“When I first arrived in New London,” recalled Ed Keller, “I asked the guard where the barracks was. ‘Oh, you’re going to Spritz’s navy,’ he said with a grin, pointing to a building on the hillside. So I put my seabag on my back and went uphill to the barracks where I saw a chief torpedoman standing on the porch and I says to him, ‘Where is Spritz’s navy?’ And he says, ‘It’s right here! Your hat is dirty. Your shoes are not shined. You’re restricted for two days!!’”
The future Sculpin mate had come face to face with Chief Torpedoman Charles Spritz, the submarine navy’s version of the marine master sergeant.
With a craggy scowl and guttural bellow one veteran described as ten octaves above a bullhorn, Spritz oozed authority. He stood six feet, two inches tall in impeccably crisp Navy blues with golden hash marks running the length of one sleeve. The emblems of the master sea diver, the torpedoman, and the crow of the chief petty officer (CPO) stood out plainly. His squarish face was accented by a large Roman nose, a cleft chin, and a huge mouth framing prominent, uneven teeth. Most noticeable were his coal-like eyes that bored holes in every enlistee. He was a man who seldom left the school and rarely fraternized. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. He never married, although some said he once loved a British nurse who was killed during the V-2 bombing of London in World War II. Many were convinced that old Charlie had gone a little crazy after a deepsea diving accident in the 1930s. If one thing could be said with certainty about him, however, it was that he was the most despised person at the school, and perhaps in the entire underseas navy. To this former Bronx policeman the Navy entrusted an estimated 20,000 seamen who came to New London to become submarine sailors in the 1930s and 1940s.
“You men may have passed some tests wherever you come from,” he snapped on the day of arrival. “But that don’t mean you’re going to make it here. You’re just getting started.”
Spritz issued a precise manifesto of expectations: Razor-sharp grooming in regulation clothing at all times. Daily work details. No smoking or talking while on assignment. Bunks made and personal effects stowed properly every morning. No standing, walking, sitting, or lying on the lawns anywhere on the base. Liberty one day each week, contingent on meeting Spritz’s meticulous inspections and having no infractions on record.
In the 12 weeks the students spent at the base, Spritz blared axioms until they were fixed in the subconscious: “Around here there’s only one daily prayer. You’ll commit it to memory: ‘O Lord, help us to keep our big mouths shut until we know what we are talking about!’ . . . There is room for anything on a submarine—except a mistake! . . . Without teamwork, a submarine is no more than a bastard cousin to a foundering whale!”
From the beginning, the men came to loath Spritz, the omnipresent perfectionist. He had spies everywhere, some of whom brutalized students who got out of line. A yeoman toting a clipboard inevitably followed behind Spritz, noting infractions.
Spritz left the base once a month to do his banking and visit a relative. “He was afraid to go ashore because he thought someone would kill him. He was universally hated. The hatred was so widespread it was dangerous. The way he ran that place was like a concentration camp,” said Bryson, who was an escape training instructor during the war. “Charlie always came to the tank parties. He felt safe there.”
The reason for the hostility, said Bryson, was the constant haranguing the students would take and the punishment dealt out to those who violated the rules. “You have to remember that most of the men had already been in the Navy for some time. It was like going back to boot camp. They weren’t going to take it.”
Yet, they really had no choice. For a minor violation, said Keller, “you would have to take all the chairs out of one building and take them to another on a Monday and then line them up. Then on Wednesday, you would take them back. Transferring chairs was the normal punishment.” But for more serious offenses, there was loss of liberty and extra duty. That meant extra work details after hours plus overnight confinement to the “Blue Room,” an isolated barracks where every lightbulb inside was painted blue. In the supernatural glow, a seaman had to answer roll call every hour on the hour throughout the night and then return to his normal barracks at 0500 for his workday.
Although most graduated from New London detesting Spritz, the teamwork he achieved was a major factor in the success of the boats in the days to come. Indeed, Keller said the experience “made me into somebody, a respectable man. He molded us into the discipline needed in the Navy.” Wrote another veteran after the war, “To be sure, he instilled fear in those he commanded, but only that fear of making a mistake that could cost not only your life but all the lives of your shipmates.”
Although Spritz governed the daily routines of the recruits, other CPOs—mostly 20-year veterans of deepsea diving and submarines—provided the instruction and the encouragement, working closely with the students. Each class was divided into diving sections of perhaps six to eight students. One petty officer was paired up with each section for the entire training program.
The first task was to determine who was physically and mentally fit for submarine duty. On arrival, each student was led by two instructors into a dark room built to look like the bridge of a submarine. Pinpoints of light overhead represented stars, as if the boat were cruising at night. The instructors then asked if the student could see anything. After a period of eye adjustment, most began to distinguish the vaguely gray outlines of ships. But some couldn’t, thereby becoming expendable.
By far the most physically demanding tests were in the submarine escape tower. After roll call in the first week, the students gathered in a room below the tower where a pressure chamber—a round, oversized barrel 20 feet long and 8 feet high—squatted on the floor. Painted gray and containing glass viewports, it was an imposing sight for the students lined up outside in swimsuits. An instructor opened the hatch and motioned the men inside, single-file, to two facing benches. He followed, squeezing between the men to the far end of the chamber while plopping a large pile of terrycloth robes on the floor next to him. Dogging the hatch, he faced the men grimly. “You’re going to get fifty pounds of pressure. That’s about three times the atmospheric pressure at sea level,” he said, his voice booming off the walls of the chamber. “If you ever have to make an escape from a submarine, you will face this kind of pressure. If you can take it, you’ll be all right for submarine work.
“As we start going down, remember to hold your nose with your left hand, and keep blowing. If you are suddenly in pain, raise your other hand as a signal to me. I’ll immediately stop increasing the pressure inside the tank, and if you’re in real trouble, you will be taken out of the tank. Okay, let’s go!”
With dry mouths, the students sat anxiously as the chief banged the wall to signal those outside that the test had begun. Opening a valve protruding from the wall, he unleashed compressed air, which entered the chamber with a sharp hiss. All eyes were fixed on a large pressure dial on the bulkhead above the instructor. Abruptly, the hissing stopped.
“We’re under two pounds of pressure per square inch,” the instructor noted. “Two pounds doesn’t sound like much. You probably don’t feel anything yet. But all of us together couldn’t open that hatch against two pounds. It equals about one ton.
“Don’t forget now. Hold your nose and blow to clear your ears. Try also swallowing to clear them,” he advised, knowing that those who couldn’t were out of the program.
The students apprehensively eyed the pressure dial as the instructor again opened the pressure line. Ten, fifteen, twenty pounds.
A thermometer inside the chamber moved past 100°. Glistening with sweat, the men swallowed hard, popping their ears. The heat made it difficult to breathe, increasing the psychological strain. The chief studied the group, looking for signs of panic and making mental notes on any who seemed unduly distressed.
Twenty-five pounds. Thirty. Thirty-five. Forty. Forty-five. Fifty. There the pressure gauge held steady amid a sizzling 130°. The pressure simulated that which the men might experience at more than 100 feet deep. Despite their earlier trepidations, all passed the five-minute “descent.” Quickly, the chief tripped a relief valve and the air rushed with a whoosh out of the room. Moisture in the air condensed, fogging the viewports. The men shivered in the sudden cold, grateful for the robes tossed to them. At ten pounds and again at five pounds, the pressure stabilized for a few minutes so the men could decompress to avoid the bends, the sometimes fatal scourge of deepsea divers.
The group exited the chamber greatly relieved. “We knew that if you could take that, it was no problem going through the [water-filled] tank,” said McLees. They now faced the last of the physical tests—an ascent from the bottom of the escape tower, known informally as “the water works.”
Since most of the men had been around water for a year or more in the Navy, there was at least a familiarity with diving. In addition, they had the reassurance of wearing Momsen lungs. Similar to inflatable, rubberized life vests, fitted around the neck and resting on the chest, the breathing devices were invented by then Lt. Cdr. Charles B. Momsen who was appalled at the loss of life in submarine accidents in which crews had no means of escape. Theoretically, the lungs enabled each person to exit a submarine from perhaps 200 feet deep and float to the surface. Each lung was inflated with oxygen before an ascent. A flexible tube ran from the lung, through a canister of carbon dioxide absorbent, to a mouthpiece. The chemical purified the air as a person breathed in and out through the mouthpiece. The key was not to panic, to rise slowly, and to stop at various stages to decompress to avoid the bends.
The students climbed the spiral staircase to the cupola at the top of the tower. There they entered a “roving bell,” a metal chamber attached to a chain hoist which was lowered into the tank, first to the 18-foot and then to the 50-foot level. The men made two practice ascents from each level. For Bryson, it was a wonderful experience. “I dove in and swam down to the 50-foot level right away. When I was a kid, I learned to swim across the Saluda River [in North Carolina] under the water before I could swim across on top. My father taught me how to swim and he was a good swimmer.”
At all times, the escape tank was manned by at least eight seasoned divers and instructors who worked in pairs. Most could hold their breath for several minutes at a time as they maneuvered around the tank. They worked out of air-filled vestibules on the sides of the win-dowless tank.
After the two uneventful shallow ascents, willing students returned to the ground by the stairs and entered the 100-foot ascent chamber, where the instructor-in-charge, a veteran deepsea diver, swung open a heavy watertight door. Instructors, mindful of two deaths in the tower in the early 1930s, realized this ascent posed the greatest risk. The group of students, the instructor, and an assistant ducked through the door into a lock built to look like the interior of a submarine. The chamber contained a hollow metal shaft that projected downward from the overhead, similar to a large stovepipe. Above this three-foot-wide “escape” pipe sat the tank’s entire 240,000 gallons of water, sealed from the lock by a hatch at the top of the pipe. The floor was already flooded to ankle depth. As the students sloshed around, the instructor swung shut the compartment door, dogging it with the turn of a wheel. Then he checked to make sure all was in order.
“I’m going to flood the lock now—slowly,” he announced, cracking a valve near the floor which released a stream of water. It rose steadily, bubbling up over the men’s ankles, calves, thighs, past their waists and chests, automatically coming to a stop just below their arm pits. The level was just above the lower lip of the escape pipe. “We’re under full pressure now,” noted the instructor. The air trapped in the overhead of the lock had been compressed to 44 pounds per square inch—exerting enough force to prevent any more water from leaking in. At the same time, the hatch at the top of the escape pipe opened to the tank.
At the officer’s direction, the students put on spring-loaded nose clips that would prevent them from accidentally breathing in water during their ascents. They also inserted the mouthpieces of their Momsen lungs. Then each ducked briefly underwater to test the devices. “Now charge up!” ordered the instructor, motioning to an air flask containing oxygen on the overhead above the men. Each in turn attached his lung to the flask and inflated the bag about half full.
Meanwhile, the instructor’s assistant pulled a lever that released a yellow buoy from the top of the lock. This escape buoy shot rapidly to the surface of the tank, trailing behind an ascent rope tied to an eyebolt on the chamber. The students were told to wrap their feet around the line to keep themselves upright while using their hands as a brake to control the ascent. The Momsen lung tended to buoy the men too rapidly to the surface, and rising too quickly could cause the air in their bodies to expand, potentially bursting blood vessels in their lungs. Cupping his hands around the line, each student would float up until he reached a series of knots near the surface. At each knot, he was to breathe in and out of the Momsen lung while counting to ten slowly to decompress the air in his body. The students would be staged so that preferably none would ram the other on the way up. A tug of the rope at the bottom signaled those on the surface when each was coming up. Simultaneously, instructors at various levels and on the surface watched the progress of the ascent.
Assured that all was well, the instructors in the lock asked for a show of hands on who would like to go first. One by one, each student dropped below water and slid through the escape pipe. The first one out could see what appeared to be the deck of a stranded submarine below him. Gripping the line lightly between his legs and hands, and leaning out away from it, he began his ascent, concentrating on breathing slowly in and out of his Momsen. A small circle of greenish light illuminated the surface far above. Light also filtered into the tank from the illuminated vestibules on the sides of the tank and the roving bell. He could make out the caricatures of two mermaids painted on the sides of the tank. Instructors, gliding above and below him, gave the impression of flying, arms waving as they motioned to the students coming up the line. Reaching the first decompression knot at the 30-foot level, he stopped, counting slowly to ten, before moving on to the next, repeating the procedure. From one of the air-filled bells on the side of the tank, one instructor noticed a student gripping the line too tightly. In goggles and a nose clip, he swam over to set him right. After several minutes, the first student broke surface at the yellow buoy. Slipping off his nose clip and shutting the valves on his Momsen, he swam to the edge of the tank and stepped out onto a platform ringing the tank. From the warm cupola, he looked down triumphantly from the large windows to the submarine base, miniaturized by the height.
As the last student made it to the top without incident, there was a sense of general euphoria, because they knew they had made a simulated escape from a submarine. The experience gave them confidence they could make such an ascent at sea if needed—a factor that would come into play for McLees and Bryson a year later on the sunken Squalus.
For the next 11 weeks, the students were enmeshed in submarine training. For days, they went back and forth to classes while casting furtive glances to the submarines coming and going on the river. “I would think to myself, ‘Tomorrow I am going to be on one of them.’ And then when the day arrived, the hair on the back of my head stood up going aboard,” recalled Keller.
The students concentrated on learning all aspects of the boats. It was a process that would turn the men into what was needed: electrician’s mates, machinist’s mates, torpedomen, radiomen, signalmen, cooks, gunner’s mates, yeomen, and seamen. The regimen included in-depth study of submarine mechanisms, practice in simulators, and dives in training boats once a week in Long Island Sound. “There was a tremendous number of training devices,” recalled Keller. “One room was exactly like the control room of a submarine. It was hooked up electrically to hydraulics which caused the room to move. You make one wrong move, and it tilted out of control. You had the illusion of the boat turning in the water. There was also an engine room for training. Bells would ring. A speed indicator would show the propellers turning. It was all very realistic.”
A typical day consisted of four hours of classroom study in the morning, and four hours of instruction on the boats in the afternoon. Lectures and after-hours study assignments kept lights burning into the evening. The recruits were expected to devour such 200-page tomes as Submarine, Diesel Engines, Electricity, Submarine Tactical Instructions, Storage Batteries, and Torpedoes. In school laboratories, every man spent exhaustive hours tearing down and putting together practically every item making up a submarine. Diesel engines were dismantled and rebuilt. Motors and generators were rewound. Acid storage battery cells, each as tall as a man and used for underwater propulsion, were charged and discharged, and were observed emitting deadly chlorine gas if drenched by water—a constant concern on the boats. Torpedoes were taken apart, studied, and then put back together.
Every Monday the men took written tests; any who failed two exams were returned quietly to the surface fleet. “Every Monday morning, someone would be missing,” said Keller. “You’d be told he went to a minesweeper, he went to a destroyer.”
On the school’s fleet of antiquated “O” and “R” boats from World War I, the students were divided into small groups for 10-minute dives. Under the watchful eyes of the regular crew, they experienced the deafening clatter and heat of the two diesel engines in each boat. They jumped at the explosive “ah-ooo-gah” of the Klaxon alarm just before diving, and were a bit edgy as crewmen cranked open huge Kingston valves to flood ballast tanks to start the boat down. They observed machinist’s mates shutting down the noisy, air-breathing diesels while switching over to quiet motors, powered by the huge batteries at the bottom of the hull which accounted for nearly a fifth of each boat’s weight. And they gathered around the helmsmen who stood before two oversized steering wheels at midships which controlled the stern and bow diving planes, giant mechanical wings deployed underwater to move the submarine up and down in the sea.
As the weeks rolled by, the groups practiced all shipboard operations, slowly taking control of the vessels. “Each group would have a number,” said Keller. “Number 4, for instance, might be for the group learning to handle the bow planes of the sub. Number 5, the stern planes. Number 6, the helm. They had you rotating duties continuously. A subman, in order to qualify, had to know the submarine from one end to the other. Theoretically, every man aboard has to be able to do another man’s job. You had to be able to start the engines in case chlorine gas from the batteries killed the engine crew, for instance.”
In the end, Bryson graduated from diesel school, later to become a machinist’s mate; McLees and later Keller became electrician’s mates.
In September 1938, while Bryson was a student, one of the greatest storms to hit New England passed over New London. It had been nearly 70 years since the last big storm, so residents were completely unprepared. In fact, no warnings at all were issued north of New York City about a hurricane bearing up the East Coast on September 21. Two hundred miles off Long Island, it unexpectedly veered inland, pushing 18-foot breakers at the coast. Swimmers, seeking safety on 12-foot dunes, were swept away. Sustained winds of 120 MPH snapped telephone poles, toppled church steeples, and downed electric lines. Mammoth waves pounded the Connecticut shoreline, setting off seismographs as far away as California. Entire fishing fleets were lost. Trains were blown off their tracks. Houses were crushed and people killed by flying glass, bricks, and lumber. From the damage, meteorologists estimated wind velocity reached 250 MPH in some areas. Before the day was out, more than 700 people had perished throughout New England and 1,500 were injured.
In the middle of the storm, Bryson was about to take a well-earned liberty with a buddy. “I had a Ford bought for $45 in Hartford. The whole lot where the cars were parked at the end of the base was flooded. So my buddy and I devised a way to float it out of the lot. Then we had to get it started. So we pushed it up to the base behind the movie theater. Suddenly, a boxcar broke loose and ran down into the river, crashing through barriers where we had just been. Then the roof of the theater blew off. But we finally started the car and drove to the gate. There a marine told us to park the car and get in a truck. ‘Not us,’ we said. ‘We’re going on liberty.’ To which he said, ‘Not you?! You’re on fire party. Liberty is canceled!!’”
New London was on fire. Flames stretched from a coal company on the riverfront to the downtown sector. Electricity was out and looters were having a field day. Throughout the night, men from the submarine school battled the blaze, finally bringing it under control by early dawn. For the next few weeks, as Bryson awaited orders following graduation, he was part of the relief effort in beachfront areas of New London. “No one had flood insurance back then. So the skipper of the base sent us sailors down there to do the dirty work—cutting up fallen trees, carrying out debris, and chlorinating cellars.”
In the days to come, Bryson was attached to school submarine R-4 where he saw brief duty. Meanwhile, the Navy began casting about for men to form the crews of huge, ultramodern submarines it was building in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The boats were like no others, capable of operating in wartime off the Japanese coast from U.S. bases—if it came to that. Bryson, McLees, and other carefully chosen submariners from throughout the fleet—a mix of older veterans and top recruits—were asked to report to Kittery, Maine, in the fall of 1938. There, on the Piscataqua River, the nearly completed sister ships Squalus and Sculpin awaited them.