"Submariners assumed that if they were sunk, they would die. That’s why many never bothered training to escape; it seemed pointless"

"No,” Alex Kershaw laughs, “I’m always asked, but I’m not related to [Hitler biographer] Ian Kershaw.” Like his nonrelative, though, he has carved out his niche as a scholar of World War II. Born in England forty-two years ago, he worked as a journalist and emigrated to the United States in 1994. He wrote a few screenplays: “None of them were ever actually produced, but they taught me about blocking out scenes and pacing and such.”

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His first book, Jack London, tackled the outsized life of that American writer. The next, Blood and Champagne, was a controversial biography of war photographer Robert Capa. Then came bestsellers powered by his human touch, dramatic flair, and meticulous research. The Bedford Boys chronicles one town’s home front war and the experiences of its sons on Omaha Beach. The Longest Winter tracks the war’s most decorated platoon through the Battle of the Bulge and a POW camp. The Few remembers the American flyboys who violated the Neutrality Act to join the RAF. Kershaw’s latest, Escape from the Deep, tells the suspense-driven story of the USS Tang, the high-killing navy submarine sunk by its own torpedo during a late 1944 “unrestricted warfare” run near Formosa.

Why retell this story now?
I’ve always loved submarines and submarine stories and movies, and I was looking for an adventure story, really. And that’s what became my book’s center: the escape. I saw it as a powerful story about human survival that took place during the war. I mean, there you are, in the forward torpedo room, 180 feet below the surface, and your only escape route is through a tiny room where you have to survive pressure equalization. That’s six or seven times surface pressure. So your head is exploding, you’re talking like you’re on helium, and blood can start gushing from your nostrils and ears. If you manage to stand that, then you have to very slowly and carefully find your way up a knotted line through the dark water, pausing at every knot to try to avoid the bends, or just getting lost and drowning. It’s no wonder, really, that only nine men out of about forty managed to pull it off. Many of them didn’t even want to try; some just pulled the blankets over their heads and waited for the inevitable, as the water and smoke and battery acid gradually leaked into their sealed compartment. So this is a story about human endurance. And it was historic: it was the first time Americans escaped from a submarine in a situation like this. You have to remember, submariners assumed that if they were sunk, they would die. That’s why many never bothered training to escape; it seemed pointless.

You almost gave up on this book early on.
When I first talked to Larry Savadkin, one of the three surviving crewmen from the Tang, he seemed noncommittal. I didn’t know then that he had early Alzheimer’s, so I decided to move on to another submarine story. I didn’t want to do a book without that sense of commitment, because you get really involved in the lives of the people whose stories you’re telling. I’m not interested in strategy and operational decisions. What I care about is how history affects people’s lives. Historians like David McCullough write about this incredibly well. The loftier stuff I leave to the academic military historians. I’m a journalist, so I think that while people who actually experienced the war are still alive, we should talk to them. What they remember is astounding, especially about moments that changed their lives—like the Tang’s sinking.

What drew you back to the Tang?
When I talked to [Floyd] Caverly and [William] Leibold, the only other survivors still alive, they were really enthusiastic about my doing a book. That more than canceled out the initial reaction I’d gotten from Savadkin, who was quite helpful afterward. I gradually got the sense that they felt ever so slightly like they’d been standing in [Tang captain Richard] O’Kane’s shadow all these years. They turned out to be amazing sources. Then it became a question of assembling the puzzle and deciding which pieces to emphasize.

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