Escape From the Deep (23 page)

Over sixty years later, Jackie Narowanski, only four years old when news of the
Tang
’s fate arrived, would vividly recall being summoned into a front room by her grandmother, Anya, who also called for her eldest daughter, Sophie. When Sophie arrived, Anya handed her a Western Union telegram. She wanted Sophie to read it out to the family; she herself could not read.

Sophie read the telegram. Peter, Anya’s favorite son, was missing in action. The family broke down. Then Anya calmed the room, insisting that everyone kneel at the window; they were to ask God to allow her son to make it home. Four-year-old Jackie kneeled and prayed until she could pray no more and then fell asleep. The next thing she knew, her grandmother was soothing her and telling her everything would be all right.

“Your father is okay,” she said. “He will come home. I can see him . . . he’s alive . . . in the water.”
³⁶

MOTHER OF TWO, Ernestine O’Kane received a Western Union telegram at her two-bedroom apartment in the Bay Area:

WASHINGTON D.C.

THE NAVY DEPARMENT DEEPLY REGRETS TO INFORM YOU THAT
YOUR HUSBAND COMMANDER RICHARD HETHERINGTON
O’KANE USN IS MISSING FOLLOWING ACTION WHILE IN THE
SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY. THE DEPARTMENT APPRECIATES YOUR
GREAT ANXIETY BUT DETAILS NOT AVAILABLE NOW AND DELAY
IN RECEIPT THEREOF MUST NECESSARILY BE EXPECTED. TO
PREVENT POSSIBLE AID TO OUR ENEMIES AND TO SAFEGUARD
THE LIVES OF OTHER PERSONNEL PLEASE DO NOT DIVULGE THE
NAME OF HIS SHIP OR STATION OR DISCUSS PUBLICLY THE FACT
THAT HE IS MISSING.
³⁷

Ernestine was devastated, but she was also a woman of remarkable courage and faith. Immediately, she contacted other
Tang
wives and tried to give them hope. There was a chance that the men were still alive. They could be POWs. It was possible to survive the sinking of a submarine. In the following months, she kept in touch, sending out a newsletter and many more letters, all of them intended to give comfort to the families of the men who had not returned.

Not long after the official telegram announcing that her husband was missing, Ernestine received a letter from Vice Admiral Lockwood. O’Kane, wrote Lockwood, had been “the heart and soul of the ship. His leadership, his coolness under counterattack, his daring, his determination to destroy any and all enemy ships encountered, all combined to make him the idol of his fellow skippers and of his seniors.”
³⁸

Lockwood gave no indication that O’Kane was still alive. Yet he had already learned from intelligence sources that this was the case.
³⁹
To protect the secret of Ultra, he, too, had to remain silent.

IT WAS ALREADY TWO FEET DEEP, and the snow kept falling. They could see it piling up as they peered through the cracks in their cell walls, as they huddled under their thin blankets, their stomachs cramping from hunger, their fingers and toes numb from the drafts that blasted them whenever the wind blew.

Winter had arrived in Japan. Because there was no other means of keeping the inmates warm, the guards decided to let the prisoners into the Ofuna compound for an hour each day so they could at least exercise to stay warm. “The only clothing we had was what we had on our backs,” recalled DaSilva, “so we would march around with blankets over our heads and stamp our feet to get the circulation going. There we were, all walking around in a circle with blankets over our heads looking like a bunch of old Mother Hubbards.”
⁴⁰

Enlisted man Floyd Caverly often walked in circles with his captain, Dick O’Kane.
⁴¹
Rank had barely separated the men before and did not matter a jot now. “O’Kane would tell me about little Marsha, his daughter, and his family,” recalled Caverly. “I would listen to him and sympathize. He also talked about Jim, his son.”

Floyd Caverly also often walked around the exercise yard with the tough, bony-faced Irishman, Hank Flanagan, whose lean features were increasingly cadaverous.

“You know, if we do live through this,” Flanagan told Caverly, “and I get back to the States, I’m not taking any shit off anybody. I don’t care if it’s my old lady or relatives or friends or whoever.”

He would be true to his word.
⁴²

AS THE WEEKS PASSED, the
Tang
survivors became increasingly concerned about their families. Had they been told of their fate? Those with young wives worried that they might be seeing new men. It was likely that some had given up hope and begun to get on with their lives. After all, no one had so far returned to the States after their submarine had been reported missing. Only in Ofuna had the
Tang
veterans discovered that a few other very fortunate men, such as Lieutenant Commander Fitzgerald’s crew from the
Grenadier,
had survived the loss of their submarines.
⁴³

During their months at sea, the
Tang
survivors had listened to Japanese propaganda, in particular Tokyo Rose’s broadcasts, and often laughed. “We had heard her on the radio,” recalled Floyd Caverly. “She had said things like: ‘You knuckleheads, why don’t you give up this damned war and go home . . . who do you suppose is dancing with your wife at night? Are you going to have a girlfriend when you get home? I don’t think so.’ ”
⁴⁴

Now Tokyo Rose’s warnings returned to haunt the
Tang
survivors. Seven of the nine were married. Their wives were for the most part in their early twenties. Would they remain faithful?

They were right to be worried. Sadly, only three of the
Tang
’s survivors would still be married by the end of 1945. Unknown to Larry Savadkin, his young wife, Sarah, was already sleeping with a new man in Rochester, New York; she would soon become pregnant with the man’s child.
⁴⁵
Clay Decker’s wife, Lucille, the mother of his two-year-old son, Harry, had also given up hope of him returning. She too would soon fall in love with a new man.

12

The Coldest Winter

DECEMBER 1944 in Ofuna was a bleak month. The men were heartened briefly by the appearance of silver-winged B-29 planes over the camp, headed to bomb nearby cities, but there was precious little else to lift their spirits. Just before Christmas, they were joined by five of the crew of the British submarine H.M.S.
Strategem
. Several B-29 pilots also became prisoners. Then, at Christmas, the Red Cross delivered food parcels.
¹
Finally, it seemed, there was reason to celebrate.

“Several guards came,” recalled Bill Leibold, “opened our cell doors, and gave each of us a Red Cross food package.” The packages contained the stuff of dreams: soap, cigarettes, gum, a chocolate bar, powdered milk, dried prunes or raisins, canned fish and meat, a small block of cheese, and a can opener.
²
“We were ordered not to open or use any of the contents as we were going outside to celebrate our Christmas with other prisoners. We were to leave the packages in our cells.”

The
Tang
survivors were taken outside. A gate was opened and prisoners from the other parts of the camp were allowed into the compound where the
Tang
men were being held in solitary confinement. From the other men, the
Tang
survivors learned that the
Grenadier
’s captain, John Fitzgerald, had in fact survived the brutal beating the day after their arrival. Leibold also had a chance to chat with Major Pappy Boyington for the first time since the day he had served them rice.

After an hour, the survivors were returned to their cells. To their outrage they found that their Red Cross packages had been stolen or were emptied of valuable goods. The men were furious and began to protest loudly. “We all did a lot of shouting and beating on our cell doors,” recalled Leibold. “The guard was concerned about the racket we were making and finally showed up with a basket of hot sweet potatoes. He gave two potatoes to us.”

The men quickly devoured the potatoes. At least there had been something other than their pitiful ration of hard rice with which to celebrate Christmas.

THE YEAR 1944 finally drew to a close. It had been a triumphant twelve months for the submarine force operating in the Pacific. Lockwood’s underwater raiders had sunk 548 vessels and the Japanese had lost so many fuel tankers that supplying their forces in Empire waters had become a desperate struggle. Thousands of Japanese soldiers and sailors had also been killed as American submarines had carried out unrestricted warfare with a vengeance. Captains of O’Kane’s ilk and caliber had struck at the heart of the Japanese military colossus and crippled it.
³

In the first months of the new year, the rate of sinking would rapidly decrease—so few ships were left to sink. To all intents and purposes, the submarine war was drawing to a close. It had been a remarkably lethal and effective campaign.
⁴

JANUARY 1945 SAW THE SKIES above Ofuna fill with more and more B-29s. But it also saw many men begin to die. O’Kane discovered that he was suffering from ulcers caused by scurvy. To his dismay, they would not heal.
⁵

However, the new year also brought a long-awaited change to the survivors’ routine. The men were transferred to the other side of the fence in Ofuna and they no longer had to suffer solitary confinement. They could now take care of each other and pool greater resources to help the weaker men.

A few weeks later, the harsh conditions finally took their toll—the first man to die was twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Richard L. Hunt, on February 25, 1945. He had been brought into the camp on January 17, bandaged from head to foot, suffering from terrible burns caused when the B-29 he was in crashed.
⁶
Unable to use his hands to feed himself, he starved to death.

Dick O’Kane had protested to the Japanese, demanding that he and other
Tang
survivors be allowed to feed and care for Hunt.
⁷
By the time the Japanese agreed to O’Kane’s request, Hunt was as good as dead. Nevertheless, the
Tang
’s survivors did what they could to help ease Hunt’s pain. “I was given the impossible task of washing his bandages,” recalled Bill Leibold. “He deteriorated to a point where the guards would not go into his cell due to the stench.”

Not long after, Hunt died. Bill Leibold and others carried his remains to a small wooden building, which served as Ofuna’s morgue. Late one night, Hunt was buried across a road from the camp in a makeshift graveyard.
⁸

Jesse DaSilva had volunteered to join the burial party, knowing he would receive a boiled potato in return. They had to carry the corpse through deep snow to a hilly wooded area. They then dug a hole and buried the young flyer, about 180 yards north of Ofuna, in the rear of a nearby temple called Ryuhoji Temple.

It was later thought that Hunt was injected with poison by the camp doctor, perhaps to put him out of his misery given the absence of proper medicine and painkillers.
⁹

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE STATES, more families were receiving official confirmation that their loved ones from the
Tang
were missing. Floyd Caverly’s wife, Leone, received a letter from the navy explaining that “The USS
Tang
was conducting an offensive war patrol against the enemy in the Empire waters. In that she did not return as scheduled, and no word has been heard from her, nor any information concerning the possibility of her survivors, it is regrettable that all officers and men are considered missing.”
¹⁰

The letter included a list with each man’s next of kin. Twenty-four of the men were married. Twenty-three other women were now also concluding that their husbands had in all likelihood been lost.

All over America, such telegrams were arriving in unprecedented numbers. The war was bloodier, more costly than ever, and Americans were beginning to tire of the slaughter. In January, over twenty thousand Americans had been killed in the European Theater alone. To defeat Japan, hundreds of thousands more were expected to become casualties.

IN OFUNA, LATE IN FEBRUARY, the
Tang
’s survivors got their first real jolt of hope that the war might end before they had wasted away. They saw Avenger bombers from an aircraft carrier fly over and strike targets in Japan. “The [attack] signified to us that the Philippines were secure,” recalled O’Kane, “for otherwise our carriers could not be this far north. As before, a glance to the skies meant a beating from the guards, but the sight of torpedo bombers just yards away was worth it.”
¹¹

More and more bombers soon filled the skies, wreaking greater destruction. With the same escalating intensity, malnutrition took its toll on the inmates of Ofuna. Beriberi was rampant. According to O’Kane, four prisoners died of the disease in March alone, and many more, including Larry Savadkin, were soon barely able to walk. Men throughout Ofuna got weaker by the hour it seemed, having expended their last resources of fat and energy.