The Conquering Tide (50 page)

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.

T
HE
W
AHOO
'
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 leadership 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

In the long run, it might have been better had the torpedoes failed absolutely in 1942. Complete failure would have compelled immediate and decisive action to identify and correct the various mechanical flaws. Instead,
the weapons sometimes functioned properly, while in many other instances they appeared to do the job when they had actually exploded prematurely and harmlessly. Intermittent and apparent success perversely guaranteed that the deficiencies would not be discovered all at once. The torpedo problem was solved in fits and starts, over a period of two years, against the obdurate resistance of bureaucrats and engineers in Washington and Newport, Rhode Island. Meanwhile the submarine crews risked and sometimes gave their lives to carry unreliable weapons into enemy waters, all the time wondering whether their suspicions were justified. On October 20, 1942, the
Trigger
, while submerged at a depth of about 100 feet, fired a torpedo at an unescorted tanker. The weapon's rudder jammed and it ran in a circle, a failure that should have destroyed the
Trigger
. But the boat was saved by a second defect in the boomeranging torpedo. The detonator, which should have detected the
Trigger
's magnetic field and activated the warhead upon reaching its strongest point, instead exploded at a distance great enough to leave the boat intact. The weapon had suffered two unrelated failures, the second providentially neutralizing the first. Meanwhile the enemy tanker went on her way, probably unaware that she had been fired on. The incident would have been laughable were it not so potentially deadly.

The first problem to be isolated and solved was the Mark 14's tendency to run about 10 feet deeper than set. It had required initiative on the part of Charlie Lockwood in Freemantle, Western Australia. His correspondence with the bureau in Washington brought a high-handed dismissal, replete with technical data purporting to show that the complaints were unwarranted. In June 1942, Lockwood took matters into his own hands by designing a series of tests. These conclusively demonstrated that the weapons were running about 11 feet deeper than their settings. With additional pressure from Admiral King, the engineers in Newport finally conducted their own tests and concluded that the Mark 14 was running
10
feet deeper than set. That was easily corrected by changing the depth setting, in most cases to zero.

O
N THE STORMY MORNING OF
J
ANUARY 21, 1943,
a flying boat named the
Philippine Clipper
descended to 2,500 feet over mountainous terrain in Mendocino County, California. The big aircraft was a former Pan Am airliner, pressed into service by the navy to fly high-ranking officers between
Hawaii and the mainland. The pilot had lost his way in the impenetrable white murk. Aiming for San Francisco Bay, he was more than sixty miles off course to the north. He flew directly into the side of a mountain. No one survived. Among the dead was Admiral Robert English.

Nimitz tapped Charlie Lockwood as the new commander of the Pacific submarine force. It was a fortunate choice. Lockwood, more than any flag officer in the submarine fleet, had recognized and advocated a reconsideration of prewar doctrines and tactics. Arriving in Pearl Harbor to take up his new command in early 1943, he discovered to his satisfaction that the submarine base had been expanded and improved. New construction was apparent everywhere. Nimitz's CINCPAC staff had moved out of the submarine base and into a new headquarters building, freeing up space for Lockwood's operation. The new COMSUBPAC moved into a large white house on Makalapa Hill.

In December 1942, Admiral Christie had been relieved of command of Task Force 42 in Brisbane and sent to Newport to take command of the Naval Torpedo Station. Bitterly opposed to the assignment, Christie could do nothing to stop it. He had defended the torpedoes and obstinately dismissed the rising chorus of complaints against them. Now he would come under pressure to reform the obstruction at its source. Arriving in Newport, he had hardly unpacked his bags before receiving orders sending him back to Australia to take command of all submarines in the Southwest Pacific Area. He would serve in that position, subordinate to Lockwood, until November 1944.

Continued reports of premature explosions of torpedoes prompted Lockwood to wonder whether the Japanese had developed some countermeasure. Had the enemy devised some means to trick the torpedoes into exploding early? Many skippers became so distrustful of the device that they advocated disabling it in favor of the contact detonator. Lockwood, though sympathetic, was reluctant to allow such a drastic measure. The magnetic detonator was one of the navy's most prized technological innovations in the interwar period. It had influential proponents, including Mush Morton. Though it might not be entirely reliable, it also did not fail in every instance. The unreliable detonator was not disabled in favor of the contact detonator until late 1943 (except on the initiative of individual captains). In any case, the contact exploder was also unreliable.

In Australia, Christie refused to entertain grievances about the torpedoes.
In his view, skippers who blamed their weapons were blowing smoke to obscure their own faults. Airing complaints about the torpedoes, he said, would jeopardize the collective morale and self-confidence of the submarine force. He was not entirely unbiased. For more than twenty years, dating back to a postgraduate program at MIT in the early 1920s, Christie had been personally involved in the development of the magnetic detonator and other torpedo technologies. In the mid-1930s, he had run the torpedo section of the Bureau of Ordnance. His fingerprints were all over the Mark 14. After the war, he told Samuel Eliot Morison that torpedo failures were “largely a question of upkeep on the part of repair and operating personnel. . . . I have always contended that, given a conscientious and experienced torpedo gang, much of the poor performances in 1942 would have been eliminated.”
⁶⁸
When William J. Millican of the
Thresher
reported that he had fired on a Japanese submarine and “clinked 'em with a clunk” (that is, the torpedo was a dud), Christie ordered that no written mention of the incident should appear in patrol reports or endorsements.
⁶⁹
The discussion boiled over into a full-scale shouting match.

Writing to Lockwood that fall, Christie avowed that “torpedo performance here is steadily improving” and doubted the credibility of reported prematures and duds. Commanding officers, he added, had in some cases recounted torpedo failures “under conditions where it was impossible that he could see it.”
⁷⁰
The suggestion that captains were deliberately lying was too much for Lockwood. He slapped Christie down in a letter laced with sarcasm. “Thank you for your letter,” he wrote. “From the amount of bellyaching it contains, I assume that the breakfast coffee was scorched or perhaps it was a bad egg. . . . [T]he facts remain that we have now lost six valuable targets due to prematures so close that the skippers thought they were hits. . . . Sorry to note that you believe the operating personnel is usually wrong about what they see, or think they see. Your Bureau training has not been wasted.”
⁷¹
A shaken Christie lost no time in apologizing, but he would never fully acknowledge the egregious flaws of the Mark 14.

On a quick trip to Washington in early 1943, Lockwood threw down the gauntlet. He spread his criticisms widely through the Navy Department, presenting his case with pungent sarcasm. To a senior member of King's staff he said, “If the Bureau of Ordnance can't provide us with torpedoes that will hit and explode, then for God's sake get the Bureau of Ships to design a boat hook with which we can rip the plates off the target's side.”
⁷²
That salvo
touched off a heated exchange with Admiral William H. P. “Spike” Blandy, chief of the Bureau of Ordnance. Blandy admitted that engineers at the Naval Torpedo Station had been slow to identify and correct the problems, but complained in turn that the fleet had resisted assigning good men to work in weapons development programs. “We sadly lack submarine officers in the bureau,” wrote Blandy, “and you won't get the best results from your torpedoes until you let me have some. . . . As you know yourself, every time I try to get some submarine officers who also know torpedoes, I am usually offered somebody who hasn't made good in the boats themselves, and my efforts to get a good man are usually met with the objection that he is too valuable as a commanding officer.”
⁷³

J
APAN'S DECISION TO LAUNCH A WAR
in the Pacific had been motivated, above all, by the desire to possess the oil fields of Borneo and Sumatra, as well as the rubber plantations and tin mines of Malaya and other territories under Dutch or British control. Control of those prizes would avail nothing if Japan could not command the sea-lanes linking them to the home islands. Impoverished in natural resources, Japan's economy and war-making potential were perilously dependent on imported iron ore, bauxite, rubber, copper, zinc, and especially oil. Japanese fighting forces throughout the region required massive and sustained logistical backing, which could be supplied only by sea. The entire system could be held hostage by a fleet of aggressive and well-equipped submarines operating against Japan's critical interior sea routes. The freighters and tankers that would ply the sea routes would need to be protected at all costs; otherwise Japan's entire imperialist project would collapse like a sand castle in the surf. That is in fact what happened in 1944 and 1945.

All of this was clearly foreseen prior to the war, but Japanese naval leaders never made any real study of this problem, nor did they develop more than rudimentary capabilities in antisubmarine warfare (ASW). The nation's previous naval wars had been relatively short and decisive affairs in which commerce protection had never become a vital consideration. The samurai warrior culture esteemed offensive warfare more than defensive considerations, and no ambitious officer would waste his time specializing in the dreary and unglamorous business of protecting
marus
. There was no percentage in it; no hope of promotion or influence. Japan's fine destroyer
fleet trained intensely for night torpedo attacks against enemy warships, but escorting convoys of merchantmen was never more than an afterthought. Antisubmarine warfare never gained a strong voice at the Navy Ministry or the Naval General Staff, and no unit was tasked with full-time convoy duties until months after the war began. As shipping losses mounted in 1944, the manifest necessity of convoys ran up against the need to keep the remaining ships circulating briskly. Even as entire convoys were slaughtered at sea, the Japanese navy was reluctant to put talented officers to the problem. The leadership could not bring itself to admit that antisubmarine warfare was a professional subspecialty requiring staff analysis, weapons development, and training. Atsushi Oi, one of a handful of staff officers assigned responsibility for antisubmarine warfare, was often told by skeptical colleagues that “escort-of-convoy was common sense to a navy officer.”
⁷⁴