of USS Chicago. Both officers were sceptical that any attack was taking place. Muirhead-Gould arrived aboard HMAS Lolita at approximately midnight, an action he described as attempting to learn about the situation. But members of Lolita's crew later recounted that when Muirhead-Gould came aboard he immediately chastised the patrol boat's skipper and crew, and quickly dismissed their report. Junior officers on Chicago provided similar descriptions of Bode's return on board, and members of both crews later claimed that Muirhead-Gould and Bode were intoxicated. It was only after the destruction of HMAS Kuttabul that both officers began to take the attack seriously. During the attack, there were several delays between events and responses to them. Over two hours passed between the observation of M-14 in the boom net and Muirhead-Gould's first order for ships to commence anti-submarine actions. It took another two hours to mobilise the auxiliary patrol boats, which did not leave their anchorage for a further hour. Part of these delays was due to a lack of effective communications. None of the auxiliary patrol craft in the harbour had radio communications, so all instructions and reports came from signal lights via the Port War Signal Station or Garden Island, or by physical communication via launches. In Muirhead-Gould's preliminary report on the attack, he stated that the Port War Signal Station was not designed for the volume of communications traffic the attack caused. Telephone communications with Garden Island were unreliable during the early part of the attack, and then the first torpedo explosion disabled them completely. The need to keep information secret may also have contributed to the delays and the defenders' scepticism. As the auxiliary patrol boat crews, the indicator loop staff, and other personnel manning defensive positions would have been outside 'need to know' and would not have been informed about any of the incidents prior to the attack, they would not have been alert, contributing to the disbelief demonstrated in the early hours of the attack. Flaws in Japanese tactics The main flaw in the Japanese plans was the use of midget submarines for the primary attack. Midget submarines were originally intended to operate during fleet actions: they would be released from modified seaplane carriers to run amok through the enemy fleet. This concept went out of favour as changing Japanese naval thinking and experience led to recognition that naval warfare would centre around carrier-supported aerial combat.