- 4 days ago
Nine miles inside a Japanese anchorage off New Guinea, an American submarine fired four torpedoes at a destroyer and missed every shot. With the destroyer bow-on and closing straight down the periscope line, USS Wahoo’s new captain had one torpedo left and one decision to make: follow the manual, or make the move that staff officers would have called suicide.
That choice, made only twenty-four days into his command, became the opening moment of a patrol that would later credit the boat with 19 Japanese ships. The story traces the risk, the logic behind the attack, and the cost carried by the crew who went along with it in the Pacific War.
For fans of WW2 stories, military history, submarine warfare, and narrated war history, this is a gripping listen about command decisions under pressure, bold tactics, and the realities of combat at sea. Ideal for viewers searching for World War 2 documentary-style storytelling, historical battle accounts, and forgotten Pacific theater stories.
That choice, made only twenty-four days into his command, became the opening moment of a patrol that would later credit the boat with 19 Japanese ships. The story traces the risk, the logic behind the attack, and the cost carried by the crew who went along with it in the Pacific War.
For fans of WW2 stories, military history, submarine warfare, and narrated war history, this is a gripping listen about command decisions under pressure, bold tactics, and the realities of combat at sea. Ideal for viewers searching for World War 2 documentary-style storytelling, historical battle accounts, and forgotten Pacific theater stories.
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LearningTranscript
00:00January 24th, 1943. Wewak Harbor, on the north coast of New Guinea,
00:06nine miles inside a Japanese anchorage that the submarine USS Wahoo had no proper chart for.
00:13It is a few minutes before three in the afternoon. In Wahoo's conning tower,
00:18Lieutenant Richard O'Kane has his face pressed to the periscope, and what he sees in it is the
00:24one thing every American submarine officer has been trained to run from. A Japanese destroyer.
00:31Bow on, coming straight down the line of the periscope. Four torpedoes have already gone out
00:37at her. All four missed. She turned away, swung around in a wide circle, and now she is steering
00:45for the place where the torpedo wakes began. She knows where the submarine is. Here is the detail
00:52to hold on to. Wahoo has exactly one torpedo left in her forward tubes. The stern tubes are loaded,
00:59but they point the wrong way, and there is no time to swing 300 feet of submarine around.
01:05Under her keel is a harbor, not an ocean. Behind O'Kane stands the captain,
01:10Lieutenant Commander Dudley Morton, 35, from Owensboro, Kentucky. A Naval Academy wrestler
01:17with a jaw so big, his classmates named him after a comic strip character. Mushmouth. Mush,
01:23for short. He has commanded this boat for exactly 24 days. Everything the submarine force has taught
01:30since the last war says the same thing about this moment. Take her deep. Rig for depth charge.
01:37Go quiet and wait. O'Kane calls the range. 1200 yards and closing. The answer, as O'Kane wrote it
01:46down,
01:46more than 40 years later, was this. That's all right. Keep your scope up, and we'll shoot that SOB
01:52down the throat. A torpedo, fired straight into the bow of a charging warship. A target as narrow
02:00as a barn door, rushing at you as fast as she can steam. Miss, and the next thing coming through
02:06the
02:06water is her depth charges. In less than nine months, Morton and his crew would be credited with
02:1219 Japanese ships. It remains one of the great records of the submarine war in the Pacific.
02:18And the story of it begins right here, with one torpedo and a decision the book said no captain should
02:25make. So why did it work? And what would it cost the American crew who went with him?
02:32If you want to see how that shot ends, and what it started, tap like and subscribe now.
02:39It helps this channel keep telling the stories of U.S. submariners in the Pacific.
02:45Back to O'Kane. To understand how he came to be staring down a destroyer, rewind a few days.
02:52Wahoo's orders said Reconnoiter Wiwak, a Japanese supply base the Allies knew very little about.
02:59And nobody aboard knew exactly where the harbor was. The charts in the boat showed that stretch
03:05of New Guinea as a thin coastline and a scatter of islands. What saved the mission was one sailor's
03:11shopping. Motor machinist mate Dalton Keeter, known aboard as Bird Dog, had bought a cheap school
03:17atlas in Australia. Morton's patrol report, still on file today, calls it an Australian two-bit school
03:24atlas. On one of its pages, Wiwak sat clearly marked behind two islands, Kairiru and Mushu.
03:33O'Kane and the quartermaster, Fertig Kraus, traced the page onto toilet paper. Then they borrowed a
03:39camera that belonged to the father of another officer, George Greider, and turned it into a
03:44projector with a signal lamp, throwing the image onto the wardroom deck. They copied the enlargement onto
03:50larger sheets and added every line of sailing directions they had. That homemade chart is what
03:56Wahoo carried into an enemy harbor. At half past three in the morning of the 24th, she dived two and
04:03a
04:03half miles north of Kairiru and crept in. At first light, the periscope picked up a small tug with a
04:09barge
04:10alongside. Then two Japanese torpedo boats. Wahoo slipped past them and kept going. For almost ten
04:18hours, she worked her way deeper, periscope up in short looks, on a chart copied from a school book.
04:24At 18 minutes past one in the afternoon, O'Kane saw it. Something in the lee of an island, five
04:30miles
04:31farther in, that looked like the bridge of a ship. Wahoo started toward it at three knots, the pace of
04:38a man
04:38walking. As the range came down, the shape changed. First a tender with small craft alongside. Then,
04:46unmistakably, a destroyer, with Japanese submarines moored beside her. Morton kept going in. Then O'Kane
04:54saw the destroyer begin to move. Now stop and think about what that meant in 1943. Periscope up, in daylight,
05:02in shallow water, closing on a warship built to hunt submarines. Before the war, American captains
05:10in fleet exercises were threatened with losing their commands simply for letting a periscope be seen.
05:16And in 1942, nearly one American submarine captain in three was removed from command. The reason behind
05:24that number is the key to everything Morton did next, and it is not the reason you would expect. The
05:30captains removed in 1942 were not, for the most part, men who took too many chances. They were men who
05:37took
05:37too few. Think about how they had been trained. Through the 1930s, American submarines practiced
05:44against an imagined enemy battle fleet, screened by destroyers and aircraft. In that world, a periscope
05:52was a death sentence. So captains were taught to attack from deep, firing on sound bearings alone. In fleet
06:00exercises, a captain whose periscope was spotted was threatened with losing his command. The navy's written
06:07doctrine for meeting a destroyer rested on the same idea. Go under, keep quiet, get away. Then came the real
06:16war. The
06:17habits that kept a skipper's record clean in peacetime now too often sent boats home with torpedoes still
06:24in the racks and nothing in the logbook. In 1942, roughly 30 percent of American submarine commanding
06:32officers were relieved. Put that another way. Walk down a submarine pier that year and count 10 conning
06:40towers. Three of the men standing on them would be gone before the new year. Wahoo's first captain was one
06:47of them. Lieutenant Commander Marvin Kennedy, known as Pinky, took her out on her first patrol in August 1942.
06:56She came home with no confirmed sinkings. Among the chances that got away was a Japanese aircraft carrier.
07:04On her second patrol, she sank a single freighter, the Kamoi Maru, on December 10th. Riding along on that
07:12second patrol, watching every approach, was a prospective commanding officer with nothing to do
07:18but observe. Mush Morton. And here is a detail almost nobody remembers. Morton himself had nearly
07:27been pushed out of submarines. Shortly before, a division commander had lost confidence in him and
07:34removed him from an old boat called Dolphin. He came to Wahoo with something to prove and very little margin.
07:41On December 31, 1942, in Brisbane, Kennedy was relieved and Morton took command. Before the boat sailed,
07:50he gathered the crew. What he said has survived nearly word for word. Wahoo is expendable. We will take every
07:59reasonable precaution, but our mission is to sink enemy shipping. Then he offered every man a way off.
08:06If anyone doesn't want to go along under these conditions, just see the yeoman. I am giving him
08:12verbal authority now to transfer anyone who is not a volunteer. Listen to that offer again. A captain
08:20telling a crew of submariners, in wartime, that their boat is expendable and that the door is open.
08:27Not one man took it. Among the sailors who heard that speech was a yeoman named Forrest Sterling.
08:34Remember his name. He comes back at the very end of this story, in a way nobody aboard could have
08:39imagined. Morton broke a second tradition before he fired a single torpedo. In an American submarine,
08:47the captain ran the attack from the periscope. Morton handed the periscope to his executive officer.
08:52His patrol report spells it out. O'Kane made all observations through the periscope and fired all
09:00torpedoes. The captain stood back, worked the plot and the attack computer, and conned the boat.
09:07Why would that matter? Picture the man at the eyepiece. For a few seconds at a time, he sees one
09:14ship,
09:14magnified, filling the glass. The man standing behind him sees the whole problem at once. The ranges,
09:21the angles, the escorts, the way out. Morton chose to be the second man. And in the same report,
09:29he wrote, O'Kane is the fightingest naval officer I have ever seen. That was the team in Wahoo's conning
09:37tower on the afternoon of January 24, 1943. Back to the destroyer. At first, she seemed ready to offer
09:45a shot from the stern tubes. Then she zigged, and the bow tubes had the setup instead. At 2.41
09:51that
09:52afternoon, Wahoo fired a spread of three torpedoes from 1,800 yards, set for a target speed of 15 knots.
10:00Okane watched the wakes running after her. Sound reported her propellers turning for 18 knots.
10:07She was faster than the setup. Okane fired a fourth torpedo, set for 20. The destroyer turned away from
10:15it, circled to the right, and pointed her bow straight at the periscope. Four torpedoes, four misses.
10:22Hold on to why. Every one of those shots depended on a guess about her speed and her course.
10:29And she had changed both. Now she was coming. 1,200 yards. The moment for the last torpedo in
10:37the bow tubes. And Morton didn't fire. His report puts it in one flat line. To ensure maximum
10:46likelihood of hitting with his last forward torpedo, he withheld fire. He was going to let a charging
10:52Japanese destroyer come 400 yards closer. A destroyer covers that distance and well under
10:58a minute. Why wait? Why hand a charging warship 400 more yards? Everything about Morton's method,
11:07the 19 ships, the next 9 months, is hidden inside that decision. And inside a number Okane was about
11:14to watch run out through the periscope. 25 seconds. 249. 800 yards. Okane fired the last torpedo in the
11:24bow tubes. Start the clock. Almost at once, the sound operator lost it. The torpedo's small propellers
11:32were drowned out by a much bigger sound. The destroyer's own screws, coming through the water and into the
11:38steel around them. Okane wrote that they were, now roaring through our hull. Wahoo was already heading
11:46down. Every man aboard knew what the next noise would be if the torpedo missed. 10 seconds. 15. 20.
11:56At 25 seconds, it hit. The whole fire control party shouted the same words at the same instant.
12:04Okane remembered them ringing out in unison. We hit the son of a bitch.
12:09Then came a sound he later compared to steam hissing into a bucket of water. Amplified a million times.
12:16It was the destroyer's boilers. Morton's patrol report, usually as dry as a shipping ledger,
12:23lets go for exactly one sentence. The explosion was terrific. He writes that her top side was
12:30crowded with men, on the turret tops and up in the rigging, more than a hundred lookouts searching for a
12:36submarine that was now watching her bow settle. Wahoo took photographs through the periscope,
12:43and one of them is still in the National Archives. Then Morton took the boat down to 150 feet and
12:50turned for the harbor mouth. Eight minutes from the first shot to the last. Five torpedoes. One hit.
12:58Now the way out. Nine miles of enemy harbor, submerged, with no periscope.
13:06Somewhere behind them, guns were firing, and a couple of bombs came down from aircraft.
13:12Wahoo navigated by ear, taking sound bearings on the surf breaking over the reefs and beaches,
13:18and matching them to a chart copied from a school atlas. At 7.30 that evening, she surfaced,
13:25well clear of the islands. So why did it work? The first part of the answer is hiding in those
13:33four
13:33misses. Every one of them asked the crew to predict where a fast, turning warship would be a minute or
13:39more in the future. Her speed, her course, her next move. They guessed, and she moved. A destroyer charging
13:48bow on takes most of that guesswork away. When a ship is coming straight at you, her speed hardly
13:55matters. She is not crossing your line of fire. She is running down it. What matters is the bearing,
14:02and at 800 yards the bearing is something you can see with your own eye. Put yourself at that periscope
14:08for a moment. A warship filling the glass, getting bigger every second, and your captain telling you
14:14to wait. So why not fire at 1200? Because at 1200 yards a destroyer has time to spot the wake
14:21and swing
14:22clear. Why not wait even longer? Because a torpedo has to run a certain distance before it arms itself,
14:29and a destroyer that close is nearly on top of you anyway.
14:33Morton was threading a needle between those two dangers. 800 yards. 25 seconds. And here is the
14:41detail that almost nobody tells. Later accounts of the attack conclude that if the destroyer had held
14:47her course, that torpedo would probably have missed. She didn't hold it. At the last moment she turned,
14:54the way a destroyer is trained to turn when a torpedo comes at her, and swung her side into its
14:59path.
15:00Think about that. On the Japanese bridge, somebody did the correct thing, by the book, and the book put
15:07the torpedo into his ship. Now the honest part. Remember the 19 ships. This destroyer is not one of
15:15them. Her name was Harusame. Japanese records put the hit farther forward than the report says,
15:21under her forward gun. Three of her crew were killed. Three badly hurt. 17 more wounded.
15:28With her keel nearly broken, she was run onto the beach to keep her from sinking.
15:33In February she was towed to Trook and given a temporary bow, then sent home to Japan for rebuilding,
15:39and by early summer she was ready for sea again with radar she hadn't carried before.
15:45Wahoo was credited at the time with sinking her. After the war, the count was corrected.
15:51Every one of the 19 is a ship that post-war investigators matched against Japanese records.
15:58So the most famous shot of Morton's career did not sink its target. What it did was harder to measure.
16:0524 days into a new captain, a crew had watched the thing they were all taught to fear, turned around,
16:12and pointed back at the enemy. From Wiwak on, Wahoo's men believed their boat could do what others
16:20wouldn't. That belief was about to be tested in a way none of them expected. Two days later,
16:27on the morning of January 26th, Wahoo found a Japanese convoy. Over the next 12 hours,
16:34she would fire every torpedo she had left. And late that morning, Morton made a decision
16:40that O'Kane believed, to the end of his life, cost Morton the Medal of Honor.
16:46January 26th, 1943. A quarter to nine in the morning, in open sea off the north coast of New
16:53Guinea. Smoke on the horizon. Two freighters, making ten knots on a steady course that, Morton noted,
17:01led neither to nor from a known port. Wahoo tracked them, worked ahead, and dived.
17:08At 10.41, O'Kane fired two torpedoes at the leading ship, and 17 seconds later, two more at the
17:16second.
17:17The first pair hit bow and stern. Of the next two, one ran ahead of its target. The other hit.
17:25Four minutes later, O'Kane swung the periscope around and found three ships close around them.
17:32The third was a huge transport.
17:35At 10.47, with the transport broadside on at 1,800 yards, Wahoo fired three torpedoes from the bow tubes.
17:45Two hit. The transport stopped dead. And then came something you have heard before in this story.
17:53The damaged second freighter was coming straight at the submarine. Morton did not go deep.
17:59He fired two bow torpedoes down the throat, to stop him, and as a defensive move. The second one hit.
18:07The report adds four words that sum up that whole morning. But he kept coming.
18:14Two days, two ships charging a periscope, and twice the same answer from Wahoo's conning tower.
18:21What had been a desperate improvisation in Wewak Harbor was turning into a habit.
18:26Now pay attention to the next entry, because it matters later.
18:29At 11.33, with the transport stopped at 1,000 yards, O'Kane fired one more torpedo.
18:36Its wake ran directly under the middle of the ship.
18:40Nothing happened. The torpedo failed to explode.
18:44Remember that dud. It was the first small warning of a problem that would one day do what no Japanese
18:51destroyer ever managed. Stop Mush Morton cold.
18:56Two minutes later came a second torpedo on the same setup. Morton wrote that the explosion
19:01blew her midship section higher than a kite, and that the troops aboard began
19:06jumping over the side like ants off a hot plate. What happened next is the hardest part of the Wahoo
19:14story, and it has to be told straight. Morton brought the boat to the surface.
19:21His report says he meant to charge batteries and to destroy what he estimated were 20 boats of troops
19:26in the water. The four-inch deck gun opened fire on the largest boat. According to the report,
19:33the men in it went over the side, and small machine guns fired back.
19:38Then the report says,
19:40We then opened fire with everything we had.
19:44Morton believed they were all Japanese soldiers. Many were not.
19:50The ship was the Buyo Maru, and she was carrying prisoners of war,
19:55Indian soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 16th Punjab Regiment, along with Japanese guards and troops.
20:02Of 1,126 men aboard, 282 died. The accounts have never agreed.
20:11Admiral Charles Lockwood, who commanded the Pacific Submarine Force, maintained that the men in the
20:17boats fired first. The historian Clay Blair concluded the opposite, that Wahoo opened fire first, and the
20:24survivors fired back. And O'Kane believed that this morning is the reason the Medal of Honor never came.
20:33That was the first price of the method, and it was not paid in American lives.
20:38The day was not over. At 25 past 8 that evening, Wahoo caught a tanker, and her second torpedo hit
20:46just
20:46aft of midships. She went down in the middle almost instantly. At 10 past 9, Wahoo fired her last two
20:55torpedoes into the freighter that had charged her that morning. Both hit. Fifteen minutes later,
21:02she sank, leaving only the destroyer's searchlight sweeping a clear horizon. Four hits in three separate
21:09attacks to sink one ship. Morton's report sums up the state of his boat in two lines. Torpedoes? None.
21:18Other factors? Indefinite.
21:21On February 7, 1943, Wahoo came into Pearl Harbor with a broom lashed to her periscope shears,
21:28a clean sweep, and eight small Japanese flags flying. Morton, who was proud of his skill with a needle,
21:35stitched some of Wahoo's battle pennants himself. The pennant she flew that day read,
21:41Shoot the sons of bitches. Morton received the Navy Cross and, unusually for a sailor,
21:48the Army's Distinguished Service Cross. The force commander's endorsement said every attack was
21:54carried out in a most aggressive manner. After the war, the records would confirm two of the ships from
22:00that convoy, not the four Wahoo claimed. But in February 1943, the submarine force saw a boat
22:08that had entered an enemy harbor on a school atlas and come home with empty torpedo racks.
22:14Lockwood's answer was a new patrol area. The Yellow Sea between China and Korea. Shallow,
22:20crowded, and far from any American base. And within weeks, codebreakers at Pearl Harbor would pick up a
22:27Japanese message about those waters. It spelled out exactly what the Japanese believed they were
22:33facing in the Yellow Sea. They were wrong about one thing. And that mistake may be the highest compliment
22:40Wahoo ever received. March 25, 1943. The Yellow Sea between China and Korea.
22:48Wahoo is on the surface in daylight, and her deck guns are firing. Two Japanese freighters. Over the course of
22:56the fight, her 4-inch gun will fire 170 rounds, and her 20mm cannon about 2,000. One of the
23:04freighters
23:04swings around and tries to ram the submarine. Later the same day, a trawler. This time the 20mm
23:12jam. So the crew reaches for something no submarine manual has ever listed. Molotov cocktails. A parting gift
23:20from the Marines on Midway. They throw them. The trawler's wood is so waterlogged it will not burn.
23:28They sink her anyway. Morton wrote that day up in his report with obvious delight.
23:34Anyone who has not witnessed a submarine conduct a battle surface with three 20mm and 4-inch gun,
23:40he wrote, just ain't lived. Now step back and look at where Wahoo is, because this is the part that
23:47matters. The Yellow Sea is shallow. Much of it is shallower than the length of the submarine herself.
23:55The book's first answer to danger, Go Deep, barely exists here. A captain who fights by the manual in
24:03these waters has almost nowhere to hide. A captain who fights like Morton was never planning to hide.
24:10She had sailed from Pearl Harbor on February 23rd, topped off at Midway, and reached her area on March
24:1711th. Then, for a week, no sinkings. And then, in 11 days, this. March 19th, two ships. March 21st,
24:31two more. March 23rd, one. March 24th, a tanker. March 25th, the freighter and the trawler. March 29th,
24:44one more. Nine ships that post-war records confirm in a single patrol. Set that figure beside the 19.
24:54Nearly half of Morton's entire record came out of 11 days in the Yellow Sea.
25:00And here is what those 11 days looked like from the other side.
25:04At Pearl Harbor, American codebreakers were reading Japanese radio traffic.
25:09One intercepted message from that month reported the situation in the Yellow Sea.
25:13The summary read,
25:16Japanese think a submarine wolf pack operating in Yellow Sea. All shipping tied up.
25:22A wolf pack. Several boats hunting together.
25:26There was one. Think about what that mistake tells you. Japanese officers ashore were looking at ships
25:34torpedoed. Ships shot to pieces on the surface. Losses scattered across the sea.
25:40And they drew the only sensible conclusion. No single submarine fought like that.
25:47The method had made one boat look like a squadron.
25:51Now the other half of the ledger. Because the machine was starting to pay.
25:56On that patrol, Wahoo fired 24 torpedoes. Eight hit. Four exploded on their own,
26:04short of their targets. And one more struck and failed to go off.
26:08Morton's report praised the new Torpex warheads that did work,
26:12in words that sound like him and nobody else. Torpex heads carry an awful wallop.
26:19But you can do the arithmetic. One torpedo in five was failing in ways that had nothing to do with
26:25aim.
26:26And the post-war count added its own twist. Wartime credit for the patrol was eight ships
26:32and more than 36,000 tons. The records found nine ships, but only about 20,000 tons.
26:40More ships than claimed, many of them smaller than they had looked through a periscope.
26:46On April 25th, Wahoo sailed from Midway again, north this time, to the Kurile Islands.
26:53She found targets, and she pressed her attacks, as she always did.
26:57On May 4th, she damaged a big aircraft transport, the Kamikawa Maru.
27:03On May 8th, attacking the Kinryu Maru, one torpedo was a dud,
27:08and another blew up early. By the end of that patrol, the numbers had turned ugly.
27:14Twenty-four torpedoes fired. Seven hits.
27:19Morton's own report worked out the score to the decimal point. 29.2%.
27:26The Navy's official history of Wahoo would later say that faulty torpedoes cut her results on that
27:32patrol by as much as half. And still, the force commander's endorsement noted that across three
27:38patrols, Wahoo had been credited with more than 93,000 tons sunk in only 25 days on station. A record.
27:48Here is the second layer of our answer. The down the throat shot worked because it stripped away
27:54every guess except one. But there was one thing it could never strip away. The torpedo itself.
28:01A spread of four can survive a dud. A single torpedo fired into the bow of a charging destroyer
28:07cannot. The bolder the method, the more it rested on a weapon that was now failing one time in five.
28:15By summer, the team that had fought at WEWAC was coming apart. And in August 1943, Morton would take
28:23Wahoo into the Sea of Japan, the enemy's home waters, and fire ten torpedoes in less than a week.
28:30Hold on to that number. How many of those ten found their targets is the most shocking figure in Wahoo's
28:37whole war? August 15, 1943. The Sea of Japan, between the Japanese home islands and the Asian mainland.
28:4535 minutes past midnight. A medium-sized freighter making seven knots. Wahoo fires one torpedo.
28:54The report's entry. Miss and no explosion. 222. A bigger freighter. One torpedo. This time it runs
29:04straight and strikes the ship exactly where it was aimed. Morton's report. Hit at point of aim,
29:10but torpedo was a dud and did not explode. 418. Two torpedoes at the same ship. Both miss.
29:19One explodes at the end of its run. 424. One more. It breaks the surface and blows up before the
29:28end of
29:28its run. And at 427, with daylight coming and the target now fully alerted, Morton writes three words
29:36into his report. Damn the torpedoes. Count along with me. Five torpedoes. Four attacks. Four hours. Not one hit.
29:48To understand how Wahoo came to be here, and why this hurt so much, go back to the summer. The
29:54team from
29:55Wiwak was gone. George Grider had left after the third patrol to become executive officer of another
30:01boat. And in July, Richard O'Kane, the man at the periscope, the man Morton had called the fightingest
30:08officer he had ever seen, left to commission a new submarine of his own. The Tang. Wahoo sailed from
30:15Pearl Harbor on July 21st. In the middle of August, she slipped through La Perouse Strait,
30:21the narrow passage between Japan's Northern Island and Sakhalin, and into the Sea of Japan.
30:27Remember that, Strait. It is the way home. Now the rest of the patrol.
30:33August 17th. Two more single shots. Two more misses.
30:38August 18th. Just after midnight. Another miss. 311. A miss. 314. One more. And the report records
30:49that it broached at end of 23 second run. 23 seconds. Two seconds short of the number from
30:57Wiwak. Same single shot. Same short run. Seven months earlier, it had broken a destroyer's back.
31:06Now it came up out of the water like a porpoise and went nowhere. Ten torpedoes. Nine attacks. Zero hits.
31:15That same day, Wahoo came up on a freighter and was about ready to fire when her flag was made
31:20out.
31:21It was Russian. The Soviet Union was not at war with Japan, and Morton held fire and stayed out of
31:28sight. Then he did the only thing left to do. He radioed Pearl Harbor and reported the poor performance
31:35of his torpedoes. The answer came back on August 19th. Come home. On the way out, Wahoo used her guns.
31:44She sank three sampans. From the first, six Japanese fishermen were taken aboard as prisoners.
31:51Five of their crewmates had been lost. And Morton's report notes what his crew gave the six men.
31:57Clean, dry clothes, baths, and a round of brandy. Put that beside the Buyo Maru. The same captain,
32:05the same boat, seven months apart. When the patrol report reached the staff,
32:11the book answered back. The squadron commander wrote that Morton's decision to fire single torpedoes,
32:16while understandable, is not concurred in. A minimum of two, preferably three torpedoes,
32:23using a spread, should be fired at any target. Admiral Lockwood ruled that the patrol was
32:29not considered successful for combat insignia award. The official damage credited to Wahoo for
32:36the entire patrol. Three sampans, 96 tons. It is not hard to see why Morton fired one at a time.
32:44Far from home, with ships everywhere, every torpedo was precious. And at Weewalk, one had been enough.
32:52But look at what the Sea of Japan had actually taken away. Here is the third layer of the answer,
32:58and it is the deepest yet. Weewalk worked because three things were in place at once.
33:04A captain standing back, seeing the whole problem. A man at the periscope he trusted completely.
33:11And a torpedo that did what it was told. In the Sea of Japan, the man at the periscope was
33:17gone,
33:18and the torpedo was failing. What was left was the nerve. And nerve alone, for ten torpedoes, produced
33:25nothing. The book had never said that boldness was useless. It had said boldness was a way to die.
33:33What the Sea of Japan showed was something the book never considered. The move was never really
33:38about courage. It was about a system. And a system is only as strong as its weakest part.
33:46Morton came home furious. And then he asked to go back. Into the same sea, through the same strait.
33:55Lockwood hesitated. And then said yes. This time, Wahoo would carry the Navy's newest weapon,
34:03the electric Mark 18. It was slower than the old torpedo, but it left no wake, no trail of bubbles
34:11pointing back to where the submarine lay. On September 13, 1943, Wahoo topped off at Midway
34:18for her seventh patrol. Forty-five minutes before she sailed, Morton gave an order to one man aboard.
34:25It was the yeoman from Brisbane, Forrest Sterling. For the rest of his life, Sterling said he could
34:32never understand why Morton did it. Midway, September 13, 1943. Forty-five minutes before
34:39Wahoo sailed, yeoman Forrest Sterling was ordered off the boat and sent to a stenography school.
34:45He had served on five of her patrols. Years later, he still could not explain it.
34:51I can never understand, he said, why Captain Morton changed his mind.
34:56Wahoo sailed without him. Her orders were to enter the Sea of Japan through La Perouse Strait
35:02around September 20, and to be clear of the area by sunset on October 21.
35:08She had a new executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Vern Skionsby, from Hickson, North Dakota.
35:14And in her racks, the new electric Mark 18s. This time, the torpedoes worked. No wake, no bubbles.
35:24A Japanese lookout could stare straight at the water and see nothing coming.
35:28On September 25, she sank a freighter, the Tako Maru, and at a quarter past one in the morning on
35:35October 5, ten miles off the island of Okinoshima, in the strait between Japan and Korea, a Mark 18
35:41found the Konron Maru. Stop on this one, because of what it did on the other side.
35:48The Konron Maru was not a warship. She was a brand new railway ferry, in service only since April,
35:55carrying passengers between Shimonoseki, on Japan's main island, and Pusan, in Korea.
36:01She was hit in the dark and went down in about four minutes. Of 655 people aboard, 583 died or
36:10were
36:10never found. Among them were two members of the Japanese parliament. Now watch the Japanese reaction,
36:17because it is as clear a verdict on Wahoo as any American report. The government's own news agency
36:24announced that an American submarine had sunk a steamer near the Tsushima Strait with the loss of 544
36:31lives. Then the ferry line changed the way it ran. No more night crossings. Daylight crossings only
36:38with a destroyer escort. Passengers limited to military personnel and officials. Think about what
36:45that meant. The sea lane between Japan and Korea, a crossing ordinary Japanese had made for decades,
36:52now ran on a wartime timetable because of one submarine. Two more ships followed. The Konko Maru,
37:01on October 6th, and another Konko Maru, on October 9th. Four ships confirmed after the war.
37:08They were the last of Morton's 19. Then Wahoo turned north, toward the way home, toward La Perouse
37:17Strait. What happened on October 11th, 1943, comes to us only from the Japanese side. There was no one
37:25left on the American side to tell it. Listen to it the way you would listen to a witness, because
37:31that
37:31is what these Japanese records are. That morning, according to Japanese records, a submarine was sighted near
37:38Cape Soya, at the northern tip of Hokkaido. The shore battery there opened fire. Aircraft came out and
37:45attacked with bombs. Shortly after noon, a Japanese subchaser ran in and made three attacks with 17 depth
37:52charges. 18 minutes later, a second subchaser dropped seven more. At 10 minutes to 1, the aircraft reported
38:00that the wake was gone. By the end of the day, the Japanese had dropped roughly 40 bombs and more
38:06than 60
38:07depth charges into that narrow strait. The next morning, an oil slick still lay on the water,
38:13about 200 feet wide and three nautical miles long. 80 American submariners went down with her.
38:21Mush Morton was 36. Now we can answer the question this story began with. Why did the move every rule
38:30warned against actually work? Look back at every success in this story? WIWAC, the convoy, the yellow
38:38sea? In every one, Morton chose the moment. He picked the harbor, the range, the second to fire.
38:47A destroyer charging his periscope was not a danger he had to escape. It was a ship that had stopped
38:53guessing, running a straight line toward the one place he could predict. The manual measured danger
38:59by how strong the enemy was. Morton measured it by who controlled the moment. And the price?
39:07The manual was not wrong about it. It simply had the timing wrong. For nine months, attacking kept
39:15Wahoo alive because an enemy who is always reacting never gets to choose. On October 11th, the enemy
39:24chose. The time was morning. The place was a narrow strait. And the one thing about Wahoo that anyone
39:31could predict was the way home. At Pearl Harbor, the date she was due out of her area, October 21st,
39:39came and went. Then more days, with no signal. In November, the Navy listed Wahoo as overdue, presumed lost.
39:49Eighty families received the telegram. For 63 years, no one knew exactly where she lay,
39:56or exactly how she died. In 2006, a Russian dive team went down in La Perouse Strait, 213 feet below
40:05the
40:05surface. What they found on Wahoo's conning tower settled the question. And four days after Wahoo was
40:12lost, a new submarine was commissioned at Mare Island. Her captain was the man who had once stood
40:18at Wahoo's periscope. July 28th, 2006. La Perouse Strait, between Hokkaido and the Russian island of Sakhalin.
40:27A Russian dive team led by Vladimir Kartashev goes down on a sonar contact. The contact came from a
40:36sonar survey for an energy company in 2004. A researcher named Brian McKinnon passed the image
40:43to the Wahoo Project Group, which had been searching the strait since 1995. At 213 feet,
40:50the divers find a submarine sitting upright on the bottom, intact. The shape is unmistakable,
40:59an American fleet submarine of the Gato class. And near the conning tower is the damage that answers
41:07the question the Navy had carried since November 1943, a direct hit from an aerial bomb. After all
41:16the depth charges, it was a bomb from the air. It fits the Japanese record, an aircraft that saw a
41:23wake
41:23and did not wait. The search had not been an American effort alone. A Japanese Vice Admiral,
41:31Kazuo Ueda, helped predict where she lay. And on Cape Soya, near where the shore battery had fired on
41:38her, a memorial to Wahoo and her crew has stood since 1995. On October 31, 2006, Admiral Gary Roughead,
41:49commander of the Pacific Fleet, put it in one line. We are certain USS Wahoo has been located.
41:56On October 11, 2007, 64 years to the day, Wahoo's crew were remembered at a ceremony at the submarine
42:04museum in Pearl Harbor. Now the men. On October 15, 1943, four days after Wahoo was lost, Richard O'Kane
42:15put Tang into commission at Mare Island. He had no way of knowing. He took Tang to sea and fought
42:22her
42:22the way he had learned in Wahoo's conning tower. He received the Medal of Honor. He finished the war
42:28in a Japanese prison camp and came home. In 1987, he published his account of Wahoo,
42:35and that is where the words from Wiwak come from. Keep your scope up. And the shot that was only
42:41a
42:41theory before Wiwak did not stay one. In 1944, Commander Sam Dealey of the submarine Harder
42:49sank an attacking Japanese destroyer with a torpedo straight into her bow.
42:54He received the Medal of Honor after he and his crew were lost.
42:59What the book had treated as a desperate man's shot became part of the way American submarines
43:04fought. Mush Morton received four Navy crosses, the last one after his death. The Medal of Honor
43:12never came. The Navy named a destroyer for him, and his wife, Harriet, was left with two small
43:19children. Douglas, four years old, and Edwina, not yet two. And Forrest Sterling. Go back to Brisbane,
43:27to that first speech, and to the sentence about the way off. Any man who wanted to leave was to
43:34see the
43:34yeoman. Not one man did. Nine months later, 45 minutes before the last patrol, the man sent off
43:42the boat was a yeoman. Sterling lived. He wrote a book about his boat and called it Wake of the
43:50Wahoo.
43:51Two things from Wiwak outlived that afternoon. The first was the destroyer.
43:57Harusame was rebuilt and went back to war until June 8, 1944, when American B-25 bombers caught her
44:05off the coast of New Guinea and sank her.
44:08The second was the chart. The homemade chart of Wiwak Harbor traced onto toilet paper from a
44:14two-bit school atlas marked with the track of the attack. At the end of that patrol,
44:20George Greider won it in a round of poker, and kept it. The boat lies at the bottom of La
44:26Perouse
44:27Strait. The chart that took her into Wiwak came home. Go back one last time to Wiwak Harbor,
44:34to that conning tower, on the afternoon of January 24, 1943. A destroyer filling the periscope,
44:421,200 yards. Every rule saying, go deep. And a big man from Kentucky standing back from the eyepiece.
44:502,200 yards saying, keep your scope up. So here is the whole answer. The book told captains to go
44:57deep
44:57because it counted only what boldness could cost. Morton counted what it could buy. 19 ships.
45:04A sea lane closed at night. An enemy who saw a wolf pack where there was one boat.
45:11The book was right about the price. Morton was right about what it bought.
45:15And the 80 men of USS Wahoo paid it together. If this story meant something to you, please tap like.
45:23It helps the story of Mush Morton and the crew of USS Wahoo reach people who have never heard it.
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45:41Tell us in the comments. And if your father, grandfather, or uncle served in the Second
45:46World War, write his name and his unit below. Every name helps keep a story alive.
45:53Thank you for watching, and for making sure that Mush Morton and the 80 men of USS Wahoo don't disappear
46:00into silence.
46:00What's your father?ometown
46:01and the 80 men of USS Wahoo too?