by James Scott
The swarm of escorts that guarded the convoy demonstrated the toll America’s unrestricted submarine war had now taken on Japan. Merchant ships loaded with everything from oil and coal to bauxite and rubber now went down faster than shipbuilders could hammer out new ones, starving Japan’s wartime industry of precious raw materials vital to construct fighters, warships, and munitions. American submarine skippers in 1944 would average 137 attacks each month, firing more than 500 torpedoes. The success of those attacks came down to more than just talented skippers, like O’Kane. Thirty months of war had revealed the failure of Japan’s antisubmarine strategy, a major problem since maritime transportation served as the backbone of the island nation’s civilian and military economies. Inferior technology and poor prewar planning coupled with a reluctance to adapt to new tactics now threatened not only Japan’s war effort but the nation’s ability to survive.
One of Japan’s biggest weaknesses was poor technology. Japan had proven slow to embrace the promise of radar, instead emphasizing lookouts. Though lookouts are valuable for spotting large surface ships, American submarines presented a much greater challenge. The low and sleek design of submarines coupled with improved camouflage paint introduced in 1943 made submarines difficult to spot at great distances. The preference of many skippers to hunt late at night further complicated that challenge. Skippers like O’Kane routinely seized such opportunities to pick off targets under the watchful eye of lookouts. Japanese technicians in advance of Midway had installed two experimental radar sets, not on the frontline carriers, but on the battleships Hyuga and Ise, both relegated to guard the Aleutians invasion. Even as radar appreciation grew, escorts remained a low priority. Not until at least September 1944 would technicians install radar on escorts with any regularity.
But Japan’s problems ran deeper than just technology. While Japan provided some antisubmarine protection to large combatant ships and vital convoys, military leaders had failed to adequately anticipate the threat from American submarines. Many ships in the early days of the war often steamed through the open seas unescorted, easy prey for lurking subs. The only time ships enjoyed protection was when leaving or arriving in port. The responsibility of that protection then fell to local commanders, each of whom had varying resources. Exacerbating the problem was the failure of the Japanese to accurately gauge the effectiveness of its antisubmarine measures. Antisubmarine efforts, according to a Navy postwar tally, cost America just three submarines in 1942. The next three years saw the likely losses of fifteen, fourteen, and eight submarines respectively. Japanese forces in contrast claimed as many as 500 American submarines destroyed, a figure ten times higher than reality.
Japan’s antisubmarine failures were rooted in an outdated view of naval warfare that centered on fleet actions and surface battles. Military leaders did not view submarines as independent fighters, but as auxiliaries to the fleet, much as American leaders had viewed submarines two decades earlier. This frustrated the Germans, who unsuccessfully pressured Japan to adopt America’s strategy of targeting merchant ships. “The Japanese Navy thought always of the U.S. carriers. They talked about how many were building, and how many were in the Pacific and that these must be sunk; but it was always carriers they talked about. Next after that they would attack battleships and lesser ships but never the merchantmen except under most favorable conditions,” Vice Admiral Paul Wenneker, who had served as an attaché in Japan, would tell American investigators after the war. “The mission was the American carriers and they could not be changed on this principle.”
As much as military leaders resisted change, Japan could no longer ignore America’s submarine war. Too many ships were going down. The Japanese in November 1943 finally formed the Grand Escort Fleet to protect ships that steamed between the empire and vital locales, including the Marianas, Philippines, and the East Indies. Within a year the fleet grew to include some sixty vessels, including destroyers, sub chasers, patrol boats, and about forty-five frigates. Many of these frigates could carry as many as 300 depth charges. The Grand Escort Fleet also depended on air patrols that would reach a maximum size of 170 planes, many of them obsolete and only one third equipped with radar. In March 1944 Japan also issued its first operation order, outlining no fewer than ten formations escorts should use when driving convoys. The general plan called for a convoy to steam in a block formation encircled by a ring of escorts. On the bridge of Tang this evening, O’Kane saw not just one ring, but two.
O’Kane could not shoot from outside the escort screen and hope to hit any of the freighters. He would have to penetrate the double-layered screen, a job better suited for a magician than a sailor. He had no chance at an undetected approach on the convoy’s bow, but he hoped he could slip in for a broadside attack, a move that would allow him to fire a split salvo at two ships. Jones and Leibold studied the patrols through binoculars, looking for any sign that the escorts had spotted the submarine. Tang cruised across the phosphorescent wake of the leading port escort only to find that the submarine would pass the bow of the inner escort, a move that guaranteed the lookouts would spot Tang. O’Kane retreated. The skipper tried a second time but again found the inner escort blocked his path. The broadside attack, he realized, wouldn’t work. He needed a new strategy, one the Japanese would never anticipate. O’Kane decided to attack from the stern.
Tang eased across the wake of the rear port escort, expecting to find a starboard patrol right alongside. The men scanned the dark waters before Leibold spotted it, far off the starboard flank. O’Kane hopped down into the conning tower, where the radar confirmed the visual observation. The skipper ordered Frazee to calculate the distance between the two rear escorts. The executive officer delivered the news to O’Kane on the bridge seconds later—2,300 yards or a little over a mile. O’Kane had found what he needed: a hole in the net. Tang crossed the convoy’s wake and turned to follow the same course, planning to slip between the escorts. The skipper ordered a third engine online, and Tang roared ahead in the darkness, closing in on the rear escorts. O’Kane slowed to sixteen knots, fearful Tang’s motion might draw the eye of the enemy’s lookouts.
The scenario reminded O’Kane of a night on Wahoo eighteen months earlier under then skipper Pinky Kennedy. On its second patrol off the Solomon Islands Wahoo had encountered a large freighter in the middle of the night accompanied by a single escort. The freighter had just passed Wahoo, zigzagging frantically. The target’s stern still loomed large on the horizon and its erratic course slowed its pace, making it easy prey that Wahoo could sneak up on from behind. Though skippers generally preferred a broadside attack, in war ideal setups were rare. O’Kane told Kennedy that Wahoo had no choice but to pursue and attack the freighter from the stern. The skipper’s reaction shocked and humiliated O’Kane. “Don’t be stupid,” Kennedy had shouted in front of several other officers and crewmembers. “A submarine can’t attack from here.”
O’Kane planned to prove him wrong.
Tang inched up on the convoy’s rear. Jones focused his binoculars on the port escort while Leibold studied the starboard. Neither would say a word unless the patrols turned toward Tang. Communication had been reduced to whispers. The men on the bridge could now clearly see the patrols that flanked either side of the submarine, two destroyer escorts with guns mounted fore and aft. The Japanese ships towered over Tang, and though intimidating, their height worked to O’Kane’s advantage. The elevated vantage points meant enemy lookouts would not see a submarine silhouetted against the sky. In fact, to spot the Tang, lookouts would actually have to look down, where the submarine would blend into the dark waters. Furthermore, no lookout would ever suspect an American skipper would be stupid or bold enough to try to penetrate the narrow swath between them. They hadn’t met Dick O’Kane.
“Come up here, Fraz,” the skipper called. “This you’ve got to see!”
Frazee was there before the skipper finished his sentence. The two officers surveyed the scene. The silhouette of the destroye
r escorts now fell behind Tang’s stern. A glance to either side revealed the sleek outlines of other craft, encircling the convoy. Directly off Tang’s bow steamed the massive freighters. Like a virus that penetrates a cell’s defensive membrane, O’Kane had punctured the convoy’s protective shield. He was now on the inside, a traveling member of a Japanese convoy, protected from the outside world by the enemy’s own escorts—as long as he wasn’t spotted. O’Kane was thrilled. The skipper dropped down into the conning tower for one last look at the chart. Nagasaki remained another twenty-five miles to the north. The skipper had plenty of time. O’Kane considered how best to attack. Should he target the port or starboard column?
O’Kane settled on the starboard column. Tang increased speed to seventeen knots. The men on the bridge could see the two closest targets through binoculars as Tang maneuvered off the convoy’s starboard side: a large four-masted freighter with a high composite superstructure topped by a short stack led the starboard column, followed by what appeared to be a modern tanker. Both rode low in the water and likely were loaded. O’Kane planned to shoot a spread of three torpedoes from Tang’s bow at each of the two closest ships. “Make all tubes ready for firing.”
“All tubes ready,” Frazee answered.
“Open outer doors forward.”
“Outer doors are open.”
O’Kane had waited months for this exact moment, a loaded convoy dead ahead, oblivious to his lethal presence.
“Any time, Captain.”
The skipper watched the lead freighter chug across the scope of the target-bearing transmitter, centering the reticle on the ship’s after mast. “Constant bearing—mark!”
“Set,” crackled over the bridge loudspeaker.
“Fire!”
Tang shuddered as the first torpedo left the tube, followed seconds later by two more. O’Kane then turned to the tanker and fired three torpedoes.
“Torpedo run one minute forty-eight seconds, Captain.”
O’Kane ordered Tang to turn north, all four engines online for evasion once the skipper had the required visual confirmation of the Japanese losses.
“Thirty seconds to go.”
The freighter’s stern exploded followed by a blast amidships that lit up the night sky. “The explosion appeared to blow the ship’s sides out, and he commenced sinking rapidly,” O’Kane wrote in his report. “On schedule, our fourth and fifth torpedoes hit under the stack and just forward of the after superstructure of the tanker. His whole after end blazed up until extinguished as he went down by the stern.”
The Japanese escorts hurled depth charges as additional explosions rocked the night. Tang seized on the chaos to escape, just slipping past one stunned escort. A low-hanging cloud of smoke marked the dark sky where the ships sank. O’Kane climbed below at midnight for a visit to the head in the forward torpedo room. Wardroom steward Howard Walker greeted the skipper afterward with a cup of hot coffee. “How many did we get,” Captain?”
“Why, both of them,” O’Kane said, taking a sip. “We saw them go.”
“I think there was more, sir.”
Explosions often outnumbered ships, O’Kane explained, making it impossible for sailors below deck to tally losses.
“Oh, I wasn’t down here,” Walker confessed. “You were topside so long, I brought your coffee to the bridge. It was so exciting, I dropped your coffee down into the superstructure.”
Walker was right, though O’Kane didn’t know when he logged just two ships sunk in his report that night. A postwar review of Japanese records would double that number, revealing that O’Kane had destroyed the freighters Tainan Maru and Kennichi Maru along with passenger cargo ships Nasusan Maru and Tamahoko Maru, the latter taking down with it 560 Allied captives en route to prison in Japan, a tragedy that would prove all too common in the war. Six torpedoes fired in the two-hour-and-eight-minute attack had destroyed 16,292 tons of Japanese ships. O’Kane’s approach from the stern—ridiculed eighteen months earlier by Kennedy—had produced the most successful single attack of the war, an attack Petty Officer 2nd Class Donald Sharp summed up afterward with four simple words in his diary: “Tonight the fireworks started.”
• • •
O’Kane scanned the horizon at 8 p.m. the night of June 27 when the bridge loudspeaker crackled with the news that an Ultra message had arrived. O’Kane preferred such messages contain specific information on convoy movements. This one in contrast provided only coordinates for offshore enemy shipping routes. O’Kane was suspicious. Good information was rare in this area yet American war planners some 4,000 miles away in Pearl Harbor had suddenly cracked a message about a new secret shipping route. O’Kane didn’t buy it. Tang had just obliterated four ships. The weary skipper suspected the enemy had put out bogus leads to throw off the American submarines that now hunted in Japan’s home waters.
The Ultra directed Tinosa skipper Don Weiss to take charge again and position the three submarines to intercept the enemy convoys. O’Kane fumed. He was tired of Pearl Harbor’s micromanagement of this patrol, particularly the insistence that the three submarines work together. The effort so far had proven futile. Tinosa had never even responded to Tang’s messages during its attack on the convoy a few nights earlier. Sealion had at least responded, but failed to get in on the action. The time had come for them to part ways. Weiss ordered another meeting off Danjo Gunto. Frazee climbed back into the yellow raft and paddled over to Tinosa. When he returned to Tang, he headed to the wardroom to deliver the news. “We’ve been banished.”
Tinosa would operate south of the enemy shipping lane, Sealion to the north. Tang would patrol north of both, at least forty miles above the shipping lane.
“And the other boundaries?” O’Kane asked.
“Well, Captain Weiss didn’t get around to that,” Frazee answered. “I didn’t think we would want to bring it up.”
The skipper digested the news. Weiss had only limited Tang’s southern boundary. O’Kane had no restrictions to the north, east, or west. The whole Yellow Sea was now his. Some of his crew in contrast greeted the news with trepidation. “The water is mighty shallow,” Don Sharp wrote in his diary. “May god & luck still be with us, we’ll need plenty.”
• • •
Heavy fog swept across the waves at dawn on June 29 as Tang patrolled submerged near the southwest coast of Korea. The cold water and the humid air fogged the two periscopes, forcing the officers on watch to alternate between them, dunking one to clear the lens as the officer peered through the other. Tang compensated with periodic radar sweeps.
The loudspeaker crackled near noon with the news that a freighter steamed west. O’Kane peered through the periscope—still clutching his lunchtime drumstick—and could just make out the major details of the ship, a mast-funnel-mast-freighter. O’Kane could not overtake it submerged, so Tang surfaced early that afternoon and paralleled the freighter through rough seas. Once O’Kane was ahead of the freighter, he ordered Tang to dive again. The skipper would wait for his prey to come to him.
O’Kane ordered his crew to battle stations at 5:30 p.m. and fired two torpedoes. Frazee announced a forty-seven-second run time. O’Kane raised the scope to watch. The skipper spied the smoke from the torpedo’s wakes; both raced ahead just as aimed, but disappeared beneath the ship. Both had run too deep and missed.
The freighter turned on the Tang. O’Kane ordered the submarine deep. Two depth charges exploded as Tang reached 200 feet, just fifty feet off the shallow bottom. The failed attack—the second in as many days—infuriated O’Kane. “To bring torpedoes pushing on toward 5,000 miles, and to have six in a row, six out of our first 12 fail us,” he wrote. “That wasn’t quite fair.”
Tang surfaced, allowing the watch to track the freighter’s last known course. The smell of steaks wafted through the compartments. The skipper rehashed the failed attack over dinner. How at ten feet had the torpedo passed beneath the target? Then it hit him: the China-bound freighter was empty, carrying just
enough weight for ballast. He’d missed because the ship rode high in the water. The draft of an empty ship was only eight feet. His torpedo had slipped right beneath.
The wardroom phone interrupted a post-dinner cribbage game at 8:30. The conning tower reported a radar contact due north. O’Kane climbed to the bridge. The skipper suspected it was the same ship he had missed earlier, a mistake he planned to remedy before dawn. O’Kane decided to attack after moonset, still a few hours away. The darkness would allow Tang to slip in so close that the freighter would have no time to evade. The skipper climbed down to his bunk, slipped off his shoes, and closed his eyes.
Wardroom steward Walker woke the skipper a few hours later with a cup of hot coffee. O’Kane downed a second one moments later in the wardroom beneath the glow of the red night-vision lights. “We going to get her this time, Captain?”
“That’s right,” O’Kane told his steward. “One pickle right in her middle.”
The skipper climbed to the bridge, where Frazee pointed out the Nikkin Maru to O’Kane, whose eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark. The 5,707-ton freighter that had left the Japanese port of Moji bound for Woosung proved far from empty. Some 3,400 passengers crowded aboard, all oblivious to the lurking submarine. Across the dark and rough seas, O’Kane studied his target. “Let’s go to battle stations,” he ordered. “Set all torpedoes to run at six feet. I’ll take the con.”
Frazee dropped below.
“Constant bearing—mark!”
“Set!”
“Fire!”
This time O’Kane hit the ship with one shot. The one-and-a-half-ton weapon—packed with more than 500 pounds of the explosive Torpex—doomed 3,150 passengers and sixty-nine crewmembers. “The explosion amidships, just thirty seconds after firing, was as beautiful as it was reassuring,” O’Kane wrote in his report. “It broke the freighter’s back, his stern sinking with a down angle, his forward section with an up, in a cloud of fire, smoke, and steam.”