Hellcats (37 page)

“[‘I was told,' she wrote] how badly the ship was damaged on her patrol before the last. And how my little brother hated to go on this last patrol, [as] he knew he would never be back. I can't understand why, if the job they were assigned to do was so dangerous, they didn't let the boys come home [on leave]. But there are a lot of things I don't understand about the Navy.” Later, she wrote to Sarah that she hadn't been taken in by the sailor's wild story.

 

 

The days turned into weeks
of unrelenting agony over the unknown fate of the missing men. More reports came in every day about the release of POWs, some hopeful, some not. BuPers released a statement that every effort was being made to liberate prisoners and to locate and clarify the status of personnel listed as missing. Admiral King had directed that all islands and areas not previously explored were to be subjected to a thorough and exhaustive search for U.S. and Allied personnel. It was a huge task that would take a lot of time and require the transport of hundreds of search teams over a vast area of the Pacific. Meanwhile, other teams were fanning out over the home islands of Japan, searching for prisoners in every town, village, and farm, as the Japanese, in addition to holding POWs in large, squalid camps, had also scattered POWs across the country to prevent them from being rescued.

As news reached the public about the horrible physical condition of returning prisoners, along with stories about how barbaric the Japanese treatment of captives had been, the families of the missing
Bonefish
men feared the worst.

In the absence of information that would either confirm or dispel the families' worst fears, new rumors began to spread, some darkened by anger arising from the need to blame someone other than the Japanese for the loss of the
Bonefish
. Fueled by the belief that the
Bonefish
had been sacrificed unnecessarily, that anger boiled over into the open.

The mother of a
Bonefish
officer wrote, “There is no logical person other than Admiral Lockwood to have given orders for [the
Bonefish
] to have gone on into Toyama Bay—I, personally, would like to ask Admiral L just one question, ‘Would you have ordered the Bonefish on into the Bay if you had had a son a member of the crew?'” And from another family member, “A report from a boy who was on a sub tender . . . [said] that he knew [the
Bonefish
] was given extra assignment
over and beyond
[emphasis in original] other boats.” “Seems to me that those ‘high up' in submarine service could elicit information from Japs. I heard on the radio . . . soon after the [
Bonefish
] must have been in trouble, the Japs claim that they had sunk 6 American subs just off the mainland. Since [the
Bonefish
] seems to be the only one not accounted for I feel sure Japs stationed in Toyama areas know what happened.”

A rumor spread by persons unfamiliar with how submarine war patrols were conducted suggested that somehow Lawrence and the other Hellcat skippers had requested permission from Lockwood to make the Operation Barney patrol into the Sea of Japan, and that he'd approved their request.

To put an end to such rumors, Sarah sent letters to the families in which she included copies of her correspondence with Lockwood. The families responded with a flurry of letters of appreciation for her efforts. While the information she provided didn't dispel the families' uncertainty, it helped to clarify some of the murky details and half-truths that had grown up around the missing
Bonefish
.

In mid-September Sarah received a reply to a letter she sent to Lockwood seeking answers to two important questions. Lockwood was busy administering a sub force already beginning to put itself up in mothballs, Barney far from his mind until Sarah refocused his attention on it. Her questions concerned submarine POW returnees and also whether or not Lawrence had gone on the mission into the Sea of Japan at his own request, as had been rumored. Lockwood replied to her first question but didn't answer her second question directly. Instead he forwarded a copy of her letter to George Pierce, the
Tunny
's CO during Operation Barney.
⁹

This was the breakthrough Sarah had hoped for—contact with someone who had actually spoken to Lawrence on the scene just before the
Bonefish
disappeared. The news about returning POWs was only mildly hopeful at best, but Sarah knew that the Navy didn't declare a man dead until he had been missing for a year, and there was still plenty of time left to find Lawrence and the others. U.S. search teams had only just begun their searches throughout Japan for prisoners and it would take time to reach the camps on that country's west coast, much less the ones they didn't know about. With her unshakable faith, Sarah believed anything was possible, perhaps even that Lawrence and his men would return home.

For Sarah, struggling to keep faith that Lawrence would return, Pierce's assessment that capture seemed remote because the men had gone down with the
Bonefish
dealt this hope a crushing blow. Pierce described what he and Lawrence had discussed prior to Lawrence's patrol in Toyama Wan, but Pierce didn't know what had happened to the
Bonefish
any more than Lockwood did. Nor did he and Lockwood reveal what Operation Barney had accomplished. Could the mission have been so vital to the winning of a war, a war virtually won, that eighty-five men aboard the
Bonefish
had to die? It must have seemed incomprehensible to Sarah that Lawrence and the men under his command had perished little more than eight weeks before the war ended.

 

 

By mid-September U.S. servicemen were
starting to stream home from Europe and the Pacific. Meanwhile, in Japan, teams of U.S. Navy intelligence experts began combing through the tens of thousands of pages of Japanese naval records, many of them handwritten, seized at the naval ministry in Tokyo. The teams were searching for technical, operational, and scientific information related to methods the Japanese armed forces had employed during the war. Other teams of specialists were searching the records for information on the fate of missing men and ships, trying to discover the circumstances of their loss. They were also trying to determine the fate of American naval personnel—submariners in particular—thought to have been captured by the Japanese navy but not yet located in POW camps.

In general, the records thought to contain this information consisted of Tabular Records of Movement, that is, the day-to-day records kept by each Japanese warship of its operations. These records provided the search teams with everything from the names of the ships to their duties, battle engagements, expenditure of ammunition, and battle damage. In addition, so-called action reports and war diaries similar to a ship's log provided the search teams with detailed accounts of an individual ship's battle actions. Though these records were in disarray, the Japanese-speaking Navy specialists began to assemble a mosaic of Japanese naval operations throughout the Pacific theater, which they broke down into smaller segments for study. At the behest of ComSubPac, a team had been detailed to identify Japanese ships that had attacked U.S. submarines. Making sense of it all was hard, slow work. Little by little a picture of Japanese antisubmarine operations began to emerge from the blizzard of paper that provided information on the fate of some missing U.S. subs. Lockwood knew, for instance, that while the Japanese had had little trouble locating submerged submarines via sonar, they consistently failed to destroy them due to a lack of persistence and skill. As a result they were quick to accept even the flimsiest evidence as proof of a kill. As the data began to trickle in from Japan Lockwood was astonished to discover that the Japanese believed that they had sunk a total of 468 U.S. submarines, far more than the total number in the entire U.S. fleet!

The search team often found itself hampered by incomplete or contradictory data. And because the work required meticulous attention to detail, it took longer than expected to piece together bits of information pointing to a specific cause for the loss of individual submarines. The team organized the reports of antisubmarine attacks by date and geographic location, then correlated that data to known information about missing U.S. subs with names like
Amberjack
,
Grampus
,
Scamp
, and
Golet
. Reports of attacks on other missing submarines, including the
Bonefish
, weren't found during this initial search.

 

 

Back in Atlanta, Sarah Edge,
undaunted in her quest for answers to the
Bonefish
's disappearance, compiled a list of questions based on the information she had painstakingly assembled from her sources.
²
A question that emerged from this information, and which troubled her and some of the families, was whether or not Lockwood had pulled some of the Operation Barney subs off patrols to send them into the Sea of Japan without giving their crews enough rest. Sarah feared that fatigue may have played a role in the loss of the
Bonefish
, given that Lawrence had written about the quick turnaround between his seventh and eighth patrols that had cut short his rest period on Guam. Another troubling question was, Had the men been ordered on the raid by Lockwood?

Sarah posed these questions and others in a letter she mailed in early October to Lawrence's friend and pack mate Ozzie Lynch, skipper of the
Skate
. Lynch had filled the electronics job that Lawrence was slated to fill after completing Operation Barney. Sarah's letter was blunt and to the point. Her words expressed all the anguish and pain caused by Lawrence's disappearance, all the unknowns and unanswered questions that had made her spirits sometimes soar and sometimes crash as she waited for news of his fate.