Hellcats

by Peter Sasgen

  Sarah always received a cable from Lawrence upon his return from a war patrol (“ALL WELL AND SAFE. LETTERS RECEIVED ... FONDEST LOVE AND KISSES”), which was then followed by a letter, in this case, one typical of those he wrote during the war.

  My most precious, most wonderful, most lovely wife,

  Back again [from patrol] to the greatest thrill I know ... getting once again your wonderful letters. Angel, you can’t know ... the feeling, the soaring to the skies of my spirits upon receiving one of your beautiful letters.

  ... I can think of only one thing which can be yet more joyful to me, and that, I know your heart will tell you, is seeing you and little Boo once again. That, I hate to dwell on for any length of time at all, because it just makes me unhappy about being out here.... What I meant is that it makes having to stay out here one minute longer almost unbearable.... [H]ow miserably I failed to write you at all this whole last patrol, long as it was.

  The worst of it, darling, is that I hardly know how to offer you an excuse. It just seems to me even looking back on it, that I was tired the whole time. We started with a pretty strenuous training period, which tired every one to begin with and continued the training for some time after departing; perhaps I just never quite caught up. We did operate somewhat differently as compared to the previous patrol, due principally to the new skipper [of the Bluefish] with different ideas from Capt. Porter. We operated submerged much more of the time and no one feels quite as chipper as when on the surface in the fresh air and sun.

  ... Anyhow, I still consider myself very lucky indeed to have had the training I have had with these two patrols under two different skippers, each of whom I consider good, different as they are. Yes, their very difference has been an advantage to me, being worth more, I am sure, than two patrols with the same one—not that I learned all there is to learn from either one, of course.

  The skipper of the next boat I’m on won’t be so easy for me to analyze, however, as in the case of the Bluefish. Yes, I’ve made my last patrol on the good old Bluefish—and now I’m ready, perhaps, for the first time, for my next job. The new job I’m promised, is to begin soon, which really delights me. I would dread a long wait, as so many of the boys have had. I don’t yet know for sure which boat it will be, but the sooner the better.

  When I first came out here, as you know, I wasn’t really sure whether I was ready for this next job; at the end of my [first job] ... I felt better, but still not too sure; now I do feel sure that I’m ready for it. No, I don’t feel overconfident, but just that the next step in my education for the job will be the job itself. 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—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, Jap though they be, who happened to be on some of those ships).

  I’m not sure how I got started on my “philosophy of war,” or lack of it there, because what I was really discussing was your indescribably wonderful, faithful, and beautiful letter.

  ... Anyhow, in my next job I hope to ... [write] as nearly as possible each and every day, at least a few lines.

  ... [With] all my dearest love, sealed with all my kisses,

  for you and little ... Boo.

  Lawrence2

  As recounted earlier, Edge relieved Hogan on June 13. In only eleven months, and with New London, Annapolis, and Atlanta on the other side of the world, Edge found himself standing on the Bonefish’s quarterdeck taking his crew’s salute and being addressed as “Captain.”

  On June 27, just hours before the Bonefish departed on her fifth war patrol, Edge started a letter to Sarah, telling her how lonely he felt, that he was suffering from a bad case of the blues, adding:Dearest, most precious love ... maybe the time will really come some day when this is all over, and I’ll be holding you and [Boo] in my arms again! Oh, Shug, I shiver all over to think of it, it’s so wonderful.3

  The next day he completed the letter, in which he hinted that he now had command of his own sub.

  Dearest Angel, I do hope this patrol will not find me too busy or too tired to talk to you often in letters. Last patrol was no fun, especially on that account. Even though I don’t like the mental discipline ... required to put my thoughts on paper, I do like talking to you, sweetheart, better than anything I can do out here, except reading and receiving letters from you.

  So far, I like my new job fine, and if we make out as well as I’d like to this time, I’ll definitely call it superior to any I’ve ever had before on a ship! So keep your fingers crossed and don’t forget to say a prayer for us! ... And don’t worry about us either, sugar mine; this may be another long [war patrol], and perhaps even longer [than others]. As to length it is utterly impossible to tell in advance, as you know. My last one [in the Bluefish] was actually just normal full time. Only exceptionally good hunting or damage, or other casualties [would] cause them to be shorter. The long ones, then, are really the rule and the short ones the exceptions. If ours this time is another long one, just remember that I’m thinking of you and Boo just as much as you of me, to say the least, and am anxious to get back to receive your letters. . . .

  After topping off provisions and fuel at Exmouth Gulf, a forward base on the coast of Australia, the Bonefish headed for her patrol area in the Celebes and Sulu seas north of the Malay Barrier. U.S. submarines had found good hunting in these waters. Despite questionable torpedo performance, SoWesPac subs had sunk scores of Japanese marus along with their cargoes destined for the home islands. They had also sunk scores of other marus doubling as troop transports. Thousands of Japanese soldiers along with their weapons, ammunition, and supplies had thus failed to arrive at the many Imperial Army garrisons scattered throughout the conquered territories in East Asia. For the Japanese the loss of these needed troop replacements and food supplies was like dying a slow death from a thousand bleeding wounds.

  Early in the patrol the Bonefish encountered fleets of native fishing vessels and other small craft. For a while Edge shadowed a pair of sea trucks—small wooden-hulled cargo haulers—thinking to sink them with the sub’s four-inch deck gun. But before Edge could act the two gave him the slip into the shallow coastal reaches of Lombok Island. No matter, Edge sought bigger game.

  He found it on July 8, when the Bonefish picked up a convoy of four escorted ships making a sortie through an interisland channel off Cape Mangkalihat. Edge made a high-speed submerged end around to reach a position ahead of the convoy, a maneuver that required nearly five hours to complete. As the Bonefish’s tracking party followed the convoy’s movements, they input fire-control data—the convoy’s range, bearing, speed, and other essentials—into the sub’s Torpedo Data Computer (TDC). A mechanical analog computer, the TDC solved the complex mathematical equations associated with firing torpedoes from a moving submarine at a moving target and hitting it. The TDC didn’t guarantee success; it just made the job easier.

  After sidestepping a group of slow-moving single-masted luggers, Edge swung the Bonefish around to fire torpedoes from the stern tubes. If the attack proved successful and all hell broke loose in the convoy, it would cover the sub’s withdrawal. If a follow-up attack was necessary to finish the job, he’d swing around to fire torpedoes from the bow tubes before the convoy broke up and fled.

  The TDC’s angle solver and position keeper hummed and whirred as the Bonefish closed in. When the machine’s “correct solution” light flashed green, the executive officer, in charge of fire control, bawled, “Shoot anytime, Captain!”

  Edge motioned with both thumbs. “Up scope!” A quick look revealed that the ship he’d chosen to torpedo would cross the Bonefish’s stern in about a minute. The TDC said that he had to shoot now or else lose it.
/>   “Fire . . . !”

  The Bonefish lurched once, twice, three times as her torpedoes lunged for the target.

  Edge saw three streaking wakes emerge from the Bonefish’s stern even as the soundman, headphones clamped to his ears, reported hearing the tin fish running hot, straight, and normal. Edge and his crew waited expectantly, if not patiently, for the torpedoes to reach their target.

  “Captain, torpedo noises mingling with target screw noises.”

  Edge looked at the passing parade of darkened ships and saw ... nothing. The marus and escorts continued merrily on their way, apparently unaware that they had escaped being torpedoed.

  Edge didn’t hesitate a beat. After a quick TDC setup he swung the Bonefish around, fired five torpedoes from the bow tubes at a second target, then, rudder hard over, veered away from the convoy. Five bubbling torpedo wakes spread like fingers, headed for the target. An escort spotted them, heeled around, and, stack belching black smoke, bow cutting water like a knife blade, barreled straight in after the Bonefish. It was time to dunk the scope and go deep! What about those fish? Still nothing. The escort’s screws beat a steady inbound rhythm until her skipper veered away, wary of taking a sixth torpedo in his snout.

  Running deep, the Bonefish evaded detection. Meanwhile, before Edge could regroup for another attack, the convoy hightailed it out of sight. All he could do was shake his head: eight torpedoes fired with nothing to show for it.c Edge reported that he and his men were “feeling mean enough ... to bite any Japs on sight.”

  Ten days later, patrolling east of Palawan at midnight, radar contact! The officer of the deck (OOD) reported the target’s vitals: range, bearing, speed. “Station the tracking party,” Edge ordered.

  He started the pursuit on a course parallel to the target, then slowly closed in to identify it. A night dark as ink, with heavy overcast and fast-moving rain squalls, made a visual identification impossible, though the size and strength of the target’s radar blip indicated it was worth a torpedo.

  While the tracking party kept the TDC updated with radar ranges and bearings, the chase unfolded across miles of ocean. Time dragged. Two hours after the initial contact, the Bonefish arrived at a favorable firing position, though Edge still hadn’t seen the target. No matter; he had the setup pictured in his mind—the target’s course, angle on the bow, distance to the track, all of it.

  Battle stations torpedo!

  As the Bonefish closed in, Edge ordered: “Make ready all tubes! Open outer doors. Stand by forward! Stand by One.”

  The sailor facing the torpedo firing plungers numbered One through Six stood ready at Edge’s order to slap them home.

  Once again the exec at the TDC with its clicking machinery reported, “Shoot anytime, Captain.”

  “Fire One!”

  In quick succession three torpedoes howled out of their tubes. Two veered off on erratic runs. Damn the tin fish! There was no hope for them; they were long gone who knew where? A stopwatch thumbed by the exec timed the sixty-second run of the third straight-running fish. Sixty seconds dragged like sixty hours.

  Edge, on the bridge peering into a seemingly impenetrable curtain of ink, had almost given up hope for the third torpedo. Then a bright flash followed by a sharp boom signaled success. After ten straight misses Edge had the satisfaction of seeing and hearing a Bonefish torpedo blast a hole in the hull of an enemy ship. He watched it sink under an oil slick and a vast mat of floating wreckage.

  After the attack the Bonefish maneuvered carefully through a sea covered with lumber, straw mattresses, capsized and wrecked lifeboats. In the middle of this mess she nosed alongside a group of twenty-five oil-soaked survivors clinging to debris. Somehow Edge coaxed aboard the sub one of the men too exhausted to swim away. Japanese rarely submitted to being taken prisoner at sea, preferring to drown themselves than undergo the dishonor of capture by the enemy. In passable English the man claimed he was the ship’s boatswain and that she was bound from Negros to Manila with a crew of thirty-two plus 124 naval ratings and six officers, most of whom had drowned. Edge cleared the area, keeping the prisoner for interrogation by Navy intelligence back at Fremantle.

  The night of July 30, Edge attacked another convoy. This time the escorts, Chidori-type torpedo boats and a destroyer, detected the Bonefish and held her down long enough to allow the convoy to escape. If they thought Edge would slink away, they were wrong.

  Edge chased the convoy and caught up with it. Working in from a parallel track, he allowed the leading starboard escort, the destroyer, to go on by. Then he cut in behind it to fire torpedoes at the main convoy body. On the bridge Edge saw four evenly spaced torpedoes explode against the hull of an oil tanker. “Four beautiful hits seen, heard, felt, and timed [Edge reported], with two equally forceful internal explosions likewise recorded.... Near perfect torpedo performance if ever we had seen it.”

  Edge hauled out as the escorts began dropping depth charges on what they thought was the submerged Bonefish. “Felt sorry for any survivors in the water. Four more depth charges; they sound much better [when we’re on the surface] than down below.”4

  In between chasing and torpedoing ships, the Bonefish’s gun crews shot up and sank five miscellaneous luggers and sailboats. Edge had orders to be on the lookout for any vessels doubling as submarine spotters. These were usually large twin-masted sailboats with radio antennas strung between their masts. Though these and other small craft often looked more like innocent fishing vessels than spotters, it was hard to tell from a distance. Overhauling and boarding them was risky work. The armed Bonefish boarding parties had no way to know whether their crews were friendly Filipinos, Malayans, or Chinese, or whether they were Japanese, armed and ready to put up a fight.

  Typically the Bonefish, her deck guns manned, approached a suspect boat, circling it as the boat’s crew doused sails in preparation for being boarded. Sometimes it took bursts from the sub’s .50-caliber machine guns to convince them that Edge meant business. In a battle-surface encounter with a large, motorized two-masted schooner that refused to heave to for boarding, the Bonefish’s gun crews laid down a barrage that splintered the boat’s hull and deckhouses and blew up a load of fuel drums. Some boats fought back. A pair of small wooden cargo vessels returned fire with a machine gun, bullets zinging off the Bonefish’s hull. Another vessel, though holed by four-inch rounds, tried to ram. The Bonefish’s gunner’s mates made short work of it, pumping in round after round until, with its topsides ablaze, the vessel drifted away to sink.

  Edge soon discovered that among all the small craft plying the waters south of the Philippines, few were spotters. Most were crewed by friendly Filipinos fleeing the Japanese. Those who spoke a little English were eager to provide Edge with information about Japanese ship movements in the area. In return, Edge, with little in the way of provisions to spare, gave them fresh water, packs of cigarettes, a little food, and in one case nine hand grenades from the Bonefish’s armory.

  Edge reported that later in the patrol,[O]ne of the vessels [we] stopped looked harmless at close quarters, with only brown-skinned crew showing. The complement consisted of eight men. Two women, and one baby (prominently displayed, age about eight months). They hailed as best as we could make out from Macassar, no English spoken. She carried no cargo other than own food and water, and a few boxes of Javanese cigarettes made at Soerabia. A check disclosed considerable money in the form of Japanese-issue guilders, and a ledger indicating that the boat had called at Macassar, Soerabia, Batavia, and Tarakan. Upon our approach the crew had not hidden, but lowered sail without any show of force on our part and willingly helped bring the boat alongside by tending lines. They appeared friendly in every way. Wished we had something to leave them as a parting gift, but [there was] nothing we could spare, whereas we were offered both cigarettes and money.5

  The Bonefish’s crew and the Filipinos waved good-bye and departed friends.

  Midday August 2, as the submerged Bonefish eased south along the Za
mboanga Peninsula of Mindanao, the masts of three ships escorted by circling airplanes lumbered into view. They turned into a five-ship convoy consisting of one large empty tanker, a medium-to-large freighter, and three smaller ships providing escort. Battle stations submerged!

  Edge tracked the targets, careful to minimize periscope exposure to avoid detection by the circling planes. He bored in on the tanker’s starboard flank, confident that her escorts and the circling planes hadn’t spotted the stalking Bonefish. He swung right, fired three stern tubes from very long range, 1,700 yards, then swung left, ready for a bow shot if needed. Stopwatches timed the runs. Sonar reported hearing only two fish, not three. Edge just shook his head. But an explosion 1,600 yards into the run signaled success—or was it premature or a bomb dropped from one of those circling planes?

  “Up scope!” Edge reported a solo hit on the tanker. It had damaged her, but not enough to sink her. Once again erratic torpedo performance had marred a successful attack.

  Edge spun the scope for a quick look around and saw the panicked escorts rushing to and fro, an indication that a hunt for the Bonefish was under way. But it proved a half hearted one that quickly ended as the scattered convoy cleared the area.

  Determined to finish off the tanker, Edge started an end around to get out in front of the convoy to attack as it plowed south. The end around chewed up almost thirteen hours and it wasn’t until two the next morning that radar picked up the convoy disposed in a ragged column paralleling the Zamboanga coast near the Basilan Strait.

  The tanker Edge had damaged earlier, her unmistakable silhouette masked somewhat by the dark land background, had two shepherding escorts stationed port and starboard. Edge waited until the moon set behind thick clouds; then, with the Bonefish flooded down, decks awash to minimize her silhouette, he came in fast on four roaring engines, wary that the Bonefish’s bow wave glowing white in the phosphorescent sea might be spotted by an alert lookout on the outriding escort.