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WW2 Dispatch
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When a Japanese destroyer charged straight at USS Wahoo, Dudley “Mush” Morton fired the last torpedo down its throat and rewrote submarine warfare in a single shot. From that moment in Wewak Harbor, Morton and executive officer Richard O’Kane turned an underperforming boat into a relentless hunter, attacking inside enemy harbors, in the Yellow Sea, and in the Sea of Japan with tactics the Navy had said should never work.

This military history documentary follows the rise of Wahoo, the split-command attack system Morton created, and the brutal reality of Pacific submarine warfare: faulty Mark 14 torpedoes, convoy ambushes, deck-gun duels, and the cost of pushing too far into Japanese waters. It also traces O’Kane’s path from Wahoo to Tang, where Morton’s methods helped produce the deadliest submarine record of the war.

For viewers who search WW2 submarine stories, Pacific War history, naval combat, and World War 2 documentary narration, this is a gripping account of courage, innovation, and loss. It also fits searches for military history stories, WWII submarine attacks, and dramatic historical narration about the USS Wahoo and the men who fought beneath the waves.

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Transcript
00:00January 24th, 1943, Wewak Harbor, northern coast of New Guinea.
00:05An American submarine is inside a Japanese naval anchorage.
00:09No American submarine has ever entered this harbor.
00:12The crew is navigating by a homemade chart,
00:15sketched from a school atlas that one of the motor machinists
00:18bought for a few cents at a bookshop in Brisbane.
00:21A tiny indentation on a map of New Guinea,
00:24labeled Wewak, was the only reference they had.
00:27The captain photographed it with an improvised rig of a camera and signal lights,
00:32blew it up, and called it a chart.
00:35That is what 79 men are trusting with their lives.
00:38Through the periscope, the executive officer spots a Japanese destroyer, Harusame.
00:44She is nested alongside several Japanese submarines, and she is getting underway.
00:49The captain fires three torpedoes from 1,200 yards.
00:53All three miss.
00:54The wakes streak past the destroyer,
00:56and every lookout on that ship now knows exactly where the American submarine is.
01:01A fourth torpedo, Harusame turns hard.
01:05Miss.
01:06The destroyer swings, bow on, and charges.
01:09Here is where this story breaks from every other submarine engagement of the Second World War.
01:14Every manual at the submarine school in New London,
01:18every tactical exercise,
01:20every instructor who had ever trained a skipper taught the same rule.
01:24When a destroyer charges, you go deep.
01:27You run.
01:28You do not fire a torpedo at a ship presenting zero degrees on the bow,
01:33a target barely 20 feet wide at the waterline, closing at 30 knots.
01:37The torpedo may not arm before impact.
01:40The gyroscope is unreliable.
01:42The Navy's own textbooks had a word for this shot.
01:46Suicide.
01:47The captain did not go deep.
01:50He let the destroyer come.
01:52800 yards.
01:53Close enough to see Japanese sailors crowding the bow.
01:57And he fired his last torpedo straight down the throat of the charging warship.
02:02The explosion broke the destroyer's back.
02:05The captain wrote two lines in his patrol report that would become legend across the submarine force.
02:11Broke his back.
02:12The explosion was terrific.
02:15His name was Dudley Morton.
02:17His crew called him Mush.
02:19He was 35 years old from Owensboro, Kentucky.
02:22And that torpedo, the first successful down-the-throat shot in American submarine history,
02:28was not a desperate gamble by a man with no options left.
02:32It was the first sentence of a 10-month revolution that would change how the United States Navy fought its
02:38war beneath the Pacific.
02:40If stories like this, stories of the Americans who fought the war under the waves, far from any headline, matter
02:47to you,
02:47hitting the like button and subscribing helped them find the audience they deserve.
02:51But to understand why that single torpedo mattered beyond Wewak Harbor,
02:55why it sent a shockwave through every submarine base from Pearl Harbor to Fremantle,
03:00you need to see what the American submarine force looked like before Mush Morton took command of anything.
03:06In 1942, American submarines were failing.
03:10Not for lack of courage and not for lack of boats.
03:13They were failing because they were still fighting by rules written in peacetime by men who had never fired a
03:19torpedo in anger.
03:20The doctrine was clear.
03:22Submarines were scouts for the battle fleet.
03:25They observed.
03:26They reported.
03:27They attacked submerged, from depth, using sound bearings alone,
03:32without raising a periscope that might give them away.
03:34And if a destroyer spotted them, they ran.
03:37In the first 12 months of the Pacific War, American submarines fired hundreds of torpedoes and sank almost nothing.
03:45A full third of all submarine captains were relieved of command.
03:49Not for cowardice, but for following the doctrine they had spent their entire careers learning to obey.
03:56And one of the boats going nowhere was Wahoo.
03:59Before Morton, she had sailed two patrols under a skipper named Marvin Kennedy,
04:04a man the crew called Pinky.
04:06He was cautious in a service that still rewarded caution.
04:10His executive officer, a lieutenant named Richard O'Kane,
04:13watched target after target slip away unharmed.
04:17O'Kane said it plainly.
04:19The Wahoo was not making much of a record, and we knew it.
04:23He was considering asking for a transfer.
04:25Morale on the boat had collapsed.
04:27Then, on December 31, 1942, Kennedy was relieved.
04:32And the man who replaced him, a tall Kentuckian who had ridden Wahoo's second patrol as an observer,
04:39watching everything, criticizing nothing out loud,
04:42stepped into command and immediately did something no submarine captain had ever done.
04:47Not the torpedo shot.
04:48That came three weeks later.
04:51What Morton did first was quieter than courage and stranger than aggression.
04:56He sat down with O'Kane, opened two bottles of ale,
04:59and calmly dismantled the most fundamental procedure in submarine warfare.
05:04Who controls the periscope during an attack?
05:07What he proposed had never been attempted on any American submarine.
05:11And it is the reason that torpedo found its target inside Wewak Harbor.
05:16On the last night of 1942, in a rented apartment near the submarine base at Pearl Harbor,
05:22Dudley Morton opened two bottles of ale and told Richard O'Kane
05:26something that no executive officer in the submarine force had ever heard.
05:30He had just come from the prospective commanding officer school,
05:34where instructors watched him at the periscope during simulated attacks,
05:38calling angles on the bow, reading the range, giving rudder and speed orders,
05:43spinning the attack calculator, checking the plot.
05:45All at the same time.
05:48Every time, the instructors who stood back and concentrated only on maneuvering the submarine
05:54arrived at better solutions.
05:57Faster.
05:58More accurately.
05:59The problem was obvious.
06:01The Navy trained every captain to be a one-man orchestra during an attack.
06:06And the orchestra was too slow.
06:10Morton looked at O'Kane and said,
06:12You're going to be my co-approach officer, not my assistant.
06:16You'll make all the periscope observations.
06:19I'll con Wahoo to the best attack position, and you'll fire the torpedoes.
06:23He paused.
06:24The serious face broke into the wide grin that would become famous on every submarine pier in the Pacific.
06:31This way, he said,
06:34O'Kane understood immediately what was being offered.
06:40He wrote later,
06:41This opportunity and sharing of responsibility was new within our submarine forces.
06:47Think about what Morton had just done.
06:49No captain in the United States Navy had ever handed the periscope, his eyes, his authority, the instrument on which
06:56the life of every man aboard depended, to a junior officer during combat.
07:01It meant trusting someone else with the survival of the ship.
07:05But it also meant the captain could step back, see the full tactical picture on the plot, and think clearly,
07:11instead of reacting in a blur of data.
07:14Morton was splitting the most overloaded job in the Navy into two halves.
07:18And both halves would be sharper for it.
07:21Two weeks later, in Brisbane, he delivered the other half of his revolution.
07:25This one was not a procedure.
07:28It was a declaration.
07:30He stood before Wahoo's entire crew, the same men who had watched targets vanish under Pinky Kennedy, and said,
07:48I am giving him verbal authority to transfer anyone who is not a volunteer.
07:53Nothing will ever be said about your remaining in Brisbane.
07:57Not a single man walked.
07:59The Navy's official history recorded what happened next inside that crew.
08:03They felt confidence in the capabilities and luck of their new captain, and the belief that their boat was now
08:11capable of performing miracles.
08:14Three weeks later, Morton proved them right.
08:17You already know what happened at WeWAC.
08:19The homemade chart, the charging destroyer, the torpedo down its throat.
08:23But WeWAC was only the first 48 hours.
08:27On January 26, two days after the harbor raid, Wahoo found a convoy.
08:32Two freighters, a large transport, and a tanker.
08:36O'Kane was on the periscope.
08:38Morton was running the plots.
08:40The system they had built over two bottles of ale was now firing live torpedoes against multiple ships.
08:47What followed was a 10-hour running battle, the kind of sustained aggression no single American submarine had ever attempted.
08:55Wahoo hit the lead freighter with two torpedoes, hit the transport with three,
08:59chased the tanker over the horizon, circled back, hit again.
09:03When Morton radioed Pearl Harbor, his report read like nothing any submarine commander had ever sent.
09:09In a 10-hour running gun and torpedo battle, destroyed entire convoy of two freighters, one transport, one tanker.
09:17All torpedoes expended.
09:19All 24 torpedoes.
09:22Gone.
09:23In 23 days at sea.
09:25A standard war patrol lasted 60 to 75.
09:28But Morton was not finished.
09:30With every torpedo tube empty, he surfaced behind another Japanese convoy and charged a lagging tanker with his deck gun.
09:37The bluff worked.
09:39The convoy scattered.
09:40Until a destroyer came tearing out of a rain squall and Wahoo had to run.
09:45He had attacked enemy shipping with nothing left to shoot.
09:48When Wahoo entered Pearl Harbor on February 7th, she had a broom lashed to her periscope, the old signal for
09:55a clean sweep.
09:56Eight small Japanese flags flew from the halyard, and from the conning tower hung a hand-lettered pennant
10:02that said everything about what Mush Morton had built inside this submarine.
10:07It read,
10:09Shoot the Sunza, bitches!
10:11Word had already traveled by radio.
10:14Submarine crews from across the harbor came topside to watch Wahoo come in.
10:19They were looking at a boat that had broken every rule they had been trained to follow.
10:24Three firsts in a single patrol.
10:27First penetration of an enemy harbor.
10:30First successful down-the-throat shot.
10:32First solo destruction of an entire convoy.
10:36The submarine force saw all of it.
10:39And what they saw was not just a record.
10:42It was evidence that the old doctrine was dead.
10:45But hold this fact, because it is going to matter more than anything else in this story.
10:50The officer who had stood at the periscope for every one of those attacks, calling every
10:55angle, reading every range, firing every torpedo, was quietly absorbing something he would carry
11:02with him when he left this boat.
11:04What Richard O'Kane would do with it would one day surpass even Morton himself.
11:10But first, Morton had something left to prove.
11:13Within three weeks of that hero's welcome, he would take Wahoo somewhere the Navy said no submarine could survive.
11:20The Yellow Sea sits between China and Korea.
11:23Shallow, cold, and thick with Japanese patrol aircraft.
11:28At its northern reaches, near the mouth of the Yalu River, the water is so shallow that a Gato-class
11:34submarine
11:35sitting on the bottom would have its conning tower above the surface.
11:38There was nowhere to hide.
11:40A single depth charge in water that shallow would almost certainly be fatal.
11:45No American submarine had ever patrolled there.
11:49The Navy's charts did not even show routes.
11:52By every standard the submarine force used to evaluate risk, the northern Yellow Sea was off-limits.
11:58Morton requested it.
12:00On February 23, 1943, 16 days after his return from Wewak, Wahoo departed Pearl Harbor for her fourth war patrol.
12:09She topped off at Midway, then pushed northwest into waters no American submarine had entered,
12:15heading for the far northern Yellow Sea near the Korean coast.
12:19Morton was doing what he had done at Wewak, going exactly where the enemy did not expect him,
12:24because the enemy assumed no one would be reckless enough to try.
12:28The surprise was total.
12:31There were no anti-submarine patrols in the northern Yellow Sea, no listening posts, no escorts calibrated for a submarine
12:38threat,
12:38because the Japanese had never imagined an American boat would come.
12:43Morton had found a hole in the enemy's assumptions and driven Wahoo straight through it.
12:48What happened over the next three weeks earned the boat a name that would follow her for the rest of
12:52the war.
12:53The One Boat Wolf Pack.
12:56Here is a detail worth holding onto.
12:58The night before the killing began, Morton and O'Kane sat in the wardroom with a cribbage board.
13:04Wahoo was running on the surface in daylight, another rule Morton had shattered,
13:08because a surface submarine could spot smoke on the horizon at three times the range of a periscope.
13:14Morton dealt O'Kane a perfect 29, the rarest hand in cribbage.
13:19That night, they sank two Japanese freighters.
13:22Days later, Morton dealt a 28.
13:25In the next 48 hours, three more ships went down.
13:29The cribbage board would follow O'Kane for the rest of the war,
13:32and every man on Wahoo came to believe it carried luck.
13:35But luck was not what sat across that table from Richard O'Kane.
13:39It was a man who had turned the terror of submarine combat
13:43into something that looked, from the outside, like calm.
13:47Morton tore through the Yellow Sea's shipping lanes with a fury the Japanese could not explain.
13:52He sank freighter after freighter,
13:54and when he found a 100-ton trawler too small for a torpedo,
13:58he surfaced and opened fire with the 4-inch deck gun and the 20-millimeter cannons.
14:03All three 20-millimeter guns jammed.
14:06What happened next defines Morton as completely as any torpedo shot.
14:11He pulled Wahoo alongside the trawler.
14:13A submarine surfaced close enough to touch an enemy vessel,
14:17and his crew grabbed homemade Molotov cocktails
14:20that Marines on Midway had given them as a going-away present.
14:24They threw the bottles by hand and set the trawler ablaze.
14:28When Morton finally radioed his results,
14:31Pearl Harbor's reply told him what one boat had done
14:34to the enemy's entire logistics network.
14:36It read,
14:37Congratulations on a job well done.
14:40Japanese think a submarine wolf pack operating in Yellow Sea.
14:44All shipping tied up.
14:46One submarine.
14:48The Japanese believed it was a fleet.
14:51Nine vessels sunk in a single patrol.
14:54Morton received his second Navy Cross.
14:56But the numbers told only half the story.
15:00Wiwak could have been explained away as recklessness.
15:03One captain, one moment, one desperate torpedo.
15:07The Yellow Sea killed that explanation.
15:11Morton had built a system that was repeatable.
15:13A captain who thought while his executive officer aimed.
15:17A crew whose trust in their skipper was absolute.
15:20And the willingness to hunt where the enemy believed no submarine could survive.
15:24That system worked in a harbour.
15:27It worked in shallow water.
15:29It worked against convoys and trawlers and everything between.
15:33And it was about to collide with something that Morton could not outthink and could not outfight.
15:39The Mark 14 torpedo, the standard weapon of every American submarine in the Pacific, was broken.
15:48Not occasionally, fundamentally.
15:51It ran too deep, sliding beneath the target's keel.
15:55Its magnetic exploder detonated early or failed entirely.
15:59Its contact exploder was so poorly built that a direct hit at the right angle would crumple the firing pin
16:06instead of triggering the warhead.
16:08The Bureau of Ordnance had been hearing these complaints from submarine captains since the first weeks of the war.
16:14Their answer never changed.
16:16The torpedoes are fine.
16:18You are missing.
16:19Morton had compensated through volume.
16:21Firing three and four where one should have been enough.
16:24Trusting that sheer numbers would overwhelm the defects.
16:27It had carried him through Wiwak.
16:29It had carried him through the Yellow Sea.
16:32But 24 torpedoes do not last long at that rate.
16:35And on Wahoo's next patrol, what the Mark 14 did to Mush Morton would come close to breaking something that
16:41no Japanese warship had ever managed to touch.
16:45Wahoo's fifth war patrol began on April 25, 1943.
16:49Morton took her to the Kuril Islands, the volcanic chain curving northeast from Japan toward the Aleutians, hunting in cold,
16:57fog-choked waters where Japanese shipping moved between the home islands and the northern Pacific.
17:03In ten days, Morton launched ten attacks on eight different targets.
17:08He found ships.
17:09He maneuvered into position exactly as his system demanded.
17:13O'Kane on the periscope, Morton on the plot, every angle checked, every solution confirmed.
17:20They fired.
17:21And the torpedoes betrayed them.
17:24One after another, the Mark 14s ran wild, veering off course, broaching to the surface, detonating too early, or slamming
17:33into a hull and failing to explode.
17:36Morton put a torpedo into the seaplane tender, Kamikawa Maru, a 15,000-ton target, the kind of ship that
17:43makes a patrol legendary, and watched through the periscope as she absorbed the hit and kept steaming.
17:49The warhead had failed to detonate properly.
17:52Kamikawa Maru survived.
17:55Morton was not alone.
17:57Across the Pacific that spring, submarine captains were fighting the same battle against their own weapon.
18:02The Mark 14 torpedo ran too deep.
18:06Its magnetic exploder was erratic, and its contact exploder crumpled on impact instead of firing.
18:12The Bureau of Ordnance had been told.
18:15They insisted the torpedoes worked.
18:18The skippers, they said, were missing.
18:20Every captain in the force knew the truth.
18:23And none of them could fix it from the conning tower.
18:26What made Morton's situation different was what it meant for his system.
18:30He had built something.
18:32The periscope split.
18:34The aggressive positioning.
18:35The willingness to operate in impossible water that was designed to create firing opportunities where other captains would never get
18:43close.
18:44And it worked.
18:46Wahoo found targets constantly.
18:48But creating the shot and finishing the kill were two different things.
18:52And the Mark 14 was destroying the second half of his equation.
18:58Despite the torpedo failures, Wahoo still sank enough on the fifth patrol to earn Morton his third Navy Cross.
19:05The report noted, with the restrained fury of an officer who cannot say what he wants to say, that
19:11faulty torpedo performance cut positive results probably by as much as one half.
19:17Here is a number that needs to be understood.
19:19After three patrols under Morton, 25 days in patrol areas,
19:24Wahoo had sunk over 93,000 tons and damaged another 30,000.
19:30No submarine in the Pacific had ever done that much damage in that little time.
19:34On May 22nd, Admiral Nimitz himself walked the deck of Wahoo at Pearl Harbor to present awards.
19:41The commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet standing on a submarine,
19:46shaking the hand of a 35-year-old lieutenant commander from Kentucky.
19:50That is how far Mush Morton had taken this boat in five months.
19:54And then, the partnership ended.
19:57In July 1943, Richard O'Kane was detached from Wahoo.
20:01Promoted to lieutenant commander, he was assigned as the prospective commanding officer of USS Tang,
20:08a new submarine under construction at Mare Island.
20:12Five patrols together, every attack, every angle,
20:17every torpedo O'Kane had ever fired in combat had come through the periscope
20:21that Morton handed him over two bottles of ale on New Year's Eve.
20:26O'Kane left carrying everything Morton had taught him,
20:29the split command system, the surface hunting, the refusal to run from anything.
20:35He did not know that he would never see Mush Morton again.
20:40Without O'Kane, Morton took Wahoo into the Sea of Japan in August 1943,
20:46her sixth war patrol.
20:48To reach it, they threaded the La Perouse Strait,
20:51a 25-mile gap between Hokkaido and Russian Sakhalin
20:55that was watched by Japanese aircraft,
20:58patrolled by surface vessels, and seeded with mines.
21:01It was the most dangerous water Morton had ever entered,
21:04and for the first time since he had taken command,
21:07everything fell apart.
21:09In her first four days inside the Sea of Japan,
21:12Wahoo sighted 12 targets and attacked 9.
21:15Ten torpedoes broached, ran erratic, or were duds.
21:19Not one torpedo hit one ship.
21:22The only sinkings on the entire patrol were three wooden sandpans,
21:25destroyed with a deck gun.
21:28Wahoo, the one-boat wolf pack,
21:30the submarine that had been mistaken for a fleet,
21:33came home with nothing.
21:35The Navy's official history described Wahoo's return
21:38with a sentence that carries more weight
21:39than any of her award citations.
21:42She came back with a dejected air peculiar
21:45to a highly successful submarine,
21:47which suddenly could not make her torpedoes run true.
21:51Morton came back furious.
21:53Not broken, furious.
21:55He told his superiors the problem was the torpedoes,
21:58not his crew, not his tactics, not his boat.
22:01And then he made a request that no other captain
22:04in the submarine force would have dared to make.
22:07He demanded to go back.
22:10Same straight, same sea.
22:12The exact body of water where the Mark 14s had humiliated him.
22:16But this time he wanted different weapons.
22:18A new torpedo had just arrived in the Pacific.
22:21The Mark 18, an electric design based on a captured German weapon.
22:26No steamwake to give away the submarine's position.
22:29No erratic depth control.
22:31And, Morton hoped, no defective exploder.
22:34He wanted a full load of Mark 18s and permission to return to the Sea of Japan.
22:40The Navy gave him both.
22:42What no one at Pearl Harbor could have known was that this permission,
22:46this second chance that Morton had earned through fury and faith,
22:50was sending Wahoo to the last water she would ever sail.
22:54On September 9th, 1943, Wahoo departed Pearl Harbor for her 7th War Patrol,
22:59Morton's 5th in command.
23:01She topped off fuel and supplies at Midway four days later,
23:04and then, under orders of strict radio silence, she vanished into the Pacific.
23:10That is not a figure of speech.
23:12From the moment Wahoo left Midway on September 13th,
23:16no transmission was sent or received.
23:18The plan was precise.
23:21Enter the Sea of Japan through La Perouse Strait on or about September 20th.
23:26Patrol south of the 43rd parallel.
23:29Exit through La Perouse on October 11th.
23:32Break radio silence only after clearing the Kuril Islands on the way home.
23:36No one at Pearl Harbor would hear Morton's voice or read his words for nearly a month.
23:42In the submarine force, long silences were routine.
23:46But there was something about this patrol, the Sea of Japan, the Narrow Strait,
23:51the fury that had driven Morton to demand this return, that made the silence feel different.
23:56One officer who was supposed to be aboard for this patrol was not.
24:01Ensign Donald Showers, a young intelligence analyst from Commander Joe Rochefort's code-breaking team,
24:06had volunteered for submarine duty and received orders to join Wahoo for a familiarization ride.
24:12Days before departure, his superior canceled the assignment.
24:16Operations at Bougainville needed him elsewhere.
24:19By that accident of paperwork, Donald Showers survived.
24:23He would retire as a rear admiral.
24:25The men whose bunks he would have slept in did not come home.
24:29Wahoo entered the Sea of Japan around September 20th,
24:32and from the first time Morton opened the outer doors on his new Mark-18 torpedoes,
24:36it was clear that this patrol would not be the sixth.
24:40The Mark-18s worked.
24:42On September 25th, Wahoo torpedoed and sank the Taiko Maru,
24:46nearly 3,000 tons, in waters where the Japanese believed no American submarine could operate.
24:52No wake from the torpedo.
24:54No steam trail on the surface.
24:56The electric Mark-18s ran clean and silent,
24:59and the first sign the Japanese had of a submarine in their home waters
25:03was the sound of their own ship breaking apart.
25:06Morton was back.
25:08Whatever the 6th Patrol had taken from him,
25:10the rhythm, the confidence, the belief that his system could beat anything,
25:15the new torpedoes had returned it.
25:17The crew felt it too.
25:19After the 6th Patrol's humiliation,
25:2112 targets, 0 hits,
25:23the familiar machinery of a Wahoo attack was running again.
25:27The system worked.
25:28And then, on October 1st,
25:31Morton found the target that sealed his fate.
25:34Konron Maru.
25:358,000 tons.
25:36A transport steaming off the west coast of Honshu,
25:40near the Tsushima Strait,
25:41carrying 544 passengers and crew.
25:44Morton put torpedoes into her hull,
25:47and she went down.
25:48Among the dead were two sitting members of the Japanese House of Representatives.
25:52The sinking of Konron Maru
25:54did something none of Morton's previous kills had done.
25:57It enraged the Japanese Navy at the highest level.
26:01The loss was announced publicly by the Domei News Agency,
26:04an American submarine operating inside Japan's own waters,
26:08sinking ships in sight of the homeland.
26:10The Maizuru Naval District issued an order that had not been given against a single submarine before.
26:16Find this boat and destroy it.
26:20A full-scale anti-submarine operation was launched.
26:24Morton knew none of this.
26:26Under radio silence,
26:27he could not receive intelligence about Japanese movements.
26:30He could not be warned.
26:32He was hunting blind.
26:33He kept attacking.
26:36On October 6th,
26:37Wahoo sank the Konko Maru,
26:391,300 tons.
26:41On October 9th,
26:43another vessel of the same name,
26:44nearly 3,000 tons.
26:46Four ships in three weeks.
26:48The Mark 18s had given Morton his weapon back,
26:51and he had used it the only way he knew,
26:54without pause,
26:55without hesitation,
26:57without stopping until the ammunition was spent,
26:59or the calendar said,
27:01go home.
27:02By October 9th,
27:04Morton had been inside the Sea of Japan for three weeks.
27:06His exit date was two days away.
27:09The plan called for Wahoo to transit La Peru Strait,
27:12the same 25-mile channel between Hokkaido and Sakhalin
27:16that she had slipped through on the way in,
27:18and steam east through the Kurils toward Pearl Harbor.
27:21But La Peru's was not the same strait
27:23Morton had entered three weeks earlier.
27:25Two days before Wahoo's scheduled exit,
27:28USS Sawfish had transited the same passage on her way home.
27:32Japanese patrol boats attacked with depth charges.
27:35Sawfish survived and got through,
27:37but the attack confirmed to the Japanese what they had suspected.
27:41American submarines were using La Peru's as a doorway.
27:44Anti-submarine forces in the strait went to maximum alert.
27:48Shore batteries at Cape Soya were manned and tracking.
27:51Aircraft patrols were doubled.
27:53Every vessel in the area had orders to watch for a submarine attempting to exit.
27:58Mush Morton had no way to know any of this.
28:01No radio.
28:02No intelligence.
28:03No warning.
28:04On the morning of October 11th, 1943,
28:08Wahoo approached La Peru Strait to go home,
28:10and everything the Japanese Navy had been preparing for
28:13was pointed directly at the 25 miles of water she had to cross.
28:18The morning of October 11th, 1943,
28:21was clear over La Peru Strait.
28:23Wahoo was on the surface.
28:24That detail matters,
28:26because the question of why Mush Morton was running,
28:29surfaced in daylight through a hostile strait,
28:31has never been fully answered.
28:33She may have already been damaged.
28:35She may have been trying to spot mines visually.
28:37La Peru Strait was known to be seated with them.
28:40She may have calculated that speed on the surface
28:42gave her a better chance than crawling blind
28:45through a minefield at periscope depth.
28:47Whatever Morton decided,
28:49Wahoo was visible when the Japanese found her.
28:51Shore batteries at Cape Soya opened fire.
28:54Wahoo dove.
28:56And somewhere in those first minutes beneath the surface,
28:59from a mine,
29:00a near miss,
29:01or a depth charge,
29:02something opened her hull.
29:04Oil began streaming into the sea behind her.
29:07Instead of pressing east through the strait,
29:10Wahoo reversed course.
29:11She turned west,
29:13back toward the Sea of Japan.
29:14She was trying to reach deeper water,
29:17but the oil trail was marking her track
29:19across the surface as clearly as a lit fuse.
29:22Japanese aircraft spotted the slick.
29:25What followed lasted seven hours.
29:28Between 9.45 in the morning
29:30and 1.30 in the afternoon,
29:32five Japanese aircraft flew 10 attack sorties
29:35on the oil trail.
29:36Surface vessels closed in,
29:38dropping depth charges in patterns
29:40around the spreading stain.
29:42Wahoo was still moving,
29:44slowly,
29:45wounded,
29:46dragging herself westward through water
29:48that was giving her away with every yard.
29:50At 1.30,
29:52the oil trail stopped moving.
29:53The attacks did not.
29:56For three more hours,
29:58until 4.30 in the afternoon,
30:00Japanese aircraft and surface ships
30:02continued to pound the position
30:04where the oil had gone still.
30:07At least 40 bombs
30:09and 69 depth charges
30:10were dropped on USS Wahoo
30:13over the course of that day.
30:15At 4.30,
30:17two final bombs struck.
30:18The sea erupted in a column of oil,
30:22debris,
30:22and compressed air.
30:24The sound a submarine makes
30:26when its pressure hull fails
30:28and the ocean rushes in.
30:30Seventy-nine men were aboard Wahoo.
30:33The motor machinists
30:35and the torpedo men.
30:36The quartermasters
30:37and the fire control men.
30:39The officers who had stood watch
30:41in the conning tower
30:42and the cooks who had fed them
30:44between attacks.
30:45The men who had thrown
30:47Molotov cocktails
30:48at a Japanese trawler
30:49and the man who had bought
30:51a school atlas in Brisbane.
30:53Every one of them
30:55went down with the boat.
30:56There were no survivors.
30:59There was no distress signal.
31:01There was nothing.
31:03At Pearl Harbor,
31:05Wahoo was expected
31:06to break radio silence
31:07after clearing the Kurils.
31:09The date came.
31:10Nothing.
31:12Another day.
31:13Nothing.
31:15The submarine force
31:16waited the way it always waited.
31:17In silence.
31:19Hoping that silence
31:20did not mean
31:20what silence usually meant.
31:23Morton's wife
31:24was listed as next of kin.
31:25His son Douglas
31:26was four years old.
31:27His daughter Edwina
31:28was younger.
31:29They would wait for a letter
31:31that was never written.
31:32On December 2nd, 1943,
31:35USS Wahoo
31:36was declared overdue
31:37and presumed lost.
31:39Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood,
31:41Commander Submarine Force Pacific,
31:42the man who had championed Morton,
31:44publicized his record,
31:46and used Wahoo's victories
31:47to drive aggression
31:48into every reluctant captain
31:49in the fleet,
31:50was told,
31:51and said something
31:52the men around him remembered
31:53for the rest of their lives.
31:55It just didn't seem possible
31:57that Morton and his fighting crew
31:58could be lost.
31:59I'd never have believed
32:01the Japs could be smart enough
32:02to get him.
32:03That sentence carries
32:05more than grief.
32:06It carries the disbelief
32:07of a man who had watched
32:08Morton do the impossible
32:10so many times
32:11that the possible,
32:12an American submarine
32:13lost in combat,
32:14no longer seemed
32:15to apply to him.
32:17After Wahoo,
32:19no American submarine
32:20entered the Sea of Japan.
32:21Not for two years.
32:23Not until 1945,
32:25when new mine detection sonar
32:27was ready,
32:28and a group of submarines
32:29called the Hellcats
32:30penetrated the Tsushima Strait
32:32using technology
32:33that did not exist
32:34when Morton died.
32:36Lockwood had driven
32:37that development personally,
32:38visiting the engineers
32:39at the University of California's
32:41laboratory at Point Loma
32:42again and again,
32:44pushing them to work faster.
32:46Some who knew Lockwood
32:47said he never stopped
32:49thinking about the sea
32:49that had taken Morton.
32:51He may have looked on Mush
32:52as a surrogate son.
32:54Morton was 36 years old.
32:56He had commanded Wahoo
32:58for 10 months,
32:5919 ships sunk,
33:014 navy crosses,
33:03the first penetration
33:04of an enemy harbor,
33:05the first down-the-throat shot,
33:08the first solo destruction
33:10of an entire convoy.
33:12He had done all of it
33:13by doing what the textbooks
33:14called suicide
33:15and being right
33:17every single time.
33:19Every time,
33:20except the last.
33:22But here is what the men
33:23who mourned Morton
33:24at Pearl Harbor
33:25did not yet understand.
33:27The proof that he had changed
33:29submarine warfare,
33:30that he had not just
33:31broken rules,
33:32but had built something
33:33that could be taught,
33:34replicated,
33:35and carried forward,
33:36was not inside Wahoo's record.
33:39It was inside a man who,
33:41at that very moment,
33:42was standing on the deck
33:44of a brand-new submarine
33:45at Mare Island, California,
33:473,000 miles
33:48from La Perouse Strait.
33:51Four days before Wahoo was lost,
33:53four days,
33:55Richard O'Kane
33:56had commissioned USS Tang.
33:58He did not yet know
33:59that his captain,
34:00his mentor,
34:01the man who had handed him
34:03the periscope and said,
34:04this way I'll never get scared,
34:06was gone.
34:07And what O'Kane
34:08was about to do
34:09with everything
34:09Morton had taught him
34:10would prove
34:11that the down-the-throat shot
34:13at Wewak
34:13was not a single act of nerve.
34:16It was the beginning
34:17of something
34:17that would outlast
34:18the man who fired it.
34:21On October 15, 1943,
34:24four days after Wahoo went down,
34:26Richard O'Kane
34:27stood on the deck
34:28of USS Tang
34:29at Mare Island
34:30and put her into commission.
34:32He did not yet know
34:33that Morton was dead.
34:34When he learned,
34:36the loss hit him
34:37like nothing else in the war.
34:38But O'Kane did not stop.
34:40He went to sea.
34:41He took everything
34:43Morton had built
34:44and wired it into Tang
34:45from her first day afloat.
34:47The split command system,
34:49O'Kane on the periscope,
34:50his own executive officer
34:52running the plots,
34:53surface hunting in daylight
34:54with extra lookouts posted,
34:57the refusal to break contact,
34:59the willingness to close range
35:00until the target
35:01filled the lens.
35:02Morton's fingerprints
35:03were on every attack
35:05Tang ever made.
35:06O'Kane added refinements
35:08of his own.
35:08He modified a musician's metronome
35:11into a tool
35:11for calculating target speed,
35:13drilled his periscope operators
35:15until they were
35:16the fastest in the fleet.
35:17But the foundation
35:18was Morton's,
35:19unchanged.
35:20He once told a reporter,
35:22it's a big ocean.
35:23You don't have to find the enemy
35:25if you don't want to.
35:27The way he said it
35:28made clear
35:28that not wanting to
35:30was never an option
35:31aboard his submarine.
35:33Tang's first patrol,
35:34five Japanese ships sunk.
35:36Her second,
35:3722 downed airmen
35:39rescued from the sea
35:40near Truk,
35:41then more ships
35:42to the bottom.
35:43Her third patrol
35:44set a record
35:45that staggered
35:46the submarine force.
35:47Ten ships sunk,
35:4840,000 tons,
35:50in a single run.
35:51By October of 1944,
35:54Tang was one of the
35:54deadliest submarines
35:55in the Pacific.
35:57O'Kane took her out
35:58one last time.
35:59On the night of October 23rd,
36:02in the strait
36:02between Formosa
36:03and the Chinese coast,
36:04he drove Tang
36:05on the surface
36:06into the center
36:07of a Japanese convoy.
36:09Destroyers on every quarter,
36:11shells and tracer rounds
36:12coming from all directions.
36:14O'Kane stood on the open bridge,
36:16calling targets,
36:17and put torpedoes
36:18into three tankers.
36:19The next night,
36:21another convoy.
36:22More sinkings.
36:23He was fighting
36:24the way Morton
36:25had taught him.
36:26Close,
36:27fast,
36:28on the surface,
36:29never breaking contact.
36:30Then came the last torpedo.
36:33Tang's final Mark 18
36:34left the tube,
36:36curved left,
36:37kept curving,
36:38and came back around
36:39in a full circle.
36:41O'Kane saw it coming.
36:42He ordered emergency speed
36:44and hard rudder.
36:45There was no time.
36:47Tang's own torpedo
36:48struck her stern
36:49and detonated.
36:50She sank in 180 feet of water.
36:53The submarine
36:54that Morton's methods
36:55had made possible
36:56was killed
36:57by her own weapon.
36:59Nine men survived
37:00out of 87.
37:01O'Kane was blown
37:03from the bridge
37:03into the sea
37:04and pulled from the water
37:06by the Japanese.
37:07For the next 10 months,
37:08he was held at Ofuna,
37:10a secret interrogation camp
37:12near Yokosuka
37:13where prisoners
37:14were beaten,
37:15starved,
37:15and denied
37:16every protection
37:17the Geneva Convention
37:18was supposed to guarantee.
37:20He endured it.
37:21He survived.
37:22And when the war ended,
37:24the United States Navy
37:25awarded Richard O'Kane
37:27the Medal of Honor.
37:29In 10 combat patrols,
37:315 on Wahoo
37:32under Morton,
37:335 commanding Tang,
37:34O'Kane participated
37:35in more successful attacks
37:37on Japanese shipping
37:38than any other submarine officer
37:40in the entire war.
37:42No one else was close.
37:44And every attack
37:45he ever made
37:46traced back to a night
37:48in a Pearl Harbor apartment
37:49when Mush Morton
37:50looked across
37:51two bottles of ale
37:52and said,
37:53You make the observations,
37:55I'll con the boat.
37:56This way,
37:57I'll never get scared.
37:59Now see what that
38:00torpedo at Wee Whack
38:01actually was.
38:02It was not
38:04an act of courage.
38:05Courage was common
38:06in the submarine force.
38:07Every man who climbed
38:09down a hatch
38:09and sealed it behind him
38:11had courage.
38:12What Morton fired
38:13down the throat
38:13of that destroyer
38:14was an argument.
38:15And the argument said,
38:17The old doctrine
38:18is dead.
38:19Submarines
38:20are not scouts.
38:21They are killing machines.
38:23And the way to fight
38:24is not to hide
38:25and fire blind.
38:26It is to close range,
38:28see the enemy,
38:29think clearly under pressure,
38:31and put the torpedo
38:32where it needs to go.
38:33The submarine force
38:35did not accept
38:35that argument
38:36because of a memorandum
38:37or a doctrinal revision.
38:39They accepted it
38:40because of Wahoo's results.
38:42Captains who had spent
38:43a year diving deep
38:44and shooting
38:45from sound bearings
38:45watched Morton
38:47come home
38:47with a broom
38:48on his periscope,
38:49all 24 tubes empty,
38:51and a hand-painted pennant
38:52that said everything.
38:53They saw what was possible.
38:56And one by one,
38:57they changed.
38:59Morton did not live
39:00to see what the submarine force became.
39:02By the end of the war,
39:03American submarines
39:04had destroyed
39:05over 1,200 Japanese merchant ships
39:07and 200 warships,
39:09severing Japan's supply lines
39:11so completely
39:12that the home islands
39:13were starving
39:13before the first bomb fell.
39:16The fleet that accomplished this
39:17was not the cautious,
39:19doctrine-bound service
39:20of 1942.
39:21It was the fleet
39:22that Mush Morton
39:23had shown how to fight.
39:25But for 63 years
39:27after that morning
39:28in La Perhue's Strait,
39:29no one knew
39:30where Morton was.
39:32Wahoo lay somewhere
39:33on the bottom,
39:34in the cold dark
39:35between Hokkaido
39:36and Sakhalin.
39:38His son Douglas
39:39grew up without a father
39:40and without a grave.
39:42The Navy had a date,
39:44a probable location,
39:45nothing more.
39:46And then a Russian sailboat,
39:48searching for an entirely
39:50different lost submarine,
39:52found something
39:52on the floor
39:53of La Perhue's Strait
39:54that changed everything.
39:56In July of 2004,
39:58a company surveying
39:59the floor of La Perhue's Strait
40:00for an energy project
40:01recorded the sonar contact
40:0312 miles off
40:04the northeast coast of Hokkaido.
40:06The shape was unmistakable,
40:08long, narrow, cylindrical.
40:11A submarine.
40:12Whose submarine
40:14and from what war
40:15no one could say?
40:16Two years passed.
40:18In July of 2006,
40:19a Russian research sailboat
40:21named Iskra
40:22anchored above the contact.
40:23Her captain,
40:24Vladimir Kartashev,
40:26was looking for
40:26the Soviet submarine L-19,
40:29the last Russian boat
40:30lost in the Second World War,
40:31believed to have hit
40:32a Japanese mine
40:33in this same strait
40:34in 1945.
40:36Divers went down
40:37185 feet.
40:39What they found
40:40was not Russian.
40:41It was American.
40:42A Gato-class fleet submarine,
40:45sitting perfectly upright
40:46on the ocean floor,
40:47almost entirely intact.
40:49The hull was whole.
40:50The propellers had not moved
40:52in 63 years.
40:54The periscopes
40:54were still in place.
40:56Near the conning tower,
40:58the place where Morton
40:59had stood during every attack,
41:00the steel was torn open
41:02by a single, direct bomb hit.
41:04The wound that had ended everything.
41:07In the cold, dark water
41:09of the strait,
41:10Wahoo looked less like a wreck
41:11than like a boat
41:12that had simply settled
41:13to the bottom
41:14and waited for someone to come.
41:16In October 2006,
41:18the United States Navy
41:20confirmed what the footage showed.
41:22Admiral Gary Roughead,
41:24commander of the Pacific Fleet,
41:25said,
41:33Douglas Morton was 67 years old.
41:36He had been four
41:37when his father sailed
41:38for the Sea of Japan
41:39and did not return.
41:40He had grown up
41:41without a grave to visit,
41:43without a place to stand
41:44and say goodbye.
41:45When he heard the news,
41:46he said,
41:47the Morton family is thrilled
41:49that there will be closure
41:50to the loss of our father.
41:51The loss of a famous submariner
41:53who was loved
41:54by his family and crew
41:55has been very difficult.
41:5763 years between a boy
41:59and the place
42:00where his father's war ended.
42:02185 feet of water
42:04between them still.
42:06Now go back
42:07to where this began.
42:08January 24th, 1943.
42:11Wewak Harbor.
42:12A Japanese destroyer
42:14is charging bow on
42:15at an American submarine.
42:17The captain has fired
42:18four torpedoes
42:19and missed with every one.
42:21His position is exposed.
42:23The enemy is closing
42:24at 30 knots.
42:25Every manual says,
42:27Go deep.
42:28Every instructor says,
42:29Run.
42:30Every rule the Navy has written
42:32says,
42:32This shot cannot work.
42:35The captain does not go deep.
42:37He does not turn away.
42:39He waits.
42:40800 yards.
42:42And he fires his last torpedo
42:44straight down the throat
42:45of the oncoming warship.
42:47That captain had 10 months
42:49left to live.
42:50In those 10 months,
42:52he would sink 19 ships,
42:54navigate by a school atlas,
42:56burn a trawler with Molotov cocktails
42:58when his guns failed,
42:59and train the man
43:00who would become
43:01the deadliest submarine officer
43:02in the history of the war.
43:05He would prove,
43:06beyond any possible argument,
43:08that the doctrine
43:09his Navy had followed
43:10for 20 years
43:11was wrong.
43:12He would not receive
43:13the Medal of Honor.
43:14His student would.
43:15He would not see the fleet
43:17he rebuilt
43:17go on to sink
43:191,200 Japanese ships.
43:20He would not know
43:22that his submarine
43:22would sit upright and whole
43:24on the floor of a strait
43:25between two countries,
43:27waiting 63 years
43:28for a Russian captain
43:30searching for someone else
43:31to find her.
43:32Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood,
43:35the man who sent Morton to sea,
43:37celebrated his victories,
43:38and never stopped grieving his loss,
43:40wrote the only words
43:42that come close to enough.
43:44When a natural leader
43:45and born daredevil
43:47such as Mush Morton
43:48is given command
43:48of a submarine,
43:50the result can only be
43:51a fighting ship
43:52of the highest order,
43:53with officers and men
43:55who would follow their skipper
43:56to the gates of hell.
43:57And they did.
43:59They followed him
44:00to Wewak and the Yellow Sea
44:02and the Curials
44:03and finally,
44:04to the floor
44:05of La Perouse Strait.
44:07Dudley Walker Morton
44:08fired a torpedo
44:09down the throat
44:10of a charging destroyer
44:11because he believed
44:13that hiding
44:13was not what submarines
44:14were for.
44:15He was right.
44:17And the Navy
44:18that learned from him
44:18won the war
44:20under the Pacific.
44:22Thank you for watching
44:23to the end.
44:23If it meant something to you,
44:25if these men
44:26and what they did
44:27deserve to be remembered,
44:28I'd ask you to hit
44:29the like button.
44:30It is how stories like this
44:32find the people
44:32who should hear them.
44:33If you have not subscribed,
44:35now is the time.
44:36And the bell makes sure
44:38you never miss one.
44:39I would love to know
44:40where you are watching
44:41from today.
44:41drop it in the comments.
44:43And if someone in your family
44:44served in the Second World War,
44:46on a submarine,
44:47on a ship,
44:48in the air,
44:49or on the ground,
44:50tell us about them.
44:52Every one of those stories matters.
44:53Let's go.
44:53Let's go.
44:53users.

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