Name: US Balao-class submarine sinking sampans with gunfire in 1945
Uploaded: 2025-04-12T09:18:37+00:00
Duration: 2 min 16 s
Description: At 1:20 a surface mine is detonated after a few attempts with 40mm gunfire. In mid-March 1942 the USS Pollack made the first submarine attack on a war patrol using its three-inch deck gun and a .50-c

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At 1:20 a surface mine is detonated after a few attempts with 40mm gunfire.

In mid-March 1942 the USS Pollack made the first submarine attack on a war patrol using its three-inch deck gun and a .50-caliber machine gun. The objects of the surface attack were two Japanese sampans, presumably civilian craft and unarmed. During 1942 U.S. submarines reported 34 attacks on sampans, trawlers, and a schooner. The number of attacks increased to 80 in 1943, the year that U.S. Seventh Fleet Bulletin No. 15, issued on this date, approved submarine deck gun attacks against “Chinese” junks, schooners, and other small vessels.

Their sinking over the long haul would produce impressive results, the bulletin prophesized. With mounting shipping losses to their large cargo ships (less than 1 million tons lost at the end of 1942, 1.77 million tons at the end of 1943, and 2.5 million tons through 1944), the Japanese increasingly resorted to smaller craft to transport personnel; fuel, food, raw, and finished materials; and military equipment between their Home Islands and their southern resource areas and island garrisons. Small craft were also engaged in transporting goods along the coasts of their Home Islands due to the country’s underdeveloped railway system and rudimentary roads.

From 1944 to 1945, with fewer and fewer large Japanese ships in the region, the number of deck gun attacks by U.S., British, and Dutch submarines on smaller craft doubled, from 508 to 1,044, with more than half being American kills. By war’s end most large Japanese fishing vessels, junks, schooners, trawlers, and coasters in Southeast Asia had been destroyed in the context of “total war” against the Japanese empire. Throughout the Pacific war the issue of whether to attack and sink defenseless or lightly armed small craft using deck guns remained a persistent moral and tactical dilemma for Allied skippers and seamen—because doing so meant killing crews (often made up of multiple Asian nationalities and often with their families) close up and face-to-face.

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