The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are, by far, the world’s largest graveyards. In the Second World
War, tens of thousands of ships were sunk and millions of sailors were lost at sea.
In many cases, the success of key land battles was predicated on
naval victories far away. But while the admirals studied their charts,
it was the captains who fought the battles, making the tactical decisions that turned the tide.
In this video, we tell the stories of five of these men—the war’s deadliest ship captains.
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In early 1939, the career of Royal Navy Commander Frederic John Walker seemed at an end. He had been
passed over for promotion several times and was scheduled for early retirement. Despite three
decades of loyal service, he had never been given command. Instead, Walker had become
an expert in a branch of warfare no one else seemed concerned with: anti-submarine warfare.
By 1941, the Admiralty desperately needed good officers to guard the Atlantic convoys.
They gave Walker command of the not-very-formidable sloop HMS Stork
and put him in charge of the 36th Escort Group, which comprised another sloop and six corvettes.
They didn’t know it, but Walker had been thinking up new anti-submarine
tactics in his spare time, and he soon got a chance to test them out.
In December, while guiding the 32-ship convoy HG 76 from Gibraltar to Britain, Walker sunk not one,
not two, but five German U-boats that attacked his convoy. This action was widely considered the
first true victory by the Allies in the Battle of the Atlantic. Armed with the humble depth charge,
Walker sank three more U-boats while commanding Stork and protecting HG 76.
Amazed at his success, the Admiralty took Walker off convoy duty and gave
him a fleet of six sloops. He had one order: “Sink U-boats.”
This he did. Playing a nursery rhyme over the ship’s loudspeakers, Walker sank 17 U-boats in
the Atlantic. His fleet was also instrumental in protecting the landing ships during D-Day.
A hunter like Walker never rested while at sea, and this eventually killed him. In late 1944,
he suffered a stroke. The Kriegsmarine could breathe a sigh of relief.
Even with captains like Walker stalking the waves for submarines,
some German U-boat captains managed to do
serious damage to Allied shipping. First among these men was Fregattenkapitän Otto Kretschmer.
Kretschmer began the war in command of U-23 and was already a respected authority on
submarine warfare. His “Eleven Points of Submarine Warfare”, written in 1937,
was required reading for new U-boat officers.
Stalking the North Sea and British coastline,
Kretschmer torpedoed and sank eight ships, totalling 27,624 tonnes.
One of these was the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Daring, by no means an easy target.
In May 1940, Kretschmer upgraded to the Type VIIB U-boat U-99.
With a longer range and more torpedoes, he wreaked havoc on the enemy. In 11 months of patrolling,
Kretschmer sank 36 allied ships, both alone and as part of a wolfpack. He earned the nickname
“Silent Otto” for his use of silent running and lack of radio reports.
He believed too many radio reports could alert the British to his position, so he
would often not be heard from for weeks, leaving nothing but burning oil and wreckage behind him.
Kretschmer did his best to only attack at night, when his U-boat had all the
advantages. On one occasion, he surfaced U-99 right in the middle of an Allied convoy.
Sandwiched between ships, the escorts couldn’t risk firing at him, but Kretschmer was in a
target-rich environment. He decimated the convoy and dived into the depths.
Far from the cat-and-mouse game of Atlantic submarine hunting, in the Pacific, the Japanese
and the Allied navies were squaring up for decisive battles. One of these was the — often
regarded as the worst defeat the United States has ever suffered at sea. At the forefront of
this battle was the heavy cruiser Chokai and her intrepid captain, Watanabe Seishichi.
Chokai was the flagship of Imperial Japanese Navy Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa,
the strategist behind the Battle of Savo Island. He ordered Chokai, along with heavy cruisers Aoba,
Furutaka, Kako, and Kinugasa; light cruisers Tenryū and Yūbari; and the destroyer Yūnagi,
to engage US Navy forces protecting the marine landings on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
Seishichi was a master of naval night battle, and his crew could fight as well in the dark as
they could during the day. Under the cover of darkness, Chokai was safe from air attacks and
could take the Americans by surprise. In the early hours of August 9th, that’s exactly what she did.
Guided to the US fleet by recon seaplane, Chokai
led the Japanese fleet into the attack. At 1:38 AM, Seishichi let loose a salvo of torpedos,
then rained explosive shells on the heavy cruisers HMAS Canberra and USS Chicago.
Canberra was quickly crippled and began to sink, while Chicago was damaged and fled the battle.
Seishichi then turned Chokai north, lighting up three US cruisers with her powerful searchlights
and letting loose with her deck guns. Before long, USS Quincey and USS Astoria were aflame,
while one of Chokai’s torpedos crippled USS Vincennes. The US fleet was crushed
and Captain Seishichi commended for his decisive actions in command of Chokai.
In 1944, the US Navy avenged its loss in the Solomon Islands with a crushing victory
off the Filipino coast. At the Battle off Samar, one American captain turned the tide.
Ernest E. Evans, nicknamed “Big Chief” due to his Native American ancestry, took command of the
Fletcher-class destroyer USS Johnston in mid-1943. He had his priorities straight from day one,
telling his men when he first came aboard Johnston that
On October 25th, Evans, commanding Johnston and joined by destroyers USS Hoel and USS Heermann,
was guiding six escort carriers off the coast of Samar Island when he was spotted by the Japanese.
Led by the super-battleship Yamato and comprising three other battleships, as well as six heavy
cruisers and 11 destroyers, this Japanese fleet packed enough firepower to annihilate US forces
landing in the Philippines. There was only one thing in their way: Evans and his little fleet.
Facing the threat head-on, Evans fired smoke shells then charged the Japanese battleships,
letting loose everything he had. His guns were near useless against the thick enemy armour, but
his torpedoes could stop them dead in the water. Above him, aircraft from the escort carriers
launched all their weapons at the fleet, too. Some even dropped depth charges on top of the ships,
and one pilot reportedly shot at sailors from the cockpit with his revolver.
Evan’s charge drew all the Japanese fire to Johnston, and the ship started going down.
Evans went down with it, but his ferocious defence gave the carriers time to pull back and forced
the Japanese to retreat. Just one destroyer scared off the largest battleship ever built.
The Dutch are often forgotten when it comes to the Pacific theatre. While their surface vessels may
not have had the best record, their submarine force more than made up for it. Captained by
Luitenant ter Zee First Klasse Hendrikus Goossens, HNLMS Zwaardvisch punched well above her weight.
When the Japanese rolled into the Pacific, the Dutch had 15 submarines based in Surabaya. They
got to work straight away: attacking transports, hunting escorts, and gathering intelligence.
They made their first kill only five days after the Pearl Harbour attack,
sinking the Japanese transport ship Toto Maru.
But constant combat means constant losses, and it wasn’t long before the Dutch submarines were
forced to relocate to Australia to preserve what was left of their force. Cut off from
their bases and leadership back home in Europe, the submariners were on their own.
Or so they thought. The British were keen to keep these fighting men going,
so they gave them a few of the submarines they had lying around. HMS Talent became
HNLMS Zwaardvisch in 1943, and her captain, Goossens, immediately put her to work.
Early in the morning of October sixth, Zwaardvisch lay in ambush outside of Surabaya harbour.
The Germans had been steadily relocating U-boats to the Pacific to threaten Allied shipping,
and Goossens was determined to stop them. After noticing a tell-tale shape through his periscope,
Zwaardvisch launched a spread of six torpedoes. Two of these hit U-168,
and the U-boat quickly sank. Goossens didn’t know it,
but U-168 was carrying German military technologies destined for Japan.
THOSE were five intrepid stories of the Second World War’s best ship captains.
But what do YOU think? What do YOU think it would have been like to live on a submarine?
Did YOU know the Japanese were excellent at naval fighting at night? And if you had to choose,
what type of ship would have been the best to serve in? Let us know in the comments!