Escape From the Deep by Alex Kershaw Read Free Book Online Page A

“watertight integrity.” The stars shone in the sky. There were no clouds. It was around two o’clock in the morning. He knew that for sure. He had looked at his wristwatch just before the last torpedoes had been fired, when O’Kane had called for a time check.
    I wonder which side of the international date line we’re on, he thought. If I’m on one side, then it’s now October 25th, my wedding anniversary. So, I’ve been sunk on my wedding anniversary! 17
    Caverly thought about his loved ones as he tried to keep his head above water. “There was nothing to do but think,” he later recalled. “It’s hard to explain what goes through your head in a situation like that. I thought about my childhood, my folks, Leone, my wife, and my daughter, Mary Anne. I thought of all [the] things I had planned to do that I wasn’t now going to get to do.” 18
    Caverly’s childhood had been tough. His mother died eighteen months after he was born in northern Minnesota, the son of a blacksmith from Michigan who first came to the area to work with logging crews. He met blonde-haired Leone, who was a year older than him, when he worked on a threshing gang on a farm near her family’s home before the war. They had fallen in love after painting a house together. Within eight months, they were married at her home, and, in 1942, Leone gave birth to Mary Anne, who shared her Scandinavian good looks. “Leone was a kind soul, a lot of fun, hard working, a very good mother,” recalled Caverly. “She wrote and sent photographs of [two-year-old] Mary Anne that I kept with my uniforms and personal things back on the submarine tender in Pearl Harbor.”
    Caverly was still in good physical condition from his boxing days before the war. But he was not the strongest of swimmers. The odds for survival seemed slim. Would he see Mary Anne, Leone, and his folks again? Would he ever get to spend the $385 in poker winnings that he had locked away with the pictures of his family in Pearl Harbor? 19
     
     
     
    IN THE WATER NEARBY, but out of sight, Captain Dick O’Kane also watched as the Tang went down, “the way a pendulum might swing down in a viscous liquid.” His heart ached for the crew below the surface and for the few who had been topside and now had to face the cruel sea.
    O’Kane could soon see the Tang ’s gray bow jutting above the surface at a forty-five-degree angle. The torpedo tubes were not exposed—there could be no escape through them. The Tang looked like “a great wounded animal, a leviathan.” It was a devastating sight, far more wrenching than when he had heard of the Wahoo ’s loss. All he could feel was utter grief. 20 These moments would always haunt him, as would his memories of so many good men who were now dead, who had trusted him with their lives. 21
    O’Kane called out encouragement, as if trying to coax the Tang back to life. He then struck out instinctively toward his submarine, the first and only he had commanded. It was exhausting but he got closer, fighting the strong current. Every now and again, he saw a Japanese patrol boat in the far distance. It had not seen the Tang sink. Fortunately, her Mark 18 electric torpedoes had been wakeless, preventing the Japanese during the night’s battle from immediately locating the Tang .
     
     
     
    BILL LEIBOLD WAS NOT AS LUCKY—unlike Floyd Caverly and his captain, he was unable to step away in time from the bridge and swim clear of the sinking Tang . “I went down with the boat,” he recalled. “I don’t know how far but it seemed like it was a fair distance. I wasn’t hanging onto anything. I was just standing there and all of a sudden I was submerged. I remember very clearly there was a distinct bump that made me start to swim back to the surface. It may have been when the stern hit the bottom. Or it could have been some kind of explosion.” 22
    Leibold reached the surface. Regaining his composure, he heard men crying out. He recognized the voices of