Creative History

  No light.   No air.   No water.   Temperatures in excess of one-hundred and fifty degrees.  The smell of excrement and piss.  Hundreds of filthy, naked and sweaty men with only room to sit cross legged on the floor.  No room to lie down.  Not enough room to stand up. If heat exhaustion and dehydration don’t kill you then you may be lucky enough to lose your mind and go insane and into a blissful oblivion before someone strangles you, or bashes your head against the metal walls just to get you to shut up.   And then there are the beatings and the periodic executions, performed for sport by your sadistic captors on deck who will blindfold you, have you kneel and then slice off your head at the neck with the curved blades of their samurai swords and then laugh as your severed head rolls off the deck and floats out into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Maybe, just maybe you’ll be “lucky” enough to live through the be...

              In the middle of the night during April of 1943, while cruising off the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean, lookouts aboard the heavily armed destroyer USS O’bannon spot an unusual silhouette in the distance. The O’bannon is attempting to return to its home port after having engaged in shelling of Japanese positions in support of the American amphibious invasion of New Georgia Island, and all hands are on edge, and on the lookout, for signs of enemy naval activity. In the darkness members of the ship’s crew notice that the odd silhouette is creeping closer and closer until it’s nearly astride their ship itself. What the crew is seeing is the silhouette of the Japanese submarine RO-34.  The RO-34 is a small submarine by the standards of the Second World War, one of a fleet of tiny “midget” submarines that the Japanese Navy uses to infiltrate and wreak havoc on unsuspecting American shipping convoys, but when it is first...