Escape From the Deep (5 page)

That morning, Walker brewed the coffee to perfection. O’Kane and Lockwood sipped it in the captain’s cabin for several minutes as they discussed the progress of the war. Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of the
Tang
’s diesels firing up. Lockwood and O’Kane climbed up to the bridge, shook hands, and then Lockwood stepped ashore.

As the
Tang
announced her departure with a five-second blast from her Klaxons, Lockwood and other base personnel stood at attention.
⁶

“All back two-thirds,” ordered O’Kane.

The
Tang
’s diesel engines roared.

“Left twenty degrees rudder . . . All ahead two-thirds, shift the rudder.”

It was one o’clock on September 24 as the
Tang
left the dockside, headed for the Formosa Strait via Midway at four-engine power.
⁷
The harbor was much as it had been before the attack on December 7, 1941.
⁸
Most of the ships stricken that day had been moved, with the notable exception of the USS
Arizona
.

O’Kane looked around and remembered how he had felt when he returned from a patrol in late January 1942. He had been greeted by scenes of utter devastation along so-called battleship row. He and the men lined up on the deck of the USS
Argonaut
had cried unashamedly.

To his port and starboard, O’Kane spotted the red and black channel buoys that guided his boat out of the harbor. In the distance, he could see the sea buoy that marked the true starting location of the
Tang
’s fifth patrol.
⁹

Finally, the
Tang
cleared the submarine nets around Pearl Harbor. As was customary, O’Kane then went to his cabin, unlocked the safe, and opened his formal orders.

Not long after, he informed the crew of where they were headed. “We discovered that we were going to be on patrol in the Formosa Strait,” recalled Clay Decker. “It was a hot area. We knew we would see action.”
¹⁰

All went smoothly at first. Three days after leaving Pearl Harbor, the
Tang
approached Midway. The prospect of a brief liberty on the island, however, brought little excitement among the crew. In Floyd Caverly’s eyes, it was “nothing but a sand-spit with a bunch of gooney birds on it. That was about it.” The men would sometimes play drunken volleyball there if they had time, but otherwise it was not the kind of stopover they wrote home about, unlike Perth in Australia or their favorite port for a spot of liberty, San Francisco.
¹¹

O’Kane had a choice: He could either bypass Midway and forgo topping up the
Tang
’s diesel tanks or enter a north-facing narrow channel in choppy seas with the wind blowing from the south, a difficult maneuver. O’Kane opted for extra fuel, but as he entered the channel he began to have second thoughts. The
Tang
began to yaw alarmingly. Anxious moments followed. With only yards to spare, O’Kane managed to avoid running the
Tang
aground, steering her through a narrow gap in the reef.
¹²

It was seven o’clock in the morning on September 27, 1944, when the
Tang
moored at the submarine base in Midway. Two new young officers came aboard: twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Paul Wines, an outstanding athlete and scholar who had been president of his high school’s student council in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and Lieutenant John Heubeck, who grew up in Baltimore, where he had won several awards for swimming.
¹³

With her tanks topped up, the
Tang
left after just five hours at Midway with two of her four engines operating, and was soon bucking through heavy seas in increasingly stormy weather, headed for Formosa.
¹⁴
The
Tang
’s recently departed executive officer, Murray Frazee, would later write that O’Kane was always in a hurry to get to Midway “just so he could load up more torpedoes and get back out there—sink more ships, kill more Japs.”
¹⁵

O’Kane wanted to reach Formosa before a planned air strike on the island so he could stand by, ready to pick up any downed aviators. But he made slow headway in the eight-foot waves at two-engine speed. Three days after leaving Midway, however, the storm abated for a while and O’Kane added a third engine, hoping to make up for lost time. There were some practice dives as the
Tang
continued west; O’Kane was delighted by the crew’s speed and efficiency.

On October 4, the
Tang
received a coded message—a wolf pack comprised of the USS
Trigger
and the USS
Sunfish
was looking for a small Japanese weather ship. The ship’s last reported position was right in the track of the
Tang
. It seemed that the wolf pack was trailing the
Tang,
even though its boats had left Pearl Harbor first. O’Kane felt he had a good chance of finding the enemy ship first, especially if the codebreakers back in Hawaii were on their usual game.
¹⁶

Throughout the war, O’Kane and his fellow captains had been aided immeasurably by the genius of American cryptographers in breaking Japanese naval codes. By this stage of the war, it was not unusual on any one day for all but a handful of American submarines on patrol in the central Pacific to be operating on instructions derived from the prompt breaking of Japanese codes.
¹⁷

On October 6, the weather worsened significantly.
¹⁸
Among the first to feel the effects was Floyd Caverly, who had been an amateur boxer before the war. Although he was used to being knocked around in the ring, he was particularly sensitive to increased pitching and rolling. In fact, Caverly’s stomach had become as accurate as a barometer: When Caverly started to puke, a storm never failed to materialize. “The [crew] got me a little piss pot with a handle on it,” he recalled, “and I was supposed to hook that onto my belt so I had something to heave into. It was a big joke. The slow rolls didn’t bother me too much. It was the pitch.”
¹⁹

O’Kane called an inspection for midmorning to make sure the
Tang
was ready to weather a storm. At the assigned time, he began his inspection in the forward engine room, where he found, among others, his junior officers gathered in a group: Hank Flanagan, Ed Beaumont, Mel Enos, Dick Kroth, John Heubeck, Paul Wines, and Basil Pearce. Only one of them was destined to survive the patrol.

Addressing his captain, Frank Springer explained why he assembled the group, “I suggested that they be here to see what you demand on these inspections.”

The
Tang
’s officers saluted.

O’Kane returned their salute, stepped forward, and suddenly fell through the deck to the engine room five feet below. Someone had left a hatch open. O’Kane landed on the bottom rung of a ladder, breaking his left foot. Doubled up in agony, sick with pain, he began to sweat heavily.
²⁰
His men helped him up and he limped to his cabin, where Pharmacist’s Mate Paul “Doc” Larson examined his foot.

Larson gave his captain a painkiller and set his foot before bandaging it. O’Kane would have to hobble around for a few days “like a three-legged dog.”
²¹

“You’ve got some small broken bones, Captain,” said Larson. “I can feel them but they’re pretty straight now—and one hell of a sprain. There’s nothing they’d do ashore that I haven’t done except to take some X-rays, and I already know about what they’d look like.”
²²

O’Kane lay on his bunk, his foot propped up on the gray bulkhead and his ear next to the intercom, bitching mightily and listening to the wind howling and waves slapping against the
Tang
. There was no question of letting up for even a few hours: Frank Springer took over the running of the boat from the conning tower while O’Kane issued commands over the intercom, or “squawk box.”
²³

The weather continued to deteriorate rapidly, waves doubling in size every hour. O’Kane ordered the lookouts to come below, leaving senior watch officer Larry Savadkin alone on the bridge. Angry green waves now pounded against the
Tang,
drenching Savadkin, who had to cling to the bridge cowling to keep his balance as the
Tang
began to plunge down the mounting waves.

As the storm intensified, O’Kane ordered Savadkin to leave the bridge. The hatch from the bridge to the conning tower was sealed behind him. Soon, all aboard the
Tang
could hear the full might of the storm, a class-four typhoon. “The sound of mounting seas now came through the ballast tanks, great muffled roars, but they were mild compared to the screaming winds and crashing seas I could hear over the Voycall,” recalled O’Kane.
²⁴

Suddenly, the
Tang
rolled so severely that O’Kane was thrown out of his bunk. He knew that he would have to issue orders from the control room to stand the best chance of weathering the storm without significant damage. Doc Larson gave O’Kane another injection to kill the pain in his foot, which Howard Walker then carefully slipped into a size-fourteen boot. Larson and Frank Springer helped their captain toward the control room.

O’Kane stepped over a sill into the control room. At that moment the
Tang
rolled violently to starboard, knocking O’Kane off his feet. “I landed on the after end of the high-pressure air manifold with my face about a foot from the bubble inclinometer on the forward end of the low-pressure blows. It read seventy degrees, and there she hung, obviously broached by the seas,” he recalled.
²⁵

“Jesus Christ,” said O’Kane, “is she ever coming back?”

Frank Springer suddenly fell back onto a switchboard and was jolted by a 110-volt current. He leapt away from the board.

“Sometimes they don’t, you know!” said Springer.

The
Tang
righted herself again, much to the relief of the crew.

Springer scrambled up the ladder to the conning tower. O’Kane followed him, pulling himself up by the arms. Tensions were running high. Chief Quartermaster Sidney Jones raised the periscope to its full height, some fifty-five feet above the sea.
²⁶
Then O’Kane steadied himself and looked through the scope. To his shock, he saw a “single monstrous wave, so big it had normal waves on its crest, which were blowing out into spume as it rolled in. Reflexes made [him] duck momentarily just before it hit, and then green water, solid green sea, went over the top of everything, burying
Tang
’s scope and all.”
²⁷

O’Kane stepped away and Jones quickly lowered the periscope so it wouldn’t be ripped off by the storm.

The
Tang
was in the heart of the typhoon. Her bridge was swamped by the crashing waves. Her bow rose from the wind-ripped water as she crested yet another huge wave. Then, as she tipped over and slid down the other side of the wave, her propellers whined when they broke the surface. Men were clinging to anything they could find to stop themselves from being thrown around. Larry Savadkin wedged himself between a bulkhead and a bunk.
²⁸
Others lay in their bunks, clutching the side railings. In all their years at sea, they had never experienced such giant waves.

One man could take comfort in having survived worse: the strapping, dark-haired Chief Boatswain’s Mate Bill Leibold. Aboard his first ship in the navy, the
Pruitt
, Leibold had actually been on deck in weather so severe that the
Pruitt
began to break up before finding safety.
²⁹

Leibold would vividly recall enduring this, his second life-threatening typhoon, more than sixty years later: “We couldn’t dive for safety reasons, and so we had to ride it out. We had to button everything up—close the conning tower hatch. All you could see was foam and green water through the scopes. It seemed it went on forever. When we rolled, we wondered whether we would come back up because the rolls were so extreme. We were all worried we might capsize.”
³⁰

O’Kane could have ordered the
Tang
to dive hours ago but he had wanted to stay surfaced on the off chance of sighting the Japanese weather ship. Now there was no time to dive. To make matters worse, the
Tang
was probably being blown along at the speed of the storm, in winds of 150 miles per hour or more, toward rugged islands in the Ryukyu chain to the north. O’Kane knew he had to avoid them or be wrecked.
³¹
But to do so would mean risking everything by turning the
Tang
toward the seas. If a powerful wave hit as she went broadside, she could capsize.

“All ahead standard,” said O’Kane.

Eyes fixed on the
Tang
’s inclinometer, which would show the extent of any roll.

“Twenty-five degrees,” called out Chief Motor Machinist Marvin De Lapp.

The roll was considerably less than previous ones.

The moment to make the turn had come.

“All ahead full,” ordered O’Kane. “Right full rudder.”

Another massive wave struck the
Tang
. She swung over, but just as she seemed about to capsize, she somehow righted herself.