Tang's own torpedo circles back and sinks her; nine men swim through the night
Just after midnight on October 25, 1944, USS Tang was finishing the most devastating patrol of any American submarine in the war when her final torpedo, a Mark 18, curved back on itself and struck her own aft torpedo room. The submarine sank by the stern into 180 feet of water in the Formosa Strait. Of 87 men aboard, nine escaped and survived, including Commander Richard O'Kane, who swam through the night until a Japanese frigate pulled him from the water eight hours later.
Tang sank 33 ships, more than any other American submarine, and her loss became part of the Navy's postwar reviews of torpedo design. The Mark 18's circular-run flaw, already suspected after other incidents, pushed the service toward new safety interlocks and testing standards for torpedoes in the years that followed.
QHow old was the youngest sailor lost when Tang went down?
Rubin MacNiel Raiford was just 15 years old when he died in the sinking, making him one of the youngest Americans killed aboard a submarine in World War II. Recruiting standards of the era were not always strictly enforced, and teenagers occasionally slipped into service on forged paperwork or inflated ages. Raiford was among the 78 men who never made it out of Tang's flooding compartments. Raiford's age was unusual even for a crew that had just completed the most successful submarine patrol record of the war.
QWhat happened to the one man who got close to rescue but never made it?
A sailor who surfaced near the group of five men rescued from the Momsen lung escape was injured during the ascent and was never pulled from the water. He had made it out of the sunken hull and through 180 feet of open water, only to die within sight of the men who survived. No further detail survives on the nature of his injury or how long he lasted after reaching the surface. His death left only five of the original thirteen men who escaped the forward torpedo room alive.
QHow did a survivor turn his own trousers into a life preserver?
One officer who escaped the flooded conning tower had no flotation gear, so he knotted the legs of his pants, filled them with trapped air, and used the improvised bladder to stay afloat in the dark water of the Formosa Strait. The trick kept him alive long enough to be swept into the same group of survivors treading water through the night. No training manual covered the trick, but it kept him afloat until he was among the nine men hauled from the sea the next morning by the Japanese frigate CD-34.
