Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (33 page)

American strategists were also hindered in seriously considering a submarine-led commerce raiding campaign by the navy’s prevailing view that this was an inferior operational approach. Submarines, it was asserted, could only raid and run, not maintain open sea lanes for extended periods. This view was very much in line with the analysis of the great American apostle of sea power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose classic formulation was that commerce raiding, though beguiling to strategists, had never been decisive in a major conflict and was among the worst of war’s “specious attractions.”
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These diplomatic and operational objections notwithstanding, the dire circumstances accompanying the late U.S. entry into the war at the close of 1941, the savaging of the Pacific Fleet in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and other sharp losses that came in the following weeks and months swiftly muffled ethical inhibitions or latent strategic snobbery toward commerce raiding. Thus a submarine campaign intended to be as ruthless as the one being conducted on the other side of the world by the Germans was commenced, placing the U.S. Navy in the peculiar position of simultaneously attacking via this mode of operations in the Pacific while defending against it in the Atlantic.

The American decision to resort to irregular warfare at sea should not be seen as driven simply by exigent circumstances, however. There was actually considerable historical precedent for operating in this fashion. The embryonic U.S. Navy during the Revolutionary War (1776–1783) was basically a small raiding force whose exemplar was John Paul Jones. The overwhelming British advantage in ships of the line during the War of 1812 guaranteed that the lighter American fleet of frigates would focus on hit-and-run operations too. And when the first round of naval arms control was played out in the Paris Conference of 1856, where the leading powers of the day sought to outlaw privateering, it was the United States that came to the vigorous defense of using “sea dogs for hire.” The U.S. secretary of state in attendance at the conference, William Marcy, argued that giving up the
GUERRE DE COURSE
would create conditions where “dominion over the seas will be surrendered to those powers which have the means of keeping up large navies.”
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Americans, who had written the right to authorize commerce raiding into their Constitution,
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were not about to allow an international ban on the practice.

No doubt there were regrets in Washington just a few years later when, during the Civil War (1861–1865), Confederate naval units and privateers engaged largely in commerce raiding, inflicting a great deal of damage to Union shipping.
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While it was not enough to have a truly decisive effect on the outcome of the war—perhaps because the Confederates had only one short-range submarine, the
HUNLEY
, which was lost on its first operation—rebel sea raiders did enough damage to leave a “strategic memory” in place attesting to the efficacy of this form of warfare. In the dark days after Pearl Harbor, it was this and earlier manifestations of the American tradition of sea raiding that helped inspire a new generation of sailors to strike back in this fashion.

The early going for submarine operations against the Japanese Imperial Navy was hardly smooth. America’s Asiatic Fleet, based in the Philippines, had twenty-nine submarines capable of long-range operations, but they proved incapable of harassing the ships supporting the many amphibious landings the Japanese made there. In December 1941 these submarines mounted more than forty attacks on Japanese ships, expending nearly one hundred torpedoes, but sunk only three small merchant ships.
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The problems were twofold: faulty technology and inadequate human resources. The Americans’ Mark-14 torpedo tended to run at too great a depth, often passing far below its targets’ hulls. When it did hit, the torpedo’s detonator regularly malfunctioned.
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Added to this was the “skipper problem”: few submarine captains had trained for long-range patrols, and all believed—perhaps a bit too conveniently—that their boats were more vulnerable to depth charges and other enemy countermeasures than they actually were. This serious misperception led Asiatic Fleet commander Admiral Thomas Hart, who fled Manila Bay in a submarine, to urge great caution upon his submarine captains.
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His wrongheaded guidance came at a time when the more aggressive use of submarines, including reset depth levels for their torpedoes, might well have significantly hampered the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.

In the event, the Japanese naval and amphibious
BLITZKRIEG
rolled on mostly unimpeded for many months after Pearl Harbor throughout the southwestern Pacific. Despite American willingness to wage unrestricted submarine warfare, the results achieved against the Japanese continued to be quite poor until both the technological and human capital problems were addressed. In the course of resolving these difficulties, Charles A. Lockwood came on the scene, helping bring solutions in both areas. From early 1943 until the end of the war in 1945, he commanded all submarines in the vast Pacific theater of operations. More than any other man, Lockwood turned the American submarine force into a deadly weapon, one that would eventually account for just under a third of all Japanese warships sunk, including eight aircraft carriers, a battleship, and eleven cruisers. His submarines would also sink about two-thirds of the Japanese merchant fleet, about five million tons.
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*

Charles Lockwood grew up in Missouri at the turn of the twentieth century, near the Mississippi River that, as a boy, he dreamed of sailing down to the Gulf of Mexico. His imagination was also fired by stories of American naval successes in the war of 1898 against Spain, which featured great fleet actions off Cuba and in the more distant Philippines. He was bright enough to earn admission to the U.S. Naval Academy, but his grades there held steady in the lower half of his class. He graduated in 1912 without particular distinction and served on two battleships over the next two years. But in 1914, newly transferred to the Asiatic Station, Lockwood was given command of a small submarine,
A-2.
He was soon enthralled with the emerging technologies that were, even then, making undersea warfare into what he thought would become the leading edge in naval affairs.

Because the United States entered World War I late—in 1917, after American anger had been sufficiently stoked by U-boat attacks, and the German naval and merchant fleets had long been bottled up—the Americans engaged in virtually no submarine action. Only a single enemy vessel was sunk by U.S. submarines before the armistice in 1918. But Lockwood drew the interesting postwar duty of commanding the
UC-97
, a surrendered German U-boat given to the Americans to study. He sailed it west across the Atlantic, then through the Great Lakes, learning much along the way and developing a deep respect for German design and engineering skills

Lockwood next returned to Asia, where he served on the China Station’s Yangtze River Patrol, made famous by Richard McKenna’s classic novel
THE SAND PEBBLES
. He commanded two small gunboats during this time and operated at a great distance and with little oversight from senior officers. Day to day he found himself dealing with pirates, warlords, and missionary relief societies. These experiences, which placed such a premium on the personal judgment and initiative of the commanding officer, would serve him well two decades later as he built up—or, more accurately, rebuilt—a new corps of submarine skippers who would spend most of their time far off on patrols, under little direct control.

After his tour as a gunboat captain, Lockwood returned to the growing submarine service. He pioneered the idea of “division attack” by several boats operating in what his German counterpart, Karl Doenitz—also a junior submarine officer during World War I, but who had gained more combat experience—would come to call “wolf packs.” This idea of attacking in numbers was thought to be the antidote to the convoy system, which had dealt the U-boats a serious blow in World War I by using small antisubmarine warships to shepherd clusters of merchant vessels.

Lockwood also got into a major dispute with Thomas Hart, who would see his Asiatic Fleet destroyed at the outset of the Pacific War, over whether the American submarine fleet should be comprised of short-range and defensive or long-range boats capable of taking the war to the enemy’s distant pressure points. Lockwood favored long-range submarines and, through doggedness and an unbreakable faith that he was right, eventually prevailed. But when war came it was Admiral Hart who was in charge of the more than two dozen submarines operating in the teeth of the Japanese invasion.

Now a captain, Lockwood found himself on the other side of the world, serving as the American naval attaché in London. He lived there during the Nazi blitz, regularly bringing Washington’s top secret cables to Winston Churchill, now Britain’s prime minister. In this post Lockwood learned a great deal about the German submarine campaign, a naval offensive that came perilously close to defeating Britain in the early dark days of the war. “The U-boat attack,” Churchill observed, “was our worst evil.”
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For three months after Pearl Harbor, Lockwood continued to request sea duty. In March 1942, perhaps the darkest moment in the war against Japan, he was given command of submarines in the southwest Pacific and promoted to rear admiral. Arriving in Perth in Western Australia, he began immediately to shore up the morale of the battered submariners. The care he showed for his captains and crews was to become one of his trademarks, a brand nicely described in his nickname, “Uncle Charlie.” Like his German counterpart Doenitz, Lockwood made sure to see off his boats in person and to greet them upon their return. He also ensured that they were well supplied with good food for their long-range missions that sometimes lasted up to eight weeks.

Beyond being good human relations policy, his close ties to the boat crews allowed Lockwood to debrief them quickly and skillfully. What he found was deeply disturbing. Based on debriefings, he became convinced that the Mark-14 torpedo tended to run much deeper than its setting, causing many “misses.” The Bureau of Ordnance would not accept his conclusion initially, so Lockwood used the stopgap measure of having his skippers reset the torpedoes to run at much shallower depths in the hope that this overcorrection would enable them to hit more targets. While this did result in an uptick in sinkings, new reports came in of “duds,” torpedoes that struck as intended but did not detonate.

Eventually the navy would address both the depth and detonator problems, but it took another year to do so, well into 1943. Thus the early submarine campaign was greatly hobbled by technical deficiencies. Lockwood found he had a “skipper problem” too, and had to sack many of his too-cautious captains in favor of bolder ones. The problem stayed with him when he took command of all submarines in the Pacific theater in February 1943, after his predecessor died in a plane crash. Before all his personnel moves were complete, about a third of the submarine skippers in the Pacific had been sacked. Lockwood may have been Uncle Charlie, but he was one tough uncle.

With better captains manning his boats, and the torpedo problem finally being fixed, Lockwood was poised to launch a major offensive against the Japanese. Interestingly, he chose not to emulate Doenitz’s wolf-pack operations. Instead U.S. attack submarines were sent out mostly as “lone wolves,” their skippers generally maintaining radio silence and conducting their operations according to the dictates of their own judgment in the patrol areas designated for them. Late in the war Lockwood did send a small wolf pack to the Sea of Japan—nine boats, a fraction of the dozens that Doenitz often brought together in convoy battles. There it operated successfully; but this case was an exception in a campaign largely dominated by single raiders.
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Lockwood chose the lone-wolf approach out of concern that coordination of the wolf packs by means of back-and-forth radio communications ran the risk of enemy decryption and direction-finding technologies, the two elements that did so much to defeat Doenitz’s U-boats.
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Lockwood also had the advantage of intelligence gleaned by American cryptanalysts who had broken the Imperial Navy’s codes (the famous “Magic” operations) often giving him advance knowledge of enemy sailings. This allowed him to economize on his use of force, sending just one or a few boats—but to more areas, where the code-breakers assured him the inviting targets would be. Just as this “Magic” decryption capability had proved of immense value in the Midway campaign, it was to play a significant role in submarine operations throughout the war.
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Aside from ramping up the campaign against Japanese commerce, Lockwood’s submarines performed a range of other tasks during the Pacific War. They provided aid to guerrilla operators, usually in the form of arms and equipment but sometimes they rescued insurgents being harassed by the Japanese, taking the fighters and even their families onboard. Submarines also played a crucial role in providing photo intelligence of islands that were to be invaded. Their stealth allowed them to approach close enough to take extremely useful pictures.

Later, when the air war against the Japanese was in full swing, submarine pickets would stand by at sea to rescue downed pilots. By this means hundreds of fliers’ lives were saved, including that of the young pilot who would become the forty-first president of the United States, George H. W. Bush. In short, Lockwood found himself overseeing a wide range of operations in support of the larger sea war being masterminded by his immediate superior, Admiral Chester Nimitz. But he never allowed these diverse tasks to keep him from his core mission: to sink Japanese naval and merchant vessels. Once he had the right personnel in place, and the torpedo detonator problem fixed, he unleashed the full ferocity of his campaign.