Escape From the Deep (11 page)

Savadkin removed his pants, tied them off, and began blowing. They slowly filled with air, enough to help keep him afloat. He alternated between floating on his front and his back. He soon felt cold and began to shiver uncontrollably, which made him swallow water.
⁴²

He had risen perhaps as much as 60 feet. It had almost killed him. What hope then for the men who were a farther 120 feet below? How could they survive without breathing apparatus? The
Tang
was surely too far down for any man to rise so far to the surface using only his own lungs?

Savadkin looked around in the darkness. No one was in sight. But he could see the gray bow of the
Tang
jutting above the sea, and far off he could make out another bow. It belonged to one of the
Tang
’s last victims.

Savadkin floated on his back. Bright stars were above. He heard the distant thuds of depth charges exploding, and a few seconds later he felt shock waves. He arched his back as they washed over him. Then he “screamed bloody murder,” but there was no reply. Was he the lone survivor? It seemed that way.
⁴³

7

The Terrible Hours

C
LAY DECKER WAS AT HIS BATTLE STATION on the bow planes in the
Tang
’s control room, below the conning tower, when her last, erratic torpedo slammed into her. Luckily, he was sitting on a bench with a bulkhead at his back the moment the torpedo exploded. When the
Tang
was rocked by the resulting concussions, he was jarred only a few inches from where he was sitting. But others near him were thrown across the compartment. Decker saw two men fall through the hatch from the conning tower head first. One broke his neck; the other his back.

Decker could see men lying on the ruptured deck plates in agony, blood flowing from wounds inflicted as they were thrown against metal edges and machinery. Chief of the boat, Bill Ballinger, had been knocked out. Another man, John Accardy, had fallen through the hatch from the conning tower and broken his arm when he landed in the control room.
¹
“I didn’t get a bruise or a scratch even,” recalled Decker. “But we had men who were in bad shape. [Ballinger] was thrown across the room and bashed across the bulkhead. Lieutenant Mel Enos also got banged up. He was bleeding from the forehead.”
²

Water was gushing down through the open hatch from the conning tower into the
Tang
’s control room. Decker saw several men trying to close it, but a wooden handle was caught in the closing mechanism.
³
The men could not seal the hatch properly, so water continued to rush in, though not as swiftly as before. Nevertheless, it was soon washing through the control room, seeping into the generators that powered the lighting. Decker and the other dozen or so men in the control room were cast into an eerie twilight.

Decker realized that the
Tang
was sinking by the stern—the compartment was tilting. It quickly settled at forty-five degrees. The bow was still out of the water, he figured, because he could hear waves sloshing against the hull. The
Tang
’s stern was no doubt stuck in the mud on the sea bottom. At least they had stopped sinking.

There was no time to lose. In a matter of minutes, Decker thought, the control room could be flooded and they would all drown. Tons of water had already gushed down into the submarine. It was clear to Decker that the rear compartments of the
Tang
were all flooded. At least half the crew, many of them close friends, had already drowned or been killed by the torpedo’s explosion.

Determined not to share their fate, Decker began to focus on how to get out of the
Tang
. His best chance of survival lay in getting to the escape trunk in the forward torpedo room. But how were he and the other surviving men, several of them badly wounded, going to reach the trunk? Two sealed half-ton doors separated the control room from the forward torpedo room. Even if they could climb the forty-five degree angle upward, the men were not strong enough to open the doors held down by air pressure and gravity.

Decker realized that the only hope was to level the
Tang
so that he and his fellow survivors could then make their way through the submarine without having to climb up and lift hatch doors above them. To do that, they would have to sink the
Tang
’s bow so that the submarine settled on the bottom.
⁴

They would need a hydraulic jack to open the hatches and hydraulic pressure to flood the ballast tanks. But neither was available, making the task of leveling the
Tang
far more of a challenge but not impossible.

Decker kept a cool head. He had learned in submarine school that most of the hydraulic features on the boat had backups that could be operated by hand. Since joining the
Tang,
he had memorized the position of thousands of valves, levers, and switches. A long lever was attached to the overhead in the control room, above the chart table. If he could get to it, he would be able to manually flood the forward ballast tanks, thereby leveling the
Tang
. But time was running out—water continued to swamp the control room, rising inexorably.

Decker waded through the water and climbed onto the chart table. He lay on his back and reached up. There it was—the lever. He removed the safety pin and pulled on it with all his strength. Slowly, valves opened and tons of water poured into the forward ballast tanks. The
Tang
began to shift as the bow dropped gradually to the sea bottom.

Decker felt the bow finally settle down. There was a small jolt as she hit the bottom. Anyone who was still alive aboard the
Tang
was now 180 feet below the surface.

Survival was possible once more. Decker and others could at least move forward to the torpedo room. If they got there without mishap and in time, they could then try to escape through the small escape trunk.

JESSE DASILVA WAS IN the crew’s quarters, to the aft of the control room, when the last torpedo was fired. The slight jolt as it left the
Tang
filled him with delight because they could now “head for the barn”—back to America. The tension began to ease in his face, although DaSilva knew he could only truly relax when the
Tang
was moored at the pier in Mare Island, across the bay from San Francisco. But now, at least, he would be moving away from danger rather than chasing it.
⁵

Nineteen-year-old DaSilva had just been given a watch relief. Moving forward through the crew’s quarters, he stopped in the air lock door between the bunkroom and the mess. Two men were nearby. One was sitting on a bunk with headphones on, listening to O’Kane’s orders.

“All ahead emergency!”
⁶

“Torpedo running circular!”
⁷

The grins of just seconds ago disappeared. DaSilva could see in his crewmates’ eyes a terrible foreboding. Each knew his life now hung in the balance. “The boyish face lines were forever erased in the blink of an eye,” he recalled.
⁸

DaSilva stepped into the mess area. It was then that the Mark 18 torpedo, carrying all 565 pounds of its Torpex load, hit the
Tang
.

He grabbed the ladder under the after battery hatch and held on tight as the
Tang
was “whipped around violently like a giant fish grabbed by the tail.”
⁹

Oh my God, what happened?
thought DaSilva.
This is it. This is going to be the end. How long is it going to take?
¹⁰

When the reverberation stopped, DaSilva looked around in shock. Several men in the crew’s quarters were badly hurt. The compartment to his rear—the forward engine room—was flooded. Looking forward, DaSilva could see water streaming over the sill connecting the crew’s mess, where he stood, to the control room.

DaSilva and two other men acted fast, trying to shut the half-ton door that connected the compartments. It was very difficult to do so. They had to push against the oncoming water and high-pressure air. Then DaSilva felt the deck tilt upwards.

The
Tang
was sinking. That much was obvious. It was soon impossible to stand upright without support.

DaSilva hung on as men around him slipped and fell aft. He felt the
Tang
’s stern touch down on the sea floor. Air in the sealed compartments at the fore of the boat had clearly kept the bow above the surface. That was something, at least. “It was as if the
Tang
herself was trying to breathe the life-giving air,” DaSilva recalled, “and hold on as long as she could.”
¹¹

“The boat acted as a thoroughbred,” recalled one of the other men, “dying but still trying to save the crew.”
¹²

ON THE SURFACE, Dick O’Kane saw the
Tang
’s bow disappear beneath the surface.

Surely, that was no accident?

It looked as if someone inside the
Tang
had flooded a ballast tank to level the
Tang
on the bottom.

Some of his men were alive
.

That had to be the case. If they were, they would now at least have a fighting chance.

O’Kane watched the surface where the
Tang
had been, hoping for some sign of life from the boat.
Perhaps the escape buoy will appear?
Time passed. But he saw nothing, and soon the current pushed him away from the area.
¹³

AROUND 180 FEET BELOW, the men near DaSilva picked themselves up and got back to the task at hand: closing the half-ton door between the crew’s mess and the control room. If they didn’t get it shut fast, they would drown.
¹⁴

DaSilva grasped the door and pulled. The heavy hatch wouldn’t budge. But he and others were now so pumped with adrenaline, so desperate to live, that they somehow summoned immense strength. Inch by inch, they forced it shut.

Wide-eyed with relief, DaSilva and his buddies looked at each other.
¹⁵
They all knew what they had done. They had saved themselves from drowning—for the time being—but in the process they had locked themselves into a compartment that had no escape trunk.
¹⁶
Moreover, only a flimsy deck separated them from 120 storage batteries under their feet. It would take just one leakage of water into just one battery for deadly chlorine gas to form.
¹⁷

If more water got into more batteries, more gas would form and then slowly, imperceptibly at first, it would begin to kill them, bleaching their lungs until they finally choked to death. “There were about twenty of us in the crew’s quarters and the mess,” remembered DaSilva. “We knew that we couldn’t remain there long because of chlorine gas from the flooded batteries.”
¹⁸

Chlorine gas had been the stuff of submariners’ nightmares ever since men trapped in a submerged German U-boat had survived to tell of its devastating effect in a confined space with no ventilation. In 1915, the
U-57
had hit a mine off the coast of Scotland, sinking to 128 feet with twenty men on board. Seawater quickly flooded the submarine’s batteries, resulting in chlorine gas filling the boat. Men’s ears ached intolerably as the pressure grew. Soon they could scarcely breathe as the chlorine fumes scorched their lungs. Frantically, the crew looked for breathing apparatus but could find only four units. When the pain had become unbearable, two men picked up pistols and shot themselves to death.

Jesse DaSilva did not want to die of chlorine poisoning. They could not stay where they were. Their only chance of survival was to get to the forward torpedo room, which had the escape trunk. “But we had to go through the control room to get there,” recalled DaSilva.
¹⁹

“We’ll just have to take a chance and see if the control room is flooded or not,” someone said.

Suddenly, there were the distant thuds of depth charges. Surely, with the
Tang
crippled, her bow jutting above the surface providing an excellent target, they would soon be blown to hell by a Japanese shell?

MEANWHILE, IN THE forward torpedo room, about ten men had gathered. They knew that they were close to the surface because they could hear the sound of waves slapping against the
Tang
’s hull. They also knew that there were only two ways out of the
Tang
: through the escape trunk or through the torpedo tubes. Both were daunting routes to survival.

Someone suggested that they try to get out through the forward torpedo tubes, not realizing that they were submerged. It was not as crazy as it sounded. Men had managed it before when they had escaped the fabled
S-48
, the unluckiest submarine in U.S. naval history.

On December 7, 1921, on her very first test dive, the
S-48
had sunk to the bottom of Long Island Sound with forty-one men aboard. Someone had forgotten to replace a faulty manhole cover on her stern ballast tank and the
S-48
had plunged rapidly and settled sixty feet from the surface, with three after compartments flooded. Fortunately, her quick-thinking captain had ordered the closing of watertight hatches, sealing off the flooded compartments. Then he had blown the forward ballast tanks with air at full pressure and managed to at least raise the bow far enough above the surface that the torpedo tube exits were exposed. Realizing this, the captain had ordered his men to get out of the
S-48
through the tubes. Every one of his crew survived.
²⁰