The War Below

by James Scott

  Tang had barely arrived in Midway for refit before the ecstatic admiral turned O’Kane around and sent him back, this time to the waters off Honshu. The skipper’s orders had come with a personal note. “I want to tell you why I am sending you and your Tang right back to the Empire, with hardly a breather,” the admiral wrote. “We have had two poor, and now a dry patrol in these areas, the boats reporting a dearth of shipping. Intelligence reports indicate that the merchant traffic must be there, and I am certain that Tang can rediscover it.” The aggressive skipper did just as ordered. Despite malfunctioning torpedoes that plagued the thirty-four-day patrol, O’Kane still sank two ships—with a total tonnage of 11,463—and set a patrol boat ablaze in a fifty-three-minute surface battle on Tang’s return to port.

  Tang prepared to depart for its fifth patrol without O’Kane’s trusted executive officer, Murray Frazee, who had been promoted to lieutenant commander. O’Kane had come to depend on Frazee much as Morton had once relied on O’Kane. But the time had arrived for Frazee to advance. O’Kane typed a one-page letter, recommending him for command of his own submarine. O’Kane noted that Frazee had made eleven war patrols, likely more than any of his contemporaries. Furthermore, the skipper wrote, the Navy would only do the Japanese a favor by holding him back. O’Kane recommended Frazee attend prospective commanding officers’ school in New London, not because he felt his exec needed more training, but with the hopes that the four-week course would give him much needed time off and that others in his class might learn from him.

  Frazee looked forward to the break. Tang’s fourth patrol had made him jittery. The Navy’s policy of rotating a quarter of the crew after each patrol had left Tang with young and inexperienced officers that Frazee feared might fumble in an emergency. His worries had forced him to stay up every night on patrol to back up his men. It had exhausted the twenty-eight-year-old; he joked that the intensity of Tang’s four patrols should make them count double. But O’Kane had educated the grateful Frazee. “Going to sea with you was a revelation,” he later wrote in a letter to his skipper. “I learned that taking some real risks was in order; that the Japanese were not supermen; that our submarines were hard to detect and harder to damage if we operated intelligently; and that seeking out the enemy with real determination yielded great rewards.”

  Much of the crew shared Frazee’s exhaustion. O’Kane had pushed his boat and men to the limit. In four patrols totaling 171 days he had destroyed seventeen confirmed ships, more than many submarines would sink during the entire war. O’Kane now averaged a ship sunk for every ten days on patrol. Though his taut routine had made Tang a legend, Frazee noted, it had come at the expense of the crew. O’Kane even pushed to cut rest periods so he could return to the fight, a tactic Morton, too, had embraced to his men’s frustration. “O’Kane liked to run back to base on the surface at full speed, with lookouts all over the place, just so he could load up more torpedoes and get back out there—sink more ships, kill more Japs,” Frazee would later write. “That did not thrill many people in the crew.” But O’Kane was not blind to his crew’s fatigue. If his men needed a break, he would make it happen. The crew had earned it.

  • • •

  Allied forces had carved two routes toward Japan. Admiral Nimitz’s forces had fought through the Gilbert and Marshall islands, the Carolines, and the Marianas while General MacArthur’s troops had battled the Japanese across the malarial jungles of New Guinea and isolated the enemy’s once mighty base at Rabaul. The September 15 invasions of the Palaus and Morotai island merged these divergent paths. MacArthur now planned his triumphant return to the Philippines. Carrier air strikes would wipe out Japanese supply lines and reinforcements while submarines would target cargo and warships.

  War planners expected a ferocious fight. Japan’s only hope to prolong the day when enemy warships appeared off its shores hinged on stalling America’s westward advance. Reinforcements and supplies shipped out for the Philippines. Troops came from as far away as Manchuria while freighters loaded with tanks, horses, and ammunition steamed down from Formosa and aircrews flew in from Burma. Anemic Japan had few resources to spare, a fact reflected in the decision to escort one convoy of aircraft personnel and supplies with battleships.

  The undersea service planned a choke hold around the Philippines that when coupled with the destruction wrought by American aviators would destroy Japan’s merchant fleet. Fourteen Australian-based submarines would hunt the archipelago’s waters, guarding the Palawan Passage, the west coast of Luzon, and the approaches to Manila. Lockwood intended to contribute another twenty-six Hawaii-based boats, including Tang, Drum, and Silversides. These would crowd the waters north of the Philippines, covering the approaches from Formosa and Japan. These forty subs that created what Lockwood later described as a “watertight blockade” approached the total number of boats America had had to cover the entire Pacific at the start of the war. To make it all work, however, the admiral needed Tang in place—and fast.

  O’Kane had power to bargain.

  “How soon could you be ready to head west?” Lockwood asked the skipper. “All the way west.”

  “Four days, sir,” O’Kane replied. “But there is one thing I request in return.”

  The admiral listened.

  “I’d like something to take back to my crew,” he said. “I’d like our next upkeep scheduled for Mare Island.”

  O’Kane had asked for a real plum. A California overhaul would sideline one of America’s top submarines for up to three months at a critical time when the Navy hoped to capitalize on its momentum. But for the eighty-seven officers and crew who served on Tang, Mare Island would give them a chance to visit family and enjoy a real break from the war, not just the couple of weeks on the beach in front of the Royal Hawaiian, but a chance to enjoy San Francisco, the wine country, and a taste of American life. The added incentive of an extended visit to the West Coast would give O’Kane’s crew motive to fight extra hard on this next patrol.

  “I appreciate what you say,” Lockwood said, extending his hand to O’Kane. “I’ll take care of it.”

  O’Kane and his crew departed four days ahead of schedule. A sudden torpedo shortage had hit Pearl Harbor, forcing Tang to scavenge a load of electric fish from Tambor, waylaid from patrol by a propulsion problem. Tang’s officers and crew paused only long enough from fueling and stashing canned vegetables, meat, and coffee for Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Nimitz and Lockwood to present medals honoring Tang’s third patrol, including a second Navy Cross for O’Kane. The departing Frazee received his third Silver Star, while new executive officer Lieutenant Frank Springer received his first. The entire crew also received the coveted Presidential Unit Citation—the highest award a ship or combat unit can receive—in honor of the submarine’s first three patrols.

  With the food all loaded and the crew on board, Tang let out a prolonged blast of its whistle at 1 p.m. on September 24, signaling its departure for its fifth patrol. O’Kane marveled at how Pearl Harbor—decimated by the Japanese two years, nine months, and seventeen days earlier—largely had returned to its pre-attack condition. Salvage crews had righted the capsized battleship Oklahoma and moved it into dry dock for repairs. Other ships had already returned to battle. The bombed and scorched battleship Tennessee, which had bombarded the Japanese in the Gilbert, Marshall, and Mariana islands, would soon fight in the Leyte campaign that Tang now supported, while the torpedoed Nevada’s deafening guns had just three months earlier pounded German defenses during the Allied landings on D-Day. Crews had stripped the sunken battleship Arizona’s topside structure and armament, leaving the hull as a tomb on the harbor’s murky bottom.

  One of the newer faces on board Tang belonged to Lieutenant Lawrence Savadkin, a tall and lean engineering officer who had joined the wardroom before the fourth patrol. The twenty-four-year-old Savadkin, known to friends as Larry, grew up in a Jewish household in the small town of Easton in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley midway between Philadel
phia and New York City. The former captain of the Lafayette College track team, Savadkin was once the half mile champion for the Middle Atlantic Association. Savadkin had served on the destroyer Mayrant, bombed by the Germans a year earlier off Palermo in the assault on Sicily. The explosion had hurled Savadkin out of the forward engine room just seconds before it flooded, but he brushed off his injuries and fought to save the ship, actions that earned him the Silver Star.

  O’Kane was particularly fond of the athletic Savadkin, whom he felt brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to the Tang even though he was new to the submarine service. Savadkin soaked up the opportunity. The young officer on his first patrol had felt curious to see what it looked like when a torpedo hit a ship. After Tang fired on a moored patrol boat, Savadkin asked permission to climb to the bridge. O’Kane invited him up. Savadkin stepped onto the deck just forty-five seconds after the explosion to find the enemy ship obliterated. “There was still glowing bits of debris coming down from the heavens,” Savadkin recalled. “That was all that was left of our target. There was a blotch of smoke on the surface, no evidence of any solid mass there at all and these bits of glowing debris falling from the sky.”

  Tang arrived at Midway at 7 a.m. three days later to top off fuel. The boat had spent seventeen days there between its third and fourth patrols. O’Kane had soured on how the two-square-mile atoll in the middle of the Pacific had developed. The former stopover for China-bound Pan Am Clippers had morphed into a bustling naval base and air station, bringing with it the crushing formality that permeated the Navy. Crews had constructed a separate bar to allow junior officers to drink apart from senior leaders. O’Kane felt that that move ruined one of the greatest war patrol schools in the Navy, a place where junior and senior officers swapped patrol stories over beers, unencumbered by rank. No more. “The gooneys would not change, but Midway had,” O’Kane observed. “The island was no longer a frontier.”

  Tang departed Midway five hours after its arrival and aimed west toward Formosa, battling eight-foot waves that forced perennially seasick radarman Floyd Caverly to strap a child’s toilet onto his belt. O’Kane joked that Caverly’s crapper more accurately predicted the weather than the submarine’s barometer. During a pre-storm inspection O’Kane stepped into an open hatch in the forward engine room and plummeted some five feet below. His left foot snagged on the ladder’s lower rung. The skipper felt a wave of nausea wash over him and sweat on his brow. Pharmacist’s mate Chief Petty Officer Paul Larson examined O’Kane and informed the skipper he had broken some of the small bones in his foot. The skipper stretched out in his bunk and commanded Tang via the squawk box, his foot secured in a size fourteen sand shoe laced tight to serve as a splint.

  Days later a swell out of the southwest developed into crashing seas that battered the bridge crew. The injured skipper, who listened to the storm’s fury over the Voycall in his cabin, ordered his men below. A violent roll tossed the skipper to the deck. Executive officer Springer appeared in the cabin seconds later with pharmacist’s mate Larson. The exec needed help. O’Kane’s convalescence would have to wait. Larson gave O’Kane an injection in his foot and the skipper hobbled toward the conning tower. The submarine rolled again. O’Kane landed by the inclinometer, which measured the submarine’s list. It read seventy degrees. He began to wonder if Tang would roll back to port and right itself or capsize. “Jesus Christ,” the skipper blurted out. “Is she ever coming back?”

  “Sometimes they don’t, you know,” Springer replied.

  The seas moderated by October 8 and O’Kane ordered a third engine online as the submarine headed toward the Formosa Strait, the narrow body of water that divided China from the island of Formosa. The typhoon had pushed the submarine off course by as much as sixty miles. The towering mountains of Formosa, many of which climbed over 10,000 feet, loomed dead ahead at noon on October 10. O’Kane ordered a fourth engine online to enter the strait that night. The afternoon faded to evening as Tang powered ahead, rounding the northern tip of Formosa after dark and entering the strait. Crews found calmer seas now that Formosa, which translates to “beautiful island” in Portuguese, shielded Tang from the Pacific. The skipper stretched out on his bunk when at 4 a.m. on October 11 the duty officer appeared at the door.

  “We’ve got a ship, Captain.”

  The radar showed the ship almost ten miles away, steaming up the coast from Pakusa Point. The target’s fourteen-knot speed made the skipper question whether it was just a large patrol craft. Whatever it was, the shallow waters would force O’Kane to attack from a seaward position. He wouldn’t have Formosa’s dark backdrop to camouflage Tang’s silhouette. To get in close as he preferred—under 1,000 yards—the skipper would have no choice but to attack submerged. O’Kane and Leibold climbed up to the bridge and scanned the horizon for the target. Leibold spotted it in seconds, a large modern diesel freighter, heavily loaded and boasting a low silhouette. Tang maneuvered onto the freighter’s track as the first gray light of dawn began to show on the horizon. Two blasts of the diving alarm took Tang down.

  The 1,658-ton Joshu Go cargo ship closed to 800 yards. The skipper raised the scope for a final look, placing the reticle on the freighter’s aft well deck. “Constant bearing—mark!”

  “Set!”

  “Fire!”

  Three electric torpedoes sped through the water at twenty-nine knots toward the target, which was barely more than a quarter mile away. Springer called out a run time of forty-seven seconds. Caverly flipped the speaker switch and the men listened to the rhythmic thump of the freighter’s propeller coupled with the whine of the torpedoes, the sound of death’s approach. “The first two hit exactly as aimed sinking this overloaded freighter immediately,” O’Kane wrote in his report of the attack, which killed eight enemy sailors. “Surfaced as soon as the smoke had cleared away to find no survivors and only wreckage and several empty landing craft half-swamped, drifting about in the water.”

  O’Kane ordered a full-power run down the coast toward Pakusa Point, a spot that would offer the submerged submarine clear views north and south. The Japanese had covered the west coast of Formosa with airfields. Tang needed to clear the area before enemy air support arrived. The towering mountains that crowded Formosa blocked the morning sun and gave Tang a few more minutes of precious darkness to escape. The skipper surveyed the shore that raced past, noting the lush mountains and valleys. “The view brought home the importance of this great island to the enemy as both a strategic frontier and a rice bowl,” O’Kane would later write. “It suddenly became all the more evident that every torpedo must count.”

  Tang cruised south. The skipper climbed up to the conning tower around noon for a look through the periscope. A northerly wind battled the prevailing current and whipped up the seas, conditions that made depth control difficult but also camouflaged the periscope. O’Kane spotted the masts of a northbound freighter. The zigzagging ship hugged the coastline, staying inside sixty feet of water. O’Kane considered his options. Tang could run submerged at high-speed and catch the target by mid-afternoon. That would force O’Kane to attack in shallow water with nearly depleted batteries, a dangerous scenario since it would still be daylight. The skipper opted instead to track the ship until nightfall and attack on the surface under cover of darkness.

  The seas picked up after lunch, making depth control difficult. Tang slipped down to eighty feet to avoid the rough water and pick up speed. The occasional trip up to periscope depth showed that Tang still closed in on the 711-ton Oita Maru. The unloaded freighter rode high in the water, its screws churning up heavy foam. At sundown the Oita Maru passed directly overhead. The officers sat down in the wardroom for dinner and listened to the thump of the target’s propeller through the hull at seventy beats a minute. “We could work better on a full stomach,” Savadkin recalled. “It made us feel sort of odd to sit down to a very sumptuous dinner, planning this fellow’s doom immediately after we had finished.”

  Tang now trai
led the cargo ship, a move that allowed the tracking party to precisely determine the target’s course, speed, and zigzag pattern. The lookouts zipped on foul weather gear and Tang climbed to the surface. The target loomed 4,000 yards ahead in the dark. Two engines powered Tang as it veered off the target’s track to race ahead. The radar detected two escorts. O’Kane now ordered Tang to pass abeam. The skipper spotted the spume of Oita Maru as the radar operator reported that the escorts had dropped back. O’Kane studied the ship through the target-bearing transmitter, noting its large black bow. “The 400-foot ship looked enormous as she started across our stern,” O’Kane wrote, “mainly due to her proximity but perhaps amplified by this somewhat eerie stormy night.”

  The skipper watched Oita Maru parade across his reticle before he ordered Tang to fire a single wakeless torpedo. The explosion some thirty seconds later rocked the submarine as a pillar of fire streamed skyward. The torpedo must have exploded the ship’s boilers. Shore-based antiaircraft fire lit up the night sky, as the Japanese mistakenly blamed American bombers for the attack, which had claimed the lives of twenty-six of Oita Maru’s crew. O’Kane ordered Tang to clear the area south before the enemy realized its mistake. Tang’s crew was at the top of its game. “Our experience of the morning was not a mistake. We were clicking,” O’Kane wrote in his report. “Only the first few members of the fire-control party to reach the bridge saw any of the ship before it went down.”

  But Tang’s explosive start fizzled. The monotony of the next few days was interrupted only by the furious fires around Kiirun, the result of American air strikes on Formosa. O’Kane ordered Tang to cross the strait and patrol off the coast of China, but even there the skipper found only empty seas. He returned two days later to the center of the strait. Still, other than one fruitless chase after a cruiser and two destroyers, O’Kane had found little to do. The skipper stretched out to take the weight off his injured foot when the duty chief burst into his cabin at midnight on October 23. “We’ve got a convoy, Captain,” he blurted out. “The chief says it’s the best one since the Yellow Sea.”