August 1943, Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Chester Nimttz picks up a phone. He does not call Washington. He does not request another meeting with the Bureau of Ordinance. He does not dictate another letter into the same silence that has swallowed every letter before it. He calls the submarine base.
He tells them to load torpedoes into a boat, take it out to Cahulawi Island, and fire them into the underwater cliff face. Not at a Japanese ship into rock, so they can pull the duds off the ocean floor, bring them back to a workbench at Pearl Harbor, and cut them open. The answer comes back from the machine shop. It is the firing pin.
At a perfect 90deree impact, the textbook shot, the one every American submarine commander spent years learning to execute. The spring collapses under the force of the blow. The pin cannot travel fast enough to strike the primer. The detonator does not fire. The better the shot, the more likely the dud. This test happens in August 1943, 21 months after the first American submarines fired their first torpedoes of the war.
21 months of submarine commanders filing the same report up the chain of command. The torpedoes are not working. 21 months of the Bureau of Ordinance, the men who designed the weapon, certified it, and sent it to sea, sending back the same answer every time. The fault is with the crews, not the torpedo, the men. Nimttz had read every one of those reports.
He had been one of those men inside those boats in those waters before most of the officers now filing those reports had finished school. And for 21 months he had pushed the system in every way available to him and gotten partial answers to a problem that kept putting sailors on the bottom and letting Japanese ships go.
So he fired the torpedoes into the cliff. What he found and what he did with it is a story that does not appear in most history books. Not because it isn’t important, because it went right. And history as a rule remembers the things that went wrong. If this is the kind of story you think more Americans should find, hit the like button.
It costs you nothing. It tells the algorithm this history is worth putting in front of people. And then stay with me because what comes next is the part nobody talks about. July 7th, 1908. Bangas Harbor, the Philippines. Enson Chester Nimttz runs the destroyer USS Decar ground on a mudbank. He had not checked the tide tables.
The ship sits on the bottom overnight. A small steamer pulls her free the next morning. No one is killed. The damage is minor. The Navy convenes a court marshal. Nimttz is found guilty of neglect of duty. He receives a letter of reprimand. At 23 years old, his career is already carrying a weight that most young officers never have to lift.
Washington sends him to submarines. In 1908, that is not where the Navy sends its rising stars. The boats are called pigboats, cramped, loud wreaking of gasoline fumes in sealed metal hulls. They run on engines that demand constant attention and reward inattention with casualties. They dive to depths that compress the hull in ways you can hear.
The officers who command them are not, as a rule, the officers the Navy is grooming for Admiral. Assignment to submarine duty is where the Navy parks officers it isn’t sure what to do with. Nimttz accepts the assignment without a word of complaint. In January 1909, he reports to the first submarine flotilla.
By May, he has command of USS Plunger, a boat so primitive the crew sometimes breathes fumes when the engine floods the hull. He does not treat it as a punishment. He treats it as an education. He studies the machinery until he understands it better than the men who built it. He converts his boats from gasoline engines to diesel, cleaner, more reliable, less likely to kill his crew with fumes or fire.
He writes papers on submarine tactics that the Naval War College files and largely ignores. In 1912, he stands before the officers at the Naval War College and gives a lecture on submarine warfare. Most of those officers to consider submarine warfare a curiosity at best. a distraction from the real navy, the battleships, the gun lines, the fleet engagements that naval doctrine has been built around for a hundred years.
Nimttz is not confused about what submarines can do. He has spent 3 years inside them. He has watched what happens when a boat can move unseen beneath the surface, surface, fire, and disappear before anyone above the waterline knows where the shot came from. He understands something that will not become obvious to the rest of the Navy for another 30 years.
An empire that depends on shipping, on oil and ore, and food and steel moving across thousands of miles of open ocean has a throat, and submarines are the hand that closes around it. December 31, 1941. Pearl Harbor, 8 in the morning. The change of command ceremony for commanderin-chief of the United States Pacific Fleet does not take place on the deck of a battleship because there is is no undamaged battleship available at Pearl Harbor.
The USS Arizona is 27 ft below the surface of the harbor. The Oklahoma has capsized and has not been writed. the West Virginia, the California, the Nevada, all sunk or beached in the 24 hours that ended Sunday morning, December 7th. The ceremony takes place on the deck of USS Graing, a submarine, SS 209. Nimttz later told people he assumed command aboard a submarine because the Japanese attack had left no other deck available.
That may be true. He steps off the launch onto the dock. The harbor is still black with oil, not metaphorically, but literally. The fuel from the ships that burned in the first hours of December 7th has spread across the surface and sits there thick and dark between the sunken hulls. The officers waiting on the dock are not smiling.
They know what the fleet looks like now. They know what is left. Three carriers at sea, a handful of cruisers, a submarine force that has not yet fired a single torpedo in anger against the Navy that did this. Snimmitz looks at the wreckage. He looks at the Arizona where she went down. He looks at the Oklahoma, her hull still showing above the waterline, men still somewhere inside her. He flub time.
Then he turns to his staff. Get to work, he says. He does not go to the battleships first. Does not walk the airfields. Does not tour the command bunkers or the fuel depots or the dry docks. Still working around the clock to pull ships off the bottom. He goes to the submarine base. He walks through the boats the way a man walks through a house he grew up in.
With a knowledge that is in the hands and the feet, not just the head. He knows every sound these hulls make. He knows what the gauges mean when they read wrong. He knows the smell of a boat that is ready and the smell of one that is not. The officer accompanying him has spent his career on surface ships.
He watches the new commander in chief move through the submarine and understands without being told that this man has been here before. On December 7th, 1941, the same day the bombs fell, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark had issued the order for unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan.
Every Japanese vessel on the Pacific Ocean was a legitimate target. No warning required. Nimttz inherits that order. He makes it the spine of everything he does. The submarines go to sea. The first patrol reports come back within weeks and they all say the same thing. The torpedoes are not working. There is a phrase the United States Navy uses.
Four words: overdue and presumed lost. It appears on a standard form, a bureaucratic phrase, clean and precise, designed to describe a specific administrative condition. A submarine departs on patrol. It does not return. Radio contact is attempted. No response. More attempts. Still nothing. Enough days pass that silence becomes its own answer. The boat is gone.
The men are gone. Nobody knows exactly where. Nobody knows exactly when. Nobody knows what the last hour looked like. Chester Nimtt signed those forms. He did not have an aid initial on his behalf. He did not delegate the paperwork to a subordinate and move on. He signed them because he knew in a way that most of the men who held his rank did not know could not know exactly what those four words described from the inside.
He had been below periscope depth. He had heard the sounds a pressure hull makes when it goes deep. The creek of metal under compression, the way the frame settles, the small adjustments of a boat finding its trim in cold water. He had stood in a control room when the boat went quiet, and every man stopped what he was doing and watched the gauges and waited, waiting to find out whether the next sound would be water coming in or the signal to surface. He knew that silence.
he had lived in it. And 30 years later, sitting at a desk at Pearl Harbor, reading a form that said a boat and its crew would not be coming back. He knew precisely what that silence looked like at its end. February 11, 1943. USS Grampus SS 207 departs Brisbane War Patrol. She is not a green boat. She has been out five times already.
She has sunk Japanese shipping. She has survived depth charge attacks. Her crew of 71 men knows the work. Somewhere in the waters near the Solomon Islands, she disappears. No distress call, no survivors, no wreckage ever found. On March 22nd, 1943, after radio messages go unanswered for weeks, the Navy lists USS Grampus as overdue and presumed lost with all hands. All hands. 71 men.
Nimtt signs the form. He does not know if they were sunk by a Japanese destroyer. He does not know if it was depth charges or a mine or something mechanical that failed in water, nobody could reach. What he knows is the number 71. And he knows that on every one of the patrols USS Grampus ran, every dive, every approach, every shot taken through a periscope.
Her crew carried the Mark1 14 torpedo. Grampus is not the exception. In 1942 alone, the Pacific submarine force loses seven boats. Seven times Nimmits signs the form. Some of them are sunk by Japanese destroyers. Some by depth charges in waters they were ordered into. Some vanish without a witness to record what happened in the final hours.
And on every patrol, every one of those crews ran. They carried the same weapon. In all of 1942, American submarines fire 1,442 torpedoes across the Pacific. Postwar analysis of Japanese records. The actual accounting done after the war ended from Japanese documents of what Japanese ships actually went down finds 109 ships sunk. 109 ships from 1442 torpedoes.
In a war being run at Nimitz’s direction as a campaign to cut the supply lines that kept Japan alive, Nimitz reads those numbers. He also reads the Bureau of Ordinances response to every complaint filed through proper channels by submarine commanders who came back from patrol and put the evidence in writing.
The bureau’s answer does not change. Not after the first complaint. Not after the 10th. Not after the hundth. The fault lies with the crews, not the torpedo. The men. He is a former submariner reading a report that tells him the men in those boats are the problem. He had been one of those men. He had trained alongside them. He had worked the same machinery, run the same approaches, lived in the same sealed world below the surface.
He knew what those men were. He knows what that answer is worth. He does not say publicly what he thinks of it. There is a particular kind of weight and not yet having the proof that forces it to stop. Nimttz carries that weight to his desk every morning. Some mornings there is a new form waiting. He signs it and he goes to work. Spring 1942.
Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood is commanding submarines in the Southwest Pacific based in Fremantle, Australia. His commanders are telling him the torpedoes run too deep. He asks the Bureau of Ordinance to investigate. The Bureau says the torpedo runs exactly where it is set. Lockwood decides to find out for himself.
What he does next costs a career if it goes wrong. He commisss his own test. Without Bureau of Ordinance approval, without authorization from Washington, June 20, 1942, King George Sound, Southern Australia, a fishnet is strung below the surface at a measured depth. USS Skipjack fires Mark1 14 torpedoes set to run at 10 ft.
The holes in the net are at 25 ft, not 10 ft. 25. Lockwood reports his findings to the Bureau of Ordinance. The bureau disagrees. He repeats the test. Same result. He reports that the Mark1 14 is running 11 ft deeper than its depth setting and formally requests that the bureau conduct its own equivalent tests. The Bureau resists.
Lockwood takes his findings to Admiral King. Chief of Naval Operations in Washington. The man above every admiral in the United States Navy. King, in the words of one historian, lit a blowtorrch under the Bureau of Ordinance. August 1, 1942. The Bureau of Ordinance officially concedes, “The Mark1 14 runs deep. Its depth control mechanism was in their own words. Here is what had happened.
During a warhead redesign years before the war, engineers had moved the torpedo’s pressure sensor, the device that measured depth and controlled the weapon’s course from the nose to a position near the tail. At the tail, as the torpedo moved through the water at speed, the sensor sat inside a pocket of reduced pressure created by the weapon’s own movement.
That pocket told the sensor the torpedo was running shallower than it actually was. So, the guidance mechanism automatically drove the weapon deeper. A torpedo set to run as 15 ft was passing beneath its target at 25 to 26 ft. By this point in the war, more than 800 Mark1 14 torpedoes have already been fired in the Pacific.
The fix, a corrected pressure mechanism, is ordered. Nimmits watches the numbers. They improve. They do not change enough. The Mark 14 torpedo carries two separate detonation systems. The first is contact. The torpedo strikes the hull. The impact triggers the detonator. The warhead explodes. The second is magnetic.
It is called the Mark 6’s exploder. It works like this. As the torpedo passes beneath a steel ship, it senses the change in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by the mass of metal above it. At the right moment, it fires. The warhead detonates not against the hull, but beneath the keel. A hull explosion tears a hole in the side of a ship. A keel explosion breaks the spine.
Ships hit beneath the keel don’t flood. They break in half and go down in minutes. In theory, the Mark 6 is the most devastating torpedo detonator any Navy has ever put to sea. In practice, in the Pacific at tropical latitudes thousands of miles from the magnetic poles, the Earth’s magnetic field is weaker than the conditions the Mark 6 was calibrated for.
The mechanism fires early, a premature explosion in open water, far from the hull, loud enough to warn every destroyer within five miles, accomplishing nothing. Or it does not fire at all. Submarine commanders have already begun disabling the magnetic feature themselves. without orders, without telling anyone above them in the chain of command.
They reason correctly that a contact hit that has a chance of working is worth more than a magnetic detonation that will almost certainly not. The first submarine commander to do this was Captain Terrell Jacobs of USS Sargo on the first war patrol of the entire Pacific War in December 1941. He disabled the Mark 6 on his own authority.
He got into, as Navy records put it, considerable difficulty for doing so. The men who went around the system were punished for being right. By 1943, what had been an unofficial practice has spread across the submarine force. Nimttz finds out. He does not discipline the commanders who went outside proper procedure.
He reads their patrol reports. He understands their reasoning. On June 24th, 1943, as Sinkpack, commander-in-chief of the entire Pacific Fleet, Nimmits issues a direct order, deactivate all magnetic exploders on all Pacific Fleet submarines. The Bureau of Ordinance sends a response. It asks why. Limits replies in one sentence.
His decision is final. The Bureau notes its disagreement on the record. The order stands and still the duds continue. Two defects, two fixes, 20 months of war, and every week submarines depart Pearl Harbor carrying weapons that may or may not fire. And every few weeks, one of them does not come back.
Nimttz is not the kind of man who slams his fist on the table. He is not the kind of man who fires off angry cables to Washington or calls press conferences to publicly humiliate the Bureau of Ordinance. He has been doing this the right way through proper channels with documented evidence, building a record that no one in Washington can dismiss.
And the right way has given him two partial fixes and a war that is still being fought with a weapon he cannot fully trust. July 24th, 1943. USS Tanosa, Philippine Sea. Lieutenant Commander Dan Daspit is at the periscope. In the crosshairs, the Tanan Maru number three, Japanese fleet tanker, 19,000 tons.
One of the largest tankers in the Imperial Japanese Navy. No escort, not zigzagging, making 13 knots in open water, loaded with fuel, moving from Palao to truck. Tanosa had been alerted to the tanker’s position by codereakers. Daspit has been running toward her since before dawn. He closes to firing range, sets up the approach, runs the calculations.
He fires his first spread of four torpedoes. The son hears them running true. Four hits, zero explosions. The tanker turns away and increases speed. Daspit turns in pursuit. A nighttime chase. hours of maneuvering. By the time he gets back into position, it is the following morning. This time coming at the tanker from the starboard quarter, an awkward angle, not textbook.
He fires two torpedoes. Both hit. Both explode. The Tonan Maru takes the hits in the engine room. She coasts to a stop. She settles by the stern. She is not sinking. Daspit now has her exactly where every submarine commander trains for. A stationary target, pointblank range, perfect attack position. 90° off the beam, he fires one torpedo.
He moves Tanosa to the other side. Repositions fires again. Silence. Again, silence. Between each shot, his torpedo men pull the next weapon from the rack and inspect it end to end. Every torpedo declared in perfect working order before it enters the tube. Daspit fires. The torpedo runs straight. The soundman calls the track as normal.
The impact is clean. Silence. He fires again. Silence. He fires again. The torpedo hits the hull, glances off to the right, jumps clear of the water 100 ft from the tanker’s stern. And Daspit writes in his log. I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this. He fires again. Silence. He fires again. Silence. A destroyer appears on the horizon bearing toward them.
Daspit fires two more stern shots as Tanosa dives. Both hit. Neither explodes. 15 torpedoes. 13 hits. Two explosions. Both fired at awkward angles during the nighttime chase before he had the perfect position. Every torpedo fired from the ideal angle, silence. One torpedo remains in Tanosa’s racks. Daspit does not fire it.
He orders the torpedo secured. He orders Tanosa to turn around. He sets a course for Pearl Harbor, 2400 m away. He is not returning to rearm. He is returning with something no submarine commander has ever brought back before. a torpedo that hit its target and did not explode. And a patrol report documenting 13 hits and 11 detonation failures.
Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood is at Pearl Harbor when Tinosa arrives. He goes to the dock. He expects to see a man in a rage. 19,000 ton tankers, he later writes, do not grow on trees. Daspit is almost silent. He hands Lockwood the patrol report and says almost nothing. The last torpedo, the one brought back from the Philippine Sea, is taken to the torpedo shop at the submarine base and completely disassembled by the base technicians.
Their finding it is in perfect working order. A torpedo the shop certifies as combat ready. A patrol report documenting 13 hits and 11 detonation failures. The gap between those two facts is this question the Bureau of Ordinance has never answered because they have never asked it. The Mark14 torpedo entered production in 1930.
The Great Depression had gutted the Navy’s development budget. The engineers who built it could not afford to fire live weapons at actual targets. Every test before the war used reduced speed runs, practice warheads, controlled conditions designed to protect expensive equipment, not to simulate what happens when 3,000 lb of torpedo traveling at 46 knots strikes a steel hull headon.
No live fire test, not one, not in 13 years of production. Nobody had looked. Lockwood calls in Commander Charles Momson. His suggestion is simple. Take torpedoes out to Cahuli Island. Fire them at the underwater cliff face at full speed. Whatever doesn’t explode, send divers down to recover. Bring the duds back to the torpedo shop. Cut them open.
Find out what happens at the moment of impact. Lockwood agrees. Limits approves. USS Muskillunge is assigned to the test. August 31, 1943. Cahulawi Island, Hawaii. Muscalunge positions off the cliff face. The first torpedoes are fired. Some explode, some do not. Divers go down. They bring up the duds.
Simultaneously at the submarine torpedo shop, a second test is running. Torpedoes loaded with dummy warheads are dropped from a crane 90 ft above a steel plate. A height chosen because the velocity at impact matches the torpedo’s running speed of 46 knots. The plate is set at different angles when it is perpendicular to the drop.
A perfect 90° impact. The textbook shot the attack position every submarine commander trains for. 70% of the exploders fail to fire. 70%. The results from the cliff test confirm it. The answer is in the firing pin. When the torpedo strikes a hull headon at full speed, the deceleration force is greater than the firing pin mechanism was designed to absorb the guide rods that direct the pin toward the primer distort under the impact load.
The pin cannot travel far enough, fast enough to strike the cap with sufficient force. The detonator does not fire. And here is what the test confirms about every patrol report the Bureau of Ordinance had spent 21 months dismissing. The two torpedoes Daspit fired during the nighttime chase. The two that exploded were fired at oblique angles under pressure, not quite the textbook position.
Imperfect impacts those detonated. Every subsequent torpedo fired from the ideal position at perfect 90deree right angles after the tanker was dead in the water and Daspit had all the time he needed. Did not. The better the shot, the more likely the dud. For 21 months, every submarine commander who came back from patrol and reported that his torpedoes had hit their targets and failed to detonate had been filing without knowing it proof of exactly this.
The fix does not come from the Bureau of Ordinance. No team of engineers arrives from Washington. No project is launched with Navy Department resources. No official program is funded or announced. The torpedo shop at Pearl Harbor Naval Submarine Base redesigns the firing pin. The steel firing pin blocks are replaced with aluminum alloy, lighter, stronger under impact, fast enough to strike the primer before the force of the blow can distort the mechanism.
The aluminum comes partly from Japanese aircraft shot down over Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7th, 1941. Metal salvaged from the wreckage of the attack, melted down, recast, machined into the component that finally makes the weapon work. The metal from the planes that started the war goes into the torpedo that helps end it.
Lockwood inspects every rebuilt explos before it is installed in a weapon. He will not send another submarine to sea with a torpedo he has not personally verified. September 1943, 21 months after USSO fired 13 torpedoes on her first war patrol and watched every one of them fail. American submarines leave Pearl Harbor with torpedoes that work.
What happens in the next 18 months is what Nimtts had bet everything on from the first week finally actually happening. American submarines sink more than,00 Japanese merchant ships in the final 18 months of the war. Japan’s oil imports to the home islands collapse from 1.75 million barrels per month to near zero by late 1944. Japanese pilots complete their flight training.
They sit on airfields across the Western Pacific. They cannot fly. There is no aviation fuel. Japanese warships are finished in the yards at Kare. They sit at anchor in harbor. There is no oil to put in their engines. The factories house producing artillery shells and aircraft parts slow and slow again. The raw materials that fed them no longer arriving.
The freighters carrying them no longer crossing the ocean. The ocean no longer safe for the ships that Japan’s empire had always assumed would be there. By 1945, Japan’s foreign trade has declined by more than 60%. The decisive naval battle that Japan spent 20 years planning. The single afternoon that would shatter American will and force a negotiated peace never comes.
Nimttz never gave them the conditions for it. The weapon he had counted on from the first week was finally doing what he knew it could do. Two years late. September 2nd, 1945. Tokyo Bay, the USS Missouri sits at anchor. General Douglas MacArthur stands at the microphone on the forward deck. He speaks for 4 minutes.
He describes what this moment means to civilization, to freedom, to the generations that will follow. When he finishes, the Japanese delegation steps forward and signs the documents on the table. Then it is Nimitz’s turn. He steps to the table. He signs with one pen. He steps back. A yman hands him the pen afterward.
He puts it in his pocket. One of the correspondents present writes that evening that Nimmitent signed and withdrew so quickly. It was easy to miss that he had been there at all. In the weeks that follow these the newspapers fill with photographs and retrospectives. MacArthur is named Supreme Commander for Japan. Holly gives interviews.
Spruants is profiled in several magazines. Nimttz flies back to Pearl Harbor. He has one task remaining. He writes his final report on the Pacific War, several hundred pages. Every major campaign from December 1941 to August 1945. He names the decisions that were correct. He names the operations that succeeded and explains why. He notes the failures.
He does not name the individuals responsible for them. He submits it to the Navy Department. It receives no press coverage. There is a number that doesn’t appear in that report. Not because Nimmits does not know it, because of some numbers resist being written down cleanly in a document that will be filed and archived and read by strangers who were not there.
52 American submarines were lost in the Pacific War. 52 boats, 374 officers, 3,131 enlisted men, 3,5 total, the highest loss rate of any branch of the United States armed forces. 22% of all men who served on war patrols did not come home. Some were sunk by Japanese destroyers, some by depth charges in waters they had been ordered into, some hit mines they could not see.
Some disappeared in circumstances that left no witness and no answer. And some of them, we will never know exactly how many, went to sea, carrying a Mark14 torpedo that the Bureau of Ordinance had certified as reliable, fired it at a target, and heard silence. Nimmits knew the difference between those deaths.
He had signed the forms, overdue and presumed lost. He signed them for 21 months, while the Bureau of Ordinance answered every complaint from his submarine commanders the same way. The fault lies with the crews. He never said publicly what he thought of that answer. He fired the torpedoes into the cliff. found in days what Washington had not found in 13 years of producing the weapon, fixed it with a torpedo shop at Pearl Harbor and aluminum salvaged from Japanese aircraft that had come over on a Sunday morning in December and went
back to work. Chester Nimttz died on February 20th, 1966. He was 80 years old. He died at his quarters on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay. the same Navy that had been his home for 60 years, providing the rooms where he spent his last years. He was buried at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.
The men buried beside him were not selected by protocol, not by rank, not by proximity to his fame. They were Raymond Spruants, Richmond Kelly Turner, Charles Lockwood, the man who had fought the Bureau of Ordinance from a desk at Pearl Harbor, who had fired torpedoes into a cliff because Washington wouldn’t, who had rebuilt the weapon from the torpedo shop up, buried beside the man who sent those submarines to sea and signed the forms for the ones that didn’t come back.
They had arranged it while they were still alive. No announcement, no ceremony organized for cameras, just the men who had done the work together in the ground the way they had always preferred to operate. Out of the spotlight, getting on with it. If your father served on a submarine in the Pacific, or your grandfather, I want to ask you something.
Did he tell you about it? The men of that generation, as a rule, did not. Not at dinner. not in the living room on Sunday afternoon, not in the ordinary language of of a life that had moved forward from what they had been through. But some of them talked late at night to a wife in a car on a long drive to a son who didn’t ask the right question until it was almost too late.
In the last years of a life, when the things they had never said started finding their way out, maybe he told you the name of his boat. Maybe he mentioned a patrol once, just once, and then went quiet and didn’t explain. Maybe you found something after he was gone. A photograph, a service record, a patch from a boat whose history you never knew.
If you have one of those stories, even a fragment, even something you only half remember, write it in the comments. the name of the boat, the year he served, whatever, you know, because those men went to sea with weapons that didn’t work. And they went back out anyway. The stories they carried home, the ones that never made a newspaper, never appeared in any history book, told once at a kitchen table to people who loved them and didn’t fully understand what they were hearing.
Those stories are part of how this war was won. Don’t let them disappear.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
