Hellcats

by Peter Sasgen

  The force suffered its first loss on December 10, 1941, when Japanese planes attacked the navy yard, Cavite, Philippine Islands. The USS Sealion (SS-195), commanded by Lieutenant Commander Richard G. Voge (who would later serve as ComSubPac operations officer; his last name is pronounced Vouge-E), was undergoing repairs when it was hit by bombs and sunk. The attack killed five members of her crew. The last U.S. submarine lost in the war, the USS Bullhead (SS-332), commanded by Lieutenant Commander E. R. Holt, was bombed by a Japanese plane and sunk with all hands while patrolling in the Java Sea near Bali on August 6, 1945, the same day that the B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Lockwood, who had vowed that the Japanese would pay a heavy price for every submariner killed, eventually kept his promise, which he regarded as an almost sacred obligation.

  Charles Andrews Lockwood was born in Midland, Virginia, on May 6, 1890. Raised in Lamar, Missouri, Lockwood was a self-described country boy steeped in the lore of rural turn-of-the-century America. Though far from the sea, he knew even as a youngster that he wanted a career in the United States Navy. Appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy by Missouri senator William Stone, Lockwood entered the academy as a plebe with the class of 1912.

  An average student, Midshipman Lockwood ranked academically in the lower half of his class. That ranking, plus his experiences at sea along the eastern seaboard of the United States during his class cruise aboard the old armored cruiser USS Chicago (CA-14), would, it seems, hardly have prepared him for a future career in submarines. Like most midshipmen of his day, Lockwood was determined to serve in a modern surface warship, preferably a battleship, certainly not a submarine, which, at that time, it was thought no self-respecting naval officer would want any part of. His first encounter with a sub, a primitive Holland-class boat, really not much more than a riveted sewer pipe of a vessel, left him shaking his head in disgust. Little did he know.

  After graduation Ensign Lockwood served, first, in the old battleship USS Mississippi (BB-23), then in the newly commissioned USS Arkansas (BB-33). To Lockwood, a tour of duty aboard the new 562-foot-long, 26,000-ton-displacement Arkansas, with her twelve 12-inch guns in six turrets, personified the real spit-and-polish Navy. This assignment turned into a serious and eye-opening experience for the young officer, for when he was thrust into the Arkansas’s wardroom, filled as it was with high achievers, it put Lockwood’s desire to succeed as a naval officer to the test. He passed the test, though not without having to overcome a few rough spots along the way, he said. He also said that this singular tour of duty had not only helped him mature, it had also formed his character and lifelong commitment to excellence.

  As for the submarine service, Lockwood more or less stumbled into it. Transferred to Manila, Philippines, in 1914, he was talked into applying for submarine duty by a fellow officer who enticed him by pointing out that subs, with their less structured organization than that of the Navy’s surface fleet, offered a speedier path to command at sea. Lockwood took the bait (every naval officer dreams of being addressed as “Captain” on the bridge of his own ship) and seemingly in no time at all had qualified for command of a so-called “pigboat,” the gasoline-powered submarine A-2. Commissioned in 1903, the A-2 was a cranky old tub in need of constant repair. And with its gasoline-fume-fouled atmosphere, it was a bomb waiting to go off. More than one sub had blown up or caught fire, with disastrous consequences for its crew. Yet for all of the problems Lockwood encountered as CO of the A-2, it was that old sub that set him on the path that, while it meandered from time to time, he would follow for the rest of his career.

  In 1918, just as World War I drew to a close, Lockwood, who had seen no action in that war, received orders to Japan. While there he took note of the continuing emergence of Japanese imperialism, which had gained momentum with Japan’s earlier acquisition of territory in Korea, and, during the First World War, the annexation of German-controlled Shantung, China. Further acquisition by Japan of the German Pacific island mandates of World War I emboldened Japan’s leaders to pursue their unfettered imperialist aims in East Asia. Lockwood claimed to have had a premonition that in due time Japan would pose a serious danger to the United States that would one day lead to war between the two countries.

  After completing his tour in Japan, Lockwood received orders to the Navy’s sub base at New London, Connecticut. There he took command of another gasoline-powered sub, the old G-1. But not for long. Now a lieutenant commander, Lockwood transferred yet again, this time back to the Asiatic Fleet in Manila to command a river gunboat. After he completed this second stint in Manila, it was on to Rio de Janeiro as a member of the U.S. Naval Mission to Brazil. The interwar years of the late 1920s and early 1930s flew by in something of a blur, for with Lockwood’s promotion to full commander, he arrived in San Diego to take command of Submarine Division 13. He was never in one place for very long, in 1937; a change of orders sent him to Washington, D.C., and the office of the Chief of Naval Operations to chair the submarine officers’ conference, an organization that guided the development and design of new submarines.

  Lockwood had become one of the Navy’s top experts on submarines and submarine tactics. As chair he fought hard to change the narrow and hidebound thinking of senior officers who resisted many of the improvements the submarine force needed to undergo to modernize and prepare for the war with Germany and Japan that was then looming on the horizon. Lockwood, in collaboration with two equally farsighted colleagues, Lieutenant Commander Andrew I. McKee and Lieutenant Armand M. Morgan, tirelessly battled Navy red tape and bureaucratic intransigence to win approval for the development and construction of what would prove to be the supremely successful wartime Gato-class fleet-type subs. With only a few basic design modifications introduced during the course of their deployment, the Gatos and their sister Balao-and Tench-class boats became the workhorses of the Pacific submarine fleet.

  In 1939 Lockwood received a promotion to captain and was made chief of staff to Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Fleet, headquartered aboard the light cruiser USS Richmond (CL-9). Lockwood, who wanted sea duty above all else, once again had to endure a tour of shore duty, albeit an important one. His influence on the Navy’s thinking about how to effectively build and utilize modern submarines in wartime had slowly, if not reluctantly, been adopted by a peacetime sub force undergoing the changes needed to prepare for war.

  In February 1941, Lockwood, fresh from his duties as submarine force chief of staff, arrived in London as a naval attaché. He immediately set out to learn as much as he could about the war now raging in Europe (in London he got a taste of the Blitz), especially the war at sea where the Royal Navy was fighting a desperate, all-out battle against German U-boat commerce raiders in the North Atlantic. He was still in London when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. All he could do was fume at being stuck on the beach out of the shooting war, while sending requests to the Navy’s Bureau of Naval Personnel (BuPers) in Washington, virtually begging for an assignment at sea. His requests were denied because, said the bureau, it could find nothing for him to do, since almost all of the seagoing billets had already been filled, many of them, Lockwood noted sourly, by officers junior to him. Then things suddenly changed.

  On March 5, 1942, Lockwood received a promotion to rear admiral and orders to proceed to Fremantle, Australia. There he was to relieve Captain John Wilkes, commander of the ragtag SubsAsiatic Force of the Asiatic Fleet that had been driven out of the Philippines by the Japanese. Lockwood was ecstatic. This was what he’d been craving all along: action in subs against America’s main enemy. Not in subs exactly, but in command of subs, which was the next best thing, as Lockwood had never fired a torpedo in anger during a real war, just in exercises for war. On his arrival in Australia, Lockwood immediately assumed two hats: Commander, Submarines, Southwest Pacific Fleet (ComSubSoWesPac) and, temporarily, Commander, Task Force 51, a surface ship command. His arrival had precipitated other shifts in the evolving submarine command structure in Australia d
ictated by events in the Philippines and in Java, both of which soon fell under Japanese control. These changes included the reassignment of Rear Admiral Ralph W. Christie, in charge of submarines in Brisbane, to the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport, Rhode Island. Captain James Fife, head of the administrative staff of SubsAsiatic, replaced Christie in Brisbane, while an exhausted Wilkes returned to the United States for reassignment.

  In early 1942 the submarine force, reacting to the requirements thrust upon it by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, quickly reorganized from its original three commands into two. The SubsAsiatic force was decommissioned, putting Wilkes out of a job, and folded into the two remaining Pacific commands: ComSubSoWesPac, headquartered in Fremantle, Australia, and now headed by Lockwood; and Commander, Submarines, Pacific Fleet (ComSubPac), in Pearl Harbor, under the command of Rear Admiral Robert H. English. The two commands operating within their assigned areas of the Pacific would continue to function independently of each other but would share common tactical and technical attributes, including intelligence collection and distribution.

  Thus, Pearl Harbor subs commanded by Admiral English (ComSubPac) operated in an area extending west from Pearl Harbor to the eastern coast of China, north to Hokkaido, Japan, and south to the Caroline Islands area. Fremantle subs (and for a short time those few subs still based in Brisbane with Captain Fife) commanded by Admiral Lockwood (ComSubSoWesPac) operated in an area that encompassed the Philippine Islands, the southern coast of China, all of Indochina, Borneo, Java, the Malay Barrier, and New Guinea in the Coral Sea area. Lockwood’s SoWesPac area, with its far-flung conquered territories, had forced the Japanese to weave a tangled web of shipping routes. By necessity these routes were shorter and more compact than those in ComSubPac’s area of operations. In either case these were immense areas in which to conduct war patrols, and submarines, whether departing from Pearl Harbor or Fremantle, had to endure long voyages to reach their assigned areas.

  Despite his wearing two hats, Lockwood immediately focused his attention on reviving a dispirited force of submariners in Fremantle. Not only had they been driven south of the Malay Barrier by the advancing Japanese, but their main offensive weapon, the Mk 14 torpedo, had proven itself unreliable. Far too many Japanese ships were escaping from attacks by U.S. subs, which so far had little to show for their efforts. Even worse, the seemingly unstoppable Japanese army, after overrunning the Philippines, Malaya, and the Netherlands East Indies with their prize oil fields, seemed poised for a thrust south to Australia. Intelligence reports claimed that there were 200,000 Japanese troops in the Malay area alone. The only thing that stood between them and the Australians and New Zealanders were the open waters of the Indian Ocean. Lockwood’s subs with their lousy torpedoes were in no shape to mount a robust defense. Fortunately, the threat to Australia never materialized. Lockwood and his submariners, breathing easier, concentrated their efforts on solving more immediate problems.

  The introduction by Lockwood of the new sub force war-fighting doctrine and its implementation by a new breed of aggressive young skippers eager to fight the Japanese, coupled with Uncle Charlie’s optimism and enthusiasm, began to have a positive effect. As noted earlier, the submarine doctrine in use at the beginning of the war was based on outmoded and conservative peacetime principles themselves founded on a strategy designed principally to sink an enemy’s warships, not its cargo ships. In practice it proved useless under actual combat conditions in the Pacific, where the vagaries of geography and the wide dispersal of Japanese naval forces nullified the doctrine’s effects. Moreover, its reliance on passive sonar for targeting, minimal periscope exposure, and an almost unshakable belief in the safety of deep submergence during daylight hours proved totally inadequate. Senior commanders at first failed to realize how essential it was to cut off the lines of supply Japan needed to sustain her garrisons in the Pacific, and that it wasn’t the Japanese navy that had to be destroyed, but Japan’s merchant marine.

  Despite the meager sinkings of Japanese ships by U.S. subs early on, it didn’t take long for those senior commanders and for the sub skippers on patrol to discover just how badly flawed their old war-fighting doctrine really was. With the experience gained from operating in enemy-controlled waters, submarine command shaped a new doctrine emphasizing innovative and daring tactics. These tactics were perfectly suited to the younger skippers fast replacing the older, conservative ones from the prewar era. New tactics emphasized attacks on merchant ships instead of warships; night surface torpedo attacks instead of submerged night attacks; the use of radar and sonar to track and attack targets; high-speed daylight surface patrolling to cover more territory; the use of more frequent and prolonged periscope observations; and much more.

  As this new generation of skippers took command of the submarines coming off the builders ways at the Electric Boat Corporation in Groton, Connecticut; the navy yards in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Mare Island, California; the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company in Manitowoc, Wisconsin; and later, Cramp Shipbuilding in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the tide began to turn against the Japanese. Even so, no one, least of all Lockwood, had any illusions but that it would be a long, hard road back and that a lot of mistakes would be made along the way.

  As the new doctrine entered sub force planning and operations, Lockwood continued to make steady progress toward solving the Mk 14 torpedo dilemma and convincing the ossified and bullheaded BuOrd that the sub force had a serious problem with its main offensive weapon and that it had to be solved pronto.

  Two major flaws in the Mk 14—a penchant to run deeper than set and a sometimes obstinate refusal to explode—had been traced in part to the weapon’s faulty depth-control mechanism and its overly complicated magnetic influence exploder. Through extensive testing Lockwood and his technicians traced the problems to flaws in the design of both the depth controller and exploder. This evidence proved conclusively that the torpedo problem lay not with incompetent submarine fire-control personnel, as BuOrd had claimed, but with BuOrd itself. In time, and with more testing, Lockwood would make the further discovery that the poorly designed firing pin used in the exploder mechanism was too flimsy to withstand a collision between a torpedo warhead and a ship’s hull, as it sometimes caused the pin to bend out of shape and jam in its guideway before it could contact the primer to set it off. It took a lot of time and hard work to remedy these three interrelated problems, which plagued sub crews on and off until the end of the war. Lockwood the doer found himself fully engaged in SoWesPac submarine operations when things suddenly changed again.

  On January 21, 1943, at 6:50 a.m., the Philippine Clipper, a four-engine Martin M-130 flying boat on loan from Pan American World Airways to the Navy, approached the coast of California near San Francisco after a routine thirteen-hour flight from Pearl Harbor. Aboard were ComSubPac Admiral English, three of his senior staff officers, six other Navy passengers, including a nurse, and a civilian crew of nine.

  The Pan Am base at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay radioed the clipper to report heavy rain, fog, and high winds, and to advise that under such conditions it would not be possible for the plane to land before daylight and that it should divert to San Diego. At 7:15 the pilot radioed that they were on a course due west, back out over the Pacific. Seven minutes later he requested a navigation fix, after which the plane was not heard from again.

  The clipper’s disappearance remained a mystery until an air search team spotted its wreckage a week later in the Ukiah area near Boonville, California, ninety miles from San Francisco and twenty-two miles from the ocean. The big plane had come in low, shearing off treetops before it crashed into a mountain, killing all nineteen aboard. The bodies were found with the wreckage in a fire-blackened ravine. It took days and the cutting in of a road from the main highway through heavily forested terrain with bulldozers to remove the dead and to comb through the wreckage for any classified documents relating to submarine operations. The wreckage was later buried under
tons of earth.1

  English had flown to California to inspect submarine support facilities at Hunters Point and Mare Island, after which he had planned to inspect those at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and at Panama. The shock caused by his death, and the deaths of his staff of experts on submarine engineering and weapons, swept through sub command. Lockwood in Australia learned of it in a newspaper report, not through official channels. It threw the entire command structure into chaos and left a big hole at SubPac in Pearl Harbor.

  According to Lockwood, he had no desire to be named English’s replacement. He immediately wrote a letter expressing his preference to remain in Fremantle, where he was closer to the submarine front lines than he would be in Pearl, and sent it to one of his former bosses, who was now chief of staff to Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and Commander in Chief, United States Fleet (Cominch). The crafty Lockwood claimed that the job of ComSubPac, should it be forthcoming, would be a step backward for him. In truth, Lockwood coveted the position of ComSubPac and hoped to get it. When he was selected for the position by Admiral King, and after receiving orders on February 5 to pack his bags for Hawaii, he didn’t hesitate for a moment. Lockwood apparently suspected that his selection had been partially influenced by old friends in high places in the Navy bureaucracy. But his friend, King’s chief of staff, assured him, “You were selected on the platform that the officer best qualified to determine the submarine policy throughout the Pacific should be at Pearl Harbor.”2 That was true. To run the submarine war the Navy had not only picked the most qualified officer but also one of the best submarine experts in the world. Ralph Christie, recalled from Rhode Island, took over Lockwood’s old job in Fremantle.