The Bravest Man - Richard O'Kane and the Amazing Submarine Adventures of the USS Tang

Informationen zum Autor William Tuohy served with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in 1945—46. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for his Vietnam War reporting in the Los Angeles Times. As a journalist, Tuohy covered the conflicts in the Middle East, Central America, Northern Ireland, and the Gulf, as well as covering the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the Berlin Wall in 1989. He is the author of Dangerous Company: Inside the World’s Hottest Trouble Spots with a Pulitzer Prize—winning War Correspondent . Tuohy divides his time between the United States and the United Kingdom. Klappentext "There's no margin for mistakes in submarines. You're either alive or dead.” -Richard O'Kane Hailed as the ace of aces, captain Richard O'Kane, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor for his consummate skill and heroism as a submarine skipper, sank more enemy ships and saved more downed fliers than anyone else. Now Pulitzer Prize—winning author William Tuohy captures all the danger, the terror, and the pulse-pounding action of undersea combat as he chronicles O'Kane's wartime career-from his valiant service as executive officer under Wahoo skipper Dudley "Mush” Morton to his electrifying patrols as commander of the USS Tang and his incredible escape, with eight other survivors, after Tang was sunk by its own defective torpedo. Above all, The Bravest Man is the dramatic story of mavericks who broke the rules and set the pace to become a new breed of hunter/killer submariners who waged a unique brand of warfare. These undersea warriors would blaze their own path to victory-and transform the "Silent Service” into the deadliest fighting force in the Pacific.Chapter One “Wahoo is Expendable” At the first, pale light on a January morning in 1943, Wahoo carved through the calm waters of the South Pacific with her crew at full alert. In the breaking, shimmering dawn, the sleek, matte-black American submarine strained on the surface at full speed, 18 knots, her powerful diesel engines leaving a boiling wake astern. Wahoo was approaching the Vitiaz Strait, a narrow waterway separating the Solomon Sea from the Bismarck Sea off the northeast coast of the big island of New Guinea. The strait was a maritime chokepoint, patrolled by Japanese aircraft and anti-submarine vessels from nearby New Britain Island—dangerous water for U.S. submarines. Wahoo’s seventy-one crewmembers shared an edgy expectancy. They were embarked on a war patrol to seek out armed, enemy ships. They would be risking all. Thousands of miles from a friendly port, they would face the enemy alone. Defeat would mean death in their own iron coffin, in a nameless deep. They were heading into a no man’s sea, and Wahoo was fair game for foe, or even friend—patrol planes from Australia had a nasty habit of dropping bombs on American submarines. Normal doctrine called for Wahoo to dive beneath the surface at first light and proceed submerged. But the situation was not normal. Wahoo was holding to a breakneck pace to reach a Japanese-occupied harbor, and running on the surface would save precious hours. Now, seven days out of the U.S. Submarine Base at Brisbane, Australia, Wahoo was several hours ahead of schedule heading for her patrol area around the Japanese-held Palau Islands east of the Philippines. En route to her assigned area, Wahoo had orders to make a slight detour, if possible, to reconnoiter the anchorage of Wewak on the north coast of New Guinea, captured by the Japanese in the conquest of the East Indies the year before. It was used by the Japanese as a staging area to support amphibious operations in the Solomon Islands chain. Thanks to her four powerful diesel engines Wahoo was able to maintain an 18-knot speed, almost 21 statute miles per hour. (A knot, a nautical mile per hour, is 1.15 statute miles an hour.) To fit in the requested reconnaissance, Wahoo was ...

Product details

• Authors: William Tuhoy, William Tuohy
• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 27.06.2006
• EAN: 9780891418894
• ISBN: 978-0-89141-889-4
• No. of pages: 464
• Dimensions: 107 mm x 171 mm x 29 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > History; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous