The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  In quick succession, Doyle ordered the valves and vents opened on the bow buoyancy tank and on main ballast tanks 1 and 2. Next he had the valves on tanks 3 and 4 also opened, which would partially fill them. He held back on opening their vents until he was absolutely certain that the Squalus was sealed against the sea.

  The control board would tell him that.

  His eyes never left it. He saw the light for the hatch in the conning tower wink from red to green after Naquin and Murphy had dogged it down. So did the one for the antenna.

  Then those for the diesel exhaust vents went green. In the control room, there was a startling silence when the diesels cut off. It made everybody’s breathing sound very loud.

  On the control room Christmas tree, only two lights still glowed red—those for the main inductions. They closed in tandem from the same hydraulic lever. Machinist’s Mate Second Class Al Prien operated it this morning, as he did with the levers for the other valves and vents he was either opening and closing. He’d had the same duty on another sub before reporting to the Squalus. Prien now pulled the lever for the main inductions. Immediately, the last two red lights on the board turned green.

  Lieutenant Doyle shut his eyes for one count and then looked at the board again. It was all green. The Squalus was secure. To make doubly sure, Carol Pierce, also an experienced machinist’s mate, bled some air from one of the pressurized cylinder banks. If pressure built up inside the hull, it meant that the sub was airtight and therefore watertight.

  From his station behind Doyle, Pierce announced, “Pressure in the boat, sir.”

  Doyle raised his right hand and extended two fingers.

  At the signal, Chief Torpedoman Roy Campbell, the ranking enlisted man on board, pressed a button. The second ah-ooo-gah, ah-ooo-gah went off, the sound of the final klaxon dive alarm reverberating throughout the sub.

  Driven by battery power, the Squalus slid down into the ocean. Outside, had anyone been watching, he would have seen the cold North Atlantic boil over her elongated hull, reach for her three-inch deck gun, and surge up around the base of her superstructure.

  Then, suddenly, she was gone.

  IN THE CONTROL room, after sounding the second dive warning, Chief Campbell instinctively glanced at the board and saw that it was green.

  Yeoman Kuney, the control room talker, saw it was green. Kuney liked to bet with himself whether he would ever get word of a closing before it showed on the board. The board always won.

  Al Prien, releasing his grip on the main inductions lever, saw that the board was green. So did Harold Preble, stopwatches in hand.

  Just as the klaxon was honking, Oliver Naquin reached the bottom rung of the ladder from the conning tower. He, too, saw that no red lights registered on the board. Naquin stepped past Preble and joined his executive officer at the diving control station. He shifted his attention to the depth gauge indicator in front of him.

  When it hit twenty-eight feet, the Squalus hesitated. This habitually happened during a dive. It signified the end of the sub’s initial thrust from the surface. Now, against the mounting pressure of the sea, it took a few moments for her battery power to assert itself. Then she started to plunge down again.

  At thirty feet, Preble said to Naquin, “Good, good. You’re going to make it.”

  “This,” Naquin replied, “is going to be a beauty.”

  The depth indicator moved faster . . . thirty-five feet . . . forty . . . forty-five. Up inside the conning tower, Frankie Murphy saw the sea flash over his eyeports.

  Doyle ordered his bow and stern plane operators to gradually reduce the dive angle. He wanted the Squalus to level off at around sixty-three feet.

  At fifty feet, their time target depth, both Naquin and Preble called out, “Mark!” They stopped their watches and compared the results. The time was a fraction over a second more than the sixty seconds Naquin had been aiming at.

  “Good, good,” Preble repeated.

  Naquin smiled. It was better than he’d expected. He still had three weeks for crash-dive run-throughs, not only to get to a minute, but to get under it.

  Automatically, he stepped to his number 1 periscope, gripped its handles and bent forward slightly to peer through its rubber-cupped eyepiece.

  As he did, a strange fluttering sensation assailed his ears.

  An instant later, talker Kuney’s eyes went wide with disbelief. Not at what he saw, but at what he was hearing. For the first time word of something had come over his battle phone that wasn’t reflected on the control board.

  He cried out the stunning news. “Sir! The engine rooms! They’re flooding!”

  4

  HIS NAME WAS Charles Bowers Momsen. Then forty-three years old, he was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. Almost everyone called him “Swede.” He had picked up the nickname at Annapolis and it had stuck, although his ancestry was North German and Danish. He would have looked quite at home on the bridge of a Scandinavian tramp steamer. Six feet tall, he had an unruly thatch of light brown hair, a square jaw, and a soft-spoken reflective manner.

  Yet his deceptively composed demeanor disguised an extraordinary combination of visionary, scientist and man of action. Many would say he was the greatest submariner the Navy ever had. But above all else, he was a human being.

  That humanity was starkly evident. Before Momsen, if a sub went down, except in instances of the most bizarre luck, every man on board was doomed. From the time the U.S. Navy had acquired its first submarine, the Holland, in 1900, it was accepted that there would be no deliverance. But not by him.

  And on this Tuesday morning in May 1939, Momsen knew more about undersea escape and rescue than anyone on earth.

  Everything that could possibly save a trapped submariner—smoke bombs, telephone marker buoys, new deep-sea diving techniques, escape hatches and artificial lungs, a great pear-shaped diving bell, or rescue chamber—was either a direct result of his inventive, pioneering derring-do, or of value only because of it.

  None, however, had ever been used in an actual submarine disaster. For most people, the worth of their lives is a blend of shaded grays. But for Swede Momsen, that judgment would now come swiftly. And in black and white.

  As usual, that May 23, Momsen was up at six A.M. and in the kitchen of his home in Northern Virginia brewing the first of the countless cups of coffee he downed during a day.

  He had plenty on his mind. For the past twenty months, he had been heading an experimental deep-sea diving unit at the Washington Navy Yard. Under his leadership, a major breakthrough had been achieved. The air we breathe is basically a mix of two invisible gases, oxygen and nitrogen. But their life-giving properties change dramatically under sea pressure. Just beyond a relatively shallow depth of thirty-three feet, oxygen, which comprises about a fifth of a lungful of ordinary air, starts turning increasingly toxic. At the pressure per square inch that’s exerted 200 feet down, about seven times what it is on the surface, it can be fatally poisonous, causing convulsions and coma.

  At 200 feet, nitrogen presents still another insidious danger. Under pressure, it enters the bloodstream and then body tissue. The end result is a giddy drug-like state, an inability to think clearly, that’s called nitrogen narcosis or rapture of the deep. If a disoriented diver ascends too rapidly, the nitrogen in his tissue bubbles back into the bloodstream, settles in his joints and triggers an agonizing case of the “bends” that will maim and even kill him unless promptly treated.

  But Momsen, in a momentous, highly complex series of tests, had replaced nitrogen with another inert gas, nontoxic helium. Next he carefully calibrated the amount of oxygen fed to a diver depending on the depth of water he was in while either descending or coming back up. And he had shown that this new atmosphere of oxygen and helium enabled a diver to operate efficiently well past 300 feet, then the working limit beneath the surface.

  (The success of this mixture profoundly affected man’s ability to explore the earth’s inner space. Without it, for i
nstance, there would have been none of the scuba diving that we take for granted today. Decades later, further refined, in one of the great intelligence coups during the Cold War, it would allow Navy divers to tap undersea telephone cables from far-flung Soviet nuclear submarine missile bases to Moscow.)

  The early going was treacherous, however. Time and again, in proving out his theory in the big pressure tank Momsen was using, a diver would be hit by the bends. A particularly harrowing incident had taken place only a few days earlier. As pressure in the tank was lowered to simulate an ascent from the ocean floor, the diver inside suddenly crumpled.

  To everybody watching through the thick glass eyeports, it looked like another case of the bends. The normal procedure would have been to raise the pressure in the tank quickly again and reduce it more gradually. Momsen was ready to give the order when some instinct held him back. All he had to go on was an apparently minor point. The stricken diver had failed to complain about the sharp pain that usually accompanied an actual attack.

  So, while his assistants gaped in amazement, Momsen directed the pressure in the tank to be dropped completely; the unconscious man was hauled out and rushed to a nearby recompression chamber. Later, samples of air taken from the tank turned out to be loaded with deadly carbon monoxide. It had come from burning lubricants in the tank’s compressors. If the pressure in the tank had been raised, the diver’s life would have been snuffed out instantly. As it was, he barely survived.

  Moments like this brought Momsen the unquestioned loyalty of his divers. And in all of his uncharted forays to save submariners trapped in the deep, he was renowned for never asking anyone to attempt anything that he had not first tried himself.

  By chance, on May 23, Momsen’s thoughts over morning coffee centered on the Portsmouth Navy Yard. His winter tests under controlled, laboratory conditions were practically over. It was time now to run through them in the ocean itself. Ten days hence, he planned to take his diving team to Portsmouth and work from there for the rest of the summer. A good deal of material had already been sent and more was due to be shipped that afternoon. He spent the better part of an hour drafting a letter to Portsmouth detailing the care and storage of his equipment until he arrived.

  Then he went back upstairs with juice and coffee for his wife, Anne. She had remained in bed with a bad cold, and he promised he would cut short his workday to be with her. It was hot and muggy outside, the first really uncomfortable day of the season. So Swede Momsen left wearing a linen suit and a panama hat. He climbed into the two-year-old Packard sedan he had bought new in Shanghai before returning to duty in the States. As he drove along the Potomac toward the Washington Navy Yard, he consoled himself with visions of the cool weather he would soon be enjoying off the New England coast.

  5

  AT THE SUDDEN cry from Kuney that the engine rooms were flooding, everyone in the control room froze, hypnotized by the Christmas tree board.

  It was still unaccountably green.

  This could not be happening! There was a moment of complete stupefaction on every face, the kind experienced by men who are absolutely certain that what is coming to pass could not possibly be. Yet it was.

  Somehow, the dreadful thing was upon them. Despite what the control board was registering, the big main air-induction valve leading back to the now-dormant diesels had failed to close or, if it did, had opened again. With ferocious force, tons of sea were shooting into the engine rooms. It was as if a huge fire hydrant, wide open, had suddenly gone berserk. The fluttering sensation that Naquin had felt seconds ago was the rush of air being shoved violently forward by the ocean as it burst into the after compartments of the Squalus.

  Naquin was the first to recover. “Blow all main ballast!” he shouted.

  The words were barely out of his mouth before William Thomas Doyle called out, “Blow bow buoyancy!”

  The still-mesmerized control room crew came to and scrambled into action. Al Prien, the machinist’s mate manning the levers for the valves and vents during the dive, had already closed the ballast tank air-escape vents. Close by, Carol Pierce, who had bled air into the boat to make doubly sure it was watertight as the dive commenced, now slammed home the lever that would blow 3,000 pounds per square inch of air into the bow buoyancy tank. The air from his number 1 bank blasted off. Inside the control room, it made a soft whooshing sound. An instant later, he sent more pressurized air rushing into the main ballast tanks to drive the sea from them.

  Two gunner’s mates, Gene Cravens and Gavin Coyne, operating the bow and stern dive planes, immediately put them at hard rise.

  Prien, having closed the ballast-tank air vents, stared down at the lever that should have shut the main inductions. He clenched it, knuckles white, and tried to yank it farther toward him. But it wouldn’t budge. It had gone as far as it could go.

  Charles Kuney stood transfixed, his hands clapped over his phone receivers, pressing them tighter to his ears. The last thing he had heard from the after compartments was a desperate scream, “Take her up! Take her up!” Kuney couldn’t tell which compartment the scream had come from.

  The Squalus shuddered.

  At eighty feet, for a tantalizing tick in time, she hung suspended between ocean floor and surface. Then she seemed to respond to the blowing of her ballast tanks. Her bow tilted upward. She even rose a little, her nose perhaps just breaking through the waves above. But the growing weight in her tail was too much. Inexorably, she began to slide stern first into the black depths of the North Atlantic.

  The steep pitch of the Squalus came so suddenly that only by clinging to his number 1 periscope and bracing himself against the steel well of the second periscope directly behind him did Naquin remain on his feet. This was crazy, he kept thinking. How was it possible?

  As Pierce was sending emergency blasts of air into the ballast tanks, Harold Preble rushed to his aid. Hanging on to the base of the gyroscope with one hand, the Portsmouth yard’s test superintendent knelt beside Pierce and tried to activate a reserve cylinder of air to clear the tanks faster. He had to use a wrench to get the valve open. He was still struggling with it when a column of water hit him in the back of his neck, flattening him. Both Pierce and Chief Roy Campbell were struck by the same stream. Pierce, stumbling over Preble, grabbed the wrench and finished the job. But it didn’t make any difference.

  Campbell picked up Preble. Then he reached overhead to shut off a pipeline in the ventilation system from which the water had shot out. By now the sea had found its way into the maze of pipes that ran the length of the Squalus. In the control room, jets of salt water sprayed from a dozen different places. The men worked frantically to close them off, seizing hold of whatever they could to stay upright.

  Behind him, Chief Campbell heard an ominous hissing. He traced it to two toilet closets in the rear of the control room on the starboard side. Campbell groped through a billowing mist. It was coming out of a drainage line in the second closet. He had trouble turning the handwheel that would stop the leak because of the new packing around it. But finally he succeeded. Then he turned off every other valve he could find.

  Across from Campbell, alone in his cubicle, radioman Powell was in the process of stowing his transmitter after sending the second dive message to Portsmouth when water gushed out of an air-supply blower in front of him. Powell reached for a valve in the pipe that he thought might stop the flow. Before he got to it, the water suddenly dwindled to a dribble. Powell figured that someone in the after battery must have closed another valve down the line. He sealed his anyway, and trying to maintain his balance, he staggered into the control room proper to find out what was happening. Overhead, the lights flickered, flared briefly and went out. The emergency lights came on, then they also began to flicker.

  In the forward torpedo room, Lieutenant Nichols ordered Lenny de Medeiros to close the watertight door to the forward battery moments after learning that the engine rooms were flooding. As he did, he spotted Gerry McLees, head and shoul
ders sticking out of the passageway hatch leading down to the forward group of batteries. There didn’t seem to be any problems in the compartment as far as he could tell.

  When the bow rose so abruptly, de Medeiros thought that whatever the trouble was, it wasn’t going to be so bad after all. The sub appeared to be on her way back to the surface.

  Just then the dummy torpedo set up for a reload started to roll free. Loose in there with the Squalus now tilting so sharply, it would crush anyone in its path. Nichols, Torpedoman First Class Bill Fitzpatrick and a young seaman, Donny Persico, jumped for it and wrestled it back in place. Nichols finally threaded its nose ring with manila line and together the three men managed to lash down the wayward torpedo.

  Some seawater mixed with air was sputtering out of the ventilation pipes, but it didn’t amount to much. De Medeiros quickly shut the valves and the sprays of water stopped completely. By now, he could distinctly sense the backward slide down of the boat and realized that surfacing was out of the question.

  He’d seen McLees in the forward battery. He couldn’t remember where his other close pal, Lloyd Maness, was stationed for this dive. All he, like the others in the compartment, could do in the eerie silence was wait. And hope.

  IN THE FORWARD battery, as the Squalus struggled to rise, a coffeepot bounced across the pantry past one of the mess attendants, Feliciano Elvina. Elvina picked up the pot and tried to put it back on its stand, but it toppled over again. He finally placed it in a corner of the pantry deck. To his intense annoyance, water suddenly belched out of the faucet into the sink all over the dishrags he had squeezed dry a minute ago.