Escape From the Deep (12 page)

Could the
Tang
’s crew also squeeze their way through tubes and live to tell the tale? Only those slim enough to fit through the
Tang
’s twenty-one-inch wide tubes would be able to do so with ease. Few of the men were sufficiently skinny, given the always available supply of superb food aboard the
Tang
. Those with thicker waistlines would have no option but to try the escape trunk attached to the bulkhead above them.

Suddenly, the men in the forward torpedo room could hear the distant thuds and reverberations of Japanese depth charges. Like the men trapped in other compartments, they now wondered how long it would take before the Japanese spotted the
Tang
’s exposed bow and opened fire with surface guns.
²¹

Then the deck below them started to shift and in consternation they felt the
Tang
begin to level off and settle to the bottom. They couldn’t use the torpedo tubes now in any case. There was just one way out—the escape trunk.

JESSE DASILVA KNEW he had to keep moving forward or die. He and several others were gathered at the door sealing the crew’s quarters from the control room. Looking through the eye port, they could see that, although the control room was badly flooded, the water had not yet entered the ventilation piping. It was likely that the control room still had some air in it, which meant they could risk opening the door.

But first DaSilva and the men trapped with him decided to prepare for the inevitable rush of water when they opened the door. DaSilva lifted some decking and opened a freezer locker below it so that it would act as a makeshift bilge and collect at least some of the water. A storeroom and the
Tang
’s magazine were also below the decking. At some point, Gunner’s Mate James White had emptied the magazine of firearms to take forward to the torpedo room.
²²

DaSilva and the others climbed onto oblong tables. The tables had raised sides to prevent plates from sliding to the deck and were patterned with checkerboard squares.

Someone cracked open the door. Dirty water gushed in. Tense moments followed as the crew’s mess filled with the overspill.
Would the water continue to rush in or subside?
To their relief, it leveled after a few seconds. The men climbed down from the mess tables and waded through water that began to settle around their ankles.

About a dozen men, including DaSilva, started to make their way into the control room.
²³
It was soon clear that the room had partly flooded because of water that was still leaking into it from the damaged hatch leading to the flooded conning tower above.

The men waded through the control room toward the officer’s mess. The water was soon reaching their knees.

DaSilva looked around the control room. He spotted Mel Enos, the eager young officer of whom O’Kane had expected great things.

“We’d better destroy some of these papers,” said Enos.

Enos was still bleeding from several deep cuts to his head.
²⁴
He began showing men which vital documents to destroy. Some of the men began to carry out his orders without thinking, setting fire to codebooks and other confidential documents, including top secret Ultra messages, which were held in a safe in the wardroom or in another safe in the captain’s stateroom nearby.

As an officer, Enos had access to both safes and he knew the importance of the information inside because he had decoded key Ultra messages in recent weeks. In the dimly lit room, DaSilva could make out documents piled up in a wastebasket set on a table.

Enos set fire to them, creating a “great deal of smoke.”
²⁵
It was a stupid thing to do in a sunken submarine with a fast dwindling oxygen supply. But he wasn’t thinking straight. He was a green ensign. Before joining the
Tang,
he had never even been to sea.
²⁶

Other men, led by Doc Larson, began to carry injured crew members forward, using blankets as litters.

“We’ve got to get to the forward torpedo room because that’s where we can make an escape,” someone said.

From the control room, they stepped into the adjacent officers’ quarters.

As Jesse DaSilva moved forward, he noticed that the high-pressure air tank was full. He felt a jolt of hope. They had air. It would not last long, but a couple of hours’ supply was left at the least.
²⁷

They would need every breath they could get. Already the
Tang
’s normally thick fog of body odor, diesel fumes, and stale air was starting to become difficult to breathe. There was also the steady buildup of carbon dioxide from the rapidly exhaled breath of the men. Many of them were probably already panting because of increased heart rates due to shock and the adrenaline pumping through them.

To compound the problem, at 180 feet below, the air was under far higher pressure than on the surface, and this meant there would be a far greater increase in carbon dioxide when exhaling. Sooner or later, the men literally could be killed by their own breath.

DaSilva kept moving. He saw three apple pies that had been laid out on tables, no doubt for the crew to celebrate on their return to San Francisco. Others noticed turkeys that were thawing for the Thanksgiving dinner that was to have been held on their journey home.
²⁸

DaSilva continued forward. He spotted a depth gauge. It showed that the
Tang
was at 180 feet. That was deep, but not too deep to rule out a successful exit from the forward torpedo room’s escape trunk. Had they sunk in several hundred feet of water, there would now be no chance of survival. The best option, in that case, would be to put a pistol to one’s head.

OTHER MEN WERE also working their way toward the forward torpedo room. Clay Decker stuck close to chief Bill Ballinger, who had recovered somewhat from being thrown across the compartment when the
Tang
’s last torpedo struck. As the pair passed through the officer’s mess, they also encountered the young junior-grade lieutenant, Mel Enos. He was still busy burning codebooks and other papers in the metal wastebasket.

“You can’t do that, Enos, you can’t do that!” cried Decker. “We can’t have a fire going! We need every bit of air we’ve got!”
²⁹

Enos stopped setting light to the codebooks.

Decker and Ballinger grabbed the remaining codebooks, dropped below into the forward battery compartment and dunked them into the battery acid, a far safer and instantaneous method of disposal.

As many as twenty survivors continued forward through the submarine. It was around 2:45 a.m., fifteen minutes or so after the torpedo had struck, when they reached a sealed door—all that separated them from the forward torpedo room. Among the men who gathered before the door were Mel Enos, Clay Decker, Bill Ballinger, Doc Larson, Hank Flanagan, and Jesse DaSilva. The more experienced among them, and those who were still thinking relatively clearly, in spite of the oxygen-depleted air, knew that they now faced a serious problem.

The difference in air pressure between the forward torpedo room and the compartment they were in was likely to be enormous. If they opened the door without attempting to equalize the pressure between the two compartments, they could be shot forward like pellets in an air gun.

To make matters worse, on close examination, the men realized that the intercom linking the two compartments wasn’t working. Soon, men on both sides of the door were trying to tell each other what they planned, gesturing at each other through the eye port and hammering on the door. Chaos ensued. No one on either side had a clear idea of what the other group was about to do next. Banging on the door—any kind of unnecessary noise—was a bad idea. In fact, it was life-threatening given the presence of sonar-equipped Japanese patrol boats that were trying to locate the
Tang
.

In the forward torpedo room, Hayes Trukke saw that high-pressure air lines had snapped, no doubt when the torpedo had struck. That meant there was not just a significant but a massive difference in air pressure between the two compartments.

Trukke urgently attempted to signal to DaSilva and others that they should open the door very slowly.
³⁰
But it was no use. The men standing near DaSilva on the other side of the sealed door began to panic, terrified that they would be trapped in a compartment with no way out. Thinking that Trukke and others were trying to keep them out, they started to push against the door with all their brute strength. Suddenly, it seemed to explode. The men were blown forward.
³¹

In the forward torpedo room Howard Walker felt the full brunt of the door suddenly bursting open, hitting him in the face. Hayes Trukke saw that Walker’s nose was squashed to one side, his “lips smashed and eyes closed.”
³²
Blood poured from the wound.
³³
Doc Larson did his best to patch him up.

Finally, Jesse DaSilva and the men with him entered the forward torpedo room. Most of the men were familiar with the compartment, and had fond memories of it, having visited it most evenings to watch movies such as
Dracula
and
Flying Down to Rio,
which were projected onto a screen at one end.

The air inside was worse than in the compartments they had left behind: dense with minute debris and so full of exhaled carbon dioxide that it was hard for every man gathered there to breathe normally. And it was hot, above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and getting hotter by the second—without ventilation, heat from the engines and other sources had no outlet.

DaSilva figured that about forty men, some seriously injured, were now in the forward torpedo compartment.
³⁴
They were “excited, scared and didn’t know what to do.”
³⁵

CLAY DECKER WAS ASTONISHED to see his best friend, Motor Machinist’s Mate George Zofcin, among the white-faced survivors in the forward torpedo room. “When we had gone to battle stations submerged,” he recalled, “I had left the throttles to George and gone to the control room. I figured he was back [in the engine room in the after part of the boat] when we took the torpedo. I was absolutely flabbergasted when I got to the forward torpedo room and saw George.”
³⁶

Zofcin told Decker that he had stepped away from his position in the engine room after the last torpedo had been fired and moved forward toward the galley to get a cup of coffee. He had been standing just a few feet from the galley when the last torpedo hit the
Tang
.

“Then I just stepped through the hatch and closed it behind me,” Zofcin told an astonished Decker.

Twenty-one-year-old George Zofcin and Clay Decker were particularly close. They met in San Francisco, where Zofcin had grown up, during the commissioning of the
Tang
. Like Decker, the light-haired, boyish-looking Zofcin was married to an attractive young woman, Martha, and like Decker, he had a two-year-old son. Zofcin approached Decker as soon as he learned from other crewmen that Decker and he had sons the same age.

The two men often discussed their wives and sons with each other. Decker told Zofcin that his wife, Lucille, was working at a Bay Area shipyard as a secretary when she wasn’t caring for his son, Harry.

“I’ve also got a wife and a two-year-old son,” Zofcin told Decker. “I just bought a house over at 67 Stonyford Avenue on the hill in San Francisco. It’s as small as a postage stamp. You step off the sidewalk and two strides later you’re in the front door. But the back yard is big enough for a small picnic table and two chairs. It’s a two bedroom with two stories. Just my wife and son are going to be there when I go aboard the
Tang
and make this patrol.”

“Maybe your wife and mine could live together,” Zofcin suggested. “Your wife can bring in the beans. Mine can look after the children.”
³⁷

The arrangement was working out perfectly so far.

ALSO AMONG THE MEN in the forward torpedo room was the muscle-bound Leland Weekley, the chief torpedoman. An avid bodybuilder who lifted weights in the forward torpedo room when not on duty there, Weekley had complained to Floyd Caverly and others that his marriage to his wife, Edith, who was living in Compton in Los Angeles, had been under strain for a while. But he had recently received a letter from her, which had filled him with the hope of patching things up. As much as any other man, he was now determined to get out of the
Tang
so that he could be with loved ones again.

Weekley stepped onto a ladder and climbed the few feet to a hatch on the overhead. Then he opened it and looked up into the
Tang
’s escape trunk.
³⁸
Below him, men began to pull out cellophane-wrapped Momsen Lungs that had been stowed in overheads. As they did so, some discussed the odds of getting out of the
Tang
alive, and what they would do if they got to the surface. They knew how deep they were and roughly how far it was to the coast of China. At this point, they were all confident they would survive.
³⁹

Suddenly, the men could hear depth charges exploding far off. Invaluable time passed as they waited for the depth-charging to end, their faces taut with tension, sweat streaming off their brows. Never had an escape been attempted from a submerged submarine while under attack. “Jap patrol boats [had] evidently picked us up again,” recalled one of the men, “and dropped about ten depth charges, which shook us severely but did no real damage. Everything came to a dead standstill until they had left and there was no danger of them picking up our sounds.”
⁴⁰