During the first year of the Pacific War, roughly forty of the 135 officers commanding American submarines lost their boats. The first loss came in the second week of the conflict, on 13 December 1941. Lieutenant Commander Morton Mumma took the Sailfish down off the Philippines, ran a sonar approach against a pair of Japanese destroyers, and fired two torpedoes. The destroyers found him.
The Navy had deliberately chosen Mumma for that submarine. The Sailfish had previously been the Squalus, the boat that flooded and sank on a trial dive off the New Hampshire coast in 1939 with more than half her crew trapped inside. She had been raised, cut open, dried out, and recommissioned under a new name. The Navy believed a strict disciplinarian with a reputation for spit and polish was what she needed.
Off the Philippines, the destroyers held contact and worked her over with close to two dozen depth charges. Somewhere in that attack, Mumma handed the submarine to his executive officer and asked to be relieved. The exec took her and radioed Manila. When the Sailfish came alongside, Mumma was relieved of command and presented with the Navy Cross.
Then he stayed. There was no passage out of Manila and no other billet on the island to send him to. He lived at the base with the men who had heard the report come in. He had to face them every morning.
Losing a boat that way usually ended an officer’s career. It shut him out of the good jobs and closed off any road to flag rank. Everyone in the submarine force understood this. The younger officers took it hardest.
They had been taught at Annapolis to go in harm’s way, and a great many of them could not fit what happened to Mumma into anything they had been told to expect. The Navy Cross has since been read as a tidying-up award, handed over to spare everyone the conversation. That is how historian Clay Blair read it three decades later. A decoration and a relief signed inside the same week is a document that argues with itself.
It argues in an awkward direction because if the citation meant what citations usually mean, then something was wrong in the force far larger than one lieutenant commander. The reading that survived was the tidier one: the trouble was the man in the conning tower. That belief lasted about two years, and it died in pieces. Lieutenant Commander Joseph Callaghan had the Porpoise in the Philippines when war reached them.
With all four main engines opened up for overhaul and her entire after battery lifted out, his crew had her seaworthy in a fortnight. He took her out five days before Christmas, spent a month on patrol, attacked two ships, hit neither, and came back unable to stand a watch. He told Blair long afterward that he possessed every requisite for wartime submarine command except one: stamina. He had already put in his patrol report that he would not have taken one particular shot if he had been in full possession of his faculties.
He was relieved as the patrol ended. The Porpoise went to Lieutenant Commander John McKnight, who had opened the war in the old S-36 and put her on a reef in Makassar Strait hard enough that the crew abandoned and scuttled her. Nobody appears to have held that against him. He made four patrols in the Porpoise, took her into a typhoon, and was eventually relieved as well after Admiral Charles Lockwood went through his report and wrote down his regret at the number of targets McKnight had seen and let go by.
Marvin Kennedy had the Wahoo for her first patrols and was relieved for insufficient aggression. He was wearing a Silver Star at the time, awarded for the same patrol on which he was judged insufficiently aggressive. A comparison was available the whole time, and nobody ran it. American submarines were also at sea in the Atlantic across those years.
More than one hundred war patrols there produced five sinkings among them all. Not one Atlantic commanding officer was recorded as having been removed for failing to produce. It was the same navy running the same schools and the same attack manual, firing the same torpedoes out of the same tubes. Groundings are where the record goes strange.
Francis Brown put the S-39 aground in 1942 and damaged her beyond saving, so the crew abandoned her. There were recommendations that he face a court-martial. He was given the S-43 instead. Albert Bontier grounded the brand-new Razorback on her shakedown cruise, was removed, and had the Seawolf a few weeks later.
William Wylie grounded the Scorpion in 1943, went from submarines to destroyers, and came out of the war holding a Navy Cross from his first submarine patrol and a Silver Star from Okinawa. In 1944, John Crowley took the Flier onto a bank coming into Midway in a storm. The submarine rescue vessel Macaw went aground trying to pull her off, broached, and sank. Her captain and four crewmen drowned.
Crowley remained in command of the Flier, took her to San Francisco for repairs, and was later awarded the Navy Cross. Donald McGregor took the Gar into the war and was given the Navy Cross for her first patrol. Her third and fourth patrols produced no attacks at all, and in November 1942 he was removed from command. Between that November and the following spring, the Navy promoted him to commander and handed him a brand-new boat, the Seahorse, which is not how a service disposes of someone it has written off.
On his single patrol in her, he attacked twice and was depth-charged off Palau. When the Seahorse reached Midway, his executive officer went to Submarine Force Pacific and reported that his captain was failing in his duty. The exec got the submarine. The reliefs reached men who had held their boats for years as well.
Adrian Hurst had the Permit for three years and took her out twice, dogged by failing engines, sickness running through the crew, and one patrol carrying so many extra men that the boat ran short of food. His last patrol sank three ships. He was relieved anyway and went from there to running an LST task group at Makin, then to command of the naval station at San Diego. Edward Hannon had the S-43 for over three years before he was removed for not producing, then held the Dolphin for nearly two more.
Hamilton Stone lost the Snapper after two years and two patrols, moved through staff jobs, ran operations for the gunfire support groups at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and after the war took a surrendered Japanese cruiser out to Bikini Atoll for the atomic tests. Several of the men relieved for poor patrols in that first year were later handed submarines again. Some of them were wearing Navy Crosses earned on the very patrols that had been written up as unproductive. Dudley Morton was relieved for cause in 1942 by Captain John Haynes of Submarine Division 42, who inspected his boat, the elderly Dolphin, found her filthy, and put on record that her captain was not competent to put her right.
Morton did not argue about the state of the boat. He argued with the idea that she was worth fixing and told his own exec that the Dolphin would get them killed, that he meant to get off her, and that the exec should do the same. He was back in command within months. A more senior officer wanted him and knew him from the Naval Academy, where the two had played football together.
That is the entire recorded mechanism by which the United States Navy returned Mush Morton to sea. How a man came back off that list is not something anyone wrote down as policy, which is exactly why it is worth pulling out of the files. Morton took the Wahoo in January 1943 and had ten months in her. He put her inside an enemy harbor and sank a ship there.
He met a destroyer bow on and shot it down the throat. He broke up a convoy single-handed. Four Navy Crosses came out of those ten months, and in the middle of the run he brought the Wahoo home from one patrol having attacked six times and sunk nothing whatever. The Wahoo sailed on her seventh patrol in the autumn of 1943 and did not come back.
Reliefs went on through that year and the next at a falling rate, and the paperwork behind them thinned out as it went. Blair, whose book built the modern version of this story, did not finally place the cause of the 1942 failure in the conning towers. He placed it at the top of the force, called it a failure of imagination, and listed ten officers by name to carry it, running from King and Nimitz down through the men actually issuing the patrol orders. Lockwood was on that list.
Lockwood relieved skippers himself across 1942 and 1943, wrote eight books about the submarine war afterward, and never took the subject up directly in any of them. So the record holds two verdicts on the same man and offers no way to choose between them. Haynes wrote in 1942 that Mush Morton could not run a submarine. Lockwood wrote in 1960 that handing a boat to a born daredevil of that kind could only produce a first-rate fighting ship with a crew that would follow him anywhere.
Neither of them ever accounted for the other. Two of the reliefs from that first year carry no recorded reason of any sort, and everybody who could have supplied one is dead. Nobody in 1942 had a reliable way to tell a bad captain from a bad torpedo, and the men doing the relieving were working from patrol reports written by the men they were judging. Across five years of war, something over seven hundred officers held submarine command.
Sixty were relieved. Twenty-five of the sixty went back to command something in submarines or surface ships, and most of the rest went to staff billets or back to sea as executive officers. Two left the Navy. Mumma took motor torpedo boats in the Southwest Pacific, ran them out of New Guinea for two years, collected a Legion of Merit, and finished the war as naval aide to the Secretary of the Navy.
There is a bay in Papua New Guinea named after him. Kennedy went to a destroyer and won a second Silver Star in the Philippine Sea. McGregor made captain, commanded an attack transport and then a service squadron, and left the service as a rear admiral in 1956. Callaghan went back to sea in transports and came ashore a captain.
McKnight got his destroyer and was still commanding ships into the late 1950s. Crowley survived the loss of the Flier, spent close to a month on Palawan getting out, and finished as a captain. Morton is the only name on that list without a date beside it at the end.
The Navy took him off one submarine in 1942 and gave him another within months, and what it got back for that was ten months of work and four Navy Crosses.
