by James Scott
Radar showed Japanese planes in the skies, though none closer than twenty miles. O’Kane hoped the planes accompanied a convoy though his searches ten miles on either side of Tang’s track failed to spot one. The skies emptied by the afternoon and that evening sailors settled down to watch a movie. The next morning, the repeated appearance of a Japanese bomber sent Tang up and down like a yo-yo, slowing the trip. O’Kane finally decided to ignore the plane and continue north. The bomber remained on the horizon as two other planes—one hidden in the sun, the other behind a cloud—suddenly zoomed toward Tang. Only at the last second did lookouts spot the planes and send Tang safely down yet again. “Twice now we had underestimated the Japanese,” O’Kane wrote. “If we were to be successful in our present endeavor, a little more brain power and less reliance on our ship’s capabilities was certainly indicated.”
The skipper was learning. Not only had the crafty bomber pilot served as a decoy, but now after repeated surveillance the Japanese no doubt knew his course. Rather than risk another trap, he ordered Tang to submerge. The submarine surfaced that night after dark and patrolled ten miles south of Aguijan island, hoping to intercept traffic between Saipan and Guam. O’Kane found only a Japanese patrol boat. Bombers crowded the skies the following day, prompting Tang again to patrol submerged. Only after dark on February 22 did Tang surface. Searchlights from Tanapag Harbor lit up the night sky. O’Kane presumed a convoy had just departed. He ordered the submarine to head north on two engines. Lookouts pulled on rain gear as squalls soaked the bridge, hampering radar performance. But the foul weather also made it easy for Tang to patrol unseen on the surface.
O’Kane’s instincts paid off. Tang’s radar picked up a single pip at 10 p.m. at a range of almost eight miles. The radar operator watched the lone signal multiply. One ship morphed into five. The radar showed another possible group of ships to the north. At least five ships, maybe more, loomed ahead. It was a skipper’s dream. O’Kane debated how best to attack. Should he charge the convoy, fire a large spread, and retreat from harm’s way? That might guarantee hits on multiple ships. German skippers had used that tactic with success against American convoys in the North Atlantic. But that strategy worked only if a convoy’s major ships outnumbered the escorts. Japanese convoys often consisted of one or two large ships accompanied by multiple escorts. Armed with limited torpedoes—and with replacements a 6,000-mile round-trip away—O’Kane needed to be precise. “We would hunt out each enemy ship—cargomen of any sort or sizable warships, first come first served—and make every torpedo count.”
The bad weather slashed visibility so that even at 4,000 yards O’Kane could not see the convoy in the dark. The skipper ordered the submarine to stop so the sonar operator could listen. Radar showed the lead ship zigzagging toward Tang and would pass just a half mile off the bow. O’Kane ordered outer doors three through six in the forward torpedo opened. Chief quartermaster Jones spotted the target just as Caverly picked up its screws over his headphones. Both reported the same: a patrol boat. A worthless target. Not only did patrols not carry war materials, but a missed shot guaranteed a depth charge attack, a scenario that could blow the entire assault and let the convoy escape. O’Kane watched the second pip develop into a patrol or minesweeper; another worthless target. He would bide his time.
The rainsqualls dissipated. A third pip materialized to the north, this one larger than the patrols. O’Kane scanned the dark horizon from the bridge through the 7x50 binoculars atop the target-bearing transmitter, spotting a ship four miles away. A freighter. The ship steamed southwest at nine knots. O’Kane saw two escorts. One patrolled off the target’s starboard bow, the other its starboard quarter—good news for Tang. The submarine reached its attack position and stopped. Executive officer Frazee down in the conning tower again ordered the outer doors opened. Quartermaster Jones studied the escorts through his binoculars, looking for any sign that Tang had been detected. The 3,581-ton Fukuyama Maru, a passenger-cargo ship, closed to just 1,500 yards.
“Ten degrees to go,” Frazee announced, his voice crackling over the bridge loudspeaker.
“Stand by for constant bearings,” O’Kane called back as he focused the reticle of the target-bearing transmitter on the freighter’s stack. “Constant bearing—mark!”
“Set.”
“Fire!”
Tang shuddered. Three more torpedoes followed in the next twenty-four seconds, aimed at Fukuyama Maru’s port side. The skipper ordered full speed and right full rudder, hoping to clear the area before the explosions hit and set the escorts after him. O’Kane wasn’t so lucky—nor were the forty-seven enemy sailors who unknowingly stood just seconds away from death. “The enemy literally disintegrated under four hits and sank before we had completed ninety degrees of our turn to evade,” the skipper later wrote in his patrol report. “One escort guessed right and closed to 3000 yards, but these boats always seem to find a couple of extra knots for such occasions, and we made a sandblower out of him.”
The men relaxed from battle stations long enough for O’Kane to climb down for a much needed visit to the head and a quick cup of coffee in the wardroom. The night was still early. The navigator had charted the convoy’s course and O’Kane still had time before dawn to attack again. Thirty minutes after the last explosion—and with the forward tubes reloaded—Tang set off to hunt its next victim. O’Kane ordered a thirty-degree course change to starboard and maneuvered ahead of the convoy. When the range to the convoy hit 4,000 yards, O’Kane ordered his crew back to battle stations. Minutes later, a Japanese destroyer emerged from the darkness. The skipper was concerned his torpedoes—set to run at ten feet because of the rough seas—would pass beneath the shallow-draft target. He opted not to attack.
O’Kane retreated. He didn’t want the destroyer’s lookouts to spot Tang, so he moved on to the next target. Scanning the horizon through his binoculars, the skipper saw a sleek and familiar silhouette: a submarine. He felt certain it was Japanese but couldn’t chance a shot without positively identifying it first. Then O’Kane spied the silhouette of a freighter, accompanied by bow and stern escorts. The skipper watched the bow escort pull far ahead of the freighter, creating an opening for O’Kane to attack. Tang closed on the target’s bow. Visibility improved and the skipper studied the 6,776-ton Yamashimo Maru. The cargo ship boasted guns forward and aft. A rainsquall had developed in the distance behind Tang, hiding the submarine from the target’s lookouts as the skipper closed to less than a half mile.
O’Kane fired tubes three, four, five, and six, each at just eight-second intervals. The explosions triggered a shockwave that O’Kane later compared to the detonation of 100 torpedoes. The phosphorescence turned the ocean white. “The first two were beautiful hits in her stern and just aft of the stack, but the detonation as the third torpedo hit forward of his bridge was terrific,” O’Kane wrote in his report. “The enemy ship was twisted, lifted from the water as you would flip a spoon on end, and then commenced belching flame as she sank. The Tang was shaken far worse than by any depth charge we could remember, but a quick check, as soon as our jaws came off our chests, showed no damage except that the outer door gasket of number five tube, which was just being secured, blew out of its groove.”
O’Kane suspected that the target must have served as either an ammunition ship or a submarine or destroyer tender. The detonation of such a ship’s cargo would explain the secondary explosion that had rattled Tang. One thing was certain: there could be no survivors. The three remaining ships appeared to be escorts, none worth a torpedo. O’Kane ordered his men to hunt the northbound convoy that had appeared on the radar earlier that evening. The skipper stretched out in his cabin at 2:45 a.m. He found sleep impossible. The voices of officers across the passageway in the wardroom rallied him. O’Kane joined them as Ensign Mel Enos, Jr., a graduate of the University of California’s Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps program, discussed the waste of torpedoes. Enos believed Tang could have sunk each ship with just t
hree, not four fish.
O’Kane had wrestled with whether he’d needed to fire the fourth torpedo in his attacks against Gyoten Maru, Fukuyama Maru, and Yamashimo Maru. But the skipper considered it his insurance policy. It guaranteed a ship’s destruction and allowed him to focus on his escape. “You’re right,” O’Kane told Enos. “But they’re on the bottom, and that’s what counts!” The younger officers cleared the wardroom moments later to head topside, leaving O’Kane and his executive officer. The men relaxed over a game of cribbage. The previous conversation percolated in the skipper’s mind, prompting him to share advice with his second in command that Morton had once shared with him—advice that would have haunting consequences for both the Japanese and Tang. “Tenacity, Fraz,” O’Kane told him. “Stay with ’em till they’re on the bottom!”
• • •
O’Kane had gone from three weeks without spotting a single target to sinking three ships in seven days. He still had twelve torpedoes and the promise of more success. While not the dramatic start that Morton had enjoyed in his first patrol a year earlier, the skipper knew the difference those twelve months had made in the war. American submarines in 1943 had picked off some 1,360,000 tons of enemy shipping, averaging seventy-seven attacks each month for the first half of the year, a figure that climbed to almost 100 attacks per month by the year’s end. The Japanese responded by ramping up escorts, making it harder to pick off convoys. More American submarines—1943 saw new boats commissioned at a rate of more than one a week—crowded the seas, upping the competition. Skippers had to work harder for scalps.
O’Kane planned on it.
Tang patrolled on the surface 150 miles west of Saipan the morning of February 24, searching for targets with its high periscope and radar. An Ultra message from Pearl Harbor delivered good news: the expected noontime coordinates of a Japanese convoy. O’Kane ordered Tang to three-engine speed and a slight course change of only twenty degrees to intercept. The submarine sped through the empty ocean as lookouts scanned the horizon for targets. A sailor on the tall search periscope spotted a clue so opaque that only an experienced submariner would recognize what it signified. “A single faint puff of smoke rose off to the north and then blended into the clouds. It was distant, far beyond the horizon,” O’Kane would later write. “The enemy had made one mistake, for one bearing was all we needed.”
Two targets now appeared on the radar more than a dozen miles away. Jones climbed up the periscope shears with binoculars. The chief quartermaster spotted a freighter, large tanker, and destroyer headed west. O’Kane ordered an end around. The skipper didn’t want the convoy’s lookouts to spot the stalking sub so he ordered Tang to remain on the edge of the convoy’s radar range as it raced ahead at eighteen knots. Frazee calculated the course and determined that it would take three hours for Tang to arrive at an attack position, but gathering rainsqualls coupled with the convoy’s erratic course slowed pursuit. O’Kane suspected the Japanese knew an enemy submarine shadowed them. That possibility made each entrance into a rainsquall more perilous as the downpours reduced Tang’s visibility at times to zero.
When sunset approached and the squalls let up, O’Kane ordered the submarine to stop. The fading light silhouetted the distant convoy. The skipper watched the destroyer flash several signals on a searchlight to the other ships that soon lined up behind it. The tanker was now in the rear. Lookouts followed the convoy with binoculars from atop Tang’s periscope shears. When the convoy disappeared west over the horizon, O’Kane ordered Tang up to full power. He planned to follow the convoy’s last true bearing. The skipper surmised the straggling tanker was a ploy—no convoy commander would leave his most valuable charge so exposed for long—and that the convoy in fact planned to circle back. O’Kane wasn’t about to be tricked. Lookouts soon picked up the convoy, now headed east toward Saipan, just as O’Kane had suspected. “The enemy zigs were of the wildest sort, sometimes actually backtracking,” the skipper wrote in his report. “But their very wildness was his undoing.”
Tang continued to track the convoy after dark as sailors sat down for dinner. O’Kane ordered ship identification books passed out in the mess so the lookouts could familiarize themselves with enemy silhouettes over dinner. The attack would prove more challenging than earlier ones since the convoy knew an enemy submarine lurked nearby. But the enemy’s wild zigzags not only slowed down the convoy, but seemed almost to guarantee a tactical blunder at some point. O’Kane just needed to wait. The destroyer now patrolled off the tanker’s bow. The skipper planned to attack from the stern, trusting that the enemy’s aft lookouts would succumb to human nature and stare straight ahead rather than behind. The downside of the plan meant that he would be attacking the freighter first, but could then spend the rest of night hunting the tanker.
O’Kane ordered his crew to battle stations at 8:30 p.m. His hope for an easy shot soon vanished. The 2,424-ton Echizen Maru’s erratic zigzags forced O’Kane to botch his early efforts to set up a shot. The third approach appeared much better. If the freighter zigzagged left, it would cross Tang’s bow, offering a perfect shot, but as the skipper prepared, acrid smoke from the coal-burning freighter descended on the bridge, temporarily blinding O’Kane and his men. But moments later, his luck changed. The freighter zigzagged again and now crossed Tang’s bow at 1,400 yards. This was the shot that O’Kane had sought. The forward torpedo room’s outer doors yawned open as the skipper marked the target’s bearing and fired.
Four torpedoes raced toward the Echizen Maru and exploded at about 10:30 p.m., killing thirty-five crew members. The skipper colorfully captured the detonation in his report. “We cold-cocked him with the first three of our usual four torpedoes,” O’Kane wrote. “The ship went to pieces, and amidst beautiful fireworks sank before we have completed our turn to evade.” The tanker opened fire from its forward and aft guns as the destroyer closed, firing shells in all directions. Tracer rounds peppered the waves within 1,000 yards of Tang. The skipper ordered Tang to cruise out about five miles off the tanker’s beam. The destroyer hunted in the area where the freighter sank, convinced that Tang had submerged, and dropped a string of harmless depth charges.
O’Kane still coveted the tanker, the convoy’s top target. The destroyer now hugged its last charge so close that at times the radar showed only a single pip. Sporadic gunfire and depth charges signaled the destroyer’s anxiousness. An immediate attack might be tough. Time and darkness proved O’Kane’s tactical advantage, so he decided to wait until dawn. That would give Tang time to decipher the enemy’s zigzag plan and speed. A few trouble-free hours coupled with the morning light also would cause the enemy to relax. Tang could drive ahead, pick the best spot for an attack, and dive. O’Kane turned the ship over to his executive officer for the night and climbed down to his cabin to sleep.
Thirty minutes before dawn, O’Kane climbed out of bed, downed two cups of coffee, and headed to the bridge. Tang remained eighty miles west of Saipan and 10,000 yards ahead of the convoy. An Ultra message arrived from Pearl Harbor, reporting that the convoy had been ordered to change course to the north at dawn. O’Kane didn’t buy it. He suspected the Japanese had put out misleading information to throw him off. O’Kane ordered Tang to dive to radar depth at 5:48 a.m. as the eastern sky grayed. Eighteen minutes later, he spotted his prey. The 18,000-ton tanker O’Kane had so hungered for turned out to be the 1,794-ton freighter Choko Maru. Tang had only eight torpedoes left, four forward and four aft.
The Japanese destroyer cruised down Choko Maru’s starboard side. What struck O’Kane—and what he made special note of in his report—were the lookouts. His attack the night before had clearly rattled the Japanese. “All vantage points,” O’Kane wrote, “including guns, bridge, bridge overhead, and rails, were manned with an estimated 150 uniformed lookouts on our side alone.” The skipper made his final calculations, careful to use the attack periscope for no more than four seconds at a time and never raising it more than a few inches above the glassy s
ea. Even if the lookouts spotted Tang, there would be no time to take evasive moves. The target loomed just 500 yards away, its fate determined.
O’Kane fired four torpedoes. At a range of just over a quarter mile, the run time was only twenty-three seconds, barely enough for the torpedoes even to arm. O’Kane watched as the Japanese lookouts spotted the torpedo wakes and began to point and shout. Not a single man on the freighter appeared to abandon his post in the final seconds before three of the four torpedoes rammed into Choko Maru’s starboard side under the smokestack, bridge, and after superstructure, killing eight. “The explosions were wonderful, throwing Japs and other debris above the belching smoke,” O’Kane wrote in his report. “He sank by the stern in four minutes, and then we went deep and avoided. The depth charges started a minute later, but were never close.”
12
TANG
“Now I’ve got my fighting gear on—shorts, sandals and stubble over my face.”
—John Bienia, October 7, 1943, letter
Dick O’Kane looked up in awe. Waves of as many as fifty American planes at a time crowded the dawn sky, engaged in a massive air strike on Truk. O’Kane’s mission this morning of April 30 was to rescue downed aviators. Carrier-based fighters and bombers had first pummeled the Japanese stronghold in February. America had since refused to quit. Army B-24 Liberators based in the Marshall and Solomon islands had now pounded the sunken mountain range more than thirty times. Despite the continual bombardment, Japan had managed to reinforce Truk. More than 100 planes crowded four airfields. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Chester Nimitz had had enough. He wanted to sideline Truk permanently. That effort was now under way—and O’Kane was impressed. “With the possible exception of a sinking maru,” he wrote in his report, “this was the most encouraging sight we’ve witnessed in this war to date.”