Why Nimitz Fired Torpedoes Into a Cliff After the Navy Gave Him the Same Answer

August 1,943 Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Chester Nimttz picks up a phone. He does not call Washington. He does not request another meeting with the Bureau of Ordinance. Not He does not dictate another letter into the same silence that has swallowed every letter before it. Calls the submarine base.

He tells them to load torpedoes into a boat. not take that boat out to Cahuli Island and fire the torpedoes 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. But this is a four-star admiral, commander in chief of the entire United States Pacific Fleet, ordering live weapons to be fired at a cliff.

Because for 21 months, the men who designed those weapons have refused to admit anything is wrong with them. 21 months of submarine commanders filing the same report up the chain of command. Torpedoes are not working. 21 months of the Bureau of Ordinance sending back the same answer every single time.

Fault lies with the crews. Not the torpedo, the men. He hangs up the phone. He sits at his desk. Outside his window, the harbor moves under a hot afternoon sun. Salvage crews have been working since the December of,941. Stopped. Somewhere below the surface of that harbor, there are still men whose bodies will not be recovered until the war is over and some who will never be recovered at all.

By the time Nimitz picked up that phone, thousands of American submariners were already dead. Some killed by Japanese destroyers, some killed by depth charges in waters they had been ordered into, and some killed by the silence that came after a perfect shot at a perfect target. Aunt Chester Nimmits has been carrying this decision for weeks, maybe longer.

He has been carrying it in the way a man carries any decision that will end his career if it goes wrong. Right. He has just made it. To understand why a fleet admiral would resort to shooting torpedoes at a rock wall in the middle of a world war, you have to understand how Chester Nimitz got there.

Story begins 33 years earlier. In the mud, May 7th, 1,98 Bangas Harbor, the Philippines, the sun is coming up over the South China Sea. Young Enzin named Chester William Nimmitz stands on the bridge of the destroyer USS Dicata. He is 23 years old, 5’10”, sandy hair, Texas accent he never entirely lost. He was born in Fredericksburg, a small German immigrant town in the Texas Hill Country in a hotel his grandfather built and ran dining room.

He grew up serving customers in the dining room, learning discipline from a man who had crossed the Atlantic in steerage and made a life out of nothing. old. He is now three years out of the Naval Academy in command of a United States warship on the far side of the world. Hiring, he has been in command of this ship for less than 3 months.

Checked the tide tables. The Decator eases forward through the harbor entrance and settles onto a mud bank with a slow, heavy shudder. Engines strain. The screws churn silt to the surface. Move. She will not move all night. Next morning, a small steamer comes out from the port and pulls her free. No one is killed. No one is injured.

The damage to the hull is minor. Not thee, but the United States Navy does not measure a young officer’s future by what he broke. Measures him by what he did not do. He did not check the tide tables. Navy convenes a court marshal. Enzen Chester Nimttz is found guilty of neglect of duty. He receives a formal letter of reprimand.

It goes into his service record and stays there. At 23 years old, before he has commanded anything larger than a destroyer, before he has stood a single watch in a war, his career is already carrying a weight most young officers never have to lift. Harvey needs to do something with him. They send him to submarines. 1,98. This is not where the Navy sends its rising stars. Boats are called pigboats.

Cramped, loud, wreaking of gasoline fumes inside sealed metal hulls that heat up like ovens in the sun and freeze like meat lockers in cold water. Unon engines that demand constant attention and reward inattention with casualties. Annie, they dive to depths where you can hear the hull complain.

Creek of steel under compression. The smart adjustments of a frame settling into pressure it was never fully designed for. Officers who command them are not the officers. The Navy is grooming for Admiral. Submarine duty is where the Navy parks men it isn’t sure what to do with. It is where an end sign with a court marshals on his record goes to be forgotten.

It is where a career goes to end quietly. Chester Nimits accepts the assignment without a word of complaint. He does not letters requesting a transfer. He does not use his family connections in Washington. hot sulk in the wardroom. He reports for duty. In January 1,99 he reports to the first submarine flotilla.

I may he is in command of USS Plunger, a boat so primitive that when the engine floods, the crew sometimes breathes gasoline fumes for hours. He commands her and he commands USS Snapper and USS Narwhal and USS Skipjack early eboat. He commands more submarines before his 30th birthday than most naval officers see in a lifetime.

Most men in his position would treat this as punishment. A career sentence, something to endure until the Navy forgot the tide tables and let him back into the surface fleet where real careers were made. Does not treat it as a punishment. He treats it as an education. Honor, he climbs down into every part of the boat. He studies the diesel plants and the electric motors and the ballast systems until he understands them better than the men who built them.

He writes reports on submarine tactics that the naval war college files and largely ignores. And then in 1,912 at 27 years old, exile stands up and speaks. He is invited to the Naval War College to give a lecture. Audience is senior officers, men who command battleships. line whose entire understanding of naval warfare has been built around a single word. Not fleet.

The fleet engagement, the gun line, the great decisive battle between rows of dreadnots that would settle the future of nations in a single afternoon. China. That is how the United States Navy thinks about war in 912. That is how every major navy in the world thinks about war in 1,912. asked Chester Nimttz stands at the podium in front of these men and he tells them they are wrong.

He tells them that in the coming century sea power will not be decided by battleships alone. It will be decided by ships they cannot see. Ships that move beneath the surface. The ships that appear from nowhere fire and disappear before anyone above the waterline knows where the shot came from. Ancho, he tells them something else.

Something that will not become obvious to the rest of the world for another 30 years. Empire that depends on shipping, on oil and ore and food and steel moving across thousands of miles of open ocean. It’s a throat and submarines are the hand that closes around it. Officers listen politely. They ask a few questions.

I knew they go back to their battleships. Nobody remembers that lecture. Nobody quotes it in the years that follow. It is filed in the archives of the naval war college and left there rather except for one thing. The young ensign who ran a destroyer ground in Batanga’s harbor has just described in 912 the exact strategy the United States Navy will use to strangle the Empire of Japan not 29 years before Pearl Harbor.

The exile has become the only admiral in the United States Navy who actually understands what he has been exiled into. He just does not know it yet. In 1,913, the Navy sends him to Germany, Nuremberg, to the factories where the finest diesel engines in the world are being manufactured. He walks the factory floors.

He talks to the German engineers who built the engines. Arty, he watches being assembled the way most men watch a symphony. Home, he installs those engines in American submarines. converts his boats from gasoline to diesel. Cleaner or reliable, less likely to kill his crew with fumes or fire, not supervises the construction of a diesel plant for the Navy’s oil tanker USS Momy.

And in April 1,917, while working on that engine, he loses a fingertip on his left hand in a piece of turning machinery. Stop working. December 31st, 1,941 Pearl Harbor, 8:00 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 no undamaged battleship available at Pearl Harbor.

But the USS Arizona sits on the harbor bottom, her superructure twisted above the waterline. 1,177 of her crew went down with her that Sunday morning. 900 of them are still inside her now. Oklahoma has capsized, her keel pointing at the sky. Workers with cutting torches have been going down through her hull for days trying to reach the men trapped in air pockets.

And every day the tapping from inside is weaker than the day before. And then one day the tapping stops. 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. Marine hole number 209. Nimttz later told people he assumed command aboard a submarine because the Japanese attack had left no other deck available.

What may be true, it is not the whole truth. He is 56 years old. His hair has gone white. He steps off the launch onto the dock. Arbor is still black with oil. Not metaphorically, utterly. The fuel that spilled from the ships that burned in the first hours of December 7th has spread across the surface and settled there thick and dark between the sunken hulls.

But you can smell it before you can see the water. 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 has not yet fired a single torpedo in anger against the navy that did this. Looks at the wreckage.

He looks at the Arizona where she went down. It’s a long time. Then he turns to his staff. Get to work. Not two woodses. That is the beginning of his command. He does not go to the battleships first, but walk the airfields. He does not tour the command bunkers or the fuel depot or the dry docks still working around the clock to pull ships off the harbor bottom.

The he goes to the submarine base. He walks through the boats the way a man walks through a house he grew up in. Knowledge that is in the hands and the feet, not just the head. Knows every sound these hulls make. He knows what the gauges mean when they read wrong. 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. Not that this is not a tour. That is a homecoming. On December 7th, 1,941, the same day the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark had issued the order.

Unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan, every Japanese vessel on the Pacific Ocean. Every warship, every tanker, every freighter carrying rice or bork site or steel, a legitimate target, no warning required. It is the same warfare Germany used against Britain in the First World War. The same warfare the United States had spent two decades formally condemning as a violation of the laws of the sea.

In the years between the wars, American diplomats had signed treaties promising it would never happen again. American admirals had lectured foreign navies about the moral necessity of warning merchant vessels before sinking them. On December 7th at Pearl Harbor, before the fires were out, before the bodies were counted, before anyone in Washington had time to think about what it meant, the United States adopted it as strategy.

Inherits that order on December 31st. He makes it the spine of everything he does. The submarines go to sea of the first patrol reports come back within weeks and they all say the same thing. Not working. There is a phrase the United States Navy uses, not words, overdue and presumed lost. It appears on a standard form, bureaucratic phrase, clean, precise, designed to describe a specific administrative condition.

A submarine departs on patrol. It does not return. Ideal contact is attempted. No response. More attempts, nothing. Enough days pass that silence becomes its own answer. Is gone. The men are gone. Nobody knows exactly where. Nobody knows exactly when. Nobody knows what the last hour looked like.

Nimates signs those forms. He does not have an aid initial on his behalf. He does not delegate the paperwork to a subordinate and move on. He signs them himself, everyone, because he knows exactly what those four words describe from the inside. He has been below periscope depth. He has heard the sounds a pressure hull makes when it goes deep.

A creek of metal under compression, the way the frame settles, the small adjustments of a boat finding its trim in cold water. Might he has stood in a control room when the boat went silent for every man stopped what he was doing and watched the gauges and waited or waiting to find out whether the next sound would be water coming in or the signal to surface. Knows that silence.

He has lived in it. and 30 years later sitting at a desk at Pearl Harbor reading a form that says a boat and its crew will not be coming back knows precisely what that silence looks like at its end. Patrol reports begin arriving on his desk in the first weeks of 1,942. The commanders write in careful professional language.

Officers of the United States Navy do not exaggerate in official documents, but the pattern is unmistakable. Torpedoes running under the target. Torpedoes exploding early. Torpedoes striking the hull and doing nothing. Island hits. That is the phrase the commanders begin to use. They fire a spread of four.

The soundman tracks them through the water. Straight. True. Running to the mark. And then nothing. No detonation. No column of water, no shudder of impact translating through the sea. A Japanese ship steams away. The submarine dives. A commander writes it down. And somewhere in Washington at the Bureau of Ordinance, an officer reads the report.

Writes back, “The fault lies with the crews, not the torpedo.” Men, he does not say publicly what he thinks of it. Not yet. Because there is a particular kind of weight in not yet having the proof that forces a bureaucracy to stop. But you suspect you know you have spent a lifetime in the machinery that they are dismissing until you can put an object on a desk and say, “Look, here is the floor.

Here is why my men died. They will keep sending their answer.” The fault lies with the crews. Chester Nimttz carries that weight to his desk every morning. awnings. There is a new form waiting, overdue and presumed lost. He signs it and he goes to work. Somewhere on the other side of the world in Fremantle, Australia, a rear admiral named Charles Lockwood is beginning to reach the same conclusion.

He is closer to the boats than Nimmits is. He hears the commanders speak in their own voices, not through the filter of a written report. Right. He watches them come back from patrols with their hands still shaking. He is going to do something no admiral has done before. He is going to test the weapon himself without authorization without approval, without permission from Washington. Right.

And what he is about to find at the bottom of King George Sound in the winter of 1,942 and is going to detonate the second act of this story. That’s King George Sound. Western Australia, June 20th, 1994. Ocean. The winter wind comes off the southern ocean and cuts through anything it touches. Mortar is gray, cold enough that a man overboard has minutes, not hours.

I Admiral Charles Andrews Lockwood Junior, 52 years old, not slight build. A face that has been weathered by two decades on the water. asked of submarines southwest Pacific based in Fremantle answerable to the theater commander in Australia and through him to Washington not answerable to the Bureau of Ordinance that is about to matter.

Wood has been in his job for less than a month either. He inherited a command that had been run by Captain John Wilks since the retreat from the Philippines. He inherited a command in crisis. His captains are coming back from patrol with the same story. Torpedoes are not working. He has forwarded their reports to Washington. Washington has replied, “The fault lies with the crews.

” Oward has read those replies. He is not the kind of man Washington is used to dealing with. He came up through submarines. He served on the boats before he commanded them. He knows the language of the men filing the reports because it is his language, too. I am and he has decided that if the Bureau of Ordinance will not test the weapon, he will test it himself, not ask permission.

He orders the submarine USS Skipjack out to King George Sound, but he has a fishing net strung between two boats at a measured depth beneath the surface. It hangs in the water like a curtain. He tells the captain of Skipjack to fire Mark1 14 torpedoes through the net at a depth setting of 10 ft. Torpedoes are fired. Divers go down to inspect the neck.

Holes in the mesh are not at 10 ft. They are at 21 ft. Every torpedo, every shot running 11 ft deeper than the setting, passing far beneath any target it was aimed at, sliding under Japanese ships that submarine commanders had lined up in their crosshairs for months and watched sail away unharmed and untouched. Wood writes it up.

He sends the results to Washington. Bureau of Ordinance replies, “The test was improperly conducted.” Ow runs it again. Same result, same number, 11 ft deep. It up again. The Bureau replies again, “The methodology is not accepted.” At this point, most admirals would give up. Most admirals would send the results forward, note their disagreement in the record, and get back to running a war.

This is what the system is designed to produce. Lockwood is not most admirals. Night books passage on an aircraft heading east. He flies to Washington. He walks into the office of Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations. Most powerful uniformed officer in the United States Navy. But King is not a man you go see for a friendly conversation.

Officers who have served under him describe him with the same phrase over and over in different variations of the same thought. He is the meanest man in the United States Navy. He shaves with a blowtorrch. He would fight the war single-handedly if the paperwork allowed. Wood tells King what he has found.

King picks up the telephone. He calls the Bureau of Ordinance. What he said on that call was not recorded. Need to be. On August 1st, 1,942, the Bureau of Ordinance formally admitted that the Mark1 14 torpedo was running deep. own words, “The depth control mechanism was quote faulty.” I here is what they had done.

Years before the war, during a redesign, engineers had increased the weight of the torpedo’s warhead. More explosive, more stopping power. They had not, however, recalibrated the pressure sensor that controlled the weapon’s depth. The sensor sat inside a pocket of low pressure created by the torpedo’s own motion through the water.

Art Pocket told the sensor the weapon was running shallower than it actually was. I So the guidance system automatically drove it deeper. Torpedo set to run at 15 ft was passing beneath its target at 25 to 26 ft. I knew by this point in the war more than 800 Mark1 14 torpedoes had already been fired in the Pacific.

Hundred fired at Japanese hulls, sliding beneath them. Punishing into the deep water on the far side without a scratch on the enemy. A fix is ordered. A corrected pressure valve distribution begins. [music] Reads the numbers as they come in. They improve. Not improve enough. Because the depth keeping problem was only the first of three.

Ark14 torpedo carries two separate detonation systems. This is important. Understand this and you understand everything else. A first system is called contact. It is exactly what it sounds like. But the torpedo strikes the hull of the target. Impact triggers the detonator. Orhead explodes. Simple reliable. The way torpedoes have worked since the American Civil War.

A second system is called magnetic. This one is the crown jewel. It is called the Mark 6 exploder. And in,942, it is the most closely guarded technical secret the United States Navy possesses. Here is how it is supposed to work. The torpedo passes beneath the target instead of striking it. As it does, a sensor inside the weapon measures the change in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by the enormous mass of steel above it.

[music] Moment the reading is right, the torpedo fires against the hull beneath the keel. A hull explosion tears a hole in the side of a ship. The crew can seal it. Pumps can fight it. Damage control parties can save the vessel. A keel explosion breaks the spine. The ship comes apart in two pieces and slides under the surface in minutes.

In theory, the Mark 6 is the most devastating naval detonator any navy has ever put to sea. On theory, here is what the theory did not account for. The Bureau of Ordinance had calibrated the Mark 6 exploder against the magnetic field of the North Atlantic. Art testing conducted near Newport, Rhode Island. Cold water, northern latitudes, a magnetic environment shaped by the proximity of the magnetic pole.

Pacific war was not going to be fought in the North Atlantic. It was going to be fought at tropical latitudes, thousands of miles from the magnetic pole. Finally, in an environment where the Earth’s magnetic field is measurably weaker than the conditions the Mark 6 had been designed to sense, the sensor could not tell the difference between a Japanese warship passing overhead and a random fluctuation in the surrounding water. It fired early.

It fired for no reason at all. It sent enormous columns of water into the sky hundreds of yards short of the target. Announced the presence of the submer into every destroyer within 5 miles. Or it did nothing at all. The submarine commanders who came back from patrol and tried to explain what they had seen were told again that the fault lay with them.

Some of them stopped arguing. They just started disabling the Mark 6 themselves without orders, without telling anyone up the chain, opened the guidance compartment, deactivated the magnetic feature, and left only the contact detonator active. Their reasoning was simple. 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 Lieutenant Commander Tier Jacobs of USS Sargo. He did it on the very first war patrol of the entire Pacific War. December 1,941, 2 weeks after Pearl Harbor, Jacobs was patrolling in the waters of Indochina. I know he fired 13 torpedoes over the course of a series of attacks on Japanese shipping moving south toward the invasion of Malaya.

13 shots, not one hit. His men worked the tubes until they were exhausted. Night. He surfaced at night and studied his approach calculations against the Bureau of Ordinanc’s own performance data. M did not lie. The torpedoes were failing. Jacobs came back from that patrol with dry hits and no results and a certainty that the Mark 6 was worthless.

He put it in his patrol report. In writing, he recommended that the magnetic feature be disabled fleetwide. Avi did not thank him. The Navy got him quote into considerable difficulty. I He was one of the first men in uniform to name the problem. And the system punished him for naming it. The men who went around the system were disciplined for being right.

is a phrase worth stopping on because it explains what Chester Nimitz was reading from his desk at Pearl Harbor in the winter and spring of 1,943. Report after report from commanders who came back from patrol and described exactly what Jacobs had described in December of 1,941. The same weapon, the same failures, the same reply from Washington.

fault lies with the crews who had been one of those crews but in boats not much different otter not much less dangerous 30 years earlier USS Argonaut submarine 166 the largest submarine in the United States Navy 381 ft long a crew of 105 meni she departed for patrol in December 1,94 42. On January 10th, 1,943 in the waters of New Britain, she was caught on the surface attacking a Japanese convoy.

Three Japanese destroyers turned on her. Ass army bomber flying overhead out of bombs and unable to intervene watched what happened next. Watched her rise briefly to the surface, bow up, not stern down, and it watched the destroyers close in and finish her. 105 men, the largest single loss in the history of the American submarine service.

Ashitz signed the form. USS Amberjack hull number 219 lost in February 1,943 in the waters near Rabau. 74 men survivors. He signed the form USS Grampus submarine number 207. Marted Brisbane, Australia on February 11th, 1,943. Her sixth war patrol. She was not a green boat. She had sunk Japanese shipping.

She had survived depth charge attacks in waters her crew could describe by feel. Islands. Somewhere in the waters north of the Solomon Islands in early March 1,943, she disappeared. No distress call, no wreckage, no survivor, 71 men. March 22nd, 1,943. After repeated radio calls went unanswered for weeks, the Navy listed USS Grampus as overdue and presumed lost with all hands.

Archimmitz signed the form. He did not know if she had been sunk by a Japanese destroyer. not know if she had struck a mine. He did not know if something mechanical had failed at depth in water no rescue could reach. What he knew was the number 71. And he knew that on every patrol Grampus had ever run.

Every dive, every approach, every shot taken through a periscope. A crew had carried the Mark1 14 torpedo. Grampus was not the exception. ISS Triton hull number 201 March 15th 1,943 44 men nimtt signed the form USS Pickle hole number 177 lost April 3rd 1,943 94 [music] men he signed the form USS Grenadier number 2110 lost April 22nd 1,943 bombed by a Japanese aircraft damaged beyond pair.

A crew scuttled the boat and was captured. Four of them would die as prisoners of war, but he signed the form for those two when the war was over and the accounting was done. 1,942 the Pacific submarine force lost seven boats. Times Nimmits signed the form. Overdue and presumed lost. In the first 6 months of 1,943, not before the tests at Cahulaway find six more.

All of 1,942 American submarines fired 1,442 torpedoes across the Pacific. Postwar analysis. Actual accounting done from Japanese naval records after the surrender. Documented tonnage of ships that actually went down. 109 ships. 109 from 1,442 torpedoes. War being run at Nimitz’s direction as a campaign to cut the supply lines that kept the Empire of Japan alive.

[music] He read those numbers. He read the Bureau of Ordinances reply to every complaint filed through proper channels. Fault lies with the crews, not the torpedo, the men. While Nimttz worked from his desk at Pearl Harbor and Lockwood worked from Fremantle, a third admiral watched from a different office and saw the same reports through very different eyes.

I Admiral Ralph Waldo Christi 50 years old 1,915 graduate with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT engineer by training and one of the men who had helped design the Mark 6 exploder in the 1920s. When Christy looked at a patrol report describing another silent hit, he did not see a broken weapon. He saw a poorly trained crew because the weapon could not be broken. He knew the weapon.

He had built the weapon. Christy replaced Lockwood as commander, submarine Southwest Pacific. When Lockwood was promoted north to Pearl Harbor in February 1,943 to replace Rear Admiral Robert English, not killed when his aircraft went down in the mountains of Northern California in January on the way to San Francisco.

Christy inherited Lockwood’s captains. And Lockwood’s captains, who had begun to trust that their reports would be taken seriously, learned very quickly that under Admiral Christy, the reports would not be taken seriously. Two of his captains had the courage to say what they had seen. Mark 14 torpedo was failing, that the Mark 6 exploder was a fantasy.

Dynasty transferred them off submarine duty. The word spread through the wardrooms of the Southwest Pacific Submarine Force. If you want to keep your command, do not report torpedo failures. Later in war in the summer of 1,943 and again in 1,944, Christy would ride USS Bowin and USS Harder into combat himself. He would stand behind the periscope and watch his own torpedoes miss and fail and dud, but he would still record those patrols as evidence that the weapon worked.

Nine men will die before they will change their minds. In the spring of 1,943, while Christy held that line from Fremantle, other American submarines were experiencing failures of a kind so catastrophic they defy easy description. April 9th 1,943 near truck the forward staging base of the Imperial Japanese fleet.

Alenant commander John Scott in command of USS Tani has done something no American submarine commander in the entire war will ever do again. On he has worked his boat into the center of a Japanese aircraft carrier formation. Three carriers, he or Junior Taya on one side of him, a fleet carrier. On the other side, two smaller ones at a range of 880 yards. Saint blank.

He fires all 10 of his torpedo tubes are from the stern. Six from the bow. He hears the explosions through the hull. All detonations from the stern tubes. Three from the bow. Explosions. Zero carriers stopped. Zero carriers sunk. Our carriers even slowed. He watches the Japanese task force sail away. Most war intelligence would eventually determine what happened.

Every one of those seven explosions was premature. Mark 6 exploder had done exactly what it was designed to do and exactly what it was not supposed to do. It had detected magnetic anomalies in open water and fired the warheads yards short of the Japanese hulls. Seven premature explosions in a single attack against three Japanese aircraft carriers at 880 yards.

Any one of those carriers sunk in April 1,943. I changes the war. Anyo would fight at the Battle of the Philippine Sea a year later. Io would be sunk there by a different American submarine and different weapons. or they if John Scott had been given torpedoes that worked, all three of those carriers might have been on the bottom of the Pacific before the summer of 1,943 was over.

The Japanese carrier fleet, already reeling from Midway, would have been decapitated. Instead, they sailed away. In April, 1,943, 17 months into the war, John Scott put his submarine into a position that any admiral in any navy would have prayed for. weapon in his tubes gave him nothing. Chester Nimitz read the patrol report. Something in him changed.

He had spent 17 months working through proper channels, holding a record, documenting every failure, sending it up to Washington. And Washington had responded with two words that had not changed since the first patrol report of the war. The cruise he was done. June 24th,943. Nimitz issues a written order from the office of the commanderin-chief Pacific Fleet to every submarine under his command deactivate the magnetic exploder all of them.

Every Mark 6 in every torpedo in every submarine of the Pacific Fleet. He does not go through the Bureau of Ordinance. He does not ask the bureau’s permission. Request that the bureau conduct a study, ought to offer the bureau an opportunity to disagree in writing. He issues the order and he issues it as CPAC, which is a rank the Bureau of Ordinance cannot override.

The Bureau of Ordinance receives the order and they do the only thing left to them apply. It asks a single question. Why? Chester Nimit’s response to that question has come down to us in the historical record. Nice sentence. He replied that his decision was final. The bureau noted its disagreement in writing for the record.

Order stood under Christiey’s command in the southwest Pacific. The order was not obeyed. Night Christie continued to insist on using the magnetic exploder. submarines that started their patrols out of Pearl Harbor and ended them in Freemantle found themselves under contradictory orders. Nine. Their captains worked around it as best they could.

I fired the way their consciences told them to fire. They came back and reported what they had seen. And on both sides of the ocean, the boats kept disappearing. And still in the Pacific, the duds continued because the Mark 6 had been only one of two systems. contact detonator was the other and nobody in 17 months of war had ever seriously tested the contact detonator.

May 24th 1,943 the Philippine Sea USS Tinosa submarine commander Lawrence Randall Daspit known to his crew as Dan. He is at the periscope in the crosshairs. It has the largest, fattest, most helpless target any American submarine commander has ever seen in the war so far. Onen Maru number three Japanese fleet tanker 19,262 ton homaly a whale factory ship converted to carry fuel to support the Japanese fleet at truck unescorted she is not zigzagging she is making 13 knots in open water holdered with fuel oil that will keep the Japanese Navy at sea

for another month has been alerted to her position by American codereers reading Japanese naval traffic. He has been running toward her since before dawn. He knows what she is worth. Every submarine commander in the Pacific knows what a ship like this is worth. A single tanker of that size sunk is worth more to the war effort than a dozen destroyers.

He closes to firing range. He sets up the approach, runs the calculations. He fires a spread of four torpedoes. Aloo the sound man tracks them through the water straight ark running to the mark. Four hits zero explosions on Maru turns and increases speed. Dan Daspit does not curse but slam his hand against the periscope.

What he does is turn Tinosa and give chase. He runs the boat hard through the night. He maneuvers into position for another shot. It takes hours. By the time he is set up, it is the following morning. This time the angle is not perfect. He is coming at the tanker from the starboard quarter. Awkward attack, not textbook. He fires two torpedoes.

Both hit. Both explode. The Tonan Maru takes both hits in the engine room. Hed to a stop. She settles slightly by the stern. She is not sinking. She is dead in the water. She is exactly precisely mathematically what every submarine commander trains his entire career to face. A stationary target. Point blank range. Perfect attack position.

90° off the beam. Dandaspit fires one torpedo. Silent. He repositions Tininoza on the opposite side of the tanker. He fires again. Silent. He repositions again. Between each shot, his torpedo men pull the next weapon from the racks and inspect it end to end. Fins, propellers, fuel connections, fuses. Every torpedo declared in perfect working order before it enters the tube. It fires again.

Silent. He fires again. The torpedo runs straight to the hull, impact. And then in a moment, Dan Daspit will never forget as long as he lives, the torpedo glances off the side of the ship. Jumps clear of the water, sails through the air, spinning 100 ft beyond the tanker’s stern and falls back into the sea.

Dan Daspit writes in his log that evening. I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this, but he fires again. Silent. He fires again. Silent. The men in the forward torpedo room have stopped speaking. Oh, they fire. They wait. They load. They fire. But they wait. There is a discipline to it that is close to prayer.

And there is a horror to it that only submariners will ever understand. Not to do everything right. To hit the target you have trained your whole career to hit. to hear nothing. A Japanese destroyer appears on the horizon. Bearing down at speed, radioed for by the Tonan Maru’s captain, who now understands that the vessel attacking him is unable to sink him.

Despit fires two more torpedoes from the stern tubes as Tinosa is diving away. Both hit. Neither explodes. 15 torpedoes fired. 13 hits, two detonations. And those two detonations came from the only two shots that were not fired at the perfect 90° angle. The two shots taken in the dark at speed from an awkward position under pressure. Those exploded.

Every subsequent shot taken with all the time in the world from the ideal position at the textbook angle every American submarine commander had spent his entire career learning to execute. Vilent. The better the shot, the more likely the dud. Daspit does not fire his last remaining torpedo. Or as it’s secured in the rack, he orders Tininoza to turn.

Night, he sets a course for Pearl Harbor, 2,400 m away across water controlled by an enemy navy that has now been warned that an American submarine is loose in the Philippine Sea and unable to detonate its own weapons. Not going back to rearm. He is going back with something no submarine commander in this war has ever brought back before.

Torpedo that hit its target and did not explode. Patrol report documenting 13 hits and 11 detonation failures. Physical evidence. An object. Something that can be laid on a workbench and cut open. Something even the Bureau of Ordinance cannot dismiss. Oh, what he has. He does not say it in his log. Have to.

Every man on that submarine understands what they are carrying home. The proof. 20 months of it packed into a single steel tube in a rack behind the forward torpedo room. Not 2,400 m is a long way when your torpedoes may not work. Ons Tinosa quietly deep during the day. Night surfaced at night to recharge his batteries.

Avoids contact wherever he can. Although he is not looking for another fight, he is bringing home the answer. Ask Chestnimitz is at his desk at Pearl Harbor when the patrol report arrives ahead of the boat. He reads it once. He reads it again. Somewhere in the same building, Charles Lockwood, now commander of submarines Pacific Fleet, is reading his own copy.

Lockwood is at the dock when Tinosa comes in. He is expecting to meet a man in a rage. 19,000 ton tankers, Lockwood later wrote, do not grow on trees. Instead, he meets a man who is almost completely silent. Daspit hands over the patrol report. He says almost nothing. Ask torpedo, the one brought back from the Philippine Sea.

Mines taken to the torpedo shop at the submarine base. Technicians disassemble it entirely. They check every component, every spring, every wire, every mechanism. They’re finding a torpedo is in perfect working order. The torpedo the shop certifies as combat ready. Patrol report documenting 13 hits and 11 detonation failures.

The gap between those two facts is a question the Bureau of Ordinance has never asked. In 13 years of producing this weapon, not one live fire test, not one full speed full warhead shot against an actual target under the conditions the torpedo would face in combat. Every test the bureau had ever run had used reduced speed practice runs, warheads, controlled conditions designed to protect expensive equipment.

Nobody had ever asked what happens when 3,000 lb of Mark1 14 torpedo traveling at 46 knots strikes a steel hull headon. Nobody. For 21 months, Chester Nimttz picks up the telephone. Call Washington. He calls the submarine base. What? He tells them to load torpedoes into a boat, take it out to Cahulawi Island, and fire them into the underwater cliff face.

Mar Lockwood receives the order and turns to a man he has known for years. Captain Charles Bowsen, 47 years old. Everyone in the submarine service calls him Swed. If there is one man alive in the United States Navy in the summer of 1,943 who cannot be intimidated by the Bureau of Ordinance, it is Swedson. He is the man who invented the Mumsen lung, the escape device that saved sailors from crippled submarines.

He is the man who in May 1,939 led the rescue of 33 men from USS Squalas trapped on the seafloor 240 ft down off the coast of New Hampshire. He directed the rescue from the surface support ship USS Falcon and he was a qualified deep sea diver himself who had gone into pressure water more times than the Navy could count.

The Swede Momson has stood at the top of the Momson ladder and looked down at men who thought they were going to die and told them they were not. Not care what the Bureau of Ordinance thinks. He listens to what Lockwood needs. He nods. He goes to work. August 31st, 1,943. Cahulawi Island, Hawaii. The island is uninhabited. Volcanic rock rising out of the Pacific between Maui and Lai, stripped bare by decades of grazing.

Its underwater cliffs dropping sharply into deep water. Harvey has been using it as a bombing range for years. Mate, today it will serve a different purpose. USS Muscalange takes position offshore. Awning is bright. The sea is calm on the deck. Sailors stand ready. Milo in the control room. The captain has the boat trimmed for the shot.

First Mark1 14 slides out of the tube. The soundman tracks it running true toward the cliff. Impact detonation. The water lifts in a white column against the rock face and falls back to the sea. Loed. Fired. Impact. Nothing. Silence. The soundman calls it. The torpedo has struck the cliff dead on. No explosion, no column of water, just the fading wine of a propeller ceasing to turn as the weapon settles into the shadows at the base of the rock. They send Navy divers down.

They find the torpedo lying on the bottom, still armed, its warhead intact. Not 640 lb of torpex with a fuse that could still function. If explosive to [music] break the back of a heavy cruiser, divers rig it carefully. They bring it up hand over hand lay it on the deck of Musculong and secure it for the return to Pearl Harbor.

Every man on that deck knows what he is looking at. It’s a broken weapon, not a failure. A message from every submarina who ever came back from patrol and said the torpedoes were not working and was told he was the problem. message wrapped in steel and high explosive laid across the deck of a submarine bound back to Pearl Harbor.

The torpedo shop, a second test is running simultaneously. Torpedoes with dummy warheads are hoisted to the top of a construction crane. 90 ft up. The height is not arbitrary. 90 ft is the drop distance at which a falling object reaches roughly the velocity of a Mark1 14 torpedo running at full speed knots. The dummy warheads are dropped onto a steel plate below.

Plate is set at different angles. At an oblique angle, the plate tilted so the warhead glances off it. The exploders fire. 90° perpendicular. The steel plate flat to the falling warhead. Textbook impact. Seven times out of 10, the exploder fails to fire. 20% at the perfect angle. The angle every American submarine commander has been trained his entire career to achieve. Exploders fail.

They cut open the dud from Cahula. There on a workbench at Pearl Harbor about 21 months into the Pacific War, I find the answer. Firing pin, a small steel component about the size of a man’s thumb guided down a set of steel rods toward the prime app by the force of the impact itself. In theory, when the torpedo strikes the hull, the deceleration slams the pin forward along the guide rods and into the primer which sets off the detonator which detonates the warhead.

What is the theory? Here is what is actually happening. A torpedo strikes at 90° at full speed. The deceleration force is greater than the firing pin mechanism was designed to absorb. Rods themselves distort under the load. The pin binds. It cannot travel far enough, fast enough, with enough force to strike the primer cap. Detonator does not fire.

The warhead does not explode. [music] A submarine commander who came back from patrol and reported a silent hit at the perfect angle had been reporting without knowing it. Proof of exactly this 15 shots against the Tonan Maru. But the two that exploded were the ones taken at awkward angles in the dark. The 13 that failed were the ones taken from the ideal position.

The better the shot, the more likely the dud for 21 months. Every patrol report, every silent hit. Every commander told the fault lay with him. Had been describing this this mechanism, this flaw. this one component that had been in the weapon since 1,930 and had never been tested against a real hull because the Bureau of Ordinance could not afford to fire live torpedoes and had convinced itself the tests were not necessary.

14 years of production, not one live fire test at full speed against an actual target. Nobody had ever looked. Tier Jacobs had been right. in December 1,941 on the first war patrol of the entire war. Iron he had been ripe and he had been punished for it and it had taken 21 months and thousands of men in the water and one fleet admiral willing to fire torpedoes at a cliff to prove it.

The fix does not come from Washington. No team of engineers arrives from the Bureau of Ordinance. No official program is funded. No press release goes out. Torpedo shop at Pearl Harbor Naval Submarine Base does the work itself. Steel firing pin blocks are redesigned. Lighter, faster, machined from aluminum alloy, strong enough to hold together under the impact, but light enough to move the distance it needs to move in the split second available before the guide rods can bind. War.

According to Clay Blair’s history of the submarine war, and according to the men who worked in that torpedo shop in the summer of 1,943, some of the aluminum they used to machine, those new firing pins were salvaged from the wreckage of Japanese aircraft shot down at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7th, 1,941. from the planes that started the war melted down.

Recast machined into the component that finally makes the weapon work. The attackers becoming the metal that ends them. Mars Lockwood inspects every rebuilt torpedo personally before it is installed in a submarine. He will not send another boat to sea with a weapon he has not verified himself. Locks the shop floor. He talks to the machinists.

watches the pins being set into the mechanism one by one. He is 53 years old and he is doing the work of a chief petty officer because the work needs to be done and the men doing it need to know that an admiral is standing behind them. September 1,943, 21 months after USS fired her first 13 torpedoes at the Japanese and watched every one of them fail.

American submarines leave Pearl Harbor with torpedoes that work. Nine. What happens in the next 18 months is what Chester Nimttz had understood in 1,912. What he had said standing in front of the officers of the Naval War College in a lecture nobody remembered. Empire that depends on shipping across an ocean has a throat.

Submarines are the hand that closes around it. Hand closes. American submarines sink more than 1100 Japanese merchant ships in the final 18 months of the war. More than 5 million tons of shipping sent to the bottom by boats that finally at long last carried weapons that worked. 90 Japanese oil imports to the home islands collapsed from 1.

75 million barrels a month to nearly zero by late 1,944. Japanese pilots complete their flight training and sit on airfields across the western Pacific. They cannot fly. There is no aviation fuel. Japanese warships lie at anchor in harbors from Kuri to Singapore. They cannot sorty. There is no oil to put in their engines. The great battleships Yamato and Mousashi, the largest warships ever built, become almost useless because they cannot be fueled for extended operations. Tiny.

When Yamato finally sails on her last mission in April 1,945, she carries only enough fuel for a one-way trip. Factories producing shells and aircraft parts slow and slow again and stop. Raw materials that fed them no longer arriving. The freighters that carried those materials no longer crossing the ocean. Ocean no longer safe for the ships the Empire had always assumed would be there.

945. Japan’s foreign trade has declined by more than 60%. Melting Japanese housewives are melting down cooking pots for the metal. Japanese school children are digging pine roots out of the mountains to distill for aircraft fuel that will never quite work. Japanese factories are producing wooden airplanes because there is no aluminum.

The decisive naval battle that Japan had spent 20 years planning. Not the single afternoon that was supposed to shatter American will and force a negotiated peace. It never comes. Chester Nimitz never gives them the conditions for it. A weapon he had bet everything on from the first week is finally at last doing what he had always known it could do.

Mighty late September 2nd 1,945 Tokyo Bay. The USS Missouri sits at anchor gray in the morning haze. her 16-inch gun silent above the assembled delegations on her forward deck. General Douglas MacArthur stands at the microphone. He speaks for four 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. It is Chester Nimitz’s turn. He steps to the table, signs with one pen. He steps back. A yman hands him the pen afterward. Either he puts it in his pocket without looking at it. One of the correspondents present writes that evening that Admiral Nimtt signed and withdrew so quickly that it was easy to miss he had been there at all.

In the weeks that follow, the newspapers fill with photographs and retrospectives. Carthur is named Supreme Commander for the occupation of Japan. Aussie gives interviews. Spruce is profiled in magazines. Ice Chester Nimitz flies back to Pearl Harbor. He has one task remaining. He sits down at his desk and he writes his final report on the Pacific War. Several hundred pages.

Every major campaign from December 7th, 1941 to August 15th, 1,945. N he names the decisions that were correct. He names the operations that succeeded and explains why. What’s the failures? He does not name the individuals responsible for them. He does not name the Bureau of Ordinance. He does not name Ralph Christie, not name a single officer whose obstruction cost American lives.

He writes the report the way he had always operated, documented, precise, without personal accusation. He leaves the record for history to interpret. He submits the report to the Navy Department. It receives no press coverage. There is a number that does not appear in that report because Chester Nimitz did not know it.

Cuz some numbers resist being written down cleanly in a document that will be filed and archived and read by strangers who were not there. Not 52 American submarines were lost in the Pacific War. Not 52 boats, 374 officers, not 3,131 enlisted men. are 355 total. The highest loss rate of any branch of the United States armed forces in the Second World War.

92% 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 hit mines they could not see. Some disappeared in circumstances that left no witness and no answer. on some of them. We will never know exactly how many.

To see carrying a Mark1 14 torpedo that the Bureau of Ordinance had certified as reliable, fired it at a target and heard silence and then heard the destroyer coming. It Chester Nimitz knew the difference between those deaths. Signed the forms overdue and presumed lost month. 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. A He fired the torpedoes into the cliff, found in days what Washington had not found in 13 years of producing the weapon. 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, 1,966. 80 years old. He died at his quarters on Yerbena 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.

unburied beside him were not selected by protocol by rank not by proximity to his fame. They were Raymond Spruent Turner. Charles Lockwood Lockwood the man who had fired torpedoes into a cliff because Washington would not who had rebuilt the weapon from the torpedo shop up beside the man who had sent those submarines to sea and signed the forms for the ones that did not come back.

I they had arranged it themselves while they were still alive. No announcement, no ceremony organized for cameras, asked 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. They lie there now, four graves in a row, in the fog that comes in off the Pacific in the mornings, in the hills above the city that had sent them to sea, and that most of the men now walking past their headstones no longer remember.

Bureau of Ordinance no longer exists. It was reorganized after the war. Its records went into the archives. Its officers ride tired. Iden, the organization that spent 21 months telling the men who were dying that the fault lay with them was quietly folded into other departments and never spoken of again.

Men who died carrying those torpedoes are still where they went down. 52 American submarines, 3,55 men. Their exact positions in the Pacific known to nobody are remains part of the ocean floor now beyond recovery, beyond ceremony, beyond the ability of any navy to bring them home. Alio, 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. in the ordinary language of a life that had moved forward from what they had been through. But some of them talked late at night to a wife, a car on a long drive, to a son who did not ask the right question until it was almost too late.

life in the last years of a life when the things they had never said began finding their way out. Maybe he told you the name of his boat. Maybe he mentioned a patrol once once and went quiet and did not 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, you only half remember, write it in the comments below. Name of the boat, the year he served, whatever you know. Because those men went to sea with weapons that did not work. They went back out anyway. The stories they carried home, ones that never made a newspaper, never appeared in any history book, all told once at a kitchen table to people who loved them and did not fully understand what they were hearing.

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