by James Scott
The next few days proved anticlimactic as the submarines searched for targets. That changed at 4:01 a.m. on October 30. Salmon’s radar picked up a large tanker escorted by as many as four escorts. Skipper Lieutenant Commander Harley Nauman alerted the others and dove to begin its approach at 5:45 a.m. Silversides spotted the target—the massive 10,021-ton Takane Maru—an hour later at a distance of fourteen miles. Coye ordered his submarine to dive minutes later. Trigger picked up the tanker soon after. All three submarines, like wolves hunting cattle, moved in on the Takane Maru. Coye closed to just under two miles and fired six torpedoes in the span of just fifty seconds. “Ten seconds after last torpedo had been fired, heard and felt an explosion that jarred our back teeth,” Coye would write in his report. “As nearest escort was about 1200 yards away this could only have been a premature.”
Coye ordered Silversides deep as the depth charges started, a total of fourteen. None detonated as close as the premature torpedo. Silversides surfaced and started to chase. The skipper of Takane Maru—alerted by the premature torpedo—had taken evasive measures and now knew at least one submarine hunted him. The enemy skipper sought shelter in rainsqualls and executed dramatic course changes. That afternoon Trigger moved in to attack, firing six torpedoes, all of which missed. But the submarine scored with another round of torpedoes five minutes later. Coye spotted the tanker emerging from a late afternoon haze more than ten miles away and saw it rocked by at least two of Trigger’s torpedoes. The shots blew off Takane Maru’s stern and left the tanker afloat but dead in the water. Escorts swarmed and began dropping depth charges—seventy-eight total—on Trigger.
Salmon and Silversides prepared to finish off the crippled Takane Maru as the setting sun and bright moon illuminated the moderate seas. Salmon closed at 7:40, the enemy tanker about fourteen miles away and drifting with the wind at a speed of one and a half knots. Four escorts patrolled on either side of the tanker at a range of about 1,000 yards, searching for enemy submarines. Salmon closed to about four and a half miles and dove to attack. Lieutenant Commander Nauman, who had first detected the tanker fifteen hours earlier, now hoped to put it on the bottom. Salmon closed to 3,300 yards at 8:01 p.m. and fired four torpedoes. A sonar operator on board Silversides reported the high-pitch whine of torpedo screws now speeding through the dark water toward the tanker at forty-six knots. An attack was under way. Four minutes and ten seconds after firing, the first torpedo hit Takane Maru. A second followed ten seconds later, lighting up the night sky.
Nauman had seen three of his torpedoes breach the surface, leaving a phosphorescent trail straight back to Salmon. Japanese escorts turned on the submarine. The skipper had planned to fire his stern tubes, but the escorts forced him to stop the attack. He ordered Salmon deep and passed 310 feet one minute later. Four sets of depth charges—each consisting of six to eight charges—exploded close overhead. The blasts shut down auxiliary power and the steering and stern planes failed. Light bulbs shattered, the fathometer fried, and the magnetic compass lost all direction. Seawater flooded the electric ranges in the galley and hull fittings started to leak in the engine rooms and in the air and hydraulic systems. The pumps struggled to keep up with the rush of water and the bilges filled up. “The conning tower vibrated up and down so violently that I thought the ship was going to shake herself apart,” Nauman would later write. “I remember bending my knees to ease the shock.”
The depth charges continued, each explosion forcing Salmon deeper. The skipper ordered all ahead emergency, and a twenty-degree up angle on the boat stopped the plummet at 400 feet—150 feet past Salmon’s designed operating depth. Salmon climbed to 300 feet. The skipper ordered the boat to level off and reduce speed, but that move caused the submarine to again drop, this time to 500 feet. The skipper brought Salmon back up to 150 feet, but another attempt to level the boat sent the submarine plunging to 578 feet before the crew could stop the descent. But the depth in the after torpedo room, given the angle of the boat, approached some 620 feet. Nauman knew at that depth the pressure hull could collapse. The boat was in serious trouble. Complicating the challenge, the batteries were empty. The water level in the engine rooms continued to rise and had now reached the main motor casing. Salmon had run out of options. The skipper recorded his decision in his report: “Our only hope is to surface and take our chances.”
Seventeen minutes after Salmon dove, Nauman ordered his submarine to surface. The skipper had no way to know what he might find above in the dark. He knew only that his chances below were worse. Crews raced to the guns as luck prevailed. The closest escort appeared down-moon almost four miles away. The crew was safe for the moment, but Salmon was in bad shape. Water washed over the decks and the submarine suffered a fifteen-degree list to starboard. The depth charge attack had cracked the binoculars on the target-bearing transmitter and the sights on the four-inch deck gun. Sailors found the wood decking and steel frame of the superstructure warped and broken. Crews hustled to make repairs. Nauman ordered the No. 3 engine and battery put on for propulsion. Engineers restored the fourth engine eighteen minutes later, cranking open the exhaust vents by hand. Electricians started the low-pressure blowers, blew the ballast tanks, and killed the list, helping to level the submarine in the water.
The escorts made no attempt to close in on the crippled submarine, which gave damage control crews time to make repairs. But the submarine was not alone for long. An escort searchlight illuminated the Salmon at 9 p.m. from a distance of about three miles. A few wild salvos followed, likely from a three-inch deck gun. Nauman found his radio antennas destroyed but crews rigged an emergency wing antenna. The skipper ordered an emergency message sent out to the wolf pack. He relayed Salmon’s position and let the others know the submarine could not dive and had no choice but take on the escorts with gunfire. Salmon needed help immediately. The other three escorts about five miles south of Salmon began firing in the direction of the first escort. Confusion followed and gave Salmon precious minutes. The skipper ordered his gun crew to use ammunition sparingly. He did not know how long he would have to fight. With the four-inch gun sight telescopes destroyed, crews would have to use the open sights. If he hoped to hit the escorts, the skipper would have to get in close.
Salmon got a third engine running, giving it a maximum speed of about sixteen knots—an improvement certainly, but still not fast enough to outrun the escort. Nauman watched as the escort repeated the same tactic. The enemy skipper would charge Salmon’s port quarter, sheer out to expose its after gun, and fire a few rounds at the crippled submarine. Salmon’s gun crew learned to wait until the escort sheered out, then fired five rounds of the four-inch gun. Salmon missed, but gunners registered a few near splashes. But the enemy’s rounds landed even closer, splashing water on the bridge and decks. The skipper spotted a rainsquall to the southwest. Before he could make it, the escort attacked again, passing within 2,000 yards off Salmon’s port beam. The submarine’s gun crew opened fire, landing a few small caliber hits. The escort now prepared to cut across Salmon’s bow. The skipper knew this was his best—and only—chance to go on the offensive. Nauman ordered all guns trained off the starboard side.
The escort moved to cut across the Salmon’s course, but the skipper ordered hard left rudder. Salmon swung to port and headed straight toward the escort, passing alongside at a distance of just fifty yards. Gun crews opened fire. The submarine’s four-inch deck cannon roared again and again, hitting the escort’s bridge at least once. Smaller .30 and .50 caliber automatic weapons rattled in the dark, raking the escort from bow to stern, killing as many as five enemy sailors and wounding twenty more. The escort returned fire, hitting Petty Officer 3rd Class Troy Adams just below the knee. Sailors carried Adams below, where the pharmacist’s mate gave him morphine, tied off the bleeders, and applied compress dressings over sulfanilamide powder. He would later pluck ten bone fragments from his leg. The startled escort stopped firing and fell astern of Salmon. A second escort closed in on the submar
ine, but the gun crew again opened fire and repelled the escort. The battered submarine aimed for the rainsquall at 12:15 a.m., one escort ahead and the others falling astern.
Salmon disappeared into the heart of the dark swirling showers. All Nauman and his crew could do was wait and hope. Ten minutes passed without an attack. The submarine pushed onward. Half an hour later it became clear the escorts had vanished. The battle for Salmon was over. The submarine had beaten the odds. Unable to dive, the injured Salmon had held off four Japanese escorts for five hours. The desperation of the battle showed in the gun crew’s tally of ammunition fired: 7,760 tracer, incendiary, and armor-piercing rounds from the submarine’s smaller guns and fifty-seven of the larger four-inch shells. The submarine Sterlet, lured by the frantic radio calls, arrived and put the final shot into the 10,500-ton Takane Maru. Salmon spent the night making emergency repairs and sent out a message around dawn to Silversides and Trigger, alerting them to the submarine’s position, course, and speed. “It was a relief to get a message from her,” Coye would later write. “At this point we were not too certain that she was still afloat.”
Orders arrived, directing the crippled Salmon to return for repairs, its patrol now over. Silversides, Trigger, and Sterlet would escort the injured submarine. Coye positioned Trigger ten miles ahead to warn of patrol boats while Sterlet and Silversides cruised 1,000 yards off each bow because Salmon still could not dive. Coye refused to leave one submarine alone on the surface as a target. If an enemy plane or ship approached, he ordered all boats to remain on the surface and fight it out. The next few days passed without incident as the four submarines cut south through the waves, arriving in Saipan on November 3. Silversides would spend the next week in Saipan before departing for another two weeks to help hunt down patrol boats, an extension that would not lead to any sinkings. The Silver Lady wrapped up its eleventh patrol at Midway on November 23.
The eleventh patrol would be Coye’s last as skipper. He relinquished command six days later in a quiet ceremony at Midway, turning Silversides over to his friend Commander John Nichols. The Silver Lady would make three more war patrols in the East China Sea and off the Japanese home islands of Kyushu and Honshu. But the lack of enemy targets translated into just one more victim, a 4,500-ton cargo ship in late January 1945. In Guam undergoing refit when the war ended, Silversides would conclude its service as a naval trainer and auxiliary, destined never again for combat. Commissioned just eight days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Silversides over the course of the war would consume more than 1.5 million gallons of diesel fuel and cover more than 141,000 miles on war patrols. The 183 torpedoes Silversides fired would claim twenty-three confirmed kills, earning the coveted Presidential Unit Citation. For his part Coye had earned three Navy Crosses, a Bronze Star, and the Legion of Merit.
The Navy reassigned Coye as the top instructor at the prospective commanding officer school in New London, where he could apply his wartime expertise to train others in the dwindling days of the war and after. Coye had served as the skipper for six patrols, one more than the Navy policy normally allowed. But Coye was good. Real good. His superiors no doubt felt reluctant to interrupt his stream of destruction. Coye had begun his tenure sixteen months earlier worried he might not live up to Burlingame’s record. He now departed with the record of having sunk fourteen ships, putting a total of 38,659 enemy tons on the bottom. He had nearly doubled the number of ships Burlingame sank and would rank the tenth top skipper of the war by the number of ships sunk. “That was really the highlight of my career, the patrols on Silversides,” Coye would later recall. “That’s what I figured I was trained for and what I did as well as I could.”
18
TANG
“We knew when we went aboard the submarine that we might end up with this iron cylinder being our tomb.”
—Clay Decker, Tang survivor
O’Kane watched in horror as his twenty-fourth torpedo of the patrol now circled back toward Tang. The skipper estimated he had just ten seconds to turn his submarine—a ship almost the length of a football field—before the torpedo crashed into his stern. He had rung up emergency speed and left full rudder, hoping to fishtail Tang out of the torpedo’s path. Black diesel smoke poured from the submarine as Tang’s four engines roared. Sailors throughout the submarine had prepared to head for California after the final shot, but the euphoria of another successful patrol was interrupted by the frantic bells of the engine order telegraph and shouts from the bridge. O’Kane and boatswain’s mate William Leibold watched the armed torpedo porpoise closer and closer, its phosphorescent wake aimed straight at Tang.
O’Kane’s hope dimmed.
The torpedo ripped open the port side of Tang at around 2:30 a.m., just twenty seconds after the skipper had fired his last shot. The violent explosion near the bulkhead that divided the maneuvering and after engine rooms destroyed the submarine’s propulsion plant and blew the tops off the only regular ballast tanks aft. Tang’s forward momentum halted in seconds. Cold seawater immediately flooded the after torpedo, maneuvering, and after engine rooms, drowning any men who may have survived the blast. Sailors inside the adjacent and half-flooded forward engine room struggled to seal the watertight door against the pressure of streaming seawater, the added weight of three flooded compartments pulling the submarine’s stern underwater like a giant pendulum.
The explosion ruptured high-pressure air lines, jarred watertight doors, and popped up steel deck plates throughout the submarine. Loose equipment, gear, and fittings crashed to the deck as men struggled to grab anything in reach. The detonation’s shock hurled unsuspecting sailors as far forward as the control room against the deck, bulkheads, and equipment with enough force to rip skin and break bones. Signalman Petty Officer 3rd Class John Accardy plunged through the conning tower hatch to the control room deck some eight feet below, snapping his arm. Another sailor nearby suffered a broken leg. The shock tossed Lieutenant j.g. Mel Enos headfirst, leaving several deep gashes that poured blood.
Up on the bridge, the torpedo’s detonation jolted O’Kane and Leibold, who struggled to maintain their balance. The men watched a spray of water rise up in the dark night in what looked to Leibold like a big cloud of black smoke. The telltale sign of destruction the men had seen so many times to mark a torpedoed enemy ship now hovered over Tang, the tragic result of its malfunctioning weapon. The skipper ordered the conning tower hatch sealed as Tang’s flooded stern began to dive underwater. He scanned the horizon for the two Japanese destroyers that had guarded what he thought was an injured transport though was likely Matsumoto Maru. Enemy lookouts had no doubt heard and possibly seen the explosion. The injured Tang would make easy prey. “Do we have propulsion?” the skipper demanded, his voice crackling over the loudspeaker. “Do we have propulsion at all?”
“We have no communication with the maneuvering room,” replied executive officer Frank Springer, who stood at the foot of the hatch.
“We’re coming to a stop,” O’Kane yelled. “Any report of damage?”
“No.”
O’Kane asked if Tang had steering.
“The rudder is locked,” Springer shouted up the ladder. “We are trying to shift to hand steering.”
“Radar, I want information on the two destroyers,” O’Kane called out, turning his attention to the enemy. “Where are they?”
Radarman Floyd Caverly had listened to the whine of the torpedo’s propellers through the sonar operator’s headphones, a whine that vanished a second before impact. The explosion had wiped out much of the submarine’s internal communications. Caverly could hear O’Kane’s orders broadcast over the conning tower speakers, but nothing happened when the radarman keyed his microphone to answer. Caverly twice shouted that his last radar reading before the system crashed showed one of the destroyers about 3,000 yards away, the other about 4,200.
“Radar, I want information on the two destroyers,” the skipper barked again. “Where are they?”
; Caverly realized O’Kane couldn’t hear him. He stepped beneath the hatch. “Captain, this is Caverly,” he shouted. “I want permission to come to the bridge.”
This was no time for formality. Springer grabbed Caverly by the nape of his neck and the seat of the pants and shoved him up the ladder. The radarman clambered up as cold seawater drenched him. He stepped onto the bridge to find water up to his knees and looked back to see the strong current flow down through the open hatch he just exited. Some eight men—the executive officer, engineering officer, helmsman, plotters, soundman, and another radarman—remained trapped below. The water climbed to Caverly’s waist.
“Captain, this boat is sinking,” Leibold shouted in the dark. “We’re going down.”
The sea swallowed Tang’s stern. The rising water washed O’Kane off the bridge just as the twenty-third torpedo blasted the crippled enemy ship. Caverly feared the sinking submarine might pull him down with it. The radarman stepped off the bridge into the water and swam away from Tang, pulling his body through the water, one stroke after the other. The bridge vanished seconds later, leaving only the air-filled bow to bob above the waves. “The people on the bridge were left standing there treading water,” recalled one survivor. “The ship just dropped out from underneath them.”
Leibold didn’t fare as well. The boatswain’s mate held his breath as the submarine plummeted beneath the dark waters, accelerating as the stern plunged toward the seafloor. Darkness enveloped him. Leibold felt what he surmised was either a secondary explosion or Tang’s stern striking the bottom of the Formosa Strait. He pushed off and kicked up, pulling himself toward the surface, his adrenaline pumping as he fought against the weight of his metal binoculars, submarine jacket, and shoes.