Lifeguard at Truk: USS Tang Rescues 22 Airmen, April–May 1944

On the morning of 30 April 1944 a Navy floatplane from the battleship North Carolina sat low in the swell outside the reef of Truk, its wings and fuselage crowded with wet aviators and its pontoon slowly filling. Its pilot, Lt. (jg) John A. Burns, could not take off with that load, so he taxied out to sea and waited. A few miles away the submarine USS Tang, under Lt. Cmdr. Richard H. O’Kane, was running toward him on the surface in full view of Japanese shore guns, with carrier fighters circling overhead. By nightfall Tang had twenty-two airmen aboard, and the Pacific Fleet had a new idea of what a submarine could do.

Why it mattered

Tang’s second war patrol sank nothing. For sixty days she hunted off the Palau Islands, off Mindanao and outside Truk, made five ship contacts and was unable to attack any of them. By the usual measure, tons sunk, it was a blank. Yet Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood Jr., who commanded the Pacific Fleet’s submarines, called it an outstanding patrol, and it became one of the best-known patrols of the war. The reason was the two days at the end of April 1944 when Tang served as the “lifeguard” submarine for the carrier strikes on Truk and brought twenty-two downed aviators out of the water, several of them from within range of Japanese guns on the reef islands.

Lifeguard duty was still new. Submarines had been stationed off targets for air raids since December 1942, but they had rarely been needed, and many aviators did not believe a submarine would come for them. Tang’s rescues, carried out with fighters strafing the shore guns while she ran in on the surface, showed what a submarine, a radio net and a few fighters could do together. According to Nathaniel Patch of the National Archives, they also changed the Army Air Forces’ view of submarines, and the Army began asking for lifeguards across the Pacific. By the end of the war U.S. submarines had rescued 504 airmen (Patch, Prologue, 2014), among them a future president, Lt. (jg) George H. W. Bush, and many B-29 crews flying against Japan.

For Tang’s own story the patrol mattered in another way. It was the quiet middle of her short career, between the five sinkings of her first patrol (Chapter 3) and the record patrol of June and July 1944 (Chapter 5). Sixty days of long transits, unproductive stations and constant aircraft alarms turned a new crew into a practiced one; the patrol report notes that many men qualified in submarines during it. And it showed the qualities in O’Kane that the rest of this collection follows to the end: his readiness to take a submarine into shallow, dangerous water on the surface when he judged the stakes were worth it.

From Midway to the Palaus: sixty days without a target

Tang had come in from her first war patrol on 3 March 1944, putting in to Midway after firing all twenty-four of her torpedoes and sinking five ships in the Truk and Marianas area. After a short refit by the relief crew at Midway she sailed again at 06:55 on 16 March, bound for the Palau Islands at two-engine speed. The transit took eleven days and, by the patrol report’s count, 3,500 miles and 27,000 gallons of fuel (Tang, Report of Second War Patrol, 1944).

The Palaus, at the western end of the Carolines, had been the Combined Fleet’s refuge after it left Truk in February, and carrier aircraft of Task Force 58 had struck them on 30–31 March. Tang took station about sixty miles off Toagel Mlungui, the western pass into the Palau lagoon, on 27 March. What she found was aircraft. On 29 March she sighted a patrol plane and, that night, a thin raked mast; six patrol planes then arrived and forced her deep. Over the patrol the report lists fifty-one aircraft contacts, against five ship contacts, and the submarine dived again and again for planes that were usually too far off to see her (Tang, Second War Patrol Report, aircraft contacts).

On 2 April Tang was sent west to a station 120 to 150 miles east of Davao City, Mindanao, under the operational control of the Seventh Fleet’s submarine commander (Task Force 71). She patrolled there on the surface for three days, saw nothing worth an approach, and on 6 April was ordered back to the Palaus, now under Task Force 17, the Pacific Fleet submarine command. Her SJ surface-search radar, the set that made night surface attacks possible, failed on 8 April; the crew spent, by the report’s estimate, a thousand man-hours keeping it running during the patrol. On 10 April she sighted a patrol craft she could not close. Between 11 and 22 April she patrolled the passes on the west side of the Palaus, Toagel Mlungui and Ngaruangl, and met USS Trigger, whose officers exchanged messages with Tang by line and then spare parts: compressor valves, radar tubes and modulator units. Lockwood later noted that the exchange helped Trigger continue what became a productive patrol (ComSubPac endorsement, 27 May 1944).

On the evening of 22 April Tang left the Palaus for lifeguard duty in the Truk area, at one-engine speed to save fuel. The assignment was not an afterthought. Task Force 58, back from covering General MacArthur’s landings at Hollandia on the north coast of New Guinea (22 April), was to strike Truk on its way back to its anchorage at Majuro, and Lockwood’s staff had assigned Tang as lifeguard for the downed airmen that every big strike produced.

Truk after Hailstone

Truk Atoll, in the central Carolines, is a ring of reef about 60 km across enclosing a lagoon with a cluster of high volcanic islands. Japan had held it under a League of Nations mandate since the First World War, and by 1942 it was the Combined Fleet’s main forward anchorage, with airfields on Moen, Eten and Param, a seaplane base, a submarine base and the naval headquarters on Dublon. American newspapers called it the Gibraltar of the Pacific; the Navy’s aviation museum calls it, more aptly, Japan’s Pearl Harbor (National Naval Aviation Museum, “Truk Taxi”).

Its reputation did not survive February 1944. On 17–18 February, in Operation Hailstone, the carriers of Task Force 58 caught the merchant shipping and aircraft still at Truk (the main fleet units had left days before) and destroyed most of them; Tang, on her first patrol, was in the area and sank the transport Gyoten Maru on the night of the 17th (Chapter 3). After Hailstone the Americans decided not to invade Truk but to neutralize and bypass it. Japan nevertheless flew aircraft back in, including about a hundred moved from Rabaul, and Truk remained a threat to the coming invasion of the Marianas. Army Liberators bombed it repeatedly through the spring, and Mitscher’s carriers came back at the end of April to finish the job (U.S. Navy strike photograph captions; Morison, vol. VIII).

The second carrier raid struck Truk on 29 and 30 April 1944. The fast carriers of Task Force 58 went for the airfields, the seaplane base, fuel and supply dumps and what shipping remained, and the Pacific Wrecks chronology records 145 Japanese aircraft claimed destroyed and three small ships sunk. The defenders were fewer than in February but their antiaircraft fire was heavy, and over the two days a number of American aircraft were lost. Patch, drawing on the lifeguard reports, gives thirty-five airmen shot down, of whom thirteen came down over land or inside the lagoon, beyond any submarine’s reach. The rest came down in the sea, and Tang was waiting outside the reef.

How a submarine became a lifeguard

The idea of using submarines to rescue downed airmen grew out of the first American air raids on Japanese island bases. For the Army Air Forces’ raid on Wake Island on the night of 22–23 December 1942, the submarines Finback, Triton and Pike were stationed around the island, chiefly as navigation beacons for the B-24s; all twenty-four bombers came home and the submarines were not needed. Through 1943 submarines stood by for raids on Wake, the Gilberts and Marcus; Snook covered the Marcus strike and Steelhead the Tarawa strike of September 1943, and again no one went into the water near them (Patch, Prologue, 2014).

The first real test came at Wake in October 1943. USS Skate, on her first war patrol, was stationed off the island for the carrier strikes of 6–7 October. Over four days she picked up six aviators, often under fire from the shore; on 7 October a strafing Japanese fighter mortally wounded one of her officers, Lt. (jg) Willis E. Maxson III, who died the next day. Skate’s captain, Lt. Cmdr. Eugene B. McKinney, received the Navy Cross (Patch; DANFS, Skate). The lessons were clear. A submarine on the surface off an enemy base was in danger from aircraft and shore guns, it needed accurate positions to find a small raft in a large sea, and it worked best with fighters overhead.

By the spring of 1944 the procedures had caught up. From January 1944 each strike plan carried a grid of reference points, given cartoon-character code names, so that a pilot could report a downed comrade as a bearing and distance from a named point without giving the position away in plain language; later the names were chosen to contain an “L” sound, which Japanese speakers found hard to pronounce, to expose impostors on the radio. Rafts carried signal mirrors, dye marker, Very pistols and, increasingly, the hand-cranked “Gibson Girl” emergency radio. Fighters assigned as a submarine combat air patrol stayed over the lifeguard, guided her to rafts and attacked anything that threatened her (Patch). An April 1945 analysis of the lifeguard calls of 1944 found how much the fighters mattered: calls answered with air support produced 51 rescues from 60 calls, while unescorted submarines made only seven rescues from 75 (Patch, citing the ComSubPac study).

Fais, a smoke on the horizon and the night before

On the way to Truk, Tang carried out a small piece of offensive business. Fais, a raised coral island about 85 km east of Ulithi, had a phosphate works that the Japanese were exploiting. On 23 April Tang test-fired her 4-inch deck gun to establish its ballistics, and at 18:28 on 24 April she shelled the phosphorite refinery from about 7,300 yards with thirty-three rounds. There was no answering fire, and at 18:45 she set course for her lifeguard station (Tang, Second War Patrol Report).

On 27 April she dived for an aircraft contact and sighted smoke near Hitchfield Bank from what the report later counts as two ships. Japanese air cover forced her under five times before noon, and she gave up the chase to keep her appointment off Truk. The last day before the strikes she spent submerged on high-periscope patrol at the edge of her assigned area northwest of the atoll. That evening Army Liberators passed about seven miles north of her on their way to bomb Truk, and she watched the explosions in the distance. Afterward Japanese aircraft searched for her with flares along the line from the atoll; she dived about every hour to evade them, and after three dives moved out to some forty miles, where the search stopped (Tang, Second War Patrol Report).

A note on dates. Tang’s patrol report logs the two days of carrier strikes as 30 April and 1 May, and the Navy’s photographs of the rescues, captioned from it, carry the date 1 May. The task force’s records, the strike photographs, the National Naval Aviation Museum, the Battleship North Carolina and Burns’s Navy Cross citation all put the strikes and the Kingfisher rescue on 29 and 30 April, and a museum photograph of one of the ditched Avengers whose crew Tang later took aboard is dated 30 April. The report’s narrative also repeats the heading for 29 April, which suggests a dating slip in the log rather than a different time reckoning. This chapter uses the carrier dates, 29 and 30 April, with the report’s times as logged.

The first day: a raft off Fourup and the guns of Ollan

Tang was on her station, about forty miles from Moen, before dawn on 29 April. At 04:00 her radar was swamped with interference from the approaching task force, and at 04:36 low-flying aircraft passed some 4,600 yards away. By 06:10 she could see the strikes going in; she watched one plane go down in flames over Dublon. After a short dive for aircraft that might not have been friendly, she surfaced to the sight of flights of up to fifty planes shuttling between the atoll and the carriers to the southwest, and at 08:15 she sighted the task force itself (Tang, Second War Patrol Report).

At 10:25 the first call came: a plane down off Fourup Island on the southwestern reef. Tang ran in at emergency speed under fighters and bombers covering the area and found the raft about four miles west of its reported position. By 11:56 she had aboard Lt. (jg) Scott Scammell II and his crew, AMM3c Joseph D. Gendron and ARM2c Harry B. Gemmell, whose Avenger had been forced down by antiaircraft fire that hit its wing (NNAM, “Truk Taxi”). O’Kane, by the museum’s account, had the raft kept as a souvenir.

The afternoon was less successful. At 15:59 Tang headed for a second raft reported north of the first, then for one reported off Ollan Island on the western reef; she closed to about two miles east of Ollan and a mile off the reef and searched from the periscope and the shears without finding it. With the aircraft recalled to their carriers, O’Kane turned his 4-inch gun on the gun emplacements at the southwest end of Ollan, fired about twenty rounds and withdrew; the Japanese guns answered as Tang turned away, the first splash landing about a thousand yards short. Another pilot, reported some thirty miles off, was beyond reach before dark (NNAM). Through the night Tang zigzagged southwest of the atoll firing green Very stars to draw an answer from any raft; the only reply was a set of lights near Uman Island. One pilot rescued the next day told O’Kane he had seen the stars but had been afraid to answer them (Tang, Second War Patrol Report).

The second day: Burns, the Kingfisher and twenty-two men

At 03:30 on 30 April Tang moved in ten miles closer to the atoll for the second day’s strikes. At 06:00 she sighted the conning tower of a Japanese submarine heading south around Kuop, the separate reef at Truk’s southern edge; she tried an approach, lost the contact when the submarine dived, and surfaced to report it to the task force commander. Then the calls began, and they did not stop until dark.

The battleship North Carolina, steaming with the carriers, carried three Vought OS2U Kingfisher floatplanes of her observation squadron, VO-6, which were launched by catapult and recovered by crane from the sea. Two of them had been sent to search for downed airmen off the western reef. Near Ollan, Lt. John J. Dowdle Jr. landed to pick up a downed Hellcat pilot, Lt. (jg) Robert F. Kanze, and a gust of wind flipped his Kingfisher over, leaving Dowdle and his radioman, ARM2c Robert E. Hill, in the water with the man they had come to save. The second Kingfisher, flown by Lt. (jg) John A. Burns with ARM2c Aubrey J. Gill as radioman, landed in seas of about five feet, took the three men onto its wings and towed their raft clear of the shore while fighters strafed the guns on Ollan (NNAM; Tang, Second War Patrol Report).

Tang came in at emergency speed and at 09:17, about two and a half miles southwest of Ollan, took Dowdle, Kanze and Hill aboard; she sank the capsized Kingfisher with 20 mm fire and fired her 4-inch gun at Ollan as she passed. This time the island did not answer, with strafing fighters and bombers over it. Burns took off again. At 10:04 Tang sighted a raft under circling fighters, and by 10:20 she had aboard Cmdr. Alfred R. Matter, ARM2c James J. Lenahan and AOM2c H. A. Thompson. She then set off to round Kuop for three rafts reported off its eastern reef, passing the morning’s submarine contact at speed under her air cover.

While Tang was working around Kuop, Burns had found the three rafts. He radioed their positions, but Tang was being called to other airmen as well, and the rafts were drifting toward the reef. Burns landed again. He picked up a Hellcat pilot, Lt. (jg) Robert T. Barbor, and then the crews of two Avengers that had ditched near each other. When Gill tried to tow their rafts behind the floatplane they swamped, and the men climbed onto the Kingfisher itself, on the wings, the fuselage and the float (NNAM). Burns now had seven passengers on an aircraft built for two. He could not take off, so he taxied out to sea, away from the reef, and waited for the submarine.

Tang meanwhile followed her escorting fighters to the raft of Lt. Harry E. Hill off the eastern reef. Hill had been dropped a rubber boat but was too weak to do more than climb into it; Tang recovered him at 13:25. She then picked up Lt. (jg) James G. Cole, backed clear of the reef and at 14:10 reached Burns’s Kingfisher, about three miles east of Saeat Island. Nine men came aboard from it: Lt. Robert S. Nelson, Lt. (jg) Barbor, Ens. Carroll L. Farrell, ARM1c James L. Livingston, AMM1c Robert W. Gruebel, ARM2c Joseph Hranek, AMM2c Owen F. Taburn, and finally Burns and Gill. The Kingfisher had been pounded by the waves; its main float was leaking, its tail was battered and flooded, and it was listing so far that it threatened to capsize. O’Kane sent the two fliers below and at 15:15 sank their aircraft with 20 mm fire. His report recorded that Burns’s action in placing himself in a precarious position would be the subject of a special report (Tang, Second War Patrol Report; NNAM).

There was still one raft, reported south of Ollan. Tang asked for two night fighters, which joined her at sunset and found the raft by the Very stars its occupants fired. By then the light was too poor for the periscopes, and the raft was spotted by lookouts in the shears. At about 18:30, three and a half miles south of Ollan, Tang took aboard Lt. Donald Kirkpatrick Jr. and AOM2c Richard L. Bentley, dismissed the fighters and began a slow search to the west of the atoll for anyone the day had missed (Tang, Second War Patrol Report). She had made seven pickups in two days and had twenty-two aviators aboard, the number Lockwood’s endorsement and the Navy’s own photograph caption both record.

Twenty-two guests and the long way home

Tang stayed off Truk for six more days. Lockwood’s plan called for her to watch the atoll after the strikes, and the Liberators were still coming. On 1 and 2 May she made submerged high-periscope searches off the western reef, seeing a flying boat, land planes and floatplanes; on 3 and 4 May she patrolled the approaches to Otta Pass, the main southern entrance to the lagoon, hoping to intercept traffic; on the evening of 4 May she moved outside the forty-mile circle to a position east of Dublon for another Liberator strike, and she evaded searching aircraft until about 02:00. At 03:00 on 5 May (the report’s 6 May), with her relief in the area, she set course for Pearl Harbor (Tang, Second War Patrol Report).

A Balao-class submarine was built for a crew of about eighty; Tang’s report counts seventy-two men aboard for this patrol. Twenty-two more meant bunks shared in shifts, men sleeping in the torpedo rooms and passageways, and a galley feeding a third more mouths than it was stocked for. The aviators stood lookout watches, and O’Kane later wrote fondly of them; the museum account notes that they served temporarily as members of Tang’s crew for the rest of the patrol (NNAM). The voyage home took about ten days. About 120 miles from Wake she slowed to one engine to save fuel; she reached Pearl Harbor on 15 May 1944 with 2,000 gallons of fuel left from the 96,500 she had used, all twenty-four torpedoes still aboard, and fifteen days’ provisions, after a patrol of sixty days and 11,150 miles (Tang, Second War Patrol Report; uboat.net).

The endorsements on the patrol report show how the Submarine Force judged a patrol with no sinkings. E. R. Swinburne, commanding Submarine Division 44, noted on 21 May that Tang had sunk no shipping, but credited her cooperation with the aircraft, her speed in reaching rafts within range of the shore guns and her bombardment of Ollan for the rescue of the twenty-two aviators. The squadron commander, Capt. Charles B. Momsen, the inventor of the submarine escape lung that would matter so much to Tang’s crew five months later (Chapter 8), concurred and recommended Tang’s lifeguard methods as training material. Lockwood’s endorsement of 27 May called the patrol outstanding, recognized the twenty-two aviators rescued in seven pickups, and designated the patrol successful for the award of the Submarine Combat Insignia, a distinction normally earned by sinking ships (endorsements to Tang’s Second War Patrol Report).

In the record

Tang rescued 22 downed airmen and transported them to Hawaii at the conclusion of the patrol.

The North Carolina connection

The aircraft at the center of the story belonged to a ship that North Carolinians can still visit. USS North Carolina (BB-55), the first of the Navy’s new fast battleships, was commissioned in April 1941 and spent the Pacific war escorting the carriers, whose air defense depended on her dozens of antiaircraft guns. In April 1944 she was screening Task Force 58 for the Hollandia and Truk operations. Her three Kingfishers, the floatplanes of VO-6, were part of the task force’s rescue arrangements: when the carrier aircraft went in, the battleship floatplanes could land beside a raft in water a submarine could not easily reach, and hold the men until a submarine or a destroyer arrived (battleshipnc.com).

The Kingfisher crews went on doing it. A marker on the battleship’s stern, erected by the Friends of the Battleship North Carolina, records two famous rescues: Burns and Gill at Truk, and on 10 August 1945 a rescue by Lt. (jg) Almon Oliver and Lt. Ralph Jacobs of a downed pilot from the waters of the Japanese home islands, for which both received the Distinguished Flying Cross (Historical Marker Database, “Search and Rescue Missions”).

The Kingfisher that sits on the battleship’s catapult today is not Burns’s aircraft, which Tang sank off Truk, but it is a genuine OS2U. It crashed into Mount Buxton on Calvert Island, British Columbia, in fog in August 1942, while flying from Port Hardy; the wreck was lifted out by a Royal Canadian Air Force search and rescue unit in 1964, restored, and dedicated aboard the North Carolina in Wilmington on 25 June 1971 (Reader’s Digest Canada). It is one of very few Kingfishers left in the world.

After Truk: Chichi Jima, the B-29s and the lifeguard league

From the summer of 1944 every major carrier operation had its lifeguard submarines. Off Guam in June, during the strikes before the Marianas landings, Stingray brought a pilot in by “scoping”: she stayed submerged and towed his raft away from the shore with her raised periscope, a method only she and Finback are recorded as using (Patch). Finback used it during the strikes on the Bonin Islands in September, and the most famous of all lifeguard rescues came on the same patrol.

On 2 September 1944 Lt. (jg) George H. W. Bush, flying a TBM Avenger of Torpedo Squadron 51 from the light carrier San Jacinto, attacked a Japanese radio station on Chichi Jima that had been relaying warnings of American air strikes. His aircraft was hit by antiaircraft fire; he pressed home his attack, flew out to sea and bailed out. His two crewmen, ARM2c John Delaney and Lt. (jg) William White, did not survive. Bush came down in the water, reached a rubber raft and paddled away from the island while fighters circled him and reported his position, and USS Finback, under Lt. Cmdr. Robert R. Williams Jr., surfaced near him and took him aboard. He stayed with the submarine for the rest of her patrol, about thirty days, standing lookout watches, and was landed at Midway; he received the Distinguished Flying Cross for the attack (Naval History and Heritage Command; Patch). Several other airmen shot down over Chichi Jima in the same weeks were captured, and some were later murdered by their captors; Bush’s rescue is a measure of what the lifeguard service meant to the men who flew over the islands.

The Army’s turn came with the B-29s. When the Twentieth Air Force began bombing Japan from Saipan, Tinian and Guam in late 1944, its crews faced a flight of some 1,500 miles each way over open sea, and lifeguard submarines were stationed along the route and off the Japanese coast. The first B-29 crew rescued by a lifeguard submarine, seven airmen, was picked up by USS Spearfish in the Bonins on 19 December 1944 (Patch). From early 1945 the Lifeguard League at Saipan kept boats on station for almost every major raid, and the capture of Iwo Jima in February and March 1945 added an emergency airfield and a base for rescue aircraft (Battle of Iwo Jima; Army Air Forces).

The lifeguard service is easy to treat as a footnote to the submarine war, but the men who flew in the Pacific did not see it that way. Each rescue returned a trained aircrew to the war, and the knowledge that a submarine would be waiting off the target, and would come in under the guns, was a real support to the morale of carrier and bomber crews alike. For the submarines it was dangerous work that brought none of the credit of a sinking. Tang showed at Truk that it could be done well, and the procedures she helped prove were still in use when the war ended.

Timeline

Tang’s second patrol and the lifeguard service, 1942–1945

1. 22–23 Dec 1942Finback, Triton and Pike are stationed around Wake Island for an Army B-24 raid, the first submarines assigned to stand by for an air strike.
2. 7–10 Oct 1943Skate rescues six aviators off Wake during and after the carrier strikes; Lt. (jg) Willis E. Maxson III is mortally wounded by a strafing fighter.
3. 17–18 Feb 1944Operation Hailstone: Task Force 58 devastates Truk; Tang, on her first patrol, sinks Gyoten Maru nearby.
4. 3 Mar 1944Tang ends her first patrol at Midway.
5. 16 Mar 1944Tang sails from Midway on her second patrol, bound for the Palau Islands.
6. 27 Mar–22 AprPatrols off the Palaus and east of Davao Gulf; fifty-one aircraft contacts, five ship contacts, no attack possible; spare parts exchanged with Trigger.
7. 24 AprTang shells the phosphate works on Fais Island with thirty-three 4-inch rounds.
8. 29 AprFirst day of the Task Force 58 strikes on Truk; Tang rescues Scammell, Gendron and Gemmell off Fourup and shells the guns on Ollan.
9. 30 AprSecond day: Burns’s Kingfisher rescues the crew of the capsized floatplane and seven men from swamped rafts; Tang makes six pickups and ends the day with twenty-two aviators aboard.
10. 1–5 MayTang watches Truk and its southern passes; she leaves for Pearl Harbor early on 5 May (her report: 6 May).
11. 15 May 1944Tang arrives at Pearl Harbor with the twenty-two aviators.
12. 27 May 1944Lockwood endorses the patrol report: outstanding, successful for the combat insignia.
13. 2 Sep 1944Finback rescues Lt. (jg) George H. W. Bush off Chichi Jima.
14. 19 Dec 1944Spearfish makes the first rescue of a B-29 crew, seven airmen, in the Bonins.
15. May–Jun 1945Tigrone is credited with thirty aviators rescued on one lifeguard patrol.
16. 10 Aug 1945North Carolina Kingfisher crew Oliver and Jacobs rescue a downed pilot from Japanese home waters.

Questions readers ask

Why didn’t Tang sink anything on this patrol?

Because there was little to sink where she was sent. After the February strikes the Japanese had largely abandoned Truk and the Palaus as fleet bases and routed their shipping elsewhere, and both areas were heavily patrolled by aircraft. Tang made five ship contacts in sixty days, three small patrol craft, a submarine and a two-ship smoke she could not close, and none offered an attack. Her next patrol, in the crowded sea lanes of the East China and Yellow Seas, was a different story (Chapter 5).

How did a submarine find a raft in the open sea?

Mostly with help from the air. Pilots reported a downed comrade by bearing and distance from a coded reference point; the submarine ran to the position on the surface, and aircraft circling the raft guided her the last few miles. Rafts carried dye, mirrors and Very pistols, and at night flares could bring a submarine and a raft together, as they did for Tang’s last pickup on 30 April. Even so, the first raft Tang rescued was about four miles from where it had been reported.

Was Burns’s Kingfisher sunk by Tang?

Yes. After Tang took the nine men off it, the aircraft was too badly damaged by the sea to fly: its float leaked, its tail was flooded and it was close to capsizing. O’Kane had it sunk with 20 mm fire so that it would not drift ashore or become a hazard. Tang had sunk the other North Carolina Kingfisher, Dowdle’s, the same way that morning.

Where did all the extra men sleep?

Wherever there was room. A fleet submarine had a bunk for most but not all of her crew, and men already “hot-bunked,” sharing between watches. With twenty-two aviators added to a crew of about seventy, the guests slept in the torpedo rooms and on any free surface, ate in shifts and took a share of the lookout watches during the ten-day run to Pearl Harbor.

Did Tang’s captain receive a decoration for Truk?

The patrol was rated successful for the Submarine Combat Insignia. O’Kane’s own decorations, which eventually included the Medal of Honor, were for Tang’s attacks on her other patrols and for her last fight. The individual decoration from Truk that is best documented is Burns’s Navy Cross. O’Kane’s Medal of Honor is described in Chapter 9.

How many airmen did submarines rescue in the whole war?

The figure usually given is 504 airmen of all services rescued by U.S. submarines (Patch, citing Navy figures). The great majority came in the last year of the war, during the carrier strikes on the Philippines, Formosa and Japan and the B-29 campaign.

How it connects

This chapter follows Chapter 3, on Tang’s building at Mare Island and her first patrol in the Truk and Marianas area, and leads to Chapter 5, where she goes into the Yellow Sea with Sealion and Tinosa and makes the patrol that set the war’s record for ships credited sunk. The carrier war that Tang served off Truk reached its climax two months later in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, where submarines sank two of Japan’s fleet carriers (Chapter 6). Charles Momsen, whose endorsement appears on this patrol report, is the inventor of the escape lung described in Chapter 8.

The lifeguard story runs through other lkn-law.com collections. Wake Island, where submarines first stood by for air raids and Skate made the first rescues under fire, is the subject of the Wake Island collection. The B-29 crews whom the Lifeguard League rescued off Japan, and the emergency field on Iwo Jima that saved many more, are part of the Army Air Forces and Battle of Iwo Jima collections, and the special units of the war are gathered on the Special Units hub. The whole Pacific war begins with Pearl Harbor, where Tang brought her twenty-two guests home.

Remembering it today

Battleship North Carolina, Wilmington, North Carolina. The ship whose floatplanes flew at Truk is a museum and memorial on the Cape Fear River, opposite downtown Wilmington. A restored OS2U Kingfisher stands on her stern catapult, and the marker beside it tells the story of Burns and Gill (battleshipnc.com; the museum’s own account of the Truk rescue).

Pacific Fleet Submarine Museum, Pearl Harbor. USS Bowfin (SS-287), a Balao-class boat like Tang, is preserved beside the Pearl Harbor visitor center, where Tang landed her aviators in May 1944; the museum keeps memorials to the fifty-two submarines lost in the war (bowfin.org).

National Naval Aviation Museum, Pensacola, Florida. The museum displays an OS2U Kingfisher and published the account of Burns’s rescue, “Truk Taxi,” used for this chapter.

Chuuk Lagoon, Federated States of Micronesia. Truk, now Chuuk, is one of the world’s best-known wreck-diving sites, with dozens of Japanese ships and aircraft sunk in the February 1944 strikes lying in the lagoon. The wrecks are war graves and protected sites; visitors dive them with licensed local operators.

National Museum of the Pacific War, Fredericksburg, Texas. The museum, built around the hometown of Admiral Nimitz, covers the submarine and carrier war and George H. W. Bush’s service as a naval aviator (pacificwarmuseum.org).

Sources

• USS Tang (SS-306), Report of Second War Patrol, R. H. O’Kane, May 1944, with endorsements by Commander Submarine Division 44 (E. R. Swinburne, 21 May 1944), Commander Submarine Squadron 4 (C. B. Momsen) and Commander Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet (C. A. Lockwood Jr., 27 May 1944). Transcription: warfish.com. Contemporary record.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships: “Tang I (SS-306)”; “Skate I (SS-305)”; “Tigrone (SS-419).”
• Naval History and Heritage Command, USS Tang (SS-306), and Online Library, USS Tang (SS-306) photographs (80-G-227987 to 80-G-227992), with the caption listing the twenty-two rescued aircrewmen.
• National Naval Aviation Museum, “Truk Taxi: Lieutenant (junior grade) John Burns’ Epic Rescue Mission.”
• Nathaniel S. Patch, “Mission: Lifeguard,” Prologue 46, no. 3 (Fall 2014), National Archives.
• Navy Cross citation, Lt. (jg) John A. Burns, USNR, action of 30 April 1944, as published by Home of Heroes.
• Battleship North Carolina, “Truk Rescue”; Historical Marker Database, “Search and Rescue Missions (Eyes in the Sky),” marker erected by the Friends of the Battleship North Carolina.
• “How Canada Helped Recover One of World War II’s Most Iconic Aircraft,” Reader’s Digest Canada (on the recovery of the Kingfisher displayed at Wilmington).
• Naval History and Heritage Command, “Vice President Bush Calls World War II Experience ‘Sobering’.”
• Pacific Wrecks, 29 April 1944 (Task Force 58’s second strike on Truk).
• uboat.net, “Richard Hetherington O’Kane, USN” (patrol dates and ports).
• Richard H. O’Kane, Clear the Bridge! The War Patrols of the U.S.S. Tang (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1977). Later recollection, written from the patrol reports and the author’s memory.
• George Galdorisi and Thomas Phillips, Leave No Man Behind: The Saga of Combat Search and Rescue (Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2008), pp. 79–80.
• Clay Blair Jr., Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975).
• Theodore Roscoe, United States Submarine Operations in World War II (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1949).
• Charles A. Lockwood, Sink ’Em All: Submarine Warfare in the Pacific (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951).
• Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. VIII, New Guinea and the Marianas, March 1944–August 1944 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953).
• Alex Kershaw, Escape from the Deep: The Epic Story of a Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2008).
• Wikipedia, “Charles A. Lockwood” and “USS Tang (SS-306),” used as pointers to the sources above.

Photographs: official U.S. Navy photographs held by the National Archives (80-G series) and the Naval History and Heritage Command (NH series), U.S. Navy strike photographs and National Museum of Naval Aviation photographs, all public domain as works of the U.S. government; and a modern photograph of the Kingfisher at Wilmington released into the public domain by its photographer; all via Wikimedia Commons. Several of the Navy captions date the Truk rescues 1 May 1944, following Tang’s log; the text explains why this chapter uses 29–30 April. The lifeguard insignia is an illustration drawn for this collection, not an official emblem.