(February 2, 1911–February 22, 1994)
Navy Officer
As captain of the Tang, Richard Hetherington O’Kane sank 24 ships in just nine months, the greatest number of any American submariner. He lost his vessel through a freak mishap, but his heroic efforts resulted in a Congressional Medal of Honor.
O’Kane was born in Dover, New Hampshire, on February 2, 1911, the son of a university professor. In 1934, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and completed three years of surface duty with the cruiser Chester and the destroyer Pruitt in the Caribbean and Pacific before transferring to the submarine service. In 1938, O’Kane completed training at New London, Connecticut, and was assigned to the minelaying submarine Argonaut at Pearl Harbor. Following the Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, he joined the crew of the fleet submarine Wahoo as executive officer under the celebrated Comdr. Dudley W. “Mush” Morton. American submarines at that time were bedeviled by tactical rigidity and equipment failures, especially faulty torpedoes. However, the gregarious Morton and the boasting, garrulous O’Kane complemented each other well as a team. They went on to score brilliantly through a unique approach to fire control. In combat situations O’Kane would man the periscope, calling out distance and bearings, while Morton paced about doing the mathematics in his head and setting up the shots. Between May 1942 and July 1943, the Wahoo accounted for the sinking of 16 Japanese vessels weighing 45,000 tons, making it the navy’s most successful submarine up to that date. It was an even more impressive accomplishment considering the poor performance of their weapons. In contrast to the superb Japanese “long lance” torpedo, American underwater ordnance experienced failure rates of up to 70 percent. This problem, almost entirely related to malfunctioning detonators, was not resolved until midway through the war and at great cost to submarine crews.
In August 1943, O’Kane left the Wahoo to outfit and equip his own command, the submarine Tang. This vessel was commissioned the following October and put to sea in January 1944. While cruising off the island of Saipan on the night of February 22, the Tang encountered a convoy of three Japanese freighters and two escorts. O’Kane expertly surfaced to track his targets on radar and dispatched two large ships. On February 24, he sank another larger freighter and a tanker in the same vicinity. The next evening Tang tracked another convoy and sent a freighter to the bottom for a total of five vessels and 21,400 tons on its first cruise. A second cruise proved uneventful, but O’Kane’s third sortie in June 1944 was memorable. While patrolling the South China Sea on the night of June 25, he stalked a convoy heading into the port of Nagasaki and sank two freighters. Over the next nine days, the Tang continued sinking targets until it ran out of torpedoes on July 11. O’Kane then returned to Brisbane having destroyed eight ships for a total of 56,000 tons. At that time, this was the best-scoring cruise of any American submarine and it garnered O’Kane a Navy Cross. Meanwhile, Japanese shipping was becoming increasingly scarce and surviving vessels began hugging the coastlines for their own protection. This maneuver proved no deterrent to O’Kane, however. On the night of August 10, he patrolled the waters off of Nagoya, Japan, and spotted several ships skirting the coast. He then took the unprecedented step of easing the Tang to within sight of the beach and opened fire, sinking an escort ship. By the time he concluded his foray on August 25, another six ships of 31,000 tons had gone down in shoal water.
O’Kane led the Tang out for a fifth and final time in October 1944 on a cruise through the heavily defended Formosa Strait between the island of Taiwan and the Philippines. On the night of October 23, he encountered a 10-ship convoy and maneuvered in the darkness so that it approached him head on, unaware of his presence. Once he was between two lines of ships, O’Kane sent several torpedoes into a large freighter, which exploded so violently that the Tang was rocked by the force. As he was tracking his next quarry, it suddenly turned and charged him before he could dive. Ordering “left full rudder,” the Tang passed right next to the freighter, so close that machine gunners could not depress their guns low enough to rake it. Before diving to safety, O’Kane observed that two Japanese ships had collided and fired several torpedoes into one of them, sinking it. Boxed in by blazing vessels and charging escorts, O’Kane took advantage of the confusion, submerged, and slipped away. On the evening of October 24, 1944, another heavily escorted convoy was detected and the Tang repeated its head-on tactic. Two large vessels were immediately damaged before enemy destroyers forced O’Kane to dive and evade them. He waited an hour and resurfaced to finish off the cripples, firing his last two torpedoes. The first struck as intended but the second went wild, arched around, and struck the Tang amidships. The ensuing explosion threw O’Kane and eight crew members into the water and their ship sank “like a pendulum might sink in a viscous fluid.” Although an additional 13 men escaped through air locks, only eight of the original 87-man crew survived. O’Kane and his men were subsequently rescued by a Japanese patrol ship and spent the rest of the war at a secret POW camp at Ofuna. They were repeatedly tortured and starved, while their captors never gave word of their capture to the Red Cross. O’Kane was not aware of it, but his gallant activity earned him a Congressional Medal of Honor. This award was not publicly announced out of fear of retaliation if he was still alive. Postwar investigation revealed that the Tang’s fifth cruise sank no less than seven ships for a total of 21,772 tons. For a second time, O’Kane had registered one of the best cruises of any American submarine during the war. Furthermore, his final tally of 24 ships, rounded down after the war to 93,824 tons, makes him the highest-scoring American submarine commander in history.
After the war, O’Kane completed a tour with several surface vessels before taking command of Submarine Division 32 in 1949–1950. He then attended both the Armed Forces Staff College and the Naval War College before teaching at the New London submarine school during 1951–1953. He rose to captain in July 1953, and took charge of Submarine Squadron 7 at Pearl Harbor from 1953 to 1954. O’Kane retired from the navy in July 1957 as a rear admiral. He died of pneumonia in Petaluma, California, on February 22, 1994.
Bibliography
Blair, Clay, Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War against Japan, 1975; Frazee, Murray B., “We Never Looked Back,” Naval History 8 (1994): 47–51; Hoyt, Edwin P., Submarines at War: The History of the American Silent Service, 1983; Keatts, Henry C., and George C. Farr, Dive into History, Vol. 2: U.S. Submarines, 1991; O’Kane, Richard H., Clear the Bridge! The War Patrols of the USS Tang, 1977; O’Kane, Richard H., Wahoo: The Patrols of America’s Most Famous World War II Submarine, 1987; Smith, Stan, Dive! Dive!, 1965.
