Escape From the Deep (19 page)

“The Bravest Man.” President
Truman shakes O’Kane’s hand after
presenting him with the Medal of
Honor, on the White House lawn,
March 1946. (
National Archives
)

Happy campers. The O’Kane family
in Kings Canyon, Sequoia National
Park, 1947. The trailer, designed
by Richard O’Kane, was built to be
“as compact as a submarine inside,”
according to Marsha O’Kane,
seated opposite her brother, Jim,
and mother, Ernestine.
(
Courtesy O’Kane family
)

Sailor on horseback. Richard O’Kane at his ranch in northern
California in the early 1980s. (
Courtesy O’Kane family
)

Jesse DaSilva with Ernestine O’Kane at
submarine veteran’s reunion. (
Courtesy DaSilva family
)

Reunited. The survivors at a
Tang
reunion in 1988.
(
Courtesy DaSilva family
)

Survivors and their wives at Decker’s house in Denver, 1991:
from left to right, Grace and Bill Leibold, Ann and Clay Decker,
Floyd and Betty Caverly, Ernestine and Dick O’Kane,
Joyce and Jesse DaSilva. (
Courtesy DaSilva family
)

Narowanski and DaSilva swam to Larson’s side and pulled him over to the buoy. Larson could not even manage to keep his head above the surface. DaSilva tried to get Larson to hold onto the buoy but it was useless. The soft-spoken Iowan, a favorite with all the men aboard, was clearly dying. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, his last thoughts may have been about his family and wife, Caryl, who worked in a beauty parlor in Harlan, Iowa.

Then another man’s head appeared above the surface, between twenty to fifty feet away. It was Howard Walker. That he was farther away than Larson had been on surfacing suggested that he had let go of the line at some point during his ascent. He was not wearing a Momsen Lung. His badly injured nose may have prevented him from using it. Walker was flailing around in the water as if he couldn’t swim.

Jesse DaSilva still had plenty of energy. He struck out toward Walker but Walker suddenly went under, disappearing before DaSilva could reach him. One of the other men saw Walker’s body drift away. His head was under the water but visible for a while.
³⁸
“The tide was going out to sea, and before you know it, well he just disappeared,” recalled DaSilva. “I turned around and it took me forever to get back to the guys because the tide was going out.”
³⁹

The men turned their attention to Larson, trying to keep him alive. “We managed to hold on to him [and] keep him afloat,” recalled Decker. “He was not fighting us or anything like that. He had taken water in his lungs. Had we been on the beach, we might have been able to save him.”
⁴⁰

The sun rose in the sky. It was sometime after nine o’clock. The men were exhausted, parched, and beginning to lose their last reserves of strength. But they had done what no other American had managed before. They had won an important victory over the ocean—they had escaped from a submerged submarine without help from the surface. Of the more than 3,500 Americans lost in sunken submarines during the war, they alone had survived. They had made history.
⁴¹

A FEW MILES AWAY, Japanese sailors aboard a patrol boat, the
P-34
, dropped a buoy into the ocean. Then the
P-34
began to sweep in a circle. Throughout the night, its crew had been searching for survivors from the ships sunk by the
Tang
.
⁴²
Some of the bedraggled men fished from the oil-slicked waters now lay in a desperate state on the deck or sat huddled under blankets. Several were in terrible pain from steam burns caused by exploding boilers.

A lifeboat was lowered from the
P-34
’s main deck. Two sailors armed with rifles sat in the boat and began rowing toward the exposed bow of one of the ships that the
Tang
had sunk the night before.

The Japanese sailors spotted Leibold and Caverly, who had now been treading water for almost eight hours.

Leibold and Caverly could not yet see the lifeboat, but they could see the bow of the last ship they had sunk the night before.

“Let’s get over to that ship,” said Leibold. “If we can get on there maybe we can get ahold of a lifeboat or something like that and we can get to the coast of China.”
⁴³

Leibold and Caverly were about to swim over when they finally saw the two Japanese sailors in the
P-34
’s lifeboat. It was about 9:30 in the morning.

Caverly and Leibold called out to them, but the Japanese could not understand a word they said.
⁴⁴

The Japanese were clearly puzzled by their Caucasian faces.

One of the Japanese sailors, who looked to be the boat’s coxswain, began talking to them.

“Doitsu ka?” asked the Japanese (meaning “Are you German?”).

The Japanese hauled Caverly and Leibold aboard.

Caverly slapped one of the Japanese on the back as a way of thanking him for pulling him out of the water.
⁴⁵
The Japanese sailor was not amused and growled at Caverly.

The coxswain kept repeating “Doitsu ka?,” thinking he had picked up two German sailors who had been on one of the Japanese ships, not realizing that they were American submariners responsible for the destruction wreaked the night before.

“They think we’re krauts,” Caverly told Leibold.

Caverly turned to the coxswain and then said: “Heil Hitler!”
⁴⁶

The Japanese began to row back toward the
P-34
. Soon they caught sight of a head bobbing in the water. As they neared, they could see a man lying on a wooden door. The boat drew closer. It was Dick O’Kane.
⁴⁷

Leibold and Caverly leaned over and began to haul O’Kane aboard. “Good morning, Captain. Do you want a ride?” said Leibold.

The coxswain overheard the word “captain” and now realized he had picked up American sailors and their captain. He motioned for O’Kane to sit in the stern, the assigned place for officers. With its passengers under guard, the lifeboat returned to the
P-34,
where it was hoisted up to the main deck.
⁴⁸

As Caverly stepped out of the boat and onto the deck, he noticed a deckhand’s wristwatch. Leaning over, he grabbed the man’s wrist to check the time. It was 10:30 a.m. The deckhand punched Caverly in the face. As Caverly later recalled, he had received his “first knuckle sandwich” from the Japanese. There would be plenty more.
⁴⁹

LARRY SAVADKIN HAD NOW been floating for over eight hours. Every quarter of an hour, he had refilled his makeshift life preserver—his inflated pants. Several times during the night, the Japanese had dropped depth charges, and he had felt the shock waves from each explosion. At one point, he had struck out to the west but had then realized quickly that the current was too strong to make progress, and in any case he could not orientate himself by the stars.
⁵⁰

Savadkin could see the faint outline of the coast of China. He could also make out several Japanese ships in the far distance, one of them the
P-34
. He guessed they were combing the area looking for survivors from the previous night’s battle.

At first, Savadkin tried to not be spotted by the Japanese ships, but then he realized that he would eventually drown because he was starting to suffer from hypothermia. So he yelled and splashed the water. It worked. He was soon spotted by the
P-34
’s lifeboat, hauled aboard, and then taken to the
P-34
.
⁵¹

The lifeboat then returned to the area to search for more survivors.

MEANWHILE, THE FIVE MEN who had escaped from the submerged
Tang
still clung to the yellow buoy and each other. They could see the
Tang
’s last victim around five hundred yards away, its bow sticking up above the surface. They agreed to wait until there was a favorable current, and then swim to the bow and find a life raft or some other object on which they could float to China.

Then the Japanese lifeboat came into sight. It approached slowly. One of the Japanese sailors aimed his gun at the
Tang
survivors.

Well, this is it,
thought DaSilva.
They’re going to shoot us.
⁵²

To DaSilva’s surprise, the Japanese held his fire.
⁵³
He indicated that the men were to board at the aft end of the lifeboat while they stayed at the bow. Before climbing aboard themselves, the men helped Larson into the boat. One of the Japanese sailors tried to bring him around by slapping him. But it was no use. He had stopped breathing.
⁵⁴