Building USS Tang: Mare Island, Richard O’Kane and the First Patrol, 1943–1944

On 15 January 1943, nine days before Dudley Morton took Wahoo into Wewak, workmen at Mare Island Navy Yard, on the tidal strait across from Vallejo, California, laid the keel of a new submarine, hull number 306, to be named Tang for a small reef fish of the tropics. Seven months later she slid into the water; on 15 October 1943 she was commissioned, and her captain read his orders on deck: Lt. Cmdr. Richard H. O’Kane, 32, until that summer Morton’s executive officer. On 22 January 1944 Tang sailed from Pearl Harbor on her first war patrol. In the next five weeks she fired all 24 of her torpedoes, sank five ships, and showed that O’Kane had learned everything Morton had to teach.

Why it mattered

USS Tang is usually ranked among the two or three most successful U.S. submarines of the Second World War, and by some counts first. JANAC credited her with 24 Japanese ships of 93,824 tons, second only to Tautog’s 26 in number of ships; a widely cited later revision raised her total to 33 ships of 116,454 tons, which would put her first in both ships and tonnage, though other reassessments of Japanese records give lower figures. She did it in just five war patrols, in nine months, between January and October 1944. Her captain received the Medal of Honor, and her loss, to her own torpedo in the Formosa Strait, produced the most remarkable escape and survival story of the submarine war, which is told in Chapters 7 to 9 of this collection.

Tang also stands for the submarine force of 1944 as a whole: a new boat built in a few months by a wartime navy yard, a young crew, many of whom had never made a war patrol, fixed torpedoes, radar, and a captain trained under the best commander of 1943 and given a free hand. This chapter tells how that boat and crew were put together and how they fought their first patrol, in the waters around Truk and Saipan during the great American carrier strike on Truk of February 1944.

Hull 306 at Mare Island

Mare Island Navy Yard, on San Pablo Bay at the mouth of the Napa River, about 25 miles northeast of San Francisco, was the Navy’s oldest base on the Pacific coast, founded in 1854. Between the wars it had become one of the Navy’s submarine builders, and in the Second World War it built fleet boats on its building ways while overhauling and repairing others that came back from the Pacific; Wahoo had been built there, and returned for overhaul in the summer of 1943. The contract for the submarine that became Tang was awarded to the yard on 15 December 1941, eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her keel was laid on 15 January 1943 (DANFS). She and her sister Tilefish (SS-307) were built side by side.

Tang was launched on 17 August 1943, seven months after her keel was laid, sponsored by Mrs. Antonio S. Pitre, wife of Capt. Antonio S. Pitre, the yard’s director of research (DANFS; Wikipedia). She was commissioned on 15 October 1943 with O’Kane in command and delivered to the Navy, her fitting out complete, on 30 November. In his account of the boat, Murray Frazee, her executive officer, credited O’Kane’s pressure on the shipyard for the speed with which she was finished (Frazee, 1994). Her commissioning officers, as identified in photographs from the crew’s scrapbook, included O’Kane, Lt. Murray Frazee, Lt. Frank Springer, Lt. William Walsh, Lt. Bruce “Scotty” Anderson, Ens. Henry Flanagan and Ens. Fred “Mel” Enos (Tang scrapbook, warfish.com).

Tang was a Balao-class boat, the follow-on to the Gato class described in Chapter 1. Outwardly almost identical, the Balaos had a thicker pressure hull of higher-strength steel, which raised their designed test depth from 300 to 400 feet and gave a wide margin beyond it. Tang carried 24 torpedoes for her ten tubes, six in the bow and four in the stern, a 4-inch/53-caliber deck gun and 20-mm antiaircraft guns, one of them on a platform forward of the bridge. Like all the new boats she had the SJ surface-search radar, whose range and bearing could be fed to the TDC, and a cut-down bridge structure to reduce her silhouette (Friedman; Tang scrapbook).

Richard O’Kane

O’Kane had spent most of the first year and a half of the war in Wahoo. As her executive officer under Marvin Kennedy and then Dudley Morton, he had seen in two patrols what caution produced and in three what aggression could do, and he had been part of the system Morton invented, in which the executive officer made the periscope observations while the captain fought the boat. He had also stood on the bridge during the Buyo Maru shooting of 26 January 1943 (Chapter 2), and his later account of it, written forty years on, is one of the main sources. After Wahoo’s fifth patrol, in July 1943, he was detached, promoted to lieutenant commander and ordered to Mare Island to take Tang. Two months later Wahoo and Morton were lost in La Pérouse Strait.

O’Kane brought from Wahoo a set of convictions. A submarine should stay on the surface whenever it could, because its lookouts and radar could see ships and aircraft much farther away than they could see the low silhouette of a submarine, and because on the surface it could move at 18 or 20 knots instead of 2 or 3. It should attack at night on the surface, using radar, when it could, and press in close, to 1,500 yards or less, so that the torpedoes had little time to go astray. It should not waste torpedoes: a single torpedo, well aimed at short range, could do what a spread of four did at long range. And when the torpedoes were gone, it should go home fast for more. Frazee, who called O’Kane’s surface running a revolution in submarine practice, recalled these principles in a memoir of his service in Tang published in 1994; they are borne out by Tang’s patrol reports (Frazee; Tang patrol reports).

The crew and the shakedown

Tang went to war with a crew of some 80 to 87 officers and men. Like every new boat in 1943, she was given a core of experienced petty officers and officers who had made war patrols, and filled out with men fresh from submarine school at New London, many of whom had never been to sea. The chief of the boat, the senior enlisted man who ran the crew for the captain and the executive officer, was William Ballinger (Whitlock, citing the recollections of crewman Decker). From the start O’Kane ran the boat hard. In Frazee’s recollection he borrowed a wire recorder during the shakedown and played back the talk in the conning tower during drills, so that officers and men could hear for themselves how much unnecessary chatter there was, and he insisted on short, exact reports.

After fitting out at Mare Island and sea trials off the California coast, Tang went south to San Diego for 18 days of intensive training in December 1943 (DANFS; patrol report). It was there, Frazee remembered, that O’Kane took her on a deep test dive far below her rated depth, to about 625 feet, in an exercise that frightened some of the crew and convinced others that their new captain meant to find out what the boat could do before the enemy did. The figure is Frazee’s recollection fifty years later, not a logged depth, and should be read as such. Tang then crossed to Pearl Harbor, arriving on 8 January 1944. In eleven days of training there, from 8 to 19 January, she fired 43 exercise torpedoes (patrol report), more practice than most boats got, with the fixed torpedoes that had reached the fleet that autumn.

Life aboard was the life described in Chapter 1. Many of the crew slept in the torpedo rooms beside the reload torpedoes, which they would fire off one by one as the patrol went on, gaining space with every attack. The forward torpedo room, with its six tubes, its reloads on racks and the escape trunk in its overhead, was home to many of the crew, and it was there, ten months later, that the survivors of Tang’s sinking gathered to try to escape (Chapter 8).

A day on patrol

The rhythm of a war patrol in 1944 was set by the sun and by enemy aircraft. In waters within range of Japanese air bases, a boat usually dived at first light and spent the day at periscope depth, moving slowly on her batteries, with the officer of the deck making periodic sweeps with the periscope and the sound operator listening for propellers. At dusk she surfaced, started her diesels, began charging her batteries and ran at speed through the night to her next position, with lookouts on the shears and the radar searching. Farther from land, as on much of Tang’s first patrol, she could stay on the surface by day as well; of the 41 days of that patrol, Tang spent only ten submerged (patrol report). The navigator fixed the boat’s position by star sights at dawn and dusk, when the horizon and the stars were both visible, since there was no other way to know exactly where she was.

The crew stood watches, typically four hours on and eight off, around the clock, and between watches slept, ate, worked on the boat’s machinery and studied for qualification. Meals were the event of the day, and most boats added a fourth, at midnight, for the men coming off and going on watch. A boat on patrol was quiet for long stretches, sometimes for days with no contact at all, and then, when smoke or masts were sighted, everything happened at once: the call to battle stations, the end-around run, the approach, the attack, and perhaps hours of depth charging afterward. The captain kept the patrol report, a day-by-day narrative written up as the patrol went on and typed after it, with an attack data sheet for every torpedo fired; it is the main record of what the boat did, and the source of most of what follows.

The boats did not hunt blind. From 1943 the U.S. Navy’s codebreakers at Pearl Harbor were reading much of the Japanese merchant shipping traffic, the so-called maru code, which gave the noon positions and routes of convoys, and Lockwood’s operations officer, Cmdr. Richard G. Voge, passed the information to the boats by radio as “Ultra” contact reports, disguised so that a captured message would not reveal its source (Blair). Many of the convoys that U.S. submarines attacked in 1944 they had been sent to find. Tang’s patrol report, like those of other boats, does not say which of her contacts came from Ultra; the records of that traffic were kept secret for decades after the war.

First patrol: Wake and the road to Truk

Tang left Pearl Harbor at noon on 22 January 1944 on her first war patrol, bound first for Wake Island. Her first assignment was not to hunt ships but to stand by as lifeguard, ready to pick up the crews of American aircraft shot down attacking the Japanese garrison on Wake during the opening of the Marshall Islands campaign. She patrolled submerged off the island from 29 January to 5 February, through air strikes on 30 January and 5 February, and was released after midnight on 6–7 February (patrol report). No aircrews needed her. The lifeguard role, new since late 1943, would become one of the submarine force’s most valued tasks, and Tang’s next patrol would be spent almost entirely on it (Chapter 4).

From Wake she ran at 15 knots to a new station north of Truk, the great Japanese fleet anchorage in the Caroline Islands, entering her area on 8 February. Lockwood had placed a ring of submarines around Truk to catch ships fleeing or reinforcing it in the days before Operation Hailstone, the carrier strike by Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 planned for 17–18 February. On 16 February one of them, Skate, sank the light cruiser Agano north of Truk. Tang spent 9 to 16 February on surface patrol on the Truk–Saipan route, converting two of her fuel ballast tanks to ordinary ballast as her fuel was burned, and on 16–17 February she found a convoy (patrol report).

It was a convoy of two freighters with escorts and smaller ships. An escort came out at about 7,000 yards and forced Tang down, and at about 02:19 on 17 February dropped five depth charges, which did no damage. O’Kane worked back into position and at 03:35 fired four torpedoes at the nearest freighter from about 1,500 yards. Three hit. The ship, Gyoten Maru, of 6,854 tons, a former British freighter, the Empire Dragon, sank by the stern at 8°04′N, 149°28′E, west-northwest of Truk; eight of her crew died (DANFS; patrol report; On Eternal Patrol). Within hours the first strikes of Hailstone were hitting Truk; over two days the carrier aircraft sank more than 30 Japanese merchant ships and several warships in and around the lagoon, among them Tonan Maru No. 3, the ship that Tinosa’s duds had failed to sink seven months before (Chapter 2).

Four ships in four nights off Saipan

After the Truk strike Tang moved north toward the Marianas, dodging aircraft, and on 22 February patrolled submerged southwest of Aguijan, the small island off the southern tip of Tinian. At dusk she surfaced and headed north toward Tanapag, the harbor of Saipan, and that night she found a convoy of three cargo ships and four escorts. At 23:49 O’Kane made a night surface attack; four torpedoes hit Fukuyama Maru, of 3,581 tons, from bow to stern, and she disintegrated, taking 47 of her crew with her. At 01:20 on 23 February, still on the surface in the dark, Tang slipped past an escort and fired four more at the next ship; three hit, and Yamashimo Maru, of 6,776 tons, which O’Kane took for a naval auxiliary, blew up in a huge secondary explosion. One of her crew died (DANFS; patrol report; On Eternal Patrol).

On 24 February Tang tracked a tanker, a freighter and a destroyer through the day, and at 22:30 made a night surface attack on the freighter, Echizen Maru, of 2,424 tons; three of four torpedoes hit, and she sank at 15°16′N, 143°12′E, with 35 of her crew. The destroyer dropped twelve depth charges, none close. At dawn on 25 February, at 06:39, Tang attacked the tanker submerged; three torpedoes hit and she sank in about four minutes. O’Kane reported her as a large naval tanker comparable to the U.S. oiler Cimarron, and the endorsement credited her as 12,000 tons; she was in fact the Choko Maru, of 1,794 tons, a merchant ship in use as a fleet tanker, and eight of her crew died (patrol report; On Eternal Patrol). On the night of 26 February Tang fired her last four torpedoes at a zigzagging transport escorted by four ships and missed astern with all four. With her torpedoes gone, she headed for Midway, where she arrived on 3 March 1944, 41 days after leaving Pearl Harbor (patrol report; DANFS).

Claims and the record

Tang’s patrol report credited her with five ships sunk and one attack missed. The endorsements of her division and squadron commanders and of the Submarine Force accepted all five, as a freighter of the Mansei Maru class of about 7,700 tons, a freighter of the Kenyo Maru class of about 6,500 tons, a submarine tender or naval auxiliary of 8,663 tons, a freighter of the Tatutaki Maru class of about 7,000 tons, and a naval tanker of 12,000 tons, a total stated as 41,969 tons; the five figures in fact add to 41,899 (patrol report, third endorsement). After the war, JANAC matched Tang’s attacks with Japanese records and found five sinkings, as she had claimed, but of ships far smaller than her officers had estimated: about 21,400 tons in all, half the wartime figure. The submarine force awarded its officers’ medals and its boats’ reputations on the wartime figures; the historian has the postwar ones.

By the numbers

Tang’s first patrol: tonnage claimed and confirmed

Gray: tonnage credited in the patrol endorsement. Red: tonnage of the ship actually sunk, from Japanese records (JANAC).

Attack 1, claimed (Mansei Maru class)7,700

Attack 1, Gyoten Maru6,854

Attack 2, claimed (Kenyo Maru class)6,468

Attack 2, Fukuyama Maru3,581

Attack 3, claimed (naval auxiliary)8,663

Attack 3, Yamashimo Maru6,776

Attack 4, claimed (Tatutaki Maru class)7,068

Attack 4, Echizen Maru2,424

Attack 5, claimed (naval tanker)12,000

Attack 5, Choko Maru1,794

Midway and what came next

Tang’s first patrol was among the best first patrols of the war: six attacks, 16 hits from 24 torpedoes by her own count, five ships sunk, no damage to herself. At Midway, where the submarine base had a relief crew to refit the boat and a rest camp for the crew, she was turned around in under two weeks. Her report recorded a patrol of 41 days, 22 of them in her assigned areas and 19 in transit, ten days spent submerged, ending when the torpedoes ran out. O’Kane’s crew had learned to work together in action, and they had learned something about their captain: he would get close.

Tang’s second patrol began from Midway on 16 March 1944 (DANFS). It took her back to Truk, but in a different role: when the carriers returned to strike Truk again at the end of April, she was their lifeguard, and in two days she picked up 22 downed naval aviators, one of them rescued with the help of a floatplane from the battleship North Carolina. That patrol, and the lifeguard league of submarines that saved hundreds of airmen, are the subject of Chapter 4.

Timeline

Building USS Tang and her first patrol, 1941–1944

1. 15 Dec 1941The contract for the boat that becomes Tang is awarded to Mare Island Navy Yard.
2. 15 Jan 1943Tang’s keel is laid at Mare Island.
3. 1 Jul 1943Tang and Tilefish photographed under construction side by side.
4. Jul 1943O’Kane leaves Wahoo after her fifth patrol and is ordered to Tang.
5. 17 Aug 1943Tang is launched, sponsored by Mrs. Antonio S. Pitre.
6. 15 Oct 1943Tang is commissioned, Lt. Cmdr. Richard H. O’Kane commanding.
7. 30 Nov–2 Dec 1943Tang is delivered complete and photographed off Mare Island.
8. Dec 1943Eighteen days of training off San Diego, including a deep test dive.
9. 8 Jan 1944Tang arrives at Pearl Harbor; 43 exercise torpedoes fired in training, 8–19 January.
10. 22 Jan 1944Tang leaves Pearl Harbor at noon on her first war patrol.
11. 29 Jan–5 Feb 1944Lifeguard off Wake Island during air strikes on 30 January and 5 February.
12. 8 Feb 1944Tang enters her area on the Truk–Saipan route.
13. 16 Feb 1944Skate sinks the cruiser Agano north of Truk.
14. 17 Feb 1944, 03:35Tang sinks Gyoten Maru west-northwest of Truk; Operation Hailstone strikes Truk on 17–18 February.
15. 22 Feb 1944, 23:49Tang sinks Fukuyama Maru southwest of Saipan.
16. 23 Feb 1944, 01:20Tang sinks Yamashimo Maru.
17. 24 Feb 1944, 22:30Tang sinks Echizen Maru west of Saipan.
18. 25 Feb 1944, 06:39Tang sinks the tanker Choko Maru in a submerged dawn attack.
19. 26 Feb 1944Tang’s last four torpedoes miss a transport; she heads for Midway.
20. 3 Mar 1944Tang arrives at Midway after 41 days.
21. 16 Mar 1944Tang leaves Midway on her second patrol.

Questions readers ask

What is a tang?

A tang is a surgeonfish, a flat, brightly colored fish of tropical reefs with sharp spines near its tail. The U.S. Navy named its wartime submarines for fish and other sea creatures, which is why the fleet boats carried names such as Wahoo, Tang, Tinosa, Barb and Bowfin.

How long did it take to build a fleet submarine in 1943?

Tang took seven months from keel to launch and nine months from keel to commissioning, and was delivered complete in ten and a half. Wahoo, at the same yard two years earlier, took about seven and a half months from keel to launch. The yards got faster as the war went on; Electric Boat and Portsmouth built some boats in less time still.

Was O’Kane Morton’s protege?

In the sense that he learned his trade as Morton’s executive officer, yes, and he said so. Frazee, who served under O’Kane, thought Morton influenced him strongly but could not say how much of O’Kane’s method was Morton’s and how much his own. O’Kane wrote books about both boats, Wahoo (1987) and Clear the Bridge! (1977), which remain the main first-hand sources for both.

Why did the patrol end at Midway rather than Pearl Harbor?

Midway, about 1,300 miles closer to Japan and the western Pacific, had a submarine base with tenders, a relief crew and a rest camp by 1944. Ending a patrol there saved several days of steaming each way, and many boats refitted there between patrols.

Where can I read Tang’s patrol reports?

The originals are in the National Archives in Record Group 38. Transcriptions of Tang’s reports, including the first patrol with its endorsements, have been published by veterans and historians at warfish.com, and the Historic Naval Ships Association and the Submarine Force Library have made scans of many patrol reports available.

How it connects

This chapter follows Chapter 2, where O’Kane served as Morton’s executive officer in Wahoo and where the torpedoes that Tang fired were fixed. It leads to Chapter 4, Tang’s lifeguard patrol off Truk, and through her record patrols (Chapter 5) to her loss and the escape and captivity of her survivors (Chapters 7, 8 and 9). The Marianas, where Tang made most of her first-patrol attacks, were invaded in June 1944; Tinian became the base from which B-29s of the Army Air Forces bombed Japan and from which the atomic missions flew, subjects of this site’s Army Air Forces and Manhattan Project collections.

Remembering it today

Mare Island Navy Yard closed in 1996, after 142 years. Part of the old yard is now a historic district, and the Mare Island Museum in Vallejo tells the story of the submarines built there, Tang and Wahoo among them. The lost boats of the war, Tang included, are commemorated at the Waterfront Memorial of the Pearl Harbor Aviation and Submarine Museum and Park, beside the Balao-class Bowfin, the best place to see what Tang was like inside, and at the Submarine Force Museum in Groton. A memorial to Tang and her crew stands at the Veterans Memorial Plaza in Boathouse Riverfront Park, Palatka, Florida.

The Truk Lagoon wrecks of February 1944, the dozens of ships sunk by the carrier strike of 17–18 February, are today one of the world’s best-known wreck-diving sites, in Chuuk State of the Federated States of Micronesia, where they are protected as historic sites and war graves. The ships Tang sank lie in the open sea west of Truk and Saipan.

Sources

• Richard H. O’Kane, Clear the Bridge! The War Patrols of the U.S.S. Tang (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1977; Novato: Presidio Press, 1989).
• Richard H. O’Kane, Wahoo: The Patrols of America’s Most Famous World War II Submarine (Novato: Presidio Press, 1987).
• Alex Kershaw, Escape from the Deep: A Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2008).
• USS Tang (SS-306), Report of War Patrol Number One, 22 January–3 March 1944, with endorsements by Commander Submarine Division 61, Commander Submarine Force Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command and Commander Submarine Force Pacific Fleet; National Archives, RG 38; transcription at warfish.com.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, “Tang I (SS-306)”, DANFS; United States Submarine Losses, World War II: Tang.
• Murray B. Frazee Jr., “‘We Never Looked Back,’” Naval History 8, no. 4 (August 1994), U.S. Naval Institute (recollection).
• Flint Whitlock, “Famous Navy Ships: The USS Tang,” Warfare History Network, drawing on the recollections of crewman Decker.
• USS Tang scrapbook, commissioning and trials pages, warfish.com.
• On Eternal Patrol, “Tang sinkings” and individual ship pages (Gyoten Maru, Fukuyama Maru, Yamashimo Maru, Echizen Maru, Choko Maru), compiling JANAC, Alden and Japanese sources.
• Clay Blair Jr., Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975).
• John D. Alden, The Fleet Submarine in the U.S. Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1979), and Alden’s later reassessments of U.S. submarine attacks.
• Norman Friedman, U.S. Submarines Through 1945: An Illustrated Design History (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995).
• Joint Army–Navy Assessment Committee, Japanese Naval and Merchant Shipping Losses During World War II by All Causes (1947).
• “Richard O’Kane,” Wikipedia, citing O’Kane’s books, Tuohy (2009) and the New York Times obituary of 23 February 1994; consulted for biographical dates.

Photographs: U.S. Navy photographs from the Naval History and Heritage Command, NavSource and the National Archives, public domain; a photograph of Tang’s original commissioning invitation (CC BY-SA 4.0) and modern photographs of a museum submarine’s torpedo room and of a Tang memorial by Wikimedia Commons contributors, with their licenses as stated in the captions; all via Wikimedia Commons. The badge drawn for this collection is an illustration, not an official emblem.