Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (34 page)

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Over the last two years of the war in the Pacific, Lockwood, now a vice admiral, demonstrated great virtuosity in the use of his finely honed instrument. He commanded a force of submarines capable of operating throughout a naval battlespace that, despite Japanese reverses, encompassed an area measuring more than two thousand miles from north to south, and nearly that distance from east to west. When it was observed, early in 1944, that Japanese oil tanker capacity had increased by three hundred thousand tons since Pearl Harbor, Lockwood focused his efforts on these ships. The result was massive tanker sinkings throughout the year, the high point being in October 1944 when a third of the 320,901 tons of Japanese merchant ships sunk were tankers.
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During this period the American submarine force also began to target Japanese escort vessels, exacting a terrible toll among them as well.

Area of Submarine Operations in the Pacific War

By November 1944, with the sea virtually drained of enemy merchant ships and escort vessels declining sharply in numbers, Lockwood shifted target emphasis once again, this time to Japan’s troop transports and larger warships. In this month alone, just a handful of American submarines accounted for two transports filled with troops, thousands of whom died, the battleship
KONGO
, and the fifty-nine-thousand-ton aircraft carrier
SHINANO
. The Japanese submarine fleet, which had focused almost exclusively on targeting Allied warships, never came close to achieving results like these. By war’s end Japan had lost just under seven hundred warships of all sizes, more than two hundred of them sunk by submarines.

This success may suggest that American submariners in the Pacific enjoyed one field day after another against indifferent opposition. The truth is that these remarkable results were achieved against a first-rate Japanese navy that fought bitterly to the end. There were many hard-fought actions between subs and Japanese escort vessels, including dramatic surface battles at night (the American vessels mounted three-inch deck guns) and long cat-and-mouse hunts with many hours of depth charging as skippers dove and turned their boats in feverish evasive maneuvers.

The key point to remember here is that in the vast majority of these actions, the submarines were on their own—seventy crewmen and seven officers, fighting outnumbered and without hope of timely reinforcement or air support. Nonetheless they always strove to take the offensive, like Orde Wingate’s Chindits and Special Night Squads. Or, going back further, like so many other great irregular forces, from Rogers’s rangers to Forrest’s rebels, and on to de Wet’s
KOMMANDOS
. The tactical essence of irregular warfare is the offensive, conducted with ferocity and pursued unless the enemy’s sheer numbers compel an end to the action—until the next attack is launched.

One of the engagements that Lockwood considered particularly exemplary of the gallantry of his captains and crews began just after midnight on October 23, 1944, in waters off China’s southeastern coast. Commander Richard O’Kane, skipper of the
TANG
, had come upon a large convoy of Japanese ships headed for the great Leyte campaign in the Philippines then getting underway.
TANG
, completely alone, drove into the middle of the convoy on the surface, attacking and sinking two tankers and a freighter, then narrowly missed being rammed by a transport, which hit another ship instead. By now Japanese escorts were closing in, so
TANG
broke contact until the next day. Resuming its attack after dark,
TANG
next took out another tanker, a transport, and a destroyer. Twisting and turning his boat in evasive surface maneuvers, O’Kane was able to line up one more target with his last two torpedoes. He fired; one ran straight and hit its target, but the other malfunctioned—Lockwood had fixed the depth and detonator problems, but guidance often remained an issue—and it circled back and hit
TANG
, sinking it.

O’Kane and a few sailors were blown off the conning tower into the sea when the hit occurred. They met up with the five crew members who had managed to escape from inside the boat. Everyone else died. These nine were captured by the Japanese and imprisoned until the end of the war. O’Kane lived to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Truman. Lockwood was standing at his side at the ceremony. As to the
TANG
, in its eight months of war it accounted for twenty-four enemy ships sunk, almost a hundred thousand tons.
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Not every skipper performed at O’Kane’s high level of efficiency, but many came close. Lockwood had gone out of his way to select the kind of men who would thrive on independent action and who were relentless in their pursuit of the offensive against the Japanese. In this he succeeded beyond all expectations, as the relative handful of sailors under his command—2 percent of all navy personnel—accounted for more than half of Japanese naval losses.
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In merchant tonnage Japan fell from six million at the start of the war to less than two million by its end, net of new production and captured vessels. Most of the ships that remained were “small wooden vessels” that plied the waters of the Inland Sea.
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This result reflects the kind of high return on investment that can come with a skillful irregular approach to battle. But it came at great cost. Nearly a quarter of the submariners who fought on the more than two hundred boats that served in the Pacific War died on the four dozen that were sunk in the fighting. Forty of their skippers were among the dead. The submariners in all oceans, some twenty thousand men in all, suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the U.S. armed forces in World War II.

As this bitter war neared its close in August 1945, President Harry S Truman, who had assumed office after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April that year, resolved to use atomic weapons against Japanese cities to compel a rapid surrender and avoid the need for an invasion. Aside from the ethical nuances of this decision, another option was available: to compel surrender by means of tightening the submarine blockade. This was certainly the preferred view of Admiral Nimitz, Lockwood’s immediate superior. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur also opposed nuclear attack.

But perhaps the military voice closest to Truman, his chief of staff Fleet Admiral William Leahy, was the most articulate in emphasizing the impact of the irregular naval campaign. Leahy told Truman that Japan was “already defeated and ready to surrender because of the sea blockade.”
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Despite this, and in the face of opposition among senior military leaders, Truman went ahead with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war ended in August. Whether the sea blockade would have compelled surrender—which I believe—remains a lively subject of academic discussion.

For Lockwood, the end of the war allowed time for introspection about the future of naval warfare. Based on his experiences, and his deep knowledge of how close the German U-boats came to winning the Battle of the Atlantic, he concluded that submarines, with all their capacity for irregular warfare, would play a dominant role in naval affairs in the years to come. He lobbied hard for the creation of a major submarine command but ran up against a naval leadership that instead sought to make the aircraft carrier the center of the postwar navy.

After Lockwood retired he continued to argue that the submarine would be the true capital ship of the future. Years before Admiral Hyman Rickover became the father of the nuclear submarine, Lockwood was writing of such vessels, which would cruise for many months submerged, their reactors seldom needing refueling, their limits driven only by food requirements and the psychology of human endurance. Of their power, Lockwood had no doubts: “This submarine could drive every surface ship from the face of the sea.”
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While the U.S. Navy did not heed his advice, the Soviets clearly did. They refused to emphasize carriers during the Cold War (and even today) and instead built hundreds of submarines. Today China seems to be following this model, taking a distinctly irregular approach to twenty-first-century naval affairs. In the one hard-fought, major sea war between advanced countries since World War II, the duel for the Falkland/Malvinas Islands between Britain and Argentina in 1982,
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two British submarines ultimately bottled up the entire Argentine surface fleet. Only air attacks from land bases imperiled the Royal Navy in this fight. As the military historian John Keegan observed about the Falklands conflict, in a view quite in line with Lockwood’s thinking: “The era of the submarine as the predominant weapon of power at sea must therefore be recognized as having begun.”
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Lockwood continued to write about his experiences in several best-selling books. Although he had nothing of the literary style of Lawrence, the two shared a larger vision of the power of “the few,” properly employed, to bedevil “the many.” Like Lawrence, Lockwood recognized the great value of stealth and the initiative it granted to small forces to strike at the enemy’s crucial pressure points. He also shared Lawrence’s fate as an innovator, in that he too failed to inspire major changes. When he died in 1967, the navy was still carrier-centered. It remains so today. But if Lockwood was right in his belief that the submarine was becoming the most potent naval weapon, bringing irregular warfare to the fore at sea—much as ranging and raiding tactics came to dominate in the North American wilderness in the eighteenth century—the United States and its allies have much to worry about. The first submarine captain, Jules Verne’s Nemo, was a terrorist who struck at modern warships and merchant steamers with impunity. The next Nemo may be one too.

PARTISAN:
JOSIP BROZ, “TITO”

© Bettmann/Corbis

In at least one important respect, the German armored
BLITZKRIEG
that overran France in 1940 and the Japanese carrier aircraft attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 had quite similar effects: both were such disabling blows that they allowed the aggressors free reign for conquest, at least for a while. The fall of France permitted the Germans to move with impunity across virtually all of Europe. The crippling of the U.S. Navy opened up the Pacific and East Asia to Japanese conquest.

The British tried hard to make a conventional stand in each theater of operations. But in Africa their initial successes against the Italians were soon overturned by the arrival of Rommel’s
AFRIKA KORPS
. In Europe, British expeditionary forces sent to the Balkans to stem the fascist tide were driven from the mainland, then from the island of Crete in a series of bruising defeats. In the East the empire suffered even more humiliating losses in Singapore and Burma. Despite the deep entanglements of the Germans in Russia (from June 1941) and the Japanese in China, Britain and the United States still found it difficult to open up new fronts for massive conventional campaigns.

During these dark early years of World War II, the principal countermoves available to the remaining forces of resistance were to a great extent irregular in nature. As noted in the preceding two chapters, the strategic situation in the Pacific placed a premium on the waging of irregular warfare against Japan with Wingate’s long-range penetration groups on the Asian mainland and Lockwood’s submarines at sea. In Europe, Nazi control, almost complete from the fall of France to the invasion of Normandy four years later, also required an emphasis on unconventional operations. Winston Churchill, who was still holding out against Hitler in Britain, and someone very well acquainted with irregular warfare from the time of his experiences with the Boers forty years earlier—not to mention what he had learned from his friendship with T. E. Lawrence—was determined to foster strong resistance to Nazi rule throughout the occupied countries. With a mix of local insurgents and British-led commando raids, the main goal of the Special Operations Executive he established was to “set Europe ablaze.”
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