Escape From the Deep (2 page)

Tick, tock, tick, tock

The beat of the enemy’s screws was getting faster.

“Fast screws bearing three four zero, Captain,” reported Caverly.

O’Kane shifted the periscope quickly and saw a gunboat. It was heading straight for the
Tang
. No part of its bow was exposed, which meant the
Tang
had precious little to aim at. It was closing fast. In less than a minute, it would reach the
Tang
.

O’Kane was undeterred. He decided he still had time to attack the freighters.

“Constant bearing—mark! Keep the sound bearings coming, Caverly.”

“Set.”

“Fire!”
⁴

There were three jolts as three torpedoes were fired in a spread toward a freighter. Another three were soon heading toward another ship.

O’Kane gripped the periscope. He saw his first target explode. But he also saw the Japanese gunboat, still closing fast. It was high time the
Tang
disappeared beneath the waves. He knew he had cut things particularly close.

“Flood negative,” ordered O’Kane, trying to sound calm.

“Take her deep,” he added. “Rig for depth charge.”

The submarine’s ballast tanks flooded with fourteen thousand pounds of salt water. She was quickly 180 feet below, close to the sea bottom.

The crew was now sealed off in the
Tang
’s compartments, manning battle stations, rigging the
Tang
for silent running.
⁵

“Keep her going down, Larry,” O’Kane ordered Lieutenant Lawrence Savadkin, a quick-witted twenty-four-year-old who had been a track-and-field star at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania before joining the navy.
⁶

Floyd Caverly listened to the enemy’s screws. They had slowed.

The sound of the enemy’s sonar echoed inside the
Tang
.

Ping . . . Ping . . . Ping
. . .
⁷

Sweat beaded Caverly’s brow as he tracked the enemy.

Executive Officer Murray Frazee, who was second-in-command of the
Tang,
waited for the inevitable.
⁸

“Coming on the range now!” announced one of the crew. “Coming on the range . . . He’s dropped the first one!”
⁹

The men could hear the splash of a depth charge hitting the water.

Frazee thought about the time he’d spent on a destroyer before volunteering for submarine duty. The depth charges that
he
had dropped on the enemy back then had fallen at around ten feet per second. The
Tang
was now about two hundred feet below the surface.

So in about twenty seconds’ time
, thought Frazee,
the first explosion will occur . . . if the Japanese have set their charges for the correct depth.

“He’s dropped six of them!” said Caverly.

The slightly balding Caverly looked warily at a pressure gauge located just above his radar. The last time he’d been depth-charged, the
Tang
went down to three hundred feet and the gauge snapped off the bulkhead like a popped shirt button and hit him in the head.
¹⁰

“Ten seconds more, Captain,” Frazee announced calmly.
¹¹

There was a click followed by a sound that felt like “someone hitting the hull with a million sledgehammers.” A lightbulb shattered. The
Tang
shook.

Edwin Bergman, the
Tang
’s radioman, screamed and ripped off his headset. He had not turned down the volume and was in agony.

O’Kane grabbed onto the hoist cable of the periscope to steady himself. With a free hand, he propped up Bergman, who was quivering with pain and fear.

Another explosion was followed by another massive vibration, this time upending ashtrays and unsecured objects as the deck plates contorted and shook.

The explosions continued, each one reverberating throughout the submarine, knocking men off their feet.

O’Kane had suffered his fair share of depth charges after ten wartime patrols in two years. But the enemy ship was laying down charges faster and closer than he had ever experienced before.
¹²

It was now less than a minute into the attack and the already groggy air was filled with asbestos dust, flecks of paint, and pieces of cork.

It was also the worst depth-charging that twenty-year-old motor mechanic Clayton O. Decker had endured. But he remained composed, struggling to stay upright, standing beside the bow planes in the control room, the nerve center of the submarine.

Decker grew up in the mountains of Colorado, where he had worked as a miner before the war—an ideal qualification in the eyes of his navy recruiter because Decker was unlikely to suffer from claustrophobia after spending so much time so far down.
¹³
And sure enough, he never did. But the current depth-charging was enough to send even the most hardened veterans like Decker over the edge.
¹⁴
It was as if he was “inside an empty fifty-gallon drum with someone beating on it with a hammer.”
¹⁵

More explosions. The
Tang
rocked. More lightbulbs popped.

Decker did not know how deep the
Tang
was, but he hoped she was as far down as possible in the short time she had been able to dive. If the
Tang
was below where the charges were exploding, the chance of survival was good. On the other hand, if the
Tang
was too close to the surface, a single explosion below could blow water from the ballast tanks and pop the submarine to the surface like a cork.

The enemy’s sonar could detect even the faintest noise from the submarine. Everything that could make a sound had been shut off, including the air-conditioning. As soon as its cool breeze had disappeared, intense heat from the engines and motors had started to spread through the
Tang
. Sweat now ran off the men in a constant stream.
¹⁶

In the conning tower, Captain O’Kane and Executive Officer Frazee exchanged anxious glances. The
Tang
was made of stern stuff. But how much more pounding could she take?

Bergman, the sound man, returned to his post in the sound shack, his ears still ringing. He put on his headphones again and heard the enemy’s screws once more.

The Japanese were now on the
Tang
’s port bow and slowing down, perhaps waiting to see if the depth-charging had been successful before dropping another round of “ash cans.”

O’Kane spoke into the conning tower’s telephone: “Check and report all compartments!”
¹⁷

It didn’t take long for O’Kane to hear back. By some miracle, there had been no serious damage.

“She’s turning this way,” said Bergman.

The crew braced themselves for more explosions.

“Here she comes!”

“Shifting to short scale!”

“Screws speeding up!”

“Right full rudder!” ordered O’Kane. “All ahead full!”
¹⁸

So far, the
Tang
had been moving at “evasive speed”—as slow as possible—and with only the slightest noise. “All ahead full” meant no more silent running. The Japanese were bound to detect the
Tang
. Nevertheless, that is what O’Kane ordered and soon the
Tang
was turning toward her tormentor—the gunboat. Incredibly, in the next few seconds, she snuck right under the Japanese boat. The captain of the Japanese boat was no fool, however, and quickly ordered the dropping of another volley of charges.

There were sixteen in all. They exploded in a “prolonged, un-punctuated, smashing, shattering cataclysm.”
¹⁹
It was a heart-stopping experience: Deck plates lifted as men were thrown about and everything in the submarine seemed to shake. The vibration became so intense that men clutching wheels shivered as if they were being electrocuted. The electrician’s mates were similarly affected as they held down levers and switches, grateful that they were at least wearing protective asbestos gloves.

In the conning tower, O’Kane and Frazee somehow stayed on their feet. It would surely be only a few seconds before the
Tang
took a fatal hit. It was hard to believe that she was still operable at all.

A long silence passed. The depth-charging was over.

The
Tang
continued at full speed toward deeper water, away from the coast, and the Japanese gunboat was soon left far behind, vainly searching for wreckage. One of the crew made a tally. There had been twenty-two very close detonations.

Men opened the doors sealing each compartment and began to move through the boat, nerves jangled, hugely relieved that the worst depth-charging any of them had experienced was over.

O’Kane went to the officer’s dining room, joining Frazee and a shocked Larry Savadkin.

“Captain,” said Savadkin, “if I had known that depth charges would be like those, I might have stayed in surface ships.”

“They seemed close because you’re not used to them,” replied O’Kane. “When we get some that are really close, these won’t seem too bad.”

Frazee was noticeably quiet.

O’Kane laughed to break the tension and then conceded that the experience had also rattled him to the core. Were it not for her extra-thick hull, the
Tang
might well be on the bottom, lost with all hands.

Savadkin pulled out the boat’s well-worn cribbage board as Frazee left to go check on every compartment and assess the damage. Before long, he reported back that the damage had been mercifully light given the intensity of the attack—several smashed lightbulbs but little else.
²⁰

Although uninjured, the crew looked badly shaken.
²¹
They needed a good shot of brandy to calm their nerves. Frazee returned to the conning tower and made a drinking motion, indicating to O’Kane that it was time to distribute the so-called “depth-charge medicine.” O’Kane readily agreed.

Frazee had counted every depth charge he had ever heard—about 250 had been dropped during his first ten patrols. On this, his eleventh, he reckoned there had been 250 more.
²²

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, the
Tang
was heading back to Pearl Harbor. O’Kane announced, to the crew’s delight, that there would be no stopping in Midway to refuel. Nor would they waste time practicing a daily trim dive. It had been a short but highly effective fourth patrol, and O’Kane was eager to return to base, load up with more “fish”—torpedoes—and get back to sinking the enemy.

As the
Tang
slowly pulled away from Japanese waters, the men began to unwind. When not busy cleaning and preparing for a refit, they gorged themselves on steaks and ice cream—the submarine service was rightly famous for the finest chow in the military. O’Kane ordered that whatever steak they could not finish on the patrol be cut up and served at a shore party when the
Tang
got back to Hawaii.

For three more days the
Tang
was within range of Japanese antisubmarine planes, but O’Kane still opted to run on the surface, with extra lookouts, to save time.
²³

Murray Frazee was far from happy as he navigated the
Tang
toward Pearl Harbor. He was feeling “jittery” after so many patrols—eleven in total now, more than any other submariner he knew. “Twenty-two percent of all those who made war patrols were lost, in fifty-two submarines,” he would later write. “I think I deserved to be a little [nervous] by my eleventh patrol, especially operating with Dick O’Kane.”
²⁴

Frazee was uncomfortable with the risks that O’Kane was taking, seemingly as a matter of routine. He was in command of several inexperienced officers. More and more, he wondered whether they could cope if the submarine was surprised on the surface. Along with his chief quartermaster, Sidney Jones, Frazee felt he had no option but to stay awake every night on the return so he could be on hand should anything go wrong.
²⁵
Only when he could actually see Pearl Harbor would he be able to relax.
²⁶

The
Tang
finally entered Pearl Harbor. As was customary, the chief quartermaster, Jones, went to a locker under the chart desk in the conning tower and pulled out the battle flag. He then climbed to the bridge of the submarine and raised the flag until it fluttered for all to see. It was covered with small Japanese flags, each one indicating a record haul in enemy ships in just the eight months that the
Tang
had been at war.

At the center of the flag was a black panther, one of the most elegant predators in the animal kingdom. “It was determined that we should be known as the ‘Black Panther of the Pacific,’” recalled Bill Leibold, the
Tang
’s chief boatswain’s mate. “The flag was to reflect this theme. We were fortunate in having an aspiring artist on board, one John Kassube, who actually designed our flag (with a great deal of input from all hands). The flag was basically a copy of the Japanese man of war, with a black panther jumping through the large red ball, Meatball as we called it. Sidney Jones fabricated the flag with signal bunting, using our portable Singer sewing machine.”
²⁷