Accompanied by her sister ship which had also been discharging passengers to Tigrone, Trepang surged ahead. The two submarines raced to save the Superfortress's crew. Trepang put on full speed and arrived on the scene first. She found eight survivors in four groups of rafts, spread over about of ocean. By the time Springer arrived on the scene, Trepang had picked up seven of the fliers. Springer picked up the last man. Four other members of the Superfortress crew did not survive, either having been either trapped in the plane, killed when their burning parachutes failed, or gone missing. On 30 June 1945 En route to a rendezvous with submarine , Trepang sighted a small, troop-laden freighter — described in an official ship's history both as a 492-displacement ton minesweeper and a 600-gross register ton cargo ship, in either case armed with two 37-millimeter guns — and sank the ship with her deck guns. A dozen or so Japanese soldiers from the flaming vessel refused to be picked up and taken prisoner and so were left to drown. Subsequently patrolling off the eastern coast of Honshū, Trepang went scoreless until July 7, 1945 when she spotted a coastal convoy of three ships. She torpedoed and sank the lead ship—Koun Maru Number Two—but the other vessels conducted evasive action and sped away from the scene at full speed. Heading to seaward, Trepang suddenly shuddered under the impact of two depth-charge explosions. A solitary Japanese plane had spotted Trepangs shadow in the shallow waters and had attacked her with depth charges. All missed their mark. Given another lifeguarding assignment, Trepang stood on the alert to pick up possible downed airmen from British and American aircraft carrier strikes on the Japanese Home Islands. During this tour in July 1945, she rescued one pilot, Lieutenant, junior grade, Bill Kingston, USNR. In addition, on 14 July 1945, she witnessed a shore bombardment conducted by three battleships and a heavy cruiser against Kamaishi, Japan, during which, reportedly, Trepang sank a 100-gross register ton Lugger with her deck gun. By now, the war was moving fast, and Trepang returned to Pearl Harbor for a refit. There, she watched the tumbling succession of staggering headlines—first the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union's entry into the Far Eastern War, Japan's tentative acceptance of surrender terms, and finally, on 15 August, peace at last. Post-World War II