Phantom from the Deep

The night of Dec. 27, 1951 fell black and squally over Formosa Strait. Through the choppy waters, the U.S.S. Higbee, a 2,425-ton radar-picket destroyer, steamed cautiously on patrol. Her skipper, Commander Verner J. Soballe, dozed fitfully in his sea cabin. But the Higbee was alert. Men on watch stood by the five-inch guns, and down below soundmen listened intently for signs of prowling enemy submarines.

Shortly before midnight, the Higbee's sonarman sat up straight before his dials and scopes. Through the earphones came an unmistakable, high-pitched whine. He punched a floor switch with his foot, barked out an electrifying message to the bridge. "Torpedo sounds . . . torpedo sounds."

The Second Contact. Almost before he could give range and bearing, the Higbee was going into action. The officer of the deck rang for flank speed; the helmsman spun the wheel to comb the torpedo track. Alarm gonging, the Higbee heeled over, gathered speed. Captain Soballe tore on to the bridge; the crew clattered to battle stations.

Higbee's soundman lost the torpedo whine, but his probing sonar picked up a new contact: the metallic hull of a submerged vessel. Depth charges at the ready, the destroyer bore down on the contact. The captain ordered an uncoded message sent to CINCPAC at Pearl Harbor: "Attacked by submarine. Position: latitude 24DEG 36 min. north, longitude 121DEG 25 min. east. Am attacking submarine."

Halfway around the world, phones jangled in the Pentagon. The White House was notified. Top Washington officials waited tight-lipped for the next message from the Higbee.

On board the Higbee, the echo of the metallic hull came in loud & clear as the ship went in for the kill. The destroyer hunted back & forth, shotgunning depth charges left & right. Satisfied at last, Captain Soballe switched on his searchlights to look for wreckage. The stabbing white beams found nothing, but the sonar still pinged off a metallic hull resting on the bottom 180 ft. down.

Soballe fired off another message: "Have made attack ... am assessing results."

In Washington, the Navy waited for a full report, and watched anxiously for other signs that World War III had started. When none came, the Navy began to doubt Higbee's claim. Soballe was ordered back to the area next morning. He found an oil slick spread across the water--hydraulic oil of a kind used exclusively on submarines. That was not enough. The Navy knew how easy it was for an overeager soundman to "hear" torpedo sounds and hull echoes on a lonely watch. False contact, declared the brass, and closed the incident.

Unanswered Questions. But other naval officers in the Pentagon were not so sure. What about the oil and the continuing echoes from the hull? Quietly, a small group of World War II sub captains got out old charts and started poking into the files. Their search led them to the record of another U.S. vessel that had fought a battle in Formosa Strait.

The name was a famous one: U.S.S. Tang, one of the Navy's most successful submarines in World War II.* Captained by Commander Richard Hetherington O'Kane, the Tang had nosed into the strait on her fifth war patrol in October 1944. Within 24 hours, she had racked up a record submariners like to dream about. At 12:30 a.m., her radar picked up the first of two large Japanese convoys--three heavily loaded tankers, a transport, and a freighter. O'Kane eased silently into the convoy's wake and polished off the three tankers with five torpedoes. The transport tried to ram the sub. "It was a real thriller-diller," said O'Kane. Scuttling under her looming bow, O'Kane shot out four fish from the Tang's stern tubes.

The transport swerved, crashed into the freighter. The torpedoes exploded against the two ships; both sank. O'Kane's score after ten minutes of action: five Jap ships on the bottom.

All next day, the Tang played dead on the bottom while Jap destroyers lashed the water overhead. That night, O'Kane found another convoy, sank two transports and a tanker. A blizzard of fire from the escort swept over the sub. "Things were anything but calm and peaceful now," said O'Kane. He fired three more torpedoes, blew up a Jap destroyer and a second tanker. A third transport, badly wounded, stopped dead in the water.

The Last Torpedo. An hour later, O'Kane crept back to finish off the crippled transport. The first torpedo ran true. But the second broached. O'Kane saw it curving sharply to the left, rang for emergency speed, and began maneuvering to escape its path. The torpedo streaked around toward the sub. There was a flash of flame and the Tang went down. O'Kane and eight others were blown off the bridge. Inside the hull only a handful of survivors reached the escape hatches.

A Jap escort vessel hauled the survivors aboard, clubbed and beat them unmercifully on the trip to Japan. Said O'Kane, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his action, is now assistant head of the Submarine School in New London, Conn: "When we realized that these, brutalities were being administered by the burned, mutilated survivors of our own handiwork, we found we could take them with less prejudice."

In the Pentagon last week, the submariners searching through the records for a clue to the Higbee mystery checked the position of the Tang's last action. The files showed that she had gone down very near latitude 24DEG 36 min. north, longitude 121DEG 25 min. east, and in 180 ft. of water --the same depth and position as the Higbee's phantom sub. The Navy is still skeptical, but the submen are convinced that Commander Soballe and his alert crew had stumbled on the scene of the Tang's great victory and fought an action with the dead sub.

*The Navy now has a new Tang, a sleek, snorkel-equipped boat built on the lines of the Nazi XXI-class subs captured after the war (TIME, July 9).

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