The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  Muttering under his breath, Elvina stuck his head into the passageway to see what was going on. Everyone appeared to be yelling, but Elvina was no great shakes at English and he could not make out what they were saying. Then he spied the second mess attendant, his friend Basilio Galvan, back from finding out about the menu for the noon meal. Elvina looked at him in puzzlement. Galvan had been on submarines before and this was Elvina’s first one. Galvan simply shrugged, however, and Elvina couldn’t tell whether he was concerned. Galvan was both concerned and confused by the sudden turn of events, but as a veteran submariner in Elvina’s eyes, he was determined not to show it. Finally Elvina just gave up, returned to the pantry and hunched down next to the coffeepot.

  Allen Bryson, a machinist’s mate, was on the forward battery phone when he heard the scream. Gerry McLees was about to close the passageway hatch over him when Bryson shouted out the news. McLees scrambled back up to see what was what.

  Chief Electrician’s Mate Lawrence Gainor had positioned himself at the aft end of the compartment to take voltmeter readings. He had yet to relay one of them to his recorder, a signalman named Ted Jacobs. But Gainor would have his hands full soon enough.

  Sometimes a person’s moment of truth comes so quickly that there is no chance to think about it. For Gainor, his twenty years of sub service came into instinctive play, triggered by whatever makes one man charge and another run, one man grapple with opportunity and another impotent.

  At the first word of trouble, Gainor moved immediately to the watertight door between the forward battery and the control room, and with the help of Jacobs, he secured it. He could see the geysers of water spraying from the overhead network of pipes into the control room. Once the door was closed, he saw the water splattering against its eyeport. For all Gainor knew, the control room was flooded.

  There was no time to dwell on it. As the forward battery lights began to flicker, he took another look at his voltmeters. They were discharging at a furious rate. Somewhere there was a bad short circuit.

  He grabbed a flashlight and worked his way forward against the upward slant of the Squalus to the battery hatch. When he peered down into the well, he was greeted by a fearful sight. Solid bands of blue-white fire were leaping from battery to battery in eight-inch arcs. Stabbing through the darkness, they threw grotesque shadows against the sides on the inner hull. The heat was so intense that steam was pouring out of the battery cells and the rubber-compound insulation had begun to melt. As the boat continued her sickening drop, she was only seconds away from a gigantic explosion that would rip her apart even before she reached the bottom.

  Without hesitation, Gainor lowered himself down there. The big batteries, six feet high, completely filled the space beneath the deck except for a narrow center walk. Alone, squinting against the fiery bands dancing around him, he crouched on the walk and groped for the master disconnect switches. Finally he located the starboard switch and yanked it clear. Next he bent to his left for the port switch. A terrifying arc over it spluttered and flashed in his face. One brush against it would send him to a horrible death. Gainor was sure that he would be electrocuted before he could reach the switch. He tried anyway, and with a last desperate effort he jerked it free. The fierce arcs vanished.

  Gainor stayed put for a minute, gathering himself. Then he quietly made his way up the ladder.

  IN THE AFTER battery, Lloyd Maness would face an equally daunting task. Like Gainor, Maness was preparing to call off voltmeter readings. He also never got to the first one. For both Maness and his recorder, Art Booth, the early stages of the dive were perfectly routine. Booth had penciled in the dive time on his notepad. Together, they waited for the meter indicator to stabilize after the transfer to battery power. They could hear executive officer Doyle issuing his familiar commands in the control room.

  All at once, the same movement of air that Naquin had felt swept by them. Then they heard Kuney’s stunned cry that the engine rooms were flooding. All hell broke loose in the after battery. The lights went out. In the dim glow of the emergency lights, water was shooting in every which way. Maness went right to his disaster station, the watertight door between the after battery and the control room. He stepped into the control room and got ready to swing the door shut.

  As he did, Booth skipped past him.

  Farther back in the after battery, Electrician’s Mate First Class Jud Bland was manning the compartment battle phone. When he heard the incredible report come over it, he couldn’t believe his ears. Then the water slammed into him. His initial thought was to close the valves in the overhead ventilation pipes. He wasn’t quite sure where they were. After a dozen years with the surface fleet, not only was the Squalus his first sub, but he had not been on dive duty in the after battery before. As he felt for them in the gloom of the emergency lights, the Squalus lurched violently upward and sent him sprawling to his knees. By now he realized that she was long past the point where closing some valves would do any good. As the full impact of what was happening swept over him, Bland started toward the control room. Maness yelled at him to hurry.

  Seaman Bill Boulton came on frantically behind Bland. One minute Boulton had been sitting at a mess table, idly staring into space, drying off after stowing gear topside. In the next, he was dumbfounded to see water streaming along the battery deck. For a moment, he could think only that the main-deck hatch above him had not been secured and he stood up reflexively to check it. Then he saw that the water around his feet was pouring in from the engine rooms. As he tried to puzzle this out, the sea rocketed in from pipes all over the compartment. And almost before he knew it, the upward pitch of the boat sent the water rolling back at him. It had already surged over the tops of his work shoes. Boulton splashed his way forward, more water springing suddenly at him in a terrifying crossfire. Dazed, Boulton stumbled blindly toward the control room. Then, all at once, he had passed Maness and fell into it.

  At the far end of the after battery, Rob Washburn was still waiting for the pharmacist’s mate, O’Hara, to give him aspirin for his cold when the water hit him. It shot out of the air blower over the medicine cabinet with explosive force, knocking Washburn to the deck on the port side of the compartment. He got back up just as the Squalus unexpectedly rose by her bow and was thrown headlong to the deck again. Once more, he managed to struggle up.

  O’Hara was searching through his cabinet as the water gushed over his head, barely missing him. Then the bottles on the shelves started tumbling out. Instinctively, O’Hara tried to catch them. A moment later, he found himself sitting on the deck, water swirling at his waist. He flopped around and pushed himself up with both hands. He saw Washburn to his right and started to follow his erstwhile patient.

  By this time, the slant of the Squalus was so steep that Washburn had to cling to the bunks lining the compartment as he worked himself forward hand over hand, O’Hara a few feet behind. Finally, he reached the control room. Lloyd Maness, holding the door, urged O’Hara on. At last, O’Hara also made it past him.

  In the galley, Will Isaacs, the cook, waited impatiently for the Squalus to level off so he could switch his oven back on and get the meatballs going. A seaman, Alex Keegan, and a fireman second class, Roland Blanchard, were on mess duty helping Isaacs. When the dive began, Keegan had left to go to the crews toilet across the passageway.

  Isaacs and Blanchard never saw him again.

  At the first klaxon alarm, Blanchard had started closing a valve in the hull ventilation line running through the galley. This was one of his regular dive assignments, and as had happened on previous plunges, he ran into difficulty trying to turn the stiff, new handwheel. There was a quick rush of escaping air and then the water followed, but there was so much pressure now that Blanchard couldn’t budge the wheel at all.

  After the sudden movement of air, Isaacs looked inquiringly into the passageway outside the galley. A solid stream of water smacked him in the face. He ducked away and glanced aft toward the forward engine roo
m. The door to it was partially open and water was coursing through from the other side. Isaacs went immediately to the door and secured it. Then he straightened up to look through the eyeport. The sight was awesome. A great cataract was thundering out of the air-induction outlet above the diesels. It had already buried them. Isaacs stood there, transfixed.

  In the galley, Blanchard had given up trying to turn the handwheel and stepped into the passageway. When the Squalus tipped upward, all the water in the after battery came racing down the deck toward him. Blanchard waded forward, fighting the current, arms flailing wildly to keep his balance. He had gotten about a third of the way through the compartment when he slipped. His head went under and he felt himself being carried back again. At the last second, his hand clutched a steel stanchion. He hung on to it and with savage frenzy, he pulled himself up. Kicking off from the stanchion, he lunged desperately for the nearest tier of bunks. He got to it and dragged himself from one tier to the next. The water wasn’t as deep here, but it kept pouring down from the overhead pipes and the footing was miserable. Up ahead of him, he saw the door to the control room begin to close. He yelled out. Maness heard him and eased the door open again.

  For Isaacs, time was fast running out. But, his face pressed against the eyeport, he seemed unable to tear himself away from the frightful sight in the forward engine room. He could not see any crewmen in there, just the thundering ocean. Then he became aware of the icy water lapping around his waist. Before he could move, it had almost reached his armpits. He frantically propelled himself away from the door, actually swimming, and barged right into one of the mess tables hidden by the rising surge. Isaacs went under, but he had a hand around a leg of the table bolted to the deck and he came up spewing salt water from his mouth. He kept going and Maness, holding the door open an instant longer, saw him. Isaacs floundered into the control room and dropped to his knees, gasping for breath.

  Now Maness could delay no more. Indeed, for agonizing seconds, it would appear that he had waited too long.

  Twice he had paused before sealing off the control room, once for Blanchard, then for Isaacs. He peered into the blackness of the compartment. He thanked God that he couldn’t see anybody else. To have closed the door in someone’s pleading face would have been more than he could bear.

  His task defied all odds. The door swung in from the after battery. It was oval and fitted into a steel frame that curved around the rest of the passageway. Normally, when the Squalus was on an even keel, it moved easily on its hinges. But now the ravaged sub was sagging by her stern at an angle of nearly fifty degrees. And Maness had to lift it toward him, almost as if it were a trap door. A trap door of solid steel, except for its eyeport, that weighed several hundred pounds.

  He had to do it alone. There wasn’t enough room for anybody to help him. Maness bent forward and pulled, the sea already spilling over the lip of the doorway. He strained harder, his feet braced against the sides of the door frame, beads of sweat full-blown on his forehead. The door began to swing up steadily, inch by inch. Then it stopped, neither moving up nor falling back.

  Maness gritted his teeth. Summoning a last ferocious burst of strength, his arm and leg muscles quivering wildly, his shoulders threatening to pop their sockets, he heaved once more. And this time, the door shut.

  On the other side was Sherman Shirley. He could only hope that there would still be a wedding, that Shirley was safely barricaded in the after torpedo room.

  John Batick had made the wrong choice. Down in the well of the after battery instead of Gerry McLees, the hatch above him closed, he never had a chance.

  A few moments later, in a swirl of trailing bubbles, the Squalus touched delicately on the North Atlantic floor, first her stern, then her bow. Inside, they hardly felt it. She had settled evenly on her keel, still slanting upward at an angle of about eleven degrees. Her emergency lights were out and she had no heat. She lay helpless in 243 feet of water. The temperature outside her hull was just above freezing.

  In the control room, Chief Roy Campbell held a flashlight up to the eyeport of the door Maness had closed. An evil film of oily water rode against it on the other side. It was not quite eight-forty-five that morning. Less than five minutes had elapsed since the Squalus started her dive.

  Up on the surface, it was as if she had never existed at all.

  6

  ADMIRAL CYRUS COLE had entered his office at the Portsmouth Navy Yard promptly at eight o’clock that morning.

  Except for the VIP delegation he would be receiving, a routine day loomed ahead. Along with the usual construction and repair work at the yard, just two boats in his care would be at sea. Besides the Squalus, out on her trial runs, her sister sub, the Sculpin, was to depart on a two-month shakedown cruise to South America. Cole was in an especially good mood. An accomplished amateur sculptor, he had finished a bust of Admiral David Farragut, who had uttered the famous order “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” during the Civil War battle at Mobile Bay. He hoped to get away from the yard early enough to see how the casting was coming along.

  Right before the visiting dignitaries were ushered in, Cole’s chief clerk handed him the transcripts of the messages sent from the Squalus that spelled out the time, location and duration of her morning dive.

  After the meeting was over, Cole started going through a pile of paperwork stacked on his desk. Nobody at Portsmouth gave it much thought when the Squalus failed to report surfacing on schedule. It wouldn’t be the first time a sub had been tardy on that score. But then the minutes stretched into an hour.

  Cole called in his aide, Lieutenant Commander John Curley. “Why haven’t we heard from Squalus yet?” he demanded.

  Curley, who was soon to ship out for sea duty and had been busy breaking in an officer assigned to replace him, replied, “I don’t know, sir. I was about to call it to your attention. I’m getting a little concerned.”

  “So am I,” Cole said. “It’s probably an oversight of some sort, but get on this right away.”

  Before Curley could leave Cole’s office, the duty officer in the Portsmouth radio room rang up with a report that he had been trying for twenty minutes without success to establish contact with the Squalus. Cole instructed Curley to phone the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston to see if it could raise the missing submarine. When this also failed to produce any results, the rear admiral grew increasingly apprehensive.

  Still, it was difficult for him to believe the worst had happened. He recalled how Harold Preble had been raving about the Squalus and comforted himself with memories of the Pollack, another Portsmouth sub. Earlier in the year, she also had failed to report surfacing after a routine dive. Cole immediately dispatched the Pike to find out what was wrong. It was a false alarm. The Pollack had submerged with a valve that closed the aperture for her radio antenna partially opened. While the matter was remedied in short order, her radio had been temporarily knocked out of commission.

  But then Curley reported disquieting news from a Coast Guard lookout station on the Isles of Shoals. The Squalus had been spotted passing by it on a southeast heading about three hours ago. Now there was no sign of her anywhere on the horizon. Cole could no longer doubt that something might be seriously amiss. After a fretful moment, he snatched up the last messages from the Squalus and hurried out of his office.

  It was now nearly eleven o’clock.

  On the bridge of the Sculpin, Lieutenant Commander Warren Wilkin surveyed the last-minute preparations for her departure from Portsmouth. Wilkin, whose nickname was “Wilkie,” was in fine fettle. After weeks of training and trials, the Sculpin was for all practical purposes a part of the Navy’s fighting fleet. On her way south, she would stop off at Newport, Rhode Island, to pick up her live torpedoes and then sail on to Coco Solo in the Panama Canal Zone.

  Suddenly Wilkin was astonished to see Cole striding posthaste toward the Sculpin’s berth and barely had time to make his way down to the main deck before the admiral came on board. Skippi
ng the amenities, Cole said, “Wilkie, I want you to shove off immediately. We’re not sure, but Squalus may be in trouble, big trouble. Here’s her diving point. I want you to pass over it and let me know what you find without delay.”

  As Wilkin acknowledged the order, Cole was already on his way off the Sculpin. Back in his office, he sent for Captain Halford Greenlee. “Hal,” he said, “we’ve got a problem. The word’s bound to get around by now. Probably has already. We haven’t heard from Squalus since her dive. It doesn’t look good. I’ve got Sculpin out searching for her.”

  His face ashen, Greenlee excused himself and went into his own office. His daughter Betty and Ensign Patterson—“Pat”—had been married for more than eleven months. The previous weekend, her biggest worry had been whether she and Pat would be able to spend their first anniversary together before the Squalus left to join the fleet. Now what was Greenlee to tell her? The young couple had set up housekeeping in an apartment in town. But after a minute’s indecision, afraid that he would find his daughter alone, he elected not to call the apartment. Instead, he dialed his own home, where his son Bob, an Army lieutenant on leave, was staying. Young Greenlee’s wife, Jacqueline, happened to answer the phone. She would never forget her father-in-law’s strained voice.

  “Betty isn’t there, is she?”

  “Why no, Dad. Is something the matter?”

  “She may be down,” Greenlee blurted.

  “What’s down? I don’t understand.”

  “Pat’s boat, Squalus.”

  At about that time, Oliver Naquin’s wife, Frances, left their rented house and started driving toward the yard, unaware, of course, that the Squalus was long overdue. On the way she had one stop to make. She had promised to pick up Betty Patterson. After seeing the Sculpin off, the wives of the Squalus officers were hosting a lunch for their counterparts to cheer them up a bit following the departure of their husbands. In the afternoon, they all planned to play bridge together.