Hellcats (5 page)

As the new doctrine entered sub force planning and operations, Lockwood continued to make steady progress toward solving the Mk 14 torpedo dilemma and convincing the ossified and bullheaded BuOrd that the sub force had a serious problem with its main offensive weapon and that it had to be solved pronto.

Two major flaws in the Mk 14—a penchant to run deeper than set and a sometimes obstinate refusal to explode—had been traced in part to the weapon's faulty depth-control mechanism and its overly complicated magnetic influence exploder. Through extensive testing Lockwood and his technicians traced the problems to flaws in the design of both the depth controller and exploder. This evidence proved conclusively that the torpedo problem lay not with incompetent submarine fire-control personnel, as BuOrd had claimed, but with BuOrd itself. In time, and with more testing, Lockwood would make the further discovery that the poorly designed firing pin used in the exploder mechanism was too flimsy to withstand a collision between a torpedo warhead and a ship's hull, as it sometimes caused the pin to bend out of shape and jam in its guideway before it could contact the primer to set it off. It took a lot of time and hard work to remedy these three interrelated problems, which plagued sub crews on and off until the end of the war. Lockwood the doer found himself fully engaged in SoWesPac submarine operations when things suddenly changed again.

 

 

On January 21, 1943, at
6:50 a.m., the
Philippine Clipper
, a four-engine Martin M-130 flying boat on loan from Pan American World Airways to the Navy, approached the coast of California near San Francisco after a routine thirteen-hour flight from Pearl Harbor. Aboard were ComSubPac Admiral English, three of his senior staff officers, six other Navy passengers, including a nurse, and a civilian crew of nine.

The Pan Am base at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay radioed the clipper to report heavy rain, fog, and high winds, and to advise that under such conditions it would not be possible for the plane to land before daylight and that it should divert to San Diego. At 7:15 the pilot radioed that they were on a course due west, back out over the Pacific. Seven minutes later he requested a navigation fix, after which the plane was not heard from again.

The clipper's disappearance remained a mystery until an air search team spotted its wreckage a week later in the Ukiah area near Boonville, California, ninety miles from San Francisco and twenty-two miles from the ocean. The big plane had come in low, shearing off treetops before it crashed into a mountain, killing all nineteen aboard. The bodies were found with the wreckage in a fire-blackened ravine. It took days and the cutting in of a road from the main highway through heavily forested terrain with bulldozers to remove the dead and to comb through the wreckage for any classified documents relating to submarine operations. The wreckage was later buried under tons of earth.
¹

English had flown to California to inspect submarine support facilities at Hunters Point and Mare Island, after which he had planned to inspect those at Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and at Panama. The shock caused by his death, and the deaths of his staff of experts on submarine engineering and weapons, swept through sub command. Lockwood in Australia learned of it in a newspaper report, not through official channels. It threw the entire command structure into chaos and left a big hole at SubPac in Pearl Harbor.

According to Lockwood, he had no desire to be named English's replacement. He immediately wrote a letter expressing his preference to remain in Fremantle, where he was closer to the submarine front lines than he would be in Pearl, and sent it to one of his former bosses, who was now chief of staff to Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and Commander in Chief, United States Fleet (Cominch). The crafty Lockwood claimed that the job of ComSubPac, should it be forthcoming, would be a step backward for him. In truth, Lockwood coveted the position of ComSubPac and hoped to get it. When he was selected for the position by Admiral King, and after receiving orders on February 5 to pack his bags for Hawaii, he didn't hesitate for a moment. Lockwood apparently suspected that his selection had been partially influenced by old friends in high places in the Navy bureaucracy. But his friend, King's chief of staff, assured him, “You were selected on the platform that the officer best qualified to determine the submarine policy throughout the Pacific should be at Pearl Harbor.”
²
That was true. To run the submarine war the Navy had not only picked the most qualified officer but also one of the best submarine experts in the world. Ralph Christie, recalled from Rhode Island, took over Lockwood's old job in Fremantle.

Lockwood arrived in Pearl Harbor on February 15, 1943, sporting on both sleeves the three gold stripes of a vice admiral. After settling in at the Makalapa Hill bachelor officers' quarters (BOQ) overlooking the sub base, Lockwood confronted a mountain of issues that included everything from personnel assignments, lack of spare parts, and the need for enlarged repair facilities, to torpedo shortages, especially of the new Mk 18 wakeless electric. There were also serious issues regarding intelligence collection and its interpretation and the need for better communications. The inspection of West Coast submarine support facilities, which had been postponed due to English's death and which Lockwood planned to complete in his stead, would have to wait until after he'd had a chance to familiarize himself with the late admiral's operations at Pearl. Busy as he was, Lockwood still found time to reevaluate overall submarine strategy and give consideration to refining it. There were problems, too, with the new tactical doctrine that needed immediate attention. Yet looking beyond these problems he saw that there existed certain opportunities that hadn't existed before, brought about by the influx of those young, eager, and aggressive skippers. Lockwood decided to put those skippers to the test. If they passed, as he believed they would, then there might soon be a way to hit the Japanese where they'd not been hit before.

A
s long as men have gone to sea, whether in peacetime or war, it is understood that ships will sink and sailors will die. It is a given that their remains—flesh and bones, wood and steel—will rest in the sea for eternity, because, as every sailor is taught, the sea never gives up its secrets, nor its dead.

Of course, that's no longer true, at least not since the discovery of the
Titanic
and other long-lost liners and warships. Today the question is: What other ships might yet be found and what mysteries might be solved by their discovery? The answer to part of that question arrived in 2006, 2007, and again in 2010 when the news media reported that five lost World War II-era U.S. Navy submarines had been located: The USS
Lagarto
(SS-371), the USS
Wahoo
(SS-238), the USS
Perch
(SS-176), the USS
Grunion
(SS-216), and the USS
Flier
(SS-250). Three of the five subs had been lost with all hands. Not only had the subs been found, they'd also been filmed by the dive teams who located them.

Of the five submarines, the USS
Wahoo
was arguably the most celebrated, even though another sub, the USS
Trout
(SS-202), was famous for having spirited from under the noses of the invading Japanese twenty tons of Philippine government gold bullion and silver coins for safekeeping at Fort Knox, Kentucky. (The plucky
Trout
was sunk on or about February 29, 1944, in action off the Ryukyus east of Formosa.)

As for the
Wahoo
, her commanding officer, Commander Dudley W. “Mush” Morton, a Naval Academy class of 1930 standout, personified the ideals of heroism American submarine skippers of his generation sought to emulate. He was uncommonly fearless and utterly tenacious in his pursuit of the enemy, at times even a bit reckless. Few if any of his peers could match his drive and nerve. From the day he arrived in the Pacific, Morton seemed determined to carve a name for himself in the annals of submarine history. According to submarine historian Theodore Roscoe, “If the philosophy of a combat submariner could be summed up in a single word, one would certainly suffice for Morton's: ‘Attack!' ”
¹
To be sure, Morton possessed all of the traits a World War II submariner needed to succeed. And while the
Lagarto
,
Perch
,
Grunion,
and
Flier
were fighting subs with experienced skippers, they never had a chance to amass the combat record of Morton and the
Wahoo
.

In July 2007, a search team found the
Wahoo
in La Pérouse Strait, a body of water separating the upper tip of Japan's northern island of Hokkaido from the crab claw-like southern tip of the Russian island of Sakhalin (formerly Karafuto). The strait connects the Sea of Japan to the Sea of Okhotsk. The
Wahoo
's wreckage lies in 213 feet of water close to where she was attacked and sunk by Japanese planes and ships on October 11, 1943. On September 20, in company with the USS
Sawfish
(SS-276), Morton had driven his submarine westward from the Sea of Okhotsk through La Pérouse Strait into the Sea of Japan in search of targets. He never returned.

 

 

Seven months prior to Morton's
fateful September patrol, Charles Lockwood was still getting the feel of his new job as ComSubPac after the death of Admiral English. Along with English's duties, he inherited the admiral's staff, among whom was ComSubPac operations and intelligence officer Commander (soon Captain) Richard G. Voge, the former skipper of the USS
Sealion
, which, as recounted earlier, had been sunk at Cavite. Earlier, and with Lockwood's blessing, English had pulled Voge off his new command based in Australia, the former USS
Squalus
(SS-192) now renamed the
Sailfish
,
²
and installed him in Pearl Harbor.

Voge was an exceptional officer, brilliant, thoughtful, and articulate. He also had an uncanny ability, which he'd developed from close readings of intelligence reports, to anticipate Japanese merchant ship movements in time to redeploy patrolling submarines into position to attack them. Lockwood had an extraordinary teammate in Voge, who served with him until the end of the war. As Lockwood's right-hand man, Voge had enormous influence on the evolution of submarine operations throughout the Pacific theater. In typical fashion, and because nothing escaped his purview, Voge had been keeping an eye on the all-but-landlocked Sea of Japan, with its shipping routes running arrow-straight between the Asian mainland and western Japan. Those routes had been inked in red on the big pull-down map of Japan on a wall in Lockwood's office. The Sea of Japan had yet to be exploited for targets by U.S. submarines, so it wasn't long before Lockwood and Voge began to plan a possible foray into its confined waters. The biggest challenge they faced in their planning was how to get submarines in there and how to get them out without being caught by the enemy.

 

 

The Sea of Japan is
surrounded by mainland Asia, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese islands. Its 250-mile width and 900-mile diagonal length covers an area of about 390,000 square miles. It has a maximum depth of over 12,000 feet, its bottom running up into rocky shallows against the western coast of Japan. In some respects Japan's coastline, with its small, rugged islands populated by seabirds and its deep inlets and big-shouldered bluffs, looks similar to the coast of Maine. Local weather conditions are influenced by the stormy Sea of Okhotsk and vary wildly by season and location. Gale-force winds, heavy fog, and below-freezing temperatures (La Pérouse Strait can freeze solid in the winter) rack the sea's mid and northern latitudes well into early summer, while in the south, milder temperatures and fair weather are more common.

Ships can enter the Sea of Japan from the East China Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Sea of Okhotsk through five straits that vary significantly in both width and depth. In the far north the Strait of Tartary lies wedged between the eastern coast of Siberian Russia and the western coast of Karafuto; the aforementioned La Pérouse Strait gives access to the Sea of Japan from the Sea of Okhotsk; the twisting, narrow Tsugaru Strait sits between southern Hokkaido and northern Honshu; the Shimonoseki Strait separates southern Honshu from northern Kyushu; the Tsushima Strait, between the southern tip of Kyushu and the southeastern coast of Korea, is divided into eastern and western channels by the fortresslike Tsushima Island. Lockwood and Voge knew that the mission they had in mind would not be easy to execute nor free of risk. On the contrary, they knew that the natural and man-made obstacles lurking in the straits might be a death trap for submarines.

Voge had studied the intelligence reports supplied to ComSubPac by ICPOA (Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Areas), the Pacific Fleet's intelligence-collection operation based at Pearl Harbor. The reports convinced Voge that all five straits were patrolled by antisubmarine aircraft and patrol boats and sown with antisubmarine mines. Moreover, ICPOA believed that shore batteries lined both sides of the narrow Tsugaru and Shimonoseki straits. As for the Strait of Tartary, its northernmost approaches from the Sea of Okhotsk were often icebound a good part of the year. Russian destroyers patrolled the southern end of the strait.

Voge presented his findings to Lockwood. Declaring the Tsugaru, Shimonoseki, and Tartary straits unsuited for passage by submarines, Voge and his boss gave the Tsushima Strait and La Pérouse Strait a close look.

Because Tsushima was wider than the other four straits and had a deep-water trench, it seemed to be an ideal entry point for submarines. The problem with it was that ICPOA had little in the way of solid intelligence regarding the size and density of the minefields sown in the strait and its approaches. To further complicate matters the Tsushima Strait had a unique hydrographic feature known as the Kuroshio Current, the Japan Current, sometimes called the Black Stream for its deep blue color.