Escape From the Deep (27 page)

Decker and the other enlisted men soon received a dollar a day in back pay for the time they had been in prison camps in Japan. Decker cashed the check, bought a car, and drove with his son back to Colorado, where he had grown up.
²⁰
It was tough starting over again, especially as a single parent, but the following year, 1946, he met and then married a woman named Ann, who would remain his wife for the rest of his life. Decker considered going back to college but instead went to work for an oil company so he could support his family. In the mid-sixties, he set up a successful garbage business which, by the time he sold it before retirement, had over forty employees.

Decker stayed in touch with the other
Tang
survivors and his cellmate in Ofuna, Pappy Boyington, who quickly descended into a vortex of failed marriages and alcoholism after his return to the States. Boyington had often lifted men’s spirits in Omori by telling them he would hold a big party after the war on the top floor of a hotel in San Francisco. He was true to his word. Decker went to it and had a ball.

LARRY SAVADKIN RETURNED to find that his wife, Sarah, whom he had known for only a few months before marrying, had met and fallen in love with another man and given him a child. They were soon divorced.
²¹
Somehow, he retained his sense of humor and zest for life and remained remarkably unembittered by his experiences. He remarried in 1947 and opted to stay in the navy rather than finish a degree in engineering, explaining to his parents that he would qualify for a pension earlier with the navy and had “already learned more about engineering in the service” than he would ever learn at college.
²²

Jesse DaSilva, by contrast, wanted to return to civilian life. He left the navy and found a job in the Los Angeles area after the war. He soon met a young woman, Joyce, at the Lutheran church he had attended before joining the
Tang
. They were married in 1947 and went on to have three children, two daughters and a boy. “I always said that I married a man who came back from the dead,” his wife would say years later. “When Jesse had gone missing, our minister in the church we were married in had asked the congregation to pray for his safe return.”
²³

TO THEIR DYING DAYS, some prisoners of the Japanese continued to hate their captors with a startling intensity, exacerbated by the Japanese government’s refusal to pay adequate compensation as Germany had.

Among the
Tang
survivors, there were mixed feelings. Some could forgive but none could forget. “Even when Larry first came back from Japan,” recalled Savadkin’s sister, Barbara, “he never talked about the horrors he had seen. He talked instead about the civilians who had given him food in Japan. Before the war, we had eaten potatoes and rice a great deal. He noticed that my mother no longer served rice at meals. He said he had no problem with rice. He said it was quite the opposite—‘We never got enough rice. Please go back to rice.’ ”
²⁴

The last place on earth Bill Leibold wanted to visit after the war was Japan. “I didn’t care for the Japanese,” he recalled.
²⁵
But during two visits to Japan after the war he came to realize that in every culture there is good and bad, the bestial and the humane. In 1947, he flew back, reluctantly, to testify in the war crimes trials that were underway in Tokyo. Years later, in 1960, he returned again to help set up a new Japanese navy—he even had a hand in the commissioning of Japan’s first post-war submarine.

Dick O’Kane was also asked to testify at the war crimes trials. Larry Savadkin was the only other man from the
Tang
who returned to give testimony. He noted wryly that “most Japanese being tried or interrogated had very poor memories.”
²⁶

Their fellow survivor Floyd Caverly did not go to Tokyo, although he was keen to do so. “I had some very good plans on how to wipe out some Japs while I was in prison camp,” he later said. “That’s why the old man wouldn’t let me go to the war crimes trials. He was afraid I’d smuggle in a .45 and start shooting the hell out of them—Tojo and those bastards on trial. I could have broken his head in and stood around and laughed about it.”
²⁷

16

To the Last Man

M
ARCH 27, 1946, WASHINGTON, D. C.—Dick O’Kane was standing tall and proud in the White House, in front of his family and old friend, Murray Frazee, when President Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor for his actions during the
Tang
’s fifth patrol.

Truman cited O’Kane’s last two attacks before the
Tang
had sunk herself.
¹

“This is a saga of one of the greatest submarine cruisers of all time,” concluded Truman, “led by her illustrious, gallant, and courageous commanding officer, and his crew of daring officers and men.”
²

O’Kane was now one of the most decorated Americans of the war—and the
Tang
arguably its most legendary submarine. The other survivors and some of the deceased from the
Tang
also received awards, which O’Kane had recommended. Fellow survivor Lieutenant Larry Savadkin and the
Tang’s
executive officer, Lieutenant Frank Springer, who drowned in the conning tower, both received Navy Crosses. There were Silver Stars for survivors Floyd Caverly, Jesse DaSilva, Clay Decker, Hank Flanagan, Bill Leibold, Pete Narowanski, and Hayes Trukke, as well as for thirteen others who perished, including the young officer Mel Enos, John Heubeck, who was last seen swimming to China, Decker’s best friend, George Zofcin, and Doc Larson, who had cared for his patients to the end.

For the success of her fourth and fifth patrols, the
Tang
received her second Presidential Unit Citation, becoming one of only three U.S. Navy vessels ever to receive that honor twice.

Dick O’Kane stayed in the navy, commanding the submarine supply ship USS
Pelias.
He was then appointed commander of the Submarine School in New London, before captaining another submarine supply ship, USS
Sperry
. A series of desk jobs in Washington followed, but he quickly became disillusioned and bored on land. He was a man of the sea, a hunter to the last. He had little patience for bureaucracy and did not like the way the navy was developing during the Cold War. “He disagreed with the navy about how they were preparing for a Third World War using Second World War technology,” recalled Bill Leibold, who stayed in close touch with O’Kane.
³

In July 1957, O’Kane resigned with the tombstone rank of rear admiral. None of his post-war assignments had come close to the thrill and satisfaction of captaining a submarine in wartime. Because his pension was just $358 per month, O’Kane worked for the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation in New York City until 1962, and then retired to a small horse ranch in the hills of Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. He delighted in working on the ranch, where he often hosted old navy colleagues, including the
Tang
’s survivors, and wrote two best-selling books about his wartime experiences.

THE TOUGH IRISHMAN, Hank Flanagan, was the first of the survivors to die, in 1957, his early death no doubt hastened by his treatment as a POW. “One of the Japs had hit him on the head with a baseball bat,” recalled Floyd Caverly. “It cracked his skull, and there was a tumor that started to form underneath, and the next thing he knew he was having severe headaches.”
⁴

Flanagan had divorced after returning from Japan. “He had told me he wasn’t going to take orders from anyone anymore,” recalled Bill Leibold. “[His] time as a POW affected him a great deal. He had a hard time when he came home.”
⁵

THERE WERE OTHER SAD ENDINGS. Shortly after the war, while still in the navy, Hayes Trukke helped pull a pilot from a crashed plane. An officer on duty at the time argued with Trukke, reprimanding him for not following regulations. In the heat of the argument, Trukke snapped and hit the officer, knocking him out. Commended for saving the pilot, he was also hauled on the carpet for striking a superior. He soon left the navy and joined the Los Angeles Police Department.

Trukke had been badly affected by the countless beatings he had received as a prisoner of war, and he apparently drank heavily after retiring to Flagstaff, Arizona, where he had grown up. According to a fellow submarine veteran, Bill Gallagher, Trukke died in 1981 a broken-hearted, embittered man. “His true love married while he was a prisoner,” Gallagher wrote Jesse DaSilva. “He later married, had one son, whom he lost at age five. He then turned to alcohol.”
⁶

The exact circumstances of his death were a mystery, but alcoholism was thought to be a factor. “We heard that he had died in a swimming accident,” recalled Bill Leibold. “He was a strong swimmer, so some of us wondered what had really happened. Some say he was drunk and fell into the swimming pool and drowned.”
⁷

Trukke had left an important legacy. He proved that a man could free float from a submerged submarine and live to tell the tale. In the late 1940s, the British navy had sent over submarine officers to question Trukke at length. In a subsequent report, they recommended that all British submarines adopt the “blow and go” technique, which Trukke had used to save his life, as standard escape practice.
⁸

THE
Tang
survivors stuck together as they aged. At one reunion, Pete Narowanksi disappeared into a bedroom at a hotel only to reemerge wearing the same brightly-colored trunks he had worn so long ago in the water when the
Tang
had gone down. Incredibly, he had managed to keep them from falling to shreds during his time as a POW.
⁹

Floyd Caverly recalled other reunions in the eighties attended by his skipper. He had noticed that O’Kane’s essential personality was unchanged although he was dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s. To his crew, he was still an undersea hunter. Caverly remembered one reunion when O’Kane, even as a gaunt, old man, went down on one knee, pretending to take bearings and ranges, still telling his crew: “Hold me up now. Don’t dip me.” He was still the old O’Kane. “He knew every damn ship we ever sunk,” recalled Caverly. “He’d tell you where it was sunk, the name. He remembered every detail.”
¹⁰

IN 1985, two days before Valentine’s Day, Dick O’Kane received a telephone call at his ranch.

“Admiral O’Kane?” asked an unfamiliar voice.

O’Kane identified himself.

“I have found your ring,” said Navy Pharmacist’s Mate Wayne Schutts.

O’Kane was amazed. Schutts had found the diamond and sapphire encrusted engagement ring he had given Ernestine on Valentine’s Day 1936. It had been lost while the couple had been surfing on Oahu in the late thirties. Schutts explained that he had found the ring, engraved with “RHOK,” under a foot of sand off Oahu beach, with the help of a metal detector.

O’Kane paid for Schutts to fly to his ranch in California and hand deliver the ring so that he and Ernestine could personally thank him.
¹¹

In letters to family, friends, and inquisitive reporters and historians, right to the end of his life, O’Kane stressed how much he still loved Ernestine, often ending correspondence with the number of years they had been married. It was the thought of Ernestine that had kept him alive in the water and through the POW camps all those years ago, and Ernestine herself who had helped him through the long and painful rehabilitation after he had come home a physical wreck.

ONE AFTERNOON on his beloved Red Hill Horse Ranch in California, O’Kane was walking with Bill Leibold, who had become an ever closer friend as the years passed.

O’Kane still ribbed Leibold about the moment when he had nearly dislocated O’Kane’s shoulder, trying to attract his attention to the Japanese destroyer that was bearing down on them. He deeply respected Leibold, who had remained in the navy, becoming a highly regarded diving expert specializing in submarine rescue, and forming the first Navy Seal teams while on assignment to Washington in 1960. Leibold had eventually captained his own ship, the USS
Volodar,
and had risen to the rank of commander before retiring with his wife, Grace, to a beautiful home on top of Mount Palomar, north of San Diego.

That afternoon on the ranch, O’Kane surprised Leibold.

“Do you remember Ofuna?” O’Kane asked.

Leibold nodded.

“You can never forget,” said O’Kane.
¹²

In his last years, sadly, Dick O’Kane did start to forget—he suffered Alzheimer’s to the point where he could no longer recognize Leibold when he visited.

A FORTNIGHT AFTER his eighty-third birthday, on February 16, 1994, Dick O’Kane died of pneumonia. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the most decorated submarine officer of World War II.

Four years after O’Kane’s death, a new destroyer was named after him. At the launching of the USS
O’Kane
in Maine, in March 1998, two survivors were present for the ceremony, Bill Leibold and Floyd Caverly, and of course, O’Kane’s “childhood chum”—his widow, eighty-five-year-old Ernestine O’Kane, designated the ship’s matron of honor. They watched with great pride as O’Kane’s granddaughter, thirty-six-year-old Leslie Allen Berry, smashed a red, white, and blue bottle of champagne on a metal hull. Then the Aegis-guided missile destroyer slid down ways into the Kennebec River at the Bath Iron Works shipyard. As a boy, O’Kane had sailed the very same river.