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

by Edward Ellsberg

  Carr went down next morning to install the first wire lashing. In a somewhat choppy sea he was hoisted overboard, dragged to the forward descending line (attached to the S-51’s gun) and started his descent.

  Carr was perhaps halfway to the bottom when on the surface, over nearly the whole length of the submarine, there was a sudden burst of bubbles lasting a few seconds, then solid water again as the waves rolled on. Something had happened below. We wondered what.

  Carr stopped taking out lifeline. Evidently he had landed but the customary “On the bottom!” was conspicuous by its absence. Grube, his partner, stood on the stage, helmeted, ready to go overboard, but till Carr reported himself safely down, we could not put another diver over. The minutes went by, Grube sagged under the weight of his equipment. I took Carr’s phone.

  “Hello, Carr! Are you all right?”

  “On deck! The descending line is tangled in the bridge and I’m mixed up with the periscopes! There’s something wrong with this boat, I don’t know what. Send Grube down to help clear the descending line!”

  We hoisted Grube over, he landed near Carr and reported. Both worked in silence for ten minutes when Carr bellowed up excitedly.

  “On deck! I just doped out what’s wrong. The submarine has rolled over! Instead of heeling to port, she’s listed way over to starboard, a lot worse than she used to be to port! I’m down on deck now, hanging on to the gun. The boat’s leaning about twenty degrees to starboard. You can’t walk on the deck any more!”

  I heard the report with mingled joy and alarm. At last we had moved the S-51 and broken the suction! The one unknown was conquered. If we could move the boat, we could lift it.

  The alarm was due to the uncertainty as to what damage might have occurred when she suddenly rolled to starboard and also how her new position would effect our future work.

  “Lucky we got that engine room hatch secured,” I confided to Hartley. “We’d never get it in place with the deck sloping the way she is now!”

  Carr went ahead with the lashing job. One wire he got secured, the other would no longer fit with the changed position of the submarine. He came up with a new measurement.

  Eadie went down to inspect. He found the stern of the submarine had lifted perhaps five feet off the bottom, while the bow had buried itself a few feet deeper. In its present position, the submarine’s stern was lying over, partly covering the after starboard pontoon as it rested on the bottom. In going from bow to stern Eadie had walked on the high side of the ship which was level now; he had not been able to walk along the deck.

  I was fearful that if the submarine or the buoyant pontoons lost any air, the stern of the submarine would settle down again and crush in the pontoon on which it was resting, or at least jam it down so tightly that we could not float it up and level it off.

  The pontoons which we had afloat over the submarine were all leaking and we could see air from them constantly bubbling to the surface. When they left the boiler shop at New York, the steel cylinders had all been tested and made tight, but their journey from the Navy Yard to Newport on barges, the strains they had undergone in being hoisted overboard by derricks at Newport, the towing from Newport to the wreck, and finally the heavy pounding by the seas against the sides of the Falcon which they had undergone while being lowered, had all combined to spring seams and rivets. Every pontoon leaked,—the wonder was that they held air at all.

  A storm was blowing up and the sea was getting rough. We would soon have to leave and perhaps before we could get back, the floating pontoons would lose enough air to let the stern sink down hard on the after pontoon. To get that pontoon clear was important. Niedermair connected its hoses to the Falcon’s manifold and blew enough air into it to make it just float off the bottom, in the hope that it would slip clear, but it failed to move. We gave it a little more air, but still it remained imprisoned. More buoyancy was not wise. It might suddenly come clear, float upwards with a heavy pull, and jerk the port pontoon, its mate, hard enough against the other side of the submarine to dent in the motor room and ruin its watertightness.

  By now the wind was blowing harder and the seas rolling up. The Falcon began to strain on her regular moorings and the additional ones run out to the Iuka and the Sagamore, anchored to windward. It was too late to send more divers down, but a new dilemma presented itself. In the storm coming up, the lightened submarine would probably roll a little from the disturbance set up in the water on the bottom. If it did, the stern pontoon, released, would float up on the starboard quarter, till it brought up on the chains and stopped just above the motor room deck. And there, projecting above the stern of the submarine like a spear, was a heavy steel mast, six feet high, to which the after radio antenna and net clearing lines had once been attached. With the boat lying far over on its starboard side, this mast was pointed so that when the pontoon floated up and swung to the currents, it would be driven against the top of the mast and be punched full of holes.

  The mast had to come off before we left. Kelley, who knew best how to handle the torch, and Carr, who had some experience with it, had both been down already. None of the other divers had had any training with the torch, except myself. There was strong disagreement on the Falcon over any further diving. The weather was such that ordinarily we would have unmoored and steamed clear before the sea reached the state it was in. If it had been a case of any other diver going down, we would have left, but I could go myself when I couldn’t ask anyone else to go and I settled the argument by electing to dive. I dressed hurriedly, was hoisted overboard, seized the torch, and slid hastily down the descending line to avoid the surging pressure of the surface waves in my ears. Forty feet down, the sea was calmer, and I went a little more slowly till I landed on the port side of the submarine.

  “On the bottom,” I reported, and walked aft on the port side of the hull, clinging to the rail till the rail ended, and then balanced myself on the curved side of the submarine as I went some fifty feet further aft to where the stub mainmast rose from the center of the narrow deck. I tried to sit on the high edge of the deck to work but slid downwards and only by grabbing the tall light set in the deck just abaft the mast did I keep from going overboard.

  I straddled the mast with both legs, and lighted off the torch. It burned with the usual roar, especially noticeable in the silence of the deeps. Hanging down the steep deck, with one hand clinging to the tail light, I swung the torch to the base of the mast, just above the deck planking, and burned into the steel. A stream of white sparks flashed through the water.

  It was slow work. I had much trouble hanging on and was unable with only one hand to guide the torch very well, but I succeeded in getting a ragged cut completely across the starboard half of the mast. From where I hung, I could not reach the opposite side of the mast at all, and had to drag myself up the deck and on to the port side, where I stretched out flat on the steel side of the submarine and tried to reach down to the mast.

  Half an hour had gone by since I had dived, and but half the job was done. If only I could have reached it decently, I might have burned the whole mast off in five minutes, but as I lay I barely touched the near side at all, and that only by stretching out the torch to the limit. I started on the port side, cut half an inch when my arm slipped and I had to start over. Meanwhile, every few minutes I was getting phone calls from the Falcon, which I tried to disregard, but which nevertheless annoyed me.

  “Are you done yet?”

  “No, let me alone!”

  I burned another inch. Again a voice in my ears:

  “Sea very bad up here. We’re afraid the mooring lines will break any minute.”

  Where I was, everything was calm. The water was quiet, the submarine immovable, no sign of life except the blazing torch and myself. It did not seem possible a storm was raging overhead.

  “On deck! Don’t bother me. I’m nearly done!”

  I reached for the mast again, cut across the port side of it to the after end, leaving only about an
inch of metal unburned where the inaccessible steel curved away from me. I rolled over, tried to find a position where I could reach it, but failed. I shifted the torch to my left hand, hung on with my right, and clumsily managed to burn through another half inch. Another call came from on deck, Hartley’s voice this time.

  “Are you done, commander?”

  “No, another minute or two! Leave me alone!”

  “Sorry, but I can’t hold on another minute. The seas are sweeping our stern and the mooring hawsers are singing like bowstrings. They’ll let go any second now!”

  I looked at the mast. Just a thread of steel left uncut which kept it from toppling over. If it touched the pontoon, it would snap off without doing any damage.

  I put out the torch, gave four jerks on my lifeline. In a trice, I was jerked off the boat, hauled up forty feet well clear of everything. Dangling on my lifelines as I went up, I could see that already we were rapidly swinging away from the submarine. Apparently Hartley was slacking off his weather lines and heading into the sea to relieve the strain.

  I got only a few minutes decompression at eighty feet, a few more minutes at sixty feet, where I began to feel the sweep of the waves, and then I was hastily run up the rest of the way to the surface without any more decompression, to avoid the danger of burst ear drums from wave pressure variations.

  It was an amazing change from the calm of the bottom to the breaking crests and the tossing waves as I was jerked through the surface and swung drunkenly in on the swaying stage. A huge wave broke over our counter as I dropped on deck, and soaked the bears as they struggled with my helmet. Through my faceplate, I glimpsed the port quarter mooring line, taut as an iron bar, going over the rail. Off came my helmet. Still cumbered by the rest of my diving rig, with a bear on either side I hurried for the recompression tank. Off to port I could see Hawes and the surfboat crew lifting high on the waves, trying to trip the pelican hook on a mooring buoy.

  I reached the recompression tank, crawled through the door. Two bears followed to undress me. Slam went the steel door, and a loud hissing followed as the air shot in and quickly built up to a pressure of forty pounds. My decompression started.

  Stripped of my suit, I lay down on the floor of the inner chamber, and as the pressure was gradually reduced, exercised vigorously.

  Soon the throbbing of our propeller indicated we were unmoored. We steamed away. I found it a little difficult to exercise with the Falcon heaving so erratically in the storm.

  Ninety minutes later I came out. No ill effects from “the bends.” Hartley was in his bunk, but he turned out to give me hell nevertheless.

  “That was the worst weather the Falcon ever had a diver down. It made me sick to watch our mooring lines, I never thought they’d last, the way the waves kicked up a few minutes after you went down. We were taking green seas over our stern. And you can bet I started to let go the minute I had you off the bottom!” He clung to his desk to avoid sliding away. I hung on to the wash basin.

  “Well, skipper, that mast will never hurt anything now. One touch and away she’ll go. I’m sorry I couldn’t come up sooner, but the job was tough going, and it was so calm down there, I hated to leave and come up to this pitching tub!” And as the little Falcon did her stuff during the night while I tried to stay in my berth, I half wished myself back in the unearthly quiet that rules on the ocean floor.

  The Falcon went to Newport to give the divers liberty till the storm blew over. Several days later, on June 17th, we came back once more and started to secure for raising. Kelley went down with the torch, burned holes in the starboard ballast tanks, low down, where we had been unable to reach and open the Kingston valves from the inside. He crawled over the boat, tried to get under the bilge keel on the port side, and burn just below the bilge keel into a tank there. He could not squeeze under the projecting keel, and failing, came up. I thought I could do better, being a little smaller. Down I went with the torch, and McLagan with a light to tend me from the submarine’s deck. We landed just forward of the conning tower. I slid down the port side, walked forward a few steps. There was not much light anyway, but with the pontoons overhead, they cut off what little light ordinarily filtered down to the bottom. McLagan dropped the light to me; with it I could see a few feet. I was standing opposite the ragged gash cut in the hull by the City of Rome. Curious, I shined my light through it. A torn mass of steel plates, broken pipe lines, and blackness beyond.

  The tank just aft this hole was my job. I paced off ten feet back, swung the light over the hull. The bilge keel stuck out from the ship, perhaps a foot above the sand. Putting the light on the bottom ahead of me, I lighted the torch, lay down in the mud, and tried to squeeze in under the bilge keel to the hull, but with my bulky helmet, I had no more luck than Kelley had. I wasted an hour on it, but it was useless, I could not get under and reach the hull. McLagan hauled me back on deck, and we went up together on the stage. I decided to let Kelley burn a hole higher up, above the bilge keel where the ship was accessible, and on his next dive, he did it.

  Michels followed Kelley with an airhose, and reaching in through the holes Kelley had burned in the starboard ballast tanks, blew all the water out of them.

  This made the buoyancy of the boat symmetrical, as it balanced the side pull exerted by the dry port ballast tanks, but the submarine still lay far over to starboard.

  We finished installing lashings on the two pairs of floating pontoons amidships, and turned attention to the stern pontoons. Wickwire was hoisted over, and crawling aft on the submarine, dropped to the bottom and walked around the starboard pontoon to inspect its position. The stern of the submarine seemed to be resting lightly on the wood sheathing of the cylinder; the top of the pontoon was inclined away from the ship as if the submarine had rolled it partway over.

  Wickwire made a complete circuit of the pontoon, reported that he thought by hooking on a hawser and having the Sagamore heave that we might pull the pontoon out sideways. From the Falcon’s deck, we watched his bubbles in the water as Wickwire circled round the pontoon and searched along it for a line by which he might pull himself up.

  “On deck!” Wickwire called, “are you blowing any air in this pontoon? It’s starting to roll around a little.”

  “Hello, Wickwire,” I answered, “we’re not touching it. You must be seeing things!”

  “The pontoon’s rolling a little more, commander.” A pause. Then excitedly, “The submarine’s moving too! She’s rolling. There she goes! She’s over on her port side again the way she used to be! Say, you ought to see her go!”

  I imagined Wickwire, leaning against the pontoon, the solitary spectator. A magnificent sight to watch a large ship resting quietly at the bottom of the sea suddenly come to life and lazily roll in her bed from one side to the other! I clung tightly to his telephone. What next?

  “Mr. Ellsberg, this pontoon is moving again! Say, she’s on her way up! Going faster now. You’d better stop her! So long, I’m leaving!” My eyewitness reports ceased. Wickwire, in spite of lead shoes and heavy ballast, sprinted through the water across the sea bottom, away from the ship.

  Wickwire’s faith in my ability was impressive, but I saw no way of stopping that pontoon till it fetched up on its chains. But Wickwire himself must be in a precarious position, with both the submarine and the pontoon doing acrobatics around his lifelines.

  I called him. No answer. The tender jerked “One” on his lifeline. No jerk in return. No “give” to Wickwire’s lines. They were obviously caught on something, no signals were going by the obstruction. I tried again on the telephone, but still no answer. Five anxious minutes passed with no news from Wickwire. Hastily we put Smith, the stand-by diver, into his helmet, placed him on the stage, were hoisting him overboard—

  “‘One’ on Wickwire’s line!” sang out his tender. He answered with one jerk. I telephoned again.

  “Hello, Wickwire!”

  “All clear now, Mr. Ellsberg! I’m sitting on the sub’s tail. I
’ll come up as soon as I see how she lays! I was too busy to answer before.”

  Wickwire was safe.

  Hartley belayed the stage, swung Smith back in on deck.

  Wickwire had run some thirty feet when he was stopped with a jerk. His lifelines were taut, stretching back towards the submarine and he could go no further. He turned round, walked back along his lines, till he came to the submarine. The pontoon was nowhere in sight, but its two chains led vertically upward against the stern, and there alongside one of the chains, his lifeline hung. Wickwire grasped the chain, started to climb the links. He went up twenty feet, came flush with the deck of the submarine, was just able through the water to discern the pontoon as a dark mass perhaps twenty feet higher. Up he went, climbing the stiff chain, like Jack up the Beanstalk, a queer sight. There, just under the pontoon looming over him like the bottom of a ship, his airhose was caught in a loop round the chain. He circled round the chain, unwound his line, hastily slipped down again, and then swung round to the stern, where he climbed the rudder and sat down on the after torpedo tube to rest. The pontoon was now plainly visible to him, floating a little above the S-51.

  Wickwire had cleared himself none too soon. The top air valve had broken off the pontoon in its gyrations and air was escaping from it fast.

  Wickwire, resting himself on the narrow tip of the stern, was galvanized into life as the pontoon above suddenly started to sink and shot downwards past him, resting heavily on the chains from which a few moments before he had been hanging.

  That was too much. Wickwire changed his mind about a further inspection.

  “On deck! I’ve had enough this dive. Take me up!” Smith made the inspection. The S-51 was lying about ten degrees to port. We flooded back the engine room, and the submarine then settled practically erect, with a list of only a few degrees to port.

  A heavy fog and a bad swell prevented diving June 18. With a somewhat lesser swell on June 19 and 20, we started to level off the bow pontoons. The motion of the Falcon was bad and three times the wires or the shackles broke, spoiling the job. Finally we succeeded; and then transferred our gear to the stern, where lay the last pair of pontoons. Here we had a little better luck, as only one wire broke in the process.