Hellcats (36 page)

 

 

Admiral Nimitz had been counting
the days since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he received a coded message from Admiral King. The message began, “This is a peace warning.”
⁸
King's message stated that though it was not yet official, the Japanese had informed the United States government through the Swiss that they were willing to accept the terms of surrender contained in the Potsdam Declaration. While Washington waited for an official announcement from Tokyo, the Navy continued to launch air attacks across Honshu. On Tinian, Curtis LeMay's B-29s stoked up on incendiaries to drop on Japanese cities.

On August fifteenth, at CinCPac headquarters on Guam (the fourteenth in Washington), a restricted-use eyes-only Teletype began spewing out a message in plain English, not code. Nimitz's intel officer tore the top sheet from the machine, read Admiral King's message, then dashed for his boss's office.

Nimitz looked up, surprised. “It's over,” blurted the excited intel officer. Nimitz read the message, which included the full text of Japan's acceptance of surrender transmitted via the Swiss legation in Tokyo to Washington. Nimitz didn't get excited; he just gave the officer a smile of satisfaction. He'd known all along that the Japanese were finished, and now at last it
was
over. Nimitz wasted no time broadcasting an immediate cease-fire order to the fleet, which he followed with a personal message to sailors across the Pacific on the ending of the war. Lockwood broadcast a message of his own to the submarine force. It read in part:

The end of the war
brought a push for demobilization and, with it, cries to get the troops home by Christmas. Lockwood was caught up in a whirl-wind of meetings and conferences designed to do just that, piled on top of the Everest of paperwork generated by the cessation of hostilities. He hardly had time to reflect on what his sub force had accomplished and at what cost. He was thankful the war was over—thankful, too, that he'd not have to send any more young men on patrols they might not survive. There were, given the small size of the force, far too many who did not return.

As for Operation Barney, Lockwood believed it pointed the way to the future of the submarine force through operations that would capitalize on ever more sophisticated submarines and weapons. Not everyone shared Lockwood's view. Critics within the sub force observed that despite the bravery and dedication of the submariners, the results of the recent forays into the Sea of Japan hardly seemed worth the risk, especially in regard to the loss of the
Bonefish
, whose fate was yet to be determined. Critics outside the sub force believed that Barney had been a stunt, a make-work patrol, designed by Lockwood to keep his sub force occupied as the war wound down. They pointed out that no matter how many ships the Hellcats sank in the Sea of Japan (the seven submarines that followed the Hellcats into the sea in August 1945 sank only two ships), it had had no measurable effect on the weakening of Japan's ability to prolong the war. And though the sub force had almost single-handedly destroyed Japan's merchant marine and a good portion of her navy, the force nevertheless stood to be eclipsed by Army and Navy air power. In the end the atomic bomb proved to be the decisive weapon that ended the war in the Pacific, not sea power. By comparison Operation Barney was just a relatively minor affair. Lockwood, always an optimist, shrugged off the criticism as he heaped deserved praise on his submariners and looked to the future.

For the moment, however, the future of the silent service looked bleak. Occupied with the logistics of winding down the robust wartime sub force, Lockwood saw a shrinking fleet of mostly battle-weary subs and submariners. He knew America would need a new and modern fleet of long-range, high-endurance submarines and that such a fleet would require a complete rethinking of what a submarine should be.

While grappling with these issues, Lockwood flew with Admiral Nimitz and a group of other officers to Tokyo Bay, where they participated in the surrender ceremony held aboard the USS
Missouri
(BB-63) on September 2, 1945. After the ceremony Lockwood took the opportunity to tour several captured Japanese submarines capable of launching aircraft from waterproof hangars on their decks. Among them was the
I-400
, at that time one of the biggest submarines ever built.

Lockwood was shocked when he saw these submarines. Their sheer size alone staggered the imagination. The Japanese boats were far more advanced than Lockwood could have envisioned. The design of their diesels incorporated up-to-date technologies; their radar and sonar systems were on a par with those of the U.S. Navy. He also got a close look at the fabled Japanese “Long Lance” torpedo, which vastly outperformed by a whopping margin any torpedoes the U.S. Navy had in its inventory. Though Lockwood was dismissive of the big subs for their lack of refinement and creature comforts in comparison to U.S. subs, clearly their great size pointed to possibilities for the future of submarine development.

Lockwood's return to Guam coincided with the arrival of some of the first American POWs from camps liberated in Japan. Many of the survivors (only a few submariners were among the returnees, none from the
Bonefish
) were in terrible condition, suffering from dysentery, jaundice, malnutrition, and physical abuse. Far too many showed evidence of the brutality and the inhuman conditions they had suffered in captivity. Many of the returnees had to be hospitalized; those in better condition, and able to withstand it, were debriefed by naval intelligence to gather information for use in the upcoming war crimes trials.

It was a pitiful, embittering sight, Lockwood said, to see those men, their skeletal, hard-planed, sunken-eyed faces haunted by what they'd experienced. He was horrified to learn what the Japanese had done to them and to learn that the Japanese had murdered and maimed prisoners as they saw fit. How many submariners had survived the sinking of their ships only to succumb to torture and disease would not be known for months. Meanwhile, Lockwood's staff kept a tally of submariners returning from POW camps, hoping to get information from them about the fate of missing shipmates. Among the first returnees to Guam, not one of them had seen or heard of any survivors from the
Bonefish
.

 

 

Home again and with a
new baby to care for along with Boo, Sarah began to assemble all the information she could find about the loss of the
Bonefish
. What she had so far were just the basic facts provided by Lockwood concerning a raid by submarines in the Sea of Japan. They included a couple of names, a date, and a bay in Honshu called Toyama Wan. This wasn't enough. She had to know more. Somehow she had to get every piece of information available. If she could, it might explain what had happened to the
Bonefish
and help her cope with the fact that Lawrence was missing in action, perhaps dead. The
Bonefish
families, coping with their own losses, were no better off. They knew almost nothing regarding the fate of their loved ones beyond what they'd been told by the Navy, which wasn't much. In distress they turned to Sarah for help.
^ac

The mother of a quartermaster serving in the
Bonefish
wrote:

The mother of another
Bonefish
sailor had reason to be hopeful.

The writer shortly sent Sarah another letter. It contained information about 156 men, survivors of the sinking of the destroyer USS
Pope
(DD-225), who had been located in a prison camp. “It evidently seems they are still locating prisoners,” she said. Another writer refused to allow “three brutal words, ‘missing in action,' to shatter [my] world.”

Sarah received many letters praising Lawrence as a wonderful, caring skipper who would do everything in his power to bring his men home. One sailor had written home that Edge was like a father to him. Mothers, fathers, and wives told Sarah that they believed all the men would come back as soon as they were found in one of the camps. It would just be a matter of time, they said, until their prayers were answered.

Some letters contained information and news clippings detailing the return of survivors of submarines. One letter writer wrote, “[P]apers came out with a story about a lot of men being found in a Jap prison camp from the S-44, Sculpin, Tullibee, Perch, Tang, and Grenadier.” The writer enclosed a clipping of a story published in
The New York Times
in late August 1945, which said, “7 Jap Ships Bagged Before Tang Sank.” As explained earlier, the
Tang
had been sunk by one of her own circular-running torpedoes. Her skipper, Commander Richard O'Kane, and eight men survived the sinking but were held captive by the Japanese under extremely brutal conditions. O'Kane was lucky to have survived his ordeal. Stories like these helped ease the crush of anxiety and grief bearing down on the families of the missing
Bonefish
men. And they kept hopes alive that eventually they'd be recovered.

While Sarah was digging for information and answering letters from the families, false eyewitness accounts and rumors about the sinking of the
Bonefish
began circulating. These cruel, deliberately fabricated stories concocted by sailors with limited knowledge of submarine operations were replete with erroneous information and impossible scenarios. For the anguished families it was almost more than they could bear. The men who made these false claims were eventually exposed and punished by the Navy.

A relative of a
Bonefish
sailor, after hearing these rumors, wrote Sarah that a friend had spoken to several submariners who claimed to have seen the
Bonefish
attack a large convoy, after which she was depth-charged by destroyers and sunk. Another story circulated that the
Bonefish
was last heard from going into Toyama Wan and that she had been attacked and sunk by midget subs. Both stories were false. No one ever saw the
Bonefish
attack a large convoy in the Sea of Japan, and the Japanese had no active midget subs deployed in the western Pacific.

Another false rumor claimed that the
Bonefish
, plagued by radio problems and unable to communicate, was hiding out somewhere off the coast of Manchuria or Siberia. Yet another said that her crew had sought refuge on one of the tiny volcanic islands dotting the Sea of Japan and, not knowing that the war was over, were awaiting rescue. Another claimed that part of the crew had been taken prisoner and that they were safe. Some of these rumors gained credence because the families grasped at anything that might offer hope for the men's survival. While most rumors got started through ignorance or from a lack of knowledge of submarine operations, others were started deliberately.

The cruelest rumor of all got started by a submariner who sent a letter to the mother of a
Bonefish
sailor. He claimed to have been only five hundred yards away from the
Bonefish
when she was torpedoed and sunk, presumably by a Japanese submarine. He also claimed to have seen the woman's son a split second before the torpedo hit, which, he said, made him the last person to see her son alive. His claim was an outright lie. So was the story told by a young submariner to the sister of a
Bonefish
sailor that the
Bonefish
had had her conning tower shot off at Iwo Jima during her seventh patrol, but that she'd managed to return to Guam. It was unthinkable, said the missing man's sister, that anyone would send men on such a dangerous mission in a ship that had been so badly damaged.