1/20/44 Washington DC

The victory in the Pacific was significant but the president’s mood was no better than at the previous meeting. They must find a way to punish the Japanese mainland, just defending our coast wasn’t the answer. Marshall and Nimitz left the office and by evening a joint Army Navy committee was set up to study the problem. Committees study problems. People solve them. Mush Morton, one of the bright stars in the submarine command was not a member of a committee. And he was in Washington, on his way to take command of a new Harrisburg class boat that was even now being completed at Electric Boat. The boat had originally been assigned to another skipper but he had developed pneumonia and was in no condition to handle it. Mush was selected to replace him. One of his Annapolis classmates, Jack Smith invited him over for a drink while he was waiting for his orders. Jack had been on the California at Pearl and was now declared unfit for sea duty. He had lost his right arm to infection from injuries in the battle and was now assigned to a desk post in Washington. Jack confided that he was part of a committee that was looking for a way to hit the home islands. Mush laughed, “I did that last month.”

“You did what?”

“I hit the home islands. Don’t you guys read the action reports? Why do I bother to write them? Maybe I should write in the next one that I shelled Washington, would that get your attention, or maybe I should drop by and fire a few rounds just to prove I can? I hit a Jap town with about 75 rounds of five inch in my last patrol.”

“How, why?”

“Near the end of the patrol we were short on torpedoes, found a coastal tanker with no escort and surfaced to sink him with the deck gun. Just as we set him on fire a coastal battery opened up and fired on their own ship. We didn’t want him to get credit for the sinking so we opened up on the battery and the town to silence it You should have seen the fires we started, must have hit some petrol. We silenced the battery and left. Damn, if that deck gun wasn’t so hard to fire we’d have beat them up good. I could have stayed another hour and shelled the place, nobody came by to bother me but we just couldn’t keep the gun going. You have to man handle the ammo up through the hatch, it’s a real pain. We fired about 75 rounds and when it was over the whole gun crew was beat along with everyone else I could muster for ammunition duty. I pulled the cooks, half of the torpedo room and the half of the engine room to help carry it up. I even had officers handling ammunition. Seventy five rounds, that’s nearly four tons of ammunition they brought up. I finally quit firing because the shells weren’t coming up fast enough to keep the gun going. I couldn’t justify sitting there unless I was doing something. It’s a shame someone doesn’t build a real deck gun for a sub. I’ll tell you what I’d like to see, give me one of those 5 inch rocket launchers, they throw thirty six at a time. Give me one of them. I find a good target, I stick up my nose, light them off, then I could go off somewhere, hide and reload and come back and hit them again.”