Looking back after World War II, many Navy officers believed that their prewar planning was superb. “War Plan Orange persevered for 40 years and eventually won the war,” claims one noted scholar. “What more can one ask of a great plan.”1 There is no doubt that the U.S. Navy was effective, eventually. But the ultimate victory was not just because of War Plan Orange or the fleet exercises that refined it.2 Instead, success must be credited to the innovation and learning done by the Fleet. War Plan Orange’s envisioned blockade of Japan began much earlier than originally designed. In ordering its small submarine force to conduct unrestricted warfare, the Mahanian clashes long expected by the U.S. Navy in the Pacific were displaced for a time. Because they did not anticipate this role for the submarine, the Navy had to learn under fire, which it accomplished with great success.
The results were eventually impressive. Outdated tactics and timid commanders were replaced by night surface attacks and aggressive officers. New technologies, including search radars and sonar, were introduced. New torpedoes and their exotic magnetic exploders were found to be flawed, and were painfully fixed. Doctrine, intelligence on shipping, and strategy were integrated into a ruthless war of attrition in the Pacific. A small part of the overall force, just two percent of the Navy’s personnel, sank nearly 4,800,000 tons of merchant shipping (55 percent of the war’s total) and asphyxiated Japan’s economy.3
Both the U.S. and Imperial Japanese navies recognized their respective strengths and weaknesses. But it was not the size of the fleets or their matériel differences that dominated. Overall, the competition in naval combat and organizational learning dominated the Pacific war. In fact, a significant “learning gap” was created in both surface and subsurface warfare.4 That got wider and wider as U.S. submarines adjusted to new demands, technologies, and roles.5 While the Japanese began to adapt as the war progressed, the U.S. Navy achieved what could be called “organizational learning dominance.”6 Ultimately, it was the Navy’s learning capacity that allowed it to be so successful.
Organizational Learning Capacity
Innovation literature identifies four principal attributes of highly successful learning organizations. Collectively, these facilitators constitute the most important contributors to what can be called Organizational Learning Capacity.7
Leadership. Leadership involvement at lower and medium levels of the force is evident in innovations and adaptation all through World War II in both the Army and the Navy.8 The Americans placed no restrictions on where they got good ideas and were decentralized in terms of best practices, many of which were generated from the bottom up.9
A decentralized approach delegates authority for solutions to lower levels, where ideas can be rapidly discovered and implemented.10 Current research suggests that a personal attribute of leader openness is invaluable. This is manifested in intellectual curiosity, creativity, and a degree of comfort with novelty and variety. Leaders high in openness search for relevant and conflicting perspectives on problems and seek and value inputs regardless of rank.11
Organizational Culture. A number of scholars emphasize the importance of culture to how organizations innovate or adapt.12 One went so far as to observe that “Military culture may be the most important factor not only in military effectiveness, but also in the processes involved in military innovation. . . .”13 Culture serves as a prism for how organizations view problems, and establishes limits to acceptable solutions. Thus, culture can be both a barrier and a facilitator of change and adaptation.14
The literature suggests that certain cultural factors explain the greater flexibility and adaptability of military organizations.15 Students of German military history, for example, credit German culture with supporting an ethos of critical thinking and analysis within its concept of Ausbildung or professional development.16 Climates of critical thinking, intellectual curiosity and objective analyses are key to supporting the rigorous evaluation of new ideas.17 Cultures that value conformity and compliance with rules, routines, and operational praxis are rigid. Centralized and controlling cultures do not generate the conditions for creative problem solving.
Learning Mechanisms. An adaptive culture capable of inquiry must have processes to help commanders make sense of ongoing operations and to explore possible changes. One historian argues, “without a coherent system of analyzing what is actually happening, military organizations have no means of adapting to the conditions they face except doggedly to impose assumptions on reality or, even more dubiously, to adapt by guessing.”18 During World War II, most armies and navies began producing after-action reports to collect best practices, a practice the Germans started in World War I.19
In both peacetime and during war, successful commanders or services must also have a capacity to experiment to explore the unknown. Peacetime innovation has been correlated with cultures of critical inquiry augmented by these exercises and experiments.20
But in wartime, the laboratory moves to the battlefield; success is dependent on being able to sense, interpret, and respond faster than one’s opponent. Experimentation and thus learning become largely generated on the battlefield, “in contact.” Sometimes this can be done by operational units, and often by special staff sections or operations research analysts. The British began this practice in dealing with the Luftwaffe and U-boat challenges.21 New staff structures or special task forces should also be considered a learning mechanism.22 Some historical examples, including the development of infiltration tactics in World War I by the German Army, were created by special units. Other examples, with the Israeli Defense Force, point to using designated units as “incubators” to test new ideas and create knowledge under operational conditions.23
Dissemination Mechanisms. Most military organizations have entities and processes dedicated to doctrine and distributing lessons; this can be done by bulletins or new doctrine by formal schools, or institutional-level training activities. In wartime, there is a need to rapidly acquire, process, and distribute new tactical lessons and techniques to units that have not yet had their own combat experiences.24 Without such mechanisms, lessons learned by one ship or boat are not shared and have to be learned again, perhaps at grave cost.25
The Submarine Force’s Learning Capacity
Leadership. The key strategic leaders in the Pacific naval war possessed credible credentials with submarines and open minds willing to test existing doctrine. Fleet Admirals Ernest King and Chester Nimitz were intimately familiar with submarines, both having commanded boats as young officers.26 King commanded a division of boats, as well as the New London submarine base.27 He claimed to be a proponent of decentralized leadership, recognizing that the coming war required “the initiative of the subordinate” with less detail in orders on how to do something.28
Nimitz, in turn, exuded calm and competence.29 He commanded four different boats as a junior officer, led a submarine division, and created the submarine base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He was an acknowledged expert on diesel engines, and he too would write in his profession’s journal, Proceedings. And like King, he lectured on the offensive opportunities presented by fleet submarines.30
The principal officers at the operational level were Admirals Charles Lockwood and Ralph Christie. Both spent the majority of their careers in submarines and were leaders in submarine development before the war. Known as “Mr. Submarine,” Lockwood was famous for his advocacy of the long-range fleet boat.31 Known for an informal style of leadership, he defended subordinates and reflected “loyalty down” rather than just demanding compliance.32 He was open to new ideas and actively sought out leaders like Commander Dudley “Mush” Morton for personal interviews. Lockwood attempted to ensure he had the best information from the fighting units of his command.33 He would personally meet each boat as she returned to port, and would go over patrol reports with the commanders.34
Lockwood’s subordinates described him as “not conformist and against rule book thinking.”35 He was willing to experiment and press to get necessary changes.36
Admiral Christie on the other hand effectively retarded learning in his command, and his example serves to highlight the positive impact that learning leadership from others had on the course of the war. He over-centralized his operations in Australia, and created a command climate in which he had stifled critical inquiry and adaptation. Known as “Mr. Torpedo” before the war, his insistence that commanders not criticize faulty weapons in their patrol reports closed out the possibility of learning about their faults, and he relieved commanders who persisted in complaining about the troubled magnetic exploder that Christie had championed. While Nimitz had ordered their deactivation in July 1943, as late as March 1944 Christie had boats trying to use the flawed exploder.37 He failed to create or sustain a collaborative climate conducive to adaptation. Even after the war, Christie insisted torpedo performance was a function of operator and maintenance personnel, not the hardware itself.38 Lockwood sustained a more open and tolerant command style that allowed officers to challenge doctrine and make independent judgments.
Organizational Culture. At an organizational cultural level, the submarine community had to apply its specialty within the Navy’s sense of traditionalism and its Mahanian conception of sea control.39 War Plan Orange remained the embodied beliefs about the Navy’s principal operational challenge and how it would fight. Thus, the submarine had to fit and conform to this vision of a transoceanic drive across the Pacific to defeat the Imperial Japanese Navy. The fleet submarine, with its impressive range and 24 torpedoes, was originally designed to fit the bill, although it lacked speed.
Aside from its corporate identity and operating culture of independent command at sea, the operating culture of the submarine branch was technically focused and oriented on problem-solving. It was by necessity a rules-based group and subjected to a common operating procedure. The older officers were the most indoctrinated by a rules-based system that focused on the reconnaissance mission of submarines but made them risk-averse in attack situations. This produced a generational tension between the more inflexible older officers and the younger officers who were less risk-averse. The former, indoctrinated by years of peacetime fleet exercises stressing conformity to an overarching “decisive fleet battle” concept, were comfortable in a control-based culture, whereas the latter were comfortable with informal command styles and stress on individual initiative that arose in the immediate aftermath of the war’s opening disasters. The new operating code for submarine warfare in the Pacific, unrestricted warfare, required a more creative/risk-taking culture.
The culture of the submarine community was somewhat different from that of the larger Navy. The officers were younger and well trained and educated. Commanders were also younger and obtained command at an earlier stage of their careers. Boat crews were also volunteers and technically competent in their ratings. Leadership was more informal and discipline could be maintained, but living and working so closely generated less formal and less hierarchal modes of leading.40
Learning Mechanisms. The Navy’s submarine service had possibly the best after-action/lessons-learned gathering process. While each boat was returning from a combat patrol, the captain or his executive officer worked full time on making a formal record of it. These reports included tactical maps of each firing solution on each target. On return to port, each captain would formally submit the patrol report to his immediate superior, and copies were disseminated horizontally to boats in the same squadron. This provided a means of feeding forward valuable information about the operating environment, new tactics and techniques, and on what needed to be enhanced (e.g., periscopes, radar, and, all too often, torpedoes).
In addition to the reports, each commander in the chain would review and append a formal written endorsement. These would assess each patrol as successful or not, and often publicly commend a commander for aggressiveness or rebuke one for recklessness with torpedoes. Endorsements to the war patrol reports became a tool for reinforcing best practices and produced a collective understanding.41 Lockwood and his staff examined every patrol report closely and strived to interview each returning boat captain to gain the latest intelligence directly from the source without filters.
Endorsements proved a way for the community at large to learn how officialdom viewed each new combat lesson and how others might view initiatives and overall boat performance. Naval historians and former commanders described them as the principal policy-making documents for the submarine fleet, by which the force’s doctrinally approved “way of war” was disseminated.42
In keeping with general willingness to try nontraditional solutions to hard problems, the American fleet commander, Admiral King, turned to operational analysis to support the antisubmarine warfare challenges in the North Atlantic. Ultimately, in April 1942, the U.S. Navy stood up the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG). It helped devise and refine submarine tactics, as well as best practices for sonar and convoy techniques. By August, ASWORG was making a real contribution.43 King credited this cell with recommendations that “increased the effectiveness of weapons by factors of three or five.” In fact, Admiral King found his learning/research support critical to success:
In the see-saw of techniques the side which countered quickly, before the opponent had time to perfect the new tactics and weapons, had a decided advantage. Operations research, bringing scientists in to analyze the technical import of the fluctuations between measure and countermeasure, made it possible to speed up our reaction rate in several critical cases.44
Ultimately, Lockwood decided to set up his own operations-research shop (called the Submarine Operations Research Group [SORG]) at Pearl Harbor.45 This team was slow to get started and adapt itself from antisubmarine work to submarine warfare. However, its insights were quickly cycled back through special reports or synthesized into tactical bulletins to the fleet.46 Not long after his staff was augmented with the SORG, Lockwood issued his first campaign plan and raised the priority placed on targeting Japanese oil tankers.47 He used them well beyond their scientific disciplines as a Red Team as well, with appreciable influence.48
The initial absence of an experimental staff or operations-research cell slowed the pace of adaptation. Lockwood ultimately had to develop his own experiments to find out that the Mark XV torpedoes were running too deep and that the contact exploders were flawed.49 Lockwood’s lack of his own SORG “learning team” may account for his slow investigation into the flawed torpedo.
Dissemination Mechanisms. During the course of the war, the submarine community shared its patrol reports beyond the fleet to schools, training commands, and the submarine/torpedo production facilities. Lockwood even took steps to provide his officers with copies of the war patrol reports while resting at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.50 Reading patrol reports became a form of self-improvement or pastime reading while at sea.51 This supports the idea that social and informal methods of distributed learning reinforce formal learning mechanisms.
Not only were these war patrol reports used to feed better practices horizontally, but they were sent to the classrooms of the Submarine School as new crews were stood up.52
Finally, the Navy fed lessons learned and new techniques to the fleet through short doctrine reports called Submarine Bulletins. The Submarine Force Pacific published numerous tactical submarine bulletins over the course of the war. The sub force based in Australia also issued bulletins that became an official means of recording and sharing best practices and semi-official doctrine within the theater and the force after trial and error at sea. Patrol reports, distributed endorsements, and Submarine Bulletins were collectively a classic learning system based on an open-feedback loop.53 Postwar memoirs note that these reports emphasized content to share among the community of practice.54
‘Victory in the Crucible of Battle’
Ultimately, the U.S. submarine force made a major contribution to the naval defeat of Japan, although not the one the Navy originally planned. The postwar assessment from inside the submarine community was telling: “Neither by training nor indoctrination was the U.S. Submarine Force readied for unrestricted warfare.”55 Rather than a campaign of cataclysmic salvos by battleships or sorties of dive bombers between opposing battle lines, it proved to be a war of attrition, learning, and military change. Commanders from that period estimate that the submarine force was operating at a level only 15 percent of its effectiveness in 1942.56 By late 1943, the sub force was at full throttle.
The essence of this culture of learning existed throughout the Navy even before Pearl Harbor, but it strengthened as the service quickly refocused itself to learn from actual experience at sea. As one historical account of the Pacific notes:
Combat was a hard and unforgiving school, but the U.S. Navy was taking its lesson to heart. If the Navy did one thing right after the debacle of December 7, it was to become collectively obsessed with learning, and improving. Each new encounter with the enemy was mined for all the wisdom and insights it had to offer. Every after-action report included a section of analysis and recommendations, and those nuggets of hard-won knowledge were absorbed into future command decisions, doctrine, planning, and training throughout the service.57
In the end, victory was forged in the Pacific campaign by the Navy’s learning capacity. Yes, the Navy outfought the Japanese, but this could only happen because its learning processes out-cycled those of the adversary so that each battle and each patrol laid a foundation for subsequent successes. Leaders and culture supported the process of learning. The obsession with learning that began in Sims Hall at Newport and continued with the fleet exercises was a central element in the operating ethos of the fleet. This learning capacity ultimately ensured victory in the crucible of battle. Technology was a part of this learning, as the Navy absorbed updated radars and sonar, wakeless “fish,” and an array of advanced defensive capabilities. They were incorporated into the fleet and ultimately refined by the operators. This learning had to be shared with the rest of the force. The Navy’s learning capacity proved to be the ultimate game changer.
To promote innovation, in war and during peacetime, the Navy must once again establish dominance in organizational learning and sharpen the education and mechanisms that promote learning across the fleet. It must stimulate a new generation of young Turks to bring forth fresh ideas.58 Our leadership must embrace and absorb disruptive thinking, experimentation, and technologies effectively to sustain its preeminence at sea.
1. Edward Miller, cited by George Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power, The U.S. Navy, 1890–1990 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 128.
2. For details on these fleet exercises see Craig Felker, Testing American Sea Power: U.S. Navy Strategic Exercises, 1923–1940 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). Albert A. Nofi, “To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923–1940,” Newport Papers 18 (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2010).
3. Ian Toll, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015), 244–286. See “Effects of Strategic Bombing on Japan’s War Economy, Appendix Table C-50; “Japanese Imports, Production and Inventories of Crude Oil;” “Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee, “Japanese Naval and Merchant Shipping Losses During World War II by All Causes,” February 1947, Appendix Table 1. www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/Japan/IJN/JANAC-Losses/JANAC-Losses-6.html
4. Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tulley, Shattered Sword, The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2010), 407.
5. For the conduct of that campaign, see Joel Ira Holwitt, “Execute Against Japan,” Freedom-of-the-Seas, the U.S. Navy, Fleet Submarines, and the U.S. Decision to Conduct Unrestricted Warfare (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2009), 162–182.
6. Evan Ellis, “Organizational learning dominance,” Comparative Strategy, vol. 18, no. 2 (May 1999), 191–202.
7. Derived from the theory of adoption capacity posited by Michael Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power, Causes and Consequences for International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 16–84.
8. Paul Kennedy, Engineers of Victory, The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, (New York: Random House, 2013), 270. Michael D. Doubler, Busting the Bocage: American Combined Arms Operations in France (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1988), 32–34.
9. Russell A. Hart, Clash of Arms: How the Allies Won in Normandy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 269, 271, 279.
10. Williamson Murray, Military Adaptation, With Fear of Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 311. Meir Finkel, On Flexibility, Recovery from Technological and Doctrinal Surprise on the Battlefield (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 98–110.
11. Stephen J. Gerras and Leonard Wong, Changing Minds in the Army: Why It is So Difficult and What to Do About It (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, October 2013), 8. See also Steven Appelbaum and Walter Reichart, “How to Measure an Organization’s Learning Ability: the Facilitating Factors,” Journal of Workplace Learning, vol. 10, no. 1 (May 1998), 15–28; and John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 22.
12. From Theo Farrell, “Culture and Military Power,” Review of International Studies, vol. 24, no. 3 (Fall 1998), 410.
13. Williamson Murray, “Does Military Culture Matter?,” Orbis, vol. 43, no. 1 (Winter 1999), 90. Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff, The Sources of Military Change, Culture, Politics, Technology (London: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 7–8. Elizabeth Kier, “Culture and Military Doctrine—France Between the Wars,” International Security, vol. 19, no. 4 (Spring 1995), 65–93.
14. Anthony J. Dibella, “Perspectives on Changing National Security Institutions,” Joint Force Quarterly, no. 69 (April 2013), 15.
15. Murray, Military Adaptation, 305–328.
16. James Corum, “A Comprehensive Approach to Change,” in Harold R. Winton and David R. Mets, eds., The Challenge of Change: Military Institutions and New Realities, 1918–1941 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 54–56.
17. Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, eds., Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 314–328.
18. Murray, Military Adaptation, 15.
19. See Robert T. Foley, “Dumb donkeys or cunning foxes?Learning in the British and German Armies during the Great War,” International Affairs, vol. 90, no. 2 (March 2014), 287.
20. Barry Watts and Williamson Murray, in “Military Innovation in Peacetime,” from Murray and Millett, eds., Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, 410.
21. See R. V. Jones, The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence, 1939–1945 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1978); and Stephen Budiansky, Blackett’s War, The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013).
22. Matthew Alan Tattar, Innovation and Adaptation in War, PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 2011, 24.
23. Raphael D. Marcus, “Military Innovation and Tactical Adaptation in the Israel-Hizbollah Conflict,” Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 38, no. 4 (August 2015), 8–10.
24. See Murray, Military Adaptation, 262–304; Finkel, On Flexibility, 150–163; and Robert Foley, “A Case Study in Horizontal Military Innovation,” Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 35, no. 6 (December 2012), 799–827.
25. Thomas Mahnken, “Asymmetric Warfare at Sea: The Naval Battles of Guadalcanal, 1942–1943,” Naval War College Review, vol. 64, no. 1 (Winter 2011), 95–121.
26. Thomas B. Buell, Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980). Walter R. Borneman, The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy and King (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 26–40, 119–126.
27. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 51–55.
28. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 25, 31. Borneman, The Admirals, 192.
29. E. B. Potter, Nimitz (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1976). Borneman, The Admirals, 53–65, 79–84.
30. Borneman, The Admirals, 120.
31. I. J. Galantin, Take Her Deep!: A Submarine Against Japan in World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007), 29.
32. Ibid.
33. Anthony Newpower, Iron Men and Tin Fish: The Race to Build a Better Torpedo During World War II (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 101.
34. Charles A Lockwood, Sink ’Em All: Submarine Warfare in the Pacific (New York: Dutton, 1951), 33.
35. Theodore Roscoe, United States Submarine Operations in World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1949), 225.
36. On his early career, see Brayton Harris, Admiral Nimitz: The Commander of the Pacific Ocean Theater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 7–65.
37. Wilfred Jay Holmes, Undersea Victory: The Influence of Submarine Operations on the War in the Pacific (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 311.
38. Toll, The Conquering Tide, 281.
39. Alfred Thayer Mahan, Mahan on Naval Strategy: Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991).
40. George Grider with Lydel Sims, War Fish (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), 10–11, 55.
41. James F. Calvert, Silent Running, My Years on a World War II Attack Submarine (New York: J. Wiley, 1995), 55.
42. Clay Blair, Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 77. Calvert, Silent Running, 55.
43. Montgomery C. Meigs, Slide Rules and Submarines (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1990), 58–62.
44. FADM Ernest J. King, USN, “United States Navy at War: Final Official Report to the Secretary of the Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 71, no. 515, 174. Cited in Brian McCue, U-Boats in the Bay of Biscay (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1990), 1.
45. For details, see Lockwood, Sink ’Em All, 167–168. Peter Sasgen, Hellcats; The Epic Story of World War II’s Most Daring Submarine Raid (New York: Caliber, 2010), 171–173; and Edwin Hoyt, Bowfin: The True Story of a Fabled Fleet Submarine (New York: J. Wiley, 1995), 155–175.
46. Meigs, Slide Rules and Submarines, 202.
47. Holmes, Undersea Victory, 236.
48. C. Lockwood and Hans Christian Adamson, Hellcats of the Sea: Operation Barney and the Mission to the Sea of Japan (New York: Bantam, 1988), 357.
49. Lockwood, Sink ’Em All, 112–113. Roscoe, United States Submarine Operations in World War II, 145–146; Newpower, Iron Men and Tin Fish: The Race to Build a Better Torpedo During World War II, 170–180.
50. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 313, Blue 443/2, A16 3 (3), Ltr, Commander SubPac, 1 November 1943.
51. Eugene B. Fluckey, Thunder Below!: The USS Barb Revolutionizes Submarine Warfare in World War II (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 201.
52. Galantin, Take Her Deep, 27.
53. Meigs, Slide Rules and Submarines, 175. Calvert, Silent Running, 54, 55.
54. Grider and Sims, War Fish, 90. Calvert, Silent Running, 54–55. Fluckey, Thunder Below, 201.
55. Roscoe, United States Submarine Operations in World War II, 18.
56. Edward L. Beach, Submarine! The Classic Account of Undersea Combat in World War II (New York: Pocket Star, 2004), 20.
57. Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), 375.
58. CDR Benjamin Armstrong, USN, “The New Young Turks,” Naval War College Review, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Autumn 2015), 108–113.
‘It Was Our Chiefs, Too!’
“Some of them were crazy” or “hell-bent to get killed,” the veterans reflected on some of the legendary submarine commanding officers of World War II. I overheard these comments some years ago when I had the honor of listening to them tell sea stories at a few Submarine Veterans of World War II conventions. These surprising appraisals of their leaders varied greatly but always were fascinating.
At one such gathering, I had the pleasure of meeting Clayton Oliver Decker, who served as a machinist’s mate third class on board the USS Tang (SS-306) during the war. Clay was one of the nine who survived the ship’s final war patrol. Interested in what the crew thought about their legendary commander, Richard Hetherington “Dick” O’Kane, I asked, “What made Tang so special?” Clay answered, “Well, we had the finest skipper of the war in Dick O’Kane, but it was our chiefs, too!”
Decker’s stories about the Tang’s chiefs’ mess were remarkable. He respectfully spoke of men such as Chief Quartermaster Sidney William Jones, who had been sent to a “top-secret telephone school” in Canada prior to reporting to the Tang. It turned out that the school taught the young quartermaster how to operate and maintain the ST and SJ radars, a fleet submarine’s second most unreliable pieces of equipment. Decker explained that Jones “had no match when it came to radar. Our radar worked!” he boasted. Embellishing a little, he said, “We could detect contacts at twice the range of any other boat.” Chief Jones trained the crew to a high level of expertise, even using the radar to navigate, a novel idea at the time. Excellence in radar operations surely gave the Tang and O’Kane, later a Medal of Honor recipient, a sizable advantage in detecting and closing their enemies for the kill.
After driving to close an enemy target, our submariners often faced the biggest equipment problem on a fleet submarine, the legendary unreliability of their torpedoes. Fortunately, according to Decker, the Tang’s Torpedoman Chief and later Chief of Boat William “Billy” Ballinger, “would have none of it.” Decker lauded that “Ballinger knew his stuff, and he violated regs and jury-rigged every torpedo.” Chief Ballinger trained “the fastest torpedo reload team in the fleet,” and “those torpedoes worked.” With chiefs like that and a brilliant commander in Dick O’Kane, it is no surprise that the Tang was credited with sinking 33 ships, the most of any submarine during the war.
Decker didn’t talk much longer, as he teared up at the very mention of Ballinger. Later, I was told that Decker was the last to see Ballinger alive. After firing their last shot, the Tang crew’s joy at the thought of returning home quickly turned to despair as their final torpedo circled back. Unfortunately, her torpedo worked all too well, striking a devastating blow that instantly killed more than half of the crew, including Chief Jones. Decker followed Ballinger’s lead as they opened the ballast tanks, allowing the ship to rest somewhat level on the bottom of the Formosa Strait.
Chief Ballinger, his head bleeding profusely, then began to calmly prepare the remaining crew to escape. Japanese destroyers began depth-charging their position. After carefully guiding Decker and others through the escape procedures, Ballinger later followed them up from the deep. Arriving on the surface just next to Decker, Ballinger endured extraordinary pain and struggled violently to survive. His lungs likely had exploded during the ascent. Watching Ballinger die haunted Decker. He always wondered why he survived and “not Billy.” Clay Decker, Dick O’Kane, and seven others were picked up by the Japanese and brutally tortured in a prisoner-of-war camp before returning home to tell their story.
Perhaps that is the answer to Decker’s question, for we would not know all this had he not survived. We would not be reminded that a submarine’s wartime success belongs not only to the innovative, bold leadership of skippers like O’Kane but also to everyday heroes like Decker and to the terrific chiefs who trained them—leaders such as Chiefs Ballinger and Jones, who demanded that the Tang’s equipment perform reliably and that her crew always be ready to fight. Clayton Oliver Decker joined his shipmates on eternal patrol on 24 May 2003.
—Captain David Adams, U.S. Navy