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

by Edward Ellsberg

  Kelley wasted no time. He crawled aft where the open end of the ventilation main leading to the motor room now faced us. Out came his diving knife. Kelley started to scrape away the rough pieces of gasket still stuck to the flange.

  Once more I called the Falcon.

  “Send down the blank and a new gasket!” I waited at the descending line for them and soon they appeared, hanging from a small manila line at the end of the ever-present guide shackle.

  I unscrewed my diving knife, cut them loose, and started back to join Kelley. The blank steel plate had already been drilled to suit the flange, and cemented to it was a rubber gasket to make the joint watertight. Kelley took the blank, and while I held it in position against the end of the ventilation pipe, he shoved through a few bolts and set up the nuts. Both of us put in the remaining bolts, some sixteen altogether, and tightened them up with the wrenches. We were ready to come up in a little less than an hour. That chattering ventilation valve in the motor room was sealed off completely.

  George Anderson went down while Kelley and I were decompressing on the stage. He slid down near us, clusters of bubbles streaming out of the back of his copper helmet, leaving a trail like a skyrocket. I could see he was carrying an extra airhose.

  Anderson secured the hose to the valve over the motor room which he and Kelley had screwed into the hull the autumn before. When finally the stage with Kelley and me swung dripping onto the Falcon’s deck, that hose was already connected and Anderson also was on his way up. I shifted from my diving dress to an old uniform and joined the deck force on the quarterdeck. A sailor was coupling the motor room airhose to the blowing manifold just over the Falcon’s stern capstan.

  It was an everyday scene, but for the men there, a rather tense moment. We had worked for months to seal up that motor room, each time before something had gone wrong, but now we had it and we were ready to blow out the water.

  Niedermair opened the air valve, sent air at one hundred pounds pressure rushing down the hose, and in his notebook jotted down the time. He estimated the compartment would take two hours to empty of water.

  After blowing a moment, he shut off the air, balanced off on his gauge and read the pressure in the motor room. It was forty-nine pounds. To expel all the water, we would have to drive it down sixteen feet to the bottom of that room, when the pressure in the compartment would have to rise to fifty-seven pounds.

  Niedermair started blowing again, stopping every few minutes to balance off and read his gauge. The pressure rose slowly, showing the water was going lower. We breathed more freely.

  “Look!” Hawes plucked me by the arm and pointed to a spot just astern of the Falcon. A stream of bubbles was rising over the stern of the submarine where a moment before had been only quiet water. Niedermair shut off the air to the hose. The bubbles stopped. He turned the air on again. In about half a minute another stream of bubbles appeared in the same spot.

  There was no doubt about it. There was another leak somewhere in the motor room. We blew a while longer but the air pressure inside the submarine rose no higher. The air was coming out as fast as it went in.

  Carr went down to investigate. He was below only a short while, and came up with only forty minutes’ decompression.

  “There’s a bad leak in her side, commander. I couldn’t reach it from the deck, but I tied my lifeline to the rail and hung down the starboard side just opposite the hatch to the motor room. It’s a bad seam in her hull. The bubbles are coming out where two of the plates are riveted together. I could slip the edge of my knife into the joint.”

  Niedermair broke out the hull plans, and Carr showed us the spot. Halfway down the starboard side, near the forward end of the motor room was a vertical butt where two heavy steel plates joined. Evidently they had not been as closely fitted in building as they should have been and the joint had been caulked by splitting the edges of the two plates and forcing the metal together in a feather edge. The butt must have been tight before the accident, but the long submersion had apparently corroded away the feather-edge caulking and left the joint open nearly an eighth of an inch.

  “The seam is leaking for about four feet,” Carr added.

  There was no help for it. We had to caulk it up.

  To make sure of the job, we decided first to fill the open seam with lead, caulked firmly in, then split the steel plate edges again and caulk them iron to iron in the regular manner.

  Eadie was chosen for the job, Eiben to help. We made up long strings of braided lead, weaving them from fine electrical fuse wire, and gave Eadie a set of wood caulking tools for that part of the job. He was to caulk the lead braids in between the two plates just as the old-time shipwrights used to caulk oakum in between the planks on the side of a wooden ship. Then with a regular air-operated caulking machine, he was to split the steel plates with his chisels and force them together over the lead with a fuller.

  Joe Eiben went down first, taking a small iron stage with him. This Eiben rigged, hanging down the side of the submarine below the leak, for Eadie to stand on. Eadie slid down, taking his large assortment of tools and equipment in a canvas bag. (It was carefully checked before he dived to make sure no possible thing he might want was forgotten).

  On the bottom, Eiben tended from the deck while Eadie stood on his little stage against the side of the hull and caulked in the lead braids with the hand tools. String after string went in and was hammered down, before the gap between the plates started to fill up. At last the lead had plugged the opening, and the mallet in Eadie’s hands had driven it firmly home. Tom Eadie then took the air-driven hammer, slipped in a chisel, braced it against the plate, and squeezed the trigger. On the Falcon, listening on his telephone, I heard the clatter of the chisel against the steel hull. It paused at brief intervals, but otherwise kept up a steady rat-tat-tat for thirty minutes. Then it ceased.

  In a faraway tone, I heard Eadie call:

  “On deck! Put the air pressure on the motor room again!”

  Niedermair turned on the air. We waited a short while. Eadie called again.

  “The seam is tight where I caulked it, but it’s leaking further down now. I’ll caulk that!” His hammer started drumming away again.

  We might have expected it. Any boilermaker knows how caulking part of a seam is apt to spring leaks from the vibration in the rest of the seam ahead of the chisel.

  Eadie chased the leak along with his chisel, caulking seven feet of seam altogether before he came to the end of the joint and finally stopped the bubbles from escaping. Then loaded down with tools, Eadie and Eiben were hauled up to the stage. They had been down an hour and twenty minutes.

  Weeks later, I examined that job. No boilermaker, working with all the facilities of a shop around him, ever did a neater caulking job than the one turned out by Tom Eadie, clinging to a little stage against the S-51 at the bottom of the sea. And the wonder grew when I remembered that every time he pressed the trigger of his machine, the escaping air, which on the surface cannot even be seen, sent up clouds underwater of bubbles which totally blotted out from his sight the hammer, the chisel, and the steel plates that he was caulking. He had done the job, once the trigger was pulled, wholly by a sense of touch.

  Next day we resumed our blowing on the motor room. Again we clustered round the manifold, while Niedermair manipulated the valves. The air went through steadily. We blew for half an hour, tested the pressure, found it balanced at fifty-three pounds. The water in the room had dropped eight feet, leaving the motor room half dry. We blew again, sure now that we had it, when for the fifth time since we had started work on that room, another stream of bubbles began rising to the surface. The bubbles this time were too far aft to be over the motor room itself but they were coming from the motor room without doubt, for whenever we stopped blowing, the bubbles stopped.

  A little investigation of the blueprints gave the probable explanation. Just abaft the motor room was a tiny space called the tiller room which held the rudder head and the ste
ering gear. A watertight bulkhead separated it from the motor room. Halfway down on this bulkhead was a hinged manhole plate, just large enough for a sailor to crawl through and oil up the rudder gear.

  We had often wondered whether this manhole cover was open or closed. The three survivors of the S-51 had told us it was ordinarily closed. Now we knew it must be open. We had forced the water in the motor room low enough so that the level was just even with the top of this manhole. Air was passing into the tiller room and leaking out of the tiller room in some manner.

  Once more a diver went down to search for a leak,—a new diver this time. Davis, torpedoman third class, one of the men who had trained with me, was sent to investigate. Slowly he crawled aft from the conning tower, came to the motor room, searched along the deck on both sides to where the superstructure and the deck ended. No sign of any leak. He slipped off the deck to the cylindrical hull of the submarine, very fine here as it approached the stem, and straddling one leg down each side of the tail, hitched himself aft, a little at a time.

  About twelve feet from the tip of the submarine, he found the leak. Here the smooth hull of the ship had a dent nearly six inches deep and several feet in diameter. In the center of the dent, two rivets had pulled out of the shell, leaving holes an inch wide. From these, two jets of air rushed out, merging into one stream of bubbles constantly floating up.

  Davis came up, reported. The leak puzzled us. The S-51 of course had no such dent in her when she sailed on her last voyage. The City of Rome had rammed her forward, and could not have damaged her stern. We had not worked there with any weights which might have made that mark. Finally we concluded that during the winter, while we were away, some vessel had unknowingly dropped anchor right over the S-51, and the anchor, bouncing off her stern, had caved it in and pulled two rivets out of the shell. At any rate, there was the dent and the holes, and we were losing air from the motor room as fast as we sent it down.

  From Davis’ description, we cast a dozen special lead plugs to fit the holes, with their diameters varying slightly, so that in the set, the diver would be sure to find two which would fit. Each lead plug had an oak wedge in its base, which would rest against the steel frame just beneath the shell, and expand the base of the plug inside the boat while the diver riveted the head of the plug over from the outside.

  A new, but not an inexperienced, diver was chosen for this task. Gunner’s Mate Wickwire of the Panama Submarine Flotilla, whom somehow we had missed before, volunteered and came north in May. His stocky build and cheerful disposition (unusual for a diver, for most of them are quiet men) made him a welcome addition to our force.

  He practiced on some holes we drilled in the Falcon’s deck till he was quite familiar with the plugs; then armed with a hammer and with the dozen plugs tied to his belt like a string of sausages, he went down alone. Where he was to go, the submarine was so narrow two men could not work together.

  Wickwire landed on the submarine, and started out, but like many a diver before him, he lost his sense of direction and went forward from the conning tower, instead of aft. Not till he reached the gun on the forecastle did he begin to wonder. Then he asked:

  “On deck! Has this submarine got a gun on her stern?”

  I imagined what had happened.

  “No!” I yelled. “You’re on the bow! Go the other way!”

  We started blowing air into the motor room to help him locate the holes. Wickwire retraced his steps, clambered over the deck aft. Like Davis, he straddled the narrow stern and slid out along it till he came to the dent. He tried to fit plugs in the holes. They promptly blew out of his hands.

  “On deck! Stop blowing on the motor room! I can’t do a thing with that compressed air whistling out!”

  Fortunately the plugs were lashed to his belt. He retrieved them. Niedermair shut off the air, but it was several minutes before the pressure blew down enough in the motor room to permit Wickwire to examine the holes.

  Again he tried his plugs. A one-inch-diameter plug suited one hole perfectly. Wickwire pushed it through a little till its base touched inside, then carefully riveted it over with his hammer, upsetting it gradually, and filling the countersink left by the old rivet. He trimmed away the excess lead, flattened out the point of the plug, and left it beautifully flushed off with the shell.

  Wickwire tried all his remaining lead plugs in the other hole but none would go. The old rivet from that hole was still partly jammed underneath it and the plugs would not slide through. Even the smallest diameter plug I had given him would not enter.

  Gripping the submarine tightly between his legs to hold himself, Wickwire hammered desperately at the remains of the old rivet, trying to drive it clear, but it was firmly jammed between shell and frame and he could not dislodge it. He changed his tactics. Making sure his hammer was still lashed to his belt, he dropped the hammer and unscrewed his diving knife. Then, laying a medium-sized lead plug on the hull of the submarine, he placed the blade of his knife on it lengthwise, meanwhile holding the plug between thumb and forefinger. Cautiously retrieving his hammer, he brought it down sharply on the knife, driving it through the plug. Instantly he gripped the two halves to prevent them from dropping overboard.

  He tried half a plug in the hole. It slipped through nearly an inch. As before, he peened down the plug, flattening and expanding it out till the countersink outside was flushed off. Then, still straddling the stern, he pushed himself backward till he came to a broader part of the hull and started up the descending line.

  Once again Niedermair turned on the air. Steadily he blew. The water went lower, the pressure increased. Finally the gauge registered fifty-seven pounds. Not a leak anywhere. The motor room was dry at last!

  XXIV

  THE TORCH SOLVES A PROBLEM

  The first week in May, the S-50 rejoined the squadron. All the new divers were taken on board her, to make them familiar with the S-51, while the older divers examined her to refresh their memories.

  The work on the first pair of pontoons had taught us something about the troubles handling them. We proceeded with the second pair with the trepidation born of experience.

  The second pair of pontoons were to go down alongside the bow. This, like the stern, was a little clear of the bottom owing to the rocker shape of the submarine’s keel. Michels and Bailey passed a reeving line under her forward, some thirty feet from the stem, where the keel just started to bed itself in the clay. This line ran just abaft the bow diving planes. The same two divers also passed a second reeving line under about fifteen feet from the bow, then came up.

  On deck, we rove a heavier cable down, spliced into the end of the after small line, and with this heavier manila down, we pulled down one side and up the other one of our wire lines. We started to repeat the process on the forward reeving line, but to our disappointment, the line slipped up the curved stem and out from under the bow, and the whole line came to the surface.

  We had to dress two more divers and send them down to repass the forward reeving line. They tied two small lines together under the stem, waited while we sent a four-inch manila line down the starboard side and hauled it to the surface on the port side, then had to come up.

  Carefully leading both ends of our large line aft to hold it from slipping out, we tied it to a wire hawser, which we fed out to starboard while we hauled up the manila line to port. We had paid out about sixty feet on the wire when, in spite of our precautions, the line once more slipped out from under the bow. It was evident that something positive was necessary to keep our lines then and our chain later from running up the curved stem and getting out from under the boat.

  I thought of a trap for the line. About ten feet from the bow, the ship had a mushroom anchor fitted into her keel, with a cylindrical shank that ran about six feet up into a hawsepipe between the torpedo tubes. If we could only drop that anchor, the shank would still stick several feet up into the hawsepipe when the mushroom hit the bottom, which was only three feet below the keel. An
y lines rove abaft that point would be stopped by the anchor shank from slipping any further forward. In addition, with the anchor out, there would be a recess left in the keel into which our forward chain would probably slide when the lifting strain came, and that would prevent the chain from slipping forward and out.

  Letting go the anchor, however, was a conundrum. The releasing gear was inside the torpedo room forward. While several of our best divers had tried the fall before to enter that room, none had succeeded because the small, peculiarly sloped hatch intended mainly for loading torpedoes into the boat had proved inaccessible to a man in a diving rig. While I believed that in a pinch, Wilson or Eadie might do it, I hesitated to ask. Meanwhile, I looked over the S-50 for an easier method.

  Examining her with Lieutenant Commander Lenney, I found that the cable for the mushroom anchor, which was a heavy wire hawser, ran forward from a reel over the torpedo room through the nonwatertight superstructure forming the forecastle, to a pulley over the top of the hawsepipe. It passed from the forward side of the pulley down the hawsepipe where it shackled into the anchor. From the outside of the ship, the cable was inaccessible except at one point where it passed through a deck locker. The little hatch over this locker, about one foot square, could be thrown back from the deck, and the anchor cable was then visible about three feet below the deck.

  The answer was obvious. I sent the surfboat back to the Falcon. It returned immediately with Kelley. I showed him the little opening in the deck, explained the task to him. The cable was too far down to touch with his hand, but he was to push the torch through the hole and burn the wire cable in two.

  We went back to the Falcon. While Kelley was being dressed, we hooked up the torch to the gas bottles. In a few more minutes Kelley went down, the torch dangling from his waist. Landing on a line tied to the gun, he walked cautiously along the forecastle, found the little deck locker near the bow, and threw back the cover. He could not feel the cable as it was beyond the reach of his fingers; he could not see it for it was black inside the water-filled forecastle.