The Record Patrols: USS Tang in the Yellow Sea and off Honshu, June–September 1944

On the evening of 24 June 1944 USS Tang was on the surface west of Kyushu when her radar picked up ships coming out of Koshiki Strait, some 20,000 yards away. As the range closed, Lt. Cmdr. Richard O’Kane and his officers made out at least six large merchant ships in columns of two, wrapped in two rings of escorts with more escorts ahead and astern. Tang worked around the screen in the dark, slipped between two of the escorts on the convoy’s quarter and closed to 2,500 yards. Just before midnight she fired six torpedoes. O’Kane claimed two ships. The Japanese records, read after the war, show that four went down, and that one of them was carrying 772 Allied prisoners of war.

Why it mattered

Tang’s third war patrol, into the East China and Yellow Seas in June and July 1944, is the patrol that made her reputation. In sixteen days in her area she fired all twenty-four of her torpedoes, scored twelve hits and sank ten ships, a total the postwar Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee confirmed in 1947. No other American submarine was credited by JANAC with as many ships on a single war patrol. Her fourth patrol, off the Pacific coast of Honshu in August, was harder and less productive, fought against heavy antisubmarine forces with torpedoes that ran deep and erratic, but it took Tang into Japan’s home waters within sight of the coast.

The two patrols also show the submarine war of mid-1944 as it really was. By then the torpedo problems of 1942–43 had been largely solved (Chapter 2), Lockwood was sending boats into the inner seas that fed Japan’s war economy, and the sinkings were rising toward their peak. Most of the ships Tang sank were small or middle-sized freighters, tankers and transports carrying iron ore, coal, oil, food and soldiers, the unglamorous traffic that Japan could not replace. Some of them carried people who had no part in the fight: in Tamahoko Maru, torpedoed on the night of 24 June, 560 British, Australian, Dutch and American prisoners of war died.

Finally, the two patrols are a lesson in the evidence. O’Kane’s reports, written days after each attack, sometimes undercounted his successes and more often overestimated the size of his targets; the postwar committee that checked them against Japanese records made its own mistakes; and modern research has corrected both. The difference between claims, credits and the ships actually lost is part of this chapter’s story.

Japan’s inner seas

Japan’s war industries ran on imported raw materials, and much of the traffic in 1944 came from close at hand: iron ore and coal from Korea, Manchuria and north China, soybeans and other food from Manchuria, salt and ore from the Chinese coast, carried across the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea to Kyushu and the Inland Sea ports. These were short routes in waters the Japanese regarded as their own. The Yellow Sea is shallow, with an average depth of only about 44 meters (some 145 feet), less than the length of a fleet submarine, and much of the approach to it from the Pacific had to be made through the narrow straits of the Ryukyu and Tokara island chains, which the Japanese patrolled and, in places, mined.

Wahoo had shown in March 1943 that these waters could be raided. Under Lt. Cmdr. Dudley W. Morton, with O’Kane as executive officer, she sank a string of ships in the Yellow Sea on her fourth patrol; in October 1943, on her seventh, she was lost with all hands trying to leave the Sea of Japan (Chapter 2). By the summer of 1944 Lockwood had enough boats, and enough confidence in his torpedoes, to send them back regularly. He also had a new method. Since the autumn of 1943 the Pacific Fleet had been sending its submarines out in coordinated groups of three, the American “wolf packs,” which hunted in the same area, shared contact reports and tried to attack convoys from several sides at once (Blair, Silent Victory).

Three boats for the East China Sea

Tang had come home to Pearl Harbor from Truk on 15 May with her twenty-two aviators (Chapter 4). After three weeks of refit and leave she sailed again at 13:30 on 8 June 1944, in company with the new submarine Sealion, commanded by Lt. Cmdr. Eli T. Reich and starting her first war patrol. The two boats ran training dives, fire-control drills and communication tests on the way to Midway, where Tang arrived on 12 June, topped off with fuel and repaired a ground in one of her main motors; she left the same afternoon at two-engine speed for the East China Sea (Tang, Report of Third War Patrol, 1944).

The transit took ten days without sighting an aircraft. On the evening of 22 June Tang dived about thirty miles from Yaku Shima, south of Kyushu, and after dark passed through Colnett Strait, giving a wide berth to a Japanese radar she detected on the island. Before dawn on 23 June she met Sealion south of Kusakaki Shima, and early on 24 June the two boats met Tinosa about fifteen miles south of the Danjo Islands. Tang’s executive officer went across to Tinosa with infrared signaling equipment, the code the three boats would use for coordinated attacks, and O’Kane’s ideas for the patrol. The plan was for the boats to spread across the probable convoy routes, report what they found, and converge (Tang, Third War Patrol Report). In practice, as the report shows, contact reports did not always get through, and much of the patrol was fought by each boat on her own.

The convoy from Koshiki Strait, 24 June

The convoy that came out of Koshiki Strait on the evening of 24 June was HO-02, which had sailed from Takao on Formosa on 20 June for Moji (Wikipedia, “Tamahoko Maru,” citing combinedfleet.com). Tang made radar contact at about 20,000 yards. As she tracked it, O’Kane found that the six large ships were steaming in two-ship sections, each enclosed by a circular screen of at least six escorts, with more escorts ahead and astern; the division commander’s endorsement later counted “at least 16 escorts.” An approach from ahead or from the flank, the classic submarine attack, was close to impossible against such a screen. Tang instead slipped between the escorts on the convoy’s quarter, diverged to starboard, and reached a position about 2,500 yards off the starboard beam of the last section (Tang, Third War Patrol Report, attacks 1 and 2).

At 23:53, at 32°30′N, 129°35′E, she fired three Mark 23 torpedoes at a large freighter, and a minute later three more at a ship she identified as a large tanker. The report records two hits on each target; one torpedo ran erratically. O’Kane claimed the freighter, which he estimated at 7,500 tons, and the tanker, at 10,000 tons, as sunk. Tang evaded the nearest escort, sent a contact report and, about twenty minutes later, tried to attack again near Nagasaki; this time an escort found her, a destroyer-type ship chased her and illuminated her, and she dived. The escort passed over without finding her, and she surfaced again to watch the approaches to the strait (Tang, Third War Patrol Report).

The Japanese records, studied after the war, show that the six torpedoes did more than O’Kane knew. Four ships of the convoy sank that night at almost the same position: the army cargo ship Tamahoko Maru (6,780 gross register tons), the army cargo ship Kennichi Maru (1,938), the tanker Nasusan Maru (4,399) and the cargo ship Tainan Maru (3,450), a vessel built in 1897 (uboat.net; DANFS). In a convoy moving in close columns, torpedoes that missed or passed through their targets could strike the ships beyond them, and a fan of six fired into an overlapping column could do damage that no one on the submarine’s bridge could see in the dark. JANAC credited Tang with all four.

Tamahoko Maru

Tamahoko Maru was carrying 772 Allied prisoners of war from Southeast Asia to labor in Japan: 197 British, 42 American, 258 Australian and 281 Dutch. About 500 Japanese soldiers were also aboard. Torpedoed at about 23:50, by the Japanese time recorded for the sinking, about forty miles southwest of Nagasaki, she sank in less than two minutes. The prisoners, many of them held below decks, had almost no chance. Five hundred and sixty died. The 212 survivors were picked up the next morning by a small Japanese whaling ship and taken to Nagasaki, where they were held in Fukuoka Prisoner of War Camp No. 14 for the rest of the war. The ship’s crew lost 35 men; Japanese escorts rescued the surviving soldiers (Wikipedia, “Tamahoko Maru,” citing wrecksite.eu, combinedfleet.com and the Australian POW records).

Tamahoko Maru was one of the “hell ships,” the overcrowded merchant ships in which Japan moved prisoners of war and forced laborers around its empire. They were not marked as prisoner transports, they sailed in ordinary convoys with soldiers and war cargo, and the submarines that attacked them had no way of knowing who was below their decks. Many thousands of Allied prisoners died when such ships were sunk by American submarines and aircraft (Michno, Death on the Hellships, 2001). In September 1944 Sealion, Tang’s companion on this patrol, torpedoed Rakuyo Maru in the South China Sea; when she and other boats returned to the area days later they found British and Australian survivors still clinging to wreckage, and Sealion, Pampanito, Barb and Queenfish rescued more than 150 of them (DANFS, Sealion II; Wikipedia, “Barb”).

Fog off Korea, 26 June to 1 July

For the next week Tang worked her way north and west. On 26–27 June, in fog and rain off Bono Misaki at the southwest corner of Kyushu, she made a full-power end-around on a medium freighter and fired four Mark 18 electric torpedoes from her stern tubes; two broached and ran on the surface, and the freighter turned toward the spread and escaped. Tang surfaced and cleared the area ahead of a patrol boat. She then moved to a coordinated patrol position on the suspected Shimonoseki–Shanghai route, and on 29 June toward the Korean coast to cover the routes into the Yellow Sea, where low, fast-moving fog patches and fogging periscopes made the search slow (Tang, Third War Patrol Report).

Late on 29 June she fired two torpedoes at a freighter from periscope depth and missed. She kept contact through the night in heavy seas and at 01:01 on 30 June, at 35°03′N, 125°08′E, off the southwest coast of Korea, fired a single “feeler” torpedo that hit. The ship, which O’Kane estimated at about 5,500 tons, was Nikkin Maru, a transport of 5,587 tons; DANFS describes her as carrying about 3,200 Japanese soldiers, and the uboat.net record, drawn from Japanese sources, lists no survivors.

On 1 July Tang made two more attacks. At 14:44, submerged, she fired two torpedoes at what she took for a small escorted freighter; one hit, and the ship sank in two minutes and twenty seconds by the report’s timing. Postwar records identify the victim as the small tanker Takatori Maru No. 1 (909 tons). At 22:47 she hit a medium freighter with one of two torpedoes; this was probably the cargo ship Taiun Maru No. 2 (1,044 tons), although the positions in the American and Japanese records do not agree closely. On 3 July, Tang’s executive officer crossed to Sealion to exchange news; Reich had not received Tang’s convoy report of 24 June and had sunk a freighter of his own on the way to the convoy route (Tang, Third War Patrol Report; uboat.net).

The Yellow Sea, 4 to 6 July

The best days of the patrol came at the end. At 06:26 on 4 July, at 35°22′N, 125°56′E, Tang fired three torpedoes from periscope depth at a large ship that O’Kane identified as a seaplane tender or aircraft transport of the Kurosio Maru class and estimated at 10,000 gross tons; two hit, and she went down. Tang cleared the area through a fleet of 34 fishing boats while some fifty men were in the water, and took no survivors aboard. The ship was the cargo ship Asukazan Maru (6,886 tons), completed only that year (Tang, Third War Patrol Report; uboat.net).

That night, at 21:28, at 36°05′N, 125°48′E, she hit a big ore carrier with one of two torpedoes and sank her. This time she did take a survivor: the crew snaked an overturned lifeboat alongside with grapnels and brought one man aboard. He told them where his ship had been hit, showed that he knew the shipping routes, gave various tonnage figures between 7,000 and 10,200, and said that she had been carrying iron ore. She was Yamaoka Maru (6,932 tons), another new ship (Tang, Third War Patrol Report; uboat.net). The report left her tonnage “pending interrogation” of the prisoner ashore.

Tang had two torpedoes left, both electric Mark 18s in her stern tubes. At 03:20 on 6 July, in the northern Yellow Sea at 38°40′N, 123°40′E, she fired both at a medium freighter and both hit. The ship was the old cargo ship Dori Maru (1,409 tons), built in 1902. With her torpedoes gone, Tang ran south at high speed, some 700 miles on the surface; she gave a wide berth on 7 July to a group she took for a Japanese antisubmarine “killer group,” and on the night of 8 July passed through the Tokara chain between Gaja Shima and Taira Shima at four-engine speed despite a Japanese radar contact. On 9 July she reported her results to Lockwood. She arrived at Midway at noon on 14 July (Tang, Third War Patrol Report).

In the record

The box score for her third patrol was 10 enemy merchant ships sunk that totaled 39,160 tons.

The division commander’s endorsement of 17 July called the patrol outstanding, Tang’s third strong patrol in a row, credited her with the eight ships of about 59,000 tons that O’Kane had claimed, rated twelve hits from twenty-four torpedoes “an excellent score in any league,” and noted that three torpedoes had run erratically. The refit was assigned to the division’s relief crew with the help of the Midway submarine base (endorsement to Tang’s Third War Patrol Report). Sealion sank four ships on the same patrol, among them the collier Sansei Maru, sunk near Tsushima on 28 June (uboat.net; DANFS, Sealion II).

Off Honshu: the fourth patrol

Tang was refitted at Midway by the Submarine Division 62 relief crew and the submarine base, and the refit was complete on 24 July. She sailed at 15:55 on 31 July for patrol areas four and five, off the Pacific coast of Honshu, and arrived after a seven-day transit (Tang, Report of Fourth War Patrol, 1944). This was a different kind of hunting ground. The coastal traffic between Tokyo Bay, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe, the industrial heart of Japan, ran close inshore, along a coast of headlands and bays watched from lookout stations and patrolled by aircraft, small escorts and armed trawlers. Targets were smaller and fewer than in the Yellow Sea, and the water off the beaches was shallow.

The first attack, at 10:34 on 10 August off Omae Saki, was a miss: three Mark 23s at an old loaded tanker, which reversed course. The next day, at 17:41 near Miki Saki on the Kii Peninsula, Tang found a small convoy of two freighters and two escorts and fired three torpedoes at the leading freighter and two at the second. The first torpedo hit the leading ship, which, in O’Kane’s word, “disintegrated.” She was Roko Maru (3,328 tons), carrying soybeans from Osaka to Nagoya; four of her crew died (oneternalpatrol.com, citing Japanese records). The escorts then held Tang down with twenty-two close depth charges in thirty-eight minutes, and searched for her through the next day with two dozen more (Tang, Fourth War Patrol Report; DANFS).

On 14 August Tang fought a surface action with her 4-inch gun against an armed patrol vessel, firing 88 rounds and scoring eight certain hits that wrecked its after deckhouse; she did not claim it sunk, and DANFS describes it as a patrol yacht. On 21 August she made two attacks on freighters close to the beach and missed with all five torpedoes, which exploded on the shore, and was depth-charged both times. That night she found a gunboat anchored off Kuki Saki; her first two Mark 18s, set to run at three feet, ran deep and missed, and at about 02:00 on 22 August she fired two Mark 23s, of which the second destroyed the vessel. O’Kane estimated it at 1,500 tons. It was the auxiliary patrol boat Nansatsu Maru No. 2, of 116 tons (Tang, Fourth War Patrol Report; uboat.net).

On 23 August, at 11:18 south-east of Hamamatsu, she fired three torpedoes at a large ship that her officers could not find in their recognition manuals, and that the NHHC account describes with men in white uniforms on her superstructure and bridge. Two hits sank her. O’Kane estimated her at about 10,000 gross tons; JANAC credited her as the 8,135-ton transport Tsukushi Maru; uboat.net gives the Tsukushi Maru sunk that day as a transport of 1,859 tons. On 25 August, at 18:05 south of Miki Saki, Tang fired her last three torpedoes, two at a heavily loaded modern tanker and one at its escort. All three hit. The tanker was Nanko Maru No. 8 (834 tons); the escort, which O’Kane reported as believed sunk, is not identified in the postwar records. The counterattack was the heaviest of the patrol: Tang counted 68 depth charges in a systematic search before she could surface at 20:39. On 26 August she set course past Aogashima for Pearl Harbor, where she arrived on 3 September (Tang, Fourth War Patrol Report; NHHC; uboat.net).

Claims, credits and the evidence

Every submarine sinking of the war was recorded three times. First came the captain’s claim in his patrol report, written from what he and his officers saw through a periscope or binoculars, heard on sound gear and estimated from silhouettes in recognition manuals. Then came the credit allowed by his division and squadron commanders and by Lockwood’s staff, which judged the claims against the evidence in the report and against radio intelligence. Finally, after the war, the Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee went through captured Japanese records and in February 1947 published its list of Japanese naval and merchant losses by cause. JANAC counted only merchant ships of 500 gross tons or more and did not assess ships whose cause of loss it could not establish, and it was not free of errors; later researchers, working from Japanese sources, have corrected many of its entries (JANAC, Foreword; Alden and McDonald).

Tang’s two patrols show how the figures could diverge in both directions. On 24 June O’Kane claimed two ships and actually sank four; over the whole third patrol he claimed eight and sank ten. But he overestimated their size: the 16,000-ton aircraft transport of 4 July was a 6,886-ton cargo ship, and the 10,000-ton tanker of 24 June was probably one of the smaller ships of the convoy. On the fourth patrol the gunboat he estimated at 1,500 tons was a 116-ton patrol vessel, and the 10,000-ton ship of 23 August was, by modern reckoning, a transport of 1,859 tons, though JANAC had credited her at 8,135. The gaps were not dishonesty. They came from identifying ships at night or through a periscope from silhouettes, from the natural tendency to see the biggest ship in the recognition book, and from the fact that a submarine that had just fired usually had to go deep before she could watch the results.

By the numbers

Claimed, credited and confirmed: Tang’s third and fourth patrols

Gray: tonnage Tang claimed or estimated. Red: tonnage credited by JANAC (1947). Gold: gross register tonnage of the ships identified in postwar research (uboat.net). Tons.

Third patrol, claimed and credited at the time (8 ships)59,000

Third patrol, JANAC (10 ships)39,160

Third patrol, postwar research (10 ships)39,334

23 Aug target, Tang’s estimate10,000

23 Aug target, JANAC credit as Tsukushi Maru8,135

23 Aug target, Tsukushi Maru by postwar research1,859

Fourth patrol, all four ships sunk, postwar research6,137

Tang at the top

When Tang reached Pearl Harbor on 3 September 1944 she had made four war patrols in less than eight months. By the count credited at the time she had sunk well over a dozen ships and rescued twenty-two aviators, and O’Kane was regarded as one of the two or three most successful captains in the force. By JANAC’s later count her first, third and fourth patrols had sunk seventeen ships. The two patrols of this chapter had also shown the limits of the weapons and the rising strength of the Japanese defenses in home waters: the depth-charge attacks off Honshu were longer and more systematic than anything Tang had met before, and her torpedoes were still not as reliable as her crew.

For her fifth patrol Lockwood sent Tang alone into the Formosa Strait, the channel between Formosa and the China coast through which the Japanese were reinforcing the Philippines against the coming American invasion. She sailed from Pearl Harbor on 24 September 1944 (Chapter 7).

Timeline

Tang’s third and fourth patrols, June–September 1944

1. 8 Jun 1944Tang sails from Pearl Harbor with Sealion, 13:30.
2. 12 JunFuel and a motor repair at Midway; departs for the East China Sea.
3. 22 JunPasses through Colnett Strait after dark.
4. 23–24 JunMeets Sealion and then Tinosa; plans for a coordinated patrol are passed to Tinosa.
5. 24 Jun, 23:53Attacks convoy HO-02 southwest of Nagasaki; claims two ships; Tamahoko Maru, Kennichi Maru, Nasusan Maru and Tainan Maru sink. 560 Allied prisoners die in Tamahoko Maru.
6. 27 JunMisses a freighter off Bono Misaki; two Mark 18s broach.
7. 30 Jun, 01:01A single torpedo sinks the transport Nikkin Maru off southwest Korea.
8. 1 JulSinks Takatori Maru No. 1 in the afternoon and, probably, Taiun Maru No. 2 at night.
9. 4 JulSinks Asukazan Maru at 06:26 and the ore carrier Yamaoka Maru at 21:28; one survivor taken aboard.
10. 6 Jul, 03:20Last two torpedoes sink Dori Maru in the northern Yellow Sea.
11. 14 JulArrives at Midway: 24 torpedoes fired, 12 hits.
12. 17 JulEndorsement credits eight ships, about 59,000 tons.
13. 31 JulSails from Midway for the coast of Honshu.
14. 11 AugSinks Roko Maru off Miki Saki; 22 depth charges.
15. 14 AugGun action with an armed patrol vessel: 88 rounds, 8 hits.
16. 22 AugDestroys the patrol boat Nansatsu Maru No. 2 off Kuki Saki.
17. 23 AugSinks Tsukushi Maru southeast of Hamamatsu.
18. 25 AugLast three torpedoes sink the tanker Nanko Maru No. 8 and hit its escort; 68 depth charges.
19. 3 Sep 1944Arrives at Pearl Harbor.
20. Feb 1947JANAC publishes its assessment: ten ships, 39,160 tons, for the third patrol.

Questions readers ask

Was Tang’s third patrol really a record?

For number of ships, yes. JANAC credited ten ships to Tang’s third patrol, and it credited no other American submarine with more on a single patrol. For tonnage, no: several patrols, including those that sank large warships such as the carriers Shokaku and Shinano (Chapter 6), accounted for more tons.

Did Tang work as a wolf pack with Sealion and Tinosa?

In plan, yes; in practice, mostly not. The three boats met, exchanged codes and signaling equipment, and divided the probable convoy routes between them, but radio reports did not always get through: Sealion never received Tang’s report of the 24 June convoy. Each boat made her attacks on her own. The three did, however, share an area that the Japanese could not cover against all of them at once.

Who was the prisoner Tang took on 4 July?

A survivor of the ore carrier Yamaoka Maru, pulled from an overturned lifeboat. The report does not name him. He told his captors about his ship and her cargo, and was to be interrogated ashore. Submarines took prisoners when they could, chiefly for intelligence; most Japanese survivors refused to be picked up.

What happened to Tamahoko Maru’s survivors?

The 212 prisoners who survived were taken to Nagasaki and held at Fukuoka Camp No. 14 for the rest of the war. That camp was in Nagasaki, and its prisoners were in the city when the atomic bomb was dropped on 9 August 1945 (see the Manhattan Project collection).

Why did so many torpedoes miss on the fourth patrol?

Partly the targets and partly the torpedoes. Off Honshu the ships hugged the coast in shallow water, and some of Tang’s shots ran past their targets onto the beach. Several Mark 18s ran deeper than set and passed under a gunboat, and O’Kane found steering and depth faults in some of his remaining torpedoes. Of twenty-four torpedoes fired on the fourth patrol, fewer than ten hit.

How it connects

This chapter follows Tang’s lifeguard patrol off Truk (Chapter 4) and leads, by way of the great naval battles of 1944 in which other submarines sank three Japanese carriers and a battleship (Chapter 6), to Tang’s fifth and last patrol in the Formosa Strait (Chapter 7). The Yellow Sea route Tang attacked had been opened to submarines by Wahoo, with O’Kane as executive officer, in 1943 (Chapter 2).

The prisoners who died in Tamahoko Maru and the other hell ships included men captured in the first months of the Pacific war, among them defenders of the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies (Bataan and Corregidor) and of Wake Island (Wake Island). The war on Japanese shipping by submarines in the Pacific has a counterpart in the German U-boat campaign against Allied shipping (Battle of the Atlantic), and the strategic bombing of Japan’s cities in 1945 completed what the blockade began (Army Air Forces). All of these are gathered on the World War II hub.

Remembering it today

The Tamahoko Maru prisoners. The Australian War Memorial and the Roll of Honour hell-ship records list the prisoners who died in Tamahoko Maru by name; the Australian, British and Dutch dead are commemorated on the memorials to the missing of their nations, and the American dead on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery (roll-of-honour.org.uk).

Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture. The lighthouse at Omae Saki, which Tang used as a landmark off Honshu in August 1944, still stands on the headland and is open to visitors; it was first lit in 1874.

Submarine museums. USS Bowfin at Pearl Harbor and USS Pampanito at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf are Balao-class boats like Tang; Pampanito, one of the submarines that rescued Rakuyo Maru’s prisoners in September 1944, tells their story aboard (bowfin.org; maritime.org). The National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas, and the Naval Submarine Force Museum in Groton, Connecticut, cover the submarine campaign as a whole.

Sources

• USS Tang (SS-306), Report of Third War Patrol, R. H. O’Kane, 14 July 1944, with first endorsement of 17 July 1944. Transcription: warfish.com. Contemporary record.
• USS Tang (SS-306), Report of Fourth War Patrol, R. H. O’Kane, 3 September 1944. Transcription: warfish.com. Contemporary record.
• Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee, Japanese Naval and Merchant Shipping Losses During World War II by All Causes (Washington: Government Printing Office, February 1947).
• Naval History and Heritage Command, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships: “Tang I (SS-306)”; “Sealion II (SS-315).”
• Naval History and Heritage Command, “USS Tang (SS-306).”
• uboat.net, “USS Tang (SS-306)” (ships hit, with gross register tonnages and positions) and “USS Sealion (SS-315).”
• On Eternal Patrol, “Tang sinkings” (comparison of JANAC, Alden-McDonald and later assessments) and “Roko Maru.”
• Wikipedia, “Tamahoko Maru” (citing wrecksite.eu, combinedfleet.com and Australian POW records), and “Eli Thomas Reich,” used as pointers to the underlying sources.
• Roll of Honour, Hell Ships: Tamahoko Maru (names of prisoners who died).
• Richard H. O’Kane, Clear the Bridge! The War Patrols of the U.S.S. Tang (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1977). Later recollection.
• Richard H. O’Kane, Wahoo: The Patrols of America’s Most Famous World War II Submarine (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1987).
• Clay Blair Jr., Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975).
• John D. Alden and Craig R. McDonald, United States and Allied Submarine Successes in the Pacific and Far East During World War II, 4th ed. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009).
• Gregory F. Michno, Death on the Hellships: Prisoners at Sea in the Pacific War (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001).
• Theodore Roscoe, United States Submarine Operations in World War II (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1949).
• Alex Kershaw, Escape from the Deep: The Epic Story of a Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2008).

Photographs: official U.S. Navy photographs and illustrations from the National Archives and Navy manuals, public domain as works of the U.S. government; and a modern photograph of the Omaezaki lighthouse by the Wikimedia Commons contributor Qurren (CC BY-SA 3.0); all via Wikimedia Commons. No photographs of Tang’s attacks on her third and fourth patrols are known; the periscope photograph of Nittsu Maru is from Wahoo’s 1943 patrol, and the photograph of Rakuyo Maru’s survivors illustrates the hell-ship sinkings, not Tamahoko Maru. The USS Tang insignia is an illustration drawn for this collection, not an official emblem.