by Peter Sasgen
As the pain of Morton’s death slowly eased, Lockwood thought about his visit to the UCDWR labs earlier in the year and the demonstration of FM sonar that had been conducted for his benefit off Point Loma. In his mind a bell began to ring, softly at first, then louder, until its peal began to slowly but surely unleash a chain of events that would culminate in what would come to be known as Operation Barney. It also unleashed a chain of events that would have a profound and lasting effect on the lives of a select group of submariners and, most especially, those of the USS Bonefish.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Commander from Georgia
On March 7, 1943, Mrs. Freeland A. Daubin, wife of the former Commander Submarines Atlantic (ComSubLant), smashed a bottle of champagne on the bow of the USS Bonefish. Duly christened, the submarine slid down the building ways of the Electric Boat Corporation in Groton, Connecticut, on a sunny but cold day, pennants and red-white-and-blue bunting flapping in the wind as she entered the Thames River stern-first. She was one of those good-looking Gato-class fleet-type submarines: a long, beautifully proportioned vessel, her low freeboard sweeping back over a 312-foot length and 27-foot beam to a narrow and trim stern. With her sharply raked snout and rounded gray body shaded with black, the Bonefish in many ways resembled the Florida game fish after which she was named.
Sitting in the water fully loaded with fuel, ordnance, and food, the Bonefish displaced 1,800 tons and drew 17 feet of water. Divided into nine watertight compartments, they included two engine rooms housing four General Motors Winton 16-248A 16-cylinder, 1,600-horsepower diesel engines. Each engine drove a DC generator (thus, diesel-electric drive) that supplied electricity to the ship’s four main propulsion motors and for lighting, air-conditioning, radar, and communications, among other things.
Connected through reduction gears to the ship’s twin propeller shafts, the motors drove the Bonefish at a top speed of twenty-one knots on the surface. Submerged, two massive 126-cell rechargeable electric storage batteries provided sufficient power to propel the Bonefish at nine knots, though for only a short duration and with the penalty of a high discharge rate. A more usable underwater speed of two or three knots, though limiting maneuverability, conserved electricity and provided greater submerged cruising range. When the submarine returned to the surface one or more diesels recharged the batteries while those not used for battery charging drove the ship. When all four main engines went online for high-speed surface cruising the small auxiliary diesel picked up the extra electrical load needed to keep the batteries topped off.
The Bonefish’s main armament consisted often 21-inch torpedo tubes: six forward, four aft. She carried ten war shots in her tubes and fourteen reloads. A pair of 20mm guns augmented the old-style long-barreled four-inch .50-caliber gun mounted on her forward deck. Later, from experience gained during war patrols, submarines employed heavier armament, usually a five-inch .25-caliber deck gun and twin 40mms. Submarine command didn’t encourage the use of deck guns because return fire from enemy ships could cause serious damage to the sub’s pressure hull. Also, because of the sub’s low freeboard, exposed gun crews ran the risk of being swept overboard, if not killed or wounded by enemy fire. Yet there would come a time late in the war when Japanese ships were so scarce that submarines assumed the role of submersible gunboats, damaging and sinking Japanese small craft not worth the expenditure of a torpedo.
Big submarines like the Bonefish, with their usual complements of eighty-one men—seven officers and seventy-four enlisted—were well designed for their offensive role in the Pacific, given that many of Admiral Lockwood’s ideas had been incorporated into them. With a fuel capacity of almost 90,000 gallons and a cruising range of 13,000 miles, a fleet-type submarine could easily undertake a sixty- to seventy-day war patrol to hunt down and sink Japanese ships.
After fitting out and undergoing sea trials the Bonefish was commissioned on May 31, 1943, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Thomas W. Hogan. During four war patrols out of Fremantle, Australia, Hogan, an aggressive and resourceful skipper, sank seven shipsb for a total of 34,329 tons.1 During that period the Bonefish compiled an enviable record that included Navy Unit Commendations for her first, third, and fourth war patrols. Little more than a year later, on June 13, 1944, in a ceremony attended by ComSubSoWesPac Vice Admiral Ralph W. Christie, Lockwood’s replacement, Hogan relinquished command of the veteran Bonefish to thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Lott Edge, USN.
Lawrence Edge had graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1935. Tall and slender, he had a prominent forehead topped by thinning dark hair (his portrait in the Lucky Bag class yearbook foreshadowed this early baldness). The Lucky Bag remarked on Edge’s pleasant personality, soft Southern drawl, and deep inner nature. The latter might account for his musical artistry, both on piano and violin, his interest in photography, woodworking, and drawing and painting. His watercolors of tropical flowers are sublimely beautiful. One might think Edge would have been more at home on the faculty of a small college, happily ensconced in an office strewn with books, than in the hot conning tower of a submarine filled with sweating sailors. Not so.
Upon graduation from the Naval Academy, Ensign Edge served a two-and-a-half-year tour of duty in the battleship USS Maryland (BB-46). It may have been that the “real Navy” of battleships and cruisers that so appealed to Charles Lockwood appealed less to Edge’s deep inner nature than one might expect inasmuch as he requested duty in submarines, which even then was a service still shunned by officers with ambitions to flag rank.
After selection for duty in subs Lawrence reported to the U.S. Navy’s modernized and bustling submarine school at New London, Connecticut, in January 1938. A week after graduating from sub school, on June 15, 1938, he and Sarah Simms married in Atlanta, Georgia. They had met while Lawrence was attending Georgia Tech and Sarah was attending Hollins College in Virginia. Their romance continued through Lawrence’s graduation from the Naval Academy and Sarah’s graduation from Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.
Lawrence and Sarah came from prominent families in Columbus and Atlanta, Georgia. Both were descended from ancestors long associated with the cultural and business life of those cities. Their June wedding became a centerpiece in the society pages of the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer and the Atlanta Constitution. The Atlanta Georgian’s society columnist, Polly Peachtree, called it a “fashionable event,” and dubbed Sarah “the charming Atlanta belle” and Lawrence “the handsome naval officer.” The papers featured long, detailed descriptions of the bride’s and her attendants’ gowns, the floral arrangements, the music, even the interior of the church. The Constitution gushed that attendees included fashionable members of Atlanta society and prominent out-of-town guests.
A month after their wedding a full-page banner headline topping the Constitution’s society page announced: “Pacific Ocean Borders Front Yard of Atlanta Bride.” An accompanying article informed society-conscious Atlantans that the newlyweds had arrived in the exotic Pacific outpost of Hawaii, with its palm trees, swaying grass skirts, and uninhibited American sailors, and where Lawrence, now a lieutenant junior grade, started his career in submarines aboard the big V-class Narwhal (whose six-inch guns would in the future bombard Matsuwa To during that pioneering foray into the Sea of Japan).
After he completed his tour in the Narwhal in December 1940, Edge reported aboard the rusty World War I-vintage submarine O-4 based at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where many obsolete submarines were laid up before scrapping. Unlike her sisters destined for the breaker’s yard, the O-4 had been chosen by the Navy for duty as a submarine school training boat. Edge worked hard and put in long hours on the refurbishing and fitting out of the rusty old sub. Then, in July 1941, with World War II looming for America, Edge received orders to report to the Naval Academy to undertake a two-year postgraduate course of instruction in what was then called “radio engineering.” This new field married electronics to communications and other technologies that
were coming into wider use in the Navy. The equipment required highly skilled technicians to operate it and repair it.
The assignment must have convinced Lawrence that he was doomed to attend classes ashore while the war everyone knew was coming got started without him. He may have doubted that he’d ever get aboard a submarine to join the battle. After all, it was no secret that submarines would play a major role in a war against the Japanese, and every submariner alive, veteran and novice alike, wanted aboard one. A lot happened during the two years he and Sarah spent together in Annapolis. The most important event was the birth of their first child, Sarah. Meanwhile, overseas, Hitler, after conquering eastern Europe, invaded the USSR. The Japanese, after attacking Pearl Harbor, overran the Far East.
Lawrence endured his two years at Annapolis far from the action, studying basic and advanced electronics. His course of instruction included periodic bouts of temporary duty at places like the Sperry Gyroscope Company on Long Island, the National Broadcasting Company in New York City, the Radio Corporation of America in New Jersey, Philco Radio & Television Corporation in Philadelphia, and many others. His duties included visits to the Fleet Sound School in Key West, Florida, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He and a pregnant Sarah moved up and down the East Coast together, often living in temporary quarters while enjoying married life in the Navy even as Lawrence grew impatient for submarine work.
The companies and institutions where Lawrence learned the practical working side of electronics had earlier started gearing up for war by developing and then refining the very technologies Edge was studying. During the period that Lawrence and Sarah traveled up and down the East Coast from duty station to duty station, Manila fell to the Japanese; the U.S. Navy mauled the Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway; the Allies began to turn the tide against the German U-boat onslaught in the North Atlantic; and Russian troops, after encircling Germany’s Sixth Army, began to break the Wehrmacht’s stranglehold on Stalingrad.
Lawrence’s salvation, as it were, arrived in two phases. On May 1, 1943, he received a promotion to the rank of lieutenant commander. Then in late July, as he was completing his studies, he received orders assigning him to New London for instruction at the Prospective Submarine Commanding Officer (PCO) School. This was a major turning point in his life and career, for the goal of any seagoing naval officer, especially in wartime, is command at sea.
An officer selected for PCO School and possible command of a fleet-type submarine faced a formidable challenge. This despite the fact that when the United States entered World War II the Navy needed all the trained submariners it could get to man the new boats coming out of the building yards at the rate of four or five a month. Only the very best officers received training as potential skippers. To succeed in the pressure-cooker environment of submarine combat, a candidate for command had to be not only highly intelligent and have an analytical mind, but he also had to be resourceful, self-confident, and above all, unflappable under pressure. Consequently, PCO candidates were carefully screened to weed out individuals who lacked the qualities essential for command; a lot of men didn’t make the grade. Men like Lawrence Edge, who did, joined a select group destined for command of a submarine in a Navy that had undergone such swift and far-ranging changes in outlook and structure that it scarcely resembled the Navy America had when it entered the war.
With the increased tempo in the Pacific at last turning back the Japanese, Lawrence arrived in New London in August 1943 for PCO instruction, which he completed in late September. He then received orders to report in late November to the Seventh Fleet and to the headquarters of ComSubSoWesPac, 13,000 miles away in Fremantle, Australia.
Lawrence took leave at home with his family in Atlanta before departing for Australia. He and Sarah knew that they’d not see each other again for a long time, perhaps a year or more. Though eager to undertake his new duties, which would culminate in command of a submarine, Lawrence knew that this achievement, important as it was, wouldn’t ease the pain of prolonged separation from his wife and daughter and the longing it would cause. It was no different for Sarah and for all the wives, husbands, and friends of the men and women serving in the armed forces; they, too, would suffer the pain of extended separation, and with it the constant, nagging fear that their loved ones might be killed.
As for submariners, the fear of death was something they learned to live with, though it was never far from their minds, given the dangers inherent in submarine operations themselves, and not just from enemy action. Yet by their nature submariners are optimists. They have to be, for after all, they’d volunteered (the submarine service is an all-volunteer force) to be sealed up in a steel hull—some would say an iron coffin—for the duration of a war patrol. Other than the ship’s officers only a handful of enlisted men ever got to see the world outside their submarine during a patrol. What kind of men would volunteer to spend a good part of their lives living together in cramped, hot, smelly spaces enduring physical and mental stress while under constant danger from the Japanese, if not their own machinery and the sea itself?
One answer is that the submariners’ lifelong bond of brotherhood and camaraderie with shipmates is like few others in the military service. Another answer is that because the duty is so demanding submariners have always had a certain mystique, as though schooled in some black art or arcane specialty, which is absolutely true, given how complicated subs are. Aboard a submarine, more than in most warships, each man is dependent upon his shipmates for the sub’s performance and safety, if not his own survival. Caution and vigilance are the watchwords aboard a submarine prowling beneath an unforgiving sea, where one mistake can lead to disaster. Thus, after undergoing rigorous and highly specialized training, each officer and enlisted man strove to earn the designation “qualified in submarines” and to wear the twin-dolphins insignia that marked him as a man apart, a man belonging to an elite service, a man who was special, even fearless.
Fearless indeed. Up until just before the start of World War II, it was dangerous to go to sea in a submarine, much less submerge in it. The old submarines of the 1920s, the O-, S-, and R-class boats, though vastly improved over the subs Charles Lockwood had once served in, were still nothing more than leaky rust buckets. Often their hatches didn’t seal properly, and as seawater sluiced into the boat through inch-wide gaps in the hatch’s knife edge, sub crews could only hope that sea pressure would eventually seal them, which it usually did, but not always. Then there was the stench of sweat, oily bilges, and stopped-up heads brimming with human waste. Back then sub sailors had to endure one-hundred-degree-plus temperatures, lack of air-conditioning, and choking diesel fumes. Things weren’t much different from what they were in Lockwood’s day. Stalwarts said that conditions like these built character and fostered camaraderie. No doubt they did, though with the advent of the modern fleet-type submarine in the late 1930s, conditions vastly improved for sub crews. More than shared hardship, the camaraderie fostered during World War II resulted from the shared experience of men fighting to defeat a vicious and pitiless enemy. The camaraderie that such experience engendered in submariners patrolling the Pacific Ocean was outside Sarah’s understanding. She knew only that Lawrence was committed to his profession and that he was determined to carry out his duties to the best of his ability. As close as she and Lawrence were, she could never share with him the closed world he was about to enter. When they parted early in November 1943, there was no way for either of them to know whether they would ever see each other again.
Edge departed from the West Coast on a lengthy sea voyage “down under,” to Australia. From Brisbane, he flew cross-country in an Australian National Airways DC-3. Days later, after arriving at the sprawling submarine base in Fremantle, he reported for duty to Submarine Squadron Sixteen.
The submarine base at Fremantle, on Australia’s western coast, bustled with activity. Submarines departed almost every day on war patrols, while others returned from patrols for refi
ts and crew rotations. A sense of urgency permeated every aspect of submarine operations, from the staff level down to the sailors chipping rust on the boats. Swept up in this urgency, Edge, with little time for rest after his long trip, reported to Admiral Christie’s ComSubSoWesPac operations staff to undergo a two-month crash course in submarine operations, logistics, ordnance, personnel, and much more.
Then, in late January 1944, in preparation for taking command of a submarine, Edge received orders to the USS Bluefish (SS-222) as executive officer. It was invaluable experience for a PCO, as an exec has responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the ship, including all the paperwork and personnel headaches that go with it, to say nothing of his duties as navigator and, in some boats, fire control and attack coordinator. Edge served in the Bluefish during two war patrols under two skippers: Commander George E. Porter and Commander Charles M. Henderson. They could not have had a better exec than Edge.