“They had a small square hand-cranked Victrola [record player] and a few records. Whenever we crash dived, everyone would grab the Victrola and records to keep them from falling because we plunged almost straight down. That was our only entertainment other than talking and singing, including our own made-up verses.”
Passing the island of Bali, the captain let Lucy and the others have a look through the periscope. It was Lucy’s only glimpse of daylight during the entire trip. “All we saw was a dark blob on the horizon, but I saw it!”
There was some fun too. The crew wasn’t about to let their passengers cross the equator without partaking in the Ancient Order of the Deep (or line crossing ceremony), an old maritime tradition. Those who have never crossed before, “Pollywogs,” become initiated as “Shellbacks” at the Royal Court of King Neptune. The submariners put a lot of effort into lifting the spirits of their guests.
“The crew was very ingenious in fixing funny and remarkable costumes for the Royal Court: King Neptune, Davy Jones, The Royal Baby, and others,” said Lucy. “The fun and mystery during the preparations, plus the forewarnings we got of the awful things to come, made the hot monotonous trip more intriguing.”
The event began when the Spearfish arrived at the equator; each passenger received a summons to appear before King Neptune and his court. The Spearfish’s charges against Lucy were typed up by the yeoman, and included tongue-in-cheek complaints against the young nurse for such things as:
Working on the sympathies of the crew and thereby talking them out of their clothes, seats, food, and even in some cases, their hearts.
Being a cowgirl from Texas.
Always pouting.
Being hot tempered.
Telling tall tales about Texas.
Beating new born infants around while a nurse in training.
Having been fortunate enough to get away from Texas, desiring to go back.
Asking if there were a beauty parlor on board.
Making insulting remarks concerning the persons of the Royal Shellbacks.
Lucy credited the ceremony with helping her and the other nurses begin to heal from their ordeal. In a way, it made everyone seem like a family—a family “who had just, and was still, going through some of the most horrible experiences the human body and mind can go through and come out alive, still fairly well balanced mentally and physically. Usually in one group there is at least one who is grouchy or touchy in some fashion, but I have absolutely no memory of any such person aboard at all….
“I do not know how to adequately express my gratitude to the submariners for all they did for us and for making such an impossible trip so tolerable and enjoyable,” she wrote later. “Had it not been for that seventeen days of good food and quiet relaxation, comradery and kind consideration, I do not know if I could have survived.
“Of course we knew of the danger we were going through daily, at least it did not have the horrors of working 24 to 48 hours continuously, trying to sew bodies back together and wondering just how long they would last amid the constant bombing and shelling.
“A submariner not only has to perform his job perfectly, but must be able to get along with other people in extremely close quarters without very much else to do but work and sleep in unpleasant surroundings. They are the world’s best to me!”
On May 20, 1942, the Spearfish arrived in Freemantle, Australia, where she was greeted by Charles A. Lockwood, Jr., recently promoted to rear admiral and commander of the Asiatic Fleet submarines.
While Lockwood doesn’t mention the young nurse by name, from his description it seems likely that he met Lucy on the dock. “One pint-sized girl in a makeshift costume of mixed slacks and uniform, came up the submarine’s hatch and onto the dock where she quietly walked from one end of the submarine to the other, looking over it carefully.
“Noticing that I was regarding her quizzically, she came up and said, ‘I just wanted to see what the darned thing looks like. I’ve been inside it, like Jonah in the whale … but have never seen the outside.’ ”
Lucy went home to Big Sandy, Texas, where friends and neighbors celebrated her safe return and provided her with new clothes. Lucy felt so grateful for everyone’s support she wore everything given to her, even dresses way too large.
Lucy did not rest for long. After training to become an Army flight nurse, she served in New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, and other Pacific islands, flying in hazardous conditions to care for and evacuate wounded soldiers.
While on Bataan, Lucy had fallen in love with a soldier named Dan Jopling, who had been captured by the Japanese. Later in the war, whenever she helped fly out prisoners from a liberated POW camp, she would ask if anyone knew what had become of him. She never heard, and assumed he was dead.
Lucy left the Army in August 1945 as the war was ending. That November, she discovered that Dan had survived the Bataan Death March. They married on December 5, 1945, and lived happily with their four children, although Dan continued to suffer from the physical and emotional aftereffects of his POW ordeal. Dan died in 1985, and Lucy passed away in 2000.
“ ‘We spent our lives helping people,’ ” said another of the Bataan nurses, “ ‘and we did it with honor and love and never looked back.’ ”
She might well have been describing the life of Lucy Wilson.
In 2012, Jennifer Noonan became one of the first three women officers to qualify in submarines.
In 1942, Lucy Wilson was a passenger on a submarine. It wasn’t until the twenty-first century that women were allowed to become submariners themselves. The first women officers qualified to serve on submarines in 2012. On January 21, 2015, a Navy press release announced that the Submarine Force would be opening to enlisted female sailors as well.
“ ‘We are the most capable submarine force in the world,’ ” said Vice Admiral Michael Connor, Commander, Submarine Forces. “ ‘While we have superb technology, the ultimate key to our success is our people. In order to continue to improve and adapt in a rapidly changing world, we need to ensure that we continue to recruit and retain the most talented Sailors.
“ ‘Today, many of the people who have the technical and leadership skills to succeed in the Submarine Force are women. We will need them. Integrating female officers into the Submarine Force has increased our talent pool and subsequently the force’s overall readiness, ensuring that we will remain the world’s most capable force for ensuing decades. Following our successful and smooth integration of women officers into the Submarine Force, the Navy’s plan to integrate female enlisted is a natural next step.’ ”
One rain-swept evening in May of 1942, Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, Jr., hopped out of his jeep and walked into a hotel in a harbor town in Western Australia to have dinner.
In the lobby he caught a burst of noise from the lounge, where a dozen submariners on leave were gathered around a piano, belting out an improvised song: “ ‘Sink ’em all, sink ’em all … Sink all their cruisers and carriers too!’ ”
Lockwood stopped short, inspired by the men’s spirit (later, he used the phrase “Sink ’Em All” as the title for his book about the war). “These fighting words were destined to keynote our entire submarine campaign in the Pacific and their defiant ring bolstered many a man’s courage in the dark days that were to come.”
“Uncle Charlie,” as he was known affectionately, was no armchair submariner, having skippered his first sub in World War I. The fifty-two-year-old was taking on his highest command yet when he arrived in Australia to replace John Wilkes as head of the SubsAsiatic Force, the Asiatic Fleet submarines, which included the Seawolf and Spearfish.
Admiral Charles A. Lockwood.
Lockwood was a logical choice for the job: He was a respected leader with deep experience and the ability to hit the ground running. It didn’t take him long to size up the problems that had dogged the Asiatic Fleet submarines in the first months of the war.
Lockwood believed that military strategy needed to be sharpened in
the light of Japanese advances in the Pacific. While some skippers like Frederick “Fearless Freddie” Warder had distinguished themselves, other captains relied on prewar textbook strategies. Their tentative, cautious approach had led to disappointing results.
In the months to come, Lockwood would be on the lookout for young, aggressive skippers willing to take risks to help achieve the goal of destroying Japanese merchant shipping. In addition to the “skipper problem,” Lockwood had to deal with a shortage of torpedoes—and worrying reports of unreliable fish.
Finally, Lockwood sensed exhaustion and low morale in both officers and men. “ ‘The boys here have had a tough row to hoe in the last four months,’ ” he wrote to a friend. As a submariner himself, Lockwood understood how essential rest could be, and so he tackled this last issue first.
Despite the fighting words in the song he’d heard, Lockwood understood what the men suffered at sea and the toll it took on sailors. “The thin faces of the officers and men, their unnaturally bright eyes, told of the tension on their nerves and the drain on their vitality produced by those long weeks submerged in tropical waters—weeks of peering into the sun glare or into the darkness for enemy targets, of sweating out depth charge attacks.”
Lockwood reflected, “Beyond a doubt, their stouthearted front and resolute faces concealed many secret, questioning thoughts as to their chances of returning from these 50-day patrols into badly charted waters…. Not once throughout the war, was I able to watch a submarine shove off for patrol without a twinge of sorrow and a period of soul searching as to whether or not I and my Staff had done everything humanly possible to insure the accomplishment of its mission and its safe return.”
One of Lockwood’s first acts was to lease four small hotels in Australia as recovery spots for sailors on leave. “The submariners needed complete rest, as much as we could give them, between patrols. They must go back fit, mentally and physically, to stand the strain of 50-day patrols in enemy-controlled waters where every man’s hand was against them.”
The next issue, however, would take a lot longer to resolve: bad torpedoes.
Since the first patrols of the war, skippers like Seawolf’s Frederick Warder had raised concerns about the Mark XIV (Mark 14) torpedoes, the model most submarines used.
Back in December of 1941, when the Seawolf attacked a Japanese seaplane tender anchored at Aparri, Warder had set the fish to pass under the target’s keel. This should have activated the magnetic exploder each torpedo carried. Yet it hadn’t. Had the torpedoes missed the mark, had the exploder simply failed, or had the torpedoes been running too deep to activate the exploder? No one knew.
Nor, as it turned out, was this an isolated incident. After Seawolf’s lack of success on several other occasions, Warder wrote, “ ‘The … torpedoes were no … good. That was the problem.’ ”
Warder wasn’t the only frustrated submarine commander. During a December 1941 patrol, Tyrell Dwight Jacobs, skipper of the USS Sargo (SS-188), had launched eight separate attacks, firing thirteen torpedoes without a hit.
Jacobs, who had an engineering background, set up each shot carefully, hoping to convince officials to acknowledge the problem. His report of one attempt reflects his exasperation. “During the thirty five minutes of this approach, seventeen periscope observations were made, and as it was dusk when torpedo was fired, almost continuous periscope observation was utilized during the last ten minutes…. No reason can be offered for this miss, since the entire torpedo had been previously checked.” Jacobs concluded that in his opinion the torpedoes were faulty in two respects: the magnetic exploder and the depth settings.
In June 1942, soon after Lockwood assumed his post in Australia, James Coe, skipper of the USS Skipjack (SS-184), also voiced his concerns, penning a scathing, four-page analysis of the issues he encountered with poor torpedo performance during a fifty-day patrol.
“To make round trips of 8500 miles into enemy waters to gain attack position undetected within 800 yards of enemy ships only to find that the torpedoes run deep and over half the time will fail to explode, seems to me to be an undesirable manner of gaining information which might be determined any morning within a few miles of a torpedo station in the presence of comparatively few hazards,” he wrote.
“The above statements may seem extreme and rabid; they represent my honest opinion and explain why ‘sure hits’ resulted in misses in this patrol,” Coe declared. “I believe that many of the wartime misses of the other submarines of this squadron are also explained by the same discussion. If it can be shown that this explanation is wrong, I shall be the first to acknowledge it.
“What we on the submarine firing line need is a dependable torpedo; and at least the knowledge of what the fish will and will not do; when we have this, some of those … ships which ‘got away’ will start going to the bottom.”
Angry complaints weren’t limited to commanders of boats in the Asiatic Fleet. Skippers in Pacific Fleet submarines based at Pearl Harbor were voicing similar concerns. Even so, officials in the Bureau of Ordnance, the section at Navy headquarters that dealt with technical issues, continued to dismiss the criticisms as mere excuses for misses.
Although Lockwood wished to avoid a bureaucratic tussle, he could no longer ignore the impassioned pleas of skippers whose judgment he trusted. “So much evidence was piling up and our submariners were becoming so discouraged by repeated misses which should have been hits, we decided to do a little torpedo testing on our own.”
As one submariner commented later: “ ‘It took Charlie Lockwood … to take that bull by the horns.’ ”
After the war, submariner Edward L. Beach—whom we’ll soon meet—wasn’t shy about expressing his opinion of the men running the Bureau of Ordnance. He called them “incompetent dunderheads.”
Lockwood wrote to the Bureau of Ordnance, asking about any new information or tests on the torpedoes. (There weren’t any.) Then he and staff member James “Jimmy” Fife (who’d been evacuated from the Philippines by the Seawolf) set up their own experiment, recruiting James Coe from the Skipjack to help out.
First, they bought a net and moored it outside the harbor in King George Sound near Albany, in Western Australia, to conduct what was, in effect, the first controlled test of the Mark XIV torpedoes. Next, they fired several of Skipjack’s remaining torpedoes with an exercise (not explosive head) at a normal attack range of one thousand yards.
The torpedoes were set to run at a depth of ten feet. When divers examined the net, the evidence was indisputable: The torpedoes had broken through the netting eleven feet deeper than the depth at which they’d been set to run.
Lockwood sent the test results to the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, which concluded that his tests had been inaccurate. Undeterred, Lockwood and Fife conducted more tests in July. This time, in addition to sending the results through official channels, Lockwood contacted a high-ranking Navy official and asked him to help behind the scenes.
It worked. Lockwood got a policy change issued: Every skipper was informed that, officially, the torpedoes ran eleven feet deeper and adjustments should be made accordingly. Future torpedoes would get a new, improved depth-control mechanism.
Submarine skippers needed reliable torpedoes. Here the Seawolf sinks a destroyer, seen through the Seawolf’s periscope.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of torpedo troubles. Solving one issue managed to cause others. Lockwood explained, “Bringing our torpedo runs closer to the surface seemed to multiply the number of premature explosions of war heads as well as the number of times in which torpedoes could be heard to thud against the side of a target without exploding.”
In fact, it would take two more years to completely debug all the problems with torpedoes, but at least a start had been made.
The challenges facing the silent service in 1942 seemed, at times, nearly insurmountable. The Submarine Force was spread very thinly to meet its goal of eliminating Japanese shipping from more than eight million square
miles of ocean.
It took time for a submarine to reach a designated patrol area; submarines also required regular upkeep and repairs. Crews needed breaks from the stress and tension caused by long patrols. Added to this was a sometimes disappointing performance from submarine commanders.
For all these reasons, it was urgent to get new boats—and officers—into action as soon as possible. One of these men and his boat would become an unforgettable team, even though Edward “Ned” Beach had never wanted to be a submariner in the first place.
And, unlike Mel Eckberg and his beloved Seawolf, Ned didn’t think much of Trigger when he first set eyes on her.
USS Trigger.
USS TRIGGER (SS-237)
A fantastically colored and dangerous fish is the trigger, and like the fish after which she was named, the USS Trigger had a fantastically colorful career and a dangerous one for the Japanese…. From the very beginning Trigger had a spirit of go-ahead built into her trim lines.
—Office of Naval Records and History
Ships’ Histories Section
Navy Department
At the beginning of 1942, Edward L. “Ned” Beach Jr. reported to Mare Island Navy Yard in California for his first submarine assignment as communications officer on a brand-new Gato class boat called the Trigger. Ned drove to the docks to get his first look at her.
“There she was, a great black conning tower sticking up over the edge of the dock, with a huge white 237 painted on her side,” he said. He remembered thinking: “ ‘There’s my new home … wonder if I’m looking at my coffin.’ ”
Dive! World War II Stories of Sailors & Submarines in the Pacific Page 8