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