Hellcats

by Peter Sasgen

  Ozzie, which boats saw the ships going around [the Noto Peninsula] into Toyama Bay? And why was Lawrence sent in after them? Why did he decide to go submerged at a deep depth all the way if not to avoid mines.... Did you and George [Pierce] too feel that there were mines in the waters below 100 fathoms?

  Did you go into any bays? I know some of the boats did! I understand Toyama Wan was more hazardous than the others. Do you think Lawrence just sank the two ships or more? How lucky were you?

  Do you not believe with me that he struck a mine? Everyone seems to feel that he was lost around or in the bay. Am I correct in thinking that he could have been lost anywhere between the point [where] George last contacted him, 50 miles NW of [the peninsula] and La Pérouse Strait.

  I still can’t believe he is gone. It is too much to ask of one right at the end of the war. Sarah keeps insisting that Daddy is coming home “tomorrow” to see “Little Brother.” I suppose you know that Lawrence was to have left sub duty and gone to radio work after his April patrol. He was informed that arriving at Pearl after he left Calif. but Adm. Lockwood told him he would have to make one more [patrol]. I will admit to you that he was indeed disappointed.

  . . . If you can spare a moment . . . I would appreciate your writing me to help clear my dizzy head.

  Sincerely,

  Sarah [signed]3

  Lynch answered promptly.4 He told Sarah that the Bonefish had suffered no serious damage (as rumors had claimed) and was in good shape when she shoved off on Operation Barney. “I talked to Larry quite a bit before we started out and he seemed to feel fine about going in.” As for being ordered to take on the mission, “We were ordered to make the June raid the same as we were ordered to make any other patrol except we had all the special charts and gear to make the run.”

  “I was not asked particularly whether I wanted to make the run or not. In my case I wanted to go. I was married once, and there was no great loss to anyone should I not return. It has always been the policy for any skipper who wanted to give up command to merely say so and he would be relieved.”

  As for the rest period between patrols, Lynch said, “Larry had a short rest period because he had to make the schedule with the rest of us. The operation as you may have guessed had been planned for a long time.” “You are correct about the patrols being dangerous. I felt that I would not get back.... I did not tell anyone about it, but it’s the case.”

  Lynch explained his role in the Toyama Wan incursion, writing, “I was the boat that saw the [Japanese ships] going into Toyama Bay and so reported it to the pack commander, George Pierce. Larry went in after them because that was his assigned patrol area. I was assigned half of it for the first two days only.... I do not . . . think that there were any mines below 100 fathoms.

  “. . . The only word we had from Larry on how many [ships] he sank was four days before we thought he was missing. He could easily have sunk more.” To the hazards of Toyama Wan, Lynch said, “. . . [it] was no more hazardous than any other place except it was a bay and as such had only one direction to go to get out.

  “. . . You asked me how lucky I was. We were very lucky [to have sunk the ships we did.]

  “No one knows just what happened to the Bonefish. We thought that some information might come from the Japanese after the war was over as to claims made by their anti-submarine vessels. There is one third of a chance that they struck a mine. There is just no way to tell just where the boat might have been sunk.”

  A few weeks later Ozzie Lynch received Sarah’s response.

  Somehow your letter seemed to lift a weight from me, especially the one sentence: “Larry went in after them because that was his assigned patrol area.” So many of the families have heard that Lawrence asked to go into the bay, and I believe several felt as one mother said to me over long distance: “Why should he have asked to risk the boat and men to go into such a dangerous place?” No one knows better than I, that Lawrence would never risk his boat and men anywhere he was not ordered to go or felt it his duty to go. He personally was too anxious to survive this war.

  . . . [I]n the last week I have received other reports that do not coincide with what I had figured to be true.... I wonder if you think, why bother with these details. It is over and done with but somehow it helps a small amount to know all the true facts surrounding the loss of the boat and our men. It is constantly in my mind, as in others, so I guess it is best to work it off this way rather than just to sit and wait for the final verdict from the Navy.

  In a follow-up letter to Lynch, Sarah asked for his views on a number of issues circulating among the Bonefish families. Foremost were the rumors and speculation that some of the men had survived the sinking and were alive in prison camps awaiting rescue. Such rumors and speculation had been stoked by a report from a Navy chaplain, the father of a Bonefish sailor, assigned to POW recovery in Japan. He reported that many of the POW camps had still not been reached by U.S. forces, especially those on the west coast of Japan. This was due in part to heavily mined waters in the Sea of Japan that had not yet been cleared, plus the fact that there were few roads into the areas where those camps had been built. The chaplain explained that while records were still being searched for information, none had yet been found that would indicate Bonefish survivors were in one of the camps. Still, the chaplain said there was reason to be hopeful.

  Another troubling issue concerned those who had all but given up hope for their loved ones and sought to assess blame. For them, Lockwood had become a convenient scapegoat. It was said that he and others in authority, realizing that it looked bad for eight undamaged subs not to go back into the Sea of Japan to the aid of the Bonefish, had told Pierce and Lynch what they could and could not say about it.

  Through dogged persistence Sarah had assembled an impressive array of facts pertaining to Operation Barney, which she included in her letters to Lynch and the families. As the wall of secrecy surrounding the operation slowly opened wider, she at last understood the mission’s tactical and strategic objectives and also how the mission itself had been carried out. However, at this stage she still had no knowledge of Lockwood’s desire to exact retribution, if not a measure of personal vengeance, from the Japanese for the death of Mush Morton and the loss of the Wahoo.

  Addressing the questions Sarah posed in her follow-up letter, Lynch wrote in mid-November, “Let there be no doubt that Larry was as good a fighter as any man who ever went to sea. None of us know the story of the end of his ship, but I know that he went down fighting for you and me and the rest of us.”

  Most of the information that she had was correct, he said, in regard to the mission itself, the number of subs, and its dates. What was not true, he said, was that the Bonefish had rendezvoused with the other eight Hellcats, after which she had somehow disappeared or turned back during the escape phase. It was also not true, according to rumors, that the ship had been scuttled or that she’d been seen attacking a large convoy and was in turn attacked herself. Once again, he told Sarah that he doubted the Bonefish had struck a mine, as the water in which she was operating was too deep for mining. “Much as I hate to say it to you, capture by the Japs seems a remote possibility.”

  Sometime in the fall of 1945, Sarah sent a long letter to all of the Bonefish families. She told them what she had learned about Operation Barney and the loss of the Bonefish.5 She explained that the information had been pieced together from her correspondence with Lawrence, Admiral Lockwood, George Pierce, Ozzie Lynch, and several officers whom she didn’t name who had firsthand knowledge of Operation Barney. Sarah knew that her letter wouldn’t lessen the crushing heartbreak of the loss of those men whose lives had ended prematurely, if not needlessly. She simply wanted to share the facts she’d assembled to try to help the families understand, as she now did, what the men had faced in their hour of sacrifice.

  “The loss to all of us,” she wrote, “is indeed more regrettable and harder to understand since the war was all but over when the Bonefish wa
s reported missing, for the public utterances of Adm. Nimitz say that the Japs were well defeated some weeks before the atom bomb was dropped on August 6.”

  In her letter Sarah shared with the families Lawrence’s sentiments regarding his and his friends’ belief that they had been lucky to survive the war so far and that it would be a tragedy for them not to live to see its end. Sarah also included a comprehensive overview of Operation Barney, starting with the Wahoo’s incursions into the Sea of Japan, which she characterized as having been turned into a highly fortified and dangerous area. Drawing on Pierce’s and Lynch’s letters she described the operation’s tactical aspects from beginning to end, though she erred through misinformation on the two final points on which her letter ended. Nevertheless her words are a fitting conclusion to the gallant Bonefish’s final days in action: “. . . Adm. Lockwood sent a message to the eight subs as they went out of La Pérouse Strait, saying that disturbances in Japan Sea indicated that the Bonefish was still in the Seaae and that he had tried to send a message to her telling her how the others had left the Sea. No one went back to look for her or to see if she needed help.”af To this she added, “The greatest success was that only one sub, U.S.S. Bonefish was lost. . . .”

  In Tokyo, intelligence officers continued digging through records and conducting interrogations of Japanese naval personnel. They knew there had to be someone, the captain of a ship, an officer, an enlisted man, who knew something about an attack in Toyama Wan that would reveal the fate of the Bonefish. The team, despite working under difficult and sometimes chaotic conditions, remained optimistic that a relevant action report would eventually show up, given that action reports concerning the fates of other subs had surfaced. Adding to the difficulties, the team’s efforts on behalf of ComSubPac had been harnessed to those of other Navy and Army personnel engaged in sifting material for inclusion in a massive report on Japan’s technical and engineering proficiency as it related to the production of weapons and war matériel. Searching captured Japanese records for the fate of one lost submarine would prove to be a long and arduous task.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Shining Glory

  December 1945 brought a change at the top of the Navy’s chain of command: Admiral Nimitz replaced Admiral King as chief of naval operations. In the Pacific, Rear Admiral Allan R. McCann replaced Admiral Lockwood as ComSubPac. That McCann was a two-star rather than a three-star confirmed the diminishing role played by the Pacific sub force as the Atlantic submarine force began to meet the challenge posed by the Soviet Union.

  Lockwood wasn’t happy with his new assignment as the Navy’s inspector general, or, as he characterized it, the Navy’s top cop. For him it was the end of a life in submarines, a life he’d known for almost thirty years. He had little stomach for investigating corruption and wrongdoing in the ranks. Instead, he’d wanted a job as the Navy’s submarine czar, but Nimitz wasn’t interested in having one on his watch. Lockwood tried to make the best of it. He longed for his old friends and missed the camaraderie submarine service had fostered. He also missed the smells of diesel oil and the sea; he was no more fit for shore duty in postwar Washington, D.C., than he had been back in the late 1930s. Many of the skippers he had known so well, whom he had come to think of as his kin, left their wartime commands for new ones or they retired. Others went on to begin the work of building a new, modern submarine force that would need those faster, deeper-diving, quieter, more powerful submarines Lockwood had envisioned to replace those that had so ably fought in the Pacific. Also, new tactics would be needed to utilize the properties these modern subs would bring to the fleet. To man the new boats the force would need men who were proficient in electronics and advanced radars, sonars, and weapons systems. All of this lay in the future, of course. Because Lockwood knew where the force was headed, he felt trapped in his office at Main Navy; worse yet, he felt that he was being left behind. Already there was talk of an atomic-powered submarine that would revolutionize submarine warfare altogether. For men like Lockwood, those glorious days of hard-fought success against the Japanese were sliding into distant memory.

  Sarah tried hard to accept that Lawrence and his men were not coming home. It was almost 1946; the war had been over for almost five months. During that time there had been no new news from the Navy Department about their fate. Captured Japanese records had not yet yielded information that would explain what had happened to the Bonefish. The search for POWs in Japan was coming to an end. The wait for information was agonizing.

  Frustrated by the Navy’s slow-moving bureaucracy, Sarah, in typical fashion, took matters into her own hands. In late December she telephoned Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger, the commanding general of the U.S. Eighth Army in Yokahama, Japan, at home on Christmas leave in Asheville, North Carolina. When he answered the phone she didn’t hesitate to ask for his help locating information about the Bonefish. He suggested that she write to him in Japan with all of the information she had accumulated so far, which he would use to conduct a search of Eighth Army records for any trace of the missing men.

  In a letter to Eichelberger dated January 15, 1946, Sarah wrote, “We thought that by now some information would have come from the Japanese through claims made by their anti-submarine vessels. If the assumption that [the Bonefish] did not strike a mine, in which case debris would float ashore to indicate such is correct, then she was sunk by plane or ship and the Japs well know her fate.... These past months have indeed been of the greatest anxiety for all of us who had loved ones aboard, especially since officially we have been told only that the boys are ‘missing in action’ and the sub ‘lost.’ . . . Am I correct in having understood you to say that our forces have occupied all of Japan, which cancels our hope that the boys could yet be prisoners of war? Are our forces actually searching the many islands of the Japan Sea?”

  Eichelberger replied, “I am writing . . . to inform you that to date I can only report that a check of Army and GHQ recovered personnel records and graves registration records reveals no information pertaining to Commander Edge or personnel of the submarine which your husband commanded.

  “Investigations are being continued with the Naval Affairs section of General Headquarters and the Japanese Government for any possible information on this subject. . . .”

  By March, further inquiries to Eichelberger proved fruitless. Undaunted and drawing on remarkable reserves of faith and strength, Sarah pressed on, more determined than ever to part what seemed like an opaque curtain of bureaucratic obfuscation surrounding the Bonefish’s loss. With time she’d accepted that Lawrence and his men could not have survived the sinking, and that if by some miracle some had, she knew in her heart that by now they would have been found. Lawrence was gone and nothing, not prayers, not tears, not anger, would bring him back. It was important, then, that his accomplishments were not forgotten and that his integrity and heroism be celebrated. He had placed his ideals above his fears and had died doing his duty. By taking aggressive action during his war patrols, Lawrence had personified the best of the submarine force. Like Dudley Morton, who never gave up the chase and once said, “Stay with [the enemy] till they’re on the bottom,” Lawrence Edge always stayed with the enemy, never mind the risks.

  In Tokyo, the Navy intel teams were now working under the supervision of General MacArthur’s occupation headquarters command. The team working for ComSubPac had come upon several important sources that detailed the circumstances surrounding the loss of most but not all U.S. submarines. The slog through these records, to say nothing of the interrogations of Japanese naval personnel involved in antisubmarine work, had been difficult, and pressure was building on the team to wrap up their work in Tokyo and prepare the tons of documents for shipment to Washington for further review by ONI, and for microfilming and cataloging for storage. If the team didn’t find the answers they were looking for now, they might never be found after the documents arrived in Washington. Thus, it was only through their dogged determination that the
documents finally yielded results.

  In early May a report entitled “Tabular Summary of U.S. Submarine Losses During World War II” arrived on the desk of Admiral McCann, ComSubPac. The report gave the details and circumstances of each loss gleaned from the records and interrogations in Tokyo. While it settled the fates of most but not all of the fifty-two boats lost, the summary explained that information about the other boats wasn’t available because the Japanese themselves had no direct evidence of attacks on those submarines. In those cases all ComSubPac could do was accept the fact that those boats had simply vanished.

  The long nightmare of uncertainty over the Bonefish’s fate finally came to an end in late June 1946, more than a year after her disappearance, when a letter from the Navy arrived at Collier Road. Though Sarah had been preparing for this day, the letter’s arrival struck a hard, painful note. Here at last was the end, the final, official word in cold, efficient, unadorned language.

  Quoting excerpts from the official history of the Pacific Submarine Force, Admiral McCann wrote:Japanese records of anti-submarine attacks mention an attack made on 18 June 1945, at 37°-18’ N, 137°-25’ E in Toyama Wan. A great many depth charges were thrown, and an oil pool one kilometer by ten kilometers was observed. This undoubtedly was the attack which sunk the Bonefish.

  No survivors from the Bonefish were ever found in any of the Japanese prison camps, nor did any of the repatriates from other U.S. submarine losses report seeing or hearing of survivors from the Bonefish. I cannot encourage you to believe that Commander Edge survived the loss of his ship.