…
Chapel makes a radically different choice.
He does not order the boat deep.
Instead, he orders the torpedo tubes readied.
He is committing his obsolete esboat to a daylight surface intercept against a major fleet formation.
It is a fiercely aggressive decision, hinging entirely on the gamble that the Japanese lookouts remain fixated on the sky and completely blind to the water directly ahead of them.
But human intent immediately collides with physical reality.
As Chapel begins snapping rapid bearings to calculate the enemy’s track, the brutal limitations of the S44 reassert themselves.
The Japanese column is moving at a sustained unrelenting 16 knots.
The submarine, even if it drained its batteries to run at absolute maximum submerged speed, could manage barely a fraction of that pace.
Watching the lead cruiser, the Aoba, angle across his limited field of view, Chapel rapidly works the manual is was slide rule to plot a firing solution.
It takes only seconds for the officers in the conning tower to realize the grim geometry of their situation.
The angle on the bow is too wide.
The distance is closing, but the enemy is moving laterally much too fast.
Because the S44 lacks a torpedo data computer to automatically adjust the gyroscope angles of the torpedoes, the submarine itself must be physically pointed ahead of the target to fire.
By the time the sluggish ESBOT can maneuver its bow into the correct firing position, the Aoba will have already sprinted past the window of opportunity.
Chapel shifts his periscope to the second ship in line, the Kinugasa.
He runs the numbers again.
The result is identical.
The math simply does not work.
The old submarine cannot pivot through the water fast enough to catch the vanguard of the formation.
The sheer speed of the Japanese warships is dictating the terms of the encounter, rendering the submarines forward tubes useless against the primary targets.
Frustration mounts in the stifling conning tower.
The crew stands locked at their battle stations, drenched in sweat, hands gripping manual valves and heavy brass hydroplane wheels.
They can do nothing but listen in silence to the thunderous heavy roar of enemy propellers passing over them.
Thousands of tons of prime steel slipping untouchable through their fingers.
The third cruiser, Furutaka, thunders past the periscope bearing.
The aggressive intercept plan is rapidly crumbling.
The lead targets have evaded destruction, not by complex maneuvering, but simply by outrunning the submarine’s mechanical ability to turn and aim.
But Chapel keeps the scope up for one final calculated sweep.
Trailing at the very rear of the Japanese column, attempting to maintain the formation’s rigid 16 knot pace, is the fourth heavy cruiser.
It is the Kako.
As the acoustic roar of the three lead ships begins to shift away, Chapel realizes the tactical geometry has fundamentally altered.
The vanguard is gone, but the physical length of the Japanese formation has inadvertently bought the S44 crucial minutes.
The submarine is finally maneuvering into a position ahead of the very last ship in the line.
The target window for the Kako is agonizingly narrow and closing by the second.
But for the first time this morning, a firing solution is actually possible.
The shift in tactical geometry was instantaneous, transforming the atmosphere inside the cramped, sweltering conning tower from suffocating frustration to a hyperfocused synchronized execution of naval mathematics.
The heavy cruiser Kako anchoring the rear of the Japanese column was locked into the rigid 16-n pace of the formation.
However, her physical position at the very end of the line meant she had not yet crossed the critical threshold of the submarine’s narrow firing window.
The vanguard of the enemy fleet had inadvertently acted as a massive armored diversion, drawing the initial calculations of the S44 and consuming the precious minutes required for the submarine to maneuver.
Now, the lead ships were fading away, and the trailing cruiser was steaming directly into a fatal, inescapable trap.
To capitalize on this fleeting window, Lieutenant Commander Chapel had to execute a flawless mechanical choreography using technology that belonged to a bygone era.
The American S-class submarine was not designed for dynamic rapid fire intercepts.
Aiming the boat required treating the entire 700 ton vessel as a single sluggish sniper rifle.
Without a torpedo data computer to automatically adjust the gyroscope angles of the weapons in the tubes, the torpedoes could only fire straight ahead.
To aim the weapons, the crew had to aim the boat.
Chapel stood at the center of the conning tower, a steel cylinder barely large enough to hold the attack party, dripping with condensation and smelling of hot oil, ozone, and unwashed bodies.
He ordered the periscope raised.
The hydraulic lift winded, pushing the steel tube upward through the pressure hull.
He could not leave the optic exposed for more than a few seconds.
The Pacific was notoriously unforgiving on a clear, calm morning.
A periscope shear cutting through glassy water creates a distinct white feather of foam.
A highly visible wake that alert enemy lookouts could spot from miles away.
Worse, the flat optical glass of the lens could catch the morning sun, flashing a brilliant, blinding reflection across the water like a signal mirror.
Up periscope, Chapel commanded.
He crouched low, waiting for the eyepieces to clear the deck, pressing his face into the rubber cup the moment they were accessible.
He rode the scope upward, breaking the surface for a calculated 3 seconds.
In that violent microscopic window of time, his brain had to process a massive amount of visual data.
Through the magnified optics, the Kako was a terrifying awe inspiring sight.
Displacing roughly 10,000 tons, the heavy cruiser was a masterpiece of aggressive naval architecture.
Her massive undulating shear line swept upward toward a towering, heavily armored pigota mast.
Twin-mounted 8-in naval rifles sat menacingly in their turrets, and the dark modeled camouflage paint of the Imperial Japanese Navy contrasted sharply against the brilliant blue of the tropical sky.
The sheer scale of the warship filled the gritted reticle of the periscope.
A moving mountain of steel displacing thousands of tons of water with every forward surge.
Chapel snapped his observations with the rhythmic staccato precision demanded by the submarine service.
He aligned the horizontal crosshair with the cruiser’s waterline and adjusted the stimeter, a mechanical optical device built into the periscope that split the image in two.
By aligning the ghost image of the cruiser’s mast head with the actual image of its waterline, the stimter calculated the exact distance to the target based on the known height of the enemy ship’s mast.
Mark, Chapel barked.
The quartermaster instantly punched the button on a heavy brass stopwatch, freezing the exact second of the observation.
Downscope, Chapel ordered, folding the handles up as the tube hissed back into its housing, plunging the sub back into blind reliance on acoustics.
He immediately called out the raw data.
He gave the bearing, the estimated range, and the critical angle on the bow, the apparent angle at which the enemy ship was facing relative to the submarine’s line of sight.
This raw data was immediately fed to the executive officer, who was hunched over the attack plot.
The exo rapidly rotated the celluloid discs of the is was slide rule to calculate a static mathematical snapshot of the target.
The mathematics of the intercept had to be worked out by hand in the head and under the crushing pressure of a collapsing time limit.
He aligned the submarine’s true course with the enemy’s estimated bearing and angle on the bow.
He factored in the cruiser’s estimated speed of 16 knots and the known 36 knot running speed of the American torpedoes.
The goal was to find the collision course, the exact compass heading the submarine needed to point its bow toward, and the exact moment the torpedoes needed to be launched so that the speeding warship and the underwater weapons would arrive at the identical coordinate in the vast Pacific at the exact same second.
Rudder hard right, Chapel ordered, initiating the final approach.
Deep in the stern of the boat, the electric steering motors winded in protest, drawing massive amperage from the exhausted lead acid batteries.
The helmsman physically wrestled with the heavy brass diving wheel, fighting the hydrodnamic resistance of the water against the submarine’s control surfaces.
The S44 was notoriously sluggish.
Her hull design optimized for surface cruising rather than submerged agility.
Turning the boat took agonizing minutes.
the compass card and the binnacle ticking off degrees with excruciating slowness.
Every second that passed altered the geometry of the attack, requiring the executive officer to continually update the manual plot, running the slide rule over and over again to ensure the math still held.
While the men inside the suffocating steel tube fought a desperate battle with trigonometry and machinery, a radically different psychological reality was playing out just a few dozen feet above them in the bright morning air.
Aboard the heavy cruiser Kako, the atmosphere was one of profound relief, heavily laced with physical exhaustion, the men of cruiser division 6 were experiencing a massive collective adrenaline crash.
Less than 12 hours prior, they had been the architects of absolute slaughter in the narrow waters offso island.
They had navigated perfectly in pitch blackness, illuminating Allied cruisers with blinding search lights and tearing them apart with devastating salvos of 8 in armor-piercing shells and massive type 93 long lance torpedoes.
They had driven through a chaotic, burning graveyard of American and Australian warships, dodging retaliatory fire and narrowly avoiding catastrophic collisions in the dark.
Surviving a point blank night surface action requires a level of psychological endurance that rapidly depletes the human body.
As the sun rose on August 10th, the men on the bridge of the cacko were running on fumes.
The rhythmic steady vibration of the 16 knot withdrawal served as a mechanical lullabi to a crew that had not slept in days.
The openair command platform of the Kako was crowded with lookouts, navigation officers, and command staff.
But the massive 120 mm naval binoculars that had provided a lethal advantage in the dark were now aimed entirely in the wrong direction.
The psychology of their recent victory had created a fatal blind spot.
The Japanese command structure had thoroughly convinced itself that the surface of the sea was a neutralized domain.
They had just annihilated the only Allied surface fleet capable of challenging them in the region.
There were no American cruisers or destroyers left to hunt them.
Therefore, the only logical, credible threat to a heavily armored 10,000 ton cruiser division in broad daylight would have to come from the sky.
Every set of high-powered binoculars on the bridge of the Kako, every weary set of eyes was tilted upward, meticulously scanning the horizon line, the cloud bases, and the glare of the sun for the tiny dark silhouettes of American dive bombers.
They were looking for the staggered formations of SBD dauntlesses or the low-flying approach of TBF Avenger torpedo planes.
Because their entire defensive posture was oriented vertically, the water immediately surrounding the hull of their own ship, the invisible three-dimensional space extending directly beneath their keel was essentially ignored.
It was treated merely as a secure highway carrying them home to their base at Caviang.
The watertight doors throughout the cruiser’s lower decks were likely dogged open to allow the tropical ocean breeze to ventilate the stifling engineering spaces.
A standard practice when a warship believes it is operating in a secure, low threat environment.
They felt untouchable.
Beneath that false layer of security, the S44 was closing the distance with terrifying aggressive precision.
Chapel brought the periscope up for another microscopic observation.
The geometry was locking in perfectly, but the physical reality of the intercept was becoming extraordinarily dangerous.
Standard American submarine doctrine of the era dictated that an ideal torpedo attack should be launched from a standoff distance of approximately 1,500 to 2,000 yd.
This provided a comfortable margin of safety, allowing the submarine to fire its weapons and immediately dive deep to evade the inevitable counterattack from escorting destroyers.
Firing from extreme close range was actively discouraged.
It drastically reduced the torpedo’s run time, which limited the weapon’s ability to arm its warhead, and it placed the fragile submarine dangerously close to the concussive shockwave of its own explosives.
Furthermore, driving a small submarine directly into the path of a rapidly moving 10,000 ton warship courted the very real risk of being physically run over, crushed by the targets deep draft or violently sucked into the massive turbulence of its bronze propellers.
Chapel was systematically ignoring that doctrine.
The lack of a torpedo data computer meant he could not trust a long range shot.
The manual calculations of the IS was were prone to slight errors in estimating the target’s exact speed.
At 2,000 yards, a one knot error in estimating the cruiser’s speed would result in the torpedo missing the target entirely, passing harmlessly ahead or behind the ship.
To guarantee a hit with unguided straight running weapons, Chapel had to eliminate the margin of error by physically closing the distance to point blank range.
The S44 was creeping forward, angling directly into the path of the oncoming behemoth.
The acoustic roar of the Kako’s propellers was no longer a distant rumble.
It was a physical pressure vibrating through the steel hull of the submarine.
The sonar operator had to pull his headphones slightly away from his ears to avoid being deafened by the thunderous rhythmic cavitation of the massive blades thrashing the water just ahead of them.
Chapel [clears throat] took his final periscope bearing.
The sheer wall of the cruiser’s camouflage steel hull entirely filled the optic lens.
The target was so massive, so close that the statimeter was practically useless.
He could clearly resolve the individual rivets on the ship’s armor belt and the white spray of the bow wave curling off the cruiser’s stem.
The primary combat report filed by Lieutenant Commander Chapel would later document the firing distance at an astonishingly close 600 yardd.
Postwar historical analysis, including the official dictionary of American naval fighting ships, would later adjust this estimate slightly to 700 yd.
In the context of naval surface warfare, the discrepancy is utterly meaningless.
Both distances represent a knife fight in a phone booth.
At 600 yards, the Kako was barely three of its own ship lengths away from the periscope shears of the submarine.
It was a range so close that it practically removed the ocean from the equation.
“Stand forward tubes,” Chapel ordered, his voice cutting through the heavy, humid air of the conning tower.
In the forward torpedo room, the crew sprang into a frantic, highly synchronized routine.
The torpedo tubes of an S-class submarine were packed tightly into a claustrophobic curved compartment.
The weapons loaded inside them were Mark 10 steam torpedoes.
These were archaic weapons originally designed in 1915, long before the outbreak of the current war.
They were massive cylindrical machines of brass and steel, nearly 16 ft long and weighing over 3,000 lb each.
Inside their noses sat a warhead packed with 497 lbs of TNT, armed by a Mark III contact exploder, a mechanical trigger designed to detonate the explosive charge the moment the torpedo physically smashed into a solid object.
Open outer doors,” the command came down.
The torpedo men cranked the heavy brass hand wheels, manually retracting the steel doors at the front of the submarine’s bow, exposing the loaded torpedoes to the open ocean.
Seaater rushed into the tubes, flooding the space around the weapons to equalize the pressure.
The ocean was now literally pressing against the internal mechanisms of the torpedoes, held back only by the watertight seals of the inner doors.
Chapel watched the crosshairs of his periscope slide across the dark, towering hull of the cacko.
He was not aiming for the bow or the stern.
He was letting the ship steam directly across his fixed line of sight, waiting for the massive, vulnerable engineering spaces amid ships to drift into the crosshairs.
The math was done.
The slide rules were set aside.
It was now entirely a matter of mechanical timing.
Fire one.
The firing sequence of a submerged submarine is a violently physical event.
An electrical contact closed, triggering a massive blast of highly compressed air into the back of tube number one.
The sheer pneumatic force violently ejected the 3,000 lb Mark 10 torpedo out of the submarine and into the sea.
Inside the conning tower, the crew felt a sharp distinct jolt shutter through the deck plates.
a physical kick of recoil as tons of mass instantly left the boat.
Immediately, the dive planesman had to fight the controls.
When a submarine fires a torpedo, it suddenly loses thousands of pounds of weight from its extreme forward end.
Without immediate compensation, the bow of the submarine will violently pitch upward, potentially breaching the surface and exposing the boat to the enemy.
To counter this, the torpedo men had to instantly open large vent valves, allowing tons of seawater to flood into specialized compensation tanks in the bow, artificially replacing the exact weight of the lost weapon to keep the submarine perfectly level.
It was a delicate highstakes balancing act performed with manual valves while under attack.
Inside the ejected torpedo, a mechanical tripping lever caught against the inside of the tube as the weapon was pushed out.
This simple mechanical action initiated a complex internal chain reaction.
It opened a valve that mixed highly compressed air, fresh water, and denatured alcohol.
This volatile mixture was sprayed into a combustion chamber and ignited, creating a massive volume of superheated steam.
This steam was forced into a small, powerful turbine engine, which spun the counterrotating bronze propellers at the rear of the torpedo to thousands of revolutions per minute.
The gyroscope, already spun up to speed by compressed air, locked onto the torpedo’s heading, moving small internal rudders to keep the weapon running perfectly straight.
Fire two.
8 seconds later, the second Mark 10 was violently blown from its tube, followed by the same physical jolt, the same frantic weight compensation, and the same internal ignition of a steam turbine.
Fire three.
Another 8 seconds.
The sub shuttered again.
The air in the torpedo room was now thick with the smell of atomized oil and high-press air bleeding off from the firing valves.
Fire four.
The final weapon left the boat.
A spread of four torpedoes was now in the water, running hot, straight, and normal.
The submarine’s part in the attack was over.
The outcome was now entirely governed by the rigid, unforgiving laws of physics and hydrodnamics.
Chapel immediately ordered the periscope down and commanded the boat to dive deep, rigging for the inevitable depth charge counterattack, plunging the crew back into a blind, silent world where they could only listen to the consequences of their math.
The run time for a Mark 10 torpedo traveling at 36 knots to cross a distance of roughly 650 yards is incredibly brief.
It is a matter of approximately 30 to 35 seconds.
Up on the surface, the bright, peaceful morning was about to violently fracture.
