The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  When she turned into the block where the Patterson apartment was, she found a perplexed Betty standing at the curb with her brother Bob. “Dad wants me over at his place right away,” she said. “Bob won’t tell me why.”

  After Betty got into her brother’s car, he came around to Frances Naquin and said, “You’d better come, too.”

  IN PORTSMOUTH ALL Cole could do was to sit tight until he received some word from the Sculpin. As the minutes dragged by, a sober assemblage of his staff officers gathered in his office.

  At noon, having cleared the Piscataqua, the Sculpin relayed her first ominous report: “Have not sighted Squalus. Am calling her with sound gear and proceeding to her diving point.”

  Cole’s response was swift. “Inform Sculpin,” he ordered, “to remain searching the area until some trace is found.” To the officers around him, he said, “Gentlemen, I’m afraid we’re in for a very bad time.”

  Anticipating the worst, he decided not to take any chances. He’d wait no more. Time was of the essence if what he most feared came to pass.

  First, he checked the operating schedule of one of the Navy’s submarine rescue vessels, the Falcon, and found that she was at her home base in New London, Connecticut.

  Then he put in a call to Washington and got on the line with Commander Charles Lockwood, Jr., who sat at the submarine fleet desk in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations.

  He sketched out the situation, its uncertainty, its baleful probabilities, and asked for authorization to have the Falcon immediately on the move to Portsmouth.

  “And it’s critical that we have Swede Momsen,” Cole said. “We must have him. He’s going to be the key to all this. I know he’s preparing to come up here for the summer. He hasn’t gone off somewhere, has he?”

  “No, no, don’t worry. He’s with his diving unit.” Lockwood, himself a longtime submariner, paused and then added, “Thank the good Lord he never gave up.”

  7

  AT THE WASHINGTON Navy Yard Swede Momsen was working his way through the second of the two ham sandwiches on hard rolls that he favored for lunch. One of his divers was in the pressure tank simulating an ascent from 250 feet on helium and oxygen and had another hour to go before the exercise would be completed. He had received some ribbing from his men when he showed up that morning in a panama hat. “Gee, Mr. Momsen, is that going to be our dress code for the summer?” one of them said. Otherwise, the day had been uneventful. As soon as the diver in the tank was out, he planned to call it quits and keep his promise to his wife to return home early.

  Then the phone rang. Momsen happened to pick up the receiver himself, idly thinking that it must be the girlfriend of one of his younger divers. They had a habit of calling around lunchtime.

  On the line, instead, was Commander Lockwood, his voice tense. “Swede,” he said, “there’s hell to pay. Squalus up at Portsmouth may be down. All indications are that she is. We’re presuming the worst. It’s more than three hours since she was due to report in. Cole has Sculpin out looking for her, but no dice yet.”

  “Where?”

  “Southeast of the Shoals, around five miles, I think. We’re not sure how deep.”

  “Probably two to three hundred feet, as I recall. Certainly, no less if that’s the spot.”

  “There’s no time to lose,” Lockwood said. “A front’s moving in and the forecast is for dense fog. We’re getting a plane ready now. Space for you and three others. We’ll get the rest of your men up there as soon as we can.”

  “Where’s the Falcon?”

  “In New London,” Lockwood said. “We’ve already alerted them. If I hear anything more, I’ll get right back to you.”

  Momsen slowly cradled the phone. After fourteen years the day had come. And despite the jeers and the backbiting and the skeptics, all his work, the long days and restless nights of dreaming and planning, had been validated. The Navy was then controlled by battleship admirals. “Who does this Momsen think he is, Jules Verne?” one of them had sneered.

  If he had been there to respond, he might well have said, “Yes, I do think I am.” As a youngster, he’d been enthralled by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The fact was that it had influenced him to join the Navy in the first place. To be in submarines, to “live within the ocean,” as Verne wrote.

  Without him, there would have been no hope for the crew of the Squalus. None of his pioneering efforts, however, had ever been used in an actual catastrophe. Now they would be. And under the worst possible circumstances—in fickle weather, the water frigid, the men awesomely far down, beyond the reach of any previously imagined help.

  With a precision that defined him, he prepared his departure in ten methodical minutes. Limited to three men on the first flight out, he chose the two doctors attached to his experimental diving unit along with his most experienced diver. He ordered the rest of his unit on standby alert and directed that a careful watch be maintained on the diver still in the big pressure tank. This would complete a critical stage with his new helium and oxygen mixtures and he didn’t want anything gumming up the works at the last minute. Next he got in touch with his wife, told her what was happening and then phoned a neighbor to look in on her. He even remembered to have his Packard garaged. He left nothing unfinished except for the ham sandwich he’d been eating when Lockwood’s call came.

  UNTIL MOMSEN’S ADVENT, scant attention was paid to the question of saving submariners. They simply took their chances. If their boats sank, as they did with nerve-racking regularity, the fortunate ones died quickly, by drowning. Once in a while sheer luck—and makeshift ingenuity—got them out alive.

  There was the O–5, dating from World War I, rammed by a United Fruit freighter. But she had foundered in the clear calm waters of a bay at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal. She settled only thirty feet down on smooth white sand within easy grasp of two of the canal’s giant floating cranes. Cables were slipped around her bow and stern, the cranes hoisted her up without difficulty, and the men inside climbed out in less than three hours.

  There was the S–5. She dived into the Atlantic off Cape May, New Jersey, with her torpedo tubes open to the sea. Her crew made it safely aft, however, and she lay in water shallow enough for her stern to break the surface when her aft ballast tanks were blown. The crew drilled a hole in her hull and stuck out a pipe with a white flag fluttering from it. Finally a merchantman came by to take a closer look at the strange sight. The ocean fortunately remained placid while rescuers cut a larger opening in her exposed hull, so the men could wriggle out one by one.

  There was also Momsen’s own O–15, his first command. Trying for a time record, he plunged her under full power steeply into the sea off Coco Solo. When he ordered her leveled off, the bow planes suddenly jammed and she kept going down. He had her motors put in emergency reverse, but it was too late. She plowed into the muddy bottom and was held fast by it. In the nail-biting time that followed, Momsen grimly sought a way out. At last he hit upon a clever solution. Despite the mud, he was able to get the sub’s external torpedo-tube doors partially open. Then he carefully flooded the tubes. When he blasted the water out of the first tube, as though he were firing a torpedo, nothing changed. Nor did it after a second blast. After firing a third tube, the boat quivered slightly. With the fourth blast, there was another, stronger movement. Everyone on board held a collective breath. Then the bow slowly floated free.

  Those were some of the happy endings.

  But there was the S–51, churning along the Atlantic surface one moonless night in 1925 off Block Island when she was ripped apart by the passenger ship City of Rome. As the skipper of a sister sub, the S–1, it was Momsen himself who found her telltale oil slick and the ugly air bubbles rising from 131 feet down. Recalling the scene in a letter to a friend, he wrote: “We tried to contact her, but there was only silence in return. Those of us on the bridge simply stared at the water and said nothing. No one at the time knew anything about the principles of esc
ape and rescue. We were utterly helpless. I myself never felt more useless.”

  He would remember something else, too. Months later he would witness the horribly contorted faces and the flesh-shredded fingers of those in the S–51 who had not drowned immediately, who instead spent the final minutes of their lives trying to claw their way out of a steel coffin.

  Two years later, the S–4’s number was up. On training maneuvers one December afternoon off Provincetown on Cape Cod, submerged a few feet below the surface, she was slashed open by a Coast Guard cutter chasing Prohibition rumrunners. Incredibly, all forty men on board were still alive as she lay only 110 feet down—less than the distance from home plate to second base.

  A score of ships circled over her. But they could do nothing and a howling winter nor’easter wiped out what little chance there was of raising her. For nearly three days, the entombed men beat out their pitiful hammer taps of hope. Each hour, the taps grew more feeble. Then they stopped altogether.

  Now it was the Squalus.

  SWEDE MOMSEN’S CAREER in the Navy almost ended before it really began. He entered Annapolis in 1914. In the spring of his plebe year, a cheating scandal was exposed at the Naval Academy and exams the following fall term were made doubly difficult. All told, some three hundred midshipmen failed and had to resign. One of them was Momsen, who just missed a passing grade in Spanish.

  Typically, he refused to abandon his chosen path. He quickly tried for a reappointment from his home district congressman in St. Paul, Minnesota. The odds for success were hardly in his favor. The Republican who originally sponsored him had lost his seat—to a Democrat. To make matters worse yet, Momsen’s businessman father was a local GOP activist. Momsen nonetheless continued doggedly to pursue his cause with the new Democratic representative, Carl C. Van Dyke. Van Dyke finally surrendered, specifying in a letter to Momsen’s father why he had done so. “I want to make it perfectly clear,” he wrote, “that the only reason for my reappointing your son, Charles, is because of Charles himself.”

  As a member of the class of 1920, he was forced to repeat his plebe year. But because of an accelerated academic schedule brought on by World War I, he actually graduated and was commissioned an ensign in 1919. After spending two humdrum years on the battleship Oklahoma, he got the opportunity he wanted in the spring of 1921. A new class of officer recruits was being accepted for training at the submarine school in New London and he applied forthwith. The captain of the Oklahoma took him aside. “I think you’ve got a bright future,” he counseled. “Better reconsider. Only the scum of the Navy go into pigboats.”

  The Oklahoma’s skipper wasn’t unique. All the Navy’s pride was centered around its big battle line. Subs were grudgingly tolerated as a new sea weapon, but sort of underhanded when you came right down to it and certainly not the place for a career-oriented young officer. An Annapolis man faced double jeopardy. He not only had to face the enormous risks involved, but also wound up scraping the bottom of the social barrel.

  Living conditions, moreover, were wretched. The psychological stress of close confinement often proved unbearable. When Swede Momsen boarded his first submarine, she was a cramped capsule less than half the size of the Squalus. His berth was a collapsible cot alongside a torpedo. His belongings remained in the duffel bag he brought with him. There was only a washbasin and no shower. Laundry facilities were nonexistent.

  Because of the arduous duty, there were extra food rations. But this didn’t mean much in real life. There was no refrigeration and fresh meat usually spoiled before it could be cooked. When it did, the job of hauling it up through the hatches to be tossed overboard was a memorable one. Butter, stored in half-gallon cans, sloshed around, completely liquefied after a couple of days. Since there were no distillers, fresh water was severely limited. It didn’t taste too bad when it was boiled with coffee. Air-conditioning was a subject for your wildest daydreams, and the aroma inside the hull, a combination of diesel fumes, sweat, dirty socks and unwashed clothes, was something you never really got used to. There were no toilets. When traveling submerged, you were reduced to a bucket half-filled with diesel oil. As an old-time chief observed, “Even goldfish stink in diesel oil.”

  On the surface, you draped yourself over the main-deck railing and were interrupted more often than not by a breaking swell.

  But out of all this, a raffish élan emerged that was unequaled elsewhere in the Navy. Strumming his ukulele, Swede Momsen would lead his men in a defiant ditty:

  Submarines have no latrines,

  The men wear leathern britches.

  They hang their tails out o’er the rails

  And yell like sons-o-bitches.

  How to get out of a submarine if something went haywire was a question nobody wanted to dwell on. When Momsen was in sub school, the problem was pointedly avoided. Sometimes, in the dead of night, you couldn’t help thinking about the tons of water that enveloped you only a few inches away. From there, it was no trick to picture yourself hopelessly trapped on the ocean floor. But it was considered extremely bad form to discuss this subject. Whenever a new disaster struck, you simply took the tack that it wouldn’t happen to you. Or you got philosophical. After all, ran the argument, you could be knocked off just as easily crossing the street.

  At first, Momsen was no different from the rest. Within eighteen months, as a junior lieutenant in 1923, he was handed his initial command, the aged O–15. It was a heady time. He described his feelings to a civilian friend:

  Suddenly there was no one to lean on. I was responsible for the lives of twenty-seven officers and men, for their personal safety and future progress. At the ceremony all their families were in attendance. I could see the wives and children looking at me, wondering perhaps if I really could be trusted with the welfare of their breadwinners.

  In my training I always thought that I had it, that command would be a cinch. Now I know what it is like. Every order I give has to be carefully weighed. After all, a submarine is all or nothing. Once under water those steel walls are surrounded by thousands of pounds of water and if something goes wrong there is nothing we can do about it; just don’t let it happen!

  My crew watches my every expression, every emotion, and listens intently to my every word, whether it’s an order or a casual remark. When I am at the periscope, a dozen eyes are on me and, believe me, they can tell exactly what’s happening on the surface. They share the pride of serving on a smart ship and the shame of one that doesn’t measure up.

  Even the simple maneuver of bringing a submarine alongside of a dock is important. If you back and fill, break lines and start shouting like mad, your men feel the scorn ashore and there are going to be plenty of black eyes and cracked jaws in the beer hall that night. But if you bring her in “like a feather, “you feel them bristle with pride in themselves and you.

  Most of all, I have found what a wide gap exists between the executive officer and the captain. He has one last check; the captain has none. But to have your own ship, to take her to sea—and under it—what an experience that is! I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

  Even given the chafing limitations of his woebegone craft, he was held spellbound by the tremendous potential that lay beneath the surface. If he thought about the perils he faced on every trip, he showed no signs of it. Not even his own chilling plunge into the mud dismayed him. He just chalked it up as one of those things. For the husky young skipper with cheerful blue eyes, being aboard a submarine was the best of all possible lives.

  Nothing, it seemed, could dampen his delight. Bound for the Philadelphia Navy Yard late one October afternoon, the O–15 chugged out of the Gulf of Mexico. The air grew heavy and a long, sinister swell rolled out of the southeast. During the night, the wind rose in the north, picked up even more and then backed eastward. Before daybreak, it was at gale force and the sea built steadily higher. The O–15 was caught in the maw of a monstrous hurricane.

  By noon, she was lurching in dizzy sweeps up and down the hu
ge combers and Momsen had what he thought must be the sickest crew in all creation on his hands. It was pointless to submerge. The old boat could not go deep enough to escape the impact of such gigantic wave action. Besides, this looked like a hit of major proportions beyond the capacity of her battery power to stay submerged. Momsen could only try to ride it out. He had a wooden plank wedged across the conning-tower hatch to allow enough air in the sub while keeping most of the solid water from inundating her interior. Then he lashed himself to the bridge with double lengths of manila line.

  The sea ran higher and higher and the wind shrieked poisonously past him. Whole mountains of water heaved skyward, hesitated and came hurtling down on him. He had never experienced anything like them. They seemed a hundred feet high. Each time the O–15 was buried in their swirling mass, he held his breath. Each time he was sure he would never come up. The hurricane raged unbelievably through the day and by dark was stronger than ever. In the fading light, he saw his main-deck railing bent all the way over, and around the bridge the protective sheet metal was crumpled like paper.

  It stormed during the night as well, the O–15 first bucking, then rolling forty and fifty degrees at a clip. Around five o’clock in the morning, she was in the eye of the storm. The wind abruptly stopped. The sea was nearly flat. The sky above Momsen had a pale greenish glow, which he found eerily oppressive. From the bridge, he called to his helmsman to get ready for more. In less than half an hour, the respite was over and the wind roared in from the opposite direction. Seconds later, the colossal waves smashed in with even greater fury. All that day, the O–15 continued to reel against the fearful pounding.