U.S. NAVY OKAYS ATTACKS ON JUNKS, SAMPANS
U.S. Seventh Fleet HQ · July 30, 1943
During the Pacific War U.S. submarines fired some 11,000 torpedoes, sinking hundreds of Japanese warships and well over one thousand merchant ships. The number of lives lost in the latter engagements is estimated at 116,000 Japanese merchant seamen, with 70,000 casualties the result of U.S. submarine actions.
In mid-March 1942 the USS Pollack made the first submarine attack on a war patrol using its three‑inch deck gun and a .50 caliber machine gun. The objects of the surface attack were two Japanese sampans, presumably civilian craft and unarmed. During 1942 U.S. submarines reported 34 attacks on sampans, trawlers, and a schooner. The number of attacks increased to 80 in 1943, the year that U.S. Seventh Fleet Bulletin No. 15, issued on this date, approved submarine deck gun attacks against “Chinese” junks, schooners, and other small vessels. Their sinking over the long haul would produce impressive results, the bulletin prophesied.
With mounting shipping losses to their large cargo ships—less than 1 million tons lost at the end of 1942, 1.77 million tons at the end of 1943, and 2.5 million tons through 1944—the Japanese increasingly resorted to smaller craft to transport personnel, fuel, food, raw and finished materials, and military equipment between their Home Islands and their southern resource areas and island garrisons. Small craft were also engaged in transporting goods along the coasts of their Home Islands due to the country’s underdeveloped railway system and rudimentary roads.
From 1944 to 1945, with fewer and fewer large Japanese ships in the region, the number of deck gun attacks by U.S., British, and Dutch submarines on smaller craft doubled, from 508 to 1,044, with more than half being American kills. By war’s end most large Japanese fishing vessels, junks, schooners, trawlers, and coasters in Southeast Asia had been destroyed in the context of “total war” against the Japanese Empire.
Throughout the Pacific War the issue of whether to attack and sink defenseless or lightly armed small craft using deck guns remained a persistent moral and tactical dilemma for Allied skippers and seamen—because doing so meant killing crews (often made up of multiple Asian nationalities and often with their families) close up and face-to-face.
Sinking Enemy Ships in the Pacific, 1941–1945
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Left: The Japanese freighter Nittsu Maru sinks after being torpedoed by the USS Wahoo on March 21, 1943. Within six hours of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the U.S. Navy adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan. American submarines attacked warships, commercial vessels, and civilian passenger ships flying the Japanese flag without warning. From 1943 Allied subs waged an increasingly effective campaign against ill-protected Japanese merchant shipping and the Japanese Navy. By the end of the war in August 1945 the Japanese merchant marine had less than a quarter of the tonnage it had in December 1941, when it already had a deficit of 40 percent in ship bottoms flying flags of Japan’s new enemies.
Right: Torpedoed Japanese destroyer Yamakaze photographed through the periscope of the USS Nautilus on June 25, 1942. It is notoriously difficult to provide a definitive accounting of surface vessel losses over the course of the war. The best estimate is that U.S. submarines sank roughly 200 Japanese warships and close to 1,300 Japanese merchant ships, for a loss of 52 U.S. submarines. (One in five U.S. submariners was lost during the war, the highest casualty percentage of any service.) Japanese losses due to all sinking agents (e.g., submarines, mines, aircraft, and shore batteries) of whatever Allied nation appear to number 2,117 merchant ships, 611 naval ships, and 15,518 civilian ships (small craft).
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Left: The USS Wahoo off Mare Island Navy Yard, California, 1943. Its skipper was Lt. Cmdr. Dudley W. “Mush” Morton (1907–1943), the first superstar of the U.S. submarine service. He and his crew were responsible for sinking at least 19 Japanese ships on six patrols, more than any other submarine of the time. His motto, emblazoned on the sub’s pennant, was “Shoot the Sunza Bitches.” The Wahoo, recognized as a “One-Boat Wolf Pack,” received the coveted Presidential Unit Citation.
Right: Morton (left) speaks with his executive officer, Richard O’Kane, on the bridge of the Wahoo days after torpedoing the Japanese troop transport Buyo Maru, north of New Guinea, on January 26, 1943, on the sub’s third patrol. Surfacing, the Wahoo used its four-inch deck gun, two 20mm guns, crew rifles, and pistols to fire on shipwreck survivors, some floating in the ocean, some in roughly 20 lifeboats. O’Kane claimed that the survivors opened fire first and crewmen responded with everything they had for the next 20 minutes. Close to 300 survivors of the sinking died before the Wahoo left the scene.
Crew of USS Wahoo: No Mercy on Shipwreck Enemy (Video Contains Disturbing Scenes of Crewmen Firing on Shipwreck Survivors, January 26, 1943)
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