Technology has of course advanced since the 1940s. The modern location buoy, SEPIRB (Submarine Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon), sends a coded message via satellite with the sub’s ID and whereabouts to the closest rescue coordination center. The buoys are still launched through the little tube, though, and ideally that tube hasn’t been welded shut, as it was on some cold war–era subs—to keep the buoy from launching accidently and revealing the sub’s position to the Soviet subs upon which it was spying. Before a location buoy is launched, someone takes a grease pencil and writes all over it, as much detail as there’s room for: damage to the sub (and crew), air quality on board, etc.
What happens next depends on how dire the situation is. Inside every US sub is a fat, white three-ring binder labeled “Disabled Submarine Survival Guide,” and in the front of that is a stay-or-go diagram: a decision tree of yes-or-no questions. Is the flooding contained? Are all fires out? If so, if the situation is stable, the answer will likely be Stay. Wait for the rescue vehicle. In water less than 600 feet deep, it may be possible to get out of a sunken sub and make one’s way to the surface—Hello, Wilkie!—however, for reasons we’ll shortly get to, this is a last resort.
A US sub is stocked with enough oxygen-generating and carbon dioxide–subtracting capability to last at least a week without power: a week of what Clarke calls “bottom survivability.” By bottom he means the ocean floor, but the British accent, to my ear, anyhow, tilts it toward the naughty meaning. Which kind of fits: bottom as in, “your ass,” will it be saved? Seven days is meant to be the outside limit of how long it should take for help to arrive. Fifteen countries and NATO have submarine rescue systems—deep submergence vehicles with decompression capabilities—but they differ in how deep they’re able to go. None is designed to function deeper than 2,000 feet; then again, neither are most submarines. (Modern US submarine “crush depths” are classified[54] information, but educated speculation puts them in the neighborhood of a half-mile down.)
Clarke adds that there may be well more than seven days of supplies. “Because you’re probably dealing with a proportion of the crew.” It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. He was saying that the oxygen will probably hold out longer than a week, because some of the crew won’t be using any. Aboard the Squalus, twenty-six men drowned in the first few minutes of the disaster, entombed in the flooding compartment when the watertight doors closed.
The least of anyone’s worries is starvation. Subs leave port stocked with full provisions, much of it in cans—so many cans, in fact, that they may overflow the storeroom on the smaller class of subs, with the result that entire passageways, in the early weeks of an underway, are cobblestoned by cans. Water may be a concern, if the desalination unit isn’t functioning. The Disabled Submarine Survival Guide includes unflinching water conservation strategies. “Minimize water closet ops following bowel movements to one minimal flushing cycle… every three uses.” To control odors, the Guide recommends covering the mess with the powder used by the galley crew to mix the “bug juice.” The high acidity of the drink is pointed out, leading one to assume that that’s why it’s used for this, though it’s also possible it’s an editorial comment on bug juice.[55]
And then you wait. The men of the Squalus huddled disconsolately on the torpedo room floor, eating canned pineapple. It is notable that neither crew, Squalus nor Tang, exhibited panic. Aboard the Tang, the commanding officer wrote in his report, “No one was hysterical or disorderly at any time…. Toward the last, conversation seemed to be mostly about their families and loved ones.” One of the last messages tapped out by the crew on the hull of the sub S-4, accidently rammed and sunk in 1927, was “Please hurry.” The laborious and time-consuming inclusion of “please” breaks my heart. It’s so Navy: courteous and respectful to the end.
The crew of the Squalus were as lucky as they were unlucky; the Navy’s first submarine rescue chamber had just been completed and tested. The Squalus was its maiden rescue. Thirty-three survivors rode it to the surface. The chamber was a modified diving bell. As with an inverted drinking glass lowered into water, the pressure of the air trapped inside keeps the water outside. A diver accompanied the bell to position its opening over the lip of one of the submarine’s hatches and bolt it in place. The sub’s hatch could now be opened, and small groups of crew helped into the chamber.
Prior to this, sinking was likely a death sentence. Even a few inches of water will bear down on a submarine hatch—or a car door, for that matter—with sufficient pressure that it can’t be pushed open (unless one equalizes the pressure by letting water in). On the smaller subs of the 1920s, the air would last about three days. It was one of these “iron coffins,” the S-51, that inspired Lieutenant Commander Charles “Swede” Momsen to come up with a way to get people out. Momsen’s sub had been the one that first arrived on the scene. All the crew could do was stare at the oil slick on the surface of the water, “utterly helpless,” as Momsen wrote to a friend. When the sub was salvaged, bodies of the crew were said to have been found with their fingers torn and bloodied from trying to pry open a hatch against fifteen tons of ocean.
Given that most US ballistic missile submarines today spend the bulk of their time in oceans that bottom out deeper than their crush depth, the term “iron coffin” has regained some accuracy. Crush depth is the point at which the hull succumbs to the extreme water pressure and the sub implodes. John Clarke likens it to putting a submarine inside a giant bomb. The sub shatters inward. And the crew? “If you can imagine,” Clarke says, “all the metal parts are imploding together and anything in the way would be crushed and shredded and pounded into bits.” No one saves your bottom now. On April 10, 1963, the USS Thresher imploded, killing all 129 men aboard. “She’s scattered all over the seafloor,” Jerry Lamb says.
In light of the deep-sea haunts of modern subs, why even bother with rescue and escape systems? Do they simply exist to, as one submariner expressed it, “give moms and dads a warm feeling”? No, no more so than airplane emergency exit slides. Because, as with airplanes, most collisions take place on arriving or departing: in port or airport, where the traffic is busiest but the plummet most survivable.
The Tang went down in water just 180 feet deep, but rescue was complicated by the circumstances of battle. She sank in the midst of the convoy of Japanese ships she’d spent the night torpedoing and sinking. In the end, bad air forced the crew’s hand. Smoke had built up from the burning of classified paperwork, and saltwater had reached the batteries, creating deadly chlorine gas. Disaster luncheon. You didn’t need a decision tree to know that Stay had turned into Go.
Swede Momsen invented something for this scenario, too. During World War II, subs were equipped with escape trunks and Momsen lungs. (The “lung” was a wearable air supply that, upon reaching the surface, handily converted to a flotation device). Like an airlock on a spaceship, the escape trunk allows for the equalization of pressure inside and outside. On a sub, this allows the hatch to be popped open and the lung-clad sailor set loose in the brine. The Tang was the first bottomed sub from which sailors escaped without the aid of a rescue bell. There were nine, four of whom subsequently drowned or disappeared. (In the surreal etiquette of war, the five survivors were plucked from the near-freezing water by their enemies—as the Tang’s commanding officer described them, “the burned and mutilated survivors of our own handiwork”—who then beat them and sent them to starve in a prisoner of war camp.)
54
As someone for whom the phrase “top secret” has applied mainly to decoder rings and campy spy movies, I had to remind myself that these are actual security classifications. I found it hard to take seriously the sign on the chain stretched across the navigation room door saying, TOP SECRET—KEEP OUT. They may as well have added NO GIRLS ALLOWED. I saw a printer in the crew lounge labeled SECRET PRINTER.
55
Almost as good as this one, by Andrew Karam, in the cold war–era submarine memoir