Hellcats (38 page)

Lynch answered promptly.
⁴
He told Sarah that the
Bonefish
had suffered no serious damage (as rumors had claimed) and was in good shape when she shoved off on Operation Barney. “I talked to Larry quite a bit before we started out and he seemed to feel fine about going in.” As for being ordered to take on the mission, “We were ordered to make the June raid the same as we were ordered to make any other patrol except we had all the special charts and gear to make the run.”

“I was not asked particularly whether I wanted to make the run or not. In my case I wanted to go. I was married once, and there was no great loss to anyone should I not return. It has always been the policy for any skipper who wanted to give up command to merely say so and he would be relieved.”

As for the rest period between patrols, Lynch said, “Larry had a short rest period because he had to make the schedule with the rest of us. The operation as you may have guessed had been planned for a long time.” “You are correct about the patrols being dangerous. I felt that I would not get back.... I did not tell anyone about it, but it's the case.”

Lynch explained his role in the Toyama Wan incursion, writing, “I was the boat that saw the [Japanese ships] going into Toyama Bay and so reported it to the pack commander, George Pierce. Larry went in after them because that was his assigned patrol area. I was assigned half of it for the first two days only.... I do not . . . think that there were any mines below 100 fathoms.

“. . . The only word we had from Larry on how many [ships] he sank was four days before we thought he was missing. He could easily have sunk more.” To the hazards of Toyama Wan, Lynch said, “. . . [it] was no more hazardous than any other place except it was a bay and as such had only one direction to go to get out.

“. . . You asked me how lucky I was. We were very lucky [to have sunk the ships we did.]

“No one knows just what happened to the Bonefish. We thought that some information might come from the Japanese after the war was over as to claims made by their anti-submarine vessels. There is one third of a chance that they struck a mine. There is just no way to tell just where the boat might have been sunk.”

A few weeks later Ozzie Lynch received Sarah's response.

In a follow-up letter to Lynch, Sarah asked for his views on a number of issues circulating among the
Bonefish
families. Foremost were the rumors and speculation that some of the men had survived the sinking and were alive in prison camps awaiting rescue. Such rumors and speculation had been stoked by a report from a Navy chaplain, the father of a
Bonefish
sailor, assigned to POW recovery in Japan. He reported that many of the POW camps had still not been reached by U.S. forces, especially those on the west coast of Japan. This was due in part to heavily mined waters in the Sea of Japan that had not yet been cleared, plus the fact that there were few roads into the areas where those camps had been built. The chaplain explained that while records were still being searched for information, none had yet been found that would indicate
Bonefish
survivors were in one of the camps. Still, the chaplain said there was reason to be hopeful.

Another troubling issue concerned those who had all but given up hope for their loved ones and sought to assess blame. For them, Lockwood had become a convenient scapegoat. It was said that he and others in authority, realizing that it looked bad for eight undamaged subs not to go back into the Sea of Japan to the aid of the
Bonefish
, had told Pierce and Lynch what they could and could not say about it.

Through dogged persistence Sarah had assembled an impressive array of facts pertaining to Operation Barney, which she included in her letters to Lynch and the families. As the wall of secrecy surrounding the operation slowly opened wider, she at last understood the mission's tactical and strategic objectives and also how the mission itself had been carried out. However, at this stage she still had no knowledge of Lockwood's desire to exact retribution, if not a measure of personal vengeance, from the Japanese for the death of Mush Morton and the loss of the
Wahoo
.

Addressing the questions Sarah posed in her follow-up letter, Lynch wrote in mid-November, “Let there be no doubt that Larry was as good a fighter as any man who ever went to sea. None of us know the story of the end of his ship, but I know that he went down fighting for you and me and the rest of us.”

Most of the information that she had was correct, he said, in regard to the mission itself, the number of subs, and its dates. What was not true, he said, was that the
Bonefish
had rendezvoused with the other eight Hellcats, after which she had somehow disappeared or turned back during the escape phase. It was also not true, according to rumors, that the ship had been scuttled or that she'd been seen attacking a large convoy and was in turn attacked herself. Once again, he told Sarah that he doubted the
Bonefish
had struck a mine, as the water in which she was operating was too deep for mining. “Much as I hate to say it to you, capture by the Japs seems a remote possibility.”

 

 

Sometime in the fall of
1945, Sarah sent a long letter to all of the
Bonefish
families. She told them what she had learned about Operation Barney and the loss of the
Bonefish
.
⁵
She explained that the information had been pieced together from her correspondence with Lawrence, Admiral Lockwood, George Pierce, Ozzie Lynch, and several officers whom she didn't name who had firsthand knowledge of Operation Barney. Sarah knew that her letter wouldn't lessen the crushing heartbreak of the loss of those men whose lives had ended prematurely, if not needlessly. She simply wanted to share the facts she'd assembled to try to help the families understand, as she now did, what the men had faced in their hour of sacrifice.

“The loss to all of us,” she wrote, “is indeed more regrettable and harder to understand since the war was all but over when the Bonefish was reported missing, for the public utterances of Adm. Nimitz say that the Japs were well defeated some weeks before the atom bomb was dropped on August 6.”

In her letter Sarah shared with the families Lawrence's sentiments regarding his and his friends' belief that they had been lucky to survive the war so far and that it would be a tragedy for them not to live to see its end. Sarah also included a comprehensive overview of Operation Barney, starting with the
Wahoo
's incursions into the Sea of Japan, which she characterized as having been turned into a highly fortified and dangerous area. Drawing on Pierce's and Lynch's letters she described the operation's tactical aspects from beginning to end, though she erred through misinformation on the two final points on which her letter ended. Nevertheless her words are a fitting conclusion to the gallant
Bonefish
's final days in action: “. . . Adm. Lockwood sent a message to the eight subs as they went out of La Pérouse Strait, saying that disturbances in Japan Sea indicated that the Bonefish was still in the Sea
^ae
and that he had tried to send a message to her telling her how the others had left the Sea. No one went back to look for her or to see if she needed help.”
^af
To this she added, “The greatest success was that only one sub, U.S.S. Bonefish was lost. . . .”

 

 

In Tokyo, intelligence officers continued
digging through records and conducting interrogations of Japanese naval personnel. They knew there had to be someone, the captain of a ship, an officer, an enlisted man, who knew something about an attack in Toyama Wan that would reveal the fate of the
Bonefish
. The team, despite working under difficult and sometimes chaotic conditions, remained optimistic that a relevant action report would eventually show up, given that action reports concerning the fates of other subs had surfaced. Adding to the difficulties, the team's efforts on behalf of ComSubPac had been harnessed to those of other Navy and Army personnel engaged in sifting material for inclusion in a massive report on Japan's technical and engineering proficiency as it related to the production of weapons and war matériel. Searching captured Japanese records for the fate of one lost submarine would prove to be a long and arduous task.

D
ecember 1945 brought a change at the top of the Navy's chain of command: Admiral Nimitz replaced Admiral King as chief of naval operations. In the Pacific, Rear Admiral Allan R. McCann replaced Admiral Lockwood as ComSubPac. That McCann was a two-star rather than a three-star confirmed the diminishing role played by the Pacific sub force as the Atlantic submarine force began to meet the challenge posed by the Soviet Union.

Lockwood wasn't happy with his new assignment as the Navy's inspector general, or, as he characterized it, the Navy's top cop. For him it was the end of a life in submarines, a life he'd known for almost thirty years. He had little stomach for investigating corruption and wrongdoing in the ranks. Instead, he'd wanted a job as the Navy's submarine czar, but Nimitz wasn't interested in having one on his watch. Lockwood tried to make the best of it. He longed for his old friends and missed the camaraderie submarine service had fostered. He also missed the smells of diesel oil and the sea; he was no more fit for shore duty in postwar Washington, D.C., than he had been back in the late 1930s. Many of the skippers he had known so well, whom he had come to think of as his kin, left their wartime commands for new ones or they retired. Others went on to begin the work of building a new, modern submarine force that would need those faster, deeper-diving, quieter, more powerful submarines Lockwood had envisioned to replace those that had so ably fought in the Pacific. Also, new tactics would be needed to utilize the properties these modern subs would bring to the fleet. To man the new boats the force would need men who were proficient in electronics and advanced radars, sonars, and weapons systems. All of this lay in the future, of course. Because Lockwood knew where the force was headed, he felt trapped in his office at Main Navy; worse yet, he felt that he was being left behind. Already there was talk of an atomic-powered submarine that would revolutionize submarine warfare altogether. For men like Lockwood, those glorious days of hard-fought success against the Japanese were sliding into distant memory.

 

 

Sarah tried hard to accept
that Lawrence and his men were not coming home. It was almost 1946; the war had been over for almost five months. During that time there had been no new news from the Navy Department about their fate. Captured Japanese records had not yet yielded information that would explain what had happened to the
Bonefish
. The search for POWs in Japan was coming to an end. The wait for information was agonizing.

Frustrated by the Navy's slow-moving bureaucracy, Sarah, in typical fashion, took matters into her own hands. In late December she telephoned Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger, the commanding general of the U.S. Eighth Army in Yokahama, Japan, at home on Christmas leave in Asheville, North Carolina. When he answered the phone she didn't hesitate to ask for his help locating information about the
Bonefish
. He suggested that she write to him in Japan with all of the information she had accumulated so far, which he would use to conduct a search of Eighth Army records for any trace of the missing men.

In a letter to Eichelberger dated January 15, 1946, Sarah wrote, “We thought that by now some information would have come from the Japanese through claims made by their anti-submarine vessels. If the assumption that [the
Bonefish
] did not strike a mine, in which case debris would float ashore to indicate such is correct, then she was sunk by plane or ship and the Japs well know her fate.... These past months have indeed been of the greatest anxiety for all of us who had loved ones aboard, especially since officially we have been told only that the boys are ‘missing in action' and the sub ‘lost.' . . . Am I correct in having understood you to say that our forces have occupied all of Japan, which cancels our hope that the boys could yet be prisoners of war? Are our forces actually searching the many islands of the Japan Sea?”

Eichelberger replied, “I am writing . . . to inform you that to date I can only report that a check of Army and GHQ recovered personnel records and graves registration records reveals no information pertaining to Commander Edge or personnel of the submarine which your husband commanded.

“Investigations are being continued with the Naval Affairs section of General Headquarters and the Japanese Government for any possible information on this subject. . . .”