The War Below

by James Scott

  • • •

  Morton proved everything Kennedy was not. Three and a half years O’Kane’s senior, the Kentucky Baptist radiated physical strength. With blue, wide-spaced eyes, light brown hair, and a ruddy complexion, Morton stood almost six feet tall and weighed more than 170 pounds. He boasted large hands, broad shoulders, and a jaw that Time magazine later described as a “boulder.” His prominent mouth and ear-to-ear grin earned him the nickname “Mushmouth”—later shortened to just “Mush”—after the character in the popular Moon Mullins comic strip. The skipper fueled the name by showing off his trick of stuffing four golf balls in his mouth at once. Morton’s physical power defined his athletic career at the Naval Academy where he played varsity football and wrestled all four years until his 1930 graduation. But his fearsome stature camouflaged a warm and gentle nature. He never had to raise his voice; men wanted to follow him. “He was built like a bear, and as playful as a cub,” an officer wrote. “The crew loved him.”

  Wahoo’s new skipper approached submarine warfare much as he did his beloved wrestling. You didn’t win by avoiding your opponent. Kennedy’s tactic of waiting for ships to come to him had clearly failed. So had his timid approach of pursuing ships submerged and pausing for endless periscope searches as faster surface ships disappeared over the horizon. Morton planned to stay on the surface, use more lookouts, cover greater distances. If an attack failed, he would not give up. He would go after his target again and again until he sank the ship. Morton’s aggressive new tactics would lead his men to later hail him “Mush the Magnificent”; the press would label him the “maker of Jap widows.”

  Morton immediately set out to change Wahoo’s culture. Kennedy had covered the bulkheads with close-up pictures of Japanese ships, an idea designed to help his lookouts recognize the silhouettes. Morton yanked them down and plastered simple slogans with red block letters that read: “SHOOT THE SONS OF BITCHES.” The messages reflected Morton’s single-minded view of his job, a view he demanded all men on board share. “In his mind anyone who did not fight the enemy with every bit of his capability was not doing his duty,” one officer later wrote, “and he felt nothing but contempt for that person.” Morton’s aggressiveness rattled some Wahoo’s officers, who had grown used to Kennedy’s leadership. “Most of us, in calculating the risk, threw in a mental note that we were worth more to the Navy alive than dead—and to our wives and children as well,” wrote George Grider, Wahoo’s third-ranking officer. “But when Mush expressed himself on tactics, the only risk he recognized was the risk of not sinking enemy tonnage.”

  O’Kane had found a kindred spirit. Unlike Kennedy, who had refused to delegate responsibility to his executive officer, Morton would come to depend on O’Kane. “You will be my co-approach officer,” Morton told O’Kane. “You’ll make all observations and fire all torpedoes, but I’ll con Wahoo to the best attack position.” If O’Kane could handle the mechanics of an attack, Morton felt he could focus on the big picture and make faster decisions. Some officers watched the development of this unorthodox method with unease. The doubts these men harbored about Morton only reaffirmed previous concerns about O’Kane, worries that Kennedy’s tight leadership had kept in check. Grider, who shared a stateroom with the exec, found O’Kane “overly garrulous and potentially unstable.” “He talked a great deal—reckless, aggressive talk—and it was natural to wonder how much of it was no more than talk,” Grider wrote. “With Mush and Dick in the saddle, how would the Wahoo fare?”

  Wahoo would fare exceptionally.

  Morton and O’Kane developed in the first half of 1943 into one of the submarine force’s top teams, claiming to sink a staggering five ships on Wahoo’s third patrol though a postwar review of Japanese records could confirm only three kills. Morton boasted in a radio message to Pearl Harbor that he had destroyed an entire four-ship convoy, a feat no submarine had yet achieved, though he would only be credited after the war with three of the four ships. General Douglas MacArthur even awarded the aggressive skipper the prestigious Army Distinguished Service Cross after Morton clobbered a troop transport, though the ugly manner in which he attacked that ship would come to haunt Wahoo’s legacy. Wahoo’s fourth patrol claimed another eight ships, a figure postwar review of Japanese records would actually bump up to nine, setting a record for the most ships sunk on a single patrol. When the deck gun jammed in a battle with a trawler, Morton’s men lobbed homemade Molotov cocktails. “Morton is the heavy swordsman, the saber,” one reporter described of the duo. “O’Kane the quick rapier. Together they are deadly.”

  The Navy soon realized that Wahoo could generate positive press. Newspaper and magazine articles described the submarine returning from patrol with a broom lashed to its periscope, the centuries-old naval symbol of a clean sweep, meaning the boat had fired all of its torpedoes. Morton appeared on the Philip Morris radio program in mid July 1943 with his three-and-a-half-year-old son, Doug. Warner Bros. hired the skipper as a technical adviser for the submarine thriller Destination Tokyo—starring Cary Grant—and he even took actor Errol Flynn on a ride. But in letters to friends and family, Morton wrote that he took such great risks, not for celebrity, but to protect his wife, son, and daughter, whose photos he displayed on his desk in his cabin. “Take good care of my family for me,” he wrote to his father. “You know that it is for such a grand family that I fight so hard.”

  Ever the professor’s son, O’Kane studied his mentor. He had gone from one extreme under Kennedy to another under Morton, from muffed attacks on aircraft carriers to sinking an entire convoy. The divergence in tactics of these two skippers would prove symbolic of the larger struggle inside the submarine force as older skippers appeared hobbled by outdated tactics and timidity that reflected their peacetime training compared to younger captains, whose experience came during actual war patrols. O’Kane would have to develop his own style as skipper. Were Morton’s methods the best? Should he steer a middle course between Kennedy and Morton? Could O’Kane achieve the same success as Morton with less risk to his ship and crew? O’Kane would later wrestle with these questions when the Navy assigned him his own boat—then under construction at Mare Island—after he completed five patrols on Wahoo. But Morton still had another lesson to teach.

  Malfunctioning torpedoes plagued Wahoo’s sixth patrol in the Sea of Japan. Morton attacked nine ships and failed to sink any of them, prompting him in his report to quote Rear Admiral David Farragut’s famous line: “Damn the torpedoes.” The irate skipper returned to Pearl Harbor in a record-breaking eleven-day run and begged Vice Admiral Lockwood to send him back to the Sea of Japan, where targets were plentiful. He wanted a new batch of torpedoes and a second shot. Lockwood relented. How could he refuse his top skipper, a man who had grown so successful that the Navy sat him down between patrols for a series of recorded interviews—both aboard Wahoo and in the Operations Office—in which he detailed his patrols, tactics, and exploits. Morton wrapped up his third interview at 11:50 a.m. on September 9, just seventy minutes before Wahoo’s scheduled departure for its seventh patrol.

  Dogged by prostate troubles—a little known fact among his peers—Morton refused to allow his pain to sideline him, though it took its toll. “During our periods in port he would be hospitalized and on patrol have to have semiweekly prostate massages,” Wahoo Ensign John Griggs III later wrote. “Yet he did not let this deter him from his goal—sink Japs.” The chemistry on board Wahoo also had changed, as the wardroom became a revolving door of new faces, most of whom knew Morton by reputation. “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,” Grider wrote. “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.”

  Wahoo veteran James Allen visited his former sub shortly before departure to see his friend, crewman Kenneth Whipp. Whipp confided over coffee that he had asked for a transfer, but Morton denied it. The crew had grown scared of the skipper, he said, who had grown unstable, driven by his quest to sink more ships. Morton passed through the mess deck as the men chatted. The relaxed skipper Allen recalled, who had washed his skivvies in a bucket of soapy water in the engine rooms, looked haggard and confused. Exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him. “I am going to continue to fight Wahoo as I have in the past,” Morton had written to his mother in August. “When I begin to slow-up I will turn her over to some kid who has better nerves than I.” The weary skipper now seemed unable to follow his own advice. Had Morton the myth finally caught up with Morton the man? Allen watched Wahoo back away from the pier and depart for its seventh patrol. He raised his right hand and saluted.

  The exhausted Morton had shown previous signs of recklessness, but his popularity and success had prompted his superiors to overlook them. One of the most egregious examples was his attack on the 5,447-ton transport Buyo Maru, which carried 1,126 men, including 491 Indian prisoners of war. Japanese and Indian survivors bobbed in the water and crowded aboard twenty small boats. Morton ordered his gun crew to fire across the bow of one boat. “Our fire was returned by machine gun,” Morton would later tell the Navy. “Therefore we considered free game to fire not only at the boats but at the troops also. We proceeded to have a field day.” The attack, which would earn MacArthur’s praise, killed at least eighty-seven Japanese and 195 Indians. The scene shocked some of Morton’s men. “Mush, whose biological hatred of the enemy we were only now beginning to sense, looked about him with exultation at the carnage,” Grider later wrote. “Combat works its changes in men with chilling speed.”

  These clouds hung over Morton as he closed in on the enemy’s homeland. Japanese radio broadcasts reported in early October that an Allied submarine had boldly slipped into empire waters and torpedoed the loaded passenger steamer Konron Maru in the narrow Tsushima Strait between Japan and Korea. The 7,908-ton steamer, ripped open by a single torpedo, sank in seconds. Of the 616 passengers, Tokyo reported that warships and planes rescued only seventy-two. “The Tsushima Straits are Japan’s historic doors to the Asiatic mainland,” wrote Time magazine. “Presumably the submarine knocking on the door last week was American. It had achieved one of World War II’s most daring submarine penetrations of enemy waters, a feat ranking with German Günther Prien’s entry at Scapa Flow, the Jap invasion of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. raid in Tokyo Bay.” Submarine force leaders didn’t have to presume. Senior officers knew only one submarine operated in those perilous waters: Wahoo.

  Morton had regained his touch.

  Wahoo’s orders demanded that Morton radio the results of his patrol on October 23. That day came and went. Days soon turned into a week, but still no word arrived. None ever would. A Japanese floatplane had spotted Wahoo at 9:20 a.m. on October 11 in La Perouse Strait, separating Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido from Russia. The plane dropped two bombs. Oil and bubbles surfaced. More planes and ships armed with bombs and depth charges joined the hours-long attack. With only some 200 feet of water to hide, Wahoo couldn’t dive deep enough to evade. Following a 12:11 p.m. depth charge attack, Japanese forces spotted part of a propeller blade. Lockwood knew none of this at the time; he knew only that something must have gone wrong. Terribly wrong. The three-star admiral waited as long as he could before he reported Wahoo overdue on November 9. “It just didn’t seem possible that Morton and his fighting crew could be lost,” Lockwood would later write. “I’d never have believed the Japs could be smart enough to get him.”

  • • •

  O’Kane, having finished his five patrols on Wahoo, was overseeing the completion of Tang in California when the press reported Wahoo’s loss in December. He refused to believe it. Not Morton. Not his friend. Within hours of climbing off Tang after it first reported for duty in Pearl Harbor on January 8, O’Kane sought and received confirmation of the reports. The official postwar tally showed that in just ten months Morton had destroyed nineteen ships with a total tonnage of 54,683, making him the third most successful skipper of the war. He held the record at the time of his death for the most ships sunk on a single patrol: nine. The death of the invincible skipper, whose photo adorned the submarine base piano with a Hawaiian lei draped around the frame, reverberated up the chain of command, with Admiral Chester Nimitz calling it “the most serious loss the submarine service has sustained.” His loss proved more than just a submarine and its crew, but the first casualty of a new style of submarine warfare. Some questioned whether the risks were worth it.

  Not O’Kane.

  Morton’s death instilled a greater urgency in his protégé, who now devised his own unique methods to drill his men for war. The skipper found that a metronome mounted on a bracket adjacent to the receiver helped his soundmen better track an enemy ship’s propeller. He surprised his crew during training off the California coast when he brought a wire recorder on board and placed microphones by the attack periscope, torpedo data computer, plot, and in the control room. O’Kane recorded everything his men said during practice approaches. The skipper then played the recordings between runs, erasing the exclamations, needless orders, and irrelevant conversations. He taught his men how to pare down talk to just the essentials. “The result was amazing—a crisp order, the acknowledgement, and then quiet,” O’Kane later wrote. “Three quarters of everything we had said could be erased. We all learned to think before we spoke and to limit what we said to the problem at hand.”

  But the real test still awaited Tang. Naval engineers had designed the Balao class Tang—the latest class of submarine—to dive 100 feet deeper than the previous generation of submarines, thanks to a switch from mild steel to high-tensile steel along with an increase in the thickness of the pressure hull plating. O’Kane wanted to push the 400-foot test depth. The skipper knew that with the number of Japanese escorts increasing and antisubmarine measures improving, Tang’s survival might depend on any extra depth he could squeeze out of his submarine. He ordered crews to man the battle phones in each compartment and stationed officers and senior petty officers throughout the submarine. Tang reached 450 feet before the pressure broke a gauge line and a hose to the Bendix pitometer, which measured the submarine’s speed. Crews secured the pitometer’s valves and jammed a raw potato over the gauge line to plug it until men could find and shut off the stop valve.

  Tang dove again. This time the submarine reached 525 feet before the pressure cracked the sound head rollers, part of the submarine’s sonar system. Tang had to surface. Shopfitters and machinists set to work on improvements. The next free afternoon, Tang made it down to 525 feet. Then 550 feet. When the submarine hit 580 feet, flanged joints in the vent risers burst, spraying water at 300 pounds per square inch. Tang returned for more repairs. O’Kane set out again the next day. “No one batted an eye till we passed 575 feet, but the very fact that 600 feet was the last figure on the depth gauge did cause some uneasiness, like coming to the edge of the ocean,” O’Kane wrote. “The pointer moved to the 600-foot mark and then to the pin three-quarters of an inch beyond. There were no leaks.” O’Kane had successfully pushed Tang’s limit, and he now knew that in an emergency he could safely dive down to 612 feet.

  O’Kane’s test rattled some of the crew. The chief cook approached executive officer Lieutenant Murray Frazee, Jr., soon after the submarine docked. He wanted off. Tang sailed in the morning for Pearl Harbor and the chief commissary man proved too vital to the ship’s operation to lose on short notice. “Well, if you’re not going to do anything about it now,” the cook threatened, “I just won’t show up tomorrow morning.”

  Frazee turned to the chief of the boat, who stood next to him. “Chief, you heard what he said, didn’t you?”

  “I sure did,” the chief replied.

 
Frazee turned to the cook and grabbed his shirt. “Listen, you son of a bitch, if you’re not here tomorrow morning at 0800 when we sail, I’m going to have you shot for desertion in time of war!” he barked. “Now, have you got that straight?”

  Every man showed up the morning Tang left for Pearl Harbor. “Never was there such an aggressive submarine officer as Dick O’Kane,” Frazee later wrote. “In fact, there were some who doubted his sanity.”

  11

  TANG

  “We certainly kept after the bastards until we sank them all. You know I am never satisfied as long as a Jap has a ship still afloat.”

  —Dudley “Mush” Morton, February 16, 1943, letter

  O’Kane stared at the empty horizon. No warships, no freighters, no trawlers. Nothing. This was not how he envisioned his first patrol as skipper. Lifeguard duty off Wake had proved interesting, but uneventful. Bombers pounded the atoll the night of January 30, 1944, and again on February 5. O’Kane watched from the bridge—his teeth clenched and eyes misty—as the night sky lit up. But the Japanese failed to shoot down any planes and damaged only one, making a rescue by Tang unnecessary. Tang had since patrolled north of the enemy stronghold at Truk, so far an equally uneventful assignment. With the exception of a February 11 galley fire—a deep-fat fryer ignited and torched the paint and cork on the bulkheads—little had happened. The crew was restless. So was the skipper. “We had been 20 days on patrol without even a puff of enemy smoke to reward the hours of concentration,” O’Kane wrote. “It is difficult to inject any levity into such a deadly serious business, but neither is it possible to maintain such a taut routine without some break.”

  That break arrived in the form of an Ultra message addressed to submarines Skate and Sunfish—and sent to Tang only for information. The message alerted O’Kane that a Japanese convoy planned to depart Gray Feather Bank for Truk at 8 a.m. the following day, February 15. If O’Kane arrived first, the convoy was his, though his theft of a prized target would infuriate his fellow skippers. O’Kane didn’t mind. He ordered all four engines online as executive officer Frazee plotted an intercept course. The skipper didn’t have long to hunt. His orders had given him until midnight on February 15 to patrol the waters north of the Caroline Islands—an area roughly the size of Connecticut—before he would have to depart and take up his assigned position for the upcoming assault on Truk. The United States planned a carrier strike against the Japanese stronghold and ordered Tang and eight other submarines to patrol the waters to intercept fleeing ships and rescue downed American aviators.