Squalus Saga - North Hampton’s Modest Role
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Squalus Saga: North Hampton’s Modest Role
On July 30, 1939 Mrs. Arthur L. Hobson, whose Summer concerts on Little Boar’s Head attracted thousands, sponsored a “Squalus Memorial Concert” featuring the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Arthur Fiedler as conductor.
The Historical Society has two copies of the program, one signed by Captain Naquin of the Squalus. The program includes the following message: “At the conclusion of this program on the field, the audience is requested to journey with us across lots to the shore where final tribute of this service will take place, by the gracious act of Aviator Frothingham casting a memorial wreath on the waters over the Squalus.”
Anyone living on the seacoast of New Hampshire hears or reads about the Squalus sooner or later. Here’s a brief recap. On September 14, 1938 the submarine Squalus was launched at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine with the usual pomp and circumstance – a bottle of champagne broken across its bow and a band playing Anchors Aweigh. It was among a new class of diesel-electric powered submarines.
Commissioned in March 1939, the Squalus began sea trials. On its test dive May 23, after eighteen successful ones, it sank off the New Hampshire coast near the Isles of Shoals. The Squalus’s main induction valve did not close (its purpose was to let in fresh air when the sub was on the surface). The aft torpedo room, both engine rooms, and the crew’s quarters flooded. Twenty-six men drowned. And the Squalus was at the bottom of the sea in 243 feet of water. No one on a submarine at that depth had ever been rescued.
Located by its sister submarine, the Sculplin, the two boats were able to communicate for a while via a telephone marker buoy released by the Squalus and popping up on the surface. Buoys date back to the 13th century but there does not seem to be any specific date other than early 20th century for the one the Squalus deployed. The buoy got lots of publicity with this accident.
Divers from the submarine rescue ship Falcon, using the McCann Rescue Chamber, commonly called a diving bell, for such deep dives, were able to rescue the thirty three survivors. The diving bell dated from the 1920s when Charles B. “Swede” Momsen recommended it for the purpose of rescuing submariners. It was not until 1928 and the loss of another submarine, the S-4 and its entire crew, that Momsen was given the go-ahead to design and build a prototype rescue chamber.
Why wasn’t the rescue chamber named for Momsen? He got reassigned by the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair to work on an underwater breathing apparatus for individual escapes – the Momsen lung. But Lieutenant Commander Momsen was on the scene after the Squalus went down in charge of the U.S. Navy Experimental Divers Unit. Those divers, using the McCann Rescue Chamber, a revised version of Momsen’s diving bell, recovered all the survivors in the first deep submarine rescue ever.
It took four dives over a 13 hour period. McCann was in charge of the Chamber operations, and Momsen commanded the divers. Although there was no reason to believe anyone was alive in the aft part of the ship, a fifth dive was made to the aft torpedo room hatch on May 25 just to confirm. New York Times reporter Hanson W. Baldwin wrote about the rescue, “Man won a victory from the sea early this morning.”
What happened to the Squalus afterwards? Recommissioned in 1940 as the Sailfish, she served in World War II and saw action in the Pacific. After the war, the Squalus returned to Portsmouth in October 1945 for deactivation. The City of Portsmouth and area citizens attempted to save the ship as a memorial. In the end, the Navy agreed to the retention of its conning tower and bridge within the Portsmouth Navy Shipyard.
For further details, there is much available online -- accounts by some of the survivors; the Naval History and Heritage Command, and the U.S. Naval Institute’s Naval History magazine. A copy of a 1999 book The Terrible Hours: The Man Behind the Greatest Submarine Rescue in History by Peter Maas about Momsen is available at our library.
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Momsen-McCann Rescue Bell Prototype
During the first three months of 1928, divers and other salvage personnel were able to raise S-4 and tow her to the Boston Navy Yard, where she was drydocked and repaired. She returned to active duty in October 1928 and was employed thereafter as a submarine rescue and salvage test ship. Momsen went to sea in the reconditioned S-4 to carry out practical experiments and training with the rescue chambers.
Work with S-4 helped to develop equipment and techniques that bore fruit a decade later, when 33 men were brought up alive from the sunken submarine Squalus. The first diving bells for rescuing men from submarines were designed by the BuC&R in 1928. The diving bell went through a series of tests off the shores of Key West, Florida. Based on these tests, Momsen had several changes in mind for the bell, and after nearly two years of experimentation full of highly interesting results, the final bell was evolved and christened a "rescue chamber." This success was catalyst for gaining approval for development of the submarine rescue chamber in 1930. Before he could make these changes, Momsen went to the Bureau of Construction and Repair to work on an underwater breathing apparatus (the "Momsen Lung") for individual escapes.[3]
Lieutenant Commander Allan Rockwell McCann was put in charge of the revisions on the diving bell. From July 1929 to July 1931, McCann was assigned to the Maintenance Division, Bureau of Construction and Repair, where he developed the submarine rescue chamber. When the bell was completed in late 1930, it was produced as the McCann Submarine Rescue Chamber (SRC) (Navy designated the first 12 of these as [YRC] 1–12,
