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

by Edward Ellsberg

  With the seven anchors we had, and the use of the Iuka and Sagamore as portable moorings, we were able to hang on and dive in weather at least twice as bad as diving had ever been attempted before.

  There was, however, another feature which made diving in a storm dangerous and uncomfortable to the diver. The pressure of the water on him depended on the depth he was at. While coming up on the decompression stage, he would be required to stand, we will say, twenty minutes at a depth of twenty feet, and he would consequently be subjected to a pressure there of ten pounds. Now when a wave fifteen feet high swept over him, the depth of water on him would for a moment be suddenly practically doubled, and so also would the pressure on him be suddenly increased. These quickly increasing and decreasing pressures as the waves swept by, alternately stretched the ear drums in and out and caused intense pain and severe headaches; a diver who had to stand decompression on the stage near the surface when the seas started to roll high always came in violently ill. This effect was also aggravated by the rolling and pitching of the Falcon, for the decompression stage, hanging from her boom, heaved up and down through the water as we rolled, and the poor diver standing on it one minute found himself near the surface and the next roll dropped him perhaps thirty feet down.

  It was a particularly bad feature of our exposed location off Block Island, that even when the wind died out after a storm, the swells kept rolling in for a day or more later and prevented diving anyway. For a while we hoped that we might dive under such conditions from the Vestal, which was steadier than the Falcon, but this had to be abandoned when we found that the divers were getting sick from the wave motion alone.

  We struggled along, fighting the difficulties inside the submarine; fighting against lack of divers and sickness; fighting the sea which in our minds began to take on a definite personality with an apparent determination to cling to the vessel it had swallowed. The season advanced, the weather grew worse: We had averaged about one day’s work in three since arriving; the twenty-first of November came in a storm which blew steadily and from then on, day after day, each morning broke on a wild gray sea. As the wind shifted we sought protection sometimes to the eastward of Block Island, sometimes to the westward of it, and finally were driven inside the stone breakwater forming the Harbor of Refuge at Point Judith, fifteen miles to the northward. Here we lay, as the days dragged on, unable to work, crowded and uncomfortable.

  Finally came a smoother day, November 30, bitterly cold, but still calm enough. Ten days had gone by since last we dived. Our little squadron steamed out to the wreck, the Falcon sheered in among the buoys, the surfboat shuttled back and forth with the hawsers.

  We moored, picked up the buoys to the descending lines. We had only four divers left.

  Heavily muffled in woolen clothes and encased in windproof suits, the tenders and dressers worked in the biting cold to dress the first two men,—Eadie and Michels.

  They were dressed, hoisted overboard, went down. We knew diving could continue but a few days more at the best. Eadie’s job was to enter the engine room, make a last attempt to remove the body of the officer jammed over the port engine. Michels was to attend to Eadie.

  “On the bottom!”

  Eadie slipped through the hatch, Michels stood by it outside.

  A minute went by. Michels called:

  “On deck! There’s something the matter with my air. I’m coming up.”

  We heaved on Mike’s line. He needed no decompression for so brief a dive. We hauled him in, removed his helmet, tried the air valve. It seemed all right, though Michels said he had received air only in gusts.

  Meanwhile I had a report from Eadie:

  “I’ve got him by the legs, Mr. Ellsberg, but I can’t pull him free! If I tie a line on him you could pull on him with the winch up there, but I think you’d pull him in half! He’s stuck tight!”

  “Never mind, Tom!” I yelled back. “Let him stay. Come on up!”

  Eadie came out. He had been down only ten minutes; in twenty minutes more he was up, reported a little more fully.

  “The water is awful cold down there, commander. It makes it hard to see, because the faceplates on the helmet all fog up from your breath.”

  I decided to secure the boat for the winter. Bailey, our smallest diver, was dressed, dropped over the side, went down to close the hatches on the submarine’s deck, to seal up the boat as much as possible.

  Bailey landed near the gun, started forward over the slippery deck to the open torpedo room hatch. Slowly the tender hanging over the Falcon’s rail paid out his air line as the trail of bubbles marking Bailey’s progress streamed ahead, rose in great clusters through the waves, burst in a fine spray at the surface of the sea.

  The clusters of bubbles seemed to grow smaller, then ceased altogether. The lines stopped running out. The tender “fished” them carefully to make sure there was no extra slack. Suddenly the line pulled through his hands again, four quick jerks, the emergency signal!

  The tender hastily started to gather in all the slack, when the four jerks came again, feebler this time.

  A cry from the tender: “Emergency signal from Bailey! Take him up!”

  Eight bluejackets seized Bailey’s line. With frozen fingers, as the cold water dripped from the wet lines, they heaved in, hand over hand, at top speed. Bailey had been down only a few minutes, there was no need for decompression; no need for anything but haste. The stage was swung over the side, two men on it, lowered till they stood waist deep in icy water. The tenders hauled, Bailey appeared at the surface, limp, his suit clinging to his body. The men in the water dragged his weighted form onto the stage, the winchman threw in his clutch, jerked the stage and its occupants in on deck. The dressers ripped off Bailey’s helmet; his usually light face was blue and distorted, he was nearly unconscious. He murmured weakly:

  “No air, no air!”

  Bailey was carried into “the iron doctor” given a little pressure, wrapped in hot blankets.

  We tried his airhose. Nothing blew through. We increased the pressure. A block of ice blew through, then others, cylindrically shaped to suit the inside of his hose. The cold air going down to Bailey had been further chilled in its passage through the long lead of airhose submerged in ice cold water, the moisture in the air had condensed out, frozen solid, plugged his airhose.

  For the moment, the sea had won. We dared not risk further diving. With but few men left and the winter storms upon us, our chance to work was gone. Sadly we pulled up our mooring buoys and anchors, planted a buoy heavily anchored against the bow of the submarine as a marker and dragged the whistling buoy a little closer to the stern to serve as an additional mark.

  Then the expedition disbanded. The Vestal, the Falcon, and the S-50 went south to join the fleet. The other vessels returned to New York.

  XIX

  A DIVING SCHOOL

  It was driven home on me that if the S-51 were ever to rise, we were going to need many more divers than we had had. Consequently before the expedition separated, I gathered together on the Falcon all the men who had ever had any experience in diving in shallow water. There were some twenty-five of these, seamen and petty officers, who had been sent to us in the beginning as divers. They had served throughout the operation as dressers, tenders, and repairmen, but none of them had actually dived, since L’Heureux’s sad experience made it look unwise. These men were all much younger than the group who had done the work so far, but their actual diving experience, even in shallow water, was small.

  Surgeon Flotte examined the group. Twenty-two of the men he found physically qualified. These men, together with myself, entered the recompression tank for a pressure test. The surgeon ran the pressure up on us in the tank, a few pounds at a time. At forty pounds, two of the men showed signs of difficulty and they were removed through the air lock. On the rest of us, the pressure was raised to seventy pounds (equivalent to a depth of about one hundred and sixty feet). The remaining twenty men stood this pressure a few min
utes without undue symptoms of distress. After examining our hearts and lungs, the surgeon passed us all as qualified for work at the depth in which lay the S-51.

  When the other ships and divers sailed for Cuba, I kept the twenty men selected for training and started a diving school at the New York Navy Yard.

  As instructor, I had Chief Torpedoman John Kelley, who had done excellent work on the submarine and was exceptionally fitted by temperament and previous experience to teach the men. We had a steel tank sixteen feet deep set up in the shipfitter shop; this was fitted with glass ports near the bottom through which the diver could be watched.

  There were two primary objects in the training course. The first was to make each man thoroughly at home in a diving suit, so that he could work in any position underwater without having to devote his conscious endeavors merely to keeping himself out of trouble. The second aim was to make each diver able to work with tools underwater so that he might accomplish useful work.

  Aside from the need of having more divers, it was also evident that we needed some method of cutting metal underwater if we were to overcome the numerous obstacles to working on the submarine. To this end, I desired to design and develop a torch that would actually cut steel submerged, and to train myself and other divers to use it successfully. To help on this, I also kept with me Chief Torpedoman Frazer and Boatswain’s Mate Carr. Frazer had strained his heart and could do no deep diving, but in the shallow tank his diving skill was invaluable during the experiments.

  The school started in early December. Wholly forgetting the diving part, the students were given a course in handling air drills, using chipping hammers, running caulking irons, cutting out rivets, and doing various pipe fitting and plumbing jobs with Stillson wrenches. For this work, the mechanics in the Navy Yard were the instructors. No man was allowed to start diving till he showed a fair mastery of the tools. It was obvious that if he could not perform a job satisfactorily in the air and on land, it was hopeless to expect him to do it when hampered by the many difficulties encountered in a diving suit.

  So we all drilled innumerable holes in steel plates, cut out rivets, caulked leaks, made and unmade unions, unbolted flanges, assembled valves. Each man became a jack-of-all-trades, for that is what the diver must be.

  After a week of intensive tool work, we filled the tank with water and diving commenced. Kelley instructed us thoroughly in the machinery of the diving suit; showed us how to adjust our buoyancy; explained the dangers of “blowing up” and of a “squeeze”; outlined the many other dangers encountered underwater and the best ways to meet them. One by one we dived in the tank, dropped sixteen feet to the bottom. There we practiced adjustments of buoyancy, kneeling, lying down. We tried lightening ourselves by inflating our suits till we were practically ready to float up; and getting “heavy” by bleeding out as much air as we dared in order to get as heavy as possible to stay in position against a strong current.

  I found this last trick, which borders on an incipient “squeeze,” a most unusual sensation. It is done by shutting off completely the flow of fresh air at the control valve over the left breast, then opening the exhaust valve on the back of the helmet somewhat wider and slowly permitting the air in the suit to escape. As the pressure inside the helmet decreases with the escape of air, the water outside starts to press in on the body, starting on the legs first and gradually working upward. It is as if one were being tightly embraced, hugged all over, and the hug creeps up the body and grows tighter and tighter as the air goes out. When the hugged feeling reaches the chest, it is time to close the exhaust and prevent the loss of any more air. Failure to do so will result in cracked ribs as the water grips you tightly around the body; and the loss of all the air will result in a “squeeze” which even in relatively shallow water is sure to be fatal.

  In the tank we were purposely taught to come near the danger line in every operation, that we might afterwards be able to recognize how far we could safely go. And so we “blew ourselves up,” took minor “squeezes,” allowed water to leak into our suits.

  When we were familiar with the diving technique, we started using tools underwater, and I learned at first hand how hampered the diver is in carrying out the simplest task while submerged.

  By early January, I was fairly well at home in the water; my underwater torch was designed, and I started experimenting with it. It worked beautifully from the start; we had no difficulty lighting it, and after a little experience found we could cut steel underwater nearly as fast as on the surface. Kelley and I both became expert in its use; but perversely enough, Frazer, who was never going to be able to use it on the submarine, surpassed us both in speed. On a steel plate one inch thick, Frazer cut thirteen feet of steel in ten minutes,—about a foot every forty-five seconds. It was beautiful, looking through the porthole in the tank, to watch Frazer slicing through the steel plates.

  We worked along, diving every day. By the end of January, the diving class was reduced from twenty men to twelve, but these twelve gave every promise of being good divers. All young, they were getting to feel at home in their suits, and they were able to make fair progress on underwater jobs.

  Through the Navy Department, I made arrangements to have the diving class sent south at the end of January to join the Falcon, which was then with the fleet off Panama. We could do no outdoor diving in winter around New York; besides we had no deep water there. I desired to have the students start diving in deeper water to accustom themselves to it, and in the tropics even in January, conditions were ideal to finish their training before spring.

  With Kelley as their instructor, the twelve remaining student divers sailed for Panama. I stayed in New York with Frazer and Carr, and kept up in the tank, where we practised with the torch.

  In early March, I received a letter from the Falcon. The men had been aboard nearly a month, but not once had any one of them been able to make a dive. The admiral commanding totally ignored the character of the Falcon as a rescue ship; she was kept constantly employed as a minesweeper, as a tender for the submarines, and as a tugboat for towing or other uses. That she had an unfinished job in raising the S-51 to prepare for and that divers on board urgently needed training for that task was something the admiral was not interested in. The Falcon was given no opportunity to train her men.

  After some hasty correspondence which showed it was hopeless to expect anything else, I had the diving class detached from the Falcon and sent north again to resume their training in the tank. They arrived late in March, not having been in the water since leaving New York. Seven valuable weeks were lost.

  Early in April, we started diving outdoors, in the Navy Yard basin. The water there was cold, muddy, and somewhat deeper than in the tank. We could get thirty-five feet in the basin, and best of all the visibility was so poor that it accustomed the men to working under actual conditions. We used the regular diving barge as our base, and worked from morning until night to catch up the lost diving days.

  At the same time, orders went out for the reassembly of the salvage squadron. All vessels were ordered to rendezvous at New York on April 15, to refit for the expedition. The S-50 was excepted, as we felt familiar enough with the job to dispense with her at the start.

  Meanwhile, I combed the records more carefully and managed to pick up a few additional divers, qualified for wrecking work. We got the yard diver from Boston, Joe Madden; and a chief torpedoman, Sanders, from the submarine flotilla at Panama. We were to have all the divers except Ingram we had before, now recuperated,—Eadie, Michels, Smith, Wilson, Bailey, Carr, George Anderson, Eiben, and Kelley. Then there were twelve men in the diving class, including myself, making a total of twenty-four divers to start the job,—over twice as many as we had originally had.

  The middle of April, the Falcon and the Vestal came into the yard. Quickly we put aboard them the special equipment, boats, and stores needed. We mobilized the divers from their various stations and received a draft of forty extra seamen to act as dressers
, tenders, and working party.

  XX

  LOST, A SUBMARINE

  On April 23, 1926, the Falcon, carrying the divers, sailed for the wreck. We had better equipment than before, more divers; but we also knew better our enemy the sea and it was a grim group that sailed out of New York harbor on the second expedition. We stopped at Narragansett Bay to inspect our pontoons and the derrick United States; then on April 26 we steamed out to the wreck.

  The sea had a new surprise for us. Weekly during the winter, a tug from Newport had gone out, inspected our marker buoys, found them safe and in position. The last inspection had come only four days before.

  Now, however, as we approached the buoys, we found them five miles apart, the whistling buoy to the southeast of the other one. The blank gray sea rolled in between. Which buoy was correct? We could not tell. Perhaps neither was. The weather was a little hazy. From the Falcon’s low masts we could not make out land in any direction to get our bearings. We asked for radio compass bearings from various stations along the coast. We made our radio call steadily,—the stations radioed back our bearings from them. We plotted the positions given. They varied over several miles of ocean—some placed us near one buoy, some near the other. They were not accurate enough for our purposes. We steamed to the southeast and examined the whistling buoy carefully. It seemed as if it were slowly dragging its anchor. We decided it was probably out of position, steamed back to the other buoy.

  Here we anchored and hoisted out our surfboat. Boatswain Hawes started to sweep the ocean floor with a grappling hook. All day he dragged, but caught nothing. We worked all around the buoy in widening circles. As evening came, the prospect was depressing. Even using a wide sweep between two ships, there was a tremendous expanse of ocean bottom to cover between those two widely separated buoys. We might be at it for weeks.