Escape From the Deep (9 page)

Maybe it will miss. Maybe it will veer away and begin another erratic circle. Maybe the
Tang
will evade just in time.

In a second or so, Leibold would find out.
²⁵

PART TWO

Escape from the Deep

Neither timid nor reckless men should go to sea.

—
Arleigh A. Burke, Admiral, U.S. Navy

6

The Deep

I
N THE CONNING TOWER, Floyd Caverly waited like the other men for the inevitable.

Surely there’s enough time to get out of the way
—
to get the hell out of here? Surely?

Speed. Speed is all we need . . . just enough to get out of the way. If only the
Tang
would just set by the stern and set off like a speedboat.
¹

But the
Tang
was not a speedboat. She could not avoid the charging torpedo. It hit the
Tang
’s stern with a massive explosion somewhere between the maneuvering room and the after torpedo room, killing as many as half the crew instantly and flooding all aft compartments as far forward as the crew’s quarters, midway along the boat.
²

Caverly was standing looking at a radarscope when it happened. He knew the outer hull was almost a full inch of nickel-alloyed steel, perhaps the best of its kind in the world. The
Tang
was rugged, but the sheer violence of the impact was astounding. The Mark 18 electric torpedo was packed with a powerful new explosive developed in the early days of the war to give submarines the extra punch required to sink thick-skinned enemy boats.

Caverly thought that the
Tang
had been snapped in two. The waves of concussion from the explosion made him feel as if he were experiencing a massive earthquake. He did not know which way to step to catch his balance. The deck plates rattled and shook. Lightbulbs went out.

In the conning tower, there was chaos.

“We’ve been hit!”
³
cried Executive Officer Frank Springer.

IN THE FORWARD TORPEDO ROOM, Pete Narowanski found himself flat on his back from the huge explosion.
⁴
He picked himself up.
What happened?
There had been no alarm. One moment he had been rejoicing, looking forward to carousing in San Francisco. Now he could feel the
Tang
sinking. Had the
Tang
been hit by a Japanese shell? Loose equipment began to slide through the compartment.
⁵
Then he felt a bump as the stern hit the bottom. A few seconds later, he heard air rushing through the main ballast tank blowers—someone in the control room was trying to blow the
Tang
back to the surface. But it didn’t work. Clearly, much of the after section of the submarine was flooded.

Narowanski looked around at his comrades in the forward torpedo room. Among the men now holding on to anything within reach and nursing serious bruises were blonde-haired Hayes Trukke; the burly Leland Weekley, chief torpedoman; and Virginian John Fluker.

Narowanski was in good company. After four patrols and several hair-raising episodes in their presence, he could rely on these men totally. They wouldn’t “flip out” in a crisis.
⁶

Narowanski’s fellow torpedomen also knew they could depend on him one hundred percent. “Ski,” as he was nicknamed, and the other men in the forward torpedo room remained calm. They were well trained and had many years’ experience between them. As they tried to figure out what exactly had happened to the
Tang,
they scanned the compartment for damage. There was surprisingly little. Then their training kicked in. They closed the watertight door leading to the next compartment. One of the men, who was still wearing headphones, tried to contact other compartments but without success. Someone else turned on the emergency lights.
⁷

Narowanski and the men in the forward torpedo room were lucky. Unlike men trapped in other compartments, the torpedomen knew they had a way out from theirs—they were a few feet from one of only two escape trunks on the
Tang
. The other was in the after torpedo room, which was flooded, its occupants either killed instantly by the explosion or now drowned. But Narowanski and the men with him could not use the escape trunk yet. They would have to wait until everyone left alive made it to the forward torpedo room. Only then could they try to get out. For the time being, all they could do was hold on and pray.
⁸

ON THE BRIDGE, Bill Leibold saw a cloud of what looked like black smoke. In fact it was water thrown up from the explosion. He and other men on the bridge felt the boat being wrenched, as if it were being split in half.
⁹

A few feet from Leibold, Dick O’Kane watched, aghast, as the tops of the after ballast tanks blew into the air. Water washed across the wooden main decking, around the five-inch main gun, and then toward the aft cigarette deck where the
Tang
’s 40mm gun was positioned, several feet from where O’Kane now stood on the bridge.

“Do we have propulsion?” asked O’Kane, speaking into his bridge phone.

There was no answer.

O’Kane again shouted into the bridge phone.

The men in the conning tower below could hear him. But O’Kane received no reply. The explosion had knocked out the microphone on his bridge phone.
¹⁰

“Radar!” shouted O’Kane, “I want to know how far it is to the closest destroyer and what the course is on that destroyer.”
¹¹

Caverly picked up his microphone in the conning tower.

“The radar is out of commission,” said Caverly. “I have no bearing or range right now.”

“Radar,” barked O’Kane, “I’m asking for information and I want it
now!
”

Caverly realized that O’Kane’s microphone was out of action so he stepped over to the hatch and called up: “The radar is out of commission.”

Caverly then gave the
Tang
’s last bearing and range, but O’Kane did not hear him. He had stepped away from the hatch.

“I want information, radar!”
¹²
O’Kane shouted again.

Frank Springer grabbed Caverly by the nape of the neck and seat of his pants and began to shove him up the hatch.

“Get up there and talk to the skipper!” said Springer.
¹³

Caverly climbed up the ladder to the bridge. As he stepped onto the bridge’s deck, he saw a lookout man, Radioman Charles Andriolo, who had grown up in Massachusetts. He was clinging to a guardrail, his binoculars hanging from his neck.

Andriolo looked terrified. He said he couldn’t swim.

Caverly stepped over toward O’Kane, who was a few feet from Bill Leibold.

A second or so later, Leibold noticed Caverly standing right next to him. Both men looked aft, in the direction of the explosion.

“I’m not going back down below,” said Caverly.
¹⁴

Water started to rise up toward the bridge. It had soon covered the aft third of the submarine.

“Close the hatch!” cried O’Kane.

But it was too late. The
Tang
began to sink, tons of water pouring into the conning tower. The after section of the submarine had flooded.
¹⁵

Leibold glanced around and saw Andriolo frozen to the spot, in “a death grip,” clinging to a guardrail, as more of the
Tang
slipped below. Andriolo was one of the
Tang
’s four lookouts who would never be seen again. It is thought that they became entangled in the sheers as the
Tang
sank and were quickly drowned.

Caverly knew it was now time for every man to look after himself.

To hell with those Japanese destroyers or anything else.

Caverly moved to the edge of the
Tang
’s wooden decking. Suddenly, she seemed to roll to port a little and then came back up and righted herself. The water flooding her deck appeared to subside.

Maybe everything is going to be all right
.

But then Caverly saw the stern begin to slip beneath the waves. He stepped over to the guardrail. As soon as the water came up to his hips, he swam off, striking out, determined not to get sucked down after the
Tang
.
¹⁶

Caverly paddled away from the boat. When he looked over his shoulder, he could see the
Tang
disappear gradually, as if on a practice dive, slipping gently beneath the ocean, stern first. Then he saw that she had stopped sinking. Perhaps five or six feet of her bow remained exposed.

Thankfully, the
Tang
had sunk in relatively shallow water—it was no more than 180 feet to the seabed. Because she was 315 feet long, her stern had hit bottom after a few seconds. Clearly, enough air was still inside to keep her bow above the surface, like some upturned bottle.

It was fortunate that the
Tang
had not gone down in the north Atlantic or near the Aleutians, where Caverly could expect to last only a few minutes in icy water. He was now trying to stay afloat in the relatively warm and calm Pacific off the coast of China, but the slightly choppy sea felt cold all the same.

Caverly swam farther away from the stricken Tang.
Was anybody still alive in the submarine?
There was no way for him to know whether any men in the boat had been able to seal the
Tang
for “watertight integrity.” The stars shone in the sky. There were no clouds. It was around two o’clock in the morning. He knew that for sure. He had looked at his wristwatch just before the last torpedoes had been fired, when O’Kane had called for a time check.

I wonder which side of the international date line we’re on,
he thought.
If I’m on one side, then it’s now October 25th, my wedding anniversary. So, I’ve been sunk on my wedding anniversary!
¹⁷

Caverly thought about his loved ones as he tried to keep his head above water. “There was nothing to do but think,” he later recalled. “It’s hard to explain what goes through your head in a situation like that. I thought about my childhood, my folks, Leone, my wife, and my daughter, Mary Anne. I thought of all [the] things I had planned to do that I wasn’t now going to get to do.”
¹⁸

Caverly’s childhood had been tough. His mother died eighteen months after he was born in northern Minnesota, the son of a blacksmith from Michigan who first came to the area to work with logging crews. He met blonde-haired Leone, who was a year older than him, when he worked on a threshing gang on a farm near her family’s home before the war. They had fallen in love after painting a house together. Within eight months, they were married at her home, and, in 1942, Leone gave birth to Mary Anne, who shared her Scandinavian good looks. “Leone was a kind soul, a lot of fun, hard working, a very good mother,” recalled Caverly. “She wrote and sent photographs of [two-year-old] Mary Anne that I kept with my uniforms and personal things back on the submarine tender in Pearl Harbor.”

Caverly was still in good physical condition from his boxing days before the war. But he was not the strongest of swimmers. The odds for survival seemed slim.
Would he see Mary Anne, Leone, and his folks again? Would he ever get to spend the $385 in poker winnings that he had locked away with the pictures of his family in Pearl Harbor?
¹⁹

IN THE WATER NEARBY, but out of sight, Captain Dick O’Kane also watched as the
Tang
went down, “the way a pendulum might swing down in a viscous liquid.” His heart ached for the crew below the surface and for the few who had been topside and now had to face the cruel sea.

O’Kane could soon see the
Tang
’s gray bow jutting above the surface at a forty-five-degree angle. The torpedo tubes were not exposed—there could be no escape through them. The
Tang
looked like “a great wounded animal, a leviathan.” It was a devastating sight, far more wrenching than when he had heard of the
Wahoo
’s loss. All he could feel was utter grief.
²⁰
These moments would always haunt him, as would his memories of so many good men who were now dead, who had trusted him with their lives.
²¹

O’Kane called out encouragement, as if trying to coax the
Tang
back to life. He then struck out instinctively toward his submarine, the first and only he had commanded. It was exhausting but he got closer, fighting the strong current. Every now and again, he saw a Japanese patrol boat in the far distance. It had not seen the
Tang
sink. Fortunately, her Mark 18 electric torpedoes had been wakeless, preventing the Japanese during the night’s battle from immediately locating the
Tang
.