Lack of Aggression

During the early months of World War II, a number of submarine commanders were reported to have been relieved of command for "lack of aggression." This became a catch-all of sorts, and was sometimes cited in subsequent books and articles as the reason for removal from command of officers who were not so much unaggressive as unlucky or merely conscientious.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, most submarine commanders were older officers, usually having graduated from Annapolis in the mid-1920s and having slowly advanced in the peacetime Navy. Because the peacetime Navy was, to put it mildly, not overly tolerant of any deviation from procedure, these officers tended to go by the book.

The book, as it turned out, wasn't always right.

Interwar policy on submarine warfare included a strict prohibition on showing the periscope during an attack at any time the possiblity of enemy air support existed. Periscopes were looked upon as dead giveaways for a submarine's position, and were thought of as being quite easy to spot, either from the air, or by a ship's lookouts. This did, in fact, prove to be the case during exercises, though no one seemed to recognize the obvious—that it is much easier for a lookout to spot a periscope when he already knows there is a submarine close by. Having your periscope spotted during an exercise was a sure way to be called on the carpet and chewed out for reckless behavior.

Instead, the commanders were supposed to make their approaches submerged, using sound bearings to set up the attack. This seemed to work well enough in exercises, and it was presumed it would work just as well in combat. This even turned out to be correct, though not in the way the brass expected. "Hits" in exercises were scored based on TDC results, not on actually shooting at the target. As it turned out, most of those "hits" would have really been misses and the same results—or lack of results—turned out to be the norm for sonar attacks in wartime.

This probably didn't come as that great a surprise to the commanding officers. What did come as a surprise was the way their superiors took them to task for following those pre-war procedures on the first war patrols. Suddenly, not showing a periscope was a negative quality. Missing the target, or failing to get into firing position because of the slow underwater speed of a submarine, was also now a negative.

These problems were further compounded by the adamant failure of the powers that be to recognize the failings of the Mark 14 submarine torpedo and its Mark 6 magnetic exploder. Neither worked as advertised, yet failures were routinely put down to operator error, failure to close the target sufficiently, or just about anything other than a possible fault with the torpedo. More than one commanding officer found himself moved to a shore job because of his "poor marksmanship" when perfect attacks were foiled by torpedoes that ran too deep and exploders that either went off prematurely, or didn't explode at all. It would be some 18 months after Pearl Harbor before the Mark 14 torpedo's faults were all discovered and fixed.

Some of the commanders who had been relieved early in the war were given new commands a year or two later and, armed with torpedoes that worked as they were supposed to, happily demonstrated that they were perfectly capable of sinking enemy ships just as efficiently as younger officers.

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