Escape From the Deep (20 page)

The other Japanese sailor then attempted to pull the buoy, with the Japanese life preserver attached to it, out of the water. “We didn’t dare tell him it was anchored to a submarine down there,” recalled Decker.
⁵⁵
The sailor kept yanking on the buoy but still could not pull it aboard. Finally, he cursed and gave up.

The two Japanese sailors rowed the five
Tang
survivors to the
P-34
. A rope ladder was lowered from the ship, and one by one the men ascended. Clay Decker was the last man to climb up. He later claimed that as he neared the deck, he looked over his shoulder and saw the two Japanese sailors dumping Larson’s body over the side of the lifeboat.
⁵⁶

THERE WERE NOW NINE MEN who were still alive. According to the commander of the Pacific’s submarine fleet, Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, they had participated in the “greatest submarine cruise of all time.”
⁵⁷
Some had journeyed more than twice around the earth in total distance with the
Tang,
sinking a ship on average every eleven days. But seventy-eight of their friends had now been lost, proving in O’Kane’s words that “in war there can be an inverse moral: the greater the performance, the harsher the consequence.”
⁵⁸

Without doubt, more of their comrades would have found the strength and courage to escape the deep had they not been so afraid of ending up in exactly the situation that the
Tang
survivors now found themselves in. Before long, some of those still alive would begin to wonder whether they too would have been better off staying down with the
Tang,
being slowly lulled into unconsciousness and finally drifting off into death. At least they would not be at the mercy of the sadistic and vengeful Japanese; their nightmare would be over. Instead, a new battle for survival was about to begin.

PART THREE

Captivity

Prisoners of war are in the power of the hostile Power,
but not of the individuals or corps who have captured them.
They must at all times be humanely treated and protected,
particularly against acts of violence, insults and public curiosity.
Measures of reprisal against them are prohibited.

—
The 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to
the Treatment of Prisoners of War

10

Guests of the Japanese

N
INE MEN HAD SURVIVED—nine of eighty-seven. Their fate was now in Japanese hands. Like most Americans, they had been indoctrinated to view the “Japs” as an inferior race. Stories of Japanese atrocities, of staggering brutality, were legion by this point in the war. It was therefore all the more distressing and humiliating to be taken prisoner by them. “There was a lot of worry,” recalled Floyd Caverly. “You didn’t know what to expect from them.”
¹

Caverly spotted dozens of Japanese sailors lying on the deck, many of them with severe burns and other injuries—survivors from the previous night’s onslaught. How long before they realized that the Americans fished from the water were responsible for their injuries and the deaths of so many of their comrades? Caverly calculated that the
Tang
had sunk five ships the previous night—more than enough to justify savage revenge.
²

The Japanese promptly tied up the survivors. Their arms were pinned to their chests and their wrists were bound together. Then they were made to sit down on the port side of the main deck.
³
Badly injured Japanese were just a few yards away. They, also, had just been rescued.

Bill Leibold looked at the horribly burned Japanese survivors and became concerned.
⁴
“To put it mildly, we were all apprehensive,” he recalled. “There were a lot of [them] who had apparently been burned and otherwise banged up, and they didn’t look on us too kindly.”
⁵

The
P-34
patrol boat kept looking for survivors. No more were found from the
Tang,
but some Japanese were fished from the waters. Meanwhile, the Americans sat on the forecastle’s decking beneath the blazing sun. “It was the roughest time we had, sitting on the hot steel deck of that ship,” recalled Clay Decker. “When we went aboard we were in our shorts and a shirt, and that was it. A submariner doesn’t get any sunshine. Our skin was really fair. We were soon very sunburned. Our lips were blistered and swollen.”
⁶

The survivors felt as if they were sitting in a frying pan. Yet they could not move or shift their weight around to ease their pain.

The sun’s rays felt more intense as the hours passed. Throughout the day, the men were not given food or water. “It kept getting hotter and we kept asking for water,” recalled Bill Leibold. “Finally they brought us water . . . but it was boiling.”

Their suffering had only just begun. The
Tang
crew were about to find out that the Japanese harbored enormous contempt for enemy submarine crews, who had caused immense damage to their war effort.

At first, some of the Japanese survivors began to circle the
Tang
men, then they started kicking and slapping them. “Hog-tied like we were,” recalled Savadkin, “we just had to take it.”
⁷

The sailors grabbed the
Tang
survivors by the hair, yanked back their heads, and stubbed out cigarettes on their faces and necks. The sailors had plenty to be angry about. In the
Tang
’s attack on their ship, “a steam boiler had busted open and some of the [Japanese] survivors were scalded like lobsters,” recalled Decker. “Soon enough, they realized, ‘Hey, here’s the guys who did this to us.’ They grabbed me by the hair, took a lit cigarette, and stuck it up my nose. They hit us with rifle butts and kicked us.”
⁸

Floyd Caverly was kneeling with his hands and feet tied together.

A Japanese officer approached.

“What is the name of your ship?” asked the officer in English.

Caverly had been told never to divulge information to the enemy.

“What is the name of your boat?”
⁹

“We didn’t have a boat name,” lied Caverly. “Just a number.”

The officer pulled out his sword.

“What was the name of your boat?”

“There was no name, sir.”

Caverly prepared to die.

The officer lifted his sword. Then he swiped Caverly with it. But he didn’t kill him. Instead he hit him alongside the head with the flat side of the sword.

Caverly didn’t feel too much pain. “I thought I’d have to go over the side of the boat after my head if I wanted one,” he recalled. “I figured that was the end.”
¹⁰

Caverly was sitting between O’Kane, to his left, and Torpedoman Hayes Trukke, to his right.

“Who is that next to you?” asked O’Kane.

“Trukke,” said Caverly.

O’Kane seemed surprised.

“Was he on board my boat?”

Caverly nodded.

Trukke had joined the
Tang
just before her final patrol. After being in the water, his wet hair now hung over his face.

Caverly looked at Trukke. He reminded him of a popular cartoon character who had long blonde hair. “O’Kane was a stickler for short haircuts and no beards,” recalled Caverly. “He was amazed, I guess, that someone was on his submarine who had long, scraggly hair.”
¹¹

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the Japanese to realize that the
Tang
survivors were submariners and—more ominously—that they had rescued the very men who had caused such heavy damage and loss of life to their convoy in previous days. It seemed hard to credit, at first, that these few, bedraggled Americans had been responsible for the holocaust the evening before.

One by one, the
Tang
survivors were taken belowdecks to be questioned. “When it was my turn,” recalled Jesse DaSilva, “they took me to another part of the ship and had me sit down between three of them.They offered me a ball of rice, but I could not eat it. One of them had an electrical device and he would jab me in the ribs with this and I would twitch and jump. They all thought this was very funny. The one that could speak English carried a large club about the size of a baseball bat. He would ask questions and if he didn’t like the answers he would hit me on the head with this bat. After some time, when they figured that I wasn’t going to tell them anything, they took me back to the others.”
¹²

When the sun began to set on their first day in captivity, the
Tang
survivors were crammed together into a small deckhouse. There was only enough space for them to stand. Out of earshot of the Japanese, they talked about their escape from the
Tang
.

The deckhouse soon felt like a sauna, more uncomfortable even than the frying-pan deck. “It was extremely hot in there,” recalled Leibold. “It was all metal. There was a wooden door with an opening at the bottom and the top. The opening was about six inches at the top. A guard stood outside. When we asked for water and food, the guard thrust his bayonet through the opening.”
¹³

The next morning, the Japanese again began to question the survivors.

Bill Leibold was taken belowdecks and interrogated. He refused to provide any information beyond his name, rating, and service number, as stipulated by the Geneva convention. But the Japanese insisted on more information.

“What was the name of your submarine?”

When Leibold refused to answer, he was beaten.

Leibold was not the only survivor who was hit for not revealing the name of the
Tang
. Others were soon nursing serious bruises. Their captain, Dick O’Kane, realized that there was little to be gained by refusing to reveal the
Tang
’s identity. His men were already suffering enough; they were extremely dehydrated and exhausted, surviving on adrenaline and little else. The violence had to stop or someone would die.

“Listen,” O’Kane told his men, “The
Tang
’s on the bottom. Just go ahead and tell them what the name is.”
¹⁴

THE AGONY SEEMED as if it would never end. For four more days, the
Tang
survivors fried in the daytime sun on the
P-34
’s deck and were crammed together in the airless deckhouse at night. Some of the men recalled with bitter irony how they had treated a Japanese sailor from Kyoto, a man named Mishuitunni Ka, whom they had fished from the water on their third patrol. They had nicknamed the sailor “Firecracker” because they had saved his life on July 4, 1944.

In stark contrast to what they were experiencing, the
Tang
’s crew had looked after Firecracker so well that O’Kane noted he was “much more of a crew’s mascot than a prisoner of war.” In fact, he was treated more like a guest of honor: One midnight, while passing through the galley, O’Kane had found a cook hard at work. “Oh, I’m just trying to get the texture of Firecracker’s rice the way he’s used to it, Captain,” the cook had commented. “We’ve been cooking it too hard.”
¹⁵

On the fifth day aboard the
P-34,
the men were sitting on the deck when they saw the Pescadores Islands come into view. Then the
P-34
entered the port of Takao on Formosa, modern-day Taiwan.

As they entered the harbor, the
Tang
’s survivors were blindfolded. “They [also] put a hangman’s black sack over our heads,” recalled Larry Savadkin.
¹⁶

After the Japanese led the men off the boat, they were bundled onto a flatbed truck, which took them to a dockside warehouse. “The Japanese then waltzed us through a small town,” recalled Bill Leibold, describing the public procession the men next endured. “There was a lot of yelling. We got pushed around.”
¹⁷

O’Kane later observed that this “morning publicity parade rather backfired. Trukke had somehow managed to keep long blonde hair, but now all of the slickum had washed away, and his hair bounded down all around to the level of his mouth, giving him the exact appearance of Hairless Joe in Al Capp’s comic strip. The onlookers pointed and laughed [at him] until the whole affair took on—for them—the nature of a circus parade.”
¹⁸

After the march, the
Tang
survivors were placed in a jail. A Japanese officer threatened them with beheading if they did not cooperate. In their cells, the
Tang
survivors were chained by the wrists to rings fixed high on the wall. Unable to swat away clouds of bugs that soon descended, they were quickly covered with terrible bites from mosquitoes.

Through much of the night, the Japanese interrogated the
Tang
’s survivors.
¹⁹
“Several times two or three Japanese would come and shine a flashlight in my face and start asking me some questions,” remembered Jesse DaSilva. “When they did not get the answers they would like, they would slap me across the face. When morning came, they lined us all up again.”