The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  It exploded in the air some three hundred yards in front of the Sculpin, a little to her starboard side. Right after that her lookouts spotted the marker buoy riding in the boisterous sea. As the Sculpin eased alongside it, the buoy was gingerly hauled on deck with boat hooks and the line was secured around a deck cleat. Wilkin reached inside for the phone.

  A moment later, in the forward torpedo room, 243 feet down, Lenny de Medeiros heard him say, “Hello, Squalus, this is Sculpin. What’s your trouble?”

  “It’s Sculpin,” de Medeiros told Lieutenant Nichols and quickly handed him the headset.

  Nichols struggled to maintain his composure as he described the flooded condition of the Squalus. Then Nichols said, “Hold on. I’ll put the captain on.”

  Oliver Naquin was already on his way forward from the control room. There was a pause of about thirty seconds before he said with quiet elation, “Hello, Wilkie.”

  But as Wilkin started to respond, the Sculpin rose high on a cresting swell and the line went dead. Held taut by the cleat, the marker-buoy cable, the sole physical link to the Squalus, had parted.

  Once more, she was lost.

  9

  AT THE PORTSMOUTH Navy Yard, the tension was almost unbearable when Wilkin’s message came in that a distress rocket was believed to have been sighted. Admiral Cole ordered the yard tug, the Penacook, readied for immediate departure.

  Another call was placed to Commander Lockwood at the Navy Department. Minutes later the news was being relayed to Navy bases and Coast Guard stations all along the northeast coast that the submarine Squalus was missing. Before the day was done, the greatest undersea rescue operation in history would be in full swing.

  Cole’s initial alert concerning the rescue ship Falcon was providential. At that time the Navy had five of the diving bells pioneered by Swede Momsen. Now officially known as rescue chambers, the only one close enough to help was aboard the Falcon, a converted World War I minesweeper.

  As it was, word to the New London commandant, Captain Richard Edwards, that the services of the Falcon might be required at a moment’s notice could not have caught the ancient vessel more ill-prepared. She was undergoing an annual overhaul, her boilers were dead, the big ten-ton rescue chamber had been removed from her fantail and most of her crew was on liberty. Edwards promised to have her in shape to get under way as soon as possible.

  Police and shore patrol teams began rounding up members of the crew and her complement of divers, while a skeleton gang on duty in her engine room labored feverishly to get her boilers going. Steam was essential not only to propel her, but to run the power winches that would lift the rescue chamber from the dock back on board. Without it, the Falcon was worthless, and up on her bridge, her freckled-faced young skipper, Lieutenant George Sharp, paced back and forth in furious frustration.

  When the second message was received from the Sculpin announcing that the marker buoy had been found, the coordinates for it finally explained the delay in locating the Squalus. What had caused the inaccuracy in the reported longitude was never conclusively settled. The suspicion was that it had resulted from the peculiarity of the Morse code symbols for “one” and “six.” They are the exact opposite of each other. “One” is formed by a dot and four dashes. “Six” is a dash and four dots. Somewhere along the line, either in transmission or reception, they must have been inadvertently transposed.

  For Cole and the others at Portsmouth, the sighting of the marker buoy was devastating news. Till then, despite their fears, they were clinging to the slender hope that this all would somehow turn out to be a false alarm. Now they were deprived of even that possibility.

  With Cole on board, the Penacook nosed down the Piscataqua River. The best that the aged tug could manage was about seven knots. At the moment, however, Cole was not unduly troubled by her lack of speed. The important thing was that the Sculpin had discovered where the Squalus lay on the North Atlantic floor. Little more could be done until the rescue fleet being assembled reached the scene.

  Ten minutes later, whatever comfort Cole had begun to allow himself vanished when he was handed a message from the Sculpin with a chilling report: “Cable on marker buoy parted. Am anchoring over Squalus position. Wait further instructions.”

  Nothing could have been more unexpected—or threatened more sinister consequences. The cable not only was the sole direct communications link between the surface and the Squalus, but it also was the one guide that a diver would need to attach a crucial second cable to bring a rescue chamber to the sunken sub.

  Perched in the Penacook’s wheelhouse, Cole was badly shaken. All that morning, immersed initially in his attempts to learn what had happened to the Squalus and then in organizing a rescue operation, he had never entertained the possibility of ultimate failure. For the first time, the ugly thought occurred to him.

  “Goddammit,” he barked at the Penacook’s commander, Chief Boatswain’s Mate David Ullman, “can’t we do any better than this?” Ullman, who had never been on the receiving end of a flag officer’s wrath before, managed to coax an extra knot out of her struggling boiler. Still, it took more than an hour before the black silhouette of the Sculpin could be observed riding sentinel on the horizon and most of another one before the Penacook at last came abreast of her.

  For the time being, Cole would use the Sculpin as his command post and immediately transferred to the sub by smallboat, itself a tricky maneuver in the increasingly unsettled sea. Cole did not pursue whether the cable would have snapped if it had not been fastened to a deck cleat on the Sculpin. His first concern was to relocate the Squalus at all costs. The Sculpin’s skipper pointed to a second buoy that he’d had anchored as soon as the break in the cable occurred. Then, he told Cole, the Sculpin got a bearing with her sonic gear on what was believed to be the Squalus. The fix, however, was only approximate, and at that depth, approximate just wasn’t good enough.

  Once he had been briefed, Cole was down to his last move until more help arrived. He directed David Ullman on the Penacook to set buoys a hundred yards north and south of the one the Sculpin had dropped. “I don’t have any time for speeches,” he told Ullman. “You must find Squalus.”

  After both buoys were in place, the Penacook began her lonely sweeps between them with a grapnel. As she did, a Coast Guard patrol plane lumbered in under the cloud cover and started circling in lazy figure eights on watch for any crewmen from the Squalus who might suddenly appear on the surface using Momsen lungs.

  Just seeing this first tangible sign of outside help being mobilized lifted everyone’s spirits. In the Sculpin’s radio cubicle, meanwhile, messages were piling up for Cole reporting the progress of rescue operations that were under way elsewhere.

  Lieutenant Commander Momsen, Cole was advised, was already airborne. He was expected to arrive in Portsmouth early in the evening. His experimental diving unit would follow.

  The big, seagoing tug Wandank that Cole had requested from the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston was preparing to quit her berth. Several Coast Guard cutters and patrol boats that would ferry men and materials from Portsmouth were already en route.

  In New York City, the heavy cruiser Brooklyn with her medical facilities and thousands of extra feet of air hose on her decks slipped past the lower Manhattan skyline. Her departure was so hasty that nearly a third of her crew was left ashore. In her wake sailed another seagoing tug, the Sagamore, with nine salvage pontoons and a derrick lighter in tow.

  Cheering news arrived from New London. In an extraordinary response to the disaster, despite her almost complete lack of readiness that morning, the Falcon’s rescue chamber and all of her divers were on board within an hour after final confirmation that the Squalus was on the bottom. As she steamed down the Thames River, one of the first men Cole had turned to, Richard Edwards, the New London commandant and Commander Submarine Squadron Two, which included the Falcon, prepared to leave for the scene on the destroyer Semmes. What bothered Edwards more than anything else
now were the latest meteorological bulletins. Heavy fog was predicted for the New England coast that could raise hob with the Falcon’s voyage.

  To the north, below the Isles of Shoals, Admiral Cole would worry about the weather later. Right then all the divers and rescue chambers in the world would be useless until the exact location of the Squalus was fixed. Stationed on the bridge of the Sculpin, he never took his eyes off the Penacook as she slowly steered between the boundary buoys she had dropped before starting to grope for the Squalus.

  For everyone, the Penacook was a familiar Portsmouth sight puttering about the harbor on routine chores. Now there was something wildly incongruous in her being cast in such a dramatic role. Technically, Chief Ullman could not even be called her captain since she was not a commissioned ship. His official designation was officer-in-charge. Because of her lowly status, the Penacook wasn’t even eligible for Navy gray. Instead, she was painted a drab brown.

  Standing next to Cole on the bridge, Captain Halford Greenlee, thoughts of his son-in-law in the Squalus uppermost in his mind, finally blurted, “Do you think she can do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Cole said. “But she’s all we’ve got.”

  Ullman, acting as his own helmsman, had just completed his third fruitless pass over the presumed placement of the Squalus when a deckhand tending the dragline came into the wheelhouse with news of what Ullman had begun to suspect. The Penacook’s grapnel was too light to reach the bottom.

  Ullman decided to try once more. This time he reduced the tug’s speed, so that she barely maintained steerageway in the hope that it might allow the grapnel to get down low enough to be effective. But this didn’t work. Ullman had no choice. He ordered the dragline reeled in and reported his quandary to Cole.

  The tough little admiral had one last stratagem. After discussing it with the Sculpin’s skipper, he issued instructions to replace the Penacook’s grapnel with a spare anchor the Sculpin carried. It at least proved heavy enough. Back and forth, dragging it now, the stubby tug toiled, the whitecaps whipping higher, the billowing overcast not much farther up than the Squalus was down.

  The problem Ullman faced is easily duplicated. Simply drop a fountain pen out of a third-story window, blindfold yourself and fish for the pen from the window with a piece of twine and a bent pin. Time after time the Penacook’s grapnel snagged something and then slipped mockingly free. The Isles of Shoals were aptly named. Scattered along the bottom were scores of rotting hulks, some a century or more old.

  The Coast Guard plane overhead had been joined by other planes flying in from Boston carrying news photographers and newsreel cameramen. In the late afternoon, the lowering clouds forced all the planes to abandon the disaster scene.

  Shortly after five P.M., the tug Wandank hove to near the Sculpin. Cole instantly put her powerful underwater oscillator to work in an attempt to reach the Squalus. Back through the ocean depths came the feeble, indecipherable sound of hammer taps. A few minutes later, just as the Penacook was coming about for another pass, a rocket from the Squalus burst above the surface. It was at best a general guide. Even more maddening, it exploded over a stretch of water that Ullman had already covered twice.

  Half an hour later, the civilian tug Chandler dropped anchor. A doctor, three pharmacist’s mates and fifty blankets from the Portsmouth Navy Hospital were on board.

  A boat charted by newsmen approached the Sculpin. They had spotted Cole’s blue pennant with two white stars signaling his presence on the sub. A reporter shouted, “Can the press come on board?”

  The watch officer on the bridge replied, “I’ll ask the admiral.” After a time, he shouted back through a megaphone, “Yes, three of you. But be careful.” After drawing lots, the chosen three made the treacherous leap to a ladder on the Sculpin. Cole met with them. For the first time, the world would learn that the marker-buoy cable had parted. But he downplayed his concern. “We don’t know the condition of the crew. We don’t know how many are alive. We hope all of them. We’ll get them and the boat, if possible, later. Thank you, gentlemen. We hope to have good news tomorrow . . .yes. . . tomorrow.”

  On the Penacook, Ullman barely noticed the new arrivals. His warrant as a chief boatswain testified to his seamanship, and he needed every bit of savvy he possessed to handle his unwieldy craft as she probed the ocean floor with the Sculpin’s anchor. A slightly built man, he had clung tenaciously to the wheel for more than four hours, raising a hand from it only to gulp down cups of coffee. His brow was permanently furrowed from the vicious migraine headaches that plagued him regularly. Cole, indeed, had worried about the possibility of one suddenly incapacitating him now. But Ullman was gripped by a zeal that brooked no distraction. He was determined to locate the Squalus and would not give up until he did.

  Then, at 1930 hours, in the gathering darkness, the Penacook again snagged something in the ocean depths that was almost on a direct line between the buoys Ullman had put down.

  This time the big makeshift grapnel held.

  INSIDE THE SQUALUS, the worst part was the damp, gnawing cold. And the waiting. Eighteen men were in the control room, fifteen more in the forward torpedo room. Both were dark except for the dim light of the hand lanterns.

  In the control room, valves wheezed and hissed sporadically under the backed-up water pressure, which kept everyone’s nerves ragged. Would one or more of them abruptly give way? Beneath soggy blankets, the men bunched together on mattresses or directly on the linoleum deck. Others sat with their backs against the bulkheads, knees drawn up under their chins. Many were still wet from the first onrush of the sea. Nobody talked now. They moved as little as possible. There was an occasional cough, a sneeze, or an incoherent moan of a man drugged into half sleep by the foul air. Near each of them was a Momsen lung for use in case some new emergency forced a quick exit from the sub or if chlorine gas somehow started seeping in from the forward battery.

  After his conversation with Warren Wilkin on the Sculpin was cut short practically in mid-sentence, Naquin continued to maintain a telephone watch, hopeful that whatever had caused the break in the connection would be soon corrected. It never occurred to him then that the cable itself might have separated.

  By two o’clock that afternoon, the cold had increased noticeably. Another problem no longer could be ignored. As the men exhaled, they were filling the compartment with carbon dioxide. Naquin had a can of special absorbent opened and about a quarter of it sprinkled on the deck. Along with the CO2 absorbent, the Squalus also had a supply of pure oxygen stored in flasks. But Naquin wanted to husband it as long as possible. He had no idea how long he and the others would be trapped, and the silence on the surface was disturbing him more every minute.

  Although he had a carbon dioxide analysis kit at his disposal, he decided against using it on the grounds that it would draw more attention than necessary to the problem. Instead, he gauged the quality of the air by the amount of nausea and the difficulty in breathing among his men. He purposely kept the air slightly on the toxic side. It made the men drowsy. They were less apt to move around and the time seemed to go faster.

  When the Penacook arrived, the sound of her propellers overhead could be clearly heard inside the Squalus. The men were immensely heartened by the presence of another ship. But as the little tug unaccountably began passing back and forth on the surface, it did not take long for them to conclude that direct contact with the Squalus had been lost and that the Penacook was now searching for her. “Anyway, they know we’re down here somewhere,” Jud Bland muttered in a resigned tone to his savior, Lloyd Maness.

  This stoicism under pressure, displayed by all of his men, greatly affected Naquin. Not once had there been an outward sign of fear, a complaint about the cold, a wail of impatience or despair. They shared their blankets in the packed deck space or lay in each other’s arms to try to keep warm.

  At four-thirty, Naquin made another inspection tour to the forward torpedo room. As he walked through the forward battery,
he ruefully noted how much warmer it was there than in either of the two compartments the men occupied. But he could already detect faint whiffs of chlorine gas.

  In the forward torpedo room, he conferred with Lieutenant Nichols. Naquin had instructed him to relay over the marker-buoy phone his suspicion that the high induction feeding air to the diesels had caused all their trouble. He’d also told Nichols to recommend that divers be sent down to close the suspect valve and attach hoses to pump out the flooded compartments. But in the uncertain moments following the loss of voice communication with the Sculpin, Naquin neglected to find out if Nichols had passed this on. Now, to his satisfaction, he learned that it had been done. After thinking about it all afternoon, Naquin was more convinced than ever that this was a much better plan than relying on a rescue chamber.

  Then, as the Squalus was well into her ninth hour on the bottom, additional CO2 absorbent was spread in both of the compartments. And for the first time, oxygen flasks were bled to improve the air quality. A supper of canned beans, tomatoes and fruit was ladled out. Once again, pineapple was the chief attraction.

  A few minutes later, the pulsing beat of powerful new screws reached the Squalus. At precisely 1721 hours, according to the log being kept by Frankie Murphy, the shrill ping of an oscillator identified the new arrival as the Wandank and requested acknowledgment.

  To reply, Naquin sent Radioman First Class Art Booth and Signalman Second Class Warren Smith into the conning tower. There, they peeled off part of the tower’s cork lining, exposing the steel skin of the Squalus. Then Booth and Smith took turns pounding out a response—“We hear you”—with small sledgehammers, one stroke for a dot and two for a dash. Inside the sub, the sound of the hammer blows was deafening. But could they be understood? And clearly, it was soon discovered, they weren’t.