by Ian W. Toll
Morton brought the ship back to periscope depth and ordered up the scope. O’Kane looked first and then yielded to the captain. The destroyer’s bow had been torn off just forward of the stack. She was foundering rapidly. Sailors were climbing the masts or diving into the sea. Several photos were taken with the ship’s camera, a Kodak Medalist. Then the captain described what he was seeing through the ship’s loudspeaker: “There must be hundreds of those slant-eyed devils in the rigging . . . anybody not on watch wanting a look, get to the conning tower on the double.”47 Dozens of men crowded into the little space and took turns at the scope, and several brought their own cameras to take souvenir snapshots.
Now Morton was willing to beat a retreat from the harbor. The channel allowed a submerged retreat at the relatively safe depth of 100 feet, navigating by dead reckoning and sonar. The Wahoo crept away at 3 knots, slow enough to preserve the batteries and avoid a disastrous hard grounding. The sonar operator listened for “beach noises”—the play of surf on beaches and reefs—and small steering adjustments were made to keep these warning sounds at roughly equal distances to port and starboard. When the noises were all abaft her beam, Morton and his crew knew they were safely away.
At dusk, the Wahoo came back to periscope depth. There was nothing to see but some distant lights ashore, far behind. The Wahoo surfaced, and clean air circulated through her length. She ran dead north on four engines for thirty minutes, until it was clear no one was in pursuit.
The crew was giddy, but also exhausted and on edge. O’Kane now realized that he had not slept in thirty-five hours; only adrenaline had sustained him through the long hours in and around Wewak. Morton permitted any man who wanted one to take a shower (a rare privilege on a submarine, due to the power required to run the distillers). Later, the skipper allowed the pharmacist’s mate to dispense a ration of “depth charge medicine”—that is, a shot of three-star Hennessy brandy.
Morton’s buccaneering spirit had been rewarded, but would the success at Wewak embolden the skipper to take even more unconventional risks, and would the Wahoo’s luck persist? As the crewmen not on watch turned into their bunks, clean and mildly intoxicated, some worried that Mush Morton was not entirely sane. The taciturn O’Kane put it this way: “Understandably some might be wondering just what was coming next.”48
MORTON PUT THE SUB ON A NORTHWESTERLY COURSE, into waters that offered the likely prospect of spotting Japanese ships headed southeast from Palau. While the Wahoo crisscrossed her base course, and lookouts scrutinized the horizon for any sign of a mast or a column of smoke, the captain tinkered with drafts of his report on the Wewak engagement. It was radioed to Fife in Brisbane at 11:45 p.m. The following morning at ten, the Wahoo passed back into Nimitz’s domain, and would forward all future reports to the Pacific Submarine Force headquarters in Pearl Harbor.
That afternoon, the boat crossed the equator (crossed under it, as she was running submerged), and Morton insisted on a proper observance of the ancient line-crossing rites. Naval tradition of many centuries required all “polliwogs,” those officers and enlisted men who had not previously crossed the line, to be inducted into the “Court of King Neptune.” A riotous ceremony was held in the forward battery. Pappy Rau, chief of the boat and a veteran of more than twenty years, was done up as King Neptune. He wore Morton’s red bathrobe, a gold cardboard crown, and a fake beard, and he held a trident fashioned from a wooden broom handle. Another sailor played the role of the “royal baby,” wearing only a large “diaper”—actually a towel held together by safety pins. The inductees, beginning with Lieutenant Grider, were required to answer a series of preposterous and insulting questions, then forced to choke down a disgusting potion scrounged from the gallery, and given an electric shock. Grider’s head was shaved, much to his chagrin. He was forced to bow low and kiss Rau’s belly, which had previously been greased with lard and lampblack. At the end of all that, he could call himself a “shellback” and be placated by the knowledge that no man ever had to suffer those indignities twice.
The newly bald third officer, while standing watch on the bridge at 7:57 the following morning, spotted a plume of smoke over the horizon about two points off the port bow. Morton came up to have a look, and then put the Wahoo on a course to intercept. Gradually she drew into a profitable attack position, ahead of the convoy. Morton took the Wahoo down as soon as the topmasts of two freighters peeked over the horizon. Looking through the periscope, O’Kane studied the ships as their hulls came into view, and estimated their angle on the bow as a manageable 50 degrees. Soon two more ships came “over the hill.” The convoy was steaming at 10 knots on a course of 95 degrees, and there was no sign of an escort. It was an excellent setup. The attack angles were entered into the TDC, and as the range closed to 1,300 yards, the Wahoo fired four torpedoes from her stern tubes at the nearest two ships. All were “hot, straight, normal,” and three of four struck home, hitting both targets.
Morton brought the ship around to align her bow tubes with a third ship, significantly larger than the two wounded freighters. She turned directly toward the Wahoo, apparently with the intention of ramming. “We’ll shoot the SOB down the throat,” Morton declared. O’Kane winced: “I had hoped never to hear those words again, much less in just three days.”49 The next torpedo missed badly, but the freighter yawed and presented her broadside. Watching through the periscope, O’Kane saw that she was a large troop transport. Wahoo fired two more torpedoes and went deep; as she was descending through 200 feet, the crew heard explosions indicating two hits.
Returning to periscope depth eight minutes later, a quick periscope sweep revealed that the transport was dead in the water. Another torpedo, fired at leisure, hit between her stack and her bridge. O’Kane, observing through the periscope, saw a “tremendous explosion blow the structures aft of her bridge higher than a kite. Momentarily we saw a gigantic hole in her size bigger than a Mack truck, until she listed toward us.”50 Troops began leaping into the sea, and her boats were lowered as she went down.
At 1:10 in the afternoon, Morton ordered Wahoo to the surface. Since there was no destroyer in the vicinity, the submarine could run on the surface with impunity. Morton took the Wahoo into the wreckage of the sunken troopship, where about 1,000 castaways had piled into boats, rafts, and small craft. Morton ordered, in an even voice, “Battle stations, man both guns.”51 This brought a quizzical glance from O’Kane, and Morton solemnly justified what he was about to do. “Dick,” he said in O’Kane’s version of the exchange, “the army bombards strategic areas and the air corps uses area-bombing so the ground forces can advance. Both bring civilian casualties. Now without other casualties, I will prevent these soldiers from getting ashore, for every one who does can mean an American life.”52 O’Kane accepted this reasoning, and the Wahoo moved in to complete the ghastly business.
Did Morton intend an outright massacre? The accounts vary slightly in some critical details. In O’Kane’s telling, Morton ordered the gunners to “chase the troops out of their boats”—in other words, the boats were to be destroyed, but no swimmers were to be deliberately shot unless they fired back at the Wahoo. Grider’s account was short on details and long on insinuation. He wrote of the skipper’s “overwhelming biological hatred of the enemy,” and offered no details of the incident other than to say it took place over several “nightmarish minutes.”53 Forest Sterling recalled seeing several hundred men. Some were swimming, some on lifeboats, and others “hanging onto planks or other items of floating wreckage. . . . They all stared without expression at Wahoo’s hull.”54 O’Kane wrote that the deck gunner’s fire “was methodical, small guns sweeping from abeam forward like fire hoses cleaning a street.”55 Morton’s patrol report stated that the gunners shot at the boats until “our fire was returned by small caliber machine guns. We then opened fire with everything we had.”56
Wahoo now set off on a course of 85 degrees in pursuit of the two remaining ships, one of which had been damaged. The Wahoo
ran on the surface at flank speed, with all four engines roaring. She tracked her quarry using the standard tactic of an “end-around” pursuit. The surfaced submarine ran on a parallel course at high speed, distant enough that she remained “hull down” under the horizon and thus unseen, but able to track the enemy’s topmasts or stack smoke with periodic high-elevation periscope observations. Despite some radical zigzagging by the two ships, the Wahoo gradually overtook them and attained a favorable attack angle. Morton finally took her under at 5:21 p.m. As the fourth ship’s hull rose above the horizon, periscope observations revealed that she was an oil tanker, a valuable and high-priority target. At 6:29, with the range at 2,300 yards, Wahoo fired a spread of three bow torpedoes at her. One hit and slowed her. Another two hours of maneuvering set up a stern tube shot, which scored a single hit amidships. She sank in minutes.
Pursuing the convoy’s last surviving freighter into the night, hoping for a clean sweep, Morton bent on all-ahead full. The crippled freighter shot back with her deck guns. Most of the shots were wild, but when one splashed dead ahead and ricocheted directly over the Wahoo’s shears, Morton took her down again. For fifteen minutes they ran at a depth of 90 feet, tracking the ship by sonar alone; when the shellfire splashes grew more distant, the submarine came back to the surface.
Almost immediately, a lookout shouted, “Searchlight broad on our port bow!”57 The beam was projecting from a ship over the horizon, just emerging. Morton correctly deduced that this was an escort ship, probably a destroyer, sent to collect the ships of this convoy. He maneuvered the Wahoo into position to torpedo the freighter as she closed on the beckoning searchlight. At 9:10 p.m., when the range was 2,900 yards by radar, the Wahoo fired her last two torpedoes. It was a long shot, fired without spread, a low-percentage attempt. Minutes ticked by. The torpedoes ran about a mile and a half. Improbably, they both hit with a colossal detonation that shook the Wahoo’s bridge. Fifteen minutes later, this 9,500-ton Arizona Maru-class freighter sank, leaving only a blank horizon for the destroyer’s questing searchlight.
The officers and crew were amazed at what they had achieved. O’Kane remembers that “none of us had heard of any other submarine sinking her first ship before reaching her patrol area, to say nothing of a convoy of four more ships. These were the things submariners daydreamed about but never expected to happen.”58 Morton radioed Pearl Harbor to report the news, and Wahoo, her torpedoes gone, “headed for the barn.”
The return should have been uneventful, but when the Wahoo crossed paths with another convoy on the following morning, Morton changed course to intercept. The periscope had shown a small freighter trailing behind the other ships. Morton conceived a plan. “Dick,” he said to O’Kane, “we’re the only ones who know we don’t have any torpedoes; the enemy doesn’t know that. Supposing we were to battle surface and make a run at them. Wouldn’t they likely run off leaving the small freighter behind for our deck gun?”59 Having not seen any guns mounted on the trailing freighter, O’Kane agreed that it was worth a try.
The Wahoo surfaced and took off after the convoy. The Japanese ships rang up more speed and began a radical zigzagging pattern. These maneuvers gave O’Kane the “impression of general confusion.”60 Just beyond a tanker, the middle ship in the convoy, another set of masts began to appear. The previously unseen ship was soon identified as a destroyer, and she was bearing directly down on the Wahoo. Morton ordered a retreat on the surface, at four-engine flank speed, and gradually opened the range to 14,000 yards.
Morton assumed the destroyer would promptly give up the chase, not wanting to leave her convoy far behind. That supposition turned out to be wrong. On the bridge, the lookouts studied her through binoculars. Her bow wave—“bone in the teeth”—had a white “V” pattern. As that “V” began to fill in, to grow perceptibly deeper, the lookouts knew the enemy was gaining. Then she turned her broadside toward the Wahoo and fired. Morton expected the shells to fall wild, but about three seconds later there was a “mighty clap of thunder” and geysers rose on both sides of the Wahoo, just 150 feet away. Too close.
The crash dive was Wahoo’s fastest yet, according to O’Kane, and when the boat passed through a depth of 250 feet, Morton told the planesmen to keep her headed down. She went below test depth and waited for the inevitable depth charges. “Now we’re going to catch it,” said Morton, as the destroyer’s screws were heard overhead. She dropped six depth charges, and O’Kane remembers them as “tooth crackers” that “cracked and whacked, dumping seeming tons of bolts into our superstructure.”61 The destroyer did not stay for long, however. She had to get back to her flock of transports, freighters, and tankers, now forty miles behind. Morton ordered a round of “depth charge medicine” served out to the crew.
Returning to the surface two hours later, Morton radioed Pearl Harbor: “Another running gun battle today. . . . Wahoo runnin’ destroyer gunnin’.”62
ON FEBRUARY 7, 1943, Wahoo entered Pearl with eight Rising Sun flags on one of her signal halyards and a broom lashed to the periscope shears, bristles up, to signify a “clean sweep.” Hers had been, by a long margin, the most remarkable submarine cruise of the war. As she came around Ten Ten Dock, she was hailed by a large crowd of officers, personnel, and (oddly) news reporters. The “Silent Service” had not promoted itself and received almost no press coverage at all. But someone in the Pacific Fleet had decided that it was time to publicize the submarine war, and much of the content of Wahoo’s reports had been passed by the censors for public release. Admiral Charlie Lockwood had nicknamed Morton a “One-Man Wolfpack.” A cavalcade of photographers caught the Wahoo’s inverted broom on film, and the picture would run in newspapers throughout the United States. Upon going ashore, the crew of the Wahoo was delighted to see an edition of that day’s Hawaiian Advertiser. The headline shouted, “Wahoo Running Japs A’ Gunning.”63
All five of the sinkings claimed by Morton were credited—five ships totaling 32,000 tons. But the significance of Wahoo’s third cruise transcended the material damage done to the enemy. Morton’s tactics had turned a new page. They would be studied by all of his colleagues in the submarine service. Hereafter, their performance was to be measured against his. Skippers were to emulate his bold tactics or be pushed out of the service. Morton, O’Kane later said, had “cast aside unproven prewar concepts and bugaboos.”64 In the future, submarines would be employed on the surface, diving only when absolutely necessary. They would be expected to fight a much more persistent and audacious war against Japanese shipping.
THE WAHOO’S TRIUMPH, rousing as it was, could not sweep away the lingering frustration and disenchantment in the Pacific submarine force. Submarines had sunk 180 enemy ships totaling 725,000 tons in 1942, more aggregate tonnage than Japan was able to build that year, but a pervasive feeling remained that the fleet was falling short of its potential. Too many skippers had clung to diffident prewar tactics. Evidence was gradually accumulating that the Mark 14 torpedo was a lemon, but the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance had closed ranks against its critics and implacably refused suggestions that a comprehensive and unbiased reevaluation was needed.
In the latter half of 1942, Admiral English had sent sixty-one war patrols out of Pearl Harbor. Twenty-seven had returned empty-handed. Patrols off Truk (Japan’s major southern naval base) had been far less productive than patrols into Japan’s home waters. For all the glory of sinking a major enemy fleet unit, chasing capital ships (battleships, cruisers, and carriers) was a low-percentage enterprise. The enemy’s freighters and oil tankers offered a better return on investment—they were slower and less well defended, and thus easier to stalk and sink. In the Atlantic, German wolf packs were demonstrating that a relatively small number of submarines could menace a vital economic and military lifeline. Japan was at least as vulnerable to a war of commerce as was Britain, and it was evident that the most profitable use of the Pacific submarine force was in attacking the sea links to Japan’s major resource areas. But the submarine lea
dership had not yet made the case that all other priorities should be subordinated to a policy of cutting Japan’s interior supply lines. Submarine admirals—English, Fife, Withers, Lockwood—had allowed their boats to be pulled here and sent there, to provide marginally important reconnaissance services or to support various campaigns in ill-conceived roles.
Among active-duty submarine officers, resentment was building against Bob English and his staff, who were free-handed with criticism even when it seemed undeserved. Not all skippers came back empty-handed because they had been timorous. Some were merely unlucky; some had been deployed to unpromising patrol areas; and some had watched their torpedoes explode prematurely, or fail to explode, or run under their targets, or run in a circle, or bounce innocuously off an enemy’s hull. English, like Admiral Ralph Christie (Fife’s predecessor in Brisbane), gave the back of his hand to reports of malfunctioning torpedoes. To one returning skipper he ludicrously claimed, “SUBPAC has never had a premature explosion.”65
The Bureau of Ordnance was intolerant of criticism and sought to turn it back on the fleet by blaming reports of malfunctions on skippers, crews, and torpedo handlers. According to Clay Blair, an even-handed and even-tempered scholar who produced the most exhaustive history of the Pacific submarine campaign, “The torpedo scandal of the U.S. submarine force in World War II was one of the worst in the history of any kind of warfare.”66 Ned Beach, a submarine commander who later became a novelist and historian, remarked that the torpedoes “performed so poorly that had they been the subject of deliberate sabotage they hardly could have been worse,” and added that every submariner he knew agreed that the men responsible should have faced court-martial.67