Submarine!

by Edward L. Beach

  O’Kane gives his last order to the white face of the telephone talker in the conning tower hatch at his feet, staring up at his captain as though somehow he could do something which would prevent this monstrous thing from happening to them. “Shut the hatch!” But there is no time to carry out this order, which had been intended to help preserve as much of the watertight integrity of the ship as possible. Even as he utters the words, Dick sees the water of the far western Pacific pour into the swiftly submerging hatch, and he is swept off the bridge of his ship into the Straits of Formosa.

  And, as he comes to the surface, sputtering and splashing in the choppy but warm salty water, he sees two things—a flash of fire in the distance, followed by the sound of torpedo number twenty-three striking home in the transport which had been his last target, and the gray bow of Tang sticking out of water, still buoyant, though the stern of the ship must be on the bottom. His first thought for his crew, O’Kane notes that the torpedo tubes are all under water and that an attempt to escape via that route—assuming that there must have been some men in the forward part of the ship who survived the fatal explosion—could not succeed, and would only result in flooding the forward torpedo room and preventing all chance of escape.

  He looks around in the water and counts heads. There are eight in the water with him, like himself swept off the bridge when that part of the ship went under. Only one thing to do now. His heart like lead within him, Dick O’Kane keeps himself afloat, using the minimum possible effort. The instinct of self-preservation dies hard, even though there may not seem to be much left to live for. Every now and then the Captain glances back to the bow of his ship, still exposed above the surface. After about five minutes the head of a man appears in the water alongside, and Lieutenant Larry Savadkin swims over and joins the pitiful party of survivors. He had gone down with the ship, inside the conning tower. Finding a tiny pocket where air had been entrapped, he had pressed his mouth into it, taken what breaths he could, and then moved to the still-open hatch, where he found another air pocket. Still another one was under the bridge overhang, and, stopping there for several moments, he had finally ducked out and swum to the surface.

  This story he repeats to O’Kane between gasps in the choppy sea. And as he is telling it, there comes a sudden burbling of air from alongside the protruding bow of Tang, and it swiftly sinks from sight.

  The Captain stares, and his heart leaps within him. That was not accidental! That looked as though one of the undamaged ballast tanks had been deliberately flooded, in order to level off the submarine. True, she would sink to the bottom, but she would be on an even keel, the men trapped inside would have a fighting chance to get out! Wild, hopeless plans race through his brain. Maybe enough of his crew will get out to form a good-sized party. Maybe they will be able to capture some small vessel, and in some way arrive intact at some part of the Chinese coast not under Jap domination. Or maybe there will be some way of contacting a friendly submarine.

  But nothing comes of it, though O’Kane watches throughout the remainder of the night. The first thing which should come up is the escape buoy, and that he never sees. Japanese patrol boats make their appearance about this time, and they run about, dropping occasional depth charges. Perhaps these explosions have temporarily dissuaded the rest of Tang’s crew from attempting to escape . . . .

  Dawn finally arrived, and a Japanese destroyer escort picked up O’Kane and several others, who were immediately subjected to merciless beatings and clubbings—hardly what would have been meted out to Jap submariners had the positions been reversed. Of the ten men left floating about in the water when Tang went down, including the one who made his escape from the conning tower, only four were ultimately recovered from Japanese prison camps.

  And what of the men who remained alive inside the submarine, who leveled her off on the bottom to make it possible for them to escape? Their story is equally tragic.

  By quick action they had managed to seal the afterpart of the ship, confine the flooding to the after engine room, maneuvering room, and after torpedo room. The men in the control room, directly beneath the conning tower, had been able to close the hatch between those two compartments, thus localizing the flooding through the open upper conning tower hatch to that compartment alone, but not before considerable water had found its way into the control room; and since the lower conning tower hatch had been sprung by the terrific force of the explosion, it leaked badly and could not be made tight. Then they opened the vent valve to number-two main ballast tank, using the hand operating gear, since hydraulic power had also been lost, and by this means lowered the bow of the ship to the bottom. They were thus in an excellent position for escape. The ship was in 180 feet of water, not too far from the coast of China. They had by no means despaired.

  The next operation was to burn all the confidential and secret papers, which was accomplished at the expense of filling the control room and forward battery compartment with smoke. Much of this smoke also entered the forward torpedo room, an unfortunate circumstance. At about this time depth charging commenced, and all escape operations came to a standstill for several hours until it ceased. In the meantime, all survivors gathered in the forward torpedo room, about thirty in all, and they were forced to seal off the door to the battery compartment and the rest of the ship because of progressive flooding from the control room and an electrical fire which had started in the forward battery compartment. This fire increased in intensity, and finally prevented successful escape of many men who otherwise could have got out.

  In all, four parties left the ship, using the Momsen lung, via the escape hatch built into the forward torpedo room. Owing to the great pressure due to the depth, this process was laborious, and the men, already debilitated from the effects of the foul air and smoke fumes they had been breathing, suffered exceedingly. Toward the end, the heat from the fire in the forward battery compartment had begun to blister the paint on the after bulkhead of the torpedo room, and puffs of acrid smoke were coming past the door, where the rubber gasket itself was burning. Steadily increasing pressure in the battery compartment, due to slow flooding, also helped to destroy this gasket. Finally, the inevitable happened—the gasket blew out, or was burned out, and all men remaining in the forward torpedo room were asphyxiated.

  Thirteen men made an underwater escape from Tang’s forward torpedo room several hours after she went down, but only five were picked up by the Japs the next morning. Five of them had never reached the surface, and three, evidently suffering some form of the bends, had been unable to remain afloat.

  Of the crew of eighty-eight men and officers, only nine in all came back.

  We of the submarine force grieved silently, as men are wont to do, at the news that Tang was no more. With submarines, this news is not the sudden receipt of specific information; it is the gradual realization that it is a day or two since a certain ship should have reported in from patrol. It is the intensified waiting, hoping against hope that some inconsequential matter, such as a broken-down radio transmitter, might prove to be the cause of the silence. You hear the chatter of messages from boats on patrol, going out, or coming back, reporting contacts, requesting rendezvous, or reporting results to date, but never do you hear the faint, clipped call from the vessel you listen for—never the right message comes in over the burdened ether waves. Finally, since it is possible that some casualty may have prevented transmission, although reception of radio signals might still be possible, a “blind” rendezvous is arranged for the non-reporting ship. A message is sent repeatedly, giving the place and setting a period for arrival of the submarine which is within the realm of possibility if the lost boat is still alive. Then an escort vessel is sent out, to wait—and wait—and finally to return, empty-handed. And then you know what has happened, and you take the missing boat’s name off the operations board, trying to pretend that the lump in your throat doesn’t exist, that your action in so doing cannot be considered to have any relationship to what has happen
ed out there.

  And, as it was with all the others, so was it with Tang. We knew only that she was gone, leaving to the rest of us a legacy of consistent aggressiveness, success, and daring. But after a few months some rather odd stories began to be bruited about. Tang had singlehandedly taken on a huge convoy, with many escorting destroyers, in shallow water. Tang had shot the hell out of the enemy, but had been caught in water so shallow that, upon diving, she struck bottom before the top of the periscope shears went under—and thus was easy meat for an enraged enemy. Tang had deliberately entered an enemy harbor at night on the surface, expended all her torpedoes on the anchored Jap ships, and been caught by shore batteries on her way out. Tang had been so damaged by a furious depth charging she had undergone in shallow water that she was unable to dive, and had been forced to scuttle herself upon the arrival of enemy forces. And so on.

  But all stories seemed to agree on three particulars—great damage to the enemy, shallow water, and Dick O’Kane in a Jap prison camp! Knowing the cool daring of which O’Kane and Tang were capable, the absolute fearlessness of their tactics, and the unprecedented, original, and completely logical thinking they had time after time demonstrated—a quality partly inherited, no doubt, from Mush Morton and Wahoo—it was impossible to conceive of a set of circumstances which would fit all the reported details. But we knew that Tang’s last mission had been fraught with more than usual secrecy—and so we wondered, until Dick O’Kane himself came back from the living dead, his starved and bruised body a testimonial to the brutality of his captors, to give us the story of those last glorious moments of Tang’s short but action-packed life.

  While Tang was going into commission at Mare Island, Trigger completed her refit following Dusty Dornin’s second patrol, and on Christmas Day, 1943, was scheduled to leave for the area of Truk. “Christmas Day,” we moaned. “Surely the war is not going to be lost or won by our departure on that day.” It took a strong protest to ComSubPac himself, but finally he agreed that Trigger had earned her first Christmas in port.

  We got under way the following day, and in little more than a week took station on a convoy route between Guam and Truk. Here, for the first time, Trigger’s luck at finding targets turned sour.

  For nearly a month we plied the traffic lanes. Nothing whatever did we see, except an occasional plane or various brightly colored ocean birds, until two or three days before shortage of fuel would have started us back to Pearl Harbor. And then early one evening the sonar operator thought he heard something in his earphones. He listened intently. There could be no doubt of it. There had been an explosion in the water many miles away. And then another.

  Fandel, onetime country schoolteacher, marked the time, listened a little longer, marked the time once more, and then called for the skipper. “Captain,” he reported, “somebody is dropping periodic depth charges. Listen.”

  Sometimes Jap convoy escorts dropped depth charges periodically as they steamed along. Doubtless the idea was to discourage submarines from attacking. Its success depended on whose area they were in.

  Dusty and I heard the fifth and sixth explosions. They seemed to be a little louder to the south.

  “All ahead flank!” The soft mutter of one diesel engine pushing us along at slow speed was suddenly augmented by three more. Four plumes of smoke poured from Trigger’s exhaust ports onto the surface of the ocean, and a white tumbled wake stretched farther aft. On the bridge seven pairs of high-powered binoculars searched the dimming horizon, and above them the radar rotated slowly. For ten miles we let the ship run.

  “All stop! Secure the engines!” Trigger coasted, silenced, slowing. “Rig out the sound heads!”

  The pressure-proof speaker on the bridge blared: “Bridge! Sound reports distant depth charges dead ahead!”

  “All ahead flank!” We were getting closer. It was now dark, and as Trigger picked up speed once more, we carefully adjusted the radar, peaked its tuning and ring time. We concentrated it dead ahead with occasional sweeps sideways to prevent being taken by surprise. For a long time it showed nothing. Finally, “Radar contact!” Ralph Korn, now chief yeoman, with the simplicity of long practice swung into the routine of feeding the essential information from the radar to the tracking parties. When combined with the known inputs of Trigger’s own course and speed the result was target course and speed—data essential to the correct torpedo fire-control solution.

  “Conn! What speed we showing?”

  “Twenty and a half, sir! Picking up slowly!”

  “Bridge! We’re overtaking them on their port flank—range now about twelve. Can you see them?” We peered ahead. Nothing.

  Trigger continued to eat up the distance on the enemy’s left flank, reaching out ahead to get into attack position. With Dusty working out the fire-control solution and handling things from the conning tower, I held the bridge and strained my eyes to spot targets. With my back against the rotating radar mast, I could tell from its motion when it was on the target. A glance at the antenna, and I knew exactly where to look.

  Hours passed. Finally I could make out a faint place on the horizon where the haze was a little darker. “Conn—bridge. Enemy in sight. Standby for a TBT bearing!”

  I jammed my binoculars into the TBT, centered on the smudge, pressed the button. The skipper’s rasping voice came back: “That’s him. How many can you see?”

  I could see three smudges now, and my stomach tightened when the word came back that there were, indeed, three large ships on the radar, plus three much smaller ones that I couldn’t see.

  An hour and a half later we had pretty well overreached on the convoy, and Dusty’s voice came up on the speaker. “Ned—what do you think—can we go in on the surface?”

  This was the question I had been trying to make up my mind about for the past half hour. We could see them, but we were still too far away for them to see us. Maybe a quick surprise attack could be executed before they could get organized; dawn was already not too many hours off, and we could make a surface attack much sooner than we could possibly get off a submerged one.

  The skipper was of the same mind, and so a few minutes later, having attained a position broad on the bow of the zigzagging convoy’s base course, Trigger turned her lean snout toward the enemy.

  This was always the crucial part of the night surface attack—the run in. You kept your bows on the enemy to give him as little to see of you as possible, and you came in fast to get it over with quickly. Then, just before shooting, you had to slow down to let the fish get away properly. Having put your torpedoes in the water, you spun on your heel and ran, trusting to the confusion generated by exploding warheads to help you get away. If there were escorts present, the problem was complicated by the necessity to come in more or less under their sterns, where they would have to turn all the way around to get at you.

  The engines were still wide open, and now we and the Japs were approaching each other at our combined speeds. At a closing rate of 35 knots it didn’t take long.

  “Range, three five double oh!”

  “All tubes ready forward!”

  “All ahead one third—standby forward!” The last from the skipper.

  I had been keeping my eyes on the nearest escort, a large mean-looking destroyer. No sign yet of his having seen us, but he surely knew his job, for he was patrolling the convoy’s quarter and thus making our shot at the big ships very difficult. To get at the big fellows we would have to shoot right across the tin can’s bow—then we would have to let him have it also, because he was too close and would be upon us in a matter of minutes. Radar gave range to the tin can as seven hundred yards—broadside to, dead ahead.

  A ticklish decision, quickly made. The first three fish at the nearest big ship and the next three at the tin can. That would not give us much time. . . .

  “We’re shooting now, Bridge!” That wasn’t necessary, for I could hear Dusty shout, “Fire!” Trigger lurched three times, as three times a ton and a half was ejected fr
om bow tubes. Three streaks of bubbles in a long, thin fan reached for the last transport. Now for the destroyer. “Fire four! . . . Fire five! . . . Fire six!”

  “Right full rudder!” I screamed. Number four barely missed ahead. Number five ran erratically to the left, and number six circled to the right. No hits! The destroyer fired three green flares off his stern, started to turn toward us. From somewhere amidships a gun went off, and there was a sharp ripping sound overhead.

  Two things to do: avoid those deadly circling torpedoes, and get out of the immediate vicinity. I put my face against the bridge speaker, pressed the button. “Maneuvering, he’s after us! Pour it on!” A rather unorthodox order, but it got results.

  In the engine room one man knelt by each engine governor, holding it in by hand as he increased engine speed beyond the limits. In the maneuvering room the already overloaded motors and generators were loaded down even more. A cloud of black smoke poured out of our exhaust pipes as Trigger’s stern skidded across the slight chop.

  “Rudder amidships!” We steadied with our stem dead on the destroyer. With the smoke riding high into the air astern, we could hardly see him.

  “Standby aft! Bridge, give me bearings on the tin can!”

  “Bearing—mark!”

  “Fire!” And four torpedoes sped from our stern.

  We had to hand it to that tin can skipper for a neat job of side-stepping. Not one touched him though they must have streaked by on both sides.

  But at any rate they held him up for a bit, and in the meantime Trigger was showing a shade under 22 knots. And then came a most welcome sound—depth charges! Not realizing that we could not possibly have dived, that we must have run off on the surface, the destroyer had ceased gunfire and was depth charging the area. Our respect for his acumen diminished appreciably.