The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  Obviously, when a diver got to her, she would be an unholy mess, wrapped in hundreds of feet of twisted cables, chains and hawsers. But was she buried even deeper in the mud than before? How had she landed? Was she keel down so that divers could use her deck? Or had she listed over, making their work more treacherous than ever? Finally, was she now completely flooded inside? Had the hatches over the forward compartments been forced open because of the drastic changes of pressure during her leap to the surface?

  Momsen received a “good luck” letter from an Annapolis classmate serving on a battleship. Enclosed was a newspaper headline:

  ILL-STARRED SUBMARINE MAY BE TOTAL LOSS

  ON THE AFTERNOON of July 16, a diver slid down a manila line to try to locate the lost pontoons. He got to about ninety feet before he ran into a snarl of hoses and had to spend the rest of his stay under water clearing it as much as he could. The next man had to finish the job. But the third diver, on the day’s final descent, reported good news. He had spotted two of the pontoons. They were still fastened to the slings that had been placed around the sub’s stern.

  This meant that the appalling prospect of attempting to pass a new lance through the mud and clay could be forgotten. As for the third pontoon, set above the stern at 200 feet, no trace of it was visible.

  For the moment Momsen called off the search for it. Instead he would concentrate on the two pontoons he knew about. Even so, getting them into shape was no cinch. It took fourteen dives, miraculously without an accident, to clear the bewildering web of fouled cables around them and to painstakingly replace broken air hoses.

  Next Ship’s Fitter First Class Harry Frye descended to inspect the after deck of the Squalus. Almost at once he lost his bearings, and his matter-of-fact report to a yeoman, which Momsen required of every diver when he came up, provided a grim picture of what they could expect. “On landing on the submarine,” Frye said, “I got fouled up in loose ends of wires. I could not move around to distinguish what side I was on, port or starboard. I thought the descending line was supposed to be on starboard side. Made report of approximately six-degree list to starboard, but discovered later that descending line was on the portside.”

  Lieutenant Morrison confirmed the port list at six degrees. The Squalus had started to roll as she slid back into the sea. Luckily it had not fully developed before she hit down again. While noting a fantastic maze of hoses and lines, Morrison was also able to pick his way through them to make another welcome find. The forward torpedo hatch was still secure.

  Momsen decided to work around the snakelike tangle swaddling the submarine as much as possible. The exertion of a “general house cleaning” at that depth was simply too demanding. Subsequent dives brought more good news. While the bow pontoon sling was irretrievably lost, the bow planes that held it in place had somehow escaped being sheared off. The stern was not buried in the muck as deeply as it had been and the three forward compartments appeared to be free of water.

  Nonetheless, it was heavy going for the divers. They had to check each coupling and salvage valve on the Squalus, change every hose that had been damaged, get a new chain under the bow, bring up the two pontoons that had been found and chase down and at last pinpoint the missing pontoon where it rested nearly upright on the ocean floor. Just raising it required six days.

  As if this were not enough, an epidemic of head colds raced through the divers, knocking a number of them off the duty roster because the congestion in their eustachian tubes made it impossible for them to adjust their ears to pressure changes. Then a three-day blow out of the northeast sent huge swells to batter them. After it had passed, a dense fog bank rolled in—and seemed to sit on them forever. It brought everything to a standstill. Even on a clear day, visibility below was a maddening, unpredictable affair, one minute as much as fifty feet and an hour later in the shifting currents less than the length of a diver’s arm.

  Nothing depressed Momsen more than the mist-laden shroud that enveloped them. Standing in it with Morrison, the Falcon strangely hushed, the silence broken only by monotonous blasts across the water from Coast Guard picket boats to warn off passing ships, he finally exploded. “Jesus,” he said, “how I hate it.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Fog! There’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

  Yet with it all, by August 3 the last pontoon was on its way back to Portsmouth for repairs. August 3 was a red-letter day for another reason. It marked the official promotion of Lieutenant Commander Momsen. While he had said nothing about it, word leaked out, and on the Falcon’s fantail he was surrounded by grinning divers who presented him with the gleaming scrambled-egged hat of a Navy commander. “Well,” he said after recovering his aplomb, “that’s a mighty fine-looking hat. I hope it fits.”

  “Commander,” Cole said quietly, “I have no doubt it will.”

  THE PONTOON ARRANGEMENT for the second attempt at lifting the Squalus would be considerably different. Instead of the five pontoons over the stern used in the first lift, there would be six. Three control pontoons were to be placed at eighty feet, an intermediate pontoon at 160 feet and the lowest two at 200 feet.

  More drastic changes were in store for the bow. There would be one pontoon 200 feet down and three control pontoons seventy-five feet below the surface to prevent a repeat performance of the last time the Squalus had shown herself.

  Despite a series of line squalls that sent winds raging up to sixty knots, the pontoons were ready for the second lift early on the morning of August 12. Other than their new arrangement, everything else remained essentially the same. Since the Squalus was still headed away from Portsmouth, she would be towed stern-first by the Wandank on a northwesterly course for about a mile and a half until she grounded, according to the soundings that the Sculpin had been assigned to take, in 170 feet of water. Then, if sufficient buoyancy could be maintained, the tow would be promptly resumed northward to a hard sand bottom, around ninety feet deep, between the Isles of Shoals and the mainland, to prepare for the final leg up the Piscataqua.

  Lieutenant Commander Tusler would again direct the blowing of the ballast tanks, fuel tanks and pontoons from the Falcon. Momsen and Morrison were to embark once more in whaleboats to secure the pontoons, and follow along to keep lines from fouling.

  Again over the submarine’s stern, Momsen watched the steady buildup of bubbles and heard the awesome rumbling beneath him that culminated three hours later in an explosion of white water. In the middle of it, the three after control pontoons bounced up, disappeared momentarily and came slowly back into view lined up, he remembered, “like soldiers on parade.” Divers boarded them immediately, precariously balancing themselves on their rounded tossing topsides, and signaled that they had been secured.

  A tense expectancy settled over the little fleet as work on the bow started. Since the control pontoons had been blown during the night, there was much less surface boiling now as compressed air was sent into just the lower pontoon and one fuel tank. That was all it took. Almost as if in mockery of what had occurred a month before, the three forward control pontoons rose gracefully to the surface. The bow of the Squalus was some seventy feet off the bottom, her tail down a bit more.

  The Wandank started towing at one knot. When a strong westward tidal current developed, she increased her speed to nearly two knots and her heading slightly more to the east. The Falcon trailed behind with another cable connected to the sub’s bow.

  It could not be going better, Momsen thought, as he directed his whaleboat around the control pontoons. Not a thing was wrong with them. Even a southerly breeze sprang up as if to urge them on.

  They were twelve minutes into the second hour of the tow, the grounding area the Sculpin had staked out about 800 yards in front of them. Suddenly the Wandank’s whistle shrieked a warning blast. The Squalus had stopped moving. It happened so quickly that Lieutenant George Sharp, the Falcon’s skipper, barely managed to avoid overrunning the tow and smashing into the prec
ious pontoons.

  There was a moment of total confusion. Then when the bow of the Squalus began to swing around in an arc of almost a hundred degrees, it became evident, as Momsen’s divers later confirmed, that her stern had nudged into a tiny hummock rising off the ocean floor that the Sculpin had not noticed. It was so small that a few yards either way and it would have been avoided. As it was, most of the sub’s length remained more than twenty feet above the bottom. Cole was hopeful that they might free her stern during high tide that evening. But even after the Wandank increased her revolutions to eight knots, the Squalus stayed put.

  The idea now was to drop the upper pontoons a hundred feet to carry the Squalus over the hummock to her next target zone five miles distant. But a white-capped chop eliminated diving the following day and also prevented something everyone had been looking forward to—a visit to the Falcon by President Roosevelt, who was passing by aboard the cruiser Tuscaloosa to his Campobello vacation retreat in Maine.

  Finally, on August 17, after days of repositioning and checking to see that the pontoons were in balance, the complex blowing procedure for the lift was repeated, all the ballast and fuel tanks in the Squalus having been reflooded while the work went on. Then the stern control pontoons surged up again. In his motor whaleboat Swede Momsen routinely waited for the bow control pontoons to appear. They didn’t. “Holy smokes,” he heard master diver McDonald whisper behind him, “they’re not coming up!”

  It was exactly the same situation they had faced on July 13. After the number 1 ballast tank had been cleared of water, nothing happened. But the lesson had been learned. Before Lieutenant Commander Tusler started to blow the big number 2 tank, the number 1 tank was refilled. It worked. That evening, the bow lifted and the control pontoons surfaced.

  Just to be on the safe side, eight-inch hawsers had been attached to supplement both the towing and restraining lines in case either had weakened in all the commotion. It was a prudent move. No sooner had the tow begun than the original restraining cable snapped.

  The route the Squalus would be taking was full of zigs and zags to avoid shoal water. The hazy late afternoon light only made matters worse, and this time, sounding continually, the Sculpin led the way. Three ships were also stationed at key points along the course. One was the submarine Sargo, another the Coast Guard patrol boat 410. The third was a strange apparition out of the past, the gunboat Sacramento, a pre-World War I relic, the last of the Navy’s coal-burning vessels, in Asiatic service for so long that she had become known as “the Galloping Ghost of the China Coast.” This would be her final mission, replete with Chinese junk sails fore and aft, serving as a sort of floating hotel for the divers and salvage staff.

  Hurrying against the gathering darkness, the Wandank cranked up to eight knots on the straight legs, slowing to one or two on the turns, without a single mishap until the Squalus slid to a gentle halt on a sandy floor ninety-two feet down, precisely as planned.

  The sand was so hard-packed that divers could walk easily on it and under the submarine’s bow and stern without fear. For the first time they were sent down in pairs, checking every deck hatch and making sure that all hull valves were tight. Senior members of the salvage staff couldn’t resist the idea that by clearing the four flooded after compartments, there would be no need at all for the unwieldy pontoons. To do it, the main engine air-induction valve had to be shut manually from the outside, something impossible at previous depths. But then other leaks developed, particularly around the after torpedo tubes, that nothing could be done about. And while a combination of blowing and pumping finally removed some water, the compartments remained far from empty.

  Like it or not, they were back to pontoons. The Construction Corps officers on the salvage staff concluded that with the thirty-three hoses the divers had connected to the ballast and fuel tanks in the Squalus, just two pontoons on each side of her stern would suffice. Gunner’s Mate First Class Walter Harmon, who had been one of the operators in the first momentous descent of the rescue chamber, and another diver were assigned to pass cables through the propeller struts under the stern. Momsen could not help thinking how much things had changed. In fourteen minutes they accomplished what had once taken a month.

  But he was a bit premature in one respect. The Squalus would now be towed by her bow, which was to be raised first. As the final blowing got under way, before his horrified eyes the whole forward part of the submarine rose out of the sea, rolled heavily to port at an angle of at least sixty degrees, and with the air spilling out of her tanks, sank again. A decision was made to lift the stern anyway, but the bow would not respond and the stern was dropped back down. Master diver Jim McDonald, in Momsen’s whaleboat, summed up all their feelings: “We’ve seen the bow and now we’ve seen the stern. How about seeing both of them together?”

  “Amen,” Momsen replied.

  For complete control, two more pontoons would have to be rigged to the bow. First, however, Momsen had to find out how lopsided the Squalus was after her violent roll. The instrument he devised for diver Joe Alicki lacked certain scientific refinements, but it would do. It consisted of two boards nailed at a right angle with a weighted line hanging from the top of one of them. Alicki was to set the bottom board exactly athwart the main deck and mark the point where the line touched it. Measuring the triangle formed by the mark, he calculated the submarine’s port list at a still manageable thirty-four degrees.

  EARLY ON AUGUST 30, ominously ahead of schedule, the first of the monstrous storms that start lashing the Maine coast each September swept down on them with such ferocity that the Falcon had to buoy off all her hoses and scurry for shelter in Portsmouth.

  Two days later she was able to return to her station. Everyone was so obsessed by the thought of finally bringing the Squalus in, after having lived like cloistered monks oblivious to the outside world, that a bulletin which would affect so many of them, posted on the Falcon and addressed to all naval ships and installations, hardly caused a ripple. World War II had begun. “Germany,” it read, “has entered Poland. Fighting and bombing in progress. You will govern yourselves accordingly.”

  The swells were still too heavy to rig the bow pontoons. A diver went down to inspect the condition of the submarine and discovered that the after torpedo-room hatch had sprung open. This gave the technical aides on Cole’s staff a chance to revive a pet plan that Momsen had fought from the first—actual entry into the Squalus. Since the hatch was open anyway, why not send a diver in to close the door to the after torpedo room? Most of the air used in the earlier attempt to blow the flooded compartments had escaped through the torpedo tubes. With the door shut and the ventilation valves turned down as well, it would give them a reasonable stab at least to clear both engine rooms and the after battery. After all, the Squalus was just ninety-two feet down now, not 243 feet.

  Momsen was aghast. “Admiral,” he said, “I don’t care what depth she is in. I’d also like to point out that ninety-two feet isn’t exactly like getting into a bathtub. Putting a diver in that compartment is the most dangerous thing I can think of. The diameter of the hatch is only twenty-five inches. When I was diving, I once barely squeezed through a twenty-eight-inch hatch with no room whatever to spare. And even if a man gets in there, God knows what he will encounter. Suppose his lifeline fouls, or his air hose? In my opinion, the whole idea is not only dangerous, it’s unnecessary.”

  But he was overruled.

  Momsen could not go down himself. The age limit for Navy divers was forty. And under no circumstances would he order a man to do it. His dilemma was resolved when Lieutenant Morrison volunteered to go into the after torpedo room while Boatswain’s Mate First Class Forrest Smith tended his lines on the deck outside. Before the helmet was placed over the young lieutenant’s head, Momsen approached him. “Joe Boats, take care,” he said.

  Then he tensely followed his progress over the phone. After landing on the Squalus, Morrison immediately ran into trouble. Simply trying to worm
his bulky suit into the hatch trunk, as Momsen had feared, was difficult enough. That done, however, Morrison’s belt and air-control valve kept catching on the rungs of the trunk ladder. To continue, slowly moving step by step down the ladder, he had to press his arms and hands flat against his sides. Suddenly he reported, “I’ve lost my air. The valve must have rubbed against something.”

  For what were the “longest seconds of my life,” Momsen waited. He would order Morrison hauled up only as a last resort. Jammed as he was in the narrow trunk, it could almost certainly rupture his suit. Finally, just as he was about to risk it, Morrison managed to work his hand up to open the valve and said, “I am OK. I am going down. My helmet must be about two feet below the hatch top now. Wait a minute! My shoes keep hitting something across the bottom of the trunk. I can’t see what it is.”

  For Momsen, that was the last straw. “Joe Boats,” he ordered, “come up.”

  Laboriously now, Morrison made his way back through the hatch, aided by Smith. When he was on the submarine’s deck again, they lowered a diving lamp into the hatch. The visibility was very poor, the water in the compartment full of silt. But they could faintly see what the obstruction was—the face and arm of a body lying across the bottom edge of the trunk. There seemed to be another body just below it.

  That evening Momsen requested a private audience with Admiral Cole. “Sir,” he began, “if I am to remain diving officer, I must—”

  It was as far as he got. Cole cut him short. “Swede,” he said, “I know. There will be no more efforts to enter the submarine until she is in dry dock.”

  A few days later Morrison was relieved from salvage duty as an assistant diving officer to assume his first submarine command, the Sea Lion, a transfer that had been postponed on several occasions during the summer. “Joe Boats,” Momsen told him as he prepared to depart, “you’re an outstanding officer, one of the best, and I think you have a hell of a future ahead of you. I regret you won’t be around to see the grand finale.”