by Peter Maas
Finally Yarbrough got through. “I am standing by to come up,” Squire said. Then, suddenly, his eyes rolled back, he let go an anguished scream, grabbed the chamber’s telephone cable and in a pathetic effort to climb it, tore it off the wall. Then he lapsed into unconsciousness again.
Yarbrough patiently went through the same procedure, advancing his simulated ascent somewhat. “Squire,” he said over and over, “you are coming up.” Next, matching his words with a slow drop in pressure, he told him, “Squire, you are on the stage . . . you are on the stage.”
Squire moaned fitfully. With a deep sigh, he at last answered, “I’m on the stage.”
Duplicating exactly the sequence of a normal ascent in the sea, continually reducing the pressure in the chamber, interrupted by brief flurries of panic from Squire, Yarbrough brought him all the way up. Finally, after three and a half hours, Squire seemed to have recovered completely.
Eleven minutes later, however, he developed an agonizing pain in his left arm and was promptly returned to the chamber. Although the bends had struck once more, this time Squire’s mind was clear. The pain subsided under twenty-five pounds of pressure, which was gradually lowered during what the divers called an overnight “soak.”
When he was released in the morning, Momsen handed him a three-day pass. “Stay drunk until your money runs out,” he advised. Then, at a conference of the salvage staff, he managed to observe with a dry nicety that diving was not without its dangers.
Nobody argued.
ON JUNE 15, the original lance was abandoned. Every attempt to find the elusive snake had failed. “Come on, now,” Momsen needled his dispirited divers, “think of all the lessons we’ve learned.”
He was, in fact, far from downhearted. A new lance he and McKee had devised was being brought in from Portsmouth that morning. It featured improved couplings so the pipe sections would not slip out of alignment, as well as holes dotting its sides to keep the mud washed out, especially when the nozzle was headed up.
Best of all, the bugs in the helium hat been remedied and dives with the old helmets at last were eliminated. The basic problem was that the synthetic mix had been clogging up in the helmet’s internal circulating system by a combination of freezing in such low water temperature and too rapid expansion of gas as it passed through a tiny suction tube. Under the direction of Dr. Behnke the canister of soda lime used to sop up excess carbon dioxide was replaced by one containing a caustic potash compound, Shell Natron. Equally efficient as a CO2 absorbent, it also had an enormous appetite for moisture, which made it a perfect dehumidifier. The suction tube, meanwhile, had undergone several design revisions to get a proper gas flow at the depth the Squalus was in.
A new vacuum-tube telephone system developed by the Radio Corporation of America also made a huge difference. Phone communications had been so erratic that divers were often forced to shut off their air supply momentarily to hear a message from the surface, which in turn caused a faster CO2 buildup. But the noise of the recirculating helium was so much greater than open air ventilation that Momsen called on an old friend, Harvard’s Dr. Philip Drinker, for help. Drinker quickly produced a tiny muffler along the lines of those in automobile exhaust pipes. It worked so well that Boatswain’s Mate Second Class George Crocker, using it for the first time, asked to be hauled up after descending ninety-five feet. Unnerved by the silence, he was sure he wasn’t getting enough gas.
Not every dive from then on went smoothly. There were simply too many factors that could go wrong. But with few exceptions, the helium hat had a magical effect on morale and work capacity. Some of the men found the electrically heated underwear, controlled by a storage battery on the Falcon, bulky to move around in. But it was a necessary evil. When a couple of divers requested permission to go down without it, Momsen decided to let them find out for themselves. They were barely on the bottom before they were pleading to come up.
Work with the new lance was started as soon as it arrived. In an operation as delicate as this, Momsen had constantly been on the alert for any bickering or temper tantrums among his men. Now he had to struggle to restrain his own anger. Instead of the six-foot lengths of piping he had specified, they were an awkward eight feet long. Even with the helium hat, it made everything that much more difficult.
After the nozzle and sixteen feet of the lance had been inserted into the mud and now clay, it took three dives to connect the next section. Then things speeded up. Standing on the deck of the Squalus, divers alternately attached new sections of pipe, guided the hose into position and pushed as hard as they could while water from the Falcon’s pump roared through it.
On the afternoon of June 20, after the previous day’s progress had been measured in inches, Martin Sibitsky excitedly reported that his section had gone through “with a run.” An expectant hush settled over the Falcon. With more than forty feet of the lance circling the Squalus, it was just a matter of time. Rather than fiddling with another section, Momsen lowered Ship’s Fitter Second Class Virgil Aldrich to see if he could work a wire through the lance. Then the Falcon erupted in cheers. Aldrich had rammed it some sixty feet. Somewhere on the other side of the Squalus it was sticking out of the bottom. At sunset diver Osco Havens dropped down to find it. But, at that hour in the murky gloom, after trying for twelve minutes, he had to give up.
The next day, leaving “Joe Boats” Morrison in charge of the divers, Momsen went ashore for the first time since the salvage operation had been launched. It was his forty-fourth birthday. As it happened, it was also Admiral Cole’s sixty-fourth. The two men were celebrating over cocktails when word reached them that the wire had been located at last. “Well, Swede,” Cole inquired, “what do you think?”
“Admiral,” Momsen solemnly replied, “I think this is just about the best martini I’ve ever tasted.”
ONCE THE END of the wire had been found, progressively larger cables were passed through the lance. Then the lance itself was pulled all the way around the submarine and raised to the surface.
By June 29, despite some nasty weather, hoses had been attached to all the submarine’s ballast tanks and 360 tons of diesel oil had been removed from her fuel tanks. There had also been one of those near-misses below that made Momsen’s flesh crawl. Ship’s Fitter Second Class Edward Jodrey was sliding routinely along the descending line when the Falcon rolled violently in an unexpected swell. The line first went slack and then snapped back, sending Jodrey flying off it. All that saved him from the squeeze was the tight rein on his lifeline that Momsen had ordered maintained for every diver after Thompson’s fall.
The unpredictable sea had the whole salvage staff jumpy. More than thirty different hoses, ropes and cables were draped over the Falcon’s side. The possibility of all this “spaghetti,” as the divers called it, tangling or breaking loose was a constant threat. One bad storm could do it. But the crisis, when it came, caught everyone off guard.
The tug Sagamore, on July 3, arrived from Portsmouth with a barge loaded with salvage equipment. She hove to seemingly well clear of the Falcon. Suddenly a stiff wind sprang up and her anchor began dragging the bottom. Moments later she had fouled the Falcon’s windward mooring. The Sagamore’s skipper desperately tried to steam free, but her churning propeller sliced right through it.
As the Falcon now swung inexorably leeward, officers and men alike scrambled frantically along her deck to slacken everything leading to the Squalus, weeks of backbreaking labor in the balance, while a small boat dashed out to lay a new mooring. By nightfall the Falcon had been hauled back into position. As a result of incredible individual effort, every line and hose was still intact, either having been played out or buoyed off—with one ominous exception.
The precious main cable under the stern of the Squalus had started to strand before anyone could get to it. Nobody knew what its condition was. In the dark a diver was sent down to find out. Feeling his way along the cable, he discovered at ninety-eight feet that it had not been completely seve
red. He was able to apply a clamp below the stranded section and the cable was finally made fast to the Falcon. It had been a day of dreadful tension. But the thought in everybody’s mind was that now perhaps the worst was over. As Lieutenant Karl Wheland, one of Momsen’s assistant diving officers, wearily observed, “What else can go wrong?”
The basic plan to lift the Squalus off the ocean floor, as conceived by Construction Corps officers, involved several closely coordinated moves. To give her as much buoyancy as possible, compressed air would be blasted into the ballast tanks girdling her hull to blow out all the water in them. More air would be pumped into her fuel tanks. But the main lifting power would come from a number of pontoons straddling the submarine fore and aft.
These pontoons were actually big steel cylinders, thirty-two feet long and thirteen feet in diameter. Once they were flooded, they would be lowered into the sea and hooked up to the chain and cable slings that had been put around the Squalus. Then the water would be blown out of them, giving each pontoon a total lift capacity of eighty tons as it headed back toward the surface.
While they operated on a fairly simple principle, in practice they were fantastically unwieldy monsters to handle. Momsen, of all the officers on hand, was the only one who had any real working experience with them. They had been originally appropriated in 1929 by Congress after the S—4 tragedy and he had used two of them in simulated salvage tests.
He and his divers began positioning them on July 4. Midway through the tortuous job, Momsen had a sentimental reunion with an old friend, Commander Henry Hartley, who arrived to replace Commander McCann as a technical aide on Cole’s staff. Hartley had commanded the Falcon when she helplessly stood by both the S—51 and the S—4. As they talked of those days over a mug of coffee, Hartley said, “By God, Swede, you ought to be feeling pretty proud of yourself.” It was not an idle comment. Besides the Thetis, since the rescue of the Squalus crew, the world had been rocked by another great underseas catastrophe. The French submarine Phenix on a training cruise had gone down off Indochina, all seventy-one men aboard her lost. The circumstances surrounding the fate of the Phenix were never known. She sank in about 300 feet of water. Just a few days earlier, because of the rescue chamber’s performance in bringing up the Squalus survivors, the French Navy had placed an order for four of them.
Finally, on July 12, despite some edgy moments in a cantankerous sea, the seven pontoons to be used in this first lift attempt were set at varying depths above the Squalus. Five were over her flooded after compartments. The upper two of these, positioned side by side at a depth of eighty feet, were called control pontoons, because when they reached the surface they would check the rising stern of the submarine at that point. Over the bow there were just two pontoons—one at 140 feet and a single control pontoon at ninety feet. A lot of guesswork was involved. It was impossible to lift both ends of the sub at once because the weight and center of gravity of the water in the flooded aft sections were not known. Nor was the amount of mud suction when the buried stern came free.
With all the hoses to the ballast tanks, fuel tanks and pontoons connected to a central complex on the Falcon, which would regulate the flow of compressed air into them, the plan was to bring up the stern, then the bow. Once the Squalus was off the ocean floor, since she was headed away from Portsmouth, the tug Wandank would tow her stern-first underwater in a northwesterly direction along a course previously sounded by the Sculpin. To keep the chain and cable slings holding the forward pontoons from slipping off during the lift, they had been carefully rigged behind her still-extended bow diving planes. As for those holding the after pontoons, Momsen could only hope that they had been successfully guided between the keel of the Squalus and her propeller struts. “Anyway,” he told “Joe Boats” Morrison, “we’ll know soon enough.”
The “blow and tow,” as it was named, would begin the next morning, July 13, if the weather was favorable. And it was—the sky clear and the North Atlantic calm. With the diving phase of the operation now completed, the salvage officer, Lieutenant Commander Floyd Tusler of the Construction Corps, was in command of the lift. Momsen and Morrison, meanwhile, would each take out a motor whaleboat manned by divers to board the control pontoons when they surfaced.
On the Falcon, as Tusler directed blasts of air through his multiple hoses, there were no more interested spectators than Oliver Naquin and thirteen of the Squalus survivors who had been assigned to duty with the overworked salvage crew. In measured succession, the blowing continued.
Around Momsen’s whaleboat the bubbling was slow at first. Minute by minute it gradually built up, the bubbles getting bigger and bigger, no longer coming up one or two at a time but bursting out of the sea in mountainous piles, then tumbling down wildly into the blue water, spreading out over it in a widening white maelstrom, boiling furiously now, vomiting forth masses of giant jellyfish, underneath it all the thunderous crescendo ‘of an ocean gone mad. Momsen, as he hovered around its edge, had never seen or heard anything like it before.
Suddenly, in the middle of this raging cauldron, the two control pontoons over the after compartments roared into view right on schedule. For a moment it seemed as if they had broken loose from their restraining cables. But then they settled back into the water—and held. Momsen and Morrison headed for them in their whaleboats, secured their flood valves and prepared them for towing. The initial phase of the lift had been completed. The stern of the Squalus was some eighty feet off the bottom.
That afternoon the pontoons over the bow were blown, followed by the forward ballast tank number 1 below the forward torpedo room. When this didn’t produce enough lift, air was blasted into the larger number 2 ballast tank immediately aft. But as this was being done, before all the water could be cleared out of it, the bow began to rise. In the midst of another volcanic eruption of the sea, Momsen saw the forward control pontoon shoot to the surface. He instantly raced toward it. As he did, however, the lower pontoon, set at 140 feet, also surged up. Instinctively he knew something had gone badly wrong. He was right. The momentum of the bow sweeping up, the expanding air in the big number 2 ballast tank emptying it even more as it rose, all the free water within the Squalus now surging aft, had let loose hundreds of tons of converging forces beyond restraint.
As the pontoons slammed together, air rushing out of broken hoses, snapped cables whipping around him, Momsen quickly ordered the whaleboat put in reverse.
It saved his life and the lives of the three men with him. Less than twenty feet in front of the whaleboat, the bow of the Squalus, like the snout of some great wounded shark, leaped out of the sea, towering over him. She came almost straight up. While he gazed at the sight in awe, she climbed perhaps thirty feet into the air and hung there for a fraction of a second—the memory of the water streaming over the small “192” on her bow etched forever in his mind—before disappearing with a sibilant whoosh.
After forty-nine days of trying to salvage her, the Squalus was back on the bottom.
On the Falcon, Lieutenant Commander Tusler said, “Christ Almighty, Swede, you damn near got killed.”
Momsen managed a weak smile. “Just call me Ahab,” he said.
18
REAR ADMIRAL COLE could barely hide his chagrin in his report to the Chief of Naval Operations.
“With the advantage of knowledge gained by experience,” he wrote, “it is now possible to conjecture that the unfortunate results of the lift might have been avoided if certain precautions had been taken, such as the use of two pontoons at the upper level forward for control instead of one.”
Privately Momsen thought that raising the Squalus with only one upper pontoon over her bow still could have worked were it not for another major error. After blowing the smaller number 1 forward ballast tank failed to provide sufficient buoyancy, it should have been completely reflooded before trying to blow the number 2 tank. “Hell,” he told Morrison, “you can’t control a half-blown ballast tank that’s on the way up.”
The salvage operation, however, still had to go on, and Momsen was determined not to allow this postmortem grousing among the divers to get out of hand. He called them together and said, “All right, our little house of cards has fallen down. In case any of you are wondering what we’re going to do next, I’ll let you in on a secret. We’re going to build a better one.”
Despite his soft-spoken voice and seemingly easy manner, he carried with him an unmistakable aura of authority. Even in the most intimate circumstances, none of the men he commanded addressed him as other than “Mr. Momsen.” But now after he had finished speaking to them, a diver shouted, “You tell ’em, Swede!”
Just sorting out the lines and hoses in the cramped deck space of the Falcon was a Herculean chore. Two days after the Squalus had lunged up, the sea subsided so that the four pontoons that surfaced could be boarded and prepared for towing back to Portsmouth for a complete overhaul. This left three pontoons, their condition and whereabouts a mystery.
And, of course, there was the biggest mystery of all, the sub herself.