Escape From the Deep (6 page)

“All ahead two-thirds,” ordered O’Kane. “Ease the rudder to fifteen. Meet her. Steer two-one-zero.”
³²

The
Tang
was headed the right way. After enduring a few more massive waves, she had completed the turn. In every compartment, the sense of relief was palpable. The worst was surely over now? The typhoon continued to rage outside, but soon the
Tang
was rolling from side to side less and less violently.

O’Kane asked for an injury report. It wasn’t long before Doc Larson reported back that all hands were unharmed. The challenge now was to keep the
Tang
headed into the seas. For five long hours, the
Tang
’s steersmen worked without complaint as the
Tang
rode the waves.

Floyd Caverly took his turn at the hydraulic wheel in the conning tower, cranking it back and forth. “You sat there and you fought that rudder,” he recalled. “The sub was turning first one way and then the other as it hit big waves and troughs. I tried to keep on course but it was impossible. I just had to keep her heading into the seas in a general direction as much as possible.”
³³

Which way was the storm moving? A crew member tried to open a hatch to get a barometer reading to find out, but the hatch would not budge because of the intense atmospheric pressure outside. So the crew allowed high-pressure air to bleed slowly into the boat until the hatch could be opened. The barometer read 28.4—higher than before. The increase meant the
Tang
was moving away from the heart of the typhoon.
³⁴

Finally, the exhausted crew was able to get some rest. In the forward torpedo room, the mechanics could now lie in their bunks above the torpedoes without clinging to the railings, knuckles white. They included Torpedoman Pete Narowanksi. The fair-haired, twenty-year-old was blessed with good luck, it seemed, having already lived to tell the tale of the sinking of his first ship. On the afternoon of November 12, 1942, Narowanski had been aboard the USS
Hugh L. Scott,
a troop transport, when she was hit on the starboard side by a single torpedo launched by a particularly deadly U-boat.
U-130
was captained by the formidable Ernst Kals, who had sunk no fewer than seventeen ships on his previous four patrols, an impressive record to compare with the
Tang
’s own.

The USS
Scott
had been at anchor at Fedelah Point in Morocco when one of the five torpedoes fired by Kals exploded, sending flames stabbing into the early evening sky.
³⁵
The order was given to abandon ship as the
Scott
quickly foundered. Narowanski was one of 60 survivors, out of a crew of 119, who were pulled out of the frigid water by men in landing craft that had been unloaded on a nearby beach in recent days. A Knight’s Cross recipient, Ernst Kals survived the
U-130
’s patrol, but the
U-130
was sunk, under the command of a new captain, along with fifty-three of her crew after being depth-charged west of the Azores by the USS
Champlin
on March 12, 1943. By then, Pete Narowanski was back in the States, training at the New London submarine school in Connecticut.

Narowanski had completed two patrols aboard the USS
Halibut
before joining the
Tang
on her third patrol, knowing that she would return to San Francisco, his favorite liberty, for an extensive refit. In Pearl Harbor, he had met one of the
Tang
’s crew members who was looking to get off the boat. “He was the third lookout on-board and didn’t want to go out again,” explained Narowanski. “So I arranged a swap with him.”
³⁶

The son of Russian immigrants, Narowanski had grown up in Baltimore. A devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and an avid hunter before the war, he was among the fittest of the men aboard, one of the few who did not smoke. His quiet, laid-back manner belied a steely determination to overcome every set-back, no matter how daunting. He had been pulled out of the water after the torpedoing of the
Scott
. Now he had weathered one of the worst storms ever recorded. Surely he would not have to endure too much more before the war was over?

4

The Greatest Patrol

D
ICK O’KANE AND HIS MEN had survived all that the ocean could throw at them—their greatest ordeal in over six months of tense action. It was five o’clock in the evening on October 6 when O’Kane finally felt that conditions were calm enough to fire up the diesel engines, and the sound of their reassuring throb once again filled the boat.

Frank Springer plotted a revised course toward the
Tang
’s patrol area in the Formosa Strait; O’Kane ordered full power to make up for lost time and the distance the
Tang
had been forced off course by the typhoon—as much as sixty miles. Going by the observations made by the men on the bridge and Chief Quartermaster Sidney Jones’s recordings, they had been in the eye of one of the fiercest typhoons in living memory, with waves estimated at ninety-five feet. At one point, so huge was the mass of water crashing down on her, the
Tang
’s bridge had been under water for fourteen seconds.

Two days later, on October 8, the
Tang
was well clear of the storm and making steady progress, operating at three-engine speed. Suddenly, lookouts spotted what looked like a plane in the far distance.

Ooga! Ooga!

The
Tang
’s Klaxons sounded the alarm.

Lookouts scrambled from their positions in the sheers and down the hatch, riding on one another’s shoulders as their hands slid down the ladder sides. Within sixty seconds, the
Tang
was below the surface. The plane had in all likelihood been a bird on the horizon, but O’Kane was taking no risks in being discovered as he closed on the “hot area”—the Formosa Strait.
¹

There was now time for twenty-one-year-old Floyd Caverly to check on his secret distillery. He had set it up in a small space near the bilges. By the time the
Tang
reached San Francisco for her refit following this patrol, he figured he would have a gallon or more of homemade hooch—plenty for a well-deserved shore party.

Bill “Boats” Leibold was well aware of the still but kept its existence secret from O’Kane. He too liked a tipple every now and again, but only when on shore. “We all knew that if the Old Man found out about it,” Leibold said, “we would get our asses kicked out of submarines.”
²
According to others on the
Tang,
Caverly was a master at securing fruit, even grape juice, to distill. “We made a little ‘torpedo juice’—that’s what we called it,” recalled Caverly. “It was run off and distilled and then the pharmacist’s mate, Larson, would check it for purity. We made some good stuff.”
³

Caverly was on good terms with Bill Leibold, but others on the boat trod warily around the chief boatswain’s mate, who was as driven as his captain and demanded the highest standards. Not for nothing was Leibold referred to by some of the men as “that S.O.B.” “It always made me feel good that the guys called me Sweet Old Bill,” Leibold would later joke.
⁴

The single-minded Californian with an intense stare took his cue from O’Kane when dealing with the enlisted men under his charge. “I thought Leibold was related to Hitler the way he cracked the whip on that boat,” recalled Clay Decker, the broad-faced ex-miner from Colorado.

Decker was intensely proud that he had become fully qualified as a submariner, earning a pair of silver dolphins on the right sleeve of his shore whites after just his first patrol. He had reason to be pleased with himself—earning the dolphins as a torpedoman, under Leibold’s supervision, had been hard work. “I broke down after the first patrol and went from the torpedo room to the black gang [the motor mechanics] because he [Leibold] did not have any authority in the engine room,” explained Decker.
⁵

THERE THEY WERE, far off in the distance—the towering thirteen thousand-foot mountains of Formosa. They had arrived in the hot area. It was noon on October 10 when one of the
Tang
’s lookouts made the landfall through his powerful binoculars. With the jagged peak of Yonakuni Shima rising to the
Tang
’s starboard, O’Kane ordered an increase in speed. The
Tang
went to four engines to get into the Formosa Strait before nightfall.

The following morning, at about 4, the
Tang
made her first contact. O’Kane was lying in his bunk, looking at the luminous numbers on his cabin clock, when one of the crew, sent by the duty chief, entered his cabin.

“We’ve got a ship, Captain,” he whispered.

It was less than two hours after the
Tang
had reached its patrol area and already it had closed on its first target. This fifth patrol promised rich pickings indeed.

A pulse of excitement passed through the boat.
⁶
Veteran submariner Ned Beach would later describe how it felt to begin a chase as engines roared hypnotically and waves slapped against the hull: “The vibration communicated to the soles of your feet sets your pulses jumping and your heart beating faster, and it all adds up to the anthem of the chase, which drums in your mind, growing ever louder and more powerful, beating in an ever-rising tympanic crescendo which drugs your senses and drives you beyond normal capabilities, which takes possession of you, wipes out all external considerations, and makes itself the undisputed master of your soul.”
⁷

O’Kane hobbled from his cabin to the red-lit control room.

“Range seventeen thousand, closing,” said a torpedoman’s mate named John Foster from Detroit.

The general alarm, referred to as “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” sounded throughout the submarine.

O’Kane patiently waited until just after dawn. Then a lookout got a clear view of the target, a modern diesel freighter, loaded down and therefore providing a low silhouette on the skyline.

Bill Leibold helped O’Kane, who now walked by putting his weight onto the heel of his broken foot, up to the bridge. Together they tracked the enemy with their binoculars.

The
Tang
was soon in the perfect position to make a submerged attack.

“Clear the bridge!”

Klaxons sounded.

Ooga! Ooga!

The bridge cleared fast, men dropping below, lookouts leaving the bridge last.

The words “battle stations” passed quietly from compartment to compartment, and men went to their assigned positions.

In the control room, where the main systems for diving and surfacing were housed, Larry Savadkin trimmed the boat as she dived to forty-five feet, opening vents that allowed air to escape and tons of saltwater to rush in through flood ports. A few feet from where Savadkin stood was a “Christmas tree”—a panel of lights that showed the status of every opening in the hull. All were green, indicating that the
Tang
was watertight.

Savadkin leveled the
Tang
so that the SJ (surface-search) radar’s antenna was still above the water.

Adjacent to the control room was the cramped radio room, often thick with the smell of food from the nearby galley. Floyd Caverly sat in it now with his earphones on, listening to the sound of the enemy boat’s screws, timing it to the metronome. For a few seconds, he switched the noise to a speaker so the crew could hear it.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Thank God it was not a destroyer, whose screws made a heart-stopping
swish, swish, swish.

Idle conversation had long since stopped. Faces were etched with tension in the control room, where O’Kane’s tracking team plotted the enemy’s course on a chart table lit from above by a single, metal-shaded bulb.

O’Kane directed the
Tang
toward her first target. Frank Springer, standing near him, issued crisp orders to the firing party as the
Tang
closed on the enemy ship. In the maneuvering room, Chief Electrician’s Mate James Culp stood tensely, a little stooped because of painful arthritis, awaiting orders from the control room. He and his electrician’s mates, some wearing protective gloves, now had the key task of directing the
Tang
’s electrical current. Culp looked carefully at the amperage, knowing that if O’Kane ordered “full ahead” it would put a dramatic drain on the batteries.

Through his sea-splashed periscope, O’Kane could now see his target heading for the shore.

“Make ready tubes one, two, and three forward,” said O’Kane. “And if there’s a wide zig, tubes seven, eight, and nine aft.”

In the forward torpedo room, Pete Narowanski and muscle-bound Hayes Trukke, as well as the other torpedo mechanics, knew their six “fish” would be the first of the patrol to be fired. They let compressed air—six hundred pounds per square inch—into the tanks to use in firing each torpedo, and flooded one, two, and three tubes.

“Open the outer doors.”

The doors were opened.

Narowanksi stood beside the torpedo that was his responsibility, his hand over a firing pin he could use if the automatic firing system in the conning tower didn’t work.

O’Kane still stood at the periscope, his face pressed to its eyepiece in utter concentration. In the dawn twilight, he could make out a decent-sized cargo ship.

The
Tang
began her approach. Finally, the target was just where O’Kane wanted it. He placed his periscope’s hairline sight just aft of its stacks.