THE BRAVEST MAN - Tapa dura

Dick O'Kane was America's most highly decorated naval officer of the Second World War, and a true hero. As captain of the submarine USS Tang he was responsible for sinking more enemy ships than any other US submarine skipper. In this powerful account, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Tuohy focuses on Dick O'Kane's extraordinary career: Naval Academy graduate, junior officer of USS Argonaut on patrol when Pearl Harbour was bombed; executive officer manning the periscope of USS Wahoo under the command of legendary skipper 'Mush' Morton: and as maverick skipper of USS Tang. O'Kane rescued the largest amount of carrier aviators from under the guns of the Japanese. He participated in the most dramatic war patrols of the Pacific war, climaxed by the loss of Tang to its own torpedo. His unparalleled escape from the sunken submarine in Japanese controlled waters makes for compelling and uneasy reading. Tuohy has interviewed many submarine captains, crewmen and Tang survivors, including the late Richard O'Kane. The result is a gripping narrative that explains how combat submarines and their crews work together, and evokes the claustrophobic nature of life in the 'Silent Service' - roiled by depth-charging beneath the waves and raved by typhoons on the surface. The book relives an age when heroism was in fashion, a time of threat, danger, challenge and sacrifice.

Bill Tuohy served with the US Navy in the Pacific in 1944-46. Then, as a journalist with the Los Angeles Times, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the Vietnam War in 1968. Tuohy reported on the conflicts in the Middle East, Central America, Northern Ireland and the Gulf War, as well as the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the Berlin Wall in 1989. He is the author of Dangerous Company, a war correspondent's memoir (NY, William Morrow, 1987). Bill Tuohy is now retired and lives in London.