Hellcats (33 page)

On June 18, 1945, President
Truman convened a meeting in Washington with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss an invasion of Japan, should it become necessary. Those charged with its planning believed that it was imminent. Truman was deeply troubled by the shockingly high casualties American forces had suffered at Iwo Jima and at Okinawa. The number of dead and wounded in those two campaigns alone portended a grave outcome for any assault on Japan itself.
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The casualty estimates varied wildly, depending on who was preparing the estimates; the prospect of hundreds of thousands of U.S. dead and wounded in an invasion shocked Truman. In the event, the casualty issue wasn't settled to his satisfaction. All he and the Joint Chiefs knew for sure was that it would be frightfully high. Whether or not it would be too high and therefore unacceptable to the American people was left unanswered.

Truman had only two choices when it came to ending the war. One, he could order an invasion and then prepare the American public for the carnage that would result. He and his chiefs never doubted that the United States would prevail in an assault on the home islands, but they knew that an attack on the core of Japan's power and culture would provoke a response from its army and civilian population far more bloody than any so far encountered in the entire Pacific campaign. Truman's second choice was to authorize the use of the atomic bomb on Japan. The bomb would be ready for testing at Alamogordo, New Mexico, by mid-July, though Truman had been cautioned that there was no guarantee it would work. If it didn't, he'd be faced with ordering an invasion.

A third alternative, albeit an unpalatable one, was to offer Japan a negotiated peace in lieu of unconditional surrender. This alternative had been suggested by more than one respected public figure. Such an offer was wholly unacceptable to Truman and his advisers and to America's allies. The only way the Japanese would surrender, they believed, was for the United States to utterly defeat them. This, of course, was Lockwood's view of Operation Barney: Smash the Japs and end the war
now
.

While the president and his advisers wrestled with these issues, work on the atomic bomb progressed at a steady pace. As the Hellcats were invading the Sea of Japan and sinking ships, scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, began assembling the parts necessary for a uranium-fueled atomic bomb. Meanwhile, radioactive plutonium produced in the nuclear reactors at Hanford, Washington, and machined into a two-part hemisphere smaller than an orange, arrived in Los Alamos for use in a bomb scheduled for testing on July 16.

Back in February, a young naval weapons specialist had been dispatched from Admiral King's office to brief Admiral Nimitz on this new weapon. King had received his briefing directly from the White House and had instructions to pass the information to Nimitz and MacArthur. In his explanatory letter to Nimitz carried to Guam by the weapons specialist, King gave CinCPac a highly simplified explanation of the bomb and its potential destructive power. He added that it would be available sometime in August. Nimitz, after reading King's letter, listened politely to the weapons officer's technical explanation of how the bomb worked, thanked him, and got on with his job. To Nimitz, faced with the hard realities of fighting a war with conventional weaponry, talk of an atomic bomb seemed like just so much science fiction, if not the stuff of pure fantasy.

For his part, Lockwood had no knowledge whatsoever of the atomic bomb. Its secret was closely held among only a handful of top military commanders, like King and Nimitz, and civilians, like John J. McCloy, Truman's assistant secretary of war and a close personal adviser. Even if Lockwood had been told about the bomb, it's unlikely he'd have thought that its immense power used on the Japanese would end the war and end the need for any more Operation Barneys. Even before he'd heard the results of Operation Barney, and before the Hellcats' return from the Sea of Japan, Lockwood was pushing hard for more FMS-equipped boats to send in there.

In a memorandum to his
staff dated June 23, Lockwood wrote that he expected to find that some of the Hellcat skippers went very deep through the Tsushima Strait minefields, essentially disregarding their FM sonar. He expected that this would inspire a lot of “dare devils to go and do likewise with no FM at all.” Finally, he wrote, if it appeared safe to do that, he'd entertain such offers during the period when the supply of FMS boats was low. “I want to get more boats in there in July if humanly possible. Therefore please circulate the word as to volunteers. . . .”
¹

Lockwood had been following the Hellcats' progress via FRUPAC's (Fleet Radio Unit Pacific) intercepts of Japanese radio messages and from bits of intelligence pieced together by JICPOA. He'd even pored over photographs taken by the Army Air Force during reconnaissance missions over the Sea of Japan, which had returned images of the three ships sunk by the
Skate
sitting on their bottoms in the littoral waters of a harbor at Noto Hanto.

From these sources Lockwood began to sense that so far Operation Barney had been a huge success. In particular the Japanese, besides broadcasting alerts to antisubmarine units and merchant ships in the Sea of Japan, had let slip over Domei that U.S. submarines had attacked ships in the sea and that they in turn had been tracked down and sunk off the western coast of Honshu. The reports didn't say how many subs had been sunk, but the implication was that there were a lot of them—many more than just nine Hellcats.

Lockwood knew better. Even though the Hellcats had maintained strict radio silence except for when it was necessary to communicate with one another over the tactical network, FRUPAC had picked up snatches of these weak ship-to-ship radio messages broadcast in the clear. That they couldn't pick up more of them was due to atmospheric conditions, Japanese jamming, and the short range at which the radios broadcast. But enough of them got through for Lockwood to assemble a mental picture of what was happening almost hour by hour.

Now, as the clock wound down on Barney, he could only sit tight and wait for a “mission accomplished” message from Earl Hydeman. According to Lockwood, the days and nights of the penetration of Tsushima had been agonizing for him and his staff. But the days and nights of operations in the Sea of Japan itself and then the breakout were infinitely worse. As he waited his thoughts once again turned to Mush Morton and the
Wahoo
.

“While it is true,” Lockwood wrote, “that no single submarine nor any single crew can be considered as more important than any other in the mind and heart of a Force Commander, it is equally true that circumstances do arise wherein a ship and its men can become more closely identified with the thinking of [that commander] than other men and vessels under his jurisdiction.

“Such was true of the
Wahoo
and Mush Morton. [He] had come deeper within the orbit of my personal thinking than ordinarily happens during combat operations. [B]ecause Morton had the kind of personality that impresses itself upon people.

“War is a game you must take in your stride. There is no time for mourning or for revenge.”
²
Yet Lockwood saw an image in his mind, he said, of a ghostly
Wahoo
and the face of Dudley Morton. Lockwood may have feared that he could never be at peace with himself until the two were avenged by the Hellcats.

Then came Hydeman's message: the relative ease with which they penetrated the minefields, a rough tally of the ships the Hellcats had sunk—at least twenty-seven plus a sub—their size, etc.
^z
The news wasn't all good: the
Bonefish
was missing. Despite news that the
Bonefish
might have been lost, Lockwood rejoiced. Writing to his friend James Fife, Lockwood included a brief summary of the information Hydeman had radioed to Pearl Harbor.

The part of the mission
where the Hellcats made their exit from the Sea of Japan had happened days before Hydeman's radio message to Lockwood. On June 23 eight Hellcats formed up in two parallel columns in the half-light of dusk outside the western entrance to La Pérouse Strait. Their next move would be a rush into the unknown. Before departing Guam, Hydeman had invited review by his skippers of the provisions for Sonar Yoke, a surface transit of the strait as set out in Operation Order 112-45.

Now, on the eve of their breakout, Hydeman had to hope that the business about gunfire support wouldn't be necessary: Nine subs armed with five-inch guns were no match for Japanese patrol boats. And he had to hope that the Japanese, who by then had recovered from the shock of U.S. subs shooting up their private lake, hadn't sown surface mines to catch the raiders as they hightailed it through La Pérouse Strait.
^aa
If they had there was only one way to find out—“All ahead flank and keep your fingers crossed.” As for the diversionary bombardment east of the Tsushima Strait,
^ab
it remained to be seen if it would draw Japanese forces away from La Pérouse, as Tsushima was nine hundred miles away. From what Hydeman and his Hellcats had seen so far, Japanese antisubmarine activity had been relatively weak. Therefore, he was confident that they weren't capable of stopping the Hellcats from making their escape.

These were anxious hours as the Hellcats prepared to make their high-speed dash into the Sea of Okhotsk. Gun crews stood by. Watertight doors in all compartments remained dogged so that if a mine were to blow a hole in a sub's hull, the men in other parts of the ship would at least have a chance at survival, slim though they'd be in waters with temperatures near freezing.

At the appointed hour of departure urgent radio messages to the
Bonefish
still went unanswered. Apprehension over her fate had spread among the Hellcat crews as the clock ticked down. There could be any number of reasons why she hadn't shown up—hull damage, engine failure, flooding—the possibilities were endless. Though it went unsaid, the submariners knew that there was a good possibility that the
Bonefish
had been sunk. Hydeman waited until 0300 Sonar Day for her to show up. When she didn't, he had no choice but to order the Hellcats under way. Delay meant risking discovery and attack by antisubmarine units.

George Pierce, Edge's task group commander, asked permission to stay behind to wait for her and if necessary render assistance if Edge needed it. Hydeman gave Pierce the okay to wait outside La Pérouse Strait in the Sea of Okhotsk but only for two days. If the
Bonefish
didn't show by then, Pierce was to make tracks for Pearl Harbor.