Hellcats

by Peter Sasgen

  The Bonefish was due to complete her overhaul in mid-February. After postoverhaul shakedown and training, she was scheduled to depart San Francisco for Pearl Harbor in early March. To meet that schedule Lawrence put in ten- to twelve-hour days supervising repairs, handling paperwork, and dealing with personnel and their training schedules. The Bethlehem Steel Submarine Repair Basin at Hunters Point was a huge facility crowded with ships, dry docks, mobile cranes, and thousands of workers, both civilian and Navy. The Bonefish wasn’t just overhauled; she was modernized, too. The work performed was extensive. It included major renovations and structural improvements to her hull, machinery, and interior compartments as well as heavier armament, updated radar, and a host of other improvements designed to enhance her combat efficiency and survivability. She also received an ice-cream maker and a Coca-Cola dispenser, welcome additions that would keep crew morale at its peak during long patrols.

  Remodeled, reconditioned, thoroughly modernized, and in her fresh dark-gray-and-black camouflage paint scheme, the Bonefish was ready for operations in northern Pacific waters, where the submarine war now focused.

  The confidential letter Lockwood had drafted earlier for Lawrence’s eyes only caught up to him in San Francisco at the end of November. What he read must have pleased him immensely, for it placed him in the first rank of submarine skippers.

  Dear Edge:

  The Admiral and Chief of Staff like to have the commanding officers know their reactions to war patrols. Inasmuch as they wish these reactions to be entirely “off the record,” the Admiral has asked me to write letters to commanding officers regarding these comments. The comments may be of a praiseworthy nature or critical in type when deemed necessary. This letter is of course private and of an unofficial nature. Their comments made on your last patrol are as follows:

  “Very excellent patrol. Attacks well planned and executed.

  “I congratulate you on a good job. Have a good rest in the U.S. and come back with your chin out.”

  C. A. [Lockwood], Jr.

  “An eventful patrol, chock o block with contacts, both surface and air.”

  “You got a very nice bag and continued the fine reputation of the BONEFISH. Targets, available and not attacked, outlucked you.”

  “The coming cruise to [West Coast] is primarily to put BONEFISH in an A-1 fighting condition; secondarily, for a deserved [rest]. Combine the two and return ready for Sea.”

  C. [Lockwood]

  Please remember that this is a private affair between you and the Admiral and is meant to be helpful criticism, where present. No official record is kept of the above.

  E. E. Yeomans [signed]1

  Lockwood believed that Lawrence would soon have an important role to play in future submarine operations, and in the submarine force itself.

  Lawrence, Sarah, and Boo settled into their temporary quarters in a half Quonset hut at Hunters Point. Housing was at a premium because San Francisco’s population had surged from a prewar high of 400,000 to over half a million, most of whom were employed in the shipyards in the surrounding area. This increase did not include the hordes of soldiers, sailors, and marines stationed at the Presidio, Treasure Island, and other bases.

  Lawrence spent his days on the Bonefish, returning in the evening to his little family, clothes and skin smelling of diesel oil and hard work. Together, on one of the rare days he had off, and with a car borrowed from the submarine welfare motor pool, they went to the zoo or took a long drive up the coast. Sometimes on evenings and weekends, when a sitter could be found to care for Boo, Lawrence and Sarah went out to dinner or to a movie, alone or with other Navy couples. Around this time, too, Sarah learned that she was pregnant. The couple was thrilled. Lawrence wanted a boy, and though it was very early in Sarah’s pregnancy he started calling the baby “Junior.” The only thing that dampened Lawrence’s and Sarah’s excitement was the inexorable countdown to his departure and their separation.

  By mid-January the Bonefish had undergone dockside testing and static dives. Crew training had become a daily ritual. Lawrence, fully engaged in this work, found time to write his parents that:We received a copy of a letter on the boat the other day which was from [Lockwood, Nimitz, and King] recommending that I be awarded the Navy Cross for our last patrol. If King’s outfit ashore approves, I guess I’ll eventually get the award—which naturally makes me feel pretty good, since that is next to the highest decoration the Navy gives (only the Medal of Honor is higher).

  This was the first of three Navy Crosses won by Lawrence, all with effusive support from Lockwood.

  Toward the end of the Bonefish’s stay at Hunters Point, a truck arrived dockside with a crated FMS unit. The crew had been asking questions about the strange modifications made to their ship’s keel, and about the shaft protruding through the main deck above the forward torpedo room. Some but not all of these questions were answered when technicians from UCDWR arrived to supervise the installation of the FMS electronics stack and its associated components. As to its purpose, well, that was still a mystery.

  It wasn’t a mystery to Edge. An electronics expert, he understood the basic principles of FMS. And like every skipper who had had FMS installed in his ship, he may have had misgivings about the plans sub command had drawn up for its use in his ship. The same was likely true for the Bonefish sonar technicians who had been sent to San Diego for training on FMS, and upon their return to Hunters Point found a unit had been installed in their sub. With that and with UCDWR technicians swarming over the ship with test gear and schematics, it became all too clear that the Bonefish would be hunting mines—a chilling prospect for sailors accustomed to hunting Japanese ships.

  As work on the Bonefish and the other submarines at Hunters Point progressed, Lockwood’s war of all-out attrition against Japanese merchant shipping began drawing to a close. Targets worthy of torpedoes were proving hard to find. In 1944 alone, the sub force had sent more than six hundred ships, merchant and combatant, representing 2.7 million tons, to the bottom of the ocean. Now, in January 1945, sinkings had begun tailing off precipitously, a sure indication that the Japanese high-seas merchant marine was all but extinct. This development gave Lockwood more time to devote to his Japan Sea operation. Then, just as things began to look their most promising, Lockwood hit that FM sonar wall. It arose when another FMS submarine, the USS Bowfin (SS-287), arrived in Pearl days ahead of the Tunny, which had been undergoing modifications at Mare Island. The Bowfin’s CO, Commander Alexander “Alec” K. Tyree, a native of Danville, Virginia, and a 1935 academy graduate, was eager to get under way on a war patrol.

  A test of the Bowfin’s FMS in that dummy minefield off Oahu showed that it could easily detect mines at close range but not beyond two hundred yards, a performance that Lockwood considered unacceptable. His minimum requirement was six or seven hundred yards; the Tinosa’s and Spadefish’s units had turned in far better performance. Nothing that the technicians did made the Bowfin’s unit recover its sensitivity, and until it did, Tyree would have to delay departure on patrol.

  Lockwood didn’t witness these tests firsthand; he was at his new headquarters in Guam. And though he was a patient man the clock was ticking down on his pet project. He wrote to the project managers at UCDWR and urged them to speed up production so that more sonar units would become available to outfit more subs and to replace the ones that had problems. He also urged Rear Admiral J. A. Furer, the officer in Washington coordinating the Navy’s research and development group, to put some muscle behind his efforts on behalf of the sub force to open up the production pipeline.

  Another complication dogging Lockwood was the announcement of a competition to be held between several different sonar detection systems, arranged by officers in charge of Navy research and development who believed that there were better mine-detection systems out there than FMS. The three competing units had an alphabet soup of names, such as MATD (Mine and Torpedo Detector), SOD (Small Object Detector), OL (Object Locator), and STU,
a device under development by the British Admiralty. Lockwood fumed over the Navy’s penchant for bureaucratic interference in a field in which deskbound sailors had no expertise. He vented his frustrations in a letter to his friend Rear Admiral Charles W. Styer, then ComSubLant. Styer had connections on the East Coast, and Lockwood hoped to use Styer’s influence to head off the competition, which Lockwood believed was a waste of time and had come too late in the game. But because UCDWR’s FMS still wasn’t good enough for Lockwood’s purposes, he was willing to consider any other type that had promise, so long as its manufacturer could meet ComSubPac’s production and mission schedule.

  Lockwood noted in a letter to another friend, Captain Frank C. Watkins,2 head of the submarine desk at Main Navy, that there had been so many of these projects that he couldn’t keep them all straight. “We continue to hear about ER Sonar which you say is ‘not in this war.’ I want something which will take me through Tsushima Straits yesterday—and I don’t want to send a boat through there without a mine detector. We can lose boats fast enough without doing that.”

  In another letter to Styer, Lockwood reported, “The third FM Sonar came in on Bowfin, and while the mine detection was very excellent, the range was only two or three hundred yards.... Fourth set arrived on Tunny this week, and I will see what she can do.... I know that various bureau and east coast experts say FM Sonar is no good, but after all it is the best we have got and I would appreciate very much if these adverse experts could get the lead out of their pants and produce something better. We don’t care what it is called provided it does the job.”3

  Lockwood expressed his concern to Furer that diminishing resources allocated by the Navy for the development of technologies designed to enhance the effectiveness and survivability of submarines would hamper their missions, which had become more dangerous than ever, given the growing effectiveness of Japanese antisubmarine countermeasures. Lockwood topped his priority list of needed equipment with FM sonar and, possibly to impress Furer with the urgency of the matter, divulged his plan to use it to penetrate the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan.

  Though not fully satisfied with the Bowfin’s FMS performance, Lockwood sent her on patrol but not into mined waters. He wanted Tyree to have a crack at using FMS, if not to detect mines, then to detect Japanese patrol boats to see if FMS could work in conjunction with “cuties,” the new Mk 27 electric homing torpedoes slowly coming into service, several of which had been put aboard the Bowfin for testing on real targets. Apparently BuOrd had learned a lesson from the Mk 14 fiasco. The USS Sea Owl (SS-405) had recently nailed two patrol boats with cuties, a performance that had convinced Lockwood that more were needed and fast. He may have hoped that if Tyree could improve on the Sea Owl’s score, more cuties would enter production.

  In fact Tyree didn’t use his FM sonar at all and didn’t fire any cuties during the Bowfin’s fifty-seven-day patrol. Using Mk 14s and Mk 18s he sank only a destroyer. Tyree went on to exchange gunfire with two antisubmarine picket boats and rescue two downed Navy fliers. That Tyree didn’t use his cuties had nettled Lockwood. Typically he refrained from criticizing skippers for actions taken or not taken during war patrols; he understood that circumstances dictated what actions a CO took, and Lockwood didn’t like to second-guess his skippers. Even so it seemed a waste of an opportunity to acquire more data on torpedo performance.

  Meanwhile another setback arrived with the Tunny from Mare Island. Her FMS was only marginally better than the Bowfin’s. The unit could detect mines out to 350 to 400 yards, but it had a mysterious blind spot beyond the sub’s bow.

  Lockwood wrote Watkins, “As you will remember, I have been trying to boost this FM Sonar since December 1943, when I saw the first model at San Diego. I thought it held promise as a mine detector and hoped for big improvements with succeeding installations, but I must say that Bowfin and Tunny have been a sad blow to me. . . . Sorry my last two letters have been sobs, but sometimes I get a bit discouraged.”4 Watkins wrote back that everything that could be done to speed up debugging and production of FMS was being done.

  As Lockwood’s entreaties began to move through the Navy’s bureaucracy he took matters into his own hands to find solutions to the myriad problems afflicting FMS. Typically it had always been up to submariners to solve the problems that bedeviled the force—diesel engines and faulty torpedoes, for instance—and this time it wasn’t any different. Lockwood and his submariners would have to work the bugs out of FMS that hadn’t been worked out at UCDWR. To do this he initiated a robust training program that went beyond the training program at UCDWR: specifically, how to use FMS but also how to tune and properly maintain it aboard ship. Somehow the sub force would have to find the skilled electronics technicians needed for this work, even if Lockwood had to shanghai them from the surface Navy into the submarine Navy.

  Released from FMS training at Pearl, the Tunny sailed for Saipan, where she was met by Malcolm Henderson and two technicians from UCDWR. At Lockwood’s request the men, aware of Lockwood’s personal training initiative and its growing importance, had flown on ahead to meet the Tunny to try to straighten out her FMS electronics. Lockwood had shifted FMS training to Guam, where he could take an active hand. He not only went to sea aboard the Tunny with Henderson and the UCDWR technicians; he also operated the gear himself, twiddling the knobs and dials on the PPI in the conning tower as she eased through dummy minefields off Guam.

  His presence and hands-on approach instilled confidence in the men that the mine detector wasn’t their enemy but their protector. He explained that it would allow them to operate safely in formerly restricted areas in the course of their regular war patrols. Lockwood, always the big-picture man, knew that as U.S. forces moved closer and closer to Japan, force commanders would need accurate information on the location of minefields in waters stretching from southern Japan to Formosa in which invasion fleets would have to operate. Who else but his submariners with their magic mine gear would be capable of mapping those fields? Lockwood also understood that this work that the force might be called upon to provide could possibly scuttle his plans for the Japan Sea raid. He had to resolve the problems inherent in FMS so he could launch the mission as soon as possible, before his subs were relegated to a minor supporting role while Admiral William F. Halsey’s Third Fleet and Admiral Raymond A. Spruance’s Fifth Fleet crushed the Japanese and got all the credit.

  Lockwood was under no illusions about how hard it was going to be to sell FMS. The difficulty he faced was amply demonstrated by the incredibly poor performance turned in by the Tunny’s FMS, primarily its inability to consistently detect mines and, when they were detected, its feeble visual display and strangled bell tones. The Tunny’s crew were not only restless and unsettled by what they saw, but, within earshot of Lockwood, they openly voiced their feelings of mistrust and doubt, even questioning the sanity of officers who would fob off such a device on the sub force. Even Pierce, the Tunny’s CO, had his doubts, though he was willing to suspend final judgment until Lockwood and Henderson had had a crack at improving the gear’s performance. In all it was a failure that might have defeated even the most ardent supporter of FMS technology. Yet Lockwood’s enthusiasm for its potential never flagged, not in public and never at sea. Not even when faced with the seemingly insoluble problems that bedeviled even Harnwell and his experts, who often worked until dawn tearing apart the gadget’s innards to diagnose why its tubes and circuits overheated, shorted out, or just plain refused to operate.

  Lockwood’s faith in FMS, as well as Henderson’s and his technicians’ dedication, finally paid off when another test aboard the Tunny got the results Lockwood knew it was capable of. Now, instead of seeing mushy greenish blobs and hearing muffled tolling, Lockwood and Henderson saw luminous green pears and those icy, clear bell tones submariners loved to hate. And with those improved results there was a change of attitude by the Tunny’s crew. Maybe, just maybe, this goddamned thing would work after all!

  B
efore the Tunny departed on her next war patrol, shipfitters installed a set of clearing lines around her many hull appendages and topside fixtures—diving planes, cleats, stanchions, etc. Made from lengths of thick cable welded to the submarine’s hull, the lines were there to prevent mine cables from snagging and being dragged down into contact with the sub and detonating. It was a crude fix that would prove troublesome later when it was least expected.

  Confident that the Tunny was as ready as she could be, Lockwood gave Pierce sealed orders to find, plot, and penetrate a minefield fringing the East China Sea near Kyushu. Could Pierce do it? Lockwood believed he could, and so did Pierce. At some point the attempt had to be made if the invasion of the Sea of Japan were to get off the ground. Lockwood was so confident that he requested permission from Admiral Nimitz to accompany Pierce to prove how much faith he had in FMS and to see it in action against the real thing. He reasoned that if he, Uncle Charlie, had the balls to risk his neck on such a mission, it would bolster the men’s confidence in FMS.

  “Sorry that the answer must be negative,” Nimitz replied.5