Escape From the Deep (15 page)

Slowly, as Decker rose, the waters lightened. Finally, he could make out air bubbles shooting from his Momsen Lung to the surface far above. Somehow, he remained focused. Having gotten this far, only a hundred feet or so from life, he refused to give in to panic. He saw the water grow even lighter. Then he felt his head break the surface. There was daylight. He had made it.

Decker reached up to remove the nose clamp on his Momsen Lung. He felt blood. His nose and his cheeks were bleeding. But he had no sensation of pain or stinging. He realized that, although he had not come up fast enough to get the bends, he had risen a little faster than he should have, bursting superficial blood vessels on his face. In no time at all, however, the bleeding stopped, thanks to the salty, cold water.

Decker spat out the Momsen Lung’s mouthpiece and then threw away the Lung. There were hand-holds on the yellow wooden buoy. He grabbed on to them. He could feel the pull of the current.
¹⁸

A few moments later, Bill Ballinger surfaced a couple of yards away. He had clearly come up too fast. Decker watched in horror as he splashed frantically, bleeding, screaming, vomiting. His nose clamp was not on. He was just a few feet from Decker. Perhaps Ballinger’s Momsen Lung discharge valve had been pinned shut like his own. No matter how carefully he may have risen, if he hadn’t removed that pin, air wasn’t releasing from his lungs, and they could have burst like a balloon as he neared the surface.
¹⁹

Ballinger was clearly drowning. He was in agony.

A voice told Decker: “Don’t touch that man! Don’t you reach out and touch that man! Absolutely don’t do it!”
²⁰

Ballinger caught sight of Decker. They looked at each other, “eyeball to eyeball.”

Decker started to reach out to Ballinger but then stopped, terrified that he would be pulled down with him as Ballinger drowned.

That moment would stay with Decker forever. “Had he been able to get hold of me,” he would recall decades later, “well, it’s a known fact that a drowning man can pull a horse under the water. . . . I felt guilty. I could hear him screaming as he was [pulled away] by the tide, out to sea. But something had told me not to touch him.”
²¹

Decker had no way of knowing that four other survivors were already on the surface—the men who had been thrown from the bridge, like Bill Leibold, or who had jumped off, like Floyd Caverly. For all he knew, he was utterly alone. But, in fact, others were not too far from him, fighting to stay alive, men with nothing to hold onto but the hope of seeing loved ones again.

9

The Last Attempt

I
N THE TORPEDO ROOM, it was now about five in the morning. Another forty minutes had passed with agonizing slowness. Again there was no banging on the hull. Men put their ears to the side of the trunk, listening for some signal, or anything at all. They heard something. It sounded like a man moaning. Quickly, the exterior door to the trunk was closed from the torpedo room and the trunk drained. When they opened the hatch to the trunk, what they saw shocked them to the core.

Hank Flanagan had collapsed and was unconscious, partially wrapped in the escape line. Someone cut him free. Others carried him down from the trunk, then placed him in a bunk and draped a blanket over him. Another man was in the trunk, Basil Pearce, the Floridian. He was in a stupor and had lost his nerve. After recovering somewhat, he said he would not try again. But there was no reason, he added, perhaps trying to save face, why “every other man in the compartment shouldn’t escape.”
¹

Hope began to fade. The sight of the tough, wiry Flanagan being carried from the escape trunk, out cold, was terribly dispiriting. If Flanagan couldn’t take the pressure, what chance did the others have, especially those who were injured and badly fatigued?

Others now decided that, like Pearce, they no longer had the strength to try to get out. More men took to bunks, pulling blankets over themselves, beginning to pray, their minds casting back over their lives, thinking especially of their families and wives.

Swish. Swish. Swish.

It was unmistakable, even to the most oxygen-starved of the men who were still conscious. It was the sound of a Japanese navy patrol boat’s screws.
²
The Japanese had heard the men tapping on the bulkhead or banging about in the superstructure. Pete Narowanski was convinced of it.
³

Try as they might, some of the men could not get others to be silent. It was as if some had given up hope and no longer cared if the Japanese detected them.
⁴

The Japanese patrol boat finally passed over.

The end was near. Everyone knew it. They could hear it in the sound above. They could taste it in the poisoned air. And they could see it in smoke that was creeping into the forward torpedo room. The smoke came from the battery compartment and had found its way forward through the sinks in the officers’ quarters, above the batteries.
⁵

The men in the torpedo room managed to close some valves, but the toxic fumes kept seeping through. Someone tried to hammer wooden plugs into the drain to stop the fumes. But that didn’t work either.

To combat yet another problem—the buildup of carbon dioxide—the men considered using an absorbent kept in every compartment of the submarine. “But [we] decided it was impracticable,” one of them recalled, “as the large number of men in the compartment left no place to spread it out.”
⁶

Although the men had bled oxygen into the room several times, the level of oxygen in the air, normally eighteen to twenty-one percent, was now undoubtedly far below what was required to stay clear-headed. If it fell toward six percent, they would begin to lose consciousness and vomit. Below five percent, they would be seized by convulsions and begin gasping for air. Eventually, as the oxygen began to run out, they would lose dexterity and experience extreme fatigue, a sense of panic, and then profound lethargy before finally dying.

Then it began again. The Japanese started to drop depth charges once more. This time, apparently, the men stood or lay stock-still in silence, sweat streaming off their foreheads and chests.
⁷

Finally, the explosions faded. A fire had broken out in the forward battery compartment.
⁸
Now its heat began to spread through the boat, sending the temperature soaring in the adjacent torpedo room.

The fire would steal more oxygen from their life-sustaining supply, which was already running out.

But it was the smoke from the fire that was of more immediate concern. It was going to asphyxiate anyone who stayed in the
Tang.
They all knew it. It was certain.
⁹

Death could only be minutes away.

HAYES TRUKKE KNEW THE TIME had finally come. He had to get out and fast. It was now or never. No more officers were able or willing to take charge, so the Arizonan from Flagstaff mustered together a third escape party.
¹⁰

Trukke climbed into the escape trunk with Pete Narowanski and two others. Narowanski looked as if he was going on vacation, dressed in brightly colored swimming trunks and a Hawaiian sports shirt. He had stuffed a can of Campbell’s soup inside the belt of his trunks.
¹¹

Trukke looked around for the escape line. It had disappeared. They would have to float to the surface without a line. That would take enormous courage. It would also make it hard to find their way out of the superstructure.

Thinking quickly, Trukke climbed down into the forward torpedo room and picked up a Japanese life preserver that the crew had pulled out of the water after one of their successful attacks. He then climbed back into the escape trunk.
¹²
Narowanski saw the life preserver and recognized it as a souvenir from the
Yamaoka Maru,
which the
Tang
had destroyed on its third patrol.

The hatch below the men was sealed. Someone cranked an induction valve that let in sea water.
¹³
The trunk began to flood once more. Trukke placed his Momsen Lung close to the oxygen outlet in the trunk to charge it. It didn’t work. The supply was empty. It needed to be restored by turning on a valve in the torpedo room below. But there was no way of communicating this to the men there and invaluable time would be wasted if they had to drain the trunk, open the hatch, and repeat the process all over again.

Trukke then remembered his survival training at submarine school. He knew it was possible to rise to the surface without breathing apparatus. There was no need to panic. He told the three men with him that they could still ascend, even from 180 feet below. The method had never been tried before from a submerged American submarine, but it was possible. By steadily exhaling air as they rose to the surface, Trukke explained, they could equalize the pressure in their lungs with that of the water and avoid the bends.

The three other men squashed into the escape trunk were understandably not so sure. They still wanted to fill their Momsen Lungs with oxygen. Suddenly, Narowanski’s closest friend on the
Tang,
Torpedoman John Fluker, began to scream with pain.

Narowanksi tried to soothe him. There were just a few more pounds of pressure to endure, he said, before it would be equalized with the sea outside, and then the external door could be opened. But Fluker was close to unconsciousness because of the pressure.

Then there was yet another, potentially fatal hitch—they couldn’t open the external door. Frantically, they hammered away at it. Finally, it gave. Had the pressure inside the trunk not risen sufficiently to allow the door to open with ease?

Water surged in and then, after a few agonizing moments, settled back until it reached their chests. Testing their Momsen Lungs, they made a crucial, heartening discovery—they didn’t need to fill the Momsen Lungs with oxygen after all. Their own breath would suffice to fill the lung.

Hayes Trukke knew he had only a few seconds left. He was fading fast: “I felt very exhausted—like I couldn’t get any oxygen into my lungs and began to get dizzy, so I knew I had better get out while I could.”
¹⁴
Grabbing the life preserver, he pulled himself out of the trunk into the superstructure, where he discovered the escape line leading to the buoy on the surface. Fortunately, Clay Decker had tied it to a rung in the ladder connected to the decking above. Trukke hadn’t needed the life preserver after all. But he held onto it anyway, following the escape line through the superstructure to the three-foot-wide opening to the wooden deck. He was still wearing his Momsen Lung, knowing it would help him float on the surface.

Trukke climbed out of the
Tang
and followed the line upward. Because he was holding on to the life preserver, which provided extra flotation, he began to rise too fast. Below him, Pete Narowanski felt the line jerking and pulled on it, hoping to indicate to Trukke that he should slow his ascent. But instead he tugged Trukke’s Momsen Lung free from him. Trukke was only 20 feet above the
Tang
, as much as 160 feet from the surface, when it broke loose and drifted away.
¹⁵

He didn’t panic. He just carried on as slowly as possible, breathing out steadily so he could avoid the bends. The water finally began to lighten. Then his head was above the slightly choppy surface. He wasn’t coughing up blood. He could breathe. He could taste saltwater. It was bright daylight. But then he vomited and it seemed like he couldn’t stop. He was close to passing out but somehow found the strength to stay afloat until he could grab the life preserver.

After a few minutes, Trukke heard a voice. It belonged to Clay Decker. He looked around and saw him, fifty yards away. Trukke struck out, got to Decker, and then clung to the yellow buoy.
¹⁶
Together they attached the life preserver to the buoy.

As the two survivors held on, treading water, they decided to get rid of any extra weight. They let go of their guns and C-rations, anything that could pull them down. They knew instinctively that they would need all the strength they could muster to stay afloat, to stay alive.
¹⁷

BACK IN THE ESCAPE TRUNK, John Fluker could take it no more. He and the remaining men decided to abort the attempt.
¹⁸
The door was closed and then Pete Narowanksi banged on the trunk, giving the signal to the men below to drain the trunk. Would the Japanese also hear his signal? Time would tell.

The hatch was opened from below. Fluker somehow had enough strength left to climb down from the trunk into the torpedo room. Badly shaken, he said he didn’t want to try again. The experience had been too much.

Meanwhile, Narowanski stayed put in the trunk. He was now determined to live. He wasn’t the kind to lose heart and go lie in a bunk and die. On the waterfront in Depression-era Baltimore, he had stolen bags of potatoes off merchant ships to help feed his nine siblings.
¹⁹
After leaving school in the eighth grade, he had worked in a tin mill, carousing and playing the horses. He had later married a sixteen-year-old girl after getting her pregnant with his now four-year-old daughter, Jackie. Marriage hadn’t suited him and he quickly divorced, preferring to run with his pals and gamble on the horses and hunt deer—perhaps his greatest passion—than to stay home with his young wife.
²⁰
Now if he died trying, so be it, but Pete Narowanksi wasn’t ready to give up on his young child, his beloved mother, Anya, and his fast horses, not just yet.