Even though the submarine force has always prided itself on being all-volunteer, I got into it a little differently. I was chief engineer in a destroyer during the summer of 1941, convoying ships to Iceland, carrying loads of beer and mail to the Marines there. Suddenly, one day we received a dispatch, as did about a dozen other ships in the Atlantic Fleet. Ours said, “The Bureau of Personnel contemplates ordering Ensign Frazee to submarine school for the September class. Have him take a physical exam and report the results by dispatch.” I was checked out in Newfoundland, and we got back a message saying I was qualified. Immediately, orders came for me to report to submarine school. That’s how I and about a dozen more joined that September class. Never before or since, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone gone into submarines without being a volunteer.
In the Tang (SS-306) with Dick O’Kane, some of the crew occasionally wished they had never volunteered. The first indication I had that O’Kane was different from other submarine skippers came during the test dive before our first patrol. From then on, we never looked back. We had a lot of faith in him—he knew what he was doing. And I had made more war patrols and been exposed to more depth charges than he had, so the men weren’t getting any cherry in me, either.
We were on shakedown in December 1943 off the coast of San Diego when we made that first real dive. O’Kane took her down to about 625 feet. Nobody in the submarine had ever been that deep—accidentally or on purpose—or even close to it, and that scared some people pretty badly.
The chief cook, the chief commissary man, came up to me on deck after we had docked at San Diego. Even though we were to leave the next day for Pearl Harbor, he was asking for a transfer. He had given me the official request before, but I said we would talk about that after the first patrol. We just had to have him, obviously. He was a key man in the organization. To that, he replied, “Well, if you’re not going to do anything about it now, I just won’t show up tomorrow morning.” The chief of the boat was standing next to me when he said this. I turned to him and said, “Chief, you heard what he said, didn’t you?” To which he replied, “I sure did!” Immediately, I turned back to the cook, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and said, “Listen, you son of a bitch, if you’re not here tomorrow morning at 0800 when we sail, I’m going to have you shot, for desertion in time of war! Now, have you got that straight?” That was the end of it. I made a believer out of him. He was older than I and had been in the Navy longer than I had. But my God, we couldn’t fool around like that. We were in the middle of a war.
O’Kane had been executive officer in the Wahoo (SS-238) under Dudley “Mush” Morton, who was a tremendous influence on O’Kane. Morton rode as a prospective commanding officer, sort of a supernumerary, on the Wahoo’s second patrol, and O’Kane was exec from the start. They had had a terrible first patrol, because the skipper was “chicken,” O’Kane said. When they returned from the second patrol, they went to the squadron commander and said, “This guy’s just got to go.” Even though that seems pretty close to mutiny, they got rid of him.
All skippers I knew or had encountered before I went to the Tang were trained in peacetime. They were over-cautious; they ran submerged too much of the time; they would not go in close enough to the beach to look for targets; and they were super-scared of airplanes. O’Kane said right from the start—and how much of it came from Morton I don’t know—that if we ran on the surface, we could see airplanes much farther away and thus sooner than they could see us.
What he said is true. A submarine, especially in waves or white- caps, was low-lying and all but invisible to an airplane 15 to 20 miles away. But we could see him. So between patrols, O’Kane had the shipyard weld more platforms above for lookouts. Standard operating procedure was for submarines to have two lookouts on the bridge. The Tang sometimes had as many as seven lookouts constantly scanning the horizon with their big binoculars. Hence, we always saw airplanes before they saw us. We could see so much more when we were running on the surface. Down below we were practically blind. We could raise the periscope only about six feet above the water and could see very little from there to the horizon. Ships would go by that we should have seen. But on the surface, we could stand in the conning tower and see a ship 30 miles away, long before he could possibly see us. That was the sort of thing O’Kane originated, as far as I was concerned. He revolutionized the science.
O’Kane also introduced something during shakedown that I had never heard of. We had a wire recorder he had borrowed on the base somewhere, and it was strictly for our own edification. O’Kane would record everything, then play it back to everybody and say, “Hey, there was too much talking here.” He liked to get everybody’s input, but when he had had enough, he would say, “OK, that’s enough.” And bang. Everybody was quiet.
Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel
Of the four patrols I made in the Tang, the third patrol was the most exciting and I guess the most dangerous. We were between Korea and China in the Yellow Sea, where the main problem was the depth of the water. Over vast areas it was only 150 to 200 feet deep, which very much limited a submarine’s hiding space. The shallow Yellow Sea took away half the cubic volume of space. And it was admittedly scary in that respect.
But the Japanese had no idea there were any submarines there. We had to go through what was marked on the charts as a mine field, which supposedly ran across our route through the straits to the Yellow Sea. But we just acted like it wasn’t there and charged on in.
Because the Japanese had no clue we were there, we could track ships for a fairly long time and plan our attack. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. The plan went so well, in fact, that O’Kane would just get as cocky as hell and say, “We’ll just fire one torpedo!” He could have been strongly criticized for that when he got home, but he wanted to save his torpedoes, sink more ships, and kill more Japs.
When We Ran Out of Torpedoes
For us, the end of a patrol came when we ran out of torpedoes. The normal patrol was planned to be 55 days, portal to portal, from Pearl Harbor to whatever advance base we returned to, often Midway. After our second patrol we went back to Pearl to have our ship upgraded with all the technological advances that were constantly taking shape. We were expected to be in port 23 days, 55 on patrol, a total of 78 days. But the Tang would come back in as short a time as 35 days, stay in port a couple of weeks, and take off again, allowing a few days for underway training before leaving on the next patrol.
New submarines were popping out like hotcakes. The only way the Navy could get experienced people to man them was to take them off existing submarines, so we kept sending trained people back to new construction. We automatically replaced a third of the enlisted men and usually one or two officers every patrol, which involved a lot of new people. We generally had a good, average bunch of officers, considering we were stuck with whoever was sent to us. You didn’t have to know anything about submarines to be a submariner. After all, it was just another ship. You learned the peculiarities in a hurry. One officer had talked his way on board while the ship was building. He used to come around and say he wanted to be a radar officer, because he was a radar officer in the shipyard. It turned out he had never been to submarine school, never even been in a canoe. He didn’t know starboard from aft. And he was so bad we called him “Salty.” But the guy turned out to be all right.
Off Honshu
One of the most frequently asked questions of submariners concerns depth charges. I counted them from the start, and I figure I was subjected to about 500 depth charges during the war on 11 patrols. Those 500 are counting the ones relatively far away, the ones when we said, “Ha ha, listen to the stupid bastards! They’re going the wrong way!” Half of the total came on the first ten patrols. The other half came on the fourth patrol of the Tang.
I was navigator for the last attack on that patrol. We were 1,000 yards off the coast of the main island of Japan—Honshu. We were running submerged, and it was just turning dusk. We had torpedoes only in the stern tubes, for one ship and two escort vessels we had spotted. They were hugging the coast, and we got turned in such a way that we were between the target ship and the beach, less than 1,000 yards from point to point. We had our stem tubes pointed at the ship, with our bow pointed toward the beach. I was getting no reading on the fathometer. Just as we were about to go aground, we fired the torpedoes, sank the ship, and turned out. Then it was time for another move so typical of Dick O’Kane.
Submerged speed depended on the charge of the battery, and we had a fairly full charge. So we ran at six knots for three hours. Depth charges were going off everywhere. “Hell, they can’t hear us,” O’Kane said, “They don’t know we’re here.” This was still just off Honshu. By 2100 that night, only 18 miles off the coast, we surfaced and ran all the way to Pearl Harbor without making so much as a trim dive the whole way. O’Kane liked to run back to base on the surface at full speed, with lookouts all over the place, just so he could load up more torpedoes and get back out there—sink more ships, kill more Japs. That did not thrill many people in the crew.
But we made it back to Pearl, and I received 30 days’ leave. By that time I had made 11 war patrols, more than anyone I knew of. The main reason I had so many is because so little time had elapsed between my seventh patrol in the Grayback (SS-208) and the first patrol of the Tang. I’d been on new construction, which is supposed to take a fair amount of time. But the Tang’s construction time was so short, because O’Kane beat on the shipyard people so badly to get the submarine built and get us out of there. He hounded them so much that the Tang was ready in record time. In fact, she had been in service eight months and already had completed four patrols, when the Devilfish (SS-292), a similar submarine started at the same time, arrived at Pearl Harbor.
I left early in September 1944, as the Tang went out on her fifth patrol. My wife came back across country with me, and we stayed in San Francisco for a couple of weeks as I awaited transportation back to Pearl Harbor. I’d go down to the base and check in when I was supposed to, but I made sure they understood that I was in no great rush and hurry. After a few weeks I left in a surface ship to Pearl Harbor, where I was on the staff for about six weeks until I got command of the Gar (SS-206). She didn’t make any war patrols under my command. She had made 15 already and was war-weary by that time.
When I finally returned to Pearl Harbor, I was told very confidentially by a senior officer, who got the word from the intelligence staff at Commander-in- Chief, Pacific, that the Tang had been sunk by her own torpedo, only nine of the 87-man crew survived, and that O’Kane was a prisoner of war. As O’Kane wrote in Clear the Bridge!, the nine-month-old submarine’s last shot:
. . . only yards ahead of Tang’s port bow. . .suddenly broke to the surface in a phosphorescent froth, turned sharply left, and commenced porpoising in an arc off our port bow. . . . the torpedo hit abreast Tang’s after torpedo room, close to the maneuvering room bulkhead. . . . Our ship sank by the stern in seconds, the way a pendulum might swing down in a viscous liquid.
Naturally, I was sorry to hear it. I had a lot of friends in that boat. As the censor of all mail, I got to know people’s personal lives, and I got to know most of the wives while we were putting the ship into commission. I later wrote to every family, parents or wives of everyone, telling them whatever I knew personal about the men. But that was not until much later.
The Tang’s sinking and the fact that O’Kane was a prisoner, along with eight others, were not announced publicly. We had gleaned the information from the decryption of coded Japanese radio traffic—called Ultra—that O’Kane was being held prisoner. Because of that I could tell no one about it, not even his wife. She knew nothing of his imprisonment or even suspected it until June 1945, eight months later. All I could do was bite my tongue. I had written to her, of course, but I couldn’t even hint at what I knew. And not only was the coded information secret, so was the fact that we were breaking those codes. If the Japanese ever suspected that, they would have changed everything, and we would have been back to square one. So Ernie O’Kane and the other wives and families had to suffer.
My One Regret
The one regret I have related to my submarine service is that I wish I had spoken up sooner. A great source of information on World War II submarines is Silent Victory by Clay Blair, Jr. It covers every patrol of every submarine and lays bare many of the skeletons in the closet: namely, faulty torpedo performance and other materiel failures. It also explains how we were able to do so well as a result of communication intelligence. We were sent to places where the Japanese said they were going to be, and sure enough, they were most always there.
Blair was a submariner, but after the war he was the editor of the Saturday Evening Post. I first met him when he was military correspondent in the Pentagon for Time. He was a friend of my good friend and fellow submariner in the department of public information, who introduced me to Blair one time. When he was getting ready to write Silent Victory, he wrote to several people who had been in submarines in World War II, asking them to write down their thoughts. He wrote to me, wanting me to comment on O’Kane and the Tang. I started dictating an answer to him at the office and had it typed up in the rough. Then I neglected it and let it sit there. Suddenly, the book was published, and my input was not there. I missed an opportunity to share some of the submarine history I had witnessed.