The Wiki entry about Murphy’s command of Tambor is brutal. He seriously cheesed off Adm. Spruance. Because of the mayhem he inadvertently committed, he had a wounded and defenseless Japanese cruiser in front of him but he didn’t close and finish the ship off. Earlier, he spotted part of the Japanese fleet, but didn’t close enough to see if the ships were Japanese and of what type, rendering the intel more than useless.
Yes it was. Without Murphy, the Tambor had a distinguished record in the war.
There were a lot of overage, under aggressive and just plain incompetent skippers in the Silent Service at the start of the war. It took Lockwood a while to weed them all out but he did that faster than he solved the torpedo problems. There weren’t many who started slow but became good. Donc Donaho was one, and in his case it was partially inexperience and partially bad fish. But yeah, Murphy was totally unfit for command.
Continuing the discussion about the Tambor and her hesitant commander, on April 26, 1942, Nimitz had the following entry concerning the Tambor:
The Tambor reports sinking a medium tanker on April 15th and small freighter on March 23d, missed a freighter on the 30th possibly due to too deep torpedo setting. Unsuccessfully attacked a tanker the 6th, was depth charged by aircraft on the 12th. Score - 2 sunk, 2 missed. This is a disappointing score for a submarine in an area supposed to be quite active.Interestingly enough, on the same day a little later an entry reads,
the Japanese are taking an interest in Alaskan charts.
I'm curious to read more and learn why the Japanese became interested in Alaskan charts.