Escape From the Deep (3 page)

O’Kane did the usual rounds as the patrol came to an end, inspecting the compartments. In the pump room he was surprised to find a purple stain on a pipe. For several days, Floyd Caverly had frantically tried to get rid of the stain. It had appeared because of a leak from a homemade still that he had secretly installed in the
Tang
. On this patrol the still was producing a powerful hooch made from purple Welch’s grape juice.
²⁸
Thankfully, O’Kane did not inquire about the stain’s source.

A few miles from Pearl Harbor, O’Kane was standing on the bridge when he noticed two other submarines behind the
Tang,
also making for the submarine base there.

One of the subs, the USS
Rasher,
signaled with a light: FORM ONE EIGHT. This meant that the
Tang
was to fall in astern of the signaling boat, which would then enter Pearl Harbor first. The signal was sent by Captain Hank Munson, a brilliant mathematician and Rhodes scholar, who was completing what would turn out to be the second greatest patrol of the Pacific War in terms of tonnage sunk.

Munson was wearing a freshly pressed khaki uniform with a black tie. Above him fluttered a hand-sewn battle flag. His crew was lined up at quarters on the deck before him, as eager as their captain to be the first to reach the ten-ten dock in Pearl Harbor, where successful submarines berthed after grueling patrols. The entire
Rasher
crew deserved to be first after sinking four large ships and an escort carrier. Munson had seniority as a full commander with two navy crosses to his name. By rights, certainly in peacetime, it was his role to lead the submarines back to harbor.

O’Kane turned to his signalman, Edwin Ogden, and told him to pretend that he didn’t understand the command. The following messages then came from the
Tang
: IMI (repeat) and INT (I don’t understand) as Chief Electrician James Culp took the
Tang
to full power and left Munson fuming, far behind in the
Tang
’s wake.

Munson was later said to be outraged by O’Kane’s insubordination and arrogance. But O’Kane couldn’t have cared less as the
Tang
pulled up to the prized ten-ten dock ahead of Munson. He was not the type to be upstaged by any man, certainly not a competing submariner, no matter how brilliant.

2

The Bravest Man

T
WENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD CLAY DECKER lined up with his fellow crew members on the deck as the
Tang
neared the ten-ten dock in Pearl Harbor.
¹
Like the other noncommissioned men, he sported freshly laundered dungarees and a white hat. He could see Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, O’Kane’s commanding officer, standing on the dock beside other submarine big chiefs, waiting to greet the
Tang
.
²

The submarine base’s band played as fifty-four-year-old Lockwood, nicknamed “Uncle Charlie,” welcomed his favorite captain back to American soil and congratulated him on another outstanding patrol. A quick-thinking, incisive leader, Lockwood genuinely cared about his men and they knew it. No man was as experienced in submarine fleet command, none understood more what war beneath the waves truly entailed. Lockwood had captained seven submarines, dating back to the gas-powered pig boats of World War I, before becoming commander of Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet (ComSubPac).

Like the other men in dungarees, some sallow faced, others with deep tans because of their lookout duties, Decker relished every moment of every return to base. In a few minutes, he would be able to gorge on fresh oranges and bananas—it was customary to welcome returning crews with such wartime delicacies. Mail from his attractive young wife, Lucille, back in San Francisco, might be waiting on the dockside. Once he caught up on news about her and his two-year-old son, he could get drunk and enjoy fifteen days of R and R at the swank 425-room Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
³

Decker was planning to get one of the better rooms at the hotel, featuring large lanais that overlooked the beach and Diamond Head; maybe he would get the very suite where none other than movie star Mae West had slept before the war. Before long, Decker would take his first proper shower in weeks, letting the cold, fresh water splash on his head. That night, he would sleep like a baby on a clean, soft bed that did not move at night. He would not have to lie flat on his back to keep from rolling out. He could sleep in until the sun swung past Diamond Head and spilled through the big windows.

For several days, Decker and his fellow crew members ate fresh food and sunbathed.
⁴
Dick O’Kane, however, had little rest other than an afternoon swimming and surfing on a long board. He was busy overseeing the
Tang’
s refit and attending briefings on the progress of the war. He also had the sad task of signing the official transfer for his right-hand man, Murray Frazee, who, after four patrols with the
Tang,
was leaving the submarine, much to O’Kane’s regret. “We had been through much this past year,” O’Kane would later write, “and with results that neither of us could have accomplished without the other. The skipper-exec was a unique relationship in submarines but I was . . . blessed.”
⁵

The
Tang’s
new executive officer was twenty-six-year-old Frank Springer, a highly capable lieutenant whom O’Kane had groomed for command through four remarkable patrols. Tall and lean, Springer had graduated top of his class in submarine school. He made his home with his young wife, Carolyn, in Huntington Park, California. When he joined the
Tang,
crewmates considered him to be a rather humorless, serious-faced torpedo officer.

With men like Springer helping out, the turnabout for the
Tang
was completed in record time. Barely three weeks after returning from the fourth patrol, O’Kane and his crew were ready to set out on their fifth patrol, proud in the knowledge that the
Tang
was now officially the deadliest submarine operating in the Pacific.

O’Kane himself was the most successful captain among Vice Admiral Lockwood’s so-called “underwater aces,” having sunk more ships than any other captain in just four patrols. He and his crew had also been involved in some of the more dramatic incidents of the submarine war in the Pacific, from the rescue of twenty-two downed aviators on the second patrol, to the sinking of a record ten merchant ships, totaling more than thirty-nine thousand tons, on her third outing. All this had been achieved in less than a year since the
Tang
’s commissioning on October 15, 1943, in Mare Island.

RICHARD HETHERINGTON O’KANE was a unique commander, a true maverick in Murray Frazee’s eyes. “Never was there such an aggressive submarine officer as Dick O’Kane,” recalled Frazee. “In fact, there were some who doubted his sanity, at times, in pushing to get the
Tang
out to sea and in contact with the enemy.”
⁶

If O’Kane had any antecedents with which to compare, they would have been the freewheeling frigate captains of John Paul Jones’s early American navy, piratical master sailors who understood that a raider is at his best when destroying commercial boats in bold, hit-and-run attacks.

Born in Dover, New Hampshire, the son of an entomology professor at the University of New Hampshire, O’Kane was raised with the smell of saltwater always in the air. He was the youngest of four children, all of them Irish to the core. A keen sailor as a boy, he was also academically gifted and won a partial scholarship to an elite prep school, Phillips Academy in Andover. At Phillips, he received a classical education—to the end of his life he would be able to recite Latin phrases, French poems, verses from Coleridge’s
The Ancient Mariner
, and some of Robert Frost’s most popular lines.
⁷
He was notable for being one of very few students who yearned for a navy career.

At age nineteen, O’Kane gained entry to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he graduated 264th in his class of 464 midshipmen in 1934. The academy’s yearbook noted that O’Kane was an elegant dancer, popular with the ladies, a first-class skier and tennis player, and a “Yankee and proud of it.”
⁸

O’Kane first served on a heavy cruiser, the USS
Chester,
and then for two long years on an old four-stack destroyer, the USS
Pruitt
. During an overhaul in Mare Island in June 1936, O’Kane married a petite young woman named Ernestine Groves, whom he had first met as a young boy in Durham; until O’Kane had been nine years old, the two had in fact been neighbors. Ernestine was also the child of an academic at the University of New Hampshire.

O’Kane opted for Submarine School in New London, Connecticut, where he spent six months working his hardest, knowing that the top third of his class would automatically be assigned to active submarine duty. Among his peers was Slade Cutter, a brilliant football star, destined like O’Kane to be one of World War II’s finest captains. O’Kane graduated in the top ten of his class and began his submarine service on the USS
Argonaut,
the largest submarine in the U.S. Navy at the time, designed as a mine-layer.

The
Tang
’s twenty-one-year-old chief boatswain’s mate, Bill Leibold, a hard-driving California native, had also served on the
Pruitt
before joining the
Tang
for her first patrol. “O’Kane had established a reputation because he had been the executive officer on the
Wahoo
with ‘Mush’ Morton,” he recalled. “Everybody knew about Morton and the
Wahoo.
Morton was a legend, the most talked about submarine captain.”
⁹

In fact the entire Silent Service knew of the big-fisted, Dudley “Mush” Morton and his brilliant sidekick, Dick O’Kane. Both were said to be equally obsessed with sinking enemy ships. Together, they had reinvented the rules of submarine combat, taking the war to the enemy’s front porch during their five patrols together.

Before they devised these new submarine combat techniques, the navy had used a standard procedure for attack. As Leibold explained, “A submarine was to stay submerged, not to be seen. It would fire from periscope depth, not when surfaced. There was even an assigned speed of approach. It was all cut and dried in the official manual. Then along came Mush Morton, who just ignored it. He told O’Kane: ‘Your job is to trail that ship and I’ll maneuver the boat, and we’ll do it from the surface . . . I don’t give a damn if it is daylight or pitch dark.’ The enemy was never looking for you on the surface. Morton and O’Kane took advantage of this. The brass back in Pearl would say: ‘They can’t do this! What the hell is going on?’ But Morton came back with record numbers of ships sunk. It was no wonder—he damn near sunk himself.”
¹⁰

Before the
Tang
’s first patrol, O’Kane had gathered his men and repeated Mush Morton’s maxim: “It is our job to sink as many boats as possible. That’s how we can get the war over with as soon as possible.”
¹¹
O’Kane had also made it clear that he would require every man to give his all, but in return he would make life as comfortable as possible for them when they were not sending enemy shipping to the bottom. And sure enough, he was a man of his word, managing to get hold of an ice-cream maker and baking oven for the
Tang
.
¹²
Steak and fries followed by fresh vanilla ice cream and baked hot apple pie would be standard fare aboard the
Tang
. Whatever he could wheedle, O’Kane obtained—whether it was fresh fruit for the mess or the latest radar and sonar technology for the crew in the conning tower.

Before going to sea, the
Tang
was arguably the best equipped, best stocked, most up-to-date Balao-class diesel electric submarine in the Pacific: a superlative fighting machine, capable of over twenty knots when surfaced, almost nine when submerged, powered by four state-of-the-art Fairbanks-Morse pistol diesel engines, and armed with twenty-four Mark 18 torpedoes carrying 565 pounds of Torpex high explosives.

O’Kane had cut no corners in preparing his new boat and crew for combat, pushing both to the limit. He knew that the Japanese were becoming more and more skilled in antisubmarine techniques. Indeed, they had caught up fast. Until 1943, they had been ineffective on the whole in combating U.S. submarines. The depth charges they had used had not been as powerful as American ones and had been set to explode only at depths above 150 feet. This meant that as long as boats went to 300 feet during evasion, they stood little chance of being sunk by a depth charge.

It was a closely guarded secret that had saved many lives—the kind of intelligence that reinforced the Silent Service’s determination to keep quiet about its activities. “We operated under such secrecy and anonymity,” explained Vice Admiral Lockwood, “that only the barest mention was made of these men of lonely heroism, who fought the war not in the newspaper headlines but sealed off beneath the sea, in great steel hulls that sometimes became their tombs. We preferred to publish nothing at all, not even the score of enemy ships sunk by returning submarines. We wanted no part of the Navy Department’s campaign for play-by-play account of the war. We wanted the Japanese to think their existing methods were highly effective, that another of our subs had gone to Davy Jones’s locker.”
¹³

Only rarely were the press allowed anywhere near a submarine captain, and then it was only for propaganda purposes: By 1944, the American public had largely forgotten that after Pearl Harbor, although three aircraft carriers had survived the attack, the submarines were the last line of defense—all that had prevented the Japanese from gaining mastery of the Pacific.