10

Squalus

Sculpin’s sixth patrol to the island fortress of Truk came without the benefit of Lockwood’s improved torpedoes, but it mattered little. Although coral formations around the island created channels for incoming and outgoing ships, there were too many openings and the Japanese seemingly used them all. Chappell patrolled somewhat far from the island in the hope that he might be able to close on at least one of the ships or convoys, but he was unable to do so and had a disappointing patrol before taking the boat to Hawaii.

Before their final departure from Australia, the men took full advantage of everything Brisbane had to offer. Having gone on five patrols already, a certain fatalism set in among some of the sailors who had been in the war from the beginning. Judging by friends who had gone on patrol and never returned, they figured that you could probably rely on completing about five patrols, but beyond that your chances of surviving seemed to decline rapidly. Being young and mostly unmarried, they spent money and drank like, well, sailors on liberty.

First there was a question of booze. When the sailors finished drinking everything in Fremantle, Brisbane, and some of the smaller towns set up for R&R, some crews resorted to Prohibition-era solutions by making wine out of Welch’s grape juice. When fermentation didn’t finish before they went back on patrol, they sometimes brought the stuff onto the boat. Another solution was the ethanol alcohol fuel for the torpedoes, also known as torpedo juice or pink lady. It contained a noxious castor oil–like substance with powerful purgative effects. Naturally being tinkerers, some submariners set up stills in their hotel bathtubs to purify the alcohol, and on at least a couple of occasions the stills threatened to explode.

Since most of the men of fighting age had left Brisbane, there was no shortage of women. Love is unpredictable at any time, but in the context of war it often leads to wild, improbable romances. These were anything but “good old days,” and caught up in the events so far beyond their control—a worldwide conflagration of such proportion it would make anyone feel small—the young men and women living through them sought comfort wherever they could despite, or perhaps because of, the mutability of their lives. Several men on the Sculpin made proposals to Australian women. As Mendenhall remarked, he thought some of the proposals might even be in earnest. Gunner’s Mate Bob Wyatt, whom they nicknamed “Wyatt Earp,” was a young rascal who upheld the finest traditions of the Navy. His first order of business in Brisbane was to go to the drugstore to buy several engagement rings. Since having multiple fiancées is not technically bigamy, he had little to fear but outraged fathers and a trail of broken hearts. Another Sculpin sailor learned a novel form of prophylaxis early on in his career. An avuncular older sailor counseled him to carry a bottle of whiskey around with him wherever he went. If he got lucky, he could pour the booze over his penis to ward away a dose of the clap (gonorrhea), herpes, or syphilis. If he didn’t get lucky, he could ply a girl with the whiskey in the hope that he might.

Few are aware of it these days, but during World War II, prostitution practically had its own bureau within the War Department. Millions of men went through Hawaii on their way to the war, or on their way back home. Hotel Street in Honolulu had at least a dozen brothels where military men of all stripes literally lined up on the stairs, out the door, and into the street, where they were monitored by the shore patrol and military police. Some brothels even had their own peculiar architecture for the business: a bathroom with two doors leading to separate bedrooms. The price was three bucks for three minutes, after which was a quick cleanup in the bathroom, then out the other door to another customer.

Drinking and carousing was not for everybody, however. After being trained by his division commander John Cromwell, young quartermaster Bill Cooper came on the Sculpin. Tongue-in-cheek, Cooper would describe himself as a Tennessee hillbilly, but he was sharp as a tack and a keen observer of everything that happened on the Sculpin. Cooper had fatalistic thoughts similar to those of many of the other submariners about his chances for survival, but rather than living it up, he simply accepted the likelihood that he would die in a submarine and decided to become a Christian and leave it in God’s hands. Though never tempted to emulate his crewmates’ bawdyhouse antics, neither could he condemn them. They were all so young, so recently separated from their boyish world of comic book heroes and baseball icons. Separated from home and everything they knew, in private moments they suffered a desperate loneliness and the real possibility of dying under horrible circumstances, far away from everyone they loved. Some of them were beginning to realize that the modern submarine warfare they were conducting was far removed from the heroic, romanticized Hollywood images they’d grown up seeing and believing. When the water closed in around a submarine for the last time, it was just pure death. If their number came up, they wanted to have enjoyed as much of life with their allotment of time, whatever that may be.

For the officers there was the additional burden of command, writing reports, and wangling whatever they could for the benefit of the boat. In their off-hours they played cards at the Officers Club with their counterparts from other subs, commiserating about lousy torpedoes, grief from their superiors, and bad news from home. For the officers of the Sculpin these bull sessions often included the officers of her sister ship, the Sailfish. They were in the same division and had been chasing each other across the Pacific, often berthing on opposite sides of the same dock. In an entry in Mendenhall’s war diary, he mentions one such meeting he had with a classmate, Benjamin Jarvis, the torpedo and gunnery officer on the Sailfish. Jarvis had recently graduated from the sub school in New London, and as Mendenhall put it, “I helped him with some of his questions and offered solutions we had reached in Sculpin.” Just how that would play into a future tragedy remained to be seen; at that time either man would know only of the tragedy that had bound the two ships together years earlier. The curious story of how the ships’ histories had begun to intertwine included the legendary Charles “Swede” Momsen.

Momsen’s involvement with the submarine force began long before he solved Lockwood’s torpedo problems and became the Pacific Fleet’s first wolf pack commodore. He was haunted by the deaths of submariners, and every technical innovation he ever devised was brought about by the horrors of dying in a submarine. Momsen was the skipper of the USS S-1 when the USS S-51 went down off the East Coast near Block Island in 1925, and was among the first on the scene. A liner, the City of Rome, had accidentally rammed the S-51 in the fog after the submarine had surfaced. When Momsen arrived there was no sign of the sub except an oil slick and telltale bubbles. He tried to communicate with the boat, but received no reply, and at that time there were no means for him to rescue the men below, or for them to do anything for themselves. Momsen waited, horrified and helpless, as time crept long past when there was any possibility of survivors. A World War I–era lightship, the USS Falcon, took part in the salvaging operations, and after raising the S-51 they discovered evidence that the men had made a frantic attempt to get out as the ship sank. One of Momsen’s officer friends had nearly rubbed the skin off his hands trying to open one of the hatches in a desperate attempt to get out, but at the depth that the S-51 had plunged, the pressure of the water pressed against the hatch so hard that he would never have been able to get it open. It distressed Momsen to think of his friend’s last waking moments, and he racked his brains to devise a way to save the sailors of sunken submarines.

Momsen submitted an idea to use a diving bell as a rescue chamber to the Bureau of Construction and Repair. A diving bell is a vessel with an opening on the bottom that can be lowered into the sea. As the bell gets deeper, the water pressure pushes against the air inside the bell, decreasing the volume of air inside. Divers inside the bell could increase the amount of air inside, thereby equalizing the pressure of the surrounding sea, and pushing it back out the bottom opening. To lower the bell, the divers allowed water to come in. To raise it to the surface, they pushed water out by bleeding air into the bell—much like a submarine’s ballast tank. Momsen’s design called for a rubber gasket along the bottom of the diving bell to create a seal between the bell and a smooth collar around a submarine’s escape hatch. The young Momsen foolishly followed protocol and submitted the design to the proper channels in the Navy’s constipated bureaucracy of the time, and predictably, the Navy did absolutely nothing with it. Oddly, the Bureau of Personnel then transferred Momsen to the very unit charged with investigating unsolicited technological suggestions such as his diving bell rescue chamber. After sifting through his predecessor’s paperwork, he found his submission at the bottom of the pile, untouched. Despite fervent proselytizing about his idea, it hit the intransigent, hidebound staffies with a resounding splat. Momsen decided to let it rest, and after doing so, another submarine, the S-4, went down off Cape Cod.

This time the ships above were able to confirm that there were six survivors, as they tapped out messages against the stricken sub’s hull. For the press, in an age where the nascent titan of radio communications was revolutionizing journalism much like the Internet did years later, the sinking offered the irresistible story line of survival against the odds and possible rescue. But the Navy knew the odds, and just as with the S-51, time ran out for the six unfortunate souls sealed in the iron coffin of the USS S-4. Their last testament before succumbing to carbon dioxide poisoning was the words Please hurry.

The terrible spectacle caught the Navy off guard. Each submarine sinking was becoming a national sensation that led to questions about the advisability of even having submarines in the U.S. Navy. Momsen went back to the drawing board, and once at his new billet, the Submarine Safety Test Unit, he conceived an ingenious device that the press would come to call the “Momsen lung.” It would revolutionize submarine safety and become standard equipment not only in U.S. submarines but in submarine navies throughout the world.

The lung was a breathing apparatus with a mouthpiece leading to a tube with two valves. Exhaling opened one valve to admit the air into a rubber chamber that resembled a hot-water bottle. The chamber contained soda lime, a substance that scrubbed the exhaled air of CO₂. When the diver inhaled, another valve opened, admitting the scrubbed air back into the diver’s lungs. Charged with an initial amount of oxygen, the device would keep a submariner breathing and alive long enough to ascend to the surface. But great depths had physiological effects that Momsen had to take into account in order for submariners to escape safely.

At greater depths, water pressure will push against a volume of air; conversely, when that same amount of air reaches shallower depths and correspondingly lower water pressure, the same amount of air expands. For example, if you take a deep breath of pressurized air at a depth of 200 feet, then move to the surface, that breath of air at the surface could expand to be two breathfuls, causing the lungs to become overextended. Men holding a single breath of pressurized air at a mere depth of eighteen feet have died on the surface. So Momsen introduced another valve in the Momsen lung that would let excess air pressure out of the lung as the diver ascended, thus avoiding the possibility of bursting lungs and pulmonary embolisms.

A similar principle was at work inside the divers’ bodies in an excruciating phenomenon known as the bends. The lungs introduce tiny air molecules into the bloodstream by forcing them into solution, much like carbon dioxide bubbles under pressure in a bottle of soda pop. Oxygen and nitrogen molecules—the main components of ordinary air—are everywhere in the body’s tissues, but when a diver’s body is submerged in deep water, the gas molecules in the tissues are under pressure. If a diver surfaces too fast, the pressure keeping them that size suddenly leaves, and the molecules come out of solution. The effect is like taking the cap off the soda bottle, and the gas molecules in the body tissues now effervesce. Unable to absorb the volume of bubbles, the body fills with gas that can’t escape, and in extreme cases turns into a horrible, bloated, fizzing balloon. Unless a diver can be quickly repressurized in a barometric pressure chamber, they suffer a sudden, painful death as blood vessels burst all over the body but especially in the brain, heart, and lungs. Momsen had heard of divers surfacing too quickly and bloating at the surface, and had previously chalked it up as an old sailors’ tale, but on further reflection he incorporated this into his escape regime. As he tested his lung at greater depths, he rigged an escape line with markers at certain depths. The diver would have to stop at each marker for a certain amount of time to allow the body to adjust to the new depth, thus avoiding the bends.

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.