Dive! World War II Stories of Sailors & Submarines in the Pacific

by Deborah Hopkinson

  “In a few minutes it would be light enough to see through the periscope,” recalled Dick. The enemy continued on the same zigzag course. “We dropped to 100 feet and went ahead full…. The high-speed run would require 20 minutes.”

  Counting the freighter dispatched the day before, Tang had already sunk four ships on this patrol. Dick had only eight torpedoes left—four forward and four aft.

  No submarine on her first patrol had ever sunk five ships, and Dick wanted Tang to be the first. An oil tanker was a valuable target. After all, if enemy planes had no fuel, they could not shoot at American aircraft, ships—or other submarines.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were getting close. It was a little after six by now. Tang slowed to three knots for a periscope check—a quick one. With the morning sea as smooth as a glimmering mirror, Dick let the periscope barely break the surface before bringing it under the water again.

  “ ‘We’re right on,’ ” Dick reported, partly to reassure all hands and partly to set his own mind at rest that his approach was correct.

  For each periscope reading, Dick raised the scope inches above the sea—for just three or four seconds. Each time, he captured one small, crucial piece of information—a glance at the destroyer’s mast, or a look at the top of the tanker for a bearing.

  Dick wanted a clear shot at the tanker, and that wouldn’t be easy. The escort destroyer was always on the move, crisscrossing back and forth across the tanker’s bow to protect her from the submarine that might still be on the prowl.

  On the prowl they were. This was a game that required steady nerves—and Dick O’Kane had them. A memory of Mush Morton and Wewak Harbor came to his mind.

  “I had,” he said later, “faced this situation before, in Wahoo, a much more taut one with the destroyer coming at nearly 30 knots at my raised periscope and with but one torpedo left that we could fire.

  “By comparison this was nothing, except this time I was in command.”

  Dick ordered the doors on the torpedo tubes open.

  “The destroyer had crossed the tanker’s bow and was heading directly at us, about 800 yards away. I would not disrupt our setup on the tanker until the last instant, and that was approximately one minute away,” said Dick.

  Then, just as Dick had hoped, the destroyer turned to the right, leaving the tanker exposed in front of Tang. Now Dick was so close, it wouldn’t matter if the tanker spotted Tang’s periscope—there wouldn’t be time for the target to maneuver out of the way.

  “If we were sighted, the tanker could not possibly do anything about it; her last hope, the destroyer, was just passing under her stern heading away.”

  Dick was ready.

  “ ‘Constant bearing—mark!’ ” he called out.

  “ ‘Set! … Fire!’ Fraz hit the plunger, and the first torpedo zinged on its way,” said Dick. “The next three followed, each to hit a specific point along her starboard side.

  Depth gauges in a submarine.

  “On the tanker, the lookouts saw the torpedo wakes and were pointing and waving right up to the explosions. I saw not one of them leave his post. It was quick; the torpedo run was only 23 seconds. Debris went into the air, and the entire ship was enveloped in a mass of billowing flame and grayish-brown smoke. She started down immediately. Fraz took the scope and watched her go in just four minutes. The time was 0643.

  “Tang went deep, too,” said her skipper, “and the depth charges started one minute later, but they were not close.”

  Dick ordered a deep dive: Once the destroyer figured out where Tang was, the depth charging would start in earnest.

  “ ‘Level off at five hundred, Bill,’ ” Dick told the diving officer.

  That’s when the trouble started.

  Instead of leveling off, Tang kept going down.

  Tang passed the five-hundred-foot mark and kept going down. She was taking in water in the forward torpedo room. Dick dropped from the conning tower into the control room to assess the situation.

  The boat continued to dive.

  Dick gave orders to blow air pressure into the tanks to try to halt the drop. The first shot of high-pressure air wasn’t enough. He ordered more air: “ ‘Blow safety! Blow bow buoyancy!’ ”

  Dick checked the gauge: She should be swimming up. But the depth gauge told a different story: Tang had dropped 612 feet. There were other maneuvers he could try, Dick knew, but some, such as blowing air into the main ballast tank, would cause bubbles to rise to the surface—and reveal Tang’s position to the enemy.

  “We held on, waiting and listening,” said Dick. “The minutes dragged.”

  Then the diving officer called out good news. “ ‘We’ve got her.’

  “These had been the nine longest minutes of my life, and I daresay all hands felt the same,” Dick recalled. But they had the submarine under control again.

  Dick went to check on the leak in the forward torpedo room. Despite his years of experience, he let out a gasp at what he saw. “The scene was not as Hollywood would picture it, with men in water up to their armpits, struggling and sputtering. Nonetheless, Hank’s [Flanagan] crew was going about its serious business knee deep in water. It looked like a lake, no less, half submerging the culprit, our leaky No. 5 torpedo tube.”

  The crew brought Tang back up to a hundred feet and leveled off. At this depth, they heard the sounds of the destroyer’s screws as it searched for them. It wasn’t unexpected, but it wasn’t what Dick wanted to hear while he was still trying to control the leak.

  “ ‘Stop pumping,’ ” Dick ordered, knowing the sounds of the pumps would be a dead giveaway of the Tang’s position.

  But he couldn’t stop the pumps for long. Already the water in the torpedo room had risen another foot. Dick couldn’t let much more seawater in without further damage to other equipment.

  The destroyer lingered above, almost as if she was waiting for the right moment. The destroyer’s captain would have extra motivation to demolish the submarine that had sunk the two ships under his charge.

  And so began a tense game of cat-and-mouse. The repairmen worked desperately—the longer Tang could go without pumping, the more silent she could be, and the better chance the sailors had of slipping away from the destroyer’s grasp.

  Dick knew exactly what the destroyer’s captain had in mind. “An axiom of antisubmarine warfare is to stay with the enemy, for one never knows the extent of the troubles that may exist below. The Japanese captain had read the book, and the destroyer remained on top of us throughout the afternoon.”

  One hour, then another, then another dragged by. But as to why the expected depth charges hadn’t yet come, Dick could only hazard a guess. “Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but we concluded that the 12 depth charges where the freighter sank, the occasional drops during the night, and the numerous charges after the tanker’s sinking had left her with but one good salvo, which she was saving just for us.

  “The enemy’s error, I believe, was to assume that we were deep, where any sane submarine ought to be. How could he guess that we were watching him so as to counter every move? It was undoubtedly baffling to hear us, start a run, and then lose contact time after time.”

  Sunset was coming, making it harder to see the destroyer in twilight in their brief peeks through the periscope. Then darkness fell. It was pitch-black through the periscope.

  “The destroyer would be getting nervous, too, now knowing that we might be on the surface,” said Dick. “We delayed pumping, hoping to add to her anxiety, and thoroughly expecting a high-speed depth-charge run.”

  Forty minutes later, Dick heard the sound of the destroyer’s propellers, closer than ever, “their fast swish-swish-swish roaring through our hull. The bearing remained steady and then drifted just a hair to the right, but that was enough.”

  Dick showed the daring he had become known for with Mush Morton on the Wahoo: He set Tang on a course to squeak past the destroyer in the opposite direction below. Eight “tooth shakers” (slang for
depth charges) shook the submarine, but soon the destroyer could be heard heading away.

  It was a little like a dog slinking off with its tail between its legs. Some hands on board were convinced that the destroyer was so humiliated at having lost both her ships, she had blown herself up. In any case, reflected Dick calmly, it was “a highly agreeable parting.”

  Tang surfaced at last, to the cheers of her crew, who had survived a daylong duel of wills with a destroyer—all while setting a record of five sinkings on their first patrol. While they hadn’t been on the original menu for the day, the cook began frying steaks in celebration. Dick thought the executive officer, Fraz, had ordered them to be thawed during those long, trying hours. Divers went overboard to try to fix leaks, working in the dark by feel.

  “The sea was all ours, under a black though star-filled sky, but best of all was the aroma of God’s fresh air,” said the new skipper, breathing a sigh of relief. “As of this moment there was never a happier submarine crew.”

  When they stopped at Midway Island for a two-week break, Dick was first on the dock to greet the division commander. As he turned back to the sub, Dick got his first look at Tang from a distance. The last six weeks had changed her: The newness had all rubbed off.

  “Gone was the former glossiness of her black paint. Salt water, wind-driven spray, and the tropic sun had bleached it to a slate gray, somewhat splotched, like the camouflaged freighters of World War I,” he said. “No longer as if out of the showroom, she looked like she’d been places and done things, and indeed she had.

  “I liked the way she looked and made a mental note that no one was to get loose with fresh paint.”

  Crew members poured onto the dock. “To a man they were grinning from ear to ear. At the moment I could not say whether the pride I felt was in our ship or these men; both, I guess, for they were inseparable.”

  While Tang underwent repairs, there was also time for some relaxation. Some of the crew went fishing, returning with enough mahi mahi for a fish fry, with beer and softball. A few days later, Tang set out with orders to join other submarines in support of US air strikes on Palau, which was still held by Japan. Among Tang’s duties would be lifeguarding: plucking downed aviators from the sea.

  By spring 1944, the Submarine Force could boast more successes than failures. Code breakers were able to provide submarine captains with the locations of possible targets. With more reliable torpedoes and with the success of aggressive skippers like Morton, O’Kane, and others, confidence that Japanese shipping could be squelched rose.

  Submarines like the Tang took on expanded roles. Groups of boats were deployed in wolf packs while others were tapped as escorts for convoys of fleet ships. Submarines also played an important role as “lifeguards,” rescuing downed aviators from the water during aircraft assaults, as the United States began to drive the enemy from islands Japan had held earlier in the war.

  Some pilots, though, were a bit wary of being rescued by a submarine—even after they’d been shot out of the sky.

  “Submariners were an unknown and uncertain factor to the Army aviators,” wrote Admiral Charles Lockwood. This was especially true when pilots ended up going along for longer submarine rides than they bargained for (or, as Lockwood put it, experiencing more “thrills and hazards” than expected).

  Take the story of a pilot named Jack Heath, stranded when his plane went down in September 1944 in Manila Bay. With the help of Filipino fishermen, he reached the island of Mindoro. From there he was evacuated by the USS Ray (SS-271).

  “ ‘I thought that I had been rescued. I say I thought that I had been rescued, but a few times later I had my doubts,’ ” said Heath of his submarine experience. “ ‘Captain [Bill] Kinsella took me out and got me bombed, depth charged, had me aboard 34 days and practically made a submariner out of me. Finally got me into Midway and I was flown back to Pearl.’ ”

  Along the way, the Ray rescued another “zoomie,” a fighter pilot named James Brice who had been shot down off Lingayen.

  “ ‘We picked him up after he had been in the water about two days,’ ” said Heath. “ ‘He came aboard, so I had a little company in order to take our stand against the submariners. We both got back O.K. and we are really 100 percent for these submarine men.’ ”

  During her second patrol, Tang set another record: this time as a lifeguard in the vicinity of Truk Lagoon (which today is also known as Chuuk State and is part of the Federated States of Micronesia). The US had nearly driven the Japanese from their base on Truk Island. In late April, Admiral Chester Nimitz sent Navy aircraft carriers to wipe out any remaining enemy aircraft on Truk, as well as attack ships near the many small islands in the area. Tang would be on hand to help support the air strikes.

  “Lifeguard was our mission,” said Dick. “We’d go wherever necessary and do whatever we had to in rescuing downed aviators.”

  Tang was the only submarine assigned to support the assault. Dick brought his boat into position early on April 30. A little after eight in the morning, Dick got the first radio call from the aircraft carrier task force commander: A bomber had been downed by enemy antiaircraft fire. Tang raced to the spot to pick up the plane’s survivors on a raft.

  “Tang lit out, her screws digging holes with full battery power while the diesels fired,” said Dick. “The sight ahead as we closed the atoll would have brought a lump of pride to anyone’s throat. Our bombers were peeling off through a hole in the clouds … a hole filled with flak, and diving straight through…. If they had that courage, we could at least get this survivor, two miles off the beach.”

  Two US Navy planes returning from their mission flew overhead to help guide the submarine’s course. Then, from the lookout platform, Tang’s lookout, a sailor from Maine with a “Down East” twang, cried out, “ ‘Thar she blows!’ ”

  Tang reached the raft, four miles from its reported position, in just ten minutes. The boat’s crew had practiced what Dick called “an old-fashioned man-overboard drill” many times, making a “wide turn to place the raft upwind and a needle-threading, slow, straight final approach.” The training paid off: They had the four airmen aboard “in three shakes.”

  Throughout that day and into the night, Tang darted here and there, responding to radio messages whenever a downed plane was reported. When darkness fell, Dick put the submarine on a zigzag course, firing a green signal light every few minutes just in case they’d missed any rafts.

  On day two, Tang was kept even busier, speeding around the atoll to rescue airmen from the sea. Dick got a clear view of the action in the skies: “Time and time again, it seemed the [US] dive bombers would not be able to pull out, but they did, almost all that had not been hit, and some of those that had and were trailing smoke.

  “The obvious devotion of these men, pushing danger aside in carrying out their task, made all of us proud to be a small part of the same navy.”

  Tang left the battle with twenty-two extra men on board. Dick and her crew had set a record, rescuing more aviators than any other submarine during the war.

  “There had been sub-air rescues before,” wrote Dick later, “but never one like this.”

  Just as the crew of the Spearfish had gone above and beyond to make evacuees like Lucy Wilson feel welcome, the sailors on Tang extended submarine hospitality to their aviator guests.

  “Tang was a happy ship,” said Dick. “The new members of her ship’s company were not accustomed to drop-in movies, or hot, home-baked bread at midnight.”

  And, of course, there was that homemade ice cream.

  These photographs depict the most successful rescue of American airmen by submariners in World War II, led by Dick O’Kane and the crew of the Tang.

  Nine airmen on a plane await rescue by Tang.

  Tang rescuing downed airmen.

  Tang destroys a US plane to prevent its use by the enemy.

  Tang skipper Dick O’Kane (center) with the twenty-two rescued airmen.

  Submarines
didn’t carry doctors. Usually a pharmacist’s mate with limited training took care of treating common ailments such as fevers, colds, athlete’s foot, or rashes. In September 1942, Seadragon’s fourth patrol became part of submarine legend when Seaman First Class Darrell “Dean” Rector became ill. Pharmacist’s Mate First Class Wheeler B. Lipes concluded that Rector had a severe case of appendicitis.

  Usually, men with appendicitis were kept on a liquid diet and given ice packs. In this case, Lipes feared his crewmate would die without an operation. He told the young seaman, “ ‘I can do it, but it’s a chance. If you don’t want me to go ahead …’ ”

  Rector agreed; skipper Pete Ferrall gave his approval and ordered Seadragon to glide as smoothly as possible at a depth of 125 feet. They converted the officers’ wardroom into an operating room, with the executive officer serving as assistant. “Lipes devised surgical instruments from the wardroom silverware—bent spoons for muscle retractors, for example—sterilized in torpedo alcohol.” He also fashioned a mask from a tea strainer and put the patient out with ether.

  What would have been a quick, simple operation with a trained physician took two and a half hours, with the “doctor” following instructions from the medical books on board.

  When Seadragon arrived at port in Australia, Admiral Charles Lockwood went on board and heard from the captain what had taken place. Lockwood recalled, “The seaman came into the wardroom with eyes shining and proud as a peacock of being the first man ever to have an appendectomy in a submarine. He pulled up his shirt and displayed a scar about six inches long.”

  Lipes told Lockwood the hardest part was finding the appendix. When he found out how long the operation took, Lockwood asked Lipes, “ ‘Good Lord … will a shot of ether last that long?’

  “ ‘Oh, no, sir,’ he replied, ‘but whenever I’d feel his muscles stiffen up, I’d know he was coming out of it and I’d give him another shot!’ ”