Submarine! by Edward L. Beach Page A

battery, to repair damages, and to install new apparatus. So the vessel was ordered to Mare Island Navy Yard for two months. While there, the fine team Morton had built up suffered serious injury with the detachment of Dick O’Kane, who received orders to command the brand-new submarine Tang , then under construction at the Navy Yard. Roger Paine moved up to the position of Executive Officer. Mush Morton, though he regretted the loss of his very capable second officer, was overjoyed to see him finally get the command which he had longed for, and for which he, Morton, had repeatedly recommended him.
    In late July, 1943, Wahoo arrived back at Pearl Harbor, after the completion of her overhaul. Then bad luck struck, for Paine developed appendicitis, and had to be removed to a hospital for an operation. Morton had been deprived of the two officers he depended upon most, but, nonetheless confident, he proceeded on his fourth patrol.
    Now Dudley W. Morton was a man of original ideas andindependent thinking. Submarine doctrine called for shooting several torpedoes at each target, in a spread, in order to take into account possible maneuvers to avoid, errors in solution of the fire control problem, or malfunction of torpedoes. No quarrel could really be had with this procedure, so long as a submarine was apt to see and be able to shoot only a few ships per patrol. But in three successive patrols Wahoo had returned before the completion of her normal time on station, with all torpedoes expended. Morton knew he had the knack of searching out targets where other men could not find them.
    If you know you are going to see plenty of targets—so ran his argument—why not shoot only one torpedo at each ship, and accept those occasional misses? If a submarine fires three fish per salvo, and sinks eight ships with her twenty-four torpedoes, is that as effective in damaging the enemy as a submarine which fires single shots and sinks twelve ships with twenty-four torpedoes? Yet in the first case the sub should be credited with 100 per cent effectiveness in fire control; in the latter, with only 50 per cent. The problem, according to Mush, lay simply in the number of contacts you could make. So he asked for, and received for his fourth patrol, the hottest area there was—the Japan Sea!
    The Japan Sea is a nearly landlocked body of water lying between Japan and the Asiatic mainland. It can be reached from the open sea in only three ways—through the Straits of Tsushima, Tsugaru, or La Perouse. The only other possible entrance is through the Tartary Strait, between Sakhalin Island and Siberia, which is too shallow for seagoing vessels and, anyway, under the control of Russia. It was known that the Japanese had extensively mined all possible entrances to “their” sea, and that they were carrying on an enormous volume of traffic in its sheltered waters with no fear whatever of Allied interference.
    If Wahoo could only get into this lush area, Mush figured, she should find so many targets that she would have an ideal opportunity to try out his theory. He knew the entrances were mined but he also knew that it takes an awfully good mine field to completely close up such a large passage asLa Perouse or Tsushima, and that his chances of running through on the surface above the anti-submarine mines (which, of course, would be laid at depths calculated to trap a submerged submarine) would be good. He also was banking on probable laxness and inattention on the part of the Japanese defenders, and on taking them by surprise.
    So on August 2, 1943, Wahoo departed Pearl Harbor for the Japan Sea, carrying with her a determined Captain and an entirely new team of officers, some veterans of her previous patrols, but practically all of them in new jobs as a result of the drastic changes at the top.
    On August 14 Wahoo transited La Perouse Strait, on the surface at night, at full speed. Though detected and challenged by the shore station