Hellcats (2 page)

 

 

During the closing days of
World War II in the Pacific, nine United States Navy submarines penetrated a curtain of minefields guarding the Sea of Japan to launch a surprise attack on the remnants of the empire's merchant marine lifeline. Known collectively as the Hellcats, the nine submarines were on a mission to destroy that lifeline and hasten Japan's collapse and surrender. The Hellcats' torpedoes sank more than a score of ships and, with them, thousands of tons of the imported food and matériel Japan needed to continue fighting. The Hellcats' mission, code-named Operation Barney, was the most daring submarine raid of all time.
Hellcats
tells the story of how they did it, what they accomplished, and the price they paid for their success.

Operation Barney was fraught with danger. No one, least of all the submariners themselves, knew how it would turn out, given that its success—or failure—would depend in large measure on an unproven secret weapon designed to locate submerged antisubmarine mines. Skeptics thought that Barney, launched just a few weeks before Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, was nothing more than a technical exercise, if not a stunt to grab headlines for a sub force that, despite its astounding combat record, had operated mostly in the shadows. Among the submariners tapped for the mission were those who believed that their chances of surviving an underwater encounter with a minefield were razor thin. All they knew for certain was that regardless of the outcome it would take extraordinary courage and skill to execute Operation Barney. Indeed, the risks involved
were
great, so great, in fact, that one of the nine raiding submarines did not return from the mission. Nevertheless, just as the war was ending, a second wave of seven submarines followed the pioneering Hellcats into the Sea of Japan (not to be confused with the Inland Sea) to finish the job the Hellcats had started. The submariners who participated in these missions agreed on one thing: If they could deliver a knockout punch to the Japanese it might bring a quick end to the war without the need for a costly invasion of mainland Japan, thus saving countless American lives, if not their own.

No one doubted that Operation Barney was a bold and daring enterprise. Brave and dedicated sailors aboard the Hellcat submarines had risked their lives to carry it out. Scores of scientists and naval officers had worked at a feverish pace to develop and perfect the secret mine-detecting sonar equipment that allowed the raiding subs to break into the Sea of Japan. Mission accomplished, Operation Barney was hailed as a great tactical success that had exceeded expectations. Even so, the loss of a Hellcat sub, the USS
Bonefish
(SS-223) and her crew of eighty-five men was a blow to the submarine force, and, for the families of the men who perished, a crushing tragedy.

The eight surviving Hellcats returned from the Sea of Japan to the heroes' welcome they deserved. After all the speeches and awarding of medals for valor, the war in the Pacific ended with the dropping of atomic bombs and the Soviet Union's declaration of war on Japan. In the excitement and celebration of victory, information about the fate of the
Bonefish
and her crew was virtually nonexistent. Rumors circulating among the families of the missing men said that part of the crew had survived her loss. If that was true, they asked, how many had survived and where were they? For months the families clung to the hope that somehow their loved ones might be found alive in liberated POW camps. While the families waited to learn the fate of the missing
Bonefish
crew, reports that men held prisoner for years had been freed kept hopes alive among the families that their men would be found too. Sadly, those hopes died when the Navy announced in early 1946 that all of the American prisoners held by the Japanese had been accounted for and that there were no survivors from the
Bonefish
among them.

The loss of the
Bonefish
, coming as it did so late in the war, later fueled the controversies that arose over the execution and timing of Operation Barney itself. Why, some family members asked, did the Navy undertake such a dangerous mission only ten weeks before the war ended? In light of the atomic bomb and its effect on Japan's surrender, it appeared to some people that Operation Barney hardly seemed worth the risk, for it had had no measurable effect on an already defeated enemy nor influence on Japan's decision to surrender. Others questioned the use of an unproven sonar system to locate antisubmarine mines, which, given the danger such mines posed, some family members believed had sunk the
Bonefish
. Still others questioned the true purpose of Barney, saying it was a costly make-work operation designed to keep the sub force occupied.

Aside from the preceding issues raised by the
Bonefish
families and by critics within the Navy, there is at the heart of Operation Barney a point of debate that overrides all the other controversies and that poses an important question that needs an answer: Was the need to avenge the loss of a storied U.S. submarine in the Sea of Japan early in the war, a submarine that was skippered by a man considered the greatest submariner of his generation, the driving force behind Operation Barney?
Hellcats
will attempt to answer that question.

 

 

Even though Operation Barney unfolded
more than sixty-five years ago and is now largely forgotten, a careful perusal of declassified documents and correspondence provides a compelling account of how the mission was planned and executed. A close reading of the patrol reports of the Hellcat submarines themselves tells a thrilling story of high adventure.
Hellcats
, then, is the story of how men facing long odds against their survival overcame fear, gloried in triumph over the enemy, and kept alive their hopes and dreams for the day when the war would end.

The personal letters of Commander Lawrence Lott Edge, who perished aboard the
Bonefish
during Operation Barney, are replete with passages that touch on these matters. In particular, his letters to his wife, Sarah, tell a heart-wrenching story of love and loss. They contain revealing insights into his state of mind, personal feelings about the war, command at sea, devotion to duty, and, most poignantly, his yearning to survive the war to return home to Sarah and their daughter. These insights are of a kind not often associated with submariners who enjoy a reputation as iron-willed, remarkably self-contained, enduringly fearless individuals. Add to this the correspondence between the Navy and family members desperately searching for information that would help explain the heartbreaking loss they'd suffered, and a deeply human aspect of wartime submarine service emerges. All of this material, in addition to the writings, papers, biography, and memoirs of the Pacific Submarine Force commander, Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, proved a rich trove from which to assemble the
Hellcats
narrative.

I'm especially grateful for the help and encouragement I received from individuals with a personal interest in Operation Barney, in particular those whose fathers either commanded or served in the Hellcat submarines or perished on the mission. These individuals generously provided exceptional material from family archives, large amounts of their time, and, above all, friendship. My own father served in submarines in World War II and I discovered long ago that like our submariner dads, the children of submariners share a special bond. I hasten to add that they are not responsible for any mistakes or errors that appear in
Hellcats
; they are all my doing.

Like Nazi Germany, Japan's world-conquering ambitions ended when that country collapsed. Whether or not Operation Barney contributed to that collapse may never be known for certain. Regardless, nothing can diminish what the Hellcats accomplished during one of the most challenging and dangerous operations of World War II.

A note on geographic place-names. Where possible I've used the names that were commonly in use during World War II and appear in official Navy correspondence and reports, and on maps and nautical charts.

M
ention World War II and submarines in the same breath and most people think German U-boats and the Battle of the Atlantic. Beginning in late 1939, until their defeat in the spring of 1943, Hitler's U-boats sank more than 3,500 Allied merchant ships loaded with food, weapons, and raw materials destined for Great Britain and the Soviet Union from ports in North America. This U-boat onslaught came perilously close to defeating Great Britain, already reeling under air attack from Nazi Germany.

Unknown to most people, even to those with more than a passing interest in World War II, is that, like the Battle of the Atlantic, the war waged by American submarines in the Pacific theater against the merchant marine of Axis Japan played a major factor in that country's defeat. It was, as submarine historian Clay Blair remarked, a war within a war. It was so successful that some have argued it was the liquidation of Japan's merchant marine and the blockade of the home islands by U.S. submarines, and not the atomic bomb, that ultimately defeated Japan.

True or not, the facts are impressive.

By early 1945 Japan's ability to import raw materials and food had about reached its end. Imports had been strangled by the U.S. submarine blockade of the home islands. According to the postwar Joint Army Navy Assessment Committee (JANAC), American submarines sank 1,314 Japanese merchant ships totaling 5.3 million tons, not including cargoes, while Japan's merchant marine complement of 122,000 men suffered 116,000 casualties. This was accomplished by a submarine force of roughly 280 submarines, and 50,000 officers and men including staff and support personnel. It was a costly victory: The U.S. lost 52 subs, 41 of them to direct enemy action. Of the approximately 15,000 men who made war patrols, casualties totaled about 3,500.
¹
This war of all-out attrition, that is, unrestricted submarine warfare, ranged over eight million square miles of Pacific Ocean, a truly immense area. At the beginning of the war it seemed to the Allies an impossible task to retake this conquered territory from the Japanese. And while the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, had badly damaged the U.S. Pacific surface fleet, it had not damaged the submarine fleet, which began offensive operations on December 8.

It took time for the U.S. Navy to recover from the attack, but with dogged determination and flexible, aggressive tactics, American subs slowly began to push back the far-flung outer ring of territories that had been captured and garrisoned by the Japanese. To survive, these garrisons required uninterrupted deliveries of food, weapons, and fuel in quantities that could be transported only by Japanese ships that were prime targets for U.S. submarine torpedoes. As ship sinkings mounted, the ring of territories with its fragile network of shipping lanes shrank until it collapsed.

As they had in World War II, Germany had waged all-out submarine war in World War I, both times taking a huge toll on Allied shipping. As in World War II, British ship losses in World War I had reached alarming proportions. The losses caused Admiral John Jellicoe, First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, to warn that the Germans would win the war unless the losses were stopped and stopped soon. Winston Churchill echoed Jellicoe's words twenty-five years later. Had the lessons learned by the British from the near disaster caused by the heavy loss of ships in both wars been heeded by the Japanese, the war in the Pacific might have lasted longer than it did. As it was the Japanese badly underestimated how hard it would be to maintain their lines of supply across the vast Pacific against U.S. submarines. To make matters worse, the Japanese had a weak convoy system and a weak antisubmarine force. Unlike the British and Americans in both wars, the creaky and inefficient Japanese convoy escort system could do little to protect ships that U.S. submarines were sinking faster than they could be replaced. By the time the Japanese got around to building an effective antisubmarine force the war had been lost.

Yet, in the war's early stages the U.S. submarine force found itself hobbled by an outmoded and conservative war-fighting doctrine that had been formulated during peacetime by submarine officers who had no combat experience whatsoever. It was hardly surprising, then, that this tactical relic from another era had to be jettisoned as soon as the bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor. Changes didn't happen overnight; it took time for the sub force to develop a new, aggressive doctrine based on tactics developed under actual combat conditions during war patrols. Once that happened, the Japanese merchant marine was doomed. The only thing that prevented it from being annihilated sooner than it was was the faulty torpedoes that plagued U.S. submarines at the start of the war and continued well into 1944.

The torpedo problem turned into a scandal that bordered on dereliction of duty by the officers in the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd). Their stubborn refusal to admit that the Navy's standard Mk 14 steam-powered submarine torpedo didn't always perform as designed—instead, blaming the inexperience of submarine crews for its problems—had a demoralizing effect on the force. The torpedo problem proved a tough nut to crack because the three separate faults inherent in the design of the Mk 14, working in concert, masked the fault each of them posed individually. It took over two years to isolate and fix the flaws residing in the Mk 14's depth-control device, its magnetic influence exploder, and its lightweight firing pin. The duds, erratic runs, and premature detonations of warheads caused by these different problems saved many a Japanese merchant ship from certain destruction and most certainly prolonged the war.

By early 1944, after extensive testing that included live torpedo shots and extensive modification and further testing of the faulty components, the sub force finally had a reliable weapon. Even so, problems continued to crop up even as the new and improved Mk 18 electric-powered torpedoes entered service. With better torpedoes, the sinking of Japanese ships increased dramatically, until, by early 1945, Japan's merchant marine had virtually disappeared from the Pacific along with its cargoes of rice, coal, iron ore, bauxite, rubber, and, the most important commodity of all, oil; in most Japanese cities automobiles had vanished from the streets, replaced by jinrikishas.