Japanese Couldn’t BELIEVE One “Tiny” Destroyer Annihilated 6 Submarines in 12 Days — Shocked Navy 

Japanese Couldn’t BELIEVE One “Tiny” Destroyer Annihilated 6 Submarines in 12 Days — Shocked Navy 

10 minutes before 2:00 in the morning on the 19th of May 1944, in the black water north of Bugangville, a Japanese submarine was moving slowly through the dark, and the men inside her had no reason to be afraid. She was one of a whole line of boats the Imperial Navy had strung across the sealanes toward the Miranas.

 Seven of them spaced out like centuries, each one a pair of eyes for Admiral Toyota, who needed to know where the American carriers would come next. On paper, the arrangement was sound. A submarine on the surface at night was hard to find in all that ocean, and once she slipped under, she became a needle in a black and bottomless haystack.

 For 3 years, the tools the Allies had for killing submarines had been so poor that a boat which heard the hunters coming and went deep, could usually just wait them out down there in the cold and the quiet. That night, by every reckoning the enemy could make, the odds belonged to the men under the water.

 What that submarine could not know was that a small ship was already turning toward her, guided by a signal she herself had helped send, carrying a weapon most captains in the United States Navy did not trust, commanded by a man who trusted almost nothing on this earth except numbers. In the next 12 days, that one small ship would hunt down six of those submarines and send every single one of them to the bottom, better than 300 enemy sailors with them.

 and she would do it so fast and so completely that the Japanese Navy never worked out what was killing its boats. I am Arthur Hinton. For 40 years, I have read the records of these wars and told them straight. If that is what you came for, consider subscribing. This is the story of the smallest killer in the fleet.

 To understand what happened along that picket line, you have to understand the ship because everything about her said she should not have been the one to do it. Her name was the USS England and she was a destroyer escort which in the plain language of the fleet meant a cheap ship built in a hurry to do the dull deadly work the big glamorous destroyers could not be spared for.

 She was a Buckley class boat some 70 odd feet shorter than a fleet destroyer. Lighter, slower with half the crew and a fraction of the guns. She was the sort of ship the Navy turned out by the hundred and expected to lose by the dozen. Nobody wrote songs about destroyer escorts. They guarded the convoys. They screened the carriers. And when the war was over, the plan was to sell them for scrap and forget them.

There is a small bitter thing worth knowing about her name before we go on. She was called after a young sailor named John England, a chief who had gone back down into a burning sinking battleship at Pearl Harbor to bring men up out of the dark and who had died doing it. So the ship carried the name of a man the Japanese had killed on the first morning of the war, and she carried it into the deep water off Bugenville, looking for their submarines.

 The men who named her cannot have known how fitting it would turn out to be, but I have never been able to read the story without that name sitting over the top of it. But England carried one thing that made her different, and it sat in rows on her for castle up forward of the bridge. 24 small mortars arranged in a tidy pattern pointed out over the bow.

 The British had invented the thing and given it the name Hedgehog, and it worked in a way that turned three decades of submarine hunting on its head. To see why it mattered, you have to know how a submarine was killed before it came along, because the old way was very nearly useless. The old way was the depth charge.

 A drum of explosive rolled off the stern of a ship set to go off at a guest depth as it sank. And I want you to sit with the arithmetic of it for a moment, because it is worse than you think. The British kept careful count and across the whole war their ships made better than 5,000 depth charge attacks and killed around 85 submarines by that method.

 That is one kill for something like 60 attacks. 60. The reason was simple and cruel. The charge took a long time to sink to the submarine and in that time the boat had moved. And the moment the first charge went off the whole sea was churned into a roar of bubbles and pressure that blinded the attacker’s sonar for a quarter of an hour.

 long enough for the submarine to creep away in the confusion. Rolling depth charges was less like shooting a target and more like throwing bricks into a dark pond and hoping. The hedgehog did the opposite of all that. It threw its two dozen small bombs ahead of the ship out where the sonar was still pointed and still listening.

 So, the hunter never lost the scent. Each little bomb had a contact fuse, which meant it only went off if it actually struck the steel of a submarine. A miss made no explosion at all. No roar, no wall of bubbles, nothing to blind the sonar. The ship simply kept her contact, turned and tried again. And when the bombs did hit, they hit with 30 odd pounds of torpex a piece, punched straight through the pressure hole, and let the sea do the rest.

 On the numbers, it was a different weapon from a different century. The early figures gave the hedgehog roughly one kill for every five attacks against one kill for every 60 with depth charges. So why did most captains still prefer the depth charge? Because men trust what they have felt in their hands, and they did not trust this. A depth charge gave you the great satisfying thunder of it, the tower of water, the sense that you had done something.

 The hedgehog, when it missed, gave you silence, and a silence after firing is a hard thing for a frightened man to trust. In its early trials, it had shown a success rate of only about five in a 100, because the crews had not leared to use it, and men looked at that number and went back to rolling drums off the stern.

 I have read the reports and the pattern is the same everywhere. The better weapon sat unloved because it asked its crews to believe a page of figures over the evidence of their own ears. Which brings us to the one man on the England who believed the figures without blinking. Her captain was a left tenant commander named Walton Pendleton.

And he was a man who looked at that same page and drew the only sane conclusion from it, that the unloved weapon was five, 10, a dozen times the killer the beloved one was. and that sentiment had no place in the matter. He drilled his sonar men and his hedgehog crews until they could hold a contact through every twist a submarine could make and put their pattern of bombs into the water in a minute and a half.

 He worked the firing problem like a mathematician, not a sailor, reducing the whole murderous business to sink rates and turn radi angles. He was on his first war patrol in command, and to that point in his career, he had sunk exactly nothing. He was about to sink more submarines in under a fortnight than any other ship in the history of naval warfare before or since.

 And he would do it not with courage alone, of which there was plenty in that ocean, but with a kind of cold, patient counting that most fighting men never learn. He had one more advantage, and it was the greatest secret of the Pacific War. Back in Hawaii, the codereakers of Fleet Radio Unit Pacific were reading the Imperial Navy’s mail.

 4 days before that night off Bugenville, they had pulled a submarine’s own signal out of the air, giving her destination and the hour she was due, and England and two sister ships had been sent to sit squarely across her path. So when the sonar man called out a contact, moving at six knots beneath the black water, it was not luck.

 The Americans had been handed the time and the place. All England had to do now was prove that the mathematics were real. The submarine was the I16, and her commander did everything right. He dived. He turned hard. He changed his depth. All the old tricks that had kept boats alive for three years.

 The first hedgehog pattern went into the sea and came up silent. A miss. The boat had turned. The second pattern scored a single hit deep down and it was not enough. The third missed. The submarine had gone deeper than the England had guessed. Down past 300 ft, hiding under the weight of the ocean. The fourth pattern the boat turned inside of and missed again.

 four attacks and the enemy was still alive and running. This is the part the legend leaves out that even for the ship that would break every record, the first kill was hard and slow and full of misses. Then came the fifth attack, and the sea answered differently. Several sharp cracks as the bomb struck home, and a moment later, a single enormous explosion came up from far below.

 A blow so heavy it lifted the England’s own stern clear of the water and knocked her sailors off their feet. That was the boat’s batteries and her torpedoes letting go all at once. 20 minutes later, the things that come up when a submarine dies began to reach the surface. The oil, the splinters of wood, the scraps of cloth, the I-16 was gone, and 107 men had gone with her. One kill.

And I will not let the tally roll past without saying that plainly, because it is easy on this channel to turn a submarine into a number on a page. 107 men died in the dark that morning quickly if they were lucky, and the ship that killed them was only getting started. Because the codereakers had more to give, there was a whole patrol line out there.

 Seven boats the Japanese had strung between truck and the waters to the west, spaced at careful intervals to catch the Americans moving on the Marannas. The line had a name in the Japanese signals, and Fleet Radio Unit Pacific had read enough to know roughly where it lay. This is the quiet miracle underneath the whole story, and it deserves a moment of its own.

 Half a world away, in windowless rooms in Hawaii, American crypt analysts were breaking the Imperial Navy’s codes and handing the fleet the enemy’s own plans, sometimes before the enemy had finished acting on them. The submarines out on that line thought themselves hidden. In truth, their orders had been read, their stations plotted, and a hunter sent to walk down the row of them.

 England was ordered to join two other destroyer escorts, the George and the Rabbi, and go down that line. And the three of them turned northeast in a long line of bearing into a sea that held six more submarines, each with 56 men aboard, none of whom yet knew that the boat at the end of the line was already dead. They ran in a long open formation through the dark, radar sweeping, sonar pinging out into the black, and on the 22nd of May, they found the next one.

One of the sister ships got the first radar contact, a submarine on the surface charging her batteries in the small hours, and she crash dived the instant the search light found her. The sister ship fired her hedgehog and missed. Then England was handed the contact, and here the difference between the ships began to show.

 Her sonar men tracked every turn the boat made, and fed it straight to the men at the mortars, and on her second pattern, three bombs struck, and then the whole sea heaved with the familiar terrible blast from below. By sunrise, the oil slick was half a mile wide. Two kills. A day later, they caught a third boat, and this one was handled by one of the sisters first.

 Four attacks, everyone a miss because the Japanese commander was good and kept turning inside the pattern. Then another of the escorts tried and missed four more times. Eight attacks on one submarine and nothing. And the division commander, watching England wait her turn while the others failed, at last simply told her to take it. She took it.

 Her first pattern missed. Her second put 10 or a dozen bombs into the hull at once, and the boat came apart with a roar that the other ships felt through their own steel from thousands of yards away. Three kills in 72 hours. By now, you can feel the shape of the thing, and so could the men aboard.

 One submarine roughly every day. And I want to be careful here because it would be very easy to make this into a clean and bloodless piece of clockwork. The tidy machine that never fails. It was not clean. Every one of those blasts from below was 50 odd men dying in a steel tube in the dark, drowned or crushed or burned. And the men on the England heard it each time through the water.

 That groan and shriek of a hull tearing itself apart. And then the silence, and then the oil. Some of them never forgot the sound. A weapon that works is still a weapon, and the sea off the admirales was filling up with the dead. The fourth boat came on the far side of midnight, and her commander tried something clever. Instead of diving deep, he stayed shallow and turned hard, betting that the Americans would set their bombs for a deep target and let him slip underneath the reckoning. He bet wrong.

The sonar man called the shallow depth. The firing solution shifted to match it, and the first pattern struck. There was no great battery explosion this time, only the smaller, grimmer sound of steel bombs punching 3-in holes through a pressure hole. And then began the long arithmetic of the sea, which is worse to think about than any explosion.

 A single 3-in hole at that depth lets the ocean in at hundreds of gallons a minute under a pressure that turns a jet of water into something that can cut a man. Each hole makes the boat heavier, and a heavier boat sinks, and the deeper she sinks, the harder the sea presses, and the harder it presses, the faster it comes through every hole at once.

 The men inside such a boat do not drown gently. The air compresses, and the heat of it climbs until the compartment is an oven, and it is over one way or another, in a very few minutes. That is what a clean kill sounds like from above. A few cracks and then a long silence. Four kills in 5 days.

 That was when the word climbed all the way to the top. It reached Admiral Ernest King in Washington, the man who ran the entire United States Navy, and he read the reports of one small escort with four submarines to her name in 5 days, killed with a weapon most of his captains would not touch. and King who was not a warm man and not given to flourishes sent a signal that spread through the Pacific in hours.

 There will always be an England in the United States Navy. Fame is a dangerous thing in a war, though, because it makes the high command want to wrap a lucky ship in cotton wool. There were orders now to pull the England out to save this precious veteran crew for gentler duty. The division commander refused. Three boats were still out there on that line, and the mathematics said his ship could finish them.

 He asked for one more patrol and he got it. The fifth boat died much like the fourth. Caught on the surface late at night, driven under, tracked through her turns, and broken by a pattern that hit so close together the explosion sounded like one single blow. This one did not flood slowly. The hull was breached in several places at once, and the pressure of the deep did the rest in an instant, folding the boat in on herself, so that the 56 men aboard were gone in a matter of seconds, faster than any of them could have understood what was happening to them. There is a

mercy in that of a terrible kind, and it is the only mercy the sea offered anyone on that line. Five submarines in six days, and in Tokyo, at last the enemy knew that something was terribly wrong. Seven boats had been sent to that line and five had simply stopped answering. No distress calls, no final signals, only silence, one every day.

 The Japanese command could see the pattern even if they could not see the cause. And they sent new orders to the two boats that were left. Go deeper. Do not surface to charge unless you must. And when you are found, do not thrash about. Run silent. Because it was the thrashing that gave the sonar men their grip.

 They were learning, but they were learning from the mistakes of men who were already dead. The sixth kill was the hardest, and it is the one I want you to remember because it is the one where the enemy nearly won. The last boat they engaged had a commander who had clearly thought long and carefully about how the others had died.

 When he was found, he went deep, past 400 ft, and then he stopped his engines altogether, everything off, drifting in silence, so that the sonar had almost nothing to hold. For 4 hours the England sat over a patch of dead water, and her captain faced a real choice because his ship was running low on hedgehog bombs. She had come out with 240 of them, and she had spent most of them, and a wasted pattern on a false contact was a pattern he might need for a real one.

 He chose to wait rather than throw his bombs at a shadow. When the boat finally had to move again, out of battery power and out of air, she had drifted miles on the current, and she surfaced far from where anyone was looking, bought herself 90 precious seconds of charging, and dived again, running hard.

 Now it became a jewel of arithmetic, which was exactly the ground the England’s captain had chosen to fight on his whole career. A hedgehog bomb sank at a known speed. At 400 ft, it took 17 seconds to reach the boat. And in 17 seconds, a submarine at 6 knots moved the better part of 200 ft. So every pattern was not a shot at where the enemy was, but a prediction of where he would be.

 The first two predictions were wrong, and the bombs fell wide, and the boat’s commander kept changing his speed to poison the sums. Six knots, then four, then six again. England had fired 48 bombs on this one boat alone, and had perhaps 70 left. Three more patterns, maybe a shade more if the crew loaded with care. Three more chances.

Then the sonar man saw the thing that finished it. The Japanese commander believed he was steering at random, but no man is truly random, and the boat was turning on a rhythm, 30° one way and then the other, every four minutes, like a pendulum. The captain read the rhythm, aimed not at the boat, but at where the rhythm said she would swing, and led her the way a shooter leads a bird.

 The division commander, who had watched this one boat shrug off attack after attack, where the others had died in two, said the five words that have lived in the Navy ever since. Oh hell, go ahead, England. Her third pattern breached the hull, but did not kill her, and she went on, flooding and staggering, her crew blowing tanks in a last desperate try for the surface.

 The fourth pattern, eight shore hits, ended it before they ever got there. Oil and wreckage came up after sunrise. six submarines in 12 days. There was a seventh boat on that line, and I will not pretend the England killed her because she did not. That last boat got Tokyo’s warning after the others fell silent, abandoned her station, and ran deep and dark for safer water, and so she alone of the seven slipped out of the trap.

 Whatever became of her afterward, and the sea has a long list of ways to take a submarine, she was not one of the England six, and her escape changes nothing about what was done to the rest. When the records were opened after the war, the Japanese accounts confirmed it exactly. Six boats, each one’s last known position matching the England’s attacks to the letter, better than 330 of their sailors dead.

 What the Japanese Navy never managed in all of it was to understand the how. Their own report spoke of blasts from above and flooding from below and death within minutes. But no man ever lived through one of those attacks to describe the ring of bombs falling ahead of the ship, the contact fuses, the sonar that never once let go. The honors came, as they do.

 England took the presidential unit citation, one of only a handful of destroyer escorts in the whole war to earn it, and Pendleton was given the Navy Cross, one decoration for six submarines. The citation spoke of heroism and skill and discipline, and all of that was true. But I have come to think the real cause was the thing the medals never name.

This was a victory of arithmetic over sentiment. Pendleton had trusted a column of figures when braver men trusted their feelings, had believed the unloved weapon because the numbers told him to, and had turned prediction and patience into a killing science. The fleet understood it too in its way, and it changed how the war was fought.

Within months, the hedgehog was standard on every destroyer escort in the Pacific. Its training rewritten around what England had done. Her action reports passed from ship to ship so that other sonar men could learn to hold a contact through its turns and other gun crews could learn to load and fire in 90 seconds.

 And the wider record bears out everything Pendleton had gambled on in the Atlantic where the weapon had been used longest against the German hubot. The hedgehog accounted for something like 47 of them across the war, roughly one kill for every six attacks. And that was already far and away the best anti-ubmarine weapon anyone had.

 England had bettered even that. Six boats for around 15 attacks, better than one kill in three, a rate no other ship came close to. The numbers were not luck. They were the whole point. And here is where I keep the cost in the frame beside the record. Because the ship herself did not get a kind ending. The following spring off Okinawa, a Japanese aircraft flew itself deliberately into her, one of the kamicazi that were tearing at the American fleet in the last months of the war.

 The strike tore into her and killed 37 of her own men and wounded 25 more. And the damage was so deep that the Navy did the same cold arithmetic on her that her captain had once done on his weapon, and decided she was not worth the mending. The ship that had sunk six submarines in 12 days was towed away, stripped of anything useful, and cut up for scrap, ending her days as razor blades and tin cans barely 2 years after the fighting stopped.

 Pendleton lived. He was promoted, given command of an escort division, and spent the last stretch of the war hunting submarines in the cold North Pacific, where he never found a single one, the Code Breakers, and the Picket Line and the Perfect Run all behind him now. He retired after 30 odd years in uniform and died in the early 1970s.

 And he lies in Arlington under a stone that names his Navy Cross and says nothing at all about the six boats or the 12 days that changed how the world hunts submarines. The hedgehog itself came to the same quiet forgetting. One of the launchers sits today in storage at the Navy’s museum in Washington rusting and the placard beside it when it is out at all talks about the weapon success rate and never once mentions the England or Pendleton or the 12 days that proved the thing worked.

 The Navy tried to keep King’s promise and for a while there was another ship that carried the name, a guided missile ship that served her time and was then decommissioned in the 1990s and since that day there has not been an England on the list at all. King’s word in the end was not quite kept. But the record still stands 80 years on.

 No ship has ever matched it. Not in the Atlantic, not in the Pacific, not in any water since. So let me leave it with you. A cheap little escort that nobody expected anything from. a weapon her own service did not trust and a captain who believed a page of numbers over the feelings of braver men. And out of those three unpromising things came the deadliest 12 days one ship ever spent at sea.

 Which of it stays with you the longest, the science of it or the cost of it? And whose story out of these wars do you want me to pull from the records next? Tell me in the comments. If history told straight with the whole cost left in the frame is what you came here for, then subscribe and stay with me and I will keep pulling these ships and these men up off the page lest we forget The