It was just after 0200 on 5 June 1942, smack in the middle of the moonlit Pacific. On the bridge of the submarine USS Tambor (SS-198), Lieutenant Commander John W. Murphy Jr. was staring into the night. A great battle had been fought the previous day, 150 miles north of the Tambor’s position. Even now, the burning hulks of the Japanese carriers Akagi and Hiryū were still in their death throes, having been wrecked by U.S. dive bombers. Their compatriots the Kaga and Sōryū already had gone to their watery graves.
History would soon remember this as the U.S. Navy’s most seminal victory. But on the night of 4–5 June, that victory was not yet sealed. Indeed, the mood on the U.S. side was one of great uncertainty. No one knew whether the Japanese would retreat or if the waters off embattled Midway Atoll would be teeming with enemy warships come morning. The Tambor’s job was guarding against the latter possibility, and so she was patrolling on the surface, some 90 miles east of Midway.
Murphy, 38, was one of the oldest submarine commanders in the Navy, the son of a small-town lawyer and a schoolteacher from Huntingdon, Tennessee. His tiny, formidable, and politically well-connected mother had managed to secure coveted U.S. Naval Academy appointments for both “Jay Will” and his older brother, Marion.1 It was a good fit. Both brothers were bright, and the meticulous, mathy John did well in his classes (particularly in navigation and marine engineering), graduating 23rd in a class of 470.2 After a three-year tour in the battleship Mississippi (BB-41), he moved into submarines in 1928. Quiet, sweet-tempered, and a bit of a joker, Murphy had been the Tambor’s commissioning officer in 1940 and her skipper since. This night, though, was destined to dramatically change Jay Will’s career trajectory.
The Tambor was heading almost due south. The moon ahead of her had risen almost two hours earlier, and the submarine was paying special attention to the extra illumination it afforded. At 0215, one of the lookouts shouted that there were contacts off the bow.3 Murphy peered out, and sure enough, there they were—four large, black shapes 45 degrees to port, three nautical miles away, and fleet as greyhounds. Ominously, they were on an east-northeast course of 078 degrees—headed directly for Midway.4
Murphy did not know where his own surface forces were operating, and so he could not be sure that the four vessels were not U.S. ships. Immediately, he gave orders to come about to the northeast to shadow them. But while turning, his lookouts sighted a fresh set of ships, well behind the first quartet, but clearly following the same course.5
Murphy’s 0215 sighting were the four heavy cruisers of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita’s Cruiser Division (CruDiv) 7: the Kumano, Suzuya, Mikuma, and Mogami. They were big ships—13,500 tons fully loaded, bristling with ten 8-inch guns, and capable of 35 knots. Kurita was using all but three knots of that speed, for he had a special mission this night. At dawn, he was to arrive off Midway, blow its airfield and aircraft to hell and gone, and pave the way for the resumption of a battle that the Japanese hoped might not yet be lost.
As it happened, not long before, the two destroyers accompanying Kurita—the Arashio and Asashio—had checked down their speed in an effort to conserve fuel. They were no less swift than their larger charges, but destroyers were notorious fuel hogs at high speed, and Kurita’s cruisers had much larger oil bunkers. It was this pair that Tambor lookouts briefly glimpsed at 0217, just as Murphy was turning to shadow the lead quartet.
He did not shadow them for long. Pitting the Tambor’s 18.5 knots against Kurita’s 32 was a losing proposition. Unaware that he was being watched, Kurita was opening the range by nearly a quarter mile a minute. At 0229, CruDiv 7 disappeared into the gloom.
Here was Murphy’s big mistake: not sending a sighting report immediately. Instead, he brought his boat about due west, probably to see if he could pick up the tail-end Charlies he had sighted previously. Finding nothing, he then turned south. And at 0238, sure enough, he sighted ships to his southwest. But they had changed course and now were moving north toward him!6
Every previous account of Midway that has tried reconstructing what Murphy was seeing at this moment, including our own Shattered Sword, has held that these north-bound ships were Kurita’s cruisers.7 But this cannot be so, for they already had disappeared off to the Tambor’s east. No ships on earth would have been swift enough to loop back around, completely out of sight, and now be southwest of the Tambor. In retrospect, these new contacts had to have been the Arashio and Asashio. But why had they turned north when the Tambor had last sighted them following Kurita’s quartet? And what was happening with Kurita?
Unbeknownst to Murphy, just before he lost sight of CruDiv 7, a wireless transmission belatedly had made it to the flagship Kumano’s bridge. It was an order from Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, instructing Kurita to abort his mission and begin falling back to the northwest. With two Japanese carriers sunk and two others now clearly past hope of salvage, Yamamoto reluctantly had concluded around midnight that the battle was lost. It was time to retire. However, the original signal to CruDiv 7 canceling its mission was mislabeled and sent to the wrong cruiser division. Kurita was only now being notified. Accordingly, at 0230, the cruisers slowed to 28 knots and came about to a new northwest course of 300 degrees to comply with Yamamoto’s orders.
Meanwhile, trailing behind Kurita, the Arashio and Asashio almost certainly had received the same message. Having lost sight of CruDiv 7 but knowing Kurita would be retiring to the northwest, they were now cutting the corner and heading north to find him. Murphy, having seen the destroyers, hauled around to the north to shadow the pair.
By the time John Murphy began coming about at 0238, he already had unwittingly damaged half of Kurita’s proud cruiser division—and never even knew it. The cause of the disaster was the Tambor’s and the cruisers’ turns at around 0230. Up to that point, the submarine had been practically invisible. The moon was behind CruDiv 7, with Murphy’s submarine lying in the darkness to its north. The Tambor was a very small target to begin with—narrow, low in the water, and practically bow-on. The same was true when she turned northeast to tail Kurita’s speeding cruisers—she remained almost bow-on to any Japanese observers and in any case soon was being left behind.
At 0229, though, the Tambor came about to the west, and just a minute later, so did Kurita, placing CruDiv 7 in a position to overtake the boat from behind. Moreover, the Tambor’s foaming white wake was now curving out behind her like a bridal train. It did not take long before sharp-eyed Japanese lookouts on board the Kumano spotted the sub, fine off the port bow. The result was calamity.
As soon as she sighted the submarine, the Kumano flashed the signal “Aka-Aka Nine!” (“Red-Red [i.e., emergency] 90-degree turn to port!”) to her sisters behind.8 However, in another minor mystery, the flagship’s signaling was either bungled or not well understood.9 The Kumano began cutting very sharply to port. The Suzuya, though, executed only a 45-degree turn, and found herself bearing down on the flagship. Swerving back violently to starboard, she barely missed the Kumano’s stern.
The pair astern fared much worse. Both the Mikuma and Mogami initially turned roughly 45 degrees. But the Mikuma, perhaps spying the flagship’s sharper turn, belatedly mimicked it, turning more sharply to port, whereas the Mogami began heading back to starboard. By the time the Mogami’s skipper, Captain Akira Soji, realized what was happening, it was too late. The Mikuma suddenly loomed out of the darkness. Soji ordered the helm hard over, but nevertheless, at about 0238, the Mogami crunched obliquely into her sister’s port side, right under the Mikuma’s bridge. It was a glancing blow, but momentum is momentum, and the 13,500-ton Mogami had plenty of it.
The result was a cacophonous wail as the Mikuma’s heavy armor belt crumpled the Mogami’s bow like a tin can, crushing it all the way back to her forward gun turret, and then wrenching it perpendicularly to port. The cruiser emerged 40 feet shorter than she had been a minute prior and possessing the hydrodynamic streamlining of a garbage barge. Extraordinarily good damage control kept her afloat, but she was a mess—dead in the water and leaking.
The Mikuma was less badly injured but was weeping fuel oil from ruptured tanks on her side. Shortly after the collision, the Mogami’s damage control officer wisely consigned her Type-93 Long Lance torpedoes to the deep, concerned that if she came under air attack their massive warheads might be a threat to her. The relatively undamaged Mikuma did not follow suit, which would cost her dearly.
Murphy and the Tambor saw none of this—it had all happened out in the murk behind them, and the submarine soon was pulling away to the north in any case. It was only at 0300 that Murphy finally sent his first signal to Midway, reporting “many unidentified ships” and giving their position, but no course heading or any other information.10 This is somewhat understandable, because the two groups of ships he had encountered thus far were both on different courses. The picture then grew even more confused. For the next hour and a half, the Tambor made a wide loop, first north, then west, then south again, catching intermittent glimpses of Japanese ships, some on a northward course, some heading south.
As dawn began breaking, it became clearer to Murphy that these ships, whoever’s they were, were definitely destroyers. They were, of course, the Arashio and Asashio, first heading north before the collision to find Kurita, then coming about and returning south to assist him. The undamaged Kumano and Suzuya were still in the neighborhood of the collision, waiting to see if the Mogami could get up to speed. But the best she could do with her smashed prow was 12 knots. Kurita thereupon made the decision to split up.
The Mikuma would try shepherding the Mogami out of the area. With Midway just 90 miles away, though, the odds of the latter’s survival did not seem propitious. Meanwhile, the Kumano, Suzuya, and destroyers would immediately retire at high speed—an act that some in the Japanese Navy regarded with contempt.11 Indeed, a few hours later, the two destroyers would be ordered to rejoin the wounded pair.12
At 0412, Murphy sighted the two cruisers coming toward him, although because of their large size, he judged them closer than they were. The Tambor submerged and rigged for depth-charging, but no attack materialized. Belatedly realizing his mistake, at 0437 Murphy came to periscope depth. By now, he could clearly identify a pair of Mogami-class cruisers. Shortly afterward, he noted that one had about 40 feet of her bow missing. But wounded as the Mogami was, the Tambor could not close on her while submerged. The distance opened from 6,000 to 8,000 yards, and the firing angle was lousy. The submarine took no shots, and the Japanese gradually hauled over the horizon to the west. Murphy surfaced and sent off a more complete sighting report at around 0600, noting two Mogami-class cruisers, along with their course, speed, and position.13 It had been a very confusing, frustrating night for the Tambor, which had never been in position to attack with torpedoes.
Unfortunately for Murphy, that same frustration was soon shared by Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance, the Battle of Midway’s acting U.S. carrier commander.14 He had not received the Tambor’s initial sighting report until around 0400. In the absence of any information regarding the composition, course, or speed of the enemy ships, he did not know if they were headed toward Midway or away. To Spruance, it was possible that “many ships” meant that this was a Japanese invasion force.15 Accordingly, he kept his carriers out of range until things became clearer. Only when he received the Tambor’s 0600 report that the enemy was retiring did Spruance come about himself.
His two carriers were now badly out of position to search for either the Mikuma and her wounded sister or the Kumano and Suzuya (which were still nearby) or to pursue morning sighting reports of a burning Japanese carrier to his northwest. In the words of the Navy War College’s postmortem, “This failure to make a correct report may have caused CINCPAC [Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz] and CTF 7 [Commander, Task Force 7, i.e., Rear Admiral Robert English, commander of the Pacific submarine force] to make decisions . . . which may have had an adverse effect on that day’s operations.”16 Late sighting reports do not happy admirals make, as Murphy soon learned.
Whether Spruance was late off the mark, it made little difference for CruDiv 7’s wounded duo. The admiral spent all day on the 5th fruitlessly chasing reports of a damaged carrier to his northwest (the Hiryū, which had sunk that morning). Midway aircraft attacked the Mogami and Mikuma but inflicted no damage. The Mogami’s speed was now up to 14 knots, and the Japanese began thinking they might yet escape.
On 6 June, though, their hopes were dashed, as Spruance came south to hunt the cripples. The Mikuma’s trailing oil slick was a dead giveaway, and waves of carrier aircraft damaged both cruisers, causing a huge fire on board the Mikuma that detonated the Long Lance torpedoes she had declined to jettison. Burning and settling, the cruiser was doomed. A final attack in the afternoon drove off the Mogami, Arashio, and Asashio in the midst of pulling off the Mikuma’s crew, leaving many of them stranded. When the cruiser rolled over and sank at dusk, 700 men died with her.17
None of this was any consolation to John Murphy, though. Admiral Nimitz, a submariner himself, was greatly disappointed by the poor showing of the U.S. boats during the battle. “Our forces should have destroyed many enemy ships on 5 June,” he wrote in his after-action report to his superior, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King. “A foremost cause for their not doing so,” he continued scathingly, “was Tambor’s faulty reporting,” noting further that “Tambor passed up an unexcelled opportunity to torpedo enemy war ships.”18
Spruance also was unhappy with having wasted much time on the 5th, and apparently let Rear Admiral English know it. Concerned that this performance would see him relieved, English began cleaning house.19 Murphy was one of several skippers and staff officers transferred out. He took the news philosophically. Given the circumstances, Murphy wrote, “I really cannot find much fault with the decision.”20
In retrospect, though, it is possible to find fault. Admirals are entitled to want what they want—perfect sighting reports delivered crisply and right away. In wartime, however, that is rarely what they get. And in defense of Murphy, it must be noted that the heretofore misunderstood movements of the Arashio and Asashio had complicated his tactical picture immensely. Within a span of two hours, Murphy had seen variable groups of four, three (he thought), and two enemy ships heading first east, then north, south, then finally west. What, then, should he have transmitted as the composition of the enemy force? And its course?
Murphy perhaps may be faulted for being overmeticulous and not having sent a timelier first report. But he hardly can be blamed for hesitating to elaborate further until the tactical picture coalesced. Indeed, had he instead sent a sequence of accurate but seemingly conflicting reports, he would have helped no one and drawn his superiors’ ire just as surely.
Likewise, even had Murphy’s initial report been timely and spot on—four cruisers heading east toward Midway at high speed at 0230—it almost certainly would have been interpreted in precisely the same way: as the vanguard of a Japanese invasion force. That would have had the very same effect on Spruance: inducing him to caution. No matter what Murphy did, Spruance still would have been wrong-footed the next morning and still in possession of other intelligence suggesting a fifth Japanese carrier that needed sinking was out there somewhere.21 The only difference would have been Murphy’s ability to assert that he had acted promptly. “Might-have-beens” did not matter, though, when the Tambor docked in Pearl Harbor on 16 June. Murphy was done.
This story has a happy ending, though. John Murphy was resilient, and the wartime Navy still needed good men. He was sent first to Australia as a submarine staff officer, then eventually to the Mediterranean, where he commanded a tank landing ship (LST) group and then later an LST flotilla. He was awarded two bronze stars and numerous campaign ribbons. After the war, Murphy commanded the attack cargo ship USS Union (AKA-106), eventually retiring in 1955 as a rear admiral (his brother Marion made admiral as well.) Jay Will Murphy then followed his love of kids into a very rewarding second career teaching high school math in California.22 He died in 1995 at the age of 91.
A Question of Timing
There is a minor mystery around precisely when Kurita’s orders to abort his Midway mission were transmitted and when he acted on them. It is known that Yamamoto’s instructions to break off CruDiv 7’s attack originally were sent to the wrong cruiser division, and this seems to have delayed Kurita retreating. The official Japanese war history, Senshi Sōshō, states that CruDiv 7 received the mission cancellation order by 0035, turned away at 0045, and spotted the Tambor about two hours later.1 However, another important Japanese monograph prepared shortly after the war states that the order receipt and turn both occurred around 0230, with the Tambor spotted immediately thereafter.2
It appears Senshi Sōshō is wrong. First, no source is given for its conclusion, and its statements regarding CruDiv 7’s movements are based on postwar testimony, not official wartime documents. The same is true for the postwar monograph, but its statement is supported by two further sources. The first is Mitsuo Fuchida’s Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, which states that the encounter with the Tambor occurred shortly after Kurita’s turn.3 Fuchida, while not always trustworthy, had no reason to alter the record on this matter, although he was not an eyewitness. The second and most crucial source is the USS Tambor’s war diary, which clearly states that Kurita’s force was headed east when first sighted at 0215, and thus had not yet turned away from its bombardment mission. Here is proof yet again that sometimes the key to understanding the actions of one side in a battle lies in the records of its enemy.
—Jonathan Parshall
1. Senshi Sōshō of Midowei Kaisen (Midway Sea Battle), 472.
2. Japanese Monograph No. 93 “Midway Operations May–June 1942,” Department of the Army, 1947, 59–60.
3. Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya, Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1955), 220.
Listen to a Proceedings Podcast interview with author Jon Parshall below:
1. Jon Parshall interview with Joann Murphy Langrock, John Murphy’s daughter. We are grateful to Jon’s genealogically minded sister-in-law Anne Sullivan for having sleuthed up biographical details and contact information for Murphy’s relatives. We thank J. Michael Wenger for help in these matters as well.
2. U.S. Naval Academy annual register, 1924–25, 70–71.
3. “USS Tambor (SS198) War Diary, Third Patrol, From May 21, 1942 to June 17, 1942,” 11, RG 38, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
4. Course heading derived from fold-out track chart in the Japanese official history (Senshi Sōshō) of Midowei Kaisen (Midway Sea Battle) (hereafter BKS).
5. Tambor War Diary, 11. It should be noted that the Tambor’s report states that three targets were trailing the first quartet. This is in error. The only other Japanese ship in the area—the oiler Nichiei Maru, which had been attached to CruDiv 7—hadn’t remotely the speed to keep up (17.5 knots) and would not have been risked in such a fashion. The fact that Destroyer Division 8’s destroyers later fueled from her, after transits of several hours, supports the notion that she was well to the rear.
6. Tambor War Diary, 11–12.
7. Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 345–46. This also includes the very detailed account (and somewhat stylized track chart) in Robert Schultz and James Shell’s We Were Pirates: A Torpedoman’s Pacific War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009), 71–73.
8. BKS, 473.
9. BKS, 475; Japanese Monograph No. 93, “Midway Operations May–June 1942,” Department of the Army, 1947 (henceforth JM), 60, notes that “the signal . . . was not clear”; Kamei Hiroshi, Midowei-Senki (Battle Record of Midway) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2014), 263–64, provides the following explanation: “Observing the enemy sub, Lt. Cdr. Okamoto Isao, the duty staff officer [on the bridge of the Kumano], ordered ‘Aka-Aka’ by blinker, which meant ‘Emergency turn to port, 45-degrees.’ But thinking that 45 degrees was too small, he ordered ‘Aka-Aka’ again by radio telephone. He might have thought that by ordering a 45-degree turn twice, that it would make 90 degrees when put together. But things did not go the way he wished. If one orders the ship to turn 90 degrees to port, the order must be ‘Aka-Aka Number Nine.’ Likewise, the IJN did not use such combined signals (of both blinker and radio) during its fleet maneuvers. Later, CDR Okamoto asserted in Senshi Sōshō that he had ordered “Aka-Aka Number Nine” by radio telephone. [Taken together], Kumano seemed to be unsure whether it should turn 45, or 90 degrees . . . . Suzuya, which was 800 meters behind, interpreted the signal as a 45-degree turn.”
10. Tambor War Diary, 12.
11. Matome Ugaki, Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941–1945, Donald M. Goldstein, ed. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 152.
12. It appears that the two destroyers of DesDiv 8 rejoined Kurita just as he split his force (probably around 0400), departing with the Suzuya and Kumano, and taking the destroyers with him. This left the Mikuma and Mogami heading west, which is why the Tambor’s subsequent sightings of the pair from 0412 onward saw only two enemy ships. However, at 0325 Tokyo time (0625 local), Admiral Nobutake Kondō, evidently with some displeasure at Kurita, ordered Kurita to detach the Arashio and Asashio and send them back (BKS, 492).
13. Tambor War Diary, 13.
14. RADM Frank Jack Fletcher, USN, was the senior carrier commander but had handed tactical command to Spruance after Fletcher’s flagship the USS Yorktown (CV-5) was disabled during the battle.
15. Richard W. Bates, “The Battle of Midway Including the Aleutian Phase, June 3 to June 14, 1942: Strategical and Tactical Analysis” (hereafter Bates Report), U.S. Naval War College, 1948, 157.
16. Bates Report, 157.
17. The only Japanese survivors from the Mikuma’s sinking were two sailors rescued later by the USS Trout (SS-202). Parshall and Tully, Shattered Sword, 381.
18. CINCPAC File No. A16/Midway/(90), 8 August 1942, From: Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Fleet, To: Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, 1. We are grateful to our friend John Lundstrom for his insights on these matters.
19. Clay Blair Jr., Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1975), 249–50.
20. Blair, Silent Victory, 250.
21. Parshall and Tullly, Shattered Sword, 363.
22. Parshall interview with Joann Murphy Langrock, 11 September 2018.
View the War Diary of the Tambor's third war patrol below: