Japanese Couldn’t Believe One U.S. “Destroyer Killer” Sub Sank 5 Ships in Just 4 Days — Shocked Navy

At 0647 on June 6, 1944, in the pale silver light before dawn, the conning tower of USS Harder was as tight and tense as a clenched fist.

Commander Samuel David Dealey—thirty-seven years old, a compact Texan with a calm face and predator’s eyes—stood braced against the steel rim of the periscope well, his shoulders hunched, his hands wet on the handles. Beneath him, the entire submarine hummed and quivered with life. Around him, five men crowded into the narrow space, their bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, breathing each other’s breath, listening to the machine-like rhythm of the ship and their own hearts.

On the green glow of the plot, three Japanese destroyers cut through the moonlit waters off Tawi Tawi, fast knives of steel and spray.

Minazuki in the lead, Hayanami and Tanikaze spread behind her, their wake lines glowing faintly in the phosphorescence. Their screws were a low, relentless vibration in the sonar headphones, bearing down, swinging, zigzagging with practiced aggression. They weren’t escorting anyone today. They were hunting.

They were hunting him.

“Sonar, range on the lead,” Dealey said quietly, eye still to the periscope.

“Range decreasing… two-five double-oh yards… closing fast,” the sound man replied, voice flat but tight.

In the conning tower’s cramped circle, the air felt thick, like you could cut it with a knife. The men around him—exec, diving officer, quartermaster—watched Dealey’s face, waiting to see if he would do what every submarine commander had been trained to do when destroyers came prowling in close.

Run.

Go deep. Turn away. Rig for silent running. Hope the destroyers lost contact before they dialed in the depth charges.

For two and a half years of war in the Pacific, that had been gospel.

Destroyers did thirty-five knots on a good day. A submerged submarine, straining its electric motors to the limit, might make nine. They were built to kill subs: fast, maneuverable, armed with sonar, guns, racks and throwers of depth charges.

Between Pearl Harbor and the spring of 1944, Japanese destroyers had sunk fourteen American submarines.

During that same period, not a single American submarine had sunk a Japanese destroyer in a straight-up fight while both were actively engaged.

On paper, the math was simple: subs avoided destroyers, or they died.

Dealey had spent five patrols in the Pacific tearing that paper in half.

“Angle on the bow, zero,” he murmured, tracking the lead destroyer’s straight-on course. Minazuki was boring in, nose down, bow wave foaming, sonar pings loud enough that Harder’s soundman could hear them without his headphones.

Down the throat, the crew thought.

They all knew what that meant now.

“Captain, range eighteen hundred yards and closing. She’s charging straight at us.” The exec’s voice was steady, but it had that too-high edge that meant his body was already imagining the crash of depth charges exploding just above their hull, the crushing weight of water at four or five hundred feet.

“Recommend we dive, sir,” someone said. It wasn’t a panic plea. It was doctrine talking.

Dealey didn’t answer.

He watched the slender triangle of the destroyer’s bow grow larger in his periscope, knifing through the barely lit waves. He thought of charts, of the narrow straits around Tawi Tawi, of the coded orders he’d received at Fremantle—patrol off the anchorage, attack targets of opportunity, report enemy dispositions.

He thought of what it meant to attack an enemy’s body and what it meant to go straight for the throat.

He thought about destroyers.

He thought about Ikazuchi.

Three months earlier, on April 13, 1944, northwest of the Philippines, destroyer Ikazuchi had come screaming at Harder like an enraged bull.

Back then, Harder had been on her fourth war patrol. Dealey had already built a reputation as an aggressive skipper, the kind who drove his submarine in close, took shots other captains called suicidal, and came back with tallies that made even hardened staff officers whistle under their breath.

Eighteen enemy ships destroyed across five patrols. Tankers, freighters, troop transports. Merchant ships were the lifeblood of the Japanese war machine; he’d been cutting veins for over a year.

Destroyers, though—that was different.

Ikazuchi had caught him in mid-patrol, Harder at periscope depth, stalking a convoy.

The Japanese destroyer had seen his periscope wake and turned, her long bow slicing in, boilers roaring, sonar pings slamming against Harder’s skin like hammer blows.

Everyone expected Dealey to do what he’d done a hundred times before—crash dive, turn hard, trust to depth and silence.

Instead, he’d stared at that charging bow and seen an opportunity.

“Bring her around,” he ordered. “Point us straight at her.”

The helmsman looked up, eyes wide, then spun the wheel.

Harder’s bow swung, sluggish at first, then more quickly as the submarine’s momentum carried her into the new course.

The exec’s jaw clenched.

“Skipper—she’s doing over thirty knots.”

“So are our torpedoes,” Dealey said. “Get me a solution.”

He called it out calmly, his voice the one still thing in a world that was tilting.

Angle on the bow. Range. Speed. Depth setting.

“Down the throat,” he murmured. “Let’s see what they taste like.”

At nine hundred yards—a knife-fight range even on the surface—he’d ordered, “Fire one, fire two, fire three, fire four.”

Four steel cigars slammed out of Harder’s forward tubes, their compressed-air cough kicking the submarine back.

“Take her down. Three hundred feet. Now.”

The diving officer sang out “Dive, dive!” The klaxon blared. Vents thundered. Harder tilted as she drove her bow under, her screws churning foam on the surface for a precious few seconds longer.

Forty seconds is a long time when a destroyer is charging you and your torpedoes are racing toward her nose.

In those forty seconds, Dealey had lit a fuse that would change the way submarines fought.

Two of those torpedoes struck amidships.

The men in Harder felt the double thump as muffled underwater blows, like God knocking on the hull. The soundman cried, “Heard two hits!” The conning tower shuddered.

Ikazuchi broke in half.

It took her five minutes to go under, five minutes for a hundred and fifty men to realize the destroyer they thought would be the executioner had become the victim.

When the explosions had faded and the sonar returned nothing but bubbles and debris, Dealey had come to periscope depth.

Where Ikazuchi had been, there was only an oil slick and scattered wreckage.

He’d looked for survivors—there were none close enough for him to risk surfacing. He had done what he could do, what he was there for.

Then he’d tapped out a radio report that would become famous from Pearl Harbor to Fremantle.

EXPENDED FOUR TORPEDOES AND ONE DESTROYER.

In Tokyo, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, did not find the message amusing.

Japan had started the war with sixty-three destroyers and had built forty-nine more. They were the nervous system of the Imperial Japanese Navy—eyes and ears of fleets, guardians of carriers and battleships, escorts of convoys that still struggled to move men and fuel across an ocean grown more hostile by the month.

Between January and May 1944, they had already lost twenty-three destroyers.

Destroyers dying to torpedoes meant more than tonnage. It meant gaps in screens, holes in plans, malign whispers of vulnerability.

Destroyers were supposed to kill submarines. Not the other way around.

By late May 1944, Toyoda and Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa had gathered their remaining striking power at Tawi Tawi.

It was a name that meant little to most Americans—a speck in the Sulu Sea, a cluster of jungle-covered islands and coral-ringed lagoons between Borneo and Mindanao—but for a few weeks, it was the center of the Japanese naval universe.

In the protected waters of the anchorage, the Mobile Fleet rocked gently on tropical swell.

Four battleships, including the monstrous Yamato with her eighteen-inch guns and monstrous reputation. Nine carriers. Fifteen cruisers. Twenty-eight destroyers.

The largest concentration of Japanese naval power since Midway.

Fuel hoses snaked like dark vines between tankers and warships. Planes sat wing-tip to wing-tip on flight decks, their cowlings open for maintenance. The carrier crews sweated on sun-blasted steel, listening to the whine and clang and crash of a fleet gearing up for one last decisive battle.

Operation A-Go was the plan: lure the Americans into the Philippine Sea, smash their carriers with coordinated attacks from sea and land-based aircraft, force them back, keep the empire’s defensive perimeter intact.

Everything depended on timing, coordination, intact destroyer screens.

Everything depended on not losing more destroyers to aggressive American submarines before the battle even started.

American codebreakers in Hawaii read enough of the Japanese signals to see the outline: big fleet concentrating at Tawi Tawi, preparing for something.

In Pearl Harbor, Admiral Charles Lockwood, the gaunt, hard-driving commander of the U.S. Pacific submarine force, studied his own maps and orders. His boats were the blunt tools of a silent blockade—choking off Japan’s sea lanes, sinking tankers and freighters until the arteries of war ran dry.

Now he saw an opportunity for a different kind of stroke.

He called up Harder’s patrol reports, the ones that carried the story of Ikazuchi and that laconic line about destroyers.

“Get me Dealey,” he told his staff.

When the connection crackled through from Fremantle—the submarine base on Australia’s west coast where Harder was tied up, scars fresh and fuel tanks filling—Lockwood didn’t waste words.

“I’ve got a job for you, Sam,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Dealey answered, his drawl faint but unmistakable over the line.

“I want Harder on patrol off Tawi Tawi. Targets of opportunity. Destroyers a priority. You get in there, you sink whatever’s dumb enough to cross your bow, and you keep me posted. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Dealey said again.

He hung up the phone, looked at his exec, and smiled slightly.

“Looks like we’re going hunting, boys.”

Nine days later, USS Harder slid into the waters around Tawi Tawi, silent as a shadow.

For nine days, she stalked, listening to the rumble of big screws turning at anchor, the distant clatter of destroyers running patterns, the lazy prop wash of patrol craft sweeping the approaches.

Nine days undetected.

Until the early hours of June 6, when a Japanese patrol plane, prowling north of the anchorage, caught a faint line of white on the black surface of the sea—Harder’s periscope wake—and dropped message flares.

On Tawi Tawi’s flagship, radios crackled. Orders snapped down the chain.

Three destroyers—Minazuki, Hayanami, and Tanikaze—were dispatched with one mission.

Find the American submarine that had already left wreckage on their charts.

Kill her.

Now, in Harder’s conning tower at 0647, Dealey watched Minazuki charge straight at him.

He weighed everything he knew.

Destroyers had sunk fourteen American subs.

Submarines had never, until Ikazuchi, sunk a destroyer in a direct duel.

Destroyer captains expected subs to dive when sniffed out.

He thought about what happened when you did what your enemy expected.

He thought about what happened when you didn’t.

“Make ready forward,” he said quietly. “Set depth eight feet. We’ll go right down her throat again.”

The exec glanced sideways at him. “Captain, we do this wrong, we’re going to eat our own torpedoes.”

“If we run, we’ll eat depth charges,” Dealey replied. “I’d rather meet ’em head-on.”

The exec took a breath. Then he nodded.

“Torpedo room reports ready, sir.”

“Very well.”

He checked the bearing one last time, watched the bow of Minazuki swell in the glass, outlined in pale morning light. At this range, he could see the white teeth of her bow wave, the faint outlines of sailors moving on her decks.

He could imagine their thoughts. They’d been told there was an American sub somewhere out here, the one that had sunk Ikazuchi. They’d probably been promised extra sake if they came back with its periscope hanging over their bridge as a trophy.

They didn’t expect the trophy to bite.

“Range eleven hundred yards… one thousand… nine hundred…” the exec read off.

Dealey let it close.

“Seven-fifty,” the sound man whispered.

Dealey’s voice snapped like a whip.

“Fire one. Fire two. Fire three. Take her down. Three hundred feet, maximum angle.”

The torpedoes left the tubes with four hard jolts, the submarine bucking as each mass of steel and explosive slammed into the water.

“Down bubble thirty degrees!” the diving officer barked. “Blow negative! Dive, dive!”

Harder tipped forward, bow dropping as if she were bowing to the charging destroyer.

The men in the conning tower grabbed for handholds as the boat angled. Somewhere aft, a coffee cup slid off a shelf and shattered.

Forty seconds.

That’s how long it took for torpedoes set on straight-run settings to travel that distance at forty-plus knots.

Some men counted. Others refused to. The sound man stared at his instruments as if he could will the explosions into existence.

For a few heartbeats, the only sounds were the rush of water over the hull and the relentless pinging of Minazuki’s sonar, louder and louder as she closed.

Then—

Two deep, muffled booms rolled through the hull, like someone slamming a fist into the side of the boat.

“Two hits!” the sound man shouted.

Before anyone could exhale, a third explosion hit, this one deeper and more violent, punching up through the water like a thrown boulder.

Harder lurched. Light fixtures shattered. Men swore. Somebody laughed—a short, surprised bark that sounded half hysterical.

“That’s not depth charges,” Dealey said calmly. “That’s her magazines.”

He waited, checking his watch. Forty seconds after the third explosion, he ordered, “Take us back up. Periscope depth. Let’s see what we’ve done.”

Harder leveled, then rose, ballast tanks venting softly, pumps whirring.

At periscope depth, Dealey raised the scope.

Where Minazuki had been, there was wreckage and an expanding bloom of black oil. Bits of steel, splintered planks, shards of life rafts bobbed in the swell.

No silhouette. No bow. No stern.

Gone.

The other two destroyers—Hayanami and Tanikaze—were sprinting away, dropping depth charges behind them at random, hedgehog blasts of water and smoke erupting in the wrong patch of sea.

Dealey lowered the scope.

“One down,” he murmured.

Back in Tawi Tawi’s anchorage, Admiral Toyoda clenched his jaw when the report came in.

Another destroyer lost. Same submarine.

He signaled the order up the chain.

Find that submarine.

Kill it.

Six more destroyers left anchorage under full steam, their wakes carving white scars across the Sulu Sea, sonar operators already hunched over their gear, listening for the faintest hint of screws that didn’t belong.

But Harder was already moving.

In the early morning hours of June 7, Harder surfaced to recharge her batteries.

The night was black—no moon, heavy clouds, the kind of darkness that stayed even when your eyes were wide open.

The men topside felt the cold wind on their faces like a blessing after the stale, lived-in air of the boat. They moved quickly, eyes scanning the horizon, ears tuned for the drone of aircraft, the growl of engines.

In the conning tower, the radar operator squinted at his screen, the green sweep painting faint echoes that came and went.

At 0312, he saw it.

“Contact, Captain. Bearing zero-nine-five. Range eight thousand yards. Closing fast.”

Dealey stepped closer, looking over his shoulder.

“Speed?”

“Twenty-plus knots and climbing. Looks like a skinny signature. Probably a destroyer.”

Destroyer Hayanami had been hunting American submarines since just after midnight, sonar pings reaching out into the darkness, seeking the elusive American ghosts that had already turned two of her sister ships into oil slicks.

Her captain, Commander Hideo Kuboki, had received orders to return to base at 0300. His eyes ached from hours of staring into the night. The bridge watch was stiff with cold and fatigue.

If his radar operator’s first impression had been correct—small contact, good speed—he’d have chalked it up as another Japanese destroyer heading home. Four thousand yards. Maybe wave. Maybe trade insults. Maybe share how much everyone wanted a hot bowl of rice and a chance to lie down.

At four thousand yards, Hayanami’s radar finally tagged the contact.

“Surface ship, small,” the operator reported. “Speed twenty-one knots. Bearing constant.”

Kuboki frowned.

“ID?”

“Unclear, sir. Maybe a small escort?”

Maybe.

Or maybe something else.

On Harder, Dealey looked down at his own instruments and made a decision that would have seemed insane two years earlier.

“Flank speed,” he ordered.

Harder’s diesel engines bellowed below, their raw power vibrating up through the deck.

Twenty-one knots.

For a World War II American fleet submarine, that was as close to the redline as you could get on the surface—diesels screaming, bow cutting into waves, spray lashing the bridge.

He was closing the distance.

Deliberately.

Destroyer captains had gotten used to thinking of submarines as things that ran away under the water, not things that came at them on the surface like torpedo boats.

Get inside their radar before they realize what you are, he thought. Then hit them before they can dodge.

At three thousand yards, Hayanami’s radar operator, fighting his own fatigue, finally realized his mistake.

“Sir, the contact—its speed… it’s too slow for a destroyer. Bearing constant. It’s… it’s an American submarine!”

Kuboki stared out into the dark, jaw tensing.

“Flank speed! Hard starboard! We’ll ram her!”

It was a good instinct, the right one for the training he’d had. A charging destroyer trying to force a collision could wreck a submarine beyond repair, even if she took damage herself.

But there was a lag—always a lag—between decision and execution.

At twenty-three hundred yards, Dealey fired.

“Fire one. Fire two. Fire three. Fire four.”

Harder’s four forward torpedo tubes spoke again, voices of compressed air and steel.

Hayanami turned, but too late.

Two torpedoes struck her starboard side near the aft magazine.

Japanese sailors on the destroyer felt the ship suddenly lift under their feet as the rear third of the hull ceased to exist, the explosion tearing her stern off like a child snapping a stick.

She rolled ninety degrees, propellers spinning uselessly in the air, then went under, stern first, leaving only screams, steam, and fragments in her wake.

Kuboki and one hundred forty-seven of his men died in minutes.

On Harder’s bridge, Dealey squinted into the gloom.

“For the log,” he said quietly. “Two destroyers in twenty-four hours.”

He didn’t say it with triumph.

He said it like a man ticking off numbers in a ledger.

The ocean didn’t care how many you sank.

The ocean only cared that you’d made yourself visible again and that you hadn’t yet paid the price.

“Dive,” he ordered. “Patrol planes will be here any minute.”

He was right.

The Japanese response was swift and angry.

Admiral Toyoda was incandescent when he received the second report.

Two destroyers lost in a single day to the same American submarine.

He pulled eight destroyers from convoy duty—ships that should have been guarding tankers and transports—and organized them into a hunter-killer force. Their sole mission: find and destroy the submarine stalking the approaches to Tawi Tawi.

Every destroyer captain received the same orders.

Maximum aggression.

No retreat.

Kill that submarine.

On June 8, Harder eased south, toward the Sabutu Passage, the narrow strait between Tawi Tawi and Borneo.

Japanese destroyers patrolled that passage constantly—it was a chokepoint, a natural funnel for submarines and convoys alike. A safe skipper would have avoided it.

Dealey wanted to see how many destroyers he could sink before they figured out his game.

At 1400 hours, the lookout on Harder’s periscope reported two destroyers steaming in formation—Tanikaze and an escort, both moving at twenty-five knots, executing textbook zigzag patterns.

From periscope depth, Dealey watched them for ninety minutes, like a hunter studying the path of wolves around a herd.

Every eight minutes, they altered course in a predictable pattern. It was meant to complicate torpedo firing solutions for any lurking subs, to turn straight-line intercepts into guessing games.

If you mistimed your shot, the destroyer only had to alter course a few degrees and your torpedoes would track harmlessly through empty water.

There was, Dealey calculated, a narrow window after each course change before the destroyer’s helmsman touched the wheel again.

Thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds to recognize the turn, compute the solution, give the orders, fire.

He positioned Harder directly in their path and waited.

At 1630, Tanikaze turned toward Harder’s position.

Range: three thousand yards.

“Let her come,” Dealey said, watching the white V of the destroyer’s bow widen in his periscope.

Twenty-five hundred yards.

Two thousand.

Fifteen hundred.

At twelve hundred yards, he gave the order.

“Fire one. Fire two. Fire three. Fire four.”

Four torpedoes streaked away, leaving Harder to feel the aftershocks.

The first missed, a white blur rushing past Tanikaze’s bow.

The second struck her near the bridge.

The third plowed straight into her forward magazine.

The explosion that followed was so massive that Harder’s crew heard it clearly underwater, even with steel and sea between them.

The blast tore Tanikaze apart. Her bow separated from the rest of the hull, both pieces lifted by tons of water and then dragged down. Men who had been running for stations found themselves abruptly in midair, then dropped into a boiling, burning cauldron.

She sank in three minutes.

The escort destroyer did what a good escort does.

She turned and charged the spot where the torpedo tracks had originated, screws churning the water, depth charge crews hauling heavy canisters into place.

“Take her down,” Dealey said. “Four hundred feet.”

Harder dropped, deck canted, gauges spinning.

The first pattern of depth charges slammed down into the water above them.

The explosions were thunder in their bones.

The hull shuddered. Light bulbs popped in showers of glass. Cork insulation rained from the overhead. Someone’s coffee cup bounced off the chart table, splattering brown across the captain’s clean fire control plot.

But the charges had been set too shallow, the destroyer captain guessing at a depth based on doctrine instead of what was actually happening.

Forty minutes and a few more patterns later, the destroyer broke off.

The hunter had missed.

The destroyer killer had claimed his third victim in three days.

June 9, 0500. The South China Sea was gray, low clouds hanging like stained cotton over a restless expanse.

Harder slid up to periscope depth twelve miles southwest of Tawi Tawi.

Dealey raised the periscope and froze for just a moment, breath catching.

Dead ahead, four Japanese destroyers steamed in line-abreast formation, elegant and deadly, dark hulls cutting through the chop.

They were actively searching for submarines. Their sonar pings came so loud and sharp through Harder’s hull that the sound operator could hear them without his headphones.

The water around Tawi Tawi had become a nest of knives.

Dealey had eight torpedoes left.

Four destroyers.

If he was lucky and precise, he might get two shots before the destroyers swarmed him with depth charges. He might get one.

He studied their formation—a wide wall of steel, lead ship zigzagging aggressively across the front, the others each holding positions.

The second destroyer in line was holding a steady course, not weaving any more than necessary to maintain formation.

That one.

He set his mind on it and never looked away.

At 0612, the second destroyer altered course—and for a moment, blessedly, turned directly toward Harder’s position.

Range: four thousand yards.

He waited.

Three thousand.

Twenty-five hundred.

Eighteen hundred.

The torpedo director hummed, wheels spinning, her crew working furiously to keep up with the changing bearings.

“Stand by… tubes one, two, three,” the exec said.

“Fire one. Fire two. Fire three,” Dealey ordered.

Three torpedoes raced away, their wakes invisible at this depth, their fate dependent on seconds and angles.

Five seconds apart, three explosions roared through the water.

All three struck the destroyer’s port side.

The ship vanished in a blossom of smoke and flame. Debris flew three hundred feet into the air as her boilers and magazines erupted. She rolled over and sank in ninety seconds.

The other three destroyers didn’t waste time.

They converged on the spot like sharks, screws churning the water into foam, depth charge crews running to rails and K-guns, hurling canisters overboard in deadly arcs.

“Five hundred feet,” Dealey said calmly.

Harder went down.

The pressure increased. The hull creaked, a low groaning note like an old house in a gale.

Depth charges dropped.

Twenty-three in the first ten minutes.

Each one hit the water above them, sank, then exploded with a force that slammed into Harder’s hull like the fist of God.

The lights went out. Emergency lighting flickered on—dim red bulbs bathing the control room in the color of blood.

Men grabbed for anything that would keep them upright as the boat rolled fifteen degrees to starboard, then back.

A pipe burst in the forward torpedo room, spraying seawater across the deck. Sailors dove for valves, turning them with frantic haste.

Dust and cork fell from the overhead. Someone cursed. Somebody else laughed in short, hysterical bursts, then forced himself to stop.

They rode it out.

For two hours, the destroyers circled and searched, dropping patterns, then listening.

Harder moved at two knots, as quietly as a pack of men and machines could move under five hundred feet of water.

Finally, the destroyers gave up.

Harder came back to periscope depth.

The sea above was empty.

Four enemy warships sunk in four days.

Three destroyers in three.

Back at Tawi Tawi, Admiral Ozawa read the reports with growing unease.

Four destroyers lost in the approaches to his anchorage.

One submarine.

He ran the numbers through his head.

Destroyers were his screen.

Without them, his carriers and battleships were vulnerable, their long, thin hulls exposed to torpedoes.

If an American submarine could do this much damage here, undetected for days, how many more were lurking?

He sent an urgent message to Toyoda.

The Mobile Fleet must depart Tawi Tawi immediately. The anchorage was compromised. The Americans knew where they were.

They had planned to leave on June 15.

Ozawa proposed June 10.

Toyoda grimaced when he read the request. Leaving six days early meant his carriers would arrive in the Philippine Sea before all their reconnaissance planes were fueled and staged. His destroyers would be scattered from patrols. Supply ships wouldn’t be in position.

But staying at Tawi Tawi under submarine attack was suicide.

He agreed.

On June 10, at 0800, the Mobile Fleet weighed anchor.

Four battleships. Nine carriers. Fifteen cruisers. Twenty-four destroyers—the others already gone to the deep—turned northeast, leaving the supposedly safe waters of Tawi Tawi behind.

American codebreakers intercepted the movement orders within hours.

In Pearl Harbor, Admiral Spruance—commanding the U.S. Fifth Fleet—adjusted his plans, nudging carrier task forces across a map of the Pacific like chess pieces.

The early departure gave him one thing no admiral ever turns down.

Time.

Dealey knew none of this as Harder continued to patrol, sliding through water now buzzing with enemy sonar and anger.

On June 10 at 1630, north of Sibutu Passage, Harder found two more destroyers patrolling at high speed, zigzagging like hounds scenting something.

He had five torpedoes left.

Enough for one more shot.

At 1715, he fired three torpedoes at the lead destroyer.

One struck near the bow, tearing open steel, slowing her, but not sending her under.

The second destroyer turned to charge.

Dealey fired his last two torpedoes.

Both missed.

He was out.

No torpedoes.

No way to hit back.

And a Japanese destroyer bearing down on his position at thirty-two knots with a magazine full of depth charges and orders that boiled down to one word.

Kill.

“Emergency deep,” Dealey ordered.

Harder’s bow pitched steeply, angle of descent as sharp as the boat could take without sending men tumbling.

Three hundred feet.

Four hundred.

Five hundred.

The destroyer’s propellers passed directly overhead, the churning vibration so loud the men in Harder could hear it through the hull.

They knew what came next.

Depth charges.

The first pattern dropped at 1723, six cans falling in a tight circle around their estimated position.

The blasts hit like sledgehammers. The boat rolled. Light bulbs shattered. Men were thrown against consoles and pipes.

Two minutes later, another pattern. Closer. Harder’s stern lifted, then slammed back down, every bolt and bracket complaining.

For ninety minutes, the destroyer hunted.

Forty-two depth charges.

Most went off too shallow—they shook her but didn’t break her.

Three detonated close enough to crack gauge glass, to spring minor leaks, to make men wonder if they were hearing the first scream of an imploding hull or just their own blood in their ears.

Dealey kept her at five hundred feet, two knots, steering as gently as a surgeon’s hand, waiting out the fury.

At 1900, the destroyer withdrew.

Out of depth charges.

Out of luck.

Dealey waited another hour before he risked bringing Harder to the surface.

The ocean above was empty, dark, seemingly indifferent to the duel that had just taken place beneath its skin.

Harder limped south toward Fremantle at eight knots, conserving fuel. Her hull was scarred. Her men were exhausted.

Her legend was born.

Seventeen days later, on June 26, USS Harder tied up at the pier in Fremantle.

Admiral Lockwood was there waiting, hands behind his back, long face set in an expression that mixed sternness with something like pride.

He’d been reading Harder’s patrol reports as they came in—short, factual bursts of information sent over long-range radio, each one carrying news that made his staff look up from their coffee.

One destroyer sunk.

Then another.

Then another.

Within twelve days, five enemy warships attacked, four destroyed outright, one damaged, all with short-range torpedo shots against aggressively hunting destroyers.

The most successful anti-destroyer patrol in submarine history.

When Dealey stepped onto the pier—tanned, thinner, uniform salt-stained and worn—Lockwood stepped forward.

Without ceremony, he pinned a Navy Cross to Dealey’s chest.

“For extraordinary heroism,” he said.

Dealey nodded, eyes down.

“Thank you, sir.”

Then Lockwood asked the question that haunted every submarine skipper who’d come back with impossible numbers.

“Can you do it again?”

Dealey’s answer was immediate.

“Give me torpedoes,” he said, “and I’ll sink ten.”

It wasn’t bravado.

It was a statement of intent.

Harder’s crew spent July in Fremantle resting, patching, training—and turning their captain’s instincts into doctrine.

In cramped classrooms, under tropical sun, on blackboards stained with chalk and sweat, Dealey walked other submarine officers through his tactics.

Down the throat attacks.

Charging on the surface at night.

Using the destroyer captains’ expectations as weapons. Submarines weren’t supposed to attack head-on. They weren’t supposed to use speed to close.

They were supposed to flee and hide.

“When he expects you to run, and you charge,” Dealey said, drawing a line of torpedo tracks intersecting a destroyer’s bow, “he loses a few seconds making up his mind. Left, right, hold course.

“Twelve seconds is a long time when you’re running forty-six knots head-on.”

By late July, every submarine commander in the Pacific had read Harder’s patrol reports.

Some admired him.

Some thought he was crazy.

All of them knew they were seeing something new.

Between June and August 1944, American submarines sank fourteen Japanese destroyers using variations of Dealey’s aggressive approach.

Harder had been the proof of concept.

Now the fleet was learning.

On August 5, 1944, Harder left Fremantle on her sixth war patrol.

She was part of a three-boat wolf pack with USS Haddo and USS Hake, with Dealey as the senior captain.

Their orders were simple and brutal.

Patrol the waters west of Luzon. Intercept and destroy Japanese shipping heading for the Philippines. If it floated under a rising sun flag and wasn’t a hospital ship, sink it.

The patrol started well.

On August 21, the wolf pack intercepted a sixteen-ship convoy off Palawan Bay.

Under a starless sky, three American submarines spread out like wolves flanking a herd and coordinated an attack that left four Japanese cargo ships sinking, twenty-two thousand tons of steel and supplies heading for the bottom.

On August 22, Harder and Haddo attacked three coastal defense vessels off Bataan. All three sank. Harder was credited with two frigates—Matsuwa and Hiburi—adding to her tally of warships destroyed.

But the more havoc the wolf pack wrought, the more attention it drew.

Japanese intelligence had grown sharper. Radio messages between the submarines during the Palawan Bay attacks were intercepted, bearings and times plotted, patterns guessed.

They knew American submarines were operating off Dasol Bay on Luzon’s western coast.

They sent something special to deal with them.

On August 24, at 0453, USS Hake lay submerged four miles off Hermana Mayor Island. Through her periscope, her captain could see Harder on the surface, forty-five hundred yards to the south, a low, dark shape against the dawn line.

Both submarines were preparing to attack a damaged Japanese destroyer that Haddo had torpedoed the day before—a wounded beast limping alongshore, ripe for a final blow.

In Hake’s sonar shack, the operator’s face suddenly went stiff.

He took off his headphones and pushed them back on, as if he thought his ears were fooling him.

Echo ranging.

Sharp, rhythmic pings. Close. Growing closer.

“Captain,” he said. “Multiple contacts. Fast screws. Echo ranging. Two of them.”

Two Japanese escorts—CD-22 and patrol boat PB-102—were moving at eighteen knots, conducting an active sonar sweep.

They’d been hunting American submarines for three days.

Hake’s captain didn’t hesitate.

“Take us down. Silent running. All ahead two.”

He swung his periscope one last time toward Harder.

He saw her silhouette still on the surface.

She hadn’t dived yet.

At 0520, Hake’s radio operator tried to warn her.

No response.

Either her radio was off, or she was in the process of diving, men racing to shut hatches and vent tanks.

Harder crash-dived at 0530.

The Japanese escorts were less than two thousand yards away.

Dealey had seen them at the last possible moment.

He ordered everything at once. Flank speed. Maximum dive angle. Down to two hundred feet in as little time as physics allowed.

Harder’s bow dropped at thirty-five degrees, the boat plunging. Her diesel engines were still running as she sank below, leaving a massive stream of bubbles on the surface—a white arrow pointing exactly where she was.

CD-22’s sonar room lit up.

Perfect contact.

Range twelve hundred yards. Depth two hundred feet.

Still diving.

The escort’s captain ordered an immediate attack.

Depth charges were set for two hundred fifty feet—deep enough to catch a submarine trying to flee, shallow enough to damage one caught mid-dive.

At 0547, CD-22 made her first pass.

Depth charges rolled off her stern and flew from her K-guns in a full pattern, arcing into the sea.

The blasts bracketed Harder near perfectly.

At least three detonated within fifty feet of her hull.

In Harder’s aft torpedo room, the men heard a sound unlike the others—a wet, tearing screech, followed by the deafening roar of water under impossible pressure.

The pressure hull cracked near the after torpedo room.

Seawater slammed in, a white-green wall that knocked men off their feet and filled the space in seconds.

Harder’s stern flooded completely within ninety seconds.

The boat lurched nose-up as the heavy, flooded aft compartments dragged her down.

In the control room, men grabbed onto anything that would keep them from being flung backward. Gauges spun wild. One burst, showering glass.

Dealey ordered all ballast blown. Emergency surface.

Compressed air thundered into ballast tanks, streaks of frost forming on pipes and valves as air expanded, fighting water, fighting gravity.

Harder rose a few feet, then stopped.

Too much water in the stern.

Not enough air, not enough buoyancy, not enough time.

At 0552, CD-22 made her second depth charge run.

This pattern was set deeper.

The explosions hit even closer.

The main pressure hull ruptured in multiple places.

In the control room, someone opened his mouth to shout—an order, a prayer, no one would ever know—which was when the ocean came in like a fist.

At six hundred feet—well below Harder’s design depth, in a place where the sea presses with hundreds of pounds of force on each square inch of steel—the hull gave way.

It didn’t creak or slowly fold.

It imploded.

Compartments that had felt large when packed with eighty men shrank to nothing in fractions of a second. Steel crumpled like paper. Air compressed, then exploded into white vapor. Lights went dark. Then everything did.

At 0600, CD-22 and PB-102 reported a kill.

Oil and debris rose to the surface: wood, cork insulation, bits of gear. No men.

The escorts circled for two hours, dropping more charges just to be sure.

Four miles away, Hake stayed down, men listening to the fading explosions, every one of them knowing exactly what those sounds meant.

When they surfaced after dark, they sent the message.

Harder was gone.

All seventy-nine aboard were gone with her.

The report reached Admiral Lockwood on August 25.

He read it, lips pressed together in a thin line.

Harder was one of his best.

Dealey one of his finest.

There was no time to hold a ceremony or even properly grieve. The Japanese escorts that had killed Harder were still out there, and his job was to win a war, not mourn every blow.

He did what he could.

He suspended operations in that area, pulled his other boats back.

He notified the Navy Department.

In early September, the United States publicly announced that USS Harder was presumed lost with all hands.

The details—CD-22, depth charges, implosion under six hundred feet of water off Dasol Bay—would remain buried in classified reports until after the war.

The Japanese, of course, knew exactly what they’d done.

Admiral Toyoda received the report of Harder’s sinking on August 26.

He ordered a commendation for CD-22’s crew.

The destroyer killer was gone.

What Toyoda didn’t know—not yet—was how much damage Dealey had already done and how those four days in June had tilted the entire balance of the Pacific war.

On June 19, 1944, nine days after Harder sank her fourth destroyer off Tawi Tawi, the Battle of the Philippine Sea began.

Fifteen American carriers faced nine Japanese carriers across hundreds of miles of ocean.

Nine hundred American aircraft against four hundred thirty Japanese.

It would become the largest carrier battle in history.

When the first waves of Japanese planes lifted off their decks, their formations were ragged. Their pilots were undertrained, rushed into combat to replace veterans lost at Midway and in the Solomon Islands. Their reconnaissance had been rushed and incomplete.

Ozawa’s Mobile Fleet had arrived in the Philippine Sea out of sync with its own plans.

He had wanted four days of scouting by long-range aircraft before the engagement, time to locate the American fleet, plot its movements, prepare coordinated strikes.

Instead, his carriers spent those days just getting into position, fuel burned, crews tired, destroyer screens scuffed and scattered by anti-submarine sweeps stemming from that sudden departure from Tawi Tawi.

When American search planes found Ozawa’s fleet on June 19, many of his carriers were in the middle of launching strikes, decks cluttered, combat air patrols thin.

American pilots called what followed the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.

They weren’t exaggerating.

By the end of the two-day battle, American fighters and anti-aircraft guns had shot down 376 Japanese aircraft. American carriers lost just thirty planes in return.

Three Japanese carriers—Taiho, Shokaku, and Hiyo—were sunk, victims of American torpedoes and bombs, victims of their own weakened screens and bad luck.

Two battleships were damaged. One cruiser went under.

Most importantly, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s carrier air arm—its trained pilots, its ability to project power across vast stretches of ocean—was gutted. Seventy-five percent of its carrier aircraft and many of its remaining experienced pilots were lost in two days.

Japan would never again mount a carrier operation on that scale.

Could Ozawa have changed that if he’d left Tawi Tawi on June 15, as originally planned, instead of June 10?

No one can say for certain.

But every war plan depends on timing, coordination, proper screening.

Ozawa’s early departure, his scattered destroyers, his rushed reconnaissance—those things made it worse. They made the turkey shoot possible.

And the decision to leave early wasn’t made on a whim.

It was made because one American submarine had killed four destroyers in four days right outside his anchorage.

Harder had done more than kill ships.

Harder had bled time out of the Japanese war clock.

Lockwood saw it, years later, when he sat down to write his memoirs.

He wrote that Harder’s fifth patrol was the most strategically important American submarine operation of the Pacific war.

Four destroyers sunk meant four fewer escorts protecting Japanese carriers.

More importantly, forcing the Mobile Fleet to depart Tawi Tawi six days early meant the entire Japanese battle plan began to come apart before the first bomb ever fell.

Between December 1941 and August 1944, American submarines sank 1,314 enemy ships, totaling 5.3 million tons.

Most were merchantmen—tankers, cargo ships, troop transports. The slow, fat underbelly of Japan’s war effort.

Only twenty-nine warships were sunk in that same period.

Submarine doctrine had, at first, emphasized stealth and evasion.

If a destroyer detected you, you ran.

You went deep, turned away, minimized noise, prayed the depth charges missed. Engaging destroyers directly was considered reckless at best.

The math didn’t work.

Destroyers were built to kill you.

Dealey changed that equation by realizing something simple and human.

Destroyer captains weren’t machines. They were men, trained in certain expectations.

When they pounced on a submarine, they expected that submarine to flee.

They expected a known script.

When Harder charged instead, it forced those captains to make decisions outside their training, under stress, in seconds.

Left? Right? Maintain course? Slow? Speed up?

Every second they hesitated, their ships ate distance.

Every twelve seconds, a torpedo closed another hundred yards.

Between June and December 1944, twelve American submarines adopted Dealey’s aggressive tactics.

USS Tang sank two destroyers.

USS Trigger sank one.

USS Barb sank one and savaged another.

USS Flasher tore into escorts with down-the-throat shots.

The success rate was staggering.

For every five attacks, submarines sank three destroyers and damaged a fourth.

Only one in five failed outright.

The Japanese adapted.

By late 1944, destroyer captains developed counters.

When a submarine charged, a destroyer might turn away sharply, forcing the submarine to expose its broadside toward other escorts—or slow deliberately, letting straight-run torpedoes pass ahead.

The tactic still worked.

But the odds got worse.

American submarine losses climbed.

Nine boats were lost to destroyer attacks between August and December 1944.

Tang died on October 24 when one of her own torpedoes malfunctioned, circled, and hit her.

Harder was gone in August.

Darter ran aground in October chasing a destroyer into shallow water.

Lockwood faced an ugly choice.

Call his submarines home and tell them to go back to the old ways—avoid warships, focus on cargo—or accept higher losses in exchange for crippling Japan before the war’s end.

He chose aggression.

Between January and August 1945, American submarines sank 437 Japanese merchant ships and 53 warships.

By August, Japan had less than a quarter of its pre-war merchant tonnage left afloat. Factories choked for lack of raw materials. Cities went dark for lack of fuel. Ships rusted in harbors for lack of oil.

Dealey never saw any of this.

He died three months after his greatest tactical victory, killed by the same kind of escort ship he’d spent a year learning how to kill.

But his ideas survived him.

Every submarine captain who came after studied Harder’s patrol reports.

Every war college that examined the Pacific campaign traced a line from Ikazuchi to Minazuki, Hayanami, Tanikaze, and that fourth destroyer in June—five destroyers in four days of combat, one submarine that turned the hunter-killer logic of destroyers on its head.

On March 27, 1946, on a brisk day in Washington, D.C., President Harry S. Truman stood on the White House lawn and presented the Medal of Honor to Edwina Dealey, Samuel’s widow.

He read the words that had been hammered out by staff officers trying to condense chaos and courage into a few paragraphs.

“…For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as commanding officer, U.S.S. Harder, during her Fifth War Patrol in Japanese-controlled waters…”

The citation detailed five Japanese destroyers sunk in short-range engagements.

It spoke of “valiant fighting spirit” and an “indomitable command.”

It did not speak of Dealey leaning over a periscope eyepiece in a cramped metal tube, making decisions in seconds that would send hundreds of men to the bottom and keep his own alive.

It could not.

No citation ever could.

The Navy named a destroyer escort after him—USS Dealey—commissioned in 1954.

She served until 1972, her own plaque and photographs carried in wardrooms across the fleet.

USS Harder received the Presidential Unit Citation for her first five war patrols.

Six battle stars for World War II service.

Her motto—Hit ’em harder—became a quiet refrain among submariners, carved into mess tables, painted on torpedo room bulkheads, muttered in the dead of night when another captain faced another decision that might end as a line on a patrol report or a crushing inrush of black water.

Harder herself lay forgotten for a long time.

War ends. People rebuild. New wars come. Old ones slide into books and documentaries and the fading memories of old men sitting on porches.

But the ocean keeps its own archives.

On May 22, 2024, eighty years after she made her last dive, an underwater exploration team—Tim Taylor and the Lost 52 Project—found Harder.

Three thousand seven hundred fifty feet down, twelve miles west of Dasol Bay, the wreck stood upright on the seafloor, cloaked in darkness and the slow, steady dusting of sediment.

Her hull was mostly intact, the scars of depth charges still visible around the conning tower, burst plates and twisted steel where shockwaves had hammered her.

No human eyes had seen her since she sank.

Now cameras did, their lights playing over the silent metal.

They found no bodies, of course. The sea takes flesh quickly. But they found the shape of sacrifice, the silhouette of courage frozen forever in cold steel.

The wreck was declared a protected war grave.

No salvage.

No souvenirs.

Just photos, coordinates, and closure.

Families who had lived for decades with the words “presumed lost” could now point to a spot on a chart and say, “Here. This is where he lies.”

Today, at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, submarine tactics instructors still teach the down-the-throat attack—not because modern nuclear submarines need to charge destroyers in close, but because principle outlives technology.

Modern torpedoes are wire-guided, wake-homing, smart in ways their clumsy, mechanical ancestors could never be. Modern subs can attack from miles away, unseen, unhearable.

But the basics remain.

When your enemy expects you to run, sometimes the best thing you can do is charge.

When your opponent has built his entire strategy around your fear of his strength, sometimes the strongest move is to attack that strength directly.

Dealey understood that in 1944.

His actions forced admirals to alter plans, forced enemy strategists to rethink assumptions, forced time itself to slip out of the Japanese grasp.

In dusty archives, the Naval History and Heritage Command maintains Harder’s patrol reports.

Every radio message sent from the boat.

Every torpedo firing solution.

Every recorded depth charge attack.

Researchers can trace how Dealey refined his tactics across six war patrols, each report a snapshot of a mind in constant motion, learning, adapting, looking for the next angle.

In Arlington National Cemetery, Section 59, Grave 874 bears his name.

Samuel D. Dealey.

Commander, United States Navy.

Medal of Honor.

Destroyer killer.

Every August 24, families and submarine veterans gather there.

They bring flowers. They bring stories.

They talk about grandfathers and great-uncles who went to war in steel cigars and never came back.

They talk about fear and bravery and the strange, cold calm that sometimes comes over a man when logic says he should break.

They talk about a submarine that sank five Japanese destroyers in four days of hot pursuit and attack—Ikazuchi in April, then Minazuki, Hayanami, Tanikaze, and another off Tawi Tawi in June—so fast and so aggressively that the Japanese Navy, for the first time, truly believed an American submarine might be hunting their warships instead of just hiding from them.

And they talk about a simple, stubborn truth that runs like a spine through Harder’s story.

Steel and explosives matter.

So do tactics.

So do codes and plans and tonnage charts.

But in the end, it was one man, in a cramped conning tower, who looked at the math everyone else took for granted—

Destroyers kill submarines.

Submarines don’t fight destroyers—

and said, in his own way,

Watch me.