Off the China Coast · October 25, 1944 By October 1944 U.S. Navy submarine Tang and her skipper Richard O’Kane were legendary. (O’Kane had earlier made a name for himself aboard the Wahoo as executive officer under Dudley Walker “Mush” Morton.) The Tang, a Balao-class submarine, was credited during the war years with sinking 31 enemy…
Honolulu, Hawaii · October 11, 1943 On this date in 1943 the USS Wahoo, a Gato-class (early World War II) submarine under Commander Dudley “Mush” Morton, was sunk in the La Pérouse (Soya) Strait, the channel that separates the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō and the Russian Sakhalin Peninsula. Armed with ten torpedo tubes, the…
Washington, D.C. · October 5, 1943 On this date in 1943 the Japanese news agency Domei acknowledged that the 8,000‑ton Konron Maru was sunk by an American submarine off the west coast of the Japanese home island of Honshu, with the loss of 544 lives. The steamer was sunk by the USS Wahoo using the new,…
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 later engagements is estimated at 116,000 Japanese merchant seamen, with 70,000 casualties the result of U.S. submarine actions….
U-852 in Mid-Atlantic Ocean · March 13, 1944 On this date in 1944 German U‑boat 852, skippered by 28‑year‑old Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, torpedoed the British-chartered Greek freighter SS Peleus as it steamed from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to Buenos Aires, Argentina. After the Peleus sank, U‑852 patrolled the large debris field for five hours. Crew members used…