Hellcats (3 page)

The Sea of Japan was the only area where what remained of the Japanese merchant marine blithely went about its business, unmolested by submarines. U.S. Pacific command understood that as long as Japan had ships to lug goods across that sea from occupied Manchuria and Korea to ports in western Japan, the war would continue, perhaps at a reduced tempo, but continue it would.

In 1943, Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, Commander Submarine Force, United States Pacific Fleet (ComSubPac), had sent submarines on war patrols into the Sea of Japan. On three separate occasions they had slipped into and out of the sea by negotiating La Pérouse Strait, one of the five straits providing entry, and which the U.S. Navy believed was mined. The results of those operations were mixed, as torpedo problems plagued the five subs. Consequently, the USS
Permit
(SS-178), USS
Plunger
(SS-179), USS
Lapon
(SS-260), USS
Sawfish
(SS-276), and USS
Wahoo
(SS-238) sank only ten ships totaling approximately 28,000 tons, hardly enough to put a dent in Japan's
maru
lifeline. Worse yet, the
Wahoo
, on her second patrol into the sea, was attacked and sunk with all hands, including her famous skipper, Commander Dudley W. “Mush” Morton, revered by the sub force as the best of the best. With the
Wahoo
's loss, Admiral Lockwood suspended further operations in the Sea of Japan.

And yet a different picture had slowly started to emerge in the spring of 1943, well before the first submarine patrols into the Sea of Japan. Scientists working for the Navy in laboratories in California had developed a radically new sonar system that held promise for locating mines underwater. Lockwood thought that with refinement this system might be useful to submarines for plotting the locations of mines in their patrol areas—including, perhaps, even the forbidden Sea of Japan, which, after the earlier penetrations, was now thought to be guarded by newer and even bigger minefields designed specifically to keep submarines out. Lockwood realized that the new system, called FM sonar (FMS), if fully developed, would give submarines a powerful offensive tool.

FM sonar evolved into that tool at about the same time hard-won victories in the Pacific suggested Japan might be nearing collapse. It seemed possible, then, that as ever more successful U.S. amphibious and surface naval operations gained momentum against Japan's army and navy, and while U.S. submarines with better-performing torpedoes sank more and more merchant ships, a timely raid by subs into the Sea of Japan to attack protected shipping might speed up Japan's collapse by cutting off supplies, which would demoralize her people and her leaders, who would then surrender.

ComSubPac assumed that such a raid would accomplish several things. First, it would demonstrate that by penetrating the minefields ringing the Sea of Japan, U.S. subs could operate virtually anywhere and under any conditions. Second, it would demonstrate that the Japanese were utterly defenseless against U.S. military forces. Third, besides cutting off vital war supplies, it would slow if not end the transfer of troops from Manchuria to Kyushu to meet the anticipated U.S. invasion of Japan. Fourth, it would demonstrate to the Soviet Union that the United States Navy's powerful submarine force would play a vital role in the implementation of America's strategic objectives in the postwar era.

As Admiral Lockwood surveyed developments in the sonar laboratories in California, he quickly grasped the tactical implications that the new device had unexpectedly presented. He wasted no time putting them to use. Thus were born the Hellcats and Operation Barney.

T
he brick apartment building at 18 Collier Road, Atlanta, Georgia, still stands. Today it's in demand for its proximity to Midtown and Buckhead, and, across the street, a major medical facility, Piedmont Hospital. In July 1945 it was home to Sarah Simms Edge and her daughter, Sarah, age three.

With a second child due in August, Sarah, likely dreading another scorcher of a July day in Atlanta, went about her daily routine of household chores and caring for little Sarah. She was looking forward to the mail, anticipating a letter from her husband, U.S. Navy commander Lawrence Lott Edge. Since his deployment to the Pacific, Edge, commanding officer of the USS
Bonefish
, had written with such clocklike regularity that despite the great physical distance separating them, Sarah felt as close to her husband as was possible in wartime.

Sarah had last been with Lawrence in San Francisco, where the
Bonefish
, upon her return from the Pacific in early November 1944, had undergone a major overhaul at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Typically, Pacific Fleet subs underwent three- to four-month-long overhauls on the West Coast, either at Hunters Point or Mare Island Naval Shipyard. It had been a wonderful and long-anticipated reunion for the couple. Romantic, too, for Sarah soon discovered that she was pregnant.

After the
Bonefish
completed her overhaul in mid-February, she had sailed for Pearl Harbor. From Pearl Harbor she departed for Guam, arriving on Easter Sunday, April 1. Far to the northwest, in the Ryukyu Islands, American troops were landing on Okinawa, Japan's last Pacific bastion. Only 956 miles from Tokyo, the capture of Okinawa would give the United States a forward staging area from which to launch Operation Majestic, the proposed invasion of Japan, should it become necessary.

As the fight for Okinawa gained momentum, the
Bonefish
departed Guam on her seventh war patrol, Lawrence's third as CO. In addition to a regular combat patrol, he had orders to conduct a top-secret special mission. Well in advance of his departure from Pearl Harbor, Edge had been informed that this patrol would be his last as captain of the
Bonefish
, as he was slated for transfer to the staff of ComSubPac's new electronics training command. Edge had been trained in electronics and was looking forward to the challenges the job offered. Now, however, the letters he had mailed to Sarah before sailing from Guam hinted that upon completion of this next war patrol, yet another special mission was in the offing. Lawrence didn't try to hide his disappointment; he craved shore duty.

Beginning in early March, Lawrence's letters posted from Pearl Harbor arrived almost daily at Collier Road. They were filled with insightful and deeply personal reflections on his duties as the commanding officer of a submarine, and on the war and the effect its continuation was having on his and his crew's morale. Like the Atlanta newspapers and radio broadcasts reporting steady Allied advances against the Nazis and Japanese, Lawrence's views of the war in the Pacific gave Sarah good reason to believe that, yes, the war might be nearing an end, and that her husband would soon be home. But more than anything else he expressed deep love for Sarah and for his daughter, whom he sometimes called “Sarah, Jr.” or “Boo.” He yearned for the day he would come home to them.

His letters continued arriving from Guam before departure on his seventh war patrol and again after his return and on into late May as he prepared for the special mission hinted at in his earlier letters. Perhaps Sarah sensed that something was wrong when his letters, which had been arriving with clocklike regularity, suddenly stopped coming. Then, on that hot July day, she heard a knock on the door from a messenger with a telegram and a heart-stopping, “Ma'am, is someone with you?” The words that rose off the strips of teletype pasted on a yellow Western Union form cut like a knife.

In an instant, that telegram turned Sarah Edge's world upside down and changed her life forever. The Navy had no other information about Lawrence beyond what was in the telegram, only those three terrible words:
Missing in action
. Had the
Bonefish
been sunk? Was Lawrence dead or alive? Had he been taken prisoner? She may have wanted to scream,
Tell me!
But no one could, not even the Navy.

 

 

Like most Navy wives, especially
those of submariners, Sarah Edge had no idea, other than Pearl Harbor or Guam, where her husband was at any given time. The little information she did have came from reading between the lines of his self-censored letters, and it wasn't much. He usually started writing them aboard ship, continued them in his off-duty hours—of which there were few for a sub's skipper—then finished and posted them when he returned from patrol.

Lawrence had written one of the many letters Sarah received in April while the
Bonefish
was engaged in that first secret mission.

Unknown to Sarah, Lawrence at that time was conducting a dangerous reconnaissance of a minefield sown in waters near Kyushu, Japan. His mission was similar to those that had been assigned other sub skippers: to locate and plot enemy minefields using an experimental mine-detecting sonar system.

The experimental sonar gear in the
Bonefish
worked to near perfection, plotting strings of mines with impressive accuracy. After Lawrence's return to Guam from the mine recon he told Sarah that he and his crew were putting in long hours and working very hard, but that everything was okay.

Lawrence didn't divulge the nature of his work or the mission he'd completed nor what it portended for the future, only that he would be starting another patrol soon, after which he hoped, at last, to transfer ashore. In late May, before he departed on this, his fourth patrol, he wrote a short letter filled with words of love for Sarah and Boo, and joy that he was the luckiest man in the world to have such a sweet and wonderful wife. He closed with:

Sarah had always feared that
Lawrence would be killed in the war. Now that fear had materialized into a nightmare. The missing-in-action telegram had shocked her like a fall into icy water. Pregnant, racked by dread and anxiety, Sarah knew that submariners faced down danger and death every day. She may also have known that as of July 1945 the Navy had lost fifty submarines. Had the
Bonefish
, too, been sunk? In those first dark hours of uncertainty she may have recalled words that Lawrence wrote to her in April:

All Sarah could do was wait in agony for the Navy to provide her and the families of the missing
Bonefish
sailors with more information about their fate. And pray for her husband and those men.

A
submariner himself, Charles A. Lockwood, short in stature and with a warm, outgoing personality, was a capable and respected career naval officer. His extravagant regard for the men under his command was repaid with their undying admiration and affection. To them he was “Uncle Charlie.”

Not one to hide his feelings, Lockwood freely admitted that he was deeply affected by the deaths of the more than 3,500 officers and enlisted men serving in the fifty-two subs lost during the war.
^a
To Lockwood, his submariners (that's sub-muh-REEN-ers, not sub-MARE-iners) were his family.