The War Below

by James Scott

  Not Meyer.

  He and another prisoner grabbed a hatch cover and dropped it overboard. The men jumped in and paddled out toward the destroyers Harukaze and Take, which rescued the Japanese crewmen. Meyer realized as he paddled closer that the Japanese refused to pull the prisoners on board, pushing the captives underwater with long poles. He had no choice but to make it on his own, and clung to the hatch cover. Others joined him. The sun dropped beneath the horizon and dusk settled over the waves. Men watched the crippled Arisan Maru slip beneath the waves around 7:40 p.m. “There were still many men aboard her when she went down,” one survivor would later tell American investigators. “I could see them silhouetted against the sky.”

  Hundreds of men bobbed in the waves, clinging to planks, crates, and oil cans. One even clung to a toilet. The hatch cover that Meyer and others held began to sink so he let go and grabbed a wooden plank that floated past. After days of sweating in the coal hold, he now shivered in the water. Faint stars glowed in the sky. He could see no one in the dark, but he could hear the voices of the men around him. Some called out for friends. Others cried. “Men were going down now. The sea was getting rougher. It was a strange bereft feeling with so many of my friends drowned all about me, and a great numbness came over me and I felt for a moment as though I would be better off just to let it go. A sinking feeling took possession of me as I felt myself slipping. This only lasted a second. I shook it off and began to swim to get my circulation started.”

  Graef, too, wrestled with despair. He and several others that afternoon lassoed floating debris into a raft with ropes, belts, and wires stripped off crates. Graef had spotted two bamboo poles drifting nearby. He had struck out at sunset to retrieve them, but when he seized the poles and turned back, he found that he couldn’t find his companions in the dark. The waves rose and fell as a bitter wind stung. He felt lost and alone. “Clinging to my precious bamboo poles, I thought of my boyhood, my school days, my marriage to lovely Bobbie, my enlistment, Bataan, the son I had never seen. Everything came back, to pass in review on the gray waves,” he would later write. “In the hours before dawn I lived an eternity.”

  The waves washed over Meyer, threatening his grip on the plank. The board split in two, leaving him hanging on to one half. The debris field from the vanished hellship had begun to disperse, carried away by the wind and the waves. He had been unable before sunset to see land in any direction and knew that by ship he was at least a day away from Formosa, too far to swim. Meyer recalled a prayer from childhood. Though he could only remember a few words, he ran through it over and over again in his head. Meyer needed no less than a miracle—and in the meantime a new float. He scanned the water for more debris and spotted some bamboo poles. He paddled over to find Graef and a sense of relief that he was no longer alone.

  “What kind of chance do you think we have?” Graef asked.

  “About fifty-fifty,” Meyer replied.

  The men assembled another raft. Graef tied the bamboo poles together as Meyer paddled around to retrieve wreckage, from brooms and planks to crates. With the raft secure, the men climbed atop, struggling to stay afloat as the waves throttled them. “The yelling and screaming had grown fainter and fainter. It had been a long time since we heard anything but the pounding of the waves. Would we go down too with the rest of them? What would happen to us out here?” Meyer wrote. “As we got deeper into the night, the sea grew steadily wilder. Three times we were completely under—the raft partly broken and gone—clutching wildly at nothing. Each time we thought it was the end, then some how we would come back. We couldn’t think clearly now—just struggle blindly. We hadn’t talked for hours. Words were a waste of strength.”

  Eventually, the gray light of dawn began to glow on the horizon. Graef and Meyer had made it through the night. Meyer spotted a boat less than 100 yards away, bobbing on the waves. Impossible, he thought. Surely he had gone mad.

  “Say, bud,” Meyer asked. “Is that a boat?”

  “Sure it’s a boat,” Graef answered. “Come on let’s go.”

  The exhausted men paddled the raft toward the boat, one of the discarded lifeboats the Japanese crew had used the day before to reach the destroyers. “Hey boat!” Graef shouted as the men approached. “Anybody there?”

  Several men sat up. The survivors reached down and plucked Graef and Meyer from the raft. Too exhausted to move, the men lay in the boat. Civilian Robert Overbeck, Corporal Anton Cichi, and Sergeant Avery Wilbur waited for the new arrivals to rally. After a round of introductions, the men began to bail water from the boat. The Japanese had stripped the boat of its oars and sail, but Overbeck had managed to fish a sail out of the water. The Japanese had fortunately failed to toss the mast, boom, and tiller overboard. Rations consisted of a sealed can of dry biscuits. Though the Japanese had opened the water barrels to drain—even filling one with salt water—the survivors found enough fresh water to last several days with rationing. Meyer contributed his full canteen, which he had tied to his leg when he abandoned ship.

  The men unfurled the sail when a Japanese destroyer appeared on the horizon, aimed straight for them. Would the Japanese take them prisoner again or machine-gun them? The men had worked too hard to fall prisoner again. But there was nowhere to go. The destroyer closed the distance, the bow wake slicing through the waves. The survivors had one option: play dead. The men dropped to the deck and froze. The destroyer circled the lifeboat at a range of just 100 yards. The men could see Japanese sailors crowding the destroyer’s deck, studying the survivors through binoculars. No one moved. The destroyer circled the lifeboat again. Then to the amazement of the survivors, the enemy warship steamed off, disappearing over the horizon.

  “Where’s China?” one of the men asked.

  “West,” answered another.

  The five survivors raised the sail. The afternoon wind grabbed it and propelled the boat west with Overbeck at the tiller. These five men along with four others that the Japanese rescued would be the only survivors among the 1,800 prisoners aboard Arisan Maru, making it one of the worst hellship disasters of the war. The men picked up by the Japanese—dehydrated, plagued by open sores, and with one man completely naked—had endured days at sea. Only three of those four would live long enough to see the end of the war. Another eighty-seven Americans died on board the submarine Shark, sunk during a depth charge attack by the Arisan Maru’s escorts. The predator had become the prey.

  Graef, Meyer, and the other three survivors crowded in Arisan Maru’s discarded lifeboat put the horror and tragedy of the hellship astern and sailed toward China. A few Japanese planes zipped through the skies high overhead, too high, the men surmised, to spot them. Afternoon gave way to evening as the boat sliced through the waves. The darkness brought out the stars, allowing Overbeck to navigate by the North Star. “There was a lot of phosphorescence in the water and in my imagination, probably brought on by mental strain and lack of sleep, I kept seeing lights and hearing the familiar voices of friends on the ship calling my name and screaming for help,” he would later write. “When dawn broke it was like coming back to life.”

  The sun climbed high the next morning. The survivors munched on hardtack and sipped water, each hour taking them closer to freedom. The dark silhouette of the Chinese coast appeared on the horizon that afternoon. Chinese fishing junks bobbed in the water. Rather than risk the heavy surf near shore, Overbeck pulled alongside one of the junks. The Chinese fishermen welcomed the survivors with a reception of hot tea, rice, and fish while crews dismantled and sank the lifeboat. Handed over to the Americans, the survivors began the journey home, flying to India, North Africa, and on to the United States. Meyer looked down out of the plane at the bright lights below. “This was our country,” he wrote. “This was Mom and Dad—home.”

  20

  TANG

  “Dear All, Am prisoner of war in Japan. Feel alright. Miss you very much. . . . Will see you when the war is over.”

  —Gordon Cox, undated pos
tcard

  The October sun beat down on O’Kane and his crew, hogtied on the deck of P-34. The nine exhausted men could see off the port side as the Japanese plucked more survivors from the water, all victims of the ships Tang had torpedoed. The guards moved the prisoners at dusk into a deckhouse fireroom that housed a locker, stove, and the ship’s traditional bath. The cramped compartment proved little bigger than a bathroom, allowing only four men to sleep at a time while the others stood. Guards ordered the survivors to knock to use the head. “When we would knock on the door,” Leibold would later tell investigators, “the Jap guard would shove his bayonet through the space about the door and swing it about maliciously, making it very hard for us to dodge the bayonet.” Narowanski improvised. “I’ll be damned,” the blond torpedoman griped, urinating in the bath heater’s ash pot. “I’ve got to take a leak.”

  Sparse rations only added to the crew’s discomfort. Despite the ship’s visible stores of fish, rice, and squash, the Japanese fed the survivors just a few hardtack crackers accompanied by a cup of hot water. The only solace these meager meals offered was a fifteen-minute reprieve from the hand ties. The Japanese continued to harass the men—albeit not as bad as the first day—including the ship’s executive officer, who repeatedly tried to pry a diamond ring off Leibold’s finger. Unable to remove it, the officer settled for punching him. The terrific heat from the neighboring galley made the men’s nightly 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. confinement unbearable as the bulkheads grew too hot to even touch. “Our men would pass out,” Caverly would later tell war crime investigators. “We would have to carry the men to the door, which was locked and try to revive them with the little air that seeped through the door-jambs.”

  Tang’s malfunctioning twenty-fourth torpedo had brought a tragic end to one of the war’s greatest runs. Postwar records would show that in just thirty-one days O’Kane had sunk seven ships for a total of 21,772 tons, making it the third most successful patrol of the war by the number of ships sunk. The final run added to O’Kane’s already impressive list of sinkings. In just nine months at the helm of Tang, the thirty-three-year-old skipper had sunk a confirmed twenty-four ships with a total of 93,824 tons, solidifying his rank as the top skipper of the war. But none of that mattered now. The war was over for O’Kane and his men. They had one goal: survive. “Anything that the Japs ask you, answer them,” O’Kane ordered his men. “Don’t tell them a lie. Don’t let them catch you in a lie. Anything you know, be assured they know. I am the guy they are after.”

  P-34 arrived a few days later in Formosa’s Takao. The Japanese hauled the blindfolded Americans ashore, threatened to behead them, and imprisoned them for the night in an old warehouse. The guards chained the men’s hands to rings set high on the cell walls, leaving them defenseless throughout the night as a swarm of mosquitoes feasted on them. The Japanese guards paraded the prized American submariners through town the next morning for the locals to see. Hayes Trukke’s shaggy blond hair hung down in front of his mouth—the product of the lax submarine force regulations—and reminded O’Kane of the character Hairless Joe in the Al Capp comic strip. With each step, his locks swayed, prompting the locals to holler and jeer, turning what should have been a display of Japanese military might into a circus.

  The guards issued the half-naked sailors ragged white clothes, blindfolded them again, and loaded them on a train, each handcuffed prisoner tethered with a lanyard to a guard. The train pulled away from the station and chugged north, following the same valley the men had seen from the sea. The exhausted prisoners—with blindfolds removed and train car shades opened—sat largely in silence for the eight-hour trip, content to watch the verdant landscape slip past the window beneath gray and drizzly skies, the farms and rudimentary tools a throwback to an earlier century. “We watched their primitive agricultural methods, hand-powered water wheels for irrigational purposes, thatched garments for shedding rain,” Savadkin recalled. “We also noted that all the people, civilians, school children and everyone seemed to be in some sort of uniform. They all wore leggings of some type and a uniform hat.”

  The train ended its 150-mile journey that evening on the northeastern tip of Formosa in the port city of Kiirun. The Japanese guards marched the Tang survivors through the now dark rain to the city jail, a decrepit and primitive fortress the Americans dubbed the “Kiirun Clink.” The guards marshaled the prisoners—three to a cell—into small wooden pens. “The cells are like the cages you see in the zoo, the floor of the cell being raised above the floor of the corridor that leads between the cells,” recalled Savadkin. “There are bars in the front of the cell running from ceiling to deck. They were wooden bars about four inches in diameter, there was a very small door in the forward portion of the cell through which we entered and left it. The door was very narrow and small and you had to stoop down and double up to get in and out of it. The head was nothing more than a recess in the wall and a slit in the deck.”

  The Japanese fed the prisoners a couple baseball-sized rice balls, cucumbers, and a few small fish that reminded the prisoners of shiners or minnows often used as bait. The meal came served in a corn or cane husk accompanied by bamboo chopsticks wrapped in paper, much like soda straws found at any local pharmacy counter. Guards passed out blankets—one per prisoner—when the men finished dinner. That night the exhausted prisoners slept for the first time since the loss of the Tang. The men passed a few days in the cells, swapping stories and sleeping. The only highlight came when a conscripted guard entered Savadkin’s cell and announced that he was a Christian and had brought presents for the men. He handed the lieutenant—the only one awake—several melting popsicles. Savadkin hid them behind his back. “Hey, fellows!” he announced, rousing his cellmates. “Guess what I’ve got for you—ice cream on a stick!”

  “Take it easy, Mr. Savadkin,” griped a groggy sailor—no doubt convinced the lieutenant had lost his mind—until Savadkin produced a “long, cool, drippy, and wonderfully sticky popsicle on a stick for each of us.”

  The guards returned a few days later, hauled the men out of the wooden cells, and loaded them on a convoy bound for Japan; the three officers went on separate destroyers, while the six enlisted men piled on top of sugar sacks in the cargo hold of a cruiser. The destroyer captain escorted O’Kane to his cabin, where he was provided shoes, warm clothes, and food. An armed guard stood watch at the door through which O’Kane observed the ship’s drills, marveling at the speed of the destroyer’s gun crew. The destroyer’s skipper, a lieutenant commander about the same age as O’Kane, visited his prisoner that evening. The two officers chatted in English about naval tactics, the progress of the war—the men agreed a battleship confrontation was no longer possible given Japan’s losses—and even literature. “How is it, Commander, that you speak no Japanese, but seem to understand my English?” asked the Japanese officer. “How could we expect to understand each other’s problems when you made no attempt to learn even a word of our language?”

  The destroyer captain soon returned to the bridge, leaving O’Kane alone to replay the loss of his submarine, questioning why the Navy had removed anti–circular run devices from torpedoes. That mechanism forces a torpedo to dive if it turns too far. Such a device would have saved seventy-eight lives and O’Kane’s submarine. Tang could have continued fighting, sunk more ships, and helped bring an end to the war. Instead O’Kane and eight other survivors steamed north toward Japan and an uncertain future.

  Savadkin and Flanagan enjoyed similar warm treatment on board the other destroyers. The Japanese allowed the officers to bathe and issued them clean clothes, blankets, and a pillow, offering the wardroom transom as a bed. Two guards armed with bayonets sat day and night, occasionally attempting conversation. The ship’s doctor visited Savadkin, giving the lieutenant an English-Japanese dictionary. Savadkin and the doctor, armed with his own bilingual dictionary, discussed the similarities between American and Japanese destroyer crews. “I ate with the Japanese officers,” recalled Savadkin. “H
owever, they provided me a plate and a set of silverware, a regular knife, fork and spoon inscribed with the Japanese naval emblem. The officers used chopsticks, each had his own set of very beautifully-formed chopsticks and kept in a highly polished and extremely well decorated personal case, something like a toothbrush kit.”

  Four days and three nights passed as the convoy steamed some 700 miles north through the East China Sea toward Kobe, Japan’s bustling port on the southeastern side of the main island of Honshu. The Tang survivors arrived at a Kobe naval base to find Formosa’s more tropical climate had given way to a bitter November rain mixed with sleet. With the promise that fresh clothes awaited him and his men on shore, O’Kane returned the shoes, shirt, and pants issued at the start of the trip, thanking the destroyer captain for his hospitality. O’Kane paused at the top of the gangway to ask the captain one last question. Why had he and the others been treated so harshly on the P-34 compared to the civility enjoyed on this voyage? “That ship and the escort force,” the captain replied, “are not part of the Imperial Navy.”

  Barefooted and dressed in little more than rags, the reunited survivors slogged through the rain and sleet to a naval training station, where guards sat them down, backs against a fence. A Japanese rear admiral arrived with his entourage after an hour to inspect the soaked and shivering sailors. The admiral walked down the line, pausing when he reached Leibold. “How old are you?”