by Peter Maas
Momsen concluded that friction between the steel and the silk had produced a spark of static electricity that set off the powder. Still smarting about the faulty torpedo exploders, Bureau of Ordnance experts politely countered that this time Momsen was in effect nuts. But as usual he persisted and lined up enough support to force a testing of his theory. For a month the simulated loading of powder continued without results. On the last day, however, of the agreed-upon thirty-day test period, there was a spark. That ended the argument—and the use of silk bags for gunpowder—for good.
After the end of the war, Momsen was back where his heart always belonged—with submarines. A rear admiral now, he was appointed Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Undersea Warfare. And it was there that he left a tangible legacy for the Navy that remains with us today.
AS THE KOREAN conflict drew to a close, I was a seaman/journalist in the Navy. During the last three months of my service, I was assigned to the Navy’s press office in the Pentagon under Captain Slade Cutter. Renowned for kicking the winning field goal in the 1934 game against Army, Cutter, as a submarine skipper, had scored the third highest total of Japanese tonnage sunk during World War II. He was a five-time winner of the Navy’s highest decoration, the Navy Cross.
From him, I first learned of Swede Momsen—and a revolutionary, then secret submarine, the Albacore. When Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, at the time a captain, began working with nuclear power, it would be tried out first as a matter of cost efficiency in a submarine named the Nautilus. If it proved successful, aircraft carrier admirals, who had replaced their battleship counterparts as kingpins in the Navy’s hierarchy, foresaw much bigger atomic power plants—for carriers and their escorts. So did Rickover, who had gotten the project under way by first achieving a high staff position with the Atomic Energy Commission.
What Momsen foresaw was something entirely different. Submarines historically, because of their dependence on battery power, were actually surface ships that occasionally dipped beneath the waves. Their basic design—including, ironically, even that of the Nautilus—was predicated on this principle. Yet with the advent of nuclear power, a true submersible, which occasionally would come to the surface, was within grasp. Given the right kind of hull, as Momsen put it, “a submarine no longer would have to slink along like a frightened cow at one or two knots at a depth of a few hundred feet while her tormentors rained depth charges on top of her until their supply was exhausted.” Now, instead, she could be the aggressor, potentially the Navy’s new capital ship, the backbone of the fleet.
To speak openly about what he privately envisioned would invite a fast trip to the booby hatch. But that young lieutenant who had arrived in Washington years before only to find his scheme for a diving bell rudely dismissed had learned his lesson: avoid direct confrontation. Guile was the key to circumvent establishment thinking. In a carrier-dominated Navy, he knew there was no chance that funds would be appropriated for such a radical purpose. But he also knew that carrier admirals feared submarines. And that was the leverage he used. He submitted his proposal as a target for submarine hunter-killer groups to practice on. Approval was immediate.
Since as a target she would not be armed, Momsen made sure that only the Bureau of Ships would be involved. The designers did not have to concern themselves with any input from the Bureaus of Ordnance, Engineering, Navigation and Construction and Repair, which, as Momsen remarked, always ended up stuffing a submarine like a “turkey.” His instructions to the designers were to the point: “Forget about surface performance. Think only about submerged capability which will provide the utmost speed with a minimum of power. When in doubt, think speed!”
An investigation was made into every conceivable shape—including aircraft and blimps—for clues to the hydrodynamic perfection Momsen sought. Endless tests were conducted. More than twenty-five scale models were produced, ranging from seven to seventy-five feet in length. Blunt-nosed and wide-bodied amidships, the final version was shaped like a fish with a cod’s head and a mackerel’s tail. Topside, she had only a rakish, slender tower called a sail. Attached to the rear of the sail was a maneuverable dorsal-like rudder. Since the twin screws on conventional subs were primarily for surface navigation and actually impeded their thrust under water, she had only one five-bladed propeller.
Named the Albacore, she was commissioned on December 5, 1953. Addressing her officers and crew, Momsen told them that the future was in their hands, that “this boat upon which so much depends may lead the way to mastery of the sea by the submersible.”
Even with her limited conventional battery power, she could reach more than thirty knots in short bursts. But speed was not her sole asset. She could do tight turns and dives as if she were a jet plane. In fact, her control room resembled the cockpit of a jet, her diving officer directing her course and depth with a single “stick” while strapped into a bucket seat complete with a safety harness. Her crew—as she dived, turned, stopped, and started with startling swiftness—hung on to overhead straps like subway riders.
For a delighted Swede Momsen, she was a bust only as a target. She easily outran and outmaneuvered anything that went after her. It would take time, but the end was inevitable. From the Albacore the design of all of the Navy’s modern, nuclear-powered submarines has evolved. Just as the battleship once fought a losing battle for primacy against the carrier, the nuclear power of the Nautilus married to the Albacores configuration became the centerpiece of the fleet.
At the Pentagon, Captain Cutter assigned me to put together a general fact sheet about the Albacore without any of the background details of how she had come about. “There’s no point in rubbing everyone’s nose in it,” he laughed. “It would just make a lot of admirals around here very unhappy.” Even with Cutter’s extraordinary chestful of ribbons, he added that Swede Momsen was the best submariner the Navy ever had. Then he told me a little about Momsen and the Squalus.
I had never heard of the Squalus. One weekend, I went to the New York Public Library to look up newspaper clips about the disaster. I was stunned by the amount of headline coverage it received. I was even more stunned by how ephemeral those headlines were, probably because of the advent of World War II.
After my discharge, I asked Cutter if he would arrange an introduction to Momsen, who by then had retired and was living in Alexandria, Virginia. Although he could have served longer, he told me that after the Albacore, he had gone about as far as he could within Navy ranks. Still part man of science, part prophet, he had moved past the purely military aspects of the millions of cubic miles of water covering the earth. For him, they had become as intoxicating, as meaningful, as great a challenge as outer space, and he was now a civilian consultant to several companies interested in exploring and mining the rich potential that lay in the oceans.
I found a man modest in manner, apparently at ease with himself, but with an understated aura of command that his old divers had felt. I said that Captain Cutter had told me, half-jokingly, that his real training manual was Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
“Ah, yes,” he replied, eyes lighting up. “My true mentor, Captain Nemo.”
During several visits, I got him to talk about himself, how and why he had decided on a naval career. When he spoke about the many rebuffs and slights he’d suffered, he did so without displaying the slightest bitterness.
I pressed him on this. Hadn’t they hurt deeply? How had he persevered? “My worst moment,” he said, “was when the S—4 went down and I had to answer all the mail explaining why her crew wasn’t saved. I almost quit then. But there was that other moment when the first survivor from the Squalus came out of the rescue chamber and that made it all worthwhile.”
He paused. “Look,” he said, “I loved the Navy and I loved submarines. In the military career I chose, it becomes very clear early on, perhaps for good reason, that the best way to get ahead is to stay with the pack. I guess, during my career, I steered a course a bit too much my own. It’s h
appened in the other services, too. When an officer with initiative and imagination leaves the middle of the road, he’s bound to have trouble. His superiors get set in their ways, indifferent or even hostile to new ideas. Sometimes it’s just because they didn’t think of them themselves. Often when I presented a new proposal, I was made to feel like a felon committing a crime and ended up not only having to defend the idea, but myself for daring to bring it up. But it did happen—too rarely, maybe—to have someone up the line say, ‘That sounds good. Let’s do it.’ I like to think that the situation is much improved.”
He allowed me access to his diary entries; some of his personal and official correspondence; his worksheets for the lung, the diving bell and the helium/oxygen experiments; his files for the Squalus rescue and salvage; his log for the first wolf pack patrol; and his seminars, including an address just before he retired to sub skippers in the Pacific fleet, with the marvelously ironic title “Submarines Emerging from a 50-Year Dive.” I also interviewed survivors of the Squalus and many of the officers and men who either served or worked with him during his Navy years.
As a contract writer for the Saturday Evening Post, I wrote a lengthy article about Momsen and the Squalus. Not long afterward, he became fatally sick. I visited him in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he had moved with his wife, Anne. It was heartbreaking to see this indomitable man waste away. He taught me new lessons in courage. Of his cancer, he said, “There are some things you can’t do anything about.” He shrugged ever so slightly. “Just like the fog,” he said.
I expanded the article into a larger work. It could not have appeared at a worse time. In 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. The Democratic National Convention erupted in violent street riots. The country was exploding in turmoil over the Vietnam War. The slaying of four students at Kent State by Ohio national guardsmen during an antiwar protest was not far off. The last thing anyone was interested in was a long-forgotten sunken submarine and a military man.
But times change. Today the nation rightly yearns for its heroes, and Momsen belongs in that special pantheon. So I decided to write about him once more, to research further the events of his career and to cover areas I had previously missed.
In pursuit of this, I returned to Portsmouth, where, embedded in concrete, is the superstructure and part of the deck of the old Squalus. With it now, since Swede Momsen’s death, is the rakish tower of the Albacore. They are monuments, of course, to what they stood for and to the men who served on them.
They also stand as mute tributes to a true hero.
AFTERWORD
ALTHOUGH I SENSED the hurt that Swede Momsen felt when the Navy named his rescue chamber after a fellow officer, he did not voice the full extent of it to me during the time I spent with him. It was only after the publication of The Terrible Hours that I learned how deeply wounded he was. One of his granddaughters, Helen Hart Momsen, forwarded me a copy of a letter he had written to his uncle, Carl Momsen, after the Navy publicly unveiled the revolutionary device as the “McCann Rescue Chamber.” Aware of the long and bitter struggle his nephew had engaged in with the Bureau of Construction and Repair to be able to proceed with his pioneering invention, Uncle Carl apparently wanted to know what had happened.
Momsen replied, “The inside story of the naming of the rescue chamber after him [Lieutenant Commander Allen McCann] and giving him a Navy Cross was some of the Naval Construction’s stiletto stuff. It was my original idea and I ran all the early tests—and wrote up the specifications for the final chamber. Then I took it and tested it and trained every operator that was trained, including McCann. I fought and bled for it until I had Naval Construction, all of them, furious at me and I had a devil of a time to retain what we had. When McCann was decorated upon recommendations of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, I was not even mentioned—nor have I had a single word of thanks other than remarks in my fitness report.”
True to his innate sense of fairness, however, Momsen went out of his way not to blame McCann for playing any part in this mean-spirited act. He ended his letter to his uncle by saying, “Now I like McCann. He is an ace and I would not do anything to harm him.”
As I wrote in the body of this work, the only reason his escape lung bore his name was because a young reporter had called it the “Momsen Lung” when he broke the story of Momsen’s secret experiments in the Potomac River. Clearly, as a reprisal for what it perceived as an encroachment of their authority, a spiteful Navy bureaucracy gave all the credit for the rescue chamber to McCann.
Even Momsen’s pivotal role in saving the surviving members of the Squalus crew and directing the diving operations to salvage the stricken sub received scant media coverage at the time. This oversight was of Momsen’s own making. Self-effacing to a fault, he did nothing to promote himself. He was too busy doing his job. For all but a day and a night ashore in Portsmouth, he remained on the scene throughout the rescue and salvage. And though Navy spokesmen mentioned him during press conferences, they did nothing to single him out for the special attention he deserved. But the truth was, as Allen Bryson, a crewman who was in the fourth, harrowing trip of the rescue chamber, so succinctly put it: “I owe my life to Swede Momsen. We all did.”
With this in mind, once I had finished writing The Terrible Hours, I wondered what the Navy’s reaction would be. Probably defensive at best, I thought. But from the first, I began to be pleasantly surprised.
Rear Admiral Paul G. Gaffney II, the chief of the Office of Naval Research, paid me a visit. He had been sent an advance copy by a mutual friend, Walter Anderson, the editor of Parade magazine. Gaffney told me that recognition of Momsen’s achievements was long overdue. He said that while the public at large and, indeed, much of the modern Navy might be unfamiliar with him, everybody involved in undersea projects at the Office of Naval Research knew all about him. Gaffney added that he was going to propose an official Navy website about Momsen and his remarkable career, the tragedy of the Squalus, and the Navy’s subsequent programs to delve beneath the ocean surface.
Under Secretary of the Navy Jerry MacArthur Houltin enthusiastically endorsed the idea, and the site can now be found on-line at www.onr.navy.mil/focus.
Then I received a notification from Commander Mark Helmkamp. He was in charge of the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City, Florida. Helmkamp advised me that the center henceforth would be named after Vice Admiral Charles B. (“Swede”) Momsen. “Down here,” Helmkamp told me, “he’s always been our hero.”
The best was yet to come.
On September 19, 2000, Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig formally announced that the Navy was naming a warship, a guided-missile destroyer, the USS Momsen.
The ceremony took place at the submarine base at Groton, Connecticut, across from New London on the Thames River, the same river that the Falcon steamed down sixty-one years ago carrying Swede Momsen’s rescue chamber to where the Squalus lay helpless on the ocean floor. Two survivors of the disaster, Allen Bryson and Donato Persico, were in attendance, as was Momsen’s granddaughter, Helen.
In his address, Secretary Danzig noted that in naming the warship, “I care very much about finding an example for its crew to follow . . . and Swede Momsen represents, to me and to other people, a tremendous example of honor, courage, and commitment—the Navy’s watchwords.”
He continued: “Vice Admiral Momsen personified the traits that we prize most in our naval leaders—an innovative and sharp mind, a passionate spirit, and a profound caring for shipmates—all of which came together in his success at pushing the Navy to new heights in technological and operational success. His extraordinary courage and achievements gave hope to a whole generation of mariners where there had been none before. His legacy is one that links all of us together and will live on in the namesake of this great ship.”
Danzig acknowledged that there were some who would have liked to see a submarine named for Momsen. He had considered this, h
e said, but decided otherwise, recalling that Momsen had commanded two surface ships as well, including the mighty South Dakota. So this offered an opportunity “to emphasize the connection” between the Navy’s surface and undersea communities. “It’s a way of saying to the Navy that we are one Navy,” he declared.
He also was kind enough to add that The Terrible Hours had played a major role in the Navy’s decision to have a warship bear Momsen’s name.
I was invited to say a few words. “In honoring Swede Momsen,” I said, “the Navy honors itself.”
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Epub ISBN: 9781448116874
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First published by Harper Collins Publishers Inc.,
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Portions of this book were published in 1967 in
the Saturday Evening Post and The Rescuer
Copyright © 2001 Peter Maas
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