Hell's Bells

I don’t know how many of you have ever heard the expression “Hell’s Bells.” It was something I heard a lot in my youth. I never questioned where it came from, thought about it, but never knew from whence it came. Now today after nearly 60 years, I was reading a book about submarines in WWII and there it was, “Hells Bells.”

The US navy was planning ahead in 1943 for submarine attacks on Japanese shipping in the Inland Sea between Japan and Korea. The problem was the five straits leading into the Inland Sea were heavily mined by the Japanese. In 1944 the Chief of Submarines Pacific made a west coast tour of submarine facilities. He found what he needed in San Diego. The University of California War Research Depot was working at Point Loma to develop a Frequency Modulated Sonar system for submarines. This system would allow submarines to map and then penetrate submerged anti-submarine minefields. Prior to this time, several of the US navy’s subs were trapped in and sunk in the minefields of Japan’s inland sea and off southern China and Formosa.

The new system was prone to breakdowns and needed constant tuning to operate at peak efficiency. Submariners were not happy with the system as they knew if it failed at the wrong time, in a mine field, the sub and crew would all die. When the system worked, a Plan Position Indicator on a Cathode Ray Tube monitor would detect and display enemy mines relative to the position of the sub. The indicator would show a dot and the audio system rang a bell. The closer the sub came to an undersea mine the louder the bell would ring. It did not take sub sailors long to tag the bell rings as Hell’s Bells, calling them towards their deaths.