Escape From the Deep (21 page)

The men were given old white Japanese navy uniforms, put on a truck, taken to a station, and then loaded on a train for an all-day journey up the coast. Their blindfolds were removed once they were on the train. They saw that each of them was guarded. It was a regular passenger car. The shades were drawn until they left the station.

Jesse DaSilva stared through the window. He felt as if he were looking back a hundred years. Peasants toiled in the fields with hand plows pulled by oxen. There was no sign of mechanization.

Finally, the men arrived at the other end of Formosa in the port city of Kiirun.
²⁰
It was raining and dark when they were taken off the train and placed on a truck that took them a few miles from the city. “The truck stopped in front of some building and they marched us in there,” recalled Jesse DaSilva. “Blindfolded, we stood before some officials until the blindfolds were removed. There were a few words said, then the blindfolds were put back on and we were taken back to the truck and taken to some old buildings.”

The buildings were an old, stone Portuguese prison, which the men nicknamed “Kiirun Clink.” They were then separated from each other and taken to cells with dirt and gravel floors. “The cells were set above the guards’ catwalk like the cages in a zoo,” recalled Larry Savadkin. “The bars were of wood, but about five inches in diameter stretching from the ceiling to the floor. The [toilet] was a hole in the floor set back in a niche.”
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To the men’s surprise, they were provided with blankets and then served a meal—balls of rice and fish wrapped in leaves. It was their first real nourishment in almost a week, since the October 25 sinking. “They also brought us some hot tea,” recalled Leibold. “We slept. They didn’t fool with us at all.”
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The Kiirun Clink guards were not all brutes. In fact one, who had been conscripted, was memorably humane. “He crept into my cell,” recalled Larry Savadkin, “and in broken English told me he was a Christian, and he had a present for the boys.”

The guard gave his “present” to Savadkin and then slipped away.

The other men in their cells were asleep.

Savadkin held the presents behind his back.

“Hey!” he said, waking some of the men. “Guess what I’ve got for you—ice cream on a stick!”

“Take it easy, Mr. Savadkin,” replied one of the men.

The men looked in amazement as Savadkin revealed the guard’s gifts. “They thought I was completely off my rocker,” he recalled. “But sure enough, that was what the guard had produced: one long, cool, drippy, and wonderfully sticky Popsicle on a stick for each of us. It was a great day.”
²³

THE
Tang
survivors were soon on the move again. This time they were loaded onto a bizarre-looking, charcoal-fired bus—evidence of the Japanese’s vastly diminished fuel supplies thanks to the devastating effect of American submarine warfare. “It had a little boiler on the tail end of it,” recalled Bill Leibold. “Each of us was assigned a guard who carried a rifle. After a while, the bus stopped and the guards got out and started pushing the bus. They left their rifles on the bus.”
²⁴

The men knew there was no point trying to escape—they would simply be rounded up and probably killed.

The bus finally stopped in a harbor where the officers were separated from the noncommissioned men. The officers—Savadkin, O’Kane, and Flanagan—were taken to a destroyer for transport to mainland Japan, while the enlisted men—Caverly, DaSilva, Decker, Narowanski, Leibold, and Trukke—went to a cruiser where they were placed in a hold full of sacks of sugar cane. Every now and again, Japanese sailors would enter, punch holes in the sacks, and fill up little bags of sugar.
²⁵
The survivors realized that the U.S. blockade of Japan must have become so severe that sugar was as rare as gold.

On board the destroyer, Dick O’Kane was treated with unusual respect during his journey to mainland Japan. O’Kane had even been greeted by the customary ceremonial formation of sideboys as he boarded the destroyer. He was then escorted by its captain to a large stateroom. The Japanese captain told O’Kane he would return to talk to him from time to time. An armed guard stood in front of the open door—the sole reminder, it seemed, that this was not, after all, a pleasure cruise.

O’Kane looked through the open door and watched the crew performing their drills and duties. It was depressing to see an enemy gun crew going through a drill with impressive discipline. He was then given shoes and clothes, and fed properly. It was after dark when the Japanese captain, who was about O’Kane’s age, returned to the cabin to talk to him. At first they discussed tactics. The Japanese captain said it was unlikely now that there would be a large-scale, decisive sea battle between what was left of the Japanese navy and the Americans.

“How is it, commander, that you speak no Japanese but seem to understand my English?” asked the Japanese captain.

O’Kane said Japanese was not offered as a course when he had been at Annapolis.

The Japanese captain looked at O’Kane.

“How could we expect to understand each other’s problems when you made no attempt to learn even a word of our language?”

The Japanese captain returned to his duties. O’Kane’s thoughts turned to the last torpedo he had fired.
How had a circular run been possible?
Torpedoes on his previous surface ships had been fitted with safety mechanisms to prevent circular runs. If only the
Tang
had had the same.

FINALLY, THE
Tang
survivors neared mainland Japan. Aboard the destroyer, O’Kane returned his clean clothing and comfortable shoes, having been told he would get a new uniform when he got ashore. He thanked the Japanese captain as he left the boat.

Why, asked O’Kane, had he been treated so well on the destroyer but not on the
P-34
patrol boat?

“That ship and the escort force,” said the Japanese captain, “are not part of the Imperial Japanese Navy.”
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O’Kane went down the gangway and stepped onto Japanese soil in Kobe, at a naval training base. It was a cold and rainy day. Before long, O’Kane and the
Tang
’s other surviving officers were reunited with the enlisted men and marched past fanatical-looking Japanese trainees who were practicing with bayonets, lunging back and forth. The Americans were made to sit alongside a wall near a building. Suddenly, they spotted a group of Japanese officers walking toward them.

A tall rear admiral began to inspect the row of miserable survivors, stopping in front of Bill Leibold, who was sitting next to Dick O’Kane.

The rear admiral looked down at Leibold.

“Are you frightened?” he asked in excellent English.

Leibold was shivering badly from the cold.

“No, I’m cold.”

The rear admiral looked at him contemptuously.

“Of course you’re cold, stupid! You’ve got no shoes!”

Leibold tried to ask for some dry clothes.

The rear admiral ignored the request and then asked Leibold how old he was.

“Twenty-one.”

The rear admiral looked skeptical.

“You’re not a day under thirty-five.”

The rear admiral then turned to O’Kane and asked his age.

O’Kane replied that he was in fact thirty-three.

“No, you’re not,” said the rear admiral, seeming to take delight in pointing out how quickly the
Tang
’s survivors were aging under such extreme duress.

“You’re at least fifty.”
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That concluded the inspection. The rear admiral and his party walked away. “We had no clothing to speak of,” recalled Leibold. “It was a miserable time. I figured they were going to give us shoes and clothes, but they didn’t give us anything.”
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The
Tang
survivors were then loaded onto a small boat and taken across a bay to a train station. O’Kane vividly remembered the ensuing journey northward to Yokohama, a major industrial center: “The countryside may have been beautiful, but the fast, loaded trains, the hydro-electric lines coming down out of the mountains, and the buzzing industry were depressing to us.”

O’Kane realized how formidable an enemy Japan really was. “It was dark, but the factories were booming like Kaiser’s shipyards, with the bluish light of arc-welding spread out through the city. And here I knew that Japan, with her routes to China quite defensible, could be defeated only by invasion.”
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The journey seemed to last a long time. Finally, the train came to a standstill. It was late at night. They were herded onto a bus, which wound up into hills, and then marched along a muddy road for several miles. Their muscles ached. A steady rain soaked them to the bone. They had been given no coats. Jesse DaSilva had no shoes or shirt. He was especially cold and his feet were sore and numb.

Finally, the
Tang
’s nine survivors reached a set of gates and were lined up in front of them. They had arrived at perhaps the most brutal of all POW camps on mainland Japan. The camp had earned its nickname: “Torture Farm.”
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11

Torture Farm

T
HE
Tang
survivors had reached the gates of a secret naval intelligence interrogation center known as Ofuna, situated on the southern outskirts of Yokohama. For a while, they stood and shivered in the cold. “The only thing I had on was a pair of dungarees,” recalled Jesse DaSilva. “I had lost one of my sandals after we were torpedoed and I kicked the other one off before I escaped [from the
Tang
], so my feet were very sore and numb from the cold.” Pete Narowanski was still wearing his swimming trunks and Hawaiian shirt.
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Ofuna was built in a U-shape with the Japanese guards’ quarters in the middle and prisoners’ barracks on each side of a fence. The most recent arrivals were kept on one side of the fence until they had been interrogated. As soon as they arrived, guards made it clear that the
Tang
survivors were not to speak with each other, and especially not with the prisoners on the other side of the fence.
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If they did so, they would be beaten and made to sit in the infamous “Ofuna crouch,” which meant “standing on the ball of your foot, knees half bent and arms extended over the head.”
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Japanese guards took the
Tang
survivors into a holding room where they were each given a dry shirt and pants. “They [also handed out] a pair of tennis shoes that were three sizes too small,” recalled DaSilva. “This was all the clothing I ever received the whole time I was a POW. They also gave us blankets.”
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Then Caverly and Leibold were singled out and told by a guard to follow him to a galley. There, a U.S. Marine pilot handed them a bucket full of warm, lumpy rice and bowls.

The pilot was none other than Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington—a future Medal of Honor recipient. Leibold recognized the hard-living, thirty-four-year-old Boyington immediately, having recently read an article about him in a magazine that included a full-page picture of the soon-to-be legendary ace, credited with twenty-two kills. Boyington’s famous escapades and derring-do would later inspire the hugely popular 1970s television series
Baa Baa Black Sheep
.

Unknown to Leibold, Boyington was recovering from losing eighty pounds since being shot down on January 3, 1944, and then being fished out of the water by the crew of a Japanese submarine. He had befriended a Japanese grandmother, who worked in the camp’s kitchen and helped him pilfer food.
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Leibold and Caverly took the food back and placed bowls of rice and tea in front of their fellow survivors’ cells in a section of the camp called Ekku. Each man had been given his own cell, six feet long by ten feet wide, with a barred window at one end and a raised floor with a three-by-six-foot mat at the other.

The next morning, the men learned that they would not be afforded any of the rights of other POWs.
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“They told us they were classifying us as special prisoners of Japan,” recalled Clay Decker. “They contended that ninety percent of the crews of merchant ships were civilians so we were waging war against their civilian population. We were not entitled to be POWs. We [would] only get half the food rations. They [had not] notified the Red Cross that we were captured.”
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Because they were submariners, the
Tang
survivors were particularly at risk. As one of the camp’s interrogators had already explained to another submariner in the camp: “You have survived the sinking of a submarine. No one survives the sinking of a submarine. No one knows you’re alive. We are going to ask you questions. This man and this man are going to shoot you if you don’t answer the questions, and no one will ever know you were alive.”
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There was at least some pleasant news. “On the nicer side was word that we would start learning Japanese on the following day,” recalled O’Kane. “Discounting the threats, the opportunity to learn a foreign language seemed a fair exchange. . . . We at least had a chance to live.”
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The
Tang
survivors would always remember the Japanese lesson they received the following day. The Japanese had decided to make an example of some of the older prisoners. They were going to show the new arrivals what would happen if they didn’t cooperate during interrogation. “We were not there very long when they opened the gates between the two compounds and had the older prisoners lined up facing the guards,” recalled Jesse DaSilva.
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