The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  Even though the sun was almost at its zenith as Momsen started down, the muddy Potomac turned absolutely black before he had gone twenty feet. As he continued his descent, he could feel the sharp pain behind his ears as the pressure mounted to more than four times what it had been on the surface. Just when he was wondering if the trip would ever end, the platform touched down with a slight bump and suddenly began to settle in the slimy riverbed. For a panicky second it seemed as if he would be buried in it. But the loathsome ooze stopped just short of his knees. Worse yet was the stench that accompanied it. Momsen couldn’t wait to inflate his lung from a flask of pressurized oxygen and put on his noseclip.

  After the buoy had been released that would bring the ascending line to the surface, Momsen tested his lung. The usually faint clicking noises of its valves magnified eerily in the stillness of the steel box. Once his breathing had assumed its normal rhythm, he crouched down in the muck to begin his ascent. As he did, his fingers brushed against a rock, and he impulsively stuck it into the top of his tank suit. When he was a boy, the way to prove you could dive to the bottom of the local swimming hole was to come up with a fistful of pebbles. The temptation to pull the same sort of stunt now was too much to resist.

  Momsen used both his hands and his feet on the line to control his speed. This was a far cry from the clear water of the mine tank, and he fought against the urge to go faster. Finally the color of the river changed to a deep chocolate that gradually grew lighter until all at once he found himself staring up into the brilliant blue sky he had left some ten minutes before. He held up the rock he had brought with him just long enough for everyone to have a good look and then tossed it nonchalantly over his head into the Potomac. It was a moment nobody there would ever forget. The 110 feet Swede Momsen had ascended was precisely the depth at which the S–4 had been lost.

  Everything went so smoothly that three of the divers who had been working with him were able to make successful ascents before the tide rolled in again. A huge grin creased Momsen’s face as a triumphant broom was lashed to the Crilley’s mast. It had been a clean sweep.

  The Navy found out what had happened off Morgantown exactly like everyone else—by reading the papers. Midway through the testing, someone who looked like a high school kid on the riverbank started waving and shouting so persistently that Momsen finally sent a dory over to him. He turned out to be a cub reporter for the Washington Star named A. W. Gilliam. After being allowed to experience the sensations of an ascent from twenty feet, Gilliam hurried back to his office with the scoop of a lifetime. The next day, when the Crilley returned to Washington, a notable collection of brass, including some with red faces, was on hand to greet her. Among those present was the Chief of Naval Operations himself, Admiral Charles Hughes, who spoke for them all when he demanded of Momsen, “Young man, what the hell have you been up to?”

  The news made headlines across the nation, and the Navy, of course, quickly approved more tests. Momsen chose to conduct them in the Chesapeake Bay in 155 feet of water—deeper by four fathoms than the S–51 had been on the morning he found the telltale oil slick where she had finally come to rest. A bigger base ship was required for a location exposed to the weather, and the Falcon—the same ship now frantically getting up steam to go to the aid of the Squalus—was dispatched from New London. She was an especially appropriate choice. She had participated in the futile attempts to save not only the men trapped in the S–51 but those in the S–4 as well. Veterans of both disasters still served with her, and Momsen was deeply moved on the eve of his first ascent in the Chesapeake when a group of them came to him. “Sir,” a spokesman said, “we just want you to know that we are proud to have you on board.”

  As a precautionary measure because of the depth, Momsen decided to run a safety line around his waist up to the surface. He thought it might make all the difference in case something went wrong. It would, instead, nearly cost him his life.

  Because of some minor technical delays he was not lowered into the great bay until late in the afternoon, and by the time he had adjusted his lung and was ready to come back up, it was as dark as it had been in the Potomac. He had risen about fifty feet when he was suddenly stopped short. It took him a moment to realize what had happened. His safety line had unaccountably gone taut. What’s more, it was leading straight down.

  After a couple of experimental tugs he concluded that it must somehow have become tangled in his diving rig. He first tried to see if he could worm out of it with one hand while he held on to the ascending line with the other. When this didn’t work, he considered yanking on the safety line in an effort to free it. But the men tending the line on the surface might mistake it for a signal to haul him up. If they did, they would simply be dragging him back down, fouling the line further or, even worse, pinning him against the steel box he had just left.

  He could think of only one thing to do. Crawl down the ascending line and try to find where the safety line had snagged. This, however, raised a chilling prospect. For Momsen time was beginning to run out. He had already used part of his precious oxygen and the increased pressure he would encounter going down might force so much more of it from the lung that he would not have enough for the return trip up.

  But he had no alternative and down he went, blindly groping his way along, the murky depths of the bay closing in around him. It was, as it turned out, exactly the right move. When he reached the bottom, he drew in the safety line and discovered that it had caught on a corner of the platform where he stood during his descent. He cleared it with a flick of his wrist and started up again. After he got to the surface and was hustled on board the Falcon, they examined his lung. It had barely enough oxygen in it for two more minutes—about thirty breaths.

  The fault, however, had not been with the lung itself. Subsequent trials in the Chesapeake went off without difficulty, and upon their completion he prepared for an exploit beyond anything he had attempted. The one element lacking in all his previous tests with the lung had been a submarine.

  Salvaged some three months after she had become a coffin for her crew of forty, the S–4 had been rusting away ever since at the Charlestown Navy Yard. At first there were vague plans to put her back into service, but they had never progressed very far. Then Momsen learned that she was going to be sold for scrap and promptly badgered his superiors to turn the S–4 over to him as a test boat for submarine safety. What he planned was to allow himself to be purposely trapped inside her. He was motivated by something more than sheer bravado. As he noted, “Telling some poor submariner that he can come up through a hundred feet of water isn’t going to mean much unless he can get out to do it in the first place.”

  Momsen personally directed the S–4’s conversion. Of the five compartments submarines of her class carried, the control room and battery were reconditioned to house her test crew. The other three compartments—torpedo room, engine room and motor room—would be reserved for experimental flooding and escape.

  The means of escape were artfully contrived. Around a hatch in the motor room, Momsen installed a steel “skirt” extending down into the compartment about four feet. The idea was to get the crew out of a stricken sub by first unlocking the hatch cover and then letting the sea in through the compartment’s flood valves. As the water came in, it would compress the air in the compartment until the hatch was forced open. After the water level rose above the lower edge of the skirt, the external and internal pressure would equalize, leaving an air pocket at the top of the compartment where the men could don their lungs before rising to the surface through the hatch.

  There was, however, a rub to all of this. Nobody could be absolutely certain that sufficient air would remain in the compartment to support life after it was flooded. Momsen was going to have to find out the hard way.

  The resurrected hulk of the S–4 once again went to the bottom on February 6, 1929, off Key West, Florida. A small flotilla of attending craft hovered on the surface as Momsen and Ed Kalinoski, a
skinny chief torpedoman from Jersey City who had participated in the first ascents in the Potomac, rode in the S–4’s control room with her caretaker crew. But once they touched down at forty feet the two men went into the motor room and shut themselves in. Kalinoski unlocked the hatch overhead, and a moment later Momsen opened the flood valves. The water flowed quickly across the deck. As they watched, it crept past their knees and began licking at their waists. “Mr. Momsen,” said Kalinoski, “I hope to Christ you know what you’re doing.”

  Short of an actual disaster, they could not have more closely duplicated conditions that had taken an endless procession of lives. The pressure continued to build up inside the motor room. Suddenly there was an enormous crash as the hatch flew open and the sea started pouring in. Every few seconds there was an angry interruption as great bubbles of air fought their way through the hatch. The water level in the compartment shot up at a fearsome rate until it rose over the edge of the steel skirt—and just below their chins. Once that happened, no more air escaped and no more water came in. Everything fell quiet. The water that had been surging up so furiously seconds ago lapped peacefully against the compartment bulkheads. It had gone precisely as Momsen thought it would.

  Kalinoski took the ascending line, tied one end of it to a cleat on the skirt and sent the other end with its wooden buoy floating to the surface. Then he and Momsen inflated their lungs. Momsen was the first to leave. He ducked into the water, went up through the skirt out of the hatch and waited for Kalinoski to appear. Compared to previous ascents in the Potomac and the Chesapeake, it was easy going in water as clear and warm as this, but there was a big difference. Only fourteen months before, eight men had perished without a chance in the same motor room from which they had just exited so effortlessly.

  Although he was soon escaping at one hundred feet, which was as far down as his orders called for with the S–4, boats of her class had been designed to dive to two hundred feet, and Momsen was anxious to come up from that depth as well. This caused quite a flap since the Navy, now basking in world praise, was as skittish over the possibility of something going wrong as it had once been skeptical of the lung having any value at all. But the knowledge that such an escape had actually taken place, Momsen argued, would be a huge psychological boost for every submariner who had to learn to use the lung.

  The historic trip measured exactly 207 feet, and the memory of it would linger with Momsen always. No man ever before had risen from such a depth without a diving helmet and lived to tell about it. When he left the submarine it was nearly dusk and he paused momentarily on the ascending line to marvel at the scene around him. The effect of the last rays of the sun as they filtered through the water made it seem as if he were suspended in the middle of an incredibly brilliant moonlit night. Below him the white sand bottom was spotted with sponges and clumps of gently waving grass while the S–4 stretched out in front of him like some great slumbering sea monster. A silent column of glistening air bubbles rose from her to scare off sharks. None were nosing about, however, and as he looked up all he could see were the spectral shapes of a half-dozen ships on the surface waiting for him to appear. They seemed so distant, but at the sight of them he finally shook free from his reverie and continued his ascent.

  “Well done” wires poured in from the White House on down. And the Navy added something extra—the Distinguished Service Medal. “Lieutenant Momsen,” the citation read in part, “repeatedly and voluntarily risked his life in conducting experiments of a nature such that there was little or no information available as to their probable results. . . . It is through [his] initiative, courage and perseverance . . . that the development of the lung . . . reached a successful conclusion.”

  But more important for Swede Momsen was an announcement from the Secretary of the Navy that contracts had been let for seven thousand lungs. Henceforth every new submarine would be equipped with escape hatches and they were also to be installed as rapidly as possible in the seventy-five submarines already in service.

  NOW, A DECADE later, the Squalus was down. Halfway to Portsmouth, Momsen was still preoccupied with dozens of unanswered questions about the condition of the sub when the chief pilot, Lieutenant Seymour Johnson, came back with bad news about the weather. “It’s closing in fast at Portsmouth,” he said. “I’ll do the best I can, but I’m not making any promises.”

  11

  LIKE MANY REPORTERS based on the Eastern seaboard, one of the nation’s best-known radio news correspondents, Bob Trout of CBS, thought he was getting to Portsmouth the quickest possible way—by air. That afternoon, Trout was in a Manhattan studio rehearsing a feature spot he had on an evening network program called The Time to Shine Show. In the middle of the rehearsal, the director of special events called and told him that the Squalus was down. He was to drop everything. A car was waiting to take him to Newark Airport where he was to board an amphibian. Trout dashed out of the studio trailed by a representative of the show’s sponsor who shouted, “I don’t care what’s down! You can’t do this to me!”

  There was considerable haze when Trout took off, but he could clearly see the Trylon and Perisphere of the New York World’s Fair as the plane headed for Long Island Sound. Along the Connecticut shore, however, his pilot had to fly at 500 feet to get under heavy, incoming cloud cover. Then, as they were flying over the Yale Bowl in New Haven, fog completely enveloped them. The pilot, Trout recalled, “dipped, wheeled and dived, banked out over the water and then back inland almost to Hartford” before he finally gave up and landed Trout in New London.

  He finally caught a late-night express train that would get him to Dover, New Hampshire, about six miles upstream from Portsmouth. The New London station master told him that while his own quota of sleeping compartments was sold out, he’d surely have no trouble obtaining a berth on board. But Trout was lucky to get on the train at all. It was jammed with reporters, photographers, newscasters, radio technicians and newsreel cameramen, all facing the same problem. “There we were,” Trout remembered, “supposedly covering a great disaster and we probably knew less about what was going on than anyone else.”

  EARLIER THAT DAY, as soon as the sub’s plight became known, two marines assumed guard duty in front of the redbrick residence of Captain Greenlee at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. By the time Greenlee’s son Bob brought his sister Betty and Frances Naquin there in response to his father’s phone call, Greenlee himself rushed home to speak to them before boarding the Penacook with Admiral Cole.

  “We’re still not sure what went wrong,” he told them. “The boat’s in trouble. But there’s every reason to believe that Pat and Oliver are all right. Just a few minutes ago, Sculpin reported sighting a smoke bomb, and under the circumstances that’s the best news we could have.” After Captain Greenlee departed, Bob and his wife, Jacqueline, went off to round up the other wives of the Squalus officers who were supposed to attend the bridge luncheon for the Sculpin wives.

  Frances Naquin stared blankly out of a window. All she could think of now was the drive down to the overnight anchorage of the Squalus with their two children the previous evening so that they could wave to their father. A minor disappointment at the time when no one had come on deck, it suddenly seemed so important now, and she couldn’t help wondering if it had been a dark portent of what was to come. Then she silently reprimanded herself for such thoughts. As the wife of the sub’s commanding officer, she had a special presence to maintain—for him as well as herself.

  Once the sinking was confirmed, other calls went out from the yard. About a third of the crew had installed their wives and families in apartments or rented bungalows behind the fine old homes that dotted Portsmouth and its sister city of Kittery, Maine, just across the Piscataqua. But rumors of what had happened spread quickly through the close-knit Navy community. And before official notification reached many of them, grim-faced women were already streaming over the bridge that connected the yard to Kittery.

  Cole had appointed his aide, J
ohn Curley, as his spokesman. He did his best to reassure them as they crowded into the yard’s administration building. Oddly, his task in the beginning was easier because of the gap in communications between Portsmouth and the scene of the disaster. In the brief exchange that the Sculpin had with the Squalus before the marker-buoy cable parted, there had been no mention of casualties. So Curley presumed that all hands on the sunken sub were still alive.

  This misconception would continue well into the night of May 23, even after the Wandank managed to ascertain that only thirty-three of the trapped crew could be accounted for. In all the confusion of trying to understand the sub’s hammer taps, that fact was not initially relayed to Portsmouth. The one big message that had come through clearly—“Conditions satisfactory but cold”—was what everybody seized on.

  Most of the women, relieved of their greatest fear, at least for the moment, and ready to grasp any straw, took their cue from Mabel Gainor. In tones as laconic as those her husband might have employed, she said, “Lawrence’s been in scrapes before. He’ll be OK.”

  Later in the day, Frances Naquin echoed this optimism in a statement that Curley issued in which she cited the massive rescue efforts the Navy was making and her confidence that “it will all be over tomorrow.”

  Not everyone, however, was so sanguine. Could the men, even if they still survived, be able to escape entombment at a depth no trapped submariner had ever been in before? Nowhere was this anguish more evident than on the face of Ellen Chestnutt, who had pleaded with her husband to quit the silent service. All afternoon and into the night, holding their baby daughter in her arms, accompanied by two young sons, she walked ceaselessly about the yard, striding from the administration building up to the Greenlee residence, back down to the riverfront and across the bridge into Kittery, pausing there only to retrace her route.