The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  A hush so strained that the men could almost physically feel it spread through the Squalus. Five minutes passed. Ten. After twenty minutes, Naquin ordered, “Cravens, send up a rocket.”

  Still there was nothing. Suddenly the silence in the control room was broken. Ever since supper Rob Washburn had been trying to fight off an attack of the chills. The young seaman, aboard his first submarine, had started off the day plagued by his bad cold. Then, in escaping from the after battery, he’d been thoroughly soaked. Now he could no longer hold out. His teeth began to chatter uncontrollably and his body was racked by violent shivering.

  Naquin was at his side at once. He took off his foul-weather jacket and put it around Washburn’s shoulders. The pharmacist’s mate, Ray O’Hara, was right behind Naquin. He gave up his own blanket to Washburn and held him. That was all O’Hara could do, except whisper, “Hang on. You’ll be OK.”

  Shortly after six P.M., the Wandank’s oscillator activated again. The message was not encouraging: “Can you hear us?”

  In the conning tower, Smith pounded back, “Yes.”

  Fifteen dispiriting minutes dragged by without a response from the Wandank. Naquin, concerned that there had been no reaction to his plan for raising the Squalus, decided to initiate a message of his own. Smith and Booth, alternating on each word, hammered it out: “Will you apply salvage air to compartments abaft control room? We have air for ballast tanks.”

  But the Wandank’s next set of signals left Naquin as nonplussed as ever. They bore no relation to his query. He could only assume that the Squalus was just too far down for the hammering on her hull to be effective. Now the Wandank wanted to know: “How many officers and crew in unflooded compartments? Are you taking water in those compartments?”

  With little hope that it would do much good, Naquin dictated a terse reply: “Thirty-three. No.” What made the whole thing all the more infuriating was the clarity of the Wandank’s signals. Naquin felt like a man in a nightmare standing on a busy street corner while throngs of people passed by oblivious to his shouts.

  Then, as the clang of the hammers died away into the vastness of the North Atlantic, two-way contact, however tenuous, was established at last. “We can hear your hammering,” the Wandank signaled, “but very weak. Send each word three times.” The smattering of cheers inside the submarine quickly subsided as the Wandank continued: “What degree list?”

  Once more, Smith and Booth went to work. They had taken incredible punishment. The cold in the conning tower was far worse than in the control room and the air was just as bad. Gasping for breath and choking down waves of nausea, however, they never let up for a moment as they hammered out a steady tattoo of dots and dashes. With their efforts apparently rewarded, they banged away with renewed fury.

  Naquin kept his answer as brief as he could: “No list. Eleven degree angle up by bow.” Even so, it took Smith and Booth half an hour to complete it. As Smith finished the last word for the third time, he found himself, despite the frigid temperature, bathed in a clammy sweat. Then he threw up.

  Naquin recalled both men to the control room. He replaced them with Charles Powell, the radioman who had sent the original dive messages, and a signalman, Ted Jacobs, both of whom were now in the forward torpedo room. As Smith and Booth staggered down from the conning tower, Naquin was about to direct those closest to the two exhausted sailors to share their blankets. He didn’t have to. It was already being done.

  At seven-thirty, glancing at his watch, Naquin was vaguely aware that there was a change in their situation. It took him a minute to realize what it was. The throb of the Penacook’s propellers had abruptly ceased. He discounted the idea that the weather was a factor. Surely, if it had become a problem, the Wandank would have mentioned it. And he couldn’t imagine that the search had been abandoned, even temporarily. The only other possibility he could think of was that the tug had hooked the Squalus. Or the men on her thought they had.

  Naquin anxiously awaited some confirmation of this. But when none was forthcoming by eight o’clock, he instructed Powell and Jacobs to hammer out: “Have you located us?”

  But all he got back was still another query, this one requesting a description of current conditions in the sub.

  The reply Naquin ordered was just four words long and directed as much to his own men as to those on the surface. It said: “Conditions satisfactory but cold.”

  For some reason—perhaps there’d been some parting of the thermal layers in the ocean water that often deflected sound waves—it was one message from the Squalus that was received clearly and completely. And it would subsequently electrify millions of morning newspaper readers and radio listeners still under the illusion, since there’d been no reports to the contrary, that the entire crew might have been spared.

  Then the Wandank’s oscillator unexpectedly relayed what Naquin had been striving to find out ever since the Penacook had stopped passing back and forth overhead: “Believe have grapnel attached to your boat.”

  Naquin fervently hoped that was the case. But there was a nasty little fact that he could not ignore. Absolutely nothing had been heard or felt inside the Squalus to give the slightest indication that a grappling iron had taken hold of her.

  10

  AIRBORNE IN A twin-engine amphibian that had taken off from the Anacostia Naval Air Station in Washington, Swede Momsen remained unaware of the arduous search for the Squalus or that communications with the sunken sub had broken down.

  Limited to three others on this emergency flight, he had chosen them without hesitation. Lieutenants Al Behnke and Pete Yarbrough were both Navy doctors attached to Momsen’s experimental diving unit. Their presence would be crucial if the men in the Squalus were forced to brave some forty freezing fathoms of the North Atlantic with the lung.

  The third man, in the event of an unforeseen emergency, was a master diver, Chief Metalsmith Jim McDonald, co-holder of a then record 500-foot dive simulated in the pressure tank while testing Momsen’s new helium and oxygen breathing mixtures.

  The irony of his situation was not lost on Momsen. For years, he had dreaded this day and prepared ceaselessly for it, and now that it had come, he had no certain idea of what he was going up against. Buckled in his seat, all he could do was wonder if he had overlooked anything, some secret mockery of the sea yet to be revealed. Later, in a letter to his wife describing that flight, he wrote, “I never felt more humble. It seemed as if all the gods were pointing at me.”

  Momsen had every reason to think so. When he first submitted plans for his diving bell, other suggestions being bandied about to save submariners were incredibly primitive. One popular theory was that you could rise to the surface with your head inside a bubble of air. Out of curiosity, he tried it and discovered to his consternation that the theory had a major defect. The bubble disintegrated on the way up.

  While the dismissal of his bell proposal just before the tragic loss of all hands on the S–4 very nearly caused Momsen to quit the Navy in disgust, a daring new concept—of escape from below rather than rescue from the surface—began to grip his restless imagination.

  It centered around the premise that if a man had the physical ability to stand in water up to his chin and breathe, he could also breathe into a bag positioned on his chest at a level corresponding to that of his lungs. Assuming that the air supply was revitalized, Momsen asked himself, why couldn’t a man breathe back and forth into the bag even though his head was under water? It sounded logical enough—except that nobody had thought of it before. And whether it would work or not was another matter. In order to test his theory, however, one thing was certain. Momsen would not go through official channels again. After his bitter experience with the bell he figured he didn’t have any choice. Instead, for the kind of technical help he needed, he approached a free-spirited young engineer in the Bureau of Construction and Repair named Frank Hobson, who specialized in research and development. Better yet, as a civilian, Hobson could afford to wink at the
Navy’s hidebound ways.

  Hobson was immediately intrigued by the idea and agreed to comb through his files for anything that might relate to submarine escape. In the end he managed to turn up reports on a number of contraptions, but none of them had really panned out. While each had been introduced with considerable fanfare at one time or another, every device up until then was either too bulky or balky, and nowhere had there been any serious effort to train submarine crews in their use.

  So there was nothing left for Momsen to do except start from scratch. It was an audacious undertaking, probing an alien world as no man before him had ever done, without funds, operating almost alone, buoyed only by his belief in himself and determined this time not to be thwarted.

  His first problem—revitalizing the bag’s air supply—proved simple enough. Soda lime was already known to be an effective absorbent for carbon dioxide, the poisonous waste product of exhaled air. But some means had to be found to replenish the amount of oxygen a man would consume during the time it took him to reach the surface. A day’s research in a medical library convinced Momsen that a supply of pure oxygen would be needed. The reason oxygen could be used safely to inflate the lung was that a man using one started out with a lungful of air. Since the man would be coming up, constantly decompressing, the oxygen in the bag merely replenished his initial supply. And since the body will use only as much oxygen as it requires at any given moment, an amount sufficient to cover the escape period was all he needed. That night Momsen went to bed thinking that he had the whole thing licked.

  By morning he wasn’t so sure. What if the oxygen requirements made the bag too big? The resulting buoyancy would propel its hapless user to the surface out of control, his body unable to endure such rapid decompression. The size of the bag now became the critical factor—and in more ways than one. It had to be a size that a man’s lungs could easily handle. It also had to be large enough to supply him with enough oxygen to rise to the surface safely. Finally, it had to be small enough to enable him to control his upward movement.

  For someone whose formal education had shaped him for duty as a line officer in the U.S. Navy, Momsen was getting into pretty deep water. At the time practically nothing was known about the environment a human might encounter in the ocean depths or the mysterious changes it wrought on his body chemistry. But from the beginning Momsen’s instinct was to have the bag function like human lungs right down to its placement on the chest. Somehow, he sensed, this would keep him on the track.

  He was right. The average capacity of human lungs measured in liquid terms proved to be somewhat more than a gallon, so breathing in and out of a bag that size presented no problem. His proposed lung was also large enough for the ascents up to 300 feet that Momsen foresaw as submarines increased their test depth. Keying the capacity of the bag to that of real lungs even took care of the danger of going up too fast. It would produce only about eight pounds of buoyancy.

  Out of his investigation into previous attempts to engineer escape apparatus, Momsen did learn one vital lesson. They had all been far too complex. But buttressed by Hobson’s technical know-how, he finally settled on a design that seemed workable.

  The bag, made of rubber and resembling nothing so much as a hot-water bottle, hung around the neck with additional straps around the waist. A canister of soda lime inside it filtered out the carbon dioxide. Leading to the mouthpiece were two tubes, one to breathe in the oxygen and the other to exhale it. A valve on the bottom side of the bag automatically allowed excess oxygen to escape as the pressure decreased during an ascent. Between the mouthpiece and the tubes there was a second valve that would retain the oxygen still in the bag once the surface was reached, so that it could serve as a temporary life preserver. The only other feature was a noseclip.

  Building a working model was something else again. To do it Momsen enlisted another confederate, Chief Gunner Clarence Tibbals, who headed up the diving school at the Washington Navy Yard. A salty veteran, Tibbals had won the Navy Cross for the part he played in trying to rescue the crew of the S–4, and it didn’t take much to get him to lend his workshop to the project. But latching on to the right materials still stretched everyone’s ingenuity to the limit. All the rubber, for example, was eventually scrounged from old inner tubes. This accounted for the large red patch that decorated Momsen’s first artificial lung.

  Little more than a month after he had committed himself to its development—on February 25, 1928—the lung was ready for testing in the model boat basin at the yard. The officer in charge, in giving Momsen permission after regular hours to ignore the POSITIVELY NO SWIMMING sign, dryly noted, “Swede, if your heart’s desire is to emulate a fish, who am I to stand in your way? Only do me a favor and don’t drown. It won’t look good on my record.”

  Momsen cut a memorable figure in his woolen tank suit, the rubber bag with its red patch drooping around his neck, a clothespin serving as his noseclip. He entered the basin at its shallow end and walked slowly down the incline until the water was just below his eyes. He stood there breathing in and out of the bag for thirty seconds or so. Then, gravely saluting Hobson and Tibbals, he took a final step and went in over his head. That first trial lasted less than three minutes, but for submariners everywhere it was the beginning of a new era.

  Night after night Momsen returned to the basin, drifting around its bottom at a depth of ten feet, weighed down by a piece of scrap iron, his imagination carrying him through all the compartments of a submarine pinned helplessly to the ocean floor.

  Three weeks later he was ready to switch to the pressure tank at the yard that was used by Tibbals and his divers to simulate conditions in the sea. When the tank was partially filled with water, compressed air was admitted to build the pressure to any desired depth, starting off at fifty feet. Momsen described his first experience in the tank in a letter to a friend.

  There was the hiss of air, and then the intense heat caused by the added pressure. Suddenly the pressure on my ears became almost unbearable and I held my nose and blew as hard as I could. At fifty feet I filled the bag with oxygen and ducked down under the water holding a line attached to an anchor. Tibbals was peering intently through the eyeport watching every move I made from his control station outside the tank. I waved my hand and he threw open the exhaust valve allowing the pressure to fall at a rate approximately equal to the change in pressure that would have taken place had I been rising through the water. While I actually did not move, I had the sensation of surfacing. The bag swelled as the pressure fell and the excess gas escaped through a valve in the bottom just as we planned.

  From fifty feet in the pressure tank, Momsen gradually worked his way down to a simulated 100 feet, then to 150, 200, 250 and finally to 300 feet. While several of the divers under Tibbals had joined in the experiments by then, Momsen was always the first to try each new test. He considered himself responsible for any mishap that might occur as he pushed farther into the unknown, and although everything had gone off without a hitch so far, he could never quite rid himself of the feeling that a hidden danger lurked somewhere in all of this.

  Once his trials in the pressure tank were finished, he faced an odd paradox. Before he could attempt a real ascent, he had to have some means of getting down deep enough to do it. Tibbals supplied the solution. He had listened to Momsen talk about his old diving-bell plan and decided to adapt some of its features. In this instance the “bell” was fashioned from half of a pickle barrel requisitioned from the enlisted men’s mess. Two vertical boards were nailed to its open end and connected with a crosspiece. After the whole contrivance was weighted and in the water, Momsen could stand on the crosspiece with his head and shoulders inside the barrel and breathe the air that had been trapped there. A hose from the surface kept the air supply renewed while a manila line regulated the barrel’s movement. When it reached a predetermined depth, all Momsen had to do was slip outside and glide back up.

  He decided to baptize the pickle barrel in a tank some s
ixty feet deep that was normally reserved for testing mines. Getting into such depths without any of the control factors of the pressure tank added a new wrinkle to the lung’s basic equipment—an ascending line that ran up to a wooden buoy on the surface. Along this line he strung a number of cork “stop” marks. At each stop there would be a pause, measured by a prescribed number of breaths, so that a man coming up could safely decompress. Although Momsen’s first ascent from the pickle barrel was a cautious twenty feet, rising through the tank’s full sixty feet was routine by the advent of summer. The same exhilarating thought swept over him each time he did it. If he had been on the bottom in a submarine and had some way of getting out, he would have been able to reach the surface safely.

  While word had circulated that Momsen was fiddling around with some sort of escape device, nobody had taken it very seriously. The best engineering minds in the country, after all, had been called in following the S–4 tragedy, and nothing was off the drawing board yet. Now, he decided, the moment had come for a dramatic demonstration of what the lung could do, and he searched through charts of the Potomac River until he located a hole 110 feet deep off Morgantown, Maryland.

  Since the pickle barrel could not stand up under the downstream tides of the Potomac, a similar contraption of steel had been put together and was brought to the Morgantown hole on board the small diving boat Crilley. But the river was still ebbing so fast on the morning of their arrival that Momsen had to wait for slack water. This didn’t leave much margin for error. As soon as the current subsided, the new rig was lowered into the Potomac. It was really nothing more than a steel box three feet by four feet and thirty inches high. Like its rickety predecessor, it had a platform underneath its open bottom.