On November 6th, 1943, off Cape Bougaroun on the Algerian coast, German bombers used the Henschel Hs 293 — the world's first operational guided anti-ship missile — to sink the American destroyer USS Beatty and the transport Santa Elena, killing seventeen men in Convoy KMF 25A. It was one of the opening chapters of guided-weapon warfare, and a warning largely unheeded: twenty days later, the same weapon, fired from the same region, would sink HMT Rohna and kill 1,149 men in the deadliest single loss of American troops at sea in WWII. This episode tells both stories, accurately, on their own terms.

On February 20, 1942, the Action off Bougainville pitted the carrier USS Lexington against seventeen Japanese bombers from Rabaul in one of the early Pacific War's most lopsided air battles. We trace the full chain of events: Vice Admiral Wilson Brown's aborted raid on Rabaul, the morning interception of Japanese scout planes, and the four-minute dogfight in which Lt. Edward "Butch" O'Hare became America's first flying ace of World War II. We follow the ripple effects through the March 10 strike on Lae-Salamaua, and close with O'Hare's full story — heroism, tragedy, and a legacy still hiding in plain sight at one of America's busiest airports.

In this solo personal essay, Dale argues that American submarines — not the aircraft carriers — won the Pacific War against Japan. It's one sailor, one opinion: the carriers won the headlines at Midway, but the boats did the killing, sinking over half of Japan's fleet and strangling the oil that the Yamato and the whole empire ran on. From the Shinano to Archerfish to Nimitz himself. Come agree, or come fight him about it.

https://discord.gg/fC5EJDR

Why Nuremberg Refused to Sentence Dönitz for Submarine Warfare — And What Fleet Admiral Nimitz's Sworn Testimony Reveals About America's Pacific War?

In this solo personal essay, Dale argues that the United States' unrestricted submarine campaign against Japan in World War Two was legally and morally identical to the German U-boat campaign for which Karl Dönitz was prosecuted at Nuremberg — and that the tribunal's own verdict, shaped by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz's sworn testimony, proves it. Fifty-two submarines lost. Over a thousand merchant ships sunk. One verdict that couldn't say what it meant.

https://discord.gg/dxSvauDb

On the night of August 1st, 1943, fifteen American PT boats entered Blackett Strait with thirty torpedoes and a solid intelligence picture. By morning, they had hit nothing, lost one boat, and left eleven men in the water. This is the story of that boat — and everything that happened before and after.

Dale and Christophe trace the full arc of PT-109: from her keel laid in Bayonne, New Jersey in March 1942, through the brutal Guadalcanal campaign, to the night a Japanese destroyer cut her in half in the dark. Along the way, they dig into the politics that put a medically disqualified young man from Boston in command, the engineering compromises baked into the Elco 80-footer, the catastrophic failure of the Mark 8 torpedo program, and what the Navy's own after-action record says — versus what John Kennedy said privately to a tentmate months later.

They also tell the stories that rarely get told: the crew members who died and deserve to be named, the two young Solomon Islander scouts who paddled 38 miles through enemy water with a coconut, and the coast watcher on a volcano who set the whole rescue in motion.

In the pre-dawn darkness of March 6, 1943, two veteran Japanese destroyers turned east into Kula Gulf after a routine supply run. They never knew what was waiting. Rear Admiral "Tip" Merrill had spent months building a doctrine around one radical premise: trust the radar completely. Four minutes after contact, he proved it worked — thirteen minutes later, 174 Japanese sailors were dead and two ships were on the bottom. No American casualties. No American damage. And almost no record. This is the first clean surface victory of the Solomons campaign — unnamed in the official histories, unknown to most Americans, and still one of the most instructive engagements the Pacific War produced. Also: the 71 men of USS Grampus, and why the strait that bears a dead British surveyor's name still matters.

In this episode, Dale and Christophe cover one of the most decisive — and most overlooked — air-sea battles of the entire Pacific War: the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, March 2–4, 1943.

In three days, Allied air power destroyed an entire sixteen-ship Japanese convoy carrying nearly 7,000 troops of the 51st Infantry Division bound for Lae, New Guinea. All eight transports were sunk. Four of eight destroyers were lost. Roughly 2,900 Japanese soldiers and sailors were killed. Allied losses: thirteen airmen and a handful of aircraft.

It was not luck. It was the product of broken enemy codes, a network of courageous coastwatchers operating behind enemy lines, and months of classified training in a revolutionary attack technique most of the military establishment had dismissed as reckless.

In this episode:

• The strategic situation in early 1943 — why New Guinea and Rabaul were the twin keys to the Southwest Pacific
• Japan's calculated decision to run the convoy despite the risks, and the reasoning behind it
• The ULTRA code-breaking program and how Allied signals intelligence handed General Kenney the convoy's route, composition, and timing days before it sailed
• The unsung coastwatcher network — Allied personnel living in Japanese-occupied territory, transmitting intelligence at mortal risk
• General George C. Kenney — one of the most innovative and underappreciated air commanders America has ever produced
• The development and perfection of skip-bombing, and how Kenney's crews modified the B-25 Mitchell into a ship-killing weapon the Japanese had no answer for
• March 2: the opening B-17 strikes through bad weather, and why Japanese commanders made the fateful decision to press on
• March 3 morning: the coordinated killing blow — B-17s, RAAF Beaufighters, A-20 Havocs, and B-25s in a sequenced assault that shattered the convoy in thirty minutes
• March 3 afternoon and night: the destruction continues, the PT boats enter the picture, and the moral complexity of the strafing orders
• The final accounting: losses, survivors, and Japan's institutional reckoning with what had just happened
• Operation Cartwheel, the isolation of Rabaul, and why the road from New Guinea to Tokyo ran directly through the Bismarck Sea

Dale and Christophe also sit with the moral weight of the lifeboat strafing — a decision that exists in genuine tension with the laws of war and with the brilliance of the tactical victory surrounding it. They don't resolve it cleanly, because it doesn't resolve cleanly.

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Fair winds and following seas.

In this episode, Dale and Christophe cover one of the most misunderstood naval engagements of the Pacific War — the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, fought October 25–27, 1942. On paper, Japan won. A US fleet carrier sunk, another put out of action, the Japanese holding the water and the air. And yet, Japan never won another carrier battle for the rest of the war. How does that happen?

Dale walks through the full story in detail — from the desperate situation on Guadalcanal where Marines were surviving on Japanese rice and malaria medication, to the strategic pressure cooker that made this battle inevitable, to the savage air combat of October 26th itself. Christophe brings his perspective as someone coming to this specific battle fresh, asking the questions that sharpen the story for everyone.

In this episode:

• Why Henderson Field was the hinge point of the entire Pacific campaign in the fall of 1942 — and why both navies knew it
• Admiral Halsey's arrival and how a single command change electrified a demoralized force
• The Japanese order of battle — four carriers, approximately 200 aircraft, and three coordinated strike formations built for decisive engagement
• The frustrating cat-and-mouse of October 25th, including a communication failure that cost the Americans a potential pre-dawn knockout punch
• The audacious two-plane attack by Lieutenant Stockton Strong and Ensign Charles Irvine on the carrier Zuiho — 80 miles outside their assigned sector, on their own initiative
• The brutal, 15-minute destruction of USS Hornet — three bomb hits, two torpedo hits, and two deliberate aircraft crashes
• Hornet's extraordinary dive bombers hitting Shokaku with multiple 1,000-pound bombs, putting Japan's most powerful carrier out of action for nine months
• USS South Dakota throwing up a wall of antiaircraft fire that claimed 27 Japanese aircraft in a single engagement
• The remarkable story of USS Smith — a destroyer crashed by a Japanese torpedo plane that extinguished her own fires by steering into South Dakota's wake
• The human cost: Lieutenant Commander Shigeharu Murata, who led the torpedo attack on Pearl Harbor, killed leading the strike that sank Hornet — and the 148 Japanese aircrew who never came home
• Why Japan's tactical victory at Santa Cruz quietly guaranteed their strategic defeat — and why Halsey's summary remains the most concise verdict ever rendered on this battle

Key figures discussed:Admiral William "Bull" Halsey · Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo · Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid · Captain Charles Mason (USS Hornet) · Lieutenant Stockton B. Strong · Ensign Charles Irvine · Lieutenant Commander William "Gus" Widhelm · Lieutenant James "Moe" Vose · Lieutenant Commander Shigeharu Murata · Lieutenant Commander Hunter Wood (USS Smith)

Ships featured:USS Enterprise (CV-6) · USS Hornet (CV-8) · USS South Dakota (BB-57) · USS Northampton · USS Smith (DD-378) · USS Porter (DD-356) · IJN Shokaku · IJN Zuikaku · IJN Zuiho · IJN Junyo

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Fair winds and following seas.

In this episode, Dale and Christophe cover the Battle of Midway — one of the most consequential naval engagements in American history and the decisive turning point of the Pacific War. From the catastrophic losses of the first six months following Pearl Harbor, to the codebreakers working in a windowless basement in Hawaii, to the torpedo bomber crews who flew into certain death and made victory possible, the full story gets the treatment it deserves.

What we cover:

The strategic context going into the battle — Japan's "Victory Disease" and the devastating string of Allied losses across the Pacific from December 1941 through the spring of 1942. Admiral Yamamoto's Operation MI: the plan to lure the American carrier fleet into a decisive engagement and destroy it before the US industrial machine could turn the tide. The unsung heroes of Station HYPO — Commander Joseph Rochefort and the codebreaking team that cracked enough of Japan's JN-25b cipher to reveal where and when the attack was coming, and the famous "AF is short on water" deception that confirmed Midway as the target. The American order of battle — two operational carriers, a Yorktown repaired in 72 hours by 1,400 workers around the clock, and a collection of aircraft ranging from capable to dangerously obsolete. The opening moves on June 3rd and 4th, including the PBY Catalina patrol that made first contact and the wave after wave of Midway-based aircraft cut to pieces without scoring a single hit. The sacrifice of Torpedo Squadrons 8, 6, and 3 — 41 of 42 aircraft lost, zero torpedo hits, and why their deaths were anything but wasted. Wade McClusky following a destroyer's wake across empty ocean, Maxwell Leslie leading a dive bombing attack with no bomb, and the five minutes that broke the back of the Pearl Harbor strike force. Hiryu's counterstrike, the crippling and eventual loss of Yorktown, and Admiral Yamaguchi going down with his ship. The final accounting: four Japanese fleet carriers, 248 aircraft, and roughly 3,000 men — against one American carrier, 150 aircraft, and 307 men.

Why it matters:

Midway ended Japan's offensive momentum permanently, gutted an irreplaceable generation of veteran naval aviators, and made the Guadalcanal campaign possible just two months later. The battle stands as one of the clearest examples in military history of signals intelligence directly deciding the outcome of a major engagement — and as a testament to men who did their duty knowing it might not be enough.

Honor Roll:

This episode closes by honoring the men of Torpedo Squadrons 8, 6, and 3 — whose sacrifice made everything that followed possible.

The US Navy History Podcast drops new episodes regularly. Find us on Spotify, follow us on X at @USNHistoryPod, reach out at [email protected], and join the conversation on our Discord — https://discord.gg/hzFAtfhvm

The episode recounts the January 23–24, 1942 night raid at Balikpapan in the Dutch East Indies, seven weeks after Pearl Harbor, when Commander Paul Talbot led four aging Clemson-class destroyers (USS John D. Ford, Pope, Parrott, and Paul Jones) through the Makassar Strait toward burning Dutch-demolished oil facilities to attack a Japanese invasion convoy anchored off the coast. With no air cover, limited equipment, and unreliable Mark 15 torpedoes, the destroyers used the refinery fires for navigation and target silhouette, fired the first American surface-launched torpedoes of WWII against Japan, shifted to gunfire amid smoke and confusion, and withdrew before dawn with all four ships intact. Postwar records confirm four Japanese transports and patrol boat P-37 sunk, additional damage inflicted, but the invasion succeeded; the hosts emphasize morale, tactical lessons, and torpedo-failure documentation. The episode closes honoring Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Manuel Reyes Denton, killed in Vietnam in 1963 during a rescue mission.