Hellcats (14 page)

 

 

Early the next day a
radar contact off Mindoro developed into another oiler and two escorts, one of them a sleek destroyer. With her low freeboard and hidden Plimsoll mark the oiler looked fully loaded.

Once again Edge worked in and fired six torpedoes. This time torpedo gremlins attacked in force but couldn't save the doomed target. One of the torpedoes tore off on an erratic course; three others missed the target completely. Two evaded the gremlins and crashed into the ship. One of them hit just aft the MOT—middle of the target—sending hot debris and sparks pinwheeling skyward. The other one hit just forward of the MOT with the same effect. Hull ripped open, oil gushing from ruptured bunkers, the tanker
^h
vanished from the
Bonefish
's radar screen.

Three days later Edge made contact with the
Flasher
-led wolf pack. After an exchange of information, including details of his attacks on the two tankers, Edge began patrolling off the west coast of Luzon, where he found plenty of targets.

Convoys hugging the Philippine coast, some of them containing as many as ten ships, lit up the
Bonefish
's radarscope. But Edge was driven off by echo-ranging escorts, which, alerted to the presence of submarines, intermittently dropped patterns of warning depth charges. Planes patrolling out ahead of the convoys dropped bombs whenever their pilots thought they had a submarine in their sights. In addition to the enemy's antisubmarine efforts, a persistent and heavy overcast interfered with celestial navigation. Without accurate position fixing, conning a submarine in and around coastal convoy routes trapped with shoals, reefs, rocks, and bars was pure guesswork and also dangerous.

It wasn't until October 10 that Edge's luck changed and the weather moderated. Patrolling submerged off Cape Bolinao, the westernmost point of land midway up the coast of Luzon, the sound watch reported echo ranging from escorts. A careful search by periscope revealed thin columns of smoke from ships hull-down over the horizon. As the smokers plodded over the horizon toward the
Bonefish
, Edge got a good look at a ragged eight-ship convoy protected by four echo-ranging escorts and a low-flying plane. “Battle stations torpedo!”

Men leaped to their stations as Edge started an approach. Though the
Bonefish
wasn't far off the convoy's base course, the approach was hampered by heavy swells that made depth control difficult and necessitated high and prolonged periscope exposure to keep track of the convoy. If the escorts were alert they'd spot the raised periscope and its white feather streaking through the sea. But Edge didn't worry about that or the plane buzzing over the convoy like a mayfly. Should the pilot spot the
Bonefish
's dark hull moving underwater in the direction of the convoy, Edge would go deep.

He worked the
Bonefish
between the two columns of ships. He did it confident that the pilot of that plane was napping or, more likely, that the ruffled, leaden sea had camouflaged the
Bonefish
sufficiently to allow her to get close enough to count nine freighters and a lone tanker. With an eye on the nearest escort, Edge picked out a fat, juicy target and ... All of a sudden he saw an escort change position from starboard to port, crossing the
Bonefish
's bow less than a thousand yards away! Edge also saw the escort two-block a flag, a warning to the convoy that it had a sub contact! Edge ignored him for now; he had that fat, juicy target at the end of a long, two-thousand-yard torpedo run.
Fire One!

Two more hits! The familiar sound of exploding warheads rumbled through the
Bonefish
. Three minutes later Edge and his crew were

Forced down by the depth charging, Edge didn't know what had happened topside, yet was reasonably certain that if they'd not sunk a ship, several had been damaged.
ⁱ
When it was all over Edge made contact with the
Lapon
and
Flasher
to report the convoy's position. With luck the wolf pack might be able to intercept what remained of it.

 

 

The periscope lurched out of its well. Edge snapped down the training handles, put his eye to the ocular. The exec stood on the opposite side of the scope, his hands on Edge's gripping the training handles, and rotated the scope onto the reported bearing of the echo ranging.

Once again Edge saw smokers, six or seven of them. Soon enough the masts of hull-down ships heaved over the horizon just as those ships had yesterday. Fifteen minutes later ten ships and their escorts were strung out in a long southbound column hugging the twenty-fathom curve off the coast near Santa Cruz. It seemed likely that the convoy was headed for an anchorage there or at Manila. The trouble was, the submerged
Bonefish
was so far off the convoy's base course she couldn't catch up to its main body. Because it was still daylight the only thing Edge could do was to intercept the tail end of the convoy as it steamed down the coast. His scheme worked until the convoy seemingly evaporated into thin air. “Lost contact,” Edge reported. A taxing periscope search turned up nothing.

Three blasts of the Klaxon reverberated through the ship. Daylight or not, Edge was on the surface with four straining diesels to find the convoy and send a radio message to the
Flasher
: “Convoy. Chasing. Edge sends.”

Despite intermittent radar contact with the convoy, it somehow slipped away. Peppered with small bays and shallow bights, the Philippine coast offered suitable refuge to small convoys but not ones made up of ten ships and escorts. A convoy that big would need a body of water almost the size of Subic Bay in which to anchor. Acting on that fact the
Bonefish
reached Subic Bay around midnight to discover that the convoy was nowhere in sight. At that moment Edge realized that by racing south down the coast he'd gotten ahead of it and that if he reversed course he'd run into it.

While Edge hunted for the elusive convoy, ComSubSoWesPac was busy handing out new assignments to patrolling submarines: A radio message from Fremantle directed the
Bonefish
and
Lapon
to assume lifeguard stations off Cape Bolinao on October 16.

 

 

Lifeguarding—plucking downed U.S. fliers from
the sea under the noses of the Japanese—was an important service submarines had been providing to the Army and Navy air forces. With the advent of air strikes on Japan launched from the Marianas, lifeguarding rapidly expanded from a sideline for patrolling submarines to a nearly full-time job. By war's end U.S. submarines had rescued 504 airmen ditched at sea. In the Philippines, the Navy had begun launching air strikes against the Japanese in preparation for the invasion of Leyte, scheduled for October 21. Lifeguarding submarines would be needed for the rescue of downed Navy pilots flying air-support missions during that operation.

As he patrolled back to the north, Edge expected to find the convoy standing down the coast. The
Bonefish
pounded along, radar sweeping, lookouts stationed in the periscope shears with binoculars hunting for the white bow waves and jagged black profiles of their prey. Hours passed. The radar men peaked the SJ: Nothing out there, they reported, but the Philippine coast and a vast, empty sea. Weary lookouts just shrugged coming off watch: Nothing in sight but water, they said. Time passed and with it the prospect of a swift, hard-hitting attack on an unsuspecting row of targets slowly evaporated. Edge, convinced that the convoy had somehow slipped past them or had anchored somewhere out of sight, finally abandoned the search. The
Bonefish
continued north to patrol off Cape Bolinao lighthouse, which was not far from the area where she had been assigned lifeguard duties.

Edge patrolled the area submerged, searching for targets. He didn't have long to wait. “Captain to the conning tower!” The periscope watch reported a thin column of smoke on the horizon. Edge eased behind the scope and saw a zigzagging, smoking freighter. Minutes later a second smoking ship heaved into view behind the first one. Edge put the two 2,000-ton freighters in the crosshairs of the attack scope, then swung into action.

Four torpedoes aimed at the trailing ship streaked from the sub's stern tubes. A heavy explosion erupted on the target and Edge watched her go down under a thick cloud of smoke and steam. The lead ship, which he thought was another freighter, turned out to be an escort-type vessel armed with depth charges. As he watched the hapless escort from a safe distance through the periscope, Edge noted Japanese sailors struggling to roll heavy ash cans over her sides.

Between the thundering of depth charges the submariners heard the crash of collapsing bulkheads and internal compartments, the screech and groan of cargo tearing loose, the thousand other popping and crackling noises that a ship makes when it breaks up and sinks.

Concluding her torpedo work off Luzon, the
Bonefish
arrived at her assigned lifeguard area the morning of October 16. Edge began patrolling a five-mile-wide figure eight, waiting for a call to pick up downed fliers. It was boring but important work, submariners told themselves. But after the thrill of a chase punctuated by the staccato drum of diesels at full song, booming torpedoes, cracking depth charges, and ships breaking up, playing acey-deucey and cribbage and watching the same old scratchy movies over and over again could almost make a sub sailor long for shore duty. Submerging only to dodge enemy planes and patrol boats, the
Bonefish
lazily churned her figure eight. What little action there was centered on the radio room, where the radiomen on watch

On the eighteenth and with night coming on, the
Bonefish
received a radio message vectored through Fremantle reporting the position of two Navy airmen adrift in a rubber boat about eighty-five miles north of the
Bonefish
. The men had reportedly been in the water for nine hours. Edge didn't have to be told that if they weren't picked up soon they stood a good chance of being captured by the Japanese. Edge bent on four engines to get there as soon as possible. Even so he knew it wouldn't be easy to find two men in an inflatable lifeboat tossing around on the South China Sea in the dark.