CHAPTER XI
Quite as thrilling as the experience of the men who went down in the K.13 was the adventure which befell the crew of an American submarine, the S.5, and it is doubtful if any popular novelist, with all his imagination and powers of invention, ever thought out a more remarkable situation than that in which these American sailors found themselves.
The American submarine concerned had been travelling on the surface, when the commander gave the order to prepare to dive. Down she went, and for a time glided unseen in the depths. Then her commander got ready to bring her up once more.
Of a sudden something went wrong. The air failed to blow out the forward tanks. The men felt the floor slip away under their feet as they rose. They were thrown on their backs, on their faces, rolling sideways in all directions. There was no shock, not the slightest jar. The submarine just swung like a pendulum, and when the officers and men managed to disentangle themselves from the various positions into which they had been thrown, they found the bulkheads had changed places with the floor of their craft.
The submarine was actually hanging perpendicularly, bow downward, with just the end of the stern showing above the surface. It was a terrible plight to be in, and every man aboard recognized at once that he was face to face with death. Their only hope was that a vessel would sight them and manage to rescue them before their air gave out, yet there was so little of the stern peeping above the surface of the sea that the odds against it being noticed were tremendous.
Most submarines nowadays are equipped with a portable telephone which can be floated to the surface, where it is supported by a buoy. This telephone was designed for just such an emergency, and the commander quickly uncoiled the cable and sent the telephone floating upward.
Followed a most nerve-racking experience. For hour after hour they swung about under the sea, rocking this way and that, spinning sometimes like a top, ringing on the telephone at regular intervals, and waiting tensely for the sound of a voice to tell them that they were found. All day they waited without any reply. Air was being used up every minute, and death by suffocation was not pleasant to think upon. Even worse was the thought that at any moment the submarine might cease to swing, and would plunge to the bottom like a stone, fracture her plates and wipe them all out in a few seconds.
Twenty-four hours passed. All through the darkness of night until dawn those insistent signals went up to the telephone and a sailor waited tensely for an answering voice. None came.
Another day of suspense began. The men were like prisoners in a condemned cell, not knowing whether they were going to their doom or whether a reprieve was coming. All the time they were striving to find out what was wrong, struggling to right their craft again. The task was beyond them. Their efforts were of no avail. Still they rocked and swung like a pendulum in the broad Atlantic. It was a nightmare situation. For men to remain so strong and yet so helpless was maddening. So the dreadful hours crept by.
An American transport, the General Goethals, was steaming down to Panama when one of the men aboard thought he heard the sound of a telephone bell.
“What’s that?” he said.
His companion looked at him, “What?”
“Sounded like a telephone,” said the first man.
His shipmate was about to retort when he, too, heard the sound of the bell.
“There it is again,” said the first man.
“Sure!” answered the companion.
Other men came crowding up.
“What’s wrong?” they inquired.
“Didn’t you hear it?” asked the first man.
“What?”
“The telephone!”
At that moment the sound came to them again. They looked at each other. Some wondered if they were bewitched. They were far out on the open sea, and it seemed impossible that a telephone bell could be ringing there.
More and more men crowded round, and more and more heard the bell. There was no mistaking it. It was certainly a telephone bell. So plain was it, so insistent, that at last the captain signalled down to stop the engines.
Half a dozen seamen took their places in a boat. Outwards it swung from the side of the ship and a moment later sat with a splash in the sea. Rowing in the direction of the mysterious sound, the sailors at last sighted the buoy with the telephone attached. The stern of the craft was barely visible.
Imagine the transports of those unfortunates when voices hailed them cheerfully from above! They had been swinging about in their awful predicament for thirty-five hours when the telephone was picked up, and air was running so short that they had only enough to last them for an hour or two longer.
Instantly the men below made clear their peril. The troopship flashed out her wireless call for help.
Not a ship within radius heard the call.
Then cropped up another of those strange tricks of Fate. An American schoolboy, named Moore, keen on wireless long before the wireless boom set in, was experimenting with his home-made set when he picked up the call. Proudly he sent out this message of life and death on his own transmitter. The nearest naval depot picked it up and destroyers with special plant aboard were hurried at full speed to the rescue.
Meanwhile the captain of the transport had managed with the greatest difficulty to get strong hawsers round the submarine, lashing them tightly to his transport in order to keep the stern of the submarine above water. Then his engineers after a deal of labour cut a small hole in the steel skin and began to pump fresh air in to the prisoners.
This was the situation when the destroyers appeared on the scene. Immediately they fixed more hawsers round the submarine to prevent her from slipping to the bottom, and with the special appliances at their command they managed to cut through the rivets and force out one of the plates of the up-ended craft.
One by one the twenty-seven men and their commanding officer scrambled through to the open air again, after being imprisoned for forty hours in that crazy submarine swinging about under the sea. Thus a telephone ringing in the open sea, where no telephone could possibly be expected, and a boy playing with his wireless set were instrumental in saving the lives of an entire crew after a most terrible experience.
Not so fortunate were the crew of a British submarine which, like the K.13, met with a mishap that sent her plunging to the bottom. All were killed except one man, who with his own lips afterwards related how he had battled with death and won his way back to life after one of the most amazing adventures that have ever befallen man.
He happened to be in the engine-room when he perceived the water pouring in through the conning tower in one mighty cascade. In a flash he realized that the boat was doomed. Rushing along the engine-room he shouted at the top of his voice to warn his comrades in the other parts of the ship. The sea swept into the engine-room after him. In a moment the floor was flooded.
Fast as he moved, the water was faster. Before he could get out, he heard the sinister sound of the engine-room door slamming. He turned and thrust his shoulder against it. It would not budge. He was trapped in the engine-room of a sunken submarine! The rush of water had closed the bulkhead door, and the space beyond was completely flooded, making it impossible for the imprisoned man to move the door. Even if he had succeeded in opening the door, it would have been merely a matter of seconds before the hungry sea drowned him.
He stood to compose his thoughts, to make up his mind what to do. More than once he had imagined himself trapped in just such a manner, and he was well aware that if he could succeed in equalizing the pressure of the air inside with the water outside he might get out of the submarine and escape.
But to work things out in theory is much easier than to carry them out in practice, especially if your life depends on your doing everything exactly as it should be done, when the least little slip means death.
The man reached out his hand to grasp a metal lever. His fingers closed on it. He recoiled from a severe electric shock. He touched something else, and again felt the jolt of electricity. His knee knocked against one of the engines and he felt a big shock in his leg. Very gingerly he put his finger on another metal object, and once more experienced the sensation of electricity. Everything around him was charged with electricity, and it was some time before he realized that the flooding of the engine-room had short-circuited the electric current.
Now another factor crept in to make the situation still more desperate. The sea water, flooding the electric batteries, began to set free chlorine gas. The smell of it grew stronger, made him gasp. So to the risks of drowning and suffocating was added the danger of gas poisoning.
In like circumstances few men could have kept their nerve. Most men would have abandoned themselves to their fate, would have given up all hope in the face of so many perils. But not this British sailor. With all his strength he began to fight to get out of the submarine, to put his theories into practice in order to save his life. He must have possessed tremendous will power, wonderful courage and determination.
He tried the torpedo hatch, to make quite sure that the pressure above was such that he could not shift it. He might have been pushing against Mount Everest itself. Wasting no time, he set the bolt of the hatch so that the merest touch would release it, then he opened a valve to let in more water. As the water flooded the compartment, the air in it was compressed more and more. Higher and higher crept the water, greater and greater became the pressure of the air until he felt he could stand it no longer. He slipped the bolt of the hatch, and as he felt it give to the pressure he slipped a hand on the outside. A gust of air swept out, held up the cover momentarily, then the great metal lid slammed down again, crushing all the fingers of the brave man’s hand.
Maimed though he was, his courage remained unshaken. Giving up his idea of escaping by raising the air pressure, he determined on the most desperate expedient of all. He made up his mind to flood the compartment completely, when the pressure of the water inside and outside would be equal, and he could open the hatch—if he were not drowned in the attempt.
Opening more valves, he scrambled on top of the engines and watched the water pouring in. It rose to the hatch coamings, till only his face was above the surface. Then with a quick heave of his shoulder he pressed against the hatch. The imprisoned air burst out and the water rushed in, sweeping over his face and head. Holding his breath, he thrust again at the hatch, which luckily passed the vertical and fell backwards with a clang. Then he struck out desperately towards the surface.
A destroyer steaming along saw a tiny patch of white in the water. It was the face of the hero of the submarine. He was to all intents lifeless, practically dead. Wasting not a moment, they forced the water from him and after a hard struggle succeeded in bringing back to life one of the bravest men who ever breathed.
Not without its amusing side was the adventure which befell three unhappy men on an American naval submarine. She was engaged in making a series of cinematograph pictures, and orders were given to prepare for a very rapid dive, known as a crash dive.
Two cinema men were still standing on the deck with their cameras, and the commander was in the top half of the conning tower, which was, of course, open. To their consternation the boat began to submerge. Realizing that there had been some misunderstanding, and thinking only of saving his ship and crew from a terrible disaster, the commander, who had no time to enter the ship, shouted to the men to close the hatch under his feet.
It was slammed not a moment too soon, and the commander inside the conning tower was carried beneath the surface. His first thought was to escape. He scrambled upwards towards the opening. Something stopped him, held him fast, kept him a prisoner.
What had happened was that a projection in the conning tower had caught in his open pocket and was holding him down.
Struggling desperately, and swallowing a deal of water, he managed to tear himself free and kick up to the top. Gulping in the fresh air, he looked around him. One cinema man was swimming strongly some little distance away. Of the other, there was no trace.
Just as the commander was beginning to give the other man up for lost, the submarine herself reappeared. The commander gazed at her in astonishment, hardly believing his own eyes. With her came the half-drowned cinema man, his arms thrown round his camera and the wireless mast, and clinging to them like grim death.
“What the dickens did you go down with her for?” asked the amazed officer, when he was taken aboard.
“I couldn’t swim a stroke, so I thought it safer to stick to the ship,” explained the camera man naively.
Luckily for him the crew instantly saw that something was wrong and brought the boat up at once.
So recently as the last days of October, 1923, two American seamen, Henry Breault and Lawrence Brown, were immured for thirty hours in a submarine at the bottom of a bay near the Panama Canal. Breault most heroically dashed into the ship as she was sinking to see if he could assist anybody who happened to be within. He found Brown asleep in the torpedo-room, and they just succeeded in closing the door when the O.5 went down in 40 feet of water.
There was not a morsel of food aboard, not a drop of drinking water. First the lights failed, then the batteries exploded and caused a fire which blazed furiously for some time.
Meantime, a third man, Charles Butler, caught in the engine-room, took refuge in an air pocket, stripped off his clothes and made for the hatchway. Emulating the plucky fellow who escaped from the British submarine, he thrust open the hatch. So enormous was the pressure that he was blown right out of the water, breaking the surface like a leaping salmon. He was soon picked up, after being at the bottom for eight minutes.
In three hours the other two prisoners heard the knocks of a diver and knew that attempts were being made to rescue them. Nine hours later they felt the submarine begin to move upward. For a little time she continued to rise, then their hopes were dashed by a sharp snapping sound and they felt their craft fall with a bump to the bottom again.
The ticking of the clock for hour after hour, the dreadful dragging of the hands round the face of it nearly drove them distracted. They could not bear to watch it longer. There they sat, wondering, hoping.
Another sixteen hours passed before they felt the submarine again begin to rise, moving so slowly that both men were consumed with anxiety. The maddening clock ticked on as the craft was wound up. Water splashed on the deck, the pent-up air gushed out, footsteps sounded and they knew deliverance was at hand. Breault pushed open the hatch and both men stood blinking blindly in the dazzling sunshine.
Their heads reeled. So sick and ill were they owing to the sudden change of pressure that grave danger was only averted by quickly placing them under the same pressure in another submarine, and then slowly reducing the pressure in accordance with the recognized diving practice. Thus they came unscathed through their dreadful trial.
The K.5 during battle practice with the British Fleet in 1921 sank in such deep water that no attempt was made to recover her. But the American naval experts, when a similar disaster overtook the submarine F.4 at Honolulu in March, 1915, were so anxious to find out what had happened that they determined to do their utmost to retrieve the sunken craft.
Going out for a practice spin, the F.4 quietly submerged and was never seen again. Boats were soon in search of her, and the result of dragging operations led to her discovery on the bottom outside Honolulu harbour in just over 50 fathoms, or 304 feet, of water.
Unhesitatingly the greatest salvage experts in the world would have pronounced her lost beyond recovery. She was 100 feet deeper than the British record dive of 210 feet, a depth which no other divers in the world had ever reached, and she was far deeper than any craft hitherto lifted from the seabed.
The experts of the American Navy, aware of these and other facts, knew that they desired to achieve the impossible, but instead of admitting that it could not be done they straightway set about doing it. A big rise and fall in the tide would have been of tremendous assistance to them, but at Honolulu the tide rises and falls only 18 inches. It was of no help to them at all. So they made their plans to haul her up bodily by winches and tow her into shallower water until she grounded; while for the last stage of the journey into the harbour they placed their faith in six pontoons, each sheathed in a jacket of timber 4 inches thick to prevent the cables from cutting it. This stout timber casing successfully protected the pontoons from all damage when they were brought into play. Nor was it unnecessary, for, incredible as it may seen, the chafing of the submarine during a sudden gale quickly wore through the mighty steel cables as she rubbed them against the bottom.
It was in connection with the cables that the greatest diving feat in all history was accomplished. The cables were swept underneath the submarine by surface craft in the usual way. But the salvors could not be sure that the cables were exactly where they ought to be. With cables too near the bow and the stern, the submarine would just fold up as she was lifted and break her back, the two halves, falling apart, probably defying recovery. Even if they could be raised, the damage would be so great that all traces of the original accident would be destroyed and the experts could never learn why the submarine had foundered.
The one way of finding out whether the cables were properly in place was to send down divers to see. A diver in Lake Huron in the ’nineties, trying to recover sunken treasure, was crushed to pulp at a depth of 198 feet; even a diving bell, operating later on the same wreck, was unable to withstand the pressure, consequently it seemed like sentencing a man to death to order him to dive to a depth of 304 feet. However, the cleverest diving expert in the American Navy pondered over the matter and, in the light of recent experiments, considered it could be done provided all the rules were most rigidly observed. The finest divers in the American Navy, men who had been specially trained, were thereupon sent to Honolulu to carry out this gigantic task.
The leading diver struggled into his suit. For aught he knew, he would never come up alive; the enormous pressure of the water might squeeze his unprotected legs and body and arms until it had squeezed all the blood in his body through his eyes and ears and nose and mouth. He knew that the metal helmet protected his head from the sea pressure, which was the reason why the nip of the sea drives all the blood in the body up to the head. But he smiled cheerfully as his helmet was screwed into place.
A few moments later he was sliding down the shot-rope. Down and down he went, the sea pressing heavier and heavier on his body. Up on the surface the air pumps heaved quickly to pass down to him the air that would prevent him from being squeezed to death.
Reaching the wreck at last, he found the pressure so enormous that it was almost impossible for him to lift his hand in the water. To move at all was really like pushing his way through some solid substance. Nevertheless, he managed to survey the wreck and was slowly drawn up again to safety, after spending ten minutes at the bottom.
Several times he and his fellow divers penetrated to these startling depths to see that adjustments were properly made. Then, just when everything seemed all right, the sense of impending tragedy gripped the watchers on the surface. They had drawn up one gallant diver to 200 feet, when he found that his lines were entangled and that he was stuck fast. It was a fearful situation. For a diver to be caught at this great depth is almost certain death.
Relays of divers were sent down to his aid, and for two hours they struggled and fought to release their comrade who was dangling there at death’s door 200 feet below the surface of the sea. In the end they disentangled him, and he was drawn up in a most critical state. Double pneumonia struck him down, and for months his life was despaired of. Eventually a fine constitution and tireless nursing enabled him to pull round and regain his lost health. But it was a desperately close shave. That any man could reach this depth and still live is little short of a miracle.
Eventually the ill-fated F.4 was towed into harbour. In raising her according to plan, the American Navy broke three records. By attaining the incredible depth of 304 feet, the American divers wrested the diving record from the British Navy; that unfortunate diver who was forced to remain at 200 feet for two hours, without fatal results or permanent injury, created another record; and their third record was achieved by lifting the submarine from the greatest depth at which any wreck has ever been raised. It is impossible to praise the divers and salvage officers too highly for these magnificent feats.
If the American Navy has robbed the British Navy of the diving record, the British Salvage Section still has a few more records left. For instance, when a German submarine was put down in 190 feet of water off our rocky northern coast, the British Admiralty calmly ordered the Salvage Section to bring the submarine to port.
In the face of a definite order of this sort, there was nothing to be said. The Director of Salvage hastened to the spot, and sent divers down to survey the wreck and if possible recover the papers. They found an arm protruding from the partly-closed conning tower, the fingers, stiffened by death, clutching as in a vice some of the secret orders which the commander was endeavouring to cast away when he saw that capture or destruction was inevitable. Before he could rid himself of the papers, the submarine plunged to her doom and the cover of the conning tower slammed down on his arm.
With an effort, the divers unlocked those clammy fingers and took the papers. Then they managed to raise the lid of the conning tower and enter the ship, although it was practically at the limit of the depth at which divers can possibly work. Their submarine lamps lit the gloom of the interior, and a search brought to light the log and other papers, which were sent post haste to the Admiralty.
The order to take the wreck to port was much more difficult to obey. She was down on such a rocky coast in such a position that lifting her in the ordinary way was quite out of the question. Commodore Young thereupon decided to do what had never been done with a craft of this size since the world began, that is, raise her from the depths by sheer mechanical power. The cables were swept underneath, and divers saw that they were properly in place. Then the powerful machinery installed in the salvage ships began to work, and slowly but surely the great steel cables, thicker than a man’s wrist, were wound up until the U-boat was within a few feet of the surface. It was an extraordinary feat to lift this wrecked submarine, weighing nearly 1000 tons—practically four times the weight of the American F.4—from a depth of 190 feet by the sheer power of machinery.
The salvors crowned this remarkable effort by carrying the submarine in her cradle of slings nearly 40 miles round the coast, which was another record the British Salvage Section made that month. Just as they got her to the mouth of the harbour, she slipped from the slings and went to the bottom again. Picking her up once more, the salvage men towed her into dock so that the submarine experts could dissect her.
Another astonishing feat performed by British salvage men was the raising of a collier that sank right in the fairway at Rosyth. The danger of other ships striking her and piling up was so great that her removal became imperative. To pick her up in the approved style by sweeping cables under her and using lifting craft to swing her clear of the bottom was the obvious way of clearing the channel. But she was a dead weight of 3000 tons, or about 1000 tons heavier than the heaviest wreck raised by such methods.
If her cargo had been bales of cotton or something easy to handle, divers would have gone down and removed part of her burden in order to lighten her. But coal is about the worst thing in the world to deal with under water. Consequently the salvors tackled the job with a brace of lifting craft, which enabled them to master 2400 tons, and a couple of mighty pontoons, which provided the power to lift the remainder. Everything was fixed, and as the tide rose the salvors managed to drag the wreck out of the way of other ships, and eventually, after a terrific fight lasting a considerable time, succeeded in beaching her.
Commodore Sir Frederick Young also mastered a weight of about 3000 tons in lifting Captain Fryatt’s ship, the Brussels, at Ostend, and these two feats performed by British salvage experts constitute a world’s record for the greatest deadweight ever raised in recent times from the bottom of the sea.