Hellcats (7 page)

All in all, the first foray by U.S. subs into the Sea of Japan didn't break the empire's back. Lockwood's endorsement to the
Lapon
's patrol report said it best: “Results were disappointing. 22 days of foggy weather did much to render operations difficult.... Contacts were meager.”
³

As for the
Narwhal
, delayed by lousy weather, she arrived off Matsuwa To long after the three raiding subs had departed for home. Nevertheless, Latta swung into action. After dodging a
Wakataki
-class destroyer and a Mitsubishi 96 bomber, the
Narwhal
encountered a spate of clear weather and took advantage of it to battle surface six miles off the beach, and at

“Where we had expected our
submarines to find an abundance of targets, they found few worth the expenditure of a $10,000 torpedo,” said Lockwood. Disappointed with the results, he was cheered that the four subs had returned unscathed.

He and Voge immediately began planning a second mission, one that would build on and take advantage of the lessons learned. The most important lesson was that U.S. subs could operate in the Sea of Japan, proving that no part of the empire, no matter how remote, was immune from attack. Lockwood believed that the next time subs entered the sea they would sink everything in sight. He might have kept his fingers crossed that when they did, the problems still plaguing Mk 14 torpedoes would be solved once and for all. If the submariners were going to risk their necks again getting into the Sea of Japan, they had better have a reliable weapon to take along.

Ray Bass, skipper of the
Plunger
, immediately volunteered to go back in. Another volunteer was Mush Morton, skipper of the
Wahoo
, which had just arrived in Pearl Harbor after a West Coast overhaul. Even then Morton was one of Lockwood's stars. He'd already sunk sixteen
marus
totaling about 49,000 tons and was clearly on his way to outpacing every skipper in the force.

Lockwood gave Bass and Morton the okay and saw them off from Pearl Harbor on August 8. Lockwood had confidence that the experience Bass had gained from the earlier raid would come in handy. According to their operation orders the
Wahoo
and
Plunger
were to enter the Sea of Japan through La Pérouse Strait on August 14 at night and on the surface via the safe channel that the
Plunger
,
Permit
, and
Lapon
had used in July and had plotted so other subs could use it in the future. According to the latest intelligence assembled by ICPOA, there was no reason to believe that the Japanese had made any alterations to the layout of the existing minefields or that they had sown any more mines below the surface of La Pérouse Strait. Like the
Plunger
,
Permit
, and
Lapon
that had ventured in before them, as long as the
Wahoo
and
Plunger
didn't submerge in the strait and didn't stray from the confines of the channel, Bass and Morton had nothing to fear. Furthermore, if ICPOA developed any information that the Japanese had altered the minefields, SubPac would alert the skippers by radio.

 

 

The
Plunger
developed engine and
motor problems that crippled her port propeller shaft, forcing her to steam on only one screw, which delayed her entry into La Pérouse Strait for two days. Rather than turn back, Bass decided to run the strait submerged during daylight rather than on the surface at night, which would require speed and maneuverability that the
Plunger
lacked. It was a death-defying decision on Bass's part, given that any mines anchored at seventy feet—never mind any moored at forty feet—allowed only a five-foot margin of safety between the tops of the mines and the
Plunger
's keel, which, when she submerged to periscope depth, measured sixty-five feet below the surface. It's not clear whether Bass, knowing the high-low layout of the minefields, simply threw caution to the wind or if he assumed that the force exerted on the anchored mines by the outflowing Kuroshio Current, which made them lean over (a phenomenon called “mine dip”), gave him an extra margin of safety. Whichever it was, somehow the
Plunger
with her frozen port shaft got through in one piece.

Unlike the first raid, this time targets were plentiful. Regrettably, torpedo performance was abominable. Bass, plagued with faulty Mk 14s, managed to sink only two cargo ships. Morton, meanwhile, was bedeviled with duds, broachers, and erratic runs. His and Bass's patrol reports are a litany of miss, miss, dud, broach, miss, miss.... Furious, Morton sought permission to end the mission and return to Pearl Harbor to have his remaining torpedoes examined. Lockwood, deeply disturbed by this unexpected turn of events, approved. So far the two forays had been miserable failures.

Back in Pearl Harbor, Morton barely contained his anger when he powwowed with Lockwood to curse the lousy torpedoes he'd lugged all the way to the Sea of Japan. His boss was sympathetic—he'd been wrestling with torpedo problems ever since taking over in Fremantle, and more than anyone, Lockwood wanted Morton to succeed. When the irate skipper insisted on going back with a load of freshly overhauled Mk 14s and a batch of new Mk 18 electrics, Lockwood gave his approval. This time he tapped the USS
Sawfish
(SS-276), skippered by Lieutenant Commander Eugene T. Sands, to accompany the
Wahoo
. The
Sawfish
, like the
Wahoo
, carried a mixed load of Mk 14s and Mk 18s.

Both submarines departed Pearl Harbor on September 10, arriving off La Pérouse via different routes. The
Wahoo
headed in first, then made tracks to patrol her assigned area in the southern part of the sea; the
Sawfish
, assigned the northern part, followed three days later. Morton had orders to conduct operations as he saw fit, after which he was to depart the area on October 21 and report his position by radio after transiting the Kuriles. The
Sawfish
, which during the patrol had no contact at all with the
Wahoo
, kept to her own schedule. Lockwood and Voge expected that the Japanese would be on guard for more submarine intruders and had so briefed Morton and Sands.

There were plenty of targets, but once again poor torpedo performance thwarted success, at least for the
Sawfish
. Sands made numerous attacks that should have resulted in sinkings. Instead he was plagued by duds and erratic torpedo behavior. He reported that on firing, several of his Mk 18s struck the bow torpedo tube shutters—the streamlined outer doors covering the tubes' muzzles—sending them wildly off course. Fortunately the tin fish were designed to arm only after completing a four-hundred-yard run or they might have blown the
Sawfish
to bits. In seven attacks on eighteen ships Sands failed to sink a single one.

On October 9, after sixteen miserable days on station, Sands, with Lockwood's permission, pulled out with several Mk 18s still in their tubes for the torpedo experts to examine. Making good speed through La Pérouse, the
Sawfish
encountered patrol boats and twice escaped a bombing by patrolling aircraft.
⁵

The
Wahoo
, meanwhile, had vanished.

 

 

On October 5, four days
before the
Sawfish
departed enemy waters, the Japanese news agency Domei announced the torpedoing of the eight-thousand-ton passenger steamer
Konron Maru
in the Tsushima Strait. Lockwood acknowledged that since there were no other subs in that area it had to have been the work of the
Wahoo
. Unlike the
Sawfish
, maybe this time her torpedoes had worked.

On October 7, the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
published an article about the attack. It read in part:

When the
Wahoo
didn't report to Pearl Harbor by radio as scheduled on October 21, Lockwood began to worry. Of course, she could have been delayed as the
Plunger
was by an engineering casualty that had forced the
Wahoo
to lie doggo for a few days while her crew made repairs. Lockwood chain-smoked and waited. As the days dragged by without a word from Morton, Lockwood feared that something serious had happened to the
Wahoo
, something he didn't want to admit was possible, even as he held out hope that she might limp into port, perhaps damaged but still intact. After all, he knew from experience that whenever the Japanese thought they had sunk an American sub—and they thought they had sunk hundreds—they were quick to announce it, even though more often than not the submarine had returned to its base with all hands safe aboard. In an unusual step, Admiral Nimitz approved a request by Lockwood for a search by air of the most likely route home the
Wahoo
would travel. A careful search of an area hundreds of miles west of the Hawaiian Islands returned without finding a trace of the sub. Distraught, Lockwood confided to his diary, “No news of Mush. This is the worst blow we've had and I'm heartbroken. God punish the Japs! They shall pay for this....”
⁷

In early November Lockwood had no choice but to report that the
Wahoo
was overdue and presumed lost with all hands. Reluctantly he took down the little magnetic submarine silhouette engraved with the
Wahoo
's name from the wall map in his office. He had a hard time accepting that Dudley Morton and his crew were gone and it left him badly shaken. For Lockwood, Morton's and the other skippers' raids into the Sea of Japan, or Lake Hirohito, as it was now dubbed by U.S. submariners, ranked up there with German U-boat ace Günther Prien's raid on the British fleet at Scapa Flow in 1939 and with Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo in 1942.

With little information to go on and lacking U.S.-decrypted radio messages from Japanese antisubmarine forces, Lockwood naturally blamed the
Wahoo
's loss on mines. He was convinced that the Japanese, stung by the two earlier forays by U.S. subs, and perhaps anticipating future incursions, had sown more contact mines in the straits, one of which must have destroyed the
Wahoo
. Unknown to Lockwood, Morton had sunk four ships, among them the aforementioned
Konron Maru
. His bold attacks had indeed put the Japanese on full antisubmarine alert. Yet the alert had not, as Lockwood assumed, prompted more mine laying.

The mystery of the
Wahoo
's loss was solved at the end of the war, when intelligence officers combing through tons of Japanese documents seized at the naval ministry in Tokyo for information on the fate of missing men and ships found a report describing an attack on a submarine in La Pérouse Strait. The date of the attack matched the date that the
Wahoo
was supposed to make her exit.

The report stated that on October 11, at 0920, a floatplane had spotted an oil slick on the surface of the strait. The
Wahoo
, perhaps damaged by an earlier depth charging or a bomb, must have been leaking diesel fuel. Then at