Escape From the Deep (26 page)

“We can’t move him yet.”

Leibold did not want to leave O’Kane on his own. But he also wanted to go home. He tried to talk to O’Kane but without success—the captain was too weak and too heavily sedated. Leibold was unable to say goodbye and left reluctantly, thinking he might never see O’Kane again.

THE NEWS MEDIA that accompanied Harold Stassen and his liberators included a
New York Times
reporter, Julius Ochs Adler. By coincidence, Adler’s editor was from O’Kane’s hometown in New Hampshire. When he discovered that O’Kane was among the liberated, the editor asked Adler to also wire his report from Japan directly to the O’Kane family.

Ernestine was overjoyed when she read the following wire story:

Aboard the
USS. Reeves
, in Tokyo Bay, August 30:

The saga of the submarine
Tang
and her nine survivors cannot be retold too often. It ranks among the epics of American naval history. In daring raids in Formosa Strait this little ship sank thirteen enemy ships, including one destroyer, totaling more than 100,000 tons, between October 10 and October 24, 1944. Commander Richard H. O’Kane . . . told quietly and without emotion today . . . about the last day of his daring craft.
²⁰

The story listed the names of all nine survivors.

At last, the waiting was over. Her husband had definitely survived captivity. She did not yet know that he was lying, hovering between life and death, on a hospital ship in Tokyo Bay.

PART FOUR

Back from the Deep

Ex communi periculo, fraternitas
(From common peril, brotherhood)

15

Back from the Deep

S
EPTEMBER 2, 1945, TOKYO BAY—Vice Admiral Lockwood had waited a long time for this moment. During the dark days of 1942, when the Japanese had stormed across the Pacific, their formal surrender had seemed only a distant possibility. But now Lockwood was among the Allied victors, in the front line of the top brass aboard the battleship
Missouri
in Tokyo Bay, watching as a Japanese delegation walked to a spot assigned them on the main deck.

General Douglas MacArthur, flanked by Admirals Nimitz and Halsey, stepped to a microphone.

“It is my earnest hope—indeed the hope of all mankind—that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past,” said MacArthur, “a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and fulfillment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance, and justice....”
¹

It was an exceptional speech, the best of MacArthur’s career. The Japanese present were surprised by his magnanimity. One later wondered if their most senior military leaders would have behaved the same way. Only one of them, General Yoshijiro Umezu, had had sufficient honor—and face—to show up.

“And so my fellow countrymen,” MacArthur concluded, “today I report to you that your sons and daughters have served you well and faithfully. . . . They are homeward bound. Take care of them.”
²

THAT SAME DAY, back in America, Ernestine O’Kane wrote to the families of the
Tang
’s lost crew:

You may be sure that there is a constant aching in my heart for each one of you. There are no people finer than you and I feel that I know each of you and my sorrow for you goes deep into my heart. Words are inadequate to tell you what a great part your loved one took in helping to bring the war to its end. I pray each of you may find peace of mind with His help.
³

AFTER THE SURRENDER CEREMONY, Vice Admiral Lockwood was anxious to see his men as they returned to their home base in Pearl Harbor. Larry Savadkin was among the first to arrive back. He had returned on a C-54, as had Clay Decker and several of the other men. Some had looked back through the open doors of C-54s as they flew high above Tokyo. At least one had stood and urinated onto the ashes thousands of feet below.

Savadkin told Lockwood that O’Kane had been treated terribly. But, he added, his skipper had never cracked.
⁴
He had revealed no sensitive information and not a word about Ultra.

A few days later, Lockwood met with O’Kane himself, his “underwater ace of aces.” O’Kane was a shadow of his former self, weighing just eighty-eight pounds. It was obvious that Stassen and his men had arrived just in time.

O’Kane told Lockwood he did not want to return to the States just yet. He wanted to stay in Pearl Harbor to recuperate a little. “He probably felt that his condition was too shocking for his family to see,” explained Lockwood. “He was just skin and bones. His arms and legs looked no bigger than an ordinary man’s wrists, his eyes were a bright yellow from jaundice (the result of rat-contaminated rice, I was told), and the dysentery from which he suffered would have killed him in a few more weeks.”

O’Kane was in the worst shape of all, but plenty of others were pitifully thin and close to death. Lockwood was enraged by their treatment: “It made my blood boil to see this human wreckage returning from the prison camps of an alleged civilized nation, and to compare them with the fat, insolent-looking German and Japanese prisoners I had seen in the United States.”
⁵

BILL LEIBOLD WAS DELIGHTED to be on U.S. soil. He was not only back in Hawaii but also in the same hospital in Pearl Harbor as O’Kane and other
Tang
survivors. Unlike his skipper, he was able to walk around.

A few days after arriving at the hospital, Leibold was escorted to a car where he joined Hayes Trukke and Pete Narowanski. The three survivors were then driven to the submarine base in Honolulu, where they were welcomed by none other than Lockwood himself. Lockwood chatted with them and asked them about their experiences, showing genuine concern, and then awarded Narowanski a Silver Star and presented the others with a submarine combat pin. He also pinned a Purple Heart on Bill Leibold’s chest.

Lockwood offered to put the men up at the Royal Hawaiian hotel. They were welcome to stay and “fatten up a little bit.” But Leibold and his fellow survivors were eager to get home and declined Lockwood’s offer.

Soon enough, they were on their way to the States. When they arrived, they were admitted to the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California.
⁶
When Leibold was weighed, he discovered that he was down to one hundred pounds, seventy less than he had been on the
Tang
.

Dick O’Kane was the only one of the
Tang
survivors to stay on in Hawaii. Six weeks would pass before he was fit enough to be flown across America to the Naval Hospital in New Hampshire, where he would receive medical treatment for many more months before finally returning to duty in early 1946.

FLOYD CAVERLY stepped onto U.S. soil for the first time in almost two years in Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco. Like Bill Leibold, he also went to Oak Knoll Hospital. To his utter consternation, he was placed in a mental ward, the only place where there was a free bed. Caverly fumed—he had survived hell in Japan only to end up in a “nut ward.”

Caverly searched the hospital and found a female nursing officer.

“Madam, I have been locked up for a year,” said Caverly. “I’m not going to be locked up tonight. Open that damned gate and let me out of here.”
⁷

Eventually, Caverly was placed on a different ward. The following day, he tracked down his wife, Leone, who was teaching in a local dental nursing school. It was an intensely joyous reunion with her and their three-year-old daughter, Mary Anne. The last time he had seen Mary Anne, she had not even begun to walk.

Floyd and Leone had spent just a few months together in the five years since they had been married, and Caverly was determined to make up for lost time. “It didn’t take me too damn long to get her pregnant,” he recalled. “We just did what came naturally.”
⁸

Three days after Caverly returned to his home on Sunnydale Avenue in San Francisco, he received a check for a thousand dollars, his life insurance policy payout. He sent the check back with a note: “Try another year . . . I might be dead then but I’m not yet.”
⁹

BILL LEIBOLD’S WIFE, Grace, was working as a clerk in the public records office in Los Angeles that September. One morning, a reporter she knew from the
Los Angeles Times
spotted a teletype that listed a certain “William K. Leibold, Chief Boatswain’s Mate” as being among the liberated Americans. The journalist had visited Grace’s office several times and knew that her husband had gone missing with the
Tang
.
¹⁰
He quickly figured that William K. was in fact William R. Leibold and rushed over to the hall of records where Grace worked. Since receiving a telegram announcing that Leibold was presumed lost, she had heard nothing more of her husband’s fate.

The reporter showed Grace the teletype. The man mentioned had to be her husband.
¹¹
Grace gasped. Could it be true? Then she bit her tongue, trying to hold back her tears.

“Golly, golly! But I never gave up hope that he was alive. I just couldn’t feel he was dead.”
¹²

The journalist from the
Los Angeles Times
had a photographer with him. To this day, Bill Leibold cherishes the photograph he took of Grace, sitting behind a typewriter, wearing a pretty flowered dress, making the “A-okay” sign with one hand, grinning from ear to ear, her eyes sparkling with pure joy.

Grace and Bill were soon able to speak on the telephone. Grace was all for getting in a car and driving up to Oak Knoll Hospital to see her husband, but he discouraged her. He was in bad shape. Like Dick O’Kane, he wanted to regain some strength before seeing his wife again.

A few days later, Leibold arrived in Los Angeles and hailed a taxi that took him to his in-laws’ house, where Grace was living. No one was home, so he sat on the stoop and waited. Suddenly, a familiar car pulled up. It was his old Ford coupe. Grace was driving it. Then his parents and his in-laws arrived in another car. “It was great to see her drive up in my car,” he recalled. “What had kept guys like me going was the hope of that happening. She got out and there were lots of hugs and kisses. My parents were there too—all the family.”
¹³

ACROSS TOWN, another Los Angeles resident was just as happy as Bill Leibold’s young wife and parents. His name was James B. DaSilva, father of Jesse DaSilva, and he too had just discovered that his son was alive.

When a reporter informed him that Jesse was on his way home, he appeared at first not to believe it. The reporter assured him that it was true. The sixty-year-old James DaSilva then fell silent, trying to control his feelings. His wife, Edith, had died three years ago, aged just forty-six, leaving him with two sons, Jesse and Jimmy, both of whom had joined the navy when war broke out. Then there had been that dreadful telegram, and the constant worry that Jimmy, too, would be lost along with Jesse—that his whole family would be dead by war’s end.

But, then, James DaSilva’s smile slowly returned.

“I was sure he’d come back,” he said. “Now I know Jimmy will be alright, too.”
¹⁴

“ FOR SOME OF US it was a long and trying voyage home,” recalled Dick O’Kane. “But once there our recovery was complete. Best of all, our prayers had been answered and we found our families and loved ones fine.”
¹⁵

It was not so happy a homecoming for others among the survivors.

Clay Decker had returned on a C-54 plane, thanks to his famous cellmate, Pappy Boyington, who had arranged for Decker to be flown out of Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, then to Guam, and then to the States. On the morning of September 7, at Alameda Naval Air Station, a crowd of tearful and overjoyed wives and relatives greeted Decker and twenty other men liberated from Japanese camps. The press was also waiting. A photographer snapped Decker holding his four-year-old son, Harry, who was dressed in a child’s navy uniform, and hugging Lucille, his red-headed wife, as he kissed her on the cheek.
¹⁶

Once they were in private, it wasn’t long before Lucille broke the terrible news. As with so many of the wives of the
Tang
’s crew, she had assumed the worst when she had received the missing in action telegram. Since then, she had remarried.

Decker was stunned. “It was a great shock to both of us,” he recalled. “She was shocked to find out that I was alive. I was shocked to find out that I was no longer Papa-san.”
¹⁷

Lucille had not only remarried, she had also collected on Decker’s life insurance for almost six months.
¹⁸
The following months were a heartbreaking period, but Decker managed eventually to gain custody of Harry. “During the times when I was taking beatings,” Decker recalled, “I would say to myself: ‘Let them beat me. I can take this. I’m going to get back to where I see that little boy of mine.’”
¹⁹