LAST EDITED ON Aug-27-18 AT 07:53 PM (EDT)
 
The Fourth Seal of Twilight used to contain a reference to Lt. Cmdr. Dudley W. "Mush" Morton and the submarine USS Wahoo (SS-238), the former commanding the latter among the Einheri naval forces engaged in the Battle of Rainbow Bay.

I knew of Morton and Wahoo from a book written by Dick O'Kane, who had been Morton's executive officer in Wahoo before being given command of his own submarine, USS Tang (SS-306). Wahoo (the book) is an encomium of sorts to Morton, to whose tutelage O'Kane gave much of the credit for his own standing as one of the US Navy's most successful and decorated sub captains. Morton and Wahoo (the sub) are also mentioned in Edward L. Beach, Jr.'s book Submarine!, in similarly admiring terms.

What I either didn't know or had forgotten until just now—I haven't re-read either book recently, but I don't recall O'Kane or Beach mentioning it—is that Morton was also an admitted and fairly notorious, albeit unprosecuted, war criminal. In January 1943, while O'Kane was his exec, he ordered his crew to machinegun the lifeboats and swimming survivors of the Japanese transport Buyo Maru, which Wahoo had just sunk.

Morton's defense was always that Buyo Maru was a troop ship and the survivors were IJA soldiers, and as such combatants and legitimate targets. Not only was this not true—Buyo Maru was a prisoner transport and many of the people he had shot were Indian POWs—it wouldn't be a valid defense if it had been. Convention X, Article 16 of the 1907 Hague Conventions, to which the US was and is signatory, makes it plain:

"After every engagement, the two belligerents, so far as military interests permit, shall take steps to look for the shipwrecked, sick, and wounded, and to protect them, as well as the dead, against pillage and ill treatment."

"Military interests" may not permit submarines to "look for the shipwrecked"; that has always been the defense of powers engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare to the (incontestable) charge that their submarines routinely sink ships and leave the survivors to fend for themselves, and is pretty well (if grudgingly) accepted as the state of affairs in such warfare. Having specifically gone out of one's way to "look for" survivors of a ship one's sub has just sunk, however, one is then enjoined "to protect them... against pillage and ill treatment," not shoot them up with machine guns. No matter who they are. If they're shipwreck survivors, they're not fair game—period.

As I noted above, Morton never faced prosecution for the Buyo Maru incident, although both Japanese and German submarine commanders were pursued after the war for similar crimes (U-boat captain Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, for instance, was executed by firing squad in 1945 for doing pretty much the same thing). Partly that's because he died only a few months after the incident, while the war still had nearly two years to go, but I find myself doubting anything much would have come of it afterward either. O'Kane was the #2 man in Wahoo at the time, after all, and he received the Medal of Honor for his subsequent command of Tang. He lived until 1994 and as far as I know, no one even brought it up.

Anyway. In the UF universe, while I have no doubt that Wahoo was in Valhalla at the time—as the Japanese submarine I-8, who has a very similar black mark on her own war record, would point out, you can't pick your crew—it's pretty clear to me upon reflection that Dudley Morton would not have been. At best, he would have been with Nathan Bedford Forrest and company, among the ones who fucked up in life and may have regretted it later.

I have therefore adjusted that line to refer instead to Howard W. Gilmore and USS Growler (SS-215). Growler, like Wahoo, was a Gato-class fleet submarine; she operated mostly in the South Pacific, is credited with sinking the Japanese destroyers Arare and Shikinami, and was sunk on her eleventh war patrol, in November 1944, probably by Shigure. Gilmore was her captain from her commissioning in 1942 until his death the following year, during Growler's fourth patrol. He was seriously wounded on the bridge during a surface attack, and ordered the hatch closed and the boat submerged under him when he realized it would take too long for him to get below in his condition. His last order is one of those phrases (like Cassin Young's "Where the hell do you gentlemen think you're going?") that have become legendary in the relevant circles: "Take her down!"

It's a small thing, and perhaps a bit revisionist, but I think I'm more comfortable memorializing that guy by name.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I support this change wholeheartedly.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

I should note that I was prompted to take this action by a footnote in a book I'm currently reading: John J. Geoghegan's Operation Storm: Japan's Top Secret Submarines and Its Plan to Change the Course of World War II, which is about the Sentoku Squadron—that is, the I-400-class submarines and their slightly smaller aircraft-carrying companions, I-13 and I-14, and their never-carried-out mission to attack the United States mainland (later changed to an attack on the Panama Canal, likewise never actually attempted).

It happens that the overall commander of the squadron, Commander Tatsunosuke "the Butcher" Ariizumi, earned his nickname committing the same kind of crime as Morton when he was the captain of I-8, earlier in the war. There is a passage in which Geoghegan notes that while some American submarines' crews killed survivors of ships they had sunk (Wahoo is the only one he specifically names), doing so was official Japanese government policy*—although the Sixth Fleet order Ariizumi was acting under in I-8 says nothing about doing it as sadistically as possible, which was something of a signature of his.

It appears this policy was honored much more in the breach than the observance—if nothing else, most Japanese sub skippers presumably thought there were better uses of their time than hanging around the sites of sinkings to make absolutely certain that everyone involved was dead—but Ariizumi was regarded as a generally unnecessarily brutal man within the IJN at the time, and this was an organization in which "the beatings will continue until morale improves" wasn't satirical. Even his subordinates, as war-hardened and as steeped in the IJN's tradition of unthinking obedience as any Japanese sailors could be, were alarmed and disgusted by the way in which Ariizumi went about it. He didn't just have his men shoot up lifeboats and swimmers; his customary practice was to rescue everyone he could fit topside on his sub, then torture them to death one by one until he got bored. At that point he'd have anyone he hadn't gotten to yet tied to the railings and submerge the boat.

As I said, later in his career Ariizumi was named to command the Sentoku Squadron. I-401 was his flagship—I assume that's why she, not the class boat, was chosen as the main character of Arpeggio of Blue Steel and was the first of the class implemented in Kantai Collection—and Geoghegan notes that even his flag captain, Lieutenant Commander Nobukiyo Nambu (no relation to Kijirō Nambu, the weapons designer), disliked him intensely.

I haven't finished the book yet, but I suspect that before the end, those two men are going to get into some shit, because I can't see Ariizumi ever agreeing to surrender even after the Emperor's "the war is lost" broadcast, and we know Nambu did. (Spoilers?)

As an aside, I'm pleased with Geoghegan's assessment/portrayal of Nambu's character. I didn't know who I-401's captain had been when I wrote Cantata for Warships—this is the first book I've encountered that's even mentioned his name—and it coincides nicely with the (at the time entirely fictional) impression Shioi gives of him in Cantata that the real Lt. Cmdr. Nambu was evidently the kind of captain who cared about his ship and looked after his crew.

He also rocked a pretty great moustache, judging by the photo in the book. I wish the photographic reproduction quality in this book were a lot higher; there are a number of photos and diagrams in here that, judging by their captions, I would very much like to see, but because they're presented in the usual "muddy b&w reproduction in a paperback book" format, they really might as well not be included. :/

--G.
* It will probably not surprise anyone here to learn that this policy was the result of an agreement with Germany. Hitler had this idea that although the Axis powers could never beat American shipbuilding, they could scare American merchant sailors into refusing to work, or, failing that, at least kill them all.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Aug-27-18 AT 01:44 AM (EDT)
 
>Morton and
>Wahoo (the sub) are also mentioned in Edward L. Beach, Jr.'s
>book Submarine!, in similarly admiring terms.

I don't have a copy of O'Kane's book, but I dug out my copy of Submarine! and refreshed my memory. There is an entire chapter in this book about Wahoo, and it contains a long and detailed account of the entire action of January 26 (or 27—Beach says the 27th, I presume it's an International Date Line thing). There's no mention of the attack on Buyo Maru's survivors, but with a little close reading you can see the spot it's missing from—where the sub has just sunk the largest of the several non-warships she sank that day, and Beach laconically notes, "Two down out of three, and time out is taken to get a few pictures."

Yeah.

It shouldn't surprise me that these things were redacted from contemporary accounts written by serving USN officers for popular consumption. And it doesn't, really, surprise is the wrong word. I mean, this was a era when a television documentary series broadcast on national network TV (CBS-TV's Victory at Sea, which aired at around the same time Submarine! was published) contained footage of an American submarine sinking a Japanese freighter, with a completely unironic voiceover narration to the effect of, "Attaboy, fellas! That's ten more dead Nips for Uncle Sam." It was a less... considered age than the one in which my sensibilities were formed.

Still, it makes me a bit sad. Submarine! was one of my favorite books in that middle school/early high school period when I did my first really serious reading on the war. I knew from its tone and publication date that it was neither a scholarly work nor one that did otherwise than wear its bias on its sleeve, but all the same...

--G.
Note that I didn't say "than the one we're in now." :/
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I endorse this change wholeheartedly.

You know what, this seems like an appropriate time to put this out there. There are a lot of people on the Valhalla side of things in UF whose presence I find difficult.

I mean... okay. The entrance requirements are super low and don't include an amazingly strong moral component, and make allowances for personal and cultural ignorance, and also for extenuating circumstances.

But even within those very loose guidelines... the Valhalla side has a bunch of real-world people in it who were shockingly bad. There are slavers who made it into Valhalla; men who took free people and made them slaves. There are torturers.

I know that the universe of UF is not a just one and that people do not always receive in death what they earned in life. (Exhibit A in this is Nanami Kiryuu.) And that a lot of this was written in the nineties. If I'm going to be super blunt and name some names, I would like to imagine that if UF were being written TODAY, a lot of Kris Overstreet's Dunning School Confederate-lionizing bullshit would not pass editorial muster. (I like Kris. I do. But man, reading his author-avatar identify himself as a citizen of the Confederate States of America has always made me think "the Wayward Son should have blown him out of space." And that's before we even get to him splashing the Stars and Bars all over everything.)

But even with those provisos... some of this old stuff relating to the afterlife and who got into heaven and who did not can really grate. And I am very glad that in this instance you have gone back and changed at least one of those things.

-Merc
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>But even within those very loose guidelines... the Valhalla side has a
>bunch of real-world people in it who were shockingly bad.

Oh, I've no doubt. Please keep in mind that, in most if not all cases, I was not a historian at the time. Some of those namedrops in Twilight, for instance, are just there because I'd heard of them, or in a couple of cases probably because I was thinking of someone else.

(And that I am not proposing to undertake a thorough retroactive vetting of all such persons at this time. In Morton's case, I had recently run across the mention of him while I was looking for something else in that same scene, so it stuck out in my mind when I read that footnote in Operation Storm a few weeks later.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I don't think anyone would seriously propose a deliberate retcon project; you have better things to do with your time. But I also don't think that anyone would object if further retcons of this kind were to present themselves.

Proginoskes is a smart man.

-Merc
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