November 26, 2014 • 32 mins
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. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm try C V. Wilson, Holly Frying and you know, uh,
people sunny it seemed to love the stories about shipwrecks. Yeah,
we have a lot of maritime history fans. Yes, that
(00:21):
lots of people who love the shipwrecks stories and who
want to hear more shipwrecks 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
think the only submarine disaster that has been on the
podcast ever in its history is a brief part about
(00:43):
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 in
Actually I've put this in my notes before I got
(01:03):
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
(01:23):
terrifying thing in the world. Drowning is my big death fear.
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
(01:44):
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, something
goes wrong aboard a submarine. Most developed countries navies have
these tools on hand to try to rescue the crew
(02:07):
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 submarines crew is usually
an international effort, so whoever's closest and has the technology
(02:29):
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
(02:50):
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,
(03:12):
it would be impossible to swim to the service before
you either succumbed to the bends or drowned. Your odds
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
(03:33):
was in nineteen fifteen and the other one was in
nineteen seventeen. 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. Navy
(03:54):
submarines from World War One. The S five was, just
like its name suggests, the fifth in its class, and
it was launched in November nineteen and commissioned the following March.
On Monday, August, the S five left the Boston Navy
Yard on its first mission with a crew of thirty
six officers and enlisted men. The vessel was expected to
(04:16):
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 ex servicemen to be part of
the submarine fleet. This was really a pretty posh assignment
(04:39):
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 nice skies to be around.
And in addition to these recruitment stops, the S five
(05:00):
I 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 intensive training. It was
just sort of a happy coincidence that their performance evaluation
(05:22):
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 is about forty feet
in under a minute, and the first time the crew
(05:44):
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. These evaluations were scored
and used as a competition among the submarines in the fleet.
(06:07):
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. So before we get to
the crash dive and how it went wrong, a brief
bit about submarines for those who may not know. A
(06:29):
submarine rises and falls through the water depending in part
on how much ballast it has and its tanks, and
the ballast mostly comes in the form of seawater, and
as class submarine, the ballast level, so how much water
was in the ballast tanks was regulated by valves called
Kingston valves. Uh. These valves were controlled using waste high
(06:50):
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 more staple
men to open and close each of them. Because the
Kingston valves were so temperamental, when preparing for a crash dive,
what the crew would do would be to seal off
all the vents that let air in and out of
(07:12):
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
and the tanks to stay the same. So the air
vents were just a lot easier to deal with, and
that meant that they could deal with the easier job
when it was time to dive. Opening the vents was
(07:33):
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 September one, this
didn't go as planned, the crew closed all of the
air vents and they opened the Kingston valves, and it
(07:55):
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 the right for
non maritime people. Uh. This was something that could cause
some pretty serious problems if it wasn't corrected, so the
(08:17):
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's mate and the senior most man on the ship
except for the lieutenant commander. They probably could not have
gotten the Kingston valves taken care of without Fox's help.
It was. There was a lot of opening and closing
(08:39):
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
at the top of the conning tower and Fox had
to close the main induction valve, which was the valve
(09:01):
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
induction valve itself. It had proved to be a little
temperamental on the S five as well as on her
(09:23):
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
and the crew did all their tasks to get the
ship to dive. And because Fox had overlooked his part
(09:46):
while wrangling with another crisis, water started pouring into the submarine. Ah,
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 sponsors sir to get back to the
S five with water pouring into the submarine from outside.
(10:08):
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, while sea water was
literally pummeling them in the face as they did. The
(10:31):
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 imagine a much higher pressure situation,
of a much higher stress situation. Yes, it would be intense.
(10:55):
So with the torpedo room essentially open to the sea
at that point, it filled with water and the S
five sank to the seafloor. Knows first when it came
to rest four minutes later it was under about a
hundred and eighty feet of water 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.
(11:16):
But the good news was everyone had survived this initial
sinking of the ship. The only inner injuries at this
point were pretty minor. The hull was still intact, they
still had emergency power provided by batteries, and they still
had about half of their supply of compressed air. The
bad news was the torpedo room was about two thirds
(11:38):
full of water, and the billages 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 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
(12:01):
Cook blew the resid 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 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
(12:21):
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 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
(12:44):
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, and while this did help,
it quickly became obvious that there was not enough air
to do this job. The idea was that if they
were able to pressurize the room, it would force the
(13:05):
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 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,
(13:26):
lifting the submarine off of the sea floor. Uh, but
also reorienting it so that it was more or less vertical.
So just imagine for a moment a submarine which is
a confined, 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
(13:46):
really tight space. We 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, 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
(14:10):
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 slowly
inching upward towards the surface. But there was bad news,
which is that now the lowest point of the ship
(14:30):
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 ventilation. Remember,
the chlorine gas had the potential to become deadly. So
the crew started evacuating the parts of the ship that
we're filling up with chlorine gas by basically hauling themselves
(14:52):
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 refilling back with water. And at this point, uh,
(15:13):
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. And now let's get back to
those poor gents on the sub. So five hours after
sinking to the sea, floor. The men aboard that S
five were not in good shape. Everything. As we said before,
(15:34):
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 they could rise faster was not working. He
(15:56):
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, like we have
cleared the water. Uh. Since they weren't oriented in the
(16:17):
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 feet of the ship
were above the water line. That's all, But there's also
bad news. The actual escape hatch, though, was still submerged
by a good thirty feet, and even if they'd been
(16:38):
able to shift their angle from sixty degrees to ninety
degrees from horizontal, the hatch still would have been under water,
and that ship would not have been enough to clear
it of the water line. But now having part of
the vessel above the water line gave everyone a tiny
glimmer of hope, and they came up with a plan
to cut their way out of the ship. So it's
(17:02):
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 desperate plan, but it is what they
decided to do, and they did it. Cook climbed up
(17:25):
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 yourself and a lot of
men that you are, you know, close with, at that
(17:47):
point they've worked together really closely I'll do it. You
have the choice of we can try to drill through
three quarter inch still with a manual drill, or we
can die. Yeah, uh so slowly, but surely. They drilled
a quarter inch holes the side of the sub and
that took twenty minutes. So a quarter inch hole. So
it's not like any anybody's getting out of that. No,
(18:08):
and unfortunately that also doesn't mean that fresh air is
coming in. 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 a hammer and a chisel,
hoping to create a hole large enough for the men
(18:28):
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 were actually seeing some, but those
ships were too far away for them to get their attention.
(18:51):
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 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. The air was in fact increasingly disgusting,
and the oxygen levels were low enough that the men
(19:12):
couldn't keep it 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, right, that is what was happening.
(19:32):
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 it's a race against
time to try to make the whole bigger before the
(19:55):
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 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 side of the ship that
was about six inches by eight inches, but basically everyone
(20:19):
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, and all of the oxygen, not all,
but a lot of the oxygen at this point had
(20:40):
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, some of them had started to have
other breathing problem ones because of the toxic gases that
(21:01):
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 shirts to a ten ft
long length of copper pipe and then sticking out, sticking
that out the hole that they had made, and waving
(21:23):
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 who sees like a piece of
pipe sticking out of a hole of something sticking out
(21:45):
of the ocean. Yeah, what the heck is that? Yeah?
The Atlantis is. 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 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?
(22:08):
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 looked on IMDb before we came in here. Um.
And then just like we laughed, the men who are
still conscious on the submarine laughed. Um. And after you know,
(22:31):
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 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.
(22:51):
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 mint. I also just loved
the book. In the most dire circumstances is finding a
way to correct chill like he gets my unending respect
and admiration for Yeah, well, and the one of the
are There are two primary sources for for this episode,
and one of them is a book called Under Pressure
(23:13):
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, but
the jokes had ceased for quite some time before, he
said to hell by compass, and like that was one
(23:36):
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 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
(23:57):
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
S General George W. Girtles and Johnson ran up an
emergency flag on the Atlantis to get the other ship's attention,
(24:18):
and that ship's master, Captain E. O. 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. Gettles was able to radio the Navy
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
(24:40):
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
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
(25:02):
enough for the crew to crawl through thirty six hours
after the original incident. That's 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,
as you would imagine, the men were in really bad shape.
Two doctors from the George W. Gettles were on hand
(25:22):
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. That they weren't done
getting all the men off of the S five until
about the same time as the Navy ships arrived. And
Cook was the last man to leave the S five,
(25:43):
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 this surface,
and just they decided it was just gonna it was
more trouble than it was worth. Basically, as of two
(26:05):
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 those
extenuating circumstances, including that the valves themselves were apparently defective, uh,
(26:25):
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
guilt over it was the whole thing going on. Uh.
Cook also took some of the blame for having not
(26:46):
ensured that the ship was clear before giving the order
to submerge. So there's a there. 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 of them is that before the motor burned out
in their drill um, they needed to go get more batteries,
(27:07):
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 at um.
There's also a note in the book that that Cook
uh at one of these points when Fox volunteered to
go do something dangerous to try to help them, realized
(27:28):
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
on not laying blame on anybody and not arguing about it.
(27:50):
But I'm 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
they also put more safety measures into place so that
(28:12):
the same thing would not happen again. Cook was also
a career Navy man, and he eventually retired as a
full admiral in after 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
(28:32):
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 end, happy ending, harrowing story,
but a happy end name it is harrowing. I I
(28:54):
do wish that I had made sure that there's not
a movie of this at IMDb, because they're so Louie
should be if there's not. Anyway, do you have a
spot of listener mail? Unfortunately it's going to temper that
the positivity of ruin it Uh. I said that I
was going to read um at least one more email
(29:17):
about our mini series on China under a chairman Mao
zedong uh And this I think is probably, you know,
unless we get another really amazing one. We've We've read
quite a few, but I did want to make sure
that I read as many personal accounts of people as possible.
And this is from Helen heal And says you're Tracy
and Holly. I wanted to thank you for your recent
mini series on Chinese history. Both of my parents were
(29:40):
born in ninety three, right where your mini series starts.
Their lives were very much affected by the events you covered.
I grew up hearing stories about their childhoods spent working
in the countryside raising pigs or making bricks, and about
how they studied secretly using textbooks they found in the trash.
They were able to teach themselves the equivalent of a
high school education Asian, so that when the universities finally reopened,
(30:02):
they were able to pass the entrance exams. One of
my art When I was younger, my parents told these
stories with a humorous tone, like anyone simply recounting childhood
antics or sometimes usually these stories to motivate me to
do my homework. As I grew older, I started to
learn more about the dark side of this history, such
as how my grandparents were jailed during the Cultural Revolution
(30:24):
and my mom and her siblings suddenly had to take
care of themselves, or how my father became very ill
during the Great Famine and almost died because of the
impact of this period of history. How do my family
I've always been very hungry to learn about it, but
have often felt frustrated by how different sources are usually
biased in one way or the other. I found your
series of wonderfully balanced view of the topic, even though
(30:45):
it was a subject that I've been familiar with. I've
definitely learned a thing or two, and the big picture,
I think my family was lucky and that they survived
and were able to move on successfully after all of
the chaos has stopped. Your series helped shed more light
onto the experiences that my parents had growing up and
helped shed more light onto my own origins. Sincerely, Helen,
Thank you so much, Helen. That is the kind of
(31:07):
email that makes our day. Really, I'm that Tracy read
it because I've all choked up just hearing her. Are
I looked over that I was when I read it.
When she first sent it, I looked over the table
and I was like, oh no, Holly looks tears. That's
like a short walk often. I mean, I definitely will
tear up and a lot of things both that we
find a research and that people write us. But yes,
(31:28):
thank you so much, Helen. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast, or
send us some ideas of other uh I don't know,
other Submarine to the Actors in which everyone were aculously survived,
where there are random jokes, random jokes that are pretty hilarious.
We are in History podcasts at work dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in
(31:51):
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have a spreadshirt store which is miss Industry dot spreadshirt
dot com where you can get T shirts and sweatshirts
and UH phone cases and all sorts of things like that.
If you would like to learn a little more about
what we talked about today, you can come to our
(32:12):
parent company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com
and put the word submarines in search bar. You will
find the article on how submarines work. You can also
come to our website where we have show notes and
an archive of every single episode and occasionally other blog posts,
and that is at missed in history dot com. So
come and find us how stuff Works dot com or
(32:34):
miss industry dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Because it has to works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm try C V. Wilson, Holly Frying and you know, uh,
people sunny it seemed to love the stories about shipwrecks. Yeah,
we have a lot of maritime history fans. Yes, that
(00:21):
lots of people who love the shipwrecks stories and who
want to hear more shipwrecks 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
think the only submarine disaster that has been on the
podcast ever in its history is a brief part about
(00:43):
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 in
Actually I've put this in my notes before I got
(01:03):
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
(01:23):
terrifying thing in the world. Drowning is my big death fear.
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
(01:44):
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, something
goes wrong aboard a submarine. Most developed countries navies have
these tools on hand to try to rescue the crew
(02:07):
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 submarines crew is usually
an international effort, so whoever's closest and has the technology
(02:29):
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
(02:50):
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,
(03:12):
it would be impossible to swim to the service before
you either succumbed to the bends or drowned. Your odds
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
(03:33):
was in nineteen fifteen and the other one was in
nineteen seventeen. 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. Navy
(03:54):
submarines from World War One. The S five was, just
like its name suggests, the fifth in its class, and
it was launched in November nineteen and commissioned the following March.
On Monday, August, the S five left the Boston Navy
Yard on its first mission with a crew of thirty
six officers and enlisted men. The vessel was expected to
(04:16):
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 ex servicemen to be part of
the submarine fleet. This was really a pretty posh assignment
(04:39):
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 nice skies to be around.
And in addition to these recruitment stops, the S five
(05:00):
I 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 intensive training. It was
just sort of a happy coincidence that their performance evaluation
(05:22):
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 is about forty feet
in under a minute, and the first time the crew
(05:44):
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. These evaluations were scored
and used as a competition among the submarines in the fleet.
(06:07):
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. So before we get to
the crash dive and how it went wrong, a brief
bit about submarines for those who may not know. A
(06:29):
submarine rises and falls through the water depending in part
on how much ballast it has and its tanks, and
the ballast mostly comes in the form of seawater, and
as class submarine, the ballast level, so how much water
was in the ballast tanks was regulated by valves called
Kingston valves. Uh. These valves were controlled using waste high
(06:50):
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 more staple
men to open and close each of them. Because the
Kingston valves were so temperamental, when preparing for a crash dive,
what the crew would do would be to seal off
all the vents that let air in and out of
(07:12):
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
and the tanks to stay the same. So the air
vents were just a lot easier to deal with, and
that meant that they could deal with the easier job
when it was time to dive. Opening the vents was
(07:33):
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 September one, this
didn't go as planned, the crew closed all of the
air vents and they opened the Kingston valves, and it
(07:55):
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 the right for
non maritime people. Uh. This was something that could cause
some pretty serious problems if it wasn't corrected, so the
(08:17):
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's mate and the senior most man on the ship
except for the lieutenant commander. They probably could not have
gotten the Kingston valves taken care of without Fox's help.
It was. There was a lot of opening and closing
(08:39):
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
at the top of the conning tower and Fox had
to close the main induction valve, which was the valve
(09:01):
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
induction valve itself. It had proved to be a little
temperamental on the S five as well as on her
(09:23):
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
and the crew did all their tasks to get the
ship to dive. And because Fox had overlooked his part
(09:46):
while wrangling with another crisis, water started pouring into the submarine. Ah,
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 sponsors sir to get back to the
S five with water pouring into the submarine from outside.
(10:08):
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, while sea water was
literally pummeling them in the face as they did. The
(10:31):
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 imagine a much higher pressure situation,
of a much higher stress situation. Yes, it would be intense.
(10:55):
So with the torpedo room essentially open to the sea
at that point, it filled with water and the S
five sank to the seafloor. Knows first when it came
to rest four minutes later it was under about a
hundred and eighty feet of water 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.
(11:16):
But the good news was everyone had survived this initial
sinking of the ship. The only inner injuries at this
point were pretty minor. The hull was still intact, they
still had emergency power provided by batteries, and they still
had about half of their supply of compressed air. The
bad news was the torpedo room was about two thirds
(11:38):
full of water, and the billages 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 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
(12:01):
Cook blew the resid 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 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
(12:21):
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 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
(12:44):
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, and while this did help,
it quickly became obvious that there was not enough air
to do this job. The idea was that if they
were able to pressurize the room, it would force the
(13:05):
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 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,
(13:26):
lifting the submarine off of the sea floor. Uh, but
also reorienting it so that it was more or less vertical.
So just imagine for a moment a submarine which is
a confined, 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
(13:46):
really tight space. We 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, 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
(14:10):
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 slowly
inching upward towards the surface. But there was bad news,
which is that now the lowest point of the ship
(14:30):
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 ventilation. Remember,
the chlorine gas had the potential to become deadly. So
the crew started evacuating the parts of the ship that
we're filling up with chlorine gas by basically hauling themselves
(14:52):
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 refilling back with water. And at this point, uh,
(15:13):
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. And now let's get back to
those poor gents on the sub. So five hours after
sinking to the sea, floor. The men aboard that S
five were not in good shape. Everything. As we said before,
(15:34):
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 they could rise faster was not working. He
(15:56):
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, like we have
cleared the water. Uh. Since they weren't oriented in the
(16:17):
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 feet of the ship
were above the water line. That's all, But there's also
bad news. The actual escape hatch, though, was still submerged
by a good thirty feet, and even if they'd been
(16:38):
able to shift their angle from sixty degrees to ninety
degrees from horizontal, the hatch still would have been under water,
and that ship would not have been enough to clear
it of the water line. But now having part of
the vessel above the water line gave everyone a tiny
glimmer of hope, and they came up with a plan
to cut their way out of the ship. So it's
(17:02):
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 desperate plan, but it is what they
decided to do, and they did it. Cook climbed up
(17:25):
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 yourself and a lot of
men that you are, you know, close with, at that
(17:47):
point they've worked together really closely I'll do it. You
have the choice of we can try to drill through
three quarter inch still with a manual drill, or we
can die. Yeah, uh so slowly, but surely. They drilled
a quarter inch holes the side of the sub and
that took twenty minutes. So a quarter inch hole. So
it's not like any anybody's getting out of that. No,
(18:08):
and unfortunately that also doesn't mean that fresh air is
coming in. 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 a hammer and a chisel,
hoping to create a hole large enough for the men
(18:28):
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 were actually seeing some, but those
ships were too far away for them to get their attention.
(18:51):
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 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. The air was in fact increasingly disgusting,
and the oxygen levels were low enough that the men
(19:12):
couldn't keep it 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, right, that is what was happening.
(19:32):
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 it's a race against
time to try to make the whole bigger before the
(19:55):
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 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 side of the ship that
was about six inches by eight inches, but basically everyone
(20:19):
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, and all of the oxygen, not all,
but a lot of the oxygen at this point had
(20:40):
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, some of them had started to have
other breathing problem ones because of the toxic gases that
(21:01):
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 shirts to a ten ft
long length of copper pipe and then sticking out, sticking
that out the hole that they had made, and waving
(21:23):
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 who sees like a piece of
pipe sticking out of a hole of something sticking out
(21:45):
of the ocean. Yeah, what the heck is that? Yeah?
The Atlantis is. 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 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?
(22:08):
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 looked on IMDb before we came in here. Um.
And then just like we laughed, the men who are
still conscious on the submarine laughed. Um. And after you know,
(22:31):
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 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.
(22:51):
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 mint. I also just loved
the book. In the most dire circumstances is finding a
way to correct chill like he gets my unending respect
and admiration for Yeah, well, and the one of the
are There are two primary sources for for this episode,
and one of them is a book called Under Pressure
(23:13):
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, but
the jokes had ceased for quite some time before, he
said to hell by compass, and like that was one
(23:36):
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 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
(23:57):
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
S General George W. Girtles and Johnson ran up an
emergency flag on the Atlantis to get the other ship's attention,
(24:18):
and that ship's master, Captain E. O. 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. Gettles was able to radio the Navy
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
(24:40):
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
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
(25:02):
enough for the crew to crawl through thirty six hours
after the original incident. That's 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,
as you would imagine, the men were in really bad shape.
Two doctors from the George W. Gettles were on hand
(25:22):
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. That they weren't done
getting all the men off of the S five until
about the same time as the Navy ships arrived. And
Cook was the last man to leave the S five,
(25:43):
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 this surface,
and just they decided it was just gonna it was
more trouble than it was worth. Basically, as of two
(26:05):
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 those
extenuating circumstances, including that the valves themselves were apparently defective, uh,
(26:25):
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
guilt over it was the whole thing going on. Uh.
Cook also took some of the blame for having not
(26:46):
ensured that the ship was clear before giving the order
to submerge. So there's a there. 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 of them is that before the motor burned out
in their drill um, they needed to go get more batteries,
(27:07):
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 at um.
There's also a note in the book that that Cook
uh at one of these points when Fox volunteered to
go do something dangerous to try to help them, realized
(27:28):
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
on not laying blame on anybody and not arguing about it.
(27:50):
But I'm 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
they also put more safety measures into place so that
(28:12):
the same thing would not happen again. Cook was also
a career Navy man, and he eventually retired as a
full admiral in after 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
(28:32):
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 end, happy ending, harrowing story,
but a happy end name it is harrowing. I I
(28:54):
do wish that I had made sure that there's not
a movie of this at IMDb, because they're so Louie
should be if there's not. Anyway, do you have a
spot of listener mail? Unfortunately it's going to temper that
the positivity of ruin it Uh. I said that I
was going to read um at least one more email
(29:17):
about our mini series on China under a chairman Mao
zedong uh And this I think is probably, you know,
unless we get another really amazing one. We've We've read
quite a few, but I did want to make sure
that I read as many personal accounts of people as possible.
And this is from Helen heal And says you're Tracy
and Holly. I wanted to thank you for your recent
mini series on Chinese history. Both of my parents were
(29:40):
born in ninety three, right where your mini series starts.
Their lives were very much affected by the events you covered.
I grew up hearing stories about their childhoods spent working
in the countryside raising pigs or making bricks, and about
how they studied secretly using textbooks they found in the trash.
They were able to teach themselves the equivalent of a
high school education Asian, so that when the universities finally reopened,
(30:02):
they were able to pass the entrance exams. One of
my art When I was younger, my parents told these
stories with a humorous tone, like anyone simply recounting childhood
antics or sometimes usually these stories to motivate me to
do my homework. As I grew older, I started to
learn more about the dark side of this history, such
as how my grandparents were jailed during the Cultural Revolution
(30:24):
and my mom and her siblings suddenly had to take
care of themselves, or how my father became very ill
during the Great Famine and almost died because of the
impact of this period of history. How do my family
I've always been very hungry to learn about it, but
have often felt frustrated by how different sources are usually
biased in one way or the other. I found your
series of wonderfully balanced view of the topic, even though
(30:45):
it was a subject that I've been familiar with. I've
definitely learned a thing or two, and the big picture,
I think my family was lucky and that they survived
and were able to move on successfully after all of
the chaos has stopped. Your series helped shed more light
onto the experiences that my parents had growing up and
helped shed more light onto my own origins. Sincerely, Helen,
Thank you so much, Helen. That is the kind of
(31:07):
email that makes our day. Really, I'm that Tracy read
it because I've all choked up just hearing her. Are
I looked over that I was when I read it.
When she first sent it, I looked over the table
and I was like, oh no, Holly looks tears. That's
like a short walk often. I mean, I definitely will
tear up and a lot of things both that we
find a research and that people write us. But yes,
(31:28):
thank you so much, Helen. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast, or
send us some ideas of other uh I don't know,
other Submarine to the Actors in which everyone were aculously survived,
where there are random jokes, random jokes that are pretty hilarious.
We are in History podcasts at work dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in
(31:51):
History and on Twitter at miss in History. Are tumbler
is missed in History dot double dot com or on
Pinterest at pinterest dot com, slash missed in History. We
have a spreadshirt store which is miss Industry dot spreadshirt
dot com where you can get T shirts and sweatshirts
and UH phone cases and all sorts of things like that.
If you would like to learn a little more about
what we talked about today, you can come to our
(32:12):
parent company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com
and put the word submarines in search bar. You will
find the article on how submarines work. You can also
come to our website where we have show notes and
an archive of every single episode and occasionally other blog posts,
and that is at missed in history dot com. So
come and find us how stuff Works dot com or
(32:34):
miss industry dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Because it has to works dot com
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Tracy Wilson
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