Hellcats

by Peter Sasgen

  After the Spadefish’s attack on the Transbalt, Germershausen finally found a legitimate target. Just north of La Pérouse Strait, he sank a two-thousand-ton maru. Moving south to Tsugaru Strait, the Spadefish then torpedoed another two-thousand-tonner. After that, things settled down. Germershausen had no reason to complain: He’d sunk five ships (six if one included the hapless Transbalt) and four small craft. He was content to wait for Sonar Day, when the Hellcats could break for home. On the other hand, if something came along while he was waiting, he’d try to run up his score. Germershausen didn’t let his guard down. The Hellcats couldn’t allow themselves to fall victim to complacency or hubris. That would be a fatal mistake. While the Japanese defenses had stiffened, they hadn’t yet mounted a determined effort to find and attack the Hellcats. That could change.

  To the south, the big ship sunk by the Bonefish had spread a carpet of debris and survivors over a huge area north and west of the Noto Peninsula. Currents and tides had pushed the flotsam inshore, where George Pierce, patrolling the traffic lanes off Toyama Wan, encountered more than a dozen life rafts loaded with oil-soaked and shivering survivors. As the Tunny approached a raft, the survivors lay facedown, apparently expecting to be machine-gunned. Despite Pierce’s exhortations lifted from a Japanese phrase book, none of the survivors could be coaxed aboard. Pierce gave up and moved on.

  Early the next day, after combing the area for targets, Pierce spotted the same drifting rafts still clotted with survivors. He surfaced in their midst, no doubt a frightening scene for the exhausted onlookers—the sea parting and hissing, a submarine rising from the depths shedding white water. This time Pierce took aboard a senior Japanese navy petty officer who’d apparently had enough raft time and was eager to cooperate with his rescuers in exchange for dry clothing and hot food.

  Resuming the patrol, Pierce received a radio message from Lawrence Edge, stating that he had the masts and stacks of two ships in sight and giving their coordinates. Pierce bent on four mains to find them and join the Bonefish in a coordinated attack.

  It was after full dark when the Tunny and Bonefish made radar contact with the targets. After Pierce and Edge planned their attack via voice radio, the two subs closed in. Edge reported that he was within a thousand yards of the targets but still couldn’t see them. Darkened ships and surface haze always made a night surface attack difficult to execute. Yet there was something else out there, something spectral and sinister evidenced by a wobbling electronic shimmer on the SJ radarscopes of both subs. Shades of Harry Greer and the Seahorse: Japanese radar interference!

  Pierce and Edge smelled a trap. The two ships they had been targeting, which up until now had seemed unaware of the presence of the two subs, suddenly opened up with their guns. Patrol boats!

  Four-inch rounds started dropping around the Tunny. As Pierce and Edge veered away and hauled out at flank speed, the two patrol boats began dropping random depth charges. Both subs went deep to let things cool off. They’d almost been suckered by a hunter-killer team. The next morning, June 18, Pierce, relieved to see that the Bonefish had escaped from the patrol boats, held a confab with Edge via megaphone. After reviewing the trap set by the patrol boats,Larry asked for permission to make a daylight submerged patrol in Toyama Wan. Decided to split up for independent operations close to coast tomorrow. Set course for Wakasa Wan; Bonefish set course for Suzu Misaki.4

  Edge’s asking Pierce for permission to patrol in Toyama Wan was standard procedure, as it was his duty to keep Pierce informed of his movements at all times in order that the actions of the Tunny and Skate could be properly coordinated with those of the Bonefish. Edge was merely following regulations, which required a junior officer (Edge) to obtain authority from his superior officer (Pierce) to search his assigned area, a task no more nor less risky than any of the other operations, including harbor penetrations, that had been conducted by the Hellcats. In any event, the forty-mile-long-by-twenty-mile-wide Toyama Wan had the potential to contain targets that an aggressive skipper like Edge was not about to ignore.

  After her rendezvous with the Tunny, a mysterious, dark silence enveloped the Bonefish.

  For a time the Bonefish’s disappearance went unnoticed by Pierce and Lynch. On the eighteenth and nineteenth, Lynch, target spotting for his mates, reported seeing two small transports, an ancient coal-burning destroyer, and a small R-class sub, near the mouth of Toyama Wan. When his initial contact report went unacknowledged, Lynch tried to raise the Tunny and Bonefish on radio. Neither of them answered, and Lynch concluded that they were patrolling submerged. When Pierce finally showed up the next day, he radioed Lynch to start heading north to La Pérouse for the prearranged rendezvous with the other Hellcats. In their exchange Lynch didn’t report hearing any explosions from torpedoes or depth charges.5 Pierce also radioed Edge with similar instructions, but didn’t receive an acknowledgment. Edge’s silence on the radio net didn’t raise an alarm with Pierce because he assumed that Edge was busy hunting for targets in Toyama Wan and that he’d catch up with the other Polecats later.

  Heading north, Pierce, who had yet to sink a single ship, ran down a large escorted freighter he estimated was in the ten-thousand-ton range. Out of position for a close-in attack, he fired a long-range shot and missed. Pierce was the only Hellcat skipper who hadn’t sunk a ship, and if he had any hope of making up for it, time was fast running out.

  It was now June 21. The Hellcats had staged a successful raid into the Japanese bastion, though the final tally was yet to be written. They weren’t home free, but so far had met and overcome every challenge laid before them. They had also demonstrated conclusively how versatile submarines were and how valuable that versatility would be in the future, when subs would be called upon to undertake missions far more dangerous than Operation Barney. Not one to show his feelings, inwardly Hydeman was pleased and impressed: His Hellcats had performed magnificently. He radioed them to head for La Pérouse for the breakout.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Breakout

  Despite newspaper headlines announcing imminent victory in the Pacific—“Jap Defeat Assured”—Sarah Edge wasn’t fooled into thinking the war was over for Lawrence and his men. Indeed, she waited every day for a letter saying that he had returned from patrol, that he was safe and that his arrival meant he was destined at last for shore duty.

  Lawrence received a letter from Sarah before sailing from Guam with the Polecats on May 27. She played a little guessing game based on a popular moviex she’d seen in an Atlanta theater about submarines.

  Dearest Shug[ar],

  I can hardly wait to get home to get a letter to see just what you will be doing. If I do not get one today then I am sure of it tomorrow. Wish I could guess the type of mission you were on. Of course, it could be 1) catching our aviators, or 2) it could be something like “Destination Tokyo”—going through an [anti]sub net into a Jap harbor to let spies ashore and then waiting ’til they had their data and bringing them back home again, or 3) it could [be] something else of which I have no idea. Wish I knew.

  When Sarah received the letter Lawrence had posted before his departure from Guam on Operation Barney, he was far out at sea.

  May 25, 1945

  Most darling wife,

  This, I fear, because of the press of time will just be [a] short letter [to tell you] that I love you so deeply and completely....

  . . . There’s just a spot of news this morning. . . . We had a surprise in that word was received that our last patrol was called “successful” because of the special mission, although we had not guessed it would be so. Anyhow, it is a pleasant surprise as at least the Bonefish string of successful patrols had not been broken after all, and our new men and officers can have [combat] pins after all.

  Also unexpectedly [an officer] developed a kidney stone two days ago and the doctors have transferred him; so now we have two new officers to replace him and [another officer]. The new ones have just reported aboard, so I can’t say that I k
now them yet....

  . . . Darling, I guess it’s because I wished so hard . . . another letter from you came this morning, plus one from Mother. None had come for about three days and I was sorely looking for one more. Mother wrote about you and Boo’s bringing them my picture on Mother’s Day, and how much she and Dad both appreciated it.

  Goodbye, my precious for today. You’ll be constantly in my thoughts as well as my heart until I can write again—and for always.

  With all my deepest love,

  Lawrence

  On June 18, 1945, President Truman convened a meeting in Washington with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss an invasion of Japan, should it become necessary. Those charged with its planning believed that it was imminent. Truman was deeply troubled by the shockingly high casualties American forces had suffered at Iwo Jima and at Okinawa. The number of dead and wounded in those two campaigns alone portended a grave outcome for any assault on Japan itself.y The casualty estimates varied wildly, depending on who was preparing the estimates; the prospect of hundreds of thousands of U.S. dead and wounded in an invasion shocked Truman. In the event, the casualty issue wasn’t settled to his satisfaction. All he and the Joint Chiefs knew for sure was that it would be frightfully high. Whether or not it would be too high and therefore unacceptable to the American people was left unanswered.

  Truman had only two choices when it came to ending the war. One, he could order an invasion and then prepare the American public for the carnage that would result. He and his chiefs never doubted that the United States would prevail in an assault on the home islands, but they knew that an attack on the core of Japan’s power and culture would provoke a response from its army and civilian population far more bloody than any so far encountered in the entire Pacific campaign. Truman’s second choice was to authorize the use of the atomic bomb on Japan. The bomb would be ready for testing at Alamogordo, New Mexico, by mid-July, though Truman had been cautioned that there was no guarantee it would work. If it didn’t, he’d be faced with ordering an invasion.

  A third alternative, albeit an unpalatable one, was to offer Japan a negotiated peace in lieu of unconditional surrender. This alternative had been suggested by more than one respected public figure. Such an offer was wholly unacceptable to Truman and his advisers and to America’s allies. The only way the Japanese would surrender, they believed, was for the United States to utterly defeat them. This, of course, was Lockwood’s view of Operation Barney: Smash the Japs and end the war now.

  While the president and his advisers wrestled with these issues, work on the atomic bomb progressed at a steady pace. As the Hellcats were invading the Sea of Japan and sinking ships, scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, began assembling the parts necessary for a uranium-fueled atomic bomb. Meanwhile, radioactive plutonium produced in the nuclear reactors at Hanford, Washington, and machined into a two-part hemisphere smaller than an orange, arrived in Los Alamos for use in a bomb scheduled for testing on July 16.

  Back in February, a young naval weapons specialist had been dispatched from Admiral King’s office to brief Admiral Nimitz on this new weapon. King had received his briefing directly from the White House and had instructions to pass the information to Nimitz and MacArthur. In his explanatory letter to Nimitz carried to Guam by the weapons specialist, King gave CinCPac a highly simplified explanation of the bomb and its potential destructive power. He added that it would be available sometime in August. Nimitz, after reading King’s letter, listened politely to the weapons officer’s technical explanation of how the bomb worked, thanked him, and got on with his job. To Nimitz, faced with the hard realities of fighting a war with conventional weaponry, talk of an atomic bomb seemed like just so much science fiction, if not the stuff of pure fantasy.

  For his part, Lockwood had no knowledge whatsoever of the atomic bomb. Its secret was closely held among only a handful of top military commanders, like King and Nimitz, and civilians, like John J. McCloy, Truman’s assistant secretary of war and a close personal adviser. Even if Lockwood had been told about the bomb, it’s unlikely he’d have thought that its immense power used on the Japanese would end the war and end the need for any more Operation Barneys. Even before he’d heard the results of Operation Barney, and before the Hellcats’ return from the Sea of Japan, Lockwood was pushing hard for more FMS-equipped boats to send in there.

  In a memorandum to his staff dated June 23, Lockwood wrote that he expected to find that some of the Hellcat skippers went very deep through the Tsushima Strait minefields, essentially disregarding their FM sonar. He expected that this would inspire a lot of “dare devils to go and do likewise with no FM at all.” Finally, he wrote, if it appeared safe to do that, he’d entertain such offers during the period when the supply of FMS boats was low. “I want to get more boats in there in July if humanly possible. Therefore please circulate the word as to volunteers. . . .”1

  Lockwood had been following the Hellcats’ progress via FRUPAC’s (Fleet Radio Unit Pacific) intercepts of Japanese radio messages and from bits of intelligence pieced together by JICPOA. He’d even pored over photographs taken by the Army Air Force during reconnaissance missions over the Sea of Japan, which had returned images of the three ships sunk by the Skate sitting on their bottoms in the littoral waters of a harbor at Noto Hanto.

  From these sources Lockwood began to sense that so far Operation Barney had been a huge success. In particular the Japanese, besides broadcasting alerts to antisubmarine units and merchant ships in the Sea of Japan, had let slip over Domei that U.S. submarines had attacked ships in the sea and that they in turn had been tracked down and sunk off the western coast of Honshu. The reports didn’t say how many subs had been sunk, but the implication was that there were a lot of them—many more than just nine Hellcats.

  Lockwood knew better. Even though the Hellcats had maintained strict radio silence except for when it was necessary to communicate with one another over the tactical network, FRUPAC had picked up snatches of these weak ship-to-ship radio messages broadcast in the clear. That they couldn’t pick up more of them was due to atmospheric conditions, Japanese jamming, and the short range at which the radios broadcast. But enough of them got through for Lockwood to assemble a mental picture of what was happening almost hour by hour.

  Now, as the clock wound down on Barney, he could only sit tight and wait for a “mission accomplished” message from Earl Hydeman. According to Lockwood, the days and nights of the penetration of Tsushima had been agonizing for him and his staff. But the days and nights of operations in the Sea of Japan itself and then the breakout were infinitely worse. As he waited his thoughts once again turned to Mush Morton and the Wahoo.

  “While it is true,” Lockwood wrote, “that no single submarine nor any single crew can be considered as more important than any other in the mind and heart of a Force Commander, it is equally true that circumstances do arise wherein a ship and its men can become more closely identified with the thinking of [that commander] than other men and vessels under his jurisdiction.

  “Such was true of the Wahoo and Mush Morton. [He] had come deeper within the orbit of my personal thinking than ordinarily happens during combat operations. [B]ecause Morton had the kind of personality that impresses itself upon people.

  “War is a game you must take in your stride. There is no time for mourning or for revenge.”2 Yet Lockwood saw an image in his mind, he said, of a ghostly Wahoo and the face of Dudley Morton. Lockwood may have feared that he could never be at peace with himself until the two were avenged by the Hellcats.

  Then came Hydeman’s message: the relative ease with which they penetrated the minefields, a rough tally of the ships the Hellcats had sunk—at least twenty-seven plus a sub—their size, etc.z The news wasn’t all good: the Bonefish was missing. Despite news that the Bonefish might have been lost, Lockwood rejoiced. Writing to his friend James Fife, Lockwood included a brief summary of the information Hydeman had radioed to Pearl Harbor.

  We had fine news
from Hydeman’s Hellcats last night from which it appears that all 9 got in running at depths of 130 and 150 ft. according to 2 reports and exiting through La Pérouse on surface in a fog. Bonefish did not rendezvous for exiting although she had been talked to a few days before. I have hopes she may still exit and there are indications she may come out of Tsushima. I consider this proves the worth of FM Sonar and, as you know, we are rushing installation of next 9 full speed. I expect to find that some of those lads ran very deep and practically disregarded FM Sonar....

  I am going to Pearl about 5 July to get all the straight dope when the FM boats arrive there.3

  The part of the mission where the Hellcats made their exit from the Sea of Japan had happened days before Hydeman’s radio message to Lockwood. On June 23 eight Hellcats formed up in two parallel columns in the half-light of dusk outside the western entrance to La Pérouse Strait. Their next move would be a rush into the unknown. Before departing Guam, Hydeman had invited review by his skippers of the provisions for Sonar Yoke, a surface transit of the strait as set out in Operation Order 112-45.

  [Sonar Yoke] Exit will be made through La Pérouse Strait [surfaced at night on June 24] . Sunrise on 24 June is 0342, and sunset 1924. Hence, daylight extends seventeen hours. Depending on intelligence information concerning anti-surface mines and enemy activities in La Pérouse Strait now available and received during Operation “Barney” [sic], Commander Submarine Force Pacific Fleet, will recommend what appears to be the more feasible exit plan to the Pack Commander. Exit plans for [Sonar Yoke] are as follows.