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Each half hour depth charges were dropped (12), a total of
some 70. The boat tried to evade the depth charges by “jumping
a 100 meters” and lie down again. At 18.00 hrs the attacks
stopped and the propeller noise of the destroyers became weaker
and died out. At 20.00 hrs the boat surfaced in the darkness
and tried to get away from the area at high speed. As the
hull is high on the water its diesel exhaust pipe produced
a rain of sparks shooting into the air. These sparks were
as good as fireworks in the darkness of the night. The CO
decided not to switch to diesel.
Disaster finally struck. After running for 30 minutes at
maximum speed the 0-2O was spotted and caught in a large searchlight.
Commander Snippe decided that there was no chance of escape
and thus decided to scuttle the submarine.He ordered all hands
to be up on the deck of the O-20. With an interval of 2-3
seconds main ballast tanks 1 through 6 were flooded. With
the diesels still at full speed the submarine disappeared
below the surface.
The situation was made worse when the Japanese destroyer wrongly
assumed that the submarine was doing a crash dive and thus sailed
with a speed of 20kts through the middle of a group of swimming
submariners and dropped several depth charges nearby. For fear
of getting torpedoed, the Japanese destroyer Uranami did not
start rescuing the survivors right away and instead opted to
wait for daylight. Nevertheless, the destroyer droped a depth
charge now and then to scare the sharks away from the swimmers.
Finally, on the 20th December 1941 at 07.30hrs, the Uranami
picked up 32 survivors from the O-20 as POWs.
This was the Dutch’s interpretation of the story, but
the Japanese war history records claimed that it had not known
that the ship was scuttled as it was a dark night, and the Uranami
was simply sailing around in its search for the submarine. Though
the ship crew did hear something like human voices, they could
not see anything or anyone in the darkness. It was only when
morning dawned that the Japanese destroyer discovered that the
crew members of O-20 were swimming around and rescued them.
After a head count it turned out that 7 men were missing,
including Commander Snippe who was not wearing a life vest.
Maybe the men were hurt and drowned when the Japanese destroyer
sailed through the group of swimmers, or maybe some of the
life vests malfunctioned. As for the commander, it was probably
due to the lack of a life vest that he was lost.
The fate of the missing men remains a mystery: the commander
has been seen afloat till the passage of Uranami and the depth
charges it dropped; the other six are not accounted for as
having been outside the sub. However, there is a written statement
by the chief engineer who left O-20, together with the helmsman
as the last ones.
He states that around 20.00hrs the boat surfaced and was
prepared to run at maximum speed. After some 30 minutes he
noticed that the conning tower was caught in bright light.
After another 10 minutes the commander - in person - ordered
him a) all hands on deck and b) prepare boat for sinking.
Order a) was relayed by him by telephone to all compartments,
together with his directive to bring their Draeger vests.
Order b) took him some 10-15
minutes. He noticed that all personnel in engine room and
centre control room had left. He reported to the Commander,
put on his vest and climbed the ladders to the conning tower
were he found the helmsman and together they were swept overboard.
The officers of the O-20 were put in a prison in Hong Kong,
while the lower echelons were put to work in a camp in Kyushu.
On the 28th January 1942, 2 of the officers managed to break
through the barriers of their prison camp in Hong Kong through
the sewage system, crawling out finally at the beach of Hong
Kong. These men then fell into the hands of a local resistance
group with weapons the resisters were unfamiliar with. The
2 Dutch officers imparted their knowledge of weaponry to the
group and in exchange the resistors arranged for transport
to bring the POWs to Mainland China. From there, they managed
to contact the Dutch chargé d'affaires who arranged
for them a transport to Colombo (Ceylon) where both reported
on the 18th of April 1942 and found themselves again on a
Dutch submarine a couple of months after their escape.
From the POW that remained in the camps three died of illness
or exhaustion.
At the instigation of the Committee of Relatives of the missing
submarines O-13, O-20 and K-XVI an expedition was launched
in 2002 and on the twelfth of June 2002 O-20 was located near
Kota Baru by the team of Michael Lim and Klaas Brouwer, CEO
of the International Association of Handicapped Divers.
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