by James Scott
• • •
Larry Savadkin operated the torpedo data computer in the rear of the conning tower when the explosion rocked Tang. He felt the submarine bounce up and down, but the wiry lieutenant kept his footing. Savadkin heard the skipper ask whether Tang still had propulsion and started forward to check the pitometer log. He spotted it just as the lights went out, forcing him and others to struggle in total darkness. Water raced through the open hatch into the conning tower as the stern dove. “No one was able to close the hatch to the bridge, sufficient time just didn’t exist,” Savadkin recalled. “Water rushed through the hatch with terrific force, knocking down practically everybody in the conning tower, just sweeping them off their feet, tangling them all up and making it impossible for them to do anything to help themselves.”
Savadkin grabbed the No. 2 periscope shaft. The downward angle of the boat coupled with the rush of water washed loose gear and men past, bumping into him. Savadkin held on tight. The water level rose, lifting him with it. The former college track star found a small pocket of air—just large enough for his nose and mouth—in an indentation between the overhead cork and hull. He sucked in air. The conning tower, buzzing moments before, fell silent. Gone were the voices of the executive officer, radarmen, and plotters, all now drowned, their lungs filled with salty seawater. Savadkin breathed the precious air. The torrent of water coupled with the sudden darkness disoriented Savadkin, who felt the submarine was upside down. He feared if he continued up the periscope well he would end up in the pump room. The air soured.
The engineering officer took a deep breath and ducked beneath the cold water. Like a blind man, he ran his hands over the equipment to orient himself. He popped up into another air bubble in the forward end of the conning tower near the hatch that led to the bridge, the air bubble this time large enough to accommodate his entire head. Savadkin again fingered the equipment, grasping the engine order telegraph. The knob clicked as Savadkin spun it over the various engine speeds—standard, full, flank—speeds the legendary Tang never again would make. The young officer took another deep breath, dropped under the water, and pulled himself up through the hatch, popping up in yet another air bubble, this time underneath the forward cowling on the bridge.
“Who is it?” a voice called out in the dark.
“Mr. Savadkin,” he answered. “Who are you?”
“Bergman,” replied Petty Officer 1st Class Edwin Bergman, the soundman who had stood opposite the torpedo data computer. “Do you know where we are?”
“I think we are under the bridge.”
“What are you going to do?”
Savadkin told him that they had to get to the surface.
“Can I go with you?” Bergman asked.
“Sure,” Savadkin replied.
“How?”
Savadkin instructed Bergman—a veteran of all five of Tang’s patrols—to grab hold of his legs. He would lead them out, just as the former captain and champion runner had once led his Lafayette College teammates to victory. The officer took a deep breath and pushed down to clear the cowling, but Bergman let go. Savadkin later speculated that he must have been confused though Bergman had sounded fine in the brief conversation the men shared. Savadkin kicked off toward the surface. He would never see Bergman again. “I began to swim up, using both hands, as hard as I could—the whole idea was to get up,” he recalled. “I wanted air and lots of it.”
Tang’s bridge hovered underwater at a distance roughly equal to the height of a six-story building. Savadkin remembered from submarine training that he needed to exhale as he ascended to prevent his chest from ballooning as the water pressure decreased. Rather than slowly breathe out, he blew all of his air out at once. The surface loomed far above. The lieutenant clawed his way up, his oxygen-depleted body desperate for air. Savadkin feared he wouldn’t make it; every instinct in his body screamed at him to breathe, but he knew he would only fill his lungs with saltwater. Just when Savadkin couldn’t resist any longer, he broke the surface and sucked in the cool night air.
• • •
Petty Officer 3rd Class Pete Narowanski knew the hell a submarine could inflict on a ship—and not just because he worked as a torpedoman. The twenty-six-year-old Marylander previously served on Hugh L. Scott, a 12,500-ton former passenger liner the Navy had converted into an attack transport. Scott offloaded supplies in November 1942 near Casablanca off the coast of Morocco when a German submarine penetrated its protective screen at sunset and slammed two torpedoes into its starboard side. The explosions turned wooden partitions into arrows that skewered sailors in the mess deck. Concrete used to reinforce the bridge crashed through the lower decks and one of the boilers exploded, spraying scalding steam throughout the engine room. The attack killed eight officers and fifty-one crewmen. Landing craft rescued Narowanski and other survivors before the crippled transport slipped beneath the waves.
The loss of the Scott, followed by a stint shoveling snow off the decks of battleship Alabama, prompted Narowanski to volunteer for submarines. He made two patrols on Halibut—that submarine’s eighth and ninth—before it docked in San Francisco for a three-month overhaul and crew rest. Halibut arrived in Pearl Harbor just four days before Tang left for its fifth patrol. Narowanski learned that Tang planned to return to Mare Island for a refit after its next patrol. The promise of several more months in San Francisco prompted him to swap duty with one of Tang’s exhausted lookouts. Narowanski had counted the days until the patrol’s end. He felt the familiar shudder of Tang’s final torpedo before he stepped out from between the tubes with an announcement for his fellow sailors. “Hot dog, course zero nine zero,” he howled, his course suggestion due east. “Head her for the Golden Gate.”
The torpedo explosion seconds later knocked Narowanski to the deck. The torpedoman recovered to find ten men—all equally shocked—huddled in the forward room, including the reload crew, fire controlman, torpedo officer, and chief petty officer in charge of the compartment. The sailors knew from the violent lurch that Tang had sustained a severe hit but did not know where or what damage the explosion had caused. The pitometer log showed Tang suffered an immediate loss of forward motion seconds before the stern sank. Narowanski and the others reached out for anything to grab as loose gear and men tumbled toward the rear bulkhead. The stern struck the muddy bottom. The sailors in the buoyant bow heard air rush through the main ballast tank blowers and suspected survivors in the control room hoped to blow Tang to the surface. But the flooded stern refused to budge.
Sailors sealed the watertight door that divided the forward torpedo room from officers’ country. The man on the sound-powered phones tried unsuccessfully to raise other compartments while another sailor triggered the emergency lights. The bow plane rigging and tilting motor ran uncontrollably, burning out ten minutes later. The men debated an escape through the empty torpedo tubes, but decided against it for fear the Japanese destroyers might shell the bow. They chose to wait and use the escape chamber. Chief Petty Officer Leland Weekley, in charge of the forward room, climbed up and opened the chamber’s lower hatch. “Since it was quite possible the conning tower might be flooded and we were sure the after torpedo room was, that left only the forward torpedo room for escape purposes,” one survivor recalled. “Therefore, we couldn’t escape without waiting for everyone left alive to get to the forward room.”
• • •
The torpedo’s ferocious detonation moved Petty Officer 3rd Class Clay Decker less than four inches. The twenty-three-year-old motor machinist, seated on a bench with the bow plane operating wheel right in front of him and a bulkhead behind, gripped the steel wheel the second of impact. The married father of a two-year-old son, Decker had served on board Tang since its commissioning almost a year earlier. The Navy figured since Decker had once worked in a mine—a job no one with claustrophobia could stomach—that he would be a perfect fit for submarines.
Decker surveyed the control room. He had escaped injury, but others around him
had not. He counted at least two men who had plummeted through the control room hatch, each suffering broken limbs. The sharp metal edges of various pumps, equipment, and the chart table had sliced open others, including chief of the boat Bill Ballinger, who bled from a head wound. But the watertight hatch that led to the conning tower presented a greater concern. A hunk of wood tied to a lanyard used to pull the hatch closed had gotten wedged in the rubber gasket, preventing the men from sealing it. Seawater from the flooded conning tower rained down, frying the lighting motor generators and forcing the men to rely on the faint glow of emergency lights that fed off the batteries. Survivors would have no choice but to leave—and soon.
Tang’s shredded stern sat on the seafloor off the Formosa Strait some 180 feet underwater. The air-filled bow still jutted like a knife blade as much as twenty-five feet above the dark seas. Decker and the other roughly fourteen survivors in the control room could hear the waves slosh against the exposed bow, an easy target for the Japanese escorts that by now no doubt were hunting Tang. Naval engineers had designed the submarine with two escape hatches, one in the after torpedo room, the other in the forward torpedo room. The survivors in the control room knew, based on the sinking of the stern, that the after torpedo room had flooded. The forward torpedo room—two compartments away—offered their only hope.
Tang’s sharp forty-degree angle from stern to bow meant survivors faced an uphill climb, a tough task for men with broken limbs. The steel doors that divided the compartments would further complicate the climb. The doors closed forward to aft, meaning survivors would have to fight gravity to push them open, a job Decker figured would require the use of a hydraulic jack. The injured Ballinger muttered to Decker that the men had only one option: level the boat. If the flooded stern couldn’t float, Decker would have to sink the bow, a task that required releasing the air from the main ballast tanks. Because the explosion had knocked out the hydraulic power, Decker would have to do it manually. He spied a large lever in the overhead that would allow him to manually open the vent valves for the ballast tanks. Decker crawled up on the chart table, removed a pin, and wrapped his legs around the lever to give him added strength. He pulled. The valves yawned open and air bubbled out. Seawater flooded the tanks, pulling Tang’s bow beneath the waves for the last time.
Injured sailors moaned. The able-bodied men untangled a pile of wounded at the bottom of the conning tower ladder and loaded them into blankets that could double as stretchers. Assuming all the sailors aft of the control room had died—either from the explosion or by drowning—the survivors set out for the forward torpedo room, carrying the injured along the narrow passageway into officers’ country. There the sailors found communications officer Mel Enos, his head still bleeding from several deep gashes, in the skipper’s cabin, struggling to torch Tang’s codebooks in a wastebasket. “Mr. Enos, you can’t do that! We need every bit of air we’ve got,” Decker told the officer, snatching the codebooks from his grip. “Besides, the batteries are right below us—you can’t have any sort of spark near them!”
“But we have to destroy the codebooks,” replied Enos, refusing to budge from Navy protocol.
“Stuff ’em in the batteries,” barked Ballinger.
Decker yanked open a hatch in the deck and dropped down inside the forward battery well that held half of Tang’s 252 cells. He popped the top of one of the battery cells and dumped the codebooks in the sulfuric acid. Decker hopped out and the survivors continued on to the forward torpedo room, reaching the compartment at least fifteen minutes after the torpedo hit. The explosion had ruptured the high-pressure air lines to the forward torpedo room, meaning a great difference in pressure existed between the two compartments. Opening the doors and equalizing that pressure could prove dangerous. Survivors had no choice but to unseal the watertight door, a move that seconds later sent them airborne. “There was such a difference in air pressure between the compartments,” recalled one survivor, “that it literally blew the men into the forward room.”
• • •
Petty Officer 2nd Class Jesse DaSilva had spent much of the night in the after engine room, manning the sound-powered phones. The nineteen-year-old Los Angeles native—and son of a Portuguese immigrant from the Azores—needed a cup of coffee. DaSilva reached the crew’s mess to find two friends perched on a nearby bunk, one listening to the final attack unfolding over headphones and relating the details to the other. DaSilva joined them. Tang fired its twenty-third torpedo followed a few seconds later by its last, the familiar vibration signaling the end of another productive patrol. The men waited for the news that Tang would be heading home. Instead the sailor on the phones reported the skipper had ordered all ahead emergency. An explosion seconds later whipped the ship “like a giant fish grabbed by the tail,” forcing DaSilva to cling to the ladder under the after battery hatch. “My God,” he cried. “What happened?”
Sailors inside the half-flooded forward engine room struggled to dog-down the watertight hatch that led to the after engine room. That would prevent the rest of the submarine from flooding but guaranteed that any survivors trapped inside the stern compartments would die. Water poured through the open door that ran from the control room into the crew’s mess, cutting off any escape. DaSilva felt certain he would drown in the same compartment where for the last three patrols he had swapped stories over dinners of chicken, canned vegetables, and fruit. He wondered how long it would take. The cold water that climbed his legs triggered DaSilva’s survival instincts. The men needed to seal the door. DaSilva and several sailors seized the door and tried to force it shut. Seawater pushed back. The sailors heaved, fighting against the torrent. The rush of water slowed and finally stopped as the door clanged shut.
Some twenty men now gathered in the crew quarters and mess, a dangerous place to loiter in a flooded submarine. Just beneath the steel deck sat 126 battery cells, each made of lead plates submerged in a water and sulfuric acid solution. Saltwater was a critical threat to the batteries, a fact hammered into sailors in submarine school. Seawater mixed with sulfuric acid created chlorine gas, a yellow-green fog that filled a victim’s lungs with fluid and drowned him. The poisonous gas was so deadly that the Germans killed hundreds—if not thousands—of French soldiers in minutes during the spring of 1915 in what is widely considered the first significant use of weaponized gas. “We knew we couldn’t stay here,” DaSilva said. “This meant opening the control room door and for all we knew, it might be flooded. Yet, we had to risk it.”
Water had indeed flooded the control room up to the eye port in the door. The trapped sailors tested the bulkhead flappers in the ventilation piping above and discovered the water had not yet climbed that high. A good sign. Opening the door would let the water disperse throughout the two compartments—lowering the overall level—and allow the men to trudge through the control room toward the forward torpedo room. DaSilva decided to divert the water further. He yanked open the deck hatch that led to the voluminous refrigerator and freezer space beneath the crew mess; no one planned to stay on board long enough to need the food. To avoid the flood of water, sailors scrambled atop the four rectangular tables. One of the men cracked the door. Seawater again charged inside. The men waited as the water climbed ankle deep. The force of the water soon dissipated and the surge slowed, leveling off at DaSilva’s knees.
The men sloshed one after the other into the control room. DaSilva eyed the depth gauge and saw it read 180 feet. The bottom of the Formosa Strait. He knew his only chance of survival hinged on reaching the forward torpedo room and the escape chamber. One of the officers demanded the sailors stop and destroy secret equipment and records, an order DaSilva privately questioned. He doubted the Japanese—now struggling against American advances across the Pacific—would ever recover Tang. The anxious sailors obeyed, smashing the radar and radio equipment with rifle butts, then waded forward, passing from the control room into officers’ country, the wardroom on the left, the skipper’s stateroom on the right.
Smoke filled the narrow passageway. One of the officers again ordered the men to stop and torch classified papers before resuming the trip, the path forward illuminated by faint emergency lights.
The last of the survivors reached the sealed forward torpedo room almost an hour after Tang sank. The escape chambers—the only hope for survival—sat just a few feet behind the sealed door. Torpedoman Petty Officer 2nd Class Hayes Trukke and Rubin Raiford, one of Tang’s black stewards, feared a repeat of what happened when the first group of survivors opened the door. With the voice communication system fried, men tapped out a warning to crack the door. That would allow the pressure to equalize. Survivors outside failed to understand. Were the men in the forward room deliberately keeping them out? Tension and fear escalated as sailors pushed the door. That raw force coupled with tremendous air pressure rammed the door open. Trukke looked in horror as Raiford dropped. “It struck the negro in the face,” Trukke recalled. “His lips were smashed, nose pushed over to one side and eyes closed.”
• • •
O’Kane treaded water in the cold. As the seas charged up the stern and washed him overboard, the skipper had taken small consolation in watching the Matsumoto Maru explode, the victim of his twenty-third torpedo. His heart went out to the men trapped inside Tang and to the eight lookouts and bridge personnel topside who, like him, now faced the sea alone. He watched for the first few minutes after Tang’s stern sank as the bow swayed in the current, reminding him of a buoy anchored in a seaway. O’Kane tried to swim to Tang, but the strong current coupled with the depth charges kept him back. “She appeared to be struggling like a great wounded animal, a leviathan, as indeed she was,” he wrote. “Tang’s bow suddenly plunged on down to Davy Jones’s locker, and the lonely seas seemed to share in my total grief.”