Escape from the Deep: The Men Who Left USS Tang at 180 Feet

Shortly after daylight on 25 October 1944, about 45 men crowded the forward torpedo room of USS Tang, 180 feet down on the floor of the Formosa Strait. The after part of the boat was flooded; the compartment behind them was on fire; the air was hot, thick with smoke and slowly filling with carbon dioxide. Above their heads was a steel chamber big enough for four men, the forward escape trunk, and in the racks and on the deck were the rubber breathing bags called Momsen lungs. Most of the men had never used one outside a training tank, and many never had. Over the next several hours thirteen of them went up through the trunk. Five lived.

Why it mattered

Every American submariner of the Second World War trained to escape from a sunken boat, and almost none ever had the chance. Most of the 52 U.S. submarines lost in the war went down in deep water, under attack, with all hands; the sea gave no time and no depth from which escape was possible. Tang was different. She sank in shallow water, her forward compartments were intact, and the men in them had hours to think and act. What they did, and what went wrong, was set down after the war from the survivors’ accounts in the Navy’s War Damage Report No. 58, which described it as the only known case in Navy history of men escaping individually from a disabled submarine, in peace or war (Bureau of Ships, 1949).

The escape tested the equipment and training that the Navy had built since the 1920s around one man, Charles B. “Swede” Momsen, and his breathing device. It showed that men could get out of a submarine from 180 feet. It also showed how hard it was to do so when they were injured, frightened, exhausted, poisoned by carbon dioxide and smoke, unsure of the procedure and unable to talk to one another through a steel hatch. The lessons shaped submarine escape training for decades. And it is the heart of the story that Alex Kershaw told in Escape from the Deep (2008), drawing on interviews with three of the last living survivors.

This chapter follows the War Damage Report, which rests on O’Kane’s conference letter of 10 September 1945, a Bureau of Medicine letter on submarine escape of July 1946, and interviews with the survivors by a Navy medical officer, Cmdr. I. F. Duff; it adds the survivors’ later recollections, as gathered by William Tuohy, Kershaw and oral historians, and says which is which. Recollections recorded decades later differ in detail, and no one in the forward torpedo room could see everything that happened there.

The first minutes: the bridge and the conning tower

When the torpedo hit, Tang was on the surface, trimmed down for action, with nine officers and men on the bridge and about eight more in the conning tower beneath it. The stern went down so fast that there was no time to close the upper conning tower hatch. Three of the men on the bridge were thrown or washed clear and survived: O’Kane; Chief Boatswain’s Mate William Leibold, who had been at his side as a lookout and extra pair of eyes; and Radio Technician Floyd Caverly. None of the lookouts survived, and the report suggests some were trapped or hurt by the guard rails of the periscope shears as the boat went down (War Damage Report No. 58). Leibold, interviewed decades later, remembered being carried down with the boat and then swimming for the surface in the dark, hearing and feeling depth charges somewhere in the night; he found Caverly in the water and the two stayed together (Leibold, oral history, National WWII Museum).

In the conning tower, Lt. Lawrence Savadkin had been at the torpedo data computer. As the compartment flooded he held onto the No. 2 periscope tube, breathed from a small bubble trapped at the top, then swam to a larger air pocket at the forward end, where the steep angle of the boat held air. From there he swam up through the open hatch into another pocket under the pilothouse and the officer of the deck’s platform. He rested there, judged that he could make it without a lung, and rose, exhaling part of the way, and broke the surface just as he thought he would have to breathe water. The bridge deck was by then about 50 feet down. One other man reached the pilothouse air pocket with him but did not come up; the others in the conning tower were knocked out by the explosion or drowned (War Damage Report No. 58). Savadkin later credited his submarine school instruction never to hold his breath on the way up; on the surface he took off his trousers, knotted the legs and filled them with air as a float, and kept himself up that way through the night (Savadkin, oral history).

Below the conning tower, the War Damage Report records, one man was thrown down through the lower hatch into the control room and broke an arm. The control room crew closed the lower hatch against the flood from above. It had been damaged and leaked, and the control room and pump room began slowly to fill.

Damage control at 180 feet

The three after compartments, the after torpedo room, the maneuvering room and the after engine room, flooded instantly; no one in them is known to have survived. The forward engine room’s after door was closed only with difficulty, when that compartment was already half flooded. The boat hung for a time with her stern on the bottom and her bow about 25 feet out of the water at an angle of about 40 degrees, and everything loose slid aft; men lost their footing and fell toward the stern (War Damage Report No. 58).

In the forward torpedo room about ten men secured their compartment. They could not raise anyone on the phones and concluded that the stern was gone. They thought briefly about getting out through the empty forward torpedo tubes, which were above the surface, but they could hear depth charges and feared the exposed bow would be shelled. The men in the control room had better information and acted. They set watertight boundaries that stopped the rush of water, and about fifteen minutes after the hit, with no hydraulic power, they reached up and opened the vents of the No. 2 group of main ballast tanks by hand. The bow came down and the boat settled level on the bottom, out of sight of the enemy and, they hoped, in a position from which they could escape (War Damage Report No. 58). Clayton Decker, a motor machinist’s mate who was in the control room, later recalled helping to flood the tanks (Tuohy, 2002).

They burned the secret publications, first in the control room and then, after the control room had to be flooded and sealed, in the forward battery compartment. About fifteen men from the control room and forward battery compartment then moved forward to the torpedo room, carrying the injured in blankets. Air leaking from damaged lines amidships had raised the pressure behind them, and when the torpedo room door was opened the men standing near it were blown through (War Damage Report No. 58).

About half an hour later some twenty more men, two of them injured, came forward from the forward engine room and the after battery compartment, where they had been cut off. Through the eyeport in the control room door they could see water above the level of the door. They tested the ventilation piping, found the water was not as high as it looked, opened the door, let the water rush through and went on. At the torpedo room door, the men inside signaled them to crack it slowly to equalize the pressure. The group outside misread the signals, thought they were being shut out and forced the door, which struck one of the men signaling and injured him badly. By about an hour after the sinking some 45 men were in the forward torpedo room (War Damage Report No. 58).

Forty-five men, smoke and a fire

The men believed they were a few miles off the China coast, and from the boat’s angle, the chart and the fathometer they knew the depth was about 180 feet. They judged that reaching the surface was reasonably safe. Momsen lungs were handed out and the instructions were gone over, but more than half the men had little familiarity with the equipment. There were not enough life jackets; men without them were told to use their lungs as floats on the surface. For the moment the air was fairly good, though the smoke and fumes of the burning papers hung in the compartment, the heat and humidity were rising, and the leaking air was pushing the pressure up. The ship’s lighting had failed minutes after the hit; the emergency lights still worked (War Damage Report No. 58).

Then depth charges shook the boat hard. They did no further damage, but the Japanese escorts stayed nearby for several hours, and all preparations stopped. During those hours a fire, which O’Kane’s letter attributed to electrical causes, started in the forward battery compartment just aft of the torpedo room and grew intense. When the enemy seemed to have gone, the men decided to try first to raise the boat by blowing ballast and flooded compartments, which would have made escape quicker and easier. A small party went to open the door aft toward the control room. The moment the door to the forward battery compartment was cracked, acrid black smoke rushed into the torpedo room. It was open only a second or two, but the lights almost disappeared, men began gagging at once, and the smoke smelled like burning rubber. The report thought the battery itself may have been burning: the forward battery disconnect switch had never been opened, and there were many short circuits. Men breathed through their lungs as respirators, with some success. Raising the boat was impossible. The only way out was the trunk (War Damage Report No. 58).

Carbon dioxide was a silent danger beneath the smoke. The report calculated that with 45 men in the compartment the concentration would reach 3 percent in about four hours, and the raised pressure made its effects worse. Carbon dioxide absorbent was aboard, but it was never spread, because there was no room to spread it among so many men; the report called this a serious error and judged carbon dioxide poisoning the most important single cause of the crew’s early weakening. Oxygen bled into the compartment several times eased the feeling of suffocation but did nothing to remove the carbon dioxide (War Damage Report No. 58).

The escape trunk: five attempts

The first party went up into the trunk shortly after daylight: one officer and three men. The plan was for the last man out to tap a signal before he left, so the men below could drain the trunk for the next group. It went wrong at once. The men disagreed about how to work the trunk, and rigging the buoy and ascending line took too long. The officer, Lt. (jg) F. M. Enos Jr., by survivors’ accounts, left the trunk before the buoy and line were streamed and was never seen again. The other three finished rigging, but about forty minutes had passed. No signal came from the trunk, and the men below finally closed the side door by the remote gear and drained the trunk with the three still inside (War Damage Report No. 58; Tuohy, 2002).

The second party was two officers and three men. Three left the trunk. One of them, Clayton Decker, reached the surface and lived. Decker remembered that his lung had been tied off with wire at the release valve, as the new lungs were, and that George Zofcin, who had already decided to stay behind, untied it for him; he never saw Zofcin again (Tuohy, 2002; National WWII Museum, “Words of War”). Survivors later said that the chief of the boat, William Ballinger, who went up with Decker, drowned at the surface; the report says simply that two of the three were never seen again. After about forty minutes the men below heard moaning from the trunk, closed and drained it again, and found the two officers still inside, one semi-conscious, probably from the high pressure and carbon dioxide, and the other tangled in an ascending line. That line, it turned out, was the unused spare; the escape line had been cut inside the trunk and pulled back in. The men below believed, wrongly, that the buoy had been cut free outside. The semi-conscious officer was Lt. (jg) Henry Flanagan. The other officer, who had made the 100-foot training ascent at submarine school, came back down and said he would not try again, though he saw no reason why the others could not get out (War Damage Report No. 58; Tuohy, 2002).

Morale dropped sharply. Survivors told the Navy afterward that the arguments in the trunk had wasted precious minutes, that men were afraid of making a fatal mistake, and that being unable to talk to the men in the trunk was one of the worst problems of all. The third party, four men, planned to send up a life ring on a line as a new ascending line, since they believed the buoy was gone. When they tried to charge their lungs, the oxygen manifold in the trunk was empty. Only one of the four filled his lung with his own breath. Rigging took about fifteen minutes, and by then he was exhausted and dizzy. Instead of waiting for the ring to reach the surface and then climbing the line, he stepped out holding it and shot upward. A man inside tried to slow him by jerking the line and only made him lose his lung at about 20 feet. From there he rose free, breathing out through his open mouth all the way, and reached the surface alive. He was Torpedoman’s Mate Hayes Trukke, the only man in the party who had trained for it and made the 100-foot escape before. The other three were drained back into the boat for more oxygen, and two of them refused to try again (War Damage Report No. 58; Tuohy, 2002).

About forty-five minutes later the fourth party went up. By then the fire in the forward battery compartment was so hot that the paint on the torpedo room side of the bulkhead had melted and was running down, pressure had built up behind the door, and acrid smoke was seeping past the gasket. Lt. (jg) Flanagan, recovered from his first attempt, led Motor Machinist’s Mate Jesse DaSilva and Torpedoman’s Mate Pete Narowanski. All three reached the surface alive with their lungs, exhausted and barely able to stay afloat. Members of this party judged that the air in the torpedo room had become so bad that everyone left there would be unconscious or dead within a few hours. O’Kane’s letter suggested that the door gasket may finally have blown out, from pressure or a battery explosion, and asphyxiated the men still in the compartment (War Damage Report No. 58; Tuohy, 2002).

About an hour after that, a fifth party of three reached the surface weak and unable to breathe, and died soon afterward; at least one probably died of an air embolism. Survivors named Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Paul Larson among the men who came up and did not live, and thought Steward’s Mate Howard Walker may have been swept away by the current (War Damage Report No. 58; Tuohy, 2002). No one else came up. Of the 13 men known to have left the trunk, eight reached the surface and five were in good enough shape to hold onto the buoy until they were picked up. Some who were never seen again may have reached the surface away from the line and been carried off by the current. About 30 men remained in the torpedo room. Their fate is not known (War Damage Report No. 58).

By the numbers

Tang’s 87 men, 25 October 1944

Dark bars: where the men were. Red bars: how many survived. Figures from the War Damage Report; the count in the conning tower is approximate.

Aboard on the fifth patrol87

Reached the forward torpedo roomc. 45

Left through the escape trunk13

On the bridge when the torpedo hit9

Reached the surface from the trunk8

In the conning towerc. 8

Survived from the trunk5

Survived from the bridge3

Survived from the conning tower1

Survived in all9

On the surface

The five who escaped from the trunk came up into daylight in a current that ran along the coast. They held onto the buoy, whose line still led down to the hull, and in the distance they could see, about a thousand yards away, the bow of the ship Tang had fired her last torpedo at standing up out of the water. O’Kane, Leibold, Caverly and Savadkin had been in the water since about 02:30 (War Damage Report No. 58).

During the morning a Japanese escort ship came through the area: CD-34, one of the convoy’s kaibokan, which had already picked up survivors of the tanker Ebara Maru, sunk by Tang a few hours earlier. Leibold and Caverly, after some eight hours in the water, were among the first of the Americans taken aboard; Leibold remembered that the Japanese at first took them for Germans (Kershaw, “In the Grip of Black Water,” 2013). A boat from CD-34 hauled the five from the buoy and cut the buoy line, the last physical link between the survivors and the boat below (Tuohy, 2002). Larson, who had reached the surface in very poor condition, did not survive; Tuohy records that the Japanese apparently put him back over the side. All nine Americans were bound, and what followed aboard CD-34, where the Japanese survivors of Tang’s attacks were also being carried, is told in Chapter 9.

Swede Momsen and the long road to an escape

The equipment in Tang’s trunk was the product of a series of peacetime disasters. In September 1925 the submarine S-51 sank after a collision off Block Island, and in December 1927 S-4 was rammed and sunk off Provincetown, Cape Cod. In S-4 six men survived for days in the forward torpedo room, tapping messages on the hull, while divers and ships above could do nothing to get them out; all 40 aboard died. A young submarine officer, Lt. Charles B. Momsen, who had commanded S-1 in the search for S-51, set out to give trapped crews a way out. With Chief Gunner Clarence Tibbals and Frank Hobson he developed the submarine escape lung between 1929 and 1932, testing it himself at depths down to 200 feet. The press named it the Momsen lung, and it won him the Distinguished Service Medal in 1929 (Wikipedia, “Charles Momsen,” citing the Office of Naval Research and Maas, The Terrible Hours).

The Navy built escape training tanks at its submarine bases, first at New London, where a tower of water a hundred feet deep let men practice escapes from a mock-up torpedo room compartment at the bottom. Every submariner learned the drill: a physical examination, a lecture on keeping calm, ascents from 12 and 18 feet, then 50 feet, and finally the 100-foot escape, pausing for ten breaths at each knot on the line. Submarine orders required each man to make at least one escape from the 18-foot lock every year (Cope, “Lung Training at the Submarine School,” Proceedings, November 1932). Tanks were later built at Pearl Harbor and Mare Island as well.

Timeline

Escape from Tang, 25 October 1944

1. About 02:00–02:30Tang’s 24th torpedo circles and hits her on the port side aft; the three after compartments flood; she plunges by the stern. Three of nine men on the bridge survive in the water; Savadkin escapes from the flooded conning tower.
2. About 02:45Control room crew open the No. 2 main ballast tank vents by hand; the boat settles level on the bottom in about 180 feet.
3. Early hoursSecret publications burned; about 15 men move forward to the torpedo room, carrying the injured.
4. About half an hour laterAbout 20 men come forward from the forward engine room and after battery; some 45 men are now in the forward torpedo room.
5. Before dawnJapanese depth charges shake the boat; escape preparations stop for several hours; an electrical fire starts in the forward battery compartment.
6. Before daylightAn attempt to open the door aft lets dense smoke into the torpedo room; raising the boat is abandoned.
7. Shortly after daylightFirst party enters the trunk; the officer leaves before the line is rigged and is lost; after about 40 minutes the trunk is drained.
8. MorningSecond party: Decker reaches the surface; two are lost; two officers are drained back into the boat.
9. MorningThird party: no oxygen at the manifold; Trukke makes a free ascent from about 20 feet after losing his lung.
10. About 45 minutes laterFourth party: Flanagan, DaSilva and Narowanski reach the surface; bulkhead paint is melting from the fire.
11. About an hour laterFifth party: three men reach the surface and die.
12. During the morningJapanese escort CD-34 picks up the nine survivors after about eight hours in the water for those from the bridge, and cuts the buoy line.

Questions readers ask

Why didn’t more men try to escape?

The survivors gave several reasons. Many men had little training with the lung, some could not swim, and the early failures in the trunk, with men lost and others drained back half-conscious, were frightening. Some men were injured. By the time the fourth party left, smoke, heat, pressure and carbon dioxide had weakened everyone left in the torpedo room. Some, like George Zofcin, appear to have decided to stay. The War Damage Report thought that carbon dioxide alone could account for much of the crew’s weakness.

Could they have escaped more easily before the boat was flooded down?

Possibly. The War Damage Report pointed out that while the bow stood up out of the water at 40 degrees, the forward trunk’s side door was only about 24 feet down, a depth from which a free escape without any equipment is simple. The men leveled the boat to escape detection and shelling and to make the trunk usable in the normal way; with depth charges falling, it was a reasonable choice. The report also noted, from the British submarine Thetis, sunk off Liverpool in 1939, that exhausted and poisoned men often cannot manage even an easy escape.

Was this really the only escape from a sunken U.S. submarine?

It was the only case of men escaping individually, underwater, from a sunken U.S. submarine. Earlier crews had been saved in other ways: S-5’s men in 1920 by cutting a hole in the hull while her stern was above water, and Squalus’s 33 survivors in 1939 by the McCann rescue chamber. Men had also survived from other lost boats, but by abandoning ship on the surface, as in Grenadier and Sculpin, or by being thrown from the bridge, as in Tullibee, not by escaping from below.

What is a free ascent?

Rising to the surface without breathing apparatus, breathing out steadily all the way so that the air expanding in the lungs as the pressure drops can escape. Savadkin and Trukke both survived free ascents. Tests after the war by Walter Schlech and others showed that ascents of this kind were possible from depths of up to about 300 feet, and the Navy’s training shifted toward them.

Who were the five who escaped from the trunk?

Lt. (jg) Henry J. Flanagan; Motor Machinist’s Mates 3rd Class Clayton O. Decker and Jesse B. DaSilva; Torpedoman’s Mate 2nd Class Hayes O. Trukke; and Torpedoman’s Mate 3rd Class Pete Narowanski (Submarine Losses, 1949, crew list; Tuohy). Trukke later joined the Los Angeles Police Department; he died in a drowning accident in 1981.

How it connects

The sinking that led to the escape is told in Chapter 7, and what happened to the nine survivors after CD-34 pulled them from the sea, at Takao, Keelung, Ofuna and Omori, in Chapter 9. The Mark 14 torpedo whose faults Momsen helped diagnose is the subject of Chapter 2, and the fleet boat Tang was built on, with its two escape trunks, is described in Chapter 1.

The other side of the submarine war had the same problem. German U-boat crews carried the Dräger escape apparatus and British crews the Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus, and the War Damage Report compared Tang’s case with HMS Thetis in 1939 and with the U-boats sunk in shallow water, stories told in the site’s Battle of the Atlantic collection. William Leibold, one of the three men saved from Tang’s bridge, stayed in the Navy after the war, became an expert diver and submarine rescue instructor, and in 1960 helped form the first Navy SEAL teams, the kind of special unit the site’s Special Units collection follows. For the war as a whole, see the World War II hub.

Seeing it today

Several museum submarines of Tang’s generation let visitors stand in the compartments where her men fought for their lives. USS Pampanito at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, built at Portsmouth in 1943, has both torpedo rooms and their escape trunks; USS Cod is preserved in Cleveland; and USS Bowfin at Pearl Harbor lies beside the memorial to the 52 lost boats. The Submarine Force Library and Museum at Groton, Connecticut, next to the base where the first escape tank was built, tells the history of submarine escape and rescue, and the Navy’s modern submarine escape trainer at Groton is named for Momsen. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans recreates Tang’s last attack in its Final Mission: USS Tang Submarine Experience. Tang herself has never been found.

Sources

• U.S. Navy, Bureau of Ships. War Damage Report No. 58: Submarine War Damage Reports, section on USS Tang (SS-306). Washington, 1949. HyperWar transcription.
• U.S. Navy. United States Submarine Losses, World War II (NAVPERS 15,784), 1949: “Tang (SS-306)” and crew list. Naval History and Heritage Command.
• Cope, Harley F. “Lung Training at the Submarine School.” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 58, no. 11 (November 1932). USNI.
• Kershaw, Alex. Escape from the Deep: The Epic Story of a Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2008; “In the Grip of Black Water,” World War II, April 2013 (HistoryNet); and interview, “Alex Kershaw: Escape from the Deep” (HistoryNet).
• Tuohy, William. “Escape from Tang.” The Submarine Review, Naval Submarine League, April 2002. NSL archive; and The Bravest Man. Stroud: Sutton, 2001.
• O’Kane, Richard H. Clear the Bridge! The War Patrols of the U.S.S. Tang. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1977.
• Maas, Peter. The Terrible Hours: The Man behind the Greatest Submarine Rescue in History. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
• Blair, Clay, Jr. Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War against Japan. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975.
• The National WWII Museum. “The Words of War” (on Tang’s escape) and William Leibold oral history. nationalww2museum.org; ww2online.org.
• Savadkin, Lawrence. Oral history, Warriors in Their Own Words. Evergreen Podcasts; Lafayette College, “Notice of Online Archive.” Lafayette College.
• Friends of the National World War II Memorial. “The Survivor” (William Leibold). wwiimemorialfriends.org.
• “Sinking of the USS Tang: ‘Like the world coming to an end.’” WWII on Deadline, 2020 (contemporary AP reports). ww2ondeadline.com.
• Wikipedia, “Momsen lung” and “Charles Momsen,” used as pointers to the Office of Naval Research history, Blair and Maas.

Photographs: U.S. Navy photographs and drawings from the Naval History and Heritage Command and the Bureau of Ships’ War Damage Report No. 58, and a Historic American Engineering Record copy of a Navy construction photograph, all public domain; modern photographs of the museum submarine USS Pampanito by Wikimedia Commons contributors (one public domain, one CC BY-SA 3.0); and a photograph of a preserved escape lung in the Swedish Naval Museum released under CC0; all via Wikimedia Commons. No photographs exist of Tang’s escape; the compartments shown are those of a sister boat. Insignia drawn for this collection are illustrations, not official emblems.