US Balao-class submarine sinking sampans with gunfire in 1945

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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