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then, that this tactical relic from another era had to be jettisoned as soon as the bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor. Changes didn’t happen overnight; it took time for the sub force to develop a new, aggressive doctrine based on tactics developed under actual combat conditions during war patrols. Once that happened, the Japanese merchant marine was doomed. The only thing that prevented it from being annihilated sooner than it was was the faulty torpedoes that plagued U.S. submarines at the start of the war and continued well into 1944.
    The torpedo problem turned into a scandal that bordered on dereliction of duty by the officers in the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd). Their stubborn refusal to admit that the Navy’s standard Mk 14 steam-powered submarine torpedo didn’t always perform as designed—instead, blaming the inexperience of submarine crews for its problems—had a demoralizing effect on the force. The torpedo problem proved a tough nut to crack because the three separate faults inherent in the design of the Mk 14, working in concert, masked the fault each of them posed individually. It took over two years to isolate and fix the flaws residing in the Mk 14’s depth-control device, its magnetic influence exploder, and its lightweight firing pin. The duds, erratic runs, and premature detonations of warheads caused by these different problems saved many a Japanese merchant ship from certain destruction and most certainly prolonged the war.
    By early 1944, after extensive testing that included live torpedo shots and extensive modification and further testing of the faulty components, the sub force finally had a reliable weapon. Even so, problems continued to crop up even as the new and improved Mk 18 electric-powered torpedoes entered service. With better torpedoes, the sinking of Japanese ships increased dramatically, until, by early 1945, Japan’s merchant marine had virtually disappeared from the Pacific along with its cargoes of rice, coal, iron ore, bauxite, rubber, and, the most important commodity of all, oil; in most Japanese cities automobiles had vanished from the streets, replaced by jinrikishas.
    The Sea of Japan was the only area where what remained of the Japanese merchant marine blithely went about its business, unmolested by submarines. U.S. Pacific command understood that as long as Japan had ships to lug goods across that sea from occupied Manchuria and Korea to ports in western Japan, the war would continue, perhaps at a reduced tempo, but continue it would.
    In 1943, Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, Commander Submarine Force, United States Pacific Fleet (ComSubPac), had sent submarines on war patrols into the Sea of Japan. On three separate occasions they had slipped into and out of the sea by negotiating La Pérouse Strait, one of the five straits providing entry, and which the U.S. Navy believed was mined. The results of those operations were mixed, as torpedo problems plagued the five subs. Consequently, the USS Permit (SS-178), USS Plunger (SS-179), USS Lapon (SS-260), USS Sawfish (SS-276), and USS Wahoo (SS-238) sank only ten ships totaling approximately 28,000 tons, hardly enough to put a dent in Japan’s maru lifeline. Worse yet, the Wahoo , on her second patrol into the sea, was attacked and sunk with all hands, including her famous skipper, Commander Dudley W. “Mush” Morton, revered by the sub force as the best of the best. With the Wahoo ’s loss, Admiral Lockwood suspended further operations in the Sea of Japan.
    And yet a different picture had slowly started to emerge in the spring of 1943, well before the first submarine patrols into the Sea of Japan. Scientists working for the Navy in laboratories in California had developed a radically new sonar system that held promise for locating mines underwater. Lockwood thought that with refinement this system might be useful to submarines for plotting the locations of mines in their