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Posted on 09/12/2003 4:05:48 AM PDT by snippy_about_it
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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 USS SQUALUS (SS-192) Lost 23 May 1939 At 7:30 a.m. on May 23, 1939, the Squalus left the Portsmouth Navy Yard located along the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire. It was underway for its 19th test dive under the command of Lieutenant Oliver Naquin. Before a submarine could qualify for the operational fleet, it was required to pass a series of trials. On this day, a crew of 59, five officers, 51 enlisted men and three civilian inspectors, were on board. The point of the day's test was to complete an emergency dive while cruising at 16 knots, diving to 50 feet within 60 seconds in order to avoid enemy attack. Once underwater, it was difficult for enemy aircraft to locate a submarine. The spot chosen for the dive, just southeast of the Isles of Shoals, averaged a depth of 250 feet. As the submarine neared the designated point, the submarine's location and estimated submersion time were radioed to the Portsmouth Navy Yard. At 8:35 a.m., according to the deck log, Naquin order the crew to rig for dive (prepare to dive) and soon after gave the order to dive.  USS Squalus, the 11th Sargo class submarine (USNA Archives). The sinking of the Squalus at about 8:45 a.m. on May 23 had taken only a few minutes. It settled rather gently on the bottom, without a list (tilt) to one side, but with the bow (front) raised by 11 degrees. The depth was 243 feet, and the water temperature was just a few degrees above freezing. The initial problem was to isolate the separate compartments so one would not flood another. This had been largely accomplished during the sinking. On the bottom, the first problem was sprays of water and oil, which were stopped by quickly shutting many valves. Only the dim light of a few hand lanterns relieved the darkness.  Determining who was alive and each individual's location was the next priority. Of the 59 people who sailed that morning, 23 were in the control room and 10 in the forward torpedo room. It was likely that everyone in the after battery room and both engine rooms had died. No contact was made with the after torpedo room. The possibility of survivors there remained, if only the communications with the control room had failed. Five people were moved forward, where it was dryer but colder than in the control room. Saltwater was leaking into the forward battery. If it mixed with the battery acid, chlorine gas could form, or it could short the cells and create a fire. This meant that the forward battery compartment, which was located between the two occupied spaces, would have to be left vacant. The control room had a foot of oil and water at its after bulkhead. The pump room beneath it had a slow leak.  This painting depicts the control room of the submarine and crew members desperately closing off water leaks. A telephone buoy, attached to Squalus by the communication cable, was released and surfaced soon after the sinking. Rockets were fired from time to time, the sixth launched after four hours on the bottom. By chance, a lookout on the sister submarineUSS Sculpin saw its smoke. Once the Sculpin made its way over the sunken Squalus, it found the phone buoy. However, soon after the two-way conversation began, the phone cable broke. During the morning, conversation was limited to necessities to conserve oxygen. A review of the use of the Momsen Lung was conducted in case the men had to leave the submarine through a lock and rise to the surface with the Lung to sustain them. Most of the survivors were wet and became increasingly cold. The air was decreasing, at 2:00 p.m. the first use of a carbon dioxide absorbent occurred. Oxygen under pressure in canisters was held in reserve. The slightly toxic air made the men drowsy, which promoted sleep. A second meal of beans, tomatoes and fruit was issued about 6:00 p.m.. Oxygen was bled into the stale air.  Crewmembers huddle around a lamp in the forward torpedo room awaiting rescue in cold conditions which resulted in some survivors suffering from exposure. However, no permanent adverse health effects were noted in survivors after the rescue. Two ships arrived on the scene during the afternoon. Their propellers could be heard clearly in the Squalus. One had an oscillator for generating underwater sound, making possible Morse code transmissions. The Squalus responded by laboriously beating out answers by hammering on the hull. One blow was a dot and two a dash. However, the sound from the depth was weak and only occasionally was heard. By midnight, the water in the pump room below the 18 sailors in the control room had risen two feet. Despite knowing of the ships gathered overhead, the time on the bottom must have been terrible. The awful conditions of wet and cold, thoughts of lost shipmates and loved ones ashore and the knowledge that never before had the survivors of a submarine sinking ever been saved from such a depth, each by itself, could have caused despair. But no one in the Squalus caved in, and discipline, if not spirits, remained high. Most of the day of May 23 rescuers rushed to the scene. Charles "Swede" Momsen, two doctors and a diver left Washington, DC, from the Anacostia Naval Air Station by seaplane and landed at Portsmouth at 7:30 p.m. After transferring to a Coast Guard cutter, they arrived on station at 11:30 p.m. Admiral Cole got to Squalus' sister submarine Sculpin on a small vessel named Penacook, which then succeeded in hooking a grappling hook onto some part of the Squalus. The rescue vessel Falcon (ASR-2) a slow, former minesweeper came to the scene through a fog. She was equipped with a rescue chamber, air pressure systems, a recompression chamber for divers and diverse diving gear.  A Naval tug (left) and the Falcon (right) during rescue operations (USNA Archives). Ashore, the wives and families of the Squalus Sailors awaited news. The message tapped out from the sunken submarine "condition satisfactory but cold" was interpreted most hopefully. Interviews with relatives nearby and at distant locations were published and broadcast by reporters. One group of newsmen rented a boat for a 15-hour journey to the scene and back, only to learn that not all the crew survived. The impact of this word on the wives and relatives was devastating.  Diagram of the McCann Rescue Bell Momsen learned that there were 33 survivors in an atmosphere about twice normal pressure. There were three options to save the men. One was to pump out the flooded compartments to bring the Squalus to the surface. However, it was very risky, since the reason for the sinking was still not known. The second option was to have the men come to the surface using their Momsen Lungs. But their depth was somewhat greater than the 207 feet for which the Lung had been tested. The men were very cold and undoubtedly weak from the foul air and tension. Momsen recommended, and Admiral Cole concurred, that using the rescue bell to retrieve the men was the best choice. The morning of May 24 was overcast, with choppy seas, squalls and sometimes near-zero visibility. The Falcon, which was carrying the rescue chamber, dropped four anchors around the Squalus. After four hours of efforts, a fifth anchor was dropped by another ship and the line passed to Falcon. By 9:45 a.m., the rescue ship was held stationary, pointed into the wind and pitching heavily, but on station over the submarine. Fortunately, the seas became calmer and the air clearer.  On a crowded deck, a diver without his helmet awaits his turn (USNA Archives). Momsen and the divers moved to the Sculpin to learn the details of the submarine's structure, which was identical to Squalus. Back on Falcon, Momsen chose to use divers from both his crew and the Falcon in turns, for the morale of both groups. The first diver found that the grappling hook had caught the sunken submarine only about 10 feet from the hatch to which the rescue bell would attach. It took him 22 minutes on the submarine to simply attach a shackle with the line that would guide the chamber. The crew inside the Squalus responded to the sound of the divers footsteps by banging happily on the hull.   Landing of the first surviors at Portsmouth, NH (Milne Special Collections and Archives Department, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH). Momsen vetoed the idea of four trips, each bringing up seven men, and a fifth with the five remaining survivors. He worried that the fifth trip would greatly increase the risk of an accident. He decided a load of seven men first, then eight men and finally two trips of nine men. The bell, linked to the Falcon with a cable to haul it up, two air hoses and an electrical cable for lights and phone, descended with two operators for the motors, ballast, air pressure and communications. It measured only five feet in diameter, with a height of seven feet. The first trip delivered coffee and food and then brought up the planned seven men. With that historic partial rescue, it was learned in detail who had survived the sinking and who perished.  Vice Admiral Charles B. Momsen, USN(Retired), (1896-1967) During the first ascent, the survivors in the control room donned their Momsen Lungs as gas masks and moved through the chlorine-contaminated forward battery room to join the other survivors in the forward torpedo room. The next descent took an hour, plus 45 minutes attached to Squalus taking on men and a half-hour ascent. It went smoothly, until the chamber surfaced riding low in the water. It seemed to Momsen that bringing up eight people was overloading the system, and he resigned himself to making a fifth trip. But, then it was discovered that there were really nine survivors instead of the planned eight in the bell during the second trip, so Momsen could go back to his four-trip scheme.  On the 4th rescue dive of the McCann diving bell, the steel wire used to raise the bell to the surface became fouled. The bell was lowered to the ocean floor and divers sent down in an unsuccessful attempt to unfoul the wire. The bell was subsequently raised through the manipulation of bouyancy in the ballast tanks, and manual hauling to the surface. The third trip was routine. During the fourth trip, the Commanding Officer Naquin, noted that he departed his submarine at 7:51 p.m. During the last ascent, the reel taking up cable became fouled. A diver was sent down to fix the problem, but was unable to do so. The buoyancy of the chamber had to be decreased to permit it to descend and settle on the bottom. First, one diver was sent down to attach a new cable. He failed, but he found that only one strand of the cable still attached to the Falcon remained. A second diver was also unable to put a new cable on the rescue chamber. Next, Momsen decided to try to adjust the buoyancy of the chamber so that it would rise slowly. Sailors on deck played the frayed cable in and out with the rise and fall of the ship on the waves. The chamber finally reached the surface, and the men were brought aboard the Falcon at 38 minutes after midnight on May 25. Thirty-nine terrible hours had elapsed since the sinking. The last group of survivors and the two operators were in the crowded chamber for over four-and-a-half hours. All of the men that had survived the sinking were safe on the surface.  Lt. Oliver F. Naquin and other survivors on board USCGC Harriet Lane (Milne Special Collections and Archives Department, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH).      |
Ding Bell: Old fashioneds, do you think you oughta drink while your flying?
Tyler Fitzgerald: Well stop kidding will ya and make us some drinks! You just press the button back there marked "booze". It's the only way to fly!"
Neener! Neener! Neener!
LOL!
Where were we when that woman asked "How do you spell Neener, as in when you say neener, neener..."?
That was funny, and of course we knew how to spell it!
Mission Bay, San Diego. StarBucks :-)
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