The Circular Run: How a Malfunctioning Torpedo Turned Victory into a Watery Nightmare for the Crew of the USS Tang

What would you do if your own ultimate weapon turned on you in the middle of a war zone, leaving you with only seconds to brace for impact? For the elite crew of the USS Tang, the absolute pinnacle of their military success was instantly transformed into history’s most terrifying maritime tragedy due to a single malfunctioning mechanical component.

Caught in a lethal trap of their own making, the men inside the submarine faced a nightmarish choice between a watery grave at the bottom of the ocean or a desperate, high-stakes escape using an experimental breathing device that had never been tested at such extreme depths. This sweeping journalistic investigation pulls back the curtain on the extraordinary heroism, technological failures, and profound emotional endurance displayed by the handful of survivors who lived to tell the tale.

It highlights the raw human resilience that emerged when technological systems failed completely. Read the entire, deeply moving historical article on the final, tragic voyage of the USS Tang by following the link available in the comments section below!

The Apex Predators of the Pacific

By the autumn of 1944, the vast, sun-drenched expanses of the Pacific Ocean had become the arena for history’s most intense, technologically advanced submarine campaign. The United States Navy’s submarine force, operating under a doctrine of unrestricted commerce warfare, had systematically severed the vital maritime supply lines of the Japanese Empire. This strategic isolation was choking the enemy’s industrial warmaking capability by denying them access to critical oil, raw rubber, and merchant shipping. Among the dozens of American fleet submarines prowling these dangerous waters, one vessel stood out as the absolute pinnacle of maritime lethality and operational efficiency: the USS Tang.

Commissioned in late 1943, the Tang was a state-of-the-art Balao-class submarine, a formidable engine of war constructed from high-tensile steel, powered by massive diesel engines on the surface, and driven by silent electric motors when submerged. The heart of the vessel, however, lay not in its machinery, but in the extraordinary, hyper-disciplined character of its crew and the tactical brilliance of its commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Richard O’Kane.

Richard was a legend within the submarine community—a man possessed of an aggressive tactical mind, a calm exterior under intense depth-charge attacks, and an unyielding commitment to operational perfection. Under his leadership, the Tang had conducted four highly successful combat patrols, systematically hunting down and destroying dozens of enemy vessels, earning a reputation as the apex predator of the Pacific fleet.

The atmosphere aboard the Tang during these long-range deployments was a unique mixture of intense, claustrophobic physical confinement and high-stakes camaraderie. Over eighty young men lived and worked within a narrow, cigar-shaped steel tube crammed with intricate piping, complex electrical switchboards, and heavy machinery. The air was a thick, stagnant cocktail of diesel fumes, battery acid gases, cooking smells, and human sweat. Sailors shared cramped bunk beds in shifts, a practice known as “hot-bunking,” and navigated past the heavy torpedo tubes in the forward and aft compartments with practiced agility. Despite the immense psychological strain of knowing that a single hull breach or a well-placed depth charge would instantly condemn them to an agonizing death at the bottom of the sea, the crew maintained an irrepressible, high-spirited confidence. They knew they were the best at what they did, and they trusted their commander completely with their lives.

The Fifth Patrol and the Convoy in the Dark

On September 24, 1944, the Tang slipped quietly out of the submarine base at Pearl Harbor, departing on her fifth combat patrol with her torpedo tubes fully loaded and her crew eager to continue their record-breaking run. Her operational assignment carried her directly into the heavily guarded, treacherous waters of the Formosa Strait and the South China Sea—a vital maritime bottleneck through which the Japanese military was frantically routing reinforcing troops, heavy munitions, and fuel supplies to bolster their crumbling defensive positions in the Philippines.

On the ink-black night of October 23, while running on the surface to maximize her speed and recharge her massive electric batteries, the Tang’s radar operators detected a massive, densely packed Japanese shipping convoy moving through the gloom. The convoy was an extraordinary prize: a large cluster of heavily loaded merchant transports, tankers, and troop carriers, surrounded by a protective ring of aggressive, heavily armed escort destroyers that were constantly scanning the dark waters with active sonar and powerful searchlights.

Richard O’Kane did not hesitate. Utilizing his preferred, highly dangerous tactical doctrine, he elected to launch a surface attack from directly within the perimeter of the convoy itself, running parallel to the enemy vessels where their heavy defensive guns could not easily depress to target the low-profile submarine. Moving with a silent, ghostly speed through the dark waves, Richard stood boldly on the open bridge atop the conning tower, squinting through his night binoculars as he shouted precise steering headings and torpedo bearing calculations down to the plotting room below.

The ensuing engagement was an absolute masterpiece of naval choreography. In a series of rapid, devastating attacks, the Tang unleashed her torpedoes with surgical precision. Heavy explosions rocked the night as merchant vessels were torn open by the detonations, their fuel tanks erupting into towering columns of orange flame that illuminated the dark sea for miles. Panicked Japanese escort ships fired their guns wildly into the darkness, completely unable to pinpoint the location of the American submarine that was weaving seamlessly between the burning, sinking hulls. By the early morning hours of October 24, the Tang had systematically decimated the convoy, sinking multiple large transports and leaving the remaining vessels in a state of absolute, chaotic ruin. She had exhausted almost her entire ammunition supply, leaving only two remaining Mark 18 electric torpedoes in her forward tubes.

The Final Shot and the Circle of Death

With the remnants of the enemy convoy scattering in panic and the first pale streaks of dawn threatening to expose the submarine’s position on the surface, Richard O’Kane prepared to deliver the final coup de grâce. He targeted a large, heavily damaged transport vessel that had ground to a halt in the water, its crew frantically attempting to contain a massive fire on the aft deck. Richard intended to fire his twenty-third torpedo to quickly finish off the crippled vessel, and then utilize his final weapon to disable an approaching destroyer before diving deep to escape the inevitable counter-attack.

At exactly 02:30, Richard gave the historical command: “Fire twenty-three!” Down in the forward torpedo room, a high-pressure blast of air expelled the heavy, grey-painted Mark 18 torpedo from its tube. The weapon’s electric motor whirred to life instantly, leaving no telltale trail of exhaust bubbles in the water as it began its high-speed run toward the target. From his vantage point on the open bridge, Richard watched the phosphorescent wake of the torpedo through his binoculars, expecting to see a massive explosion rip through the side of the Japanese transport within seconds.

But what occurred next completely defied the mathematical laws of probability and shattered every concept of operational safety. Instead of running straight along its calculated bearing, the torpedo suffered a catastrophic, one-in-a-million mechanical malfunction within its internal directional steering gyroscope. After traveling a mere three hundred yards from the submarine, the weapon suddenly breached the surface of the water, its nose pitching upward violently before it rolled back over and executed a sharp, terrifying left-hand turn.

To his absolute horror, Richard watched as the torpedo’s wake began tracing a perfect, tightening circle in the dark water, steering at a blistering speed of forty knots directly back toward the very submarine that had launched it. It was the ultimate, nightmarish manifestation of a “circular run”—the most feared and lethal technological failure in the history of submarine warfare.

Richard reacted with a lightning-fast, desperate instinct. He shouted down the voice tube to the control room at the top of his lungs: “Emergency flank speed! Left full rudder!” His intention was to violently swing the submarine’s stern away from the path of the incoming weapon, allowing the torpedo to slide harmlessly past their hull. The diesel engines roared with a sudden, deafening intensity as the engineers threw everything they had into the propulsion system, and the heavy rudder slammed over. The Tang began to surge forward, her hull leaning heavily into the turn as she fought for her life against her own weapon. But it was entirely too late. The circle traced by the malfunctioning torpedo was too tight, and the distance was too short. Exactly twenty breath-catching seconds after leaving its tube, the torpedo completed its fatal loop, striking the Tang squarely in the aft torpedo room with a shattering, apocalyptic detonation.

The Destruction and the Descent

The force of the explosion was unimaginable. The massive blast completely vaporized the aft torpedo room and instantly killed everyone stationed in the engine compartments, blowing the stern off the vessel and unleashing a catastrophic, high-pressure torrent of seawater into the rear halves of the submarine. The steering controls were instantly obliterated, and the Tang lost all buoyancy within seconds. Her bow pitched upward into the night sky at a terrifying, near-vertical angle before the weight of the water-filled stern dragged her backward into the dark, freezing depths of the South China Sea.

On the open bridge, the violent shock of the explosion threw Richard O’Kane and the eight other men standing top-side off their feet, slamming them brutally against the steel railings. As the submarine sank beneath them with a sickening, rushing roar, they found themselves instantly plunged into the dark, churning waters of the open ocean. Swept away by the powerful suction of the descending hull, Richard fought his way back to the surface, gasping for breath as he looked out into the pitch-black night. Around him, the screams of his fellow bridge officers echoed briefly through the darkness before they were silenced by exhaustion and hypothermia. Ultimately, only three of the nine men who had been on the bridge when the torpedo struck managed to survive those initial, terrifying minutes in the water, clinging to small pieces of floating debris as they watched the last traces of their magnificent ship vanish into the abyss.

Meanwhile, 180 feet below the surface, a harrowing, unprecedented struggle for basic human survival was unfolding within the forward compartments of the sunken submarine. The Tang had come to rest flat on the muddy ocean floor, her bow slightly elevated but her stern completely flooded and dead. The initial blast had thrown the men inside the forward battery and torpedo rooms across the decks, shattering bones, smashing delicate instruments, and plunging the remaining spaces into an absolute, terrifying darkness broken only by the dim, flickering beam of emergency flashlights.

The conditions inside the trapped hull rapidly degenerated into a claustrophobic hell. Thick, acrid smoke from electrical fires filled the air, making every breath an agonizing struggle. Worse still, seawater had begun leaking into the massive main storage batteries located beneath the deck plating. When salt water mixes with the powerful sulfuric acid inside submarine batteries, a violent chemical reaction occurs that generates lethal amounts of pure chlorine gas. This heavy, greenish-yellow vapor began seeping up through the floorboards, burning the eyes and lungs of the survivors and forcing them to retreat further into the forward torpedo room, sealing the heavy, watertight steel doors behind them. Over thirty men were now packed into a small, unheated steel chamber, listening to the ominous creaking of the hull under the immense pressure of the deep sea, knowing that their oxygen supply was rapidly running out.

The Escape from the Abyss

Among the survivors trapped in the forward torpedo room was a young, highly capable officer named Lieutenant Charles Bergman, who calmly took control of the terrified men. He recognized that their only remaining hope of ever seeing the daylight again lay in executing a highly dangerous, near-impossible submarine escape utilizing an experimental breathing apparatus known as the Momsen Lung. The Momsen Lung was a primitive, early form of rebreather—a rubber bag worn around the neck containing a small canister of soda lime to filter out carbon dioxide, allowing a sailor to breathe a mixture of pure oxygen as they ascended through the water column.

However, executing a Momsen Lung escape from a depth of nearly two hundred feet was a logistical nightmare that had never been successfully accomplished in the history of naval warfare under actual combat conditions. To exit the submarine, the men had to utilize the forward escape trunk—a small, cylindrical steel airlock located at the top of the torpedo room. The process required a level of absolute psychological discipline and physical endurance that defied human nature.

First, a small group of four or five men would squeeze into the cramped, dark airlock. The bottom hatch would be sealed tightly, and the operators would deliberately flood the chamber with freezing seawater up to their chests. Next, compressed air would be pumped into the airlock to equalize the internal air pressure with the immense hydrostatic pressure of the deep sea outside. This equalization process was an absolute torture; the sudden, violent increase in atmospheric pressure caused the men’s eardrums to rupture with intense pain, filled their mouths with the bitter taste of copper, and induced immediate symptoms of nitrogen narcosis, making them feel dizzy, confused, and profoundly disoriented.

Once the pressure was equalized, the heavy outer hatch could finally be swung open against the ocean water. One by one, the men would duck beneath the surface, grip a long, weighted escape rope that had been floated to the surface, and begin their slow, agonizing ascent through the dark column of water. They had to maintain an absolute, rigid discipline during the climb; they were required to breathe slowly and continuously through the rubber mouthpiece of the Momsen Lung, consciously forcing themselves to exhale constantly to prevent their lungs from violently exploding as the surrounding water pressure decreased during the ascent.

The physical and psychological toll of this process was catastrophic. Of the thirty-odd men who began the escape preparation in the forward torpedo room, many were completely incapacitated by panic, chlorine gas poisoning, or severe injuries sustained during the initial explosion, leaving them unable to even attempt the climb. Small groups made their way into the escape trunk over a period of several grueling hours, but as the night wore on, the air inside the submarine became too thick with carbon dioxide to sustain life. Fires continued to rage unchecked, and the rising water eventually forced the remaining men to succumb to suffocation. Ultimately, only thirteen men successfully broke through the outer hatch and made it into the open waters of the South China Sea. Of those thirteen, several suffered fatal air embolisms or drowned in the heavy surface waves before they could be rescued. When the morning sun finally rose over the ocean, only five survivors from the interior of the Tang remained alive in the water.

The Cruel Rescue

For the handful of survivors floating on the surface—including Lieutenant Commander Richard O’Kane and the five men who had successfully escaped from the depths via the Momsen Lung—the arrival of daylight brought no immediate relief, but rather a new, deeply harrowing trial of emotional and physical endurance. They had spent over eight grueling hours clinging to small life rings and pieces of wood in the restless, open ocean, their bodies shivering violently from hypothermia, their skin deeply blistered by the intense tropical sun, and their throats parched from swallowing salt water.

At around 06:00, the low, rhythmic thud of marine engines echoed across the water as a vessel approached their location. It was not an American rescue ship; it was a Japanese escort destroyer, one of the very vessels that the Tang had been aggressively hunting just hours prior. As the Japanese sailors looked down over the high steel railings at the oil-soaked, exhausted Americans bobbing in the waves, their faces were thick with an intense, burning rage. The Tang’s devastating torpedo raid had slaughtered hundreds of their comrades and destroyed valuable national shipping, and the Japanese crew was in no mood to display traditional maritime chivalry.

The survivors were hauled up onto the deck of the destroyer with brutal, unyielding violence. They were immediately kicked, punched, and systematically beaten with wooden clubs and iron rods by the furious Japanese sailors, who viewed them not as captured prisoners of war, but as ruthless, subhuman pirates who had murdered their brothers in the dark. Richard O’Kane, despite suffering from a severe concussion and being covered in thick fuel oil, used his body to shield his younger crew members from the worst of the blows, hoarsely demanding that the Japanese officers intervene to enforce international laws of captivity.

The physical abuse continued unabated throughout the journey to the shore. The survivors were stripped of their clothing, bound tightly with heavy ropes, and forced to kneel on the hot iron decks for hours under the blistering sun without a single drop of water. The psychological transition was dizzying and absolute; in the span of a single night, these men had fallen from the absolute pinnacle of naval prestige, wealth, and military power to the lowest, most vulnerable state of human existence—completely at the mercy of a sworn enemy who possessed every reason to execute them on the spot.

The Secret Hells of Ofuna

Upon reaching the mainland of Japan, the nine surviving members of the Tang’s crew were immediately separated from traditional prisoner-of-war channels and transported under heavy military guard to the infamous Ofuna Naval Detention Camp located near Yokohama. Ofuna was not an ordinary POW camp; it was a highly secretive, high-intensity interrogation center operated by the elite intelligence branch of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The camp existed entirely outside the jurisdiction of the International Red Cross, and its very existence was kept completely hidden from Western governments, who officially listed the crew of the Tang as “Missing in Action” and presumed dead.

The operational philosophy of Ofuna was designed to systematically break the psychological resistance of elite captives through a combination of severe physical deprivation, constant isolation, and calculated acts of violence. The prisoners were housed in small, unheated wooden cells, forbidden from speaking to one another, and forced to sit completely motionless on the floor for up to fourteen hours a day, facing the wall in absolute silence. The slightest movement, a whispered word through the partition, or a failure to properly bow to a Japanese guard would result in an immediate, brutal beating with heavy bamboo kendo sticks.

The food rations were a starvation diet consisting of nothing but a small bowl of watery rice and a few pieces of rotting vegetables per day. Within months, the strong, athletic sailors of the Tang were reduced to skeletal figures, their bodies ravaged by severe malnutrition, advanced beriberi, dysentery, and painful tropical skin ulcers that went entirely untreated by medical staff. The interrogation sessions conducted by the English-speaking Japanese naval officers were relentless; they were desperate to extract the Tang’s tactical secrets, wanting to know how the American submarines were successfully evading Japanese sonar networks and the exact technical specifications of the very torpedoes that had caused so much destruction.

Despite the intense psychological pressure and the constant threat of execution, Richard O’Kane and his men maintained an extraordinary, heroic code of silence and resistance. They utilized a primitive, secret tap-code through the wooden walls of their cells to communicate comfort to one another, shared mental games to keep their minds sharp, and systematically provided their Japanese interrogators with highly complex, completely fabricated technical data that appeared plausible but was entirely useless. The deep, unshakeable bond that had united them as an elite crew under the waves became their ultimate shield against the horrors of the camp, allowing them to preserve their sanity and their human dignity in an environment designed to erase both.

The Long Walk to Healing and Freedom

The agonizing ordeal of the Tang survivors finally came to a sudden, dramatic conclusion in late August of 1945, following the absolute military collapse of the Japanese Empire and the conclusion of the war. When American liberation teams first entered the secret gates of Ofuna, they were completely stunned to discover the skeletal, hollow-eyed remnants of the legendary Tang crew, whom the Navy had mourned as dead for nearly a year.

The transition back to civilian life and the military establishment was a long, deeply challenging journey characterized by profound emotional complexity and intense psychological adjustments. For Lieutenant Commander Richard O’Kane, the joy of survival was heavily eclipsed by an immense, crushing weight of survivor’s guilt. He was a commander who had lost his ship, his magnificent crew, and seventy-eight of his young men to a weapon that he himself had ordered to be fired. He spent years meticulously reviewing the technical data of that fateful night, writing official reports to ensure that the Bureau of Ordnance permanently corrected the gyroscope design flaws within the Mark 18 torpedo program so that no other American submariners would ever face the same tragic fate.

In early 1946, during a deeply emotional ceremony at the White House, President Harry S. Truman formally presented Richard O’Kane with the Congressional Medal of Honor—the nation’s highest military decoration—for his extraordinary heroism during the final battles of the Tang. While the public celebrated him as a national hero, Richard maintained a quiet, deeply humble perspective on his medals. He routinely reminded audiences that the true heroes of the Tang were not the men who returned to receive the applause, but the seventy-eight brave young sailors who remained permanently on duty at the bottom of the South China Sea, resting within the iron hull of the ship they had loved so dearly.

The legacy of the USS Tang serves as a timeless, profound beacon for a modern world that remains increasingly reliant on complex, automated technological systems and industrial machinery. It stands as a powerful, unyielding reminder that even the most advanced, meticulously engineered human creations are inherently vulnerable to unpredictable failure, and that the ultimate measure of safety lies not in the perfection of the machine, but in the unshakeable character, raw resilience, and mutual trust of the human beings who operate it. The final, tragic voyage of the Tang is ultimately not a chronicle of simple military failure, but a magnificent, enduring testament to the heights of human bravery—a story of men who fought together under the waves, faced their own weapon in the dark, and demonstrated that the human spirit possesses an ultimate, world-altering power to survive the deepest of nightmares and find its way back to the light.