Hellcats

by Peter Sasgen

  Mrs. Edge, our hearts go out to you in your great sorrow [wrote the sister of a Bonefish sailor] and may God bless and comfort you. In the paper your husband’s name was given as commander of the sub. His name is the only one we have of anyone that was with [my brother]. It seems so terrible that they could not have made this patrol safely. It might have been their last in those dangerous waters, as the war news [was] so good and encouraging.

  Mrs. Edge do you know or have any idea of where the Bonefish was? [Y]ou don’t know how very much we would appreciate it, if you would tell us the least bit of news about the location of the ship, and if you have learned any more than we have from [the Navy]. Do you hold the least bit of hope for them? That’s an awful blunt question, I know, but to get the opinion of someone who has a great interest in the same ship seems like [it] would help. We hold very little hope but seems like we must try to.

  The mother of a quartermaster serving in the Bonefish wrote:[I] wonder now if you know any more about it than we do and are you hoping or knowing that they were picked up or even taken prisoners. [sic]

  The mother of another Bonefish sailor had reason to be hopeful.

  Saw in last night’s . . . paper, a family . . . just received a wire from Red Cross that their son is alive and well—was found in a Jap prison camp. The family had previously received a wire from Navy Dept.—first, that he was missing and a later and final wire that he was dead—so miracles do happen. [A friend on Guam] thinks there is a good possibility that officers and men may have been taken prisoners.... [sic]

  The writer shortly sent Sarah another letter. It contained information about 156 men, survivors of the sinking of the destroyer USS Pope (DD-225), who had been located in a prison camp. “It evidently seems they are still locating prisoners,” she said. Another writer refused to allow “three brutal words, ‘missing in action,’ to shatter [my] world.”

  Sarah received many letters praising Lawrence as a wonderful, caring skipper who would do everything in his power to bring his men home. One sailor had written home that Edge was like a father to him. Mothers, fathers, and wives told Sarah that they believed all the men would come back as soon as they were found in one of the camps. It would just be a matter of time, they said, until their prayers were answered.

  Some letters contained information and news clippings detailing the return of survivors of submarines. One letter writer wrote, “[P]apers came out with a story about a lot of men being found in a Jap prison camp from the S-44, Sculpin, Tullibee, Perch, Tang, and Grenadier.” The writer enclosed a clipping of a story published in The New York Times in late August 1945, which said, “7 Jap Ships Bagged Before Tang Sank.” As explained earlier, the Tang had been sunk by one of her own circular-running torpedoes. Her skipper, Commander Richard O’Kane, and eight men survived the sinking but were held captive by the Japanese under extremely brutal conditions. O’Kane was lucky to have survived his ordeal. Stories like these helped ease the crush of anxiety and grief bearing down on the families of the missing Bonefish men. And they kept hopes alive that eventually they’d be recovered.

  While Sarah was digging for information and answering letters from the families, false eyewitness accounts and rumors about the sinking of the Bonefish began circulating. These cruel, deliberately fabricated stories concocted by sailors with limited knowledge of submarine operations were replete with erroneous information and impossible scenarios. For the anguished families it was almost more than they could bear. The men who made these false claims were eventually exposed and punished by the Navy.

  A relative of a Bonefish sailor, after hearing these rumors, wrote Sarah that a friend had spoken to several submariners who claimed to have seen the Bonefish attack a large convoy, after which she was depth-charged by destroyers and sunk. Another story circulated that the Bonefish was last heard from going into Toyama Wan and that she had been attacked and sunk by midget subs. Both stories were false. No one ever saw the Bonefish attack a large convoy in the Sea of Japan, and the Japanese had no active midget subs deployed in the western Pacific.

  Another false rumor claimed that the Bonefish, plagued by radio problems and unable to communicate, was hiding out somewhere off the coast of Manchuria or Siberia. Yet another said that her crew had sought refuge on one of the tiny volcanic islands dotting the Sea of Japan and, not knowing that the war was over, were awaiting rescue. Another claimed that part of the crew had been taken prisoner and that they were safe. Some of these rumors gained credence because the families grasped at anything that might offer hope for the men’s survival. While most rumors got started through ignorance or from a lack of knowledge of submarine operations, others were started deliberately.

  The cruelest rumor of all got started by a submariner who sent a letter to the mother of a Bonefish sailor. He claimed to have been only five hundred yards away from the Bonefish when she was torpedoed and sunk, presumably by a Japanese submarine. He also claimed to have seen the woman’s son a split second before the torpedo hit, which, he said, made him the last person to see her son alive. His claim was an outright lie. So was the story told by a young submariner to the sister of a Bonefish sailor that the Bonefish had had her conning tower shot off at Iwo Jima during her seventh patrol, but that she’d managed to return to Guam. It was unthinkable, said the missing man’s sister, that anyone would send men on such a dangerous mission in a ship that had been so badly damaged.

  “[‘I was told,’ she wrote] how badly the ship was damaged on her patrol before the last. And how my little brother hated to go on this last patrol, [as] he knew he would never be back. I can’t understand why, if the job they were assigned to do was so dangerous, they didn’t let the boys come home [on leave]. But there are a lot of things I don’t understand about the Navy.” Later, she wrote to Sarah that she hadn’t been taken in by the sailor’s wild story.

  The days turned into weeks of unrelenting agony over the unknown fate of the missing men. More reports came in every day about the release of POWs, some hopeful, some not. BuPers released a statement that every effort was being made to liberate prisoners and to locate and clarify the status of personnel listed as missing. Admiral King had directed that all islands and areas not previously explored were to be subjected to a thorough and exhaustive search for U.S. and Allied personnel. It was a huge task that would take a lot of time and require the transport of hundreds of search teams over a vast area of the Pacific. Meanwhile, other teams were fanning out over the home islands of Japan, searching for prisoners in every town, village, and farm, as the Japanese, in addition to holding POWs in large, squalid camps, had also scattered POWs across the country to prevent them from being rescued.

  As news reached the public about the horrible physical condition of returning prisoners, along with stories about how barbaric the Japanese treatment of captives had been, the families of the missing Bonefish men feared the worst.

  In the absence of information that would either confirm or dispel the families’ worst fears, new rumors began to spread, some darkened by anger arising from the need to blame someone other than the Japanese for the loss of the Bonefish. Fueled by the belief that the Bonefish had been sacrificed unnecessarily, that anger boiled over into the open.

  The mother of a Bonefish officer wrote, “There is no logical person other than Admiral Lockwood to have given orders for [the Bonefish] to have gone on into Toyama Bay—I, personally, would like to ask Admiral L just one question, ‘Would you have ordered the Bonefish on into the Bay if you had had a son a member of the crew?’” And from another family member, “A report from a boy who was on a sub tender . . . [said] that he knew [the Bonefish] was given extra assignment over and beyond [emphasis in original] other boats.” “Seems to me that those ‘high up’ in submarine service could elicit information from Japs. I heard on the radio . . . soon after the [Bonefish] must have been in trouble, the Japs claim that they had sunk 6 American subs just off the mainland. Since [the Bonefish] seems to be the only one not accounted f
or I feel sure Japs stationed in Toyama areas know what happened.”

  A rumor spread by persons unfamiliar with how submarine war patrols were conducted suggested that somehow Lawrence and the other Hellcat skippers had requested permission from Lockwood to make the Operation Barney patrol into the Sea of Japan, and that he’d approved their request.

  To put an end to such rumors, Sarah sent letters to the families in which she included copies of her correspondence with Lockwood. The families responded with a flurry of letters of appreciation for her efforts. While the information she provided didn’t dispel the families’ uncertainty, it helped to clarify some of the murky details and half-truths that had grown up around the missing Bonefish.

  In mid-September Sarah received a reply to a letter she sent to Lockwood seeking answers to two important questions. Lockwood was busy administering a sub force already beginning to put itself up in mothballs, Barney far from his mind until Sarah refocused his attention on it. Her questions concerned submarine POW returnees and also whether or not Lawrence had gone on the mission into the Sea of Japan at his own request, as had been rumored. Lockwood replied to her first question but didn’t answer her second question directly. Instead he forwarded a copy of her letter to George Pierce, the Tunny’s CO during Operation Barney.9

  Dear Mrs. Edge [Lockwood wrote],

  I have talked to a great number of our prisoners-of-war who have been released from Japanese prison camps and I regret to inform you that none know anything of any prisoners from the Bonefish, however it is possible that if any were taken they might have been held in some local camp and had not yet been put into the main camps.

  As to the letter you have received regarding the report that the Bonefish went on this special mission at her own request, I am sending a copy of this letter to Commander George E. Pierce, Captain of the Tunny, who was the last person, so far as we know, to talk with the Bonefish. Commander Pierce reported to me that Bonefish had requested permission to enter Toyama Wan as he [Edge] thought he might find good hunting there. This Bay is, of course, close in to the Japanese mainland but it is not excessively hazardous in the sense of being shallow water, for actually the water there is very deep.

  I will ask Commander Pierce to give you all possible information as to his last meeting with the Bonefish.

  Sincerely

  C. A. Lockwood, Jr. [signed]10

  This was the breakthrough Sarah had hoped for—contact with someone who had actually spoken to Lawrence on the scene just before the Bonefish disappeared. The news about returning POWs was only mildly hopeful at best, but Sarah knew that the Navy didn’t declare a man dead until he had been missing for a year, and there was still plenty of time left to find Lawrence and the others. U.S. search teams had only just begun their searches throughout Japan for prisoners and it would take time to reach the camps on that country’s west coast, much less the ones they didn’t know about. With her unshakable faith, Sarah believed anything was possible, perhaps even that Lawrence and his men would return home.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Hour of Sacrifice

  U.S.S. TUNNY (SS-282)

  Dear Mrs. Edge [wrote George Pierce]—

  I’m sorry to have taken so long in answering your letter [forwarded by Lockwood]. I will do my best to answer your questions.

  . . . The boats were divided into 3 groups of three, with the Bonefish in my group. We talked to each other on the 16th of June and patrolled together on the 17th. On the 18th Larry asked me for permission to enter Toyama Wan to patrol submerged in there on the 19th. . . . I told Larry to go ahead but to be at a certain rendezvous point by the 21st. . . . Larry stated that he intended to stay in deep water. The depth of the water . . . is 350 fathoms, which would preclude any salvage operations.

  The entire operation was purely on a volunteer basis.ad Larry’s decision to enter Toyama Wan was sound and I felt justified in allowing him to do so. I haven’t even tried to guess what happened to him. I seriously doubt that the Bonefish struck a mine as the water he was in is rather deep for mining. Whatever happened occurred on the 19th or 20th of June.

  Much as I hate to say it to you, capture by the Japs seems a remote possibility....

  Sincerely,

  George Pierce [signed]1

  For Sarah, struggling to keep faith that Lawrence would return, Pierce’s assessment that capture seemed remote because the men had gone down with the Bonefish dealt this hope a crushing blow. Pierce described what he and Lawrence had discussed prior to Lawrence’s patrol in Toyama Wan, but Pierce didn’t know what had happened to the Bonefish any more than Lockwood did. Nor did he and Lockwood reveal what Operation Barney had accomplished. Could the mission have been so vital to the winning of a war, a war virtually won, that eighty-five men aboard the Bonefish had to die? It must have seemed incomprehensible to Sarah that Lawrence and the men under his command had perished little more than eight weeks before the war ended.

  By mid-September U.S. servicemen were starting to stream home from Europe and the Pacific. Meanwhile, in Japan, teams of U.S. Navy intelligence experts began combing through the tens of thousands of pages of Japanese naval records, many of them handwritten, seized at the naval ministry in Tokyo. The teams were searching for technical, operational, and scientific information related to methods the Japanese armed forces had employed during the war. Other teams of specialists were searching the records for information on the fate of missing men and ships, trying to discover the circumstances of their loss. They were also trying to determine the fate of American naval personnel—submariners in particular—thought to have been captured by the Japanese navy but not yet located in POW camps.

  In general, the records thought to contain this information consisted of Tabular Records of Movement, that is, the day-to-day records kept by each Japanese warship of its operations. These records provided the search teams with everything from the names of the ships to their duties, battle engagements, expenditure of ammunition, and battle damage. In addition, so-called action reports and war diaries similar to a ship’s log provided the search teams with detailed accounts of an individual ship’s battle actions. Though these records were in disarray, the Japanese-speaking Navy specialists began to assemble a mosaic of Japanese naval operations throughout the Pacific theater, which they broke down into smaller segments for study. At the behest of ComSubPac, a team had been detailed to identify Japanese ships that had attacked U.S. submarines. Making sense of it all was hard, slow work. Little by little a picture of Japanese antisubmarine operations began to emerge from the blizzard of paper that provided information on the fate of some missing U.S. subs. Lockwood knew, for instance, that while the Japanese had had little trouble locating submerged submarines via sonar, they consistently failed to destroy them due to a lack of persistence and skill. As a result they were quick to accept even the flimsiest evidence as proof of a kill. As the data began to trickle in from Japan Lockwood was astonished to discover that the Japanese believed that they had sunk a total of 468 U.S. submarines, far more than the total number in the entire U.S. fleet!

  The search team often found itself hampered by incomplete or contradictory data. And because the work required meticulous attention to detail, it took longer than expected to piece together bits of information pointing to a specific cause for the loss of individual submarines. The team organized the reports of antisubmarine attacks by date and geographic location, then correlated that data to known information about missing U.S. subs with names like Amberjack, Grampus, Scamp, and Golet. Reports of attacks on other missing submarines, including the Bonefish, weren’t found during this initial search.

  Back in Atlanta, Sarah Edge, undaunted in her quest for answers to the Bonefish’s disappearance, compiled a list of questions based on the information she had painstakingly assembled from her sources.2 A question that emerged from this information, and which troubled her and some of the families, was whether or not Lockwood had pulled some of the Operation Barney subs off pat
rols to send them into the Sea of Japan without giving their crews enough rest. Sarah feared that fatigue may have played a role in the loss of the Bonefish, given that Lawrence had written about the quick turnaround between his seventh and eighth patrols that had cut short his rest period on Guam. Another troubling question was, Had the men been ordered on the raid by Lockwood?

  Sarah posed these questions and others in a letter she mailed in early October to Lawrence’s friend and pack mate Ozzie Lynch, skipper of the Skate. Lynch had filled the electronics job that Lawrence was slated to fill after completing Operation Barney. Sarah’s letter was blunt and to the point. Her words expressed all the anguish and pain caused by Lawrence’s disappearance, all the unknowns and unanswered questions that had made her spirits sometimes soar and sometimes crash as she waited for news of his fate.

  Dear Ozzie,

  Knowing that you were not only on the same raid with Lawrence, but also in the same group of three, I am writing to ask you to please tell me all that you know concerning the loss of the Bonefish. Since there is no longer any censorship I would appreciate your being frank with me.

  There’s a good deal I know already but there are several points which do not make sense to me. . . . How were you ordered on the June raid? Were you given an opportunity to refuse to take your boat? Why was Lawrence given such a short rest period after his terribly dangerous [seventh] patrol which was physically exhausting to him and all the men? From his letters I gathered that this patrol was extremely dangerous and that he might not return from this one and even know whether he would have a new son or daughter. From about the middle of June until [that] horrible wire reached me, as I wrote each letter I could not help wondering if he would ever receive any of them. I find that some boys who returned from the same raid had definitely warned their families that they might not return.