The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  Robertson was sure that he felt the sub respond slightly, but when they looked at her depth and trim indicators, there was no change. They were about to blast more air into the auxiliary tanks toward the bow. Naquin, however, halted the effort. He didn’t want to risk increasing the upward angle of the Squalus, which would make it that much more difficult for the diving bell to land on the escape hatch located over the forward torpedo room.

  If all went well, he was counting on the bell to get them safely out. Although there were more than enough Momsen lungs for the crew, he had decided to use them as a last resort. He was afraid that at this depth in the near-freezing North Atlantic, some of the men might lose their grip on the ascending line and suffer an agonizing attack of the bends. Even worse, right then, there were no ships to pick them up once they reached the surface.

  So far, there hadn’t been one sound of a propeller announcing the approach of a ship answering his distress rockets. He had to face up to the fact that the rockets had gone unseen. Any chance of a quick rescue was no longer in the offing. That was the worst part. They were awesomely deep, each passing minute pinned to the bottom heightening their peril, and nobody knew they were there.

  At best, it would be another forty minutes before anyone at the Portsmouth Navy Yard would have reason to suspect trouble. Naquin could only hope that whoever was on communications duty at the yard this morning was the worrisome sort. As the men in the control room huddled soberly around him, Naquin resigned himself to the inevitable. They were just going to have to tough it out.

  Addressing them, he said, “You all know our situation. The boat cannot surface by herself. We have released the forward marker buoy and we will continue to send up smoke rockets at regular intervals. It is only a matter of time before help comes. All hands are to be commended on their conduct. I expect no change.”

  Harold Preble, who had been so amazed at the hitchless way that the Squalus was shaking down, tried to buck up everyone’s spirits. He recalled how swiftly Admiral Cole had reacted when the Pollack failed to report surfacing after a routine dive a few months earlier. “It won’t be long before we’re out of here,” he said.

  There were nine beds in the quarters in the forward battery reserved for the sub’s officers and chiefs and ten collapsible crew bunks in the forward torpedo room. Both appeared to be relatively free of the water and oil that had spewed all over the crowded control room. Naquin planned on moving the worst off of his men, especially those who had escaped from the after battery, into the two compartments. He was about to give the order to open the watertight doors separating them when Yeoman Kuney on the battle phone said, “Captain, it’s Chief Gainor. He says it’s urgent.”

  In staving off an explosion that would have split the Squalus wide open when the forward batteries began to short out, Gainor had anticipated a new danger as deadly as drowning—and infinitely more sinister. If any salt water seeped into the dry battery cells, the resulting chemical combination would gradually fill the whole compartment with lethal chlorine gas. And now checking the battery well, Gainor saw that the water was there, not much, but enough.

  Naquin immediately abandoned any thought of using the forward battery as a refuge. He instructed Gainor to have the four men with him pick up blankets, strip the pantry of all the tinned goods they could find and move into the forward torpedo room. Right after that, he ordered the door on the control room side of the forward battery briefly opened to bring back blankets and mattresses, along with a ten-gallon container of fresh water. He also had Momsen lungs passed back from the forward torpedo room. In a pinch, they could serve as gas masks.

  That left twenty-three men still jammed together in the control room. To reduce the crush, he sent five additional men forward, among them Harold Preble. If and when rescue came, it would be through the escape hatch in the forward torpedo room. Although Preble probably knew more about submarines than anyone on board, he was technically a civilian, and Navy tradition ordained that he be the first to leave the stricken boat.

  Food for the moment was of no concern. Besides what had been plucked from the pantry, there was an emergency supply locker in the control room. Air, however, was another matter. It was their most precious—and limited—commodity. To use as little as possible, Naquin forbade any talk unless absolutely necessary and all movement except in the performance of an assigned task. If anyone had to relieve himself, a bucket would be passed around. In the control room, the men spread slickers on the sodden deck and arranged themselves side by side under blankets. Some of them had already started to shiver in the cold.

  Naquin then left on his first inspection tour. He picked his way through the outstretched figures at his feet, and after the door to the forward battery had been swung open, he stepped into the deserted compartment. Guided by his flashlight, he walked forward, stooped to lift the hatch in the passageway and peered down long enough to see the black water lapping corrosively at the battery cells. Next he went into his own tiny stateroom, its unique privacy on the Squalus a privileged symbol of his new command. Standing there, Oliver Naquin had never felt more alone.

  He reached impulsively into a drawer, took out a small framed photograph of his wife and their two children—a girl, nine, and a boy, four—and shoved it into his jacket pocket. As he was about to leave, he noticed that his desk chair had tumbled over. He carefully put it back in place before heading into the forward torpedo room.

  It was colder there than in the control room—where the Squalus was protected by a double hull—but there was practically no water. The men looked expectantly at him. There was pathetically little he could say. “We should be getting help soon,” he told them. “You must stay quiet. Don’t talk. Try to sleep if you can.”

  He took pains to extol Gainor for his courage. Then he took Lieutenant Nichols aside. “John, buzz me as soon as anyone makes contact,” he said. “Tell them I think the high induction is open. Also that the after battery and both engine rooms are flooded. Say we’re not certain about the after torpedo room. Tell them my recommendation is if the induction is open, divers should close it and attach air hoses to blow out the aft compartments. We can handle what’s left in the ballast tanks.” As Naquin turned to leave, he added, “One more thing, John. Keep up the good work.”

  Nichols, only three years out of submarine school, was deeply touched. “Thank you, sir,” he replied. As he watched Naquin depart, he was suddenly struck by the immense burden his commanding officer was carrying. It was something nobody else on board could truly share. Even though Nichols was trapped at a depth from which no submariner had ever escaped before, he still found himself able to give thanks that he was not in Naquin’s shoes.

  When Naquin returned to the control room, the Squalus was in her second hour on the bottom. He ordered two of the three hand lanterns extinguished to husband the limited supply of available light. Then he purposefully sat down next to the hunched-over form of Lloyd Maness. Maness was biting so hard on clenched knuckles that Naquin could see the blood. And the silent tears sliding down his face.

  “I want you to listen to me,” Naquin told the shaken electrician’s mate. “I owe my life to you. So does everyone in here. You did what you had to do. Don’t ever forget it. You acted beyond the call of duty. You gave everyone who could get out a chance to get out. I don’t know where you got the strength to close the door when you finally had no choice. But you did. You hear me?”

  Maness nodded, without answering.

  SHORTLY AFTER TEN A.M., Naquin had a third rocket fired. He knew that this was pushing things—that Portsmouth could hardly be expected to react that quickly in the absence of a report that the Squalus had surfaced on schedule. But the thought that some sort of ship might be in the neighborhood was irresistible—possibly a longliner passing by on the way back from the Grand Banks to her home fishing port at Gloucester, Massachusetts, about thirty miles south of Portsmouth.

  At 1024, a fourth rocket went up. Quartermaster Murphy, keepin
g the log, marked down the time.

  In the forward torpedo room, they could hear it swirling up. Lieutenant Nichols had just finished tutoring Preble on the use of the Momsen lung. “Above all else,” Nichols warned him, “hang on to the ascending line.”

  Charlie Yuhas, one of the men who had been moved forward from the control room, shivered in the cold. Yuhas could actually see a sheen of ice starting to form from the condensation on the bulkhead a few inches from his face. He shivered even more when he thought about Gene Hoffman back in the engine rooms. Overcome with an unutterable sadness, he knew that he would never have that dinner date with the Hoffmans to meet the girl Hoffman’s wife had picked out for him.

  Huddled miserably in a nearby bunk, Will Isaacs, still soaked and oil-smeared, still reliving his narrow escape from the after battery, remembered that when he relieved the breakfast cook, Bobby Thompson, in the galley, Thompson told him he was going to nap through the dive. Isaacs himself had often done the same thing and he was haunted by the thought of Thompson waking up just in time to realize what was happening. The idea of dying like that horrified Isaacs and he tried to pray for the salvation of Thompson and the others. But his teeth were chattering so from the wet and the cold that he could not get the words out. The best he could manage was a mumbled, “Oh, God, may their souls rest in peace.”

  Lenny de Medeiros was standing watch on the marker-buoy telephone line. Once again, after the fourth rocket was launched, he instinctively clapped the headset tighter around his ears. All he heard was the steady slap of the waves against the buoy. At first, he and McLees feared that Maness had been lost. But Isaacs, when he was moved forward, told them how Maness had saved him from the torrent of ocean water. De Medeiros had been born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Like most submariners, he’d never completely discounted the possibility of ending up like this. He always figured, though, that if it happened, it would be in some remote corner of the world and not practically over the horizon from the beaches where he swam as a boy.

  In the control room, Chief Campbell pondered the vagaries of fate. During last night’s anchorage, he had scribbled the delights of being on board the Squalus to another chief still serving on one of the Navy’s vintage S boats. Campbell rubbed it in with a P.S. “Better put in for a transfer,” he wrote, “before they retire you, too.” After he had addressed it, he stuck the envelope in a hip pocket of his dungarees. It was still there. For sure, Campbell told himself, that was one letter that never would be mailed whether he got out of this or not.

  Seated alongside Campbell, seaman Donny Persico had his own irony to contend with. Persico’s mother had taken out a life insurance policy on him. A clause in the policy said that it would be “null and void” if Persico died in a submarine accident.

  Lloyd Maness had appreciated Naquin’s pep talk. But he knew that he’d had no choice but to do his duty. It had been drilled into him repeatedly, and his response to the sudden flooding of the sub was automatic. He had no doubt that every man in the crew would have responded as he had. The trouble was that nobody ever told him how he was supposed to feel afterward. Even though he had held the door open long enough for six men to scramble to safety, he could only think about those who had not made it. In his private torment, the same question kept coming back to him. How many of them had been flailing forward in the darkness, frantically calling to him to hold the door open just a few more seconds, their voices lost in the roar of the water?

  He remembered last seeing John Batick ducking through the hatch to the after battery well when the order came to rig for diving. And there was Sherman Shirley. He dreaded the prospect of ever having to explain what happened to Shirley’s fiancée. Her name was Ruth DeSautels, a New Hampshire girl. He fantasized that Shirley was safe in the stern of the sub. There was, too, the awful realization that on the next test dive of the Squalus, he would have been aft tending to her battery-driven motors.

  Like Maness, fully a third of the men forward would have been ticketed for duty in the after compartments. Each in his own way considered the circumstances of his deliverance. It never occurred to any of them that those who had died swiftly in the first rush of the sea might be the lucky ones. Just being alive was what mattered.

  Machinist’s Mate Second Class Carol Pierce from Kansas City, who loved to play craps, was absolutely certain of his eventual rescue. If another machinist’s mate hadn’t been hospitalized with a concussion suffered during Saturday’s softball game, Pierce would have been in the flooded engine rooms right now. But in the juggling of assignments that followed, Pierce wound up instead manning the air-pressure levers in the control room. With that sort of luck going for him, he figured he was rolling a hot pair of dice.

  Naquin, meanwhile, focused on a more immediate concern. After the initial rocket firings failed to produce any results, he made up his mind to hold off launching more of them for a while. It was well past eleven A.M. and there was still no sign of a search operation that he had expected to materialize above him. He knew there was one variable that could gum up everything at this point—the weather. Although it was late in the season for one of those three-day blows out of the northeast that periodically lashed the New England coast, he remembered the clouds racing in and the wind starting to kick up as he was leaving the bridge. With an effort, he thrust these thoughts aside. Whatever the conditions were on the surface, there was nothing he could do about them.

  He could at least take comfort on one count. While the continental shelf in these waters averaged around 250 feet, there were deeper rifts and holes in it. One of them, named Jeffrey’s Ledge, had a sudden drop-off to over 600 feet. The designed operating depth of the Squalus was 250 feet. Her theoretical crush depth was 550 feet. Anything in that neighborhood would court terminal implosion of her hull.

  In the control room, Naquin overheard two crewmen discussing the fate of their shipmates aft. He couldn’t make out who the participants were, nor did he want to single them out. What he had to say was for everyone. He got up quickly and snapped, “Belay that talk. There’ll be no more of it. What’s done is done. It doesn’t help the men back there and it doesn’t help us.”

  Then, at the suggestion of William Thomas Doyle, a new tack was taken to aid any search ships attempting to zero in on them. The executive officer handled it himself. He sloshed through the water at the after end of the control room carrying a gallon can of oil and dumped it into one of the toilets. Once he flushed out the oil, the hope was that it would rise in a billowing stain around the marker buoy.

  Naquin gave it twenty minutes before ordering Cravens to send up a fifth rocket. As it left the ejector, the gunner’s mate whispered, “Go, baby, go!”

  Without a word being exchanged, everybody grew tense with anticipation. This was the one. But nothing happened. As the trapped crew slowly settled back, they continued to remain remarkably disciplined despite the catastrophe. Now, however, a new note of resignation permeated the control room. To divert his men as much as anything, Naquin ordered both occupied compartments to chow down. Canned beans were ignored in favor of tins of peaches and pineapple. The fruit, especially the pineapple, made them feel warmer.

  At twenty minutes to one that afternoon, Cravens fired a sixth rocket. Exactly four hours had elapsed since the Squalus began her plunge beneath the surface.

  Naquin was totally mystified. It would seem that Portsmouth had more than sufficient time to swing into action. Obviously, something had gone grievously awry. But what?

  AT PORTSMOUTH, ADMIRAL Cole and his staff were just as baffled.

  Shortly past noon, the Sculpin reported her arrival at the supposed diving point for the Squalus. But misguided by the error in the dive message, she could find no trace of the missing sub, no telltale wreckage bobbing on the surface, no oil slick, nothing.

  A frustrated Cole replied: “Continue searching.” Nobody on his perplexed staff had a ready explanation for what the problem might be.

  In the North Atlan
tic, the white-capped swells had a cold metallic cast, like pewter. Overhead, fat-bellied gray clouds completely covered the sky. As the Sculpin churned through the ocean seeking some sign of her lost sister boat, a half-dozen lookouts scanned the surface. Below deck, her undersea sound gear vainly pinged the call letters of the Squalus.

  According to her last message, as recorded at Portsmouth, the Squalus confirmed her dive position at a longitude of seventy degrees, thirty-one minutes west. But, as it turned out, the true longitude was seventy degrees, thirty-six minutes west. This meant that the Squalus had gone down five miles west of where the Sculpin began her search. Even worse, as Warren Wilkin, the Sculpin’s skipper, ordered a southeast heading to trail the Squaluss undersea course, she moved ever farther away from the actual position of the sunken submarine.

  The Sculpin might have hunted endlessly had it not been for a young ensign on her windblown bridge named Ned Denby. Pausing for an instant to wipe the spray out of his eyes, Denby happened to glance the wrong way at precisely the right moment. Every muscle in his body stiffened. He thought he saw what looked like a smudge astern low on the horizon. He blinked once and took another look. The smudge was still there, and it seemed to Denby that it could have been made by a distress rocket.

  He called out the news at once. Wilkin trained his binoculars in the direction Denby was pointing. Wilkin wasn’t sure. He thought he saw it. Then it was gone. Maybe it had simply been a dark spot in the clouds.

  Nevertheless, he informed Portsmouth of a possible sighting. Not a man on the bridge spoke as Wilkin ordered the Sculpin to come about and begin backtracking at emergency speed.

  Fifteen minutes after Ensign Denby had made his fateful discovery, the men in the Squalus first heard the beat of the Sculpin’s propellers drawing near. What Denby had spied was the sixth rocket fired after the crew had finished its initial meal on the bottom. There was a muted cheer, but the mood was rather one of stunned relief. Too many times their hopes had risen with the rockets launched since disaster had struck. Now nobody was sure that his ears weren’t playing a macabre trick. But the sound of the propellers grew unmistakably louder. Lieutenant Naquin directed Cravens to fire yet another rocket.