Cool story! My sweetie was a Polaris missile tech on subs & he’s described the escape protocols they were trained to do. IIRC, our guys can come up from 400 feet - but I don’t remember if that was an actual event or just an estimate.
Wow, this is an amazing story, well worth the read. Thanks for posting it!
That is the same island on which the fictitious, but I thought, sort of realistic movie, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” was set.
That island is also sometimes thought to be the real Ithaca of the Iliad and Odyssey instead of the one now named Ithaca.
Amazing. My uncle Ritchie on the British side of my family served on RN subs in the mediterranean during WWII. Sadly, he passed away about 3 years ago but he had some fantastic tales to tell us on the few occasions that we met. I think you needed to be a special breed to serve in those things regardless of what side you were on.
Back in the early ‘50s we had to go through a Momsen Lung drill at the New London sub base. The tower was over 100 feet high and we had to simulate escaping from that depth.
As a 17-year-old, I thought the whole thing was cool - I remember looking up to the surface, which looked about the size of a silver dollar. Mermaids painted along the walls to entertain you as you rose, with a frogman keeping pace in case you got into trouble.
We were told the Germans did some “free escape” during the war - no Momsens at all - just hyperventilate, take a deep breath, and exit the boat. We did it from 25 feet, which I though was ridiculous. Had frogmen escort you even at that shallow depth as some guys panicked and held their breath, and risked rupturing their lungs from air expansion. We were told to make believe we were blowing through a straw and keep pace with the bubbles to relieve the compressed air pressure. On the surface, we had to stand at attention. That way if someone had breathing problems, he’d keel over pretty fast.
Thankfully, we never had to escape for real.