by James Scott
O’Kane climbed out of his bunk, laced up his makeshift splint, and headed to the conning tower. Radarman Floyd Caverly first thought the cluster of blips eight miles ahead must be an island chain until a check of the chart showed no such land. This was none other than a large convoy. The skipper debated two possible attack plans. He could trail the enemy through the night and attack submerged at dawn. O’Kane’s second option was a night surface attack. He cringed at the thought of penetrating a dense escort screen. But this convoy appeared smaller than the previous one and with fewer escorts. Plus, O’Kane had the advantage of time. The skipper could attack tonight, and if necessary hit the convoy again at dawn.
Tang closed the distance. The four-ship convoy guarded by no less than two destroyers steamed from China toward Takao, a port city on the southern coast of Formosa. O’Kane looked for an opening. The lead escort abandoned its position and began a two-mile inspection sweep around the convoy. The skipper saw his chance, a bold move he knew the enemy would never expect. O’Kane ordered Tang to charge in and assume the destroyer’s spot as the convoy’s leader. The American submarine now mimicked the convoy’s moves so that on radar Tang would appear just like an escort. The skipper then maneuvered his submarine to the convoy’s wayward side, a move that would allow the ships to overtake Tang.
“All stop.”
O’Kane turned the submarine to bring on the bow tubes. The 1,944-ton Tatsuju Maru, the 1,915-ton Toun Maru, and the 1,920-ton Wakatake Maru chugged ahead through the darkness.
“Everything checks below. Any time now, Captain.”
O’Kane fired his first two shots at the Tatsuju Maru at a range of just 300 yards, aiming at its stack and engine room. The skipper fired a third fish at the stern of the Toun Maru, then turned to the Wakatake Maru, shooting two more torpedoes at the stack and engine room. Two tore into Tatsuju Maru’s stern, exploding the freighter’s boilers and engine room and killing seven. A single torpedo set the Toun Maru ablaze, dooming another 164 passengers, gunners, and crew. Fires now silhouetted Tang. The skipper darted aft to set up a fourth shot when Leibold grabbed him and pulled him forward. The Wakatake Maru raced to ram Tang. “We were boxed in by the sinking tankers, the transport was too close for us to dive, so we had to cross his bow,” O’Kane wrote in his report. “It was really a thriller-diller.”
The skipper rang up flank speed. Black smoke poured from Tang’s diesels. Wakatake Maru’s bow towered over Tang less than 100 yards away. With under thirty seconds until impact, O’Kane ordered left full rudder, hoping the ship might glance off Tang and not puncture the pressure hull. Tang passed down the side of Wakatake Maru as the two ships’ combined speeds totaled some forty knots. Japanese gun crews opened fire. The skipper cleared the bridge before he realized the wild shots had no chance of hitting and ordered the dive halted. He now watched Wakatake Maru continue its turn in an effort to avoid colliding with the 1,339-ton Kori Go, which also had come in to ram the Tang. O’Kane knew the enemy’s effort was hopeless. He jumped to the after target-bearing transmitter. “Stand-by aft!”
“Set below.”
O’Kane watched as Wakatake Maru closed in, about to ram Kori Go’s stern. He marked a bearing on the center of the two ships and fired a spread of four torpedoes, aimed along the lengths of both targets. Small caliber enemy gunfire popped as Tang pulled away from the impending disaster. The ships collided as the torpedoes hit home. Hit in the engine room, Wakatake Maru snapped in half, sinking in just forty seconds with the loss of 176 passengers and crew. Kori Go suffered a bruising fate, though the extent of the ship’s damage remains unclear. “At a range of 400 yards the crash coupled with four torpedo explosions was terrific, sinking the freighter nose down almost instantly while the transport hung with a 30° up angle,” O’Kane wrote. “Only 10 minutes had elapsed from the time of firing our first torpedo until that final explosion when the transport’s bow went down.”
• • •
Gunshots rattled in the distance as Tang cleared the area at full power. Only the convoy’s escorts remained, firing wild shots at random. Tang’s officers retired to the wardroom, too wound up to sleep. The men discussed the enemy’s brave attempts to ram the submarine. O’Kane excused himself at 3:50 a.m. and climbed to the bridge for a final last venture topside. In the dark and moonless night, the skipper studied the submarine’s phosphorescent wake, which to him appeared brighter than the stars. The patrol so far had gone quite well. Tang had now fired thirteen of its twenty-four torpedoes. O’Kane planned for each man to swap his battle station position with his understudy before the next attack.
That came less than forty-eight hours later when a messenger appeared at his cabin door. O’Kane slipped on his shoes, the swelling in his injured foot having finally subsided. The skipper downed a cup of coffee before he climbed to the conning tower. The convoy remained too far away to see, but the men buzzed over the radar operator’s initial reports. The convoy appeared big. Real big. “It was the biggest convoy that I—and I believe most of the other people in the submarine—had seen,” recalled engineering officer Larry Savadkin. “As a matter of fact, the radar operator, when he picked it up, thought it was land. There were pips all over the screen, almost a solid line of pips across the screen. There wasn’t supposed to be any land there.”
O’Kane studied the radar alongside the perennially seasick Floyd Caverly. The twelve-ship convoy had departed the Japanese port of Sasebo less than a week earlier, bound for western Borneo. No fewer than five escorts guarded the convoy. O’Kane suspected that a large single blip shoreward of the convoy carried the commander. The convoy size awed the skipper. He correctly judged that the convoy did not appear to be a formation of warships, but a large supply line. O’Kane now regretted using the four torpedoes on the first two ships of the patrol. Those two ships had steamed toward Japan for domestic use while this convoy likely was headed to reinforce Japanese troops. O’Kane planned to disrupt that plan. He ordered the crew to battle stations.
The convoy rounded the northeast tip of Turnabout Island in the Formosa Strait. The skipper ordered the submarine slow so that the tracking party could determine the convoy’s course. The column of ships hugged the ten-fathom curve, closing in on Tang at 400 yards a minute. The skipper watched the ships take shape in the darkness. Why had the commander strung his convoy out in this long column? He would have been wiser to make two or more columns and create dual escort screens. The skipper surmised that the commander hoped the distance might limit a submarine picking off one ship at a time, giving the others a chance to flee. O’Kane didn’t have time to dwell on it. He ordered all ten tubes readied for firing.
One of the escorts detected Tang and signaled the other ships with a searchlight, a move that illuminated the dark convoy for O’Kane. The skipper used the light to pick his first target: the 6,956-ton Ebara Maru. The 7,024-ton freighter Matsumoto Maru trailed behind it followed by what appeared to be a large modern tanker. Enormous crates crowded the decks of the loaded ships. The skipper planned to target all three. With his element of surprise now blown—and before the escorts could drive him off—O’Kane ordered Tang to race ahead at full speed. The submarine then turned and slowed for the shot. The skipper marked three bearings on the Ebara Maru at 12:05 a.m. as gunfire erupted off Tang’s starboard side.
“It all checks below,” crackled Springer’s voice over the bridge loudspeaker. “Anytime, Captain.”
Tang let loose two torpedoes in quick succession, then raced between the convoy and its escorts so O’Kane could focus on Matsumoto Maru. The skipper was shocked. None of the ships so far had taken evasive measures. He fired two more shots. O’Kane then aimed at his third target, the range just 900 yards. He shouted the order and felt the familiar shudder of the submarine as blasts of compressed air launched two more fish. The skipper watched as a trail of phosphorescence lit up the dark water. He ordered right full rudder to bring on the stern tubes. “The order was smothered by the first detonation,” O’Kane
later wrote. “The detonations continued, like a slow-motion string of monstrous firecrackers.”
One of O’Kane’s torpedoes ripped open the port side of Ebara Maru near the stern and destroyed the engine room. The freighter slowed to a stop as the second torpedo hit the No. 3 hold. Cold seawater flooded the cargo ship, pulling it down by the stern along with fourteen enemy sailors. The Matsumoto Maru skipper ordered the ship to turn hard to port and rang up full speed to evade. Lookouts spotted Tang. Japanese machine gunners on the freighter’s bridge opened fire on the submarine as the Matsumoto Maru turned to try to ram the Tang. The cargo ship charged seconds later into the path of Tang’s torpedoes. The explosion forced Matsumoto Maru’s bow beneath the waves and the ship came dead in the water.
O’Kane believed he had hit his third target as well. Chaos erupted as fires raged off either beam, a scene O’Kane would later describe as a “holocaust.” The skipper’s earlier shock over the enemy’s lack of countermeasures vanished. The Japanese were convinced a wolf pack hunted the convoy. The five coastal defense ships that served as escorts turned on Tang. Depth charges exploded and machine guns rattled. The skipper hustled on to other targets. Tang passed just 600 yards abeam of a medium freighter before turning to target what O’Kane suspected was a tanker. The executive officer reported the outer doors aft were open. O’Kane watched his fourth target of the night steam across the reticle.
The skipper fired a single torpedo aimed under the suspected tanker’s stack some 600 to 700 yards away. O’Kane focused the target-bearing transmitter on the next ship, which he believed was either a transport or a passenger freighter. He fired a shot at the foremast and another at the mainmast. The bow of an escort entered the skipper’s binocular view as he fired his last shot. The escort turned toward Tang. Time was up. O’Kane ordered all ahead flank. “Things were anything but calm and peaceful now, for the escorts had stopped their warning tactics and were directing good salvos at us and the blotches of smoke we left,” he wrote in his report. “Just exactly what took place in the following seconds will never be determined.”
Tang cleared the area, slowing to eliminate the smoke from the diesels that the escorts could follow. Sporadic gunfire and flames on the water illuminated the scene, which soon fell several miles astern. Men grabbed quick cups of coffee and relaxed as torpedomen used the next half hour to check and load the final two torpedoes. The night was not over. Nor was O’Kane’s attack. Tang turned around at 1:25 a.m. and headed back to sink what O’Kane believed was a disabled transport, though in all likelihood was Matsumoto Maru. Two escorts patrolled the seaward side of the crippled ship, forcing the skipper to do an end around so that he could attack from the shore side, where the destroyers had left a hole in the protective screen.
O’Kane ordered his men back to battle stations when Tang closed to just two miles. The hydraulic outer doors on tubes three and four opened. Darkness settled over the disabled ship. O’Kane scanned the deck, but saw no one. He wondered if the sailors were working below deck to stop the flooding. The disabled vessel appeared to sit lower in the water, but O’Kane could not be sure if it was sinking. He suspected it wasn’t or the escorts would have towed it to shore to salvage its cargo. “Tenacity, Dick,” Morton had once advised him. “Stay with the bastard till he’s on the bottom.” O’Kane planned to do just that tonight. Tang closed at 200 yards a minute, reaching an attack position 900 yards out at 2:30 a.m. “Stand by below!”
“Ready below, Captain.”
“Fire!”
The submarine shuddered as it launched its twenty-third torpedo of the patrol. O’Kane watched the phosphorescent wake zoom ahead. He estimated one minute until detonation, plenty of time for him to set up another shot and fire before the first exploded. The skipper again focused the reticle on the disabled ship. This was his last torpedo of the patrol. It would be another clean sweep. Only a few minutes stood between Tang and a victorious return trip, a trip all the way home to the West Coast of California, to waiting wives, children, and parents. It would be a well-earned break from the 1,052 days of war, from the depth charges, aerial bombs, and gun battles. His men would finally get a respite from fear.
O’Kane fired.
The spindle that controlled the torpedo’s onboard gyroscope withdrew a fraction of a second before a blast of compressed air ejected the 3,154-pound torpedo. The electric motor kicked on with a high-pitched whine. O’Kane and Leibold watched the torpedo race ahead in the dark night, the crippled ship only a half mile away. The skipper needed only to await visual confirmation of the sinking to guarantee credit, to earn another Japanese meatball for Tang’s battle flag, the expression used by sailors to describe the enemy’s ensign, featuring a red sun on a white background. Throughout the submarine, men felt the familiar vibration and relaxed. The patrol was now over. Cooks thawed turkeys and put out several apple pies in anticipation of a celebration feast. Several sailors enjoyed coffee in the crew’s mess while another yelled: “Let’s head for the barn.”
But it wasn’t over yet.
O’Kane and Leibold watched in horror as the weapon suddenly surfaced in a spume of bright phosphorescence just yards in front of Tang’s bow. The torpedo then dove, but broke the surface again seconds later. O’Kane had fired enough fish to recognize immediately what had happened: an erratic torpedo, every skipper’s nightmare. The weapon surfaced and dove, surfaced and dove, a white foam chasing it through the dark water like a comet’s tail. The porpoising projectile pulled to port, skipping along the waves. Like a boomerang, the out-of-control bomb now circled back toward Tang, each second growing closer. “All ahead emergency!” O’Kane shouted. “Right full rudder!”
The skipper’s only hope was to fishtail Tang outside of the torpedo’s turning radius. It would be tough. The submarine crawled at a jogger’s pace of just six knots. He needed speed to swing his submarine out of harm’s way. “The problem was akin to moving a ship longer than a football field,” O’Kane would later write, “and proceeding at harbor speed clear of a sudden careening speedboat.” Men raced Tang’s four Fairbanks Morse engines. The massive diesels—capable of producing a combined 6,400 horsepower—now roared below. The skipper could see the frantic efforts of his men. Tang’s screws churned up the seas and black smoke from the engines wafted skyward.
The torpedo’s dual manganese bronze propellers now drove some 570 pounds of explosive Torpex—the equivalent of 850 pounds of TNT—through the water at thirty-three miles an hour. Engineers had designed the warhead to arm after 200 yards or twelve seconds, a safety feature intended to prevent a torpedo from exploding too soon after leaving the tube and jeopardizing the sub. But that time had now passed. The skipper watched as his armed bomb galloped through the waves. The erratic torpedo passed just sixty feet off the submarine’s port beam before it turned straight for Tang. O’Kane estimated he had ten seconds to swing the 311-foot submarine out of the way. “Left full rudder!”
17
SILVERSIDES
“If we make it tonight, I’ll be a Christian.”
—Donald Sharp, July 8, 1944, diary
The prolonged blast of the Silversides whistle reverberated across the waters at Pearl Harbor at 1:30 p.m. on the afternoon of September 24, 1944, just half an hour after Tang’s departure—signifying the start of the Silver Lady’s eleventh war patrol, the sixth under the command of Jack Coye. The skipper’s previous patrol off Guam and Saipan in advance of the Marianas invasion had been one for the record books. In just forty-six days, Silversides had sunk a half dozen ships for a total of 14,150 tons, ranking the patrol as the sixth top run of the entire war. The eager yet inexperienced skipper who had taken command fourteen months earlier now joined a select club of elite submarine skippers, a club that included men like Dick O’Kane of Tang, Slade Cutter on Seahorse, and Eugene Fluckey, skipper of Barb. Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood made that clear in his endorsement: “The tenth war patrol of the Silversides makes her one of the outstanding submarines of the Subma
rine Force.”
The officers and crew celebrated that successful run with a return to Mare Island, the California Navy yard where shipbuilders had hammered out Silversides on the eve of the war. The rust-streaked submarine had since covered 92,210 miles and burned through 988,840 gallons of diesel. On patrols that ranged from Japan and the Marianas to the Solomon and Caroline islands, Silversides had fired 157 torpedoes, sinking twenty-two enemy ships. The Silver Lady had endured more action than most submarines. So had her men. The seventy-seven-day overhaul gave the officers and crew a welcome break from the war, a chance to visit family and friends, and soak up being back in America. Coye flew to New York, where he and his wife, Betty, laughed through the musical Oklahoma!, danced, and traveled up to Massachusetts so the skipper could visit his daughter, Beth, and son, Johnny, marveling at how big his young children had grown in his absence.
The news over the summer of 1944 proved far different than the headlines that had gripped the nation when the Navy had commissioned Silversides eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Allied forces successful in the June D-Day invasion swept across former Great War battlefields on the path to Berlin. Bombers and fighters crowded the skies over Europe by the thousands, pounding German oil refineries, rail yards, and war plants. Virginia representative Clifton Woodrum, chairman of the House Select Committee on Post-War Military Policy, went so far as to predict that the Army might finish its job against Germany by October. American lawmakers prepared for the end of war in Europe and the return to a peacetime economy, a challenge that would involve ending military contracts, liquidating surplus ships, tanks, and planes, and responding to the sudden unemployment of millions of wartime workers.