A Tale of Two Subs

by Jonathan J. McCullough

  Despite misgivings that he may have missed something crucial that could prove deadly while implementing his lung, Momsen successfully tested it on himself and others at the Sub Safety Test Unit. And rather than going through regular channels, as he had with his rescue chamber, he decided to make an attention-getting public test. The Navy brass was caught off guard again, and before they could do anything about it the press had dubbed his remarkable device the Momsen lung. The invention did much to improve his credibility, allowing him to finally start work on the rescue chamber, starting with experiments on the salvaged S-4, the same submarine that had killed its previous crew. Momsen worked with Allan McCann on the final design before being transferred yet again, and when the Navy unveiled the finished project as the McCann rescue chamber, regular Navymen widely acknowledged that Momsen had gotten the short end of the stick. It was a reprimand for embarrassing them with his innovative Momsen lung. Nevertheless, by hook or by crook, Momsen had gotten the rescue chamber built, and it would get its first tragic test a few years later when the Sculpin’s sister ship, the USS Squalus, went down.

  For the men of the Silent Service, the Squalus disaster was the first glimpse of what it might be like to dive for the last time. At half past eight on the morning of May 23, 1939, the Squalus began a normal test dive in preparation for formal trials and induction into the fleet. The captain, Oliver Naquin, was trying to shave fractions of a second off their crash dive so the boat would qualify for service in the fleet. Before diving he called for full speed so the boat would have momentum as it went down, and no fewer than three people watched as every single red light on the Christmas Tree indicator flashed to green: safe to dive. They bled air into the boat to confirm its airtightness, flooded the ballast and bow buoyancy tanks, and continued the dive. But as they passed fifty feet, the boat shuddered.

  A shock wave of compressed air hit the men from the engine rooms forward as thousands of gallons of water flooded the engine and maneuvering rooms. The deafening cascades of water instantly flooded the after battery. The men on the control room battle phones heard frantic screams and cries through their headphones from men drowning in the near-freezing water, which was flooding the engine rooms. The watertight door to the forward engine room closed, and for one man transfixed by the sight, the glass porthole offered a vista of drowning men that would fill a lifetime of nightmares. Unable to look away, he watched as the inky water rose above the porthole until the engine room was as black and devoid of human life as the sea all around.

  The after battery was also compromised, however, and he and the other men there had to retreat to the control room as the freezing water seemed to stab their skin as it rose alarmingly fast. Pipes burst throughout the boat, causing leaks that gushed like fire hoses that knocked the men down. As the men in the mess room strained against the rising water to get forward into the unflooded control room, the lights went out. They flopped around in the disorienting darkness, the water roaring in their ears, trying desperately to get to the watertight door before it closed. One, two, three came in. The boat was on an up angle, and the water accumulating in the after battery was like a lake as it started to slosh over the doorsill into the control room. Four, five men in. The man at the door started to close it when in the utter dark his eyes made out a ghostly glow straining in the water toward him. The water rose higher, spilling into the control room like water from a cup. If he waited any longer they might all die. The faint white apparition loomed closer, gasping and flailing in the water, appearing finally as the last man to escape the after battery. They could wait no longer for a man they’d left in the latrine, another sleeping on his bunk, and yet another down below in the battery compartment, to say nothing of the poor souls in the engine rooms. The man at the door strained to pull the heavy steel watertight door toward him to seal the after battery and all within, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t see the face of a friend bobbing behind the glass porthole, his eyes filled with despair, accusation, eventually oblivion.

  While the Squalus was filling with water and sinking, the diving party tried to blow the ballast and the bow buoyancy tanks, but it was no use. Saltwater came into the forward battery, shorting out circuits and beginning the process where the lead-acid batteries created chlorine gas, which would lead to an eventual explosion. One man had risked his life to throw open the old-fashioned blade-type switch as it glowed blue with an arc of dancing lightning sparks. The skipper went about the boat getting reports. Most of the men were whole, if shaken, and cold. So much air had been pushed forward by the surge of water that they were almost unable to open a tin of rockets. Naquin knew immediately that theirs now was a race against time; surely the sub base in Portsmouth would notice their absence and send someone to investigate, but if not, it would be a matter of how long their oxygen would last. He sent up the emergency telephone marker buoy, as well as a series of distress rockets in the hope that someone, perhaps a local fishing boat, might see them. He also gave orders for the men to rest, not speak, and conduct themselves with a minimum of effort, so that they could conserve the oxygen supply. They spread powdered CO2 absorbent on the bunks to scrub the air, and distributed the boat’s Momsen lungs. This was not only a pragmatic effort to have them ready in the event that they should have to quickly leave through the escape trunks, but also as a precaution against the possibility of chlorine gas poisoning from the batteries.

  The men huddled in the dark for hours, sleeping where they could, eating canned fruit, and sending more rockets. Several hours later they heard propellers up above. They sent up another rocket to catch the boat’s attention and waited by the buoy telephone. Then there was a voice on the other end—coming from their sister ship, the Sculpin. They were overjoyed, but the conversation was cut short, and with it their chances for survival. A seaman on the Sculpin had tied the rescue buoy’s line to a cleat on the Sculpin’s teakwood deck. Since the line had no play, it snapped when the Sculpin rose on the swell of a wave. In light of this new development, a rescue diver wouldn’t have a link leading him to the stricken Squalus, and would have to practically search by hand in the dark swirls of muck 250 feet below the surface.

  The temperature in the Squalus plunged as the hull’s steel rested in the icy waters. The roving columns of light emanating from their flashlights and head lanterns revealed shining brass valve fixtures, gray paint, pale wet faces, and the vapor coming from their mouths and nostrils in the chill air. Up above, the Sculpin had leaned a spare anchor from its chain locker to act as a grapnel. A tugboat dragged the anchor back and forth along the seafloor, trawling for the Squalus, hoping to make a connection for when the divers arrived. The Navy mobilized its rescue fleet, including a steamer from the sub school at New London, Connecticut, which had a McCann rescue chamber.

  As more ships churned in the water overhead, the men in the Squalus tried to communicate with them via Morse code by banging on the hull. The ships above could hear them, but just barely, and responded by asking questions about the state of the ship. Since their hammer blows against the hull were so faint, the men had to tap out each word as hard as they could three times. In the damp chill, this was hard work, and as the air grew more toxic with CO2 they started to succumb to hypoxia. Thinned of life-sustaining oxygen, the air was beginning to give them the symptoms of a hangover. First drowsiness, then nausea, splitting headaches, weakness, and lack of coordination. Worst perhaps in this situation was the sense of detachment, muddleheadedness, and fuzzy thoughts. The men beating out messages on the hull sweated with their exertions in the cold, thin air until exhausted, when they huddled into a cold corner of the boat, shaking with chills. Naquin spread out more CO2 absorbent and bled oxygen into the compartment for the first time. He didn’t know how long they would be down there and wanted to pay out as little oxygen as possible. In between messages the men listened for replies from the ships above, often hearing instead the slow dripping of water into the hull. Like any submarine submerged for too long, the Squalus’
s many valves and hull openings would leak, and the hull would fill drop by drop until the air remaining at the top of the compartments was at the same pressure as the sea around the boat. But that would occur so slowly that they would be long dead before seeing it, unless they were able to get out somehow.

  Despite their grim circumstances and the increasingly narcoleptic atmosphere, the men maintained good spirits and upheld the Navy’s tradition of order and discipline. Perhaps with an appreciation of the finality of over a hundred pounds of pressure pressing in on them and limited air supplies, their thoughts turned inward like men awaiting the gallows, yet they also curiously clung to hope. They speculated about what they might like to have as their next—or perhaps final—meal, and a nice steak seemed to fit the bill. Despite all this, they were still humorous young submariners with a blue streak a mile wide. One of them cracked wise and told his crewmates that he’d rather have a blonde.

  Finally, early the next morning they heard stomping noises on the deck above them, as though someone were walking back and forth. It was in fact a diver, trying to attach a line to the escape hatch above the forward torpedo room. A small cheer rose—they were going to get out of here after all. Without benefit of special diving gases, it was a remarkable feat for the diver, a young man named Martin “Skee” Sibitsky. Later in the morning, Swede Momsen gave orders to the two men in the rescue chamber as they lowered the bell down to the hatch, clamped the rubber gasket down onto the collar, and made the world’s first submarine rescue. After charging up the forward torpedo room with some fresh air and delivering hot coffee and sandwiches, the rescue chamber left with a handful of survivors.

  When they reached the unbearably bright light of the surface and stumbled onto the deck of the USS Falcon, the crew of the Squalus realized for the first time that the entire world was watching. A flotilla of ships of various sizes—some Navy, some chartered—bobbed around the Falcon. Press photographers snapped pictures and churned away at old-style moving picture cameras. In a foreshadowing of the ubiquitous news chopper phenomenon, planes buzzed and circled with more reporters and photographers. Radio journalists dashed off reports on live radio while wire reporters called in or telegraphed their stories to newspapers as near as the Squalus’s home port of Portsmouth and as far as cables could reach around the globe.

  With the first handful of rescued sailors was the roster of Squalus crewmen both living and dead. When the rescue was announced over live radio, the news understandably caused powerful waves of sobbing—for some of joy, for others anguish and despair. Thirty-two men were on the list of survivors, though one man was mistakenly left off for several hours, causing his wife to collapse once when she thought he’d died, and another time when she learned he had survived. Despite hoping against hope that the remaining twenty-six men aft of the control room had survived but had been unable to communicate by tapping, a fifth and final dive to the aft torpedo room confirmed their deaths. Throughout the entire ordeal, the faithful sister ship, Sculpin, had stood by and gained a reputation as one of the “good” ships—a billet any submariner could take with confidence.

  When Navy salvagers eventually raised the Squalus, photographers took spectacular pictures as its bow rocketed out of the water. President Roosevelt remarked that the scene reminded him of a sailfish crashing through the surface. After refitting, the Navy recommissioned the Squalus as the Sailfish. Investigators trying to determine what had caused the catastrophe eventually traced the problem to a link that closed the main induction valve: the huge hull opening that admitted air for the engines. A burr left from the metal-casting process to manufacture the link sometimes opened the valve, even after it had been closed. It was a dangerous glitch that appeared in several of the other boats of the class, including the Sculpin, which the Navy found and fixed.

  Despite the change in name, the Sailfish remained an object of curiosity, scorn, even outright hostility. It was a cursed vessel that had killed half its crew, a hard-luck boat, an evil omen. Superstitious sailors wouldn’t go on it. One wag at the Portsmouth Navy Yard called the resurrected boat the Squailfish, and the name stuck. When strict by-the-book man Mort Mumma became the skipper, he did everything in his power to strike the former ship’s history from not only his memory, but everyone else’s as well. One of his stranger standing orders was to forbid its former skipper, Oliver Naquin, from ever setting foot on the boat. One day before the war, while the Sailfish was berthed at Pearl Harbor, the order was actually carried out, leaving a nonplussed Naquin to simply walk away down the pier.

  Try as he might to obliterate any mention of the Squalus, suppression has a curious way of forcing unexpected feelings out of the woodwork. In the case of Mort Mumma, the memory of the ship and the awesome responsibility of being its skipper finally caught up with him on the Sailfish’s first war patrol. It would be a grave error, however, to call his bravery into question. As a leader of PT boats later in the war, Mumma would fly into the maw of danger several times with distinction. Mumma’s nervous collapse had less to do with the pressure of the situation and everything to do with the ghost of the submarine Squalus.

  11

  Rest and Recuperation

  The thing that we want most of all

  Why it would be ecstasy,

  Give us thirty days’ leave with traveling time

  In the Good Old U.S.A.

  —“Dear Mr. President” S-Periscope, USS Sculpin

  shipboard newsletter

  December 1942

  When the Sculpin came back to Hawaii after its sixth patrol, the captain and crew got the news they’d all been waiting for since the beginning of the war: They would be going to San Francisco for a major refit that would take enough time to allow them to return to their hometowns and visit their families. Turnover in the crew had brought in new faces, but for more than forty sailors it had been nearly two years since they’d been stateside, let alone at home. Bethlehem Steel would conduct its first submarine refit of USS Sculpin at Hunter’s Point, while the men fanned out across the country in search of family, friends, and lovers. Like nearly every other military unit at the time they were a mixed lot. They hailed from all across the United States, from the hill country of Tennessee and small towns in Texas, to New York City and the suburbs of Chicago. They were the sons of admirals and immigrants, members of the upper crust, and the recipients of Depression-era soup kitchen hospitality.

  Corwin Mendenhall got married and honeymooned at this time, and Lu Chappell likely visited his wife, Marion; their son, Lucius Jr., and daughter, Mickey, were away at boarding school. For the skipper and his family the separation had gone on far too long, the duties of his command straining tenuous ties drawn tight by the dangerous nature of his duty. The wartime censorship of letters did nothing to help the situation in that he could write little more than that he was doing well. Marion did clerical work at local shipyards and continued to act as an organizing figure among the wives of the other officers, but under the pressure she became increasingly ill, overwrought, and morose.

  The exec, Charlie Henderson, left the Sculpin for “new construction.” He would go back east to commission the new submarine USS Bluefish, bring it back to the Pacific theater, and conduct war patrols. In his stead they got Al Bontier, a redheaded lieutenant from Missouri who was described as being quick-witted, and seemed to be on the short list for command of his own boat. Jack Turner, the engineering officer, also left to become the exec of the USS Ray, while George Brown took his place. Brown was a compact young man from New York who in the future would give Park Avenue as his address. He’d attended Yale University and loved to bet on just about anything with Mendy, particularly about who sighted more targets while on watch. Despite what appears to have been a rather privileged upbringing, he’d trained as a diesel specialist and on first sight of his new boat rolled up his sleeves and got down to business with the black gang as they cleaned oil filters, replaced cylinder liners, and performed other messy machine maintenance. Since e
verybody of that era had to have a nickname, he drew his—Sammy Glickstein—from the protagonist Samuel Glick of the popular novel What Makes Sammy Run?

  As “George,” or the most junior officer on board, they got the enthusiastic young Joe Defrees. His father was Admiral “Rollie” Defrees, a friend of Admiral Lockwood. Joe also had a special relationship with the boat in that his mother had christened the Sculpin when it was first launched in 1938.

  George “Moon” Rocek, a tall young motor machinist’s mate who had been on all six previous war patrols, took a train back to his hometown of Cicero, Illinois. He’d grown some since he’d joined the Navy three years ago, and like many submariners he now sported a beard. When he got into town, his first visit was his father’s tailoring shop. He said merely, “Hi,” but his appearance had changed so much from the boy he’d once been that his father didn’t recognize him at first. “It’s me, George!” he said. His father’s eyes flashed with recognition, then with tears.