In February 1941, he served as the naval attaché in London, where he debriefed Ensign Eugene Smith, the Navy pilot secretly instrumental in helping sink the Bismarck. He held a variety of submarine commands in the interwar years. During that war he commanded Submarine Division 1, Asiatic.

Lockwood’s association with submarines began in 1914 with the A-2, the Navy’s second submarine. In May 1942, he became Commander, Submarines, Southwest Pacific Area, based in Fremantle, Australia, where he found himself neck-deep in the Mark 14 controversy. Now he braced himself for another bruising battle with BuOrd, this time over the magnetic “exploder,” also called a pistol, which was meant to detonate the torpedo beneath the keel of enemy ships. In 1942, Lockwood had forced the powerful Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) to admit to and fix faults in the Mark 14 torpedo’s depth gauge, the cause of torpedoes running too deep. The problem: duds and premature explosions of torpedoes. The results continued to be disappointingly low. Charles Lockwood looked at the tally sheet for March 1943. The new Commander, Submarines, Pacific Fleet, Rear Adm. In 1942, submarines in the three regional Pacific Ocean commands had fired 1,442 torpedoes and sunk only 211 ships totaling almost 1.3 million tons (post-war analysis of Japanese records reduced these figures to 109 ships and 41,871 tons).

Us navy submarine pin