US Submarines in the Pacific
Posted by Mitch Williamson in Naval on Monday, January 16, 2012
USS Torsk (SS-423)
Commissioned on 16 December 1944,
USS Torsk was one of only ten Tench Class fleet type submarines to see service
in World War II. Deployed to the Pacific in 1945, Torsk made two war patrols
off Japan sinking one cargo vessel, and two coastal defense frigates. The
latter of these, torpedoed on 14 August 1945, was the last enemy ship sunk by
the U.S. Navy in World War II.
Japan owed its desperate state in 1945 chiefly to U.S.
submariners. Few expected such success, given the service’s depressing record
of failure against Japanese ships in 1942. There were many reasons for this
poor start. As part of its obsession with big ships, the Navy had neglected
submarines, so the force consisted mostly of small, obsolete boats, including
many with defective engines.
Worse still, the Navy’s Mark XIV torpedo, which had never
been tested at sea, turned out to be riddled with defects. The Navy’s tactics
were defective as well, assigning the boats to patrol huge areas instead of the
Luzon Strait and other places where enemy shipping was concentrated. They
hunted singly rather than in groups, despite the success Germany was enjoying
with its “wolf packs.”
The U.S. Navy acted in the Pacific as if U-boats did not
exist, neglecting the rich store of knowledge about submarine tactics that had
been accumulated while fighting them in the Atlantic. U.S. skippers were too
old and cautious, having acquired their commands through seniority at a time
when conserving torpedoes was an important leadership requirement. Finally, the
submarine fleet was divided into three commands, two based in Australia and the
largest in Pearl Harbor, an arrangement that encouraged them to compete with
each other instead of cooperating.
Early on it became clear that the Mark XIV was ineffective,
but the Naval Bureau of Ordnance, known as the Gun Club, refused to admit
error, insisting month after month that it was the skippers who were at fault
and not their torpedoes. After many months of unsuccessful torpedo attacks,
tests in the field proved conclusively that the Mark XIV was in fact no good.
Its magnetic detonator did not work, it ran too deep, and even when a torpedo
made a perfect hit at a 90-degree angle the firing pin crumpled instead of
triggering the detonator. Machinists built sturdier pins, and at last, after 21
months of war, the submarine fleet had a reliable weapon. The Gun Club finally
went down to defeat.
Together the three submarine commands mounted 520 war
patrols in 1944 and sank 603 enemy vessels totaling 5.1 million tons. This was
a level of damage that Japan could not hope to sustain and still survive. In
the previous year Japan had imported 16.4 million tons of bulk commodities, but
in 1944 that was reduced to 10 million tons. In a single year the Japanese
merchant fleet, excluding tankers, was cut in half, bringing it down to 2
million tons. Tanker capacity remained constant at 860,000 tons, but only
because Japan built 204 additional ships. Without them the tanker tonnage would
have fallen by about two thirds. Even so, at the end of the year oil imports
were down to 200,000 tons a month from 700,000 in September. At that rate there
would be none at all very soon.
To all intents and purposes the submarine war came to an end
in December 1944, when Japanese merchant ships abandoned the open ocean. From
then on, they kept to the narrow waters of the Sea of Japan or the Yellow Sea,
sailing close to shore and anchoring in harbors at night.
While this protected Japanese ships against torpedo attacks,
it also drastically limited their usefulness. During the Okinawan campaign not
a single Japanese supply ship reached the island. After the war it was
calculated that U.S. submariners had destroyed 1,314 enemy vessels, including
one battleship, eight carriers, and eleven cruisers. A force of 16,000 men
accounted for 55 percent of all enemy ship losses, driving its merchant fleet
from the high seas and putting Japanese industry out of business for lack of oil.
In doing so, 3,500 U.S. submariners perished, the highest
loss rate of any U.S. combat arm, and yet a very low figure compared with the
number of Americans being killed on land. Despite almost two years of bungling,
the submarine was far and away America’s most effective Pacific weapon.
FURTHER READING Blair, Clay, Jr. Silent Victory: The
American Submarine War Against Japan. New York: Bantam, 1976. Calvert, James F.
Silent Running: My Years on a World War II Attack Submarine. New York: Wiley,
1995. Galantin, I. J. Take her Deep! A Submarine Against Japan in World War II.
Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1987. Mendenhall, Corwin. Submarine Diary. Chapel
Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1991.
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