In the meantime, we had continued pumping water out of the ship. Gradually, our wild gyrations lessened as we got her correctly trimmed. With ballast tanks again full of water, no air trapped in them, Triton finally hovered, motionless, balanced precariously with her internal weight exactly equal to that of the water displaced.
It might be well to explain at this point a fact that submariners know well, but which may not be so well known to others: it is impossible for a submerged body to be so delicately trimmed or balanced that it will remain indefinitely static, neither rising nor falling. Despite fanciful tales written by people who do not know their physics, things cannot just sink part way. A submerged submarine has no reserve buoyancy; that is to say, she gains no additional buoyancy by sinking a little deeper in the water (a surface ship, passing from more-dense to less-dense water, increases imperceptibly in draft). If an eight-thousand-ton submarine is one pound heavier than the water she displaces, she will slowly sink. The deeper she goes, the greater the pressure; even the strongest hull will be slightly compressed, thus reducing the volume of displaced water and increasing the disparity between her weight and that of the water displaced. She will go all the way down until she reaches the bottom. Conversely, a submerged submarine one ounce light will ultimately broach the surface. The only exception to this rule occurs when there is a layer, or stratum, of heavier water underlying a lighter layer. In this case, the submarine can “balance” on the boundary between the two, as long as the dissimilarity continues to exist. This is known as “riding a layer.”
It is true that a submarine almost in perfect trim—as near to perfect trim as it can possibly get—might very very slowly sink in water of a certain density until it reaches a layer of water considerably cooler or more saline than the one for which trimmed, and there she will stay for a while. Ships have been known to ride thus, suspended between two layers of water of dissimilar densities, for many hours. There have even been stories about balancing a submarine so skillfully that the slight increase in displacement gained by raising a periscope would cause her slowly to drift toward the surface, and sink slowly when the periscope is withdrawn inside its bearings, but, practically speaking, such situations are rare and highly temporary.
The submarine riding on a layer will maintain depth so long as all the factors affecting her equilibrium remain exactly the same. But they never do. Considering the many changes constantly taking place in the weight of the submarine, due to leakage through propeller shaft glands, to name one unstoppable source, or water taken in by the evaporators, for instance, it is certain that within a short time the sub’s trim will change. In all cases, the change is in the direction of becoming heavier and, without the intelligent hand of man, she will shortly resume her descent. Nothing, in other words, can float without control between the surface of the sea and the bottom.
Davy Jones might have been perturbed had he observed Triton, the world’s greatest submarine, slither to a halt and commence a series of astonishing gyrations in depth, accompanied by a frenetic blowing and venting of air and grinding of pumps. He would indeed have been justified in suspecting something to have gone seriously wrong. Such was, however, far from the fact. We were well pleased with the results of our drill, which showed that we had more than adequate control of our huge ship, even under the hazardous conditions which result from a complete loss of power; and after a short time, the mock-casualty restored, Triton’s great propellers began to turn purposefully once more and she settled down on her course to the northwest at a speed faster than any submarine had ever traversed these waters.
According to Triton’s Log, it was next day, at about ten-thirty at night, when a calamity of very real proportions confronted us. Intimation of the problem came when Don Fears called me on the ship’s service telephone in my room. For a few days we had had a severe leak around the starboard propeller shaft, which had been growing steadily worse. Now, as Don put it, it was no longer incidental, but of some magnitude. Fears and Curt Shellman were both in the lower level of the engine room, and I got there as soon as possible.
Spotting the leak was easy. Great sheets of water were spurting out around the periphery of the flange and gland through which the propeller shaft passed into the sea, driving a solid white spray perpendicularly outward from the shaft itself around 360° of its circumference, soaking the overhead of the platform deck above, the curved side of the ship outboard of the shaft, and the tiny walk deck. A heavy canvas dropcloth had already been rigged to protect the machinery near the leak, while Curt Shellman and three of his engineers, all of them drenched, were struggling perilously close to the rapidly revolving propeller shaft in their effort to stem the flow of water.
The tremendous racket produced by the hydrantlike force of water striking deck plates and other structures in the engine room made it almost impossible to talk. I put my mouth next to Don Fear’s ear and shouted, “Good Lord, Don, how long has it been this bad?”
Fears looked serious and shouted into my ear in turn. “This is why I called you, Captain. The leak we had before was getting slowly worse and I was thinking of calling you anyway, then suddenly she broke loose.”
“What is the trouble?” I yelled.
Don shook his head. “Don’t know for sure, sir. Curt and his people have been right on it, though. Maybe we’ll have an answer pretty soon.”
“You can’t handle this with the drain pump, Don,” I shouted, enunciating slowly and carefully above the din. “We can’t let these bilges get too full!”
Don nodded understandingly. “We have the drain pump on the line already, Captain, but I think you’re right. The pump won’t be able to keep up with this flood!”
Quite apart from the ultimate safety of the ship herself, if this huge leak could not be stopped, there was a lot of electrical equipment and other delicate machinery in the engine room which would be damaged if the water level rose too high.
“Don,” I said, “we’ll have to stop the starboard shaft. That will help some. At least it will let Curt get closer to the problem. I don’t like him working around the shaft like that while it’s turning.”
Don nodded, shouting in my ear. “Maybe we could come to a shallower depth, too, Captain. That would reduce the pressure and cut down the leak some.”
I assented. It took but a second to dash up the ladder to the upper level, find a telephone, and call the Officer of the Deck. In a moment, the starboard propeller shaft began to slow down, and at the same time the ship angled gently upward. In deference to the amount of water already in the bilges, which would all be concentrated in the after end if too steep an angle were assumed, I had told the Officer of the Deck to bring her up handsomely—that is, slowly and steadily, with good control.
As the outside water pressure was reduced, the leak correspondingly decreased. Shellman cast me a grateful look. I beckoned to him. “Curt,” I said, “we are locking the shaft so that it can’t turn. This will let you get closer to it, at least.”
Shellman was mopping his face with a rag. “Thanks, Captain. I was about to ask if we might do that. I’m afraid to put somebody outboard of the propeller shaft because there’s not much clearance between it and the skin of the ship.”
He did not need to say more. There was perhaps a foot-and-a-half clearance between the propeller shaft and the curve of Triton’s pressure hull or skin. As I watched the propeller shaft come to a complete stop, there came into view a great bolted coupling by which two sections of the shaft had been joined together. The huge coupling had been rotating previously in a sort of a blur, its machined edges a lethal hazard while the shaft was turning.
With the shaft at a complete halt, Curt and Chief Engine-man Fred Rotgers climbed on top, braving the reduced spray of water, while “Rabbit” Hathaway, a compactly built Engine-man, squirmed under the shaft and into the confined space.
Several minutes later we had the answer. The spit of anger in Rotgers’ voice as he reported the basic cause of the problem was not a
ll due to the salt-water bath he had just experienced. “The _____ nuts on the far side of the gland are so loose you can turn them by hand,” he spluttered.
“How about the locking washers, Chief?” asked Shellman.
“I sure didn’t see any. That’s why they loosened up!” Rotgers glared as he spoke. It was evident that whoever had installed these bolts would have fared badly had the powerful Rotgers been able to get his hands on him at that moment.
“There are locking wires on the inboard side of the gland,” reported Shellman, after a brief inspection.
Further investigation showed that loose bolts were not the end of the trouble. The propeller shaft water seal had been improperly installed, that is, not made tight, either because of the difficulty in reaching some of the bolts or through lack of locking devices. Under the vibration and stress of continual high speed, complication had followed upon complication. Looseness of the bolts on the outboard side had permitted the packing gland to become partially cocked on its seat, and now, tighten the bolts as we would, it remained jammed in a cocked position and could not be straightened. We heaved on the nuts with the biggest wrenches aboard, to the point where Curt feared further pressure might distort or damage the parts even more, but there was no stemming the leak.
Not sure, in fact, whether or not some improvement might have been made, we eased Triton down again into the depths, and the resulting effect, with the greater pressure outside, was striking, to say the least.
We had obviously not solved the problem. The next step was to put an emergency clamp around the leak, utilizing three damage-control clamps which had been designed for small patches, not for anything as massive as this. Down we went for a test again, but the pressure of the water was so strong that it simply pushed the clamps apart.
Midnight had long given way to morning as Curt Shellman, Fred Rotgers, Clarence Hathaway, and others struggled with the leak in the confined space. The watch had changed at midnight and again at four o’clock, but Shellman, Rotgers, and company stayed on the job. Two solutions were decided on: first, we would try to reinforce the three damage-control clamps which had failed; second, we would design an entirely new clamp, sacrificing for the purpose a section of molding from the wardroom passageway, which happened to be made of corrosion-resisting steel and was, by good fortune, of sufficient size for our use.
By breakfast time the first try was in place, damage-control clamps with backing plate for reinforcement. It had been a long, back-breaking job, performed in tight quarters under the most unfavorable conditions, with water squirting in under pressure the whole time the men worked. When we unlocked the propeller shaft for a full-fledged test, Curt Shellman’s naturally haggard face assumed an even more worried expression, the deep circles under his eyes standing out almost as though the difficulty had caused him physical suffering. But all went well; the leak did not increase beyond manageable size, the drain pump was able to take care of the water leakage without difficulty, and Shellman permitted a half-smile to wrinkle the deep bags under his eyes. At noon, Fears reported that the modified clamp would hold, for the time at least, and that our newly manufactured one would be held in reserve.
Entry from the Log dated 12 March, 1960:
0020 Our fathometer is out of commission again. This is bad news. It has been giving us trouble off and on for the past several days. Each time, however, we have brought it back into operation. This time, as our electronics technicians and sonarmen check it over, they actually record the gradually decreasing installation resistance in the head. It appears to be flooded.
Ever since the initial difficulty with the fathometer, “Whitey” Rubb and Dick Harris had been giving me daily reports as to its condition, and I was well aware of their increasing fears as to its performance. All the instruction books we had on board for the fathometer had been pored over, and in anticipation, we had checked over the stock of electronic spares on board the ship, the back-up for all the complicated electronic-control equipment with which Triton was fitted. All spare parts which could conceivably be used in the fathometer—tubes, resistors, crystals, power amplifiers—all, no matter what type of equipment they were originally designed for, had been located, so that we could substitute as necessary.
As the careful watch over the fathometer continued, our worries increased. The receiver crystals had again burned out, and our new transformer had gone, too. Both were abnormal casualties, and it appeared that the basic trouble was not in the electronic hookup of the fathometer, but in the installation of the fathometer head itself. This, unfortunately, was something with which we could not cope, even were the ship on the surface. We could, and did, take resistance and capacitance readings of various components through the electrical connections inside the ship to which we had access. But so far as inspecting the head, possibly eliminating a leak or replacing a bad component with a good one, we were completely helpless.
By 0200, complete loss of the fathometer was confirmed. Another set of crystals, just replaced in the receiver, had immediately burned out, and there was no question that the fathometer head itself was the cause. Chief Sonarman George McDaniel reported that while he was measuring the resistance to ground he recorded a rapidly reducing resistance to the point where the sonar head was completely grounded out.
All submarines are plagued with inability to maintain topside wiring free of water. A great number of cables must come through the pressure hull and therefore, over some percentage of their length, must be exposed to full sea pressure. Despite great care in installation, there are always some that flood, either through an unsuspected fault in the pressure sealing of the cable itself or because of improper installation. New ships, because of their miles of cabling, always have the greatest difficulty keeping their wiring dry.
Realizing that we would have to complete the rest of our cruise without a fathometer, a serious period of self-analysis faced me. Could we safely finish the trip without danger of running aground on some uncharted shoal or damaging the ship by striking bottom in one of the restricted passages we would later be required to navigate?
It was not as though this had suddenly become a consideration at four o’clock on the morning of the twelfth of March. I had been thinking it over ever since the first difficulty with the fathometer had arisen, and had generated some experiments with our search sonar and Mike Smalet’s “monkey in a cage”—our name for his gravity-metering gadget.
Even before it finally broke down, I had become convinced that despite the loss of the fathometer we could still proceed along our way. Our search sonar reliably detected shallow water ahead and on either side, and particularly gave us immediate warning of sudden changes in the depth of the ocean bottom. Smalet, who was as anxious as anyone that the trip proceed successfully, had advanced the theory that although unexplained anomalies in the earth’s crust had an effect on gravity, it was also true that gravity was fundamentally a function of mass and distance. A perceptible increase in gravity should therefore coincide with a reduction in the depth of the ocean, and vice versa. We had been trying out his theory whenever there was an opportunity, and to our delight found that there was indeed some such correlation.
However, a more subtle question had to be answered: should I report our trouble?
By this time, we had passed into the operational control of ComSubPac, whose headquarters were in Pearl Harbor. What would be his reaction upon receiving a message from the Triton stating that her fathometer was out of commission? What indeed would be the reaction in the Pentagon? It was in a sense my duty to report our problem, but would I not, in so doing, be passing on responsibility I should assume myself? How could any admiral in Pearl Harbor or Washington or New London evaluate the situation as well as I could? Unable to see the situation at first hand, might they not be obliged to adopt the cautious course?
In short, if I simply reported the loss of the fathometer without all the amplifying considerations we had so laboriously developed in the past week and a half, was
there not a good chance that we should be ordered to cancel the remainder of our trip and proceed directly to Pearl Harbor for repairs?
This question, with all its nuances, was the big one. In final analysis, I felt continuation of our expedition depended as much upon my decision at this point as on anything we had done to date. Well I knew the Navy tradition; on the Captain rests the responsibility for the right decision. And well I remembered what had happened to Father after the Memphis had gone aground in Santo Domingo harbor. The cause had been a tidal wave—unpredictable, therefore something against which one could not have been prepared. Pacing the deck of his ship on a warm, pleasant afternoon, at anchor with awnings rigged, gangways down, and liberty parties ashore, he had been the first to see danger. Within forty minutes, mast-high breakers swept in from the peaceful sea and Memphis was cast ashore on a coral reef, a total wreck. Father was exonerated of all blame for the catastrophe, except the impossible responsibility for not having anticipated a tidal wave. (Technically, “not having been ready to get underway immediately.”)
This was, in fact, the major contention upon which his court martial eventually turned. In the crux of the decision, which the court, true to Navy tradition, could not but render against him, was the statement that nothing could divest the Commanding Officer of the ultimate responsibility for the safety of his ship. A comparable responsibility now burdened me.
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