The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  Once all the others were on the Falcon, Commander Andrew McKee, an officer on Cole’s staff who had been involved in some of Momsen’s early experiments, looked at him in amazement. “Gosh, Swede,” he said, “how can you be so calm at a time like this?”

  Recounting this later in notes to himself, Momsen wrote, “Maybe I missed my calling. I didn’t know I was such a good actor. Perhaps I tried to appear calm, but to me this was the most exciting moment in my life. Eleven years of preparation, combating skepticism and trying to anticipate all sorts of possible disasters—and then to have it all telescoped into this one moment. Who could stay calm?”

  IN THE MIDST of this celebratory mood, Nichols carried with him sobering news, a roster with the names of the men who were known to have survived.

  When they were transmitted to Portsmouth and released to the media, the common bond that had united the Squalus women dissolved. For many hours, they had clung to the hope that the entire crew was still alive. Then had come word that possibly twenty-six of the men were missing and presumed lost. Now their identities were known.

  Earlier that morning, auburn-haired Evelyn Powell, the wife of the machinist’s mate who had written his will during the night, had rushed into the administration building and cried, “I can’t stand this waiting much longer!” She was told to come back in an hour. The rescue effort was getting under way. Soon there’d be something more definitive to tell her.

  Just as she was returning once more, she heard his name being announced as one of the survivors. Tears streamed down her face. “I had almost given up hope,” she sobbed to a circle of reporters. “This is the most wonderful thing in the world.”

  A few feet away, Ellen Chestnutt, who had roamed for so long about the base before heeding pleas to rest, learned that her husband was among the missing. “It can’t be so!” she screamed. “Last night I could see John’s body floating around in that water out there. I prayed and prayed that it wasn’t so.”

  In the pandemonium in the administration building, the cruel irony of who survived and who hadn’t was played out again and again as newsmen crowded around Lieutenant Commander Curley for more information. Typewriters drummed away. Phones rang constantly.

  Mary Jane Pierce, the recent bride of the machinist mate who had reported pressure in the boat when the dive began, couldn’t restrain her joy. “Whenever he left me to go on these trips,” she exulted, “I told him I wasn’t worried. He was too ornery to die.” Then she hastily interjected, “Please don’t get me wrong. That’s just a kidding expression we use around my hometown of Kansas City.”

  Betty Patterson, described by her brother as prostrate with grief, remained in seclusion in her father’s house. Her husband’s parents had arrived from Oklahoma City. They learned about the Squalus during a change of planes in Chicago. Her brother told a reporter for the Boston Globe that she still would not accept her presumed loss, at least not yet.

  The tragedy went beyond the naval community into Portsmouth itself. Margaret Batick had been born and raised there. Weeping uncontrollably, she was taken to the base hospital. Other women, including the wife of Gene Hoffman, were consoled by the yard chaplain.

  Slim, blond Stella Hathaway, married for two years to Fireman First Class John Hathaway, who had drawn duty in the forward engine room with Hoffman, was in deep denial. She clung desperately to an announcement by Curley: “There is no final word about the crewmen unaccounted for. Nothing is definite at this time.”

  By now reporters had learned about Lloyd Maness and Sherman Shirley. Several of them located Shirley’s fiancée at the home of her parents in Dover. She showed them the wedding band that Maness had left with her to hold. “He said it would be safer with me,” she told them. “I won’t give up hope until I am officially notified of his death. He’s too good to be trapped like that. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.”

  These scenes of anguish or rejoicing were duplicated throughout the country as the news came over the radio.

  There was one dramatic exception. Somehow the names on the list of known survivors that Nichols had brought up with him did not include Seaman First Class Bill Boulton. In Brooklyn, his wife, Rita, collapsed when she heard that he was probably dead. Not for five tear-streaked hours would she learn that he was alive. Then she collapsed all over again.

  LIEUTENANT NICHOLS WAS the only one in the forward torpedo room who had not gotten any rest during the long night. The strain of overseeing the men there had finally caught up with him, and when the cutter Harriet Lane docked at Plymouth with the initial batch of survivors, he was carried off on a stretcher.

  The others, disheveled and wrapped in blankets, managed to make it on their own. The first to step ashore was Charlie Yuhas. Before he was hustled into a waiting ambulance, a reporter asked him, “Glad to be back on dry land?”

  Yuhas looked at him as if he had gone mad. “Yeah, I guess you could say that,” Yuhas replied.

  15

  AS SOON AS the rescue chamber began its first ascent, Naquin prepared to vacate the control room.

  “Are any of you too weak to make it on your own?” he asked.

  No one spoke up.

  His next concern was the amount of chlorine gas that might have collected in the forward battery. By now, it could be at lethal levels. So he directed the men to rig their Momsen lungs to use as gas masks while walking through the compartment.

  Lieutenant Nichols had left Chief Gainor in charge of the forward torpedo room. Over the battle phone, Naquin told Gainor to have the eight remaining crew members there also put on their lungs until the transfer was completed. “Don’t crack the door until you hear us knocking,” Naquin ordered.

  Then junior grade Lieutenant Robertson opened the door that led into the forward battery. Naquin was the last to leave the control room. As the men passed through toward the forward torpedo room, he paused momentarily to open the hatch leading down to the batteries themselves. His flashlight picked up a thick greenish-yellow cloud that swirled toward him and he hastily closed it, relieved that the deadly fumes had been contained.

  In the forward torpedo room, the new arrivals breathed the fresh air that had been vented in from the rescue chamber. But despite this and the coffee and soup, the cold assaulted them again and they huddled together to keep warm.

  On the Falcon, Momsen told Cole, “We’ll try eight men this time and see how we do.”

  Since the chamber’s operators for the first trip, Harmon and Mihalowski, were both from the Falcon, Momsen replaced Mihalowski with Bill Badders, the record-holding chief machinist’s mate from his experimental diving unit.

  The Falcon signaled the sub that the second descent was imminent. But now the barest hint of trouble developed. The clutch on the reel for the down-haul cable would not engage and the chamber had to be hoisted out of the sea to reach it. Only a few minutes were needed to engage it manually and the descent continued without further incident.

  Shortly after three P.M., Harmon reported, “Holding bolts on. Opening submarine hatch.”

  Naquin waited until the excess water from the chamber drained off. Through an eyeport in the lower hatch, he saw the flashlight that Badders was shining down and opened the hatch. He had already decided that he would send up the four remaining men—Washburn, Boulton, Bland and O’Hara—who had fought their way out of the after battery. He also noticed that Gainor was coughing badly and included him. As for the others, there didn’t seem to be any obvious choices.

  Still, the incredible discipline of the crew held. Not one man tried to catch Naquin’s eye, push himself forward, or claim a special need. Each instead stayed quietly in place until his name was called.

  Badders vented in more fresh air before closing the deck hatch. “Don’t worry fellows,” he said, “we’ll be right back.”

  When the chamber emerged on the surface, Momsen instantly saw that he faced an unexpected—and bitter—decision. It rode so heavily in the water that apparently the eight passen
gers he had scheduled to be brought up on this second trip were the most that the chamber could safely carry.

  With eighteen men still in the sub, this meant that there had to be the extra trip he hoped to avoid. There was nothing specific to point to, but some instinct in him, an instinct that had served him so well during the trials and errors of the past, was flashing all sorts of warning lights. As if to confirm his unease, the sky was clouding over once more, the wind building, the bleak North Atlantic starting to kick up ever so slightly. A dozen things could go wrong if the weather got rougher. Suppose, for instance, that the Falcon’s anchors began dragging again? Momsen didn’t want to think about that. Nonetheless, he resigned himself to the inevitable. He turned to Cole and said, “Admiral, I’m afraid we’re going to have to make five trips after all.”

  Exuberant over the chamber’s initial success, Cole was unfazed. “I have every confidence in you, Swede.”

  Momsen kept Badders in the chamber for the third trip while replacing Harmon with Mihalowski. “Eight men,” he told them. “That’s it.”

  There was more trouble with the balky reel clutch, but then the chamber disappeared beneath the surface. The rest of the descent proceeded routinely. After the seal was completed, Badders reported that the Squalus crewmen were about to climb in.

  At that moment on the forward part of the Falcon, Lieutenant Commander Roy Sackett couldn’t believe what he was seeing. A member of Cole’s staff, Sackett had just left Cole and Momsen and was looking on while blankets and coffee were being supplied to the second group of survivors before their return to Portsmouth. He felt something wasn’t adding up. Suddenly he realized what it was. Dashing aft, he shouted, “Swede, there was a miscount on the last trip. There weren’t eight men in the chamber. There were nine!”

  Although a big grin creased Momsen’s face, he could not begin to appreciate the significance of Sackett’s discovery.

  Right then, only one thought possessed him. He instantly called down to Badders, “Belay instructions regarding eight passengers. Take on nine, repeat, nine men. Tell the captain to lean toward the lightest ones he can.”

  Up they came, the nine men who would make the difference between a fourth and fifth trip. Among them were Chief Campbell, Lenny de Medeiros and Al Prien. As they came on board the Falcon, their ordeal was etched on their haunted, beard-stubbled faces, eyes red-rimmed, chilled to the bone and weary beyond speech. For Momsen, though, they were a glorious sight.

  Machinist’s Mate Gavin Coyne set the pattern for them. Climbing out of the chamber, Coyne struggled to maintain his balance, tottered for a second and fell back inside. Two deckhands from the Falcon reached down and got hold of him. As they helped him out, Coyne sucked in a huge breath of ocean air. He would remember how his throat burned. His head whirled, his back and leg muscles aching, as he was half-carried onto the rescue ship. Somebody asked him his name and he couldn’t respond.

  Of the thirty-three men in the forward compartments, there remained Naquin, Doyle, and six enlisted men. To bring them up, Momsen now teamed Jim McDonald, the diver he had taken with him on his flight to Portsmouth, with Mihalowski.

  Even the recalcitrant clutch, which had caused Momsen some concern, engaged perfectly as the chamber slipped beneath the surface for its fourth trip that long day. On average, each descent had taken about an hour. Another forty-five minutes or so had been spent sealed to the Squalus. Ascending had been faster, around half an hour, as the chamber rose through progressively less pressure.

  Based on these figures, Momsen thought everything ought to be wrapped up about nine P.M. It would be none too soon. It was getting dark. The sea showed every sign of acting up. Raindrops began splattering on the Falcon’s deck.

  WHEN THE SECOND batch of survivors arrived in Portsmouth, they were rushed to the yard hospital. Seaman Bill Boulton turned out to be the member of the crew who hadn’t been counted initially. The news that Boulton, presumed lost, was in fact alive whipped the women whose men had been listed among the missing into a frenzy of renewed hope. If there had been one mistake, couldn’t there be others?

  But the first to feel an agonizing uncertainty was Mabel Gainor, who had been so confident of her husband’s safe return. She stood waiting when the cutter docked that was supposedly bringing him back to Portsmouth. She didn’t see him, however, among the rescued crewmen who were coming ashore. “Where is he?” she cried. “Where’s my husband?” Then she saw him. Gainor, his strength sapped at the outset by his heroic descent into the forward battery, was being borne toward her on a stretcher.

  The possibility of a mistake kept Elizabeth Ward, the wife of radioman Marion Ward, rooted in the administration building. Betrayed only by constantly twisting her wedding ring, she tried to keep her emotions in check. Uppermost in her mind as the chamber’s fourth and final trip was announced was the knowledge that her husband’s normal station was in the forward part of the sub. She was right. Except that on this particular test dive, he had been assigned to the after engine room to help record performance data.

  The young bride of Machinist’s Mate Second Class Elvin Deal, also in the after engine room, tearfully approached officers and newsmen alike with the same question. “Is it true they’ve heard new tapping on the hull?” she asked. “Oh, God, I just want to hear that he’s safe.”

  After she had wandered off, there was little anyone could say. Bob Trout in his evening broadcast reflected the mood: “Here in the emergency news headquarters in the administration building, typewriters which have been pounding furiously for a night and a day are now hit lightly, if at all. Naval officers relax in swivel chairs for the first time and harassed reporters are beginning to think of shaves and clean shirts. For most of them, the story does seem over, the race against time won. Those who have been lost were lost yesterday morning when the accident happened. Those who lived have already been rescued or are coming up soon, we are told, in the diving bell.”

  The late edition of the Boston Evening American headlined:

  “LIFE BELL” LIFTS MEN OUT OF SUNKEN SUB

  ALL THAT DAY, Frances Naquin helped the yard chaplain comfort frantic wives, girlfriends and relatives who had crowded into the administration building.

  She returned home early in the evening to look in on the children. “Daddy will be home before you know it,” she told them.

  Then she went to the house of friends for dinner. Afterward, she planned to leave for the yard to greet her husband when he arrived. The mood at dinner was festive. She listened to the compliments accorded Naquin’s leadership and the admirable way she had conducted herself throughout this dreadful time.

  Her host was summoned to the phone. She had left the number where she would be with Lieutenant Commander Curley and she thought the call might be for her. But it wasn’t. There was a second call. And a third. Gradually she noticed that the conversation was being led away from the Squalus. For a while, she pretended not to notice. At last, unable to contain herself, she said, “Is there something wrong? What is it?”

  “I’m sorry, Frances,” her host replied, “but the bell seems to have hit some sort of a snag. I’m sure Oliver will be all right. They’re doing everything they can out there.”

  ON THE FALCON’S deck under the glare of floodlights, the North Atlantic night sky moonless and starless, Momsen moved to meet a reversal all the more malevolent because it came just when everything appeared to be going so well, the ocean seemingly cheated of victims it had routinely claimed as a matter of course.

  If anything, the rescue chamber’s fourth descent was the smoothest yet. Exactly one hour after it had left the surface, Jim McDonald reported that the hatch of the Squalus was being opened to receive the final group of officers and crew. The men quickly entered it. As commanding officer, Naquin was the last to abandon the sub, dogging down the hatch himself. He noted the time, nine minutes to eight. To no one in particular, he said, “We’re out of the boat.” There was a tone of sadness in his voice.


  Twenty minutes later, the seal was broken. With the main ballast being blown, the chamber started reeling itself up. At about 160 feet, it happened. The chamber stopped rising. Over the phone, Momsen heard McDonald say, “The wire is jammed on the reel.”

  Before Momsen could respond, McDonald reported more bad news. Under this unexpected stress, the air motor that operated the reel conked out. Desperately, McDonald and Mihalowski tried to coax it into starting again. But it wouldn’t turn over.

  “Increase buoyancy and try riding the brake,” Momsen said.

  The brake was normally used to control the chamber as it neared the surface. Increasing the buoyancy while braking might loosen the cable. For a second, it appeared to solve the problem. But after rising a few feet, the chamber would not budge another inch.

  “Well, we’re stuck,” McDonald said, his voice flat and emotionless.

  Momsen made a last stab at clearing the reel. A second cable, called the retrieving wire, ran from the top of the chamber to a winch on the Falcon. “Stand by,” he informed McDonald. “We’re going to heave on the retrieving wire.” But that didn’t work either. Loose turns on the down-haul cable had allowed it to jump the reel and tangle beyond repair.

  It was useless to fool around with it anymore. The fouled down-haul cable had to be unshackled from the Squalus. To get some slack in it, Momsen ordered McDonald to flood his main ballast. At the same time he had the retrieving wire payed out. The chamber slowly sank. When it had reached to 210 feet, he instructed McDonald to hold it there.

  A diver would have to descend into the black depths to finish the job. Momsen picked Chief Torpedoman Walter Squire, a powerfully built, two-hundred-pounder, to do it.

  Just after nine o’clock, Squire went over the side. He slid down the same hawser that Sibitsky had traveled along that morning. Squire found himself in an eerie world. Off to one side as he landed on the sub, he could see the lights inside the chamber.