May 19th, 1944. 1:35 in the afternoon. The Solomon Sea, 140 nautical miles northeast of Cape Alexander on the island of Choiseul. Aboard the destroyer escort USS England, a junior soundman named Roger Bernhardt reports a submarine contact at about 1,400 yards. Bernhardt tells the bridge that the echoes are sharp and clear.

England is five months out of the builder's yard. She is 306 feet long and displaces 1,400 tons. Her main battery is three 3-inch guns firing 13-pound shells. Her best speed is 24 knots, too slow to keep station with a fast carrier group. The Navy drew up her design in 1941 because Britain needed a cheap ocean escort under Lend-Lease, and by 1943 a yard could turn one out for about 3.5 million dollars, roughly half the price of a fleet destroyer. Her crew is 15 officers and 198 men.

The contact is I-16. 2,184 tons on the surface, 358 feet long, one of the largest submarines in the Imperial Japanese Navy, a veteran of nine war patrols. On the night of December 7th, 1941, 7 nautical miles off the entrance to Pearl Harbor, she launched the first of the five midget submarines sent against the American battle line. The ship now hunting her is named for Ensign John C. England, who died aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma that same morning.

England attacks at 1:41 and misses. Over the next 50 minutes she attacks three more times. One projectile finds the hull, and the big submarine keeps going. At 2:33 in the afternoon, her fifth salvo of 24 contact-fuzed projectiles goes into the water, and four to six of them strike steel. Two minutes later, an explosion at an estimated depth of 500 feet lifts the stern of a 1,400-ton ship out of the sea and knocks men off their feet. Debris reaches the surface within 20 minutes. Cork, deck planking, pieces of cabinetry, and a sealed rubber bag of rice. I-16 is gone with all 107 men aboard.

That was the first. Over the next twelve days, the same ship sank five more. Six submarines attacked, six submarines destroyed. No warship in any navy, before or since, has matched it. The Royal Navy's most successful submarine killer, the sloop HMS Starling, needed the entire war to sink 14 U-boats. England did six in twelve days.

How did a half-price escort with a 3-inch main battery do what no destroyer, no cruiser, and no carrier group had ever done? The answer runs through a British weapon that most of the fleet had only just received, a code-breaking office in Hawaii, and a 26-year-old executive officer from Birmingham, Alabama, who had test-fired that weapon at San Francisco, before the ship ever sailed for the Pacific, until he trusted it.

By the spring of 1944, the Japanese defensive perimeter was collapsing from the east. Kwajalein, the main Japanese submarine base in the central Pacific, fell in February. The Sixth Fleet, the Imperial Navy's submarine force, moved its headquarters to Saipan under Vice Admiral Takagi Takao. The commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Toyoda Soemu, issued orders for Operation A-Go, the decisive battle that was supposed to stop the Americans somewhere along the line running from the Marianas through the western Carolines to western New Guinea. Nobody in the Japanese high command knew where the next blow would fall. Recent American carrier strikes along the New Guinea coast pointed west. The real target was the Marianas.

Japanese doctrine gave that reconnaissance job to submarines. The Naval General Staff had always regarded its submarines as scouts first and raiders second, sent out to locate and shadow enemy task forces ahead of the surface fleet's decisive battle. So Takagi ordered the 7th Submarine Squadron to string a picket line of seven boats across the water between Truk and the Admiralty Islands, the corridor American carriers were expected to use on the way to Palau. The line was designated NA. It ran from 1 degree 30 minutes north, 150 degrees 30 minutes east, to 0 degrees 30 minutes south, 148 degrees 30 minutes east. All seven boats were to be on station by midnight at the start of May 21st. Each boat received a fixed position on the line rather than an operating area. That one administrative decision would kill most of them.

At the same time, the Sixth Fleet was bleeding its biggest boats into transport work. Bypassed garrisons in the Solomons were starving, and the only vessels that could reach them were submarines. At Truk, I-16 loaded rice packed in 75-pound rubber bags for the garrison at Buin on Bougainville. Before she sailed, she radioed her estimated time of arrival to the commander of Submarine Division 7: 10 o'clock on the night of May 22nd. She left Truk at 8 in the morning on May 14th.

Fleet Radio Unit Pacific in Hawaii, the successor to the station that had broken the Japanese code before Midway, decoded that message on May 13th. The intelligence went to Third Fleet, and from Third Fleet to Commander Hamilton Hains, commanding Escort Division 39 at Tulagi. Hains had two ships of his own, the destroyer escorts USS George and USS Raby. He borrowed a third from Escort Division 40 at Purvis Bay. That ship was England. All three sailed on May 18th with Hains embarked in George as officer in tactical command. The same day, more radio intelligence arrived describing the NA line.

Hains took to sea the least glamorous warships in the American inventory. The destroyer escort existed because the Royal Navy, in 1941, needed an ocean escort that could make 20 knots and hunt submarines in the open Atlantic, and asked the Americans to build it under Lend-Lease. Captain Edward L. Cochrane drew up the design in June 1941. The first 50 were built for Britain. When the United States entered the war, the Navy kept most of them for itself and ordered hundreds more. American yards built more than 500. The Buckley class, England's class, ran to 154 ships ordered. Bethlehem's Hingham yard in Massachusetts was completing about six ships a month by 1943, and once delivered a destroyer escort in 23 days. Because the country could not cut reduction gears fast enough, the Buckleys used turbo-electric drive, two General Electric turbines driving generators that fed 12,000 horsepower of electric motors on two shafts. Speed was 24 knots, range 5,500 nautical miles at 15 knots. Sonar was useless above 20 knots anyway, so the speed the design gave up was speed a submarine hunter could not use.

Nothing about England was built to be remarkable.

The reason nobody expected a record from a destroyer escort was arithmetic. British wartime figures showed that a conventional depth charge attack sank a submarine about once in every 60 attempts. The best American estimate, in the middle of 1944, gave a single pattern from the newer forward-throwing weapon an 8 percent chance of a kill. A ship that found six submarines and attacked each of them once could expect, on those numbers, to sink fewer than one.

The targets on the NA line were built to survive exactly this kind of hunt. They were Kaisho type boats, the RO-100 class, designed for coastal defense. 601 tons on the surface and 200 feet long, with a surfaced speed of 14 knots and 8 submerged. Four forward torpedo tubes and eight torpedoes. A crew of 38 by design, though every boat England sank carried more. Their rated test depth was 75 meters, 246 feet. They were small and quiet, and most of them carried radar detectors that warned the crew the moment an escort's search radar touched the hull. Japanese submarine commanders had a drilled response to an escort overhead: crash dive, run deep, throw the rudder from side to side, jam the enemy's sonar with bursts of tuned sound, and if it came to it, release debris and oil to fake a sinking.

There was one more reason for Japanese confidence. The Sixth Fleet believed its codes were secure. A line of seven boats sitting at seven fixed positions was only a weakness if the enemy knew the positions.

And there was the matter of who had ever done anything like this. In February 1944, the Royal Navy's 2nd Escort Group, six veteran sloops centered on HMS Starling, sank six U-boats in 19 days in the Atlantic. That was the best any group had done in the history of anti-submarine warfare, and it took six ships. Hains had three, two of which would fire more than a dozen salvos over the following two weeks and sink nothing.

The weapon that made the difference was British, and it was called the Hedgehog. The Royal Navy's Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development designed it in 1941. It scored its first kill in November 1942. It did not reach American escorts in numbers until late 1943, which meant that when England commissioned on December 10th, 1943, she belonged to the first generation of American warships built around it.

The Mark 10 Hedgehog was a steel cradle of 24 spigots mounted forward of the bridge. Each spigot carried a 65-pound projectile with 35 pounds of Torpex in its nose. The 24 rounds fired in pairs a fraction of a second apart, sequenced so that every one of them hit the water at the same instant, in an ellipse 195 feet wide and 168 feet long, about 283 yards ahead of the ship. They sank at more than 22 feet per second. A submarine at 200 feet had under 10 seconds between the splash and the arrival.

The projectiles carried contact fuzes. That was the entire point. A conventional depth charge, the Mark 9, was a 320-pound drum holding 200 pounds of Torpex with a hydrostatic fuze set to a guessed depth. To use it, the escort had to run directly over the submarine and roll the charges off the stern. Every experienced submarine captain knew that sonar went blind in the final few hundred yards of that run, the range the Americans called instantaneous echo. He waited for the escort to enter the blind zone and then turned hard to one side. The charges went off in the water he had just left. And the detonations deafened the escort's own sonar for minutes afterward, long enough for the submarine to slip away.

The Hedgehog inverted all of that. It fired ahead of the ship, while the sonar still held contact, before the submarine reached the blind zone. A projectile that missed hit nothing and did not explode, so the sonar operator kept his echo and the ship could reload in 3 minutes and try again. A projectile that struck the hull put 35 pounds of Torpex directly against the pressure hull, and one hit was usually enough. The submarine received no warning, because a spread of small projectiles falling through the water did not sound like an attack until the hull split. Wartime records credited the Hedgehog with 47 kills from 268 attacks, one kill per 5.7 attacks. Depth charges scored one per 60.5.

The weapon's weakness was that it forgave nothing. A pattern 195 feet wide required an exact solution. The sonar team had to hold the echo through the submarine's turns, read the change in range and bearing, estimate the depth, and hand the conning officer a firing point that put the ellipse on a moving target 283 yards away and 300 feet down. England carried the QGA echo-ranging sonar, the same set her sisters carried. Hardware was not the difference. Practice was.

England's executive officer was Lieutenant John A. Williamson, 26 years old, from Birmingham, Alabama. Before the ship left San Francisco, Williamson test-fired the Hedgehog himself until he was convinced the weapon would do what the manuals claimed. Then he drilled the sonar team on it. Several accounts, including the Navy's own history office, credit Williamson as the driving force behind the ship's proficiency. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Walton B. Pendleton, did something few captains do. When his own approaches on I-16 failed twice, he handed the conn to his executive officer and watched.

The last element was the one the Japanese did not know existed. When a Japanese station intercepted an American aircraft's contact report on RO-104, Sixth Fleet radioed the entire NA line to shift 60 nautical miles to the southeast, and to make sure every boat understood, the message listed each boat's new position. Fleet Radio Unit Pacific intercepted that message too. The Joint Intelligence Center at Pearl Harbor worked out the coordinates. A newly appointed anti-submarine officer at the center then sanitized the intelligence, so it could go to ships at sea without revealing where it came from. It was the first time in the Pacific that code-breaking intelligence had been sanitized for anti-submarine forces, the way it was already being passed to American submarines. Every Japanese boat England found was within 50 miles of where the decrypts said it would be, and usually much closer.

What follows is the part of the record the Navy kept out of the newspapers in 1944. If you want more of the United States Navy told this way, a subscription costs nothing and puts the next ship in front of you when it is ready.

The proof began with I-16 on May 19th. After the explosion that lifted England's stern, an oil slick 3 miles by 6 spread across the sea the following day. Then Hains turned the group northwest toward the NA line.

At 3:51 in the morning on May 22nd, George's radar found RO-106 on the surface at 14,000 yards. RO-106 was on her eleventh patrol. Ten months earlier she had put a torpedo into LST-342 off New Georgia and broken the ship in two, killing 121 men. Her E27 radar detector failed to warn her, and George's searchlight caught her on the surface at 4,000 yards. She crash-dived. George's Hedgehog salvo missed. At 4:25, England picked her up on sonar at 2,500 yards as the submarine tried to run. England's first salvo missed. RO-106 then reversed course and came head-on toward the escort, either to fire torpedoes or because her captain did not understand what England was firing at him. At 5:01, England's second salvo produced at least three explosions at 275 feet. That was nearly 30 feet deeper than the class was rated to dive. RO-106 went to the bottom in 16,200 feet of water with all 49 men.

May 23rd. An aircraft sighted RO-104 on the surface about 250 nautical miles north-northwest of Kavieng. At 6:04 in the morning, Raby's radar found her at 4 miles. This time the radar detector worked, and RO-104 was under by 6:10. Raby held sonar contact and made four Hedgehog attacks. All four missed. RO-104 was throwing her rudder over and jamming the sonar with bursts of sound. George took over and made five attacks between 7:30 and 8:10. All five missed. At 8:19, England began her approach. Her first salvo missed. Her second, at 8:34, hit with an estimated 10 to 12 projectiles at 300 feet. The sonar team heard the hull breaking up, then a heavy underwater explosion 3 minutes later. Pendleton added 13 depth charges set between 350 and 450 feet. The debris did not surface until 10:45. RO-104 was lost with all 58 men.

May 24th. At 1:20 in the morning, George's radar found RO-116 at 17,000 yards, about 225 nautical miles north-northwest of Kavieng. The submarine dived at 1:28. At 1:50, England made sonar contact at 750 yards. RO-116 used the same violent rudder work and sonar jamming as RO-104, and twice England broke off a run because the solution was not good enough to fire. On the third run, at 2:14, she fired and hit with at least three projectiles. Debris came up after sunrise. By the next day the oil covered several square miles. 56 men.

May 26th. At 11:03 at night, Raby's radar found RO-108 at 15,000 yards, on the surface 110 nautical miles northeast of Seeadler Harbor, making 11 knots. RO-108 was the boat that had torpedoed the destroyer USS Henley in the Huon Gulf the previous October, breaking her keel and killing 15 men. England had her on radar a minute later. When England closed to 4,100 yards, RO-108 crash-dived. At 11:19, England's sonar found her at 1,650 yards, at 250 feet, creeping at 2 to 3 knots on a heading of 150 degrees. Raby went in first and missed. At 11:23, England fired. Four to six explosions came back 11 seconds after the splash, then rumbling, then a series of smaller explosions. By morning the sea held diesel oil, deck planking, bottle corks, insulation, and a fragment of the submarine's chronometer. 53 men.

On May 27th, the Sixth Fleet's own radio intelligence unit decoded American traffic describing submarine kills north of the Admiralties. Japanese analysts noted that the American messages were becoming jubilant. The Sixth Fleet issued a warning to the line. RO-109 and RO-112 received it and cleared the area. RO-105 either did not receive it or did not act on it.

England, George and Raby had by now fired most of their Hedgehog ammunition. They put into Seeadler Harbor at Manus to reload, then joined a larger hunter-killer group built around the escort carrier USS Hoggatt Bay, with the destroyers Hazelwood and McCord and the destroyer escort Spangler. Shortly before 2 in the morning on May 30th, Hazelwood's radar found RO-105 at 6,000 yards. Aboard her was Captain Kato Ryonosuke, commander of Submarine Division 51. The boat dived.

What followed was the longest hunt of the twelve days. Hazelwood held sonar contact and dropped depth charges without result. George and Raby relieved her at 4:35 in the morning and attacked through the day. RO-105 maneuvered radically, released debris and false oil slicks, and jammed the sonar. George may have scored three hits on one salvo, and still the submarine kept moving. In 25 hours, the escorts made 16 separate Hedgehog and depth charge attacks. At 3:10 in the morning on May 31st, RO-105 surfaced briefly, then went under again. At 5 o'clock, Spangler and England arrived. Spangler attacked and missed. Commander Hains, listening from George, came up on the radio circuit and said, "Oh hell, go ahead England."

England gained sonar contact at 7:29. At 7:36 she fired one salvo of 24 projectiles. Six to ten of them hit. At 7:41 a heavy explosion came up from below, and the oil and debris that followed it were real. RO-105 was lost with all 55 men. Six submarines in twelve days.

The ledger from May 19th to May 31st reads like this. Twelve Hedgehog salvos fired by England, 288 projectiles, six submarines destroyed. 378 Japanese submariners dead. Not one American casualty. George and Raby, identical ships with identical sonar and identical Hedgehogs, working the same water against the same targets, fired more than a dozen salvos in those twelve days and sank nothing. The intelligence went to all three ships. The weapon was issued to all three. The result belonged to one.

England received the Presidential Unit Citation, whose text reads in part, for outstanding performance in combat against enemy forces from May 19 to 31, 1944, she destroyed six hostile ships within twelve days, effecting this devastating blow to enemy operations during a particularly crucial period. Pendleton received the Navy Cross. Hains received the Legion of Merit. Admiral Ernest J. King, the Chief of Naval Operations, sent a one-line message. King wrote, "There'll always be an England in the United States Navy." At the same time, the Navy kept the story out of the press. Its source was worth more than the headline.

The strategic effect was larger than six hulls. The Japanese did not know why the NA line had died. They concluded that a large American force must have passed through the area on its way to the western Carolines or western New Guinea, exactly the wrong direction. The Japanese execution of Operation A-Go became confused and delayed, and the delay burned fuel the Combined Fleet could not replace. When the American fleet appeared off Saipan in June, the Sixth Fleet's boats were still being redeployed. Between May and June 1944, of about 25 Japanese submarines deployed in the campaign, about 17 were sunk. On June 19th and 20th, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Japanese carrier force lost the carriers Taiho, Shokaku and Hiyo and somewhere between 550 and 645 aircraft. The scouting line that was supposed to tell Toyoda where the Americans were coming was gone before the battle began. Vice Admiral Takagi never left Saipan. He died there when the island fell in July.

Japanese intelligence eventually reasoned that the losses on the NA line must have come from American radio intelligence. The Sixth Fleet went on believing its codes were secure.

England fought on for another year and earned 10 battle stars. On May 9th, 1945, off Okinawa, three kamikaze aircraft came at her. By then Williamson had the ship. Her gunners set the first aircraft on fire, and it crashed into her starboard side just below the bridge, and its bomb went off moments later. 37 men were killed or missing and 25 wounded. Her crew brought the fires under control, and she was towed into Kerama Retto and then steamed home to Philadelphia under her own power. With the war in Europe over and hundreds of destroyer escorts in the fleet, the Navy decided she was not worth repairing. She was decommissioned on October 15th, 1945, and sold for scrap on November 26th, 1946.

A second USS England, a guided missile cruiser, served from December 1963 to January 1994 and was broken up in 2004. Since then Admiral King's promise has gone unkept. The record has not. No ship in any navy has sunk six submarines in twelve days.

The word cheap measured the hull. It did not measure the system. A destroyer escort was a 3.5 million dollar platform built by yards that had never built warships, driven by electric motors because the country was short of gears, armed with guns no cruiser needed to fear. The Navy bought hundreds of them because it needed hulls, not because it expected any one of them to make history. What it got, in England's case, was a weapon designed in Britain, an intelligence pipeline built in Hawaii, and a crew that had rehearsed the geometry of a 195-foot ellipse until it was reflex. Two sister ships had the first two of those advantages. Only England had all three.

On the morning of December 7th, 1941, Ensign John C. England was in the radio room of the Oklahoma when the torpedoes hit. He went back into the ship three times to bring out three shipmates, and did not come back from the fourth. He received a Purple Heart and nothing else. Two and a half years later, a ship carrying his name found her first target through a radio message decoded in Hawaii, and that target was the submarine that had launched the first midget against Pearl Harbor. Then she found five more, with the same weapon and the same intelligence her sisters carried. The record she set that May has stood for more than eighty years.