Category: Fish Tales

  • The Last Torpedo Came Back

    A submarine can survive an enemy's gunfire, outrun a destroyer and slip through a guarded convoy. In the Formosa Strait in October 1944, the American submarine Tang did all of that. The weapon that finally destroyed her did not come from Japan. It came from Tang's own last torpedo tube.

    Under Commander Richard H. O'Kane, USS Tang had already established a formidable combat record. On an earlier patrol she had also performed a very different duty, rescuing 22 American aviators near Truk. Now, with American forces returning to the Philippines, Japanese convoys were rushing men, fuel and equipment toward the fighting. Tang's fifth patrol put her across those routes. The submarine hunted at night on the surface, where speed and radar offered advantages but enemy escorts could see and fire on her.

    During the nights of October 23 and 24, Tang pressed attacks against heavily guarded shipping. Japanese guns flashed as O'Kane maneuvered among transports, tankers and escorts. Some enemy vessels burned or stopped in the water. The crew had fired nearly its entire torpedo load. Rather than depart, Tang returned toward a damaged transport to use the last two weapons. The first ran toward its target. The second, the twenty-fourth torpedo of the patrol, broke the pattern: it surfaced, veered left and began turning back.

    The crew saw the danger almost immediately. O'Kane ordered emergency maneuvers, but a submarine at close range could not simply disappear from a torpedo's path. Roughly twenty seconds after launch, the weapon struck Tang. The blast flooded her after compartments, and the submarine settled on the bottom about 180 feet below the surface. Men on the bridge were thrown into the sea. Others remained alive in the forward compartments, where survival now depended on a far more difficult operation than any attack they had carried out.

    The trapped sailors prepared to escape through a forward hatch using Momsen Lung breathing apparatus. Enemy depth charges delayed them; an electrical fire added heat and smoke. Navy loss records describe thirteen men leaving the forward compartment, but only five of those escapees were eventually rescued. Four others survived from the bridge or conning tower. The nine men picked up by a Japanese escort, including O'Kane, became prisoners of war. Seventy-eight Tang crewmen died.

    The Japanese vessel that collected the survivors also carried men from ships Tang had attacked. The Americans were beaten after their rescue and endured captivity until the war ended. O'Kane later received the Medal of Honor, while Tang's combat totals were revised as historians compared wartime claims with Japanese records. None of those later calculations changed the cruel sequence of her loss: a final shot, a sudden circle, and an American submarine struck by the weapon it had just fired. The crew's underwater escape remains one of the rare documented successes of the Momsen Lung in wartime.

    Sources

    [1] U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, “H-038-2: Leyte Gulf in Detail”. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-038/h-038-2.html

    [2] U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, “Tang (SS 306),” United States Submarine Losses. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/u/united-states-submarine-losses/tang-ss-306.html

    [3] U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, “Tang (SS-306)”. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/browse-by-topic/ships/submarines/tang-ss-306.html

  • The Birthday Present at the Bottom of Niagara

    A woman approached Niagara Falls on her sixty-third birthday with a plan that depended on surviving a plunge inside a barrel. She was not trying to become a professional daredevil. She was trying to escape financial insecurity. On October 24, 1901, Annie Edson Taylor would survive the falls and discover that survival was the easier half of her scheme.

    Taylor had worked as a teacher and moved through several American cities after being widowed. By 1901 she was short of money and looking for a way to secure her future. Niagara had already attracted performers willing to challenge its rapids and gorge, but a journey over the great Horseshoe Falls itself offered an even more sensational claim. Taylor planned to be the first person to ride over the falls in a barrel and live. She also understated her age in publicity, presenting herself as younger than she was.

    The equipment was neither a toy nor a guarantee. A specially constructed oak barrel was strengthened with iron, lined with cushioning and fitted with a harness. Air could be pumped in before the opening was sealed. Before Taylor risked the ride, a cat was sent over the falls in the barrel and survived. Accounts differ on the animal's injuries and on the precise test date, but the experiment persuaded Taylor that her container might withstand the drop. It did not settle what the force of the water would do to a person inside.

    On her birthday, helpers placed Taylor in the barrel upstream of the Horseshoe Falls and sealed it. The Niagara River took control. The container drifted toward the brink, disappeared over the cascade and entered the violent water below. Accounts describe a journey lasting roughly twenty minutes before the barrel was recovered. When rescuers opened it, Taylor was alive, shaken and injured mainly by a cut to her head. She had accomplished the dangerous feat that promoters could now sell as a marvel.

    But the hoped-for fortune did not follow. Taylor received attention, photographs and opportunities to recount the event, yet she struggled to turn her fame into lasting income. Her barrel itself became part of the commercial dispute: later accounts describe a manager taking the object she needed as proof and a prop for appearances. She sold souvenirs and posed for tourist photographs near the falls. The notoriety survived far better than the money did.

    Taylor died in 1921 after years of financial difficulty. Her burial in Niagara Falls places her among the people remembered for daring exploits at the river. The stunt was a triumph of survival, not of business planning, and its publicity could not make the economics work. More than a century later, the enduring image is a barrel emerging from the water with its passenger alive. The less familiar ending belongs to the woman who had wagered that one extraordinary day would provide for all the ordinary days afterward.

    Sources

    [1] New York State Parks, “Remembering the Queen of the Mist”. https://nystateparks.blog/2021/01/12/remembering-the-queen-of-the-mist/

    [2] Niagara Falls USA, “Niagara Falls Daredevils”. https://www.niagarafallsusa.com/planning-tools/about-niagara-falls/history/daredevils/

    [3] Smithsonian Magazine, “October Anniversaries”. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/october-anniversaries-4-72394275/

  • The Civil War Battle Hidden Under Kansas City

    October 23, 2026

    The Civil War Battle Hidden Under Kansas City

    A great Civil War battlefield lies beneath the ordinary geography of modern Kansas City. On October 23, 1864, troops fought near Westport and the Big Blue River in a clash involving tens of thousands of men. It was far from the familiar names of Gettysburg or Antietam, yet it helped end the Confederacy’s last major operation west of the Mississippi. The central mystery was not how many soldiers had assembled. It was whether a Confederate army, squeezed between two Union forces, could keep an escape route open long enough to save itself.

    Confederate Major General Sterling Price had marched into Missouri hoping to revive Southern control and disrupt Union plans in the weeks before Abraham Lincoln’s reelection. His army was moving westward, accompanied by a large wagon train. Union Major General Samuel R. Curtis organized the Army of the Border to block the advance near Westport. Another Union force, cavalry under Major General Alfred Pleasonton, pressed Price from behind. The Confederate commander faced a brutal calculation: attack the troops ahead, hold off those behind, and keep the column moving. Geography sharpened the danger. The Big Blue River could protect a flank, but its crossings also created chokepoints where an enemy could trap wagons and fighting men.

    On October 22, fighting at Byram’s Ford and nearby crossings pushed Union defenders back toward Westport. Confederate Brigadier General Joseph Shelby’s troops used a flanking maneuver against James Blunt’s position. That success bought Price time, not security. By the next morning, Pleasonton’s cavalry was forcing a crossing of the Big Blue against men commanded by John S. Marmaduke. At the same time, Curtis and Blunt contested the Confederate advance near Brush Creek. The American Battlefield Trust describes Missouri and Arkansas troops fighting men from those same states across the contested ground. The battle was therefore not a simple contest between distant regions. It included neighbors divided by war, while commanders tried to coordinate movements through difficult terrain.

    The trap tightened when Union cavalry gained the river crossing and threatened Price’s rear while the line at Westport came under pressure. Accounts preserved by Civil War on the Western Border describe Marmaduke’s force falling back as ammunition ran low, followed by a broader Confederate retreat. Shelby’s rearguard helped prevent the retreat from becoming complete destruction. Price escaped southward, but his Missouri expedition had lost its strategic purpose. The fighting continued elsewhere, including at Mine Creek two days later, yet the chance to reverse control of Missouri had largely passed. Modern city streets and parks obscure how consequential this landscape once was. A ford and a creek had helped determine the fate of an entire campaign.

    Sources

    [1] American Battlefield Trust, “Byram’s Ford Battle Facts and Summary”. Source link

    [2] Civil War on the Western Border, “Price’s Missouri Expedition (or Price’s Raid)”. Source link

    [3] American Battlefield Trust, Civil War western-theater resources. Source link