Men Under the Sea
TO
LIEUTENANT OLIVER NAQUIN, U.S.N.,
AND
THE CREW, LIVING AND DEAD,
OF
U.S.S. “SQUALUS”
HEROES ALL
PREFACE
THE world beneath the sea has always had a peculiar fascination for us mortals, though unequipped ourselves by nature with fins, tails, and gills to explore its watery depths as may the fishes. But our lack of natural equipment has never prevented our imaginations from running riot with the ocean’s wonders and its treasures, and from ancient days to the present the literature of the deep sea, whether presented as fact or fiction, has mainly been notable for the fantastic tales which adorn it and the unreal terrors and legendary treasures with which authors have strewn the ocean floor.
MEN UNDER THE SEA is the story of real men of several nations and of various centuries who in different parts of the ocean and for diverse reasons have actually battled with the deep sea, sometimes for treasure, sometimes to save others, sometimes to save themselves. Here they are, whether trapped in smashed submarines, dressed in rubber diving suits, cased in ponderous metal armor, or as naked as nature brought them into the world, face to face with the real terrors of the deep. Sometimes they lived and won, sometimes they died—in either case their adventures under the sea need garnishing neither with fabulous monsters nor mythical treasures to make them as gripping to us today as anything evolved in the fertile imaginations of Victor Hugo or Jules Verne or of their more modern imitators.
In some of the struggles related here I took part. In most of the others I have had personal contact with some of the participants and with what took place, and can vouch for the facts, or (as will be noted occasionally) for the lack of them in the instances cited where the public has been gulled by self-styled salvage experts (?) and their glowing tales of wealth beneath the seas to be recovered by their particular diving gadgets.
For details in connection with the Laurentic, I am indebted to Captain G. C. C. Damant, Royal Navy (now retired), who commanded throughout in the unprecedented recovery of $44,000,000 in gold from that wartime victim of German submarine activities.
For data on the Davis “lung,” for much of the history of diving, and for permission to use certain illustrations from his book DEEP DIVING, thanks are due to Sir Robert H. Davis, manager of Siebe, Gorman & Co., of London, pioneers for over a century in diving developments and equipment.
The illustrations and much of the data on the use of the underwater torch were furnished through the courtesy of Mr. Charles Kandel, manager of the Craftsweld Equipment Corporation of New York.
To Mr. William Wallace Wotherspoon, salvage master on many wrecks in the United States and Canada, I owe my information on the Empress of Ireland.
To the late Lieutenant Alberto Cuniberti, Italian Royal Navy, lamented martyr to the advancement of safety beneath the seas, I owe a debt which can now never be paid for much information on deep diving in armored rigs, and in particular for information on the salvage of the Egypt’s treasure.
Special thanks are due to Commendatore Giovanni Quaglia, president of Sorima of Genoa, Italy, and to Signor Galeazzo Manzi-Fè de Riseis, manager of Sorima, for many courtesies while in Genoa, for detailed information, and for their privately printed account (on which my story is mainly based) of Sorima’s successful recovery of a huge amount of bullion from the Egypt’s strong room in by far the deepest salvage job ever attempted by men under the sea.
In this connection, to those interested in a very stirring and completely detailed eye-witness account of the Egypt salvage, I can recommend the two-volume story, SEVENTY FATHOMS DEEP and THE EGYPT’S GOLD, by David Scott, correspondent of the London Times, who was present during much of the work on the Egypt.
To Lieutenant Commander C. B. Momsen, U.S.N., I am grateful for data furnished on the Momsen “lung” now used for submarine escape in the United States Navy, and for the account of our Navy’s recent experiments in deep diving with helium. To Lieutenants A. R. Behnke and O. D. Yarbrough, Medical Corps, U.S.N., I am obliged for most of the facts on the physiology of “lung” training and of the physiological effects of helium in deep diving.
Lastly to Commander Henry Hartley, U.S.N., late skipper of the U.S.S. Falcon, and to my old shipmates on the Falcon, who at the risk of their lives unwittingly furnished many of the adventures here related, I owe a deep debt of gratitude. Especially is my appreciation here extended to Chief Bosun’s Mate Bill Carr, who in spite of my one lamentable failure to coöperate with him, finally and deservedly won the Navy Cross for heroism on the S-4.
EDWARD ELLSBERG.
CHAPTER I
SHROUDED in a web of frayed hawsers and dripping air hoses, a battered submarine, with a ragged gash laying open her port side from deck to keel, rested in the drydock. With her diving fins cocked drunkenly in opposite planes, her conning tower half smashed in, her rudder jammed hard astarboard, and a trickle of mud and water oozing from her stern torpedo tube, that submarine was a dismal sight. Around her, crazily floating half awash in the nearly unwatered drydock, were the eight huge cylindrical pontoons which had floated that wreck in from her ocean bed at the bottom of the cold Atlantic off Block Island, 150 miles away.
Looking down on that submarine from the towering sides of the drydock were the divers who had lifted her and brought her in, their incredulous eyes hardly able yet to believe that actually they saw her there, the submarine S-51, for whose hulk over nine seemingly endless months they had battled the fierce Atlantic—that at last, safely locked in behind the caisson of that drydock holding back the sea, they had that ship where she could not again get away from them and sickeningly slip from their sight back to the ocean depths.
They were a wan group of men, those staring divers—weather-beaten, with cracked lips, seamed faces, sunken eyes, and lean bodies from which had been burned every ounce of fat by long hours of breathing excessive oxygen in heavily compressed air forced down to them as they struggled on the ocean floor. For the hundredth time they leaned again over the drydock rails, gazing unbelievingly at the ship they had salvaged. Hopeless their task had seemed when, 22 fathoms down at the bottom of the icy ocean, they first had pitted their puny bodies against the powers of the sea, to lift that 1,200-ton wreck to the surface. Even more hopeless the task had seemed after months of fruitless struggling far offshore, when—in the minds of the divers groping in mud, in darkness, and in frigid cold—the ocean began to take on a definite personality, that of a malignant demon with superhuman cunning and unearthly strength fighting to hold from them what it had claimed as its own. Relentless was the grip, formidable were the weapons of the sea—on the surface, fierce gales to batter and to scatter the salvage ships; on the bottom, icy cold water to freeze a man to the very marrow of his bones, the dark solitude of the weird depths to drive cold fear into a man’s heart as he struggled alone in the mud and the blackness enfolding that wrecked submarine, a cold fear to paralyze the heart even more than the chilling water ever could paralyze the body, and last and worst of all the terrible pressure of the deep sea enveloping everything, ready instantly to crush a man into jelly under a load of 60 tons should he by any mischance lose the air pressure inflating his suit.
Well, all that was over now and they had won. Singly and in knots of two or three, the divers gaped down into the chasm of that drydock at the ship they had lifted—slight Francis Smith, who once, buried in a tunnel cave-in beneath that boat, had by a miracle dug his way out; big Jim Frazer, who would never dive again, his heart dilated from the superhuman strain of dragging a heavy hatch along the deck of that sunken sub; lanky Fred Michels, who had narrowly escaped being crushed between a swaying pontoon and the conning tower; profane Tug Wilson and silent Joe Eiben, who in cumbrous diving rigs had, like eels, snaked their way through the narrow doors inside that flooded submarine when each door meant a desperate gamble with death on getting back; slow-spoken John Kelley, who with a flaming torch on the bottom of the sea had sliced through obstructing steel like butter; Tom Eadie, ace of divers, who nevertheless had almost drowned in his own diving rig when a strange accident in the depths had ripped his canvas suit wide open; and red-faced Bill Carr, on deck a belligerent bosun’s mate, on the bottom as steady-going a diver as ever I worked with.
It was over, certain enough. In the drydock, safe on the keel blocks behind the massive caisson, rested the S-51. The salvage squadron could disband now—the Falcon, our diving ship, to rejoin the submarine flotilla at Panama, the other vessels, their fleet stations, and the divers (torpedomen and gunners’ mates, most of them), after brief leaves ashore, to scatter again to the various ships from which they had hastily been gathered when the S-51 had been rammed and sunk. For the men who fought through that heart-wrenching submarine campaign, nothing remained except to pack bags and hammocks and depart. The last order in the salvage squadron had shortly before been posted where the men returning aboard from the drydock would see it—the list of honors recommended for the men who had raised the S-51—Navy Crosses to six of the divers who had heroically distinguished themselves in extraordinary circumstances, promotions and letters of commendation to certain others whose services on the bottom had been only routine (if such a word can be used with regard to as perilous a job as diving).
In a tiny cabin on the Falcon, the scene of many a heartache while working over the S-51, I listlessly gathered up my few belongings preparatory to going ashore myself. I was through, also, as Salvage Officer. Slowly I gathered up my blueprints, my instruments, my records, subconsciously as little able as any of my divers to realize that our seemingly endless task was over, that I should not again have to turn to over those designs of the submarine to figure out a way of untangling another knot that the sea had unexpectedly tied in our plans; that I should not again have to drape myself in that 200 pounds of lead and copper and wet canvas that made up a diving rig, and drop to the bottom of the cold sea to struggle on that submarine, while I mapped out their work, with the same dangers that my divers faced.
Never again should I go through that. Once in a lifetime was one time too many. Sixteen years of the Navy topped off with those nine months battling the depths off Block Island was enough of a naval career for me, and when my report was in the hands of the Navy Department, I was through with the sea forever. I pulled my slide rule from a cubbyhole in the desk and tossed it in on top of the S-51’s blueprints, wondering whether, even as a civilian, I should ever get over that leaden feeling in the stomach which griped me every time a diver slipped over the Falcon’s side to disappear in a swirl of bubbles as his copper helmet vanished beneath the sea, or that mental agony as on deck I listened on his telephone, the while he groped in the mud and the wreckage on the bottom, over what the treacherous sea was likely to do to him?
I began rolling up the blueprints. Some day, perhaps, when I had got back on myself the flesh that excessive oxygen under pressure had burned off my bones down there on the ocean floor, I supposed I might get over the sickening dread of momentarily expecting that, in spite of all my planning and my care, the next instant something would go wrong and that someone for whom I was responsible would suddenly be in deadly peril, fighting in solitude and in darkness for his life against the—
BANG!
A vicious rap on the cabin door. I started involuntarily, dropped my roll of plans. Before I could say anything, the door flew open and there, framed in it against a background of signal flags and rigging outside, stood Bosun’s Mate Bill Carr, his bellicose face a fiery red, his blue eyes flashing, and waving a paper clutched in his brawny fist. I looked at him in astonishment. An unceremonious entrance into an officer’s cabin, to say the least, but Bill Carr apparently wasn’t standing on ceremony that day.
“Say, Mr. Ellsberg, look at that!”
For an instant Carr thrust under my nose the paper he was clutching. It was the order containing the list of divers’ rewards, evidently torn away from the bulletin board at the gangway.
“This order’s all wet, Mr. Ellsberg!” bellowed Carr. “Here it says that Jim Frazer an’ Tom Eadie an’ John Kelley an’ Francis Smith an’ Tug Wilson an’ Joe Eiben have all been recommended fer Navy Crosses fer their work on that sub, an’ all I’m down fer is a letter o’ commendation fer what I did! A letter o’ commendation! It ain’t right, commander! I’ve earned a Navy Cross as much as anybody, an’ I want it!”
I looked at Carr. His stocky figure, tense with anger, filled every inch of space in that tiny cabin between bunk and desk, and his blazing red face, so close to mine, left no doubt that he was in deadly earnest, that he felt badly cheated. I sympathized with Carr, but he was wrong and there was nothing for it but to convince him so.
“Sorry, Carr, but haven’t you overlooked something?” I asked as mildly as possible. “Don’t forget that, aside from that letter of commendation that’s griping you so much, you’re down on that order for promotion to chief bosun’s mate as well.”
“To hell with that promotion!” barked Carr. “What’s it amount to in my case? I’d ’ve made a chief’s rate before this cruise’s over even if I’d never seen a diving rig! But when’ll I ever git another chanst at a Navy Cross? Answer me that!”
I eyed my bosun’s mate curiously. Ordinarily such insubordinate language warranted a call for a master-at-arms and a transference of further discussion to a deck court, but this wasn’t an ordinary occasion and Carr’s previous services certainly entitled him to a hearing, however informal he chose to make it. Somewhat perplexed, I undertook to soothe his ruffled feelings.
“Look here, Carr, you’re getting promoted from first class petty officer to chief, right now. And, in spite of what you think of yourself, you might never make a chief’s rate this cruise or any cruise. And on top of that, you’ll get a letter from the Secretary of the Navy specially commending you for your services on the S-51. That’s a lot for what you’ve done.”
“Fer what I’ve done?” Carr bristled perceptibly. “Commander, I made more dives in salvaging that sub than any other gob in the outfit, an’ your own records’ll show it. You look. So if anybody rates a Navy Cross fer that job, I’m the lad that oughta be gittin’ it!”
To a degree, Carr had me there. A horse for work and a bull in physique, Carr had made the most dives—I knew that without checking the records. When other divers were tied up with “the bends,” knocked out by an accident, or from sheer exhaustion unable to don a rig and go overboard, stocky Carr had never missed a turn. But in the Navy, nobody gets medals just for routine work. I wondered if I could make my bosun’s mate understand that.
“Yes, Bill, I know that. You made more dives than anybody. I’m not disputing it with you. That’s already been carefully considered. Still, you’re out of luck just the same. There were more than twenty divers, including you, on that job. But only six of ’em, the boys you mentioned, are getting Navy Crosses. And why only six? Because they did something especially heroic on the bottom. You didn’t. I’m not saying you couldn’t have, Bill, any less than those who did, but if it was your hard luck that things broke down on the bottom so they got a chance to be heroes and you didn’t, I can’t help it. So you’d better take your promotion and that letter of commendation and be happy. It’s a lot more than some of your shipmates are getting. Come on, Carr; say you’re satisfied.”
But Carr was obdurate. Satisfied? It was obvious that he wasn’t. However, my logic seemed to have had some effect, for he dropped his bluster, took a different tack, and tried wheedling me into compliance. The truculence in his tone faded out, his red face relaxed into a broad grin, and his blue eyes took on a friendly twinkle I had never seen there before.
“Aw, now, commander, be a good fellow. Gimme that Navy Cross anyhow. Sure an’ you know I’ve earned it! An’ what good’s a letter o’ commendation to me anyway? I reads it once an’ stows it away in my diddy box an’ nobody ever knows I got it. But a Navy Cross is different. There’s Jim an’ Tom an’ Tug an’ Joe an’ those other lads that’s gittin’ ’em can pin their Navy Crosses on their coats every time they makes a liberty, an’ the girls ashore all knows they’re heroes! How about me? Can I pin that letter o’ commendation on my chest when I goes ashore so the girls’ll know I’m a hero too? Like hell I can! Come on, now! Be a sport, commander, an’ gimme that Navy Cross! It’ll look grand on that new chief’s uniform you’re promotin’ me to!”
But by all Carr’s pleas, as by his bluster, I was unmoved. Fate had never placed him on the S-51 in circumstances of extraordinary peril where he could distinguish himself by heroism above and beyond the line of duty, and I could not recommend him for a Navy Cross. Again and again I patiently reiterated that, and finally, having worn him down somewhat, I managed to ease the still grumbling bosun’s mate out of the little cabin and wearily to complete my packing.
The salvage squadron disbanded that day. With a heavy heart I said good-by to the divers on the Falcon, my companions on the bottom through nine terrible months. Never again would I see them, as I was leaving the Service and they were going back to ships scattered over the seven seas.
Once ashore, I toiled in the New York Navy Yard over my salvage report until that, laden down with intricate computations and detailed plans showing how we had raised the S-51, was on its way to Washington. Then I doffed my uniform for the last time, slid into civilian clothes, and, after sixteen years in the Navy, was once again just a civilian.
A year and a half went by uneventfully and Bill Carr and his troubles, submarines and salvage, had gradually faded out of my quiet suburban life in a little town in New Jersey, when, one cold Sunday morning in December, 1927, a week before Christmas, I opened my front door to reach for the Sunday paper lying on the steps, only to be frozen into immobility by a flaring headline screaming at me in large type:
SUBMARINE S-4 SUNK!
FORTY MEN TRAPPED!
CHAPTER II
ABOUT noon on December 17, 1927, the U.S.S. S-4 had proceeded from inside Provincetown Harbor to the deep water trial course off the tip of Cape Cod for submerged standardization trials. For some months before, at her home Navy Yard, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the submarine had been undergoing repairs and refitting; now she was to be run submerged under practically laboratory conditions to determine the effects on her submerged speed and maneuvering qualities.
From the near-by Coast Guard station at Wood End on the sandy tip of Cape Cod, overlooking the trial course and not half a mile away, were flying signals warning of an approaching northwest storm—for that vicinity the worst possible direction, as the wind would have a free sweep down the coast and across all of Massachusetts Bay before striking the unsheltered trial course.
The day was cold, the sea already rising, with white-caps everywhere, and a force 4 wind whipping up a stiff chop over the whole bay, as the S-4, leaving her tender inside Provincetown Harbor, moved slowly out of the protected waters to the open bay, under the direction of Lieutenant Commander R. K. Jones, her captain for over two years.
The S-4, designed and built by the Navy, was a double-hulled submarine 231 feet long, 22 feet in the beam, and of 800 tons surface displacement. Of this special class, the S-type, built mainly during the World War and considered generally a very satisfactory size for all-around service, the Navy had about 50 boats. On the surface, the S-4 was driven by two 8-cylinder Diesel engines; submerged, by two powerful electric motors from massive storage batteries.
For safety in case of accident, four heavily reinforced transverse steel bulkheads divided the S-4 into five main watertight compartments. These were, in order, starting from the bow, the torpedo room, the battery room, the control room, the engine room, and the motor room. Of these compartments, the battery room, owing to the space required to house the storage cells which fed the submerged propelling motors, was by far the largest. It extended practically from the conning tower amidships some 51 feet forward through the widest part of the vessel and provided incidentally, in the space over the battery cell storage, the living and sleeping quarters (much confined of course) for the entire crew, both officers and men, except a few torpedomen whose berths were slung over the torpedo storage forward.
On this particular December day, in addition to her regular crew of 4 officers and 34 men, the S-4 carried, to observe the trials as representative of the Navy Trial Board in Washington, Lieutenant Commander Callaway and his civilian assistant, Mr. Charles Ford, making a total of 40 aboard.
Meanwhile (it being still in the heyday of Prohibition), at 9 A.M. that morning, the Coast Guard Destroyer Paulding, one of a fleet of 25 such vessels transferred from the Navy to the Coast Guard mainly for the prevention of rum-running, steamed out of Boston Harbor for a sweep at high speed through Massachusetts Bay and outside Cape Cod. It was assumed that, with the approach of the holidays, increased activity of rum-runners known to be operating off that coast could be anticipated, and the presence in those waters of at least one “notorious offender” was suspected. At a speed of 18 knots, the Paulding cleared Boston Harbor and headed out to sea. On her bridge, aside from Lieutenant Commander John S. Baylis, her captain and and an officer of long experience in the Coast Guard, there were on watch a junior officer and three of the crew, all on the alert to scan and identify every vessel which hove in sight.
The Paulding had for three hours been speeding through the rising storm when about noon the S-4 slowly nosed out of Provincetown, her interior crowded as always, especially crowded this day by the added equipment in the cramped control room for accurately registering the speed of the shafts during the trials. As she moved away from the tender, with the interior of the boat throbbing to the vibrations of the Diesels, the crew taking their stations shivered from the chill inside the hull as the blasts of cold December air swept through the control room and aft to be sucked into the intakes of the Diesels. Forward in the torpedo room were Lieutenant Fitch and his torpedomen, little concerned this day with the engine trials. Amidships in the control room and aft in the engine and motor rooms were the rest of the crew—the captain; Lieutenant McGinley, the navigator; Lieutenant Weller, the chief engineer; and the Trial Board representatives.
Surrounding them in the control room on all sides was machinery. On the starboard side was the switchboard, a glittering array of electrical switches of all sizes for the complicated machinery of the boat. On the centerline were the periscopes, glistening steel tubes with their eyepieces hidden in housing wells below the deck. And to port was a dizzying conglomeration of pressure gauges, air valves, flood valves, drain valves, diving wheels, depth gauges, periscope motors, and all the intricate mechanism for controlling the submerged operation of the vessel. Here also was placed the special counter gear which Callaway and Ford had brought for calibrating the speed, and running aft from these instruments through the opened after watertight door of the control room were strung, temporarily, electric cables to the propeller shafts in the motor room.
A few miles out of Provincetown, the S-4 approached the trial course, marked approximately by two white can buoys half a mile offshore, and more exactly delineated at each end of the “measured mile” by a range mark of two poles set up perpendicular to the course. Beneath the sea between these two range marks, the S-4 was carefully to calibrate her speed and power.
Inside the S-4 the raucous note of electric horns cut through the clatter of the engines. The diving signal. All over the boat men sprang to diving stations. Another signal and the conning tower hatch slammed to, ventilation valves were closed outboard, Diesels hastily shut down and unclutched, kingston valves jerked open to flood the ballast tanks, and the S-4, driving ahead on her electric motors, planed smoothly down to periscope depth and commenced her trials.
Gone now were the roar and clatter of the Diesels, the slap of the waves against the rounded hull, the rolling of the ship in the seaway. Except for the clicking of the revolution counters, the slight whir of ventilation fans exhausting and circulating the battery gases to dissipate them, and the nearly imperceptible hum of the main propelling motors, silence filled the boat as, with her deck 20 feet below the surface, she swam down the course, passed the first buoy close aboard and headed southwest with only her two periscopes showing a few feet above the surface, one periscope with its lens fixed on the range marks ashore, the other with its solitary eye sweeping the horizon as lookout for passing vessels.
From the Coast Guard observation tower at Wood End, half a mile north of the course, during the next three hours, Surfman Frank Simonds, lookout on watch, saw off and on the periscopes of the S-4 swinging back and forth over the measured mile between the two can buoys. Neither her hull nor conning tower ever showed above surface, just a few feet of the periscopes could be seen cutting the rough water with a tiny “feather” or wake of spray following the thin periscope fingers as they sliced through the water.
At 2:46 P.M. the Paulding concluded her patrol in the open sea and, on a westerly course, headed in for a sweep past Provincetown Harbor and through Cape Cod Bay. Outside nothing of importance to her mission had been sighted. A few minutes later, Race Point Light was rounded and the destroyer started to skirt the fishhook tip of Cape Cod, heading southeast on a course which would take her well clear of the ranges off Wood End. A fishing vessel was swiftly overhauled, identified as the William Langtry of Boston, and passed without further notice. Wood End Light was drawing abeam; storm signals were flying there. The quartermaster swung his glass to read the flags, and at this time, 3:33 P.M., having followed the southeast course for over three miles, the Paulding passed a sea buoy off Wood End and abruptly changed course to port, heading 94° (practically east); for the first time pointing directly for the trial course which, to all eyes on the Paulding, seemed clear of shipping.
In the Coast Guard station ashore, Boatswain Gracie, in charge, climbed the tower, popped up through a trap door into the observation room.
“What’s doing, Frank?” he asked of his lookout.
“Not much, sir,” replied Simonds. “I’ve seen a submarine operating under the beach.”
Gracie took the telescope, focused it on the Paulding, and, noting her easterly course, became suddenly alarmed.
“Frank, I wonder where that submarine is now? Have you seen her?”
“No, sir; not lately.”
Hurriedly Gracie swung his telescope to the southeast on the can buoy marking the near end of the measured mile. There, centered in his glass, headed toward the destroyer, was the flash of the periscopes, a streak of spray flying in air! For a second only he watched, then lowered the telescope, looked again at the Paulding, and shouted:
“My God, Frank, there’s going to be a collision!”
Gracie dropped his telescope, raced down the tower to get his lifeboat underway.
On the Paulding, the buoy off Wood End having been rounded, the course was set east to clear on the port hand the next can buoy (the one marking the end of the course) about a mile ahead. The captain dropped back to the chart house in the rear of the bridge to study the chart. The junior officer of the deck, in the starboard wing of the bridge, picked up in his glass, several miles off on the starboard bow and headed for them, the Nantucket Lightship, evidently off her station, and studied her to make sure before entering the fact in the log.
On the port side of the pilot house, the quartermaster, searching with his glasses for storm signals in Provincetown Harbor itself, looking off to port, saw suddenly about one point on the port bow and not over 200 feet away, two periscopes. Simultaneously, Ensign Phanenmiller, officer of the deck, also picked them up and shouted:
“Hard astern! Full right rudder!”
As the Paulding during the next ten seconds strove desperately to reverse engines and swing to starboard, before the horrified eyes of her officers the two periscopes lifted from the water, half the conning tower of a submarine broke surface right under their port bow, and then came a terrific crash as the hurtling destroyer struck! The Paulding’s bow rose as she drove on. For an instant the tapered stern of a submarine lifted drunkenly above the surface and drifted down the port side, visible a moment abreast the destroyer’s smokestacks, then vanished. Except for bubbles and a little oil slick, nothing again showed on the surface as the quivering Paulding came to a stop, frantically lowered a lifeboat, dropped a buoy to mark the spot, and hastily took cross bearings of the lights ashore to determine her position.
The S-4, which had been planing upward to surface, with her periscopes already half housed on their way down and useless for observation, reeled from the blow as if hit by a giant sledge, rolled heavily to port, and then, with her battery room torn open, began to sink bow first. A torrent of water poured through to flood the battery compartment. In the torpedo room forward, toward which the water ran first, Lieutenant Fitch and his five men found their path to the conning tower amidships and what chance of escape it offered, blocked off by that Niagara cascading into the room between them and the sole escape lock in the boat. With quick death staring them in the face, they slammed the torpedo room door shut against the water already pouring through it, hastily jammed down the dogs, and sealed themselves up, six men altogether, in the torpedo room.
In the control room, crowded with men and officers, conditions were worse. The forward periscope, hastily housed when collision was inevitable, came down with its training handles still rigged out and jammed itself in its housing well, while the hoisting wires, still slacking off as the motor continued to spin round, spread themselves in snaky coils helterskelter over the deck to tangle the feet of men, still reeling from the shock of collision, trying automatically to get back to their stations.
“BLOW ALL BALLASTS!”
At the blowing manifolds, swift fingers traveled over the valves, frantically opening compressed air lines from high pressure air banks No. 1 and No. 2 to every main ballast tank in the boat—forward, amidships, aft—hurriedly to force out the water there, to lighten up, to float the boat to the surface before she went too deep. But the forward ballast tank of the S-4 was now torn wide open. Uselessly the precious air whistling through the blowing lines escaped to the sea without displacing any ballast, and, with fresh tons of water rushing in each moment, the S-4 only accelerated her downward plunge!
Water rising in the battery room! Someone leaped forward along the narrow passage in the control room to close the forward door. There was room only for one man to work there. But Fitch and his five torpedomen were forward. What of them? Where was the damage—in the battery room? In the torpedo room? Perhaps in both? In the control room nobody knew, nobody could know. For an instant perhaps the door was held open, but the missing men did not come aft. And then, in the face of the rising water, pouring through faster and faster as the boat sank and sea pressure increased, rising now to flood over the high sill, the steel door to the battery room was swung shut, a few dogs turned down to hold it. No more were necessary, for the water pressing that door against its seat would soon enough jam it tight.
Bow first, at a sickening angle, the S-4 went down. For the moment, the sea had been shut out; the men in the control room struggled to free themselves of the tangling coils of periscope wire and man all the controls. With diving rudders at “RISE,” air roaring through to blow ballasts, they had done everything possible in the emergency to start the boat up. Agonized eyes watched the depth gauge dials, but inexorably the needles went up the scales, continuously registering a greater and greater depth. 80 feet—90—100—
CRASH!
Again the boat reeled. Bow first she had struck bottom hard, plowed heavily along a few feet in the mud, then leveled off on an even keel.
The S-4 was on the bottom in 110 feet of water. To Lieutenant Commander Jones, to his men there in the control room, must have come an instant of hope. Things were not so bad. The sea was sealed out forward, most of the crew were safe aft, best of all they were in full possession of the control room with all its machinery, its controls, and the precious air still left in banks No. 3 and No. 4. By themselves they might raise at least the undamaged stern of the boat and escape that way. From even deeper water off the Delaware Capes, the crew of their sunken sister, the S-5, had done that very thing some six years before. So might they.
And then came disaster.
From overhead in the control room itself, a geyser of water burst suddenly forth, spraying directly on the live electric contacts of the switchboard to starboard! Wild eyes swept upward, seeking the source. Plain enough. A thin sheetmetal ventilation duct overhead, intended to carry the exhaust gases from the storage batteries forward to the engine suctions aft, had burst wide open, rupturing, of all places, only in front of that switchboard, and now was deluging it with salt water!
“CLOSE THAT FORWARD VENTILATION VALVE!”
In the confined forward passage, where that ventilation duct came into the compartment through the bulkhead just over the door, was a lever-operated quick-closing valve, intended when necessary to seal off that duct watertight at the bulkhead. The man at the forward door, who so far had turned down only three of the securing dogs on the door, left off clamping down dogs, reached overhead for the valve lever, hastily pushed it closed.
But to the dismay of all those abaft him in the control room, the deadly spray of water only diminished somewhat but did not stop! On the switchboard, circuits began to short, vivid flashes leaped like lightning between the contacts, burned the man at the board. Forward, in the restricted space before the valve, the solitary man who could get in there to work struggled desperately to seal it tight, while astern of him, amidst the tangles of periscope wire, his shipmates fought even more desperately to protect the switchboard from the water spraying on the contacts, to prevent further damage. Obtained in that mass of machinery from God knows where, a screen of canvas and cloth was hastily improvised and draped across the switchboard to shield it from the flood.
But through the ruptured duct the deadly stream of water under high pressure kept pouring in; the bulkhead valve would not swing home. Unknown to the men in the control room, beyond the bulkhead the ventilation duct in the battery room had collapsed under the sudden impact of the sea pressure and torn away from the valve body on the battery room side. The rising water in the battery room had floated up on its surface a green baize curtain draping the door of the captain’s stateroom just forward of the control room bulkhead. When the water reached the valve which the collapsing duct had just exposed, it poured aft through the opening, picked up the curtain in the rushing stream, and washed it into the valve body, effectually preventing the valve disks from seating.
Around that valve the major battle inside the S-4 was fought. Temporarily the switchboard was shielded, the short circuits stopped, but unless that valve was soon seated tight, the control room and all it meant to 34 desperate men was lost. In the narrow passage leading to the door only one man at a time could get to the valve. In the restricted space overhead, between partitions and piping, fumbling fingers and straining arms fought against despair to jam that valve lever home.
They failed. That harmless green baize drapery, clinging like a leech to the inside of that valve, was more deadly now to the crew of that submarine than depth bombs and TNT. Against those unseen folds fouling the valve seat, the men of the S-4 fought in vain as the sea poured through and steadily the water rose on the deck in the control room, flooding the pumps, lapping upward toward the switches, rising inexorably toward the level of the high sill on the after door, when it would cascade over into the engine room.
Beaten by that valve which would not close, the struggling officers and men were forced to abandon the control room with its escape lock, its compressed air, its controls, its chances of expelling fuel oil and enough ballast water from the undamaged after tanks at least, to float up the stern—to abandon everything that to a submarine sailor means anything, and flee helplessly before the flood into the engine room while yet there was a chance to flee.
The control room was abandoned; with its loss went all hope of doing anything for themselves. The last man squeezed through, the engine room door swung shut, the 16 heavy dogs on it were speedily twisted home. Soberly from its after side, 34 trapped men, helpless now to help themselves except to hold the sea out of their prison, regarded the door. That door swung closed against the after side of the bulkhead. The sea pressure on the other side would tend to spring the door and its rubber gasket away from its frame against which the dogs were clamping it. Would the dogs hold? Were they safe here at least from drowning?
Swiftly on the other side of the bulkhead the control room flooded, the pressure built up against that door. Then before the horrified eyes of the crew, as the full sea pressure came at last against the bulkhead, on one side the door gave a little, and under heavy pressure a flat sheet of water sprayed on through into their last refuge!
Once more the battle to hold out the sea commenced. Overwrought men sledged down the dogs over the tapered brass wedges on the door till the dogs brought up against their stops and would go no farther. But still some water gushed on through. Again the clang of the hammers rang out through the sea in a frenzied attempt, stops or no stops, to tighten the dogs still more, only to have five brass wedges shear off under the hammer blows, releasing completely all hold on those dogs! Before the dazed eyes of the men fighting to hold back the sea, the leak suddenly increased!
Hurriedly the engine room was ransacked for emergency securing gear. A bit of planking, two inches thick, once used somewhere as staging, was dragged up, and with other improvised material, jammed in against the door. The leak was at last reduced to an insignificant trickle.
For the first time then since the Paulding, only a few minutes before, had crashed into the S-4, the panting men aft were for the time safe from immediate death. But what faced them? Drenched, most of them, in icy sea water; packed now, 34 men in two small compartments with hardly space to stand comfortably between the engines; with no place except wet and oily steel plates to lie down; with no blankets, no bunks, no heavy clothing, no air except that fouled already from three hours submerged operation; with no means of getting rid of the carbon dioxide continuously exhaled from their own breathing and poisoning the air; with the steel shell forming their prison firmly gripped in the freezing water of the deep sea, soon chilling the engine room to 34° F., the trapped crew, powerless to do anything, began their weary wait for help from the world above. But long before the first sign of that help came, in the foul air inside the crowded stern, they had all lapsed into unconsciousness.
On the surface, from the Paulding, down by the head now and seemingly in danger of sinking herself, the radio began to crackle:
COMMANDANT NAVY YARD BOSTON.
RAMMED AND SANK UNKNOWN SUBMARINE OFF WOOD END LIGHT PROVINCETOWN.
PAULDING.
From Boston to the Submarine Base in New London, the Navy Yard at Portsmouth, and the Navy Yard at New York almost immediately went identical telegrams:
SUBMARINE REPORTED SUNK AT WOOD END NEAR PROVINCETOWN BY COAST GUARD DESTROYER. SEND ANY LIFTING APPARATUS. RUSH.
The collision occurred at 3:37 P.M. By a few minutes after 4 P.M., in New London, Portsmouth, and New York, action had started. In New London lay the Falcon, the only salvage ship the Navy had in the Atlantic, part of her crew ashore that Saturday afternoon on liberty. Hastily the word was broadcast around New London recalling the liberty parties. At 6:10 P.M., with her crew gathered from far and near around the town, the Falcon, carrying Rear Admiral Brumby, flag officer of the squadron to which the S-4 belonged, sailed for Provincetown, 120 miles away. From Portsmouth, at 7:30 sailed the Bushnell, mother ship of the S-4 and her sisters; from Boston, several destroyers and tugs; a few hours later, from New York, six pontoons in tow of other tugs—the same pontoons used two years before to lift the S-51; while, from Norfolk, sailed the U.S.S. Wright, carrying on her deck four more pontoons, the remainder of the single lot of ten that the Navy owned.
Meanwhile, during the night, over the road by automobile from Newport to Provincetown went the most important thing of all—all the divers in the vicinity-three men, Eadie, Carr, and Michels, veterans of the S-51 salvage, with eight others of less experience.
And so, while that brief December day drew to its close and the S-4, silent now, lay at the bottom of the sea, from Maine to Virginia everything that the Navy had or could hire in the way of men and materials for salvage and for rescue was starting for Province-town.
Boatswain Gracie of the Coast Guard, on the scene with his surfboat promptly after the collision, dropped a grapnel and commenced to sweep the bottom over the spot indicated by the bubbles of air and traces of oil escaping from the S-4. For four hours back and forth over that spot, first in the twilight, then in the darkness, Gracie worked with his grappling hook and, in spite of a bad sea, rode the waves with his drag astern till finally, at 8 P.M., he made a hard strike and clung to it in his boat as the hours dragged on and craft of various types began to arrive. But at 3 A.M., still awaiting the arrival of the Falcon and the divers, the grapnel gave way and his boat went adrift. Undismayed, Gracie boarded the Bushnell (which had shortly before appeared from Portsmouth), borrowed better grappling equipment and grimly went back with the surfboat to his task, for there was not a small boat the Navy had in any of the ships in the flotilla gathering now around Provincetown that could live and work in that sea.
In freezing spray and in the darkness Gracie lowered his new grapnel and, under the searchlights of two Navy minesweepers, recommenced dragging. Dawn came, he was still at it. At 7 A.M. on Sunday morning, the Falcon steamed up from the Cape Cod Canal, took aboard the divers already in Provincetown, and stood by outside prepared to dive. But until a line was hooked into the S-4 to guide the divers down to her, putting men over the side was out of the question. And while the fleet of nearly a dozen ships anchored near by, men and officers eager to go into action, had to stand by chafing idly, Boatswain Gracie, who since eight the previous evening and all through the long December night had clung to the wreck, swept now endlessly back and forth across it in his surfboat, trying to hook it again.
Finally at 11 A.M. his grapnel caught. Carefully, so as not to lose that precious grip, he buoyed off his line with an empty gasoline drum, while the Falcon, with something to work to at last, maneuvered to windward, dropped anchor, then veered cable to bring herself over the spot and took aboard the buoyed-off line. For proper work the Falcon required from four to six heavy mooring buoys laid out in a circle to hold her in position against wind and sea, but there was no time to lay out the buoys or to plant the anchors. Instead, two minesweepers, the Lark and the Mallard, anchored one off each quarter of the Falcon, and to each of them the Falcon ran a hawser to hold herself over the wreck as best she might.
At 1:38 P.M., twenty-two hours after the collision, Tom Eadie, chief gunner’s mate, was hoisted over the Falcon’s side as she yawed and pitched to the head seas, dropped into the water, and slid swiftly down the grappling line. Within a minute his lead-soled shoes landed with a clang high on the chariot bridge of the S-4 between the two periscopes where the grappling hook had caught. The water was murky, the light dim, the cross current bad. As Eadie clambered down, the quiet of the deep sea broken now by the banging of his weights against the steel hull, he thought he caught coming through the water from forward a signal. As he landed on the deck, he was sure of it. Over the slewed gun, across the torn deck, Eadie went forward, following the sounds. They came from the torpedo room. At the torpedo room hatch he stooped and banged the cover. Immediately from within, strong and distinct, came six raps, repeated each time Eadie tapped. Six men alive in the torpedo room! Promptly from the bottom of the sea, the diver reported this over his telephone.
With a final rap for encouragement, Eadie went forward to check conditions at the bow, then aft over the wrecked deck to the conning tower. He rapped there. No answer. Aft again along the undamaged deck as far as the steel hatch over the engine room where he rapped again. But there was no response from anyone astern.
What to do?
On the Falcon’s deck, listening to the diver’s reports, were gathered Rear Admiral Brumby, in whose hands lay the final decision; Captain King, lately in command of the Submarine Base at New London and two years before senior officer in command of the salvage operations on the S-51; Commander Strother, a submarine officer of long experience, to whose division the S-4 belonged; Commander Saunders, long engaged in submarine design and construction; and Lieutenant Hartley, captain of the Falcon, an expert in diving and salvage work. By Brumby the decision had to be made, guided, as his judgment dictated, by the advice of his subordinates.
Brumby knew from the Paulding, confirmed now by Eadie’s report, that the damage was in way of the battery room; he knew that six men were alive forward in the torpedo room; and he knew that from aft, where most of the rest of the crew must have been, there was no answer to signals.
Below, built into the S-4, were two entirely separate emergency air lines with connections outside her conning tower, intended only for use in disaster—a salvage air line leading only to all the ballast tanks; and a compartment air line opening only into the crew compartments on the boat. To which of these two emergency connections should the next diver hook the first air line—to the crew compartments, or to the ballast tanks?
Carefully the situation was canvassed. If only one compartment was flooded, blowing ballasts with external air ought to float up the boat; if two or more compartments were flooded, that was hopeless. Still, if the men forward with the boat going down by the bow and the water therefore tending to rush into the torpedo room first, had succeeded in closing the forward door of the damaged battery room, there was no apparent reason why the rest of the crew had not been able to do the same with the after battery room door, thus confining the water to one compartment.