In the long and dark history of submarine warfare, there is one rule that should never have been broken: you don’t fight a destroyer. A submarine is a ghost, a specter in the water. It hunts the slow, lumbering cargo ships and tankers that fuel the enemy’s war machine. But the destroyer… the destroyer is the wolf.

It’s fast, it’s lethal, and it was built for one purpose: to hunt the hunter. In World War II, for an American submarine to be caught by a Japanese destroyer was, in most cases, a death sentence. Between December 1941 and the spring of 1944, Japanese destroyers had successfully sunk 14 American submarines in combat.

During that same period, the number of Japanese destroyers sunk by a U.S. submarine while both were actively engaged in combat was zero. The math was simple: a destroyer could run at 35 knots; a submerged, battery-powered submarine struggled to reach 9. The destroyer had sonar and was loaded with depth charges.

The submarine was supposed to hide blindly and silently. The doctrine was clear: if a destroyer finds you, you dive deep, prepare to navigate silently, and pray. But in 1944, one man decided to rewrite the rules. His name was Commander Samuel Dealey. And he didn’t just fight the wolf; he hunted it.

What he and his 79 men accomplished in just four days was so incredible that it not only shook the Imperial Japanese Navy to its core, but also changed the entire course of the war in the Pacific. This is the story of the USS Harder, the destroyer killer.

To understand what Samuel Dealey did, you first have to understand the man himself. He was 37 years old, a 1930 graduate of the Naval Academy. He was quiet, unassuming, and wore glasses. But beneath that calm exterior was a core of pure steel, forged under the command of the legendary William “Mush” Morton, the captain of the USS Wahoo.

Dealey had been Morton’s executive officer and learned from the best. He learned that aggression, surprise, and sheer audacity were weapons as powerful 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 in a way that stunned the Navy.

On April 13, 1944, near the island of Guam, the Harder was hunting a convoy when its escort, the Japanese destroyer Ikazuchi, spotted it. The Ikazuchi turned and charged at full speed, intending to ram or sink the submarine with depth charges.

All the men in the Harder’s conning tower awaited the order to dive. Instead, Dealey ordered:

— Full speed ahead. Prepare the bow tubes.

I was charging straight at the destroyer. This was such a reckless tactic that it was barely a theory. It was called the “down the throat shot.” You fire your torpedoes directly at the face of the charging enemy and then, at the last possible second, you make an emergency dive and pray you get deep enough to pass under its keel.

If your torpedoes miss, the destroyer is in the perfect position to drop its depth charges directly on you. If you dive too late, its bow will slice your submarine in half. At a range of only 900 yards—point-blank range in naval terms—the Harder fired a barrage of four torpedoes.

Two of them struck the Ikazuchi amidships. The destroyer exploded in a massive blast, broke in two, and sank in less than five minutes. Dealey surfaced, surveyed the wreckage, and sent back one of the most famous radio reports of the entire war. It was brief and brutally clear:

— Four torpedoes and one destroyer were spent.

This single act of defiance sent shockwaves through the Pacific submarine force, but it also put a target on Dealey’s back. Admiral Soemu Toyoda, commander-in-chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, was not amused. By the spring of 1944, Japan was in a desperate position. Between January and May alone, they had lost 23 destroyers, not only to submarines, but also to carrier-based aircraft and surface battles.

These ships were the irreplaceable “sheepdogs” of the fleet; the only vessels fast enough to protect Japan’s aircraft carriers and battleships from American submarines. Toyoda was assembling every ship he had for one last massive gamble. It was called Operation A-Go, a plan to lure the American invasion fleet into the Philippine Sea and annihilate it in a “Kantai Kessen,” the decisive battle that Japanese naval doctrine had dreamed of for decades.

To accomplish this, he concentrated the entire Japanese Mobile Fleet at a remote, forward-looking anchorage called Tawi Tawi, in the Sulu archipelago. It was the largest concentration of Japanese naval power since the Battle of Midway. The numbers were staggering: four battleships, including the super-battleship Yamato, nine aircraft carriers, 15 cruisers, and 28 valuable destroyers.

They were like a coiled spring, waiting for the American invasion of the Marianas to begin. But the American codebreakers in Hypo, Hawaii, knew they were there. And Admiral Charles Lockwood, commander of the Pacific Submarine Force, knew exactly who to send. He sent the only man who wasn’t afraid of destroyers. He sent Samuel David Dealey.

Their orders were simple: enter the hornet’s nest, patrol the waters around Tawi Tawi, and attack any target of opportunity. For nine agonizing days, the Harder operated completely undetected, slipping between Japanese patrols, charting the fleet’s movements. Dealey was a ghost, just miles from the most heavily guarded anchorage on Earth.

Then their luck ran out. At 3:00 a.m. on June 6, 1944—the same day that Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy—a Japanese patrol plane flying in the darkness spotted the faint trail of the Harder’s periscope. The alarm sounded. The hunt had begun.

Within an hour, three destroyers—the Minazuki, Hayanami, and Tanikaze—were detached from the fleet with a simple order: find and kill the American submarine. At 6:47 a.m., as the first light of dawn streaked across the sky, Commander Dealey stood in the conning tower, his eye pressed against the periscope. He watched as the three destroyers sliced ​​through the water, coming straight toward him.

He was 37 years old. This was his fifth war patrol. He had already destroyed 18 enemy ships, but now three of the Japanese Navy’s deadliest vessels were hunting him simultaneously. Back in the conning tower, Dealey studied the lead destroyer, the Minazuki. It was 1,500 tons of gray steel, armed with four 5-inch guns, and closing fast, zigzagging to evade a torpedo launch.

Behind it, the other two destroyers were deploying. A classic search-and-destroy pattern designed to box the submarine into a kill zone. Every man on the Harder knew the manual: they were supposed to run. They were supposed to dive to 400 feet and pray the sonar operators were having a bad day.

But Dealey had no intention of racing. He turned the bow of the Harder and pointed it directly at the charging Minazuki.

“Prepare the bow tubes,” he ordered.

The range narrowed: 1,500 yards, 1,200 yards. The Minazuki’s sonar “pings” were now a frantic, high-pitched *clang clang clang* that every man on the ship could hear through the hull. The destroyer knew where they were.

— Range, 1,100 yards — shouted the fire control officer.

The time to collision was only 96 seconds. Dealey was calm. He was waiting for the Minazuki to commit. At 750 yards, less than half a mile, the destroyer was so close that Dealey could see “the bone in its teeth,” the white bow wave it was pushing.

— Fire one, fire two. Fire three.

Three Mark 18 electric torpedoes silently ran towards the target.

— Take it to 300 feet. Full speed ahead.

The Harder pitched down at a brutal 30-degree angle, its engines screaming as it clawed its way into depth. This was the moment of truth. Forty seconds after firing, two massive explosions rocked the Harder so violently that lamps shattered and cork insulation rained down from the ceiling.

Then, a third devastating explosion lifted the submarine’s stern six feet out of the water before striking it again, knocking the men off their feet. Dealey brought the boat back to periscope depth. Where the Minazuki had been, there was nothing but a plume of black smoke, debris, and a spreading oil slick. The destroyer had been ripped in two. It was gone.

But it was no time to celebrate. The other two destroyers, the Hayanami and the Tanikaze, were now fleeing at full speed; not toward him, but away, dropping depth charges randomly in a panic. They clearly believed they had stumbled upon a whole pack of American submarine wolves, not a single audacious attacker. Dealey let them go. He slid into the depths. One hunter was dead.

When Admiral Toyoda received the news at 9:00 a.m., he was outraged. He ordered six more destroyers to join the hunt. By noon, the sky above Tawi Tawi was filled with patrol aircraft, searching every 20 minutes. The entire anchorage was on high alert.

Samuel Dealey, however, was not finished. In fact, he was just getting started. He spent the rest of June 6 evading patrols, diving deep when planes flew overhead. His crew was silent, the air on the boat growing thick with the smell of diesel, sweat, and stale coffee. They were being hunted by the most powerful fleet in the Pacific, and their commander was refueling.

Early in the morning of June 7, at 2:30 a.m., the Harder surfaced to recharge its batteries. The night was pitch black, moonless, and shrouded in a thick layer of clouds. It was perfect submarine weather. At 3:12 a.m., the radar operator shouted:

— Radar contact, single vessel, bearing 095, range 8,000 yards, approaching fast.

Dealey was on the bridge in an instant. The contact was moving at 28 knots. There was no doubt it was another destroyer. This was the Hayanami, one of the two destroyers that had fled the day before. Its captain, Commander Hideo Kuboki, had been searching for the American submarine all night. He was exhausted, and at 3:00 a.m. he had received orders to return to Tawi Tawi. He was going home.

In the darkness, no one on his bridge expected an American submarine to be waiting for him, much less attack him on the surface. Dealey ordered flank speed. The Harder’s large diesel engines roared to life, propelling the submarine to 21 knots, a sprint in the dark. Dealey was deliberately closing the range, trying to get within the destroyer’s radar detection ring before they could get a clear picture of him.

At 4,000 yards, the Hayanami’s radar operator finally made contact. It was small and moving quickly. He probably assumed it was just another Japanese patrol boat returning to base. At 3,000 yards, Commander Kuboki realized his fatal mistake. That wasn’t a patrol boat. It was an American submarine, and it was attacking him.

He ordered flank speed and a sharp turn to ram, but it was too late. Dealey didn’t need the periscope. Standing on the open bridge, he gave the order to fire.

— Fire one. Fire two. Fire three. Fire four.

From 2,300 yards, four torpedoes were launched from the Harder. Two of them struck the starboard side of the Hayanami, just near the aft ammunition depot. The resulting explosion was catastrophic. The entire stern of the destroyer was ripped off. The ship capsized 90 degrees, its propellers still spinning uselessly in the air, and sank stern-first. Commander Kuboki and 147 of his sailors went down with him.

Dealey gave the order:

— Emergency dive.

He knew the patrol planes would be on them in minutes. He had just sunk two Japanese destroyers in less than 24 hours, right at the entrance to their main fleet anchorage. The Imperial Japanese Navy wasn’t just hunting him anymore. This was personal.

Admiral Toyoda was furious. He now faced a crisis. Two destroyers missing, sunk by the same submarine. This was not just an annoyance; it was a profound humiliation and a critical loss of his anti-submarine screen. He immediately withdrew eight more destroyers from convoy escort duty—ships desperately needed to protect his tankers and transports—and organized them into dedicated “hunter-killer” groups.

Their sole mission: find and destroy the American submarine in Tawi Tawi. Every Japanese destroyer captain in the area received the same orders: maximum aggression, no retreat. Kill that submarine.

Samuel Dealey knew the hornet’s nest was in full and utter chaos. A sane commander would have taken his two victories and left the area at high speed. But Dealey wasn’t a sane commander. He was a hunter. On June 8, he took the Harder south toward the Sibutu Passage. This was the deep-water strait between Tawi Tawi and Borneo. It was the main shipping route, and Dealey knew Japanese destroyers would be patrolling it heavily.

He wanted to see how many he could sink before they finally discovered what he was doing. At 2:00 p.m., the lookout spotted them: smoke on the horizon, two ships. It was the Tanikaze, the third destroyer of the original fighter group, along with an unidentified escort. They were sailing in formation at 25 knots, sweeping the passage. Dealey dived and began his approach.

For 90 long minutes, he just watched. He studied their movements. He saw that they followed a predictable zigzag pattern, changing course every 8 minutes. This was careless. It gave him a window of maybe 30 seconds after each turn to prepare and fire. So he positioned the Harder directly in their path, raised his periscope, and waited.

At 4:30 PM, just in time, Tanikaze turned towards Harder’s position.

— Range 3,000 yards — said Dealey, in a calm voice.

He let it approach. 2,500 yards, 2,000, 1,500. The Tanikaze was so close that its bow filled the periscope view. At 1,200 yards, Dealey gave the order.

— Fire one, fire two, fire three, fire four.

It fired a wide burst with 17-second intervals between each torpedo to ensure one would hit. The first torpedo missed, passing just ahead of the bow, but the second struck the Tanikaze right near the bridge. The third torpedo hit only seconds later, detonating the forward ammunition magazine.

The explosion was so massive that the crew inside the Harder, deep underwater, heard it clearly: a deep, muffled crack that vibrated through their bones. The entire bow section of the Tanikaze separated from the main hull, and both pieces sank in less than three minutes.

The escort destroyer, seeing its companion disappear in a ball of fire, went berserk. It immediately turned and charged at the Harder’s position, dropping depth charges as it came in.

“Take it deep, 400 feet,” Dealey ordered.

The depth charges exploded above, violently shaking the submarine, but they were dropped haphazardly, not accurately. They caused no serious damage. After 40 minutes of this, the lone destroyer, probably fearing it would be next, broke off the chase and withdrew to rescue survivors.

Three destroyers, three days. The news hit Admiral Toyoda’s flagship like a physical blow. “The Devil of Tawi Tawi,” as the Japanese now called this lone submarine, had attacked again. Toyoda was about to make a decision that would change the entire course of the Battle of the Philippine Sea. But first, Samuel Dealey had one more destroyer to sink, and this time he was going to do it in broad daylight with two other Japanese destroyers watching.

At 5:00 a.m. on June 9, Dealey brought the Harder to periscope depth just 12 miles southwest of Tawi Tawi anchorage. What he saw made every man in the conning tower hold his breath. Directly ahead, sailing in perfect line-of-head formation, were four Japanese destroyers. They weren’t transiting. They were actively hunting.

His sonar was pinging so loudly that the Harder’s sound operator could hear it clearly without his headset. This was the hunter-killer squadron he’d specifically sent. Dealey checked his torpedo status. He had eight torpedoes left; four destroyers. This meant he’d have maybe one shot before all four converged on his position and buried him under a barrage of depth charges.

He studied their formation. The lead destroyer at the end was zigzagging aggressively. The third and fourth destroyers were also moving erratically, but the second destroyer in the line… for some reason, was maintaining a steady course. That was his objective.

At 06:12, the second destroyer turned directly toward the Harder’s position. It was a routine turn in its search pattern, but it sealed its fate. Range 4,000 yards. Dealey waited. 3,000 yards. The sonar pings were deafening. 2,500 yards. At 1,800 yards, Dealey spoke.

— Fire one. Fire two. Fire three.

He didn’t fire his usual burst of four. He needed to conserve his torpedoes. He was betting everything on this single shot. The three torpedoes struck the destroyer’s port side within five seconds of each other. The ship didn’t just explode; it disintegrated. The blast was so violent that debris, pieces of deck, guns, and fragments of the superstructure flew 300 feet into the air. The ship capsized and vanished in 90 seconds.

The other three destroyers, witnessing this, reacted with absolute fury. They immediately converged on the Harder’s last known position.

“Emergency deep dive! 500 feet!” roared Dealey.

The Harder pitched its nose and dived. The depth charges began exploding above almost immediately: 23 of them in the first 10 minutes. The explosions shook them to their bones. The lights on the submarine went out and the dim red emergency lighting came on. The hull plates groaned and creaked under the immense pressure, a sound the crew called “the bends.”

A pipe burst in the forward torpedo room, spraying high-pressure seawater across the deck. But the crew was silent. They were veterans. They moved about in the darkness, repairing the damage, while the world outside their thin steel hull was nothing but thunder.

For two solid hours, the three destroyers hunted them down. They circled the area again and again, firing charge after charge. But Dealey was as good at evading as he was at attacking. He kept the Harder deep and silent, anticipating its movements until finally the destroyers gave up. They probably assumed the submarine had been destroyed by the sheer volume of their attack.

At periscope depth, the sea was empty. Four destroyers sunk in just four days. Dealey wasn’t thinking about his success. He was thinking about his fuel gauges. The Harder had burned 60% of its diesel reserves. It had five torpedoes left, but could only stay in position for perhaps three more days.

While Dealey was checking his fuel, the report of the fourth sinking reached Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, commander of the Mobile Fleet, who was still at Tawi Tawi. Ozawa did the math. Four destroyers sunk in four days by a submarine, right outside their main fleet anchorage.

If a single American submarine could penetrate their defensive screen so easily and sink their best escorts at will, the entire anchorage was a death trap. All their aircraft carriers, all their battleships were easy targets. He sent an urgent, panicked message to Admiral Toyoda: the Mobile Fleet had to leave Tawi Tawi immediately. The Americans knew where they were.

Toyoda agreed. The original plan for Operation A-Go was to wait until the Americans committed to their invasion and then sail on June 15 to intercept them. But staying in Tawi Tawi was no longer an option. It was suicide.

On June 10 at 08:00, the entire Japanese Mobile Fleet—four battleships, nine aircraft carriers, 15 cruisers, and the remaining 24 destroyers—weighed anchor and sailed northeast six days ahead of schedule, heading for the Philippine Sea. Their departure was a disaster. They were disorganized and rushed. American codebreakers intercepted their movement orders within hours.

Admiral Raymond Spruance, commander of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, now knew exactly where Ozawa was going, and he had six extra days to prepare his reception. Dealey, of course, knew nothing about this. He was still out hunting.

Later that same day, June 10, at 4:30 p.m., he spotted two more destroyers patrolling the Sibutu Passage. He had five torpedoes remaining, enough for one more attack. At 5:15 p.m., he fired a burst of three torpedoes at the lead destroyer. One struck the bow. The destroyer was severely damaged and slowed to a stop, but did not sink.

The second destroyer, seeing its comrade hit, instantly charged at the Harder’s position. Dealey fired its last two torpedoes.

— Fire four. Fire five.

Both failed. The command tower fell silent. They were out of torpedoes. They had no way to defend themselves. And a Japanese destroyer was bearing down on them at 32 knots, less than a mile away; its bow wave was a white line of pure vengeance.

— Emergency deep dive. Take her down. 500 feet.

The Harder’s diving planes bit hard, plunging the submarine down at maximum angle. The men clung to the handholds. 300 feet. 400 feet. 500 feet. The destroyer passed directly overhead. Its propellers churned the water so loudly the crew could hear the *wump wump wump* of the individual blades through the hull.

Then, silence. The destroyer was turning around. Dealey knew the pattern. The destroyer would make multiple passes, dropping depth charges on each run until the submarine surfaced or imploded. The Harder had no torpedoes to counterattack. Its only option was to ride out the storm and hope the destroyer ran out of depth charges first.

The first pattern of six depth charges fell at 17:23. They exploded in a tight, perfect pattern right around the submarine. The Harder rolled 15 degrees to starboard. Light bulbs shattered. Men were thrown against the bulkheads. A second pattern fell two minutes later, even closer. The explosions lifted the submarine’s stern and slammed it against the seabed.

A hydraulic line burst in the control room, spraying a fine mist of oil. For 90 minutes, the destroyer hunted them down. 42 depth charges. Most exploded either too shallow or too deep, but three came close enough to shatter gauge glass and cause minor leaks. Dealey kept the Harder at 500 feet, moving at a dead speed of two knots, making as little noise as possible.

Finally, at 7:00 p.m., the destroyer withdrew. It had exhausted its supply of depth charges. Dealey waited another hour in the crushing silence before surfacing. The ocean was empty. The Harder was battered, but alive. It was out of torpedoes and low on fuel. The patrol was over. It limped south toward Fremantle, Australia.

Arriving on June 26, the moment the Harder docked, Admiral Lockwood was waiting for her. He had been following up on Dealey’s reports. Five destroyers attacked, four confirmed sunk, one badly damaged. In 12 days, it was, and remains, the most successful anti-destroyer patrol in the history of naval warfare.

Lockwood awarded Dealey the Navy Cross right there on the deck. Then he asked the question every submarine commander dreaded after a grueling patrol:

— Can you do it again?

Dealey’s response was immediate:

— Give me torpedoes and I’ll sink ten.

The crew of the Harder spent July in Fremantle repairing the submarine and resupplying. Dealey, now a legend in the force, trained new crew members in his “throat shot” tactic. By the end of July, every submarine commander in the Pacific had studied his patrol reports. The tactic worked. Between June and August, American submarines, emboldened by Dealey’s success, sank 14 more Japanese destroyers using variations of his aggressive approach.

The hunters had become the hunted. But the full impact of the Harder’s patrol was only beginning to be understood. The Battle of the Philippine Sea began on June 19, just nine days after Dealey sank his fourth destroyer. Because Admiral Ozawa’s fleet had been forced to abandon Tawi Tawi six days earlier, his entire battle plan collapsed.

Their fleet arrived scattered and disorganized. Their reconnaissance planes had burned through their fuel reserves during the hasty departure and were unable to locate the American fleet. Their destroyers were still regrouping. Their supply ships were three days behind schedule.

When the American carrier-based aircraft encountered Ozawa’s fleet, the Japanese were completely unprepared. The result was a massacre. American pilots, facing disorganized and understaffed Japanese air patrols, shot down 376 Japanese aircraft while losing only 30 of their own. They called it “The Great Mariana Turkey Shoot.”

American submarines, including the Cavalla and the Albacore, sank two of Ozawa’s largest aircraft carriers, the Shokaku and the Taiho. American aircraft sank a third, the Hiyo. The Imperial Japanese Navy lost 75% of its carrier air groups in two days. It was a blow from which they would never recover.

And it all happened because a submarine commander, Samuel Dealey, was aggressive enough to sink four destroyers in four days, convincing the Japanese that their stronghold at Tawi-Tawi was a death trap. Admiral Lockwood, in his postwar memoirs, called the Harder’s fifth patrol “the single most strategically important submarine operation of the entire Pacific War.”

On August 5, 1944, the Harder departed Fremantle for its sixth war patrol. It was assigned to a three-submarine wolfpack with the USS Haddo and the USS Hake. Dealey, as the senior captain, was in command. Their mission was to patrol the waters west of Luzon in the Philippines and destroy Japanese shipping.

The patrol began with incredible success. On August 21, the wolfpack sank four large cargo ships. On August 22, the Harder and the Haddo attacked a group of coastal defense vessels, sinking three of them. The Harder was credited with sinking two of them, the frigates Matsuwa and Hiburi.

By August 23, the Haddo had used up all its torpedoes and withdrew. This left the Harder and the Hake operating together off Dasol Bay. But the Japanese were learning. Their intelligence had tracked the wolfpack’s movements. They knew where the American submarines were. And this time, they had sent something special to deal with them.

At 4:53 a.m. on August 24, the USS Hake was submerged four miles offshore. Through its periscope, its captain could see the Harder on the surface 4,500 yards to the south. They were coordinating an attack on a Japanese ship. Suddenly, the Hake’s sonar operator heard the one sound that made his blood run cold: echolocation. Close. Getting closer.

Two Japanese escort vessels, the CD22 and the minesweeper PB102, were rapidly approaching the Harder’s position at 18 knots. They were actively hunting. Japanese intelligence had intercepted radio transmissions among the wolfpack and knew they were in the area. The captain of the Hake immediately ordered his submarine to dive and remain silent.

He watched through his periscope as the two Japanese ships approached the Harder. His radio operator frantically tried to warn Dealey, but there was no response. At 5:30 a.m., the Harder finally spotted them. It made an emergency dive, but it was too late. The Japanese ships were less than 2,000 yards away.

Dealey brought the Harder down quickly at a 35-degree angle, but in his haste, its diesel engines were still running as it submerged, leaving a massive trail of bubbles on the surface. A perfect target. The sonar operator on the CD22 had a perfect contact: range 1,200 yards, depth 200 feet, and still submerging.

At 05:47, CD22 made its first pass and dropped a full pattern of depth charges, all set to detonate at 250 feet. The explosions framed the Harder perfectly. At least three detonated within 50 feet of her hull. The Harder’s pressure hull cracked near the aft torpedo room. Seawater flooded in under tremendous pressure.

The aft compartments flooded completely in 90 seconds. The submarine’s bow shot up sharply as the stern dragged it down. In the control room, Dealey would have been roaring, “Blow out all the ballast, surface emergency!”, but the compressed air system, struggling against the weight of thousands of tons of flooding water, couldn’t save him.

At 05:52, CD22 made a second pass. This pattern struck even closer. The explosions ruptured the Harder’s main pressure hull in multiple locations. The control room flooded. All electrical power failed. At 600 feet, well below its maximum operating depth, the Harder’s hull began to implode. Bulkheads collapsed. Compartments were crushed like tin cans.

At 6:00 AM, the Japanese ships reported a successful kill. Large quantities of oil, wooden debris, and cork floated to the surface. They circled for two hours, dropping more charges to be sure. They recovered no survivors. The 79 men aboard the Harder were gone.

Commander Samuel Dealey, the destroyer killer, had been killed by the very escorts he had taught the Navy to destroy. News of the loss of the Harder was a devastating blow to the submarine force. Admiral Lockwood immediately suspended all submarine operations in the area.

The American public wouldn’t learn the full story until after the war, but the Japanese knew. Admiral Toyoda received the report on August 26: the Devil of Tawi Tawi was finally gone. He ordered a decoration for the crew of the CD22.

What Toyoda didn’t know was that the damage had already been done. The tactics Dealey had pioneered were now standard doctrine. Before the Harder’s fifth patrol, U-boats were fleeing from destroyers after being hunted down. By the end of the war, American U-boats, using Dealey’s “throat shot” tactic, had sunk 214 Japanese warships. This included four aircraft carriers, one battleship, nine cruisers, and 38 destroyers. Dealey’s legacy was etched into the wreckage of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

On March 27, 1946, President Harry Truman presented Commander Dealey’s Medal of Honor to his widow, Edwina, on the White House lawn. The citation read in part: “This remarkable record of five vital Japanese destroyers sunk in five short-range torpedo attacks testifies to Commander Dealey’s gallant fighting spirit and indomitable command.”

The Navy named an escort destroyer in his honor, the Dealey. Harder himself received the Presidential Unit Citation. His motto, “Hit ’em harder,” became legendary. Today, at the Naval Academy, instructors still teach the “throat” attack. Not because modern submarines would use it—our new torpedoes are too advanced for that—but because it demonstrates a fundamental principle: when your enemy expects you to run, charging is the one thing they can’t defend against.

The 79 men aboard the Harder came from 38 different states. They were farm boys from Iowa, factory workers from Michigan, college graduates from California. They volunteered for “silent service,” knowing the odds. Twenty-two percent of all submariners who served in World War II died—the highest casualty rate of any branch of the U.S. military. They knew the risk and served anyway.

The last surviving member of the Harder’s crew, Paul Bryce, passed away in 2022 at the age of 98. With his death, no one who served aboard that legendary ship remains to tell their story firsthand. That’s why these stories matter. Official reports tell us what they did, but they can’t tell us what it felt like to hear those depth charges explode or to entrust your life to the man at the periscope.

If this story touched your heart, tell me in the comments what you would have done in the protagonist’s place.