Hellcats (39 page)

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 disclosed that three
sonar-equipped coast defense vessels armed with depth-charge throwers were responsible for the destruction of the
Bonefish
. According to their after-action reports, the two vessels, possibly the same two that had opened fire on the
Tunny
and the
Bonefish
near Suzu Misaki on June 17, only this time accompanied by a third unidentified ship, attacked and sank a submarine on June 18, 1945, in the area where the
Bonefish
had been patrolling in Toyama Wan.

The report stated that the three ships had been attacked with torpedoes from a submerged submarine and that the torpedoes had missed their targets. The ships then counterattacked with a savage depth charging that brought diesel oil and other debris boiling to the surface. Within hours a huge rainbow-hued oil slick could be seen from the air by planes summoned to search the area for more submarines. Unquestionably the oil had gushed from the ruptured fuel tanks of the
Bonefish
. The Japanese reported that there were no survivors. The
Bonefish
went down about eight miles from the coast in waters over a thousand feet deep. What Lawrence Edge and his crew faced in those terrible last moments, they faced with bravery and courage, giving all of their skill and strength to preserve their ship and their lives.

Before her end the
Bonefish
wrote a postscript to an outstanding career as a fighting ship. The Japanese reported on June 19 the loss of the 5,400-ton
Konzan Maru
close to where the
Bonefish
had been sunk. The reported date of the sinking of the
Konzan Maru
is incorrect, as the
Bonefish
, sunk on the eighteenth, had to have sunk the
Konzan Maru
before she herself was sunk. There is no doubt that the ship torpedoed by the
Bonefish
was the
Konzan Maru
, for no other Hellcat was in the area.

Though the details are sketchy
it's possible to visualize the
Bonefish
's final moments.

Patrolling submerged in Toyama Wan, Edge encountered three patrol boats. He attacked, but the torpedoes missed. Alerted, the patrol boats counterattacked in force. There wasn't time to fire another torpedo salvo—the enemy's
ping
,
ping
,
pinging
sonars had the
Bonefish
trapped in a vise.
Get her down fast—four hundred feet! Rig for depth charge and silent running! Here they come!
Three sets of angry, thrashing screws swept over the descending submarine. Depth charges rained down.

Whether by luck or fate, a hull-smashing explosion closer and more powerful than any the submariners had ever experienced caused mortal damage. In the split second it took the doomed men to grasp what had happened, the sea burst into the
Bonefish
like a snarling, killing beast.
Sound the collision alarm! Blow safety! Blow bow buoyancy! BLOW EVERYTHING!
In the confusion of anger and fear, frantic efforts to avoid disaster failed. Flooded and out of control, the
Bonefish
upended. Men, tools, anything not tied down crashed into the now horizontal bulkheads at the bottom of compartments. Depth-gauge needles wound violently to their stops. The water under the sub's keel was so deep that it was beyond comprehension. Down, down she plunged until, at the limit of their endurance, her stout frames and hull, moaning and shrieking in protest, gave way to the merciless sea. Trailing skeins of air bubbles and oil, the gallant
Bonefish
with her gallant captain and crew dived into eternity.

 

 

For Sarah Edge and the
grieving families a part of their lives had come to an end. Yet with these words from the mother of a
Bonefish
sailor a new one had already begun: “You and I have never met, Mrs. Edge, but we are not strangers. We share a common anguish, and a common hope, and because we are proud of our men, we bear in our hearts high courage and the knowledge that what they are and what they have done is a shining glory that will remain with us always.”

W
hen World War II ended and the Cold War began, Operation Barney and the Hellcats faded into obscurity. In retirement and with time to reflect, Lockwood accepted that Operation Barney, though a brilliant tactical success, had not brought Japan to her knees, as he had once believed it would. And while he never doubted that the Hellcats had performed magnificently, it must surely have troubled him that the mission he had conceived and worked so hard to launch had been neither the crowning achievement of the Pacific submarine war nor free of controversy.

Lockwood, justifiably proud of his accomplishments and those of the submarine force, was sensitive to this controversy. Questions, especially those regarding what he and the Navy's senior commanders expected of Operation Barney, should be considered in light of what Admiral Nimitz and Admiral King knew about the atomic bomb. As noted earlier, King and Nimitz had been told that its use on Japan would end the war. Lockwood was not privy to this information, saying that the bomb had come as a complete surprise. Operation Barney had been planned and approved far in advance of any information about the bomb divulged to Nimitz and King. When Nimitz received his first atom bomb briefing he thought it would have little effect on the war's outcome. He was convinced that a naval blockade and conventional bombing campaign would end it. But as the war ground on and he saw how stubborn the Japanese were, he came to the conclusion that the bomb had to be dropped because it might be the only way to end the war and prevent an invasion of Japan. But because there was no guarantee that the bomb would end the war, Nimitz couldn't order Lockwood to cancel Operation Barney, for if the bomb was a dud or if it worked but didn't shock the Japanese into surrendering (which it almost didn't), or if the Soviets didn't enter the war as promised, he and King—Lockwood, too—would be faced with a Pacific campaign that would likely drag on into the fall or winter of 1945, even the spring of 1946. Thus Operation Barney had to go forward.

What, then, did Operation Barney actually accomplish? It was estimated that Japan still had some two hundred steel-hulled ships afloat in the so-called “inner zone” of empire waters. The Hellcats certainly nibbled away at that total, but it would have taken many more raids like Barney to sink all of those ships and to bring about Japan's collapse. In that light, Operation Barney seems a mere pinprick, especially compared to the atomic bomb. Yet it got off and running with an irresistible force of its own that could not easily have been terminated even if Nimitz and Lockwood had wanted to. After all, one powerful force driving the mission was the huge amount of money the FM sonar project consumed every day. As in any expensive project a usable product is needed to justify the costs. Just like the invention of the atomic bomb, the invention of FM sonar predestined its use. If Lockwood can be faulted for anything, it was his willingness to risk the lives of the Hellcat submariners to prove that an experimental sonar system he'd nurtured and helped develop could guide submarines through minefields.

With the passage of time, these issues, like Barney itself, faded into obscurity. War is war, after all, and World War II was unimaginably complicated and fought on a scale so vast that its full implications are hard to comprehend. It consumed millions of lives and billions of dollars. The commanders who planned Pacific theater strategy did so with honor and integrity. Objectivity was an essential ingredient in their planning of the multitude of operations the strategy required. The commanders had to be confident that the missions would succeed and that lives would not be squandered needlessly. When sentiment, prejudice, and emotion enter the picture they can doom a military operation to failure, to say nothing of costing lives.

Clearly, sentiment, prejudice, and emotion played a significant role in Operation Barney. Was Lockwood's need to avenge the loss of Mush Morton and the
Wahoo
the
real
driving force behind Operation Barney? In his writings after the war, Lockwood made it clear that even if he wasn't obsessed by the need for revenge it was never far from his mind and that it had had a strong influence on his decisions. I believe it's fair to say that despite the bravery and dedication of the Hellcat submariners, Operation Barney was simply not worth the risks it entailed to sink ships in the Sea of Japan and avenge Mush Morton and the
Wahoo
. Certainly it was not worth the loss of the
Bonefish
.