The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  Finally, after dark, the winds slowed and the sea began to calm a little. Momsen had been lashed to the bridge for nearly thirty-five sleepless hours, sustained by an occasional onion sandwich he favored in foul weather, thrust up through the hatch by his mess steward. With the end in sight, he sent for the only other officer on board, an ensign fresh from submarine school, to take over. The ensign wobbled up and weakly saluted, barely able to talk, much less remain upright. When the O–15 at last limped into port, the new man promptly put in for a transfer. He didn’t care where, he said, as long as it was as far away as possible from a submarine.

  But what Momsen would always remember most was going below into an unholy mess. Men all around him were groaning and retching. With every pitch and roll of the boat, an assortment of gear, overturned vomit buckets, and forlorn bits of clothing sloshed freely back and forth. It was even worse in the galley, the deck a slimy conglomeration of prunes, beans, broken crockery and drifting pots.

  Yet still on duty, splattered with grease and bloody from a cut on his forehead, was the cook. With one hand, he gripped an overhead pipe for support. In the other, he triumphantly juggled a panful of frying potatoes.

  “Mr. Momsen,” he said, “you must be starving. I’ll have something for you in a minute.”

  “Cookie,” Momsen said with a huge grin, “there’s always going to be a special place in heaven for fellows like you.”

  His carefree exuberance would soon be badly jolted and Swede Momsen would never again be the same man.

  He had gone up to the big submarine base in New London in the summer of 1925 to assume command of the S–1. Now a full lieutenant, he was elated. Although the S class of subs, a World War I design, had multiple shortcomings, they were still the best that the Navy, with its budget priorities, had to offer. Besides, the S–1 had an intriguing extra attraction. A large tank that could hold a collapsible pontoon scout plane was bolted to her main deck, and he looked forward to working on the experimental project.

  But on September 25, the base duty officer roused him at home about three A.M. with forbidding news. The S–51 on a night practice run had been rammed and presumably sunk by a passenger ship in a sea lane east of Block Island between the tip of Long Island and Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Momsen blinked wide awake in consternation. The S–51 was in his division. Her officers were personal friends. He mumbled that he’d be right down to the base.

  Once his sub was under way, manned by her night watch crew, Momsens eyes strained through the darkness as he sped toward the reported point of the collision. Then, at sunrise, he arrived at the spot. A marker buoy dropped by the City of Rome was bobbing in the waves. That was all. Momsen slowly steered the S–1 through the area around the buoy. Still nothing. He decided to call off his fruitless sweeps and began instead to follow the passenger ship’s subsequent course, thinking perhaps that she might have carried the wounded boat with her for a time.

  He was right. Two miles northeast of the buoy one of his lookouts finally spied the oil slick and eddying air bubbles. Momsen circled the glistening, spreading stain, searching for pieces of wreckage. Or bodies. There were none. These were the days before sonar. He tried to contact the S–51 with an underwater oscillator that sent sound waves fanning through the water. Over and over again, he pinged out the missing sub’s call letters to no avail. His sense of futility was overwhelming. There was nothing he could do now. When a flotilla of other vessels arrived, that was all they could do, too. One of his crew cried out, “Oh my God, my God! Those poor fuckers!”

  Momsen sent him immediately below. As much to himself as to the others on the bridge, he said, “At least it was fast. They probably never realized what happened.”

  He thought especially of a young lieutenant named Jim Haselden. They’d been classmates at Annapolis. They went to submarine school at the same time. They took their first training cruise together. And when the S–51 was raised at last, he would learn just how fast Haselden actually died, his fingers pathetically torn as he had tried to pry open a hatch, a hatch held shut by more than fifteen tons of ocean pressure.

  Haselden’s face haunted his dreams night after night. By day, a mounting anger swelled in him. Somehow there had to be a means to save men like Haselden and the others, at least give them a fighting chance. But what? For weeks, he wrestled with the problem. Finally, the glimmer of a viable concept began to take shape. The more he thought about it, the better it looked.

  The idea was simple. A large steel rescue chamber, shaped like a bell, would be lowered from the surface along guide cables attached to ringbolts on the deck of a sunken sub over an escape hatch. Once the bell was in position and the hatch opened, rescuers would be able to descend into the hull compartments or the trapped men could climb out on their own.

  To accomplish this, Momsen envisioned having a flat steel plate, like a washer, welded around bow and stern hatches. When the bell landed on the plate, a hatch would be enclosed by it. He also designed a rubber gasket around the bottom of the bell to help guarantee a watertight hookup. After the bell was directly over a hatch, the air pressure inside it would be reduced, which would seal the bell to the hatch plate. If the submarine were partially flooded, however, the combined water and air pressure might be enough to break the seal. So he added an additional safeguard. The bell would be bolted down before anyone touched the hatch.

  Momsen reviewed the plan time and again. He hashed it over with some other skippers. None of them could find anything wrong with it. He set the scheme down on paper in considerable detail along with a number of companion sketches.

  Next he took the complete package to Captain Ernest J. King, the base commander at New London. King, who would become the Navy’s World War II chief, studied it and told Momsen, “Swede, I think you’ve got a hell of an idea here.”

  King then forwarded the plan to the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair for an expert appraisal. His own endorsement was to the point: “The subject device is a most practical one for the rescue of entrapped submarine crews.”

  No response came back.

  At first, this didn’t bother Momsen. He had no reason to expect an early answer. Analysis, after all, took time. But as the weeks turned into months and the months into almost a year of silence, his disappointment deepened. There must have been some radical defect that nobody at New London noticed. He was back to square one. He promised himself that he would start on another escape project that had occurred to him. It was hard, however, to get going, not knowing what the trouble had been with the bell.

  Then he found out. And in a way he never could have expected. He was due for a tour of shore duty, and transfer orders arrived in New London assigning him to, of all places, the Bureau of Construction and Repair. Still upset by the lack of any response, he couldn’t help wondering if there was some connection. But when he reported in, not a word was mentioned about the bell. He was posted in the submarine section. His initial day was spent going through the formalities. In the late afternoon, however, he had an opportunity to riffle through a pile of “awaiting action” papers his predecessor had left behind.

  He shook his head in dazed disbelief.

  There, at the bottom of the basket, pigeonholed all that time, was his proposed bell design, King’s endorsement, the whole works, just the way it had been dispatched from New London. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Despair welled up in him as he thought of Haselden and the S-51, of all the wasted months of worry and waiting. He numbly read his paper, barely able to make out the words. He really didn’t have to. He knew them by heart. He sat there wondering what to do. He was too angry to think of anything.

  By morning, he had pulled himself together. As diplomatically as possible, he started pleading his case through the bureau. The response was frosty. Who the hell was this new lieutenant? Only a couple of days on the job and he was already trying to push through some screwball idea to get people out of submarines. It was his own idea, to boot! You’d thin
k he was the first person who ever thought about it. Why, the bureau had been fooling around with the problem for years.

  Momsen still persisted. But it was no use. The entire proposal was dumped back on his desk with an anonymous scrawl: “Impractical from the standpoint of seamanship.”

  Even this he furiously protested. Problems of seamanship were not the bureau’s domain. Its function was to test a proposal like this for its technical feasibility. And nobody had yet given him an answer on that count. The matter, he was informed, was closed. As just another Navy lieutenant, Momsen had nowhere else to go. He could, of course, chuck his career. But by now, he had two children and a wife to support and no visible skill other than that of a submarine commander.

  Tragically, within weeks of his final turndown, the S–4 went to the bottom off Cape Cod. In Washington, Momsen sat reading the grim dispatches as her crew slowly asphyxiated. One of the last messages tapped out by the doomed men was an impossible request: “Please hurry.”

  The headlines touched off a national uproar. Thousands of letters poured into the Navy Department. Get rid of submarines, many of them insisted. Others demanded a way to save such men. As the Navy’s brass fidgeted, many of the letters—urging an investigation and suggesting past neglect—had been forwarded by Congress. Capricious fate saddled Swede Momsen with the task of answering all the mail. It was almost more than he could stand. All the while he possessed the bitter knowledge that the bell could have made the difference.

  In the end, he would not be denied. As the indignant letters came across his desk, he began to reconsider another idea he had toyed with briefly during the long wait to hear something about the bell. It offered a completely fresh approach to saving submariners. Best of all, no official sanction was required.

  So, with a handful of volunteers to assist him, he tackled it with renewed determination—the designing, the building, the testing. It was a device through which men trapped in a sub could breathe as they rose to the surface.

  An applauding world one day would call it the “Momsen lung.”

  And riding the crest of this success, he was able to resurrect his old bell plan, this time with the Navy’s blessing.

  To save the forty men aboard the S–4, they were far too late. But all the hopes of those still alive in the Squalus hinged on Momsens creations.

  To prove them out, he had repeatedly braved the unknown. A newspaperman once asked him what he most feared if another submarine went down.

  “That I wouldn’t be there,” he said.

  8

  THE BEAM FROM Chief Roy Campbell’s flashlight, shining on the eyeport of the door Lloyd Maness had finally closed, was the only light in the control room. Oliver Naquin stepped to Campbell’s side and observed the oil-streaked film of water on the other side of the door.

  When her emergency lights went out as the Squalus settled on the bottom, the sudden darkness left each man profoundly alone. In that instant, the enormity of what had happened to them hit home. Within seconds, though, the discipline of their service asserted itself. There wasn’t a hint of panic.

  At Naquin’s command, three hand lanterns were taken from storage racks. The ghostly glow they cast linked the men together again. For a moment they stared uncertainly at one another and then every eye fastened on the drawn face of Yeoman Kuney, still manning the battle phone, the last awful scream to surface from one of the after compartments ringing in his ears.

  “Any word aft?” Naquin quietly asked.

  “No, sir,” Kuney whispered.

  Naquin took the phone. Although he knew the fate of any men left in the after battery, there were three other compartments back there. He could not bring himself to think that they were all lost. But he got no response from either the forward or after engine rooms. That left the after torpedo room. If any of the crew had escaped the savage intrusion of the sea, they could be nowhere else.

  With immense care, Naquin said, “Hello, after torpedo room.” He paused. “Hello, this is the captain speaking. Hello.” There was no answer.

  Perhaps, he thought, the circuits might be dead. But when he tried the forward battery, Chief Gainor promptly replied.

  “What’s your condition?” Naquin asked.

  Very matter-of-factly, Gainor reported that the forward battery cells had started shorting out during the sub’s descent, but that he had been able to disconnect the master switches. Naquin could imagine what Gainor’s effort must have entailed, crawling into the battery well like that. So now there’d been two heroic actions—by Maness and then Gainor. Naquin prayed that no more would be required.

  On the phone from the forward torpedo room, Lieutenant Nichols told Naquin, “The lights are out. Otherwise, we’re OK. We took a little water in here, but not much. The compartment’s secure.”

  So that was it. Of the seven compartments that divided the Squalus, the three forward ones seemed safe for the time being at least. Three of the after compartments were definitely flooded. The cook, Will Isaacs, the last man to escape from the after battery, had described to Naquin the tremendous onslaught of the ocean into the engine rooms that he had witnessed. From what Isaacs said, every indication was that the water had somehow roared in through the high induction. But why hadn’t the control board shown that the valve was open? As for the after torpedo room, there remained the possibility that survivors of the sickening plunge might be huddled in it. Naquin, however, was under no illusion about the odds on that.

  The paramount thing was to get help. And in a hurry. Naquin’s first thought centered on the two lobster boats he had viewed so nonchalantly from the bridge. They were his only means of getting word of the sub’s plight quickly back to Portsmouth. He ordered Gunner’s Mate First Class Gene Cravens to fire a red smoke rocket, the submariner’s disaster signal.

  The rockets were in a canister in the control room and Cravens tried to pry open its suddenly stubborn lid. At first, he thought that the problem was his own ineptitude. But the sea’s rush into the after compartments had pushed so much air forward that the pressure in the control room was nearly double its normal level. Finally, Cravens got the lid off, inserted one of the rockets in its cylindrical ejector and launched it toward the surface. After it broke through the waves, it was designed to arch skyward for another eighty feet or so and burst in a reddening cloud of distress.

  But it was for naught. The comings and goings of submarines were commonplace in those waters. As it would turn out, no one on board either of the boats spared the Squalus a backward glance or a second thought as they headed home against the rising whitecaps.

  As soon as Cravens had fired the rocket, Naquin reached Nichols on the battle phone. “John,” he said, “release the marker buoy.” The bright yellow buoy, some three feet across, nestled flush on the main deck directly above the forward torpedo room. A cable, containing a telephone line, held it in place on the surface. It was a historic moment. Although the buoy had become standard undersea rescue equipment after the development of Swede Momsens escape lung and the diving bell, it had never been used with the lives of men actually at stake. The message on its topside read: SUBMARINE SUNK HERE. TELEPHONE INSIDE.

  Naquin had yet to determine how many of the sub’s crew were still alive. He now ordered his quartermaster, Frankie Murphy, to take a head count. The names of those holed up in the forward compartments were relayed by Kuney to Murphy. In the control room’s dim lantern light, he continued his grim muster. When he had finished, the news was as bad as Naquin feared. Of the fifty-nine men on board when the dive began, only thirty-three could now be accounted for.

  In the sobering hush that followed, everyone forgot about the relentless pressure of the North Atlantic backed up inside the maze of pipes and tubing that snaked the length of the Squalus. They got an ugly reminder. There was a soft gurgle and suddenly oil spurted all over the control room, followed by a wicked geyser of salt water. Will Isaacs, already drenched from having literally to swim his way out of the after battery, c
aught its full force. It knocked him down. He tried to scramble up, but was unable to get his footing in the slick oil. More oil completely covered his face and he could not see. Isaacs was sure that he was about to die. Just then Chief Campbell helped him back on his feet.

  The trouble was pinpointed a moment later. One of the main valves in the hydraulic system had collapsed. Naquin barely got the order out before every secondary valve in the system was being closed. Finally, the flow was throttled. Because of the upward slant of the sub, about eleven degrees, most of the oil and water had run to the after part of the control room. It was over a foot deep there.

  More trouble threatened. During the dive, a machinist’s mate, Carlton Powell, had been assigned to the pump room, directly below the control room. Now, as he checked to make certain that suction and discharge valves on the pumps were holding fast, his flashlight picked up a telltale bubbling in the bilge by the bulkhead between the pump room and the flooded after battery. He could not spot precisely where it originated. He called up to the control room and Naquin was immediately at the hatch, but following an anxious inspection, he concluded that the leak did not seem to be building up any appreciable speed. Naquin told Powell to join the others in the control room and to monitor the situation periodically.

  The men mopped up the mess in the control room as best they could. Naquin still clung to the hope that one of the lobster boats had seen his first distress signal. He directed Cravens to fire off a second rocket. Not quite twenty minutes had elapsed since the most modern submarine in the U.S. Navy had been transformed into a helpless hulk. And for some, already a tomb.

  Executive officer William Thomas Doyle had an idea. There were a number of secondary ballast tanks lining the underbelly of the Squalus that had not been blown. What would happen if they were freed of water? Naquin agreed that it was worth a try. So Doyle and the sub’s young engineering and navigation officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) Robert Robertson, sent pressurized air hissing into the after trim tank which kept the Squalus on an even keel as she moved beneath the surface.