During the first crossing, Dei had to break throug…
During the first crossing, Dei had to break through in order to reach the rendevous.
On the return, he had to preserve the lives just recovered and still get close enough to the fleet to finish the reconnaissance.
A reckless attack could erase the success on the beach.
A passive retreat could leave the larger mission incomplete.
As Harter approached the Sabutu passage again, Japanese destroyers were searching in organized groups.
Some swept in line of breast, spreading their sensors across the channel.
De did not challenge every contact.
He watched, maneuvered, and rejected approaches that gave the enemy too much warning or left too many ships close enough to counterattack.
The return did not become an uninterrupted series of attacks.
Harder struck when the enemy’s movement created an opening.
When the setup was wrong, it disappeared and kept moving toward the reconnaissance area.
On the night of June 8th into June 9th, the right opening appeared.
Several Japanese destroyers were searching near the narrowest part of the passage, only a few miles from Tawi.
Tawi Harter submerged and approached without being detected.
Through the periscope, Dei watched two ships move into nearly the same line of sight.
For a brief interval, their silhouettes overlapped.
This was not the same problem as Minazuki or Hyanami.
No destroyer was charging directly at the periscope.
De had gained the better position first.
Instead of turning the enemy’s pursuit into a shot, he was using concealment to place one torpedo spread across two possible targets.
At about 1,000 yd, Harter fired four torpedoes.
The first passed ahead of the nearer ship.
The second and third struck the destroyer Tanikaz.
The hits reached the machinery spaces and produced a violent boiler explosion.
Tanikaz lost power and sank so quickly that men were thrown into the water before the surrounding ships fully understood what had happened.
The fourth torpedo continued toward the farther destroyer.
De saw a blinding flash in that direction.
Inside harder sound operators heard explosions and then lost the clear propeller signature amid the noise.
When the submarine later came up to inspect the area, neither destroyer was visible.
To the crew, the conclusion seemed obvious.
They had fired at two overlapping ships, seen Tanikaz explode, seen another flash beyond it, heard more detonations, and then found an empty sea.
They believed both targets had gone down.
After Minizuki, one successful shot might still have been luck.
After Hyanami and Tanicaz, the crew could see a pattern.
In their view, Harter had destroyed four destroyers in three days using two different kinds of approach, but the water had concealed part of the truth.
Japanese records confirm the loss of Tanakaz.
They do not show a second destroyer sunk in that attack.
The farther ship survived.
The flash de saw may have come from a torpedo detonation, a defensive depth charge, or an event that could not be interpreted correctly through spray, darkness, and a periscope lens.
The distinction was invisible to Harter that night.
Underwater combat produced evidence in fragments.
A flash, a shock, propellers that stopped or changed direction, wreckage that might drift away, an enemy that might withdraw before the submarine returned to the surface.
A commander had to report what he observed, but observation was not the same as confirmation.
This uncertainty did more than alter the final score after the war.
In the moment, it changed the emotional balance aboard Harder.
The crew had entered the passage with destroyers as the dominant threat.
Now three were certainly gone, and a fourth appeared to be gone.
The boat had passed through the screen, recovered six men, and returned through the hunters again.
Confidence [clears throat] was earned.
The danger came from allowing confidence to erase the limits that the mist six torpedo spread had already exposed.
Harter still had to approach Tawitawi.
The largest Japanese ships in the region were not hiding in the open sea.
They were inside a defensive system of aircraft and escorts, and Dele’s reconnaissance would be valuable only if he could get close, observe, and transmit without being destroyed.
On June 10th, the submarine found the force it had been sent to watch.
Through the periscope, De saw a major Japanese formation, three battleships, four cruisers, and a destroyer screen.
The sighting was more important than another isolated target.
These were the ships Allied commanders needed to locate before the approaching fleet battle.
Reconnaissance at periscope depth was a contest between detail and exposure.
A brief look might confirm that large ships were present but missed their number, type, course, or formation.
A longer look improved the report and increased the chance that sunlight wake or motion would reveal the periscope.
De had to collect enough information to make the risk worthwhile while remaining close to escorts whose sole purpose was to prevent that observation.
The problem therefore reversed Harter’s normal priorities.
A merchant target could be abandoned when the approach became poor.
Intelligence about the main fleet could affect operations far beyond the submarine.
Deal could not torpedo the entire formation, but he could tell allied commanders where it was and what it contained.
To do that, he first had to survive the destroyer screen.
Harter began collecting the information, but an aircraft detected the submarine near periscope depth.
The plane marked or reported the position.
One of the screening destroyers turned toward the contact and accelerated.
Once again, a Japanese bow appeared on the attack bearing.
The resemblance to Hyanami was immediate, but the situation was not identical.
The enemy formation was larger.
Aircraft were overhead.
Other escorts could answer.
Harter was operating close to the very fleet it had come to observe.
A successful shot might remove the nearest threat, but it would also announce the submarine’s exact presence to every ship in the screen.
De chose the close attack.
The destroyer came in at roughly 35 knots.
At about 1500 yards, Harter fired three torpedoes down the line of approach and began a crash dive.
This time, De did not hold the periscope up to watch the result.
The boat angled down while the destroyer continued toward the point where it had last seen the submarine.
Explosions struck the water above.
Then, the sound of the destroyer’s machinery passed with shocking force over Harder.
The submarine went beneath the ship at close depth, near enough for the propeller noise and underwater shocks to merge into one confused event inside the hall.
The crew believed the torpedoes had hit.
The violent detonations seemed to confirm it.
Later, a lighted buoy or marker in the area strengthened the impression that another destroyer had been sunk or badly damaged, but no Japanese loss corresponds to that claim.
The ship may have been damaged or the explosions may have come from torpedoes and depth charges without a decisive hit.
What can be established is that the destroyer remained able to attack and harder was forced into another long evasion.
This was the tactic’s limit in its clearest form.
Waiting shortened the defender’s reaction time, but it did not make the torpedoes infallible.
The target could alter course at the last instant.
A firing estimate could be slightly wrong.
A weapon could run imperfectly.
An explosion heard through the hole could sound like proof when it was only noise.
And because Harter had fired at close range, there was almost no separation between the apparent attack and the enemy’s answer.
Depth charges followed for roughly 2 hours.
The boat went quiet again.
The same men who had watched three destroyers disappear now lay or stood in the heat while another escort searched above them.
The rescued soldiers were inside the pressure hall as well.
Every detonation threatened not only the submarine’s crew, but the success of the coastal mission and the intelligence Harter had not yet transmitted.
Waiting at the periscope was the visible act of nerve.
The decision that preserved the patrol after June 10th was less visible.
Harter did not surface into the middle of the screen for another shot.
De did not try to turn an uncertain encounter into a confirmed victory.
He accepted that the immediate attack had not removed the danger and returned to the slow work of survival.
The submarine changed depth, reduced noise, and moved away from the search.
Each minute bought distance, but consumed battery and air.
Each pause in the explosions could mean the enemy had lost contact or was preparing another pattern.
Eventually, the attack weakened, harder, escaped.
At that point, De had a defensible reason to leave.
The boat had been hunted repeatedly.
Its torpedo supply had been reduced.
The rescued men were aboard.
The crew believed it had inflicted extraordinary losses.
Continuing toward Tawittowi meant risking everything for information that offered no immediate protection and still had to be carried out of enemy waters.
But reconnaissance was one of the patrols central purposes.
Destroying the screen had value because it opened access to the fleet, not because the destroyers were trophies.
On June 11th, Harter returned to the edge of the anchorage.
De raised the periscope and surveyed the ships that remained.
He identified cruisers and destroyers and noted the absence of the battleships seen the previous day.
The pattern of movement was becoming clearer.
The Japanese force was preparing to leave the area.
Harter then moved towards safer water.
After dark, the submarine surfaced and transmitted its observations.
The report went into the larger intelligence picture available to Admiral Raymond Spruent before the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
Only then was the central mission complete.
Harter had crossed the guarded passage, recovered the six Australians, returned through a search line, found the enemy fleet, and sent the information out.
The damage inflicted along the route had consequences beyond the three confirmed sinkings.
Japanese commanders were already dealing with submarine reports around Tawi Tawi.
Harder’s rapid attacks intensified the impression that the anchorage and its approaches were crowded with American boats.
Destroyers were pulled into searches when the fleet needed them as escorts.
Ships maneuvered and consumed fuel.
Admiral Jizaboro Ozawa’s mobile fleet departed Tawitawi earlier than planned, a change that complicated Japanese timing before the coming battle.
Harder did not win the Battle of the Philippine Sea by itself.
Many submarines, aircraft, intelligence units, and fleet commanders shaped what followed.
But one boat had made the waters around Tawi Tawi feel less like a protected base and more like a penetrated perimeter.
That mattered to a Japanese force already short of fuel, trained air crews, and reliable freedom of movement.
The effect came from uncertainty as much as destruction.
Japanese commanders could count the ships that failed to return, but they could not see the American submarine long enough to know whether one boat or several were responsible.
Contacts appeared in different parts of the approaches.
Attacks came from stern and bow, from a charging geometry, and from a concealed broadside ambush.
The safest interpretation was that multiple submarines might be operating around the anchorage.
Responding to that possibility required more patrols, more fuel, and more escorts diverted from the fleet they were supposed to protect.
The patrols final numbers reveal something the wartime legend concealed.
During the war, De and Harter received credit for five destroyers in the sequence.
The claims made sense from inside the submarine.
On June 8th, a flash beyond the sinking tanicaz appeared to mark a second hit.
On June 10th, explosions and the destroyer’s passage overhead sounded like another destruction.
Postwar comparison with Japanese records reduced the confirmed total.
Minizuki was sunk.
Hyanami was sunk.
Tanikaz was sunk.
No matching Japanese loss confirms the farther target in the overlapping attack or the destroyer that charged on June 10th.
Three confirmed destroyers in 4 days was still an extraordinary result.
More important, the corrected total exposes the real character of the tactic.
It was never a guaranteed execution.
The same method that destroyed Hyanami at 650 yards produced missed torpedoes, uncertain explosions, and hours under depth charges.
Harter survived not because De had discovered a trick that could not fail, but because he understood that every firing solution had a boundary.
The Japanese sailors paid the human price of those boundaries.
Minazuki, Hayanami, and Tanikaz carried crews, not symbols on a plotting board.
Their losses killed hundreds of men and left survivors in oilcovered water while other ships searched for the submarine below.
Inside Harter, the crew endured its own repeated expectation that the next depth charge might open the pressure hull.
The six Australians recovered from Borneo experienced both sides of the patrol.
The relief of reaching the submarine and the hours of being hunted inside it.
What made the patrol work cannot be reduced to a single word such as courage or aggression.
Dele’s courage mattered.
Without it, he could not have kept the periscope on Hyanami as the range fell below 1,000 yard.
The crew’s discipline mattered.
The torpedo rooms, plotting party, helm, diving stations, engine rooms, and sound operators all had to execute their work while the ship above was closing at high speed.
But courage alone would have killed them.
The patrol succeeded because aggression was connected to geometry, and geometry was connected to purpose.
When Minazuki chased harder along a predictable line, Dei turned the stern tubes toward it and fired.
When Hayanami drove directly onto the bow, he waited until the destroyer had little time left to evade.
When Tanicaz crossed an overlapping line with another ship, he used concealment and attacked both with one spread.
When the approach was poor, he broke contact.
When the water filled with alerted hunters, he stayed deep.
When an apparent fifth victory could not be confirmed, he did not sacrifice the reconnaissance mission to prove it.
The destroyer’s speed was their advantage until the last seconds of a committed charge.
Then that speed narrowed their options and carried them toward the torpedoes.
Harder’s weakness was its lack of speed underwater.
Yet by holding position long enough to shape the encounter, De made the destroyer solve the final part of the approach for him.
Return to the periscope on June 7th.
Hyanami is still coming.
The bow wave fills the glass.
Every instinct says the submarine should vanish before the destroyer arrives.
De waits because he has recognized something the attacking ship has not.
The destroyer believes it is driving a submarine away from the surface.
In reality, its charge has fixed its own course and converted the distance between the ships into a rapidly closing firing line.
At 650 yards, Harter releases three torpedoes.
The fatal assumption in the Sabbutu passage was not that an American submarine could never hit a destroyer.
It was that when the hunter came straight at it, the submarine would always behave like prey.
