Escape From the Deep (7 page)

“Stand by for constant bearings,” said O’Kane. “Up scope!”

“Constant bearing—mark!”

“Set,” said fresh-faced Lieutenant Mel Enos as he pressed a button.

Enos was standing nearby, operating the torpedo data computer, which automatically computed and set the correct angle of fire on the torpedoes’ controlling gyroscopes. In pressing the button, he had locked in the enemy’s last bearing.
⁸

“Fire!” O’Kane ordered.

Frank Springer’s palm hit the firing plunger.

There was a jolting
whoosh
followed by another and a shudder as compressed air forced two torpedoes out of their tubes.

The sonar officer tracked the course of the torpedoes.

All hot, straight, and normal.

The quartermaster counted the seconds as the Mark 18 electric torpedoes sped toward the target at twenty-six knots. The run was set for forty-seven seconds.

“. . . 45, 44, 43 . . . ”

The entire crew, it seemed, waited with bated breath.

“. . . 19, 18, 17 . . . ”

Caverly turned on a speaker and switched between the sound of the enemy’s screws and the high-pitched whine of the torpedoes.

Whoom! Whoom!
Two direct hits. The cargo ship, the 1,658-ton
Josho Maru
, exploded and quickly slipped below the waves, stern first. O’Kane looked through the periscope. A breeze blew a cloud of smoke clear of the
Josho Maru.
All he could see was the ship’s bow, slipping into the ocean in the dawn light.

Ooga! Ooga! Ooga!

Klaxons sounded. The mottled camouflage grey of the
Tang
broke the surface, her shears and then bridge and finally guns emerging from the roiling waters. A hatch lifted as water drained from the bridge, and O’Kane and others emerged carrying binoculars. There were plenty of pieces of flotsam and jetsam, even some swamped landing craft, but no survivors.

Fortunately for the
Tang,
her cover had not been blown. The Japanese attributed the
Josho Maru
’s sudden loss to being hit by a mine. They had no idea that an American submarine had entered the Formosa Strait. For a while longer, the
Tang
could maneuver with relative impunity. And that was what O’Kane did, ordering the
Tang
to cruise on the surface toward heavily trafficked waters to the southwest.

It was some five hours later, around 10 a.m. on October 11, when a strong northerly wind rose and the ocean began to be whipped up. At midday, a lookout spotted the masts of another northbound freighter. “Though we could reach his track by moving in at high speed and have some battery left for evasion,” recalled O’Kane, “tracking till dark seemed more prudent under the circumstances.”
⁹

The
Tang
pursued the freighter for twenty-seven miles. The seas were heavy, and the target bucked up and down as the
Tang
ran undetected at seven knots, eighty feet below.
¹⁰
As it grew dark, the
Tang
surfaced four thousand yards astern of the enemy ship. The twilight faded to pitch darkness. Spume rolled off the waters.

“Head for him, Hank,” said O’Kane to twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Flanagan, a bony-faced, dour man who had been in the navy since the mid-1930s. Flanagan was one of several hands who could find his way around a submarine blindfolded, and he rather abrasively let every enlisted man know it.
¹¹

Howard Walker brought O’Kane a cup of coffee. “We going to get this one, too, Captain?” he asked.

O’Kane nodded.

Later that evening, about nine o’clock, the
Tang
was in position, just 450 yards from the target.

“Fire!” O’Kane commanded.

A single torpedo sped through the dark waters, aimed to inflict maximum damage and injury by hitting the target’s engine room. Seconds later, the 711-ton
Oita Maru
’s boilers exploded, sending a “pillar of fire and illuminated steam skyward,” lighting up the coastline. Men rushed from the
Tang
’s conning tower to the bridge to see what had happened. Only the first to get there were in time to see the
Oita Maru
slip with a last, pathetic hiss beneath the waves.

Then there was gunfire—the steady
ack-ack
of antiaircraft batteries. But no salvos landed nearby. It was quickly clear that the 40mm guns on the shore were not aiming at the
Tang
but into the sky, at phantom planes. Incredibly, the Japanese still had not realized that the
Tang
was in their midst. O’Kane was happy to let the Japanese think that American planes from China were responsible for the attack on the
Oita Maru
.

The
Tang
then moved down the coast. Late that night, Japanese patrol boats were finally detected. The enemy was no doubt beginning to react to the swift sinking of two ships in a matter of hours. O’Kane ordered the
Tang
to deeper water as a precaution. Once there, he gave orders for his crew to take a break. They had endured the typhoon and then two attacks without a letup. Everyone needed a good rest, not least O’Kane, who was beginning to feel the accumulated fatigue of more than ten war patrols.

But there was precious little respite: Later that night, the radar detected a large target. O’Kane was soon on the bridge, peering through binoculars. He saw tell-tale green and red side lights. Then a white hull emblazoned with a red cross. It was a hospital ship. Someone on the bridge suggested they sink it.

“We play by the rules,” said O’Kane.
¹²

“The bastard’s probably transporting 10,000 troops, all with athlete’s foot,” said Bill Ballinger.
¹³

But O’Kane was having none of it. There was a line that he would not cross no matter how much he wanted to “kill more Japs.”
¹⁴

DICK O’KANE FULLY UNDERSTOOD Ballinger’s urge to destroy the hospital ship. O’Kane’s contempt for the enemy was absolute; not once, for example, had he capitalized the words “Jap” and “Nip” as other captains did in their patrol reports—the Japanese were more often than not referred to as “debris.” But sinking a clearly marked hospital ship was not something he wanted on his conscience.

O’Kane had already witnessed the slaughter of helpless men. Indeed, during the
Wahoo
’s third patrol, he had seen more than enough “unrestricted submarine warfare.” According to a junior officer on board the
Wahoo
named George Grider, back then O’Kane had been a very different man than the one who now commanded the
Tang
. As Mush Morton’s executive officer, he had “talked a great deal—reckless, aggressive talk. . . . During the second patrol Dick had grown harder to live with, friendly one minute and pulling his rank on his junior officers the next. One day he would be a martinet, and the next he would display an over-lenient, what-the-hell attitude that was far from reassuring. With Mush and Dick in the saddle, how would the
Wahoo
fare?”
¹⁵

It was a good question, and in that January of 1943, the crew of the
Wahoo
did not have to wait long for an answer.

The
Wahoo
had been ordered to reconnoiter Wewak, a Japanese base in New Guinea. Without the aid of a chart, the
Wahoo
approached the port, Morton handing periscope duties to O’Kane. As George Grider later wrote: “This left the skipper in a better position to interpret all factors involved, do a better conning job, and make decisions more dispassionately. There is no doubt it is an excellent theory, and it worked beautifully for him, but few captains other than Mush ever had such serene faith in a subordinate that they could resist grabbing the scope in moments of crisis.”
¹⁶

Morton’s orders had stated clearly that he was to reconnoiter, but Morton declared, to his crew’s astonishment, that he would do far more—he would enter the harbor and sink any ships there. As far as Grider was concerned, Morton had gone from “mere rashness to outright foolhardiness.”
¹⁷

The
Wahoo
headed into Wewak, evading several patrol craft with Morton joking throughout, even as he narrowly avoided running aground.

Inside the port, O’Kane spotted a destroyer, and then suddenly seemed transformed. “I found myself marveling,” recalled Grider, “at the change that had come over Dick O’Kane. It was as if, during all the talkative, boastful months before, he had been lost, seeking his true element, and now it was found. He was calm, terse, and utterly cool. My opinion of him underwent a permanent change. It was not the first time I had observed that the conduct of men under fire cannot be predicted accurately from their everyday actions, but it was the most dramatic example I was ever to see of a man transformed under pressure from what seemed almost adolescent petulance to a prime fighting machine.”
¹⁸

As Morton readied to fire, the destroyer began to get under way. Morton quickly fired three torpedoes. None hit. The Japanese destroyer, with more than a hundred men on her decks, headed for the
Wahoo
. Morton did not flinch, ordering the periscope to be kept up, and then prepared for a “down the throat shot.” At twelve hundred yards, Morton again fired a torpedo and missed. One of the
Wahoo
’s terrified crew recalled having “an uncontrollable urge to urinate.”
¹⁹
At eight hundred yards, Morton then fired a sixth torpedo. This time he didn’t miss. The destroyer erupted with a huge explosion.

The next day, the
Wahoo
came across a small convoy. Morton fired on three ships, hitting all of them, before going deep to avoid being rammed. It wasn’t long before Morton surfaced and looked around. He had sunk one ship. Another was badly damaged. The third, a large transport, was motionless.

Wanting to finish off the transport, Morton approached her and fired but the torpedo did not detonate—no doubt stirring bitter memories of many other torpedoes that had failed to detonate during the
Wahoo
’s early patrols in 1942.
²⁰
Morton’s second torpedo, however, was no dud—it blew the transport “higher than a kite” in Morton’s words. Some of the 1,126 men aboard, including 491 Indian POWs, began to jump over the side into the water “like ants off a hot plate.”
²¹

Morton ordered his crew to man the deck guns. The
Wahoo
was now in a “sea of Japanese.” “The water was so thick with enemy soldiers,” recalled George Grider, “that it was literally impossible to cruise through them without pushing them aside like driftwood. These were troops we knew had been bound for New Guinea, to fight and kill our own men, and Mush, whose overwhelming biological hatred of the enemy we were only now beginning to sense, looked about him with exultation at the carnage.”
²²

“There must be close to 10,000 of them in the water,” said one of Morton’s officers.

“I figure about 9,500 of the sons of bitches,” replied Morton.
²³

“What do you think?” O’Kane asked Morton. “They look like marines to me.”
²⁴

“You’re damn right they are,” replied Morton. “They’re part of Hirohito’s crack Imperial Marine outfit. I ran into some of them before the war in Shanghai.”
²⁵

“If those troops get rescued,” O’Kane said, “we’re going to lose a lot of American boys’ lives digging them out of foxholes and shooting them out of palm trees.”

“I know,” Morton replied, “and it’s a damn stinking shame ... when we’ve got them cold turkey in the water. . . . But there’s still [an] oil tanker and cargo out there. We’re going after those babies as soon as we get a battery charge.”
²⁶

Morton then ordered his crew to destroy several lifeboats. According to Morton, some of the survivors fired back with pistols—that was all Morton needed to order his men to treat the Japanese as “fair game.” What ensued was the worst slaughter inflicted by an American submarine’s gun crews in World War II, lasting for “nightmarish minutes” in George Grider’s words.
²⁷

In his patrol report, Morton wrote: “After about an hour of this, we destroyed all the boats and most of the troops.” Back in Hawaii, the
Wahoo
was welcomed home with a
Honolulu Advertiser
headline: WAHOO RUNNING JAPS A’GUNNING. Morton and the
Wahoo
had become famous overnight. In the official endorsements of Morton’s patrol report, no mention was made of what some submariners considered the cold-blooded killing of defenseless troops.
²⁸

As it turned out, Morton never had to justify his actions after the war. By then, he and the
Wahoo
’s crew were dead, entombed by iron somewhere in the Sea of Japan after Japanese patrol planes had caught her, fatally exposed, on the surface. O’Kane would have gone to the bottom along with his mentor had he not been given his own command of the
Tang
before
Wahoo
set out on her final patrol in July 1943.

Fellow submarine captain Ned Beach knew both Morton and O’Kane. “O’Kane was not an over-sentimental man,” he recalled. “Only one who has experienced the extinction of a whole unit of comrades without trace can fully appreciate the icy fingers which must have clutched around his heart when he received the grim news.”
²⁹