by Peter Maas
Within six months Momsen would be horrified to learn of Morrison’s death. He accidentally shot himself while cleaning a rifle.
ON SEPTEMBER 11 everything was set for the last lift—except the weather. During the night a southeast wind, reaching a velocity of forty knots, canceled any chance of it. By late afternoon, however, the wind had shifted around to the northwest and gradually abated. The next morning Lieutenant George MacKenzie, who had relieved Morrison, came up with a chilling report after an inspection dive. The wind and sea had taken their toll. The stability of the Squalus was at a critical point. She was listing perceptibly more to port, at least ten degrees more. MacKenzie said that he had actually seen her move.
Time was fast running out. That evening Cole got the report he had been waiting for, the forecast for September 13. “Light to gentle north and northeast winds. Partly cloudy. Unlimited visibility. Sea smooth.”
So at daybreak the final lift began. Cole was anxious to get the Squalus into the Piscataqua for high slack water at 1330 hours. Just past eight o’clock the stern pontoons surfaced, sank out of sight and then reappeared. The hose fitting on one of them had broken and a geyser of air and water was shooting out of the broken pipe. Momsen and his whaleboat crew scrambled aboard and got an emergency valve over it just in time. Though the pontoon was still floating, it was nearly awash.
Two hours later the bow pontoons rose and with them the periscope and the top of the conning tower. “We’ve got her! We’ve got her!” somebody shouted. But it was not to be. In spite of all the air that had been pumped into her, no sooner did the Squalus start to broach than she rolled slowly over and sank, the stern pontoons with her. Now the bow had to be reflooded to line her up on the bottom. At noon she was completely down.
They had no choice. There wasn’t even time for a diver to check her over. The entire process of blowing her was repeated at once. There was a furious boil of bubbles over the stern, but no pontoons. Desperately the blowing went on but nothing happened. And now for the first time during all those weeks and months they were ready to admit they had been vanquished. The Squalus would never be raised. On the Falcon, in Momsens whaleboat, throughout every ship in the salvage flotilla, one gloomy face after another showed defeat.
Perhaps this collective gloom brought on the miracle. Nobody ever stepped forward with a better explanation. Without warning the stern pontoons bobbed up. About an hour later, the bow pontoons emerged.
As they did, it happened. Like a huge, exhausted game fish, the sub slowly rose alongside the Falcon, first the periscope again, the conning tower higher and higher, tilted slightly to port, the “192” on its starboard side clearly visible, the top of the pilothouse smashed in probably when she shot up on July 13. Her main deck was just below the surface, bent and mangled rigging briefly in view until she settled down.
It was fully five minutes—after Momsen and his divers had secured the pontoons, swiftly closing one more leaking hose valve—before they were certain they had her at last. “I just learned something about myself,” Momsen told Cole. “I didn’t know I could hold my breath that long.”
That afternoon the Wandank began her tow. It was too late for high slack water, and since the narrow, twisting Piscataqua was about to begin its ebbtide rush toward the North Atlantic, the civilian tug Chandler moved in to lend a hand if necessary. The faithful old Penacook, meanwhile, came alongside the trailing Falcon to buttress her power.
They paused outside the river’s mouth. Cole faced a decision that he alone had to make. The Squalus was drawing about thirty-nine feet of water, and with mean low tide an hour and a half away, there were two spots he would have to pass that were at least that shallow. Yet to wait for high water invited unknown dangers. “All right,” he said, “let’s go.”
The first bad point in the channel was a little below an old lighthouse guarding the north side of Portsmouth Harbor. And there the Squalus touched down. But in a superb display of seamanship the Falcon held steady until the Wandank speeded up enough to drag the submarine over the hump.
As they entered the harbor itself, the colors of each vessel they passed were solemnly lowered to half-mast. Thousands of people crowded both shorelines, watching silently in the fading light as the strange, almost funereal procession slowly headed upstream. Later, after the sun went down, they still stayed, marking the progress now by the lights of the tow ships. Then, in the hush that hung over them all in the night air, there was a great gasp. The lights had stopped moving.
From the sea the Piscataqua courses inland past the Portsmouth Navy Yard in a sweeping S-shaped curve. While rounding the lower bend of the S, the Squalus grounded again. It was here that the second shallow area of the channel lay. Here, too, the mad thrust of the river reached its greatest fury, the currents in constant, ruthless motion except for the brief period of absolutely still water between tidal runs. The sub herself began to swerve out of line, a new disaster in the making if she was stuck there.
But the Portsmouth Harbor Master, Captain Shirley Holt, who had assumed direction of the tow, daringly brought the Squalus hard by the eastern edge of the channel, skirting the rock-bound tip of the yard where the shoaling was minimal. The Wandank strained forward until it seemed that the towline must break. At that moment the Squalus slid through.
By eight P.M. she was resting on the river bottom about a hundred feet from her destination, Berth 6. Momsens whaleboat crews quickly ran lines out to the pontoons and the Penacook and the Chandler moved in to hold her against the flood tide. As the Piscataqua rose, the Squalus was finally brought in. Pumping out her compartments was begun at once to prepare her for dry dock. But for all practical purposes it was over. One hundred and thirteen days after her fatal plunge she had returned. It had been the greatest undersea rescue and deepest salvage operation in history.
After watching for a while in the glare of the floodlights as she came eerily into view, Swede Momsen could be forgiven a bit of hyperbole he entered in his diary that night. “As I stood there,” he wrote, “I thought I saw a trident and a crown rise out of the water, followed by the face of Neptune, clouded in disappointment. He had been cheated of his prize.”
There was, after all, more than a little truth in it.
PUMPING OUT THE Squalus continued through the next day, and shortly after midnight she was nearly ready to be hauled into dry dock. By then, too, five bodies had been removed from the engine rooms, placed in gray sacks and taken to the morgue at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital.
Four hours later, her hull was completely exposed. Seventeen more bodies were in the after torpedo room that Lieutenant Morrison had attempted to enter. It was obvious that the men had met mercifully swift deaths. The sea had swept in so fast that there had been no time for anyone even to reach for a Momsen lung. All of them were still in their racks. Torpedoman Second Class Al Priester, the after torpedo-room talker, was found sitting upright between a locker and a torpedo tube, earphones in place, as if waiting for a message from the control room.
Seaman Second Class John Marino, the Iowa boy on board his first submarine, was taken out of the after battery near the mess area where he would have been serving the noon meal. Nobody who had scrambled out of the compartment remembered seeing him there. Seaman First Class Alexander Keegan, who had stepped out of the galley just as the dive began, was found in the battery washroom.
That left two men yet to be accounted for. Cutting through the metal deck plates of the after battery with acetylene torches, they found the twenty-fifth man, Electrician’s Mate First Class John Batick, where he had gone down to observe how the cells there behaved.
But the twenty-sixth man, Cook Second Class Thompson, who was napping during the dive after having prepared breakfast, was never found. Momsen had an idea of what might have taken place. After the Squalus was down, the men huddled in the control room had heard a loud inexplicable clang. It was just possible that Thompson, caught in the compartment, had instinctively climbed up to the after ba
ttery hatch and undogged it, waiting for that moment when the pressure equalized so he could open it in a desperate effort to get out of the submarine. A pocket of trapped air then might have forced the hatch open, causing it to fall back after the air had escaped. The hatch cover, in any event, was closed during most of the salvage. Momsen’s divers had gotten into the habit of ringing the ship’s bell on the Squalus whenever they could. To do it they had to stand on the hatch. Then, after the unexpected grounding on August 12 as diver Jesse Duncan went toward the bell, he saw to his amazement that the hatch was open. One way or another Thompson’s body had gone through it.
WITH THE SQUALUS in dry dock, the final phase of the investigation was at hand. The official Court of Inquiry had already taken written statements from all survivors, then exhaustively questioned them orally, even down to asking Quartermaster First Class Frankie Murphy about the news item indirectly quoting him that the Squalus had been in difficulty before. Murphy denied ever saying anything like it.
Members of the court, accompanied by Naquin and his executive officer, Lieutenant William Thomas Doyle, trooped into the control room to see if they could solve the mystery of the open main engine air-induction valve. After fluid had been fed into the hydraulic system, Doyle tried the lever that would close both it and the air-ventilation valve. When he did, the ventilation valve shut. But the main engine valve did not move. Was this, as Naquin believed, what had happened on May 23? They would never know. After more fluid was pumped into the hydraulic system, Doyle pulled the lever again. This time the valves closed in tandem.
The court questioned among others Momsen and Captain Richard Edwards. Its final report to the Secretary of the Navy did not place blame on any one person for the disaster. It also certified that the sub’s officers and crew were “well-trained and efficient.” Lieutenant Naquin, it stated, “displayed outstanding leadership during the sinking of the U.S.S. Squalus and the rescue of her survivors.”
It officially concluded that the loss of the Squalus “was due to a mechanical failure in the operating gear of the engine induction valve.” Which, of course, begged the question of how that had happened. This could not be addressed because there was no definitive answer, only tantalizing circumstantial evidence.
When the high-inductions lever was tested, it was found that the locking pin was not in place. For many submariners, this confirmed their theory that the engine-induction valve was closed as the dive began and then was opened again inadvertently when the Squalus was reaching a depth of fifty feet. The court’s report danced around this possibility. While acknowledging that the mechanical failure might not have been discovered in time because of an electrical failure on the control board, it also noted that it could have been the result of “a mistake in reading this indicator by the operating personnel.”
And while the report praised Oliver Naquin, he would never be given what he so desperately wanted—another submarine to command. He had been doomed back in June when, after a preliminary inquiry, Captain Edwards, in his capacity as Commander Submarine Squadron Two, dispatched a memo to the Commander Submarine Force that said: “The Squalus was following the practice which has not become unusual of diving with open hull valves in induction and ventilation lines. This practice is considered unnecessary and dangerous.”
The valves Edwards was referring to were hand-operated ones in the engine rooms. Practically no submarine captain bothered with them because, as Momsen said, “They were so damn hard to get at, especially the one in the forward engine room.” In a new sub, moreover, they tended to stick.
The report to the Secretary of the Navy noted that these valves were open. He in turn in his “action” report declared: “Had these hull stop valves been closed prior to submergence . . . only the pipe lines and not the compartments would have been flooded.” It didn’t matter that Naquin had just been unlucky. The law of the sea was that the skipper took the rap. He was reassigned, served honorably on surface ships during World War II and retired with the rank of rear admiral.
Momsen subscribed to the theory that the main induction valve had been opened again after the dive. In his opinion, all the levers for the hull valves were confusingly close together.
The inquiry court’s recommendations were actually more instructive than its findings. To prevent the possibility of the main inductions lever ever being mistakenly opened, a protective shield was added in all subs already in service to isolate it from adjacent levers. For every new sub being constructed, the position of the lever was changed and it was given a distinctive grip.
There were other key design changes. Instead of having to shut the backup inboard valves laboriously by handwheels against an incoming surge of the sea, a crewman had only to trip levers and the sea pressure itself automatically closed them. These same design changes were also applied to the outboard main induction valves located on the side of the conning tower.
So somewhere among these recommendations lay the answer. What happened to the Squalus never occurred in any other American submarine.
Momsen left Portsmouth with a commendation in his service jacket. It applauded his “exceptional coolness, judgment, specialized knowledge and responsibility” in rescuing the thirty-three survivors of the Squalus.
It went on to say: “This was a period of the greatest diving effort in the world’s history. That in 640 dives, under the most severe conditions, there was not a single loss of life or a serious personal injury speaks for the eternal vigilance, professional skill, technical knowledge and responsibility of Commander Charles Bowers Momsen.”
In congratulating him, Dr. Al Behnke joked, “Well, Swede, all our summer tests for helium and oxygen went pretty well, don’t you think?”
19
THERE REMAINED ONE cruel irony yet to be played out in the saga of the Squalus—and the Sculpin.
In dry dock, the salvaged submarine was found to be in remarkably good shape. Very little beyond her electrical apparatus had to be replaced. Even delicate instruments like her gyro compass and the data computer were easily repaired.
She was recommissioned on May 15, 1940, as the Sailfish. It was said that President Roosevelt personally suggested the new name. Photographs of the Squalus bursting out of the sea during the first failed salvage attempt apparently reminded him of a leaping sailfish. And by the end of the summer, she was beginning test dives again south of the Isles of Shoals.
Much of her former crew had been dispersed on other assignments. But four of them were back on board, including three who were such close pals—Gerry McLees, Lenny de Medeiros and Lloyd Maness. The fourth was Gene Cravens.
Her new captain, Lieutenant Commander Morton Mumma, Jr., was a strict disciplinarian. The past history of the sub seemed to weigh heavily on him. McLees recalled how Mumma summoned him and the others and told them he never wanted to hear the word “Squalus” mentioned. If anyone else in the crew ever asked any questions about the disaster, they were to ignore them. As far as he was concerned, Mumma said, the Squalus never existed.
His edict, of course, was ridiculous. Her return to service was the talk of the submarine force. For many submariners, she was a jinxed boat. They came up with their own name for her, the Squalfish. Whenever she put to sea, other sub crews would advise, “Hey, don’t forget to close the main inductions when you dive.” “To tell the truth,” Gerry McLees recalled, “we kind of thought about that ourselves.”
In the winter of 1941, she was assigned to the Pacific fleet. To Mumma’s dismay, when she arrived in Pearl Harbor, her past continued to haunt her. Her berth was right next to the Sculpin’s. Mumma tried to have it changed, but his division commander refused the request. His paranoia reached new heights when he learned that Oliver Naquin was on a battleship stationed at Pearl Harbor. Forthwith, he ordered that if Naquin ever made an appearance, he was not to be allowed on board. Naquin did stop by early one evening. The embarrassed watch officer couched the absence of any invitation to inspect the sub as diplomatically as he cou
ld. “The captain has a strict rule,” he said. “No visitors.”
“Oh, I see,” Naquin said and left.
In the fall of 1941, Mumma received orders to join the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines, as did the commander of the Sculpin. At the Cavite Navy Base, the talk of war consumed Mumma. “It was like he couldn’t wait for something to happen,” McLees said. Then across Manila Bay on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, a signal light flashed: FROM COMMANDER ASIATIC FLEET. JAPAN HAS COMMENCED HOSTILITIES. GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.
There were twenty-nine subs operating out of Cavite. They all went to sea in anticipation of a Japanese invasion. The Sculpin briefly escorted a convoy of submarine, aircraft and destroyer tenders heading south to take up safer positions and then turned to patrol the eastern coast of the main island of Luzon. The old Squalus was assigned to the Lingayen Gulf halfway up Luzon’s western coast, where landings were anticipated.
While Japanese bombers were making their first run over Manila, she spotted enemy troopships in the gulf. She moved in at periscope depth and fired two torpedoes at one of them. Nothing happened. A soundman manning the hydrophone reported that the second torpedo had hit its target, but there was no explosion. Mumma appeared astounded. The excellence of the Mark 6 exploders being used in the torpedoes was supposed to be the submarine force’s secret weapon.
Next, framed in the periscope, a Japanese destroyer was racing toward them. Mumma ordered a dive to 250 feet. Then the soundman reported that they were being pinged.
Visibly shaken, Mumma couldn’t believe it. Destroyer skippers had convinced him that with their newly developed sonar capability, once they zeroed in on a sub, those on board might as well start notifying next-of-kin. Besides, he’d been told that the Japanese did not have sophisticated sonar.