by Peter Sasgen
Unknown to most people, even to those with more than a passing interest in World War II, is that, like the Battle of the Atlantic, the war waged by American submarines in the Pacific theater against the merchant marine of Axis Japan played a major factor in that country’s defeat. It was, as submarine historian Clay Blair remarked, a war within a war. It was so successful that some have argued it was the liquidation of Japan’s merchant marine and the blockade of the home islands by U.S. submarines, and not the atomic bomb, that ultimately defeated Japan.
True or not, the facts are impressive.
By early 1945 Japan’s ability to import raw materials and food had about reached its end. Imports had been strangled by the U.S. submarine blockade of the home islands. According to the postwar Joint Army Navy Assessment Committee (JANAC), American submarines sank 1,314 Japanese merchant ships totaling 5.3 million tons, not including cargoes, while Japan’s merchant marine complement of 122,000 men suffered 116,000 casualties. This was accomplished by a submarine force of roughly 280 submarines, and 50,000 officers and men including staff and support personnel. It was a costly victory: The U.S. lost 52 subs, 41 of them to direct enemy action. Of the approximately 15,000 men who made war patrols, casualties totaled about 3,500.1 This war of all-out attrition, that is, unrestricted submarine warfare, ranged over eight million square miles of Pacific Ocean, a truly immense area. At the beginning of the war it seemed to the Allies an impossible task to retake this conquered territory from the Japanese. And while the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, had badly damaged the U.S. Pacific surface fleet, it had not damaged the submarine fleet, which began offensive operations on December 8.
It took time for the U.S. Navy to recover from the attack, but with dogged determination and flexible, aggressive tactics, American subs slowly began to push back the far-flung outer ring of territories that had been captured and garrisoned by the Japanese. To survive, these garrisons required uninterrupted deliveries of food, weapons, and fuel in quantities that could be transported only by Japanese ships that were prime targets for U.S. submarine torpedoes. As ship sinkings mounted, the ring of territories with its fragile network of shipping lanes shrank until it collapsed.
As they had in World War II, Germany had waged all-out submarine war in World War I, both times taking a huge toll on Allied shipping. As in World War II, British ship losses in World War I had reached alarming proportions. The losses caused Admiral John Jellicoe, First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, to warn that the Germans would win the war unless the losses were stopped and stopped soon. Winston Churchill echoed Jellicoe’s words twenty-five years later. Had the lessons learned by the British from the near disaster caused by the heavy loss of ships in both wars been heeded by the Japanese, the war in the Pacific might have lasted longer than it did. As it was the Japanese badly underestimated how hard it would be to maintain their lines of supply across the vast Pacific against U.S. submarines. To make matters worse, the Japanese had a weak convoy system and a weak antisubmarine force. Unlike the British and Americans in both wars, the creaky and inefficient Japanese convoy escort system could do little to protect ships that U.S. submarines were sinking faster than they could be replaced. By the time the Japanese got around to building an effective antisubmarine force the war had been lost.
Yet, in the war’s early stages the U.S. submarine force found itself hobbled by an outmoded and conservative war-fighting doctrine that had been formulated during peacetime by submarine officers who had no combat experience whatsoever. It was hardly surprising, then, that this tactical relic from another era had to be jettisoned as soon as the bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor. Changes didn’t happen overnight; it took time for the sub force to develop a new, aggressive doctrine based on tactics developed under actual combat conditions during war patrols. Once that happened, the Japanese merchant marine was doomed. The only thing that prevented it from being annihilated sooner than it was was the faulty torpedoes that plagued U.S. submarines at the start of the war and continued well into 1944.
The torpedo problem turned into a scandal that bordered on dereliction of duty by the officers in the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd). Their stubborn refusal to admit that the Navy’s standard Mk 14 steam-powered submarine torpedo didn’t always perform as designed—instead, blaming the inexperience of submarine crews for its problems—had a demoralizing effect on the force. The torpedo problem proved a tough nut to crack because the three separate faults inherent in the design of the Mk 14, working in concert, masked the fault each of them posed individually. It took over two years to isolate and fix the flaws residing in the Mk 14’s depth-control device, its magnetic influence exploder, and its lightweight firing pin. The duds, erratic runs, and premature detonations of warheads caused by these different problems saved many a Japanese merchant ship from certain destruction and most certainly prolonged the war.
By early 1944, after extensive testing that included live torpedo shots and extensive modification and further testing of the faulty components, the sub force finally had a reliable weapon. Even so, problems continued to crop up even as the new and improved Mk 18 electric-powered torpedoes entered service. With better torpedoes, the sinking of Japanese ships increased dramatically, until, by early 1945, Japan’s merchant marine had virtually disappeared from the Pacific along with its cargoes of rice, coal, iron ore, bauxite, rubber, and, the most important commodity of all, oil; in most Japanese cities automobiles had vanished from the streets, replaced by jinrikishas.
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.
PART ONE
The Beginning of the End
CHAPTER ONE
A World Destroyed
The 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.
WASHINGTON DC JUL 28 [1945]
MRS SARAH SIMMS EDGE ATLANTA
I DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND COMMANDER LAWRENCE LOTT EDGE USN IS MISSING IN ACTION IN THE SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY. YOUR GREAT ANXIETY IS APPRECIATED AND YOU WILL BE FURNISHED DETAILS WHEN RECEIVED. TO PREVENT POSSIBLE AID TO OUR ENEMIES AND TO SAFEGUARD THE LIVES OF OTHER PERSONNEL PLEASE DO NOT DIVULGE THE NAME OF THE SHIP OR STATION OR DISCUSS PUBLICLY THE FACT THAT HE IS MISSING.
VICE ADMIRAL RANDALL JACOBS CHIEF OF NAVAL PERSONNEL.1
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.
Lovely, dearest wife,
... The patrol is moving along but slowly.... Actually there have been few dull days and too few dull moments, though I think we’ll all be glad when this patrol is over. Luckily (and I haven’t mentioned it to you before) it is to be a short one, because of a little special mission [we have been] assigned.2
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.
My precious Darling,
Today has been a long tiring one, and since we start early again in the morning, I’ll only take time tonight to whisper again that I love you dearly and miss you intensely.
... There is still no news to write about from out here. Time is drawing rapidly closer for departure on a new patrol, and practically all personal doings are in that connection.
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:
Goodbye, my precious for today. You’ll be constantly in my thoughts as well as my heart until I can write again....
With all my deepest love,
Lawrence3
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:
[T]here’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.4
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.
CHAPTER TWO
ComSubPac
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.
