Running Deep: Bravery, Survival, and the True Story of the Deadliest Submarine in World War II

Bestseller Clavin (Bandit Heaven) offers a lively rendition of the storied career of the USS Tang and its captain, Richard Hetherington O’Kane. Commissioned in 1943, the submarine downed and sank Japanese planes and ships in record numbers, including single-handedly destroying an entire Japanese convoy—successes that Clavin chalks up to O’Kane’s boldness and preternatural talents as a seaman (one military historian wrote that O’Kane’s only tactical antecedents were “the freewheeling frigate captains” of the Age of Sail). But on its fifth and final deployment, the Tang fired a torpedo that malfunctioned and boomeranged backward, hitting the sub and sending it 180 feet down to the ocean floor. Of the 87 crewmen aboard, 50 perished; nine, including O’Kane, managed to reach the surface using the innovative new “Momsen lung” breathing apparatus. The survivors were picked up by a Japanese patrol boat and transferred to Ofuna, a “temporary holding facility” for Allied aviators and submariners known to inmates as the “Torture Farm.” At war’s end, when the “walking skeletons” of Ofuna were liberated, O’Kane weighed barely 90 pounds. The book is a fast-paced yet meandering adventure that spends more time in the ocean than in Ofuna—Clavin provides a bounty of backstory on submarine warfare, with side excursions into other famous subs and their fates. The result is an entertaining account of daring exploits in the deep. (Oct.)