On the morning of May 23, 1939, the United States Navy possessed a machine for rescuing men from the bottom of the ocean.
It had spent years developing it. Men had designed fittings, tested pressures, practiced dives and worked through problems involving air, cables and decompression. The machine existed because earlier submariners had died in circumstances everyone understood afterward and nobody had known how to solve while they were happening.
Nobody yet knew whether the machine would actually work when a submarine sank with living men inside it.
Then Squalus disappeared.
243 Feet
USS Squalus was new. Very new.
The submarine had been commissioned only months earlier and was conducting trials off Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On May 23 she prepared for another submerged run.
Lieutenant William T. Doyle was at the diving control station. His later statement is worth reading because it contains so little of the drama we tend to add afterward. Compartments reported themselves ready. Officers checked their sections. The ship rigged for diving. Men took their stations.
Then Squalus submerged.
Water entered the after portion of the submarine through the main engine air-induction system. What happened next was fast enough that the boat’s internal geography became a matter of life and death.
Twenty-six men were caught in the flooded after compartments. Forward of them, 33 people remained alive.
The submarine settled on the bottom roughly 240 feet below the Atlantic.
There are depths at which a sunken vessel remains tantalizingly connected to the world above. Two hundred forty feet was one of them in 1939. Divers could reach it, but doing useful work there was dangerous. The men inside could not simply open a hatch and swim upward. Pressure, cold and decompression turned an apparently short vertical distance into something much larger.
The survivors released their telephone buoy. They fired red signal rockets. Oil was blown into the sea. When USS Sculpin eventually reached the area, contact was made first through the telephone and later by tapping signals through the hull.
There were men alive down there. Now somebody had to get them out.
Twelve Years Earlier
The machine waiting for this moment had been born from another submarine disaster.
In December 1927, USS S-4 sank after colliding with a Coast Guard vessel off Provincetown, Massachusetts. Men survived the initial sinking. Rescuers knew they were alive. Divers could communicate with some of them by tapping on the hull.
They still could not reach them in time.
That failure stayed with the Navy.
Charles Momsen, a submarine officer and engineer, became one of the central figures in the effort to make submarine escape and rescue something more than improvisation. Work eventually produced two different answers to the same problem: equipment allowing submariners to attempt an escape themselves, and a rescue chamber that could descend from the surface and mate with a submarine hatch.
Allan McCann continued development of the latter device. By 1930 the Navy had what became known as the McCann rescue chamber.
It looked less like a miracle than a piece of industrial plumbing. That was probably an advantage.
The chamber was essentially a pressure-resistant bell that could be lowered from a rescue vessel to a submarine. It carried operators inside. Once positioned over an escape hatch, water could be expelled from its lower compartment and pressure equalized. The submarine hatch could then be opened and trapped men transferred into the chamber.
On paper, the logic was straightforward. At 243 feet, attached to a wreck by cables in the Atlantic, straightforward things have a habit of becoming complicated.
The First Trip
USS Falcon, a submarine rescue vessel, reached the scene. At 11:30 on May 24, the chamber began going down.
A diver had already located the submarine and prepared the connection. The chamber descended along a cable to the forward escape hatch. At 12:47 it made contact.
For the men inside Squalus, something remarkable was happening overhead. A machine designed after one group of trapped submariners had died was now sitting on their hatch.
The first survivors climbed into it. Nine men came up. Then the chamber went back down.
The process was slow because it had to be. Every descent involved pressure, ballast, cables and a connection between two metal structures in deep water. There was no useful way to hurry physics.
A second trip brought more men to the surface. Then a third. By evening, 25 survivors had been removed.
Eight remained below.
The Last Eight
The chamber took aboard the remaining survivors, including Squalus‘ commanding officer, Lieutenant Oliver Naquin, and Doyle. It started upward.
Then trouble developed in the cables.
The Navy diving log becomes almost unnerving here because it records the emergency without embellishment.
The chamber rose, stopped, descended again, took strain on wires, flooded ballast and changed depth repeatedly. At one point it began listing. The down-haul wire had to be cut.
Eight rescued men and the chamber operators were no longer merely participating in a successful rescue. They were inside another machine experiencing its own failure more than 200 feet beneath the surface.
After midnight the chamber finally began climbing. The log records the depths almost clinically: 228 feet, 215, 200, 190, 170, 110, 102, 80.
Then, at 12:23 a.m. on May 25: surface. Two minutes later the hatch opened.
The last eight known survivors of Squalus came out. All 33 people who had survived the original flooding had been recovered alive.
They Went Down Again
There is a detail here that I find difficult to get past.
The rescue was effectively finished. Naquin believed the after compartments were flooded, and there had been no indication that anyone remained alive there.
The Navy nevertheless sent the chamber down a fifth time.
Chief Machinist’s Mate William Badders and another man descended toward the after torpedo-room hatch to determine whether anybody could still be saved. They knew what had just happened to the chamber on the fourth trip. They went anyway.
No survivors were found.
Four divers involved in the rescue and salvage work would eventually receive the Medal of Honor.
It is tempting to turn that fact into the end of the story. Medals provide a satisfying shape to events that were not satisfying while they were happening. The more interesting ending came months later.
The Submarine Came Back
The Navy decided to raise Squalus.
This was another formidable engineering problem. The submarine rested far deeper than earlier American submarine salvage projects. Divers worked at depth using new helium-oxygen techniques. Cables were worked beneath the hull. Pontoons were attached. The submarine was lifted in controlled stages.
There were failures. Squalus grounded again during the salvage effort. The work continued.
On September 13, 1939, nearly four months after she sank, the submarine was finally brought back to Portsmouth Navy Yard.
The Navy repaired her, then changed her name.
USS Sailfish returned to service in 1940 and went to war in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. She earned nine battle stars.
A submarine that had killed 26 men on a test dive, spent months on the Atlantic floor and required an unprecedented rescue operation eventually sank enemy ships in another ocean. History occasionally produces endings that would look contrived if somebody invented them.
Why the chamber was ready
The Navy did not improvise the chamber after Squalus sank. It could not have.
The useful work had happened years earlier, when there was no trapped crew waiting for rescue and no newspaper deadline forcing anyone to solve the problem quickly.
Engineers had studied a previous failure. Money had been spent. Equipment had been manufactured. Divers had trained. Procedures had been tested. People had argued over details that probably seemed painfully abstract while the submarine fleet was operating normally.
Momsen later described the Squalus rescue as the return on 12 years of research and training after the loss of S-4.
That language is revealing. Preparedness is expensive precisely because the disaster it anticipates has not happened yet. Its success can make the expenditure look unnecessary. A rescue machine that spends its life unused can resemble wasted money right up until the morning when 33 people are sitting on the ocean floor.
There is another uncomfortable part. The machine did not save everyone.
Twenty-six men were already beyond its reach.
Still, 33 people came home.