But all stories seemed to agree on three particulars — great damage to the enemy, shallow water, and Dick O’Kane in a Jap prison camp! Knowing the cool daring of which O’Kane and Tang were capable, the absolute fearlessness of their tactics, and the unprecedented, original, and completely logical thinking they had time after time demonstrated — a quality partly inherited, no doubt, from Mush Morton and Wahoo—it was impossible to conceive of a set of circumstances which would fit all the reported details. But we knew that Tang’s last mission had been fraught with more than usual secrecy — and so we wondered, until Dick O’Kane himself came back from the living dead, his starved and bruised body a testimonial to the brutality of his captors, to give us the story of those last glorious moments of Tang’s short but action-packed life.
13
Trigger
While Tang was going into commission at Mare Island, Trigger completed her refit following Dusty Dornin’s second patrol, and on Christmas Day, 1943, was scheduled to leave for the area of Truk. “Christmas Day,” we moaned. “Surely the war is not going to be lost or won by our departure on that day.” It took a strong protest to ComSubPac himself, but finally he agreed that Trigger had earned her first Christmas in port.
We got under way the following day, and in little more than a week took station on a convoy route between Guam and Truk. Here, for the first time, Trigger’s luck at finding targets turned sour.
For nearly a month we plied the traffic lanes. Nothing whatever did we see, except an occasional plane or various brightly colored ocean birds, until two or three days before shortage of fuel would have started us back to Pearl Harbor. And then early one evening the sonar operator thought he heard something in his earphones. He listened intently. There could be no doubt of it. There had been an explosion in the water many miles away. And then another.
Fandel, onetime country schoolteacher, marked the time, listened a little longer, marked the time once more, and then called for the skipper. “Captain,” he reported, “somebody is dropping periodic depth charges. Listen.”
Sometimes Jap convoy escorts dropped depth charges periodically as they steamed along. Doubtless the idea was to discourage submarines from attacking. Its success depended on whose area they were in.
Dusty and I heard the fifth and sixth explosions. They seemed to be a little louder to the south.
“All ahead flank!” The soft mutter of one diesel engine pushing us along at slow speed was suddenly augmented by three more. Four plumes of smoke poured from Trigger’s exhaust ports onto the surface of the ocean, and a white tumbled wake stretched farther aft. On the bridge seven pairs of high-powered binoculars searched the dimming horizon, and above them the radar rotated slowly. For ten miles we let the ship run.
“All stop! Secure the engines!” Trigger coasted, silenced, slowing. “Rig out the sound heads!”
The pressure-proof speaker on the bridge blared: “Bridge! Sound reports distant depth charges dead ahead!”
“All ahead flank!” We were getting closer. It was now dark, and as Trigger picked up speed once more, we carefully adjusted the radar, peaked its tuning and ring time. We concentrated it dead ahead with occasional sweeps sideways to prevent being taken by surprise. For a long time it showed nothing. Finally, “Radar contact!” Ralph Korn, now chief yeoman, with the simplicity of long practice swung into the routine of feeding the essential information from the radar to the tracking parties. When combined with the known inputs of Trigger’s own course and speed the result was target course and speed — data essential to the correct torpedo fire-control solution.
“Conn! What speed we showing?”
“Twenty and a half, sir! Picking up slowly!”
“Bridge! We’re overtaking them on their port flank — range now about twelve. Can you see them?” We peered ahead. Nothing.
Trigger continued to eat up the distance on the enemy’s left flank, reaching out ahead to get into attack position. With Dusty working out the fire-control solution and handling things from the conning tower, I held the bridge and strained my eyes to spot targets. With my back against the rotating radar mast, I could tell from its motion when it was on the target. A glance at the antenna, and I knew exactly where to look.
Hours passed. Finally I could make out a faint place on the horizon where the haze was a little darker. “Conn — bridge. Enemy in sight. Standby for a TBT bearing!”
I jammed my binoculars into the TBT, centered on the smudge, pressed the button. The skipper’s rasping voice came back: “That’s him. How many can you see?”
I could see three smudges now, and my stomach tightened when the word came back that there were, indeed, three large ships on the radar, plus three much smaller ones that I couldn’t see.
An hour and a half later we had pretty well overreached on the convoy, and Dusty’s voice came up on the speaker. “Ned — what do you think — can we go in on the surface?”
This was the question I had been trying to make up my mind about for the past half hour. We could see them, but we were still too far away for them to see us. Maybe a quick surprise attack could be executed before they could get organized; dawn was already not too many hours off, and we could make a surface attack much sooner than we could possibly get off a submerged one.
The skipper was of the same mind, and so a few minutes later, having attained a position broad on the bow of the zigzagging convoy’s base course, Trigger turned her lean snout toward the enemy.
This was always the crucial part of the night surface attack — the run in. You kept your bows on the enemy to give him as little to see of you as possible, and you came in fast to get it over with quickly. Then, just before shooting, you had to slow down to let the fish get away properly. Having put your torpedoes in the water, you spun on your heel and ran, trusting to the confusion generated by exploding warheads to help you get away. If there were escorts present, the problem was complicated by the necessity to come in more or less under their sterns, where they would have to turn all the way around to get at you.
The engines were still wide open, and now we and the Japs were approaching each other at our combined speeds. At a closing rate of 35 knots it didn’t take long.
“Range, three five double oh!”
“All tubes ready forward!”
“All ahead one third — standby forward!” The last from the skipper.
I had been keeping my eyes on the nearest escort, a large mean-looking destroyer. No sign yet of his having seen us, but he surely knew his job, for he was patrolling the convoy’s quarter and thus making our shot at the big ships very difficult. To get at the big fellows we would have to shoot right across the tin can’s bow — then we would have to let him have it also, because he was too close and would be upon us in a matter of minutes. Radar gave range to the tin can as seven hundred yards — broadside to, dead ahead.