by Brad Matsen
With his prewar reputation as a fascist, anti-Semitic journalist, PAC found a job as the editor in chief of the pro-Nazi tabloid newspaper Paris-Soir, which had been started by Otto Abetz, German ambassador in Paris. Fernande remained with her husband in Paris, but he was able to arrange refuge in an alpine village near the Italian border for their children, who were then two and three years old. Pierre-Antoine Cousteau was soon part of the most powerful circle of French collaborators, which included the celebrated author Robert Brasillach, who became the editor of another pro-Nazi newspaper, Je Suis Partout. PAC attended a Nazi rally in Nuremberg, where he interviewed Adolf Hitler for an article in which he declared the Führer’s terms for defeated France to be extremely generous. In 1942, PAC published his first book, the 120-page L’Amerique juive (Jewish America). Set in the context of the Cousteau family’s two years in New York, the book’s central thesis was that German Jews had brought anti-Semitism down upon themselves by methodically accumulating much of the nation’s wealth and installing themselves in positions of power. He asserted that if left unchecked, German Jews would have completely taken over the European economy as they had in America, while at the same time grabbing political power by installing secret Jews such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In his book, PAC traced Roosevelt’s lineage back to the Rossocampo family of Sephardic Jews in Spain, which migrated to Holland, where they became known as Rosenvelt.
During the first year of the occupation, Les Mousquemers were scattered. Dumas became an army mule driver in the Alps. Tailliez was assigned to the destroyer Valmy, in charge of torpedoes. Cousteau was transferred from Suffern to the cruiser Dupleix as a munitions officer. A little less than half the country was under the control of a collaborationist puppet government led by the aging general Philippe Pétain, who ruled unoccupied France from his headquarters in Vichy. When France surrendered, all its territory, military forces, and resources passed into the hands of Germany in the occupied northern zone, and to the Vichy government in the south. Practically, however, the French fleet and bases on the Mediterranean remained in the hands of the officers and sailors of the defeated nation under only cursory supervision by the conquering Germans and Italians. During the first year after France surrendered, Cousteau supervised a crew of sappers clandestinely rigging explosives aboard most of the ninety ships in the harbor at Toulon, while continuing to live in Sanary. If necessary, France would scuttle its Mediterranean fleet to keep it from the Axis powers.
Though the Germans promised the Vichy government postwar status as a self-governing part of the Third Reich, French resistance forces in the unoccupied zone began forming immediately after the capture of Paris. Cousteau, like most of the officers in the Mediterranean fleet, held no illusions that the fascists were planning a bright future for their defeated enemies. As long as he was not dead or in a prisoner of war camp, he decided to fight the Germans and Italians in whatever way he could. Quietly, without telling his family or friends, he made sure his superiors knew that he and his cameras and his experience underwater were ready to serve the resistance.
4
SIXTY FEET DOWN
IN THE WINTER OF 1941, Les Mousquemers reunited in the relative peace of Sanary-sur-Mer in the unoccupied south of France. Cousteau and Tailliez were assigned to the detachments watching over the idle fleet at Toulon. Dumas just showed up one day, having fled south from the Alps on foot after his mule driving unit surrendered. During their off hours, Les Mousquemers hunted underwater, the fish they killed now vital to the survival of their families, who otherwise would have been living on tightly rationed bread, butter, and dried beans. The menu was grilled fish, baked fish, and fried fish, but everyone knew they were having a much easier time of it than their relatives in the occupied zone to the north. They also knew that things in the south were going to get worse. The beans, bread, and butter were growing scarcer by the day, and hunting fish was a solution to hunger only if the calories they provided exceeded the calories they consumed to kill the fish. A hunting free diver burns more calories than a stoker in a steel mill. As Les Mousquemers grew weaker from fatigue and their meager diet, they had to spend much more time in the water for each fish.
Cousteau’s navy commanders knew about his obsession with diving and underwater photography and encouraged him to keep experimenting. They had no trouble imagining the military potential of free-swimming saboteurs and salvors. His diving research would also be a good cover story when undercover intelligence became necessary during the occupation by Germans and Italians that seemed sure to come. To informers and spies, who were everywhere around Toulon, Cousteau, Dumas, Tailliez, and the rest of the Sanary-sur-Mer diving fanatics looked very much like a bunch of friends playing with their toys in the ocean rather than spies and saboteurs.
Hunting took up most of Cousteau’s free time, and he kept working on ways to breathe underwater that would consume less energy. He had given up on oxygen rebreathers, but Maurice Fernez, who had collaborated with Le Prieur on an early version of his rebreather, had invented a lightweight surface feed system. It consisted of a flexible hose from an air pump on the deck of a tender to a free-flowing valve that the diver held in his mouth. The mouthpiece vented extra air into the water in a dense cloud of bubbles, but since the air hose was flexible, and a Fernez diver wore only a mouthpiece and face mask instead of a heavy helmet, the system let him swim free within the range of the hose length. Cousteau liked it because it was simple and had nothing to do with oxygen. Even though the constant cloud of bubbles made filming and hunting impossible, he tried out the system in Toulon harbor.
Skin diving, 1942. (Standing, left to right) Tailliez, Cousteau, and Dumas (COURTESY OF WWW.PHILIPPE.TAILLIEZ.NET)
Cousteau climbed down a ladder from a barge on which a gasoline-powered air pump chugged, while Dumas and Tailliez tended the hose line. He was wearing a new mask with a single oval glass plate sealed to his face with pliant India rubber, a huge improvement over the aviator goggles because it covered his face but still let him squeeze his nose to compensate for the pressure as he descended. He also wore his swim fins, and barely noticed the weight of the leash that tied him to the world above as he glided through the water 40 feet down. Cousteau was enjoying full breaths of air and flying above the worn, muddy bottom of the harbor when the bubbles stopped and he felt as though he had been hit in the chest by a giant hammer. The hose had snared on the gunwale of the barge, the roll of the sea had broken it, and Dumas could do nothing to warn him. The 5-atmosphere pressure of the air from the pump instantly dropped to one atmosphere. If Cousteau inhaled, his lungs could collapse as they struggled to equalize. He realized what had happened, stifled his urge to take even one more breath, and ascended before he drowned.
A few days later, Dumas was at 70 feet with the Fernez apparatus when the air line ruptured again. He had been hovering over the wreck of a freighter in the outer harbor when the bubbles stopped and he felt the pain of his lungs beginning to contract. Dumas stopped breathing immediately, but 70 feet was at the very edge of a diver’s ability to free ascend with empty lungs. As Dumas clawed for the surface, his oxygen-starved brain started shutting itself down. He lost consciousness just as he broke water. Cousteau dove in, kept him afloat, and shook him back into the world. After that, Les Mousquemers gave up on “the pipe” as a way to hunt or shoot film underwater.
Even with the demands of his wartime navy duties and feeding his family, Cousteau’s mind was never too far from his dream of making movies underwater. He imagined himself first as a filmmaker, then as a diver, knowing that he was in on the ground floor of marvels the world had never before witnessed. With the exception of music, which Cousteau enjoyed without reservation, he devoted all his energies to his ambition to make moving pictures underwater. As a teenager in Paris, he had seen the American remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, produced in 1916 by Carl Laemmle from film shot by two brothers from Norfolk, Virginia. Now that he was trying everything he could think of to keep his camera
dry and shoot movie film underwater, he read everything he could about the American brothers.
George and John Williamson were the sons of a clipper ship captain who killed time at sea tinkering with practical devices such as a collapsible baby carriage and an electric ship’s signaling lamp. Captain Williamson also invented absurdities such as a way to play golf on the ceiling using balloons. He finally left the sea to set up a ship fitting company in Newport News, where, in 1908, he built an underwater chamber for inspecting ships without sending down a diver. A riveted steel observation cylinder itself wasn’t anything new, but Williamson had come up with a system of interlocking metal sleeves with canvas gussets fitted to a hole in the top of the chamber that extended up to the surface. The tube was 3 feet in diameter, big enough for a man to slide through while hanging on to rungs inside, and strong enough to withstand the pressure down to 60 feet. Captain Williamson worked on what he called his “hole in the sea” for a decade, but it never really caught on.
In 1913, two years after Cousteau was born, Williamson’s sons, George and Ernie, fell under the spell of Thomas Edison’s much more promising invention, the motion picture camera. They had also come across a magazine story about underwater artist Zahr Pritchard, who had built a bunker in the steep bank of his pond with a window through which he could observe beneath the surface. The next time the Williamson brothers were at home in Norfolk, they persuaded their father to drag out the hole in the sea, loaded it on a barge, and took it out into Hampton Roads at the mouth of the Elizabeth River. They didn’t have a movie camera—almost no one did—but they crouched in their father’s observation chamber with a still camera and took pictures of seaweed, pilings, and fish. With Ernie inside, George swam down to the window and held up a copy of Scientific American for a photograph. They sent the picture and their account of using the observation tube to the magazine, which published them the following month.
The Williamsons had no idea that they weren’t the first men to take photographs underwater. In 1893, Louis Boutan, a French zoologist, had lowered a view camera sealed with wax and mounted in a 400-pound frame into the Mediterranean Sea off Banyuls-sur-Mer to take a ten-minute exposure of himself standing in a diving suit. Boutan took hundreds more photographs, experimented with magnesium powder lighting, and wrote La photographie sous marin to document his work. A few years later, American Simon Lake took photographs from inside his pioneer submarine, Argonaut.
For the Williamson brothers, though, a few snapshots were just the first step in their plan to make movies underwater. In 1913, armed with the photographs taken from their father’s hole-in-the-water, they raised enough money to launch the Submarine Film Corporation to build and test a similar device for filming beneath the sea. Investors were charmed by their enthusiasm, the enormous publicity surrounding Edison’s motion picture camera, and the mystery of the ocean. In a year the Williamsons had a new observation tube and chamber they named the Photosphere. They also bought a French-made Eclair camera, a 40-pound contraption of brass, iron, and steel with precision gears, a variable shutter, and a hand crank to roll film past the lens at sixteen to twenty-four frames per second. On February 21, 1914, Ernie and George loaded their camera, film, and the Photosphere aboard a steamer bound from Norfolk to the Bahamas.
Two months later, the Williamson brothers were on their way back to New York with 20,000 feet of exposed movie film. They had shot coral reefs, fish, staged scenes in which one of them in a diving suit walked around on the bottom discovering “treasure,” and the bubbly plunges of local boys leaping from a dock. Their tour de force was a showdown between a diver and a shark, set up by weighing down the carcass of a horse to attract the sharks. The movie they eventually released from their first expedition was Terrors of the Deep, which critics hailed as “something never viewed before by mankind.” The Williamson brothers were catapulted even further into moviemaking history when they joined Laemmle’s Universal Pictures to produce 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. On October 9, 1916, the first scripted, eight-reel, underwater epic opened in Chicago to rave reviews. The Williamson brothers, Universal, and their investors made a small fortune.
“If the rest of the picture were discarded,” wrote one critic, “the undersea scenes alone would be worth three times the price of admission.”
Cousteau had been in awe of the Williamsons’ work since seeing their film in Paris. Learning that they had made a fortune shooting movies underwater added to his inspiration.
In the spring of 1942, Cousteau found a 35 mm Kinamo camera in a Marseille junk shop, a ten-year-old relic with no lens. He bought it for $25. Leon Veche, the gunsmith who had become the fourth member of Les Mousquemers, built a waterproof metal housing for the big camera, fitting rubber seals around the winder, focusing lever, and trigger, and an optical-quality pane of glass through which to aim and shoot. A Hungarian refugee living in Sanary, Papa Heinic, who had been drawn to the energetic haven among Cousteau and his friends, ground a new lens for the Kinamo. The camera and housing was an ingenious contraption, the only one of its kind in the world. With it Cousteau could shoot the largest-size film available and produce the sharpest images of the world beneath the sea that had ever been seen.
The problem was that in Vichy France, all the 35 mm movie film was being requisitioned by the Germans for their gun cameras, airplane reconnaissance, and combat cinematographers. Cousteau scoured photography shops from Marseille to Nice with no luck, until he realized that he didn’t need movie film. Any 35 mm film would work, and there was plenty of black-and-white Leica still film around. Cousteau bought every roll he could find. At home, he and Simone huddled under blankets, laughing like children in a nursery hideout as they spliced the thirty-six-frame strips into 50-foot reels that would give him three minutes of shooting time underwater. “I don’t think anyone with common sense would do it,” Cousteau said of his film manufacturing under the covers. “It was absolutely crazy.”
“Absolutely crazy” became Cousteau’s code for off-the-cuff inventions that worked. His enthusiasm for outcomes that only he could envision seduced everyone into helping him even when they had no idea how what they were doing fit into the grand plan. Leon Veche built the camera housing to withstand pressure down to 60 feet, about as far as a free diver can descend and still have time to focus, shoot, and surface on a single breath of air. He made the seals for the winder, focusing lever, and trigger from the design for a device known as a stuffing box, through which a boat’s propeller shaft passed. Each seal on the camera was a hollow, threaded, male-to-female fitting that could be tightened to squeeze tarred jute around the extension shafts that controlled the winder and the focusing lever. If the fittings were too tight, the shaft and lever would not turn; too loose and water would pour into the housing, fouling the camera’s clockwork machinery and possibly cracking Heinic’s fine lens. Veche tested it with the camera replaced by half a brick and dummy controls.
After two weeks of diving with the brick, the housing was staying dry more often than not. Les Mousquemers, Simone, Jean-Michel, and Philippe trooped down to the sea to test it with the Kinamo inside. The camera and housing weighed 20 pounds out of the water. It was slung on a wooden shoulder brace about 3 feet long, which would also be used to line up a shot as though it were a speargun stock. Cousteau, Dumas, Tailliez, Veche, and Simone stood waist-deep in the water while Cousteau held the camera 2 feet down and squeezed the trigger. The first 35 mm underwater film ever shot captured a blurry image of the dark talus a few yards offshore and a pair of feet. When they opened the housing on the beach, the inside was dry. For the rest of the day, Cousteau dove deeper and deeper, triggering a few seconds of film at each level, working the controls to test the seals under pressure, and learning how to manage the bulk of the contraption underwater while holding his breath. Eventually, he reached about 60 feet. The housing held.
Three days later, one of the seals leaked and Cousteau surfaced with a housing full of water and a disaster inside. Back at the hou
se, Veche plunged the camera into freshwater, explaining that the minerals in salt water would do much more damage and the rinse would help. For two days, the gears, ratchets, springs, levers, and the rest of the guts of the Kinamo were spread out on a plank and painstakingly cleaned. When Veche reassembled the camera, it whirred like nothing had happened. From then on, many evenings included dismantling, cleaning, and reassembling the camera, whose inner workings became as familiar to Les Mousquemers as those of their military sidearms. On other evenings, after successful dives, Cousteau developed the film and marveled at what they were doing.
Once Cousteau was confident that his equipment was more or less reliable, and that he could fix it if it failed, his theatrical instincts took over. He was ready to make an underwater movie. The story would not be one of the man-woman-villain farces that Cousteau enjoyed filming as a teenager. It would be a never-before-seen underwater adventure with a simple plot: A skin-diving hunter descends into the sea in mask, fins, and snorkel, armed with a speargun. In a wonderworld of fish and gorgeous submarine light, he glides gracefully through the water in search of prey. He fires, he misses. He fires again, he misses. He fires a third time, hits a big fish just behind the gills, and wrestles his catch to the surface. It was classic storytelling. Cousteau had never studied Henry James, but the great writer’s formula for captivating an audience was instinctive to him: invent a hero, put him up in a tree, throw rocks at him, and get him down again.
