Hellcats
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Lockwood arrived in Pearl Harbor on February 15, 1943, sporting on both sleeves the three gold stripes of a vice admiral. After settling in at the Makalapa Hill bachelor officers’ quarters (BOQ) overlooking the sub base, Lockwood confronted a mountain of issues that included everything from personnel assignments, lack of spare parts, and the need for enlarged repair facilities, to torpedo shortages, especially of the new Mk 18 wakeless electric. There were also serious issues regarding intelligence collection and its interpretation and the need for better communications. The inspection of West Coast submarine support facilities, which had been postponed due to English’s death and which Lockwood planned to complete in his stead, would have to wait until after he’d had a chance to familiarize himself with the late admiral’s operations at Pearl. Busy as he was, Lockwood still found time to reevaluate overall submarine strategy and give consideration to refining it. There were problems, too, with the new tactical doctrine that needed immediate attention. Yet looking beyond these problems he saw that there existed certain opportunities that hadn’t existed before, brought about by the influx of those young, eager, and aggressive skippers. Lockwood decided to put those skippers to the test. If they passed, as he believed they would, then there might soon be a way to hit the Japanese where they’d not been hit before.
CHAPTER THREE
The Wahoo’s Last Dive
As long as men have gone to sea, whether in peacetime or war, it is understood that ships will sink and sailors will die. It is a given that their remains—flesh and bones, wood and steel—will rest in the sea for eternity, because, as every sailor is taught, the sea never gives up its secrets, nor its dead.
Of course, that’s no longer true, at least not since the discovery of the Titanic and other long-lost liners and warships. Today the question is: What other ships might yet be found and what mysteries might be solved by their discovery? The answer to part of that question arrived in 2006, 2007, and again in 2010 when the news media reported that five lost World War II-era U.S. Navy submarines had been located: The USS Lagarto (SS-371), the USS Wahoo (SS-238), the USS Perch (SS-176), the USS Grunion (SS-216), and the USS Flier (SS-250). Three of the five subs had been lost with all hands. Not only had the subs been found, they’d also been filmed by the dive teams who located them.
Of the five submarines, the USS Wahoo was arguably the most celebrated, even though another sub, the USS Trout (SS-202), was famous for having spirited from under the noses of the invading Japanese twenty tons of Philippine government gold bullion and silver coins for safekeeping at Fort Knox, Kentucky. (The plucky Trout was sunk on or about February 29, 1944, in action off the Ryukyus east of Formosa.)
As for the Wahoo, her commanding officer, Commander Dudley W. “Mush” Morton, a Naval Academy class of 1930 standout, personified the ideals of heroism American submarine skippers of his generation sought to emulate. He was uncommonly fearless and utterly tenacious in his pursuit of the enemy, at times even a bit reckless. Few if any of his peers could match his drive and nerve. From the day he arrived in the Pacific, Morton seemed determined to carve a name for himself in the annals of submarine history. According to submarine historian Theodore Roscoe, “If the philosophy of a combat submariner could be summed up in a single word, one would certainly suffice for Morton’s: ‘Attack!’ ”1 To be sure, Morton possessed all of the traits a World War II submariner needed to succeed. And while the Lagarto, Perch, Grunion, and Flier were fighting subs with experienced skippers, they never had a chance to amass the combat record of Morton and the Wahoo.
In July 2007, a search team found the Wahoo in La Pérouse Strait, a body of water separating the upper tip of Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido from the crab claw-like southern tip of the Russian island of Sakhalin (formerly Karafuto). The strait connects the Sea of Japan to the Sea of Okhotsk. The Wahoo’s wreckage lies in 213 feet of water close to where she was attacked and sunk by Japanese planes and ships on October 11, 1943. On September 20, in company with the USS Sawfish (SS-276), Morton had driven his submarine westward from the Sea of Okhotsk through La Pérouse Strait into the Sea of Japan in search of targets. He never returned.
Seven months prior to Morton’s fateful September patrol, Charles Lockwood was still getting the feel of his new job as ComSubPac after the death of Admiral English. Along with English’s duties, he inherited the admiral’s staff, among whom was ComSubPac operations and intelligence officer Commander (soon Captain) Richard G. Voge, the former skipper of the USS Sealion, which, as recounted earlier, had been sunk at Cavite. Earlier, and with Lockwood’s blessing, English had pulled Voge off his new command based in Australia, the former USS Squalus (SS-192) now renamed the Sailfish,2 and installed him in Pearl Harbor.
Voge was an exceptional officer, brilliant, thoughtful, and articulate. He also had an uncanny ability, which he’d developed from close readings of intelligence reports, to anticipate Japanese merchant ship movements in time to redeploy patrolling submarines into position to attack them. Lockwood had an extraordinary teammate in Voge, who served with him until the end of the war. As Lockwood’s right-hand man, Voge had enormous influence on the evolution of submarine operations throughout the Pacific theater. In typical fashion, and because nothing escaped his purview, Voge had been keeping an eye on the all-but-landlocked Sea of Japan, with its shipping routes running arrow-straight between the Asian mainland and western Japan. Those routes had been inked in red on the big pull-down map of Japan on a wall in Lockwood’s office. The Sea of Japan had yet to be exploited for targets by U.S. submarines, so it wasn’t long before Lockwood and Voge began to plan a possible foray into its confined waters. The biggest challenge they faced in their planning was how to get submarines in there and how to get them out without being caught by the enemy.
The Sea of Japan is surrounded by mainland Asia, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese islands. Its 250-mile width and 900-mile diagonal length covers an area of about 390,000 square miles. It has a maximum depth of over 12,000 feet, its bottom running up into rocky shallows against the western coast of Japan. In some respects Japan’s coastline, with its small, rugged islands populated by seabirds and its deep inlets and big-shouldered bluffs, looks similar to the coast of Maine. Local weather conditions are influenced by the stormy Sea of Okhotsk and vary wildly by season and location. Gale-force winds, heavy fog, and below-freezing temperatures (La Pérouse Strait can freeze solid in the winter) rack the sea’s mid and northern latitudes well into early summer, while in the south, milder temperatures and fair weather are more common.
Ships can enter the Sea of Japan from the East China Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Sea of Okhotsk through five straits that vary significantly in both width and depth. In the far north the Strait of Tartary lies wedged between the eastern coast of Siberian Russia and the western coast of Karafuto; the aforementioned La Pérouse Strait gives access to the Sea of Japan from the Sea of Okhotsk; the twisting, narrow Tsugaru Strait sits between southern Hokkaido and northern Honshu; the Shimonoseki Strait separates southern Honshu from northern Kyushu; the Tsushima Strait, between the southern tip of Kyushu and the southeastern coast of Korea, is divided into eastern and western channels by the fortresslike Tsushima Island. Lockwood and Voge knew that the mission they had in mind would not be easy to execute nor free of risk. On the contrary, they knew that the natural and man-made obstacles lurking in the straits might be a death trap for submarines.
Voge had studied the intelligence reports supplied to ComSubPac by ICPOA (Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Areas), the Pacific Fleet’s intelligence-collection operation based at Pearl Harbor. The reports convinced Voge that all five straits were patrolled by antisubmarine aircraft and patrol boats and sown with antisubmarine mines. Moreover, ICPOA believed that shore batteries lined both sides of the narrow Tsugaru and Shimonoseki straits. As for the Strait of Tartary, its northernmost approaches from the Sea of Okhotsk were often icebound a good part of the year. Russian destroyers patrolled the southern end o
f the strait.
Voge presented his findings to Lockwood. Declaring the Tsugaru, Shimonoseki, and Tartary straits unsuited for passage by submarines, Voge and his boss gave the Tsushima Strait and La Pérouse Strait a close look.
Because Tsushima was wider than the other four straits and had a deep-water trench, it seemed to be an ideal entry point for submarines. The problem with it was that ICPOA had little in the way of solid intelligence regarding the size and density of the minefields sown in the strait and its approaches. To further complicate matters the Tsushima Strait had a unique hydrographic feature known as the Kuroshio Current, the Japan Current, sometimes called the Black Stream for its deep blue color.
A branch of the equatorial current of the Pacific Ocean, the Kuroshio flows northeastward at a speed of approximately three knots along the coast of Formosa to Japan and thence into the Sea of Japan. The current continues northward until it reaches La Pérouse Strait, where it flows out into the Sea of Okhotsk. Voge pondered what hydrodynamic effect the inflowing or outflowing Kuroshio Current might have on a submerged submarine moving through the straits. Would it slow or speed up its passage?
The biggest drawback Voge saw to using the Tsushima Strait to enter the Sea of Japan was its minefields. Lockwood agreed. He believed that they posed a virtually impregnable barrier to penetration by submarines, surfaced or submerged, never mind the presence of antisubmarine air and surface patrols. Faced with having to penetrate an uncharted mine barrier, he and Voge focused instead on La Pérouse Strait. Intelligence reports indicated that it had a safe, unmined channel that the Japanese allowed neutral Soviet surface ships to use when sailing between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Russian naval base at Vladivostok on the Siberian coast. Intelligence indicated that the Japanese had sown mines in the La Pérouse channel at various depths between forty feet and seventy feet. This allowed Russian merchant ships—Japanese, too—to make safe passage, as very few ships in the world other than warships drew more than thirty-five feet of water. The mines, then, posed a danger only to submerged submarines, not surfaced ones.
Intelligence regarding the La Pérouse mine plants had been gleaned from various sources, including Japanese sailors picked up at sea from ships that had been sunk by subs operating close to Japan; from notices to mariners in the form of published bulletins distributed by the Japanese to local shippers, warning them of mined waters to be avoided; and from decrypted enemy radio broadcasts containing similar information transmitted to Japanese ships in the vicinity of the Sea of Japan. ICPOA had also picked up a few sketchy reports from spies who had made contact with Russian seamen familiar with La Pérouse Strait. Lockwood reasoned that if Russian ships could transit the strait via the safe channel, then so might surfaced American submarines. He also reasoned that even if a sub skipper didn’t know exactly where the channel was he could always trail a Russian ship whose master knew what course to steer.
After sifting through these reports and weighing the pros and cons, Lockwood and Voge came to the same conclusion: It was high time that U.S. subs poked their bows into the Sea of Japan.
As Lockwood’s plan to get subs into the Sea of Japan began to jell, he took time out to undertake the West Coast inspection tour Admiral English’s death had left unaccomplished. From Pearl Harbor Lockwood flew to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, then to San Francisco, ending his tour in San Diego. The submarine-repair facilities he toured were not as well equipped nor as efficient as Lockwood had hoped for. A lack of facilities and especially of trained civilian personnel hampered efforts to repair submarines and return them to the combat zone as fast as possible. Lockwood realized that it would take a special task force dedicated to the job of revamping the facilities and speeding up the workflow to accomplish what was needed.
While in San Diego Lockwood received an invitation from Dr. Gaylord P. Harnwell, director of the University of California Division of War Research (UCDWR), to visit the facilities Harnwell directed at the U.S. Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory (USNRSL) at Point Loma. UCDWR had been established in early 1941 to carry out research and development for the Navy under a contract let by the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Harnwell was a respected physicist and educator from Cambridge and Princeton universities. He had also taught physics at the California Institute of Technology and, before the war, had headed the physics department at the University of Pennsylvania. Steeped in advanced electronics and engineering concepts, he wanted to demonstrate for Lockwood some of the new prosubmarine gear, as it was called, undergoing development at UCDWR’s labs. Because prosubmarine gear was high on Lockwood’s list of priorities the sub force needed to counter Japanese antisubmarine measures, he eagerly accepted Harnwell’s invitation to see what progress had been made in that area.
Earlier in the war Harnwell’s efforts had been focused primarily on the problems associated with what was then called “subsurface warfare,” a discipline that encompassed not just antisubmarine weaponry but also mine detection. As the tempo of Pacific submarine operations increased, the need arose for devices to enhance the inherent stealth of U.S. submarines and to improve their survivability in combat. Harnwell and his staff of scientists had been working on such devices and were eager to demonstrate them for Lockwood’s benefit. Not only did they have a rapt audience but also one who understood how difficult such specialized work was and how much time it had taken to develop the prototypes of the gear on display.
Harnwell demonstrated just about everything in UCDWR’s inventory. It included a device that could detect an incoming torpedo’s range and bearing; a sonar decoy similar to that of the German U-boat “pillenwerfer,” a cartridge filled with calcium hydride that when mixed with seawater produced huge quantities of hydrogen gas that bubbled like an out-of-control Alka-Seltzer tablet to confuse enemy sonar; ultrasensitive long-range passive—listening only—sonar for the detection of enemy ships; a bathythermograph, a device that recorded the varying temperature layers in seawater, which, because it had a masking effect on sonar, made submarine detection more difficult than it already was; depth-charge direction and range indicators; and, to help reduce a submarine’s self-generated noise signature, a propeller cavitation warning device. Amazed at what he saw, Lockwood lamented that the sub force still lacked these “Alice in Wonderland” gadgets, which he believed would have vastly increased sinkings of Japanese ships and no doubt have saved hundreds of American lives. All he could do was put the devices on his wish list; he knew that despite the best efforts of Harnwell’s scientists, it would take many more months of testing and refinement before the advanced prosubmarine gear reached the submarine fleet—if it ever did.
After conducting a tour of the lab, Harnwell sprang a surprise on Lockwood. Harnwell and his assistant, Dr. Malcolm Henderson, who, like Harnwell, was a brilliant, dedicated physicist, took their guest for a cruise off Point Loma in San Diego Harbor to demonstrate an experimental sonar device capable of detecting underwater mines and which was slated for installation in navy minesweepers. Henderson had led the group of scientists responsible for creating the device and was eager to demonstrate its abilities. Despite being a prototype with a spaghettilike breadboard electrical layout, the thing performed well enough to give Lockwood a peek into the future, even though, he admitted later, he failed to grasp its significance.
The device Harnwell had demonstrated for Lockwood was called FAM-PAS, or Frequency and Mechanically Plotted Area Scan. Its name would soon be changed to Frequency Modulated Sonar and later shortened to FM sonar, then just FMS. The device used a then-new audio technique designed for commercial radio broadcasting called frequency modulation. Unlike AM, or amplitude modulation broadcasts, in which the audio carrier wave frequency is constant, the FM audio carrier wave varies in frequency. Conventional sonar units of the 1940s used a short pulse of sound transmitted on a constant frequency followed by a long silence as the return echo from a detected object was converted into an audible sound on the same frequency. By contrast, FM sonar emitted a steady, c
ontinuous signal modulated to avoid interference between the outgoing signal and the returning echo from a detected object, thus ending the requirement for a time lag. The experimental unit Harnwell demonstrated could locate submerged objects of every description, including shoals, sandbars, kelp, steel submarine nets, and even steel-hulled ships. In an earlier test it had even detected dummy mines. Realizing that such a device would interest Lockwood, Dr. Henderson explained that though FM sonar was originally developed for use by minesweepers, it could also be used by submerged submarines to plot a course into a defended enemy harbor.
Though Lockwood was impressed with Harnwell’s and Henderson’s Alice in Wonderland invention, he didn’t see how the device could be used by a submarine. At that time submarine targets were concentrated in deep-ocean areas of the Pacific where an attacking sub had room to maneuver and to evade Japanese escort vessels. The harbors where Japanese ships sometimes took refuge from attack were in most cases too shallow for submarines to enter without being detected, even if they had a device that could plot a course into and out of a harbor, so it wouldn’t make any difference. For Lockwood, FM sonar was an interesting gadget that not only proved the scientists at UCDWR were inventive, but also that the Navy’s substantial financial investment in the lab was starting to pay off.
Lockwood returned to Pearl Harbor buoyed by what he saw at UCDWR but disappointed by the long gestation period needed to develop the devices and to manufacture them in quantity for use by the sub force. Nevertheless, he reckoned that with his visit to UCDWR the force had established one of its most valuable contacts with the scientific world, and with Harnwell and Henderson, who would later play major roles in future submarine operations. After writing a report on his trip for distribution to Admiral King, Admiral Nimitz, and his own immediate staff, Lockwood put aside what he’d learned in San Diego for more pressing matters. At the top of his list was the get-acquainted look-see patrol of the Sea of Japan by a task force of submarines.