No one will know the truth for many years. My father only told me the stories of his missions many years after when the info was declassified. This reader's got a conspiratorial point. Or perhaps it was the Americans stalking the Japanese trawler. One submariner friend told me that American submarines like to secretly follow unsuspecting ships to practice being stealthy.
Conspiracies are the residual effluent of a secretive national security state.
When military bureaucracies, be they American, Chinese or Russian routinely cover-up, lie and disseminate false information, it is only natural that the public begins to question the validity of the information. My favorite was the botched bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the NATO offensive against Yugoslavia. NATO and the Pentagon vehemently deny that this attack was deliberate. Most Chinese, including the most senior officials, think otherwise. Many believe that the U.S. bombed the embassy in retaliation for Chinese assistance in the tracking and shooting down of a Stealth bomber earlier in the air campaign against Belgrade.