He looks around in the water and counts heads. There are eight in the water with him, like himself swept off the bridge when that part of the ship went under. Only one thing to do now. His heart like lead within him, Dick O’Kane keeps himself afloat, using the minimum possible effort. The instinct of self-preservation dies hard, even though there may not seem to be much left to live for. Every now and then the Captain glances back to the bow of his ship, still exposed above the surface. After about five minutes the head of a man appears in the water alongside, and Lieutenant Larry Savadkin swims over and joins the pitiful party of survivors. He had gone down with the ship, inside the conning tower. Finding a tiny pocket where air had been entrapped, he had pressed his mouth into it, taken what breaths he could, and then moved to the still-open hatch, where he found another air pocket. Still another one was under the bridge overhang, and, stopping there for several moments, he had finally ducked out and swum to the surface.
This story he repeats to O’Kane between gasps in the choppy sea. And as he is telling it, there comes a sudden burbling of air from alongside the protruding bow of Tang, and it swiftly sinks from sight.
The Captain stares, and his heart leaps within him. That was not accidental! That looked as though one of the undamaged ballast tanks had been deliberately flooded, in order to level off the submarine. True, she would sink to the bottom, but she would be on an even keel, the men trapped inside would have a fighting chance to get out! Wild, hopeless plans race through his brain. Maybe enough of his crew will get out to form a good-sized party. Maybe they will be able to capture some small vessel, and in some way arrive intact at some part of the Chinese coast not under Jap domination. Or maybe there will be some way of contacting a friendly submarine.
But nothing comes of it, though O’Kane watches throughout the remainder of the night. The first thing which should come up is the escape buoy, and that he never sees. Japanese patrol boats make their appearance about this time, and they run about, dropping occasional depth charges. Perhaps these explosions have temporarily dissuaded the rest of Tang’s crew from attempting to escape….
Dawn finally arrived, and a Japanese destroyer escort picked up O’Kane and several others, who were immediately subjected to merciless beatings and clubbings — hardly what would have been meted out to Jap submariners had the positions been reversed. Of the ten men left floating about in the water when Tang went down, including the one who made his escape from the conning tower, only four were ultimately recovered from Japanese prison camps.
And what of the men who remained alive inside the submarine, who leveled her off on the bottom to make it possible for them to escape? Their story is equally tragic.
By quick action they had managed to seal the afterpart of the ship, confine the flooding to the after engine room, maneuvering room, and after torpedo room. The men in the control room, directly beneath the conning tower, had been able to close the hatch between those two compartments, thus localizing the flooding through the open upper conning tower hatch to that compartment alone, but not before considerable water had found its way into the control room; and since the lower conning tower hatch had been sprung by the terrific force of the explosion, it leaked badly and could not be made tight. Then they opened the vent valve to number-two main ballast tank, using the hand operating gear, since hydraulic power had also been lost, and by this means lowered the bow of the ship to the bottom. They were thus in an excellent position for escape. The ship was in 180 feet of water, not too far from the coast of China. They had by no means despaired.
The next operation was to burn all the confidential and secret papers, which was accomplished at the expense of filling the control room and forward battery compartment with smoke. Much of this smoke also entered the forward torpedo room, an unfortunate circumstance. At about this time depth charging commenced, and all escape operations came to a standstill for several hours until it ceased. In the meantime, all survivors gathered in the forward torpedo room, about thirty in all, and they were forced to seal off the door to the battery compartment and the rest of the ship because of progressive flooding from the control room and an electrical fire which had started in the forward battery compartment. This fire increased in intensity, and finally prevented successful escape of many men who otherwise could have got out.
In all, four parties left the ship, using the Momsen lung, via the escape hatch built into the forward torpedo room. Owing to the great pressure due to the depth, this process was laborious, and the men, already debilitated from the effects of the foul air and smoke fumes they had been breathing, suffered exceedingly. Toward the end, the heat from the fire in the forward battery compartment had begun to blister the paint on the after bulkhead of the torpedo room, and puffs of acrid smoke were coming past the door, where the rubber gasket itself was burning. Steadily increasing pressure in the battery compartment, due to slow flooding, also helped to destroy this gasket. Finally, the inevitable happened — the gasket blew out, or was burned out, and all men remaining in the forward torpedo room were asphyxiated.
Thirteen men made an underwater escape from Tang’s forward torpedo room several hours after she went down, but only five were picked up by the Japs the next morning. Five of them had never reached the surface, and three, evidently suffering some form of the bends, had been unable to remain afloat.
Of the crew of eighty-eight men and officers, only nine in all came back.
We of the submarine force grieved silently, as men are wont to do, at the news that Tang was no more. With submarines, this news is not the sudden receipt of specific information; it is the gradual realization that it is a day or two since a certain ship should have reported in from patrol. It is the intensified waiting, hoping against hope that some inconsequential matter, such as a broken-down radio transmitter, might prove to be the cause of the silence. You hear the chatter of messages from boats on patrol, going out, or coming back, reporting contacts, requesting rendezvous, or reporting results to date, but never do you hear the faint, clipped call from the vessel you listen for — never the right message comes in over the burdened ether waves. Finally, since it is possible that some casualty may have prevented transmission, although reception of radio signals might still be possible, a “blind” rendezvous is arranged for the non-reporting ship. A message is sent repeatedly, giving the place and setting a period for arrival of the submarine which is within the realm of possibility if the lost boat is still alive. Then an escort vessel is sent out, to wait — and wait — and finally to return, empty-handed. And then you know what has happened, and you take the missing boat’s name off the operations board, trying to pretend that the lump in your throat doesn’t exist, that your action in so doing cannot be considered to have any relationship to what has happened out there.
And, as it was with all the others, so was it with Tang. We knew only that she was gone, leaving to the rest of us a legacy of consistent aggressiveness, success, and daring. But after a few months some rather odd stories began to be bruited about. Tang had singlehandedly taken on a huge convoy, with many escorting destroyers, in shallow water. Tang had shot the hell out of the enemy, but had been caught in water so shallow that, upon diving, she struck bottom before the top of the periscope shears went under — and thus was easy meat for an enraged enemy. Tang had deliberately entered an enemy harbor at night on the surface, expended all her torpedoes on the anchored Jap ships, and been caught by shore batteries on her way out. Tang had been so damaged by a furious depth charging she had undergone in shallow water that she was unable to dive, and had been forced to scuttle herself upon the arrival of enemy forces. And so on.