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
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