May 22nd, 1944, 3:40 in the morning. The Pacific Ocean north of the Admiral Ty Islands is black, warm, and absolutely silent. Aboard a Japanese submarine designated RO106. 56 men are doing what they have done every night for 3 weeks. They are waiting. They are part of an invisible fence of seven submarines stretched across one of the most heavily traveled American naval routes in the Pacific.

They have been placed there by Vice Admiral Aada Noru of the Sixth Fleet to ambush the next American carrier task force that comes through. Their orders are simple. Watch. Report. Sink. Anything worth sinking. Above all, do not be seen. These men are not amateurs. The captain has seven years in submarines.

The crew has trained for this kind of patrol since before the war. Their boat carries the Type 95 torpedo, a weapon so far ahead of the American Mark1 14 that it isn’t really a fair comparison. It runs on pure oxygen, leaves almost no wake, travels nearly twice as far as the American counterpart, and carries half again the warhead.

In a fair fight on the surface, the men of RO106 should win. This will not be a fair fight. At 3:50 in the morning, somewhere out in the dark beyond visual range, an American destroyer escort named USS George catches the slightest blip on her radar screen. She turns toward it. By 4:15, the Americans have dropped a pattern of small contactfused bombs into the sea ahead of them. They miss.

RO106 dives. The Japanese captain does what every submarine captain in the world has been trained to do. He goes deep. goes silent and waits for the storm of explosions to pass overhead. That is how you survive a destroyer attack. That is how it has always worked. The storm of explosions never comes.

At 5:00 in the morning, a second American ship called USS England, one she did not see, one her captain did not even know was there, drops 24 small bombs in a perfect circle around her 300 ft down. There is no warning. There’s no rolling barrage of depth charges. There’s just a series of muffled detonations from somewhere very close and then a great cracking sound as the pressure hole gives way.

By sunrise, there is an oil slick on the surface. The crew of the England recover scraps of insulation and a few human remains. 56 men are gone. That submarine was the first. Over the next 12 days, USS England will sink five more. six Japanese submarines in 12 days by a single ship, a record that has never been broken in the 80 years since.

But to understand how four small American destroyer escorts annihilated an entire elite squadron of one of the most respected submarine forces on Earth, we have to go back back to a moment when it was the Americans who were the amateurs. Back to the bitter, embarrassing winter of 1942 when American depth charges bounced harmlessly off Japanese hulls and Japanese torpedoes were sinking American carriers off the Solomon Islands.

Back to the question that this entire video is built around. How did a country that started the war unable to find a Japanese submarine end the war with the most lethal anti-ubmarine system ever built? Because the answer is not what you think. The answer has nothing to do with bigger guns or faster ships. The answer is something the Imperial Japanese Navy saw coming and refused to believe was real. Part one.

Before we get to the kill, we have to understand the killer’s reputation. And the reputation of the Imperial Japanese Submarine Force in 1941 was not just good. It was by several honest measurements the most technically advanced underwater fleet on the planet. Picture the Japanese submarine armed the way American naval officers actually saw it before Pearl Harbor.

Long range oceangoing boats, crews handpicked from across the entire Imperial Navy. Volunteer service, years of training. A culture that treated submarine duty as the assignment of an elite within an elite. The boats themselves were monsters. Some Japanese fleet submarines could travel 20,000 nautical miles without refueling.

American fleet boats could not match that range. German Ubot could not match it either. The largest Japanese submarines of the war. The R400 class were over 400 ft long and could carry three folding wing bombers in a watertight hanger built into the deck. They were the largest submarines built anywhere in the world until the nuclear ballistic missile boats of the 1960s and the torpedo.

The type 95 was a development of the surface launch type 93. the weapon Western sailors would later nickname the long lance. It used compressed pure oxygen as its oxidizer instead of compressed air. That meant no nitrogen exhaust, which meant almost no bubble trail in the water. It meant a range of around 9 km at high speed where the contemporary American Mark1 14 could barely manage four.

It meant a warhead of more than 400 kg. It meant that when a Japanese submarine fired at you, the first thing you knew about it was usually the explosion. In the first eight months of the war, those torpedoes did exactly what they were designed to do. On September 15th, 1942, a Japanese submarine called I19, commanded by Takayichi Kinashi, cited an American task force escorting reinforcements to Guadal Canal.

He fired a single spread of six torpedoes. One spread, six torpedoes. The aircraft carrier USS Wasp took three of them and sank. Another torpedo from that same spread after running for several more minutes in a straight line, struck the battleship USS North Carolina. Yet another struck the destroyer USS O’Brien, which would later break in half and sink while trying to limp home.

A single salvo, three American warships destroyed or doomed, including a fleet carrier. It is still considered by many naval historians the single most effective torpedo attack in the history of warfare. Think about that for a moment. One submarine, one spread. Three warships. One of them a fleet carrier the United States could not easily replace.

If you had read that report in late 1942 sitting in an office at the Navy Department in Washington, you would have been forgiven for thinking the Japanese submarine arm was about to win the war by itself. It wasn’t just the Wasp. Earlier that same year in June, a Japanese submarine called I168 had slipped through the screen at the Battle of Midway and put a torpedo into the already crippled carrier USS Yorktown, finishing her off.

A few weeks earlier, the carrier USS Saratoga had been damaged by a Japanese submarine torpedo and sent home for months of repairs. The Japanese submarine force in 1942 was sinking American carriers at a rate that if it had continued would have stripped the Pacific fleet of its striking power before American shipyards could replace what was being lost.

Now imagine you are a young American officer at a desk in Washington reading these reports. You look at the casualty list. You look at the tonnage. You look at the training reports from your own destroyer crews who say they cannot find these submarines. Cannot kill them when they do find them.

Cannot even reliably tell when their own depth understand something cold and you are losing a war you did not yet know was. Here’s the part most people skip over. The Japanese submarine force was not just well equipped. It was philosophically committed to what its officers genuinely believed was the correct way to fight. That doctrine had a name, the decisive battle.

Imperial Japanese naval thought going back to the great victory over the Russian fleet at Tsushima in 1905 was built around one idea. Wars between major navies are decided by one massive engagement between battle lines. Everything you do before that engagement is preparation. Submarines are scouts. Submarines are ambushers. Submarines find the enemy fleet and wear it down before the great surface battle decides everything.

That is why when the German naval attaches in Tokyo, Captain Paul Wker suggested politely in 1942 that maybe Japanese submarines could go after American merchant shipping the way German Ubot were going after British merchants in the Atlantic. The Japanese declined politely, firmly. Submarines were warships. Warships hunted warships. Hunting cargo ships was something you did when you had nothing better to do.

Remember that detail. It is going to come back as the single most important strategic mistake of the entire Pacific submarine war. Because here is the brutal mathematics. In the entire war, Japanese submarines sank by most estimates around 1 million tons of Allied merchant shipping. American submarines fighting against an enemy with much weaker anti-ubmarine capabilities sank over 5 million tons of Japanese merchant shipping.

German yubot sank 14 million tons in the Atlantic. The Japanese submarine force with its superb boats and elite crews and miraculous torpedoes finished the war as the least productive of the three major submarine forces in terms of tonnage sunk. But they did one thing extraordinarily well in 1942. They sank warships.

They terrified American admirals. And they convinced themselves that the formula was working. And while they were convincing themselves on the other side of the Pacific in a series of small, dirty, miserable training camps in Florida and the Caribbean, the United States Navy was beginning to build something that would within 24 months render the entire elite Japanese submarine force not just defeated, but irrelevant.

The first hint of what was coming arrived in the form of a phone call. A British liaison officer to the United States Navy in early 1942 asked if he could come and demonstrate a piece of equipment his country had developed. The Americans agreed. The demonstration changed the war. But the device the British brought with them was not the answer.

It was only the first ingredient. And the Americans watching it in operation understood almost immediately that what they actually needed was something much bigger, much more systematic, and much harder to build. They had less than a year to build it. And in that year, the Japanese submarine force was still sinking American ships. Part two.

To understand what changed, you have to first understand how bad it was. In the first six months of the Pacific War, the United States Navy’s anti-ubmarine capability was, to use the technical term, embarrassing. American destroyers in late 1941 and early 1942 carried sonar that worked more or less in calm water at slow speeds.

They carried depth charges left over from the First World War with fuses that had been designed 20 years earlier. They carried no forward-firing anti-ubmarine weapons of any kind. Their tactics were the tactics they had been taught in peacetime exercises where the targets were friendly American submarines whose captains had been told in advance where to be against a real Japanese submarine in a real ocean with a real captain who had every intention of staying alive.

These tactics were nearly useless. There’s a story from this period that captures the whole situation. On October 11th, 1942, a Japanese submarine called I176 attacked the heavy cruiser USS Chester near the Solomons. One torpedo hit. 11 American sailors died. The cruiser was knocked out of the war for nearly a year and the screening destroyers spent the rest of the day searching for the submarine that had done it.

They never found her. I176 simply sat on the bottom for a few hours, then crept away into the dark. The American screen had every advantage of numbers, every advantage of position, every advantage of technology, and they had never come close to her. The problem was not that the Americans were stupid. The problem was that they had been preparing throughout the entire inter war period for the wrong kind of war.

The US Navy had spent two decades building battleships and the doctrines to use them. Anti-ubmarine warfare was an afterthought. The men who specialized in it were considered gently a backwater. There were no real schools, no real fleet exercises, no real institutional commitment to learning the craft.

In December 1941, the entire combined hunter killer doctrine of the United States Navy could have been written on the back of a postcard. Then came the British. In early 1942, with the Battle of the Atlantic at its worst, the Royal Navy was bleeding ships at a rate that was going to lose Britain the war if it did not stop.

They had spent two years developing tools and techniques against the German Yubot threat. Some of those tools were inelegant, some of them were brilliant, and one of them in particular was about to be the foundation of everything the Americans built next. It was called Hedgehog. Try to picture this. A standard depth charge is a barrel of high explosive that you roll off the back of your ship into the wake.

It sinks. It detonates at a preset depth. Your sonar goes deaf for several minutes because of the noise. If your aim was wrong, the submarine you were hunting now knows exactly where you are, exactly where you are aiming, and exactly which direction to run. Worse, the dead zone created by the depth charge means you cannot track him while he runs.

Standard British wartime data showed that on average, it took something like 60 depth charge attacks to kill one submarine. 60. Hedgehog was different. It was a forwardfiring spigot mortar that threw 24 small contactfused bombs in a roughly circular pattern about 250 yards ahead of the ship.

The bombs were small enough that they only detonated if they hit something. If they missed, there was no underwater explosion. If there was no explosion, the sonar stayed alive. If the sonar stayed alive, you could keep tracking. If you kept tracking, you could attack again immediately from the same approach. And if any of the 24 bombs hit, the contact fuse meant a kill, not a near miss.

Hedgehog kill ratios in actual combat eventually came in at around one submarine destroyed for every six attacks. One in six instead of 1 in 60. a t-fold improvement in lethality from a single weapon system. But hedgehog by itself was not the answer. The British had hedgehog and they were still losing ships in 1942. The hedgehog was the gun.

The Americans needed to build the eyes, the brain, and the hands as well. Start with the eyes. By the middle of 1942, American destroyer escorts coming off the production lines at 16 different shipyards were being equipped with three different sensor systems that worked together in a way no German hubot captain and no Japanese sub captain had ever experienced.

There was the SL surface search radar mounted high on the mast which could detect a surface submarine at night in fog in any weather. There was an improved sonar set that worked at higher search speeds and better depths. And there was a system called HF/DF, pronounced Huffduff, which detected radio transmissions from submarines and triangulated their positions from multiple ships at once.

A Japanese subcaptain in 1942 believed that if he stayed under at night and only used his radio briefly, he was invisible. He was operating on the assumptions of the entire previous generation of submarine warfare. He did not know that an American destroyer escort 15 miles away could pick up his radar emissions, his radio transmissions, and the bow wakeake of his conning tower on three different sensors simultaneously.

He thought he was hidden. He was lit up like a stage actor. Now the brain below decks on every American destroyer escort was a small dim red lit room that the Navy called the combat information center. The CIC had not existed before the war in any meaningful form. It was an institutional invention born from the realization that no single human being could hold all the inputs of modern combat in his head at once.

Inside the CIC, sailors plotted contacts on transparent tables, talked to the sonar room, talked to the radar room, talked to the bridge, and turned a fog of separate data streams into a single picture of what was happening around the ship. Every contact had a track. Every track had a course and speed. Every move was recorded.

The CIC was a small, dim room full of grease pencils and headphones. And it was in functional terms the world’s first serial production combat data fusion center. And finally the hands, the men. Because none of this technology meant anything without crews who had been drilled into it until it was reflex. The US Navy built a school in Miami called the Submarine Chaser Training Center, and tens of thousands of officers and enlisted men cycled through it.

During the war, they drilled against real American submarines. They drilled at night in storms, in waves. They drilled until the moment a sonar contact appeared. Every man on the bridge, in the CIC, at the hedgehog launcher, in the engine room, at the depth charge racks, knew what his next four actions were without being told.

One of the men who passed through that school was a 26-year-old reserve officer from Birmingham, Alabama named John A. Williamson. He had wanted to be on a real combat ship. Instead, the Navy sent him to Miami to learn how to find and kill submarines. While he was there, frustrated, doing endless mock attacks against tame American boats in the Florida Straits, he developed a small piece of seammanship that became known as the Williamson turn.

It was a maneuver to bring a ship back over its own track to recover a man overboard. And it is still in use today in 2026 on every merchant ship and warship in the world. Remember that name, John Williamson. We are going to come back to him in the dark in 18 months. On the bridge of a Buckley class destroyer escort with 24 hedgehog rounds left in the launcher and a Japanese submarine somewhere below him in the Pacific.

Men like Williamson did not fight for glory. They fought because they had been told that something needed to be solved and they had decided they were going to solve it. They were teachers, salesmen, farmers, accountants who had been given a few months to learn one of the most difficult tactical problems in modern warfare.

Every like on this video is a small thing, but it keeps their names visible a little longer, and that matters. By the spring of 1943, all the pieces were in place. Hedgehog, radar, sonar, Huffduff, the CIC, the training pipeline. American shipyards were launching destroyer escorts at a pace that astonished foreign observers. By war’s end, around 450 of these ships had been built in eight different classes in just over two and a half years.

But pieces are not a system. A system is what happens when all the pieces fight together against a real enemy who is trying to kill you. And the system, the full system would not be tested against the Japanese submarine force until May of 1944 in the warm dark water north of the Admiral T Islands against an entire elite picket line that had no idea any of this had been built.

What the Japanese did not know was that the Americans had also broken something else. Something the Japanese were certain could not be broken. Part three. May 13th, 1944. a small secure room in Pearl Harbor that almost no one in the Pacific Fleet was even cleared to enter. It was called Fleet Radio Unit Pacific. The men inside were the descendants of the same codebreaking operation that had read the Japanese intentions before Midway 2 years earlier.

They had spent the morning working on a fresh intercept from Truck, the great Japanese fleet base in the Caroline Islands. The intercept was a routine logistics message. By the time the crypt analysts were done with it, they knew the following. A Japanese fleet submarine designated eyes of 16 had departed truck on May 14th.

She was carrying 75 pound waterproof rubber bags of rice. Her destination was Buin on the southern tip of Buganville where a Japanese army garrison had been bypassed by the American advance and was now slowly starving on its tropical island. I-16 was scheduled to arrive off Buin at 2200 hours on May 22nd. This is the moment. This is the crack in the world.

The Japanese submarine force, the elite garcader arm of the Imperial Navy, had been reduced by 1944 to running rice to abandoned soldiers on islands the rest of the war had passed by, and the Americans were reading the menu before the cook got there. The intercept was passed to commander Hamilton Haynes in charge of escort division 39 at Tagi in the Solomons.

Hannes had three Buckley class destroyer escorts available. USS George under Lieutenant Commander Fred Just, USS Rabby under Lieutenant Commander James Scott and USS England under Lieutenant Commander Walton B. Pendleton with a 30-something executive officer named Lieutenant John A. Williamson, handling the actual ship, handling during attacks.

England had been in the Pacific for 2 months. She had never killed anything. Her crew had drilled until they were sick of drilling. They had not yet been in combat. On the afternoon of May 18th, the three destroyer escorts left Pervvis Bay and steamed north to find a submarine that did not yet know it was being hunted.

The first contact came on May 19th. England’s sonar found something in the right place at the right time. Williamson took the con. The first attack run missed. The second missed. The third missed. The fourth missed. The Japanese captain, a veteran named Taikuchi Yoshitaka with nine war patrols behind him did something clever. He turned and followed in England’s own wake where her sonar’s blind spot was.

It was a textbook evasion against a textbook destroyer attack. But England was not running a textbook depth charge attack. She was running hedgehogs. And on the fifth approach, Williamson got the geometry right. 24 small bombs in a pattern off the bow. Four to six contact detonations from the depths.

Then a much larger underwater explosion that the sonarmen described later as the sound of something tearing itself in half. A bag of rice still in its waterproof rubber wrapping floated to the surface. I16 was gone. 107 men. The first kill. Now, here is what an honest historian has to admit.

After they recovered the bag of rice and confirmed the kill, the men of the England were proud. Then they were quiet. There is an account from Williamson himself recorded much later of a young sailor coming up to him in the passageway and asking how many Japanese had been on that boat and how he felt about what they had just done. Williamson said something about war being killed or be killed.

Then he kept walking. He wrote later that the cup of coffee he had been heading for did not taste the way he had imagined it would. This is not a triumphalist story. The men inside those Japanese submarines were sailors. They had families. Most of them had not chosen the war they were fighting.

The Americans who killed them knew this. It did not stop them. It did make the killing weigh on them. Both things are true. But the war was not done with England. The war was just starting with her. On May 20th, Pearl Harbor sent Hannes a second decrypt. It was bigger than the first. Vice Admiral Aada Noru, commander of the Sixth Fleet submarine forces, had ordered seven submarines from his seventh submarine squadron to form an underwater picket line north of the Admiral T Islands.

The line was 30 m long, stretched across a stretch of ocean. Admiral William Holsey’s third fleet had used as a transit route on two previous occasions. The seven boats were the RO104, RO105, RO106, RO108, RO109, RO112, and RO116. The Japanese expected an American carrier task force to pass through. They intended to ambush it.

The Americans intended to walk down the picket line and kill it. The next 12 days have no real parallel in the history of submarine warfare. Let me give you the timeline and then the human reality of what was actually happening. May 22nd, 3:50 in the morning, USS George catches a radar contact at extreme range. The submarine is R106.

She dives. England’s first hedgehog attack misses. Her second at 50:01 in the morning scores at least three hits. A great underwater explosion follows. By sunrise, the oil slick is enormous. 56 men. May 23rd, 6 in the morning. USS Rabby gets a contact. RO104. The two destroyer escorts, Rabbi and George, make at least eight hedgehog attacks over two hours.

They miss every time. The Japanese captain is good. He’s going deep, changing course, doing everything right. Then England moves in. Williamson takes the con. He misses on the first run. On the second at 8:34, the hedgehogs put 10 or 12 hits into RO104. Three minutes later, there’s a much larger explosion as the wreckage hits the bottom and her depth charges go off.

64 men. May 24th, 1:20 in the morning. George catches RO116 on radar. She dives. England moves in, makes one hedgehog attack at 214, scores three to five hits. The breakup noises come over the sonar with the strange almost organic sound that the sonarmen had begun to recognize. 56 men. The men of the England were starting to understand something.

The hands at the hedgehog launcher knew where the rounds were going to land before they fired. The sonmen knew the difference between rock and steel and water cavitation in a way that did not exist in any manual. The captain on the bridge knew almost intuitively when to fire and when to hold and reset. They were not lucky. They had become in three days the most effective anti-ubmarine team on the planet.

May 26th in the early morning hours. RO108 surfaced briefly and was caught by George’s radar. The picket line was being walked from one end to the other. England moved in for a rare surface engagement, lining up to use her 3-in guns. RO108 Dove. Williamson shifted to the hedgehog. He fired half of his remaining rounds.

From 250 ft down came a series of muffled thuds and then the unmistakable cracking of a pressure hull, 58 men. That was four submarines in five days by a single destroyer escort against an enemy that on paper had the better technology. On May 27th, Haynes pulled the squadron back to Manis Island and the Admiral Tees to refuel and rearm.

England was almost out of hedgehog rounds. The crew had been at General quarters for most of a week. They were holloweyed and silent. When they came alongside the supply ship, the dock workers stared at them. Word had already moved through the fleet. Four kills in 5 days. No one had ever heard of anything like it.

They went back out on May 28th. By now, the picket line had been reinforced. RO105 was still out there and Vice Admiral Aada had ordered her to come up to surface position. The Americans found her for about 30 hours between RO105 and the destroyer escorts. There was a fight that was closer than any of the others.

RO105 was commanded by Captain Ryanoske Inaba, the senior officer of the Japanese submarine division, and he fought his boat the way a man fights for his life. He survived 21 separate American attacks. He went deep. He changed course. He came up briefly between two American ships so that they couldn’t fire without hitting each other.

He was, by every honest measure, the best Japanese submarine captain to face Escort Division 39 during the entire engagement. And eventually, low on air, exhausted, he had to come up. England, which had been held back from the attack by the other ships, was finally given permission to attack. There’s an account of Hannes finally radioing across to the other destroyers.

More or less. Fine. You’ve had your shot. Let England take it. England closed in. Williamson took the con one more time. The hedgehogs went out. The breakup noises came back. R105 with all hands. That made six. Six confirmed Japanese submarines destroyed by USS England in 12 days between May 19th and May 31st, 1944.

Five of them killed by England alone and a sixth in concert with the other ships. It is a record that has never been equaled in the history of submarine warfare. The British, who had pioneered Hedgehog and built the most effective hunter killer groups in the Atlantic, never matched it. No American ship matched it. No Soviet ship in the Cold War, no nuclear submarine in any modern fleet has matched it.

When the message reached Pearl Harbor and then Washington, Admiral Ernest J. King, the chief of naval operations, sent back an order that has become legendary in the US Navy. There would always, he said, be in England in the United States Navy. The next ship to bear that name was commissioned in 1962 and served until 1994. But here’s the part that almost no one talks about.

The England’s 12 days were not on their own the thing that broke the Japanese submarine force. They were the most spectacular individual demonstration of a system that was already grinding the Japanese submarine arm into pieces all across the Pacific. In the same period of May and June 1944, of approximately 25 Japanese submarines deployed into the central Pacific, around 17 were sunk.

Twothirds of the deployed force lost in roughly six weeks. England got six of them. American hunter killer groups, escort carriers, patrol planes, and the entire intelligence apparatus that fed them targets got the rest. And the engine of that destruction, the thing that made all of it possible, was not the hedgehog. The hedgehog was the gun.

The thing that aimed it was something the Japanese Navy was certain could not be done. Part four. There’s a question that has hung in the background of this story since I started telling it. How did the Americans always seem to know where to look? How was it possible that USS England on her first Hunter killer cruise could leave port on May 18th, find I16 on May 19th, kill her, and then walk straight up the picket line of the seventh submarine squadron with the precision of a man reading a map? Luck does not produce six kills in 12 days.

Sonar does not produce six kills in 12 days. Hedgehog does not by itself produce six kills in 12 days. Something else was at work. That something else was the most consequential intelligence achievement of the entire Pacific War, and almost no one talks about it in the same breath as the destroyer war. The Imperial Japanese Navy’s main operational code was called JN25.

By 1944, American crypt analysts at Fleet Radio Unit Pacific in Hawaii and at OP 20G in Washington were reading it. Not always quickly enough, not always completely enough, but often enough and often within hours of the original transmission that the entire structure of Japanese submarine operations had become an open book.

When I-16 was ordered to deliver rice to Buen, the Americans read the order. When the seventh submarine squadron was ordered to form a picket line north of the Admiral Tes, the Americans read the order, the grid coordinates, the spacing, the boat numbers, the dates. The English language summary was on Commander Hayne’s desk in Tilagi within a day or two of the original Japanese transmission.

He didn’t have to find the picket line. He had been told where it was. This is the answer to the question the title of this video poses. The Americans terrified Japan’s elite submarine crews, not because of any single weapon. They terrified them because of an integrated system in which intelligence, sensors, weapons, and crews all fit together so tightly that the Japanese were no longer fighting a fair fight in the sense that they were no longer fighting blind opponents.

Every advantage they had, the long range torpedoes, the deep diving halls, the years of crew training was built around the assumption that the ocean was a place you could hide in. The Americans had quietly removed that assumption. There is an even darker layer to this. The Japanese submarines that were dying in 1944 were not, for the most part, the elite warship killers of 1942.

They were cargo carriers. Remember that detail I told you to remember about the Imperial Navy refusing to let its submarines hunt merchant ships? That refusal had a consequence. By late 1942, when the Japanese army needed somebody to keep its bypassed garrison supplied, the submarine force was the only Japanese asset with the range and concealment to do it.

So, Japanese submarines, the precious long range fleet boats with the elite crews and the long lance torpedoes, were stripped of their offensive missions and turned into underwater cargo trucks. Picture what that looked like to the men who had volunteered for submarine duty, expecting to fight aircraft carriers. You sail out of truck with your torpedo tubes loaded, but you’re not allowed to use them because your hold is full of 75pound rubber bags of rice, and your mission is to make a midnight delivery to a starving infantry company on a

coral island that the Americans bypassed eight months ago. You surface at night, you crawl into the lagoon, you offload the rice, you turn around, and you sneak back out. If you survive the crossing, you do it again. There’s no glory in this. There’s no fleet engagement waiting for you over the horizon.

There is just the slow, miserable, attritional reality of supporting an army that has lost. And the Americans knew exactly when you were coming. Now, think about what that meant for a Japanese submarine commander in 1944. The men of the elite submarine arm had been told for years that they were the spear point of the decisive battle.

They had been trained as ambushers, as scouts, as carrier killers. By the time they encountered USS England, most of their boats were running cargo. Their offensive capability had been politically reassigned to the wrong job. Their stealth was being penetrated by a code they did not know was broken. Their depth and silence.

The things their boats been designed for were now being matched by American crews who had been trained against living submarines for two solid years. It was not a fair contest. It had not been a fair contest for a while. They just did not know. There is a man whose story I want to tell here because numbers without people are not history.

His name was Captain Ryanoske Inaba. We met him a moment ago. He was the commanding officer of submarine division 51, an experienced officer, and he was personally aboard RO105 during the engagement at the end of May. According to American accounts and Japanese postwar records, Inaba fought his submarine for 30 hours against four destroyer escorts.

He survived 21 separate attacks. He used every trick in the doctrine. He went deep. He turned inside the American search patterns. He surfaced briefly between two of the American ships in such a way that they could not fire on him without hitting each other. He was almost certainly the most skillful Japanese submarine commander that the men of Escort Division 39 ever fought.

And in the end, with his batteries failing and his oxygen exhausted and his crew at the limits of human endurance, he had to come up. The hedgehogs found him. He died with all of his crew several hundred feet down in water that nobody on his boat had ever seen by daylight. He was not an amateur. He was not careless.

He was not betrayed by inferior equipment. He was killed by a system that he could not see. That is the difference between the Navy of 1942 and the Navy of 1944. The Navy of 1942 was outmatched by Japanese individual brilliance. The Navy of 1944 had built something against which Japanese individual brilliance was not enough. If your father or your grandfather served in the Pacific in the Second World War, in any branch, on any ship, on any island, I would consider it a real honor to read his story in the comments below.

What unit? What ship? What he saw if he ever talked about it. The official archives have most of the numbers. The numbers do not have the names. They do not have the small details that the men carried home and never wrote down. Those details deserve to be preserved. But while the Japanese were watching their elite force be destroyed off the Admiral Tes, something else was happening in the wider war that made everything that came before look like a warm-up.

Because the destroyer escorts and the codereers and the hedgehog and the CIC were not just killing the Japanese submarine force. They were strangling something much larger. And what they were strangling is the verdict at the heart of this entire story. Part five, the verdict. Here is the verdict.

Here’s the part where all the pieces come together. The popular memory of the Pacific submarine war remembers it as American boats versus Japanese merchants. That story is real. American submarines eventually equipped with working torpedoes and led by aggressive captains sank around 5 million tons of Japanese merchant shipping and effectively starve the Japanese home islands of the raw materials needed to keep the war economy alive.

By the summer of 1945, Japan was running out of oil, food, and steel. And the country that had begun the war by attacking Pearl Harbor with a fleet built on imported resources could no longer move those resources across its own shrinking empire. But the other half of that story almost never gets told.

The other half of the story is what the United States Navy was doing to the Japanese submarines that were trying to interfere. Because if Japan had used its submarine force the way the Germans used theirs, the way the Americans used theirs against merchant shipping, the supply lines that kept Australia in the war, that kept the Solomon’s campaign alive, that kept MacArthur’s army moving up the New Guinea coast, that kept the Pacific fleet fueled, those supply lines would have been horribly vulnerable.

The Japanese submarine force was big enough and good enough and wellarmed enough to have done enormous damage to that traffic. It did not because of doctrine. And the doctrine was wrong. And by the time the Japanese realized it was wrong, the American destroyer escort fleet had grown into a wall that any Japanese submarine attempting commerce rating would have had to crash through.

Look at the numbers one more time. Japan started the war with 63 oceangoing submarines. She built around 111 more during the war for a total of about 174 boats. She lost roughly 128 of them, 3/4 of her entire force. Of the 30 submarines that supported the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, not a single one survived to the end of the war.

The casualty rate inside the elite Japanese submarine arm was by many estimates around 80%. And much of that killing was done by destroyers and destroyer escorts working in coordination with patrol planes, escort carriers, and the cryptographers of Frac. Between May 1944 alone, around 17 Japanese submarines were lost in roughly six weeks, mostly to American hunter killer operations.

Now, go back to the men of RO106 in the dark on the morning of May 22nd, 1944. Go back to the moment we started with. 56 men in a steel tube 300 ft down, listening to their own breathing, thinking they were invisible. They were not invisible. They had not been invisible since the message announcing their deployment had been intercepted in Pearl Harbor two days earlier.

Their captain, an experienced officer, had executed the textbook evasion. The textbook evasion no longer worked. The American ship that killed them was not the most heavily armed ship in the Pacific Fleet. She was a 1,400 ton destroyer escort built for less than the price of a fleet destroyer. She mounted three small guns and a launcher full of contactfused bombs.

Her crew were reserveists and drafties who had been at sea for less than three months. What the men of RO106 were facing in those last seconds before the hedgehogs found them was not better men. The Japanese sailors of 1944 were as brave and as well-trained as anybody in any navy in the world.

What they were facing was the system. A system in which a code was broken, an order was decrypted, a signal was passed, ships were dispatched, sensors were aimed, weapons were fired, and a submarine 300 ft down disappeared. Every link in that chain had been built mostly from scratch in less than three years. That is the answer to the question this whole video has been circling.

American destroyer tactics terrified Japan’s elite submarine crews. Not because the Hellcat fast destroyer escorts were better than Ilclass fleet boats. They were not. Not in armor, not in armament, not in range. They terrified Japan’s elite submarine crews because the Americans had figured out how to fight a submarine war as a system instead of as a series of individual duels.

And against a system, individual brilliance cannot win. It can only delay the result. There is one more thing I have to say about this because if I do not say it, the story is incomplete and dishonest. The men in those Japanese boats died in the dark, far from home, mostly unmorned. In a war their political and military leadership had started for reasons that were mostly bad.

They did not deserve the war they were given. Most of them, like most of the men on the destroyer escorts hunting them, had lives they wanted to go home to. They had names. RO106, RO104, RO116, RO108, RO105, I16. Around 350 Japanese submariners died in those 12 days off the Admiral. Their boats are still down there. Some of them have been found. Most have not.

They are the last men of an elite force that history mostly remembers, when it remembers them at all. As a warning about what happens when an entire institution refuses to learn fast enough. And on the American side, John Williamson lived through the war. He was promoted to command of USS England in August 1944.

The ship he had hunted six submarines from was hit by a Japanese kamicazi on May 9th, 1945. off Okinawa, killing 37 of her crew and forcing her back to the United States for repairs that were not finished by the time the war ended. Williamson came home, returned to civilian life, wrote a book about his experiences in 2005 called Anti-ubmarine Warrior in the Pacific and lived for years after that.

The maneuver he invented as a young officer in Miami in 1942, the Williams turn, is still used today by every merchant ship and every warship in the world to recover a man overboard. He did not fight for glory. He fought because someone had to learn how to do this. Walton Pendleton, the captain of England during the 12 days, received the Navy Cross and was promoted to command an escort division in Alaska.

He did not seek attention afterward. Hamilton Haynes, the commander of escort division 39, kept his squadron in the Pacific and continued the war. The men of George and Rabbi, who shared in the kills and never got the same headlines, mostly went home, finished their tours, and returned to civilian life with a story almost no one in their hometowns understood.

In the larger war, the American destroyer escort program built around 450 ships of eight different classes between 1942 and 1945. The total Japanese submarine kills, credited to American destroyers and destroyer escorts during the Pacific War, working with their air and intelligence partners, account for the majority of the 128 Japanese submarines lost.

The hunter killer system, the system of cracked codes and CIC plots and hedgehog launchers and trained sonarmen and forward firing weapons did its job. The verdict is this. Equipment alone does not win a war at sea. Doctrine alone does not. Courage alone does not. The thing that wins is the willingness to look honestly at what is failing, to throw away what does not work, and to build in a hurry the system the war actually requires.

The Japanese submarine army in 1941 had better individual boats and better individual torpedoes and arguably better individual training than the Americans did. The Japanese submarine arm in 1944 was being slaughtered because the Americans had built a learning machine and the Japanese had not. The hedgehog was the symbol. The CIC was the brain.

The codereers in Pearl Harbor were the eyes. The men in the submarine chaser training center in Miami were the hands. And together they made something that ate the elite submarine force of an empire. Go back one last time to the men of RO106 in the dark. They believe they were the hunters.

They had been told their entire careers that they were the hunters. They had volunteered for it. They had earned the right to it. They were by every measure of skill and equipment that mattered to them the equal of any submariners in the world. And on the morning of May 22nd, 1944, in 15 minutes from first contact to the breaking up sounds 300 ft down, they were destroyed by a ship and a crew and a system they did not even know existed.

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