On the Bottom: The Raising of the Submarine S-51

by Edward Ellsberg

  I dashed from his office to the admiral’s car; his two-starred flag on the running board took us through the traffic and in a few minutes I was leaving the Pennsylvania Station on my way to Washington.

  It took most of that night to convince some of the officers from the Bureau of Construction and Repair that we had a feasible plan, but even so it was impossible next day to get a favorable decision. It seemed as if the Department felt that the raising was doomed to failure, and in the existing state of mind of the press and the public, they did not care to risk another failure by the Navy. Expensive though it might be, it appeared preferable to hire a commercial company so that the burden of failure, when it came, could be assumed by them, not by the Navy itself.

  In this atmosphere, little was possible, and I felt that I had achieved a considerable measure of success when I finally obtained a postponement of any decision then and had the discussion transferred to New York.

  Back at the Navy Yard next day, reinforced by Admiral Plunkett and several of the officers who had taken part in the early rescue work, we made the proposal to let the job go outside the Navy look so ridiculous that the Navy Department representatives capitulated and agreed to let us proceed. Even the wreckmaster of the salvage company, in view of his company’s lack of equipment and submarine experience, was forced to admit the wisdom of that course.

  As he left the conference, the wreckmaster turned and delivered his parting shot:

  “I don’t know who is going to do this job, but whoever he is, he’ll wish before he gets through that he had been born a girl baby!”

  Admiral Plunkett lost no time. Inside of ten minutes, orders had gone to the shops, and the construction of the pontoons for the salvage job started.

  V

  THE SALVAGE PROBLEM

  The S-51 was a vessel of one thousand tons surface displacement. Our task was to lift this weight one hundred and thirty-two feet to the surface, meanwhile working in the open sea, and then tow the ship one hundred and fifty miles to New York, the nearest harbor with a suitable drydock.

  Ordinary lifting methods were ruled out, first because no derricks existed capable of lifting so much weight, and second because of the impossibility of working them at sea even if the derricks were obtainable.

  We felt that we could seal up the undamaged after half of the boat and, by expelling the water, restore about four hundred tons of buoyancy, but that seemed to be the maximum that could be realized from the boat herself. The remainder of the buoyancy would have to be provided elsewhere.

  In conference with the Navy Department, it was agreed to use submersible pontoons, which the divers were to attach to the hull, and the Navy Yard immediately started to build six such pontoons, each with a lifting capacity of eighty tons. The Navy owned two more, which had been used eleven years before to lift a small submarine from forty feet of water. These old pontoons were too weak to work in deep water, but we reinforced them while we built the new ones. That was to give us eight pontoons with a total lifting force of six hundred and forty tons, but it would take about four weeks to build the six new pontoons.

  For a diving ship, the U.S.S. Falcon, Lieutenant Henry Hartley commanding, was assigned. The Falcon, an oceangoing tugboat, had been built as a minesweeper during the war, and afterwards converted to a rescue ship. She was small, only one hundred and eighty feet long, but well suited for the job. She carried special air compressors for diving and salvage work, extra wrecking pumps, a recompression chamber, and special winches and bitts for handling lines.

  Obviously the Falcon was too small to berth all the divers, tenders, and officers required, and there was no room on her for shop machinery, extra boats, or stores. To provide room for these, Admiral Plunkett asked for the repair ship Vestal, Captain Tomb commanding, a large vessel fitted out as a floating machine shop for the fleet. The Vestal had a foundry, blacksmith shop, machine shop, carpenter shop, and large storerooms. She was well provided with small boats, and had ample room for the extra men we required.

  As a rehearsal vessel, a sister ship of the S-51 was assigned,—the S-50, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Lenney.

  To help the Falcon in mooring, for handling pontoons, and for general service, two seagoing tugboats, the Iuka, Chief Boatswain Augustine, and the Sagamore, Chief Boatswain Cregan, were attached to our squadron. A smaller tug, the Penobscot, Chief Boatswain’s Mate Ashland, was detailed as a despatch boat, to make daily trips to New London, fifty miles away, which was our shore base, and bring out stores, provisions, and mail.

  The salvage squadron then consisted of six ships,—Falcon, Vestal, S-50, Iuka, Sagamore, and Penobscot. The whole squadron was placed under the charge of the Commandant of the Submarine Base, New London, Captain Ernest King, who in addition to his duties at New London was designated Officer in Charge, Salvage Squadron. Captain King was unfortunately compelled to divide his time between his duties at New London and these added ones, but he managed to spend half the time with us off Block Island.

  Admiral Plunkett designated me as Salvage Officer. I was attached to no particular ship, but worked during the day on the Falcon, had a stateroom and an office on the Vestal, and occasionally slept on the Sagamore or Iuka.

  As my assistants, I had Lieutenants Lemler and Kelly; and as a technical aide, Draftsman John Niedermair of the New York Navy Yard.

  VI

  DIVING

  Nothing that the ingenuity of man has permitted him to do is more unnatural than working as a diver in deep water. As a result of this, if a vessel sinks a few hundred feet beneath the surface of the sea, she becomes as inaccessible as if transported to a distant star.

  Still, many vessels laden with fabulous cargoes of gold have sunk in water less than a hundred feet deep. The lure of recovering this treasure developed the art of diving, but the divers of generations gone found that the sunken gold was purchased from the sea only at the price of life or health. Those who stayed down long enough to recover anything would shortly after their return to the surface be seized by terrible convulsions resulting, when quick death did not ensue, in paralysis for life. Many a diver working on the hulks of the Spanish Armada, around the coasts of England, or treasure ships off the Azores, learned this to his sorrow.

  Because of the contortions of the sufferers, the early divers gave to the disease the name of “the bends.” Its cause was long unknown, but its results were beyond question. No diver, in spite of fortune’s lure, dared go deep nor remain over a few minutes.

  Years ago, on one sunken galleon, access to the treasure room was easy; daily a Spanish diver entered, seized two bars of gold and hurriedly came up. It was slow work. At last the daily glimpse of pigs of gold piled high proved too much; cupidity overcame fear; the diver labored nearly an hour sending up a fortune in bullion. Finally the diver himself emerged, but the treasure was not for him; “bends” ending in paralysis of the spine ensued; he lived, but only to curse daily the gold which had tempted him to linger on the ocean floor.

  The growth of medical skill and in other lines finally solved the mystery of “the bends” and in a measure provided a way to minimize the effects.

  The usual diving dress consists of a copper helmet and breastplate secured watertight to a flexible canvas-covered rubber suit. The helmet is necessary to permit breathing; the suit may be dispensed with in warm shallow water, but is necessary in cold water or in deep water and is always necessary if the diver is to do any work requiring him to bend over or lie down.

  Water is heavy; as the diver descends he is compressed by the weight of the column of water over him. Over the surface of his body, for each foot he descends, an added load of almost half a ton presses on him. At one hundred and thirty feet, the total load is nearly sixty tons. To prevent the diver from being crushed into a jelly by this weight, it is necessary for him to breathe air under pressure slightly exceeding that of the water; this internal air pressure is transmitted by his lungs to his blood, and enables him to balance the external water p
ressure. The diver is then in a condition similar to that of a pneumatic tire on a heavy automobile; the tire stays rounded out in spite of the weight of the car on it because it is inflated with air under sufficient pressure to balance the load. If, however, the inner tube is ruptured and the air escapes, down comes the weight of the car and flattens out the tire. In the same way, the diver inflated with compressed air, stands the weight of the sea pressing on him; but if through any accident, he loses the air pressure in his helmet, like a trip hammer down comes the weight of the sea and crushes him as flat as any blown-out tire.

  As he goes deeper, a diver must increase the air pressure in his suit to correspond; it is therefore most dangerous for him if working on the deck of a ship to fall off suddenly into deeper water and be thereby subjected to greater pressure. If, under such circumstances, he cannot simultaneously raise his air pressure, he is crushed by the water into his helmet, and many men have died from such a “squeeze”; the latest instance occurring to a civilian diver in shallow water in the East River while we were working off Block Island.

  It is directly due to this pressure that “the bends” arise. To exist underwater the diver must breathe air under heavy pressure. For the depth at which the S-51 lay, the air had to be compressed to five times its normal pressure. With each breath the diver had to inhale five times his ordinary quantity of air. The large excess of oxygen consumes the tissues much more rapidly than is normal and produces a dangerous state of exhilaration somewhat akin to that caused by breathing pure oxygen; overlong exposure will cause “oxygen poisoning.”

  But it is the inert component of the air, nitrogen, which is the cause of “the bends.” Nitrogen, which forms four-fifths of our atmosphere, is ordinarily breathed in and out, having no effect except to dilute the oxygen. However, when the air is much compressed, conditions change. Under heavy pressure, the nitrogen entering the lungs, instead of being all exhaled again, dissolves in the blood, and the heavier the pressure and the longer the period of exposure, the greater the quantity of nitrogen dissolved.

  While the diver remains under pressure, that is, stays on the bottom, he notices nothing. The nitrogen goes into solution, the blood remains a clear liquid. But when the pressure is decreased as the diver rises to the surface, trouble starts.

  A bottle of ginger ale is a good illustration of what happens. There is a gas, carbon dioxide, dissolved under pressure in the ginger ale. As long as the cap remains on the bottle, there is no evidence of the gas, the liquid inside is clear. But when the cap is removed, the pressure is released with a “pop,” the gas bubbles out of solution, and the bottle froths over.

  In the same way, when the pressure is released on the diver by his coming to the surface, the nitrogen dissolved in his blood bubbles out and forms a froth in his blood. These bubbles clog the arteries, impeding circulation, and causing convulsions or “the bends.” In many cases, the bubbles gather in the spinal column, where they affect the nerves, causing paralysis. In less aggravated cases, a favorite place for bubbles is in the joints, resulting in great pain.

  When the cause of “the bends” was finally discovered, the remedy was indicated. It lies in bringing the diver to the surface in a series of short rises, with a pause at each stage; lifting him enough each time so that under the decreased pressure some nitrogen will come out, but not decreasing the pressure so much at each step as to allow bubbles of any size to form. The “decompression time,” that is, the length of time at each stage and the number of stages, depends on the amount of nitrogen originally absorbed, which in turn depends on the depth to which the diver has gone and the duration of his stay there. Consequently, for every depth, there is a limit to the time the diver can stay down (which period decreases rapidly as the depth increases), and the length of time the diver must spend in “decompressing” increases rapidly the deeper he goes and the longer he stays down.

  When the causes of “the bends” had been laid bare, and proper tables of decompression worked out by experiment, diving in deep water became practical enough to permit work to be done after a fashion, though at great expense and considerable hazard.

  But aside from his troubles from disease, the diver has many physical handicaps to struggle against. His diving suit, with helmet, lead belt, and lead shoes, weighs about two hundred pounds, and is both heavy and cumbersome. When fully dressed, the diver is quite bulky, and much impeded in action by his suit. Movements underwater are slow; if he stoops over or lies down, a different adjustment of his air valves must be made; a fog gathers on the face plate of his helmet and makes vision through it difficult; communication with the surface is always trying, even with a telephone, because of the roar of the compressed air through the helmet which makes it hard for the diver to hear. On the other hand, it is difficult for those on the surface to understand the diver, for when he passes below ninety feet depth, the air pressure causes his voice to lose its distinctive quality, his words sound all “mushed” up and become exceedingly difficult to understand. As an illustration of this, under such air pressure, a diver can no longer whistle. The “thick” air changes everything.

  Everything that the diver sees is magnified by the water, but he rarely sees much. In northern seas, the water is nearly opaque, and objects ten feet away are often invisible. It resembles looking through a ground glass window; light comes through, but nothing is seen. Conditions are often even worse than this; if the bottom is muddy, fine silt rises up in the water in clouds and objects even a foot away are invisible.

  Under such conditions, even powerful lights cannot pierce the water, and a diver a few feet from a boat has no idea where to look for it.

  VII

  THE DIVERS

  Our most immediate need was to get sufficient divers. We estimated that thirty were required. There being only a few qualified commercial divers on the Atlantic Coast, it seemed necessary to depend on what the Navy could supply. We combed the navy yards and the fleet for deep-sea divers, particularly for those who had worked on wrecking jobs before. From northern waters we obtained Chief Torpedomen Frazer of the Falcon, Michels from the Submarine Base, Ingram from the Torpedo Station, Smith, Eiben, and Wilson from the Experimental Station. From Newport came Chief Gunner’s Mate Eadie, then in the Naval Reserve Force, and Gunner’s Mate Bailey; from the New York Navy Yard, Frank Anderson and his son George, one a shipwright, the other a rigger; from the Light Cruiser Squadron came Boatswain’s Mate Carr; from a destroyer Chief Torpedoman Kelley. These men we knew about; they had worked on wrecks and in deep water; they were proved divers. But they were not half enough. To complete the crew, we asked for and had transferred to the Falcon every bluejacket whose record showed any qualifications as a diver.

  The divers were of various types. Frazer and Michels were six-footers, powerful and broad. Eadie, Anderson, Carr, Eiben, and Wilson were of medium build. Smith, Ingram, and Kelley were slight in size, while Bailey was actually small. Most of them were quiet men, unexcitable, of more than usual intelligence. There was in their makeup no spirit of bravado, no sign of daredevil dispositions. They had all proved themselves good divers, but they were of such varied types physically, it was impossible to tell from them what a diver should look like. Every one had had long service in the Navy; nearly all were married.

  VIII

  OFF BLOCK ISLAND

  On October 14, 1925, the Falcon sailed for Block Island, followed shortly by the Vestal and the other ships. At the wreck, bubbles and oil no longer marked the spot, but a buoy secured to the submarine located it immediately.

  Lieutenant Hartley’s first step was to prepare the site for long-continued diving operations. It is of the first importance to the diver that the vessel from which he is receiving his air supply shall remain steady in position while he is at the bottom. The few hundred feet of hose from him to the ship constitute literally his thread of life. If a heavy sea or a sudden squall should swing the diving ship away, especially while he is inside the wreck below, his airhose will be sna
pped off and he will be left to die.

  Anchoring the diving ship is not enough. She will swing to her anchor all the time; if the wind or sea change, she will be swept far out of position. The diving ship must be firmly held over the submarine in spite of wind or sea so long as a man is on the bottom.

  To accomplish this, Hartley planted six anchors in a circle about the S-51, the diameter of the circle being about six hundred feet. To each anchor was attached a short length of chain, and to that a double wire hawser which led to the surface where it was secured to a can buoy we borrowed from the Lighthouse Service. We then had floating in the sea a ring of buoys,—one ahead, one astern, and two on each side of the S-51. Before diving commenced, the Falcon was to steam into the circle, heading into the sea to the windward buoy, and secure a seven-inch manila hawser to it. Dropping back a little to leeward, a small boat was to run lines in succession to the other buoys, and secure them to rings there by pelican hooks in the ends of the hawsers. With the lines all secured, the Falcon could center herself over the wreck by hauling in or paying out on the various hawsers; when in position the hawsers radiated from her like the spokes of a wheel and served, in spite of changes in the direction of wind or sea, to hold her over the S-51. To make safety for the divers doubly sure, we made each diving hose six hundred feet long, of which only about two hundred and fifty feet was ordinarily paid out. The other three hundred and fifty feet hung in a coil on deck as a reserve for running out to the diver in case a hawser should part on us and let the Falcon swing away.

  It took two days with the improvised gear Hartley had on the Falcon to plant the heavy anchors; at the end of that time all the ships had arrived and we were ready to begin. The Falcon steamed in, moored herself, and the salvage work was under way.