By the spring of 1944, the Pacific had become a chessboard.

It was a huge one—sun-bleached and blue, dotted with tiny green squares that had names like Kwajalein, Saipan and Truk. The big, showy moves were happening there: Marines wading ashore, carriers launching waves of planes, battleships throwing walls of fire at jungle ridges.

But chess isn’t won on big moves alone. It’s won by cutting off the other side’s pieces until they can’t move at all.

Japan still had pieces left. Isolated island garrisons, thousands of soldiers each, cut off by Allied advances but not cut loose. So long as someone could move food, ammunition and hope to them, they would fight to the last man.

That “someone” was supposed to be the Imperial Japanese Navy’s submarine arm.

Samurai of the Deep

In Tokyo, they liked to talk about their submarine captains as if they were a breed apart. Not brawlers like destroyer skippers or ponderous admirals on big ships, but quiet artists.

A Japanese submarine commander, the doctrine said, was a modern samurai. He was supposed to embody patience and precision: one perfect ambush, one perfectly placed torpedo, a single strike that decided a battle.

They had good reasons to be proud. On paper, Japanese submarines were formidable. Some were huge—cruiser subs with long range and big guns. Many carried a frightening weapon: the Type 95 “Long Lance” torpedo.

It was an elegant killer. It ran farther and faster than anything the Americans had. It carried a bigger warhead. It left almost no wake. Marry that torpedo to a night-trained captain who believed his skills and his boat were the sharpest weapons at sea, and you had a dangerous predator.

They had learned their trade by stalking fat Allied tankers and unescorted troopships early in the war. Compared to them, the little American destroyer escorts—cheap, ugly, mass-produced “tin cans”—looked like nothing much. Noisy sheepdogs, good for scaring submarines away from convoys, not for hunting them.

That was the theory.

It was about to meet the USS England.

The Sheepdog

The England was nobody’s idea of a glamorous warship.

Barely 300 feet from stem to stern, her hull plating felt thin under your boots. She had one 3-inch gun up front, a few anti-aircraft guns, some depth charges, and a new weapon bolted to her bow that most sailors didn’t even trust yet.

She was a Buckley-class destroyer escort—designed in a meeting room in Washington, stamped out of American shipyards like toys off an assembly line. Hundreds just like her slid into the water with almost interchangeable names: England, Eldridge, Enright…

Their job description was brutally simple: escort convoys, find submarines, and if those submarines refused to go away, kill them.

England’s officers knew their ship’s role. “We’re not the greyhounds,” one lieutenant told a new ensign the first week aboard, nodding toward a photograph of a sleek fleet destroyer on a training pamphlet. “We’re the mongrels. We bite ankles.”

But England carried something the long, handsome destroyers did not.

On her foredeck sat a circular array of 24 stubby tubes angled upward like the quills of an angry animal: the Mark 10 anti-submarine projector. The crew called it by its nickname:

“Hedgehog.”

Hedgehog: The Strange New Teeth

Traditional anti-submarine warfare was messy and unsatisfying. Depth charges were rolled off the stern and exploded at guessed-at depths, filling the water with thunder. They shook a submarine to its rivets, but they were as likely to stun fish as to kill a boat.

Worst of all, the explosions deafened the attacker’s own sonar. The attacking ship had to guess if it had done real damage. In the chaos, a clever submarine captain could slip away.

Hedgehog changed that equation.

It worked like a mortar. Instead of rolling explosives behind the ship, you lobbed them in front, firing 24 small bombs in a tight circular pattern ahead of the bow. They arced out and fell into the sea.

Each bomb had a contact fuse. They didn’t go off because you thought the submarine might be there. They went off only when one actually hit steel.

The implications were unnerving. If you fired a Hedgehog pattern and heard nothing, it meant nothing. But if you heard a sharp, cracking series of explosions under the water, you knew you had just punched holes in a submarine’s hull.

You didn’t lose sonar contact. You didn’t blind yourself. You saw the target, fired, listened, and if you got that deep, ominous boom, you knew you had done more than scare someone.

By May 1944, England’s crew had practiced the drill dozens of times. They could go from sonar contact to “fire” in seconds. Most of them had never heard a Hedgehog actually hit anything.

They were about to.

Code and Chance

On May 19, 1944, England was not out hunting for glory. She was doing what destroyer escorts did—escorting.

She and two sister ships, USS George and USS Raby, had been sent to patrol a box of otherwise unremarkable ocean north of the Solomons. It was a piece of water, coordinates on a chart, one grid among thousands.

But somewhere far away, in a dim room in Pearl Harbor, codebreakers had been listening.

Japanese naval messages, carried over airwaves the American cryptanalysts had learned to pry open, told a story. Japan was trying to reinforce its isolated garrisons with a resupply operation code-named RO. Submarines were being ordered into a picket line to screen the operation.

Those submarines had names: I-16, RO-104, RO-106, RO-108, RO-116, RO-105. They were elite, and their captains trusted their skills.

They didn’t know that their patrol line chart now sat on an American admiral’s desk—and that some of those little tin cans were sailing straight into them.

“Contact!”

The night of May 19th was black enough to hide a fleet.

On England’s bridge, Ensign Kelly—fresh out of Annapolis, still learning the ship’s moods—sipped terrible coffee and tried to look like he wasn’t terrified. Down below, in a darkened box the size of a closet, Seaman First Class Vince “Pops” Taylor had his headphones clamped to his ears, his hands resting lightly on the sonar controls.

Ping… ping… ping…

Most of the time, the pings came back the same way: clean and flat. Empty ocean.

Then, a different echo. Slightly fatter. Slightly slower.

Taylor frowned and adjusted his gain. He pinged again. The contact was still there, bearing steady, range closing.

“Con-tact!” he shouted up the voice tube. “Bearing 178, range 1,800 yards and closing!”

On the bridge, England’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Walton Pendleton, tensed.

“Sound ships to general quarters,” he said. The klaxon wailed through the corridors.

They hunted I-16 for hours.

The Japanese captain below was good. He changed course. He changed depth. He slowed to a creep, hoping the American would lose him in self-noise or sea clutter.

But Taylor on sonar was persistent, and England’s officers had been drilled in the new tactics. They corrected course with every bearing change, tracked the zigzags, and tightened the noose.

Finally, the plot made sense. They would cross the submarine’s bow at just the right moment, at just the right range.

On the bridge, the Hedgehog team stood ready. The tubes were armed. The firing circuits were hot.

“Range 250 yards… 200… steady bearing…” Taylor called.

“Stand by… Fire!”

There was a muted whoomph as 24 small projectiles leapt from England’s bow and arced into the darkness ahead.

The crew crowded silent, listening.

Hedgehog attacks felt wrong at first. No crashing explosions immediately around you. Just the ship sliding forward… the pings… then—

BOOM… BOOM-BOOM… BOOM…

Four sharp, underwater cracks rolled up through the hull like a giant fist hitting a drum.

They didn’t cheer right away. Old habits said, “Wait to see the oil.” But everyone knew what those impacts meant.

The kill was confirmed when, a few minutes later, a slick of oil and debris bubbled to the surface. Bits of wood, fragments of interior fittings, and a few tragic, telltale splinters of human life.

I-16, veteran of early war sinkings, was gone with all hands.

“Mark one for the Hedgehog,” someone said softly.

On the chart table, someone wrote in pencil: “I-16—19 May.”

They had done their job.

They had absolutely no idea that they had just started a streak that would make naval history.

The Picket Line Comes Apart

In the Japanese base at Truk, when I-16 failed to report, the staff logged it with grim faces. Boats went missing. War was cruel. They noted the approximate position, filed the report, and moved on.

The odds of another loss in the same patch of ocean within days seemed low.

On May 22nd, Seaman Taylor’s sonar headphones crackled again.

“Contact. Bearing 280. Range 1,500 yards. Submerged.”

Pendleton’s jaw clenched. “We’ve fished in this pond before,” he muttered. “Let’s see what’s biting.”

This time, it was RO-106.

The pattern was the same but shorter. The England’s team was sharper now. The maneuvers flowed faster. The Hedgehog crews loaded quicker.

An hour of stalk and counter-stalk, then another launch. Another string of submerged impacts.

Later, oil and air bubbles. A few scraps of cork.

RO-106 was marked on the chart next to I-16.

In Truk, the operations staff looked at the new “overdue, presumed lost” entry and began to feel that knot in the stomach that comes when coincidences stop feeling coincidental.

May 23rd: another contact. RO-104. Another dance. Another Hedgehog pattern. Another solitary blast in the deep.

Three submarines in four days. All in roughly the same area. The same American callsign popping up in intercepts: “USS England.”

Somewhere in a Japanese wardroom, a captain ran his finger along a chart and tried to match this with anything he had ever learned. There was no doctrine that covered being systematically hunted by a single small warship you never even saw.

On May 24th, the situation went from alarming to surreal.

That morning, England found and sank RO-116.

That afternoon, before the wreckage had even finished spreading, Taylor’s headphones sang again.

“Contact. New bearing. New range.”

RO-108 had wandered into the graveyard.

The men were tired now, operating on little sleep and adrenaline. The Hedgehog team’s shoulders ached. Taylor’s ears rang. But the drill was the same, and well-oiled.

Another set of bearing lines. Another arc of white dots on the plotting paper. Another barrages of thumps, another series of deep explosions.

By dinner, two submarines were chalked onto the chart under 24 hours’ worth of work.

In the Japanese command center, maps were being erased and redrawn frantically. Reports muttered about “massive anti-submarine forces” in the area. Intelligence officers spoke of “hunter–killer groups” and “task forces.”

The idea that this might be the work of a single 1,400-ton destroyer escort was literally not considered. It was too ridiculous.

Yet that is exactly what was happening.

“There’ll Always Be an England”

On May 26th, the last submarine in that particular picket line, RO-105, died.

By that point, England’s crew moved like the parts of a single machine. Captain Pendleton trusted his sonar man and his weapons crew completely. The Hedgehog crews trusted that if they put the pattern where the plot told them to, the weapon would do the rest.

They ran in. They fired. They listened.

BOOM.

RO-105 slipped off the board.

In 12 days, in a box of ocean you could draw with your finger on a chart, USS England had killed six submarines.

Not damaged. Not “probably sunk.” Confirmed kills. Over 400 Japanese sailors gone. An entire planned defensive line cut out of the map.

No ship in American history had ever done that before. No ship has done it since.

When the after-action reports reached Pearl Harbor, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, read them twice. He assumed at first there was an error—multiple ships confused, records conflated.

His staff walked him through the dates, the positions, the corroborating intelligence. It was real.

He sent a message to the Fleet and then to the England herself that became part of the Navy’s lore:

“There’ll always be an England in the United States Navy.”

The line was half sentiment, half promise. Nameless scores of mass-produced tin cans might come and go, but this one had earned immortality.

Shock in the Silent Service

For the Japanese submarine community, the shock was harder to put into words.

They were proud of their boats, their training, their torpedoes—especially their torpedoes. They had learned to think of themselves as hunters striking at careless prey.

Suddenly, they were prey. And the predator was not a fleet of carriers or battleships, but a single, unimpressive escort with a crew barely numbering 200.

Postwar, when Japanese officers were interviewed, some admitted that they never figured out what had happened until long after. Reports came in of boats that simply failed to return, last heard from in that patch of ocean where RO-104 and RO-108 and RO-105 had died.

Some commanders guessed there must have been a large anti-submarine task force they had missed. Others speculated about new American “submarine nets” or sea-floor weapons. No one imagined a ship like England could have done this alone.

The US Navy politely did not correct them at the time.

But in the records room, officers studying the campaign understood: the days of the lone samurai under the sea were ending. The war in the deep had become a game of sensors and math and weapons like Hedgehog—fought by men like Taylor, whose weapon was his headset, and by captains like Pendleton, who trusted those ghostly echoes more than any hunch.

The Unsung Kind of Heroism

The story of the USS England doesn’t have the Hollywood sheen of a Midway or a Leyte Gulf. There are no big guns firing, no iconic flag plantings, no photographs of waves breaking against battleship bows.

What it does have is a kind of clean, scary efficiency.

It has the picture of a wired young sonar operator in a dark room, wet palms on the controls, listening so hard his head hurts.

It has the image of sailors hauling Hedgehog rounds, arms burning, because the last attack only hit once and the captain wants to fire again before the submarine can slip away.

It has a group of men learning to trust a new, strange weapon that makes almost no noise until it kills—and then trusting themselves enough to keep pushing into waters they now knew were full of desperate, dangerous foes.

And it has that moment back in some smoky Tokyo wardroom where a senior officer ran his hand down a list of lost submarines and realized something that reached beyond one campaign:

We are not the only artists in this war anymore.

Our opponents can mass-produce excellence. They can build weapons faster than we can adapt to them. They can take a cheap, expendable ship and give it teeth sharp enough to gut our best.

The USS England went on to do quieter things after those twelve days. She escorted, trained, patrolled. After the war, like so many wartime ships, she was decommissioned and eventually scrapped.

Her hull is gone. Her Hedgehog launchers are museum pieces. Her name is now on a different, more modern ship.

But in the invisible annals of how wars are really won—in the margins of staff studies, in the footnotes of sonar manuals, in the doctrine of how to kill submarines—the little destroyer escort that hunted six “invincible” boats into the abyss still prowls.

The samurai of the deep never saw her face. They heard only that faint thump-thump-thump above, and then the sharp, final crack no training had prepared them for.

A sheepdog had learned to hunt like a wolf pack.

And in those twelve days in May 1944, out on a nondescript rectangle of blue water, a small ship with a big heart quietly bent the arc of naval warfare in a new direction—showing that in an industrial war, the most frightening thing isn’t always the biggest ship or the loudest gun.

Sometimes, it’s a number on a hull, a crew nobody knows, and a weapon that only explodes when it’s already too late.