>>>I doubt if they ever got close enough to read the name on the stern

I've seen several periscope photos from WWII where the US sub was definitely close enough at the time the target was headed for Davy Jones' Locker .. most of the bow names were in Japanese but the stern typically carried English over Japanese.

Remember a couple of facts:

1) As the tactics evolved with the MK-14 torpedo, skippers maneuvered to get in shots with 1,000 yards or less of torpedo run whenever possible. That brought them up close and personal; and

2) They may have been a lot closer than 1,000 yards at some point during the approach.

John Clear's answer probably addresses the majority of the claimed and "confirmed" sinkings that subsequently got "un-sunk." All that was required for a "confirmed sinking" in the patrol report was that a second officer - usually the XO in most cases viewed the sinking as well. Under Morton/WAHOO and O'Kane/TANG, the attack officer was the XO, so the CO became the confirming officer in those cases.

One quick way to sort out whether the sub knew the name of its target is to look at the patrol report - a high percentage of the ones I've read thus far can identify the class of ship but unless they later recovered derbis or survivors, the name of the target didn't get tied back to the sinking until post-war JANAC.

Gene Fluckey in particular believed to the day he died that BARB had sunk more ships than they were ultimately credited for and even spent his own money to journey to the coast where he sank one or two ships in order to try to find witnesses.

In a few cases, JANAC credited sinkings that the boat itself hadn't claimed - they were only able to claim "hits" because they didn't witness the sinking. In some cases, there was often a tincan counterattack that drove the boat into evasion, or the target sank later outside of the boat's sight.

The other Catch-22 was that if the "ship" was less than 500 tons, it didn't count in the final ship count score. PIRAHNA SS-389, for example, logged 26 or so targets less than 500 tons - with her 5"-25 wet mount deck gun, no less! The boat also racked up about 12,300 tons with credited sinkings of 2 passenger-cargo marus.

PIRAHNA's deck gun now proudly sits on PAMPANITO's main deck after it was obtained in a trade of TAUTOG's 4" deck gun. The 5"-25 wet mount is historically correct for PAMPANITO, hence the trade.

Edited by SOB490 2009-11-21 9:55 PM

Look closely at the patrol report to see if "class" is used anywhere. My semi-educated guess is that when the CO recorded "XYZ Maru" he was referring to a specific ship by name.

In the patrol reports I've read thus far, if only the class was known, the patrol report entry typically reads " ... sunk a ship of the XYZ class..." or "attacked by a Chiordi class ..."

Thus, I would conclude that Miyagi Maru and Zensho Maru are names of specific ships that the CO was able to identify either at the time or prior to the patrol report's final version. Your question to the effect how could the CO make that identification is answered several different ways -

1) He may have had codebreaking intercepts from COMSUBPAC via radio telling him that two (or more) particular ships were leaving a specific port on a specific day; or

2) As I commented earlier, it is entirely possible that he actually read the ships' names or even recovered identifying derbis after the attack; or

3) The ships could have been so specific in the ONI Recognition Manual due to mast and stack configurations that they were the only possibilities; or

4) COMSUBPAC could have intercepted JN radio traffic after the sinkings that identified the specific ships by name; or

5) One or more of the above possibilities.

The fact the names appear in the patrol report rules out JANAC analyses as a possible source because they came years later.

Edited by SOB490 2009-11-22 3:33 PM