Escape From the Deep (13 page)

Finally, the Japanese patrol boats moved away. The men continued to distribute the Momsen Lungs, breathing devices that theoretically enabled a man to rise from depths of up to three hundred feet to the surface without being killed by the bends.
⁴¹
Without the Lungs, the men in the
Tang
’s forward torpedo room believed they were doomed.

The Momsen Lung was an ingenious device. Valves allowed exhaled air to flow into a foot-square breathing bag, where it was enriched with oxygen. The air was then inhaled through a container of soda lime, which stripped the air of potentially lethal carbon dioxide. A more recent refinement to the apparatus was the addition of a nose-clip to make sure the man wearing it breathed in and out through a mouthpiece. The nose-clip could be fixed to a pair of goggles. A valve regulated air pressure behind the goggles’ lens so that men could clear their vision.

It was soon obvious that some of the men were having problems fitting their Momsen Lung. Most of them had not been trained properly in how to use it. Their brains were slowly being starved of oxygen and so the device must have seemed infuriatingly complex. Even those who had used it before in training had never tried it again, figuring that if they ever went down, it would be in water below three hundred feet, and that was too deep for the Lung to be of any use. Throughout the Silent Service it was generally assumed that no one would survive a sinking, and many crew, and not a few captains, had resented the valuable space taken up by the Momsen Lungs.

One thing now seemed clear: Being able to use the Momsen Lung effectively, or rather without making a mistake, would soon decide who lived and who died. The stakes were the highest possible. And there was no precedent to give comfort. No American had yet gotten out of a sunken submarine alive without assistance from the surface.
⁴²

The only possible comparison with the
Tang
’s current fate was the situation faced by the survivors aboard the USS
S-51
back in 1925. The
S-51
had gone down in 132 feet of water—50 less than the
Tang
’s current depth. Thirty-three men were alive as the
S-51
settled to the bottom.

None survived.
⁴³

JESSE DASILVA LOOKED AROUND. He and the other survivors were crammed into the forward torpedo room, a semicircular space that was thirty feet long. Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Paul Larson did what he could to treat the wounded as men donned their Momsen Lungs. Fortunately, he had found extra medical supplies in an emergency store in the torpedo room.

The air continued to get worse. It was increasingly hard to see: The emergency lights grew weaker as more water dripped into the batteries and cells shorted.
⁴⁴
Every few minutes, the lights dimmed, went out, and then shone feebly again.
⁴⁵

Lieutenant Mel Enos thought it might still be possible to escape from the
Tang
through a gun-access hatch back in the control room. Others agreed that this was a reasonable idea. Enos gathered six volunteers. Someone opened the door leading back toward the control room. There was a “terrific blast” of black smoke that smelt like burnt rubber. The smoke streamed into the forward torpedo room, completely filling it, forcing men to cough and gag. The door was quickly closed. A fire was in another compartment. That was certain. Its smoke was so toxic that cracking the door open for just a second had made some of the men vomit. And now there was so much of the smoke in the room that the emergency lights were “dim glows.”
⁴⁶

Enos and his party gave up on getting back to the control room: It had been another bad idea—another rash move, as with the burning of codebooks—that had only made matters worse. The air in the torpedo room was now so poisoned from burning rubber and other chemicals that some men started to use their Momsen Lung just to stop suffocating. Others were already starting to fade, their brains addled by the lack of oxygen and a lethal combination of heat, carbon dioxide, and toxic fumes.

THE MEN WERE NOW TRAPPED in the forward torpedo room. It was already 3 a.m., high time they made a move. Twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Hank Flanagan, with twelve years in the navy, assumed command and began to organize the first escape attempt.

The prospect of making the ascent unnerved many of the men.
⁴⁷
They had all, at some point, wondered what they would do if the worst happened and they found themselves trapped as they were now. There were three options—escape, die slowly from lack of oxygen, or put a .45 caliber pistol to your head to bring the living nightmare to an end.
⁴⁸
Which would it be? Every man would have to decide for himself.

There was a delay organizing the first escape group while some men had second thoughts and argued about whether the escape trunk was really their only way out. Some men suggested it would be a good idea to fire men from a torpedo tube. Flanagan dismissed the idea immediately: It would be lethal, not least because of the difference in pressure between the torpedo tube and the outside waters.

Finally, at about 3:15 a.m., the first group of four began to gather. But only then was a major problem discovered that would complicate the escape trunk’s use. Air lines were broken, so they would not be able to blow the water from the trunk after it had been used. They would need to drain the water into a bilge in the forward torpedo room.

In the meantime, Gunner’s Mate James White, a married man from Louisiana, stepped forward. He had an armful of web belts and several .45 pistols. He had brought them from the arsenal below the decking in the crew’s mess so that every man could put one on. He began to distribute the guns and some knives.

“We knew that we would be going into shark-infested water,” Decker confirmed later. “White brought enough side arms for every man to have a .45. We also had shells, which we wrapped in gauze and paper and stuck in our pockets, and C-rations. We unbuttoned our fly and tied the rations to our legs with our shoe strings.”
⁴⁹

Armed with rations and weapons, several of the men gathered at the steps to the escape trunk and began discussing how best to operate it, knowing that one mistake could possibly doom every other survivor in the torpedo room.

Four men would enter the small escape trunk, which was connected by a hatch to the torpedo room. In the trunk were gauges, indicating depth and pressure inside and out, and an oxygen outlet from which to fill the Momsen Lung. When the men had gathered in the trunk, they would allow seawater to pour into it until the pressure was higher inside the trunk than the sea outside. The seawater would then stop pouring in and the men could open a door leading to the outside. The men would then fill their Momsen Lung with oxygen. To guide them through the dark waters to the surface, they would release a yellow wooden buoy, the size of a soccer ball, attached to a five hundred-foot-long line knotted every ten feet.

The men would follow the line up, pausing at each knot so that they did not rise more than fifty feet per minute. This slow ascent, although counterintuitive to any man wanting to reach the surface, was crucial to survival because it allowed a man to adjust to decreasing pressure as he rose, thereby avoiding decompression sickness, more commonly known as the bends. Under high pressure, nitrogen is absorbed into the bloodstream in much higher quantities than at sea level. As a result, if a diver or escaping submariner rises to the surface too quickly, the nitrogen expands in his bloodstream and forms intensely painful bubbles. The effect is usually deadly if a man rises too fast from significant depths, the nitrogen bubbles acting rather like the bubbles in a shaken can of soda when it is opened suddenly.

From 180 feet down, their ascent should in theory take between three to four minutes. Timing was everything. They must rise slowly, but not too slowly, inhaling at each knot and exhaling slowly as they rose to the next. If they did not exhale, the air pressure in their lungs would increase massively as they ascended, leading to a possible burst lung, which was often fatal.

After the last man had exited, he would bang on the trunk—the signal for the escape door to be closed by a lever from inside the torpedo room. Then the seawater would be allowed to drain into the bilges and another four men would take their place in the escape trunk. Unfortunately, because of the Japanese patrol boats above, banging on the trunk placed the men in a terrible double bind. The only way they could communicate with the men waiting their turn was by banging, and yet the sound was bound to give away the
Tang’
s position to the enemy at some point.
⁵⁰
It seemed that they were doomed if they didn’t and doomed if they did.

In the training manuals, the escape procedure had seemed straightforward enough, but in practice it was anything but simple—as the men were about to find out. As one of the survivors would later put it: “An escape procedure is very simple on paper but somewhat different when everyone’s life depends on it.”
⁵¹

Howard Walker, the black steward, listened as the men discussed how to use the trunk.

Walker was seated on a step, having had his busted nose and lips treated by Doc Larson. He was probably not in much pain because Larson had also found morphine spikes in the emergency store in the forward torpedo room.

“A lot of praying and a little less talk would do us all a lot of good,” said Walker.
⁵²

IT WAS 3:30 A. M., about an hour after the sinking. Men in the first escape group began to climb the ladder into the escape trunk. The most bullish among them was twenty-year-old Mel Enos, the only child of a couple from Vallejo, where the
Tang
had been built.
⁵³
“He had loaded himself down with two .45s strapped to his waist, two bandoliers of ammunition, and a knife, and had filled his shorts with chocolate bars and food,” recalled one of the survivors. “He was all set on reaching China.”
⁵⁴

Enos was joined by Torpedoman John Fluker, a Virginian, and the wily “sea dog,” chief Bill Ballinger. Standard procedure was for four men to get into the trunk, but now they decided that a rubber life raft should take the place of a fourth man. It may help them survive if they ever reached the surface.

Men below closed the hatch to the escape trunk. Fluker, Enos, Ballinger, and the life raft were sealed inside the small trunk, crushed together with barely enough room to stand. Precious minutes were again wasted as they disagreed on how to rig the trunk.
⁵⁵
Finally, one of them cranked a valve that allowed seawater into the trunk. Doing so was a giant leap of faith. In theory, the water would rush in until it reached their chests, raising the pressure inside the trunk so that it equalized the external pressure of the water at 180 feet below. But none of the men could be sure that it would stop at their chests. What if it didn’t?

The seawater gushed in, past their ankles, toward their waists. As more poured in and the pressure increased, the men found it hard to endure. It was difficult to breathe. They were soon panting. The escape trunk was acting like a piston chamber as the water rose. The temperature soared, making them sweat profusely and causing their hearts to race. Keeping one’s nerve was close to impossible. They were jammed together like sardines and one man’s confusion and panic badly affected the others. The simplest procedure—such as attaching the buoy to a reel of escape line—was a nerve-wracking challenge.
⁵⁶

The strain was too much. Enos was the first to crack. He did not wait for the buoy to be tied to the escape line and released. As soon as the door was opened, he dived out.
⁵⁷
It was a fatal mistake. The door did not lead directly to the ocean. It opened instead to the submarine’s superstructure. Without an escape line to guide him, a man could easily get lost in the darkness. And that is what probably happened to Enos. It is thought that he got stuck in the space between the hull and the deck, weighed down by his weapons.

According to one survivor, men in the torpedo room below heard a frantic clanging and banging as Enos searched in vain for a way out. Then there was a haunting silence. Enos had apparently drowned, killed perhaps as much by his youth and haste as by the water.
⁵⁸

Meanwhile, back in the escape trunk, Ballinger and Fluker argued about how best to get out and how to release the buoy. If they made a mistake, they could endanger the men remaining below them in the torpedo room. They had to get this right.

Forty minutes had passed since Enos and the others had entered the trunk. To those waiting in the torpedo room for their turn to escape, it felt like an eternity. “Under the conditions,” recalled Pete Narowanski, “a minute was just like an hour.”
⁵⁹

Unwilling to waste any more time, Hank Flanagan pulled on the lever operating the trunk’s external door, thereby closing it, and drained the trunk. When the hatch to the escape trunk was then opened, the men saw an exhausted Bill Ballinger and John Fluker. Mel Enos had disappeared. The rubber boat was still in the trunk.

When they were lowered back down into the forward torpedo room, Ballinger said he wanted to try again. But Fluker was worn out, and said he would have to recuperate before making another attempt. The sight of the two men, clearly traumatized by their experience in the trunk, was deeply depressing to the men in the torpedo room hoping to stay alive.
⁶⁰
Death seemed to step closer.