Saving the Squalus

Since the advent of the first submersibles, rescuing the men aboard a stricken sub was practically impossible. But that changed in 1939, when the dedication and ingenuity of Lt. Cmdr. Charles Momsen helped save the lives of 33 sailors trapped aboard the USS Squalus off the coast of New England, 240 feet beneath the ocean's surface.

Feb 16, 2015

BY Ben Phelan

Appraisal: 1939 USS Squalus Rescue Group

Transcript

GUEST: Back in the 1930s, my father and his two brothers joined the Navy. My Uncle Frank was an avid swimmer, and he became a deep sea diver. In that process, his diving team, which I understand was an experimental team at the time, were called on to rescue the Squalus, which was a Navy submarine that sunk off the East Coast. And I brought some of the carvings that he did while he was on board the ship, and for his effort with the Squalus, he and his team each received the Navy Cross.

APPRAISER: It's a wonderful grouping of artifacts from one of the seminal moments in the history of the development of submarine warfare. The Squalus disaster was unfortunately the biggest accident to happen in the U.S. Navy prior to World War II. The U.S.S. Squalus suffered a catastrophic failure on her shakedown cruise. Of course, the idea of the shakedown cruise is to make sure that everything's operational, and in one of her first test dives, they thought that they had all of the openings of the boat closed. They did not. There was a fault in the main induction valve, and water came pouring in. Instead of a controlled descent, it was an uncontrolled descent with the boat filling with water. The main goal of any submariners is to have as many surface operations as you do dives. You want that number to come out equal in the end. For a while there, it was looking like the Squalus was going to have a bigger number of dives than surfaces. If not for Swede Momsen, who was the leader of that unit, a very forward thinking officer, those 33 individuals that were rescued from the Squalus would not have had a chance. And there were two separate operations. There was a rescue operation that they led immediately after the sinking to get the guys out, and then there was a salvage operation after that to raise the Squalus. Do you know when he carved the diving suit?

GUEST: Because he was on the ship so much, he had a lot of spare time, and so he began carving. This was one of the pieces that I received because he was a deep sea diver, and it's something that I've had a particular attachment to throughout my life.

APPRAISER: It makes an excellent accent piece to the group. One of the things that helps to document the group is his Navy Good Conduct medal, which is engraved with his name and the date. But of course, the key piece to the grouping is the Navy Cross. The Navy Cross is the second highest award in the United States Navy, second only to the Medal of Honor. It is unlike its Army counterpart, the Distinguished Service Cross, in that it's typically not engraved, but in this case, where we have a chain of custody and provenance, we know exactly who earned the Navy Cross and why. And in the rescue action of the Squalus, there were four Medals of Honor that were awarded for that action, and also 46 Navy Crosses. Being a salvage diver is an incredibly dangerous occupation, and what those guys did in order to rescue the crew and even the subsequent salvage was all extremely hazardous duty.

GUEST: I understood that after they rescued the Squalus, after they salvaged it, they did refit it and put it back to sea.

APPRAISER: As the Sailfish.

GUEST: As the Sailfish. Ok.

APPRAISER: It became the U.S.S. Sailfish. Interesting twist of history, part of the group assisting with the rescue of the Squalus was from the U.S.S. Sculpin. The Sculpin was sunk in the Pacific in World War II. Some of the survivors were captured by the Japanese, and they were on board one of the hell ships on the way to work camp when it was torpedoed by the U.S.S. Sailfish.

GUEST: Oh, really? Oh, my.

APPRAISER: And they were sadly sent to the bottom by the very boat that they had helped to rescue just a few years earlier. One of those ironic twists of World War II. A Navy Cross on its own in 2014, a retail price for one would be around $500 or $600 for a World War II Navy Cross. That's really not what serious advanced collectors are pursuing. They're pursuing groupings where you have an interesting story involved, and there are few more interesting stories in the history of the United States Navy than that very unfortunate shakedown cruise of the Squalus. You have a photo album of the salvage operation. We have a picture of the individual who earned the award, and then the citation from President Roosevelt. As a complete group, a retail price today would be between $6,000 and $7,000.

GUEST: Wow. Much more than I anticipated.

A $7,000 collection of naval memorabilia brought to the Bismarck ANTIQUES ROADSHOW in May 2014 commemorates a minor yet remarkable turning point in the history of the U.S. Navy. As the collection's owner, Edward, told appraiser Jeff Shrader, his uncle had served as a rescue diver in the 1930s, and earned the Navy Cross for his part in the rescue of the Squalus crew.

But at that time, decades after the advent of modern submarine warfare, it was still generally acknowledged that in the case of a downed sub, there was little choice but to leave the stricken vessel on the sea floor — dooming any survivors to an almost unimaginable fate. Rescue was perilous, if not technically impossible: There were no craft in existence that were capable of quickly plunging to the bottom of the ocean, docking with a disabled sub, taking onboard its crew, and ascending to the surface while maintaining a livable air pressure. Consequently, the moment a submarine sank, even if it was in relatively shallow waters, their fate was all but decided.

This surprising lack of capability was finally solved by an energetic and creative naval officer named Charles “Swede” Momsen. He is the man who oversaw the rescue of the USS Squalus, and he remains one of the Navy's lesser-known heroes.

When she was commissioned in 1939, the Squalus was the most sophisticated submarine the Navy had ever built. She measured 310 feet, stem to stern, 27 feet wide, and carried a crew of nearly 60. On May 23, the Squalus embarked on her final test run, upon completion of which she was due to enter service. After moving out into open ocean, the submarine's commander sent a message to base indicating that he was about to dive and go radio-silent. At the end of the dive, upon the Squalus' return to the surface, he would send another message letting command know that the test had been successful.

Rescuing the men aboard a sunken submarine was all but impossible until 1939, when Charles Momsen helped save the lives of 33 sailors trapped 240 feet beneath the ocean's surface.

When two hours passed with no additional communiqué from the Squalus, Navy command realized something was wrong. They ordered an immediate and massive rescue attempt, and put Lt. Cmdr. Momsen in charge.

With Momsen aboard, the Sculpin was the first to reach the Squalus' last known position, at 4:00 A.M. the following morning. There they found the red smoke of the Squalus' distress signal and the rescue buoy the Squalus had also ejected; inside that was a phone that rang through to the submarine. Lt. John Nichols of the Squalus quickly conveyed the details of their situation, then went to get his commanding officer, Lt. Oliver Naquin, who took the phone but had only time to greet the captain of the Sculpin before the cable snapped, cutting off communications.

The rescue teams were eventually able to learn that an induction valve had been mistakenly left open, so when the submarine dived, seawater flooded in, sinking it. The Squalus came to rest on the sea floor 240 feet down. Twenty-six men died during the initial accident, and as the water mixed with acid from the submarine's ruptured batteries, toxic chlorine gas started to fill the forward compartment.

For the next 36 hours, the trapped submariners communicated with their rescuers via Morse code, banging out dots and dashes on the hull of the Squalus with a hammer.

Fourteen years prior, Momsen had attempted to rescue a downed sub, the USS S-51, under similar circumstances, but with no way to locate the downed vessel or extricate the trapped submariners, all aboard died. This and other disasters drove Momsen to devote his private time to developing rescue equipment, including the Momsen lung, as it came to be known — a one-man emergency breathing apparatus that he tested on himself — and a diving bell that could descend hundreds of feet of ocean and seamlessly dock with an immobilized submarine.

When the Squalus sank, Momsen's bell was still in prototype and had never been used before. But there were no other options, so Momsen sent the bell down again and again, taking on six or seven survivors at a time. When the bell was making its final ascent, carrying the submarine commander and other crewmen, the rescuers noticed that the cabling connecting the bell to the rescue ship had become frayed. They turned off the mechanical winch and gently pulled the diving bell up by hand.

The bell performed perfectly. All 33 men who survived the initial disaster were saved — the same number that had died in the wreck of the S-51. As much as the courage of the divers, it was Momsen's ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit that saved the crew of the Squalus. But Navy brass were annoyed that Momsen had developed his life-saving technology outside the chain of command, so when it was time to deploy his diving bell throughout the fleet, they named it after someone else. Momsen continued a distinguished naval career, however, serving in the Pacific theater during World War II, ultimately becoming commander of the Submarine Force's Pacific Fleet and retiring with the rank of vice admiral in 1955. Yet Momsen was also a modest man, so it was years before he would admit that he had been hurt at the Navy's slight in regard to his diving bell. He died in 1967, a figure of reverence to a few but unknown by most. In 2004, as though by way of apology, the Navy finally put things right, christening a new destroyer the USS Momsen.

The medals and memorabilia Edward brought to the Bismarck ROADSHOW give us a direct connection to the Squalus incident, which, thanks to "Swede" Momsen, was the first U.S. Navy submarine disaster that ended in a successful rescue. Within a few months, the Squalus was salvaged (also under Momsen's leadership), and later refitted and launched as the USS Sailfish — which proved a valuable component of the Pacific Fleet, with its crew earning nine battle stars by the end of the war.

Edward's remarkable carving of a man in a full-body diving suit gives the bravery of the divers who assisted in the rescue of the Squalus their due. But without the resourceful leadership of Swede Momsen, the divers' courageous efforts would have been futile.