World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig L. Symonds

Author:Craig L. Symonds [Symonds, Craig L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: 20th Century, History, Maritime History, Military, Naval, World War II
ISBN: 9780190243692
Google: A6RTDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07BH2WKQ9
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-04-02T03:00:00+00:00

After forty to sixty days, depending on how long it took to expend their torpedoes, the American submarines returned to their bases and reported the results of their patrol. Often, especially in the early months, there was little to report. Some claimed the destruction of one or two ships, most often small marus displacing an average of only about 4,000 tons each. Even then, subsequent investigation often revealed that their estimates were too high. While some skippers had successful patrols, notably Morton in Wahoo, Lieutenant Commander Frank W. Fenno in Trout, and Lieutenant Commander Charles C. Kirkpatrick in Triton, the overall record of American submarines in 1942 was a disappointment. In the first six months of the year, American subs sank only fifty-six ships, many of them small minesweepers, with a total displacement of 216,150 tons, an average of only 36,000 tons a month, barely a tenth of what Dönitz’s U-boats were doing in the Atlantic. The numbers improved slightly in the second half of the year, a result of the experience gained by the officers and their crews. From July to December 1942, American submarines sank 105 ships displacing 397,700 tons (66,000 tons per month), though of the ten fleet submarines that left Pearl Harbor in October 1942, eight returned having sunk no ships at all. Because of new ship construction, the net loss to Japanese shipping during the year was only 89,000 tons. As the historian Clay Blair has noted, it was “a figure so slight as to be meaningless.”44

Early in 1943, however, the American war on Japanese trade reached a watershed moment of its own. One aspect of it was the arrival of Charles Lockwood as the new Commander of Submarines in the South Pacific (COMSUBPAC). Initially, American Pacific submarines had been under the command of Rear Admiral Robert H. English, who was killed in a plane crash in January 1943, after which Lockwood assumed command. A popular leader who was called “Uncle Charlie” by the sub crews, Lockwood took their complaints about torpedo performance seriously. (He entitled the first chapter of his postwar memoir “Damn the Torpedoes.”) Lockwood personally supervised new torpedo tests, and brought the results to the attention of what one submarine skipper called “the desk-bound moguls in Washington.” Even then there was resistance from the technical experts, but eventually Nimitz (himself an old submarine hand) ordered the skippers to deactivate the magnetic proximity fuses and rely exclusively on the contact triggers.45

Unfortunately, there was a problem with the contact fuses, too. When a Mark XIV torpedo hit a ship flush on its side, the impact often crushed the firing pin, so the warhead did not detonate. In one extreme case in July 1943, Commander Dan Daspit in the submarine Tinosa hit a large Japanese factory ship eleven times: eleven hits, no explosions. Lockwood later reported that when Daspit returned to Pearl Harbor, “Dan was so furious as to be practically speechless.” Lockwood ordered more tests and discovered that the firing pins worked best when they struck the target at an angle of less than 45 degrees.

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