In the long and unforgiving history of submarine warfare, there existed an unspoken rule that was never meant to be broken: a submarine did not fight a destroyer. Submarines were phantoms, silent hunters of slow, lumbering cargo ships and tankers that formed the lifeblood of an enemy’s war machine. Destroyers, by contrast, were wolves—fast, lethal, and built for a single purpose: to hunt the hunter.
During the Second World War, an American submarine caught by a Japanese destroyer was, in most cases, facing a death sentence. Between December 1941 and the spring of 1944, Japanese destroyers successfully sank 14 American submarines in combat. In that same period, the number of Japanese destroyers sunk by an American submarine while both were actively engaged in a fight was zero. The imbalance was stark and undeniable. A destroyer could race along at 35 knots, while a submerged submarine, running on batteries, struggled to reach 9. Destroyers were equipped with sonar and carried devastating loads of depth charges. Submarines, by comparison, were blind and fragile once detected. Doctrine was unambiguous: if a destroyer found you, you dove deep, rigged for silent running, and prayed.
In 1944, one man chose to rewrite those rules.
His name was Commander Samuel Dealey. Rather than flee from the wolf, he decided to hunt it.
What Dealey and his 79 men accomplished in just 4 days shocked the Imperial Japanese Navy and altered the course of the war in the Pacific. Their vessel was the USS Harder, and their story defied every assumption of undersea warfare.
Samuel Dealey was 37 years old, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy’s class of 1930. He was quiet, unassuming, and wore spectacles. Beneath that calm exterior, however, was a will forged from steel. He had served as executive officer under Commander Dudley W. “Mush” Morton aboard the USS Wahoo, one of the most aggressive and successful submarines of the war. From Morton, Dealey absorbed lessons that would shape his command philosophy: aggression, surprise, and audacity could be weapons as decisive as any torpedo.
By 1944, Dealey had his own command, the Gato-class submarine USS Harder. On his fifth war patrol, he put those lessons into practice with consequences that stunned the United States Navy itself.
On April 13, 1944, near the island of Guam, Harder was stalking a Japanese convoy when its escort, the destroyer Ikazuchi, detected her presence. The destroyer turned immediately and charged at flank speed, intent on ramming or obliterating the submarine with depth charges. Every man in Harder’s conning tower expected the order to dive. Instead, Dealey gave an order that defied all doctrine: flank speed ahead, make ready the bow tubes.
He was charging straight at the destroyer.
The maneuver was known as the “down-the-throat” shot, a tactic so reckless it barely existed outside theory. It involved firing torpedoes directly into the face of a charging destroyer, then diving at the last possible second in the hope of slipping beneath the enemy’s keel. If the torpedoes missed, the destroyer would be perfectly positioned to drop depth charges directly on the submarine. If the dive was delayed by even seconds, the destroyer’s bow could cut the submarine in half.
At a range of just 900 yards, point-blank distance in naval terms, Harder fired a spread of four torpedoes. Two struck Ikazuchi amidships. The destroyer erupted in a massive explosion, broke in two, and sank in less than 5 minutes. Dealey surfaced, surveyed the wreckage, and sent a radio report that became one of the most famous messages of the war: “Expended four torpedoes and one destroyer.”
The act sent a shockwave through the Pacific submarine force and placed a target squarely on Dealey’s back.
Admiral Soemu Toyoda, commander in chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, was furious. By the spring of 1944, Japan’s situation was desperate. Between January and May alone, the Japanese Navy had lost 23 destroyers to submarines, carrier aircraft, and surface combat. These vessels were irreplaceable—the fleet’s sheepdogs, the only ships fast enough to shield carriers and battleships from American submarines.
Toyoda was assembling every ship he had for one final gamble, a decisive engagement known as Operation A-Go. The plan was to lure the American invasion fleet into the Philippine Sea and annihilate it in a single climactic battle, fulfilling decades of Japanese naval doctrine centered on the concept of Kantai Kessen, the decisive fleet action.
To prepare, Toyoda concentrated the entire Japanese mobile fleet at a remote forward anchorage called Tawi-Tawi in the Sulu Archipelago. It was the largest concentration of Japanese naval power since Midway: 4 battleships, including the super-battleship Yamato; 9 aircraft carriers; 15 cruisers; and 28 precious destroyers.
They lay coiled, waiting for the American invasion of the Marianas.
American codebreakers at Station HYPO in Hawaii knew the fleet was there. Admiral Charles Lockwood, commander of the Pacific Submarine Force, knew exactly who to send.
He sent Samuel Dealey.
Dealey’s orders were simple: penetrate the defensive screen around Tawi-Tawi, patrol the waters, and attack any targets of opportunity. For 9 tense days, Harder operated undetected, slipping between Japanese patrols and charting fleet movements just miles from the most heavily guarded anchorage on Earth.
Then, on June 6, 1944, at 0300, a Japanese patrol aircraft flying in darkness spotted the faint wake of Harder’s periscope. The alarm was sounded. Within an hour, three destroyers—Minazuki, Hayanami, and Tanikaze—were detached with a single order: find and kill the American submarine.
At 0647, as dawn broke, Dealey stood in the conning tower, watching through the periscope as the three destroyers cut through the water toward him. He was on his fifth war patrol and had already destroyed 18 enemy ships. Now three of the deadliest vessels in the Japanese Navy were converging on his position.
The textbook response was to run and dive deep.
Dealey did neither.
Dealey studied the lead destroyer, Minazuki. She was 1,500 tons of gray steel, armed with four 5-inch guns, closing fast while zigzagging to spoil any torpedo solution. Behind her, Hayanami and Tanikaze began to spread out in a classic search-and-destroy formation designed to box the submarine into a lethal trap. Every man aboard Harder knew the doctrine. They were supposed to run. They were supposed to dive to 400 feet and trust to silence and luck.
Dealey had no intention of doing so.
He swung Harder’s bow directly toward the charging Minazuki and ordered the bow tubes made ready. The range closed rapidly: 1,500 yards, 1,200, then 1,100. The sonar pings from Minazuki echoed through Harder’s hull in a frantic, metallic clang that every man aboard could hear without headphones. The destroyer knew exactly where they were. The time to collision was barely over 90 seconds.
Dealey waited for the destroyer to commit.
At 750 yards, less than half a mile, Minazuki was so close that Dealey could see the white bow wave tearing at her stem. He gave the order. Three Mark 18 electric torpedoes slid silently from Harder’s tubes. Immediately after firing, Dealey ordered the boat down to 300 feet and all ahead full. Harder pitched downward at a brutal angle, her motors screaming as she clawed for depth.
Forty seconds later, two massive explosions rocked the submarine. A third detonation followed, so violent it lifted Harder’s stern 6 feet out of the water before slamming it back down. Light fixtures shattered. Cork insulation rained from the overhead. Men were thrown from their feet.
When Dealey brought Harder back to periscope depth, Minazuki was gone. In her place was a column of black smoke, floating debris, and an expanding oil slick. The destroyer had been broken in half and sunk. The remaining two destroyers reacted not with coordinated aggression, but with panic. Hayanami and Tanikaze fled the area at high speed, dropping depth charges at random as they withdrew. They clearly believed they had stumbled into a pack of submarines rather than a single attacker.
Dealey allowed them to go and slipped away into the depths.
When Admiral Toyoda received the report, he was incensed. He ordered six additional destroyers to join the hunt, while patrol aircraft saturated the skies over Tawi-Tawi, sweeping the area every 20 minutes. The entire anchorage went to high alert. Dealey, however, was far from finished.
He spent the remainder of June 6 evading patrols, diving deep whenever aircraft appeared overhead. The crew endured in silence as the air grew thick with diesel fumes, sweat, and stale coffee. They were being hunted by the most powerful fleet in the Pacific, and their commander was calmly reloading.
At 0230 on June 7, Harder surfaced to recharge her batteries under a moonless sky blanketed by heavy clouds. At 0312, the radar operator reported a single fast-moving contact at 8,000 yards. Dealey recognized it immediately as a destroyer. It was Hayanami, one of the two ships that had fled the previous day. Her commander, Hideo Kuboki, had been searching throughout the night and had just received orders to return to Tawi-Tawi.
He was heading home.
Dealey ordered flank speed. Harder’s diesel engines roared as the submarine surged forward at 21 knots, deliberately closing the range to slip inside the destroyer’s radar detection envelope. At 4,000 yards, Hayanami’s radar operator detected a small, fast-moving contact and likely assumed it was a friendly patrol craft. At 3,000 yards, Kuboki realized the truth. The object was not a patrol boat. It was an American submarine—and it was attacking.
Kuboki ordered flank speed and a hard turn to ram, but it was too late. Standing on the open bridge, Dealey gave the firing order. Four torpedoes streaked toward the destroyer. Two struck Hayanami’s starboard side near the aft magazine. The explosion tore the ship apart. Her stern was blown completely off, the hull rolled more than 90 degrees, and she sank stern-first within minutes. Kuboki and 147 of his sailors went down with her.
Dealey ordered a crash dive, knowing patrol aircraft would arrive within minutes. In less than 24 hours, he had sunk two Japanese destroyers directly outside the primary anchorage of the Combined Fleet.
Toyoda now faced a crisis. Two destroyers had been lost to the same submarine, a humiliation that also stripped his fleet of desperately needed anti-submarine escorts. He diverted eight more destroyers from convoy protection and formed dedicated hunter-killer groups with a single mission: destroy the American submarine at Tawi-Tawi. Every Japanese destroyer captain in the area received identical orders—maximum aggression, no retreat.
Dealey knew the hornet’s nest had been stirred. A cautious commander would have withdrawn immediately. Dealey pressed on.
On June 8, he took Harder south into the Sibutu Passage, the narrow deep-water strait between Tawi-Tawi and Borneo and a critical shipping lane heavily patrolled by Japanese destroyers. He intended to see how many he could sink before they stopped him.
At 1400 hours, smoke appeared on the horizon. Two ships emerged: Tanikaze, the third destroyer from the original hunting party, accompanied by another escort. They steamed at 25 knots in a sweeping patrol pattern. Dealey submerged and began a meticulous approach, observing their zigzag pattern for 90 minutes. They altered course every 8 minutes, a predictable rhythm that created a narrow firing window.
Dealey positioned Harder directly in their path and waited.
At 1630, Tanikaze turned directly toward him. The range closed steadily: 3,000 yards, then 2,500, then closer still until her bow filled the periscope view. Dealey fired a wide spread of four torpedoes, spaced to guarantee a hit. The first missed narrowly, but the second struck near the bridge. The third detonated the forward magazine seconds later. The explosion was so massive it reverberated through Harder’s hull. Tanikaze’s bow separated completely from the rest of the ship, and both sections sank in less than 3 minutes.
The remaining escort charged Harder’s position, dropping depth charges in a furious but imprecise attack. Dealey took the submarine to 400 feet. The explosions shook the hull but caused no serious damage. After 40 minutes, the destroyer abandoned the hunt to rescue survivors.
Three destroyers had been sunk in three days.
The news struck Toyoda like a physical blow. The Japanese began referring to the submarine as the “Devil of Tawi-Tawi.” Yet Dealey was not finished. He prepared for one final act of audacity
On June 9, at 0500, Dealey brought Harder to periscope depth just 12 miles southwest of the Tawi-Tawi anchorage. What he saw froze the men in the conning tower. Four Japanese destroyers were advancing in a line-abreast formation. They were not transiting. They were hunting. Their sonar pings were so loud that Harder’s sound operator could hear them clearly through the hull without headphones. This was the hunter-killer group formed specifically to destroy him.
Dealey checked his torpedo inventory. Eight remained. Four destroyers. He would have time for one attack before all four converged and buried him beneath an avalanche of depth charges. He studied their movements carefully. The lead destroyer zigzagged aggressively. The third and fourth ships maneuvered erratically. The second destroyer, however, maintained a steady course.
That ship became his target.
At 0612, the second destroyer turned directly toward Harder’s position as part of her search pattern. Range was 4,000 yards. Dealey waited as the distance closed. At 3,000 yards, the sonar pings were deafening. At 2,500 yards, the destroyer continued on her steady approach. At 1,800 yards, Dealey gave the order. Three torpedoes left the tubes in quick succession.
All three struck the destroyer’s port side within 5 seconds. The ship did not merely explode; it disintegrated. The blast hurled debris, gun mounts, and sections of superstructure more than 300 feet into the air. The destroyer rolled and vanished beneath the surface in 90 seconds.
The remaining three destroyers reacted with unrestrained fury. They converged immediately on Harder’s last known position. Dealey ordered an emergency dive to 500 feet. Depth charges began exploding almost at once. Twenty-three detonated in the first 10 minutes alone. The concussions were bone-jarring. The lights failed, plunging the submarine into dim red emergency illumination. Hull plates groaned and popped under crushing pressure. A pipe burst in the forward torpedo room, spraying high-pressure seawater across the deck.
The crew remained silent and disciplined, moving in darkness to control damage while the sea outside their thin steel hull thundered. For 2 hours, the destroyers crisscrossed the area, dropping charge after charge. Dealey anticipated their movements, keeping Harder deep and quiet until the attackers finally withdrew, believing the submarine destroyed.
When Harder cautiously returned to periscope depth, the sea was empty. Four destroyers had been sunk in 4 days.
Dealey’s thoughts turned not to triumph, but to fuel. Harder had burned through 60 percent of her diesel reserves. She had 5 torpedoes left and perhaps 3 days of endurance remaining. As he assessed his situation, word of the fourth sinking reached Vice Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa, commander of the Japanese Mobile Fleet. Ozawa understood the implications immediately. If a single American submarine could penetrate the defensive screen so easily and destroy destroyers at will, Tawi-Tawi was not a fortress. It was a trap.
Ozawa sent an urgent message to Toyoda urging immediate departure.
The original plan for Operation A-Go had been to sail on June 15 after the Americans committed to their invasion. That plan was abandoned. Remaining at Tawi-Tawi was deemed suicidal. On June 10 at 0800, the entire Japanese Mobile Fleet weighed anchor—4 battleships, 9 carriers, 15 cruisers, and 24 remaining destroyers—departing 6 days early and in haste. The movement was chaotic and poorly coordinated. American codebreakers intercepted the orders within hours. Admiral Raymond Spruance now knew Ozawa’s direction and had nearly a week to prepare.
Dealey knew none of this. He continued hunting.
Later that day, at 1630, Harder encountered two more destroyers patrolling the Sibutu Passage. With only 5 torpedoes left, Dealey launched one final attack. At 1715, he fired three torpedoes at the lead destroyer. One struck the bow, heavily damaging and stopping her, but she did not sink. The second destroyer immediately charged Harder’s position. Dealey fired his last two torpedoes. Both missed.
Harder was now defenseless.
Dealey ordered an emergency dive to 500 feet as the destroyer thundered overhead at 32 knots. The propellers churned so violently that the crew could hear each blade through the hull. The destroyer made repeated passes, dropping 42 depth charges over 90 minutes. Several detonations came dangerously close, cracking gauge glasses, bursting hydraulic lines, and springing minor leaks. Dealey held Harder at dead slow speed, enduring until the destroyer finally withdrew, having exhausted her depth charges.
At 1900, Harder surfaced. She was battered but alive. Out of torpedoes and low on fuel, Dealey set course for Fremantle, Australia. When Harder arrived on June 26, Admiral Lockwood was waiting. Five destroyers attacked, four confirmed sunk, one heavily damaged. In 12 days, it was the most successful anti-destroyer patrol in naval history.
Lockwood awarded Dealey the Navy Cross on the pier. Then he asked if he could do it again. Dealey replied without hesitation that with torpedoes, he would sink 10. During July, Harder was repaired and resupplied. Dealey trained new crews in the down-the-throat tactic, and by late summer every American submarine commander in the Pacific had studied his patrol reports. Between June and August, American submarines sank 14 additional Japanese destroyers using variations of his aggressive methods.
The full strategic impact soon became clear. The Battle of the Philippine Sea began on June 19. Because Ozawa’s fleet had been forced to leave Tawi-Tawi early, it arrived scattered and unprepared. Japanese reconnaissance aircraft lacked fuel. Destroyer screens were incomplete. Supply ships lagged behind. When American carrier aircraft struck, the result was catastrophic. The Japanese lost 376 aircraft while the Americans lost only 30. It became known as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Submarines sank the carriers Shōkaku and Taihō, while aircraft destroyed Hiyō. Japan lost 75 percent of its carrier air strength in 2 days.
All of it traced back to one submarine commander forcing the enemy to abandon their plan.
Admiral Lockwood later wrote that Harder’s fifth patrol was the single most strategically important submarine operation of the Pacific War. On August 5, 1944, Harder departed on her sixth patrol. On August 24, Japanese escorts caught her diving and executed a perfectly bracketed depth-charge attack. The pressure hull failed. At 0600, Harder imploded at depth. All 79 men were lost.
Commander Samuel Dealey had been killed by the very weapons he had mastered. The Japanese celebrated briefly, unaware that the damage was irreversible. By war’s end, American submarines using Dealey’s tactics had sunk 214 Japanese warships, including 4 carriers, 1 battleship, 9 cruisers, and 38 destroyers.
In 1946, President Harry Truman presented Dealey’s Medal of Honor to his widow. The citation praised his “indomitable command” and the sinking of 5 destroyers in close-range attacks. The Navy named a destroyer escort in his honor. Her motto, Hit ’em Harder, became legend.
The 79 men of Harder came from 38 states. They volunteered for the silent service, which suffered the highest casualty rate of any American military branch in the war. Their last surviving crewmember died in 2022. What remains is their record, their courage, and the lesson Samuel Dealey left behind: when an enemy expects you to run, the one move they cannot defend against is the charge.
