Mush morton biography of william hill

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Subject: Picking an Admiral to Wage War
Bio: Maritime History Professor at the US Naval Academy
Reading: Nimitz at War is here

Transcript:

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history.

Today’s topic is Picking an Admiral to Wage War. Our speaker is Craig Symonds who is a Maritime History Professor at the US Naval Academy and the author of the book Nimitz at War.

Admiral Chester Nimitz was Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet during World War 2. He made the critical decisions to fight the Japanese carriers at Midway and to pursue America’s atoll hopping strategy to force Japan’s surrender.

I want to find out from Craig about what made Nimitz such an incredible leader, and why he excelled in evaluating calculated risk in wartime.

I also want to hear about learning in war and using technology to beat the enemy while minimizing your army’s casualties.

I want to discuss ethics in battle, and how America should respond to an enemy like the Japanese when they refuse to surrender and murder defenseless American POWs.

Craig can you please begin with your opening six-minute remarks.

Craig Symonds:

Chester Nimitz is not the quintessential warrior. He is not Bull Halsey; he is not George Patton; he’s certainly not MacArthur. What gives Nimitz his skill is his ability to work effectively with people and that requires listening as well as talking. It requires him to get a sense of the dynamic of the people, and this is what makes him so successful, particularly as a theater commander in World War II.

He comes to Pearl Harbor on December 31st, 1941. The shoreline is still covered with oil. The ships are still sunk at their moorings. The bottom of the USS Oklahoma looking like a metal island is still protruding from the oily water. This is the fleet he has been sent to comma

When I was a child, my family vacationed during summers at my uncle’s small beach house in Waveland, Mississippi, located on a sandy hill just a few hundred yards up from the beach and warm breezes coming off the Gulf of Mexico. There was a small bookshelf in the den, and I found a book with a green jacket that included a shark and a submarine on the cover (see photo below). Thinking that the story would have to incorporate the shark, I started reading at night on the screened-in front porch about how the submarine skipper was involved in a duel with a Japanese destroyer captain named Bungo Pete somewhere far off in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. The novel was the classic Run Silent, Run Deep by Commander Edward L. Beach, and I found out that he was a real-life submarine captain and veteran from the war.

Beach later wrote Submarine! as a historical accounting of the service of the most notable submarines that served during the war, and the above passage describes the relationship between the legendary submariner Captains Dudley “Mush” Morton and Richard O’Kane. The passage is memorable for its insight into how the loss of Morton’s Wahoo in late 1943 drove O’Kane during his command of Tang to even greater carnage against the enemy during five war patrols in 1944.  

Today we know that Wahoo was sunk on October 11, 1943, in the La Perouse Strait by an aerial bomb dropped by a Japanese aircraft. But readers might imagine being a family member of one of the crewmen, or try to imagine being Richard O’Kane. Back in Pearl Harbor waiting for Wahoo to return, O’Kane did not know what had happened. It was only when Wahoo failed to return on time, and then with each passing day and week, that the uncertainty of what had happened to his mentor and friend could be dispelled. But not dispelled with knowledge—instead, O’Kane would be filled with an awful, rising certainty that Morton and his crew would never return, and that feeling would fuel an ang

Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023: Sink Em All

Above we see the Gato-class fleet boat USS Wahoo (SS-238) at Pearl Harbor, soon after the end of her Third war patrol, circa 7 February 1943. Her skipper, LCDR Dudley W. Morton, who would count four Navy Crosses in the war, is on the open bridge, in right-center while the officer to the left could be XO, LT Richard H. O’Kane, who would go on to earn the MoH.

If you will observe, there is a broom lashed to the periscope head, indicating a “clean sweep” of enemy targets encountered as well as an aloft pennant bearing the slogan “Shoot the Sunza Bitches” and eight small flags, representing claimed sinkings of two Japanese warships and six merchant vessels. What is not in the picture is the forward radar mast, which has been brushed out by wartime censors.

Just six months after this image was snapped, Wahoo would be broken on the bottom of the La Pérouse Strait, lost exactly 80 years ago today.

The Gatos

The 77 Gatos were cranked out by four shipyards from 1940 to 1944 for the U.S. Navy, they were impressive 311-foot-long fleet boats, diesel-electric submarines capable of extended operations in the far reaches of the Pacific. Able to swim an impressive 11,000 nautical miles on their economical power plant while still having room for 24 (often cranky) torpedoes. A 3-inch deck gun served for surface action in poking holes in vessels deemed not worth a torpedo while a few .50 and .30-cal machine guns provided the illusion of an anti-aircraft armament.

Developed from the Tambor-class submarines,