Hellcats (32 page)

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 up 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.

 

 

After the
Spadefish
's attack on
the
Transbalt
, Germershausen finally found a legitimate target. Just north of La Pérouse Strait, he sank a two-thousand-ton
maru
. Moving south to Tsugaru Strait, the
Spadefish
then torpedoed another two-thousand-tonner. After that, things settled down. Germershausen had no reason to complain: He'd sunk five ships (six if one included the hapless
Transbalt
) and four small craft. He was content to wait for Sonar Day, when the Hellcats could break for home. On the other hand, if something came along while he was waiting, he'd try to run up his score. Germershausen didn't let his guard down. The Hellcats couldn't allow themselves to fall victim to complacency or hubris. That would be a fatal mistake. While the Japanese defenses had stiffened, they hadn't yet mounted a determined effort to find and attack the Hellcats. That could change.

 

 

To the south, the big
ship sunk by the
Bonefish
had spread a carpet of debris and survivors over a huge area north and west of the Noto Peninsula. Currents and tides had pushed the flotsam inshore, where George Pierce, patrolling the traffic lanes off Toyama Wan, encountered more than a dozen life rafts loaded with oil-soaked and shivering survivors. As the
Tunny
approached a raft, the survivors lay facedown, apparently expecting to be machine-gunned. Despite Pierce's exhortations lifted from a Japanese phrase book, none of the survivors could be coaxed aboard. Pierce gave up and moved on.

Early the next day, after combing the area for targets, Pierce spotted the same drifting rafts still clotted with survivors. He surfaced in their midst, no doubt a frightening scene for the exhausted onlookers—the sea parting and hissing, a submarine rising from the depths shedding white water. This time Pierce took aboard a senior Japanese navy petty officer who'd apparently had enough raft time and was eager to cooperate with his rescuers in exchange for dry clothing and hot food.

Resuming the patrol, Pierce received a radio message from Lawrence Edge, stating that he had the masts and stacks of two ships in sight and giving their coordinates. Pierce bent on four mains to find them and join the
Bonefish
in a coordinated attack.

It was after full dark when the
Tunny
and
Bonefish
made radar contact with the targets. After Pierce and Edge planned their attack via voice radio, the two subs closed in. Edge reported that he was within a thousand yards of the targets but still couldn't see them. Darkened ships and surface haze always made a night surface attack difficult to execute. Yet there was something else out there, something spectral and sinister evidenced by a wobbling electronic shimmer on the SJ radarscopes of both subs. Shades of Harry Greer and the
Seahorse
: Japanese radar interference!

Pierce and Edge smelled a trap. The two ships they had been targeting, which up until now had seemed unaware of the presence of the two subs, suddenly opened up with their guns. Patrol boats!

Four-inch rounds started dropping around the
Tunny
. As Pierce and Edge veered away and hauled out at flank speed, the two patrol boats began dropping random depth charges. Both subs went deep to let things cool off. They'd almost been suckered by a hunter-killer team. The next morning, June 18, Pierce, relieved to see that the
Bonefish
had escaped from the patrol boats, held a confab with Edge via megaphone. After reviewing the trap set by the patrol boats,

Edge's asking Pierce for permission to patrol in Toyama Wan was standard procedure, as it was his duty to keep Pierce informed of his movements at all times in order that the actions of the
Tunny
and
Skate
could be properly coordinated with those of the
Bonefish
. Edge was merely following regulations, which required a junior officer (Edge) to obtain authority from his superior officer (Pierce) to search his assigned area, a task no more nor less risky than any of the other operations, including harbor penetrations, that had been conducted by the Hellcats. In any event, the forty-mile-long-by-twenty-mile-wide Toyama Wan had the potential to contain targets that an aggressive skipper like Edge was not about to ignore.

After her rendezvous with the
Tunny
, a mysterious, dark silence enveloped the
Bonefish
.

 

 

For a time the
Bonefish
's
disappearance went unnoticed by Pierce and Lynch. On the eighteenth and nineteenth, Lynch, target spotting for his mates, reported seeing two small transports, an ancient coal-burning destroyer, and a small R-class sub, near the mouth of Toyama Wan. When his initial contact report went unacknowledged, Lynch tried to raise the
Tunny
and
Bonefish
on radio. Neither of them answered, and Lynch concluded that they were patrolling submerged. When Pierce finally showed up the next day, he radioed Lynch to start heading north to La Pérouse for the prearranged rendezvous with the other Hellcats. In their exchange Lynch didn't report hearing any explosions from torpedoes or depth charges.
⁵
Pierce also radioed Edge with similar instructions, but didn't receive an acknowledgment. Edge's silence on the radio net didn't raise an alarm with Pierce because he assumed that Edge was busy hunting for targets in Toyama Wan and that he'd catch up with the other Polecats later.

Heading north, Pierce, who had yet to sink a single ship, ran down a large escorted freighter he estimated was in the ten-thousand-ton range. Out of position for a close-in attack, he fired a long-range shot and missed. Pierce was the only Hellcat skipper who hadn't sunk a ship, and if he had any hope of making up for it, time was fast running out.

It was now June 21. The Hellcats had staged a successful raid into the Japanese bastion, though the final tally was yet to be written. They weren't home free, but so far had met and overcome every challenge laid before them. They had also demonstrated conclusively how versatile submarines were and how valuable that versatility would be in the future, when subs would be called upon to undertake missions far more dangerous than Operation Barney. Not one to show his feelings, inwardly Hydeman was pleased and impressed: His Hellcats had performed magnificently. He radioed them to head for La Pérouse for the breakout.

D
espite newspaper headlines announcing imminent victory in the Pacific—“Jap Defeat Assured”—Sarah Edge wasn't fooled into thinking the war was over for Lawrence and his men. Indeed, she waited every day for a letter saying that he had returned from patrol, that he was safe and that his arrival meant he was destined at last for shore duty.

Lawrence received a letter from Sarah before sailing from Guam with the Polecats on May 27. She played a little guessing game based on a popular movie
^x
she'd seen in an Atlanta theater about submarines.

When Sarah received the letter Lawrence had posted before his departure from Guam on Operation Barney, he was far out at sea.