Hellcats Page 14

  McMorris’s refusal wasn’t unexpected. Lockwood, the armchair submariner, accepted that with the war’s end looming he’d probably never get to make a war patrol nor fire a torpedo in anger. What rankled him, though, was that his friend James Fife had wrangled a patrol aboard a submarine operating off Subic Bay. How he had done it was a mystery to Lockwood and the cause of deep envy. Here was ComSubPac, who couldn’t even order himself aboard one of his own subs, while Fife was having the time of his life off the Philippines. Riding a sub to test FMS was hardly a substitute for the real thing.

  In the meantime two problems that had been pushed aside for more pressing matters vied for Lockwood’s attention: the upcoming test in San Diego of rival sonar detectors scheduled for late April; and finding an experienced submariner, an ex-skipper, to take over the training, planning, and execution of the Japan Sea mission. Selection of an officer for this assignment would relieve Lockwood and Voge of the enormous workload threatening to grind them down under the already formidable task of running the submarine war.

  Lockwood directed his chief of staff, Commodore Merrill Comstock, to find an officer who could take up the load. Comstock tapped ComSubPac assistant operations officer Commander William Bernard “Barney” Sieglaff for the job. Sieglaff was the former skipper of the USS Tautog (SS-199) and USS Tench (SS-417) and had thirteen confirmed sinkings to his credit.k Sieglaff was one of those quiet, resourceful, and self-motivating officers who often work behind the scenes of big and important undertakings that are successful because of men like him. With his appointment in late March the Tsushima Strait breakthrough finally had a name: Operation Barney.

  Even as Operation Barney’s load shifted from Lockwood’s and Voge’s shoulders to Sieglaff’s, the Seahorse, skippered by Commander Harry H. Greer, Jr., and the Crevalle, under Commander Everett H. Steinmetz of Brooklyn, New York, arrived at Guam. Lockwood put the two subs through four days of intense FMS training under his and Sieglaff’s supervision. As expected, the gear in both subs needed a tune-up to meet Lockwood’s and now Sieglaff’s exacting standards. Lockwood wasn’t discouraged anymore. He knew they were closing in at last on solving the few remaining problems with FMS. He was also encouraged by a genuine improvement in the attitudes of FMS sub crews and also in their mine-hunting skills, which in turn bolstered everyone’s confidence.

  In late March Lockwood dispatched Greer in the Seahorse, as he had Germershausen in the Spadefish, to sniff around the southern limits of the Tsushima mine barrier. He did this to double up on the mapping and to ensure its accuracy. Next he sent Steinmetz in the Crevalle off to patrol along the China coast and to probe the southern Tsushima boundary.

  The Bonefish nosed into Apra Harbor, Guam, on April Fool’s Day. Lockwood and Sieglaff wasted no time climbing aboard for FMS tests off Orote Point. Lockwood, enthused as ever, cast a keen eye on Edge and his ship, which arrived in spotless condition. He remarked that Edge, an electronics expert, was keen to wring out his ship’s sonar equipment and that he was self-assured and all business. Lockwood knew through scuttlebutt that sometime in July Edge would receive orders to the electronics desk at the Navy’s Bureau of Ships (BuShips), not ComSubPac, as Edge had assumed. Before this happened, however, Lockwood wanted him for Operation Barney. He was eager to watch Edge, one of the only sub skippers in the force who had been trained in the arcanum of circuit boards and resistors, put FMS through its paces.

  Even before the Bonefish could get under way at dawn, problems arose. A cable had pulled out of her FM sonar head due to faulty switches that controlled the rotational limits of the head shafting. Lockwood kept his anger in check while he chain-smoked, waiting for the technicians to complete repairs, not pleased with the delay nor with the fact that the alleged experts who had gone over the ship’s equipment upon her arrival hadn’t discovered the problem. After repairs the Bonefish’s performance that day bested any that Lockwood had seen. Coupled with Edge’s knowledgeable touch on the controls, it tempered the admiral’s earlier upset. Despite FMS’s temperamental nature, when it was handled properly, as it was by Edge, it worked beautifully. Lockwood was also pleased to see that Edge didn’t display the skepticism and cynicism about FMS that had affected so many of his peers. Lockwood could cheerlead all he wanted for his plan, could talk it up day and night, do a sales job on it that would hopefully convince even the most skeptical among them. In the end he had to prove that it would work. And he had to hope that events beyond his control didn’t scuttle his efforts. More than anything else, he feared that the loss of one of the three FMS subs now on patrol in mine-infested waters south of Kyushu, or those that would follow, would sink Operation Barney before it ever had a chance to get started. So far early reports from the skippers of the Spadefish, Crevalle, and Seahorse indicated that, like George Pierce in the Tunny, they were having success locating mines. Watching Edge demonstrate his expertise of the gadget and seeing his confidence in its abilities was all the evidence Lockwood needed to maintain his belief in FMS and Operation Barney.

  When Edge returned from his outing with Lockwood, he started a letter to Sarah.

  We’ve been operating pretty steadily, starting early and ending late every day. Admiral L. has ridden with us one day, and he, in the several times I’ve seen him (lunch once, dinner once, here on the boat twice, etc.), he has turned out to be much nicer and more interesting than I had previously thought or imagined him to be. But I’m still not sure that I’ll be on his staff after all. . . . I’m not worrying about it one way or the other, they’ll probably change their minds this way and that several times before I get back from patrol.

  A day later, after completing another workout, he wrote:Well, every day something new. This [next] patrol may not be my last after all! So the admiral happened to indicate today. He in fact doesn’t seem to have heard of all the things the other folks of his staff have been telling or are planning. So now I don’t know what to think. Even so it appears that this one and another [patrol] will be all. . . .

  Being infected with Lockwood’s enthusiasm for FMS may have been what Edge needed to convince himself that the mission he would be undertaking would help bring the war to an end and speed his return to Sarah and Boo.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Minehunters

  The Bonefish departed Guam on April 6, after Lawrence Edge received sealed orders for a seventh war patrol in Area Nine, the Goto Retto and Quelpart Island region southwest of Kyushu. His orders included instructions to operate with the Seahorse—if feasible, given Greer’s tricky assignment—and the Crevalle. Edge also had orders to locate a minefield in an area southwest of the Danjo Gunto, a small group of islands west of Kyushu. The orders didn’t specify a date for carrying out the mine recon, instead leaving it to Edge’s discretion.

  In private moments during the voyage Edge’s thoughts turned to Sarah, Boo, and “Junior.” Time permitting, he wrote letters to Sarah in which he revealed deep, personal feelings about the war he so much wanted to survive.

  Though Lockwood had delighted in Edge’s optimism regarding FMS, and his impressive bearing and self-assured manner, Edge’s true feelings, which he put into his letters, had been tempered by the great distance and duration of separation from his wife and daughter, and by the deaths of men with whom he had served and had shared, as men in combat do, his deepest fears and longings. Those fears and longings, and a sadness bordering on melancholy, are apparent in photographs taken of Edge during the period leading up to Operation Barney. He appears drawn and tired, world-weary and anxious to have the war over.

  Most Darling Love,

  . . . I write every day . . . telling you how much I miss you, and Boo and “Jr.”, and how dearly I love you and them.... It is particularly true at the beginning of the patrol . . . because . . . anxiety is probably at its greatest, in spite of trying to imagine that we’re awfully brave, well rested, and ready to go and make another killing and Navy Cross.

  To me this has been the hardest patrol of all . . .
and I suspect it’s mostly because I have so recently . . . been with you that I miss you more completely . . . than ever before. Now that I know full well what war is like, at least in submarines, and know that I don’t really like it and never will (war, I mean) . . . so I’m mainly conscious of... having to be here instead of there with you. Feeling the war is approaching the downhill side, as far as time is concerned, is no help to any of us either. Rather there’s the feeling that we’ve been lucky enough to survive so far; it would be such a shame not to last for the remainder and thus live through the whole thing.

  . . . [S]ome of the heaviest fighting (if not the worst of it) of this theater is yet to be done and probably even heavier loss of life is yet to come than has already. That being the case, why should we in submarines sit back yet and say, in effect, that we are through and our part of it is over? That applies especially to me and to most of us now on the Bonefish, since few of us have been fighting long enough to say that we have about done our share.... So, by rights I should be going on patrol ready to take all reasonable risks and chances the more of them [there are] the more the difficulties which confront us.

  . . . I want so strongly to return safely and bring the boat and the whole crew back safely that one of my big fears is that I’ll let that desire interfere with what is my real duty to the winning of the war and to those who have already given so much more than I in either risks or sacrifice. That . . . is one of the worst phases of war to anyone actually engaged in the fighting: the mental conflict between what he really wants to do and what he believes he should do. Maybe it just means I’m more scared than ever before, I don’t know. Probably I shouldn’t even be writing these things at all, because somehow I suspect it would be better not to admit them even to myself. . . . [S]tatistics still say we have a pretty good chance of getting back all right. I just hope I don’t disgrace myself in the eyes of other skippers, the boss [Lockwood] or my crew....

  I miss [you] with the tremendous longing that all but overpowers me at times.... I can hardly wait to have little brother join us and to join you three myself. . . . I just want to be with you all so much that I don’t want to be out here even a little bit, especially if there is the least doubt that I’ll not return to you. . . .

  Lawrence1

  Plowing through heavy green seas at two-engine speed, white spume exploding over her bull nose, the Bonefish cut through the Ryukyus for Area Nine, entering the East China Sea just after dawn on April eleventh.

  Edge, alert and decisive, his submariner’s sixth sense on guard for any indication that a potential problem was brewing, kept a firm hand on both his ship’s and his crew’s pulse as they approached Japanese-controlled waters. If he felt a quickening of those pulses it was because, operating so close to Japan, anything could happen. He made certain that the crew maintained a hair-trigger posture, ready to react instantly to an emergency or sudden contact with the enemy. The Bonefish rarely needed her crew’s assistance to operate with complete reliability and was in fact operating as if she had no need for them at all. That wasn’t completely true; every man aboard played an important role maintaining the submarine at the highest level of combat efficiency.

  At night, on the surface in the East China Sea, the officer of the deck, the quartermaster of the watch, and four lookouts stationed on the bridge peered out through binoculars at the dark stretch of water, searching for enemy ships and planes. As the Bonefish swept toward her patrol station the radarmen studied the bright green pips blossoming on the radarscope like stars in a galaxy each time the ship’s powerful SJ radar swept around. The pips indicated scores of night-fishing sampans and sailboats, while ghostly greenish background clutter called “grass” indicated small, grubby volcanic islands or fast-moving rain squalls. The radarmen, searching for targets worthy of a torpedo or two, evaluated each pip, dismissing some, keeping an eye on others.

  After sampling the array of contacts on the radarscope in the conning tower, Edge backed down the ladder into the control room, where the chief of the watch acknowledged that everything was under control. Edge conferred with his executive officer over a chart of the patrol area. The exec confirmed that the Bonefish’s present course and speed conformed to Edge’s orders. He also pointed out that the steering effects produced by the strong local currents required constant course corrections. Detailed information on those currents and other essentials pertaining to navigation in waters around southern Japan had been published in the ship’s dogeared copy of the Coast Pilot. Area Nine was strewn with dozens of small islets and rough-bottomed coastal shallows similar to those in waters the Bonefish had patrolled off the Philippines and that posed a potential hazard.

  Moving aft, Edge passed the radio room, banked with transmitters and receivers, and entered the crew’s mess, where off-duty sailors gathered to eat meals, drink coffee by the gallon, play cribbage and backgammon, whine, complain, and talk about what they were going to do when they got home after the war. Other favorite topics for discussion were the Navy, and, of course, women.

  Continuing aft through the crew’s berthing compartment, past snoring off-duty sailors sprawled in their bunks, Edge entered the booming engine rooms. He acknowledged the motor macs on watch and received a circled-thumb-and-index-finger status report from the engineering officer. The men used sign language to communicate; talking over the deafening roar of diesel engines running at flank speed wasn’t possible.

  Farther aft, in the maneuvering room, Edge chatted easily with the electricians’ mates controlling and monitoring the ship’s electrical load at the propulsion control console. He surveyed the console’s solid wall of amp meters and gauges and checked the lineup on the main propulsion control levers. Nodding approval, he moved on to the after torpedo room. He found, as he had during an earlier tour of the forward torpedo room, a gang of cocky and profane torpedomen itching for action. Sharing their living and bunking spaces with a load of hulking three-thousand-pound, twenty-foot-long torpedoes, the sailors had developed a genuine affection for them, patting their blunt noses as if stroking a faithful dog on the head. Torpedomen assigned to the after room saw less action than their mates up forward. Regarded as tail-end Charlies, they never failed to ask Edge, whom they all admired and respected, if, when he had a target, he could try to fire the stern tubes first. The easygoing Edge would try his best.

  After sunrise, as the Bonefish drove northwestward toward the Goto Retto, a fast-approaching plane lit up SD radar. It would be on top of them in minutes.

  Edge didn’t hesitate: “Clear the bridge!” The officer of the deck hit the diving alarm, honking it twice.

  Seawater surging into her ballast tanks, the Bonefish nosed down, rigged-out bow planes on full dive. Water streaming past the plunging submarine sluiced into the superstructure’s voids, chuckling up the sides of the conning tower and periscope shears and over the sealed bridge hatch.

  “One-five-zero feet. Eight-degree down bubble,” said the diving officer, confirming Edge’s orders. The Bonefish dived fast, clawing for depth and the protection it offered.

  Edge called for a range estimate on the airplane before the SD mast went under. “Five miles, Captain, maybe less.” He altered course away from the telltale scar of foam and bubbles the Bonefish’s dive had etched on the surface.

  A water hammer rattled pipes and valves in the forward part of the ship. The hydraulic system moaned as the planesmen finessed the bow and stern planes just so to level the sub out exactly at Edge’s ordered depth. “One-five-zero feet, Captain.” Edge acknowledged the report and nodded approval.

  Though the airplane had likely come and gone without dropping bombs or depth charges, Edge ran submerged all morning, until it was time for a cautious look-see.

  “Sonar?”

  “Nothing in the vicinity, Captain.”

  “Up scope.” On haunches, Edge waited for the periscope to appear, snapped down the folded training handles, and rose with it. Arm draped over one of the handles he muscled the scope a
round 360 degrees, searching sky and sea for intruders or, better yet, targets. It took only seconds to make a full circuit. “All clear. Down scope.” It was time to make tracks for the patrol station. “Control, prepare to surface.”

  Edge, the officer of the deck, the quartermaster, and four lookouts, with binoculars slung around their necks, waited at the foot of the ladder to the bridge.

  “Surface the boat,” Edge ordered.

  Three hoots of the Klaxon resounded through the ship, followed by the roar of high-pressure air dewatering the main ballast tanks. The Bonefish shuddered and nosed up. As the depth gauges unwound, the diving officer called out the readings until the boat had shouldered out from under the sea. Moments later four diesels, rolling on air starters, erupted, spewing smoke and cooling water from their exhaust ports. With two engines charging batteries to ensure that the ship had a “full can” for the next submergence, the staccato throb of the two on propulsion rose several octaves. The screws took a bite and the Bonefish swung onto a course into the East China Sea.

  After sunset on the twelfth, the Bonefish, patrolling south of Quelpart Island, exchanged recognition signals with her pack mate, the Seahorse, via SJ radar. Radar pulses keyed via Morse code allowed submarines to communicate on a secure channel. After an exchange of information, which included Edge’s report that they’d encountered and destroyed several floating Type 93 mines with gunfire, Greer gave Edge permission to patrol independently, as the area they were in, laced with islands and shallows patrolled by the Japanese, would impose severe limitations on a coordinated attack. As well, the Seahorse would be unavailable for a few days while she conducted that mine recon for Lockwood around the mouth of the Tsushima Strait. When the Bonefish and Seahorse parted company Greer and his men had no idea what the Japanese had in store for them.