Dead Dogfish

A dozen years ago submarine disasters were a nightmare to the Navy. Between 1919 and 1927 eight U. S. submarines went to the bottom and in few cases were any of the crew rescued. Last week the nightmare returned but in not quite so bad a form: more than half the men were saved.

Men on the Bottom. Promptly at 7:30 one clear, crisp morning last week the U. S. submarine Squalus, (rhymes with jail us), Lieutenant Oliver F. Naquin commanding, put out from the Navy yard at Portsmouth, N. H., to practice fast dives. Besides her commander she carried four other officers, three civilian observers and 51 enlisted men. None of the 59 was unusually nervous, although the Squalus had not passed the testing stage and only two weeks before had been stranded under water for an hour with a fouled blowout valve. Newest and one of the finest of the Navy's submarines (she was commissioned in March, cost $5,000,000 to build), the Squalus was named for the dogfish, which dives fast and swims deep.

At 8:40, five miles off the tiny Isles of Shoals, the Squalus, driving ahead on her Diesel engines, prepared to dive. Machinist's Mate Alfred G. Prien was at the controls.

The diving signal came. Prien began spinning his controls. Air roared from opened ballast tank vents, water rushed in to take its place. On the control board--called "the Christmas tree" because of its numerous red and green lights--lights flashed, showing Prien that the air induction valves, which carried air to the engine rooms, were closed and watertight. Down planed the Squalus. As the depth gauge showed nearly 50 ft., she began to level off.

Through the telephone a voice barked into Lieutenant Naquin's ear that water was pouring into the engine room. The lights, all green, indicated that the air valves were shut. They were not all shut. Under the weight of water rushing in astern, the Squalus tilted bow up at a 45-degree angle, hesitated, shivered, slowly sank stern-first toward the bottom. The lights went out.

At the bulkhead door between control and after-battery rooms stood Electrician's Mate Lloyd Maness, whom his shipmates called "a swell little guy." As the Squalus sank Maness tugged at the heavy door, which, because of the ship's angle, had to be swung uphill. His job was to shut that door. He had it almost closed when voices from the rapidly filling battery room screamed: "Keep it open! Keep it open!" Maness let the door fall back, counted five men who struggled through. Then as the water rushed toward the door, he swung it shut, clamped down the watertight screw, and turned his back. He had done his duty, had locked 26 men in the flooded compartments. One of them was Sherman Shirley, who was to have been married the next Sunday, with Maness as best man.

In the darkness of the unflooded forward compartments the 33 who still lived began to wait. At intervals Lieutenant Naquin fired smoke bombs to ignite on the surface showing where the Squalus had sunk. He released a deck buoy containing a telephone. Four hours later the trapped men heard the engines of the Squalus' sister ship, Sculpin. Through the telephone buoy Lieutenant Naquin reported to the Sculpin what had happened before the line snapped. Nothing more could be done. Somebody mentioned the 26 men trapped behind the bulkhead door. The commander shut him up. The sea, icy cold at 240 feet, sucked all the heat out of the ship; the sweating hull gave off moisture that intensified the cold. The air in the ship would last for perhaps 48 hours.

Men in a Bell. Not since 1921, when the E-6 went down at its moorings with a torpedo tube open, had the Navy had a submarine accident caused by mechanical failure or fault of the crew. Aboard a man-of-war floating above the 8-4 when she sank off Provincetown in 1927 with a loss of 40 lives, a thoughtful young officer named Allen R. McCann had been profoundly shocked by the inadequacy of rescue methods. Brooding over the problem of getting men out of a submarine, he designed a bell-shaped chamber which could be lowered from the surface and clamped to the hatch of a sunken ship. Last week, the best hope of the 33 men in the Squalus was Commander McCann's rescue bell, which was being made ready aboard the squat little rescue ship Falcon, steaming from New London.

Twenty-four hours after the Squalus went down the Navy had every available expert and rescue device on the scene. Calm weather was a godsend. At 10:15 a.m. Diver Martin Sibitzky went over the side of the Falcon and was lowered to. the deck of the Squalus. Under the terrible pressure in icy water, work was very slow. It took him 20 minutes to slide a shackle over a ring on the submarine's deck, clip a bolt through, tighten a nut. A cable was attached to the shackle. Before Sibitzky was back aboard the Falcon, nearly an hour later, the rescue bell, reeling in the line he had attached (see diagram), was pulling itself to the deck of the Squalus. There, two men working inside the chamber clamped the bell over a hatch like a swollen blister on the rump of the sunken ship. The hatch was opened and Lieut. J. C. Nichols and six seamen climbed into the bell.

At 1 :45, just 29 hours after the Squalus had made its dive, the seven men were helped aboard the Falcon. At four o'clock, nine more men reached safety. Three hours later a third group of nine came up. Before nine o'clock the last living men aboard the Squalus, including Lieut. Naquin, were taken into the bell. They had got out just in time. Water in the batteries had begun to generate chlorine gas.

As the rescue chamber came within 150 ft. of the surface on its final trip up, the lower cable fouled on its winch. For three hours and 45 minutes Lieutenant Naquin and seven men had to revise their calculations on the probability of death, while around them divers worked desperately in the darkness. Finally the jammed cable was cut and the bell hauled up foot by foot. At 12:38 a.m. of the second day the U. S. Navy had rescued its living. Below, in the hull of the deep-diving Squalus, 26 corpses slept.

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