Japan’s Best Submarines Found America’s Pacific Supply Line — And Still Failed to Shut It Down

On the afternoon of September 15th, 1942, six American transports were crossing open water southeast of Guadal Canal, and a Japanese submarine officer named Commander Takazu Kinashi was watching them through a periscope. Those transports carried the Seventh Marine Regiment and everything the Seventh Marines were going to need on the island.

Around them was a screen of warships, a carrier, three cruisers, seven destroyers. Kinashi fired at the warships. He took his boat inside the destroyer screen. He closed to a thousand yards of the carrier USS Wasp, and he emptied all six bow tubes in a single spread. Three of those torpedoes hit the Wasp. She burned until her own escorts had to put her under.

193 men aboard her were killed. The other three torpedoes kept running. 5 miles beyond the Wasp, they found a second American task force. One struck the battleship USS North Carolina. One struck the destroyer US O’Brien, one Salvo, a fleet carrier sunk, a battleship out of the war for months, a destroyer that would go down on her way home to be repaired.

It is still the most destructive torpedo salvo any submarine has ever fired. The six transports were never touched. They reached Guadal Canal and they unloaded. Nothing in Kinashi’s orders told him to shoot at them. Those orders came out of a plan the Imperial Japanese Navy had been refining since before Kinashi was commissioned.

It told every submarine captain in the fleet what a submarine was for. American intelligence officers spent the first year of the war trying to explain a torpedo that did not behave the way a torpedo was supposed to behave. Ships were being hit at ranges that made no tactical sense. Lookouts trained from their first week at sea to watch for the line of bubbles that runs ahead of a torpedo were reporting nothing at all before the explosion.

Officers writing action reports had to put down what their own men had seen. And what their own men had seen was open water. The weapon was the type 95. It is the reason the Imperial Japanese Navy was able to do what it did underwater in the first year of the Pacific War. The work had started in 1928 under Rear Admiral Ki Kishimoto and Captain Toshihide Asakuma at Kur.

What they built ran on pure oxygen instead of compressed air. And that single decision gave the finished weapon two properties nothing in the American inventory could match. The first was reach. The Type 95 ran 9,000 m at 50 knots. The standard American submarine torpedo of 1941 ran 4500 yd at 46 knots.

At comparable speed, the Japanese weapon went roughly three times as far. The second was the thing the lookouts kept reporting. Compressed air is mostly nitrogen, and nitrogen does not burn. It comes out the back of the torpedo and rises to the surface. As awake, a man can see from a mile away in good light.

Pure oxygen is consumed in the engine. There is very little left to come out. A type 95 crossing 2 mi of open water left almost nothing behind it. The warhead weighed 893 lb. The standard American warhead at the start of the war weighed 507. The boats built to carry it followed the same thinking.

Japanese fleet submarines were large and long ranged, designed to operate for weeks at a stretch thousands of miles from any friendly base. Several classes carried a float plane in a watertight hanger forward of the conning tower, launched off a catapult on the deck, which meant a single boat could search an area of ocean many times wider than her own horizon, and then submerge and wait.

There is a version of this history in which Japanese submarines were second rate boats crewed by second rate sailors. And that version is wrong. In January of 1942, I6 put a torpedo into the carrier USS Saratoga, 500 m southwest of Oahu, and sent her back to a shipyard on the west coast for 5 months. On the 6th of June 1942, north of Midway, Lieutenant Commander Yahachi Tonab brought I 168 inside an American destroyer screen and fired four torpedoes at the carrier USS Yorktown, which had been damaged in the battle and was under tow with a salvage party

aboard. Two struck the Yorktown. One struck the destroyer USS Haman, lashed alongside and supplying her with power. The Haman broke in two and went down in about 4 minutes. The Yorktown followed her the next morning. On the 31st of August 1942, southeast of the Solomons, I26 torpedoed the Saratoga a second time.

She went to Tongatabu for repairs with a list put on her deliberately to lift the damaged plating clear of the water. Two weeks after that, Kinashi fired the salvo off Guadal Canal. Kinashi himself finished the war credited with a fleet carrier, a destroyer, and five merchant ships sunk along with a battleship and four more merchant ships damaged.

American ordinance officers did not field a submarine torpedo that matched the reach of the Type 95 at any point in the war. By every measurement the United States Navy used in 1941, the men on the other side had built the better instrument. American naval planners in the 1930s knew what the Imperial Japanese Navy expected the next war to look like because the Imperial Japanese Navy had never been quiet about it.

Japan expected one battle. The idea went back to the 27th of May 195 in the straight between Korea and Japan where Admiral Togo Hehachiro met a Russian fleet that had sailed most of the way around the world to reach him and destroyed it in an afternoon. Two Russian squadrons ceased to exist. The war ended a few months later on terms Japan wrote.

Every officer who came up through the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy afterward was taught that afternoon as a template rather than as a piece of history. A numerically inferior fleet correctly positioned, waiting in home waters for an enemy who had exhausted himself getting there could finish a superior force in a single engagement.

The Japanese Navy of 1941 was built around that proposition down to the last fitting. The submarines had a defined job inside it. They were to locate the American battle fleet the moment it left port on the west coast or at Pearl Harbor. They were to shadow it, holding contact for as long as the crossing took, reporting position and course and speed by radio.

And as that fleet came west across the Pacific, the submarines were to attack it in relays, sinking or damaging enough of it that the two fleets would meet on something closer to even terms when they finally met. Scouts first, ambushers second, nothing after that. That is the list Commander Kinashi was working from off Guadal Canal.

A fleet carrier was near the top of it. Six loaded transports were not on it at all. The doctrine had an implication that nobody in the room seems to have found troubling. A submarine hunting freighters in the Indian Ocean is a submarine that is not in position when the decisive battle comes. Commerce rating was not forbidden.

It was simply lower than everything else on a list where the top of the list consumed every available boat. When the naval general staff worked out how much merchant shipping Japan was likely to lose in a war with the United States, the figures they built the estimate on came out of the record of the First World War. That was the last large naval war anyone had and they used it.

Commerce rating also assumed something the Japanese planning staff did not assume, which was a long war. Sinking merchant ships is a way of grinding down an enemy economy over a period of years. Japan had not planned for years. Japan had planned for a hard opening blow, a defensive perimeter, one decisive fleet action, and a negotiated settlement.

The officer most responsible for the shape of Japanese submarine strategy in the 1920s was Admiral Suetssugu Nouasa. He had never served aboard a submarine. By the available accounts, the doctrine he helped fix in place went untested in any serious way until 1938 when the Navy finally exercised it in largecale maneuvers. The results were poor across the board.

Submarines were ruled to have been destroyed by other submarines. Boats gave away their own positions by breaking radio silence. Boats missed the radio instructions sent to them and boats missed the enemy fleet they had been sent to find and shadow. Three years remained before Pearl Harbor. The doctrine was not revised.

Part of the reason sat in the organization chart. Submarine staff officers in the Imperial Japanese Navy, including at the most senior levels of the naval general staff, held rank no higher than commander. In a service run by admirals who had come up through battleships and cruisers, the submarine arm had nobody senior enough to be listened to in a room where the decisions were made.

There was one attempt to move. In April of 1942, Vice Admiral Terrohisa Kumatsu took over the main Japanese submarine force from Vice Admiral Mitsumi Shimizu. And under Komatsu, the boats were given more latitude to go after merchant shipping. Squadrons went into the Indian Ocean and worked the routes off Australia and for a period they sank a good deal of tonnage.

Four months later, the Marines landed on Guadal Canal and every one of those boats was needed somewhere else. American officers who read captured Japanese planning documents later in the war found a plan that was internally consistent and carefully worked out. It answered the question it had been built to answer, which was how to win the battle.

Nobody in the room had been asking how the enemy was going to get to the battle. The seventh Marine regiment had been on garrison duty in Samoa since the spring. By the end of August 1942, the First Marine Division on Guadal Canal was three weeks into the campaign and short of everything. They were holding a perimeter around a captured air strip, eating two meals a day out of stocks the Japanese had left behind and taking naval gunfire at night from cruisers the American fleet could not intercept. Vice Admiral Robert Gormley

released the Seventh Marines to reinforce them. 4,000 men went aboard six transports at Espiritu Santo in the new Hebdes. To cover them, Rear Admiral Lee Noise brought out a force built around the carrier USS Wasp, screened by three cruisers and seven destroyers. A second group centered on the carrier USS Hornet with the battleship USS North Carolina in company operated some miles away.

At 2:44 in the afternoon local time on the 15th of September 1942, 250 mi southeast of Guadal Canal, that formation had a Japanese submarine inside it. The boat was I19. She was one of a concentration the Imperial Japanese Navy had moved south specifically to find and attack American warships supporting the landings, and she had been in the area for days.

Kinashi worked his way through the destroyer screen submerged and got a firing solution at a thousand yards, which is close enough that a periscope observation lasting more than a few seconds risks being seen. He fired all six bow tubes. Three struck the Wasp on the starboard side forward. The forward part of that ship held her aviation gasoline stowage and her forward magazines.

Gasoline vapor ignited almost immediately. The shock of the hits broke water manes in the forward part of the ship, which meant the damage control parties fighting the fires had no pressure in their hoses where the fire was. Captain Forest Sherman held her head into the wind as long as the ship would answer, keeping the flames forward and away from the after part of the hull.

When the fires reached ready ammunition on the hangar deck and the explosion started working aft, he ordered her abandoned. The destroyer USS Landsdown put torpedoes into her that evening to finish her. 367 of her crew were wounded and taken off by the destroyers alongside. The other three torpedoes in Kinashi’s spread never found the Wasp at all.

They ran on past her, held their depth and their course for another 5 miles, and arrived in the middle of the Hornet group. One hit the North Carolina below the water line on her port side, opening a hole in her hull. She stayed in formation and held 25 knots with the sea coming in, and she went back to Pearl Harbor for repairs that kept her out of the war until the middle of November.

One hit the O’Brien in the extreme bow. The explosion whipped the hull hard enough to damage her structure amid ships well away from the point of impact. She was patched and started for the United States. On the 19th of October, off Samoa, she came apart and sank. The Imperial Japanese Navy understood what Kinashi had done with six torpedoes.

18 months later in Berlin, Adolf Hitler personally awarded him the Iron Cross, second class, for the sinking of the Wasp. The arithmetic in the South Pacific that evening was worse for the United States than any single ship loss suggests. The carrier USS Enterprise had taken bomb damage on the 24th of August and gone to Pearl Harbor.

The Saratoga had taken a submarine torpedo on the 31st of August and gone to Tongatabu. The Wasp was on the bottom. Vice Admiral Gormley had one operational fleet carrier left in the entire South Pacific, and her name was Hornet. Japanese submarines had removed two of those three carriers from the board in 16 days.

Whatever the doctrine had promised about wearing down the American fleet before the decisive engagement in the middle of September 1942, it was delivering exactly that. The six transports carrying the seventh Marines were in that same water on that same afternoon inside that same periscope picture. Slow, loaded, and worth more to the campaign than any single warship in the formation.

They continued to Guadal Canal. On the 18th of September, the 7th Marine Regiment came ashore at Lunga Point with 4,000 men along with vehicles, aviation fuel, rations, and ammunition for the perimeter. Major General Alexander Vandergrift now had a third infantry regiment. Within a month, those men were holding the ridge line south of the airfield against the largest Japanese ground attack of the campaign.

American merchant sailors ran the line that put them there. It began on the west coast. Fuel oil out of San Pedro, ammunition out of the magazines at Port Chicago on Swiss Bay, where working parties loaded high explosive into the holds by hand. flour, tires, lumber, boots, penicellin, blood plasma, mail.

It went aboard freighters and tankers in Oakland and Los Angeles and Seattle and Portland. And then it crossed 6,000 m of the Pacific Ocean to Numea in New Calonia and to Espiritus Santo in the New Hedes and from there it went forward to the islands in whatever hull was available. The ships were slow. A loaded Liberty ship made 11 knots with a following sea and a clean bottom and rather less than that most of the time.

The voyage from California to Numea took the better part of a month. The crews were civilians. A merchant seaman signed articles for the voyage, drew his pay from the shipping company, and sailed under a master who held a merchant license. The armament was a Navy gun crew of a dozen men or so and a single gun on the stern with a few smaller mounts if the ship was lucky.

For most of the war, long stretches of that route had very little guarding them. There were never enough escorts. The escorts that existed were needed forward with the fleet and with the amphibious groups, and the long haul out of California was largely a matter of sailing, keeping a lookout and hoping. The Imperial Japanese Navy knew the route was there.

Japanese boats had the range to reach any point on it, including the American coast. They had the Type 95. They had crews who had trained for a decade. They hit it occasionally and when they hit it they did damage. At the end of April 1943 I19 the same boat that had fired the Salvo off Guadal Canal went after American merchant shipping.

She sank the Liberty ship Phoebe Ahurst. She sank the William L. Vanderbilt. She damaged the William Williams and she crippled the MH. young badly enough that the ship never sailed again and was written off. Four American merchant ships by one submarine inside a matter of days. Then I19 went back to the fleet.

That is the pattern the operational record shows. The boats could reach the shipping. The boats were sent elsewhere by order and sent back again. When the Marines landed on Guadal Canal in August of 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy moved its submarines south. Rear Admiral Setsuzo Yoshito’s submarine squadron 7 went to the waters immediately around the island, operating out of Rabal, 570 mi away.

Rear Admiral Chimaki Kono’s submarine squadron 3 had been hunting freighters off Australia and was ordered down from Tru 2,000 mi from Numea and 1140 from Guadal Canal. Rear Admiral Shigayyaki Yamazaki was preparing to take submarine squadron 1 into the Indian Ocean where Japanese boats had been sinking merchant ships steadily for months.

His orders were changed. He boarded I9 and sailed south on the 15th of August with four more boats behind him. The Japanese submarine campaign against Allied merchant shipping stopped almost entirely. It did not resume until the end of January 1943. For 5 months, the best long range submarine force in the Pacific Ocean was concentrated around one island in the Solomons, waiting for American warships, while the ships carrying the fuel and the ammunition and the food went by on the open route to the south.

Everything that reached those Marines came up that line. Every round they fired on the ridge, every bandage, every letter from home. And the men who carried it were merchant sailors. Most of them working for a shipping company under a master with a merchant license. If you think that part of the story deserves to be better known, take a second and hit the like button.

That is all it takes to put this in front of somebody whose father was on one of those ships. Marines on Guadal Canal began finding steel drums washed up on the beach. The drums came from Japanese destroyers running down the channel at night, cutting strings of them loose close in shore in the hope that the current would carry them to the Japanese troops on the western end of the island.

The Imperial Japanese Army had lost the ability to bring a loaded transport into those waters and still have it afloat in the morning. By the middle of November 1942, the Japanese position on Guadal Canal was past the point where floating drums could fix it. Men in the jungle west of the perimeter were starving.

The army concluded that the only remaining way to get ammunition and food to them was underwater, and it had enough influence over the Navy to get what it asked for. On the 16th of November 1942, every available eyeboat in the theater was placed under a single command at Rabbal and assigned to supply operations.

The crews called the missions Mogura. A fleet submarine with a float plane hanger could carry better than 50 tons of cargo once the aircraft equipment came out. 16 boats worked the Guadal Canal run and by one accounting they delivered roughly 1,500 tons to the island before the campaign ended. Another 95 supply sorties carried about 3,500 tons to New Guinea by September of 1943.

Japanese engineers built a piece of equipment specifically for the work. It was called an uncato, a long steel cylinder that a submarine could tow while submerged and then release offshore where it was meant to float into the beach on the tide. In June of 1943, the boats were doing the same work at the other end of the Pacific, running supplies to the garrison on Kiska in the illutions, cut off at the western end of the chain and under regular American air attack.

I36 left Paramushiro at 10 in the morning local time on the 15th of June, towing an Uno for Kiska with an estimated arrival 4 days out. She lost the container in heavy seas before she got there. 2 days later, making 12 knots to the northeast in poor visibility, she came within yards of grounding on a reef south of Bullier Island.

The commander of submarine squadron 1 suspended the Kiska supply effort on the 21st of June. Losses and near losses among his boats had reached a level he was not willing to keep paying for a cargo of rice. 3 days after that, an hour before dawn, 30 mi north of Kiska, I36, was ordered to abandon the mission entirely and turn around.

She reached Paramushiro on the 25th of June with nothing. The crews hated the work and said so at the time. They had trained for years to make submerged attacks against warships under escort and instead they were making slow approaches to hostile beaches with cargo in the torpedo room and no way to fight if they were caught on the surface at first light.

Morale in the Japanese submarine force fell away during this period. The boats lost on supply runs took experienced crews down with them, men the Imperial Japanese Navy had spent a decade producing and had no system in place to replace. The boats had been pulled south in August to hunt American warships.

In November, they were told to stop hunting anything. By the accounting Japanese staff officers compiled afterward, the share of supplies shipped to Guadal Canal that actually reached the men it was meant for came to 18% of the ammunition, 14% of the staple food, and 27% of the medical stores. At some points in the campaign, none of it arrived at all.

Marines on Guadal Canal in those same weeks were being resupplied by ship. American submarines spent those same years doing the other thing. They went after the freigherss and they kept going after the freigherss and the Japanese Navy had built almost nothing to stop them. The numbers moved in one direction.

350 American submarine patrols in 1942 sank 180 Japanese ships. 350 patrols in 1943 sank 335. 520 patrols in 1944 sank 603. By 1945, the totals fell off for the reason that there was very little left willing to leave port. Across the war, Allied submarines destroyed about 1,200 Japanese merchant ships, something on the order of 5 million tons of shipping.

Most were small cargo carriers. 124 were tankers bringing oil up from the East Indies. Another 320 were passenger ships and troop transports with men aboard. American submarines accounted for more than half of all Japanese merchant tonnage lost in the war. What was waiting for them on the Japanese side was very little.

At the start of the war, there was no unified system of convoy control. Regulations covering the sailing of merchant ships were issued separately by each local naval commander, which meant they differed from one area to the next, and a merchant captain moving between areas was working from instructions that contradicted the ones he had been given at his last port.

The naval general staff did not consolidate them into a single directive until the autumn of 1942, 10 months into the war. Escort vessels were built late and in small numbers, because every ton of steel and every hour of yard labor had a prior claim on it from the fleet. Convoys, when they existed, were small and thinly covered.

Merchant captains were encouraged for much of the first year to sail independently on the reasoning that ships moving on their own schedules moved more cargo per month than ships waiting in port for an escort to become available. Japan had gone into a war for oil and iron and rubber with no organized plan for keeping the oil and the iron and the rubber moving.

The consequences arrived on a schedule anyone could have drawn in advance. Tankers were sunk faster than tankers were built. Fuel that had been taken at enormous cost in the East Indies sat in tank farms in the East Indies because there was no longer a safe way to carry it north or did not reach the mills. Rice did not reach the home islands and by the last year of the war it did not reach the garrisons either.

There is an explanation for all of this that gets repeated often, which is that the Japanese Navy considered attacking unarmed merchant ships to be beneath a warrior’s honor. The record does not support it. Japanese submarines sank merchant ships in the Indian Ocean, off Australia, off the American West Coast, and in the South Pacific whenever the mission they had been given called for it.

There is no evidence in the operational record of any moral hesitation about the target. The explanation the Japanese Navy eventually gave for itself came 7 years after the surrender when a former Japanese naval officer published an account of why Japanese anti-ubmarine warfare had failed. He wrote that the Japanese Navy had taken it for granted that American submarines would play the same role that Japanese submarines played and had therefore given very little weight to the possibility of a campaign against merchant shipping. They had not

underestimated the United States Navy. They had assumed it was a copy of themselves. I have read that passage a number of times now, and the part that stays with me is not that they were wrong about us. It is that they were describing themselves without appearing to notice they were doing it. The same belief produced both halves of the failure.

A navy that holds that commerce rating cannot decide a war will not conduct one and it will not prepare to defend against one either. Immediately after the surrender, the Japanese government stated that shipping losses had been the main reason for the defeat. Rear Admiral Kanei Kishimoto’s oxygen torpedo was still the finest submarine torpedo in the world in the summer of 1944.

By then, it had become difficult to find a Japanese submarine in a position to fire one. Takazu Kinashi did not see the end of it. He was given command of I29 in October of 1943 and spent the months that followed carrying cargo between Japan and German occupied France, tungsten and tin and quenine one way, engines, blueprints and radar components the other.

On the evening of the 26th of July 1944 in the Balentang Channel north of Luzon, American codereers put three submarines across his track. USS Sawfish fired three torpedoes and hit with all three. I29 went down at once. One man out of the crew survived. the most successful submarine commander the Imperial Japanese Navy produced, spent his final year as a freight captain and was killed by exactly the kind of work his own navy had never organized itself to do.

The American supply line ran until the end in 1945. It was carrying ammunition to Eoima and aviation fuel to Okinawa over the same route in the same slow ships with the same civilian crews. By then the route had been running for three and a half years without a serious attempt to break it.

Nobody at home learned the name of a single one of those vessels. There were no communicates about a tanker arriving at Numea on schedule. There is no photograph anybody would recognize. An empire that had spent 20 years preparing to fight one battle in the Western Pacific never seriously tried to stop the ships that were carrying the other side to it.

Three questions come out of this that nobody has answered. Submarine Squadron 3 was sinking freighters off Australia when it was ordered down to the Solomons. How long would the run from California to Numea have held if that squadron had been left where it was? Somebody on the Naval General staff understood the arithmetic. The submarine officers in that building held rank no higher than commander, and there is no record of who tried to say it out loud.

and the maneuvers of 1938 told the Imperial Japanese Navy that its own submarine doctrine did not work three years before the shooting started. Nobody has ever explained why it was left in place. The men who kept the American line open were not most of them in the Navy. They were merchant marine tanker crews, long shoremen who loaded ships in Oakland and never saw where any of it went.

men on Liberty ships with one gun bolted to the stern and a crew of civilians who signed articles for the run. There are not many monuments for them. So, if you had a father or a grandfather who worked the ships or the docks or a supply depot on an island whose name he never explained, put it in the comments.

His name, the ship if you know it, the year. And if he served in the Pacific any other way, Navy, Marines, Army, Army, Air Forces, put his name down, too. Every one of those men was on the far end of that line. Somebody reading this is looking for a story like the one your family has and does not know it exists. >> August 1943, Pearl Harbor Naval Base.

Chester Nimmitz picks up a phone. He does not call Washington. He does not request another meeting with the Bureau of Ordinance. He does not dictate another letter into the same silence that has swallowed every letter before it. He calls the submarine base. He tells them to load torpedoes into a boat, take it out to Cahuli Island, and fire them into the underwater cliff face, not at a Japanese ship, into rock, so they can pull the duds off the ocean floor.

bring them back to a workbench at Pearl Harbor and cut them open. The answer comes back from the machine shop. It is the firing pin at a perfect 90° impact, the textbook shot, the one every American submarine commander spent years learning to execute. The spring collapses under the force of the blow. The pin cannot travel fast enough to strike the primer.

The detonator does not fire. The better the shot, the more likely the dud. This test happens in August 1943, 21 months after the first American submarines fired their first torpedoes of the war. 21 months of submarine commanders filing the same report up the chain of command. The torpedoes are not working.

21 months of the Bureau of Ordinance. The men who designed the weapon certified it and sent it to sea, sending back the same answer every time. The fault is with the crews, not the torpedo, the men. Nimttz had read every one of those reports. He had been one of those men inside those boats, in those waters, before most of the officers now filing those reports had finished school.

And for 21 months, he had pushed the system in every way available to him and gotten partial answers to a problem that kept putting sailors on the bottom and letting Japanese ships go. So he fired the torpedoes into the cliff. What he found and what he did with it is a story that does not appear in most history books. Not because it isn’t important, because it went right.

And history as a rule remembers the things that went wrong. If this is the kind of story you think more Americans should find, hit the like button. It costs you nothing. It tells the algorithm this history is worth putting in front of people. And then stay with me because what comes next is the part nobody talks about. July 7th, 1908.

Batangas Harbor, the Philippines. Enson Chester Nimttz runs the destroyer USS Decar ground on a mudbank. He had not checked the tide tables. The ship sits on the bottom overnight. A small steamer pulls her free the next morning. No one is killed. The damage is minor. The Navy convenes a court marshal.

Nimttz is found guilty of neglect of duty. He receives a letter of reprimand. At 23 years old, his career is already carrying a weight that most young officers never have to lift. Washington sends him to submarines. In 1908, that is not where the Navy sends its rising stars. The boats are called pigbo, cramped, loud wreaking of gasoline fumes in sealed metal hulls.

They run on engines that demand constant attention and reward inattention with casualties. They dive to depths that compress the hull in ways you can hear. The officers who command them are not, as a rule, the officers the Navy is grooming for Admiral. Assignment to submarine duty is where the Navy parks officers it isn’t sure what to do with.

Nimttz accepts the assignment without a word of complaint. In January 1909, he reports to the first submarine flotilla. By May, he has command of USS Plunger, a boat so primitive the crew sometimes breathes fumes when the engine floods the hull. He does not treat it as a punishment. He treats it as an education. He studies the machinery until he understands it better than the men who built it.

He converts his boats from gasoline engines to diesel, cleaner, more reliable, less likely to kill his crew with fumes or fire. He writes papers on submarine tactics that the Naval War College files and largely ignores. In 1912, he stands before the officers at the Naval War College and gives a lecture on submarine warfare.

Most of those officers to consider submarine warfare a curiosity at best. a distraction from the real navy, the battleships, the gun lines, the fleet engagements that naval doctrine has been built around for a hundred years. Nimttz is not confused about what submarines can do. He has spent 3 years inside them.

He has watched what happens when a boat can move unseen beneath the surface, surface, fire, and disappear before anyone above the waterline knows where the shot came from. He understands something that will not become obvious to the rest of the Navy for another 30 years. An empire that depends on shipping, on oil and ore, and food and steel moving across thousands of miles of open ocean has a throat, and submarines are the hand that closes around it. December 31, 1941.

Pearl Harbor, 8 in the morning. The change of command ceremony for commanderin-chief of the United States Pacific Fleet does not take place on the deck of a battleship because there is is no undamaged battleship available at Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona is 27 ft below the surface of the harbor. The Oklahoma has capsized and has not been writed.

the West Virginia, the California, the Nevada, all sunk or beached in the 24 hours that ended Sunday morning, December 7th. The ceremony takes place on the deck of USS Gring, a submarine, SS 209. Nimttz later told people he assumed command aboard a submarine because the Japanese attack had left no other deck available. That may be true.

He steps off the launch onto the dock. The harbor is still black with oil, not metaphorically, but literally. The fuel from the ships that burned in the first hours of December 7th has spread across the surface and sits there thick and dark between the sunken hulls. The officers waiting on the dock are not smiling. They know what the fleet looks like now.

They know what is left. Three carriers at sea, a handful of cruisers, a submarine force that has not yet fired a single torpedo in anger against the Navy that did this. Snimmitz looks at the wreckage. He looks at the Arizona where she went down. He looks at the Oklahoma, her hull still showing above the waterline, men still somewhere inside her.

He flub a long time. Then he turns to his staff. Get to work, he says. He does not go to the battleships first. Does not walk the airfields. Does not tour the command bunkers or the fuel depots or the dry docks. Still working around the clock to pull ships off the bottom. He goes to the submarine base.

He walks through the boats the way a man walks through a house he grew up in. With a knowledge that is in the hands and the feet, not just the head. He knows every sound these hulls make. He knows what the gauges mean when they read wrong. He knows the smell of a boat that is ready and the smell of one that is not. The officer accompanying him has spent his career on surface ships.

He watches the new commander in chief move through the submarine and understands without being told that this man has been here before. On December 7th, 1941, the same day the bombs fell, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark had issued the order for unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan. Every Japanese vessel on the Pacific Ocean was a legitimate target.

No warning required. Nimttz inherits that order. He makes it the spine of everything he does. The submarines go to sea. The first patrol reports come back within weeks and they all say the same thing. The torpedoes are not working. There is a phrase the United States Navy uses. Four words overdue and presumed lost.

It appears on a standard form, a bureaucratic phrase, clean and precise, designed to describe a specific administrative condition. A submarine departs on patrol. It does not return. Radio contact is attempted. No response. More attempts. Still nothing. Enough days pass that silence becomes its own answer. The boat is gone.

The men are gone. Nobody knows exactly where. Nobody knows exactly when. Nobody knows what the last hour looked like. Chester Nimtt signed those forms. He did not have an aid initial on his behalf. He did not delegate the paperwork to a subordinate and move on. He signed them because he knew in a way that most of the men who held his rank did not know could not know exactly what those four words described from the inside.

He had been below periscope depth. He had heard the sounds a pressure hull makes when it goes deep. The creek of metal under compression, the way the frame settles, the small adjustments of a boat finding its trim in cold water. He had stood in a control room when the boat went quiet, and every man stopped what he was doing, and watched the gauges and waited, waiting to find out whether the next sound would be water coming in or the signal to surface. He knew that silence.

he had lived in it. And 30 years later, sitting at a desk at Pearl Harbor, reading a form that said a boat and its crew would not be coming back. He knew precisely what that silence looked like at its end. February 11, 1943. USS Grampus SS 207 departs Brisbane War Patrol. She is not a green boat. She has been out five times already.

She has sunk Japanese shipping. She has survived depth charge attacks. Her crew of 71 men knows the work. Somewhere in the waters near the Solomon Islands, she disappears. No distress call, no survivors, no wreckage ever found. On March 22nd, 1943, after radio messages go unanswered for weeks, the Navy lists USS Grampus as overdue and presumed lost with all hands. All hands. 71 men.

Nimtt signs the form. He does not know if they were sunk by a Japanese destroyer. He does not know if it was depth charges or a mine or something mechanical that failed in a water, nobody could reach. What he knows is the number 71. And he knows that on every one of the patrols USS Grampus ran, every dive, every approach, every shot taken through a periscope.

Her crew carried the Mark1 14 torpedo. Grampus is not the exception. In 1942 alone, the Pacific submarine force loses seven boats. Seven times Nimmits signs the form. Some of them are sunk by Japanese destroyers. Some by depth charges in waters they were ordered into. Some vanish without a witness to record what happened in the final hours.

And on every patrol, every one of those crews ran, they carried the same weapon. In all of 1942, American submarines fire 1,442 torpedoes across the Pacific. Postwar analysis of Japanese records. The actual accounting done after the war ended from Japanese documents of what Japanese ships actually went down finds 109 ships sunk.

109 ships from 1442 torpedoes in a war being run at Nimitz’s direction as a campaign to cut the supply lines that kept Japan alive. Nimmitz reads those numbers. He also reads the Bureau of Ordinances response to every complaint filed through proper channels by submarine commanders who came back from patrol and put the evidence in writing.

The bureau’s answer does not change. Not after the first complaint. Not after the 10th. Not after the hundth. The fault lies with the crews, not the torpedo. The men. He is a former submariner reading a report that tells him the men in those boats are the problem. He had been one of those men. He had trained alongside them. He had worked the same machinery, run the same approaches, lived in the same sealed world below the surface.

He knew what those men were. He knows what that answer is worth. He does not say publicly what he thinks of it. There is a particular kind of weight and not yet having the proof that forces it to stop. Nimttz carries that weight to his desk every morning. Some mornings there is a new form waiting. He signs it and he goes to work. Spring 1942.

Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood is commanding submarines in the Southwest Pacific based in Fremantle, Australia. His commanders are telling him the torpedoes run too deep. He asks the Bureau of Ordinance to investigate. The Bureau says the torpedo runs exactly where it is set. Lockwood decides to find out for himself.

What he does next costs a career if it goes wrong. He commisss his own test. Without Bureau of Ordinance approval, without authorization from Washington, June 20, 1942, King George Sound, Southern Australia, a fishnet is strung below the surface at a measured depth. USS Skipjack fires Mark1 14 torpedoes set to run at 10 ft.

The holes in the net are at 25 ft, not 10 ft. 25. Lockwood reports his findings to the Bureau of Ordinance. The bureau disagrees. He repeats the test. Same result. He reports that the Mark1 14 is running 11 ft deeper than its depth setting and formally requests that the bureau conduct its own equivalent tests. The Bureau resists.

Low takes his findings to Admiral King. Chief of Naval Operations in Washington. The man above every admiral in the United States Navy. King, in the words of one historian, lit a blowtorrch under the Bureau of Ordinance. August 1, 1942. The Bureau of Ordinance officially concedes, “The Mark1 14 runs deep. Its depth control mechanism was in their own words. Here is what had happened.

During a warhead redesign years before the war, engineers had moved the torpedo’s pressure sensor, the device that measured depth and controlled the weapon’s course from the nose to a position near the tail. At the tail, as the torpedo moved through the water at speed, the sensor sat inside a pocket of reduced pressure created by the weapon’s own movement.

That pocket told the sensor the torpedo was running shallower than it actually was. So, the guidance mechanism automatically drove the weapon deeper. A torpedo set to run as 15 ft was passing beneath its target at 25 to 26 ft. By this point in the war, more than 800 Mark1 14 torpedoes have already been fired in the Pacific.

The fix, a corrected pressure mechanism, is ordered. Nimmits watches the numbers. They improve. They do not change enough. The Mark1 14 torpedo carries two separate detonation systems. The first is contact. The torpedo strikes the hull. The impact triggers the detonator. The warhead explodes. The second is magnetic.

It is called the Mark 6’s exploder. It works like this. As the torpedo passes beneath a steel ship, it senses the change in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by the mass of metal above it. At the right moment, it fires. The warhead detonates not against the hull, but beneath the keel. A hull explosion tears a hole in the side of a ship. A keel explosion breaks the spine.

Ships hit beneath the keel don’t flood. They break in half and go down in minutes. In theory, the Mark 6 is the most devastating torpedo detonator any Navy has ever put to sea. In practice, in the Pacific at tropical latitudes thousands of miles from the magnetic poles, the Earth’s magnetic field is weaker than the conditions the Mark 6 was calibrated for.

The mechanism fires early, a premature explosion in open water, far from the hull, loud enough to warn every destroyer within 5 miles, accomplishing nothing. Or it does not fire at all. Submarine commanders have already begun disabling the magnetic feature themselves. without orders, without telling anyone above them in the chain of command.

They reason correctly that a contact hit that has a chance of working is worth more than a magnetic detonation that will almost certainly not. The first submarine commander to do this was Captain Terrell Jacobs of USS Sargo on the first war patrol of the entire Pacific War in December 1941. He disabled the Mark 6 on his own authority.

He got into, as Navy Records put it, considerable difficulty for doing so. The men who went around the system were punished for being right. By 1943, what had been an unofficial practice has spread across the submarine force. Nimttz finds out. He does not discipline the commanders who went outside proper procedure.

He reads their patrol reports. He understands their reasoning. On June 24th, 1943, as Sinkpack, commander-in-chief of the entire Pacific Fleet, Nimmits issues a direct order, deactivate all magnetic exploders on all Pacific Fleet submarines. The Bureau of Ordinance sends a response. It asks why. Nimttz replies in one sentence.

His decision is final. The Bureau notes its disagreement on the record. The order stands and still the duds continue. Two defects, two fixes, 20 months of war, and every week submarines depart Pearl Harbor carrying weapons that may or may not fire. And every few weeks, one of them does not come back.

Nimttz is not the kind of man who slams his fist on the table. He is not the kind of man who fires off angry cables to Washington or calls press conferences to publicly humiliate the Bureau of Ordinance. He has been doing this the right way through proper channels with documented evidence, building a record that no one in Washington can dismiss.

And the right way has given him two partial fixes and a war that is still being fought with a weapon he cannot fully trust. July 24th, 1943. USS Tanosa, Philippine Sea. Lieutenant Commander Dan Daspit is at the periscope. In the crosshairs, the Tanan Maru number three, Japanese fleet tanker, 19,000 tons.

One of the largest tankers in the Imperial Japanese Navy. No escort, not zigzagging, making 13 knots in open water, loaded with fuel, moving from Palao to truck. Tanosa had been alerted to the tanker’s position by codereers. Daspit has been running toward her since before dawn. He closes to firing range, sets up the approach, runs the calculations.

He fires his first spread of four torpedoes. The son hears them running true. Four hits, zero explosions. The tanker turns away and increases speed. Daspit turns in pursuit. A nighttime chase. hours of maneuvering. By the time he gets back into position, it is the following morning. This time coming at the tanker from the starboard quarter, an awkward angle, not textbook.

He fires two torpedoes. Both hit. Both explode. The Tonan Maru takes the hits in the engine room. She coasts to a stop. She settles by the stern. She is not sinking. Daspit now has her exactly where every submarine commander trains for. A stationary target, pointblank range, perfect attack position. 90° off the beam, he fires one torpedo.

He moves Tanosa to the other side. Repositions fires again. Silence. Again, silence. Between each shot, his torpedo men pull the next weapon from the rack and inspect it end to end. Every torpedo declared in perfect working order before it enters the tube. Daspit fires. The torpedo runs straight. The soundman calls the track as normal.

The impact is clean. Silence. He fires again. Silence. He fires again. The torpedo hits the hull, glances off to the right, jumps clear of the water 100 ft from the tanker’s stern. And Daspit writes in his log. I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this. He fires again. Silence. He fires again. Silence. A destroyer appears on the horizon bearing toward them.

Daspit fires two more stern shots as Tanosa dives. Both hit. Neither explodes. 15 torpedoes. 13 hits. Two explosions. Both fired at awkward angles during the nighttime chase before he had the perfect position. Every torpedo fired from the ideal angle, silence. One torpedo remains in Tanosa’s racks. Daspit does not fire it.

He orders the torpedo secured. He orders Tanosa to turn around. He sets a course for Pearl Harbor, 2400 m away. He is not returning to rearm. He is returning with something no submarine commander has ever brought back before. a torpedo that hit its target and did not explode. And a patrol report documenting 13 hits and 11 detonation failures.

Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood is at Pearl Harbor when Tinosa arrives. He goes to the dock. He expects to see a man in a rage. 19,000 ton tankers, he later writes, do not grow on trees. Daspit is almost silent. He hands Lockwood the patrol report and says almost nothing. The last torpedo, the one brought back from the Philippine Sea, is taken to the torpedo shop at the submarine base and completely disassembled by the base technicians.

Their finding it is in perfect working order. A torpedo the shop certifies as combat ready. A patrol report documenting 13 hits and 11 detonation failures. The gap between those two facts is this question the Bureau of Ordinance has never answered because they have never asked it. The Mark1 14 torpedo entered production in 1930.

The Great Depression had gutted the Navy’s development budget. The engineers who built it could not afford to fire live weapons at actual targets. Every test before the war used reduced speed runs, practice warheads, controlled conditions designed to protect expensive equipment, not to simulate what happens when 3,000 lb of torpedo traveling at 46 knots strikes a steel hull headon.

No live fire test, not one. Not in 13 years of production. Nobody had looked. Lockwood calls in Commander Charles Momson. His suggestion is simple. Take torpedoes out to Cahulawi Island. Fire them at the underwater cliff face at full speed. Whatever doesn’t explode, send divers down to recover.

Bring the duds back to the torpedo shop. Cut them open. Find out what happens at the moment of impact. Lockwood agrees. Nimmits approves. USS Muskillange is assigned to the test. August 31, 1943. Cahulawi Island, Hawaii. Muscalunge positions off the cliff face. The first torpedoes are fired. Some explode, some do not. Divers go down.

They bring up the duds. Simultaneously at the submarine torpedo shop, a second test is running. Torpedoes loaded with dummy warheads are dropped from a crane 90 ft above a steel plate. A height chosen because the velocity at impact matches the torpedo’s running speed of 46 knots. The plate is set at different angles when it is perpendicular to the drop.

A perfect 90° impact. The textbook shot the attack position every submarine commander trains for. 70% of the exploders fail to fire. 70%. The results from the cliff test confirm it. The answer is in the firing pin. When the torpedo strikes a hull headon at full speed, the deceleration force is greater than the firing pin mechanism was designed to absorb the guide rods that direct the pin toward the primer distort under the impact load.

The pin cannot travel far enough, fast enough to strike the cap with sufficient force. The detonator does not fire. And here is what the test confirms about every patrol report the Bureau of Ordinance had spent 21 months dismissing. The two torpedoes Daspit fired during the nighttime chase. The two that exploded were fired at oblique angles under pressure, not quite the textbook position.

Imperfect impacts those detonated. Every subsequent torpedo fired from the ideal position at perfect 90deree right angles after the tanker was dead in the water and Daspit had all the time he needed. Did not. The better the shot, the more likely the dud. For 21 months, every submarine commander who came back from patrol and reported that his torpedoes had hit their targets and failed to detonate had been filing without knowing it proof of exactly this.

The fix does not come from the Bureau of Ordinance. No team of engineers arrives from Washington. No project is launched with Navy Department resources. No official program is funded or announced. The torpedo shop at Pearl Harbor Naval Submarine Base redesigns the firing pin. The steel firing pin blocks are replaced with aluminum alloy, lighter, stronger under impact, fast enough to strike the primer before the force of the blow can distort the mechanism.

The aluminum comes partly from Japanese aircraft shot down over Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7th, 1941. Metal salvaged from the wreckage of the attack, melted down, recast, machined into the component that finally makes the weapon work. The metal from the planes that started the war goes into the torpedo that helps end it.

Lockwood inspects every rebuilt explos before it is installed in a weapon. He will not send another submarine to sea with a torpedo he has not personally verified. September 1943, 21 months after USSO fired 13 torpedoes on her first war patrol and watched every one of them fail. American submarines leave Pearl Harbor with torpedoes that work.

What happens in the next 18 months is what Nimmits had bet everything on from the first week finally actually happening. American submarines sink more than 1100 Japanese merchant ships in the final 18 months of the war. Japan’s oil imports to the home islands collapsed from 1.75 million barrels per month to near zero by late 1944.

Japanese pilots complete their flight training. They sit on airfields across the Western Pacific. They cannot fly. There is no aviation fuel. Japanese warships are finished in the yards at Curé. They sit at anchor in harbor. There is no oil to put in their engines. The factories house producing artillery shells and aircraft parts slow and slow again.

The raw materials that fed them no longer arriving. The freighters carrying them no longer crossing the ocean. The ocean no longer safe for the ships that Japan’s empire had always assumed would be there. By 1945, Japan’s foreign trade has declined by more than 60%. The decisive naval battle that Japan spent 20 years planning.

The single afternoon that would shatter American will and force a negotiated peace never comes. Nimttz never gave them the conditions for it. The weapon he had counted on from the first week was finally doing what he knew it could do. Two years late. September 2nd, 1945. Tokyo Bay, the USS Missouri sits at anchor.

General Douglas MacArthur stands at the microphone on the forward deck. He speaks for 4 minutes. He describes what this moment means to civilization, to freedom, to the generations that will follow. When he finishes, the Japanese delegation steps forward and signs the documents on the table. Then it is Nimitz’s turn. He steps to the table.

He signs with one pen. He steps back. A yman hands him the pen afterward. He puts it in his pocket. One of the correspondents present writes that evening that Nimitsson signed and withdrew so quickly. It was easy to miss that he had been there at all. In the weeks that follow the the newspapers fill with photographs and retrospectives.

MacArthur is named Supreme Commander for Japan. Hollyy gives interviews. Spruants is profiled in several magazines. Nimttz flies back to Pearl Harbor. He has one task remaining. He writes his final report on the Pacific War, several hundred pages. Every major campaign from December 1941 to August 1945.

He names the decisions that were correct. He names the operations that succeeded and explains why. He notes the failures. He does not name the individuals responsible for them. He submits it to the Navy Department. It receives no press coverage. There is a number that doesn’t appear in that report. Not because Nimmits does not know it, because of some numbers resist being written down cleanly in a document that will be filed and archived and read by strangers who were not there.

52 American submarines were lost in the Pacific War. 52 boats, 374 officers, 3,131 enlisted men, 3,5 total. The highest loss rate of any branch of the United States armed forces. 22% of all men who served on war patrols did not come home. Some were sunk by Japanese destroyers, some by depth charges in waters they had been ordered into, some hit mines they could not see.

Some disappeared in circumstances that left no witness and no answer. And some of them, we will never know exactly how many went to sea carrying a Mark14 torpedo that the Bureau of Ordinance had certified as reliable, fired it at a target, and heard silence. Nimmits knew the difference between those deaths.

He had signed the forms, overdue and presumed lost. He signed them for 21 months, while the Bureau of Ordinance answered every complaint from his submarine commanders the same way. The fault lies with the crews. He never said publicly what he thought of that answer. He fired the torpedoes into the cliff. found in days what Washington had not found in 13 years of producing the weapon, fixed it with a torpedo shop at Pearl Harbor and aluminum salvaged from Japanese aircraft that had come over on a Sunday morning in December and went

back to work. Chester Nimttz died on February 20th, 1966. He was 80 years old. He died at his quarters on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay. the same Navy that had been his home for 60 years, providing the rooms where he spent his last years. He was buried at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.

The men buried beside him were not selected by protocol, not by rank, not by proximity to his fame. They were Raymond Spruants, Richmond Kelly Turner, Charles Lockwood, the man who had fought the Bureau of Ordinance from a desk at Pearl Harbor, who had fired torpedoes into a cliff because Washington wouldn’t, who had rebuilt the weapon from the torpedo shop up, buried beside the man who sent those submarines to sea and signed the forms for the ones that didn’t come back.

They had arranged it while they were still alive. No announcement, no ceremony organized for cameras, just the men who had done the work together in the ground the way they had always preferred to operate. Out of the spotlight, getting on with it. If your father served on a submarine in the Pacific, or your grandfather, I want to ask you something.

Did he tell you about it? The men of that generation, as a rule, did not. Not at dinner. not in the living room on Sunday afternoon, not in the ordinary language of of a life that had moved forward from what they had been through. But some of them talked late at night to a wife in a car on a long drive to a son who didn’t ask the right question until it was almost too late.

In the last years of a life, when the things they had never said started finding their way out, maybe he told you the name of his boat. Maybe he mentioned a patrol once, just once, and then went quiet and didn’t explain. Maybe you found something after he was gone. A photograph, a service record, a patch from a boat whose history you never knew.

If you have one of those stories, even a fragment, even something you only half remember, write it in the comments. the name of the boat, the year he served, whatever, you know, because those men went to sea with weapons that didn’t work. And they went back out anyway, the stories they carried home, the ones that never made a newspaper, never appeared in any history book, told once at a kitchen table to people who loved them and didn’t fully understand what they were hearing.

Those stories are part of how this war was won. Don’t let them disappear.