The Deadliest Sub's Final Target

The Final Patrol

Surprisingly, the deadliest strike against America’s most successful World War II submarine did not come from the enemy fleet. It is October 24, 1944, and Commander Richard O’Kane stands on the bridge of the USS Tang, scanning the dark waters of the Taiwan Strait. His crew has just wreaked havoc on a Japanese convoy. They have one torpedo left in the tubes.

You’ve heard of legendary naval battles where ships trade fire for hours. But here is what most people miss about submarine warfare. The weapons themselves were highly experimental, and the ocean is entirely unforgiving of a single mechanical flaw.

O’Kane gives the order to fire their twenty-fourth and final torpedo of the patrol. It leaves the forward tube at a standard speed of 29 knots. Then, something impossible happens out in the pitch black water.

The Mark 18 electric torpedo breaches the surface, porpoising in the moonlight. Instead of heading toward the crippled Japanese transport ship, its rudder jams. The weapon begins a sharp left turn, carving a massive, deadly circle through the water.

A Weapon Gone Rogue

The crew on the bridge watches in horror as a phosphorescent wake loops directly back at them. O’Kane orders emergency speed to avoid the strike. It is too late.

The torpedo strikes the Tang near the aft torpedo room. The explosion is catastrophic, violently sinking the most decorated submarine in the US Pacific Fleet. Out of 87 men on board, only nine would ultimately survive the night.

How does a weapon suddenly decide to hunt its own creators? The culprit was the torpedo’s internal gyroscope. When the mechanism failed, the steering locked hard to one side, forcing the torpedo into a circular run. The Mark 18 was a reverse-engineered copy of a captured German weapon, rushed into production before all the manufacturing bugs were worked out. Military technology often hides fatal flaws that get brushed under the rug. We see this pattern time and time again in classified documents. It is similar to how a bizarre solar storm triggered early warning systems in How the Sun Almost Started a War, where a technological glitch nearly ended the world.

The Long Ascent

The true horror of the USS Tang story began after the ship hit the ocean floor at a depth of 180 feet. There were 33 men left alive in the forward torpedo room. They had to execute the only known deep-water escape using a device called the Momsen Lung.

This crude rebreather was essentially a rubber bag filled with soda lime to filter out carbon dioxide. To survive, the trapped sailors had to flood their own compartment intentionally. This equalized the water pressure so they could open the escape trunk.

The process was agonizingly slow and terrifying. Only 13 men made it out of the sunken hull into the freezing water. By the time they reached the surface, the rapid pressure changes and sheer exhaustion meant only five were still alive.

These five men treaded water alongside O’Kane and three others. The commander and his small group had been thrown from the bridge during the initial blast, sparing them the nightmare of the sunken hull.

The Aftermath of an Anomaly

Japanese forces picked up the nine survivors the next morning. O’Kane and his men spent the rest of the war in a brutal prisoner of war camp. They kept the secret of their own sinking to themselves until they were finally liberated.

Naval records show the Tang was credited with sinking up to 33 enemy ships. This is a record that remains a high-water mark for American submarines. Yet its final kill was completely self-inflicted.

Sometimes history is shaped not by brilliant enemy tactics, but by a single rusted gear inside a steel tube. It makes you wonder how many other technological disasters have been written off as enemy action. When the machines we build turn against us in the dark, who is left to tell the true story?