On August sixteenth, nineteen forty-two, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet signed award serial three two seven seven. It gave the Navy Cross to Lieutenant Commander William Brockman for the Battle of Midway, and the citation says he doggedly pushed home a torpedo attack on a screened aircraft carrier, and that the attack resulted in the closing and sinking of a ten thousand ton enemy aircraft carrier.

Brockman's own patrol report, written the same month, says something different. It says he fired three torpedoes at a burning carrier from twenty-seven hundred yards on the afternoon of June fourth, that red flames appeared along her side, and then, in his own words, that he did not actually see her sink.

The Japanese record says something different again. The carrier was Kaga. Her surviving crew reported that one American torpedo struck her starboard quarter at ten past two in the afternoon and failed to explode. Some of them said it broke apart on impact, and that men in the water held on to the air flask to stay afloat.

So three documents describe one attack. The citation says the submarine sank a carrier. The submarine says it could not be sure. The target says the torpedo was a dud. That is the problem this episode sets out to solve, because the submarine in question was U S S Nautilus, the oldest and largest boat the United States sent to Midway, a cruiser submarine from nineteen thirty that the Navy itself had rated too big, too slow to dive, and too easy to find. By the end of June fourth she had fired five torpedoes, hit nothing that exploded, and absorbed forty-two depth charges.

And yet the verdict of this investigation is that Nautilus did more to decide the Battle of Midway than any submarine in the Pacific Fleet. Not because of the torpedo that hit Kaga. Because of a destroyer she never fired at, and a wake on the water at five minutes to ten in the morning.

To understand why that matters, start with what the Navy expected from its submarines that week. Admiral Nimitz knew from the code breakers that the Japanese carriers were coming to Midway, and he put nineteen submarines in an arc around the atoll to catch them. The boats were the forward picket line and, in theory, the first weapon that could reach the Japanese fleet. In practice most of them never saw a ship. Submarines in nineteen forty-two ran at six or seven knots underwater, and a carrier force moving at twenty-five knots could pass through a patrol area before a boat could close the range. The arc was a net with holes large enough for the whole Combined Fleet.

Nautilus held a station northwest of the island, directly in the path Nimitz's intelligence predicted, and she was, on paper, the worst boat in the arc for the job.

She had been laid down at Mare Island in nineteen twenty-seven as V six, one of nine experimental V boats built between the wars. Launched on March fifteenth, nineteen thirty, commissioned that July. The design copied the German U cruisers of the First World War. Three hundred seventy-one feet long. Two thousand seven hundred thirty tons on the surface, three thousand nine hundred tons submerged, which made her and her sister Narwhal the largest submarines in American service and among the largest in the world. She carried two six inch fifty-three caliber deck guns in wet mounts, the same weapon a light cruiser carried, firing a one hundred five pound shell at three thousand feet per second to around twenty-two thousand yards. The magazine held three hundred sixty rounds. Six torpedo tubes, four forward and two aft, with roughly two dozen torpedoes.

What she bought with that size was endurance. Nine thousand three hundred eighty nautical miles at ten knots on her normal tanks, and twenty-five thousand miles at under six knots if the crew flooded fuel into the main ballast tanks. She was built to cross the Pacific and stay there.

What she paid for it was everything else. Her two original ten cylinder MAN diesels were rated at two thousand three hundred fifty horsepower each and gave seventeen knots on trials, but in service she was good for about fourteen on the surface and six and a half submerged. A hull that large took far longer to get under than a fleet boat, and a submarine that is slow to dive in a sea full of Japanese aircraft is a submarine that gets found. The same size made her sluggish on the rudder, and her broad decks made her a loud, easy sonar target. The Navy's own assessment of the class was blunt. Too large and unwieldy. Slow to dive. Difficult to maneuver. Easy to detect.

By nineteen forty-one the Navy had decided what to do with her, and it was not fleet work. She went into Mare Island on July fifteenth and stayed nine months. The MAN engines came out and four General Motors Winton sixteen cylinder diesels went in, sixteen hundred horsepower apiece. The yard fitted air conditioning, new radio gear, and four external torpedo tubes, two forward and two aft, so she could carry more weapons without opening the pressure hull. She was also plumbed to carry twenty thousand gallons of aviation gasoline, so she could refuel seaplanes in a lagoon somewhere. That tells you what the planners had in mind. A big, slow, long legged boat for special missions. Not a hunter.

She left San Francisco on April twenty-first, nineteen forty-two, reached Pearl Harbor a week later, and sailed for Midway on May twenty-fourth. It was her first war patrol. Her commanding officer was thirty-seven years old. William Herman Brockman Junior, born in Baltimore in nineteen oh four, Naval Academy class of nineteen twenty-seven, in submarines since nineteen twenty-nine. He had never fired a torpedo at an enemy ship.

And the torpedoes he carried were the Mark fourteen. Every submarine commander in the Pacific that summer was learning the same lesson about the Mark fourteen, and the Bureau of Ordnance had not yet admitted any of it. The weapon ran about ten feet deeper than the depth it was set for. Its magnetic exploder fired early or not at all. Its contact exploder had a firing pin that bent under the deceleration of a square hit, so the better the shot, the more likely the dud. Each one cost about ten thousand dollars. Six days after Midway, on June twentieth, Admiral Lockwood in Australia fired one through a net and proved the depth error. The Bureau conceded it on August first. The magnetic exploder was not switched off until Nimitz ordered it on June twenty-fourth, nineteen forty-three, and the firing pin was not fixed until that September. On June fourth, nineteen forty-two, Brockman had none of those fixes. He had the torpedo as issued.

That is the submarine. Now the morning.

At five minutes to eight Nautilus was at periscope depth when the lookout in the scope saw masts, and a Japanese aircraft saw the periscope. The plane came down and strafed the feather of water the scope left on the surface. Brockman took her to one hundred feet and his sound operator heard something new. Echo ranging. Japanese sonar, searching.

At eight he came back up and the periscope showed four ships. The patrol report records a battleship, logged as Ise class, and a light cruiser of the Jintsu type. The battleship was almost certainly Kirishima, the cruiser was Nagara, the flagship of the destroyer screen, and the formation was the outer edge of Admiral Nagumo's carrier striking force. Brockman wrote one sentence about that moment that has survived every retelling. The picture presented on raising the periscope was one never experienced in peacetime practices.

The Japanese had seen the periscope too. At ten past eight the cruiser dropped a pattern of depth charges. Seven minutes later, six more. Then, at eight nineteen, nine charges fell about a thousand yards away while Nautilus sat at ninety feet. Brockman did what no peacetime exercise had prepared him for. He came back to periscope depth in the middle of the attack and set up on the battleship.

At eight twenty-five he fired tubes one and two. The range was about four and a half thousand yards, the target angle eighty degrees on the bow, the speed estimate twenty-five knots. After tube two fired, the torpedo room reported that tube one had never left. One torpedo was in the water, and it missed. At ten past nine he fired tube two again, this time at the cruiser at twenty-five hundred yards, and missed again. At nine eighteen a destroyer came in with six charges that the report describes as more accurately placed than previous charges.

That destroyer was Arashi. A Kagero class ship of about two thousand tons, thirty-five knots, six five inch guns, commanded by Commander Watanabe Yasumasa, and she had been detached from the screen for one job. Sit on this submarine until it is no longer a threat to the carriers.

This is where the engineering of the two ships decides the battle, and it is worth slowing down to see how.

A depth charge is a steel drum of explosive with a hydrostatic fuze. Arashi carried thirty-six of them. To kill a submarine at ninety feet, a charge has to detonate within a few tens of feet of the pressure hull, and the attacking ship has to know where the target is at the instant the charge reaches depth. Her sonar could find Nautilus, and a boat this size gave a strong return, but each attack run meant driving over the target, losing sonar contact in her own wake, dropping, turning, and reacquiring. Each cycle took minutes. Between cycles, Brockman changed depth and course. Nautilus could not run away at six knots, but she did not have to. She only had to not be where Arashi thought she was when the fuze fired.

The duel ran for close to two hours. Craig Symonds counts the pattern from Brockman's report. Five charges in the first run, set shallow. Six more after a seven minute gap. Nine, each a little farther off. Six more, closer. Two near misses. Brockman logged twenty-eight explosions from this one attacker before it stopped, and forty-two for the whole day. None of them opened the hull. The big slow boat the Navy considered easy to detect was, as it turned out, also hard to kill, because three hundred seventy feet of steel built to carry two dozen torpedoes across the Pacific was built heavy.

At around ten Watanabe decided the submarine was neutralized, or at least pinned, and that his carriers were more important than a kill. He turned north and rang up something close to full speed, about thirty-five knots, to catch a force steaming away from him at twenty-five. A destroyer at thirty-five knots throws a white wake you can see from twenty thousand feet.

At that moment, Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, the air group commander of the carrier Enterprise, was at the end of his fuel and the end of his search. He had launched with Scouting Six and Bombing Six, thirty-three Dauntless dive bombers, one of which turned back early, and he had flown to the point where the Japanese carriers were supposed to be and found empty ocean. Nagumo had changed course. Some of McClusky's pilots were already below half tanks. One of them, Ensign Lew Hopkins, decided privately that this was a one way trip. McClusky had a choice between turning for home with his bombs and searching until the fuel made the decision for him. He turned north.

At nine fifty-five he looked down through a gap in the cloud and saw a single warship running north at high speed, alone, drawing a straight white line across the sea. He took it for a straggler hurrying to rejoin its fleet, and he followed the line. Ten minutes later, at five past ten, the Japanese carrier force came up over the horizon.

The attack went in at ten twenty-two. Lieutenant Earl Gallaher's bomb was the first American hit of the morning, on Kaga. Confusion over targets sent both squadrons at the same ship, and about twenty-seven Dauntlesses fell on Kaga while Lieutenant Richard Best pulled three aircraft off to hit Akagi. Kaga took at least one thousand pound bomb and three five hundred pounders. One of them destroyed the bridge and killed her captain. The others went into hangar decks full of fueled and armed aircraft. Best's single thousand pound bomb on Akagi did the same to Nagumo's flagship. By ten twenty-five both carriers were burning out of control, and within minutes Yorktown's dive bombers had done the same to Soryu.

Three of the four carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor were on fire inside six minutes, and the bombers that did it had been led to the target by the wake of a destroyer that was late because it had spent two hours trying to kill Nautilus.

Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, in Shattered Sword, their reconstruction of the battle from the Japanese records, lay out the Arashi connection in detail, and it has held up. Watanabe's ship was the only screen unit out of position that morning, it was out of position for one reason, and the one reason was the only submarine attack of the day. McClusky did not know any of that. He saw a line on the water and made a guess.

Nautilus did not know it either. Brockman had spent the critical hour at depth listening to charges, and the war patrol report records a single noise in that window: distant explosions, cause unknown.

At seven minutes to one in the afternoon he raised the periscope and saw a carrier. She was stopped, with two escorts standing by, and the report says the fire seemed to be under control and no flames were visible. He identified her as Soryu class. She was Kaga. By one o'clock he could see men on her deck trying to pass a towing hawser. His battery was low after five hours submerged under attack, and he wrote that he could not chase the cruisers, so he chose the carrier. It took him an hour to work in.

At one fifty-nine he fired. Three torpedoes from periscope depth, a mean run of twenty-seven hundred yards. He tried to fire a fourth and the tube would not fire. The last of the three went at five past two. Then the patrol report records this. Red flames appeared along the length of the ship from the bow to amidships.

What Brockman saw through the periscope was almost certainly Kaga's own fires, reaching a new fuel source as he watched. The Japanese record is specific. At ten past two one torpedo struck Kaga's starboard quarter and did not explode. The Mark fourteen had done exactly what its bent firing pin was designed to do on a good square hit. Survivor accounts collected after the war describe the weapon breaking up, and men in the water holding on to the buoyant air flask. Of the other two torpedoes, the Japanese reported no hits at all.

The escorts turned on Nautilus at once. At ten past two a cruiser passed directly over her and the charges came down again, and Brockman took her to three hundred feet, which was her rated test depth. A nineteen thirty hull at the limit of its design, holding. He stayed down. At ten past four he looked again and the carrier was burning along her whole length, and the escorts had gone. At twenty to seven that evening the sound operator heard heavy explosions under the water.

Kaga was ordered abandoned at twenty to five. The destroyer Hagikaze put two torpedoes into her starboard side at twenty-five past seven and she went down with eight hundred fourteen of her crew. Akagi and Soryu followed that night. Hiryu, the fourth carrier, was hit that afternoon and sank the next morning.

Brockman surfaced, took Nautilus to Midway for fuel and torpedoes on June seventh, and wrote his report. His conclusion is careful. He believed the carrier had been destroyed by fire and internal explosion. He did not, however, actually see her sink. Five torpedoes expended, forty-two depth charges received.

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So, the verdict, taken one claim at a time.

Did Nautilus sink a Japanese carrier at Midway? No. Kaga was mortally hit by four bombs at ten twenty-two in the morning and was scuttled by her own destroyers that evening. The Navy Cross citation credits Brockman with a sinking that did not happen, and the award board in August nineteen forty-two had only his report and the known loss of four carriers to go on. Nobody in Pearl Harbor could read Kaga's damage log. Brockman himself never claimed more than fire and explosions, and he put his doubt in writing.

Did her torpedo hit? Yes. One hit, on the starboard quarter, confirmed from the Japanese side. It was a dud, and the dud was not Brockman's failure. It was the Bureau of Ordnance's, and it took the Navy another fifteen months to admit it.

Did Nautilus change the battle? Yes, and this is the part the citation gets backwards. Her decisive act was not the afternoon attack on a ship that was already dying. It was the morning. One torpedo at a battleship, one at a cruiser, both misses, both enough to hold a first line destroyer at full attention for two hours. That destroyer left a wake. The wake led the only American strike that found the Japanese carriers in time. Of the four carriers that burned on June fourth, two, Kaga and Akagi, were hit by the group that followed Arashi home.

The old boat did not win the battle with her weapons. She won her share of it by being there, by being too heavy to kill in two hours, and by making a destroyer captain late.

The rest of her war confirms what Midway hinted at. The Navy never did turn her into a hunter, and she never needed to be. On June twenty-fifth, three weeks after Midway, off Yokosuka, she torpedoed the destroyer Yamakaze, sixteen hundred eighty-five tons, and sent her down with every man aboard, and the photograph Brockman took through the periscope as Yamakaze went under became one of the best known submarine images of the war. Depth charge damage on June twenty-eighth sent her home.

In August the special mission design finally got its mission. Nautilus and her half sister Argonaut carried Evans Carlson's Second Raider Battalion to Makin Atoll, ninety Marines packed into Nautilus and one hundred twenty-one into Argonaut. On August seventeenth her six inch guns, the cruiser guns the critics had called pointless on a submarine, shelled Japanese positions and sank a transport and a patrol boat inside the lagoon. That winter, in the Solomons, she took thirty-two civilians, including three children, off Teop Island. The following May, in the Aleutians, she landed one hundred nine Army scouts on Attu five hours ahead of the main assault. In November she photographed the Gilberts, then stood off Tarawa, where the destroyer Ringgold mistook her for an enemy and hit her conning tower with a five inch shell that failed to explode. She went to three hundred ten feet with a damaged main induction valve, came back up, and landed a Marine reconnaissance company on Abemama two days later.

From nineteen forty-four she ran supplies and ammunition to the Philippine guerrillas and brought refugees out, and in October she put fifty-five six inch shells into the wreck of the submarine Darter, grounded on Bombay Shoal, so that nothing on board would be of use to Japan. Fourteen war patrols. Fourteen battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation. She and Narwhal, between them, sank thirteen ships. She was decommissioned on June thirtieth, nineteen forty-five, struck from the register a month later, and sold for scrap that November. Brockman retired a rear admiral in nineteen forty-seven and died in Florida in nineteen seventy-nine.

Go back to the three documents.

The citation was wrong about the sinking. The submarine's log was honest about its doubt. The Japanese record was right about the dud. And none of the three contains the one fact that made Nautilus matter at Midway, because none of the people writing them could see it. The connection between a depth charge attack northwest of the island and a wake spotted from twenty thousand feet was only visible later, in the Japanese track charts and the American flight logs set side by side.

That is the lesson of the oldest submarine at Midway. A weapon system's record is not always the ships it sank. Nautilus was slow, enormous, and armed with a torpedo that could not be trusted, and she was still worth sending, because a clumsy boat that forces the enemy to deal with her is doing work, whether or not her torpedoes explode. The Navy that built her for endurance, not speed, got exactly the boat it paid for. On June fourth, nineteen forty-two, endurance was enough.

Award serial three two seven seven credits William Brockman with sinking a ten thousand ton carrier. He did not. He did something the citation could not describe, and his boat did it by surviving.