by Peter Maas
Sharp completed his maneuver at 0945 hours. As he did, it was as though nature was having a last mocking laugh. Both the wind and the sea perversely died down. Even the cloud cover began to break up.
SWEDE MOMSEN, MEANWHILE, was preoccupied with preparations of his own. Just as the Falcon showed up, his experimental diving unit—including Chief Machinist’s Mate Bill Badders, who with Jim McDonald shared the record 500-foot descent on helium and oxygen—had boarded the Sculpin. With them had come Commander Allen McCann, for whom the chamber had been named, to serve as a technical consultant on Cole’s rescue staff. Momsen welcomed him cordially, holding him in no way responsible for the slight Momsen had suffered.
Momsen also was in operational control of the Falcon’s contingent of divers led by Lieutenant Julian Morrison. And before the Falcon began laying out her anchors, he had them brought over to the Sculpin as well. Since the Sculpin was a replica of the Squalus, he wanted each diver to familiarize himself thoroughly with her every detail so that whenever one of them was on the sunken sub in the gloomy depths, he would know exactly where he stood.
With the Falcon positioned at last, the stage was set for the great drama to begin. But first Momsen made a crucial decision. It reflected the painstaking care that had always characterized him. He knew most of the Falcon’s divers personally and he sensed that the tension among the “hard hats”—as the deep-sea divers were called—was running high. All of them, his own unit divers and those from the Falcon, were a tough, proud bunch, and any outburst of ego or temperament in the natural rivalry between them could be ruinous. So he would mix them up. There’d be no favoritism. Every man would have his turn. What’s more, he would send a Falcon diver down first.
All of this was quite understandable. But what surprised everyone was that Momsen chose a husky boatswain’s mate named Martin Sibitsky to be the lead diver. Sibitsky’s career was hanging in the balance. A couple of months earlier, he had been recommended for disqualification following an attack of the bends in what was reported to be relatively shallow water. Momsen knew Sibitsky very well. When this report reached him in Washington, he couldn’t believe it. He concocted an excuse for a trip to New London to look into the matter. After a discreet inquiry, he concluded that Sibitsky had been down much deeper than supposed and arranged another chance for him.
Now Cole, Momsen and Doctors Behnke and Yarbrough transferred to the Falcon. Sibitsky was ready to go. He was encased in his heavy rubberized canvas diving suit. Fixed to his sleeves were mitten-like gloves split into two-fingered partitions. Around his waist he had a belt loaded with lead, supported by cross straps and held down by a third strap running under his crotch. His legs were tightly laced to keep them from filling with air and upsetting his buoyancy distribution. He also wore rubber shoes with lead soles for additional weight and stability. Finally, he had a new innovation spearheaded by Momsen—a suit of electrically heated underwear controlled by a storage battery on the Falcon. Altogether, his cumbersome gear amounted to some two hundred pounds.
Momsen went to him and whispered, “Skee, there’s a reason why I want you to go first.”
“Yes, sir. Thanks very much.”
“No thanks are necessary. Just do the job I know you can.”
“I won’t let you down, Mr. Momsen.”
Then Sibitsky was helped to his diving platform, which was connected to a hoist on the Falcon. The big metal helmet with its thick glass eyepiece was placed over his head. Air hoses were attached to the top of the helmet and a lifeline harnessed to him.
Sibitsky was swung over the side and lowered on his platform into the sea. Deckhands on every ship around the Falcon lined the rails, watching silently. A Coast Guard cutter jammed with reporters had arrived from Portsmouth. The sun picked this moment to poke through the clouds.
As Sibitsky started his slide down the Penacooks dragline, a sudden shaft of sunlight shone on where he had disappeared from sight. “It’s an omen,” Al Behnke told Momsen, giving him a thumbs-up. “We’re going to pull this off.”
Momsen kept in continual touch with Sibitsky by phone. On air alone, without the revolutionary helium and oxygen mixtures, anything could happen venturing into these depths, even to the most experienced diver. Under extreme pressure, the excess nitrogen being forced into the bloodstream was capable of causing all sorts of aberrations. One man could suddenly feel gloriously drunk. Another became morose, some completely passed out. Sometimes a diver suffered temporary blindness. Often he was unable to distinguish between left and right. In any event, no one felt normal. Every act demanded intense concentration. A diver soon found that he had to repeat aloud to himself over and over again how to perform the most elementary chores.
Momsen knew exactly what it was like. He vividly recalled an episode that had once happened to him during a practice dive at 300 feet. His assignment could not have been more mundane. It was to remove a cap from a pipe representing a submarine salvage air line, attach a fitting to the pipe and connect a hose. He remembered how he had taken the cap off and put the fitting on by hand. Next he carefully repeated to himself, “Now I must tighten the fitting with a wrench.” He found the wrench, set it around the fitting and began to turn it. The fitting promptly fell off. Momsen finally realized that it was because he had been turning the wrench the wrong way. But his attitude about the whole process was total indifference.
When Sibitsky reached 150 feet, Momsen called down to him, “Skee, how are you?”
“I’m OK,” he said. “No problems.”
As he neared 200 feet, he reported, “Everything remains OK. Sun getting down here. Visibility better than expected.”
Then, at 200 feet, he said, “Dragline angle turning straight down. I must be getting close.”
As Momsen tensely waited, the dim bulk of the Squalus slowly started to take form below Sibitsky where she lay on the North Atlantic’s continental shelf.
On the Falcon, Admiral Cole standing rigid with anxiety next to him, Momsen heard Sibitsky say, “I see her. I see the submarine.”
There was a pause before Sibitsky announced, “I am on her deck.”
“Skee, where are you on the deck?” Momsen asked, his words slow and controlled. “What do you see?”
Sibitsky struggled to keep his senses against the tremendous pressure of the ocean. “Just a minute,” he said. “I will tell you in just a minute.”
“Take your time, Skee,” Momsen said.
“Wait,” Sibitsky said. “Yes! I see the windlass. It is right in front of me. I am on the bow.”
“Skee,” Momsen said, “can you see the hatch?”
“Can I see the hatch? Yes, there it is. I can see the hatch. It’s right here.”
Against all odds, the Penacook not only had found the Squalus, but had snagged her port railing less than ten feet from the escape hatch that the rescue chamber would have to settle on.
One of Momsen’s maxims was that a diver had to spearhead any rescue operation. The rescue chamber should never go blindly down from the surface. Now it was never more evident. Sibitsky said, “I am approaching hatch. Wait! There is a cable or something lying across the hatch. I will move it.” What he had spotted was part of the broken marker-buoy cable that had landed back on the hatch. It would have blocked the seal that the chamber had to make. He leaned forward and pushed it aside. Even this seemingly simple act required enormous exertion. “The hatch is clear,” he finally notified Momsen. “I am on the hatch.”
Momsen immediately told him that the down-haul cable for the chamber would be lowered. While Sibitsky waited, he stamped his diving shoes with their heavy lead soles on the hatch to let the trapped crew know he was there. But inside the Squalus, alerted by the Wandank’s signal that a diver was on the way, they’d already heard him walking around. In the forward torpedo room, Lenny de Medeiros had gone up inside the escape trunk that would have been used to get out of the sub with the lung. Although he couldn’t make out Sibitsky’s words to Momsen, he could hear the sound of hi
s voice. Then de Medeiros grabbed a hammer and beat back a happy tattoo.
Looking up, Sibitsky saw the chamber’s down-haul cable glide into view. Its shackle dangled in front of his stomach. “OK,” he told Momsen. “The cable’s here. Hold it.” Like a man in slow motion, he put out a hand to retrieve the shackle—and missed. “Goddammit, I lost it!” he shouted. “Jesus Christ!”
Momsen reacted quickly and calmly to the frenzied tone in Sibitsky’s voice. “It’s OK, Skee,” he reassured him over the phone. “Don’t worry about a thing. That was our fault. We’ll get it right back to you.”
He had the cable raised and sent back down. “Tell me when you see the shackle,” he said.
“Yes, yes, I see it now, I see it,” Sibitsky said.
This time he grasped the shackle. Leaning forward until he was nearly prone on the deck, he connected the shackle to a big ring in the middle of the escape hatch. “Shackle in place,” he said. “Ready to come up.” He stamped his foot once more on the hatch to say goodbye.
Sibitsky had spent twenty-two minutes on the Squalus. It took another forty minutes to pull him up in easy stages to ward off an attack of the bends. Only then did the cold start to hit him through his suit. Momsen couldn’t have asked for anything more. It had been a splendid display of endurance and presence of mind by the thirty-year-old boatswain’s mate under pitiless stress. Sibitsky was brought back on board and rushed as a precautionary measure into the Falcon’s recompression chamber. With a conspiratorial wink, Momsen whispered the Navy’s traditional accolade, “Well done, Skee!”
As the rescue chamber was readied, Admiral Cole wanted to send a doctor down on the first descent. But Momsen, backed by McCann, talked him out of it. Momsen argued that if any of the crewmen were that badly off, they would receive infinitely better medical attention on the surface, especially since the cruiser Brooklyn, delayed by fog most of the night, was reportedly less than half an hour away. What ought to be delivered instead, Momsen said, were extra blankets, CO2 absorbent, flashlights, hot soup, coffee and sandwiches.
Momsen had still another reason for not sending a doctor down. The doctor meant one more man to be brought back up. There’d been a great deal of discussion about the number of trips necessary to get out the thirty-three men known to be in the forward torpedo and control rooms. The decision seemed headed toward five trips—four each with seven members of the sub’s crew and five in a fifth trip.
But finally Momsen decided to try for four. He told Cole that there were other risks to consider. Although the weather had momentarily changed for the better, it remained unpredictable. And every additional trip increased the odds of some fatal breakdown, either mechanical or human. So seven men would be brought up initially to see how the chamber operated. He would increase the number to eight passengers for the second trip unless the chamber obviously couldn’t handle that many. If it could, as he hoped, then he would have nine men in the chamber for the last two trips.
“It’s your call, Swede,” Cole said.
As it would turn out, Momsen had never been more prescient.
NEAR NOON, THE rescue chamber was hoisted off the Falcon’s fantail. Newscaster Bob Trout would tell millions of radio listeners, “We reporters up here really don’t know what to call it. Officially, it’s a rescue chamber, but it sort of looks like a bell. All of us here know, however, that we are witnessing a historic event.”
Momsen watched as it was hoisted out over the water with its two operators inside. For the first time, men in a sunken submarine were going to be returned to the surface alive—and from a depth once thought unreachable. Not even this bell, ten feet high and seven across at its widest, had ever gone so deep in rescue run-throughs.
Tethered to the Falcon by an up-haul cable, it floated some twenty feet away. Its lower compartment was not yet flooded, its main ballast tank and fourteen auxiliary cans filled just enough to provide positive buoyancy so that its gray top was visible. Beside the cable that would be used to retrieve the chamber in an emergency, two air hoses and electric lines for a telephone and interior lights ran from its top to the Falcon.
Two minutes after the chamber was in the ocean, one of the operators, Walt Harmon, reported to Momsen that he and his partner, John Mihalowski, were all set in the upper compartment.
“Go on down,” Momsen ordered.
Harmon started the air motor and the reel began winding in the down-haul cable that Sibitsky had attached to the Squalus. The chamber crept along the surface like a huge water bug for perhaps fifty feet. Then, as ballast was blown and the lower compartment flooded, it sank from sight.
Inside his control room, Naquin listened to the Penacook’s signal that the chamber was descending and that seven men were to make the first trip. Over the battle phone, he instructed Nichols that besides Harold Preble, he should pick five men whom he felt were in the worst physical shape. “You go, too, John,” he said. “I want an officer up there in case any consultation is necessary.”
Naquin said that he and the rest of the men in the control room would stay put until the first group was out of the boat. Moving to the forward torpedo room now would simply overcrowd it and create confusion. Nichols had a question. During the night, the Wandank had requested the removal of all confidential publications. What about this? Naquin told him to forget it. It wasn’t worth the waste in energy.
Thirty minutes into the descent, at 150 feet, the rescue chamber halted. There was some trouble with the air vent lowering the pressure to maintain proper flooding and buoyancy. Three minutes later, flooding commenced again.
Harmon continued to sing out their progress until at last, peering through the chamber’s porthole, he reported, “Submarine in sight.”
The chamber slowly settled on the flat steel collar surrounding the escape hatch. Now the process of blowing ballast and flooding the lower compartment that had begun on the surface was reversed. The main ballast tank girdling the chamber was filled while the lower compartment was emptied.
The enormous force of the ocean then sealed the rubber gasket around the bottom of the chamber to the escape hatch.
Harmon reported, “Seal complete.” Mihalowski opened the hatch in the chamber that divided its two compartments and dropped into the lower one where several inches of water remained. He attached four steel bolts to rings around the sub’s hatch. Then he lifted the hatch cover.
On the Falcon, Momsen could hear it fall with a thud against the side of the chamber. But in his growing excitement, he suddenly froze. “Upper submarine hatch is open,” Harmon told him, “but no answer from submarine.” What happened was that Nichols had kept the hatch at the other end of the escape trunk closed until a drainage pipe siphoned off the excess water, about a barrelful, that had come from the chamber. That done, he ordered the lower hatch opened.
Mihalowski looked down in the faint light. He could barely distinguish the pale faces staring back up at him.
Momsen heard the magic words from Harmon. “Mihalowski sees them!”
“When I heard that,” he wrote of the moment, “I experienced a thrill I cannot possibly describe and I wonder if any man ever could.”
Mihalowski himself didn’t know what to say. It was as if both he and the men below had been rendered speechless. “Well,” he finally said, “we’re here. I’m passing down soup, coffee and sandwiches.”
That broke the ice. De Medeiros said, “What, no napkins?”
Mihalowski heard another voice say, “Where the hell have you guys been?”
Mihalowski laughed. “You should have seen the traffic,” he said.
To accompany him and Preble on this first ascent, Nichols selected the last two men to flee the after battery, Isaacs and Roland Blanchard, who had been helping him in the galley when the dive began. Next were Gerry McLees and Charlie Yuhas, both of whom seemed particularly affected by the cold. The fifth man was Ted Jacobs, who continued to vomit following his exhausting assignment to hammer messages on the hull through the n
ight.
One by one Mihalowski and Harmon helped them into the upper compartment of the chamber. After they were all seated, Mihalowski ran down an air hose and ventilated the forward torpedo room. After that, Harmon announced, “Submarine hatch closed. Ready to come up.”
Momsen ordered a thousand pounds of ballast dumped from the auxiliary cans to compensate for the added weight of the seven passengers so that positive buoyancy would be maintained.
“Ballast blown,” Harmon reported.
“Unbolt,” Momsen said. “Flood lower compartment. Blow main ballast tank.”
It took fourteen minutes. “Seal broken,” Harmon said. “Coming up.”
The chamber slowly rose, its air motor chugging away in reverse, the reel unwinding the cable attached to the hatch cover on the Squalus. On the Falcon, the up-haul cable was taken in.
The seven dazed survivors inside the chamber said little. None of them had been in one before, and finally Will Isaacs asked, “Are we being pulled up by the Falcon?”
“No,” Harmon said. “That motor you hear runs a reel that takes us up and down.”
“Oh,” Isaacs said.
As the chamber neared the surface, it could be seen by correspondents in a half-dozen planes circling low over the sea. With about thirty feet to go, it looked to a New York Daily News reporter like “a great green blob.” Then it broke through the slight swell, less than fifteen feet from the Falcon. Boat hooks quickly brought it alongside, and two sailors scrambled down to open the hatch.
Lieutenant Nichols was the first to stick his head up. Cheers erupted from the ships surrounding him. Nichols blinked in the sunlight and faltered briefly as he tried to climb out. Hands from the Falcon stretched out to help him on board.
Harold Preble followed him. As he stood unsteadily on deck, he spied Momsen, with whom he had been having the dispute about the accuracy of the stopwatches he had supplied the experimental diving unit. He hugged Momsen with a big grin. The first thing he said was, “Swede, I’ll get some new watches to you right away.”