Hellcats (16 page)

 

 

As if to prove that
success breeds success, Lockwood received word that the
Tinosa
had found and charted a minefield north of Formosa. For Lockwood, this first successful combat test of FMS proved that Emperor Hirohito's days were numbered and that the only thing left for him to ponder, besides his and his generals' fates, would be all the sunken ships littering the bottom of his private lake.

The report of the
Tinosa
's success had reached ComSubPac via a radio message from Latham.
²
It caught up to Lockwood, commuting between Pearl Harbor and Guam to inspect his new digs. Use of the
Tinosa
's FMS off Okinawa had resulted in bright green pears and clear, unambiguous bell tones indicating the presence of mines. Detection occurred at surprisingly long distances from the probing
Tinosa
, up to fourteen hundred yards in some cases. Further probing had resulted in questionable contacts and errant visual and audio signals. In some instances FMS had made contact with objects that may or may not have been mines. Latham realized that in this instance the lack of contacts didn't mean that there were no mines present, just that they'd not been found.

Working blind, as it were, the poor
Tinosa
's crew had to endure hours of stress and dread. Latham saw the haunted looks on their sweat-burnished faces. He shared their crushing fear of being blown to bits while trapped inside the ship's hull. The work they were doing was not meant for cowards. Terrifying though it was, the mapping mission had to be completed; a lot was riding on it.

In all, the
Tinosa
's reconnaissance proved a success. Even though the minefields that ICPOA believed had been planted so heavily around Okinawa never materialized, Latham found a few sparse fields—more than enough to satisfy him and his wary crew. Lockwood reviewed Latham's patrol report and pronounced it outstanding and a genuine breakthrough in the gadget's use against real mines, not dummies. Viewed from a purely technical perspective it proved that a submerged submarine equipped with FMS could plot mines with a surprising degree of accuracy. It also underscored how effective submarines could be when they utilized their inherent stealth and near invisibility to operate effectively against enemies in waters that were otherwise denied them. Stealth coupled to FMS would not only enhance the effectiveness of submarines against Japanese targets; it would make them virtually impervious to the enemy's defenses.

Elated by Latham's success, in late January 1945 Lockwood held the first of several operational planning meetings with his staff to review the intelligence developed by Latham. His report disclosed that though the mines plotted by the
Tinosa
had been sown in rows and in staggered depths, there was enough space for a submarine to squeeze through the gaps between them with room to spare. Of course, that was the layout of the plot around Okinawa, not the Tsushima Strait. Lockwood next wanted an accurate plot of the mines sown around the entrance and inner approaches to the Tsushima Strait. This data would then be used to create a map of the minefields for use by the raiding subs.

In his report Latham had also made note of the Kuroshio Current off Formosa and the force it had exerted on the
Tinosa
, especially when she was submerged. The current, he reported, was equally strong if not stronger around southern Kyushu than around Formosa. Its presence would definitely be felt in waters around the Tsushima Strait and would need to be taken into account for future mission planning. Lockwood wanted more data, and the only way to get it was to send more FMS-equipped submarines into mined areas around the straits targeted for entry.

There was another issue looming that Lockwood and his staff would soon have to address: It was becoming all too apparent that the skippers and crews training for operations with FMS had growing doubts about its effectiveness and, with it, their chances of surviving an encounter with a minefield. But first, Lockwood had to tackle FMS production delays in order to get more subs to sea so they could probe and map the area they'd be operating in and, in the bargain, prove to those doubting sub crews how reliable FMS was. Then, despite all the success Lockwood had enjoyed so far, he suddenly ran head-on into an FMS brick wall.

W
hile the scientists and technicians at UCDWR in San Diego grappled with the seemingly endless problems plaguing FMS, the
Bonefish
sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge on November 18, 1944, bound for Hunters Point in San Francisco Bay.

Lawrence Edge and his men were relieved to be home and excited by the prospect of seeing loved ones and friends. Lawrence took a part of his accumulated leave in Atlanta with Sarah, little Boo, and his parents. After the Christmas holidays the three of them returned to San Francisco for the remainder of Lawrence's stay at Hunters Point. The crews of submarines undergoing long overhauls usually brought their wives and children to San Francisco to spend as much time together as possible, living in rented apartments or in Navy housing. This arrangement gave Lawrence, Sarah, and Boo the opportunity to be together in one place for the duration of the overhaul. It didn't make up for the long separation that the war had imposed upon them, but for now, at least, their stay in San Francisco helped shorten the time until their lives would return to normal.

The
Bonefish
was due to complete her overhaul in mid-February. After postoverhaul shakedown and training, she was scheduled to depart San Francisco for Pearl Harbor in early March. To meet that schedule Lawrence put in ten- to twelve-hour days supervising repairs, handling paperwork, and dealing with personnel and their training schedules. The Bethlehem Steel Submarine Repair Basin at Hunters Point was a huge facility crowded with ships, dry docks, mobile cranes, and thousands of workers, both civilian and Navy. The
Bonefish
wasn't just overhauled; she was modernized, too. The work performed was extensive. It included major renovations and structural improvements to her hull, machinery, and interior compartments as well as heavier armament, updated radar, and a host of other improvements designed to enhance her combat efficiency and survivability. She also received an ice-cream maker and a Coca-Cola dispenser, welcome additions that would keep crew morale at its peak during long patrols.

Remodeled, reconditioned, thoroughly modernized, and in her fresh dark-gray-and-black camouflage paint scheme, the
Bonefish
was ready for operations in northern Pacific waters, where the submarine war now focused.

 

 

The confidential letter Lockwood had
drafted earlier for Lawrence's eyes only caught up to him in San Francisco at the end of November. What he read must have pleased him immensely, for it placed him in the first rank of submarine skippers.

Lockwood believed that Lawrence would soon have an important role to play in future submarine operations, and in the submarine force itself.

 

 

Lawrence, Sarah, and Boo settled
into their temporary quarters in a half Quonset hut at Hunters Point. Housing was at a premium because San Francisco's population had surged from a prewar high of 400,000 to over half a million, most of whom were employed in the shipyards in the surrounding area. This increase did not include the hordes of soldiers, sailors, and marines stationed at the Presidio, Treasure Island, and other bases.

Lawrence spent his days on the
Bonefish
, returning in the evening to his little family, clothes and skin smelling of diesel oil and hard work. Together, on one of the rare days he had off, and with a car borrowed from the submarine welfare motor pool, they went to the zoo or took a long drive up the coast. Sometimes on evenings and weekends, when a sitter could be found to care for Boo, Lawrence and Sarah went out to dinner or to a movie, alone or with other Navy couples. Around this time, too, Sarah learned that she was pregnant. The couple was thrilled. Lawrence wanted a boy, and though it was very early in Sarah's pregnancy he started calling the baby “Junior.” The only thing that dampened Lawrence's and Sarah's excitement was the inexorable countdown to his departure and their separation.

By mid-January the
Bonefish
had undergone dockside testing and static dives. Crew training had become a daily ritual. Lawrence, fully engaged in this work, found time to write his parents that:

This was the first of three Navy Crosses won by Lawrence, all with effusive support from Lockwood.

Toward the end of the
Bonefish
's stay at Hunters Point, a truck arrived dockside with a crated FMS unit. The crew had been asking questions about the strange modifications made to their ship's keel, and about the shaft protruding through the main deck above the forward torpedo room. Some but not all of these questions were answered when technicians from UCDWR arrived to supervise the installation of the FMS electronics stack and its associated components. As to its purpose, well, that was still a mystery.

It wasn't a mystery to Edge. An electronics expert, he understood the basic principles of FMS. And like every skipper who had had FMS installed in his ship, he may have had misgivings about the plans sub command had drawn up for its use in his ship. The same was likely true for the
Bonefish
sonar technicians who had been sent to San Diego for training on FMS, and upon their return to Hunters Point found a unit had been installed in their sub. With that and with UCDWR technicians swarming over the ship with test gear and schematics, it became all too clear that the
Bonefish
would be hunting mines—a chilling prospect for sailors accustomed to hunting Japanese ships.

 

 

As work on the
Bonefish
and the other submarines at Hunters Point progressed, Lockwood's war of all-out attrition against Japanese merchant shipping began drawing to a close. Targets worthy of torpedoes were proving hard to find. In 1944 alone, the sub force had sent more than six hundred ships, merchant and combatant, representing 2.7 million tons, to the bottom of the ocean. Now, in January 1945, sinkings had begun tailing off precipitously, a sure indication that the Japanese high-seas merchant marine was all but extinct. This development gave Lockwood more time to devote to his Japan Sea operation. Then, just as things began to look their most promising, Lockwood hit that FM sonar wall. It arose when another FMS submarine, the USS
Bowfin
(SS-287), arrived in Pearl days ahead of the
Tunny
, which had been undergoing modifications at Mare Island. The
Bowfin
's CO, Commander Alexander “Alec” K. Tyree, a native of Danville, Virginia, and a 1935 academy graduate, was eager to get under way on a war patrol.

A test of the
Bowfin
's FMS in that dummy minefield off Oahu showed that it could easily detect mines at close range but not beyond two hundred yards, a performance that Lockwood considered unacceptable. His minimum requirement was six or seven hundred yards; the
Tinosa
's and
Spadefish
's units had turned in far better performance. Nothing that the technicians did made the
Bowfin
's unit recover its sensitivity, and until it did, Tyree would have to delay departure on patrol.

Lockwood didn't witness these tests firsthand; he was at his new headquarters in Guam. And though he was a patient man the clock was ticking down on his pet project. He wrote to the project managers at UCDWR and urged them to speed up production so that more sonar units would become available to outfit more subs and to replace the ones that had problems. He also urged Rear Admiral J. A. Furer, the officer in Washington coordinating the Navy's research and development group, to put some muscle behind his efforts on behalf of the sub force to open up the production pipeline.

Another complication dogging Lockwood was the announcement of a competition to be held between several different sonar detection systems, arranged by officers in charge of Navy research and development who believed that there were better mine-detection systems out there than FMS. The three competing units had an alphabet soup of names, such as MATD (Mine and Torpedo Detector), SOD (Small Object Detector), OL (Object Locator), and STU, a device under development by the British Admiralty. Lockwood fumed over the Navy's penchant for bureaucratic interference in a field in which deskbound sailors had no expertise. He vented his frustrations in a letter to his friend Rear Admiral Charles W. Styer, then ComSubLant. Styer had connections on the East Coast, and Lockwood hoped to use Styer's influence to head off the competition, which Lockwood believed was a waste of time and had come too late in the game. But because UCDWR's FMS still wasn't good enough for Lockwood's purposes, he was willing to consider any other type that had promise, so long as its manufacturer could meet ComSubPac's production and mission schedule.