September 7, 2019 • 30 mins
Today's episode is a classic from November 2014. 1920, the S-5 left the Boston Navy Yard on its first mission, with a crew of 36 officers and enlisted men. While performing a crash dive as part of a performance evaluation, the crew found themselves on a sinking vessel.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody happy Saturday. I hope it's going grandly Today.
We are going back to our November episode on the
sinking of the submarine known as S five, which happened
during the vessel's first mission and involves some very dramatic
and heroic efforts by the crew to keep themselves alive
while they awaited rescue. If you're thinking on hearing this
(00:22):
episode of sending us a note to let us know
that traditionally submarines are called boats instead of ships, We've
got it. There, you go, enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:46):
Tracy V. Wilson. Him, I'm Holly Fry And you know, uh,
people sending it seemed to love the stories about shipwrecks. Yeah,
we have a lot of maritime history fans. Yes, that
lots of people who love the shipwreck stories and who
want to hear more shipwreck stories, and we haven't really
talked a lot of about submarine disasters. After looking through
our archive and also polling on Facebook and Twitter, I
(01:09):
think the only submarine disaster that has been on the
podcast ever in its history is a brief part about
the Huntley, which was a Civil War submarine from an
episode on five Battleship Shipwrecks. So, uh, we're gonna talk
about a submarine disaster today, and there been bigger submarine
disasters in history than this one. Also maybe even actually
(01:34):
I've put this in my notes before I got to
the end of doing my research. It says, maybe some
more dramatic submarine rescues, but this one's actually pretty dramatic. Uh.
The reason that I wanted to start with this one,
Number one, it's a listener request from listener Stephen. Number two,
I personally find the idea of being trapped in a
submarine at the bottom of the ocean. The second most
(01:57):
terrifying thing in the world surrounding is my big death fear. Yeah,
the first most terrifying thing is floating into outer space
with no hope of rescue. The second most terrifying thing
is being trapped in a submarine on the bottom of
the ocean. Um. So the reason we're doing this one
is spoiler alert, everyone gets out okay, which is I
(02:18):
think the only way that I would be able to
tolerate recording this episode of being trapped in a submarine. Uh,
this is the submarine S five And as we said earlier,
it is a listener request from Stephen. So today, when
something goes wrong aboard a submarine, most developed countries navies
have these tools on hand to try to rescue the crew.
(02:40):
And relatively shallow water, it could be a matter of
the crew just putting on a suit that will let
them breathe and keep warm while they ascend, and in
deeper water, a rescue vessel can descend down to the
submarine and then carry the survivors back up to the surface.
And during peacetime, rescuing a sunken submarine crew is usually
an international effort, So whoever's closest and has the technology
(03:02):
to handle the situation is who goes. This is not
a case in at that point the United States Submarine
Force had only been officially established for about twenty years,
and even the submarines themselves had really limited means of
escape if they were in any depth of water because
the pressure of the water would hold all of the
(03:24):
hatches closed. So if your submarine sank, really the only
way to get out was through the torpedo tubes, and
that was a maybe maybe the torpedo tubes could be
used as an emergency exhibit. Maybe not. But even if
you could get out the torpedo tubes and most depths,
(03:45):
it would be impossible to swim to the surface before
you either succumbed to the bends or drowned. Your odds
are survival were they were extremely low, almost zero. But
even so, by the time this story takes place, the U. S.
Submarine Force had a relatively good track record as far
as crew safety, and prior to that year, the United
States had only seen two major accidents. One of them
(04:06):
was in nineteen fifteen and the other one was in
nineteen seventeen. And to be clear, this is that was
those numbers for once the Submarine Force was officially established,
because there were some other submarine issues before that and
the extremely limited limited tinkering with submarines that went on
before that point. So the ship from today's episode was
part of the S class, and these were U. S.
(04:27):
Navy submarines from World War One. The S five was
just like its name suggests, the fifth and its class,
and it was launched in November nineteen nineteen and commissioned
the following March. On Monday August nineteen twenty, the S
five left the Boston Navy Yard on its first mission
with the crew of thirty six officers and enlisted men.
(04:48):
The vessel was expected to reach Baltimore, Maryland, on September three.
The ship and crew had by then spent six months
in testing and training. This mission was part of a
longer voyage to the southeastern United States, and they were
going to be making stops at all these Navy ports
along the way with the hope of recruiting X servicemen
to be part of the submarine fleet. This was really
(05:10):
a pretty posh assignment, and Lieutenant Commander Charles M. Cook Jr.
Also known as Savvy, who was in command of the
S five, was extremely pleased with both the skill and
the demeanor of his crew. They all worked really hard,
they could learn to do their jobs really well, and
for the most part, they all got along and we're
my skies to be around. And in addition to these
(05:31):
recruitment stops, the S five was also to undergo a
number of speed and endurance trials as part of a
performance evaluation. After all these months of training and tests,
the performance evaluation was, for the most part kind of
a cake walk. As Tracy just said, this crew was
they worked well together, they all worked hard, they knew
their stuff, they had just been through six months of
(05:51):
intensive training. It was just sort of a happy coincidence
that their performance evaluation immediately followed all that. But the
big exception was the crash dive. So other than during
trainings and this evaluation, crash dives normally took place only
during wartime and when done perfectly. They took a submarine
from the surface of the ocean to periscope depth, which
(06:13):
is about forty ft and under a minute, and the
first time the crew of the S five tried it,
so this is when they were learning how to all
do it. It had taken them more than four minutes,
and they had steadily reduced that time during training. And
the reason that this particular maneuver was the outlier and
their performance evaluation wasn't just the level of difficulty involved.
(06:35):
These evaluations were scored and used as a competition among
the submarines in the fleet. Every extra second would incur
a penalty in the overall scores, and they all wanted
to break that one minute record, during which time they
had a highly orchestrated series of jobs to do in
order to make the vessel watertight and then dive very rapidly.
(06:55):
So before we get to the crash dive and how
it went wrong, a brief about submarines for those who
may not know. A submarine rises and falls through the
water depending in part on how much ballast it has
in its tanks, and the ballast mostly comes in the
form of sea water, and as class submarines, the ballast level,
so how much water was in the ballast tanks, was
(07:18):
regulated by valves called Kingston valves. Uh. These valves were
controlled using waste high levels which connected directly to the
valves through a system of rods which opened and closed
the ballast tanks, and they were incredibly difficult to move.
It took multiple men to open and close each of
them because the Kingston valves were so temperamental. When preparing
(07:39):
for a crash dive, what the crew would do would
be to seal off all the events that let air
in and out of the compartments, and then they would
open the Kingston valves. So because the air couldn't get out,
the water couldn't get in, and that meant that the
level of ballast in the tanks to stay the same,
so the air vants were just a lot easier to
(08:00):
deal with, and that meant that they could deal with
the easier job when it was time to dive. Opening
the vents was faster than opening the valves, so they
were basically getting a little ahead of the game, and
when it was time to dive, they'd open those vents
and the air would flow out and the water would
flow in from the already opened Kingston valves. So when
it came time to do their crash dive test on
(08:22):
September one, this didn't go as planned. The crew closed
all of the air vents and they opened the Kingston valves,
and it turned out that one of the air valves
hadn't sealed properly, so water started seeping into one of
the ballast tanks, and that meant that the submarine almost
immediately started to list to the starboard, which means to
(08:43):
the right for non maritime people. Uh. This was something
that could cause some pretty serious problems if it wasn't corrected,
so the crew immediately got to work opening and closing
other Kingston valves to get things back on an even keel.
One of the people who helped out was Percy Fox,
the gunner mate and the senior most man on the
ship except for the lieutenant commander. They probably could not
(09:05):
have gotten the Kingston valves taken care of without Fox's help.
It was. There was a lot of opening and closing
that had to be done to level things out, but
Fox had his own job to do when it was
really critical. Both he and Lieutenant Commander Cook had major
sources of ventilation to the submarine that they personally had
to close before diving. Cook had to close the hatch
(09:29):
at the top of the conning tower and Fox had
to close the main induction valve, which was the valve
that diverted air to all the parts of the ship
from the outside. So these two men had these two
jobs because they were the two most senior men on
the ship, and these jobs were the two most important
when it came to making the ship uh watertight so
that it could dive, plus when it came to the
(09:51):
induction valve itself. It had proved to be a little
temperamental on the S five as well as on her
sister ships. Cook had some trouble getting the conning tower
hatch to close. It was caught on something but Fox
overlooked his task entirely because he was trying to handle
this other stuff that was going awry. Right, So, when
it was time to dive, Cook sounded the diving Clackson
(10:14):
and the crew did all their tasks to get the
ship to dive, and because Fox had overlooked his part
while wrangling with another crisis, water started pouring into the submarine.
I know how this ends, and I'm even kind of
scared already, So let's take a brief moment for a
word from a sponsor that sounds grand. With water pouring
(10:42):
into the submarine from outside, Fox immediately realized his mistake
and started trying to close the main induction valve, while
Cook gave the order to blow the ballast tanks to
try to clear them of the water that they were
taking in. But Fox couldn't get the main induction valve
to move, so the rest of the crew started manually
closing all of the smaller events that led to the outside,
(11:02):
while sea water was literally pummeling them in the face
as they did. The torpedo room, which had been the
first compartment of the ship to part to start taking
on water, was really too far gone for them to
try to save. So they evacuated it and then sealed
it behind a watertight door. I can't imagine trying to
I mean, I can't change the temperature in the shower
if it's hitting me in the face, like I can't
(11:23):
imagine a much higher pressure situation and the stress situation, Yes,
it would be intense. So with the torpedo room essentially
open to the sea at that point, it filled with
water and the S five sank to the sea floor.
Knows first. When it came to rest four minutes later,
it was under about a hundred and eighty feet of water,
(11:44):
more or less upright. So a running theme and then
this whole story is that they keep having some good
news and some bad news. So the good news was
everyone had survived this initial sinking of the ship. The
only injuries at this point we're pretty minor. The hull
was still intact, they still had emergency power provided by batteries,
(12:06):
and they still had about half of their supply of
compressed air. The bad news was the torpedo room was
about two thirds full of water, and the bilges also
had water in them. All in all, the submarine had
about seventy five tons of extra ballast thanks to all
the water, which meant that unless they figured out a solution,
they were basically completely stuck. There was no way for
(12:29):
them to get out of the sub and even if
they could, it would have been virtually impossible for any
of them to survive a swim to the surface from
that depth. So Cook blew the red the residual ballast
out of the tanks, hoping that he would be able
to bring the ship back up to the surface, but
it didn't work, and his efforts were also hampered because
one of the drive motors had been damaged when all
(12:50):
the water started pouring in. The other drive motor also
burned out while they were trying to maneuver out of
the mud at the bottom of the ocean, which left
them with no way to maneuver the ship, and because
of where they had sunk, they weren't really in the
like path of any ships that might be passing um.
It was really unlikely that they were going to be
(13:11):
able to get the attention of another ship, and their
presence in Baltimore was not going to be missed for
several days. So for the next couple of hours, Cook
tried to force water out of the torpedo room using
a number of pumps, and he was not making a
lot of headway. So he decided to try to use
some of their compressed air to try to pressurize the room.
(13:33):
And while this did help, it quickly became obvious that
there was not enough air to do this job. Yeah,
the idea was that if they were able to pressurize
the room, it would force the water out and they
would rise back to the service. Different accounts kind of
vary in their explanations of why Cook tried the next
thing that he tried, which was to use what was
left of the compressed air to clear out the aft
(13:54):
ballast tanks, and this actually worked. It meant that the
stern of the sub now was a lot more buoyant
than the bow, so it rose up, lifting the submarine
off of the sea floor. Uh, but also re orienting
it so that it was more or less vertical. So
just imagine for a moment a submarine which is a confined,
(14:15):
cramped space on a good day. If you have ever
done like a tour of a military submarine, you probably
have that moment of holy smokes, this is really tight
space live down here. So then to think about all
of these people in this tiny space. Uh, it's it
will give you a moment of pause, at least it
does me. So everything is wet aboard at this point.
(14:36):
There is a lot of broken stuff, and now it's
about sixty degrees from horizontal, so not quite straight up
and down, but really close to vertical. So I just
imagine people stacking on top of each other as they
try to get footing. Yeah, for another round of good
news bad news. The good news was they weren't stuck
on the floor of the ocean anymore. They were tracking
their depth and the vessel was very slow, really inching
(15:01):
upward towards the surface. But there was bad news, which
is that now the lowest point of the ship was
the battery room, which had filled with water. The water
started interacting with the sulfuric acid in the batteries, producing
chlorine gas. In such a confined space, no vent delician. Remember,
the chlorine gas had the potential to become deadly. So
(15:22):
the crew started evacuating the parts of the ship that
we're filling up with chlorine gas by basically hauling themselves
over one another, climbing the previously horizontal surfaces of the ship.
Which were now vertical, until they were all out of
the battery room, and then they sealed that off behind them.
They also started trying to funnel some of their air
into the torpedo room to try to keep it from
(15:44):
refilling back with water. And at this point, uh, this
had all been going on for about five hours. We're
gonna take another brief break before we resumed their efforts
to rescue themselves. So five hours after sinking to the
(16:09):
sea floor, the men aboard the S five were not
in good shape. Everything as we said before, it was
wet and slippery. There was debris everywhere thanks to the
combination of stirred up bilge, water and fuel and exhaust,
and the lack of a functioning toilet. It smelled awful,
and Cook had come to the conclusion that his effort
to use compressed air to clear water out so that
(16:32):
they could rise faster was not working. He was preparing
to tell the men that hope was lost and that
they were going to die. Not long after that, some
men who were sheltering in the submarine's motor room, which
at that point was the highest point in the submarine,
reported that they could hear waves breaking against the side
of the vessel. So that sounds awesome, right, like we
(16:54):
have cleared the water. Uh. Since they weren't oriented in
the correct direction, they used math plus the ship's inclinometer
to figure out just how far up they were. When
the good news was now about twenty ft of the
ship were above the water line. That's all, But there's
also bad news. The actual escape hatch, though, was still
(17:14):
submerged by a good thirty feet, and even if they'd
been able to shift their angle from sixty degrees to
ninety degrees from horizontal, the hatch still would have been underwater,
and that shift would not have been enough to clear
it of the waterline. But now having part of the
vessel above the waterline gave everyone a tiny glimmer of hope,
(17:36):
and they came up with a plan to cut their
way out of the ship. So it's a tiny glimmer
of hope because they're planning to cut their way through
three quarter inch thick steel that was made specifically to
keep the ocean out of the submarine to not be
easy to break. Correct. Uh, that sounds like just a
(18:00):
sprit plan, but it is what they decided to do,
and they did it. Cook climbed up to the tiller room,
which was a small compartment off the motor room, and
he and several men took turns, starting with an electric
drill until it's motor burned out, and then they turned
to a manual drill. And that's what blows my mind. Like,
but I guess if you feel like life of both
(18:21):
yourself and a lot of men that you are, you know,
close with at that point they've worked together really closely,
I'll do it. You have the choice of we can
try to drill through three quarter and still with a
manual drill, or we can die. Yeah. Uh so slowly
but surely. They drilled a quarter inch hole through the
side of the sub and that took twenty minutes, Sarah,
(18:43):
quarter inch hole. So it's not like any anybody's getting
out of that. No, and unfortunately that also doesn't mean
that fresh air is coming in. Yeah. Um, so they
were finding you know, they were successful. Yeah, they had
managed to make a hole. They decided that what they
would do was to drill holes close enough together that
they could then knock out the spaces between them with
(19:04):
a hammer and a chisel, hoping to create a hole
large enough for the men to escape through. But based
on the fact that it took them twenty minutes to
make the first hole, they all expected that this effort
was just going to take more time than they have,
but they persisted anyway. By morning they had a space
large enough to scan the horizon for ships, and they
(19:25):
were actually seeing some, but those ships were too far
away for them to get their attention. And since they
had opened a hole in the ship, it was no
longer as pressurized as it had been, so there was
more water seeping in as air was escaping out of
this hole that they had punched. And even though in
theory they had a source of fresh air, now it
was not enough to keep the air in the ship clean.
(19:47):
The air was in fact increasingly disgusting, and the oxygen
levels were low enough that the men couldn't keep at
their drilling task for long. Having this source of of
you know, air from the outside, like fresh air from
outside wasn't coming in. Gross air from in the ship
was going out and being replaced from up underneath by water,
(20:10):
right is what was happening. So basically, now they were
in this process of trying to make the whole big
enough to escape from before the size of the hole,
let enough air out, the submarine sank back below the waves.
I'm just gonna let that set for a minute, like
(20:30):
it's a race against time to try to make the
whole bigger before the ship sinks again. I keep saying ship,
and I think somebody might write in and say, we
should have said sub the whole time. So if if
that's a nautical faux pa, I'm very sorry. Twenty four
hours after the initial incident, so a full day they
have been in peril. They had a hole in the
(20:54):
side of the ship that was about six inches by
eight inches. But basically everyone was unable to work at
that point to make it any bigger because there was
just a lack of oxygen. Uh, and many of the
men had lost consciousness, so it wasn't And when you're
doing something like drilling a hole, and with the manual drill,
it's really hard, it's really difficult, and you consume a
lot of oxygen. So when there's not much there, well,
(21:17):
and all of the oxygen, not all, but a lot
of the oxygen at this point had been replaced by
carbon dioxide and breathing that is not good for you
and can lead you to all kinds of other health
effects by your body not being able to clear that
out as waste um. Plus some of the guys who
had already as the whole situation with chlorine gas started,
(21:37):
some of them had started to have other breathing problems
because of the toxic gases that were inside the ship.
It was a really bad situation. But just then a
ship came by, and Cook, who was still conscious, roused
some men to try to find a way to signal it.
And what they wind up doing was tying a sailor's
shirt to a ten ft long length of copper pipe
(21:59):
and sticking out, sticking that out the hole that they
had made, and waving it around. So the ship in
question was a merchant ship, the s S. Atlantis, which
was actually headed away from them, but good fortune, someone
on deck turned back and actually saw their signal, and
so they came about to see what was going on.
I'm just trying to imagine the mind of the man
(22:20):
who sees like a piece of pipe sticking out of
a hole, of something sticking out of the ocean, Yeah, going,
what the heck is that? Yeah? The Atlanti, says Captain
Ernest A. Johnson, maneuvered close to the S five and
then he rode the rest of the way himself in
a dinghy or a little skiff or something, and he
had the following conversation with Cook through the hole in
(22:41):
the sub which is just fantastic. And I will do
one part in Holly can do the other part. What
ship are you? Submarine? S five? What nationality? United States?
Where are you bound to hell by compass? I love?
Why is this not a film? I feel like it
has to be And I should have thought IMDb before
we came in here. Um. And then just like we laughed,
(23:04):
the men who were still conscious on the submarine laughed. Um.
And after you know, his confusion kind of cleared up.
Johnson realized that this was a crisis like this was
an emergency that he needed to help with right now,
and so he tied the S five to his ship
with chains and cables to keep it from sinking, and
(23:25):
then he ordered his men to build an improvised wooden
platform so that they could have better access to try
to work on the ship. And then they also made
an improvised air pump to try to get some fresh
air into the ship or into the submarine for the men.
I also just loved the cook in the most dire
circumstances is finding a way to correct chips like he
gets my unending respect and admiration for Yeah. Well, and
(23:46):
the one of the there are two primary sources for
for this episode, and one of them is a book
called Under Pressure, The Final Voyage of Submarine S five,
And one of the remarks that comes up was that
the situation like it's really difficult to live on a
submarine and people tend to have really dark senses of
humor and to be able to make a joke about anything. Um,
(24:08):
but the jokes had ceased for quite some time before
he said to hell by compass, and like that was
one of the things where he realized, like how di
are the men's mental situation was that no one was
laughing about anything anymore. Uh So the Atlantis Is radio
operator unfortunately was not on board. Also not on board
(24:28):
or any sorts of tools or equipment that would have
made it easier to drill through the side of the submarine.
So the exhausted and at this point delirious crew of
the S five passed the gear that they had been
using out of the hole to the crew of the Atlantis,
who then could resume drilling from the outside, and then,
quite fortunately, another ship appeared. This one was the s
(24:50):
S General George W. Girtles and Johnson ran up an
emergency flag on the Atlantis to get the other ship's attention,
and that ship's master, Captain EO. Swinson, uh moved his
ship over and anchored nearby. Being a much bigger and
more equipped ship and having a radio operator on board,
the George W. Gettels was able to radio the Navy
(25:11):
and let them know what was up with the submarine,
but it was going to take at least until the
next morning for a Navy vessel to arrive, so Captain
Swinson and Johnson decided that they would keep on working
to try to free the crew of the S five.
Swinson's chief engineer, William Grace and his first assistant, Richard McWilliams,
headed up the task, working with another manual drill, and
(25:33):
this one was kind of a ratcheting one that seemed
to work a little better, as well as chisels and
a sledgehammer. They finally managed to make a hole big
enough for the crew to crawl through thirty six hours
after the original incidents. Ugh uh. They were taken aboard
the Atlantis, where a makeshift sick bay had been put
together so that they could receive them. And at this point,
(25:56):
as you would imagine, the men were in really bad shape.
Two actors from the George W. Gettles were on hand
to look after the men, and they agreed that the
rescue had really been in the nick of time. It
took so long to evacuate everyone just because they were
so exhausted and they were basically having to climb up
the interior of a vertical submarine. They weren't done getting
all the men off of the S five until about
(26:18):
the same time as the Navy ships arrived, and Cook
was the last man to leave the S five and
at that point he had been awake for two days.
He he gets the captain goes down with his ship. Award. Yeah,
for sure. The Navy tried to salvage the submarine, but
eventually gave up. Two different ships were not up to
the task of trying to haul it back to the
(26:39):
surface and just they decided it was just gonna it
was more trouble than it was worth. Basically, as of
two thousand two, which is when the book that I
referenced earlier was published it was still on the bottom
of the ocean. The Navy investigated, and they found that
Fox's failure to close the intake valves was probably the
cause of the sinking, But they also chalked up all
(27:00):
those extenuating circumstances, including that the valves themselves were apparently defective. Uh,
and that you know, those valves that were extremely hard
to wrangle, were really what had caused Fox to leave
his post in the first place. And Fox had also
gone way above and beyond during the whole survival effort.
Pretty much any time they needed a volunteer, he was it.
I have to wonder personally if that was motivated by
(27:21):
guilt over it was the whole thing going on. Uh.
Cook also took some of the blame for having not
ensured that the ship was clear before giving the order
to submerge. Yeah, so there's a there's a lot that
went on, like specific things that went on and all
of their efforts to save themselves that we didn't go into.
One of them is that before the motor burned out
(27:43):
in their drill um, they needed to go get more batteries,
and so somebody was going to try to go into
the battery compartment, which was filled with chlorine gas, and
foxes like, I'll go like he was the volunteer time. Um.
There's also a note in the book that that Cook, Uh,
at one of these points when Fox volunteered to go
(28:03):
do something dangerous to try to help them, realized that
at no point had he heard any of the men
criticize him for having messed up in the first place,
which is kind of incredible to me, Like, like, I
can see how a person's impulse might be, like Fox,
You've had one job, like what is the matter with you?
But instead, like all the men are really focused hard
(28:27):
on not laying blame on anybody and not arguing about it,
but on doing whatever they needed to do to keep
themselves alive. Uh. The Navy also recognized Captain's Swinson and
Johnson and their cruise for how their lengths they had
gone to to try to rescue the crew once they
found the submarine sticking partly out of the water, and
(28:48):
they also put more safety measures into place so that
the same thing would not happen again. Cook was also
a career Navy man, and he eventually retired as a
full admiral in for more than thirty years of service. Apparently,
after the S five was sunk, most of the crew
really petitioned to be placed under him again, which is
(29:12):
not surprising to me at all. I feel like this
story could be used in corporate leadership manuals. Yeah, his
nickname was savvy. He had been nicknamed that long before
and to this just because that was his demeanor. He
was a savvy guy. He knew how to how to
handle things. So yes, so happy and the happy and
the harrowing story, but a happy end name it is harrowing.
(29:33):
I I do wish that I had made sure that
there's not a movie of this at i amdb, because
their absolutely should be. If there is not, Thank you
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you
have heard an email address or a Facebook you are
l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
(29:56):
since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at History podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History. And
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
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(30:20):
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Hey, everybody happy Saturday. I hope it's going grandly Today.
We are going back to our November episode on the
sinking of the submarine known as S five, which happened
during the vessel's first mission and involves some very dramatic
and heroic efforts by the crew to keep themselves alive
while they awaited rescue. If you're thinking on hearing this
(00:22):
episode of sending us a note to let us know
that traditionally submarines are called boats instead of ships, We've
got it. There, you go, enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:46):
Tracy V. Wilson. Him, I'm Holly Fry And you know, uh,
people sending it seemed to love the stories about shipwrecks. Yeah,
we have a lot of maritime history fans. Yes, that
lots of people who love the shipwreck stories and who
want to hear more shipwreck stories, and we haven't really
talked a lot of about submarine disasters. After looking through
our archive and also polling on Facebook and Twitter, I
(01:09):
think the only submarine disaster that has been on the
podcast ever in its history is a brief part about
the Huntley, which was a Civil War submarine from an
episode on five Battleship Shipwrecks. So, uh, we're gonna talk
about a submarine disaster today, and there been bigger submarine
disasters in history than this one. Also maybe even actually
(01:34):
I've put this in my notes before I got to
the end of doing my research. It says, maybe some
more dramatic submarine rescues, but this one's actually pretty dramatic. Uh.
The reason that I wanted to start with this one,
Number one, it's a listener request from listener Stephen. Number two,
I personally find the idea of being trapped in a
submarine at the bottom of the ocean. The second most
(01:57):
terrifying thing in the world surrounding is my big death fear. Yeah,
the first most terrifying thing is floating into outer space
with no hope of rescue. The second most terrifying thing
is being trapped in a submarine on the bottom of
the ocean. Um. So the reason we're doing this one
is spoiler alert, everyone gets out okay, which is I
(02:18):
think the only way that I would be able to
tolerate recording this episode of being trapped in a submarine. Uh,
this is the submarine S five And as we said earlier,
it is a listener request from Stephen. So today, when
something goes wrong aboard a submarine, most developed countries navies
have these tools on hand to try to rescue the crew.
(02:40):
And relatively shallow water, it could be a matter of
the crew just putting on a suit that will let
them breathe and keep warm while they ascend, and in
deeper water, a rescue vessel can descend down to the
submarine and then carry the survivors back up to the surface.
And during peacetime, rescuing a sunken submarine crew is usually
an international effort, So whoever's closest and has the technology
(03:02):
to handle the situation is who goes. This is not
a case in at that point the United States Submarine
Force had only been officially established for about twenty years,
and even the submarines themselves had really limited means of
escape if they were in any depth of water because
the pressure of the water would hold all of the
(03:24):
hatches closed. So if your submarine sank, really the only
way to get out was through the torpedo tubes, and
that was a maybe maybe the torpedo tubes could be
used as an emergency exhibit. Maybe not. But even if
you could get out the torpedo tubes and most depths,
(03:45):
it would be impossible to swim to the surface before
you either succumbed to the bends or drowned. Your odds
are survival were they were extremely low, almost zero. But
even so, by the time this story takes place, the U. S.
Submarine Force had a relatively good track record as far
as crew safety, and prior to that year, the United
States had only seen two major accidents. One of them
(04:06):
was in nineteen fifteen and the other one was in
nineteen seventeen. And to be clear, this is that was
those numbers for once the Submarine Force was officially established,
because there were some other submarine issues before that and
the extremely limited limited tinkering with submarines that went on
before that point. So the ship from today's episode was
part of the S class, and these were U. S.
(04:27):
Navy submarines from World War One. The S five was
just like its name suggests, the fifth and its class,
and it was launched in November nineteen nineteen and commissioned
the following March. On Monday August nineteen twenty, the S
five left the Boston Navy Yard on its first mission
with the crew of thirty six officers and enlisted men.
(04:48):
The vessel was expected to reach Baltimore, Maryland, on September three.
The ship and crew had by then spent six months
in testing and training. This mission was part of a
longer voyage to the southeastern United States, and they were
going to be making stops at all these Navy ports
along the way with the hope of recruiting X servicemen
to be part of the submarine fleet. This was really
(05:10):
a pretty posh assignment, and Lieutenant Commander Charles M. Cook Jr.
Also known as Savvy, who was in command of the
S five, was extremely pleased with both the skill and
the demeanor of his crew. They all worked really hard,
they could learn to do their jobs really well, and
for the most part, they all got along and we're
my skies to be around. And in addition to these
(05:31):
recruitment stops, the S five was also to undergo a
number of speed and endurance trials as part of a
performance evaluation. After all these months of training and tests,
the performance evaluation was, for the most part kind of
a cake walk. As Tracy just said, this crew was
they worked well together, they all worked hard, they knew
their stuff, they had just been through six months of
(05:51):
intensive training. It was just sort of a happy coincidence
that their performance evaluation immediately followed all that. But the
big exception was the crash dive. So other than during
trainings and this evaluation, crash dives normally took place only
during wartime and when done perfectly. They took a submarine
from the surface of the ocean to periscope depth, which
(06:13):
is about forty ft and under a minute, and the
first time the crew of the S five tried it,
so this is when they were learning how to all
do it. It had taken them more than four minutes,
and they had steadily reduced that time during training. And
the reason that this particular maneuver was the outlier and
their performance evaluation wasn't just the level of difficulty involved.
(06:35):
These evaluations were scored and used as a competition among
the submarines in the fleet. Every extra second would incur
a penalty in the overall scores, and they all wanted
to break that one minute record, during which time they
had a highly orchestrated series of jobs to do in
order to make the vessel watertight and then dive very rapidly.
(06:55):
So before we get to the crash dive and how
it went wrong, a brief about submarines for those who
may not know. A submarine rises and falls through the
water depending in part on how much ballast it has
in its tanks, and the ballast mostly comes in the
form of sea water, and as class submarines, the ballast level,
so how much water was in the ballast tanks, was
(07:18):
regulated by valves called Kingston valves. Uh. These valves were
controlled using waste high levels which connected directly to the
valves through a system of rods which opened and closed
the ballast tanks, and they were incredibly difficult to move.
It took multiple men to open and close each of
them because the Kingston valves were so temperamental. When preparing
(07:39):
for a crash dive, what the crew would do would
be to seal off all the events that let air
in and out of the compartments, and then they would
open the Kingston valves. So because the air couldn't get out,
the water couldn't get in, and that meant that the
level of ballast in the tanks to stay the same,
so the air vants were just a lot easier to
(08:00):
deal with, and that meant that they could deal with
the easier job when it was time to dive. Opening
the vents was faster than opening the valves, so they
were basically getting a little ahead of the game, and
when it was time to dive, they'd open those vents
and the air would flow out and the water would
flow in from the already opened Kingston valves. So when
it came time to do their crash dive test on
(08:22):
September one, this didn't go as planned. The crew closed
all of the air vents and they opened the Kingston valves,
and it turned out that one of the air valves
hadn't sealed properly, so water started seeping into one of
the ballast tanks, and that meant that the submarine almost
immediately started to list to the starboard, which means to
(08:43):
the right for non maritime people. Uh. This was something
that could cause some pretty serious problems if it wasn't corrected,
so the crew immediately got to work opening and closing
other Kingston valves to get things back on an even keel.
One of the people who helped out was Percy Fox,
the gunner mate and the senior most man on the
ship except for the lieutenant commander. They probably could not
(09:05):
have gotten the Kingston valves taken care of without Fox's help.
It was. There was a lot of opening and closing
that had to be done to level things out, but
Fox had his own job to do when it was
really critical. Both he and Lieutenant Commander Cook had major
sources of ventilation to the submarine that they personally had
to close before diving. Cook had to close the hatch
(09:29):
at the top of the conning tower and Fox had
to close the main induction valve, which was the valve
that diverted air to all the parts of the ship
from the outside. So these two men had these two
jobs because they were the two most senior men on
the ship, and these jobs were the two most important
when it came to making the ship uh watertight so
that it could dive, plus when it came to the
(09:51):
induction valve itself. It had proved to be a little
temperamental on the S five as well as on her
sister ships. Cook had some trouble getting the conning tower
hatch to close. It was caught on something but Fox
overlooked his task entirely because he was trying to handle
this other stuff that was going awry. Right, So, when
it was time to dive, Cook sounded the diving Clackson
(10:14):
and the crew did all their tasks to get the
ship to dive, and because Fox had overlooked his part
while wrangling with another crisis, water started pouring into the submarine.
I know how this ends, and I'm even kind of
scared already, So let's take a brief moment for a
word from a sponsor that sounds grand. With water pouring
(10:42):
into the submarine from outside, Fox immediately realized his mistake
and started trying to close the main induction valve, while
Cook gave the order to blow the ballast tanks to
try to clear them of the water that they were
taking in. But Fox couldn't get the main induction valve
to move, so the rest of the crew started manually
closing all of the smaller events that led to the outside,
(11:02):
while sea water was literally pummeling them in the face
as they did. The torpedo room, which had been the
first compartment of the ship to part to start taking
on water, was really too far gone for them to
try to save. So they evacuated it and then sealed
it behind a watertight door. I can't imagine trying to
I mean, I can't change the temperature in the shower
if it's hitting me in the face, like I can't
(11:23):
imagine a much higher pressure situation and the stress situation, Yes,
it would be intense. So with the torpedo room essentially
open to the sea at that point, it filled with
water and the S five sank to the sea floor.
Knows first. When it came to rest four minutes later,
it was under about a hundred and eighty feet of water,
(11:44):
more or less upright. So a running theme and then
this whole story is that they keep having some good
news and some bad news. So the good news was
everyone had survived this initial sinking of the ship. The
only injuries at this point we're pretty minor. The hull
was still intact, they still had emergency power provided by batteries,
(12:06):
and they still had about half of their supply of
compressed air. The bad news was the torpedo room was
about two thirds full of water, and the bilges also
had water in them. All in all, the submarine had
about seventy five tons of extra ballast thanks to all
the water, which meant that unless they figured out a solution,
they were basically completely stuck. There was no way for
(12:29):
them to get out of the sub and even if
they could, it would have been virtually impossible for any
of them to survive a swim to the surface from
that depth. So Cook blew the red the residual ballast
out of the tanks, hoping that he would be able
to bring the ship back up to the surface, but
it didn't work, and his efforts were also hampered because
one of the drive motors had been damaged when all
(12:50):
the water started pouring in. The other drive motor also
burned out while they were trying to maneuver out of
the mud at the bottom of the ocean, which left
them with no way to maneuver the ship, and because
of where they had sunk, they weren't really in the
like path of any ships that might be passing um.
It was really unlikely that they were going to be
(13:11):
able to get the attention of another ship, and their
presence in Baltimore was not going to be missed for
several days. So for the next couple of hours, Cook
tried to force water out of the torpedo room using
a number of pumps, and he was not making a
lot of headway. So he decided to try to use
some of their compressed air to try to pressurize the room.
(13:33):
And while this did help, it quickly became obvious that
there was not enough air to do this job. Yeah,
the idea was that if they were able to pressurize
the room, it would force the water out and they
would rise back to the service. Different accounts kind of
vary in their explanations of why Cook tried the next
thing that he tried, which was to use what was
left of the compressed air to clear out the aft
(13:54):
ballast tanks, and this actually worked. It meant that the
stern of the sub now was a lot more buoyant
than the bow, so it rose up, lifting the submarine
off of the sea floor. Uh, but also re orienting
it so that it was more or less vertical. So
just imagine for a moment a submarine which is a confined,
(14:15):
cramped space on a good day. If you have ever
done like a tour of a military submarine, you probably
have that moment of holy smokes, this is really tight
space live down here. So then to think about all
of these people in this tiny space. Uh, it's it
will give you a moment of pause, at least it
does me. So everything is wet aboard at this point.
(14:36):
There is a lot of broken stuff, and now it's
about sixty degrees from horizontal, so not quite straight up
and down, but really close to vertical. So I just
imagine people stacking on top of each other as they
try to get footing. Yeah, for another round of good
news bad news. The good news was they weren't stuck
on the floor of the ocean anymore. They were tracking
their depth and the vessel was very slow, really inching
(15:01):
upward towards the surface. But there was bad news, which
is that now the lowest point of the ship was
the battery room, which had filled with water. The water
started interacting with the sulfuric acid in the batteries, producing
chlorine gas. In such a confined space, no vent delician. Remember,
the chlorine gas had the potential to become deadly. So
(15:22):
the crew started evacuating the parts of the ship that
we're filling up with chlorine gas by basically hauling themselves
over one another, climbing the previously horizontal surfaces of the ship.
Which were now vertical, until they were all out of
the battery room, and then they sealed that off behind them.
They also started trying to funnel some of their air
into the torpedo room to try to keep it from
(15:44):
refilling back with water. And at this point, uh, this
had all been going on for about five hours. We're
gonna take another brief break before we resumed their efforts
to rescue themselves. So five hours after sinking to the
(16:09):
sea floor, the men aboard the S five were not
in good shape. Everything as we said before, it was
wet and slippery. There was debris everywhere thanks to the
combination of stirred up bilge, water and fuel and exhaust,
and the lack of a functioning toilet. It smelled awful,
and Cook had come to the conclusion that his effort
to use compressed air to clear water out so that
(16:32):
they could rise faster was not working. He was preparing
to tell the men that hope was lost and that
they were going to die. Not long after that, some
men who were sheltering in the submarine's motor room, which
at that point was the highest point in the submarine,
reported that they could hear waves breaking against the side
of the vessel. So that sounds awesome, right, like we
(16:54):
have cleared the water. Uh. Since they weren't oriented in
the correct direction, they used math plus the ship's inclinometer
to figure out just how far up they were. When
the good news was now about twenty ft of the
ship were above the water line. That's all, But there's
also bad news. The actual escape hatch, though, was still
(17:14):
submerged by a good thirty feet, and even if they'd
been able to shift their angle from sixty degrees to
ninety degrees from horizontal, the hatch still would have been underwater,
and that shift would not have been enough to clear
it of the waterline. But now having part of the
vessel above the waterline gave everyone a tiny glimmer of hope,
(17:36):
and they came up with a plan to cut their
way out of the ship. So it's a tiny glimmer
of hope because they're planning to cut their way through
three quarter inch thick steel that was made specifically to
keep the ocean out of the submarine to not be
easy to break. Correct. Uh, that sounds like just a
(18:00):
sprit plan, but it is what they decided to do,
and they did it. Cook climbed up to the tiller room,
which was a small compartment off the motor room, and
he and several men took turns, starting with an electric
drill until it's motor burned out, and then they turned
to a manual drill. And that's what blows my mind. Like,
but I guess if you feel like life of both
(18:21):
yourself and a lot of men that you are, you know,
close with at that point they've worked together really closely,
I'll do it. You have the choice of we can
try to drill through three quarter and still with a
manual drill, or we can die. Yeah. Uh so slowly
but surely. They drilled a quarter inch hole through the
side of the sub and that took twenty minutes, Sarah,
(18:43):
quarter inch hole. So it's not like any anybody's getting
out of that. No, and unfortunately that also doesn't mean
that fresh air is coming in. Yeah. Um, so they
were finding you know, they were successful. Yeah, they had
managed to make a hole. They decided that what they
would do was to drill holes close enough together that
they could then knock out the spaces between them with
(19:04):
a hammer and a chisel, hoping to create a hole
large enough for the men to escape through. But based
on the fact that it took them twenty minutes to
make the first hole, they all expected that this effort
was just going to take more time than they have,
but they persisted anyway. By morning they had a space
large enough to scan the horizon for ships, and they
(19:25):
were actually seeing some, but those ships were too far
away for them to get their attention. And since they
had opened a hole in the ship, it was no
longer as pressurized as it had been, so there was
more water seeping in as air was escaping out of
this hole that they had punched. And even though in
theory they had a source of fresh air, now it
was not enough to keep the air in the ship clean.
(19:47):
The air was in fact increasingly disgusting, and the oxygen
levels were low enough that the men couldn't keep at
their drilling task for long. Having this source of of
you know, air from the outside, like fresh air from
outside wasn't coming in. Gross air from in the ship
was going out and being replaced from up underneath by water,
(20:10):
right is what was happening. So basically, now they were
in this process of trying to make the whole big
enough to escape from before the size of the hole,
let enough air out, the submarine sank back below the waves.
I'm just gonna let that set for a minute, like
(20:30):
it's a race against time to try to make the
whole bigger before the ship sinks again. I keep saying ship,
and I think somebody might write in and say, we
should have said sub the whole time. So if if
that's a nautical faux pa, I'm very sorry. Twenty four
hours after the initial incident, so a full day they
have been in peril. They had a hole in the
(20:54):
side of the ship that was about six inches by
eight inches. But basically everyone was unable to work at
that point to make it any bigger because there was
just a lack of oxygen. Uh, and many of the
men had lost consciousness, so it wasn't And when you're
doing something like drilling a hole, and with the manual drill,
it's really hard, it's really difficult, and you consume a
lot of oxygen. So when there's not much there, well,
(21:17):
and all of the oxygen, not all, but a lot
of the oxygen at this point had been replaced by
carbon dioxide and breathing that is not good for you
and can lead you to all kinds of other health
effects by your body not being able to clear that
out as waste um. Plus some of the guys who
had already as the whole situation with chlorine gas started,
(21:37):
some of them had started to have other breathing problems
because of the toxic gases that were inside the ship.
It was a really bad situation. But just then a
ship came by, and Cook, who was still conscious, roused
some men to try to find a way to signal it.
And what they wind up doing was tying a sailor's
shirt to a ten ft long length of copper pipe
(21:59):
and sticking out, sticking that out the hole that they
had made, and waving it around. So the ship in
question was a merchant ship, the s S. Atlantis, which
was actually headed away from them, but good fortune, someone
on deck turned back and actually saw their signal, and
so they came about to see what was going on.
I'm just trying to imagine the mind of the man
(22:20):
who sees like a piece of pipe sticking out of
a hole, of something sticking out of the ocean, Yeah, going,
what the heck is that? Yeah? The Atlanti, says Captain
Ernest A. Johnson, maneuvered close to the S five and
then he rode the rest of the way himself in
a dinghy or a little skiff or something, and he
had the following conversation with Cook through the hole in
(22:41):
the sub which is just fantastic. And I will do
one part in Holly can do the other part. What
ship are you? Submarine? S five? What nationality? United States?
Where are you bound to hell by compass? I love?
Why is this not a film? I feel like it
has to be And I should have thought IMDb before
we came in here. Um. And then just like we laughed,
(23:04):
the men who were still conscious on the submarine laughed. Um.
And after you know, his confusion kind of cleared up.
Johnson realized that this was a crisis like this was
an emergency that he needed to help with right now,
and so he tied the S five to his ship
with chains and cables to keep it from sinking, and
(23:25):
then he ordered his men to build an improvised wooden
platform so that they could have better access to try
to work on the ship. And then they also made
an improvised air pump to try to get some fresh
air into the ship or into the submarine for the men.
I also just loved the cook in the most dire
circumstances is finding a way to correct chips like he
gets my unending respect and admiration for Yeah. Well, and
(23:46):
the one of the there are two primary sources for
for this episode, and one of them is a book
called Under Pressure, The Final Voyage of Submarine S five,
And one of the remarks that comes up was that
the situation like it's really difficult to live on a
submarine and people tend to have really dark senses of
humor and to be able to make a joke about anything. Um,
(24:08):
but the jokes had ceased for quite some time before
he said to hell by compass, and like that was
one of the things where he realized, like how di
are the men's mental situation was that no one was
laughing about anything anymore. Uh So the Atlantis Is radio
operator unfortunately was not on board. Also not on board
(24:28):
or any sorts of tools or equipment that would have
made it easier to drill through the side of the submarine.
So the exhausted and at this point delirious crew of
the S five passed the gear that they had been
using out of the hole to the crew of the Atlantis,
who then could resume drilling from the outside, and then,
quite fortunately, another ship appeared. This one was the s
(24:50):
S General George W. Girtles and Johnson ran up an
emergency flag on the Atlantis to get the other ship's attention,
and that ship's master, Captain EO. Swinson, uh moved his
ship over and anchored nearby. Being a much bigger and
more equipped ship and having a radio operator on board,
the George W. Gettels was able to radio the Navy
(25:11):
and let them know what was up with the submarine,
but it was going to take at least until the
next morning for a Navy vessel to arrive, so Captain
Swinson and Johnson decided that they would keep on working
to try to free the crew of the S five.
Swinson's chief engineer, William Grace and his first assistant, Richard McWilliams,
headed up the task, working with another manual drill, and
(25:33):
this one was kind of a ratcheting one that seemed
to work a little better, as well as chisels and
a sledgehammer. They finally managed to make a hole big
enough for the crew to crawl through thirty six hours
after the original incidents. Ugh uh. They were taken aboard
the Atlantis, where a makeshift sick bay had been put
together so that they could receive them. And at this point,
(25:56):
as you would imagine, the men were in really bad shape.
Two actors from the George W. Gettles were on hand
to look after the men, and they agreed that the
rescue had really been in the nick of time. It
took so long to evacuate everyone just because they were
so exhausted and they were basically having to climb up
the interior of a vertical submarine. They weren't done getting
all the men off of the S five until about
(26:18):
the same time as the Navy ships arrived, and Cook
was the last man to leave the S five and
at that point he had been awake for two days.
He he gets the captain goes down with his ship. Award. Yeah,
for sure. The Navy tried to salvage the submarine, but
eventually gave up. Two different ships were not up to
the task of trying to haul it back to the
(26:39):
surface and just they decided it was just gonna it
was more trouble than it was worth. Basically, as of
two thousand two, which is when the book that I
referenced earlier was published it was still on the bottom
of the ocean. The Navy investigated, and they found that
Fox's failure to close the intake valves was probably the
cause of the sinking, But they also chalked up all
(27:00):
those extenuating circumstances, including that the valves themselves were apparently defective. Uh,
and that you know, those valves that were extremely hard
to wrangle, were really what had caused Fox to leave
his post in the first place. And Fox had also
gone way above and beyond during the whole survival effort.
Pretty much any time they needed a volunteer, he was it.
I have to wonder personally if that was motivated by
(27:21):
guilt over it was the whole thing going on. Uh.
Cook also took some of the blame for having not
ensured that the ship was clear before giving the order
to submerge. Yeah, so there's a there's a lot that
went on, like specific things that went on and all
of their efforts to save themselves that we didn't go into.
One of them is that before the motor burned out
(27:43):
in their drill um, they needed to go get more batteries,
and so somebody was going to try to go into
the battery compartment, which was filled with chlorine gas, and
foxes like, I'll go like he was the volunteer time. Um.
There's also a note in the book that that Cook, Uh,
at one of these points when Fox volunteered to go
(28:03):
do something dangerous to try to help them, realized that
at no point had he heard any of the men
criticize him for having messed up in the first place,
which is kind of incredible to me, Like, like, I
can see how a person's impulse might be, like Fox,
You've had one job, like what is the matter with you?
But instead, like all the men are really focused hard
(28:27):
on not laying blame on anybody and not arguing about it,
but on doing whatever they needed to do to keep
themselves alive. Uh. The Navy also recognized Captain's Swinson and
Johnson and their cruise for how their lengths they had
gone to to try to rescue the crew once they
found the submarine sticking partly out of the water, and
(28:48):
they also put more safety measures into place so that
the same thing would not happen again. Cook was also
a career Navy man, and he eventually retired as a
full admiral in for more than thirty years of service. Apparently,
after the S five was sunk, most of the crew
really petitioned to be placed under him again, which is
(29:12):
not surprising to me at all. I feel like this
story could be used in corporate leadership manuals. Yeah, his
nickname was savvy. He had been nicknamed that long before
and to this just because that was his demeanor. He
was a savvy guy. He knew how to how to
handle things. So yes, so happy and the happy and
the harrowing story, but a happy end name it is harrowing.
(29:33):
I I do wish that I had made sure that
there's not a movie of this at i amdb, because
their absolutely should be. If there is not, Thank you
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you
have heard an email address or a Facebook you are
l or something similar over the course of today's episode,
(29:56):
since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at History podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History. And
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
the I Heart radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
(30:20):
production of I heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more
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