![]() ![]() He was a hands-on, think-outside-the-box, let’s-get-it-done kind of guy, bursting with innovative ideas and the energy to bring them to fruition. At Pearl, Momsen was hard at work sorting out the nagging torpedo problems that had plagued American captains since the beginning of the war. In 1929 he invented the submarine escape device that came to be called the Momsen Lung.Ī decade later he directed the raising of the submarine Squalus after it sank off the New Hampshire coast. Swede Momsen was a well-known figure in the submarine force. Lockwood with a request to develop a coordinated attack doctrine. The pair approached a somewhat skeptical Rear Adm. John “Babe” Brown, a famous Navy footballer, and Capt. There things might have stayed but for the interest in wolf pack tactics of two senior submariners: Capt. Within days, a planning board at Pearl Harbor considered the issue and, recommending essentially no change in current tactics, sent their decision back up the chain to King. Lockwood, the Pacific Fleet’s submarine commander, for action. The memo directed Nimitz to “form a tactical group of 4 to 6 submarines trained and indoctrinated in coordinated action.” King specified that the unit was to be used in the Solomon Islands, where Japanese naval forces were still pummeling the Americans at sea. Chester Nimitz, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, on March 12, 1943. Ernest King, the commander in chief of the United States Fleet, sent to Adm. The genesis of American wolf pack operations lies in a secret dispatch that Adm. (Gift of Abbott Laboratories, now in the collections of U.S. "Going Home," a 1943 painting by Georges Schreiber. In one week of near-constant battling with the enemy, the Blasters would rack up a remarkable record, and demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt the effectiveness of America’s group submarine tactics. In the spring of that year Blair’s Blasters was only the sixth group dispatched since an experimental pack had sailed nine months earlier. Navy had by mid-1944 developed its own extremely successful wolf pack program in the Pacific theater. But, taking a page from the Nazis’ playbook, the U.S. “Wolf pack” is a term long identified with the German navy, bringing to mind flotillas of U-boats preying on Allied shipping in the Atlantic. In official Navy parlance they were a “coordinated attack group.”īut submariners knew them as a wolf pack, and gave this particular combo a name - Blair’s Blasters, after the pack’s officer in command, Capt. This trio was part of a newly created tactical unit. The Shark, the Pintado, and a third boat, the Pilotfish, quickly regrouped and took off after the convoy. But by mid-afternoon the enemy gave up and moved on, leaving the submarine unscathed. In retaliation, five Japanese escorts boxed it in and unleashed 50 depth charges, some very close. ![]() Later that morning, the Pintado fired its six forward tubes, made six hits, and sank two ships. Just after midnight on JD-Day in Normandy, half a world away - it lined up a shot on a freighter and fired four stern torpedoes.Īll missed the intended target, but hit and heavily damaged another Japanese merchantman.
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