USS Tang (SS-306): The Submarine That Turned on Its Own Torpedo

A boat that learned to hunt—and to be feared

When USS Tang slid into the Pacific war she carried more than steel and diesel‑engines. She carried the confidence of a new class of submarine, the Balao, and the temperament of a commander who preferred to press an advantage until the enemy broke. Richard H. O’Kane, a young officer with a taste for bold action, took Tang on patrols through the busy, dangerous corridors that fed the Japanese war machine. By the time autumn 1944 closed in, those patrols had forged Tang’s reputation. The boat and crew operated with an efficiency and ferocity that translated into results: postwar accounting credited Tang with sinking 33 ships for a combined 116,454 gross register tons—numbers that placed her among the most effective U.S. submarines of the war.

Life aboard Tang was the mix of long boredom and sudden violence all submariners knew. Crews ate, slept, and worked in a compressed world of steel and seawater, trained to read the ocean’s tiny voices on sonar and to answer with deadly, precise torpedoes. The submarine force by then was the backbone of the Allied effort to choke Japanese logistics—roaring through sea lanes to sever fuel, food, and materiel shipments. Improvements in radar, sonar, and torpedo design had sharpened that edge; skilled commanders learned to bite close and hard, to fire spreads at short range where the margin for hitting a target was highest.

A convoy sighted, a calculated risk

On October 24, 1944, Tang was operating in waters off Formosa (Taiwan), where shipping lanes narrowed and enemy convoys could be dense and well‑protected. Convoy attacks were dangerous, but they were also where a submarine like Tang could do its most lasting damage. Close quarters meant higher hit probability, but it also reduced the time and space available for evasive action.

That morning, binoculars and periscopes found targets: transports and escorts moving in formation. Tang closed the range, preparing the kind of short‑range salvo that had built the crew’s confidence—and its tally of sinks. The weapons of choice for many U.S. boats by late 1944 were electric torpedoes: quieter than their steam‑driven brethren and harder for enemy lookouts to hear or track. The Mark 18 electric torpedo had answered many complaints about noisy wakes and reduced detectability. But with new advantages came new, little‑understood failures—among them, the catastrophic circular run.

A circular run occurs when a torpedo’s steering or gyro system fails, or when a torpedo leaves the tube improperly, upsetting its guidance. Instead of holding to a straight course toward the enemy, the weapon slowly arcs and eventually returns to the point from which it was fired—turning the hunter’s own shot into a boomerang.

The shot that came home

Accounts of Tang’s final moments are spare and sharp. During the attack on the convoy, Tang launched a spread of torpedoes at very short range. The salvo did what so many of O’Kane’s had done before—struck and damaged enemy shipping—but at least one torpedo refused to hold its course. Whether a gyro failed, a steering vane jammed, or some imperceptible fault took hold in the weapon’s guidance, the result was the same: a torpedo began to curve back.

The circular run was not a slow, desperate drift. It was precise enough to close the distance to Tang and—tragically—hit its maker. The explosi on struck the submarine. The damage was catastrophic. A submarine’s survival depends on internal integrity; once hull plating, ballast systems, and critical compartments are breached, water floods in fast and unyielding. Tang began to sink.

Submariners train for depth charges, for surface gun duels, for the sudden shudder of near misses in the dark. They train less for the idea that their own weapon might return. In the cold, salty minutes that followed the strike, the crew’s options narrowed. Escape from a sinking submarine is a peril seldom realized; in Tang’s case it happened for only a handful of men.

Chaos in the water

Men who made it out did not remain unhurt. Those who escaped the hull were thrown into an open sea where the enemy was still present and alert. Japanese surface units in the convoy area seized survivors. Historical records show that nine of Tang’s crew were taken prisoner; the rest—78 men—were lost either in the initial sinking or later in captivity. Among those captured was Lieutenant Commander O’Kane, the boat’s commander and the man whose tactical daring had drawn both acclaim and risk.

The immediate aftermath was brutal in its clarity. The ocean claimed a ship designed to carry its crew home; the survivors entered enemy hands. Records from the time and postwar investigations would later reconstruct the chain of events, but for those who remained at sea or in prison camps, the ordeal was personal and total.

Counting what had been gained and what had been paid

The loss reverberated through the submarine community. Tang’s combat record that preceded the sinking was undeniable: 33 ships sunk, totaling 116,454 GRT. Those numbers translated into material effect. Every freighter, tanker, and transport taken from Japan’s supply lines was one less carrying oil, food, or munitions to the front. Tang’s patrols had been part of a campaign that, by late 1944, was hemming in Japan’s ability to sustain its forces.

Yet the price was heavy. Seventy‑eight sailors were lost—names written into Navy casualty lists and into the quiet registers of families who would learn of their sons, brothers, and husbands in telegrams and memorials. The nine who survived the sinking and were held prisoner later described conditions of captivity and the uncertainty of fate that followed. Postwar, the Navy’s after‑action reports and veterans’ accounts would document the boat’s achievements alongside the tragedy of her end.

Richard H. O’Kane’s wartime record, including actions before Tang’s loss, was recognized with high honors—he had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his leadership and success in earlier patrols. He survived the sinking and captivity to return after the war; his survival made him both a bearer of memory and a witness used in the Navy’s accounting of what had gone wrong.

The torpedo that taught a harsh lesson

Investigations into Tang’s loss focused on the weapon that turned inward. Circular runs were an acknowledged hazard by 1944, but Tang’s destruction crystallized the danger. The Mark 18 electric torpedo—valued for its stealth—could, under some failure modes, complete a lethal loop. The Navy examined firing doctrine, mechanical inspection routines, and the ways crews handled torpedoes in the cramped, hurried moments before release.

Tactical changes followed. Submarine commanders were urged to maintain greater caution in close engagements—longer firing ranges where possible, rapid and immediate evasive maneuvers after firing, and tighter pre‑launch checks on gyros and steering systems. Maintenance routines were reviewed to catch potential torpedo defects before they left the tube. Training emphasized the hazard of a returning weapon and drilled crews on recognition and response. The standing lesson was ugly in its simplicity: technological advantages carry new risks, and they must be respected.

The loss also affected procurement and engineering priorities. Lessons drawn from Tang and similar incidents fed into the improvement of torpedo design, quality control, and the procedures that sailors follow when they put steel into the water.

A wreck, a war grave, and a lasting memory

Today USS Tang’s legacy is not only in sunk tonnage or in the tactical manuals that quote her loss. The wreck itself is treated as a war grave—a place where the sea keeps its dead and where precise coordinates are withheld from public disclosure out of respect. The boat’s story appears in Navy histories, in memorial services, and in the recollections of the submarine community. For many sailors and historians, Tang is both exemplar and warning: an example of how audacity and skill can deliver results, and a warning about the fragile line between control and catastrophe in combat.

Scholars studying late‑war submarine operations continue to cite Tang in analyses of torpedo reliability, of close‑range engagement risk, and of decision‑making under pressure. The human dimension remains central: a crew trained to strike at the enemy could be felled by the very weapon intended to secure victory.

The quiet after the explosion

There is a kind of silence that follows a loss like Tang’s—fewer headlines, fewer official reports, an accumulation of small remembrances. But the lessons endured. Submarine doctrine was altered, torpedo safety practices were refined, and future crews carried with them the memory of what could go wrong in the darkest seconds after a shot was fired.

The men of Tang—those lost and those who survived—left a complicated inheritance: a testament to the power of aggressive submarine warfare and a cautionary note about depending too fully on machinery without guarding against its rare but deadly failures. In memorials and in the pages of naval history, Tang’s record remains both valorous and tragic, a story told in steel and salt that still instructs those who sail beneath the waves.