Bad Torpedoes and Mush Morton: The Torpedo Scandal and USS Wahoo, 1942–1943

On 24 July 1943, west of Truk, Lt. Cmdr. Lawrence R. Daspit of USS Tinosa found the kind of target submarine captains waited a career for: Tonan Maru No. 3, a whale factory ship of about 19,000 tons serving as a tanker, alone and unescorted. His first torpedoes stopped her dead in the water. Then, from the ideal position, close abeam at 875 yards, in a calm sea, he fired torpedo after torpedo into her side and watched them strike and fail to explode. He kept the last one and brought it back to Pearl Harbor. It was the clearest proof yet of what American submariners had been saying for nineteen months: their torpedoes did not work.

Why it mattered

For the first twenty-one months of the Pacific war, American submarines fought with a torpedo that ran too deep, exploded before it reached its target, and, when it did hit squarely, often failed to go off at all. Each of those defects hid the others, and the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, which had designed and tested the weapon in peacetime and in secret, refused for months to believe the reports of the men who fired it. The result was a long series of wasted attacks, wasted patrols and, in some cases, wasted lives: a submarine that fired at a ship and missed or failed still gave away its position to the escorts.

The “torpedo scandal,” as the submariners and their historians came to call it, was solved not in the laboratory but at sea and on a Hawaiian cliff, by the boats and by Lockwood’s staff. Its solution, by about September 1943, together with the arrival of a new generation of aggressive commanding officers, is the main reason the submarine campaign that had been a disappointment in 1942 became decisive in 1944. The most famous of those commanders was Dudley W. “Mush” Morton of Wahoo, who in 1943 showed what an American submarine could do and what it would cost, and whose executive officer, Richard O’Kane, would carry Morton’s methods to Tang.

The Mark 14 and its secret exploder

The Mark 14 was the U.S. Navy’s standard submarine torpedo of the war. Developed at the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport, Rhode Island, from 1931, it was a 21-inch steam torpedo 20 feet 6 inches long, weighing about 3,000 pounds, driven by alcohol burned with compressed air and water to turn a turbine. It could run 4,500 yards at 46 knots or 9,000 yards at 31 knots, and its warhead carried 507 pounds of TNT, later 643 pounds of the more powerful Torpex (Newpower; Wildenberg and Polmar). A gyroscope steered it on the course set by the TDC; a depth engine, sensing water pressure, worked its horizontal rudders to hold the depth that had been set.

Its warhead was fitted with the Mark 6 exploder, the Navy’s great secret weapon of the interwar years. Like the British Duplex and German magnetic pistols, it was meant to fire the warhead not on contact with a ship’s side but beneath its keel, sensing the change in the earth’s magnetic field caused by the ship’s steel hull. An explosion under the keel, with the water above it pushing upward, could break a ship’s back, where a hit on the side armor might only hole it. The Mark 6 also had a conventional contact feature, a firing pin released by the impact of a hit, as a backup. It was developed in the 1920s as Project G53, “behind the tightest veil of secrecy the Navy had ever created,” in Blair’s phrase, and so secret that few of the submarine officers who would have to use it in war ever studied it in peacetime.

It was hardly tested. A prototype fired in Narragansett Bay on 8 May 1926 against the old submarine L-8 ran under her without exploding on the first shot and sank her on the second; those two shots were the only live firings of the exploder before the war. An offer of an old destroyer hulk for further tests was declined (Blair; Wildenberg and Polmar). The Mark 14 itself was never fired with a live warhead against a target before December 1941. The reason was money and torpedoes: in the 1930s the torpedo station built about one and a half torpedoes a day, every weapon cost thousands of dollars, and exercise torpedoes were fired with light dummy warheads and recovered for reuse. Torpedo production was a bottleneck from the first day of the war; Newport and its sister plant at Alexandria together made 23 a day in the autumn of 1941, and only about 2,000 submarine torpedoes were built in 1942 (Newpower).

Running deep: the Albany net tests

The first suspicions came from the Asiatic Fleet in December 1941. Captains who fired at ships from good positions saw nothing happen and believed their torpedoes were passing under the targets. By January 1942 Capt. John Wilkes suspected the Mark 14 ran deeper than set; the Bureau of Ordnance blamed the shooting (Ransom). When Charles Lockwood took command of the submarines at Fremantle in May 1942, he heard the same complaint from every captain, and he decided to test it.

On 20 June 1942, at Frenchman Bay near Albany on the south coast of Western Australia, Lockwood had a fishing net hung in the water and had Skipjack, Lt. Cmdr. James W. Coe, fire a Mark 14 through it from 850 yards, fitted with an exercise head weighted to match a warhead and set to run at 10 feet. It cut the net at 25 feet. More shots followed under Capt. James Fife; Fife concluded that the torpedoes ran on average about 11 feet deeper than set (Blair; Newpower). The Bureau answered that the tests were improperly conducted. Lockwood repeated them with the Bureau’s objections met and got the same results, and Adm. Ernest King, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet, ordered the Bureau to run its own tests. On 1 August 1942 the Bureau conceded that the Mark 14 ran about 10 feet deeper than set, and some six weeks later admitted that its depth-control mechanism had been “improperly designed and tested.”

The cause turned out to be simple. The prewar depth trials had been run with exercise heads lighter than the live warhead, and the depth engine’s pressure-sensing port had been placed where water flowing past the torpedo at speed lowered the pressure it read, so that the torpedo thought it was shallower than it was and dived to compensate. The fix in the field was to set torpedoes to run 10 feet shallower than desired; the permanent fix, moving the sensor, came in the second half of 1943 (Newpower). Correcting the depth, however, uncovered the next defect.

Prematures and duds: the magnetic exploder

As long as the torpedoes ran 10 or 11 feet deep, many passed too far under a target for the magnetic exploder to fire them at all. Once captains set them shallower, more of them began to explode, but often too early: 50 or 100 yards short of the target, sending up a column of water that a lookout could take for a hit while the ship steamed on. Captains reported “prematures” in growing numbers through late 1942 and the first half of 1943. Some quietly disabled the magnetic feature against orders and found that their hits increased. The Bureau and many senior officers still believed in the exploder. English at Pearl Harbor defended it, and so did Christie, who had helped develop the Mark 6 at Newport before the war and in 1943 commanded the submarines in Australia.

Lockwood, by then at Pearl Harbor as Commander Submarines Pacific Fleet, decided in the spring of 1943 that the boats’ reports could no longer be explained away. On 10 April the chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, Rear Adm. W. H. P. Blandy, warned him that the exploder would likely detonate prematurely at shallow depths. On 24 June 1943, at Lockwood’s request, Nimitz ordered all Pacific Fleet submarines to deactivate the magnetic feature and fire on contact only. Christie, commanding the submarines in Australia, kept the magnetic exploder in service in his command until the end of 1943, when Vice Adm. Thomas Kinkaid, the theater naval commander, ordered him to deactivate it (Blair; Newpower).

With the magnetic exploder off, the torpedoes now had to hit the target’s side and fire on contact, and that exposed the third and worst defect. The contact pistol failed most often on exactly the shots a captain most wanted: a square hit at a right angle to the target’s side, from close range, at full speed. Tinosa’s attack on Tonan Maru No. 3 a month after Nimitz’s order proved it beyond argument.

Mush Morton takes Wahoo

USS Wahoo (SS-238), a Gato-class boat, was laid down at Mare Island Navy Yard, Vallejo, California, on 28 June 1941, launched on 14 February 1942 and commissioned on 15 May 1942, with Lt. Cmdr. Marvin G. Kennedy in command (DANFS). Her executive officer was Lt. Richard H. O’Kane, a 1934 Naval Academy graduate who had qualified in submarines in the big minelayer Argonaut. Under Kennedy, Wahoo made two patrols, the first off Truk from August to October 1942 and the second in the Solomons in November and December; she sank the freighter Kamoi Maru on 10 December 1942 and claimed other ships that postwar records do not confirm, and arrived at Brisbane on 26 December (DANFS). Kennedy had trained his crew hard, as O’Kane later acknowledged, but his patrols had produced little, and in the climate of 1942 that was enough to end a command.

On Wahoo’s second patrol she had carried a supernumerary officer, Lt. Cmdr. Dudley W. Morton, a prospective commanding officer making a war patrol to prepare for a command of his own. On 31 December 1942, at Brisbane, Morton relieved Kennedy as Wahoo’s captain. He was 35, a big, outgoing Kentuckian who had commanded the old R-5 on Atlantic patrols, and he had firm ideas: a submarine went to sea to sink ships, it should attack on the surface when it could and submerged when it must, it should press in close, and the officers should run the boat while the captain fought it. With O’Kane he worked out a division of labor that the submarine force later copied, with the executive officer making the periscope observations during an attack while the captain stood back, studied the whole situation and conned the boat.

Wewak, 24 January 1943

Wahoo left Brisbane for her third patrol in mid-January 1943 with orders that included reconnoitering Wewak, a Japanese harbor on the north coast of New Guinea. The Navy had no proper chart of it. According to O’Kane, the officers worked from a page of a school atlas that a motor machinist’s mate, Dalton Keeter, had bought in Australia, enlarged by improvised photographic means so they could trace the coast and the reefs. Morton read “reconnoiter” as permission to go in (O’Kane; Blair). On 24 January Wahoo crept submerged into the harbor through the islands of Victoria Bay off Kairiru Island, the first American submarine to penetrate a Japanese harbor that way (H-gram 022).

Inside she found a destroyer, the Harusame, which got under way and came at her. Morton fired a spread, missed, and as the destroyer turned in for a depth-charge run fired a final torpedo almost straight at her bow, a “down the throat” shot at very short range. It hit amidships with a great explosion. Wahoo went deep and left the harbor, and Morton reported a destroyer sunk. Harusame was in fact badly damaged; she was beached, repaired and returned to service (H-gram 022). The Wewak attack was still a remarkable feat of nerve and seamanship, and it was the first act of a patrol that made Wahoo famous.

The convoy of 26 January and the men in the water

Two days later, on 26 January 1943, north of New Guinea, Wahoo found a convoy of two freighters, a transport and a tanker, and in a running fight of some fourteen hours sank or claimed every ship in it. Postwar records credit three sinkings that day: the transport Buyo Maru, of about 5,300 tons, the Fukuei Maru No. 2 and an unidentified freighter of about 4,000 tons (DANFS). It was the Buyo Maru attack that made the day the most controversial in the history of the U.S. submarine force.

Buyo Maru was an Army transport sailing from Singapore. Aboard her were Japanese soldiers of the 26th Field Ordnance Depot and Indian prisoners of war of the 2nd Battalion, 16th Punjab Regiment, captured at Singapore, being taken to New Guinea as laborers; the Indian prisoners were not known to the Americans, and their presence remained largely unknown in the United States for half a century (Holwitt; DeRose). After she sank, Wahoo surfaced among some twenty boats, from scows to motor launches, and a great many men in the water and on debris. Morton ordered the boats destroyed. According to his patrol report, Wahoo fired a 4-inch shell into the largest boat and came under machine-gun fire, and answered with the deck gun, 20-mm guns, machine guns and small arms, firing into the boats and the men around them. Morton’s report, when he reached Pearl Harbor, claimed that most of the troops, whom he estimated at 1,500 to 6,000, had been killed (patrol report, as summarized by Crozier and Blair).

Who fired first, and why, are disputed. Lockwood’s account, in Sink ’Em All (1951), was that the survivors were Japanese soldiers who opened fire on Wahoo with machine guns and rifles. O’Kane, in Wahoo (1987), wrote that the purpose of the fire was to force the soldiers out of their boats, so they could not get ashore and fight again, and that no one was deliberately aimed at. Blair wrote that Wahoo fired first and that the men in the boats answered with handguns. The best scholarly accounts, using Japanese records, put the dead from the sinking and the shooting together at 195 Indian prisoners and 87 Japanese. Figures for the number aboard vary: the NHHC gives 1,126 men, including 491 Indian prisoners; other accounts give 1,126 soldiers and 269 prisoners (Holwitt, 2005; DeRose, 2000; H-gram 022). The Hague Convention of 1907 required belligerents to protect the shipwrecked; the U.S. Navy commended the patrol and did not investigate the shooting, and Lockwood and Nimitz knew from Morton’s own report what had happened. This site treats it as the record shows it: a deliberate attack on men in the water, ordered by a captain who believed they were enemy soldiers, most of whom were in fact prisoners of war.

Wahoo had fired all of her torpedoes in 23 days. She returned to Pearl Harbor on 7 February 1943 with a broom lashed to her periscope shears, the sign of a clean sweep, and was welcomed as a hero. Morton received the Navy Cross and, from General Douglas MacArthur, whose Southwest Pacific command had ordered the Wewak reconnaissance, the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross (DANFS). Lockwood, who took over at Pearl Harbor that month, made Morton the model of the kind of captain he wanted.

The Yellow Sea and the Kurils

Lockwood sent Wahoo next into the Yellow Sea, between China and Korea, waters no U.S. submarine had yet worked, crowded with small Japanese freighters carrying coal, iron and food from Korea and Manchuria to Japan. She left Pearl Harbor on 23 February 1943 and, after topping off at Midway, sank between 19 and 29 March the ships DANFS lists as Zogen Maru, Hozen Maru, Nittsu Maru, the collier Katyosan Maru, the tanker Takaosan Maru, Satsuki Maru, a small diesel freighter and Yamabato Maru, and damaged others. At least one torpedo failed to explode against Kowa Maru, which escaped. Morton photographed Nittsu Maru sinking through the periscope; the picture was one of the first of its kind released to the American public. Wahoo returned to Midway on 6 April (DANFS).

The fifth patrol, from Midway on 25 April 1943 to the Kuril Islands north of Japan, was a lesson in the torpedo problem. In ten days Wahoo made ten attacks on eight targets; she sank Tamon Maru No. 5 on 7 May and the tanker Takao Maru and freighter Jinmu Maru on 9 May, but she hit the seaplane tender Kamikawa Maru without sinking her, and on 12 May a torpedo against a freighter made only a low-order detonation. DANFS judges that faulty torpedoes cut the patrol’s results by perhaps half. Wahoo returned to Pearl Harbor on 21 May, Nimitz presented awards to her crew on 22 May, and she went to Mare Island for overhaul. Morton’s report on the torpedoes’ behavior was one of the reports that persuaded Lockwood to deactivate the magnetic exploder. O’Kane left the boat that summer; promoted to lieutenant commander, he went to Mare Island to take command of a new Balao-class submarine, Tang (Chapter 3).

Tinosa and the dud that settled it

Tinosa (SS-283), a Gato-class boat commissioned at Mare Island on 15 January 1943 under Lt. Cmdr. Lawrence R. Daspit, was on her second patrol when she sighted Tonan Maru No. 3 west of Truk on 24 July 1943. The ship was the former whale factory ship, of 19,262 gross tons by one count and 19,209 by another, serving as a tanker, and she was making about 13 knots alone. Daspit fired four torpedoes from about 4,000 yards on an oblique track. Two hit near the stern and exploded, and the ship stopped and began to settle. Then Daspit moved to the textbook position, about 875 yards off her beam, and began firing single torpedoes at a stationary target he could not miss. He watched them strike her side and fail to explode, one after another. Accounts of the exact count differ, from 13 to 15 torpedoes fired in all, with at least eight or nine duds from the ideal position; all agree that he saved his last torpedo for the experts at Pearl Harbor (Blair; Murphy; Tonan Maru No. 3 records). Tonan Maru No. 3 was towed to Truk and repaired; U.S. carrier aircraft sank her there in the Truk raid of 17 February 1944.

Daspit’s report and his saved torpedo, examined at Pearl Harbor and found to be in perfect order, convinced Lockwood that the contact exploder was at fault. At the end of August 1943 he had live torpedoes fired at the vertical underwater cliffs of Kahoolawe Island, southwest of Maui, beginning on 31 August. Two exploded; the third did not. Divers recovered it, and its exploder showed that the firing pin had been released but had struck the primer cap too weakly to fire it. Lockwood’s staff, led by Lt. Cmdr. E. A. Johnson with Cmdr. A. H. Taylor and Lt. Cmdr. H. A. Pieczentkowski, then dropped warheads loaded with concrete or sand, instead of explosive, from a crane 90 feet high onto steel plate, to reproduce the impact of a torpedo at 46 knots. Seven of the first ten square hits failed to fire; when the plate was angled to simulate a glancing hit, the pin fired every time (Murphy; Newpower).

The cure was made at Pearl Harbor. The base workshops made lighter firing pins and blocks of aluminum alloy, which had less momentum to jam against their guides; until enough were made, captains were told to fire at oblique angles, which roughly halved the duds. On 30 September 1943 Barb sailed from Pearl Harbor with 20 torpedoes fitted with the modified pins, and the first torpedoes with new contact pistols went to war that month (Murphy; Newpower). The Bureau of Ordnance followed with its own design of exploder using an electric switch. By the autumn of 1943, twenty-one months into the war, the U.S. submarine force at last had a torpedo that ran at the right depth, did not explode early and went off when it hit.

Wahoo’s last patrol

The Sea of Japan, enclosed by the home islands, Korea and Siberia, was Japan’s inland sea, crossed by the ferries and freighters between Japan and the mainland and thought by the Japanese to be safe from submarines. Its three entrances, the Tsushima Strait to the south and the Tsugaru and La Pérouse (Soya) Straits to the north, were guarded and mined. In August 1943 Lockwood sent Wahoo through La Pérouse Strait into the Sea of Japan, one of the first U.S. boats to try it. Wahoo, out of Pearl Harbor on 2 August, entered the sea on 14 August and found targets, but her torpedoes broached, ran erratically or failed to explode, ten of them in all; Morton, furious, broke off the patrol and was back at Pearl Harbor on 29 August, with only some sampans sunk and six Japanese fishermen taken prisoner (DANFS; H-gram 022).

He asked to go back at once, and Lockwood agreed. Wahoo left Pearl Harbor on 9 September 1943 carrying the new electric Mark 18 torpedo, topped off at Midway and left there on 13 September under radio silence, to pass through La Pérouse Strait into the Sea of Japan about 20 September, with Sawfish following. She sank four ships in the Sea of Japan, among them the Japan–Korea ferry Konron Maru, sunk off western Honshu near the Tsushima Strait on 5 October with 544 lives lost, as the Japanese news agency Domei announced (DANFS; H-gram 022). She was due to leave the Sea of Japan through La Pérouse Strait on 11 October and to report by radio after clearing the Kurils. She never reported. Declared overdue on 2 December, she was stricken from the Navy list on 6 December 1943.

Japanese records examined after the war showed that on 11 October 1943 an antisubmarine aircraft found a submarine on the surface in La Pérouse Strait and attacked it with three depth charges, and that aircraft and surface ships kept up the attack from 09:45 to 16:30, dropping at least 40 bombs and 69 depth charges and tracking a moving oil slick until it stopped at 13:30 (H-gram 022; NHHC, Submarine Losses). Wahoo was lost with all hands: 80 men on the Navy’s loss roster, 79 in another NHHC account. Her loss closed the Sea of Japan to U.S. submarines until June 1945, when Lockwood’s “Hellcats,” fitted with new FM mine-detecting sonar, went in through the Tsushima minefields. In 2005 a search group found a submarine wreck in the strait; a Russian diving team, Iskra, surveyed it in 2006, and in October 2006 the U.S. Navy confirmed from its images that it was Wahoo, lying upright and nearly intact (H-gram 022).

By the end of 1943 the submarine force was a different service. Its torpedoes worked. The cautious captains of 1942 had mostly gone, replaced by men like Morton’s former officers. Radar, wolf-pack tactics, better patrol stations chosen with the help of the codebreakers, and a stream of new Gatos and Balaos were turning the campaign. Japanese merchant losses to submarines roughly doubled from 1942 to 1943 and nearly doubled again in 1944. Morton did not live to see it. His executive officer, now commanding Tang, did.

Timeline

Torpedoes and Wahoo, 1926–1943

1. 8 May 1926Prototype magnetic exploder fired against the old submarine L-8 in Narragansett Bay; the only live tests before the war.
2. Dec 1941–Jan 1942Asiatic Fleet captains report torpedoes running under targets; Wilkes suspects deep running and prematures.
3. 15 May 1942Wahoo commissioned at Mare Island, Lt. Cmdr. Marvin Kennedy commanding, Lt. Richard O’Kane executive officer.
4. 20–21 Jun 1942Albany net tests: a Mark 14 set for 10 feet cuts the net at 25; average 11 feet deep.
5. 1 Aug 1942The Bureau of Ordnance concedes that the Mark 14 runs about 10 feet deep.
6. 10 Dec 1942Wahoo, under Kennedy, sinks Kamoi Maru in the Solomons.
7. 31 Dec 1942Morton takes command of Wahoo at Brisbane.
8. 24 Jan 1943Wahoo enters Wewak harbor and torpedoes the destroyer Harusame, which is damaged and beached.
9. 26 Jan 1943Wahoo destroys a convoy; Buyo Maru sunk; survivors, most of them Indian POWs, fired on in the water.
10. 7 Feb 1943Wahoo returns to Pearl Harbor with a broom at her masthead; Lockwood takes command of Submarines Pacific Fleet that month.
11. 19–29 Mar 1943Wahoo’s Yellow Sea patrol; Nittsu Maru photographed sinking.
12. 7–12 May 1943Wahoo in the Kurils; torpedo failures cut her results.
13. 24 Jun 1943Nimitz orders the magnetic exploder deactivated in Pacific Fleet submarines.
14. 24 Jul 1943Tinosa’s attack on Tonan Maru No. 3: a string of duds from 875 yards.
15. 14–29 Aug 1943Wahoo’s sixth patrol, in the Sea of Japan, ruined by ten torpedo failures.
16. 31 Aug 1943Torpedoes fired against the cliffs of Kahoolawe; drop tests follow.
17. 30 Sep 1943Barb sails with the first torpedoes fitted with lighter firing pins.
18. 5 Oct 1943Wahoo sinks the ferry Konron Maru near the Tsushima Strait; 544 die.
19. 11 Oct 1943Wahoo is sunk by aircraft and ships in La Pérouse Strait with all hands.
20. End of 1943Kinkaid orders the magnetic exploder deactivated in the Southwest Pacific.
21. Oct 2006The U.S. Navy confirms the identity of Wahoo’s wreck, surveyed by a Russian team.

Questions readers ask

Was anyone ever held responsible for the torpedo failures?

No one was court-martialed or formally disciplined. The failures were spread across two decades of design decisions, peacetime economy, secrecy and institutional pride at the Bureau of Ordnance and the Newport torpedo station, and the war left no time for an inquiry. The fullest accounts of the scandal were written after the war by submariners and historians, notably Clay Blair and Capt. Edward L. Beach, whose article “Culpable Negligence” (American Heritage, December 1980) gave the affair its harshest judgment.

Did German and British submarines have the same problems?

Yes, in part. The German U-boat arm suffered a “torpedo crisis” in 1939–1940, when its magnetic pistols fired early and its torpedoes ran deep, most famously in the Norwegian campaign; the Germans investigated and court-martialed several officials. The British also gave up their Duplex magnetic pistol early in the war. The U.S. Navy did not learn from either experience in time.

Why was the Mark 18 electric torpedo introduced?

Partly because Mark 14s were scarce, and partly because the Mark 18, based on a captured German design and built by Westinghouse from 1942, left no wake of exhaust bubbles to show a target where it came from. It was slower, about 29 knots, and needed careful maintenance of its battery. It entered service in the autumn of 1943, and Wahoo carried Mark 18s on her last patrol. By late 1944 it was in wide use alongside the Mark 14. Tang’s last torpedo, which circled and sank her, was a Mark 18 (Chapter 7).

Has Wahoo’s wreck been disturbed?

The wreck lies in Russian waters of La Pérouse Strait. It was surveyed but not entered, and the U.S. Navy considers it a war grave. On 11 October 2007, the 64th anniversary of her loss, a memorial ceremony was held at Pearl Harbor at which Wahoo’s bell was displayed.

How do we know about the Indian prisoners on Buyo Maru?

From Japanese records and from survivors’ accounts gathered long after the war, used by Joel Holwitt in his work on unrestricted submarine warfare and by James DeRose in Unrestricted Warfare (2000), among others. Morton, O’Kane and the Navy believed at the time that the men in the water were Japanese soldiers. The presence of the Punjabi prisoners was not generally known in the United States for more than fifty years.

How it connects

This chapter follows Chapter 1, on the Silent Service’s entry into the war, and leads to Chapter 3, where Wahoo’s executive officer, Richard O’Kane, takes command of the new USS Tang at Mare Island. The torpedoes that Lockwood’s staff fixed in 1943 are the torpedoes Tang fired in 1944; the circular run that sank her is told in Chapter 7. The German U-boat torpedo crisis of 1939–1940 is part of the story in this site’s Battle of the Atlantic collection.

The Indian prisoners aboard Buyo Maru were men of the British Indian Army captured at the fall of Singapore in February 1942, part of the vast prisoner population of Japan’s empire whose transport by sea, in the “hell ships,” cost many thousands of Allied prisoners their lives to American submarine attacks; that tragedy runs through this collection and through the Bataan and Corregidor collection. All are part of the site’s World War II library and its Special Units hub.

Remembering it today

Wahoo’s bell, which stayed ashore when she sailed on patrol, is displayed at the Pearl Harbor Aviation and Submarine Museum and Park beside USS Bowfin, where the Waterfront Memorial lists the 52 U.S. submarines lost in the war and the men who died in them. Morton is remembered in his hometown of Owensboro, Kentucky, by a memorial at the American Legion post. A surviving Mark 14 torpedo can be seen at the Submarine Force Museum at Groton, Connecticut, and at most of the museum submarines, several of which, including Pampanito in San Francisco, display the exploder and its firing mechanism.

The site of Wahoo’s loss, in La Pérouse Strait between Cape Soya on Hokkaido and Cape Crillon on Sakhalin, is not accessible to the public; the wreck lies in Russian waters. Her patrol reports, and those of Tinosa and the other boats in this chapter, are held by the National Archives and have been published online in transcription by veterans’ and historical groups.

Sources

• Clay Blair Jr., Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975).
• Anthony Newpower, Iron Men and Tin Fish: The Race to Build a Better Torpedo during World War II (Westport: Praeger, 2006).
• Thomas Wildenberg and Norman Polmar, Ship Killer: A History of the American Torpedo (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2010).
• Douglas Murphy, “Hit or Miss,” Invention & Technology 13, no. 4 (Spring 1998), online.
• Edward L. Beach, “Culpable Negligence,” American Heritage 32, no. 1 (December 1980).
• Buford Rowland and William B. Boyd, U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance in World War II (Washington: Bureau of Ordnance, 1953).
• Richard H. O’Kane, Wahoo: The Patrols of America’s Most Famous World War II Submarine (Novato: Presidio Press, 1987).
• Charles A. Lockwood, Sink ’Em All: Submarine Warfare in the Pacific (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951).
• Joel Ira Holwitt, “Execute Against Japan: Freedom-of-the-Seas, the U.S. Navy, Fleet Submarines, and the U.S. Decision to Conduct Unrestricted Warfare, 1919–1941” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 2005), and the book of 2009.
• James F. DeRose, Unrestricted Warfare: How a New Breed of Officers Led the Submarine Force to Victory in World War II (New York: Wiley, 2000).
• Ian W. Toll, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015).
• Forest J. Sterling, Wake of the Wahoo (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1960), a crewman’s memoir, with a foreword by Lockwood.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, “Wahoo I (SS-238)”, DANFS; H-gram 022, attachment 4, “Loss of USS Wahoo”; United States Submarine Losses, World War II: Wahoo.
• Paul Crozier III, “Third War Patrol: Controversy,” warfish.com, on Wahoo’s patrol report of 26 January 1943.
• Theodore Roscoe, United States Submarine Operations in World War II (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1949).
• Joint Army–Navy Assessment Committee, Japanese Naval and Merchant Shipping Losses During World War II by All Causes (1947).
• Records of Tonan Maru No. 3 (Japanese whaling and naval tanker records as compiled by combinedfleet.com and summarized on Wikipedia, “Tonan Maru No. 3”), consulted for tonnage and later history.

Photographs: U.S. Navy photographs in the National Archives (19-N and 80-G series) and the Naval History and Heritage Command, including a periscope photograph taken from Wahoo in March 1943, and a U.S. Navy photograph of 2007, all public domain; modern photographs of a Mark 14 torpedo (CC BY 2.0) and of the Morton memorial at Owensboro (CC BY-SA 4.0) by Wikimedia Commons contributors; all via Wikimedia Commons. Dates and places are given as the archival captions record them, with discrepancies noted. The badge drawn for this collection is an illustration, not an official emblem.