Dive! World War II Stories of Sailors & Submarines in the Pacific

by Deborah Hopkinson

  Lockwood was so impressed he decided Lipes should be promoted to chief pharmacist’s mate. “His courage, resourcefulness and willingness to take responsibility certainly deserved high recognition.”

  The squadron medical officer was not as pleased, but, as Lockwood put it, “we got ‘Doc’ promoted anyhow.”

  Rector received the historic operation on his nineteenth birthday. Later he transferred to the Tang under Dick O’Kane. Sadly, he did not survive Tang’s loss in October 1944.

  A few months later, in September of 1944, Dick O’Kane and the crew of the Tang set out on their fifth patrol. This time, Dick was without his talented executive officer, Murray “Fraz” Frazee, whom he had recommended for promotion. But just as Mush Morton had nurtured Dick’s career, Dick himself had developed a talented crew of officers and men, and had tremendous trust in his new exec, Frank Springer.

  They set out on patrol with a determination to fire each and every one of Tang’s twenty-four torpedoes and make them count. All were the new, Mark XVIII Mod 1 electric torpedoes, which were increasingly replacing the unreliable Mark XIV ones.

  The only mishap early in the patrol came when Dick inadvertently fell through an open hatch and broke his left foot. The pharmacist’s mate did the best he could, telling the skipper, “ ‘You’ve got some small broken bones—I could feel ’em, but they’re pretty straight now … there’s nothing they’d do ashore that I haven’t done except to take some X rays, and I already know about what they’d look like.’ ”

  Despite Dick’s broken left foot, it looked to be another record-setting patrol. Dick had already sunk two ships when, early on October 23 near the China Coast, Tang encountered a large convoy of ten ships—five freighters and five escorts.

  Deftly maneuvering inside the escorts, Dick fired nine torpedoes, scattering the convoy and sinking three ships. The next night, Tang discovered yet another convoy. Again avoiding the escorts, Dick snuck into the center, letting off ten torpedoes, which sank two large freighters and damaged another.

  By this time, Tang had only two of the twenty-four torpedoes remaining. Dick drew the submarine away, in order to check the last two torpedoes, load them into tubes three and four, and return to finish off the last ship so it couldn’t be towed away by the escorts. After this, Tang could head for home.

  The first torpedo ran true.

  Dick was on the bridge when the final fish shot through the water toward its target. “The torpedo, our very last, broached in a phosphorescent froth only yards ahead of Tang’s bow, turned sharply left, and commenced porpoising in an arc off our port bow.”

  The torpedo had popped to the surface, then had begun to circle back in a deadly arc—straight toward the submarine.

  Desperate to move Tang out of its path, Dick yelled, “ ‘All ahead emergency! Right full rudder!’

  “It was now coming in. We had only seconds to get out of the way.”

  Those seconds were not enough. The submarine was too long, the torpedo too fast. It did miss amidships, but struck the aft torpedo room with a devastating explosion. The time was about two thirty a.m.

  Automatically, Dick yelled an order to close the hatch, but it was already too late, and the men in the conning tower, including executive officer Frank Springer, drowned when the sea poured in.

  To Dick, Tang seemed to be struggling like a great wounded animal. The submarine sank almost instantly from the stern. Despite heroic struggles, only nine members of Tang’s crew were able to escape and make it through the night.

  Five men had been in the forward torpedo room and used Momsen lungs (an underwater rebreathing mechanism) to reach the surface; one had escaped from the conning tower; and three had been on the bridge.

  Dick O’Kane was one of them.

  Escape from the Tang.

  Tang and seventy-eight men who had served her so well were gone.

  The next morning, the nine survivors were picked up by a Japanese destroyer escort, which was also rescuing men from the ships that Tang had sunk. Dick and eight other survivors were interned in a Japanese prison camp.

  No one had known the fates of Wahoo and Trigger when they were lost. But with Tang, American code breakers were able to gather bits and pieces by monitoring Japanese radio transmissions.

  “All stories seemed to agree on three particulars—great damage to the enemy, shallow water, and Dick O’Kane in a … prison camp!” recalled Ned Beach.

  Tang’s former exec, Fraz Frazee, heard the news when he returned to Pearl Harbor after his leave in California.

  There was a catch, though. The information was extremely top secret. Any leaks could alert the Japanese that their codes had been cracked. That meant that no civilians could be told—including family members.

  “ ‘All I could do was bite my tongue,’ ” said Fraz, who desperately wanted to let Dick O’Kane’s wife, Ernestine, know that her husband was alive. For security reasons, he couldn’t. “ ‘Ernie O’Kane … had to suffer.’ ”

  As 1945 began, Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood prepared to move his headquarters from Pearl Harbor to the submarine tender Holland, based in Guam, which was now in American hands. Guam would put the submarine commander closer to late-war actions in the Philippines and Japan.

  American submarines had achieved remarkable success against Japanese shipping, their key objective at the start of the conflict. The tide of war in the Pacific had turned in favor of the Allied forces, and that meant a shifting role for the silent service. Submarines had rescued 144 airmen in the past two years, and would continue to support US efforts to capture islands lost to the Japanese at the beginning of the war.

  There was one other mission on Charlie Lockwood’s agenda for his submarines: to penetrate the minefields of the Sea of Japan and sink any vessels they found right on the enemy’s doorstep. Lockwood felt sure that the area was thick with targets, driven there by the aggressive actions of submarines and carrier task forces. The plan’s code name was Operation Barney, after Barney Sieglaff, a member of Lockwood’s staff designated to work full-time on the effort.

  “Ever since the loss of Wahoo in those waters in the autumn of 1943, the Sea of Japan had been ‘out of bounds,’ ” wrote Theodore Roscoe. “Captured documents, old charts, Japanese prisoners and other sources of information had confirmed suspicions that the Japan Sea was guarded by minefields.”

  Submarines tried to avoid minefields as much as possible. Getting in and out of the Sea of Japan had posed the most difficult challenge. Military officials believed that the east and west straits were full of mines, as was the narrow center exit, called Tsugaru Strait. The northern exit also posed problems: Lockwood felt sure La Pérouse Strait (also known as Soya Strait), where Mush Morton’s Wahoo had in all likelihood been lost, was still being heavily patrolled by enemy aircraft and surface ships.

  Lockwood felt better prepared to deploy submarines to this treacherous area now, however. During the fall and winter of 1944–1945, American scientists had been working to develop effective mine-detecting devices, known as FM sonar gear, which would enable submarines to actually “hear” an enemy mine in the water.

  Lockwood was eager to put the new devices to use and even took charge of training operators and skippers. He arranged tests of the FM sonar, equipping two submarines, USS Tinosa (SS-283) and Spadefish, and sent them out to try to detect mines.

  By May of 1945, Lockwood was ready. He even asked his boss, Admiral Nimitz, for permission to lead the mission in person. It was denied.

  It was time to avenge the Wahoo.

  The nine submarines in the wolf pack had their own official code name: Hellcats. The boats were divided into three groups, the Hepcats, the Polecats, and the Bobcats. The operation launched from Pearl Harbor and Guam between May 27 and May 29 of 1945, with the boats scheduled to reach the Sea of Japan and pass by packs through its minefields from June 4 to 6.

  Two of the Hellcats—Tinosa arriving at Pearl Harbor, Spadefish in the foreground.

 
Even with the new detection equipment, the boats had some close calls with the undersea lines, or cables, to which the explosive bombs (mines) were attached. Contact with one of the mines could cause it to detonate, potentially blowing a hole in a submarine’s hull. Slipping submerged into the Sea of Japan on June 6, skipper Richard Latham on the Tinosa reported, “ ‘There was a scraping, grinding noise as the mine cable slid down the starboard side. No one moved or spoke. Would it snag and drag the mine into us? … How close the mine came to us, we’ll never know.’ ”

  The captain of the Spadefish (whose mascot was Luau) heard loud explosions in the distance and feared for the two other boats in his Hepcats group: “ ‘Had Sea Dog or Crevalle come to grief?’ ”

  But both USS Crevalle (SS-291) and USS Sea Dog (SS-401), under her commander Earl Hydeman, leader of the expedition, made it safely through. Once through the minefields, Hydeman said later, “ ‘All hands breathed a little easier.’ ”

  The captains had been ordered to hold off on any attack actions until sunset on June 9, to ensure that all nine boats in the wolf pack were in place in their designated areas. They would then set out to do as much damage as possible.

  And that’s exactly what they did. “The Hell Cats turned out to be one of the most successful submarine operations of the war,” historian Clay Blair wrote.

  Over the next ten days, Sea Dog sank six enemy ships, Spadefish five, and the USS Skate (SS-305) sank four vessels, including a Japanese submarine. In all, eight of the nine Hellcats sank a total of twenty-eight ships for 54,784 tons. Only one boat, USS Tunny (SS-282), had no luck with its torpedo attacks.

  But Operation Barney was not without a heartbreaking loss.

  Born in Georgia, Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Lott Edge was a devoted husband and father when he became skipper of the USS Bonefish (SS-223) a year before, in June 1944. Like Dick O’Kane, Lawrence had gained valuable experience serving under other captains as executive officer, and felt ready when his orders came through.

  Writing to his wife, Sarah, he said, “ ‘When I came out here, as you know, I wasn’t really sure whether I was ready for this next job … now I do feel sure that I’m ready for it … Anyhow, I pray to be truly worthy of it, because if I can be truly successful at it of all jobs, I’ll be able to feel that at last I’m really doing something to hasten the end of this war, and my return to you and Boo [nickname of his daughter, also named Sarah]—which is all I really live for now.

  “ ‘Each ship we sink seems to me to cut the long wait for that great day by another hour, or perhaps day, or week or month, and I am glad (though I hate to think of what has happened to some of the poor mortals … who happened to be on those ships).’ ”

  Lawrence was indeed ready and performed well as a captain. On his first patrol, he was awarded a Bronze Star for sinking two ships and damaging a third. In another letter to Sarah, he spoke of what motivated him and others to keep going despite the long, dangerous days at sea.

  Lawrence wrote that he and other men were fighting for “ ‘our country, the place where our wives and families are, the place which we want to keep safe and happy for you, so that we can eventually return to you there and live the kind of life with you that both you and we believe is the best the world has to offer.’ ”

  USS Bonefish.

  A year later, Lawrence and Bonefish were tapped to take part in Operation Barney. The submarine arrived in Guam in early May, just as word came that Nazi Germany had surrendered. Welcome as the news was, everyone—especially the submariners about to embark on a dangerous mission in enemy waters—understood that the war in the Pacific was not yet over; Japan would not surrender easily.

  Before setting off, Lawrence penned a letter to Sarah, assuring her that he loved her “ ‘so deeply and completely … You’ll be constantly in my thoughts as well as my heart until I can write again—and for always.’ ”

  During Operation Barney on June 18, Lawrence, who had already sunk one ship, asked for and received the green light to penetrate Toyama Bay, on the northern shore of the Japanese main island of Honshu. There, Bonefish sank another target.

  But when the Hellcats gathered at the designated rendezvous spot to exit the Sea of Japan on the night of June 24, only eight boats turned up. With so many submarines gathered close together, it was too dangerous to wait for Bonefish. The Hellcats made it out of La Pérouse Strait without incident.

  On July 26, 1945, Lawrence’s wife Sarah wrote to her beloved husband, whom she called Shug. She wanted to share news of their little girl Sarah “Boo” and of the new baby expected soon. Before she could mail the letter, the telegram announcing the loss of the submarine arrived.

  Sarah kept her letter, in which she had written:

  Dearest Sweetest Love,

  Only a note tonight, because it is late again. Went to Dr. Upshaw today and think I’ll stick to him for the delivery. Today he listened to the heartbeat and said, “Well, I think it’s a boy!” … Time will tell! About three more weeks to be exact.

  Shug, you must come in before then, because you must have the news promptly … I went home after I left Dr. Upshaw and looked for one [a cable from him] stuck under the door, but no envelope! I also looked up to see the extent of your longest patrol. A few more days and this will equal it! …

  Good night, dearest, and sweetest of dreams, always.

  Bonefish skipper Lawrence Edge.

  Postwar records show that after sinking its second ship, Bonefish was spotted in the shallow waters of Toyama Bay and destroyed by antisubmarine depth charges. All hands were lost.

  On August 12, 1945, the Navy Department officially announced that the Bonefish was overdue and presumed lost.

  On that same day, Sarah and Lawrence’s son was born. Sarah named him Lawrence Lott Edge Jr.

  JANUARY 29–FEBRUARY 7: US forces drive the Japanese from the Marshall Islands, securing Majuro atoll on January 31 and Kwajalein atoll by February 7; submarines support the effort by lifeguarding, reconnaissance, and efforts to intercept Japanese vessels; submarine Skipjack sinks a destroyer.

  FEBRUARY 16–17: Americans successfully strike Japanese base on Truk; Tang sinks a fleeing freighter and USS Searaven (SS-196) rescues three airmen.

  FEBRUARY 23–JUNE: US begins operations in the Marianas, which include Saipan and Guam; submarines, including USS Sunfish (SS-281) and Tang, are deployed for reconnaissance, to attack retreating Japanese ships, and for lifeguarding support.

  FEBRUARY 29: US lands troops to begin takeover of Admiralty Islands, and is in control by April, enabling the Allies to use the Admiralties as a staging point for military operations in the final months of the war.

  APRIL–JULY: General MacArthur nearly recaptures all of New Guinea, which will be completed by Australian forces in 1945.

  JUNE 15: US forces land on Saipan in the Marianas, securing it within three weeks.

  JUNE 19–21: In the Battle of the Philippine Sea, America wins a decisive victory in a clash of aircraft carriers; submarines USS Albacore (SS-218) and USS Cavalla (SS-244) sink two Japanese carriers.

  JULY 21: US forces land on the island of Guam; a submarine refueling and repair base is later established there.

  OCTOBER 20: General MacArthur’s 6th Army lands at Leyte, beginning fulfillment of his pledge to return and liberate the Philippines from Japanese occupation.

  OCTOBER 23–26: Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. In a four-part conflict, the US Navy defeats the Imperial Japanese Navy, demolishing much of the enemy’s remaining power at sea; submarine USS Darter (SS-576) sinks the enemy’s flagship cruiser and disables another; submarine USS Dace (SS-247) sinks a cruiser. Two submarine wolf packs chase retreating Japanese ships. In all, submarines sink or damage six cruisers and destroyers.

  OCTOBER 26–DECEMBER 25: Leyte Gulf is secured, bringing the end of the war closer.

  DECEMBER 15: General MacArthur’s invasion forces target the Philippine island of Mindoro as a stepping-stone to the main island of Luzo
n; US surface ship convoy is attacked by kamikaze pilots on the way; landings on December 15 are unopposed.

  DECEMBER: US submarines have the most successful year yet against Japanese shipping, mounting 520 war patrols, and sinking 603 ships for about 2.7 million tons, effectively destroying the enemy’s capacity. Attacks on Japanese fleet ships also increased, with submarines sinking seventeen carriers, battleships, and cruisers. Nineteen US submarines were lost.

  Looking forward, US military planners focus on an invasion of Japan by November 1945 as the only way to get Japan to agree to unconditional surrender.

  Signing of surrender papers aboard USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.

  The valiant efforts and incomparable achievements of United States Navy submariners cannot be summarized in statistics. Neither graphs nor percentages could measure the leadership of an Admiral Lockwood … the skill of commanders such as Morton and O’Kane, the courage of every submarine’s crew …

  From mess attendants to admirals, all were captains courageous.

  —Theodore Roscoe

  The long-awaited day has come and cease fire has been sounded. As Force Commander I desire to congratulate every officer and man of the Submarine Force upon a job superbly well done. My admiration for your daring, skill, initiative, determination and loyalty cannot be adequately expressed …

  You have deserved the lasting peace which we all hope has been won for future generations … May God rest the gallant souls of those missing presumed lost.

  —Charles A. Lockwood

  World War II in Europe ended in May, but the war in the Pacific continued into the summer of 1945.

  To force the Japanese government to surrender and avoid a prolonged invasion of Japan itself, the United States made a controversial decision to unleash the first two atomic bombs in history at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945.