Hellcats

by Peter Sasgen

  1022 “Pingers” steadily coming closer. Evidently making a sound search off southern and eastern end of TSUSHIMA. Rigged for depth charge and silent running.

  1130 Current setting us on to TSUSHIMA at rate of one to one and one-half knots and unable to get out of the “pingers’” road. Decided to sit on the bottom and wait it out.

  1220 Pingers” passed overhead—one down port side and other down the starboard. . . . 3

  Days later, Greer tangled with two crafty patrol boat skippers south of the Tsushima Strait.

  First team patrol boats are used to patrol south of TSUSHIMA. They are equipped with radar similar to our SJ. . . . Also suspect they carried radar detectors. They seem to patrol in pairs with usually a radar-equipped plane searching with them. The planes are much in evidence during the nights. The patrol boats are equipped with large depth charges which do not make the usual detonator click before exploding.

  The Straits of TSUSHIMA live up to their reputation of being very strongly defended. There is every evidence the enemy is making maximum use of radar and radar detection in his defense. Our SJ, which has given us such an enormous advantage, is being made almost a hindrance by [this] . . . . The enemy’s . . . anti-submarine measures were so constantly active as to give us the feeling of being on the defensive instead of the offensive.4

  Japanese patrols dogged the Seahorse for days as she shadowed potential targets, which, like galloping ghosts, faded away into misty coastal shallows or at times, it seemed, into thin air. Greer parleyed with Edge early in the morning on the sixteenth, when the Seahorse’s appearance proved that she hadn’t been sunk. Greer warned of the heavy coverage by radar-equipped patrols sniffing around the strait. Edge acknowledged the warning, then departed for the Bonefish’s assigned lifeguard station in those very waters. Greer headed off to carry out a mine recon of the strait’s southern approaches. His experience with patrol boats gave him good reason to believe that the Japanese knew the Seahorse, if not the Bonefish, was patrolling south of the strait. “The Japs probably wondered why I didn’t go in or go away,” he said.5

  Midday on the seventeenth, Greer saw a telltale wobble of interference shimmer across the Seahorse’s SJ radar screen. He assumed it was coming from a friendly SJ radar, most likely the Bonefish’s or Crevalle’s, though a challenge keyed from the Seahorse’s SJ went unanswered. Greer ignored the interference and moved on. Two hours later another wave of interference, stronger than the one before, ghosted across the Seahorse’s radar screen. It should have warned Greer that he was sailing into a trap set by the Japanese; somehow, it didn’t. After the Seahorse submerged at daylight, Greer’s sonar watch even reported intermittent pinging on the same bearing as the interference, as well as distant explosions, possibly depth charges, a sure sign that patrol boats were in the area. Back on the surface late in the day, the Seahorse picked up more SJ interference, which this time Greer attributed to a radar-equipped escort.

  A day later the Seahorse picked up yet more radar interference. Despite the known presence of radar-equipped patrols, for some reason Greer thought the interference was coming from the Crevalle.o Almost too late, Greer discovered that he’d made a big, possibly fatal mistake. As he later said, “They were Japs.”

  18 April

  0512 Radar contact on two small targets at 8,000 yards [roughly four miles]. Radar interference very strong and steadied on us.

  0514 Dawn is breaking and sighted two patrol boats—very hazy. Opened out at full speed. Escorts appeared larger than PCs [patrol craft] but not as large as destroyers. Range opened out slowly as smoke poured from the escorts.

  The Seahorse hauled out on four mains with water spouts from the escorts’ guns rising in her wake and then all around her.

  Greer pulled the plug, ordered the Seahorse to three hundred feet, rigged for silent running and depth charge. He changed course ninety degrees to get off the escorts’ inbound track, then fired two pillenwerfers to confuse them. A half minute later the pinging patrol boats passed astern, only to come about and launch an accurately aimed salvo of nine depth charges that exploded above and on either side of the fleeing submarine.

  The salvo slammed the Seahorse down to four hundred feet as if she were a toy submarine, not one made of fifteen hundred tons of steel. Greer stopped the motors and put her on the bottom to wait out the attack and to take stock of the damage the initial depth charging had caused. It was bad.

  Seawater pouring into the control room through the SD radar mast’s shattered packing gland, and into the forward engine room through the warped main air induction valve endangered the submarine. Ruptured main fuel ballast tank vent fittings and hydraulic lines had sprayed diesel oil and hydraulic oil into damaged compartments, their noxious odors permeating the ship. Acid slopping from cracked battery cells threatened to form deadly chlorine gas. Cork insulation knocked from bulkheads and glass from shattered lightbulbs littered the decks, crunching underfoot. The most serious damage was yet to be discovered as men went to work in the eerie silence of a dark, half-dead ship, groping to make repairs to smashed equipment by the light of portable battle lanterns.

  “All in all,” said Greer, “things looked pretty grim. The ship was a shambles. Another pattern of depth charges like the one already delivered could possibly have finished us.”6 When he said that, he didn’t know that a crack had opened around the ship’s steering wheel mounted on the pressure hull in the conning tower. Given the submarine’s great submerged depth and the enormous weight of water pressing against her, the crack could lead to hull collapse. A thick-skinned Balao-class submarine, the Seahorse was nevertheless bottomed in mud below her test depth of four hundred feet. A depth charge exploding close aboard in an uncompressible medium like seawater could easily finish her off.

  Around dawn, sonar reported the arrival of a third pinging patrol boat that delivered two depth charges that drove the Seahorse deeper into the mud. After this cracking bombardment the three patrol boats drifted away, their screw noises fading. Greer and his crew waited in silence, all movement, all repair work suspended. Time passed slowly, the seconds ticked off by the ship’s chronometers, those that still worked, and by the steady drip, drip, drip of water into the bilges from leaking sea valves, cracked freshwater engine cooling lines, and packing glands. The ship’s breathable air, already thick with oil fumes and carbon dioxide, turned foul: eighty-plus men consume a lot of oxygen and respire a lot of CO2. Greer wasn’t fooled into taking action by the patrol boats’ disappearing act. He knew that they could be up there lying to, engines silent, ready to bore in with their guns and depth charges, just waiting for the Seahorse to stir from the muck and poke up a periscope.

  When Greer thought it was safe to move around inside the ship, he gave the okay to restart repairs, but quietly, and he cautioned the men not to drop any tools. Meanwhile, a stem-to-stern survey disclosed yet more damage: The reduction gear lube oil cooler had ruptured but was repairable; the air-conditioning system’s Freon lines had ruptured, too—Freon gas is as deadly as CO2; both periscopes were flooded and useless; the gyro compass was out of commission; both service radio transmitters were dead, their topside antennas and grounds carried away by the force of exploding depth charges; the ship’s food storeroom had flooded. And on it went. The forward and after torpedo tubes and their outer door interlocks had jammed; all four inboard engine exhaust valves leaked seawater into the engine rooms.

  When sonar reported the buzz of fast screws a few miles north of the Seahorse’s position, men froze in their tracks; repairs came to an abrupt halt. Greer could tell from the screws’ fast-changing bearing rates that the patrol boats had lost the scent and were searching for the Seahorse inside a large circle several miles away from where she lay. As the sonarman, drenched with sweat and laboring for breath in the fetid atmosphere, listened to the patrol boats make a circuit, he heard them drop almost two dozen depth charges. Even though the drop was far off the mark, its thunder rattled the Seahorse and shook up her we
ary crew. How close would the escorts and their depth charges come? they asked. The men waited expectantly, until the thunder slowly faded away to ringing silence. Minutes passed. When it was all clear, the men resumed their work.

  An exhausted Greer toured the ship to see for himself what repairs had been made. What he found was nothing short of a miracle, given the conditions the men had to deal with. They had done everything in their power to restore, repair, and jury-rig the ship’s systems to get her off the bottom and back to the surface. As Greer said later, “[The] men were not defeated, on the contrary they were just beginning a long and successful fight.” Back on the surface they could start for home—if the Japanese didn’t return in force.

  Toward midnight Greer made a circle in the air with an index finger, indicating a 360-degree sweep on the listening gear. Had the Japanese departed or were they still up there, waiting? After completing a slow, careful sweep, the sonarman gave Greer a vigorous thumbs-up—All quiet, Captain.

  But would the leaking batteries have enough current to drive the motors and turn the props? Would the props even turn, or were their bearing collars misaligned and jammed? Was there sufficient compressed air in the high-pressure bottles to blow the main ballast tanks dry and lift the partially flooded sub from the bottom? The Seahorse was saddled with tons of water that couldn’t be pumped overboard until the noisy trim and drain pumps became fully operational.

  Greer looked around at the sweat- and oil-burnished faces of his exhausted crew, men who had given the Seahorse everything they had to save her and themselves. It was time to put their courage to the test yet again. He gave the order to blow the ballast tanks, to get the ship up and off the bottom.

  High-pressure air roared into flooded tanks. For a minute the Seahorse refused to budge, to acknowledge that the time had come to rise from the muddy sea bottom and shake herself free. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, she lurched up bow first. Frames and hull groaning in protest, she rose to a chorus of cheers from her crew. They were going to live! They would breathe fresh air again! They would get the rusty old bitch back to Guam in one piece after all!

  It seemed a lifetime before the Seahorse reached the surface. Her one working depth gauge still registered seventy feet, but seas breaking over her main deck as she rolled and pitched like a surface ship on long ocean swells said that she was there. The bridge hatch and main induction clanged open. A hurricane of fresh air so sweet that it was almost intoxicating swept through the ship, purging the poisonous atmosphere and filling the men’s lungs.

  Motor macs started the engines and ran them up. The starboard reduction gear was far too noisy but turned its propeller shaft. SD radar was a wreck, flooded just like both periscopes. Somehow SJ radar, with its delicate innards, had survived the depth charging. Switched on, it immediately picked up the now-dreaded interference, a sure sign that radar-equipped Japanese patrol boats, maybe even the same ones that had almost killed the Seahorse, were somewhere in the area.

  Greer hugged the western coast of Kyushu, limping along at the best speed his damaged sub could manage. He was careful not to sweep for targets with SJ, using it only to register bearings on the interference, which grew weaker as the Seahorse headed south, hugging Kyushu for cover. A little past dawn of the twenty-first Greer submerged “gingerly,” as he put it, to test the ship and to make more repairs, some of which required welding cracks in the main engine-cooling system.

  Heading southeast, away from the East China Sea, making for Guam, the realization dawned on Greer that the damage to his ship would require major work to repair: work only a shipyard like the one at Guam could provide. Clearly the Seahorse could not be repaired in time to join Operation Barney. Another sub would have to take her place. Preoccupied with his current plight, Harry Greer didn’t have time to worry about Lawrence Edge’s Bonefish running into radar-equipped patrol boats. In fact, Edge was busy trying not to run afoul of mines.

  While the Seahorse limped home, the Bonefish, submerged west of Danjo Gunto, began her approach on the northeastern end of the line of mines Edge intended to survey. Almost immediately hell’s bells, as if trying to clear their throats, issued a garbled bell tone. A few dim and shapeless green blobs appeared on the PPI scope, only to fade out. Edge wasn’t fooled. The contacts’ poor shapes, poor tones, low persistence, and erratic movement told him that FMS had homed in on a school of fish, not mines.

  The Bonefish pressed on, her crew tense—these were not friendly waters and the mines they were hunting weren’t dummies. Edge, too, wiped sweaty palms on his khaki trouser legs. Then: “Mine contact!” The first strong, clear-toned contact of the morning. Range 250 yards. Then another, almost dead ahead. Other mines on the line began to show up at regularly spaced intervals and then all along the same line where the first two had been contacted. Hell’s bells’ clear, sharp ringing tone and the distinct, bright, and evenly spaced green pears on the PPI left no doubt that these contacts were Japanese mines, not fish. In his top secret report to Lockwood, Edge noted, “The tones were so clear and bell-like that all other contacts, of which there were many, could not compare and caused no confusion.”7

  Edge experimented with the FMS, varying the ship’s speed to see if it had any effect on the contacts’ range or tone. It didn’t. For the remainder of the day Edge ran the Bonefish through gaps in the line and along the line itself, plotting the layout of the single and double rows.

  Edge tried to determine the depths at which the mines had been planted, but couldn’t establish anything definite. He upped the scope while submerged to get a glimpse of the mines, trying to determine their depth, but the murky water limited his visibility. Aside from that, the Bonefish was never closer than two hundred feet from the line. Varying the sub’s depth changed the size of the blobs on the PPI, but not their tone, range, or clarity. Based on this experiment, Edge believed that most of the mines had been planted shallowly.

  Confronted with data that seemed to confirm this belief, Edge casually commented in his report, “It is also interesting to note that Bonefish, in proceeding to assigned area . . . on 12 April, 1945, while on the surface, crossed this same mine line at about 19 miles from its NE end without incident and with beautiful bliss.”

  Plotting resumed the next day. Edge concluded that the minefield was forty-seven miles long, with fifteen mines per mile, and that its double rows were 150 yards apart. The exercise revealed how accurate FMS plotting could be in the hands of expert operators and how its sensitivity and flawless performance could instill a feeling of confidence in a submarine’s crew.

  The data collected by Edge and the other skippers of FMS subs sent north by Lockwood, along with the intelligence developed by ICPOA, would provide the Operation Barney submarines with, if not a perfect picture of what lay hidden in the Tsushima Strait, a picture that would prove to be remarkably accurate.

  Mine recon completed, Edge moved north to patrol near Quelpart. Early in the morning, tracking what he thought were luggers, Edge almost stumbled into a trap set by two destroyer escorts. The DEs had the Bonefish boxed in between themselves and a pair of islands off the coast of Kyushu. Rather than tangle with these ships, Edge pulled away at flank speed to outrun them. The DEs were fast, faster than the Bonefish, and, closing in, they opened fire, forcing her down.

  Submerged with the first shell passing overhead, and splashing about 200 yards over; range 4100 yards!

  [Minutes later] Seventeen depth charges, all uncomfortably close, went off as we doubled back under the DEs at 270 feet. We had to turn under them due to the proximity of land in the other direction, and it may have been this which fooled them since screws passed overhead about two minutes before the first explosion.8

  From early morning until early afternoon, Edge heard strong echo-ranging and counted

  . . . a total of 41 more depth charges dropped as if the boys were hot on something’s trail; but this time it was not us! Total for the day was 75 depth charges [the last of which despite being far aw
ay] rattled the ship—possibly due to shallow water.

  Surfaced, very much put out by the day’s experience.

  Two days later the Bonefish came close to another run-in with one of the depth-charge-dropping DEs. This time Edge kept his distance, remarking that their “treatment at his hands was too fresh for us to feel like playing with him again.”

  Harry Greer’s warning about near-saturation antisubmarine patrols had proven correct. In the closing days of the patrol Edge recorded fifty-five contacts with Japanese patrol boats, escorts, and planes in the lower Tsushima Strait area. Later, endorsing Edge’s patrol report, Division Commander Louis Chappell said it all.

  Enemy anti-submarine measures were intense, persistent and effective in that it prevented [the Bonefish] from closing the Japanese coast and kept her on the defensive a good part of the time. The Division Commander concurs in the opinion that there is a strong probability of an integrated effort involving enemy air and surface craft and shore based radar stations [to thwart submarines].9

  Edge at last found time to work on the letter to Sarah he had started weeks earlier.

  All I’ll say . . . precious, is that I love you intensely today and forever.

  The patrol goes on but, but still no good luck [finding targets], except that part of our special mission has been completed successfully. I say “no luck,” but at least the boat is still safe; so the luck isn’t yet completely ill. And there are yet a few days even if experience so far doesn’t make them promising....

  Darling sweetheart, how I miss you! And how much I am wont to dream about you, and dream about our being together again, in our own home, and what we’ll do and feel like again. It’s a very, very wonderful dream and even if in reality when that time does come, it is only half as wonderful as the dream, it will still be wonderful.