On May 13, 1944, the Japanese submarine I-16 sent a routine signal concerning a rice shipment. Her commander, Lieutenant Yoshitaka Takeuchi, reported that he expected to reach the isolated army garrison at Buin, at the southern tip of Bougainville, on the twentieth of the same month. At Pearl Harbor, American codebreakers in the radio unit of the Pacific Fleet deciphered the message and gleaned enough from it to determine the submarine’s course and arrival time. Five days later, three brand-new escort destroyers waiting in Purvis Bay in the Solomon Islands received the fruits of that intercept.
Their orders detailed the position of a Japanese supply submarine and her expected arrival time, and closed with two words: “Happy hunting. ” The ships were the England, the George, and the Raby. None of their crews had ever fought a real battle. Over the next twelve days, the England alone sank six Japanese submarines, a tally no other ship achieved during the war.
By late June, the Imperial Navy declared five of those boats lost and presumed sunk. On the Japanese side of the ocean, no one could determine their fate. Five of the six boats were not cargo carriers but small RO-class scout submarines, dispatched by Admiral Noboru Owada in mid-May to form a picket line north of the Admiralty Islands. Their mission was not to sink anything but to spot the incoming American carrier fleet and send a radio warning so that Admiral Soemu Toyoda could bring the Combined Fleet into the decisive battle he was planning.
The Japanese called this picket line “Line NA. ” Within two weeks, silence descended, position by position. The England was a Buckley-class escort destroyer, 306 feet long, commissioned in December 1943 and named for Lieutenant John England, killed aboard the battleship Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor. Her commander, Lieutenant Commander Walton Pendleton, was a professional officer who issued few orders, leaving most of the ship’s training to his executive officer, 26-year-old Lieutenant John Williamson of Birmingham, Alabama, who had escorted convoys in the North Atlantic and taught sonar operators at the Navy’s Subchaser School in Miami.
Williamson drilled the England’s crew until they reached a confidence bordering on arrogance. The weapon they trained on was new in the Pacific: the Hedgehog, a British design that fired 24 charges, each weighing about 24 pounds, in a ring ahead of the ship. Unlike a depth charge, a Hedgehog charge exploded only if it struck a solid object. A miss produced no explosion at all, which let sonar operators track the target throughout the attack instead of losing it in churned water.
At midday on May 19, north of the passage between Bougainville and Shortland, the three ships were sailing in a straight line when Roger Bernhardt, the soundman’s assistant aboard the England, reported a contact. The officer of the deck thought he was hearing fish. The I-16 was not supposed to be anywhere near that position for hours. Bernhardt insisted the echo was sharp and clear.
The England launched an initial Hedgehog attack and missed, then scored a single hit on the second. Two more attempts failed. Pendleton handed the job to Williamson, and on the fifth attack, shortly after half past two, several charges struck home. Two minutes later, a massive underwater explosion lifted the England’s stern and threw men to the deck.
Takeuchi and his entire crew of 107 men went down with the submarine. Large boats like the I-16 had been built for long-range raiding and ended up as cargo carriers after a bitter dispute in which the Japanese Army threatened to build and operate its own submarines unless the Navy transported its supplies. Search parties from the George and the Raby found pieces of cork, chopsticks, and scrap wood on the surface, along with dozens of sharks. The three ships stayed in the area through the night, and toward morning a 75-pound bag of rice in a waterproof wrapper floated up.
The division commander, Commander Hamilton Haines, took it as proof they had sunk a cargo submarine. While the England tracked the I-16, the American Navy was moving the line. On the seventeenth, an American patrol plane spotted one of Owada’s submarines near the northern end of the line and sent a contact report by radio. The Japanese could intercept this kind of clear voice transmission, and Owada concluded that his line had been discovered.
He sent new instructions. No one on Owada’s staff could know the fate of those instructions after they left Japanese transmitters. The Americans reached the line on the twenty-second. At ten minutes to four that morning, the George picked up a surfaced submarine on radar at 14,000 yards, and the three ships closed in until 4,000 yards, when the George switched on her searchlight.
The boat was the RO-106, which had left Truk six days earlier under her new skipper, Lieutenant Oda. Before taking command, Oda had been a torpedo officer aboard the I-116. No radar warning alerted the Japanese boat to the American ship, and she crash-dived. The George’s first salvo missed, and the England regained contact but missed her first attempt.
On her second, three charges exploded at a depth of about 275 feet, followed by a tremendous blast. All 49 men aboard the RO-106 were lost. On the morning of the twenty-third, the Raby picked up the next submarine on radar at 8,000 yards shortly after six. This was the RO-104, and her captain was a veteran who constantly changed speed, course, and depth, even transmitting signals on the American frequency to jam their recorders, causing the Raby to launch four attacks with no hits and the George several more.
After about two hours, Haines ordered the two ships back and called in the England. Her first salvo missed, but her second at 8:34 detonated around twelve charges, followed by the sound of a hull breaking apart. There were 58 men aboard the RO-104. Later that day, a young sailor stopped the executive officer on his way to the wardroom and asked how many men were on the submarines they were sinking.
Williamson answered that the number ranged from forty to eighty, depending on the type of submarine. The sailor then asked how he felt about killing all those men. The answer he received was that war was about killing, and that every ship sunk brought the end closer. The reply seemed to reassure the young man, though the question stayed with the officer for the rest of his life.
At 1:21 in the morning of the twenty-fourth, the George picked up another radar contact, the RO-116, which disappeared the moment the American radar detector blared. Her captain worked the boat’s stern back and forth to spoil attacks and also sent a radar signal. John Brock, the England’s chief soundman, noticed something about their habits. During attacks, the sound crew usually increased the ping rate to get a better bearing, which warned the submarine of an imminent attack.
Brock suggested holding the ping rate steady. They tried it on the next attack. At 2:14, the first salvo scored three to five hits at a depth of about 180 feet. There was no great explosion this time, but by dawn patches of cork, deck planking, and oil floated on the surface.
56 men went down with the RO-116. Three submarines from the same line, on three consecutive days, had steered into the same three ships. The explanation went back to May 17 and the radio call from the patrol plane. Owada’s new instructions shifted the entire American Navy line about 60 miles to the west.
The messages were sent encrypted. At Pearl Harbor, codebreakers decrypted the messages and got to work. Within 48 hours, they had the latitude and longitude of every submarine on the reassigned line. On the afternoon of May 20, Third Fleet informed Haines that seven Japanese submarines were believed to be forming a scout line between Manus and Truk, 30 miles apart, and ordered him to find and destroy them.
The very step Owada took to protect his line was the signal that gave it away. If the England submarines had held out for 12 days so far, Haines was now told to expect seven submarines on the line. By the twenty-sixth, his ships had found three of them. The ships were low on fuel, and two were nearly out of Hedgehog ammunition.
That day, a group of escort carriers under Hoggatt Bay arrived to take over the hunt, and Haines’s division was sent to Manus in the Admiralty Islands to refuel. Pendleton proposed a slight change of course. If the ships happened to steam to Manus along the Japanese picket line, they might stumble across another submarine on the way. The other commanders agreed, as did the escort carrier group commander, because the course would take the division into MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific area, where only Third Fleet ships were supposed to chase targets.
Shortly after eleven that night, both the Raby and Pendleton’s ship picked up a surfaced submarine on radar. It was the RO-108. Pendleton’s crew spotted the submarine first on sonar, slowed to 10 knots, and fired half of their remaining ammunition in one salvo, finding the boat at a depth of about 250 feet. The next morning, rescue men found polished mahogany pieces from a chronometer case, indicating that the charges had hit near the conning tower.
Another report that same morning described a butcher’s block and pieces of broken bed legs coming up through an oil slick. There were 58 men aboard the RO-108. The three ships reached Seeadler Harbor at Manus at three in the afternoon on the twenty-seventh. The escort destroyer Spangler was waiting with fresh Hedgehog ammunition.
They loaded ammunition and fuel, and sailed on the evening of the twenty-eighth with Spangler. Early on the morning of the thirtieth, one of the escort carrier group’s destroyers, the Hazzlewood, picked up a submarine on radar and chased her with depth charges. The George and the Raby joined the action. The England and Spangler were sent to search a sector about 30 miles south.
The submarine they were hunting was the RO-105, and the scout submarine division commander, Captain Ryunosuke Kato, was aboard. For more than a day, she escaped every attack thrown at her, once surfacing to fire torpedoes at her pursuers, all of which missed. At about 3:00 on the morning of the thirty-first, the RO-105 surfaced again directly between the George and the Raby, where neither ship could fire without risking hitting the other. She stayed there for about five minutes, then dove again.
At dawn, the George attacked, then the Raby, then the Spangler, none scoring a hit. A warning came from Halsey’s staff that the ships might be subject to air attack if they stayed in the area. Over the radio, Haines wearily said, “For God’s sake, go on in, England. ” At 7:36, England’s salvo scored at least ten hits.
Five minutes later, a tremendous explosion sounded from below. The RO-105 sank with 55 men aboard, including Kato. About two hours later, oil began rising 500 yards from the point of attack, and rescue men recovered a few pieces of the submarine’s deck planking, three cork stoppers, and a piece of soap. That made six submarines lost in 12 days, against the seven reported by the codebreakers.
The escort group spent most of the next two weeks searching for the remaining submarines but found none, because Owada had moved his boats again, and the RO-19 and RO-12 survived. On the Japanese side, all that was known was that the scouts had stopped reporting, one after another, from points about a day’s sailing apart. Fletcher Pratt argued in a 1947 article in the Naval Institute magazine that the high command drew a logical conclusion from that silence: a huge American force was heading west, with so many ships and planes that it had overwhelmed the scouts. Toyoda believed the Americans were heading for Palau or the Philippines, and shifted Japanese aircraft and fleet readiness south to meet them.
In mid-June, the Americans landed on Saipan, far to the north. How much the England influenced that shift remains debated. Pratt praised the escort destroyers heavily, but his own article concedes that the Japanese already expected the next American strike to fall in the south before the England reached the line. Even the basic facts of the line do not match.
Pratt’s list includes the RO-117, a boat that other accounts say was still steaming south from Japan at the time. All Japanese orders listed the RO-109 and RO-112 instead. Published accounts also differ on the date the RO-106 was declared lost. One report gives June 15, while another lists all five boats on the missing list on the twenty-fifth.
A scout line is only as secure as its codes, and the Japanese Navy never once suspected its codes. The England received the Presidential Unit Citation, and Pendleton received the Navy Cross and a promotion. In September, Williamson turned the ship over to meet his new commander. Security officials kept the story quiet for months, and the role of the codebreakers remained secret for decades.
The England’s bill came due almost a year later. On May 9, 1945, the England was on picket duty north of Kerama Retto off Okinawa when three Japanese bombers attacked. Her gunners set the first one on fire, but it struck her starboard side just below the bridge, and its bomb exploded moments later. Fighters overhead shot down the other two bombers while her crew fought the fires.
She reached Kerama Retto safely, having lost 37 men killed and missing and 25 wounded. She reached Philadelphia in July of that year, but with the war over and enough escort destroyers on hand, the Navy decided she was not worth repairing, and she was sold for scrap in November 1946. After the May 1944 patrol, Admiral Ernest King promised that there would always be an England in the United States Navy, and on October 6, 1960, the name was given to a new guided-missile ship.