On the Bottom: The Raising of the Submarine S-51

by Edward Ellsberg

  Boatswain Burnett, in charge there, explained:

  “We can’t get any more on these wires. I’ve given ’em all I dare on the winches, but they won’t render. They just stopped coming up.”

  Others gathered round. Niedermair checked the length of wire that had come in; we knew the length of chain hanging from the pontoon. Everything fitted together. The first link in each chain had reached the box keel and hung up there, that was why the wires dragging the chains through refused to haul up further.

  We expected a little difficulty in hauling the chains through, which was one reason we were using plow steel wire cables to pull them with,—each wire was good for a strain of thirty tons and it would not chafe through while hauling over the keel or bilge keel.

  We lowered the pontoon ten feet further to make sure the chains were slack going through the tunnel, then tried again to heave up on the wires. No use,—they would not come.

  We thought the matter over. We were pulling vertically upward, which would tend to jam the chain links hard against the projecting keel. Perhaps if we pulled out horizontally, the links would drop clear of the keel and run through. We slacked our wire hauling lines a little, and took them off our winches. We bent an eight-inch manila hawser to the end of one wire, a six-inch hawser to the end of the other one. The Iuka, which had a very powerful towing winch on her stern, much stronger than our winches, was ordered to anchor one hundred fathoms off our starboard beam. We sent the two heavy manila hawsers to her, told her to heave in on them. With the eight-inch line over one niggerhead and the six-inch line over the other, both leading up nearly horizontally from under the submarine, the Iuka heaved round but without result. The afternoon wore on, darkness came with the pontoon still hanging from our side, halfway to the bottom. I ordered the Iuka to go ahead on her main engine and see if she could drag the chains through that way. The tug, specially designed to tow large battleships, gradually worked up to full speed, when with her throttle wide open, her propeller was churning up a wake which rushed past us, one hundred fathoms away, as a strong current. But she got no slack through on the hawsers. The chains were firmly anchored against the keel of the submarine. The Iuka stopped.

  It was getting late. We could not afford to hold the pontoon much longer. As a last-ditch measure, I ordered the Iuka to slack off the six-inch line, and put her full towing strain on the eight-inch hawser alone, to see whether she might not pull the chains through one at a time.

  We trained our searchlight on the Iuka’s stem. The six-inch hawser slacked, sagged away. The eight-inch line tautened, stood out from her stern straight into the sea as the throttle was opened and the engine began to race at top speed. The Iuka moved ahead a little; evidently the hawser had stretched a bit under the pull; the Iuka came to a standstill, her propeller churning the sea violently. Suddenly the taut hawser leaped free out of the water, a broken end shot in on the Iuka’s stern. The eight-inch hawser had parted!

  With the strain gone, the Iuka jumped ahead as if shot from a gun, brought up on the slack six-inch hawser, parted that as if it were a thread, and ran several hundred yards before the engine could be stopped and the ship brought to rest.

  It was ten P.M. There was nothing further we could do. Michels went down on the pontoon with a light to make sure we did not land the pontoon on the submarine. Under his direction, we jockeyed the Falcon as best we could to place the pontoon where we wanted it, but we were badly handicapped by no longer having any hauling lines under the submarine to pull the cylinder into position. In the darkness, we made a fair job of it. The pontoon rested on the bottom, touching the side of the submarine at its forward end, and slanting away from it at an angle of about thirty degrees.

  As soon as the pontoon rested on the bottom and the lines were slacked, Michels cast off the lowering hawsers, disconnected the airhoses, and came up.

  The Falcon unmoored and steamed clear for the night. For two weeks we struggled with that pontoon, trying to get the chains dragged through the tunnel. Divers crawled down the tunnel, alongside the chains, to fit large pine wedges between the keel and the chains in an attempt to guide the chains by the point where the first links were catching. It did not work. The divers tried with crowbars to work the first links through, but there was not room enough in the tunnel to swing the bars. We decided to pull the chains out of the tunnel, fit a tapering steel cone over the first link to fill the shoulder between the inch-thick wire and the twelve-inch-wide link. To do this, it was necessary to hook into the chains as they ran from under the pontoon across the intervening fifteen feet to the tunnel mouth. Even this comparatively simple job was difficult. The chain lay in a tangled heap between pontoon and submarine. It was difficult to tell which part led to the pontoon, which went to the tunnel.

  Sanders dived to secure a line for hauling back the chains. He slipped over the side of the submarine in way of the torpedo davit, which landed him in the angle between the pontoon and the submarine. The water was murky. He took a step, then lost all sense of direction, could see nothing at all, and stumbled about for ten minutes without knowing where he was, till he accidentally bumped into the submarine. He had informed me he was lost, but I could not then help him other than to advise him to walk in a straight line, and he was bound to hit something. When he reported hitting the submarine, I took him by the hand, so to speak, over the telephone.

  “Hello, Sanders! Put your right hand against the submarine! Got that?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Sure it’s your right hand?” (Divers are liable to get muddled and not think clearly, when under heavy pressure.)

  “It sure is, commander!”

  “All right. You’re on the port side of the sub, your right hand is touching her, so you’re facing forward. Walk along, keep your right hand against the sub, and you’ll bump into the pontoon. Got that?”

  Sanders walked as directed some twenty feet till he came to the apex of the triangle where the pontoon rested against the submarine’s port side. He bumped into the pontoon, reported hitting it.

  “All right, Sanders, you’re doing fine! Now turn around, keep your right hand against the pontoon, and walk along till you fall over a pile of anchor chain!”

  Sanders turned, started along the side of the pontoon, carefully keeping his hand against it in order not to get lost again. Opposite the middle of the pontoon, he stumbled across a length of chain, and a few feet to the left of it was a pile of chain at least five feet high.

  He had never at any time been more than fifteen feet away from at least one of the three objects, the submarine, the pontoon, or the chain, yet it took half his dive, with the sun shining brightly on the surface, to locate what he was looking for. That instance was not unusual in working on the submarine.

  Sanders passed a strap around one of the chains. We hauled back on the strap till the first link of the chain came out of the tunnel, then pulled the other chain out similarly. When Sanders came up, the weather was too bad for further diving.

  A few days later, when we could work again, Bailey and Anderson fitted a tapered cone over one end link, moused the tip of the cone to the wire to prevent it slipping off. They found the eye of the other wire, where it was shackled to the chain, badly chafed and in danger of letting go under another heavy pull. We would have to pull through a replacement wire.

  Wickwire tried to unshackle the wire to allow it to be pulled up, but he could not get a solid enough swing with his sledge on the tapered locking pin in the special shackle to drive it free. To help him, we lifted up the end of the chain, draped it across the submarine’s deck, where he tried again without any luck.

  I went down with the torch, and another shackle, to solve the difficulty. Chief Torpedoman Sanders went down to help me, carrying a four-inch manila line.

  I found myself for the first time on the S-51’s forecastle near the torpedo davit, with the end of the anchor cable hanging about three links over the starboard side (the high side).

  The fir
st part of the job was easy. I turned on the gases, lighted the torch, and burned through the eye of the old wire in a few seconds. Then up went the torch.

  Sanders bent his manila line to the remains of the eye on the wire. The Falcon’s deck force, at our direction, pulled up on the line, hauling out the old wire, and at the same time reeving around a new wire secured to its other end. When the eye of the new wire came through to us, we dragged it over to where the chain lay and proceeded to shackle the eye to the end link of the chain.

  I hung over the side of the S-51, with a short manila line from my belt to the rail overhead to hold me in position. Sanders took the new shackle apart, put half of it on the deck, and leaned down to give me the other half. It weighed perhaps fifty pounds. With that in one hand, I struggled with the other to lift some of the ninety-pound chain links a little free of the side so I could engage the end link in one horn of the shackle. With Sanders hanging far over the edge of the deck to assist, we finally managed it, and I then slipped the wire eye over the other horn of the shackle. Sanders carefully pulled himself back on deck, reached for the closing half of the shackle. It was gone. Probably it had slipped down the sharp incline of the deck to port and was buried somewhere in the mud. At any rate, we could not afford to search for it. Sanders went back to the descending line, telephoned to have another shackle sent down, while I dangled over the starboard side and surveyed as much of the boat as my limited vision through the water would allow. No damage in that vicinity but there were innumerable bits of manila lines hanging down all over her. Plenty of cordage had gone down on various jobs; most of it could be seen tangled in a web over the boat.

  Sanders moved slowly through the sea towards me with a new shackle in one hand, clinging to the rail with the other hand as he shuffled along. I took the shackle, fitted in place the missing parts, pushed in the locking pin, drove it home with a hammer, peened down a lead plug over the pin to hold it firmly. I was panting hard when Sanders hauled me back on deck. Together we took our decompression on our way up. But Chief Torpedoman Sanders made no more dives after that. He had had tropical fever some time before he joined us; the strain of heaving on the anchor chain put him on the sick list for the rest of the job.

  Wilson and Eiben fitted a tapered cone over the first link on this chain, guided the lines while we lowered the chain once more to the mouth of the tunnel.

  We dragged one chain into the tunnel with the wire, but in spite of our fairing piece, it still hung on the keel. We tried hauling it with our capstan, it would not come. We bent a ten-inch manila hawser to the wire and once more put the Iuka off on our starboard beam to try to pull the chain through. We were sure the ten-inch hawser would not break.

  The Iuka heaved in on her towing winch, but the chain would not come through. Then the Iuka went ahead on her engine full speed, but that also failed to start the chain. Still the hawser held, so as a last resort, I asked the Iuka to back down, let the hawser hang in a bight, and then suddenly steam ahead on it full speed, hoping that the sudden jerk might make the chain jump free of the keel.

  The Iuka drifted down toward us till the line was slack, then jumped ahead with her engine wide open. She brought up on the hawser with a sharp jerk. The chain did not start, but something else did. The Iuka’s towing winch, to which the hawser was secured, was torn out of the quarterdeck and went flying over her stern into the sea.

  Evidently we were beaten. The chains were never going to go through that way. We sent Eadie down, connected a pair of airhoses to the pontoon, and blew it, chains and all, up to the surface.

  Then we dragged the pontoon alongside our rail, and for the second time, but in a calm sea on this occasion, we lifted the chains out of the hawsepipes, landed them on our deck, released the wires, and let the Sagamore tow the pontoon away.

  I had a new method for handling the chains. We would send them down one at a time, without the pontoon. Each chain, on deck where we could work, had a new tapered steel cone carefully fitted to fair off between wire and link, and the first few links were partly wound with marline to fill the shoulders.

  When this was done, we lowered the first chain over the Falcon’s rail, hauling up on a wire on the other side. A diver entered the tunnel with the chain; with no pontoon to interfere, and a line on each end of the chain so we could haul it either way, the diver easily worked the first link by the keel, and the rest of the chain, with the diver out of the tunnel, we then dragged through in short order till half the chain hung evenly on each side of the submarine. The second chain quickly followed in the same way, and then with wires leading to the surface as guides on both sides of the S-51, we were ready again for another attempt to lower a pontoon alongside the tunnel.

  For the third time the Sagamore brought back the pontoon we had labored with for weeks. We rigged the lines and flooded it down. In about an hour it was awash; the stages swung over the side with Badders and Weaver manning the wrenches. The pontoon sank a few feet below the surface. We held it there and closed the flood valves.

  Then with Hartley aft and me forward, once more, fathom by fathom, we slacked out our twelve-inch lines till the cylinder was down one hundred feet. Kelley and McLagan ready and dressed, slid down the hoses.

  “On the pontoon!” A few minutes passed while Kelley peered at the submarine below.

  “All clear, lower away slowly!”

  We slacked away. With the divers riding it, the pontoon went down about twenty feet more. The anchor chains showed in the hawsepipes as we lowered, till seven links suspended from the guide wires, projected above the pontoon.

  “On deck! Hold her!” The lines on the bitts tautened, the pontoon swung from our side. Both chains and pontoon moved up and down together, as the Falcon rolled.

  We had previously painted with a bright yellow color the links through which the toggle bars were to go. With our new method of handling chains and pontoons separately, there was no longer any danger of the chains kinking up, so before we lowered the chains, we had burned out the stud in the yellow link.

  Kelley unscrewed his diving knife, cut the lashings holding a toggle bar to the top of the pontoon. Cautiously he lifted the heavy bar, balancing himself on the swaying pontoon as he approached the chain in the forward hawsepipe. The open yellow link was waist high. He shot his one hundred and forty pound bar through it; McLagan on the other side pushed home the locking pin. The second toggle bar went into the other chain in the same way.

  “On deck! Both toggles secured. Lower away!”

  Once more we slacked. The pontoon went the last fifteen feet; and the wood-sheathed cylinder came to rest on the bottom alongside the sunken wreck. The lowering lines went slack upon our bitts.

  Kelley unshackled the pelican hooks, and one at a time the capstan heaved up the waterlogged hawsers. Then the divers came up.

  The Iuka was standing by with another pontoon. It was already 8 P.M. but we had no desire to stop. We took the mate pontoon alongside, rigged it, and started it down at 10 P.M. It vanished in the darkness, and we lowered it slowly one hundred feet. There we held it while Carr and Grube slid down the hoses to it. It was clear of the boat; we lowered it till the chains showed through the proper amount and once again held it from our bitts.

  Carr cut the lashings on one of the toggles, lifted the heavy steel bar, aimed it at the yellow link. Both pontoon and chain, suspended from the Falcon’s side, moved lazily up and down together. Carr shot the toggle halfway through the link, Grube rammed through the locking pin to hold it. A second toggle quickly followed in the other chain.

  “On deck! Both toggles in!” sang out Carr.

  Again we lowered till the pontoon touched bottom. Grube cast off the lowering lines. I slid the torch down to Carr. Then one at a time we slacked off on the guide wires till the ends of the chains rested on top of the pontoon. Carr lighted the torch, rapidly burned the wires off the chains, climbed across to the mate pontoon and cut the wires there. Meanwhile Grube closed the air valves and discon
nected the hoses. The divers reached the surface, just at midnight. With our new method, in one day they did what two weeks of heartbreaking labor with the chains in the tunnel had previously failed to accomplish.

  XXXI

  THE LAST TUNNEL

  There was still one more tunnel required to take the chains for the fourth and last pair of pontoons, abreast the conning tower.

  For some weeks, I had looked forward to this task with dread. We had had a terrible time in the first tunnel. It seemed doubtful that the divers could last through another such ordeal, especially as the new tunnel, being amidships and therefore under the widest part of the submarine, would be even longer than the first one.

  It was nearing the end of May. On the surface the weather was growing milder, storms became less frequent. But on the bottom the water still retained its intense chill and conditions for the divers were as bad as ever. Our first-string divers displayed no enthusiasm about starting the second tunnel.

  Meanwhile a machinist’s mate on the Falcon, Waldren, had been thinking over our tunneling troubles. He visualized the divers sent flying over the ocean bottom by the “kick” from the nozzle and he remembered that he had once seen a different type of nozzle which had no kickback. Waldren said nothing, but getting a heavy brass bar, he busied himself for some weeks on the lathe in the engine room, machining out a nozzle which, when completed, looked like nothing anyone in the salvage squadron had ever seen. In addition to a large opening which discharged water ahead, it had a number of smaller ports which discharged water at an angle astern; the whole nozzle was so proportioned that the kick ahead and the kick astern practically balanced each other. I learned months afterwards that this nozzle had already been patented years before for other uses, but so far as we were concerned off Block Island, it was a brand-new idea.

  Waldren brought out his handiwork just before we were about to start the new tunnel. It was a full-sized nozzle, so we used a two-and-one-half-inch fire hose again for the first time since the day Bailey had started the other tunnel.