Hellcats

by Peter Sasgen

  The hen tracks Risser referred to were those the prisoner had penned in a letter to Risser and the men of the Flying Fish. In it he expressed his shame at being taken prisoner and how deeply he longed for death, one that would exculpate his guilt for having lived. He admitted that he was surprised and heartened by the friendship and compassion shown him by the crew. Nevertheless, because he had been made to polish the sub’s bronze torpedo tube inner doors and fittings, which he knew existed for the sole purpose of killing his people, he wanted to die all the more. He believed that his life was in the hands of America and that if he did die at the hands of Americans, it wouldn’t matter, since he was already dead by virtue of his shameful deeds. He closed by thanking Risser and his officers and men for their acceptance of him as a man, and wished them health and happiness.

  Here was the enemy made human, not just a gibbering, diabolical Japanese fanatic ready to plunge a knife into his enemy’s heart. Submarine warfare, unlike ground warfare, inhibited direct contact with the enemy; most sub sailors rarely saw their victims up close. Robert Risser and his men could only wonder at the enemy they fought. Tenacious, fearless, deadly, madly suicidal on the battlefield, yet when taken alive and shown a dram of mercy, an enemy quick to acknowledge genuine gratitude, if not deep respect for their captors. As Lawrence Edge had learned from his encounters with Japanese prisoners, a Westerner could never hope to understand the Japanese and their warrior culture of Bushido. All an American fighting man could do was hope that a crushing defeat would eradicate forever the warrior mentality that had brought the Japanese and the world to the brink of disaster.

  While Risser and the crew of the Flying Fish were interrogating the prisoner, the Spadefish was back on the hunt for targets, this time far to the north near La Pérouse Strait where her gun crews sank four small craft before Germershausen pressed on in search of bigger game.

  Germershausen found it early on June thirteenth, fifty miles west of the southern tip of Karafuto, which, on a chart, has the distinct look of a giant crab claw. A distant solo radar contact, followed moments later by a second contact, pinpointed the position of two ships, both blacked out, one of them lying to, the other moving southwest. Were they Japanese or Russian? That the ships were unescorted meant nothing, for as the Hellcats had learned, few Japanese ships in the Sea of Japan had escorts. If these two were Russian, then according to the rules governing neutrality, they should be lit up with multicolored lights to identify them as such. Also, Russian ships crossing the Sea of Japan were supposed to follow a specific route that ran due west from La Pérouse Strait to Vladivostok. The ship contact heading southwest wasn’t following this route. Germershausen peered from the Spadefish’s fog-and mist-swaddled bridge into an ink-black night, searching for lights moving or stationary, but didn’t see a thing. He decided that the ship had to be Japanese. “Let’s get him. Then we’ll go back and get the other one, too.”

  The Spadefish closed in. Germershausen still couldn’t see a thing. Steaming a straight course at five knots, the darkened ship took several minutes to draw ahead of the Spadefish. A shadow of doubt nagged Germershausen. He thought that if he could see the target instead of just its swelling blip on the radar screen, he could make sure that he wasn’t shooting at a Russian. Then again, probably not; it was too dark and too misty. There were rules of the road even in wartime and they had to be followed. As Germershausen debated with himself—Japanese or Russian?—the TDC told him that he should fire torpedoes now.

  A brilliant flash followed by a chest-thumping boom signaled the torpedoes’ impact with the freighter. She circled, helplessly out of control, then, after stopping dead in the water, sank in just minutes.

  Germershausen turned his attention to the second ship now suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree by lights identifying her as Russian. Germershausen suspected that the sight and sound of exploding torpedoes had frightened the Russian skipper into turning on identification lights to avoid a similar fate. Germershausen broke off the attack as the freighter got under way for La Pérouse Strait.

  From a flurry of radio messages exchanged with Lockwood that began only hours after Germershausen had sunk the blacked-out ship, the chagrined skipper learned that he’d sunk a Russian ship, the eleven-thousand-ton former liner Transbalt of the maritime agency Sovtorgflot. The Russians learned that she’d been sunk after a Japanese patrol boat responding to a distress call picked up her survivors. Domei, the Japanese government-run commercial broadcast network, announced that the Transbalt had been sunk by a U.S. submarine—deliberately, of course. The U.S. naval attaché in Moscow confirmed her sinking and this confirmation, as well as the Soviet government’s angry condemnation, worked its way up to Admiral Nimitz. Nimitz and King didn’t want the Japanese or Russians to know that U.S. subs were once again operating in the Sea of Japan, and so blamed the sinking on a Japanese submarine. The Russians weren’t fooled, but given their need for U.S. military aid, they dropped their protests and everyone breathed easier, especially Lockwood.8

  By June 14, Earl Hydeman had received radio reports from his Hellcat commanders describing their success (or lack thereof) sinking ships, including their torpedo expenditure thus far (the nine Hellcat subs carried a total of 216 torpedoes). Hydeman also had a fairly clear picture of what the Japanese were doing to thwart attacks by the Hellcats, and it wasn’t much. To keep the raiding subs at bay, the Japanese were rerouting ship traffic inside the fifty-fathom curve and even the twenty-five-fathom curve. Hydeman immediately altered the packs’ assignments, pulling them back from deep water, where ship contacts had dropped to almost zero, and instead deploying them into safe coastal areas where ships were taking refuge. The information he received also pointed to problems that had so far reduced the Hellcats’ overall effectiveness, mainly torpedo problems. Adding to it were the rushed, failed long-distance torpedo shots fired by overeager skippers, and targets that seemed to magically elude destruction by a sudden and fortuitous zig or zag. Hydeman may have been disappointed by these mishaps, but he surely wasn’t disappointed that the Japanese countermeasures they had all anticipated hadn’t yet materialized. So far attacks on the Hellcats had been perfunctory at best. To be sure, no one was underestimating the Japanese; there was plenty of time between Mike Day and Sonar Day for them to launch an all-out assault on the Hellcats, including a blockade of the strait. Yet, if what the Hellcats had experienced so far was any clue to what the Japanese had in mind for them, there was little to worry about. If Hydeman and his skippers had had the time and inclination to ponder this they might have concluded that the inability to quickly mount a strong response portended the imminent defeat of the empire.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Dark Silence

  Lawrence Edge had conned the Bonefish past the last string of mines in the Tsushima Strait and entered the Sea of Japan late in the day on June 5. His patrol area coincided with those of the Tunny and Skate, around the Noto Peninsula, but Edge didn’t make contact with his pack mates until the fifteenth, when Ozzie Lynch in the Skate raised the Bonefish on SJ radar sometime around midnight.

  Rendezvousing, Edge reported that he’d been busy. On the thirteenth he had sunk a large cargo ship. This bag would turn out to be the biggest of the Hellcat foray. The Bonefish’s torpedoes slammed into her as she was steaming north of the Noto Peninsula, not far from the area in which Hydeman’s Hepcats had been working with such success. So far the Polecats were in the lead: In eight days the Bonefish and Skate had sunk four surface ships and a sub.

  Late on the fifteenth, after George Pierce exchanged recognition signals with the Skate, he radioed both her and the Bonefish to rendezvous for their patrol assignments after dawn on the sixteenth. The Tunny arrived as scheduled and Pierce saw the Bonefish on the surface, waiting, but not the Skate. He assumed that the Skate had gone off somewhere on her own and had missed the rendezvous. Radio communications were spotty, what with the Japanese trying with limited success to jam the Hellcat frequencies. Sometimes
it was more efficient for the subs to lay to alongside one another and exchange news by shouting through megaphones.

  Pierce, yet to sink a ship, was pleased with Edge’s successful torpedo action. He gave Edge a new patrol assignment in an area around Suzu Misaki, at the tip of the Noto Peninsula. Rather than wait for the Skate to show up for her assignment, Pierce radioed instructions to Lynch. He received Lynch’s acknowledgment, after which he shaped a course to patrol the traffic lanes in and out of Toyama Wan.

  On the sixteenth the Skate and Bonefish rendezvoused on their own to exchange more information. Lynch reported that he had picked up and tracked three patrolling escort-type ships on radar. Out of torpedoes, he gave the trio a wide berth. Edge confirmed that he, too, had had brief radar contact with the same escorts. He thought that they were searching for the sub—the Bonefish—that had sunk that big maru. Lynch told Edge that without torpedoes all he could do was keep an eye open for targets and try to vector Pierce and Edge into position to attack them. If not, he would head north to await Sonar Day, as the Hellcat op orders had instructed. Edge left the decision up to Lynch, gave him a “roger,” and shoved off to patrol his assigned area around the Noto Peninsula.

  Farther north, the unflappable Earl Hydeman had been busy dealing with the gremlins that had plagued his ship from the start. This time a mine-clearing cable had wrapped itself around the Sea Dog’s starboard propeller shaft. It had to be fixed, as the loud thumping noise and heavy vibrations coming from the shaft might lead the Japanese right to her. The question was, What could be done at night in icy water and rough seas to clear the one-and-a-quarter-inch steel cable fouling the shaft?

  While the Sea Dog lay to, two men, one of them the chief of the boat, went over the side into numbingly cold water, equipped only with crude diving gear and heavy-duty bolt cutters. It was dangerous working topside at night. The hissing seas engulfed the men, who shivered and clung to hull protrusions with fingers stiffened by the cold. Worse yet, their diving masks leaked so much that they couldn’t work underwater. Finally, the bolt cutters proved useless on such thick cable. Forced to admit failure, Hydeman ordered the two men back aboard and resumed his course. He was convinced that the noise and vibration coming from the shaft, which slowly diminished over time, was, like the ship’s SJ radar, cursed by gremlins, if not another low point in the life of the Sea Dog.

  Undaunted, Hydeman continued tracking and torpedoing ships. Pursuing three ships steaming along the coast, he fired and hit the leader, only to have the other two make a run for it. Before Hydeman could give chase, a plane appeared. Thinking he had plenty of water under the keel, he took the Sea Dog down fast and felt the jolt of a solid grounding in shallow water. Gremlins had struck again.

  “Flooding in the forward torpedo room, Captain!”

  The grounding had wiped off the ship’s two bottom-mounted QC soundheads; water poured into the torpedo room through the wrecked soundheads’ gate valves.

  “Take charge below,” Hydeman ordered his exec, who laid forward on the double to assess damage and lend a hand.1 Then to the diving officer, Hydeman said, “All back full; shift the rudder. We’ll back her off.”

  They did and left behind both soundheads neatly sheared off at the shaft flanges. Somehow the pilot of that plane hadn’t seen the stranded Sea Dog’s dark outline in shallow water. If he had, it might have spelled her end.

  Aboard the Crevalle, Steinmetz, after sinking three ships on successive days, hunted for more targets. On the thirteenth he ran across a pair of luggers, both loaded to the gunwales with cargo. They were too small for torpedoes, but perfect targets for the Crevalle’s guns.

  Steinmetz called away battle surface. The Crevalle’s gunners rushed topside, unlimbered the sub’s five-inch and 40mm guns, and began slamming rounds into the hapless luggers, smashing them to kindling, driving their crews overboard. Their hulls shattered, strakes exposed like the ribs of dead animals, cargoes scattered over the sea, the two luggers staggered under the onslaught, capsized, and sank. Shooting motion pictures from the bridge, the Crevalle’s photographer’s mate captured the action from start to finish on color film. Not content with what they had, Steinmetz moved in for close-ups. Lockwood wanted footage of what his submarines were doing, and Steinmetz would give it to him. The Crevalle’s skipper noted in his patrol report that[We] thought we detected a Nip hiding under a box floating near the target, so heaved a couple of hand grenades at the target and took a few pot shots with carbine and sub machine-gun at box.

  Destroying enemy vessels was one thing, but trying to kill an unarmed survivor in the water was an altogether different matter, one not sanctioned by ComSubPac for obvious reasons.2 Steinmetz, perhaps realizing this, called a cease-fire and moved on, looking for bigger game.

  He found it on the fourteenth. North of the Tsugaru Strait, Steinmetz picked up three merchant ships hugging the coast and guarded by two pinging destroyers. Working into position between the marus and the destroyers, Steinmetz fired at one of the marus and missed, which brought a nasty two-hour depth charging. Undamaged and running silent, the Crevalle crept away, into deeper water.

  Across the Sea of Japan, Alec Tyree in the Bowfin had sunk his second ship, an eight-hundred-ton engines-aft freighter. She went down, leaving a lone survivor clinging to a capsized lifeboat. Tyree continued searching for, as he put it, greener pastures along the fogbound Korean coast, but found only fishing boats. On the fourteenth the Bowfin’s gunner’s mates shot up a twenty-ton two-masted schooner. Four days later Tyree ran smack into a pair of patrol boats hidden by fog. Despite severely reduced visibility, the boats landed shells just yards away from the fleeing Bowfin, their fragments sleeting across her bow. Tyree pulled the plug and gave them the slip.

  Things were no better farther north along the east-west shipping lanes to northern Honshu. Hampered by swirling fog seemingly too opaque even for seagulls to fly in, Tyree had to patrol for targets through fleets of fishing boats with their entangling gill nets. He wanted another crack at a decent-size ship before Operation Barney came to an end. But, now that the Japanese had warned merchant ship captains about the presence of U.S. submarines in the Sea of Japan, cross-sea shipping had dried up. Instead of cargo ships, Tyree had run into more and more radar-equipped patrol boats.

  On the twentieth, Tyree encountered a large southbound engines-aft freighter with two escorts in trail. He worked in on the surface and fired six torpedoes. Sound tracked them to the target, but all Tyree heard were loud explosions from what sounded like depth charges and gunfire, not torpedo warheads. Cursed by the never-ending torpedo nightmare, he tallied six misses, one of them a circular run. “Sighted all targets going away with no apparent sign of damage,” he said. “A sad sight.”3

  Tyree refused to give up. He started a flank-speed end around that took the Bowfin through a large fleet of sampans, which, Tyree discovered in the nick of time, masked one of the freighter’s escorts laying back to find the submarine that had fired those torpedoes. The escort took out after the sprinting Bowfin and stayed on her tail until Tyree submerged and went deep. Free of the escort, he doubled back to search for the freighter, which, like so much else about coastal Korea, had disappeared into a gray, swirling oblivion.

  Richard Latham in the Tinosa had had no better luck than did Tyree at this stage of Operation Barney. Though he failed to sink the ship that had fled into the Bowfin’s area, where she was nailed by Tyree, Latham continued to hunt for ships worthy of a torpedo.

  Less than a mile off the Korean coast he encountered a large sea truck, which the Tinosa’s gunners quickly demolished, including its crew, who frantically tried to load and fire a gun from the sea truck’s bow. After that, targets dried up. Like the Bowfin, the Tinosa mingled with fishing boats and spit-kits of varying sizes, groping through dense fog and ice-cold rain, hunting targets that had seemingly vanished.

  Then, on June 20, the Tinosa was inching north for the Hellcat rendezvous on the twenty-fourth when she picked u
p a small freighter, which she blew to bits with three well-placed torpedoes. The target never slowed, just kept right on plowing down, down, down until she disappeared in a cloud of steam from her exploding boilers. Latham spotted a lone, shocked survivor clinging to wreckage; the ship sank in less than a minute.

  At sunset Latham hit a tanker loaded with aviation fuel. An enormous, rolling fireball engulfed the ship, lighting up the sky like a setting Japanese sun. Her sinking, Latham’s fourth, capped a successful patrol.

  Earlier, the Flying Fish had been faring no better than the Bowfin and Tinosa, searching for targets among the rocks and fog of the coast of Korea. Like Tyree and Latham, Risser had doubts that the area would produce anything worthwhile. He had so far sunk only two ships, though he had fired at others and missed, due mainly to unfavorable attack positions. He was still aiming to run up his score. At dawn on the fifteenth, outside Seishin Harbor near Ch’ongjin, Risser tore into a fleet of sampans loaded with bricks destined for a construction project around the harbor breakwater. The Flying Fish’s guns wrecked and sank ten sampans and damaged two tugs towing barges loaded with boulders.

  Risser, astonished that the ruckus didn’t bring out patrols from inside the harbor, chanced a peek through the periscope past the breakwater. He saw ships at anchor in the shallow inner harbor, but he had no way to get at them. Later, Risser missed a shot at a transport headed downcoast for Seishin. After the transport hightailed into the harbor, a Japanese escort vessel ventured out and began dropping random depth charges. By then the Flying Fish, back on the surface, was on her way to join the Bowfin and Tinosa ranging northeast toward La Pérouse in preparation for their pre-exit rendezvous.