Escape From the Deep (22 page)

The survivors watched as Lieutenant Commander J. A. Fitzgerald, captain of the
Grenadier,
and two other emaciated men were then selected for punishment.
¹¹

Fitzgerald had been forced to scuttle his boat after it had been bombed on April 23, 1943, some eighteen months before the
Tang
survivors had been picked up.
¹²
Of the submarine officers in Ofuna, who numbered perhaps a couple of dozen, Fitzgerald had been treated the worst, enduring excruciating torture on an almost daily basis. According to Vice Admiral Lockwood, this had included “beatings, water cures, and standing at attention or in strained positions—hands over heads with knees bent—for hours on end . . . clubs, pencils between the fingers, the blade of a penknife shoved underneath the fingernails. . . . The water cure given to Fitzgerald consisted of tying him face up on a bench with his head hanging over the end. Then his feet were elevated and water poured from a teakettle into his nostrils. A hand over his mouth forced him to swallow the water, and when he was judged to be sufficiently full of water, a club beating would be administered. Usually he became unconscious during this last torture, whereupon they would revive him and try questioning again. When this was unsuccessful, another clubbing followed. The miracle is that he survived and kept his reason.”
¹³

Now Fitzgerald and others were to be beaten to within a breath of life. Three of the biggest guards stepped forward. One grabbed a club and went to work, beating Fitzgerald and the others across the buttocks. The bat swung through the air until the men could take the beating no more and collapsed. Caverly was so disgusted that he vomited. “It made me sick when they beat Fitzgerald and those guys,” he remembered.
¹⁴

“After watching this I knew what could be expected if we didn’t do what we were told,” recalled Jesse DaSilva.
¹⁵

Fitzgerald was knocked into unconsciousness. Other guards were not satisfied, however, and grabbed the men who had collapsed and held them up so they could be beaten some more. The stunned
Tang
survivors were then marched back to their cells while the head guard proceeded to kick the three men, even though they were out cold.

O’Kane and his men believed, incorrectly as it turned out, that the men had been beaten to death.
¹⁶
It was a terrifying introduction to Ofuna, where the most primitive methods were used to extract information from men whom the Japanese considered to be war criminals.

THEN IT BEGAN. On their third day in Ofuna, the
Tang
survivors were summoned one by one for interrogation. O’Kane had advised them to cooperate with the Japanese: “Anything the Japs ask you, answer them. Don’t tell them a lie. Don’t let them catch you in a lie. Anything that you know, you can rest assured they already know. I’m the guy they’re after.”
¹⁷

Jesse DaSilva may have been the first to be questioned. He was taken to a small room with a table and two chairs. A Japanese officer sat opposite DaSilva. “He was very polite and could speak very good English,” recalled DaSilva. “He would offer me a cigarette and ask me how everything was. He told me he had been educated in the U.S. He would ask me the same questions over and over as I would give him the same answers [that] he would not accept. Then he let me leave. This only happened a few times. I guess he figured I didn’t know anything.”
¹⁸

The interrogators were young and spoke English; some had been students in America. One said he had been to the University of Arkansas. Known as the “quiz kids” by the American prisoners, they were skilled interrogators, trained by the Imperial Japanese Navy’s general staff, and they came out to Ofuna on a daily basis from their headquarters at the Yokosuka naval base. The youngest of the three, known to some of the prisoners as “Handsome Harry” because of his clean-cut looks, smart suit, and polished shoes, had worked from 1934 to 1941 in the office of the Japanese naval attaché in Washington.

Floyd Caverly tried to convince his interrogators that he knew very little about the technical aspects of the
Tang
’s operations—that he was in fact a “dumb-head.”
¹⁹
Of course, his knowledge of the latest techniques in sonar and radar made him, after O’Kane, the most important source of potentially crucial information. So when he was asked about his role on the
Tang,
Caverly said that his main responsibility was to replace broken lightbulbs and fuses after a depth-charging.

What was Caverly’s rating?

Caverly explained that he was a
Dinkyshuzinski
—a light-bulb repairman.

Caverly was shown an instruction book for the
Tang
’s radar.

“I don’t understand those books too well,” replied Caverly. “I don’t read too well.”

And so it went on until finally the interrogator looked at the guards in the room in frustration.

“Get him the hell out of here.”
²⁰

All the
Tang
survivors said that depth-charging had been the cause of the
Tang
’s loss. They also let the Japanese believe that they were part of a wolf pack. This was crucial. Indeed, if the Japanese knew that the
Tang
alone had sunk so many ships on the night of October 24-25, they might have quickly paid with their lives or, at the very least, been beaten like Fitzgerald.

When Larry Savadkin’s turn came, he tried to confuse his interrogators with false information: “I just kept telling the interrogators I was a ‘prospective’ engineering officer. I really didn’t know much about the submarine. It didn’t seem to matter what you told the questioner, just so they could keep filling out papers to send back to Tokyo. I made the wildest statements about [the] speed and power of our ship. My machinist made wild statements in the other direction.”
²¹

When Clay Decker and Jesse DaSilva were then asked about Savadkin’s statements, one of them replied: “Well, you know, Mr. Savadkin—just a greenhorn, doesn’t know a thing.”
²²

AS WITH CAPTAIN FITZGERALD of the
Grenadier,
special treatment was reserved for the
Tang
’s Dick O’Kane. When asked how many ships he had sunk, O’Kane said five from five patrols. His interrogators at first appeared to be satisfied by this answer. But then they found a newspaper report on the
Tang
. O’Kane was brought back for further questioning. A sergeant was soon standing before O’Kane, wielding a club the size of a baseball bat.

“We have some good news for you,” said an interrogating officer. “The army football team beat the navy today. . . . And we have some other news . . . about the USS
Tang
.”

“Oh, is that right?” replied O’Kane.

“Yes, it just got awarded the presidential unit citation for sinking 110,000 tons.”

It was obvious—the
Tang
had sunk far more than five Japanese ships. And now the Japanese knew it. The sergeant lashed out and O’Kane was quickly clubbed unconscious.

At some point, O’Kane regained his senses.

Floyd Caverly was huddling up for warmth when he heard O’Kane talking to a guard as he was brought back to his cell. O’Kane knew the guard could not understand what he was saying, but he wanted his men to overhear him.

“Hey, we were awarded the unit citation.”

Caverly heard, as did the others. For a while at least, the news managed to lift their spirits.
²³

THE BITE OF WINTER was in the air. It was mid-November and the
Tang
survivors felt the cold all the more because of their inadequate clothing.
²⁴

The highlight of their first weeks in captivity was a hot bath, by now the only thing that managed to get any feeling back in Jesse Da Silva’s frostbitten feet.
²⁵
But bath time was not so pleasant for some men who were singled out for humiliation. Bill Leibold would vividly recall Hayes Trukke being picked on: “The Japanese had placed curtains over the showers but they pulled them aside. We were naked. Trukke had a large penis, and they all pointed to it.”
²⁶
Floyd Caverly also remembered the incident: “He was pretty well-hung for a little guy. They’d point at him and then they’d point at me and say, ‘Look at that little bastard.’ ”
²⁷

But it was at night, when drunken guards would roam Ofuna’s corridors looking for “sport,” that the men were most abused.
²⁸
“The guards would sneak in and whack you with a club when you were sound asleep,” recalled Floyd Caverly. “They didn’t give a damn where they hit you. Sometimes they’d even hit you in the back of the head and knock you cold. One night I was beaten. Two vertebrae got cracked.”
²⁹

The guards’ favorite weapon was a cherry club shaped like a baseball bat. After interrogation, if the
Tang
survivors had not been cooperative, recalled Bill Leibold, “a mark was made on your cell door. You could expect a ‘visit’ by one of two guards with [clubs] during the night. . . . Mistreatment was a daily affair.”
³⁰

Those with the toughest backgrounds, such as Pete Narowanski, seemed to hold up fairly well. But no matter how resilient they were, the men knew they could last only so long. They could see it in one another’s sallow, jaundiced features; in the bloated joints caused by beriberi; in the yellow, rotting teeth of friends who no longer smiled. They were slowly wasting away, losing strength and stamina ounce by ounce, as all men do who have been placed on a starvation diet.
³¹

BACK IN AMERICA that November, the
Tang
survivors’ families waited for news from their loved ones. They did not know yet that the
Tang
was reported missing.

Fellow U.S. submariners were, by contrast, already in mourning. “We of the submarine force grieved silently . . . at the news that
Tang
was no more,” recalled Ned Beach, who would write several best-selling books about the Silent Service, including the classic
Run Silent, Run Deep
. “With submarines, this news is not the sudden receipt of specific information; it is the gradual realization that it is a day or two since a certain boat should have reported in from patrol.”

The submarine force knew early on that the
Tang
had disappeared, but not what had happened to her and the crew. Rumors started to circulate. The
Tang
had attacked a large convoy in shallow water. The
Tang
had battled several destroyers escorting the convoy. She had sunk many ships but had been caught in the open in shallow water. She had attacked several boats in a harbor while on the surface at night and had been sunk by shore batteries.

Murray Frazee, who had been the
Tang
’s executive officer on her first four patrols, was working in Pearl Harbor that winter. Through various intelligence sources, he discovered that the
Tang
had been lost in enemy action. But he was also informed that codebreakers had learned that there had been survivors.
³²
“I was told very confidentially by a senior officer,” recalled Frazee, “who got the word from the intelligence staff . . . that the
Tang
had been sunk by her own torpedo, only nine of the eighty-seven-man crew survived, and that O’Kane was a prisoner of war.”

Frazee longed to tell O’Kane’s wife, Ernestine, but he decided not to. To prevent the Japanese from realizing that the Allies had broken their codes, Frazee could not say a word. It was an agonizing decision that would haunt him to the end of his life. “All I could do was bite my tongue,” he recalled. “If the Japanese ever suspected that we were breaking their codes, they would have changed everything, and we would be back at square one. So Ernie O’Kane . . . had to suffer.”
³³

Ernestine and her family, and the wives and families of eight other men, could not know that there was reason for hope. They could not know that they should wait until the end of the war, that there was at least a slim chance that their son or lover or father or husband was still alive and might one day turn up on their front porch.

The decision to remain silent must have been particularly difficult. As executive officer, Frazee had also been mail censor on the first four of the
Tang
’s patrols, and he knew of the men’s families, about their children and their private lives. Perhaps to ease his anguish, Frazee would later send a letter describing the qualities of each man aboard to the families of the
Tang
’s crew. It was the least he could do.

THAT THANKSGIVING OF 1944, there seemed precious little to be grateful for. Indeed, it was a terribly sad time for the relatives and wives who finally learned that the
Tang
had gone missing.

In Los Angeles, Bill Leibold’s family was traumatized by the news that he was presumed lost at sea. However, his young wife, Grace, and his father were steadfast in their belief that he was still alive.
³⁴
Across town, Jesse DaSilva’s relatives were not so convinced and decided to hold a memorial service for him at their Lutheran church.
³⁵