by James Scott
• • •
O’Kane planned for an easy day following Tang’s day-long chase of and attack on Nikkin Maru. At dawn some forty miles off Ko-To on the west coast of Korea, Lieutenant Hank Flanagan spotted a Chinese junk. Tang battle-surfaced alongside. The Chinese sailors trimmed the sails to escape—no doubt stunned by the sub’s sudden appearance—as Tang’s gun crew fired four rounds across the bow. The junk lowered its sails. O’Kane hoped he might collect some intelligence about enemy ships, but communication proved difficult. Lookouts scanned the horizon for any sign of ships as Tang sailors struggled to communicate. A distant puff of smoke curled above the horizon: a real target. Tang’s sailors tossed a bunch of canned goods that the labels had washed off over to the Chinese and set off.
The day of rest would wait.
The skipper ordered Tang to chase at full power, using the raised high periscope to increase visibility along the distant horizon. The single puff of smoke morphed into two. Lookouts watched as the masts of two ships came over the horizon, the 868-ton tanker Takatori Maru and the 998-ton freighter Taiun Maru No. 2. The ships zigzagged west. Tang chased for three hours, pounding the seas at full power to reach a position ahead of the targets. The submarine dove at 1:22 p.m. for a submerged attack. O’Kane ordered key battle station personnel to step aside and allow each position’s understudy to take charge. The Navy’s practice of rotating a percentage of sailors after each patrol, O’Kane believed, had played a role in the loss of his first subs, Argonaut and Wahoo. Too many experienced hands had left at once. He didn’t want to risk the same with Tang.
The convoy zigzagged toward Tang. O’Kane raised the periscope to check the progress every four to six minutes. With each observation, the ships drew closer. The skipper spied a hefty deck gun mounted on the bow of the tanker, which patrolled ahead like an escort. The bridge, superstructure, and smokestack all stood aft along with a large—and loaded—depth charge rack perched on the portside of the stern. The skipper presumed the tanker boasted an identical rack on the starboard side. O’Kane decided to eliminate the tanker first with a salvo of electric torpedoes. The wakeless weapons ran at almost half the speed of gas torpedoes, but proved much harder for enemy lookouts to spot—ideal for daylight attacks. The slower speed also would give him an extra minute to set up his shot on the freighter.
“Up scope,” O’Kane ordered.
Quartermaster Jones raised the scope and the skipper marked the Takatori Maru, now just 1,500 yards off the freighter’s starboard bow. Frazee mashed the firing plunger twice. O’Kane braced for detonation. Three. Two. One. Nothing. The furious skipper, who felt he had just botched his third attack of the patrol, cursed his faulty torpedoes. O’Kane ordered the periscope up and pressed his eye to the scope just as an explosion rocked the tanker. The wounded ship’s stern rose in the air before it slipped beneath the waves in just two minutes and twenty seconds, killing all twenty-eight on board.
The freighter that had trailed the tanker turned back. O’Kane did not have a solid shot and refused to waste a precious torpedo. There was no need to rush. One hundred miles of open water separated the freighter from the Korean coast and the ship’s escape route led him straight toward the submarines Tinosa and Sealion. O’Kane dashed off a contact report and ordered Tang to trail the freighter, keeping its smoke in sight. The skipper bragged in his log that the target had nowhere to go: “We had the freighter caught between third base and home.”
O’Kane ordered the sub to surface around sunset. He climbed to the bridge and studied the coal-black smoke that hung on the otherwise empty horizon. Tang dove that night ahead of the freighter and just a mile and a half from the island of Ko-To. He waited as the target steamed toward him, closing to just 500 yards. He noted that the freighter had slowed—likely feeling safe so close to land—as he fired two torpedoes.
“Both hot, straight, and normal,” soundman Caverly reported.
O’Kane asked for the run time. The executive officer calculated out loud, but before Frazee could finish, a massive explosion vaporized much of the freighter and its crew of twenty and shook the submarine. Merely twenty seconds had passed. The skipper peered through the periscope to see that only a short section of Taiun Maru’s bow remained. The second torpedo, trailing seconds behind, had nothing to hit. Tang surfaced four minutes later. “There could have been no survivors,” O’Kane would later write. “We would have seen them in the moonlight.”
• • •
O’Kane was learning that to guarantee a hit he needed to get in tight, an aggressive tactic few skippers embraced. “There were submariners who frowned at getting so close underfoot, where an enemy zig in the closing minutes could drive a submarine down,” O’Kane later wrote. “By and large, they were not the ones who sank many ships.” In the past seven days, O’Kane had more than made up for his previous patrol, putting 23,873 tons of Japanese ships on the bottom. He’d all but forgotten his earlier frustrations at his long string of missed shots. “How could anybody feel other than satisfaction at the way this patrol was now developing?” he wrote. “Five ships down and we still have five steam torpedoes plus two electrics waiting for targets.”
Tang failed to encounter many vessels over the next few days. O’Kane surmised that the recent attacks meant the Japanese would hold up shipping bound for China. The sudden lack of targets would prompt an enemy submarine to move on within a few days and shipping could resume. That had been the case in 1943 when O’Kane hunted this area on Wahoo. But the ships already at sea or those headed toward Japan—often loaded with much needed materials—would continue, hugging the coast in hope that the shallow waters would protect them from submarines. A counterclockwise search of the Yellow Sea would guarantee that Tang intercepted them.
O’Kane didn’t have to wait long. Lookouts spotted the heavy masts of a ship on the morning of July 4. The skipper climbed to the bridge for a look. More than a dozen fishing trawlers bobbed in the waves between Tang and its target: a morning traffic jam on the Yellow Sea. Tang wove between the trawlers, O’Kane hopeful the fishing boats would camouflage his sub. The submarine dove and the skipper studied the 6,886-ton freighter Asukazan Maru through the periscope. He liked what he saw: a massive bow, broad superstructure and bridge, and towering masts—and just as O’Kane had suspected—the freighter was bound for Japan. What he didn’t know was that it had departed China’s Tung Ting Lake area for the Japanese port of Yawata, loaded down with 11,400 tons of precious iron ore.
The freighter zigzagged, spoiling O’Kane’s shot. The ship steamed toward shore with Tang taking up the chase. O’Kane and Frazee studied the chart. The water grew shallower with each minute. The ten-fathom curve—signifying just sixty feet of water—ran fifteen miles offshore. O’Kane knew his next move would depend on what the ship did when it reached that spot. The skipper ordered Tang to full power, which meant his batteries would last only an hour. Caverly called out the depth. Only twenty-four feet of water separated Tang’s keel from the sea bottom, a depth that dropped moments later to just eighteen feet. Frazee announced that the ship had reached the ten-fathom curve.
“Up scope,” O’Kane ordered. “All ahead full. She’s turning right!”
The ship presented its starboard side to Tang as O’Kane closed the distance. Eighteen feet of water beneath Tang’s keel dropped to twelve then six feet. The fathometer stopped working. O’Kane ordered Tang to stop as the submarine came to rest on the muddy sea floor. The skipper shot a glance at the depth gauge to discover that his submarine sat aground in just fifty-eight feet of water, leaving no room for the boat to operate. O’Kane ordered the submarine to back up into deeper water as he took a final look through the scope, marked the target, and fired three torpedoes.
The explosion rocked the Tang. The skipper looked through the periscope. Only the bow, stern, and masts rose out of the water as the rest of the Asukazan Maru settled on the bottom, sixty-five passengers and crew now dead. A huge cloud of smoke loomed overhead. Tang su
rfaced five minutes after firing. O’Kane counted thirty-four fishing boats milling around, apparently awestruck by the blast. Some fifty survivors bobbed in the water and crowded in life rafts, far more the skipper noted than otherwise should have been needed on such a ship. The men watched as the bow tip slipped under amid the bubbling water before Tang departed for deeper seas.
• • •
The men feasted on salmon loaf and peas—the skipper’s New England Independence Day tradition—as Tang cruised slowly that afternoon. The only interruption came from distant depth charges that rumbled more than fifty miles away. The wardroom phone rang before sunset, delivering news of smoke on the horizon to the north. That meant O’Kane would have to return to where he had sunk Asukazan Maru that morning, an area likely still crawling with Japanese antisubmarine forces. The skipper took a final periscope sweep of the horizon in preparation to surface when he spotted a faint wisp of smoke to the west—another ship.
Tang surfaced after sunset and began to chase, the full moon illuminating the seas. Excitement filled the boat at the prospect of two attacks in one day. O’Kane dove at 8:41 p.m., leveling off at forty-seven feet so the crew could track the ship by radar. The skipper watched the 6,932-ton Yamaoka Maru develop in his periscope, noting its raked bow, tripod mast, and king posts forward and aft. A mushroom-topped bridge structure towered over the deck. The combined speeds of the target and the Tang meant that the distance closed at 400 yards a minute. The target zigzagged into position. “We’ll fire on this leg,” O’Kane ordered. “Standby for a quick setup.”
Yamaoka Maru chugged across O’Kane’s periscope seconds later, the range now just a half mile. O’Kane fired two shots, watching thirty seconds later as the torpedoes tore into the freighter. The explosions broke Yamaoka Maru’s back. The masts collapsed in toward one another as the ship sank by the middle, taking down fifty-eight enemy crewmembers. O’Kane ordered the sound piped over the submarine’s loudspeaker. The entire crew now listened to grinding sound of the target’s bulkheads collapsing under the pressure of the water as it plummeted toward the sea bottom. O’Kane stepped back seconds later to let chief quartermaster Sidney Jones take a peek. “She’s gone,” the quartermaster exclaimed. “Christ, all of her!”
Tang surfaced. Debris littered the dark water. Lookouts spotted a lone survivor, who ducked beneath a capsized lifeboat. Boatswain Leibold grappled the boat and pulled it toward Tang while Petty Officer 1st Class James White coaxed the enemy sailor out with a few rounds from his machine gun, Tang’s first prisoner. Sharp captured the Independence Day excitement in his journal. “If I hadn’t been on this ship & experienced it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it, the way we celebrated the 4th out here today,” he wrote. “I can say not many people had the fireworks we did. Today we sank two ships, both damn big ones.”
• • •
O’Kane had managed in just twenty-six days to sink nine ships—and tie Mush Morton’s record. His hope of breaking it depended on what he could accomplish with his last two torpedoes. The skipper didn’t have to wait long. Lookouts spotted smoke the next morning from a ship steaming south, hugging the Korean coast. The ship’s course meant that it eventually would round Choppeki Point, a promontory that offered deep water—a welcome change—and the promise of even more coastal traffic. Tang surfaced at sunset and began a three-hour run to Choppeki Point.
The skipper’s instincts again proved correct. Radar picked up a ship more than fifteen miles away that steamed north. The skipper ordered an end around at 10:57 p.m. The full moon shone down as Tang raced across a rippleless sea, reaching an attack position seven miles ahead of the 1,469-ton freighter Dori Maru several hours later. Tang dove and waited. The still fogging periscopes showed that Dori Maru chugged toward him, oblivious to the lurking submarine. Morton’s record was his. O’Kane pulled the trigger at 3:20 a.m.
The skipper stepped back to allow Frazee and Jones to look. The men alternated dunking the submarine’s two periscopes to clear the fog. The first torpedo tore into Dori Maru beneath the mainmast.
“Her whole side’s blown out!” one of the men hollered.
The second torpedo crashed seconds later into the freighter under the foremast. Dori Maru was finished. “She’s capsizing!”
The sky turned pink with the approach of dawn as Tang surfaced to inspect the damage only to find no survivors and little remaining of the freighter that had vanished along with sixteen passengers and crew. “Both torpedoes hit exactly as aimed,” O’Kane wrote in his report. “There was only floating wreckage and broken life boats in sight.”
15
DRUM
“I don’t know where we are going to go, nor do I know what we are going to do, but I hope that they send us where the Japs are good and thick.”
—Slade Cutter, December 11, 1941, letter
Lieutenant Commander Maurice Rindskopf stared through his binoculars at two motor sampans cruising five miles northwest on the afternoon of July 29. Rainsqualls gathered on the horizon and he would soon lose sight of the first targets he had seen in days, a far cry from the crowded seas his orders had promised he would find off Palau. “The Japanese are fighting desperately and will exert every effort to maintain Palau as their primary advanced base,” the orders stated. “Traffic between the Empire and Palau and Palau and other advanced outlying bases is expected to be heavy.” The only heavy traffic Rindskopf had seen were American carrier forces—and he’d spotted just the mast tops of those on the horizon—that had pounded Japanese forces in recent days. Enemy traffic proved equally light; just the two sampans.
Two measly sampans.
A conning tower leak had required Drum to return to Pearl Harbor for immediate repair. On a New Year’s Day test trial in the cool waters off Hawaii, Rindskopf looked up from his seat on the chart table at 225 feet below the surface and saw the cork in the conning tower crack. The executive officer ordered Drum to surface immediately. Crews ripped the cork off to discover that the water pressure had deformed the steel as much as an inch, the possible prelude to a catastrophic collapse. The Navy had ordered Drum to Mare Island for sixty-six days so shipfitters could install a new conning tower. The good fortune Diesel Dan Williamson had enjoyed on the eighth patrol, when he sank the prized former ocean liner Hie Maru, failed to materialize for the ninth. The seas around the Bonin Islands proved empty of worthwhile targets. After fifty-two days at sea and covering 12,641 miles, Williamson returned to port with all twenty-four of his torpedoes. The patrol had proven a bust.
So had Williamson.
Not only did the bespectacled skipper learn via a message at sea that his ill wife had died, but he suffered a painful gallbladder attack that had forced him to spend much of the patrol in his bunk, leaving Rindskopf to command the submarine. When Drum moored in Majuro for refit, Williamson hopped a plane for Pearl Harbor. Doctors there diagnosed him with gallstones and recommended surgery. Williamson’s tenure at the helm of Drum was over. With the submarine’s refit now complete, Drum was ready for patrol. The Navy offered Rindskopf two options. He could await the arrival of a new skipper—his fourth—or he could replace Williamson, a move that would allow Rindskopf to forgo prospective commanding officer school and the traditional first job as captain of an aged World War I–era submarine. Rindskopf didn’t hesitate. In a June 23 ceremony on the submarine’s deck, the twenty-six-year-old became the youngest fleet boat skipper fighting in the Pacific.
No one was better qualified. Unlike some submarines such as Tang and Silversides, where a single skipper remained in command beyond the customary several patrols, the Navy had regularly rotated Drum’s top officer. That revolving door had allowed Rindskopf to learn from each man he had saluted as captain, captains who had proven varied in personality, style, and tenor and whose backgrounds reflected some of America’s cultural diversity. Drum’s first skipper, Robert Rice, the cerebral Massachusetts Episcopalian and gifted fencer, had taught Rindskopf periscope work and finesse. The Great
White Father McMahon, the Ohio Catholic of Irish and German descent, had shown him how to build a strong combat team, while the Colorado native and Presbyterian Williamson had taught him the importance of training. These lessons would prove invaluable to Rindskopf, a Brooklyn Jew and the son of a chemical engineer, as he charted his own legacy at the helm of Drum.
Compared to O’Kane, who had witnessed the extreme leadership differences of Pinky Kennedy and Mush Morton, Rindskopf had enjoyed a progression of solid and aggressive skippers who had helped him grow. None of his predecessors would top the list of the war’s most successful skippers, in part because the men didn’t serve at the helm long enough to sink the vast number of ships credited to Morton, O’Kane, and Coye. But each of Drum’s skippers had performed well. Postwar records would show that Rice had destroyed seven ships and McMahon four. Even though Diesel Dan Williamson had sunk just one ship in his two patrols, the Hie Maru would prove Drum’s largest victim of the entire war. The aggregate tonnage of these ships—coupled with what Rindskopf would add—would make Drum one of the war’s top fighters. Unlike the brazen Wahoo, which tallied great scores in a short time but ended in tragedy, Drum’s success was built on consistent performance.
More than any other skipper, Rindskopf symbolized the Drum. Though the Navy had remained vigilant in its rotation of officers, it had left Rindskopf on board for ten straight patrols. The wiry lieutenant junior grade, who had joined the wardroom a few years out of the Naval Academy and twenty-five days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, had fought the entire war on Drum, climbing in that time from gunnery officer to skipper. Rindskopf had eaten almost every meal for nearly three years at the green wardroom table, had helped fire more than 100 torpedoes, and now closed in on Drum’s 1,000th dive, many in hostile waters, from the Japanese stronghold at Truk to the enemy homeland of Honshu. He had seen the once pristine submarine, commissioned on a blustery fall morning in New England 965 days earlier, weathered by more than 80,000 miles of salty ocean water and battered by depth charges that had shattered lights, busted glass gauges, and sprung leaks.