The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  There was a special torment for the wife of Don Smith, the General Motors man on board the Squalus. The young diesel expert earlier in the year had been on the submarine Permit when she briefly went aground beneath the sea while on a trial run off Halifax, Nova Scotia. The episode was an unnerving one, and with a newly born child to think about now, the Smiths did considerable soul-searching about whether this was the kind of work he ought to be doing. But, finally, they decided that such concerns were silly and he went ahead and purchased a home in Portsmouth where he would be GM’s full-time representative at the yard.

  When Curley released the names of the trapped crew and officers and their hometowns, reporters fanned out to interview their families. In Boston, Frankie Murphy’s mother, Anne, provided quite a story to the Evening American. “My boy,” she declared, “said the Squalus was stuck for more than an hour during a week’s cruise that ended last Friday.” Her son, she added, had told her that if the Squalus had been fifty feet deeper “we would have been cooked.” And on a visit home over the weekend, she said, he had asked her to pray for him. “My boy knew something was going to happen.”

  Her comments were duly noted and clipped by Navy authorities. At the time rescue ships were hurrying to the scene, another operation was already being organized that, in the months ahead, would seek to discover how and why the last word in American submarine design lay crippled on the ocean floor.

  Not to be outdone, the Boston Herald, after locating Lenny de Medeiros’s mother, Adelaide, in New Bedford, reported her collapse into inconsolable tears after crying out, “My God, I knew that ship would sink!”

  In Brooklyn, New York, seaman Bill Boulton’s wife, Rita, first heard the news on the radio. She’d come down from Portsmouth the preceding Sunday night to help her sister care for their ailing mother. At a party before she left Portsmouth, she recalled, one of the crew who had drunk too much beer kept roaring that nothing could ever sink the Squalus until somebody finally shut him up. But, according to the tabloid Daily Mirror, what the twenty-year-old, married only a few months, most remembered were her husband’s last words, “Kiss me again, just for luck.”

  In Washington, D.C., the mother of Will Isaacs was at a neighbor’s house when she heard about the Squalus on the radio. “Oh, those poor fellows,” she had exclaimed. Beyond that, however, she wasn’t unduly alarmed. She was sure that the name of her son’s submarine was the Sculpin. But when she returned home, touched by the thought that Will could as easily have been among the missing sailors, she reread the Mother’s Day card he had sent. To her horror, she saw that the return address on the envelope was “c/o U.S.S. Squalus.”

  In Cristobal, the Panama Canal Zone, a United Press stringer quoted Al Priester’s wife, Jeanette, as saying, “I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve never experienced anything like this before. I know there’s nothing I can do except pray to God that Al’s safe.” Then, cradling their two-year-old son, she spoke haltingly of how she’d been looking forward to seeing him when the Squalus arrived in the Canal Zone on her shakedown cruise. She had to stop constantly to correct herself. She kept talking about it in the past tense.

  All these women, wherever they were, at least had someone they could turn to for comfort. But for the Rumanian wife of Bobby Gibbs, there was nobody. Maria Gibbs had left the home of her husband’s parents in South Carolina long before the first radio bulletins were broadcast. The family immediately contacted an uncle of Gibbs’s who lived in Washington. He arrived at Union Station in time to intercept her train, and armed with her description, he finally located her. But when he tried to identify himself and explain why he was there, he realized that her English was not up to it. Just then the train started to pull out and the uncle, not knowing what else to do, jumped off. She would ride alone the rest of the way, still not sure what was wrong, sensing only that something dreadful had befallen her husband.

  ALL AFTERNOON IN the isolation of the Greenlee residence, the wives of the Squalus officers sat tensely waiting, drinking countless cups of coffee, a platter of sandwiches left untouched. The mood had grown somber when the news came that at least some of the stern sections of the sub were flooded. The burden was heaviest on Betty Patterson. She knew perfectly well that her husband’s normal station during a dive was in the after engine rooms. But she never lost her composure. “She seemed to feel that Pat was safe,” her sister-in-law, Jacqueline, later recalled.

  Jacqueline’s task was to screen phone calls from anxious friends and to take periodic reports from Lieutenant Commander Curley. Around five P.M., she was amazed to find herself connected on an overseas line with a London newspaper. “With that London call,” she remembered, “we suddenly woke up to the fact that the whole world was watching and waiting with us.”

  ONE HUNDRED FIFTY miles south of Portsmouth, on the bridge of the Falcon, her skipper, Lieutenant George Sharp, was cursing his ill fortune.

  Once he was clear of the Thames River at New London and in Long Island Sound, Sharp had planned to save precious time by cutting inside Fishers Island, the millionaire retreat southeast of the mouth of the Thames. Almost immediately, though, he encountered a thick fog bank that made this course too treacherous to chance, and Sharp had to go the long way around.

  The Falcon was one of a number of vessels built in 1917 to sweep the seas of German mines. Five of these “bird” boats, as they were called, were later converted into rescue and salvage ships and assigned to key submarine commands around the world—the Falcon in New London, the Mallard at Coco Solo in the Canal Zone, the Ortolan at San Diego, the Widgeon at Pearl Harbor, and the Pigeon at Cavite in the Philippines.

  Along with a rescue chamber, each carried air pressure systems for diving and salvage work, a recompression chamber for divers and all the complex gear that divers needed. But they also represented the one complete defeat that Swede Momsen had suffered in his efforts to bring submarine rescue to optimum efficiency.

  His objections to them were many. Their maximum speed, around twelve knots, was hardly adequate when time might be the decisive factor in an undersea disaster. Only 188 feet long with a thirty-seven-foot beam, their limited deck and storage space made the handling of literally miles of air hoses, manila line, steel cables and chains a nightmare. And, most prophetic in the instance of the Squalus, their lightweight displacement of 1,600 tons would leave them at the mercy of anything less than ideal surface conditions during a rescue operation.

  But while Momsen failed to get ships specifically tailored for the job, he did manage to engineer one policy change. Until 1929, bird-boat captains had been selected with little regard for their previous experience. Since then, however, after successful lobbying by Momsen, they were required to have both submarine and diving backgrounds. In a Navy whose whole theoretical thrust put a premium on all-around ability over specialization for line officers, he diplomatically touched on the psychological importance of such a move. “In this instance,” he argued, “it is essential that there be a commanding officer who speaks the particular language of the diver and who thoroughly understands submarine rescue and escape problems.”

  Sharp himself had just come off submarine duty to take over the Falcon and it didn’t tax his imagination much to picture what it must be like inside the Squalus. Now he took the weather that had closed in on him as a personal affront. The Falcon was a ship of destiny by any standard. Not only had she been used for Momsen’s experiments with the lung and bell, but as she nosed through the fog toward the stricken Squalus, it seemed as if she were on a ghostly track into her own past.

  Not many miles to her starboard were the waters that had closed over the S–51. Later would come Massachusetts Bay, where the S–4 had met her awful end. In each instance, the Falcon had stood by to no avail. This time, however, there was a difference—the rescue chamber she carried on her fantail. Up ahead, the Cape Cod Canal had been cleared of all traffic for the Falcon’s passage. But it would be daybreak at best before she could reach the Squalu
s.

  LIKE BOB TROUT, most of the reporters arriving from elsewhere in the nation to cover the disaster had been thwarted by the weather. Still, within three hours after the first wire-service bulletin, some sixty newsmen had already begun swarming by car into the Portsmouth Navy Yard and were filing copy out of a pressroom hastily set up in the administration building. The majority of the first arrivals were from nearby Boston, where nine newspapers were in fierce competition.

  The early big news, as announced to them by Curley, was the plan, recommended by Naquin, to refloat the Squalus by closing her high induction valve and attaching air hoses from the surface to blast the sea out of her flooded compartments. To accomplish this, he added that Lieutenant Commander Charles B. Momsen, “one of the Navy’s foremost deep-sea diving experts,” was rushing to Portsmouth, as was the rescue ship Falcon.

  As the evening wore on, speculation among the reporters began to center increasingly on the flooded after sections of the sub. Curley continued to maintain—the truth as he knew it—that there was no indication that any of the trapped crewmen were dead. Curley, in citing officers at the scene, was quoted as saying, “It’s possible that eight or ten hands were in the after part of the boat, but it’s felt that the inrush of the sea . . . was not sufficient to prevent them from running forward in time.”

  But under persistent questioning, Curley acknowledged that he could not swear that every last man on board the Squalus had made it safely into the water-free compartments.

  Late that night, four Boston newsmen determined to settle the issue. Despite the weather, they chartered a Kittery-based lobster boat to take them out. It was a voyage none of them would ever forget. Within minutes after leaving the Piscataqua, as the boat careened wildly in six-foot waves, they were drenched and hideously seasick. It took three hours to complete the fifteen-mile trip. When the boat’s owner drew as close as he dared to what turned out to be the Wandank, Harry Crockett of the Associated Press grabbed a megaphone and shouted to a shadowy figure on deck, “How many are dead down there?”

  The man on deck shouted back, “Not sure. Twenty-six caught in after compartments and believed lost.”

  If anything, the return to Portsmouth was worse, the sea running so high that Crockett was suddenly sent sprawling and his right hand slashed to the bone by a big lobsterman’s steel hook. Crockett staggered ashore at the Navy yard bleeding so badly, as one of the reporters with him said, that it looked as though he were wearing a “bright red glove.” But he rebuffed any treatment until he had finished telephoning the story to his home office.

  Only then did the families of the Squalus crew learn that some of the men were missing. The horrifying unknown for them now was which ones.

  SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT, unaware of this latest news, Frances Naquin, assured that the situation at sea would remain unchanged until morning, drove home. As she walked slowly toward her front door, she found a cluster of newspapermen on the porch. Before they could speak, she said, “Please, gentlemen, I’ve had a bad day.”

  Waiting inside was a neighbor, whom she had asked to look after the children. They were, she was told, asleep in bed. “I think, I pray, Oliver will be all right,” she said. After the neighbor departed, she started up the staircase, then stopped and sat on one of the steps. At last, she thought, I can cry.

  12

  LIEUTENANT SEYMOUR JOHNSON, Momsen’s pilot, had managed to avoid most of the fog hugging the coast by flying an inland route. Then, when he finally had to turn seaward, he got a break. The ceiling momentarily lifted just enough for him to risk a landing in the Piscataqua. He had Momsen and the others don life jackets. “I have enough fuel for one pass,” he said. “If we don’t make it, we’ll have to go back to Newport or maybe New London.”

  Swede Momsen didn’t envy him one bit. Not even submarines with their powerful diesels attempted to navigate the river except during slack water. And now with night fast approaching, there were all those spar buoys, can buoys and beacons that dotted the Piscataqua’s twisting course to think about. But at seven-thirty, about the same time that the Penacook had, they hoped, hooked the Squalus, Johnson splashed down without incident.

  “Say, that was all right,” Momsen said.

  Smiling back, Johnson replied, “Well, sir, considering who I was flying, I didn’t have much choice, did I?”

  Momsen’s first query upon arrival was the status of the divers in his unit who were supposed to be following him by air. The weather, he was informed, had forced them down in Newport. Then, with camera lights flashing all around him, Momsen immediately boarded a Coast Guard cutter for the last leg of his trip. Rain that had been falling on and off through the afternoon increased again. He shivered in the New England chill, realizing suddenly that he was still dressed in his linen suit and the now-bedraggled panama hat he had worn to work that morning. It was, he remembered thinking, a hell of an outfit to be sporting at a time like this. Somebody on the cutter handed him a foul-weather jacket.

  As always, there was nothing impersonal about what he was confronting this May 23. Momsen knew Oliver Naquin and the sub’s executive officer, William Thomas Doyle. He also knew some of the veteran petty officers in her crew. He knew Harold Preble especially well. As a matter of fact, he’d been corresponding with Preble about the accuracy of several stopwatches he had requisitioned during diving experiments the previous June.

  Because of the heavy sea, which didn’t stop him from gratefully gobbling down a couple of sandwiches he was offered, it was nearly eleven P.M. before he finally reached his destination. Gradually, a weird glow appeared through the mist and rain ahead of him. The scene grew even spookier as the cutter carrying him closed in. Riding at anchor in a rough circle approximately three hundred yards across were the Sculpin and the tugs Penacook, Wandank and Chandler. They had directed every searchlight at the area in and around a wooden grating to which the Penacook had attached her dragline. Outside of this perimeter two Coast Guard patrol boats slowly cruised, their lights playing back and forth over the black, white-tipped swells on the lookout for any of the Squalus crew who might suddenly surface without warning using Momsen lungs.

  In the wardroom of the Sculpin, he was warmly greeted by Admiral Cole. “Swede, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” Cole said. “It’s a bad situation, but it could have been worse. I’m going to be making this official to all hands concerned right away. I’m putting you in charge of all diving operations.”

  Then, as Cole brought him up to date, Momsen learned for the first time that the marker-buoy cable had parted. “I had Penacook dragging for her. We can’t be absolutely certain, but we think we have line to her now. What worries me is that we got no indication from Squalus that anything took hold down there.”

  “What about Falcon?” Momsen asked.

  “She’s under way, but fog is delaying her. With any luck, she should be here in six or so hours.”

  Cole continued his briefing. He informed Momsen that contact of sorts was being maintained through hammer taps from the Squalus, although the reception was spotty. Subsequent to Naquin’s dramatic report that conditions in the sub were satisfactory but cold, it had been learned that thirty-three men were known to be in the forward compartments and that for the time being there were ample supplies of emergency rations, drinking water and CO2 absorbent. Naquin also had volunteered, Cole said, that the pressure in the compartments still free of water was equal to that of a depth of twenty-seven feet, almost double the atmospheric pressure on the surface.

  “Is there anything else we ought to know?” Cole asked Momsen.

  “No, sir,” he answered at once. “But I think it would be a pretty good idea if we kept any more queries to an absolute minimum. Right now the best thing for them all is to stay quiet and conserve every bit of energy they can. Hammering on the hull is just going to tire them out.”

  “I agree,” Cole said. “Nevertheless I want to send some message down to the men to let them know you’re here. It
will boost their morale tremendously.”

  “That’s generous of you,” Momsen replied. “In that case you might tell them I said twenty-seven feet of pressure won’t cause any problems.”

  Cole then brought up Naquin’s plan of pumping out the flooded after sections of the Squalus. It had sounded so appealing that he had authorized its release to the press at Portsmouth as a rescue method under prime consideration. But for Momsen, that was precisely the trouble—it only sounded simple.

  As the latest addition to Cole’s rescue team—although he had just been given direct responsibility for getting the trapped crew out—Momsen demurred as diplomatically as he could. While an open main induction valve headed everybody’s suspect list, it was by no means a sure bet at this point. More important, linking up the necessary salvage lines was a good deal easier to talk about than do. Momsen was a qualified deep-sea diver himself and he knew from experience exactly how a man’s mental capability would be reduced to an almost childlike state when working in the fearful pressure of the ocean at a depth of 243 feet.

  If the new helium mixtures were immediately available, which they were not, it would still remain a job of stupendous complexity. But even granting the remote possibility of initial success, there was no assurance that all the flooded compartments could be cleared, that sufficient air under pressure could be pumped in that far down, or that the Squalus could then be quickly raised.

  “Admiral,” Momsen told Cole, “that’s always been the problem. We never seem to have submarine disasters made to order in convenient locations. Those men are either going to come up themselves or we’ll have to go down after them.”