Within days of deliverance off the Isles of Shoals, successive submarine tragedies claimed 329 lives. In the Bungo Channel of southeast Japan, eighty-one perished aboard the Japanese 1-63. Sixty-three died on the French boat Phenix in a practice dive off Indochina. And, on June 1—only six days after the Squalus rescue—the new British sub HMS Thetis went down during a practice dive in Liverpool Bay. Although the boat was 160 feet deep by the bow, its after hatch was only a few feet below surface. Nonetheless, ninety-nine men had no means of escape and suffocated. Scorn was heaped on the British navy for being unable to reach the trapped men. Many felt the admiralty could have saved the men had it only copied the McCann Rescue Chamber. One Falcon diver agreed. “They could have had them. It’s never been a secret.”
Now, with the Squalus as a shining example of what could be done to save trapped submariners, new respect was found for the U.S. Navy. Newspapers trumpeted the amazing rescue. “A splendid page in the annals of the U.S. Navy,” said the Illustrated London News. “The American Navy has accomplished a feat of seamanship which deserves universal acclaim,” enthused Boerson Zeitung in submarine-conscious Nazi Germany. Similarly, the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung noted, “The achievements of the rescue crew in those tense hours will be counted among the most impressive peacetime accomplishments of the United States Navy.”
In the glow of their rescue, the survivors and Momsen’s divers were hailed as national heroes. For their unprecedented feat, rescue-bell operators Mihalowski, McDonald, Badders, and Orson L. Grandall (CB) were awarded Congressional Medals of Honor in elaborate ceremonies in Washington. At Little Boar’s Head near Portsmouth, famed conductor Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra staged a benefit concert. Merchants in the Kittery-Portsmouth area donated to the cause and forgave debts owed by the families of the deceased. Meanwhile, each of the survivors expressed determination to go back into submarines just as soon as possible. “Well,” said ship’s cook Isaacs to one reporter, “the safety record still looks impressive to me. It took something like a hundred thousand dives in our navy before we had our accident, and that’s a good enough record for me.”
But Naquin, who took command of the Squalus to accelerate his career, wondered whether he ever again would command a ship. Nothing could wreck a naval career more quickly than a ship you commanded, especially a new one, being sunk. The captain, like his crew, was certain a mechanical malfunction of the induction valve had doomed the Squalus. Over and over, he rehearsed the fatal dive in his mind, each time coming away with no sense of guilt. “I know that I reacted correctly. We all did,” he later said. But would the Navy’s court of inquiry agree? Or would human error be cited? Or was sabotage to blame as auto mogul Henry Ford conjectured, saying it was a plot by munitions makers to get America into the war in Europe?
Hearings got under way in Portsmouth on June 19 under Rear Adm. W. T. Tarrant. For a week, each of the thirty-three survivors appeared before investigators after filing a written report of the accident. Alfred G. Prien (MM2c) testified he closed the induction valve lever as soon as the engine rooms reported the diesel engines had shut down. He said the control board lights were all green, indicating the induction had closed. Doyle and Preble also testified that, yes, the Christmas Tree was definitely green. Pierce told of how he bled air into the boat to assure the induction was closed; a rise of the ship barometer proved the hull was airtight as the dive began. Why the high induction opened seconds later was inexplicable.
Naquin was on the stand for an entire day, describing in detail what happened on May 23. The induction must have been closed, he said, because the Squalus had passed the 50-foot mark before it began to flood. The captain accompanied the court to the Sculpin where he demonstrated the sequence he followed during his boat’s last dive. One hearing examiner focused on why the inboard induction valves were not closed prior to the dive. A survivor told of the laborious process of winding them shut with hand wheels, making it impossible to get them closed in time during a quick dive. The practice on the boat was to leave them open, relying on the high induction to seal off the ship. The court suspended the hearings to await the salvage of the boat, after which it intended to inspect the induction before issuing its findings.
For the Navy, the rescue was a much needed morale boost, particularly in view of the earlier S-4 and S-51 disasters, which earned the service so much wrath. The sinking of the Squalus did nothing to diminish the Navy’s enthusiasm for its fleet submarines. Within days of the rescue, bids were opened for three new submarines, nearly identical to SS-192. Simultaneously, the Sealion (SS-195) was launched at the Electric Boat Company in New London, and the War Department decided to try and refloat its $4.3-million investment lying on the floor of the Atlantic.
Efforts to raise the Squalus got under way immediately. Permanent descent lines for the salvage divers were dropped from the Falcon to the submarine. Officers in Portsmouth requisitioned all the pressure hoses, tools, spare parts, and other devices needed to bring the boat back to the surface unscathed. But the task of doing so from such depth was daunting. Aboard the Brooklyn at anchor near the Falcon and Sculpin, Capt. Richard S. Edwards, senior aide for the salvage unit, explained:
“We hope to drag the Squalus under water, using pontoons, until she grounds herself stern first in about 160 feet of water some two miles nearer Portsmouth. Four pontoons will be suspended over the stern, attached to chains under the hull, and two pontoons will be placed over the bow. These pontoons will be blown with compressed air, and fuel and ballast tanks inside the Squalus will be blown. The submarine will then be lifted partially off the bottom as the pontoons seek the surface.
“It is not going to be an easy job, or a simple one. We know that it would be dangerous to bring the Squalus up in a single lift at this depth. One end always surfaces first when a large submarine is being lifted from the bottom and if that happened in 240 feet, she might take such an angle that nearly all the air in the main ballast tanks would be spilled out and permit her to sink again, despite the pontoons.”
Edwards described how a series of tows would be used until the Squalus was in 100 feet of water. At that point, fifty hard-hat divers could work comfortably and the submarine would be brought to the surface and towed into Portsmouth by the Wandank. “That is the plan on paper,” he noted. “Remember our divers must work in cold water in a pressure that will crush a log into pulp. Above all, we must guard against permitting the submarine to rise too rapidly. It calls for plenty of hard work, not to mention our full share of luck.”
With the Squalus survivors as hose and line handlers on the Falcon, the plan was to have divers descend to the ocean floor alongside the boat, then fasten the chain slings around the hull. Doing that at the bow was no problem since it protruded off the ocean floor. But the stern was mired 18 feet into the Atlantic mud. It was clear the divers would have to tunnel under the hull. Momsen had hoped to use normal compressed air for the descents. But the first divers experienced delusions and dizzy spells. Forrest E. Smith (Blc) blacked out from nitrogen narcosis, a numbing of the mind caused by nitrogen in his bloodstream. At the surface, nitrogen—which makes up 80 percent of the atmosphere—is present in the human bloodstream at only very low concentrations. However, under extreme pressure such as the divers faced, the gas is squeezed to the point it freely enters the bloodstream along with life-sustaining oxygen. Once inside the body, the gas can cause hallucinations.
After Smith was pulled up from the bottom, Crandall was sent over the side. He too suffered from narcosis, calling out football signals from the hull of the submarine. A third diver mistook his air hose and life line for an obstructing cable and attempted to cut them with his knife. Both men were quickly yanked up to shallower depths to avert injury or death.
To Momsen, there was no alternative but try a new approach. “It was clearly indicated that we had little chance of success unless we used helium,” he later wrote. The experimental air developed at the Washington Navy Yard replaced nitrogen with helium. Simulated test dives proved the helium eliminated narcosis, even when divers descended to depths twice that of the Squalus. In fact, it made all the difference. The divers sent down to the Squalus suffered none of the mental aberrations of before. The only drawback was communication to the surface: Helium affected the vocal cords, making each diver sound like Donald Duck over the Falcon loudspeaker.
Day after day, Momsen’s team descended in rotations to the stern of the craft where, using a tunneling lance made of seven sections of pipe shaped to the contour of the hull, they blew pressurized water and air under the boat until the pipe emerged on the other side of the submarine, nearly a month after salvage work began. Three thin steel cables, like plumber’s snakes, were pushed through the pipe to create slings that would be used to pull three battleship chains under the stern between the hull and propeller shafts. Similarly, two chain slings were fastened under the bow near the diving planes. Finally, the five chains—each link weighing 75 pounds—encircled the submarine, and passed upward through a series of gigantic, submerged pontoons. More than a dozen—each made of steel and sheathed in protective wood, 14 feet in diameter and 32 feet long, with compartments that could be flooded or blown with air to control buoyancy—would be needed to lift the boat. The pontoons were clustered at various levels on the chains that led to the Falcon.
With the Sculpin used as a schooling boat on the surface, the divers worked in 20-minute shifts, attaching scores of air hoses to the pontoons and control valves on the deck of the Squalus. The work was difficult and exacting, carried out in the daytime when sunlight barely illuminated the ocean bottom. The divers’ courage and stamina were tested.
Chief Torpedoman W. H. Squire, one of the largest divers in the crew, overexerted during the tunneling. He lost consciousness while inflating his suit and passed through the normal 90-foot decompression without stopping. He bobbed to the surface with his suit blown to twice its size. The diver’s arms and legs were stretched straight out, and compressed air roared out of his helmet.
McDonald, who operated the fateful fourth rescue bell, dived overboard, fully clothed. Reaching Squire, he climbed atop the diver’s inflated suit where he shut off the air control value and then, with a knife, ripped through the canvas to deflate it. Simultaneously, a winch on the Falcon pulled the diving platform up underneath the unconscious diver. McDonald yanked the unconscious diver onto the platform and then rode with him as it was hoisted aboard ship. There, Squire’s helmet was yanked off, catching his nose and causing it to bleed. There was no time to delay as McDonald and others carried the prone body to the recompression chamber where two doctors and a pharmacist’s mate were waiting. “If they had not done that as quickly as they did,” said Bland who watched from the deck, “it would have been just a short time until his lungs would have expanded from the helium and probably killed him. McDonald was smart enough to know that when he jumped over the side.”
McDonald joined the three attendants inside the chamber as it recompressed to 190 feet deep. “When Squire regained consciousness,” said Bland who could see the scene through the chamber’s eyeports, “he was incoherent and became wild. It took all four men to restrain him. They had to humor him as if he was still on the dive.” At one point, Squire saw a telephone cord hanging down inside the chamber. Thinking it was a life-line to the surface, he threw the four men off of him and tried to climb up the cord. Exhausted, he finally fell back, still incoherent. Slowly, the four men coaxed the diver back to the “surface,” where his breathing eased and he realized he was in the recompression chamber. Looking at the faces staring in at him through the eyeports, he waved feebly and grinned, knowing the chamber and McDonald’s quick action had saved his life.
Through hundreds of other dives, few additional mishaps occurred. One diver had to go through recompression as a safeguard when he complained of stomach cramps caused by residual helium bubbles trapped in his bloodstream. Occasionally the divers got fouled in their lines, or had difficulty maneuvering the pontoons and attaching the many pneumatic hoses that would be needed to lift the boat. And there was always the disruption of summer squalls during which the Squalus survivors would have to disconnect the air hoses from the Falcon and attach buoys to the ends before throwing them overboard to keep them from snapping.
The salvagers made slow but methodical progress. Sighed Momsen, “You know, I think it must be the gnomes down there that are holding up the works. They don’t like to have us infringing in their domain.” To which Captain Edwards replied, “We’ve got to be more respectful of the gnomes.” The salvage unit picked up on Momsen’s vignette, the divers referring to “ga-nomies” each time difficulties were encountered.
Finally, on the morning of July 13, all was in readiness to raise the Squalus. The Navy had arranged for heavy media coverage, with photographers, motion-picture cameramen, and reporters stationed on vessels a safe distance from the Falcon. The weather was perfect, the ocean a glassy expanse as the Sculpin eased in alongside the Falcon so the air compressors of both vessels could be linked together to power the coming lift. From the air manifold on the bridge of the Falcon, more than two miles of air hose seemed like a pile of black spaghetti, falling overboard into the ocean.
From 0930 until 1450, the preliminary blow began to the pontoons and ballast tanks of the Squalus, producing a large circle of effervescent water foaming around the Falcon. Below, the submarine’s water-filled stern rose 80 feet off the ocean floor, buoyed by the stern pontoons, just as planned. However the boat’s cantilevering caused her nose to descend into the mud, becoming mired. The forward pontoons and fuel tanks of the sub were blown clear to try to bring the bow to the same level as the stern so that the tow could begin. For more than an hour, as winds picked up and the ocean became choppy, the blow continued without success; the mud would not relinquish its hold on the Squalus. The divers decided to blow the main ballast tank. “If that doesn’t break her nose out of the mud, nothing will,” said one.
White water began to boil furiously on the surface in a widening circle as air from the Falcon poured down into the largest tank of the submarine. Divers, reporters, and survivors stared, mesmerized, wondering what would happen next. “There was a tremendous roaring of air coming up. The water was just boiling from the air. Then the pontoons started coming up. It was frightening,” recalled McLees. “The water was boiling and bubbling and we just knew something was going wrong.”
Admiral Cole on the bridge of the Falcon cupped his hands over his mouth in shock as geysers of water shot 30 feet into the air from pontoons popping to the surface unexpectedly. The hissing sound of compressed air split the atmosphere. Clouds of spray spewed above the commotion. And then, the black bow of the Squalus lunged vertically from the surf, out of control, like a great, wounded creature of the deep. At a 60-degree angle, she hung there, 30 feet above the surface, water cascading from her forward torpedo tubes and “192” clearly visible on her bow. She seemed alive, trying to shake cables tethering her to pontoons that bobbed wildly about her. Then she slid backwards and disappeared. “The boat came up so fast and then went back down so fast, we didn’t know what to think. We were stunned,” McLees said.
The carefully rigged cradle to the Squalus now was in shambles as the submarine plunged back to the ocean bottom. Hoses aboard the Falcon uncoiled in a frenzy. Pontoons on the surface shook violently from the compressed air inside them. Crewmen with axes chopped the air lines on the Falcon as divers in small surf boats risked their lives to chase the pontoons and climb aboard to close the valves to keep them from sinking. All the while they bucked in the sea, one flipping on the top of another, propelled by the air venting from them. Miraculously, none of the divers was injured, although one pontoon was lost.
That night, as a storm raged overhead, despondence gripped the men aboard the Falcon. Forty-five days of hard work had come to naught. In Portsmouth, when the news arrived, Squalus survivor Lieutenant Nichols, tears in his eyes, told Booth, the boat’s radioman, “The bow got away from them.” For the next few days, the Falcon crew sorted out the ship’s 13,600 feet of tangled air hose. During the cleanup, a wire rope from the Falcon to the Squalus slipped off a roller and slashed out across deck. Momsen and others ducked just in time. But Lloyd E. Anderson (GMlc) was struck in the abdomen and had to be rushed to shore for emergency treatment.
As the days stretched into weeks, the salvage unit finally rerigged the pontoons and air hoses to the Squalus, this time with a sixth battleship chain slung around the bow. On August 12, reporters and photographers again were ferried to the site where conditions were ideal. The lift proceeded perfectly to the cheers of the salvage crew. The boat hung from the pontoons on an even keel 80 feet above the Atlantic floor and 160 feet below the surface.
The Wandank got under way, towing the sub—stern first—to the intended grounding area two miles closer to shore. The ship used a path mapped out earlier by the Sculpin which charted the ocean floor all the way back to Portsmouth. Naquin and the Squalus’s quartermaster took bearings every two minutes from the Falcon, which trailed overhead, her many air hoses still attached to the Squalus. Unexpectedly, the submarine grounded a bit short of its destination due to an unmarked pinnacle 10 feet higher than the intended grounding depth.
The following day, a summer storm stymied divers from going down to prepare the Squalus for the third lift. President Roosevelt, on a vacation cruise aboard the cruiser Tuscaloosa (CA-37), set anchor near the Falcon. The president was anxious to visit the 400 men of the salvage crew but was unable to do so because of the rough surf. Instead, Cole and a small party of officers made the trip over to the cruiser. Later, as the Tuscaloosa pulled away, Roosevelt radioed congratulations to the men: “Am greatly pleased with the efficient and arduous services performed by the officers and men of your unit. Well done!”
On August 15, divers returned to the Squalus and made a startling discovery. A hatch over the after battery was undogged and open. Had someone tried to escape? Most believed it had somehow sprung open when the Squalus fell back to the sea floor following the first lift.
In the days to come, the salvagers prepared the submarine for the third lift to the 100-foot level. At one point, the Squalus survivors dreamily watched from the Falcon as the Sargo (SS-188) stood in to make a test dive nearby. Harold Preble monitored the dive from the sub’s control room, becoming the first of the survivors to return to submarine service. Gunner’s mate Cravens, pausing with his shipmates to view the dive, muttered how much he wished he were aboard the Sargo. The men of the Squalus were a dispirited lot. The U.S. Comptroller General had ruled they were not entitled to extra pay for submarine duty, retroactive to the moment the submarine came to rest on the sea bottom. Despite vigorous protests from the Navy Department, which argued how hard the survivors were working to salvage their boat, the ruling stood. Isaacs, speaking for the other survivors, was downcast. “We’ve been docked our extra pay right back to the time we were on the bottom. We certainly were aboard our vessel then.”
On August 17, the third lift occurred without problems and the Wandank towed the Squalus until she again grounded five miles closer to shore. Divers went over the side, this time to attach the necessary equipment to finally bring the boat to the surface. As September arrived, gales blew with fury out of the Gulf of Maine, producing giant combers that smashed against the Falcon. For days, the divers battled the elements. Clouds of silt stirred up by the storms obliterated their view as they walked the deck of the Squalus and the ocean floor. The submarine rocked side to side from the power of the ocean. Two divers, working near the keel, narrowly escaped death when the vessel moved, crushing the area they had just been in.
Two other divers were sent down in an attempt to enter the submarine from the after escape hatch. If they could somehow get to the watertight door between the after torpedo room and the engine room and close it, then the engine room water level could be reduced by pumping compressed air into the compartment. The men landed in a cloud of silt near the hatch cover that had been broken earlier by a collision between a pontoon and the boat. One of the divers dropped his legs into the escape trunk and proceeded to climb down into the vessel but was stopped by an obstruction. He climbed back out. Both divers lowered a light into the hatch so they could see what the problem was. To their horror, the face of one of the victims stared back at them. The plan to enter the ship was abandoned.
At last, on September 13—113 days and 628 hard-hat dives after the salvage began—the last lift was set. After weeks of relentless surf, the day broke with warm sunshine and a flat ocean surface. At 0800, the blowing of the pontoons and the Squalus began. Naquin was excited, preparing his men to board the vessel after it was on the surface. “He was real hot for all of us to ride the Squalus back in,” said McLees.
But all didn’t go as planned. Several times the conning tower emerged from the waves but keeled over and sank. By blowing and venting the many pontoons, the boat finally came to the surface and stayed there on a slight list. But only the conning tower and tip of the bow remained above water, foiling Naquin’s plan. Too much water remained in the submarine to bring her any higher.
At 1511, Admiral Cole gave the order to begin the final tow. With flags at half-staff in memory of those inside the Squalus, the Wandank and her tiny flotilla headed for port in a solemn procession. As the sun began to set, the Squalus and her pontoons slowly moved up the Piscataqua River as thousands of people lined the hills and beaches overlooking the channel. The submarine, her central tower with “192” visible to all, slid past silently.
By nightfall, the Wandank nudged the boat carefully past the rocks of Pull-and-be-damned Point and brought her to a gentle grounding next to a coal refueling pier at the navy yard. There, a gargantuan tripod crane lowered a cable to the conning tower where it was attached to the boat. Then the crane exerted upward pull as the process of pumping out the water began. It took the rest of that night, the following day, and into the next night before the vessel could be floated into a dry-dock, which was drained to expose the entire vessel. The forward part of the conning tower was smashed inward. Wire strands littered the deck, and her hull appeared splotched and rusty in places. But otherwise she seemed undamaged.
More water had to be siphoned from the boat before the medical corps could go in to retrieve the bodies. “They had no choice but to put a big firehose down into the boat to take the water out,” recounted Bland. “Who do you think had to do that job? The survivors! No one balked but we saw so many people standing around on the dock we thought they could have found someone else to go down there. We had been fearful all along that they would have us take the bodies off.”
A group of eight survivors entered through the forward torpedo room, dragging the firehose behind them as they moved through the forward battery, the control room, and then into the after battery. “There weren’t but two or three bodies in there,” continued Bland. “Nevertheless, we saw them. It was revolting to the point I never made any effort to stretch myself to see them.”
The men immediately returned to the dock as the pumping resumed. The bodies of the men in the after battery were taken from the vessel by medical corpsmen. Later in the day, pharmacist’s mates from the hospital located the rest of the deceased. One was in the well of the after battery and two were in the after engine room. In the after torpedo room, the rest were found, including the compartment talker who was still wearing his telephone headset. Autopsies concluded the shock from the pressure of the water pounding in on the men, plus the frigid temperature, induced merciful comas before they died from drowning. Could they have saved themselves? “I think the men in the torpedo room didn’t have the guts to close the door on the two in the engine room,” speculated Pierce. “They left the door open too damned long and they all drowned.”
One body was missing. He later was identified as Thompson, the ship’s cook, who had undogged the submarine’s after battery hatch in an ill-fated attempt to escape the morning of the tragedy. His body apparently was thrown from the open hatch during the first lift; many believed the corpse was driven into the mud by the boat as she settled to the floor again.
On September 15, the court of inquiry reconvened to tour the submarine in hopes of determining what caused the sinking. Donning oilskins, a group of eleven—four investigators, five newspaper reporters, Captain Naquin, and Lieutenant Doyle—entered the vessel through the after torpedo hatch. Cables and paraphernalia were heaped about from the jostling the boat had taken. The group passed waterlogged mattresses, clothing, blankets, door curtains, and tablecloths. A greasy film coated almost everything. In the galley, Isaacs’s pots and pans and the range on which he had been cooking the noontime meal were corroded by saltwater. A frozen cube of butter floated in a pool of water. Single file, the observers passed through the control room, where the induction valve lever was found in the closed position, and on to the forward battery where they saw a message scrolled in pencil by Preble on a stateroom door: “11 degrees up, 0925. Taking food, etc., to for’d torpr. room. All fine as can be expected. Capt. Naquin, Robie and Nichols for’d.” The party returned to the control room, where they closely examined the induction control. With power restored, the court had Doyle try to close the high induction. The valve didn’t budge. Workmen then applied oil to the hydraulic system. Doyle again pushed the lever to engage the valve and this time it closed tightly, as it should have during the fatal dive.
Why it didn’t on May 23 could not be resolved.
While the court adjourned to prepare its findings, the Squalus survivors fanned out across the country, accompanying the bodies of their shipmates to their hometowns for burial. The Navy tried to carefully pair each body with a close survivor to help comfort relatives. For instance, Pierce traveled to Jackson, Michigan, to deliver the flag-draped coffin bearing his good friend Eugene Hoffman. The man’s widow, previously broken-hearted over her inability to bear Hoffman a child, grieved deeply over his death. “She met me at the train and started crying when she saw me, someone she knew. It was real tough. But I was so glad that I had the privilege of taking him back and that it meant so much to her,” said Pierce. Another widow, Bette Ward of Drumright, Oklahoma, mourned as the body of her husband, Marion L. Ward (RM3c), was returned to her. Two months later she gave birth to his 7½-pound baby son.
The court of inquiry cleared Naquin and his men of any wrongdoing, and praised the captain’s leadership during the ordeal. The court attributed the sinking to a mechanical malfunction of the main induction valve. It recommended several modifications to all fleet boats to avert future incidents. An additional bulkhead and watertight door were to be installed in every boat to separate the forward and after engine rooms. Also, the hand-cranked valves in the engine rooms were to be replaced by quick-closing, spring-driven inboard shut-off valves. Actuating mechanisms of the new valves would be located far enough from the hull openings that a rush of seawater would not prevent anyone from closing them.
Many of the Squalus rates later expressed the belief that the court exonerated the crew after it became aware of incidents on the Snapper off South America and the Skipjack (SS-184), where the main induction took in a small amount of water on a test dive. The Skipjack crew, made wary by the incident, kept the hull valves well oiled in the engine rooms so they could be spun shut quickly. “The Skipjack people were more knowledgeable about the problem, were more fearful of what could happen or were just smarter than we were. They shut those valves on a dive,” said Bryson years later. Doyle admitted it was “a damned dumb thing” not to have closed the inboard hull valves before the Squalus’s last dive. He said he was unaware of the Snapper incident, but “I wish I would have known.”
Charles Edison, the secretary of the Navy, accepted the court’s overall findings. However, he faulted Naquin for not training his men to always close inboard inductions prior to a dive. He concluded “the training, supervision and indoctrination, necessary to ensure the timely closure of these important hull stop valves, while diving, was lacking in emphasis.” For Naquin, it was a bitter footnote, particularly since so many other boats operated no differently than his.
The survivors initially were barred from submarine duty; plans were made to transfer all of them to surface ships. Outraged, Naquin went to Washington to appeal the decision to Edison. The secretary reversed course, allowing all but the captain and his executive to rejoin the underseas navy.
In coming weeks, Portsmouth workers swarmed over the Squalus, removing all of her internal components, irreparably damaged by saltwater. On November 15, 1939, the noise of air drills and hammers ceased while the boat was moored next to the Sculpin. Naquin, lieutenants Doyle, Robertson, and Nichols, and twenty-eight other survivors mustered on deck for the last time. The boat’s commissioning pennant fluttered in the cold wind as the skipper prepared to address the crew. Naquin was about to be detached and sent to San Diego, while the rest of the crew was to be assigned temporarily to the sub school in New London. A marine color guard marched down the slope to the dock where they stood at attention for the arrival of Admiral Cole and three aides. “Attention!” Naquin ordered. The survivors, dressed in winter blues, formed two lines at the deck rails, standing rigidly, their heads turned slightly toward the captain who stood before the conning tower. He unfolded a sheet of paper and began to read in a strong voice, “The Chief of Naval Operations expresses his appreciation to the commanding officer, the officers, and men of the USS Squalus for their wholehearted and voluntary participation in the salvage operations.”
The survivors cracked a smile at Naquin, who tucked the short speech into his pocket and took an order passed to him. In the brief silence, the survivors stirred, turning their faces directly to the captain as he began to read the decommissioning order that would take the Squalus out of the fleet. He went through it quickly, turning the boat over to the captain of the yard. The order released each crewman to duty elsewhere. A solitary bugle sounded “Retreat” as the commissioning pennant that had once held so much promise was lowered permanently.
Soon after, the Sculpin under Wilkin cast off for the Pacific to join the fleet at Pearl Harbor. The $1.4-million refit of the SS-192 resumed, a process that would take another year.
With the reconditioning of the Squalus coming to an end in May 1940, the Navy decided to give the boat a new name to diminish her sad legacy. Inspiration came from President Roosevelt’s reference to a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the Squalus shooting up through the surface in the disastrous first lift of the boat. Roosevelt, an avid deepsea fisherman, said the picture reminded him of a tethered sailfish battling for its life.
Thus was born the USS Sailfish. And at the helm would be a tough new commander. In him, the Navy placed the task of shaking the boat’s early reputation as a “ghost ship,” a vessel doomed to repeat her fate.