How 'Broken' US Torpedo Sank Japan's Pearl Harbor Cruiser in 30 Seconds

Name: How 'Broken' US Torpedo Sank Japan's Pearl Harbor Cruiser in 30 Seconds
Uploaded: 2026-08-22T14:08:14+00:00
Duration: 40 min 5 s
Channel: WW2 Dispatch

00:00Just past 3 in the morning, the 25th of October, 1944. In the Surigao Strait, the one boat that

00:08will decide this whole night can neither see nor speak. She is called PT-137, 80 feet of plywood

00:17and gasoline, 56 tons of her, riding low and dark off the southern tip of a Philippine island called

00:25Panaon. Her commander is a lieutenant, junior grade, named Isidore Kovar, a reserve officer,

00:32a civilian in uniform, like most of the men out here tonight. And his boat is broken. A few hours

00:39earlier, her auxiliary generator failed, and when it died, it took two things down with it,

00:44her radio transmitter and her radar. So Kovar sits in the blackest dark of the war with no way to

00:52see what is coming, and no way to tell anyone what he finds. He has his eyes. He has his

00:58ears.

00:59He has a handful of torpedoes the men on these boats had long ago stopped trusting.

01:04That is all he has. And something is coming up the strait toward him.

01:09Picture the boat for a moment. 56 tons of mahogany and plywood, filled with 3,000 gallons of high-octane

01:16gasoline. The kind of thing that does not take a hit and live. One shell, even one tracer in the

01:24wrong tank, and the whole boat is a fireball on the water. Coming up the strait against it is steel,

01:32and some of it is very large. Kovar has no armor, a crew of a dozen, and the patience to

01:39sit dead still

01:40while something enormous comes for him in the dark. And no working radio to call for help or

01:45to warn the fleet at his back. You need to understand what is sitting behind him, because

01:51it explains why a blind, mute boat is waiting in the dark instead of running. To the north,

01:57beyond the strait, is the invasion. American soldiers have just gone ashore at Leyte by the

02:03tens of thousands. And their whole fleet, the transports, the supply ships, the men still

02:09waiting onto the sand, lies anchored in the gulf beyond. Between that fleet and the Imperial

02:16Japanese Navy, there is one narrow channel of black water. And the first thing standing in it

02:22is not a battleship. It is 39 wooden boats. Kovar's is one of them. Almost no one remembers the man

02:31in

02:31that broken boat. Pulling people like him out of the footnotes is the whole reason this channel

02:36exists. So if that matters to you, like and subscribe. Now hold on to this next part, because

02:42the whole story turns on it. Out of those 39 boats, the one that is about to do the single

02:49most important

02:50thing in the strait that night, the one that will land the only blow that lands at all, is this

02:56one.

02:57The broken one. The boat that cannot see and cannot speak. And the weapon that does it will not work

03:06the way it was built to work. It will fail. And the failure is the entire point. To understand why

03:14Kovar was even out there, you have to look at the plan, because the plan was not built around him.

03:20It was built around the heavy guns waiting at the far northern end of the strait,

03:24where an American admiral had laid a trap that the Japanese were steaming straight into.

03:29The boats had one job, and it was not to sink anything. It was to be the eyes. Find the

03:36enemy

03:36in the dark, count him, and get on the radio fast. The radio was the weapon that mattered.

03:43Which is the first cruel thing about this night. The one boat whose radio had gone dead

03:48was the boat that fate had picked to do the killing. But that is running ahead, because the

03:55ships now feeling their way up toward Panayon were not an ordinary enemy, and they were not coming all

04:00at once. Two separate Japanese forces were entering the strait, in two waves, hours apart.

04:07And somewhere back in that second wave, blacked out and silent like everything else in the channel,

04:13was a single light cruiser. A ship that had already crossed an entire ocean to help start this war,

04:20three years before, on a Sunday morning no American would ever forget.

04:26She had a name. We will come to it, and to what she had done, because it is the reason

04:32this video exists.

04:34For now, hold on to just one thing. The most broken boat in the strait, and that veteran cruiser,

04:42were closing on each other in the dark. And not one man aboard PT-137 knew which ship was out

04:49there,

04:50or that the torpedo they were about to fire was going to betray them in exactly the way they needed

04:56it to.

04:57Let me show you the trap, because once you see its shape, you will understand just how small Kovar's

05:02boat was inside it. At the northern mouth of the strait, an American admiral named Jesse Oldendorf

05:09had built a near-perfect ambush. He had strung his heavy ships across the top of the channel like a

05:15wall. Battleships and cruisers lined up so that every gun could fire sideways into an enemy forced

05:22to come at them bow on, one ship behind another. Sailors call it crossing the T, and it is the

05:29move

05:29every officer dreams of and almost never gets. Oldendorf was about to get it. The Japanese had

05:37no choice but to feed into the strait in one long column, and walk straight into a wall of steel

05:43that

05:44could see them coming before they could see it. Hold the scale of it. The ships at the north end

05:51threw shells weighing close to a ton ten miles out. The boats down the strait carried four torpedoes

05:58and a few machine guns, and were built so light a single well-aimed shell could erase one.

06:04A giant at the end of a hallway, and a row of children with flashlights posted to say when the

06:10intruder stepped in. But a wall that fires at the wrong moment is a wasted wall. Oldendorf's entire plan

06:17rested on one thing, knowing the exact moment the enemy entered the strait. How many ships, how fast,

06:24on what heading. And the only men close enough to tell him were the men in the wooden boats.

06:31So this is where the 39 boats came in. And it is worth being clear what they were asked to

06:36do,

06:36and what they were not. They were not the ambush. They were the tripwire.

06:43Spread in little clusters down the 50 miles of strait, their orders were to lie low, let a whole enemy

06:49fleet pass within a few hundred yards of them, count it, and send every detail north before the guns

06:55ever opened. Attack if you can, they were told, but report no matter what. The report was the weapon.

07:03A boat that saw the enemy and said nothing was worse than a boat that had never been there.

07:09Now set that against what you already know. The single boat in that strait whose radio had died,

07:16whose entire reason for being there had just been torn out of it, was PT-137.

07:22And Kovar was not alone out there. He ran in a three-boat section under a commander named Robert

07:28Leeson, with two more boats close by in the dark off Panayon. Here is the small, awful picture I want

07:36you to keep. When the shooting opened further up the strait, Leeson saw the gun flashes light the

07:42horizon and got straight on his radio, calling the sighting north. The boat next to him did the

07:48same. Report after report went up the channel from that little cluster, from every boat but one.

07:55Kovar saw the very same flashes. He had nothing to send them with. He sat in the middle of his

08:00own

08:01section and watched the battle begin, holding his silence like a stone. And then there were the

08:07torpedoes. I told you these men had stopped trusting them. And that was not nerves. It was two years of

08:14hard

08:15lessons burned into every crew. Up and down the Solomons, in the Blackwater fights of 42 and 43,

08:22PT crews had crept in close, lined up a flawless shot on a passing Japanese ship, fired, and watched

08:30the fish do everything but what it was built to do. Some ran deep and slipped harmlessly beneath the hull.

08:37Some broached and porpoised and gave the boat's own position away.

08:41Some slammed into the target dead center with a clang you could hear across the water and simply

08:47did not explode. By the time these crews reached the Philippines, a man firing a torpedo no longer

08:54expected to hit. He hoped. That was the weapon in Kovar's rack while a column of warships came up the

09:01dark toward him. And the warships were nearly on top of his section now. The first of the two Japanese

09:08forces was pushing into the straight, battleships in the lead, feeling through the black toward the

09:15wall wading up north. Within minutes, 30 of those 39 boats would be in some kind of fight. And between

09:23them they would lose more than 30 torpedoes at the passing column. Keep in your mind what these crews had

09:30learned to expect from those fish. Because what those 30-odd torpedoes did in the next two hours,

09:37and the one thing they almost entirely failed to do, is what makes the single shot still ahead of us

09:44almost impossible to believe. It was near half past 10 at night when the first boats found the enemy,

09:51and the way they found him is worth seeing. A squall was sliding across the straight,

09:56and ahead of it came one of those eerie tricks the sea plays before a storm. St. Elmo's Fire. A

10:05cold,

10:05blue electricity that crawled along the gun barrels and the radio antennas of the waiting boats,

10:11and set them glowing in the dark. The men stood at their stations and watched their own weapons burn

10:18with blue light. Then a stroke of real lightning lit the water, and there they were. A column of warships,

10:26big ones, sliding up the straight in single file, exactly where Oldendorf had promised they would be.

10:34The boats did their job first. Sightings raced up the channel. Numbers, course, speed. The exact picture

10:42Oldendorf needed, built piece by piece by men in wooden boats, lying a few hundred yards from a

10:48battle fleet. And then, having reported, they did the thing they had been told they could do if the

10:55chance came. They attacked. Watch what happened when they did. Boat after boat threw open its throttles,

11:03roared in toward the column, swung broadside, and loosed its torpedoes into the dark.

11:10The Japanese answer was instant and merciless. Starshell burst overhead and turned the night

11:17into a flat white day, pinning each little boat in the open. Then the salvos came down.

11:25The boats jinked and ran and laid smoke to hide in. Some straddled so close the falling water

11:32soaked the men on deck. They came back in. They were driven off again. For two hours this went on,

11:41wood against steel, men firing blind into a fleet that fired back with everything it had.

11:49Around two in the morning, a section under an officer named Tapan made the last run at the lead

11:55battleships, bored in through the fire, fired, and was hurled back like all the rest.

12:02And here is what all that came to. Across the whole night, 30 of the 39 boats got into the

12:09fight

12:09and fired 34 torpedoes at the passing Japanese. The first wave did not slow. It did not turn.

12:18It did not so much as flinch. 34 torpedoes and the column steamed on as if the boats were not

12:25there.

12:26The bravest thing those crews did all night was simply keep coming back. All but one of those

12:32torpedoes is a footnote, and we will get to the one, because the one is the entire reason you are

12:38here.

12:40Now lift your eyes off the boats for a moment and look north, to the wall those Japanese ships were

12:45steaming toward, because this is the part almost no one tells you. The line of American battleships

12:52across the head of the strait was not just any battle line. Five of them had been at Pearl Harbor

12:58on the morning it burned. Two, West Virginia and California, had been sunk outright, settled into

13:06the harbor mud with their dead still aboard, then raised, pumped dry, and rebuilt from the keel up.

13:13The other three, Tennessee, Maryland, Pennsylvania, had been hit and scorched and patched and sent back

13:20to sea. On the 7th of December 1941, they had been targets. On this night, three years later,

13:29those same ships sat lined up in the dark across the strait, waiting for the navy that had done it

13:34to come to them. Sit with that, because it changes the shape of the whole night.

13:40This was not only a fight for a beachhead. For the men on those battleships, it was the bill coming

13:46due.

13:47The dead of Pearl Harbor hauled up off the seabed and aimed straight back down the throat of the

13:53fleet that had put them there. In a couple of hours, their guns would open, and the entire first

13:58Japanese wave would be gone. But hold that picture. The Avengers waiting at the top of the strait.

14:06Because a cruel symmetry was coming that not one of those battleship crews would ever know about.

14:12Far down the channel, hours behind the doomed first wave, the second Japanese force was still

14:18groping its way in. And with it came the one cruiser that had actually been at Pearl Harbor itself.

14:25Not a target that morning, but one of the attackers. The resurrected battleships were about to have their

14:31revenge on the first wave. But the single enemy ship that had truly earned it was in the second wave,

14:38and it would never reach their guns. The only American who would ever lay a hand on that ship

14:44was sitting in the dark off Panan, in a boat that could not see, could not speak, and carried a

14:50weapon

14:50that did not work. It was after three in the morning when the second Japanese force came up toward Panon.

14:56And unlike the first, it came in confusion. Admiral Shima's ships had misjudged the tide,

15:03and very nearly run themselves aground on the island in the dark.

15:06Their radar was nearly useless here, the screen cluttered with false returns bouncing off a hundred

15:12unseen shorelines. So they came on blacked out and half-blind, lookouts straining into the black,

15:19feeling their way up a channel where, somewhere ahead, an entire American fleet was already tearing

15:25the first wave to pieces. And riding in that column was the ship this entire story has been circling

15:32toward—a light cruiser. I want to tell you exactly who she was, because the moment you know it,

15:39every minute of what is about to happen changes. She was called Abu Kuma.

15:46Three years earlier, in the last weeks of 1941, a Japanese carrier fleet had slipped out of its home

15:52waters and crossed 2,000 miles of the empty, freezing North Pacific in total radio silence,

15:58headed for a point in the ocean north of Hawaii. Out in front of that fleet, leading the ring of

16:05destroyers that screened the carriers, shepherding them across all that black water to the spot where

16:10the planes would fly off, was Abu Kuma. So when the bombs and torpedoes came down on the American

16:16battleships that Sunday morning, when the harbor filled with fire and oil and drowning men, this

16:23ship had been there, not as a bystander, as the lead escort of the force that did it.

16:30Hold that fact close, because it is going to matter enormously at the very end of this story.

16:37The cruiser, steaming toward Kovar, was not just another Japanese warship. It was, in a real sense,

16:44the ship that had opened the war. And she had survived everything since.

16:50While most of the ships she sailed with to Hawaii were sunk, one by one, across the Pacific,

16:55Abu Kuma fought on, through the frozen battles of the Aleutians, up in the gray seas off the Kuril

17:02Islands, year after year. By October of 1944, she was a hard, lucky old veteran,

17:10one of the last of the Pearl Harbor fleet still afloat. And now, here she was, an ocean and three

17:18years away from Hawaii, pushing up a dark strait in the Philippines. Now, put a number on what was about

17:26to meet her. It is almost comic. Abukuma weighed about 5,500 tons. Kovar's boat weighed 56.

17:37Line them up, and the cruiser outweighed the plywood boat by nearly 100 to 1.

17:42You could have stacked 100 PT-137s together and not match the ship coming up the strait.

17:50And that ship had no idea, none, that the smallest thing in the United States Navy was lying in the

17:57dark a few hundred yards off her path. Think about everything stacked against this ship surviving the

18:03war, and then think about what was actually going to kill her. Not the avenging battleships at the top

18:09of the strait. Those guns would never reach her. Within the hour, her force would see the burning

18:13ruin of the first wave, realize it was steaming into a massacre, and turn back. Not the bombers, either.

18:20They would hunt her down, but not until the next day. No. The thing in Abukuma's path tonight, the thing

18:28that would seal the fate of a ship that had led the way to Pearl Harbor, was a 56-ton

18:33boat that could not

18:34see, could not radio, and carried torpedoes nobody trusted. And what was Kovar doing in those minutes,

18:41while a Pearl Harbor cruiser bore down on his section. The same thing he had done all night.

18:48Sitting low and dark, engines barely turning, every man aboard listening. Because listening was all they

18:55had left. No radar to paint the shapes coming out of the squall. No radio to call a warning or

19:01ask for

19:02help. Just a dozen men in a wooden boat, straining their eyes into the black, trying to tell a destroyer,

19:09from a cruiser, from a trick of the rain. Knowing that whatever they did next, no one beyond their

19:15own deck would even hear them do it. By now, the two columns were closing in the dark, less than

19:22a

19:22mile apart and shrinking. The groping, half-blind cruiser, and the silent little section of boats off

19:29Panayon. Kovar in the middle of it. One of those boats was about to fire first. And the broken one,

19:36the mute one, was seconds away from being handed the single thing it had no business getting on a

19:42night like this. A clean, close, point-blank shot at a ship that had sailed to Pearl Harbor and back.

19:50For Kovar, the long, blind wait ended somewhere around half past three in the morning.

19:56Leeson's boat, the one with a working radar, had picked up the second Japanese force ten miles out

20:01and watched it close. Kovar had no such warning. For him, the enemy did not appear as clean,

20:09green blips on a screen. It appeared the old way. The hard way. As shapes slowly hardening out of the

20:16rain and the dark, bigger and blacker than the night around them, close enough now that he could

20:22count them with his eyes. Understand that this was not Kovar's first chance of the night, and that the

20:28first one had already slipped through his fingers. Earlier, he had gotten off a single shot, a hurried,

20:34overtaking shot at a ship pulling away from him, and it had run off into the dark and missed clean

20:40astern. One of his few torpedoes, gone, for nothing. Exactly the kind of night these crews had come to

20:48expect from these weapons. So when the shapes of the second force came sliding past his section,

20:54Kovar was not a man brimming with confidence. He was a man with a handful of fish left, a long

21:01string

21:01of failures behind him, and one more chance coming whether he was ready or not.

21:07His section commander went first. As the Japanese ships crossed in front of them,

21:12Leeson's boat lined up on the lead destroyer and fired its last remaining torpedo. The very last

21:18fish it had. The crew watched it run. It went wide, slipping past behind the destroyer's stern,

21:25and vanished into the night. Another miss. Two boats, two veterans, and the enemy column sliding by

21:33untouched. Exactly as it had been all night long, up and down the straight.

21:39And then it was Kovar's turn. Out of the column, another destroyer was coming almost back down the

21:44straight toward him, turning, picking up speed in the confusion. Kovar fixed on it. Now think about

21:52what he chose to do next, because everything turns on it. He did not fire from a safe distance.

21:59With no radar to aim by, a torpedo he had every reason to distrust, and a boat that would die

22:05under

22:06a single hit, he pushed his throttles forward and ran his 56 tons of wood and gasoline straight in

22:13toward a warship. Closer. And closer. Until the destroyer filled the dark in front of him. 900 yards.

22:22Then closer still. 700. Point blank for a torpedo. Close enough that a miss meant being seen, and being

22:32seen meant being killed. Picture that run-in. A wooden boat at speed leaves a long, pale wake on dark

22:40water, a white arrow pointing straight back at it. The engines, throttled up, throw a low growl across the

22:48straight. Every second of that approach, Kovar was making himself more visible to a ship that could

22:54blow him out of the water with a single shell. And still, he kept going in. And here is the

23:01thing

23:01Kovar could not see. The thing that mattered more than anything. The destroyer he was bearing down on

23:08was not alone. Further out in the column, beyond it, screened by it, rode the bigger ships. And one

23:15of them was Abukuma. Deeper in the water. Deeper in draft. A larger and more distant shadow Kovar's

23:22eyes never even picked out of the dark. He was aiming at the near ship. He had no idea the

23:28far one was

23:29there at all. And there, 700 yards from a Japanese destroyer, in a boat that could not call for help

23:36and could not run from a mistake, Isidore Kovar fired one torpedo into the dark. One. He had no

23:45second one lined up, no time for it, no radar to correct with. He committed everything to a single

23:51weapon he did not trust, against a target he could barely see, then turned his boat hard away and ran

23:58for

23:58the smoke. The way they always did. Listening for the thing they almost never heard. The sound of a hit.

24:06What came next took barely half a minute. Thirty seconds, give or take. The length of that torpedo's

24:12run through the black water of Surigao Strait. And in those thirty seconds the torpedo did three things,

24:19one after another. The first thing made Kovar's crew certain they had failed again. The second thing

24:25should have been impossible. And the third thing struck the blow that would kill a ship from Pearl

24:31Harbor. Kovar aimed at a destroyer. What his torpedo actually did was something no one on that boat

24:39intended. And something no one on either side would have believed if you had described it to them an hour

24:45before. Here is the first thing the torpedo did. It ran deep. Too deep. The way these fish so often

24:53did,

24:54the very flaw the crews had cursed for two years, it dropped below the depth it was set for and

24:59ran low

25:00through the water toward the destroyer. And so, instead of slamming into the destroyer's hull,

25:05it slid clean underneath the ship. Right under the keel. The men who could see it watched the wake

25:13disappear beneath the enemy destroyer and go on into the dark on the far side. A miss. Again.

25:21On PT-137, that was the whole story. A heavy underwater shudder rolled through the boat.

25:28They felt it in the hull. In their boots. But they saw no fireball. No flash. Nothing to tell them

25:34they had hit a thing. Just another torpedo gone into the dark. And then the destroyer they had aimed at

25:42lit them up. Starshell cracked open over their heads. And in that white glare, the little boat

25:48was naked on the water. The destroyer's guns opened, salvos walking toward them across the strait.

25:55And Kovar did the only thing left to do. He ran. Hard. Into a cloud of smoke. And was gone.

26:02As far as every man aboard knew, they had failed one more time. They had crept in, risked everything,

26:09fired their best shot, and watched it slide harmlessly under the target. They would carry

26:16that belief off into the dark with them. They were wrong. Here is the second thing the torpedo did.

26:23The thing that should not have been possible. It did not stop. When it slid under the destroyer,

26:30it did not run out of fuel. Did not broach. Did not veer off. It kept going. Straight on through

26:37the black

26:38water. Past the destroyer. Out toward the bigger shapes in the column beyond. And out there,

26:44riding deeper in the water than the destroyer ever did, was Abu Kuma. The same flaw that made

26:50the torpedo miss the near ship sent it running at exactly the depth to find the far one.

26:56Think about that for a second. The very same defect. In the very same run.

27:02And here is the third thing. The torpedo everyone had written off as another failure,

27:08plowed on through the dark and slammed into the side of Abu Kuma, low on her port side,

27:14and tore open one of her boiler rooms. A column of water and fire and steam went up out of

27:21the cruiser

27:21that had led the way to Pearl Harbor. About 30 of her men were killed in an instant, deep in

27:28the heart of

27:28the ship. Her speed collapsed. From a fast warship to a crippled thing barely making 10 knots. She

27:36staggered out of the formation, mortally hurt, while the rest of her force steamed on north and left her

27:42behind. Stop and hold what just happened. Because it is the whole point of this story. The torpedo did

27:51not work right. It failed in exactly the way these crews dreaded. It ran too deep. And that failure is

27:59the only reason a ship died. Had the fish run true, at the depth it was set for, it would

28:05have struck the

28:06destroyer. A smaller ship. A lesser prize. Or skimmed past and hit nothing at all. Because it ran broken,

28:14because it ran deep, it threaded under the screen and drove into the bigger, deeper ship hiding behind.

28:21The flaw was not a flaw that night. The flaw was the weapon.

28:28Now let me give you the number I have been holding back since the start. Across that whole night, 39

28:34American boats fired 34 torpedoes into the Japanese fleet. Of all 34, exactly one found its mark. One.

28:46And that one came not from the boats with working radar. Not from the veterans with clear shots. But

28:53from PT-137. The blind boat. The mute boat. The broken boat. Fired by a weapon that hit by failing.

29:03The single most important torpedo loosed in the entire battle of Tsuragao Strait was a mistake that

29:10worked. But here is what Kovar did not know as he disappeared into the smoke, certain he had failed.

29:17A wounded cruiser is not a dead cruiser. Abukuma was hit hard, but she was still afloat. Still under power.

29:25Still able to crawl. Down below, her crew were already fighting the flooding, shoring up bulkheads,

29:31nursing her toward any port that might save her. She had survived Pearl Harbor, the Aleutians,

29:38three years of a war that had killed almost everyone she sailed with. She was not finished yet.

29:44The torpedo had dealt the wound. But the death of the Pearl Harbor cruiser would take one more day,

29:49and it would come from a direction no one in that strait was looking.

29:53When Kovar vanished into the smoke, Abukuma did not go down. She did what wounded ships do.

30:00She fought to live. By the first gray light, her crew had her moving again, crawling south at a labored

30:0720 knots, headed for any port that could put her back together. One destroyer was pulled out of the

30:13retreat to stay with the cripple and see her home. That destroyer was named Ushio.

30:20And one more turn of the screw. Ushio, too, had sailed in that December operation of 1941.

30:27So as Abukuma limped away from Surigao, it was one Pearl Harbor veteran nursing another through the

30:33dawn. It was not enough. On the morning of the 26th of October, the day after Kovar's torpedo found her,

30:43Abukuma was crawling through the sea off the island of Negros when American bombers found her, too.

30:49They were B-24 Liberators, big, four-engined army bombers, not navy planes. And they came down on the

30:57wounded cruiser in waves. Her gunners fought back hard. They knocked three of the bombers out of the

31:03sky. But you cannot dodge bombs in a half-wrecked cruiser. The hits came, near the after guns,

31:10then deeper. And fires took hold and began to spread through the ship toward the one place

31:15no warship can afford to fire, her own torpedo room. Deep in Abukuma's stern sat her stock of

31:23Japanese torpedoes, the Type 93, the weapon they called the Long Lance. And you should understand

31:29what that weapon was, because it is the final irony of this story. The Long Lance was the

31:35finest torpedo in the world. It ran faster, farther, and harder than anything the Americans ever built.

31:42The pride of the Japanese Navy. At 37 minutes past 10 that morning, the fire reached them,

31:49and Abukuma's own Long Lances exploded inside her. The ship that had been doomed by the worst torpedo in

31:55the American arsenal was torn apart by the best torpedo in the Japanese one, her own.

32:02A little before noon, the order came to abandon ship. At 42 minutes past 11, the cruiser that had

32:09led the carriers to Pearl Harbor went down by the stern off Negros, taking about 250 of her men with

32:16her.

32:17The destroyer Ushio moved in among the wreckage and the swimmers and pulled her captain and most of the

32:22survivors out of the water. Weeks later, the Imperial Japanese Navy quietly struck Abukuma's name from its

32:30list of ships. She had opened the war at Pearl Harbor. She did not live to see its end.

32:37Now lift your eyes. North. To the top of the strait. Because while all of this was happening to Abukuma,

32:44something was happening that finishes the circle. Remember the battleships. The five ghosts raised from

32:52the mud of Pearl Harbor. In the same dark hours that Kovar's broken torpedo was crippling its cruiser,

32:58those battleships opened fire. West Virginia, sunk and rebuilt, leading the line, threw the first

33:06heavy salvos down the strait. California, Tennessee, Maryland, Pennsylvania followed. They crossed the

33:15enemy's T exactly as planned, and they tore the first Japanese wave to shreds. By dawn it was over.

33:23Two enemy battleships and most of their escorts lay on the bottom. So look at what one night in that

33:29strait actually held. Two reckonings for Pearl Harbor happening at the very same time, at opposite ends of

33:36the same channel. At the north end, the dead battleships, dragged up off the floor of one harbor

33:42and aimed straight down the throat of the fleet that put them there. At the south end, the smallest,

33:49most broken boat in the United States Navy, putting a fatal hole in the one ship that had actually led

33:55the attack. And here is the part that should stay with you. The mighty Avengers up north, all that

34:03resurrected steel, never laid a single gun on the real Pearl Harbor ship. That job fell to 56 tons of

34:11plywood with a dead radio and a torpedo that killed by breaking. And Isidore Cover, the man who did it,

34:20knew none of this. He had run off into the smoke certain he had missed, and for a while the

34:26United

34:26States Navy was as much in the dark as he was. So many boats had attacked so many ships in

34:32that

34:32black, chaotic strait that at first no one could say whose torpedo had hit Abukuma at all. It took

34:39time to work it out. And when they finally did, when they traced that one fatal hit back to the

34:45broken

34:46boat and the man who fired it, the Navy wrote something down. A few careful lines on a single

34:53citation. And those lines, read closely, quietly admit the strangest truth in this entire story.

35:00Here is what the Navy wrote. They awarded Isidore Kovar the Navy Cross, the service's second highest

35:07decoration for valor. But read the citation closely and you find something remarkable in the careful,

35:14official language. It credits Kovar with boldly closing on an enemy warship and landing a torpedo hit.

35:22And then it admits the rest. The hit, it says, left the target crippled and open for American aircraft

35:31to finish off the next day. Think about what that means. The official Navy record of one of the most

35:38famous torpedo shots of the Pacific War quietly concedes that Kovar's torpedo did not sink the ship by

35:45itself and that the kill was completed by someone else entirely. And there is one last strange detail

35:53in that citation. It calls Abukuma a destroyer. Because a destroyer is what Kovar believed he was

36:00firing at. Even the official paperwork could not quite keep straight what he had actually hit.

36:08That is how odd this whole thing was. The man who fired the torpedo did not know what he had

36:14killed.

36:15The Navy that pinned a medal on him got the ship type wrong. Nobody had planned any of it. And

36:21yet,

36:21when the accounting was done, that crippled cruiser turned out to be the largest warship of the war,

36:27whose destruction is credited mainly to a single PT boat. The biggest scalp the little wooden boats

36:34ever took. And it came from a mistake. As for Kovar himself, here is the quietest part of the story.

36:41After that night, the trail of Isidore Michael Kovar almost disappears. He was a reserve officer,

36:48a civilian in uniform for the war. And like so many of those men, when it ended,

36:53he seems to have simply gone home and folded back into ordinary life.

36:58We know what he did in 30 seconds in a dark Philippine strait. We know almost nothing else

37:03about him. No famous memoir, no string of interviews, no statue. The man who scored the

37:11most significant torpedo hit any American PT boat ever made is, today, very nearly a stranger to us.

37:19And somehow that fits him perfectly. The half-forgotten man in the half-broken boat.

37:25The ships outlived him in memory, but not by much. Abukuma's name was gone from the Japanese

37:31Navy list before the year was out. The five resurrected battleships finished their war and

37:36sailed home. Within a year, Japan had surrendered, and the ocean that had swallowed so many of these ships

37:43as well. The ships went quiet. Pearl Harbor, in the end, was answered, not in one grand stroke,

37:49but in a thousand of them, large and small. And one of the smallest was a single torpedo,

37:56fired by a man we have almost forgotten, from a boat that barely worked.

38:02So picture it one last time, the way we began. A little past three in the morning,

38:07the 25th of October, 1944. A 56-ton boat sitting dark and silent in the Surigao Strait,

38:16unable to see, unable to call for help, a young reserve officer at the helm,

38:21and a torpedo in the rack that no one expected to work. Everything about that boat was wrong for the

38:28job.

38:29And that is exactly why it could do what nothing else could.

38:34The cruiser that had led the way to Pearl Harbor was finished by the smallest,

38:38most broken thing the United States Navy had in that strait. And it was the brokenness that did it.

38:45The torpedo killed because it failed. It found the right ship by running the wrong way.

38:51The circle that opened on a quiet Sunday morning in 1941, with a screen of ships slipping toward Hawaii,

38:58closed three years later in the dark, with one bad torpedo from one blind boat that somehow could not

39:06miss. There were thousands of men like him in that war. Men who did one extraordinary thing on one

39:14impossible night and then spent the rest of their lives saying very little about it. Most of them are

39:20gone now. Their stories survive only if we go looking for them, and only if we pass them on.

39:27Before you close this out, thank you for going the whole way with Kovar tonight.

39:32If a story this small, and this nearly lost, is worth saving, the most useful thing you can do is

39:40hit

39:40that like button. It's what drags videos like this in front of the people who'd care about them.

39:45Subscribe and turn on the bell, and the next forgotten man I dig up will come straight to you.

39:51And do me one real favor in the comments. Tell me where you're watching from, and if your father,

39:57grandfather, or great-grandfather wore an allied uniform in that war, say his name down there.

40:03Let's keep them on the record.

How 'Broken' US Torpedo Sank Japan's Pearl Harbor Cruiser in 30 Seconds

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