Much to his annoyance, the water was too deep for Crabb to dive down in his frogman’s suit, so next morning he shook hands with the deep-sea diver chosen to be the first person to physically come into contact with Affray since she was last sighted on 16 April.
The diver went down at the same time as the television camera and together they found Affray laying on a shingle and hard muddy sand sea bottom, slightly listing to port at an angle of 35 degrees. Her surface detection radar aerial and after periscope – the one usually used to keep an all-round lookout when cruising at periscope depth – were both raised. All four escape hatches were shut indicating that no successful attempt at escape had been attempted. There was no obvious damage to her hull.
Captain Shelford recalled that the underwater camera transmitted pictures back to Reclaim showing that a release mechanism on the emergency buoys had not been moved into the ‘Free’ position. Both pairs of hydroplanes were at ‘Hard-arise – forward edge up’ indicating that someone had made a final frantic effort to hold the submarine up in an attempt to prevent her from smashing into the sea bottom. The forward planes were at 30 degrees to rise and after planes at 25 degrees.
Affray’s main motor telegraphs on the bridge were photographed at ‘Stop’ showing that someone in the engine room had anticipated a violent impact with the seabed. A trench in the gravel seabed was discovered a short distance away on the submarine’s starboard side, as though part of the submarine had hit the floor and then bounced to port. It appeared that the vessel’s after part had hit the seabed with some force.
The diver reported that the undamaged starboard propeller and after plane were 8–10ft clear of the seabed and that underwater guns used to fire smoke candles had not been fired.
It was obvious that whatever had happened to Affray, had occurred quickly, taking her crew by surprise, leaving them no time to save their submarine – or themselves. Another diver was sent down the following day with the television camera to continue where his colleague had left off. One of the first things he discovered was the great 35ft long snort mast lying on the seabed. Shelford recalls:
It was seen to have snapped off like a carrot a few feet above deck level and was leaning over the side into the dark shadows beneath her hull. A truly remarkable photograph by underwater television showed a break so clean that only material failure could explain it.
On closer examination the diver found the snort mast had fractured immediately above the crutch and was laying over the port ballast tanks at right angles. The mast was at an angle of approximately 30 degrees from the vertical with the head on the seabed. Only a small sliver of metal about 3in long connected the fallen tube to the rest of the boat, leaving a 14in diameter hole above the engine room exposed to the sea, allowing thousands of gallons of water to flood into the submarine.
Reclaim was instructed to make every effort to recover the snort mast before the tides turned and bring it to the surface for close examination by expert metallurgists. This was going to be a tricky business requiring the help of a salvage ship to work alongside Reclaim.
Recovering the mast involved divers attempting to grapple with a 5in thick heavy-duty tarred shot-rope – known as a strop – shackled around the top of the snort. This would be attached to a hook on the end of a recovery wire, winched to the surface and laid on Reclaim’s deck. The difficulty was that once the rope had been placed in the water and taken to the bottom, its weight was about as much as a diver could carry at such depths.
The recovery attempt was a hazardous diving operation and six attempts were made. The current was so strong during the first dive that the diver became distressed and wanted to return to the surface after only sixteen minutes. A second diver managed to stay down for a few minutes longer, but the strong pull of the current made it almost impossible to remain upright. The final attempt took place on a brilliant sunny afternoon, with a heavy sea running in from the west. Shelford recalled:
Reclaim was an impressive sight with clouds of spray breaking over her decks while the signal flags at her yardarm, warning shipping to keep clear, added colour to the scene as they streamed in the wind. Her two mooring craft rolled sickeningly as they carried the mooring wires from the buoys to the the Broken snort diving ship. I was anxious lest the weather should prevent us diving, but towards evening the sea fell away and Reclaim completed her operation.
Suddenly away to the north, I saw the great bulk of the liner Queen Elizabeth working up speed for her run to New York. Her colossal wash might well have swept Reclaim off her hard-won moorings. We signalled her, ‘Please go slow,’ and such is the camaraderie of the sea that we immediately saw the huge plume of her bow wave dying away as she eased right down and gracefully slid past dipping her ensign to our little fleet.
To reach the broken mast, a pair of divers first had to get down past the overhanging periscope, radar aerial and a tangle of wires. The underwater camera was used to make sure the diver’s shot rope went down to the seabed clear of obstructions. It took two days for divers to loop the strop around the head of the snort and onto the recovery wire. One diver landed in the middle of the submarine’s periscopes and had to be hauled back again. But on Sunday 1 July in flat calm weather, Reclaim began slowly to hoist the snort to the surface. Shelford said:
It was an exciting and awesome moment as the head of the great tube broke the surface alongside Reclaim. Here was the only part of Affray ever to see daylight again. Her name had been in our sleeping and waking thoughts ever since April and although we had found her, we still had no more idea as to the cause of her fate that we had on the night of her disappearance. Would this snort tube provide the answer?
Gently, the great tube was laid along Reclaim’s narrow deck. A quick end-toend examination by Reclaim’s senior officers showed there was no sign that it could have been hit by a ship or entangled in floating wreckage as many had suggested. The fracture at the other end of the case seemed to indicate that the material had simply failed due to metal fatigue.
Before returning to Portsmouth, marker buoys were positioned over the wreck. Divers would return to the spot and make many more visits to the watery tomb in an attempt to seek and gather more evidence to tell the Admiralty about what had caused Affray to fail.
Admiral Power and a gathering of experienced metallurgists were waiting on the quay ready to examine the mast. In next to no time, it was lifted from the ship and removed to the Admiralty’s Central Material Laboratory at Emsworth for tests. It was also carefully photographed and some of these images now see the light of day for the first time in this book.
Affray was back in the news and the press began speculating about what had happened on the night Affray dived for the last time.
Marshall Pugh, a close friend of Commander Crabb and author The Silent Enemy, an account of the frogman’s wartime exploits, wrote in the Daily Mail:
Senior submarine officers formed a theory on what had happened to Affray. In public they said nothing. In private their beliefs were never shaken.
In the early hours of the morning, the Affray had been cruising at periscope depth. Before the arduous patrols of the day to follow, the great part of the submarine’s company had been asleep.
Looking after the engine room there would probably be an artificer and a stoker. The chances were that the artificer was forward when the snort cracked open . . . cracked open, just like that.
Almost immediately water flooded in the submarine through the intake valve at the base of the snort, roaring into the submarine at 100 gallons a second, increasing to 200 gallons a second and more as the submarine dropped. Before the stoker could close the valve, he was stunned and drowned.
While the Affray went down fast by the stern, the water flooded through the submarine, drowning men before they could even begin the drills of submarine escape. As she struck the bottom, the snort snapped off.
It was one thing for the submariners to form such a theory, another to prove it and another still for the Admiralty to accept that seventy-five men and a submarine could be lost through a fault in a piece of piping. For one thing, it might infer that this was partly the Admiralty’s fault, that the snort was not only faulty, but badly designed.
The Portsmouth Evening News reported:
A former submariner with many years of experience, suggested last night that as the course and speed of the submarine were within circumscribed limits in order to comply with her training programme, it is most unlikely that she would have arrived at her last resting place near the Hurd Deep before the accident occurred.
On the other hand, had the vessel met trouble while she was actually diving, she would have holed and immediately sunk to the bottom and stayed there.
The fact that she has been found nearly 40 miles away from the spot from where she was reported to have dived on that fateful night of April 17, indicates that any buoyancy remaining in the submarine was sufficient for tides and currents to carry her well away from the track she would normally have followed.
It seems fairly certain that the vessel must have been flooded from end to end in a matter of seconds because had any one compartment been shut off with anyone in it at all, there would have been some means of indicating their presence to the men on the surface.
As soon as the men inside her were immobilised, the submarine may well have been carried either along the bottom or through the water to the position in which she has now been located.
Having found the Affray, the Navy must now at all costs discover the cause of the disaster to guard against possibilities of future tragedies, but if that can be done by divers, then there seems little point in embarking on what would become one of the biggest salvage jobs tackled in the English Channel.
What of the recovery of those inside her? It is certain that the majority of the relatives of those 75 gallant sailors would prefer their men to rest in peace, although it is equally certain that if salvage becomes necessary in order to discover the cause of disaster, they will be the first to wish that this should be so.