Hellcats (8 page)

The
Wahoo
had made her last dive.

 

 

After the loss of the
Wahoo
Lockwood grappled with several important issues that would have an influence on decisions he would make regarding future raids into the Sea of Japan. Despite the small number of ships sunk on the three raids launched so far (he nevertheless regarded every sinking as another nail in the emperor's coffin), he had to question whether the experience the sub force had gained toward future raids had been worth the lives of Morton and his crew. It might have been hard for Lockwood to weigh this objectively, for despite his sorrow at the loss of so many other submarines and their crews and his deep affection for every man in his force, Morton was clearly Lockwood's favorite. He was unique. He possessed all the skill, daring, and tenacity that Lockwood sought in his skippers and that Morton had amply demonstrated during the battles he'd waged against the Japanese on earlier war patrols.

Lockwood expressed his deepest feelings about Morton when he said, “. . . I resolved, there would come another day—a day of visitation—an hour of revenge. In time we would collect for the
Wahoo
and Commander Dudley Morton and his men, with heavy interest. And in time we did.”
⁹
He had no way of knowing whether there had been any survivors from the
Wahoo
, but experience told him that it was unlikely. When submarines were hit, they went down fast—too fast for the men inside to escape. With the
Wahoo
's loss, Lockwood reluctantly decided to put an end to operations in the Sea of Japan—for now, at least. He knew that if his subs were to return to sink ships and exact revenge for Morton and the
Wahoo
, they would have to have special equipment that could accurately plot the location of the minefields to give the raiding submarines a greater margin of safety. Lockwood knew that a submarine's greatest attribute is stealth. He believed that if submarines could find a way to penetrate the minefields submerged without alerting the enemy to their presence, next time they would deliver a blow from which the Japanese might not recover.

As the pain of Morton's death slowly eased, Lockwood thought about his visit to the UCDWR labs earlier in the year and the demonstration of FM sonar that had been conducted for his benefit off Point Loma. In his mind a bell began to ring, softly at first, then louder, until its peal began to slowly but surely unleash a chain of events that would culminate in what would come to be known as Operation Barney. It also unleashed a chain of events that would have a profound and lasting effect on the lives of a select group of submariners and, most especially, those of the USS
Bonefish
.

O
n March 7, 1943, Mrs. Freeland A. Daubin, wife of the former Commander Submarines Atlantic (ComSubLant), smashed a bottle of champagne on the bow of the USS
Bonefish
. Duly christened, the submarine slid down the building ways of the Electric Boat Corporation in Groton, Connecticut, on a sunny but cold day, pennants and red-white-and-blue bunting flapping in the wind as she entered the Thames River stern-first. She was one of those good-looking
Gato
-class fleet-type submarines: a long, beautifully proportioned vessel, her low freeboard sweeping back over a 312-foot length and 27-foot beam to a narrow and trim stern. With her sharply raked snout and rounded gray body shaded with black, the
Bonefish
in many ways resembled the Florida game fish after which she was named.

Sitting in the water fully loaded with fuel, ordnance, and food, the
Bonefish
displaced 1,800 tons and drew 17 feet of water. Divided into nine watertight compartments, they included two engine rooms housing four General Motors Winton 16-248A 16-cylinder, 1,600-horsepower diesel engines. Each engine drove a DC generator (thus, diesel-electric drive) that supplied electricity to the ship's four main propulsion motors and for lighting, air-conditioning, radar, and communications, among other things.

Connected through reduction gears to the ship's twin propeller shafts, the motors drove the
Bonefish
at a top speed of twenty-one knots on the surface. Submerged, two massive 126-cell rechargeable electric storage batteries provided sufficient power to propel the
Bonefish
at nine knots, though for only a short duration and with the penalty of a high discharge rate. A more usable underwater speed of two or three knots, though limiting maneuverability, conserved electricity and provided greater submerged cruising range. When the submarine returned to the surface one or more diesels recharged the batteries while those not used for battery charging drove the ship. When all four main engines went online for high-speed surface cruising the small auxiliary diesel picked up the extra electrical load needed to keep the batteries topped off.

The
Bonefish
's main armament consisted often 21-inch torpedo tubes: six forward, four aft. She carried ten war shots in her tubes and fourteen reloads. A pair of 20mm guns augmented the old-style long-barreled four-inch .50-caliber gun mounted on her forward deck. Later, from experience gained during war patrols, submarines employed heavier armament, usually a five-inch .25-caliber deck gun and twin 40mms. Submarine command didn't encourage the use of deck guns because return fire from enemy ships could cause serious damage to the sub's pressure hull. Also, because of the sub's low freeboard, exposed gun crews ran the risk of being swept overboard, if not killed or wounded by enemy fire. Yet there would come a time late in the war when Japanese ships were so scarce that submarines assumed the role of submersible gunboats, damaging and sinking Japanese small craft not worth the expenditure of a torpedo.

Big submarines like the
Bonefish
, with their usual complements of eighty-one men—seven officers and seventy-four enlisted—were well designed for their offensive role in the Pacific, given that many of Admiral Lockwood's ideas had been incorporated into them. With a fuel capacity of almost 90,000 gallons and a cruising range of 13,000 miles, a fleet-type submarine could easily undertake a sixty- to seventy-day war patrol to hunt down and sink Japanese ships.

After fitting out and undergoing sea trials the
Bonefish
was commissioned on May 31, 1943, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Thomas W. Hogan. During four war patrols out of Fremantle, Australia, Hogan, an aggressive and resourceful skipper, sank seven ships
^b
for a total of 34,329 tons.
¹
During that period the
Bonefish
compiled an enviable record that included Navy Unit Commendations for her first, third, and fourth war patrols. Little more than a year later, on June 13, 1944, in a ceremony attended by ComSubSoWesPac Vice Admiral Ralph W. Christie, Lockwood's replacement, Hogan relinquished command of the veteran
Bonefish
to thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Lott Edge, USN.

 

 

Lawrence Edge had graduated from
the United States Naval Academy in 1935. Tall and slender, he had a prominent forehead topped by thinning dark hair (his portrait in the
Lucky Bag
class yearbook foreshadowed this early baldness). The
Lucky Bag
remarked on Edge's pleasant personality, soft Southern drawl, and deep inner nature. The latter might account for his musical artistry, both on piano and violin, his interest in photography, woodworking, and drawing and painting. His watercolors of tropical flowers are sublimely beautiful. One might think Edge would have been more at home on the faculty of a small college, happily ensconced in an office strewn with books, than in the hot conning tower of a submarine filled with sweating sailors. Not so.

Upon graduation from the Naval Academy, Ensign Edge served a two-and-a-half-year tour of duty in the battleship USS
Maryland
(BB-46). It may have been that the “real Navy” of battleships and cruisers that so appealed to Charles Lockwood appealed less to Edge's deep inner nature than one might expect inasmuch as he requested duty in submarines, which even then was a service still shunned by officers with ambitions to flag rank.

After selection for duty in subs Lawrence reported to the U.S. Navy's modernized and bustling submarine school at New London, Connecticut, in January 1938. A week after graduating from sub school, on June 15, 1938, he and Sarah Simms married in Atlanta, Georgia. They had met while Lawrence was attending Georgia Tech and Sarah was attending Hollins College in Virginia. Their romance continued through Lawrence's graduation from the Naval Academy and Sarah's graduation from Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.

Lawrence and Sarah came from prominent families in Columbus and Atlanta, Georgia. Both were descended from ancestors long associated with the cultural and business life of those cities. Their June wedding became a centerpiece in the society pages of the
Columbus Ledger-Inquirer
and the
Atlanta Constitution
. The
Atlanta Georgian
's society columnist, Polly Peachtree, called it a “fashionable event,” and dubbed Sarah “the charming Atlanta belle” and Lawrence “the handsome naval officer.” The papers featured long, detailed descriptions of the bride's and her attendants' gowns, the floral arrangements, the music, even the interior of the church. The
Constitution
gushed that attendees included fashionable members of Atlanta society and prominent out-of-town guests.

A month after their wedding a full-page banner headline topping the
Constitution
's society page announced: “Pacific Ocean Borders Front Yard of Atlanta Bride.” An accompanying article informed society-conscious Atlantans that the newlyweds had arrived in the exotic Pacific outpost of Hawaii, with its palm trees, swaying grass skirts, and uninhibited American sailors, and where Lawrence, now a lieutenant junior grade, started his career in submarines aboard the big V-class
Narwhal
(whose six-inch guns would in the future bombard Matsuwa To during that pioneering foray into the Sea of Japan).

After he completed his tour in the
Narwhal
in December 1940, Edge reported aboard the rusty World War I-vintage submarine
O-4
based at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where many obsolete submarines were laid up before scrapping. Unlike her sisters destined for the breaker's yard, the
O-4
had been chosen by the Navy for duty as a submarine school training boat. Edge worked hard and put in long hours on the refurbishing and fitting out of the rusty old sub. Then, in July 1941, with World War II looming for America, Edge received orders to report to the Naval Academy to undertake a two-year postgraduate course of instruction in what was then called “radio engineering.” This new field married electronics to communications and other technologies that were coming into wider use in the Navy. The equipment required highly skilled technicians to operate it and repair it.

The assignment must have convinced Lawrence that he was doomed to attend classes ashore while the war everyone knew was coming got started without him. He may have doubted that he'd ever get aboard a submarine to join the battle. After all, it was no secret that submarines would play a major role in a war against the Japanese, and every submariner alive, veteran and novice alike, wanted aboard one. A lot happened during the two years he and Sarah spent together in Annapolis. The most important event was the birth of their first child, Sarah. Meanwhile, overseas, Hitler, after conquering eastern Europe, invaded the USSR. The Japanese, after attacking Pearl Harbor, overran the Far East.

Lawrence endured his two years at Annapolis far from the action, studying basic and advanced electronics. His course of instruction included periodic bouts of temporary duty at places like the Sperry Gyroscope Company on Long Island, the National Broadcasting Company in New York City, the Radio Corporation of America in New Jersey, Philco Radio & Television Corporation in Philadelphia, and many others. His duties included visits to the Fleet Sound School in Key West, Florida, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He and a pregnant Sarah moved up and down the East Coast together, often living in temporary quarters while enjoying married life in the Navy even as Lawrence grew impatient for submarine work.

The companies and institutions where Lawrence learned the practical working side of electronics had earlier started gearing up for war by developing and then refining the very technologies Edge was studying. During the period that Lawrence and Sarah traveled up and down the East Coast from duty station to duty station, Manila fell to the Japanese; the U.S. Navy mauled the Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway; the Allies began to turn the tide against the German U-boat onslaught in the North Atlantic; and Russian troops, after encircling Germany's Sixth Army, began to break the Wehrmacht's stranglehold on Stalingrad.

Lawrence's salvation, as it were, arrived in two phases. On May 1, 1943, he received a promotion to the rank of lieutenant commander. Then in late July, as he was completing his studies, he received orders assigning him to New London for instruction at the Prospective Submarine Commanding Officer (PCO) School. This was a major turning point in his life and career, for the goal of any seagoing naval officer, especially in wartime, is command at sea.

 

 

An officer selected for PCO
School and possible command of a fleet-type submarine faced a formidable challenge. This despite the fact that when the United States entered World War II the Navy needed all the trained submariners it could get to man the new boats coming out of the building yards at the rate of four or five a month. Only the very best officers received training as potential skippers. To succeed in the pressure-cooker environment of submarine combat, a candidate for command had to be not only highly intelligent and have an analytical mind, but he also had to be resourceful, self-confident, and above all, unflappable under pressure. Consequently, PCO candidates were carefully screened to weed out individuals who lacked the qualities essential for command; a lot of men didn't make the grade. Men like Lawrence Edge, who did, joined a select group destined for command of a submarine in a Navy that had undergone such swift and far-ranging changes in outlook and structure that it scarcely resembled the Navy America had when it entered the war.