Prisoners of Ofuna and Omori: Tang’s Survivors, Liberation and the Medal of Honor

On the morning of 25 October 1944 the Japanese escort ship CD-34 pulled nine American sailors out of the Formosa Strait. They were the only survivors of USS Tang, which had sunk a few hours earlier, and aboard the ship that rescued them were men who had survived Tang’s torpedoes. The Americans were tied up on deck and beaten. Within ten days they were behind the wooden fence of a camp at Ofuna, outside Yokohama, that the Imperial Japanese Navy never reported to the Red Cross. Their families were told they were missing, then presumed dead. For ten months no one outside Japan knew that any of Tang’s crew was alive.

Why it mattered

Of the more than 3,500 American submariners who died in the war, almost none left a survivor to tell how their boat was lost. Only seven of the 52 submarines lost gave up prisoners of war to the Japanese, and only from four, Grenadier, Perch, Sculpin and Tang, did more than a handful come home (United States Submarine Losses, 1949). Tang’s nine were the source of everything known about her last patrol, her sinking and the escape from 180 feet, and their testimony after the war, in the War Damage Report, in sworn statements for the war crimes trials and in O’Kane’s memoir, is the record on which the two preceding chapters rest.

Their captivity is also a window on a part of the Pacific war that was deliberately hidden. Ofuna was not a prisoner of war camp in Japan’s own accounting. It was a naval interrogation center whose inmates were treated as captives, not prisoners, kept from the Red Cross and held for months to be questioned and beaten; submariners and aviators were the prisoners it wanted most. O’Kane’s sworn statement of August 1946 about what he saw there, a contemporary record made for the prosecution, is quoted and summarized below. Finally, this chapter closes the collection with the Medal of Honor that O’Kane received for Tang’s last fight, and with an accounting of what Tang, and the submarine force, achieved and cost.

Aboard CD-34

CD-34 was one of the convoy’s escort ships, a small kaibokan of the type Japan was building in large numbers in 1944 to protect its shipping. She had spent the night picking up survivors of the tanker Ebara Maru, which Tang had sunk a few hours before, and in the morning she found the Americans: Leibold and Caverly after some eight hours in the water, O’Kane and Savadkin, and the five men clinging to the escape buoy, whose line her crew cut (Kershaw, 2013; Tuohy, 2002; Wikipedia list of shipwrecks in October 1944). Leibold’s sworn statement, taken a year later, says he was captured by the Japanese “DE 34” with the other survivors (Leibold, affidavit of 26 October 1945, IPS Document No. 8043).

The prisoners were bound and beaten. O’Kane later wrote, in the account published by the Navy in 1949, that the beatings came from the burned and mutilated survivors of Tang’s own attacks, and that knowing this the Tang men could take them with less bitterness (Submarine Losses, 1949). Decker told a reporter when he got home that the Japanese kept them tied up in the sun for days and fed them almost nothing on the voyage (Oakland Tribune, September 1945, as reported in WWII on Deadline). The Japanese at first took Leibold and Caverly for Germans, Leibold remembered, and Leibold was beaten for refusing to give more than his name, rank and service number (Kershaw, 2013).

In their words

They kept us tied out in the sun for five days.

Takao, Keelung and the passage to Japan

CD-34 landed the prisoners at Takao, the port in southern Formosa today called Kaohsiung. Savadkin remembered two or three days of interrogation there and being paraded through the town. Leibold’s affidavit says they were held one night at Takao, taken by rail to Keelung in the north and held for three days in a Japanese army barracks. From Formosa they were taken to Japan; Savadkin recalled that the officers traveled aboard destroyers, where he was treated as an officer, given Japanese clothing and fed in the wardroom, while the enlisted men were held in the hold of a cruiser (Savadkin, oral history; Leibold, affidavit; Kershaw, 2013). O’Kane and Leibold both swore after the war that they arrived at Ofuna on 3 November 1944, nine days after Tang sank (O’Kane, sworn statement, 1 August 1946; Leibold, affidavit, 1945).

Ofuna: the camp that did not exist

The Ofuna camp stood near the railway town of Ofuna in Kamakura, about 20 miles south of Tokyo, on the site of a former school across the road from a temple. The Imperial Japanese Navy opened it on 26 April 1942, run by a detachment of the guard unit of the Yokosuka Naval District. It consisted of three connected one-story wooden barracks around a field, inside an eight-foot wooden fence, with about thirty small cells, roughly six by nine feet, on each side of each building’s central corridor. Japan never reported it as a prisoner of war camp, and the International Red Cross was never allowed in. Its purpose was interrogation: prisoners the navy considered valuable, above all aviators and submariners, were kept there in silence and questioned again and again by naval intelligence officers, some for a week and some, like Tang’s men, for months. Prisoners called it the Torture Farm. About a thousand men passed through it during the war (Wikipedia, “Ōfuna prisoner-of-war camp,” citing Tuohy, Scott and the Dolder rescue team report; Mansell, “Ofuna POW Interrogation Center”).

O’Kane’s sworn statement describes the camp as Tang’s men found it. It was divided into two compounds; in the western half, one barracks building was divided into about forty cells, where “the eight other survivors of the U.S.S. TANG and myself” were confined with about twenty Army and Navy aviators and one civilian. The aviators were kept in solitary confinement, but the Tang men worked as mess cooks, carrying food to the cells and scrubbing the passageways, which let them see what went on (O’Kane, sworn statement, 1946). The rations were rice or barley and a thin soup; O’Kane swore that the camp’s civilian cook sent rice and supplies out of the camp, kept back most of the vegetables to trade for pork, and ordered good vegetables buried to rot, and that the vegetables in the soup never came to more than a level tablespoon a serving. Kershaw, from the survivors, puts the prisoners’ diet at about 300 calories a day (Kershaw, 2013).

What O’Kane saw: the sworn statement

The first beating O’Kane saw came on 6 November 1944, three days after the Tang men arrived. At about 08:30 they were marched into the eastern compound and lined up with the other prisoners in front of the camp’s staff, including its head, a warrant officer named Iida. The pharmacist’s mate Kitamura read out a list of names. He then called out the senior American officer in the camp, Lt. Cmdr. John A. Fitzgerald, the captain of the submarine Grenadier, who had been taken prisoner in 1943, and announced that the men named had not bowed properly to the guards and that Fitzgerald would be punished too, as senior officer. The guards beat the men with clubs the size of baseball bats, knocking three of them unconscious. O’Kane counted the blows Fitzgerald received: twenty-seven (O’Kane, sworn statement, 1946).

The statement goes on, incident by incident, with names and dates. The guard cook in the galley struck prisoners in the face with his fists for any mistake in the Japanese words they had to use when they asked for water; O’Kane swore that every member of his crew, and he named all eight, was beaten by him or reported it to him, that he saw him hit Savadkin hard enough to leave his face swollen for more than a week, and that the same man chipped two of O’Kane’s own teeth. The civilian cook beat Trukke and DaSilva so badly about the head that DaSilva was still dazed nine months later. On the day before Christmas 1944 three survivors of the British submarine Stratagem arrived and were beaten the next morning. In January 1945, on the orders, O’Kane swore, of the head intelligence officer, a former navy captain named Sanematsu, guards clubbed an aviator, Lt. Emil, night after night; he died in March, after the camp’s pharmacist’s mate told Leibold he would die that day, and O’Kane buried him. An injured aviator, Ensign Richard Hunt, was refused help with eating and starved to death in about three weeks; O’Kane buried him too. Another, Lt. Flynn, died in July after his rations were taken away for ten days (O’Kane, sworn statement, 1946).

O’Kane himself was singled out. On 1 April 1945, after five cigarettes were found in his cell, he was stood against a wall and struck in the face ten times by a guard, until blood ran from his mouth and chips of his teeth fell out. In May all thirty prisoners in the eastern barracks were held in a crouching stress position and clubbed, two days running, over Red Cross food packages that, O’Kane swore, the camp staff themselves had taken and eaten. In June and July a guard the prisoners called Kinga beat men nightly and ran them around the compound until they dropped. When O’Kane sent word to the intelligence officer, he and Flanagan were made to swab the barracks deck alone while four guards beat them in relays for more than three hours. “Fortunately I was transferred to Omori shortly afterwards,” he swore (O’Kane, sworn statement, 1946). The statement is the testimony of one witness, given for a prosecution, and its account of individual guards cannot now be checked against other evidence; but it was made under oath within a year of the events, and its dates and names are those of a careful officer.

Omori

Ofuna was a place to be questioned; Omori was a prisoner of war camp, run by the Japanese Army as the headquarters of the Tokyo prisoner of war camps, on a small man-made island in Tokyo Bay between Tokyo and Yokohama. Its prisoners were registered, and its men were sent out to work. The Tang men went there in stages: Leibold on 5 April 1945, by his affidavit; O’Kane on 23 July, by his; Savadkin, Trukke and the others in the same months, and all nine were at Omori when the war ended (Leibold, affidavit; O’Kane, sworn statement; Savadkin, oral history; Trukke, Find a Grave). Savadkin remembered pick-and-shovel work digging shelters into hillsides, little food, no real medical care, and rumors from other prisoners of a new kind of bomb (Savadkin, oral history).

Omori held some of the best-known American prisoners of the war. Maj. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, the Marine fighter ace shot down near Rabaul on 3 January 1944 and held at Ofuna, ended the war there. Louis Zamperini, the Olympic runner and bombardier who had drifted 47 days on a raft before capture, had been held at Ofuna from 1943 and at Omori from the autumn of 1944, and was then moved to the camp at Naoetsu; the sources used here do not record whether he met any of Tang’s men (Wikipedia, “Louis Zamperini,” citing Hillenbrand, Unbroken). From the camps around Tokyo the prisoners could see the B-29 raids that burned the city in 1945; Kershaw records that Tang’s men watched B-29s firebombing targets from Ofuna (Kershaw, interview, HistoryNet; The Air War against Japan).

15 to 29 August 1945: liberation

At noon on 15 August 1945 the prisoners at Omori heard the broadcast of the Emperor announcing the end of the war, and the guards, Leibold remembered, were too stunned to punish anyone. In the days that followed the prisoners took charge of the camp, painted signs on the roofs, and gathered up the supplies that began to fall from B-29s and Navy carrier planes (Leibold, oral history; Clavin, Running Deep). Japan’s acceptance of surrender followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet entry into the war (Fat Man and Nagasaki, and the Surrender of Japan).

The Third Fleet entered Tokyo Bay at the end of August. On 29 August the light cruiser San Juan, flagship of Commodore Rodger W. Simpson, whose Task Group 30.6 had been formed to find, care for and evacuate Allied prisoners, came into the bay, supported by the hospital ship Benevolence, and sent landing parties ashore that liberated the camps at Omori and Ofuna and the prisoner hospital at Shinagawa (NHHC photograph captions). With Simpson went Cmdr. Harold E. Stassen, the former governor of Minnesota, then serving as flag secretary to Admiral Halsey. Seeing how weak the prisoners were, Stassen ordered them taken out at once, without waiting for the formal surrender, and Halsey agreed (Clavin, Running Deep; NHHC). Savadkin remembered Stassen’s landing party announcing their release and the sick being taken out first (Savadkin, oral history).

O’Kane was in critical condition. A Navy doctor aboard Benevolence gave him even odds; he had beriberi and malnutrition, and he weighed, by different accounts, under 110 pounds or under 100 (Kershaw, 2013; Oakland Tribune, October 1945, via WWII on Deadline; Wikipedia). Savadkin had gone from about 155 pounds to about 90; he was treated for hepatitis on Guam, then at Aiea Naval Hospital in Honolulu, at Oak Knoll in Oakland and finally at a naval hospital on Long Island near his family (Savadkin, oral history). Leibold was evacuated through Benevolence and flown home to Los Angeles, where his wife met him; he was released from the naval hospital at Long Beach in March 1946 (Leibold, oral history; Kershaw, 2013). Decker reached Oakland on 7 September 1945; Kershaw writes that he came home to find his wife had remarried and collected his life insurance (Kershaw, interview, HistoryNet).

The nine

The Medal of Honor

Back in the United States, O’Kane wrote his reconstruction of Tang’s fifth patrol in September 1945. Tang received a second Presidential Unit Citation, for her fourth and fifth patrols, and her captain the Medal of Honor. On 27 March 1946, on the White House lawn, President Harry S. Truman presented it (NHHC; Tuohy, 2002). The citation recognized O’Kane’s “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty” in Tang’s attacks on two convoys on 23 and 24 October 1944, describing how he “stood in the fusillade of bullets and shells from all directions” on the first night and, on the second, attacked a convoy with crated planes piled high on its ships, “expending his last 2 torpedoes into the remnants of a once powerful convoy before his own ship went down.”

Tang’s record and the cost of the submarine war

At the end of the war the Navy credited Tang with 31 ships of 227,800 tons sunk and two of 4,100 tons damaged in five patrols, more than any other American submarine (Submarine Losses, 1949). The Joint Army–Navy Assessment Committee, which compared American claims with Japanese records in 1946 and 1947, cut that to 24 ships of 93,824 tons, putting Tang second in ships sunk, behind Tautog’s 26, and fourth in tonnage, behind Flasher, Rasher and Barb. Later researchers working from Japanese sources, notably John Alden, have revised the figures again in both directions, and the totals now quoted run from 24 to more than 30 ships depending on which ships are counted and how tonnage is measured. By any count Tang was one of the two or three most destructive American submarines, and she did it in five patrols between January and October 1944 (JANAC, 1947; Blair; On Eternal Patrol).

By the numbers

How many ships did Tang sink? Five counts

Dark bars: ships credited. Red bars: tonnage credited, in thousands of tons. The counts differ because they rest on different evidence: wartime claims and patrol reports, the 1947 JANAC comparison with Japanese records, and later research.

Ships: wartime credit, Navy summary of 194931

Ships: patrol reports and endorsements27

Ships: Alden and McDonald, later research26

Ships: JANAC, 194724

Tons (thousands): wartime credit, 1949227.8

Tons (thousands): JANAC, 194793.8

Tons (thousands): Alden and McDonald88.7

The cost of the whole submarine war was 52 boats and 374 officers and 3,131 enlisted men, about 3,505 in all, according to the Navy’s 1949 summary: 16 percent of the officers and 13 percent of the enlisted men of the submarine force’s operational personnel. In return the submarines sank more than half of all Japanese merchant shipping lost in the war, along with a large share of its warships, and starved Japan’s war economy of oil, food and raw materials (Submarine Losses, 1949; JANAC, 1947; Blair). Tang’s nine survivors were among the very few submariners to come back from a lost boat; the 78 men who did not are, in the Navy’s phrase, still on patrol.

Timeline

Tang’s survivors, October 1944 – 1994

1. 25 Oct 1944Japanese escort ship CD-34 picks up the nine survivors in the Formosa Strait; they are bound and beaten aboard.
2. Late Oct 1944Landed at Takao; by rail to Keelung; held in an army barracks; taken to Japan, officers in destroyers and enlisted men in a cruiser’s hold.
3. 3 Nov 1944Arrive at the Ofuna naval interrogation camp near Yokohama.
4. 6 Nov 1944The first beating O’Kane witnesses; Lt. Cmdr. John A. Fitzgerald of Grenadier receives 27 blows.
5. 24 Dec 1944Three survivors of HMS Stratagem arrive at Ofuna.
6. 5 Feb 1945The Navy announces Tang overdue and presumed lost; struck from the Navy list 8 February.
7. Mar 1945The aviator Lt. Emil dies after repeated beatings; O’Kane buries him.
8. 1 Apr 1945O’Kane beaten over five cigarettes found in his cell.
9. 5 Apr 1945Leibold transferred from Ofuna to Omori.
10. 23 Jul 1945O’Kane transferred to Omori.
11. 15 Aug 1945The Emperor’s broadcast announcing the end of the war is heard at Omori.
12. 29 Aug 1945Landing parties from San Juan, with Simpson and Stassen, liberate Omori, Ofuna and Shinagawa; O’Kane taken to Benevolence.
13. 30–31 Aug 1945O’Kane’s first interviews with the press in Tokyo Bay.
14. 2 Sep 1945Japan signs the instrument of surrender aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
15. Sep 1945Savadkin, on Guam, tells reporters Tang was sunk by her own torpedo; O’Kane writes his reconstruction of the fifth patrol; Decker reaches Oakland on 7 September.
16. 6 Oct 1945Navy press release confirms Tang was sunk by her own torpedo.
17. 26 Oct 1945Leibold’s affidavit on Ofuna and Omori, later an exhibit in the Tokyo war crimes trial.
18. 27 Mar 1946President Truman presents O’Kane the Medal of Honor at the White House.
19. 1 Aug 1946O’Kane’s sworn statement on Ofuna, at Mare Island.
20. Jul 1957O’Kane retires; advanced to rear admiral on the retired list.
21. 1977Clear the Bridge! published.
22. 16 Feb 1994O’Kane dies at Petaluma, California.
23. 2008Alex Kershaw’s Escape from the Deep published, drawing on interviews with Savadkin, Caverly and Leibold.

Questions readers ask

Did Tang’s men give away secrets at Ofuna?

By all accounts, no. They were questioned repeatedly by naval intelligence officers who compared notes between sessions, and they were beaten, but the survivors and those who have written about them, from Tuohy to Kershaw, agree that none gave the Japanese anything of value. O’Kane told reporters in 1945 that they were questioned constantly under threat of death for weeks.

Why were Ofuna’s prisoners not reported to the Red Cross?

Because, in the Japanese navy’s view, they were not yet prisoners of war. Japan described Ofuna as a temporary holding facility for interrogation; men were registered as prisoners only when they were transferred to army camps such as Omori. Some, like Tang’s officers, were kept at Ofuna for many months without any record reaching the outside world.

Was anyone punished for what happened at Ofuna?

Yes. After the war the camp’s commander, Cmdr. Yokura Sashizo, was sentenced to 25 years at hard labor, and the pharmacist’s mate Kitamura Sueharu, tried in 1948 for causing the death of one prisoner and contributing to the deaths of three others, was sentenced to hang, a sentence reduced to 30 years. O’Kane’s and Leibold’s statements were among the evidence gathered, and both men testified at the trials in Tokyo (Wikipedia, “Ōfuna prisoner-of-war camp”; Kershaw, 2013).

Did O’Kane know at first that his own torpedo had sunk Tang?

He saw it, but his first public account did not say so. Interviewed in Tokyo Bay on 31 August 1945 he said he never knew what hit them and guessed it was a mine, while Savadkin told reporters on Guam a few days later that it was their own torpedo. The Navy confirmed the circular run on 6 October 1945, and O’Kane’s reconstruction and later book describe it in detail (WWII on Deadline). Why his first account differed is not recorded.

What should I read first?

O’Kane’s own Clear the Bridge! (1977) for the patrols in the captain’s voice; Alex Kershaw’s Escape from the Deep (2008) for the escape and captivity, built on interviews with the last survivors; William Tuohy’s The Bravest Man (2001) for O’Kane’s life; and Clay Blair’s Silent Victory (1975) for the submarine war as a whole. The Navy’s War Damage Report No. 58, free online, is the indispensable primary account of the sinking and escape.

How it connects

This is the last chapter of the collection. Tang’s last patrol and the circular run are told in Chapter 7, the escape from 180 feet in Chapter 8, and the submarine war from Pearl Harbor onward in Chapter 1; answers to common questions are collected on the questions and answers page. The prisoners freed with Tang’s men included Americans captured on Corregidor in 1942, like Alfred Sorenson in the photograph above (Bataan and Corregidor); the defenders of Wake Island, captured in December 1941, endured captivity nearly as long. The B-29 raids the prisoners watched over Tokyo are part of The Air War against Japan in the Army Air Forces collection, and the end of the war that freed them is told in the Manhattan Project collection’s Fat Man and Nagasaki, and the Surrender of Japan. Lifeguard submarines like Tang off Truk also pulled downed B-29 crews from the sea off Japan in 1945. For the whole war, see the World War II hub and the Special Units collection.

Remembering it today

Nothing is left of Ofuna: the camp buildings were used as a kindergarten after the war and torn down in 1969, and the site is now housing. Little or nothing of the Omori camp survives either. O’Kane lies in Section 59 of Arlington National Cemetery, and the 78 men who died in Tang are named among the missing on the memorials of the American Battle Monuments Commission. Tang is remembered at the memorials to the 52 lost submarines at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum & Park at Pearl Harbor and the Submarine Force Library and Museum at Groton, in the Final Mission: USS Tang Submarine Experience at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, and by memorial plaques in Veterans Memorial Plaza at Palatka, Florida. The guided-missile destroyer USS O’Kane (DDG-77) carries her captain’s name. The Naval History and Heritage Command keeps United States Submarine Losses, with the names of every man lost, online.

Sources

• O’Kane, Richard H. Sworn statement concerning maltreatment at Ofuna, Mare Island, California, 1 August 1946. International Prosecution Section Document No. 3224, Legal Section, SCAP (National Diet Library, NDL12923130). Scan via Wikimedia Commons.
• Leibold, William R. Affidavit on treatment of prisoners at Ofuna and Omori, 26 October 1945. International Prosecution Section Document No. 8043, with Japanese translation (National Diet Library, NDL12924399). Scan via Wikimedia Commons.
• U.S. Navy. United States Submarine Losses, World War II (NAVPERS 15,784), 1949: introduction and “Tang (SS-306).” Introduction; Tang.
• U.S. Navy, Bureau of Ships. War Damage Report No. 58, section on USS Tang. 1949. HyperWar.
• Naval History and Heritage Command. “USS Tang (SS-306)” photo page (NH 97858), and photographs of the liberation of prisoners in the Tokyo area, August 1945 (80-G-700864, 80-G-473723, 80-G-490444). NHHC.
• Medal of Honor citation, Cmdr. Richard H. O’Kane. U.S. Naval Academy; Pacific Wrecks.
• Joint Army–Navy Assessment Committee. Japanese Naval and Merchant Shipping Losses during World War II by All Causes. Washington: GPO, 1947.
• 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); interview (HistoryNet).
• O’Kane, Richard H. Clear the Bridge! The War Patrols of the U.S.S. Tang. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1977; and Wahoo: The Patrols of America’s Most Famous World War II Submarine. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1987.
• Tuohy, William. The Bravest Man: Richard O’Kane and the Amazing Submarine Adventures of the USS Tang. Stroud: Sutton, 2001; and “Escape from Tang,” The Submarine Review, April 2002 (NSL archive).
• Clavin, Tom. Running Deep: Bravery, Survival, and the True Story of the Deadliest Submarine in World War II. New York: St. Martin’s Press; excerpt “Some Survived” (The History Reader).
• Blair, Clay, Jr. Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War against Japan. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975.
• Leibold, William R. Oral history. The National WWII Museum. ww2online.org; and Friends of the National World War II Memorial, “The Survivor.” wwiimemorialfriends.org.
• Savadkin, Lawrence. Oral history, Warriors in Their Own Words. Evergreen Podcasts; Lafayette College. Lafayette College.
• “Sinking of the USS Tang: ‘Like the world coming to an end.’” WWII on Deadline, 2020, collecting AP, Mutual and Oakland Tribune reports of August–October 1945. ww2ondeadline.com.
• Mansell, Roger. “Ofuna POW Interrogation Center.” Center for Research, Allied POWs under the Japanese. mansell.com.
• On Eternal Patrol. “Tang sinkings.” oneternalpatrol.com.
• Wikipedia, “Ōfuna prisoner-of-war camp,” “Richard O’Kane,” “Gregory Boyington” and “Louis Zamperini,” used as pointers to Tuohy, Scott (The War Below, 2013), Hillenbrand (Unbroken, 2010) and the other sources they cite.

Photographs and documents: official U.S. Navy photographs held by the National Archives and the Naval History and Heritage Command, a U.S. Army photograph from Arlington National Cemetery, and a page of O’Kane’s 1946 sworn statement from the records of the International Prosecution Section (copy in the National Diet Library of Japan), all public domain; and a modern photograph of the Tang memorial at Palatka, Florida, by Mjrmtg under CC BY 4.0; all via Wikimedia Commons. One liberation photograph carries an archival caption (“Aomori camp”) that is almost certainly an error for Omori; this is noted where it appears. Insignia drawn for this collection are illustrations, not official emblems.