Japanese Couldn’t Believe One “Tiny” Destroyer Annihilated 6 Submarines in 12 Days — Shocked Navy

PART 1

At exactly 01:50 on the dark, humid morning of May 19, 1944, Lieutenant Commander Walton Pendleton stood inside the cramped, dimly lit space of the Combat Information Center aboard the USS England. The rhythmic, monotonous pinging of the sonar system echoed against the steel bulkheads, a sound that had defined his existence for months, though it had yet to yield the ultimate prize of an anti-submarine warfare commander.

On the glowing green phosphor screen of the radar and through the sensitive audio gear of the sonar console, an operator was intently tracking a metallic contact submerged beneath the black waters north of Bougainville. The target was moving slowly, registering a mere six knots, utterly unaware that its electronic signature had just broken the silence of the Pacific Ocean.

Pendleton was thirty-seven years old, an age that made him a veteran compared to the remarkably young crewmen who manned his ship. This was his first war patrol as a commanding officer, and up to this precise moment, his official record stood at zero submarine kills.

The pressure weighting down on his shoulders was immense, driven by high-level naval intelligence reports indicating that the Japanese Imperial Navy had recently stationed a scouting line of seven submarines across the vital operational routes leading to the Marianas. These underwater pickets were designed to act as the eyes of Admiral Soemu Toyoda, tasked with spotting American carrier task forces and reporting their movements before a massive, decisive naval campaign could begin.

The vessel Pendleton commanded was the USS England, a Buckley-class destroyer escort specifically designed for the grueling, unglamorous work of protecting convoys and hunting enemy submersibles. At just under three hundred feet in length, she was seventy-seven feet shorter than a standard fleet destroyer and carried only half the crew complement, lacking the heavy five-inch guns and massive torpedo banks of her larger fleet cousins.

What she lacked in raw surface-to-surface firepower, however, she more than made up for in specialized anti-submarine technology, representing the cutting edge of Allied industrial and scientific cooperation. The centerpiece of her arsenal sat mounted prominently on her forward deck: a strange, multi-barreled contraption consisting of twenty-four spigot mortars arranged in neat, angled rows.

The British Royal Navy, who had originally invented and developed the weapon system to combat the German U-boat menace in the Atlantic, had given it the whimsical but deadly name of the “Hedgehog.” Unlike standard depth charges, which were rolled off the stern or thrown from side-projectors to explode at preset hydrostatic depths, the Hedgehog was a forward-throwing weapon system.

It was designed to fire a volley of twenty-four small, aerodynamically stable projectiles roughly two hundred yards ahead of the attacking ship, arranging them in a wide, circular pattern that blanketed a specific patch of ocean. Crucially, these projectiles utilized contact fuses rather than depth-sensitive ones, meaning they would only detonate if they struck a solid object, such as the steel hull of a submerged submarine.

For more than three decades, the depth charge had reigned supreme as the primary weapon used by surface ships to kill submarines, but it was an incredibly inefficient and mathematically flawed system. To launch a traditional depth charge attack, a ship had to steam directly over the estimated position of the enemy, drop the heavy cylindrical canisters off the stern, and hope the target had not changed course or speed during the approach.

The statistics compiled by the British Admiralty painted a brutal, undeniable picture of this traditional warfare method: out of 5,174 documented depth charge attacks carried out during the war, only 85 resulted in confirmed kills, yielding a dismal success rate of roughly one kill for every sixty attempts. By the time a destroyer reached the drop point and the depth charges finally sank to their detonation depths, the agile enemy submarine had almost always moved away.

Furthermore, the violent, churning explosions of standard depth charges disturbed the surrounding water column so severely with air bubbles and thermal layers that the attacking ship’s sonar became completely useless for up to fifteen minutes. Submarine commanders routinely exploited this tactical window of chaos, using the deafening noise and blinded sensors of the hunters to slip away silently into the deep ocean.

The Hedgehog system changed the mathematical calculus of anti-submarine warfare entirely by allowing the attacking vessel to maintain continuous sonar contact throughout the entire engagement. Because the weapon fired its projectiles forward, the ship never had to steam over the target and blind its own sonar operators with its wake, keeping the enemy firmly in focus.

Each Hedgehog projectile weighed sixty-five pounds and was packed with thirty-five pounds of Torpex, a highly explosive mixture that was significantly more powerful than standard TNT. If the volley missed the target, the projectiles simply sank to the ocean floor silently, creating zero water disturbance, zero acoustic clutter, and no lost contact for the tracking team on the surface.

Despite these theoretical advantages, the weapon system was still viewed with deep skepticism across many sectors of the United States Navy, as early testing trials had yielded a meager five percent success rate. Many destroyer captains openly distrusted the new technology, preferring the familiar, thunderous roar of depth charges that shook their own ships over the quiet, unproven physics of the forward mortars.

Pendleton, however, was a man who trusted numbers, studying the updated combat data which suggested that a properly executed Hedgehog attack actually yielded one kill for every five attempts, compared to the abysmal one-in-eighty ratio of depth charges. To him, the mathematics of the situation were simple, elegant, and entirely compelling, requiring only discipline, precise steering, and absolute confidence in the tracking instruments.

The tactical opportunity unfolding before him was the direct result of brilliant work by the Fleet Radio Unit Pacific, the top-secret American codebreakers who had successfully intercepted and decoded a Japanese Imperial Navy transmission four days prior. The decrypted message detailed the movements of the Japanese submarine I-16, providing its exact destination off Bougainville and predicting an arrival time of 22:00 hours on the night of May 19.

Armed with this flawless intelligence, the command had positioned the USS England alongside two of her sister ships, the George and the Rabby, directly along the predicted transit route of the incoming enemy vessel. Now, as the minutes ticked away into the early hours of the morning, the sonar contact solidified from a faint, intermittent audio return into a crisp, unmistakable reality.

Deep beneath the waves, the commander of the I-16 was acutely aware that surface vessels were operating in his vicinity, and he immediately ordered his crew to initiate standard Japanese evasion tactics. The large submarine began executing radical, unpredictable turns while simultaneously changing its depth, trying to break the acoustic bond of the surface ship’s sonar beam.

Inside the Combat Information Center of the England, the sonar operator called out the shrinking range in a calm, measured voice: “Range, fifteen hundred yards.” Pendleton stood close behind the operator, his eyes locked on the instruments as he prepared his crew to execute a maneuver that would prove whether his trusted mathematical models held true in the crucible of real combat.

At exactly 13:41, Pendleton gave the command to fire, and with a muffled, metallic thud that vibrated through the forward hull, twenty-four Hedgehog projectiles arced gracefully into the afternoon sky. They splashed into the Pacific in a tight, geometric circle, sinking rapidly through the water column at a rate of roughly twenty-three feet per second while the crew on deck waited in absolute, breathless silence.

The seconds stretched out painfully, but no explosions followed; the first volley had missed completely, as the agile I-16 had managed to turn sharply inside the projectile pattern during its descent. Undeterred, Pendleton ordered his crew to reload the spigots, a grueling physical process that his highly drilled sailors accomplished in under ninety seconds, preparing the ship for a second run.

During the second approach, the mortars fired again, and this time the tense silence was broken by a single, sharp underwater detonation at an estimated depth of one hundred and thirty feet. The shockwave of the single Torpex blast traveled through the water and visibly lifted the bow of the USS England, though it was clear the single hit was not enough to completely destroy the heavily armored pressure hull of the fleet submarine.

PART 2

The ship’s fathometer soon revealed a frustrating complication: the I-16 had stopped its lateral turns and had opted to dive deep, plunging to a depth of three hundred and twenty-five feet, far deeper than Pendleton had originally estimated. This depth meant the projectiles would take significantly longer to sink, giving the submarine more time to maneuver out of the danger zone before contact could be made.

The third and fourth attacks launched by the England missed their mark entirely, as the Japanese commander masterfully turned his vessel tightly inside the sinking mortar patterns, causing the contact-fused projectiles to slide harmlessly past his steel flanks. The tension inside the American destroyer escort was palpable as the crew realized they were locked in a deadly chess match with a highly skilled, desperate adversary who was fighting for his life.

At 14:33, Pendleton brought the England around for a fifth consecutive approach, his tracking team working with furious precision to factor the submarine’s deep depth and high speed into the final firing solution. The spigots fired, sending the fifth volley into the sea, and for several seconds, the ocean remained dead silent as the projectiles sank down into the oppressive blackness of the abyss.

Suddenly, the sonar room was rocked by four distinct, rapid detonations in quick succession, followed immediately by a massive, cataclysmic secondary explosion that tore through the deep waters. The colossal blast was the sound of the I-16’s internal torpedo stores and high-pressure fuel tanks detonating simultaneously, releasing a kinetic force so immense that it lifted the England’s entire stern clear out of the water.

Sailors across the deck were violently knocked off their feet, and the ship’s structural beams groaned under the strain of the massive underwater displacement. Within twenty minutes, the telltale signs of total destruction began to breach the surface of the ocean: a thick, bubbling slick of heavy diesel oil, shattered fragments of internal wooden cabinetry, and torn pieces of uniform fabric.

The I-16 was completely gone, taking all one hundred and seven officers and crewmen down to the seabed with her, providing a stunning validation of Pendleton’s faith in the forward-throwing weapon system. Yet, there was absolutely no time for the crew to celebrate their historic victory, for the Fleet Radio Unit Pacific had just decoded another urgent operational message from the Japanese high command.

The decryption revealed that seven additional Japanese submarines, comprising the bulk of the Imperial Navy’s 7th Submarine Squadron, were currently deployed in a tight, synchronized scouting line north of the Admiralty Islands. The USS England and her small hunter-killer group were ordered to steam immediately toward this line, entering a target-rich environment where the survival of the entire Marianas campaign hung in the balance.

Commander Hamilton Haynes, the division commander overseeing the operation, received the fresh intelligence coordinates at his headquarters in Tulagi on the morning of May 20. The Japanese deployment was a textbook defensive strategy, positioning seven advanced Type KO submarines along a pre-designated naval grid line code-named the “NA Line.”

These vessels—the RO-104, RO-105, RO-106, RO-108, RO-109, RO-112, and RO-116—were spaced at incredibly precise geographic intervals stretching from the fortress island of Truq down to the waters just west of Manus. Each of these boats was a formidable weapon system, manned by fifty-six highly trained crewmen and optimized for long-range reconnaissance and sudden, devastating ambush attacks on surface ships.

Admiral Toyoda desperately needed to know where the massive American carrier task forces would strike next, and these seven submarines were functioning as his primary scouting eyes in the vast expanses of the Central Pacific. Haynes recognized that if these eyes were not permanently blinded, the element of strategic surprise for the upcoming American invasions would be utterly ruined.

PART 3

He ordered the England, the George, and the Rabby to form a cohesive hunter-killer line, mapping out a search sweep that would pit three American destroyer escorts against seven entrenched enemy submarines. On paper, the tactical odds seemed heavily stacked against the small American flotilla, but Pendleton had just proven that the new weapon system could achieve a twenty percent success rate under combat conditions.

The mood aboard the England had transformed from tentative anxiety into a fierce, quiet confidence; the men had heard the roar of the underwater hits, witnessed the debris, and seen the oil. They knew with absolute certainty that their ship possessed the capability to locate and destroy any submarine that dared to cross their path, provided they executed their duties with mathematical precision.

The hunting group departed Purvis Bay on May 21, immediately shifting into a standard line-abreast formation that maintained a strict distance of sixteen thousand yards between each of the three surface ships. As the tropical darkness blanketed the ocean, the ships commenced regular radar sweeps every thirty seconds, while their sonar systems pinged continuously into the depths below.

The Japanese submarine commanders, operating under strict instructions from Tokyo, maintained absolute radio silence, meaning there would be no more convenient radio transmissions for the codebreakers in Pearl Harbor to intercept. From this point forward, the hunter-killer group would have to find their prey the old-fashioned way, relying on radar detection, sonar tracking, and relentless operational patience.

Pendleton spent hours huddled over his charts in the small captain’s cabin, analyzing the layout of the NA picket line relative to the routes previously utilized by Admiral William “Bull” Halsey’s Third Fleet. The Japanese naval doctrine was notoriously rigid and highly predictable, tending to station their submarine screens in areas where American forces had successfully moved in the past.

This predictability gave the Americans an enormous tactical advantage that the Japanese commanders could not possibly conceive of: the hunters knew the general layout of the trap before they even arrived. The real challenge lay in the critical element of operational timing, as a submarine’s daily routine was strictly dictated by its mechanical limitations and physical needs.

A submarine had to surface under the cover of darkness to run its noisy diesel engines, which were required to draw in fresh air and recharge the massive banks of electric batteries that powered it underwater. At the first light of dawn, the vessels would crash-dive, running silently and slowly on battery power throughout the daylight hours before rising once more after the sun had dipped below the horizon.

This meant the window for surface radar detection was incredibly narrow, limited to a few nighttime hours when a submarine hull would briefly expose itself above the waves. Submarines were highly vulnerable on the surface, but they were also incredibly fast to escape; a skilled Japanese crew could execute a crash dive in under sixty seconds and reach a safe depth of two hundred feet within three minutes.

To counter this rapid escapability, Pendleton had drilled his sonar team until their reactions were completely instinctual, enabling them to calculate a diving target’s depth, speed, and lateral trajectory within seconds. The Hedgehog launcher on the forward deck could be fully prepared, aimed, and fired in ninety seconds flat, sending its twenty-four deadly payloads into a precise thirty-foot-deep impact zone.

Every single launch was a high-stakes gamble against time and geometry, where the contact-fused projectiles offered absolute certainty: they either hit the target and exploded, or remained entirely silent. The human stakes of this mathematical exercise were massive: seven hidden submarines, fifty-six specialized crewmen per vessel, totaling three hundred and ninety-two elite Japanese sailors whose lives could be snuffed out in seconds.

At exactly 03:50 on the morning of May 22, the radar operator aboard the USS George called out a sharp, clear surface contact at a distance of fifteen thousand yards. It was the RO-106, sitting exposed on the calm ocean surface as her diesel engines worked furiously to recharge her depleted batteries, her watchstanders completely unaware of the approaching danger.

The George closed the distance rapidly, turning her powerful carbon-arc searchlight directly onto the exposed submarine, illuminating the sleek black hull against the dark ocean waves. The Japanese commander reacted instantly, ordering an immediate crash dive that sent seawater flooding into the main ballast tanks as the bow angled sharply downward into the sea.

Within ninety seconds, the RO-106 had slipped beneath the surface, prompting the George to fire a full volley of Hedgehog projectiles into the foaming vortex left behind by the sub’s descent at 04:15. The crew of the George listened intently, but the ocean remained frustratingly silent; the volley had missed, as the submarine had executed a sharp evasive turn the moment it submerged.

Recognizing that the George had lost the scent, Pendleton skillfully brought the USS England into the area, establishing solid sonar contact with the target at 04:25 at a range of fourteen hundred yards. The RO-104 was running deep and making a series of radical, sweeping turns, a standard defensive maneuver designed to force the surface hunters into a guessing game regarding the sub’s true vector.

Pendleton refused to engage in guesswork; his master sonar operator tracked every single micro-turn of the enemy hull, calling out rapid depth changes, relative bearings, and calculated ranges with robotic calmness. This stream of data was fed directly into the manual fire-control computer, which translated the acoustic movements into a highly accurate, forward-looking predictive firing solution.

The England’s first Hedgehog attack missed its mark because the RO-106 had initiated a sharp thirty-degree turn during the nine seconds it took for the unguided mortars to sink to target depth. Nine seconds was a brief window of time, but it was more than enough for a modern submarine moving at six knots to displace itself by one hundred and fifty feet.

Unfazed by the initial miss, Pendleton reset his line of approach and ordered a second attack run, launching twenty-four more projectiles into the pre-calculated intercept zone at exactly 05:01. As the pattern entered the water and sank into the darkness, the tracking team held their breath until three sharp, metallic detonations echoed through the hull, followed by a thunderous secondary explosion.

The immense pressure wave generated by the dying submarine rolled across the ocean surface, causing the hull of the USS England to shudder violently from bow to stern. Miles away, the crews of the George and the Rabby felt the distinct, rumbling shockwaves vibrate through their own steel decks, confirming that another enemy picket had been neutralized.

When the sun finally rose over the horizon, it revealed an enormous oil slick stretching more than half a mile wide across the water, littered with floating wood paneling and jagged metal fragments. There were absolutely no survivors from the RO-106; she had been completely obliterated just twenty-four hours after the destruction of the I-16, marking the England’s second confirmed kill.

Without delaying to celebrate, the three destroyer escorts reformed their tactical line with sixteen-thousand-yard spacing and continued their relentless march northeast along the NA Line. The remaining five Japanese submarines were out there somewhere in the vast expanse, their commanders likely beginning to wonder why their sister ships had suddenly stopped making their scheduled status reports.

The Japanese captains maintained a policy of absolute radio silence, but their physical reliance on oxygen and electricity remained an inescapable vulnerability that the American hunters exploited. At 06:00 on the morning of May 23, the radar console aboard the Rabby flickered to life, detecting another surface contact at a long range of twenty-two thousand yards.

The distant contact dove beneath the surface long before the American lookouts could visually identify her hull, as the Japanese commander had clearly learned from the sudden disappearance of the RO-106. This captain chose to stay exceptionally deep, betting that a massive cushion of water would protect him from the surface attacks and make it impossible for the hunters to guess his depth.

The Rabby initiated the attack sequence, firing four consecutive Hedgehog volleys starting at 06:17, but every single one of the forward-thrown patterns came up completely empty. The target, which was later identified as the RO-104, was executing expert, incredibly tight turns inside the sinking mortar patterns, rendering the surface fire-control solutions invalid.

Seeing the Rabby fail, the USS George took her turn at the target, launching a series of four distinct Hedgehog attacks between the hours of 07:30 and 08:10. Every single one of the George’s volleys resulted in agonizing silence; the Japanese submarine commander was brilliantly counter-maneuvering, changing his speed and depth the moment he heard the splash of projectiles.

Division Commander Haynes, watching the frustrating stalemate unfold from the bridge of his flagship, signaled the England to move into the primary attack position to break the deadlock. Pendleton’s crew already had two confirmed kills under their belt, while the other two ships in the division had yet to score a single success against the elusive enemy.

It was becoming increasingly obvious to everyone in the squadron that the England’s sonar operators possessed a superior ability to read the acoustic signatures of the evasive Japanese tactics. Her crew executed the physical reloading process faster, and Pendleton’s fire-control calculations factored the target’s complex three-dimensional movements with unparalleled accuracy.

Frustrated by the inefficiency of his other vessels, Haynes picked up his radio microphone and broadcasted a brief, five-word command that would instantly cement itself into United States Navy legend: “Oh hell, go ahead, England.” Pendleton accepted the challenge without hesitation, immediately steering his destroyer escort into a aggressive intercept trajectory to catch the brilliant Japanese commander.

The England’s first Hedgehog volley missed the mark as the RO-104 executed another radical turn, but Pendleton calmly analyzed the miss and adjusted his lead angle for a second attempt. At 08:34, the spigots roared a second time, sending twenty-four projectiles screaming into the sky before they splashed down directly over the submarine’s projected position.

Seconds later, the sonar room detected a staggering sequence of ten to twelve distinct explosions that quickly merged into one continuous, deafening roar beneath the waves. The acoustic monitors picked up the horrifying, unmistakable sounds of structural breakup: heavy steel bulkheads collapsing under immense pressure, internal machinery tearing free, and air escaping from ruptured compartments.

A massive underwater explosion followed three minutes later as the submarine’s heavy lead-acid batteries violently ruptured and ignited, sending a massive plume of white water erupting on the surface. By 10:45, a massive expanse of thick oil and floating debris marked the final resting place of the RO-104, securing the England’s third confirmed kill in just seventy-two hours.

The relentless pace of the operation continued unabated into the next day, and at 01:20 on May 24, the George’s surface radar picked up yet another contact at fifteen thousand yards. This target was the RO-116, caught completely flat-footed on the surface as she attempted to ventilate her toxic interior air and charge her batteries under the midnight sky.

The submarine executed a frantic crash dive at 01:30, but the England was already closing in, establishing a rock-solid, high-intensity sonar lock on the target by 01:50. The familiar tactical sequence was repeating itself with lethal efficiency: radar detection, a desperate crash dive by the prey, precise sonar tracking by the hunters, and a rapid Hedgehog deployment.

The commander of the RO-116, however, had decided to implement an entirely different defensive strategy to throw off the American fire-control computers: he chose to remain remarkably shallow. While most experienced submarine captains instinctively dove to three or four hundred feet to maximize the water cushion above them, this commander leveled off at just one hundred and fifty feet.

He was executing sharp, erratic turns at this shallow depth, betting his life that the American surface vessels would automatically calibrate their weapon systems for a deep-diving target. It was a clever tactical gamble, but it relied on the assumption that the American sonar operators were blindly following a rigid checklist rather than reading real-time instrument data.

It proved to be a fatal miscalculation; Pendleton’s elite sonar operator immediately identified the unusually short return time of the acoustic pings, shouting out the shallow depth to the fire-control team. The technical solutions were adjusted in a matter of seconds, recalibrating the mortar launch angles to intercept a target hovering just beneath the surface waves.

At 02:14, the England fired her first volley, and three seconds after the projectiles entered the water, three distinct detonations punched through the quiet night air. Unlike the previous kills, there was no massive, instantaneous secondary explosion of fuel or torpedoes, but rather the quiet, clinical sound of Torpex payloads breaching the thin pressure hull.

The sixty-five-pound projectiles had struck the submarine at a terminal velocity of seven hundred and twenty-three feet per second, instantly tearing jagged, three-inch holes through the structural steel. At a depth of one hundred and fifty feet, the hydrostatic pressure of the ocean is immense, causing seawater to violently geyser into the submarine’s interior at a rate of four hundred gallons per minute per hole.

The acoustic operators aboard the England did not hear a thunderous blast, but rather the terrifying groan of structural steel buckling under the rapidly shifting weight of internal flooding. As the RO-116 took on thousands of gallons of water, she lost her buoyancy and began to settle deeper into the ocean column, completely out of the control of her frantic crew.

The extra water weight dragged the vessel down past its maximum structural depth, causing the external water pressure to multiply exponentially with every foot it descended. The air temperature inside the sealed steel cylinder skyrocketed to two and three hundred degrees as the atmospheric pressure compressed instantly, searing the lungs of the trapped Japanese crewmen. Within six agonizing minutes of the initial Hedgehog impact, every single soul aboard the RO-116 was dead, suffocated or crushed by the relentless power of the deep ocean.

The submarine continued its silent, uncontrolled descent until it slammed into the abyssal floor, leaving behind only a small, deceptive trail of oil and minor debris that breached the surface at 07:02. Over the next twenty-four hours, that small slick expanded into an oil sheen covering several square miles of open ocean, confirming that fifty-six more Imperial sailors had perished.

In just five days of operational deployment, a single American destroyer escort had successfully hunted down and destroyed four modern fleet submarines, a feat entirely without precedent in naval history. Word of this extraordinary string of victories traveled up the chain of command, quickly reaching the desk of Admiral Ernest J. King, the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, D.C.

King, a notoriously stern and demanding officer who oversaw the global operations of the United States Navy, read the raw action reports from the Pacific with a mixture of shock and profound admiration. He was deeply impressed that a cheap, mass-produced destroyer escort utilizing a widely distrusted weapon system had achieved such a stunning tactical result in a matter of days.

Moved by the historic achievement, King drafted an official message to the leadership of the Third Fleet, penning a simple phrase that would echo through naval lore: “There’ll always be an England in the United States Navy.” The inspiring quote spread like wildfire through the fleet within hours, transforming the low-profile destroyer escort and her crew into overnight celebrities across the entire Pacific theater.

This newfound fame, however, brought immediate operational complications, as high-level commanders began to worry about risking such an incredibly successful and media-valuable asset in the dangerous picket lines. On May 25, Admiral Halsey requested that the England be pulled from her anti-submarine hunting duties and reassigned to standard, low-risk carrier escort duty where she could be protected.

Halsey reasoned that Pendleton’s crew was now an irreplaceable repository of practical anti-submarine warfare experience, and losing the ship to a lucky enemy torpedo would be an unacceptable blow to fleet morale. Commander Haynes flatly refused the request, pointing out that three active Japanese submarines still remained entrenched along the NA Line, continuing to pose a direct threat to the fleet.

He argued that the England had established an incredible mathematical rhythm, and pulling her out before the mission was fully completed would leave the vital intelligence network of the enemy partially intact. If the remaining submarines were left unmolested, they would inevitably spot the upcoming American invasions, rendering the hard-fought intelligence advantage of the codebreakers completely useless.

Halsey was ultimately swayed by the aggressive logic of the field commanders, granting permission for the destroyer escort group to conduct one final, comprehensive sweep of the remaining patrol sectors. At 23:03 on the night of May 26, the Rabby’s surface radar successfully locked onto another contact at fifteen thousand yards, located roughly one hundred and ten miles northeast of Seadler Harbor.

The target was the RO-108, which quickly initiated a crash dive the moment her crew detected the electronic emissions of the approaching American surface vessels. The England closed in at high speed, her sonar team picking up a strong, unmistakable acoustic return from the target at a range of sixteen hundred and fifty yards.

The Japanese commander proceeded to make the exact same fatal mistake as his predecessor on the RO-116, opting to remain shallow and execute tight, radical turns to throw off the surface tracking. Pendleton’s seasoned crew, having successfully dismantled four enemy submarines using identical data parameters, anticipated every single move, depth change, and turn pattern before it even occurred.

The Rabby attempted to claim the kill first, steaming into position and launching a full Hedgehog volley, but her fire-control solution was slightly off, resulting in a frustrating miss. Without missing a beat, Division Commander Haynes issued his now-famous order over the radio net once more: “Go ahead, England.”

At 23:23, the England commenced her formal attack run, releasing twenty-four Torpex-loaded mortar projectiles into the dark water directly ahead of her bow. Four to six projectiles struck the shallow submarine almost simultaneously, creating an explosion so compact and violent that it sounded like a single, deafening clap of thunder on the surface.

The RO-108 was torn completely apart in an instant; her pressure hull ruptured at multiple structural points concurrently, causing the entire vessel to implode with catastrophic force. All fifty-six men aboard were killed in less than three seconds, long before their nervous systems could even register the devastating structural failure of their vessel.

This marked the England’s fifth confirmed submarine kill in a staggering six-day period, resulting in the death of two hundred and seventy-nine Japanese submariners and leaving the NA picket line in absolute ruins. Meanwhile, at the Imperial Japanese Navy Headquarters in Tokyo, Admiral Toyoda was staring at his operational maps in a state of growing panic and profound disbelief.

The patrol logs revealed a horrifying reality: seven elite submarines had been deployed to the NA Line, and five of them had completely vanished from the face of the earth without sending a single distress call. There had been no emergency radio transmissions, no reports of mechanical failure, just an ominous, unbroken radio silence that swallowed one multi-million-dollar submarine every twenty-four hours.

It was blindingly obvious that an incredibly fast, deadly, and terrifyingly accurate anti-submarine force was systematically wiping out his forward reconnaissance screen with total impunity. In a desperate bid to save his remaining assets, Toyoda issued a set of sweeping, restrictive new operational orders to the surviving vessels of the squadron, the RO-105 and the RO-109.

Receiving the urgent transmission on May 27, the remaining captains were ordered to maintain a minimum patrol depth of four hundred feet and strictly forbid any surface battery recharging unless absolutely necessary. Furthermore, they were instructed to abandon all radical, high-speed underwater maneuvers upon detecting surface hunters, opting instead to rig their ships for absolute, dead-silent running.

The Japanese high command was finally beginning to understand the tactical parameters of the threat, but they were tragically forcing their surviving captains to learn from the mistakes of dead men. Unaware of the new Japanese tactics, the England, the George, and the Rabby continued their relentless sweep northeastward, searching for the final two targets hidden within three thousand square miles of ocean.

The tactical situation, however, was shifting rapidly against the American hunters, as five consecutive combat engagements had severely depleted the England’s onboard stores of specialized Hedgehog ammunition. Each mortar volley expended twenty-four projectiles, meaning the ship had already fired one hundred and twenty rounds out of her total maximum storage capacity of two hundred and forty.

She had exactly one hundred and twenty projectiles remaining in her forward magazine, leaving her with enough ammunition for only five more attack runs before she would be forced to withdraw from combat. At the same time, the remaining Japanese submarine commanders were proving to be significantly more cautious and difficult to locate than their deceased comrades.

On the night of May 30, the George detected the RO-105 on her radar screen at 21:45, prompting the submarine to immediately execute a deep, silent crash dive into the black water column. This captain was an exceptionally skilled veteran, and rather than running at high speed, he took his boat down to four hundred feet and ordered all electric motors and internal machinery stopped.

The RO-105 hung suspended in the deep ocean in absolute, ghostly silence, eliminating all propeller noise and mechanical vibrations that the surface sonar operators could use to track her. When the England moved into the area, her sonar team could only manage a weak, highly intermittent audio return at a long range of twenty-two hundred yards.

The operators cautioned Pendleton that the faint signal might simply be a “knuckle”—a pocket of highly disturbed, aerated water created by a submarine’s wake that could produce a deceptive false return. Pendleton found himself facing a critical tactical dilemma: he could fire a Hedgehog volley at the weak contact and risk wasting twenty-four precious projectiles, or he could wait patiently for the enemy to move.

He chose the path of operational patience, ordering his ship to maintain a silent circle around the area, refusing to give up his tactical positioning to the invisible enemy below. Four agonizing hours ticked away in absolute silence as the two vessels engaged in a tense acoustic standoff, neither commander willing to make the first sound.

By 02:30 on the morning of May 31, the physical laws of submarine operations finally broke the stalemate as the RO-105’s internal battery reserves began to drop to dangerously low levels. Facing asphyxiation from carbon dioxide buildup, the Japanese commander had no choice but to restart his electric motors and begin maneuvering toward a position where he could briefly surface.

In a final, desperate tactical gamble to break through the surface ring, the captain of the RO-105 brought his boat to the surface at 03:15, miles away from where Pendleton expected him. The submarine had allowed itself to drift silently with the deep ocean currents during those four hours of total silence, successfully displacing itself three miles from its last known position.

The George’s radar console briefly caught the surfaced contact at thirteen thousand yards, revealing that the hunting group had been searching the wrong grid sector for the past several hours. By the time the England could turn her bow and build up steam toward the new coordinates, the RO-105 had already completed a brief, ninety-second ventilation run and crash-dived once more.

Those ninety seconds of diesel operation had purchased the Japanese crew just enough battery reserves to run deep and fast, heading northeast away from the hunters at a speed of six knots. Pendleton re-established a solid sonar lock at 03:45, realizing he was locked in a duel with the most capable and intelligent submarine commander his crew had ever encountered.

This captain had clearly analyzed the fates of the other five destroyed boats, understanding that running fast at a deep depth of four hundred feet made a Hedgehog attack incredibly difficult to calculate. The problem for the surface fire-control team was rooted in pure physics: the unguided Hedgehog projectiles required seventeen full seconds to sink through four hundred feet of water.

In those seventeen seconds of descent time, a fleet submarine moving at a steady six knots would travel a lateral distance of one hundred and seventy feet through the water column. The American firing solution required the crew to predict exactly where the submarine would be nearly twenty seconds into the future; a single incorrect calculation meant the pattern would miss entirely.

Pendleton’s first mortar volley, launched at 04:05, missed the target by over two hundred feet because the RO-105 had executed a sharp turn during the projectiles’ descent. A second attack run executed at 04:23 came closer but still missed by a hundred feet, as the Japanese commander was masterfully varying his speed between four and six knots.

The mathematics of the ammunition supply were now reaching a critical breaking point for the England, as forty-eight projectiles had been expended during the two failed attack runs. With only seventy-two rounds remaining in the forward magazine, Pendleton had exactly three chances left to destroy the RO-105 before his ship would be rendered completely defenseless.

Watching the engagement from the bridge of the George, Commander Haynes felt a deep sense of anxiety; the previous five submarines had all died quickly within one or two approaches. The RO-105 had successfully shrugged off two highly accurate runs and was actively winning the deadly mathematical game against the England’s fire-control computers.

At 04:47, the England’s master sonar operator noticed a subtle, repeating behavioral pattern in the enemy’s movements: the submarine was executing a defensive turn every four minutes on the dot. It would alter its course thirty degrees to port, run for four minutes, and then swing thirty degrees to starboard in a highly structured, rhythmic zig-zag pattern.

The Japanese captain believed he was being completely random and unpredictable, but human beings under extreme stress almost always fall back on structured, mechanical habits. Pendleton seized on this psychological flaw, adjusting his fire-control data to predict the submarine’s next turn and aiming the forward mortars full two hundred yards ahead of the sub’s current vector.

At 05:08, the third Hedgehog volley erupted from the deck, splashing into the sea and sinking into the deep darkness toward the predicted intercept point. Seventeen seconds later, four sharp, metallic detonations echoed back through the water, confirming that the projectiles had successfully slammed into the submarine’s pressure hull.

The hits breached the steel shell but did not instantly vaporize the boat, as the RO-105’s commander immediately initiated emergency procedures, ordering his crew to blow all ballast tanks to surface and abandon ship. Sensing the desperate move, Pendleton rapidly brought the England around for a fourth attack run, launching another twenty-four projectiles into the path of the rising target at 05:32.

This final volley struck home with devastating force, scoring eight consecutive detonations that completely shattered the structural integrity of the submarine’s forward compartments. The emergency ballast blow ceased instantly as the sea rushed into the shattered hull, dragging the RO-105 down into the abyss before a single crewman could reach the safety of the surface.

At 06:15, as the morning sun illuminated the Pacific, a massive slick of heavy fuel oil and shattered wooden debris marked the formal conclusion of a historic twelve-day operational period. The USS England had successfully hunted down and destroyed six Imperial Japanese submarines in a single patrol, a record that stunned the leadership of the United States Navy.

Admiral Halsey, receiving the final mission report at his Third Fleet headquarters, realized that the unheralded destroyer escort had proven the tactical validity of the Hedgehog system beyond any shadow of doubt. On June 1, he issued immediate orders to pull the England from the combat zone, ordering her experience to be used to rewrite the anti-submarine warfare doctrine for the entire fleet.

The seventh submarine along the picket line, the RO-109, was never found by the hunter group; her captain had received Tokyo’s warnings and had abandoned his station to slip away to Truq. She survived the war, surrendering to Allied forces in August 1945, her crew only learning months later that six of their sister ships had been wiped out by a single American vessel.

In July 1944, the USS England was awarded the prestigious Presidential Unit Citation, one of only three destroyer escorts to receive the elite collective honor during the entire course of the war. The official citation read with typical military understatement: “For extraordinary heroism in action against enemy Japanese submarines,” failing to truly capture the mathematical brilliance that drove the victory.

The numbers compiled by naval historians after the conflict told the true story of the England’s incredible efficiency: she had achieved a staggering forty percent success rate during her twelve-day patrol. Her tactical solutions were twenty-five times more effective than traditional depth charges and eight times more effective than the established global baseline for the Hedgehog system itself.

By September 1944, Pendleton’s precise tracking techniques, loading procedures, and predictive firing solutions were codified into standard training protocols across every anti-submarine training center in the United States Navy. In the Atlantic theater, the widespread adoption of these perfected tactics allowed Allied escort vessels to destroy forty-seven German U-boats before the final surrender of the Nazi regime.

Yet, despite the global impact of the weapon system, no individual surface vessel in any theater of World War II ever came close to matching the twelve-day record established by Pendleton and his crew. In August 1944, Lieutenant Commander Walton Pendleton was awarded the Navy Cross for his tactical brilliance, a medal that recognized his leadership but left out the mathematical discipline that made it possible.

The USS England continued her quiet, unglamorous wartime service through the remainder of 1944, performing standard convoy escort duties, fleet screenings, and routine anti-submarine patrols without ever encountering another underwater target. Her historic combat career came to a sudden, violent end on October 31, 1944, during the intense naval engagements of the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

A low-flying Japanese kamikaze aircraft evaded the ship’s anti-aircraft fire, crashing directly into her superstructure and sending a massive bomb penetrating into the forward engine room before detonating. The resulting explosion killed thirty-seven American sailors, wounded twenty-five more, and left the forward half of the vessel a shattered, burned-out ruin of twisted steel and ruptured piping.

The structural damage was deemed catastrophic by fleet engineers, who calculated that repairing the small, mass-produced destroyer escort would cost significantly more than simply building a brand-new vessel from scratch. The Navy decided that the historic ship was no longer worth saving, ordering her to be towed to Manus Island where she was systematically stripped of all useful instruments, electronics, and weapons.

In November 1946, the empty, rusted hulk of the greatest submarine killer in naval history was sold to a civilian salvage yard for a small sum of scrap value. The vessel that had single-handedly broken the back of an entire Japanese submarine squadron ended her physical existence being cut apart by torches, her steel melted down to manufacture razor blades and tin cans.

Despite her unceremonious end, the ship’s incredible tactical record stood entirely unchallenged through the remainder of the twentieth century, and it remains completely unmatched by any modern warship eighty years later. Walton Pendleton survived the conflict, eventually retiring from naval service in 1961 as a full commander before passing away in 1973 at the age of sixty-six.

He was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, where his simple white headstone bears the inscription of his Navy Cross but makes no mention of the six submarines. The United States Navy briefly attempted to honor the legacy of the historic vessel by commissioning a massive, guided-missile destroyer leader named the USS England in October 1960.

That second vessel served the nation with distinction for thirty-two years, but when she was finally decommissioned in 1994, the name England was completely removed from the active registry of the fleet. Today, there is no active warship bearing the name of the vessel that single-handedly redefined anti-submarine warfare, breaking a promise made by Admiral King during the height of the war.

The original, combat-weathered Hedgehog launcher that fired those historic volleys currently sits tucked away in a quiet storage facility at the National Museum of the United States Navy in Washington, D.C. It remains largely forgotten by the public, a rusted piece of vintage machinery that thousands of museum visitors walk past every year without ever realizing the incredible human story behind its steel spigots.

Decades after the conclusion of hostilities, recovered Japanese operational records fully confirmed the absolute accuracy of the England’s six kills, matching her coordinated attack logs with the final resting places of the missing boats. The Imperial Japanese Navy never truly understood what had killed their elite crews so quickly, as their internal archives could only note that their forward scouting line had simply ceased to exist.

The British military had originally conceived the engineering principles of the Hedgehog, the American industrial machine had mass-produced it, and the crew of the USS England had ultimately perfected its deadly application. While popular history continues to romanticize the massive battleships and elite aircraft carriers of World War II, it was a tiny, cheap destroyer escort that executed the most perfect anti-submarine campaign in history.