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

by Edward Ellsberg

  Going down in pairs, other divers attacked the deck bolts with wrenches but the work was slow. We switched to crowbars, and with them managed to rip away about eight feet of the deck in way of the valve bonnet, leaving only the steel deck beams underneath. As we had no means of burning steel successfully then, it was decided to tear these deck beams out of the ship.

  We shackled a large hook into the end of a six-inch manila line; Smith and Frazer dived to undertake the work of tearing out. Once on the bottom, they hooked the first beam near its starboard end; moused the hook with marline to prevent its slipping off; then stood clear and signaled us to heave on the line.

  On the quarterdeck of the Falcon, the boatswain’s mate took four turns of the manila line around the capstan; the winchman opened the throttle and started it revolving. Lieutenant Hartley at the rail gave the signal to heave. The line tautened and stalled the capstan. The boatswain threw on a few more turns of the line and hauled hard; the winchman opened his throttle wider and the capstan groaned as it slowly started to revolve again. The line stretched under the strain; suddenly it came free and the capstan started to race.

  “All gone below!” I heard Frazer telephone. “Take her up.”

  Hartley heaved in slowly and soon brought over our rail a steel angle bar, broken at both ends where it had torn clear of the S-51. The boatswain’s mate freed the hook and sent it down again on the descending line. Frazer secured it to a beam as before; another heave on the capstan and up came the second deck beam. Only three more required. Down went the hook, in a few minutes another signal from Frazer to heave in. The divers were making quick work of securing the hook. We heaved, broke out another beam, started to hoist it to the surface.

  The two divers, standing on the slippery deck of the submarine just abaft the conning tower, looked out through the glass ports in their helmets and watched the manila straighten and stretch as the strain came, saw the deck beam bend where the hook gripped it, suddenly tear out of the ship, and start slowly for the surface. Then to his amazement, Smith saw Frazer rise gently from the deck and start upward at the same time. Smith grabbed Frazer’s lead shoes and tried to hold him down. No use,—he felt himself being pulled from the submarine. He let go and dropped back to the deck. Frazer faded from his sight.

  Smith shouted through his telephone; the man on deck could not understand. The boatswain’s mate hoisted steadily on the capstan.

  As he was jerked off the S-51, Frazer looked up and saw his lifelines had been caught in the hook. He felt the futile tug as Smith clung to his feet, then found himself rising steadily to the surface, without decompression. He tried to signal on his lifeline, but no jerk traveled past the point where he could see his lines, none too securely caught, fouled in the point of the hook. His ears were ringing from the effects of the rapid decrease in pressure. He shouted in his telephone, “Stop heaving! Stop heaving!”

  On deck, Frazer’s telephone man caught the tone, not the words. But the tender on Frazer’s lifelines, feeling them coming slack over the rail, sensed something wrong and called out “Avast heaving!” Hartley motioned the capstan to stop. The hook was halfway to the surface.

  We got Smith clearer now.

  “Stop heaving! Frazer is foul of the hook!”

  On deck, we looked at each other in consternation. Whatever we did, Frazer was in a tight place, either from “bends” or from a “squeeze.” We started instantly to lower very gently.

  Meanwhile, Frazer, dangling from the hook ten feet above his head, felt himself stop. He was seventy feet from the bottom. He could see the slack in his lifeline hanging in a loop on the other side of the hook, which, much magnified as he saw it through the water, was not quite overhead. He streamed away from it a trifle, carried over by the current. If his lines came off the hook; he would have a free fall to the bottom.

  Frazer had been diving many years; visions of divers who had been “squeezed” before shot across his mind; the victims always had to be dug out of their helmets,—jelly.

  Frazer felt himself start slowly down, then to his horror, his lifeline slipped free of the hook. No longer supported, his lines now all slack, weighted down with two hundred pounds of lead and copper, he started a swift plunge into the abyss. His suit clung to his body; he felt as if encased in a formfitting mold which was quickly shrinking on him; his ribs started to collapse. A little more pressure as he shot lower and it would be the end.

  In this extremity, beyond all help from others, Frazer thought swiftly. One thing alone could save him,—compressed air. Plunging through the depths, death but a few seconds away, Frazer swung one hand to the control valve over his left breast. He gripped the valve handle, turned it wide open. Under high pressure a stream of air rushed through his helmet, ballooned out his suit. In spite of lead shoes and heavy diving rig, his distended suit was now buoyant. He stopped sinking, hung suspended in the water, then released a little air and floated gently down to the bottom of the sea. He landed in the midst of a school of fish, which swam around him excitedly. His head was dizzy, his chest felt weak, his ear drums ached, nearly burst from the rapid variations in pressure they had undergone.

  Frazer looked around. Several feet away the hull of the S-51 loomed up, half buried in the ocean bottom. A few steps across the hard sand, and he leaned against her bilges while he pulled himself together.

  A frayed line was hanging down the side near him. Lightening up a little, he dragged himself on board. Nearby was Smith, half crazed with anxiety about his fate. In relief, Smith hugged his shipmate. The startled fish eyed them curiously.

  Possibly a minute had elapsed since Frazer was first torn from his companion’s side.

  Kelley, Carr, Eadie, Michels, working in succession, completed the removal of the deck beams, tore away all other obstructions, exposed the valve bonnet.

  The next day, Frazer and Smith, armed with short socket wrenches, attacked the bolts holding down the cover. It took three days on their part to remove the forty bolts, and break the joint on the cover by driving wedges under it. On the fourth day, the divers pried the cover loose; held by screw clamps we hoisted it to the Falcon.

  With the bonnet gone, the next diver down, Ingram, reaching into the huge valve body, felt a pipe jammed between the valve disk and its seat. Eadie, his mate, dropped inside the engine room, and swung the valve wide open. Ingram pulled the obstruction out, a rusty piece of one-inch iron pipe, some three feet long, evidently left inside the ventilation main by some careless workman when the submarine was built. With the pipe removed, Eadie swung the valve handle over; it went home easily, latched itself in the “Closed” notch. The valve was closed.

  It had taken five days and twenty dives to close a valve that should have closed in five seconds.

  XI

  THE CONTROL ROOM

  There were three of the five main compartments on the S-51 which were undamaged. These three,—the control room, the engine room, and the motor room,—we hoped to seal up and free of water.

  We had managed to close the necessary valves in the engine room,—we now turned attention to sealing up the control room. This was the central compartment of the ship, from which its operation was directed. Overhead was the conning tower; on the port side were the bow and stern diving rudder wheels, the drainage manifolds, the myriad valves required for blowing ballasts, venting tanks, flooding for submerging.

  Amidships, the three periscopes, in their housed positions, looked like columns supporting the framing overhead. Abaft the periscopes was the mast housing well.

  On the starboard side, the main switchboard covered the whole area, with its controls for the numerous electrical appliances, from the huge switches for the main motors for submerged propulsion, to the tiny ammeters showing the current taken by the gyro compass. Abaft the switchboard was a small soundproofed room for the radio operator; just across from this was a cubbyhole with an electric range for the ship’s galley.

  The room was jammed full of apparatus; a narrow pa
ssage on the port side in front of the manifolds and a small space in front of the switchboard constituted the whole clear area. Valve wheels and control levers stuck out in every direction,—from both sides and ends of the control room, from the floor below, from the deck overhead.

  Being in surface condition when sunk, the hatches from the control room up through the conning tower were open, but unfortunately these hatches were so small that it did not appear possible for a diver in his bulky suit to get through them. The other means of access were through the door from aft leading to the engine room; through the forward door leading to the battery room; or through a special escape trunk just forward of the conning tower, called the gun access trunk.

  We specially desired to close the door in the bulkhead between control room and battery room,—this was to form the dividing wall between the damaged and the undamaged parts of the ship. But to get to this door from forward meant entering the battery room, which was the crew’s sleeping quarters, and worming aft twenty feet through a narrow passage jammed with bunks, floating mattresses, and corpses. It looked hazardous.

  To get to the door from aft meant passing through the narrow engine room door, which was difficult, and then working forward the whole length of the control room, which was dangerous.

  The gun access trunk, however, was almost vertically over the door we wished to reach, and the most important manifolds were close under it. If a diver could get through there, he would be directly at his work. We determined to enter that way.

  John Kelley and George Anderson, both small-sized divers, were chosen for the job. Kelley was a chief torpedoman, with a long experience in diving, including, together with Frazer, the long but unsuccessful attempt to raise the S-5 five years before. George Anderson was much younger. He had been raised a diver by his father but had always worked before in the relatively shallow water around the New York Navy Yard.

  Kelley, Anderson, Hartley, and I went to the S-50 to study the job. The gun access trunk was a small vertical cylinder about six feet high and four feet in diameter, located over the forward end of the control room, just in front of the conning tower and just abaft the gun. The top of the trunk stood perhaps four feet above the superstructure deck. There were two hatches in the trunk, one top and one bottom, both of which opened upward. The top hatch had a coiled spring on its hinge pins, which caused it to fly open when the catch inside was released. The lower hatch had four dogs to jam it watertight on its seat when closed. There were several small glass eyeports in the side of the trunk.

  The gun access trunk had a twofold purpose. Primarily it was intended as a means of quick entrance to the inside of the boat for the gun crew in case of need. If the submarine were chasing and shelling a merchantman, with the gun crew on deck serving their gun, the captain of the submarine could keep the Kingston valves to his ballast tanks open and ride on his air vents, ready for a “crash dive.” Should the answering fire from the merchantman come uncomfortably close, or a hostile man-of-war suddenly appear and open fire, the skipper could promptly submerge by opening his vent valves and rapidly flooding his tanks, without delaying to wait for his gun crew to get inside through the conning tower. As the boat went under, the gun crew could jump into the gun access trunk just behind them, close the outer hatch, then at their leisure open the lower hatch and enter the boat. During the late war, some German boats, not equipped with such trunks, were forced to dive so fast by approaching Allied destroyers that the gun crew could not get into the conning tower before the boat submerged and were left swimming for the enemy to pick up.

  The secondary function of the gun access trunk was to act as an escape lock for the crew of the submarine, in case they were trapped at the bottom, unable to rise for any reason. For this purpose, a compressed-air line from the ship’s air banks led to the trunk. A small wire line was shackled to the underside of the upper hatch, led downward near the floor around a small pulley, and then the wire turned upward to where it ended in an eye secured to a hook on the inside of the trunk. The pulley was secured to a sliding vertical rod which passed down through a watertight stuffing box in the deck, into the control room, where the rod terminated in a handle with a tightening screw for pulling it down.

  In case the boat were sunk with the crew or part of it still alive and able to get to the control room, escape was theoretically possible through the gun access trunk. The first man to try escape opened the lower hatch, entered the escape trunk, closed the lower hatch. His shipmates in the control room released the tightening gear on the pulley rod, allowing this rod to slide up and slack the wire attached to the upper hatch. The man in the trunk then turned on compressed air, building up the pressure inside the trunk as rapidly as possible till it equaled the weight of the water outside pressing down on the top hatch. When the pressures were equalized, he tripped the latch holding the top hatch closed, and the spring caused the hatch cover to fly open. The air inside rushed out in a large bubble; the man escaping was supposed to duck out through the open hatch in this bubble and float or swim to the surface.

  The men remaining in the control room below then hauled down on the pulley rod, tightening the wire to the upper hatch and pulling it shut. When this was done, they opened a drain valve in the bottom of the escape trunk, allowing all the water in it to drain into the control room below. The lower hatch to the trunk could then be opened and another man could enter the trunk. The process of escape was thus continued one by one by each member of the crew.

  This is the theory of operation of the air lock or escape trunk on a submarine; in deep water it has never been done; in shallow water (fifty feet down) it was tried by two officers endeavoring to escape from the sunken British submarine K-13; one rose to the surface, the other was killed in the attempt.

  I examined the gun access trunk on the S-50 carefully. The outer hatch to the trunk on the S-51 was closed. How to open it from the outside was a problem. Finally I decided it was possible to do it by smashing the glass port on the starboard side and tripping the lock under the hatch cover with a steel rod pushed through the broken port. It required a rod four feet long, with some seven different twists and bends in it to go through the eyeport at the side, clear obstructions inside, and reach up and forward in the trunk to hook around the handle of the latch. We removed an eyeport on the S-50, bent a rod to suit, and Kelley practiced reaching in and releasing the catch. It required a knack in holding the rod just right outside while fishing with the hook in the trunk, but at last Kelley became so proficient he could trip the latch nine tries out of ten.

  The tightening wire remained as an added obstacle against the hatch opening. To take care of this, the port we selected for Kelley to smash was the one closest to the wire. The blacksmith on the Vestal made us a hook-shaped knife, small enough to go through the port. A stout line was secured to the knife. Kelley was to reach inside the trunk with the knife, hook the wire, and we would cut it for him by heaving on the line from the Falcon.

  When all the tools were ready, and Kelley and Anderson were well drilled in their parts, they held one last rehearsal and then hurried aboard the Falcon. The divers were dressed, hoisted over the side, Kelley first with the tools. He disappeared off the stage in a swirl of bubbles. The tender ran out his lifelines. “On the bottom!” sang out the telephone man perched in the superstructure. We assisted Anderson to the stage, hoisted him overboard, watched him step off the stage and sink below. It was George Anderson’s first dive in deep water. His father had had a tough time on the S-51; I wondered how his son George would handle himself.

  His lines ran out steadily,—no pause in his descent. “On the bottom!” repeated Anderson’s telephone talker. George Anderson was standing by Kelley’s side, just abaft the gun on the S-51.

  While Anderson was going down, it flashed across my mind that the divers might find an obstruction in the trunk that I had not provided for in fashioning the tools. However, the men were gone. No use trying to instruct them over the telephone. It was up to
them.

  Kelley moved to the high side of the submarine and came abreast the trunk. The starboard eyeport was about even with his belt. Kelley stooped over, looked through the glass. It was utterly black inside. He drew back, hit the glass sharply with the hook, and drove the fragments of the eyeport into the trunk.

  Kelley took the rod from Anderson. Carefully, he entered it through the opening, pushed it home, lined up the handle outside truly athwartship to the trunk, and then hooked forward with the inner end. It caught the latch on his first attempt. A vigorous push aft and the latch released, but, as Kelley expected, the hatch cover stayed closed. The wire was still holding it.

  He removed the rod, exchanged it with Anderson for the hooked knife. Kelley shoved his forearm through the hole and felt around inside the trunk for the wire. He groped in vain until reaching a little forward, his fingers came in contact with it, stretched taut. He shoved in his knife, hooked the wire, telephoned up:

  “Heave on the line!”

  We heaved. It took only a moderate pull and the knife severed the quarter-inch wire. The hatch cover flew open. The way to the control room was clear.

  Kelley’s talker sang out:

  “Kelley about to enter the submarine.”

  We waited silently on deck for several minutes.

  I wondered.

  Then another message from Kelley:

  “Send down a line.” It had happened as I feared.

  We lowered a line to the submarine; a brief interval, then four jerks on the line, the signal to hoist. We hauled in slowly. A body, clad in pajamas, appeared at the end of the line. The Falcon’s motorboat ran alongside, the bluejackets reverently lifted the silent figure from the water. An Annapolis class ring shone on one finger. Shortly, wrapped in the folds of the flag, the body of Lieutenant Haselton rested on the Vestal’s quarterdeck.