic last phase, the Wahoo was hindered by dirty weather, with hard rain and gale-force winds. At night, on the bridge, lookouts peered through a tumultuous seascape of towering seas, occasionally lit up by lightning flashes. The Wahoo sighted several targets but repeatedly failed to attain a viable attack position.

  On December 10, the Wahoo fired three torpedoes at a convoy of three cargo ships accompanied by a destroyer. One freighter was hit and sank quickly. The crew’s cheers were silenced by O’Kane’s urgent order: “Rig for depth charge! Rig for depth charge!”26 The destroyer laid down a pattern of depth charges on the diving Wahoo. Lights went out as bulbs exploded, men were thrown against bulkheads, and showers of cork dust rained down from the overhead. But the damage was minor, and there were no leaks.

  The freighter was Wahoo’s first kill, but the encounter seemed to exhaust Kennedy, whose nervous strain grew after each periscope observation.

  A few days later, Wahoo received a message carrying the “Ultra” designation, which meant that it contained intelligence regarding enemy shipping and must receive the highest priority. A tanker was proceeding from Truk to the Shortland Islands and was expected to arrive on December 8. Oil tankers were among the highest-priority targets throughout the war, but that was especially true in those critical closing weeks of the Guadalcanal campaign, when one lost tanker might have fatally limited Japanese shipping movements.27