There are amazing vignettes: Caverly and Leibold, adrift in the Pacific, countering hypothermia by floating in their own urine.
And keeping each other alive. They did that in many ways; each of them kept coming up with ideas. They remembered everything with such clarity, the way you do when it’s total disaster, you know? The escape, the camps, but especially their time in the water, all these years later—they remembered all these details. They recreated conversations verbatim. It helped bring the story to life.
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A great story with a great twist: they’re sunk by their own torpedo.
It doesn’t get any better than that as far as reversals, right? And lurking in the background is the idea that maybe O’Kane did push too far with that last shot—he was a hunter, after all, a killer. Maybe not a Captain Ahab, the way a couple of the crew saw him, but definitely someone who is going to take enormous risks to achieve his goal, which is to sink the most enemy ships of any American sub. He is highly competitive, to say the least. So there is a nice historical irony in having his sub sunk by this torpedo that literally reverses course. He himself, in a way, was enormously lucky. Being up on the bridge when the torpedo hit, he was literally thrown clear of the boat into the sea. He didn’t have to face what his men below did. He wasn’t tested that way.
But for O’Kane, as for the rest, the Japanese camps await.
And they are brutal—the endless beatings, the lack of food and medical treatment. They were special prisoners, not POWs, which put them at even greater risk. But they also met humane Japanese here and there. I felt this was important to get across: there was so much racism on both sides during the Pacific war. This is the first book I’ve written about that theater, and it really struck me how much propaganda both sides were pumping out—Bushido and slanty-eyed Japs. It was different in Europe. Working-class Americans who liberated Dachau could likely have ancestors who emigrated from a nearby town. At Ofuna (a naval POW interrogation center), the Tang’s crew witnesses an American B-29 firebombing. The destruction shocks them.
Less than half of the Tang’s survivors had happy homecomings.
Remember that when a sub sank the way the Tang did, everyone, including the navy, assumed all hands were lost. Wives and families might talk about their loved one being alive, but it was more hope than real belief, I think. Savadkin’s wife had another guy’s child. When [crewman Clay] Decker comes back, his wife meets him with their four-year-old and tells him she’s married somebody else and collected [Decker’s] life insurance. Yet it was the thought of her that kept him, it’s what made him dare the escape. That was the main thing the men who made it out of the Tang shared: the compelling thought that they had to see their loved ones again. But that doesn’t mean it had to work out.
What attracts a British expatriate to these American tales?
I sometimes wonder if I watched too many war movies as a kid—too much hero worship, you know? But really, it was America’s finest moment, the peak of its achievement. World War II had less gray areas than any conflict since: Americans saved Europe, and the world, from having the light of hope and freedom extinguished. It sounds very neocon today, but there you are. That doesn’t make American soldiers the “greatest generation” in the cheap marketing sense that term has come to be used in. Most of them were working-class guys who were just doing a job. They wanted the war to end so they could go home. The amazing thing is how much they accomplished with that attitude, without any self-consciousness or halos. They changed the world, and created the world we still live in. That’s quite a historical achievement.
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