The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  What lay ahead dwarfed in difficulty the rescue of the Squalus survivors.

  17

  EARLY PREDICTIONS BEING bandied about had projected a quick salvage operation. It sounded so simple. Compressed-air hoses would blast the water out of the sub’s flooded aft compartments, empty the ballast tanks and pump out the oil in her fuel tanks. Once all this weight was removed, the sub would be lifted off the bottom and towed to Portsmouth.

  It meant, of course, being able to seal off any open valves to keep the sea from reentering the compartments. But then a diver discovered that the main engine induction valve was, in fact, open despite what the control board had shown during the dive.

  Momsen himself tried manually closing the same valve from the outside on the Sculpin. It proved to be so difficult that the idea of attempting this at the depth of the Squalus had to be abandoned. So it would be impossible to drive the sea from the flooded compartments and that eliminated any chance of hoisting the sub to the surface.

  In Portsmouth, after consulting with Washington, Admiral Cole and his senior aides settled on a new plan. Hoses would still be attached to her fuel tanks to pump them dry. Other hoses would be used to empty the ballast tanks. Next, cables connected to submersible pontoons would be placed under the bow and stern of the Squalus. She would then be raised in three stages. The first would bring her up eighty feet. She would be towed until she grounded in shallower water and lifted another eighty feet. The third lift, at the mouth of the Piscataqua, was to ensure that she did not draw more than forty feet, the maximum draft that would allow her to be taken up the river to the yard.

  On paper, the revised plan looked good. But while Momsen concurred with it in principle, he felt that Cole’s staff officers were being wildly optimistic in their belief that the job would take no more than three weeks. It was an unparalleled venture into the unknown; the sub longer than a football field, more than half filled with water, 243 feet down, and requiring an underwater tow through the open sea for some fifteen miles. He was especially concerned about the excessive diving assignments that were contemplated. Some of them, which he adamantly opposed, had even called for actual entry into the Squalus to close off secondary valves.

  The first dives sobered everyone. Although the helium and oxygen mix was not yet available, Momsen was anxious to have a permanent descending line in place before something happened to the temporary one used in the rescue phase of the operation. Six-inch manila hemp ought to do it, he thought. So he sent down on air Joseph Alicki and Forrest Smith, both boatswain’s mates and expert riggers, to fasten the line to the main gun on the after deck.

  Once Alicki and Smith reported that they were on the submarine, the new line, weighted and shackled to the old one, was dropped. When it reached them, Alicki grabbed the end and started to move toward the gun, requesting the Falcon to tell Smith to give him more slack. Not getting any, he turned around and saw his partner slumped on the deck. Alicki let go of the line, went back to Smith, checked his control valve to make sure he was receiving air and then began shaking him. Smith, in the throes of nitrogen stupor, later recalled “being awakened from a deep sleep.” The first thing he saw was the new line dangling about four feet from the submarine. He tried to help Alicki retrieve it but Momsen, by now thoroughly alarmed, ordered them up. Alicki went first. As Smith followed, he passed out again. The next thing he knew, Alicki was pulling him onto their diving stage, the big metal platform that lowers divers into the water and lifts them out again.

  Afterward, Momsen had the new descending line hauled in. For the time being he would settle for a more manageable four-inch line. To secure it to the gun he called on the Falcon’s master diver, Chief Boatswain’s Mate Orson Crandall. But no sooner had Crandall touched down than he was also overcome by the narcotic action of the nitrogen in his air supply. Under the illusion that he was reporting a safe landing on the Squalus, he was in fact babbling nonsensically over the phone and was brought up at once. All he remembered before losing consciousness was being “jerked off the submarine.” When he came to, Crandall found himself jammed underneath the diving stage. Gasping out his predicament, he was finally given enough slack in his lifeline to climb on it.

  That ended diving for the day. It could not have been a more inauspicious beginning. Momsen, masking his own disappointment, moved quickly to buck up the divers. As they gathered around him on the Falcon, he blithely declared that “those damn gnomes below” were to blame.

  There was a pause before one diver said, “How do you spell that, sir?” When Momsen obliged, the diver’s face lit up. “Oh,” he said, “you mean ganomes.”

  Momsen didn’t argue the point. From then on the “ganome” became an integral part of their daily vocabulary, to be cursed at or joked about, the perfect scapegoat for anything that went awry. The word spread through the Navy. Later, in odd parts of the world, Momsen would invariably meet somebody who asked him just what a ganome was. He had a stock answer to perpetuate the legendary creature. “Oh,” he said, “it was a special kind of devilfish we encountered off Portsmouth.”

  The well-being of his divers was Momsen’s overriding concern. Whether on air or helium and oxygen, they still faced terrible perils. In the maze of hoses and lines that gradually festooned the Squalus, a man could easily cut his own breathing supply by mistake. Groggy from too much exertion, he might open his pressure-control valve too far and “blow up” his suit, soaring to the surface in a matter of seconds, dead or perhaps crippled for life. Worse yet, should he fall off the submarine, he could wind up in the fearsome grip of what divers called “the squeeze.” It was a literal description. Pressure in a helmet must always be equal, within a few ounces, to that of the surrounding sea. In a sudden fall—every two feet of which added another pound of pressure per square inch—a diver had to adjust to it instantly. If he didn’t, the squeeze began first in his feet and then coursed irresistibly up his body until he was finally stuffed inside his own helmet.

  A loudspeaker system was rigged on the Falcon’s deck so that Momsen remained in constant earshot of every man on the bottom. Each diver was required to report continuously over his phone—if nothing specific, simply that he was OK. Failure to do this, the slightest indication of erratic behavior, immediately brought forth the order “Stand by to come up.” It was to be obeyed without question.

  Instilling absolute confidence among the divers in surface authority was equally important. “No diver is to be bawled out, criticized, or corrected while in the water,” he informed his deck crew. “I especially don’t want to hear one telephone talker ever raising his voice or showing any sign of impatience or excitement. Nor do I expect to hear of a diver being criticized even after he is up. If he fails an assignment, he’ll be miserable enough as it is without somebody else telling him about it.”

  As these initial salvage dives commenced, the magnitude of the Squalus rescue became apparent to the entire world. Nine days after she went down, the new British submarine Thetis sank bow first in the Irish Sea. On board were one hundred and three men. Although her aft deck hatch was not more than twenty feet from the surface, only four of them escaped with their lives.

  In all, Momsen had fifty-eight divers, three of them masters, most of the rest rated first class and qualified at least for 200-foot descents, as well as a scattering of second class men who had not been deeper than ninety feet. They came from his experimental unit, the diving school in Washington, the Falcon, the submarine base at New London and assorted other commands. Many were strangers to him, and detailing them was a ticklish business. Still, it was essential that everyone had his fair share of dives, not only because of pride but also because of the bonus pay involved. In the end, he mixed them up as judiciously as possible into three sections, four days on duty and two off, each with the same percentage of less experienced men whom he would gradually work into the diving routine.

  Beyond his exploits with the lung, the rescue chamber and the use of helium and oxygen, Momsen
had an extra plus going for him to hold the unswerving loyalty of these hard-bitten men who went into the sea. When the old S—51 sank in 1925, a number of supposedly qualified divers turned out to be worthless. By the time the S—4 went down two years later, little had been done to improve the situation. Momsen even discovered one man listed as a diver who had never been inside a diving suit. That did it. In 1929, under his aegis, all first class divers were automatically disqualified. The only way they could regain their rating was to pass a completely revamped training program. The first commissioned officer in the Navy to graduate from it was Swede Momsen.

  A diver, interviewed during the Squalus salvage by a reporter from the Boston Traveler, explained just how they felt about him. “On the bottom,” he said, “Mr. Momsen is right there with you. When you know that, you ain’t working one hand for the government and one hand for yourself like we always say. It’s both hands for Swede.”

  Momsen would need every bit of their devotion. After the first futile attempt to attach a permanent descending line, setback followed setback. The exertion demanded in the salvage work far exceeded that of the rescue effort. It became increasingly clear that air alone could not be relied on at depths below 200 feet. After rehearsing a task on the Sculpin that took only a few seconds, several dives were often required to duplicate the same task on the Squalus. And sometimes even that didn’t work.

  When divers brought down a line to maneuver it under the sub’s bow, they succeeded all too easily on their initial attempt. This did not augur well for the stern because of the upward slant of the Squalus. But nobody imagined how bad it really was.

  In passing a line under the stern for a pontoon sling, the plan called for one diver to drop to the bottom, walk to the stern and pass the line to a second diver on the other side of the sub. The concern was whether the first diver would be able to reach high enough to pass the line between the propeller shafts and the hull. There was also worry about him having to drop from the deck to the bottom, another twenty-two feet down.

  But when the first diver stepped off the sub, he immediately found himself in thick, soft mud. Its level was about two feet below the deck. The extreme end of the Squalus was completely buried.

  Worse yet was the performance of the vital new diving helmets called “helium hats,” which had been specially designed to recirculate the new mixture. Perfecting it was one of the main objectives Momsen had envisioned for the summer tests that he thought would be occupying him.

  The helmets had been rushed up from Washington. Gunner’s Mate First Class Louis “The Greek” Zampiglione made the initial descent to the deck of the Squalus wearing one. He remained there for thirty-three minutes and reported it working flawlessly. There was no sign whatever of the drunken, groggy sensation that a man on air habitually experienced.

  But Momsen’s delight was short-lived. In ensuing dives the recirculator that sucked helium and oxygen through the CO2 absorbent malfunctioned badly, making the flow of gas ominously irregular. “I should have known better,” Momsen ruefully muttered to Lieutenant Thomas Willmon, who with Behnke and Yarbrough now rounded out his medical team.

  Throughout all the helium and oxygen experimentation in Washington, Zampiglione had emerged as some sort of physiological freak who drove everybody crazy in trying to come up with reliable diving norms. He seemed totally immune to the bends, and it had gotten to the point where no test in the pressure tank involving Zampiglione could be chalked up as a success until another diver duplicated it.

  Momsen decided that he had no choice. The helium hat was essential to salvaging the Squalus, and it had to be returned to Portsmouth for extensive rechecking of the circulation system. Divers, meanwhile, would have to keep going down on air. But while nitrogen narcosis was to be expected at 243 feet, its intensity surprised them all. Dr. Behnke had the answer. “Swede,” he said, “I don’t think we’re getting the carbon dioxide out of the helmet fast enough. Apparently it’s augmenting the effect of the nitrogen.” So the diving manual, which specified 180 pounds of pressure at the depth they faced, was shelved. To increase ventilation, Momsen upped the pressure on a diver’s air lines to 250 pounds per square inch. It was a makeshift solution, but it helped.

  BY JUNE 5, after fifty-eight dives, a total of three descending lines had been secured to various parts of the Squalus. Compressed air had been introduced into each of the three forward compartments to keep them free of water and air hoses were attached to all the after ballast tanks. While the helium hat continued to be worked on at Portsmouth, Momsen had set up a temporary rack of twenty helium and oxygen cylinders on the Falcon that could supply a diver wearing a regular air helmet. The consumption of the synthetic mixture was so great, however, that only a limited number of dives could be made with it on a given day.

  Incredibly, there had just been one really bad incident thus far. Torpedoman First Class John Thompson suddenly lost his grip on the descending line he was following down to the Squalus. Over his phone, before the deck crew could react, came the dreaded words, “I am falling!” But Thompson was lucky. Still conscious as he hit the bottom, he was able to increase the pressure in his suit to prevent being squeezed.

  Till now, however, everything had been child’s play compared to what lay ahead. When the stern of the Squalus turned out to be embedded almost twenty feet into the North Atlantic bottom, Momsen vetoed all suggestions that divers tunnel under it. At that depth it was far too dangerous. Instead, he designed a nozzle that would be connected to six-foot lengths of pipe bent to the curvature of the submarine’s hull. Then the Falcon would pump down water through a high-pressure hose to blast an opening in the mud and clay so that first a cable and then pontoon chains could be passed under her tail.

  Commander Andrew McKee, the senior Construction Corps officer on Cole’s salvage staff, promptly put Portsmouth to work on it, and “the lance,” as it was dubbed, arrived on board the Falcon on June 5. It got off to a splendid start. The first diver down maneuvered the first two sections of pipe into position in jig time. But after the hose had been removed to connect the next section, five divers in a row, including rated masters like McDonald and Badders, were thwarted primarily because the motion of the Falcon in a choppy sea so affected the hose that it was impossible to line up the fitting.

  The next day, after the third section of pipe was finally in place, it was discovered that the nozzle had somehow twisted so that it headed away from the Squalus, and the whole procedure had to be started all over again. “Excuse my English,” one diver muttered to Momsen, “but those goddamn ganomes are having a field day.”

  Two days later, the lance was twelve feet into the mud. Diver after diver kept at it, steadily progressing, sometimes as much as four feet, other times as little as six inches. Then on June 10 the lance, having circled under the keel of the Squalus and on the way up her portside with perhaps eight feet to go, perversely refused to move another inch.

  A wire like a plumber’s snake was run through the lance to finish the job. But after reaching a point believed to be about four feet beyond the nozzle, it, too, would go no farther. Now a last-ditch effort was made to wash out the bottom where the snake was thought to be tantalizingly within reach.

  The result was scary. As happened so often, the supply of helium and oxygen in the temporary setup Momsen had rigged was exhausted. So Gunner’s Mate Third Class Orval Payne from the Falcon, making his first dive, went down on air. On the bottom, he suddenly said that he couldn’t see anything. A moment later, yelling incoherently that his lines were fouled, he announced he was going to cut himself free. Then he passed out. That saved his life. When Payne was hoisted up, knife slashes were found on his air hose.

  In the afternoon Walter Squire, the powerfully built chief torpedoman who had descended in the dark to sever the jammed down-haul cable of the rescue chamber, was lowered to take another crack at washing out the snake. Squire landed on the afterdeck of the Squalus, dragged the hose over the portside and got the wa
ter pressure he asked for, 300 pounds per square inch supplied by the Falcon’s fire pump. He reported gouging a hole some two feet wide and four feet deep where he thought the tip of the snake might be. Then he said that he was starting a second hole. But he had been laboring without letup for nearly fourteen minutes and Momsen would have none of it.

  “OK,” Squire reluctantly replied, “ready to come up.” But despite repeated calls, that was the last word from him.

  “Haul him up,” Momsen ordered.

  The tenders handling his lines noted that Squire seemed exceptionally heavy. Befuddled by his tremendous exertion, he had opened the pressure valve on his suit. At 150 feet, he “blew up” and shot uncontrollably to the surface alongside the Falcon, floating helplessly in his distended suit like a grotesque parody of the balloon figures featured in Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day parade.

  Without hesitation master diver Jim McDonald jumped overboard, splashed his way to Squire’s side, wrestled him onto the diving stage that had been brought up at the first sign of danger and closed the valve. It was an amazing performance. McDonald could not swim. “I just didn’t think about it,” he said afterward.

  On the Falcon with his helmet off, Squire was out cold, his face blue. His limp body, suit and all, was rushed into the recompression chamber where Dr. Willmon and Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Harold David accompanied him on a wild ride into higher pressure. When the needle on the chamber gauge registered seventy-five pounds, Squire showed signs of coming to. As he did, his eyes still glazed, he began to thrash around furiously, crying out in terrible pain.

  It was all Willmon and David could do to hold him down. So Momsen sent in his top bends expert, Dr. Pete Yarbrough, and for added muscle, diver McDonald. After a four-minute wait in the outer lock to equalize the pressure, they were ready to assist Willmon and David. The four of them cut away Squire’s suit. In about half an hour, he had calmed down, although he remained in great pain and rambled on crazily. Cradling his head, Yarbrough now attempted to reach the stricken diver by leading him back through his ascent. “Squire,” he kept repeating, “you are standing by to come up. Can you hear me? You are ready to come up.”