Escape From the Deep (28 page)

At the dedication ceremony, Congressman Tom Allen addressed a sizable crowd.

“Today,” said Allen, “we have devalued terms like ‘hero’ and ‘courage,’ applying them loosely to athletes with multimillion dollar contracts and movie stars whose feats are no more than celluloid fantasies. The destroyer we launch today [celebrates] a genuine hero from an age when heroism truly meant something.”
¹³

When interviewed by the local press, Ernestine said her husband had rarely talked with her about the war. In her eyes, he had been a homebody, a great cook. He had not had “much interest” in the medals and other honors showered upon him.

Then, she added, reflectively, “The hardest thing for him the rest of his life was that he came home and his men didn’t.”
¹⁴

In the newspaper report describing the launching, it was pointed out that O’Kane’s first submarine “was sunk four months after O’Kane left to become executive officer of the USS
Wahoo
. That vessel, too, was sunk after O’Kane left.”
¹⁵
It was only his last submarine, the
Tang,
that had sunk with him still on board.

All his adult life, O’Kane was honored for his bravery. Over and over, it was pointed out that, in Mush Morton’s words, he had been “the bravest man.”
¹⁶
That may have been true. But as far as O’Kane had been concerned, he had simply made fewer errors than others. “There’s no margin for mistakes in submarines,” he had told the
Tang
’s crew over and over. “You’re either dead or alive.”
¹⁷

PETE NAROWANSKI DIED the same day as Dick O’Kane, of a heart attack in his sleep. “That’s the way it was with Pete,” observed Clay Decker. “Wherever the commander went, he followed.”
¹⁸

Narowanski’s daughter, Jackie, recalled that her father had been hurt deep inside and permanently changed by what had happened to him in Ofuna: “Sometimes he would take me for a drive when I was a small kid and say nothing for hours on end. He never talked about what had happened in the war until he went to one of the last reunions of the
Tang
survivors in the early nineties. He then told me he could still remember the sound of rats scurrying around when he had been tied up and blindfolded in a wooden shack.”
¹⁹

After the war, Narowanski had become something of a loner. He had married a Russian woman in the late 1940s, mostly to please his mother, but the marriage lasted less than a year. A chronic gambler, Narowanski then took to “playing the horses all the time,” recalled Floyd Caverly. “He used to go up and down the East Coast, following the horses. He found a horse and if it made a little money for him he would follow it up and down. Anytime his horse moved, well Old Pete went with him.”
²⁰
On a clear afternoon in 1988, he finally hit the big time. The track was fast and the odds very long, but Pete Narowanski was in luck. He went home that evening with thirty-four thousand dollars in his pocket, having won a Trifecta.
²¹

Narowanski loved to swim and hunt well into old age. “He grew up in the water,” recalled his daughter. “He was always an avid swimmer. He was still muscular, still in great shape, when he died—the same day his captain passed away.”
²²

Jackie was still close to her father when he died. She knew that his wartime experiences, and the friendships he had formed with his fellow
Tang
survivors, were the most important of his life. “At the last reunion my father attended, I went along to meet the other men. They were lively, happy, and still glad they had gotten to come home.”

CLAY DECKER AND JESSE DASILVA increasingly lived in the past as they got closer to death. Among the nine survivors, they were the most active in veterans’ organizations, perhaps because they had left the navy soon after the war and had all the more reason, and time, to become nostalgic. DaSilva eventually became president of the National Association of U.S. Submarine Veterans of World War II.

On a return visit to Pearl Harbor late in life, he went aboard the USS
Bowfin
in Honolulu. “Seeing that boat brought back a lot of old memories,” he said before adding that it was a miracle that he survived the
Tang
’s sinking and then Japanese imprisonment.

DaSilva had worked as a pressman at the
Los Angeles Times
from 1946 until retirement.
²³
He was the only one of the
Tang
survivors who wanted to return to the Formosa Strait to find out what had happened to the
Tang
. “I have a desire to go back and dive down and see exactly where we were hit,” DaSilva said in 1992. “I would not want to disturb anything. I’d like to place a wreath in honor of the men who are still there, put it over the sheers. The
Tang
should be treated like the
Arizona
.”
²⁴

DaSilva asked himself many times why he had survived when others had not. “Why me? I haven’t come up with an answer. Why was I saved? I was saved for a purpose but I have not put my finger on it. I don’t think I ever will.”
²⁵

DaSilva thought he might have found out why by the time he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1998. He had perhaps been spared so he could pass on the story of the
Tang
and her crew to others, in particular to relatives of the men who didn’t come back. To that end, he managed to track down the son of Glen Haws, his best friend on the
Tang.
Buck Haws had been born during the
Tang’
s final patrol. He had never even been held by his father. DaSilva was able to tell him all he could.
²⁶

DaSilva’s daughter, Joyce Paul, was with him at the end when he died of lymphoma. “While my father had a very painful last five months of his life while the lymphoma was killing him,” she recalled, “I saw God work in wonderful ways, allowing my father to ask forgiveness where needed and say good-bye to his many friends.” The visit to Haws’s son, she believed, had resolved any feelings of survivor’s guilt.
²⁷

In 2000, two years after DaSilva died, the
Kursk,
the Russian nuclear submarine, sank in the Barents Sea. The world’s press suddenly went looking for anyone who had escaped from a sunken submarine. Only one man was still alive of those who had done so from the
Tang
. “I know what’s going through those boys’ minds,” seventy-nine-year-old Clay Decker told
USA Today
. “We knew when we went aboard the submarine that we might end up with this iron cylinder being our tomb.”
²⁸

Not one of the
Kursk
’s 116 sailors survived.

Before he died in 2003, Clay Decker said that the war often felt as if it had been a dream. But every so often it would all come surging back.
²⁹
For many years, like most of the other
Tang
men, he had struggled with post-traumatic stress, waking up some nights in a cold sweat. The experience would last only a few minutes, but the memory of escaping from the deep had become, if anything, more and more vivid as the years passed.

THE PAST ALSO HAUNTED Larry Savadkin to the end. Although he had survived the sinking of two vessels, he continued his career in the navy, going on to command his own submarine, the SS- 302,
Sabalo
. In early 1953, he and his crew encountered a fierce typhoon in the Sea of Japan, reminiscent of the one the
Tang
had endured on her final patrol. Under Savadkin’s command, the
Sabalo
rode out the storm and then docked in Yokosuka in Japan. The visit bought back vivid memories.

Savadkin reminisced about the
Tang
with Lieutenant Robert Bell, the
Sabalo
’s engineering and diving officer, joking with him that the
Tang
had made her “fastest dive” after she had been struck by her own torpedo.

While in Yokosuka, Savadkin left the ship to see if he could find Ofuna. Lieutenant Bell remembered how Savadkin located the camp, despite the fact that the prisoners had always been blindfolded when they went out the gates. “He orientated himself by the position of the huge electrical power cables,” recalled Bell. “Using the same technique, he found the general area, but the Japanese had rotated the buildings and changed the streets. They did this probably out of shame and fear. Nevertheless, Larry found where he had been and proved it by tearing up the floorboards and finding a Red Cross package he had hidden years before to keep the guards from stealing it.”
³⁰

Savadkin was not tied to submarines, and after the
Sabalo
served on the carrier USS
Valley Forge
. He then worked as an officer in the Unconventional War Department and held high-level advisory positions in Istanbul and Belgium. He retired in 1972 and spent the last years of his life in an elegant home overlooking a golf course in San Marcos, California. Like O’Kane, he suffered from Alzheimer’s before he died in 2007.

Before Savadkin died, his younger sister, Barbara, wondered why he was sometimes in such mental distress. After talking with Bill Leibold, she realized that her brother was experiencing flashbacks to his time as a prisoner of war, when he had been beaten so often and without warning, often until he lost count of the blows.
³¹

FLOYD CAVERLY HAD ALSO STAYED in the navy after the war. He said nothing about his injured back, afraid he would not be let back into the submarine service. “Two vertebrae had been cracked and grown back together badly,” he recalled. “The pain was terrible.”
³²
Caverly finally retired from the navy after he was asked to go on a carrier: “I had been in the submarine service and didn’t want to go. . . . So I said ‘No. I have my twenty [years] in, so I’m going to quit.’”
³³

In 2008, aged ninety, Floyd Caverly lived with his second wife in a small town in central Oregon, delighting in his great-grand-children and still in regular contact with Bill Leibold, the only other living survivor from the
Tang
. He had lost none of the sharp humor that had made him so popular on the
Tang
.

Caverly still had nightmares about his time in Japan. He could still vividly recall the beatings he suffered, which had caused him daily pain for sixty-two years. “They would start beating your back, or your ribs if you were sleeping on your back. They’d hit you right across the stomach, or across the pelvis with that damn club. This was funny to them. You’d hear them laughing and giggling and telling one another about it.”
³⁴

At age eighty-five, when asked to look back on his many years in the navy, Bill Leibold was just as proud as his last surviving crew-mate, Floyd Caverly, of his time on the
Tang.
It seemed somehow fitting that these two men were still able to argue and joke about who actually kept who alive that night long ago in October 1944.

Both were modest, reticent men—and submariners to their core. They were not the kind to make grandiose statements or dwell on the broader significance of their roles aboard World War II’s greatest American submarine. Among the few survivors of a unique breed of naval warrior, they had belonged to the American navy’s last corsairs, men whose antecedents had defeated the British in hit-and-run raids, stealing away at dead of night or under a smoke screen.

THE LAST TWO SURVIVORS of the
Tang
remained in close contact. Bill Leibold also stayed in touch with the O’Kane family, particularly with Ernestine and her daughter Marsha. When Ernestine became too frail to talk on the telephone, Leibold began to check up on her through Marsha. He had known Marsha practically all her life, since she was just five years old and had stood on the bridge of the
Tang
during a trial run in 1943 and stared at the Golden Gate Bridge passing above her. Several reunions, countless phone calls over the years, and ever more poignant memories had created a powerful bond.

To this day, Marsha remains convinced that Leibold and her father had a pact as prisoners: whoever survived would take care of the other’s family. She knows this must be true because she nursed her father in his last years, often walking with him along a local beach that he loved, talking with him about the past, about his time as a prisoner and his great affection for “Boats,” as he still called Leibold.

As a child, Marsha had watched her father fly-fish in the Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite. After the war, when she was a teenager, he had taught her to swim every stroke expertly. He had even made her practice staying afloat in the cold waters of the Merced River in California so that she would be able to survive, just as he had, if she found herself in a similar situation.

Eventually, father and daughter could no longer go near rivers or the ocean together. As he lost his final battle—against Alzheimer’s—the mere sight of water would transport him back to that terrible night in 1944 when he had survived, unlike so many of his men. “To the very end, my father suffered tremendous survivor’s guilt,” Marsha recalled in 2007. “He talked to me about it a lot. He felt that he had not lived up to the naval creed. He had not gone down with his boat.”