In 1939, during a submarine’s regular test mission, a mechanical failure caused the boat’s engine room to fill with water and nearly half the crew drowned. The ship had sunk to a depth of over 200 feet.
Rescuers struggled to develop a rescue plan. This was a monumental task since, up to that point in time, no naval operation had ever succeeded in saving a ship lodged lower than 20 feet deep.
Dangerous Vessels
In the 1920s and 1930s, submarines were known to be dangerous craft. Between 1921 and 1938, 825 men had died in 18 submarine disasters. The USS Squalus (named after a type of shark), was equipped with new technology and commissioned in March 1939. Over the next several weeks, the submarine successfully completed 18 test missions.On the morning of May 23, the USS Squalus left on a mission with a crew of 56 sailors and three civilians. The submarine was tasked with exploring around the Isle of Shoals. This small group of islands, located about six miles off the east coast of the United States, straddles the Maine-New Hampshire border.
Then tragedy struck. Shortly after the Squalus dove beneath the ocean’s surface, the main engine air induction valve failed and water started pouring into the ship’s engine room.
The crew inside the engine room screamed to the rest of the ship to bring the submarine back to the surface. But efforts from the crew to resurface the Squalus failed. The crew quickly shut the doors leading from the flooded room to the rest of the submarine. The 26 men inside the flooded section drowned.
Once this part of the ship filled with water, it tilted at a 45-degree angle and dropped 240 feet to the ocean floor. The crew started shooting up smoke bombs and marker buoys equipped with communication lines to alert anyone above that they were in trouble.
Not hearing any communication coming from the Squalus, the submarine’s sister ship, the USS Sculpin, was dispatched to search for the missing sub.
An Impossible Plan
A rescue seemed impossible. The rescuers soon figured out that their only chance of completing a rescue was to utilize the newly invented McCann Rescue Chamber. The only catch? The invention had yet to be used. The rescue crews knew time was of the essence as the submarine had a limited oxygen supply.Luckily, the only rescue chamber on the east coast was located on a nearby rescue ship, the USS Falcon, in New London, Connecticut. Once the Falcon arrived, divers were sent down to confirm the Squalus’s location and the presence of survivors. Over the next several hours, the rescue chamber was lowered down to retrieve the ship’s survivors in small groups.
The Squalus’s crew were stranded in the sub for 39 hours. After four trips, all 33 survivors were saved. The divers took a fifth trip down to make sure there weren’t any survivors left in the engine room.
Bringing up the Ship
On Sept. 13, after several weeks of trying, the USS Squalus was eventually pulled from the ocean floor. A total of 628 dives made for rescue and salvage operations were conducted. The Squalus was decommissioned on Nov. 15, 1939.
In May 1940, the submarine was repaired and put back into service under a new name, the USS Sailfish. The Sailfish went on to serve in World War II, where it participated in 12 war patrols, sunk seven enemy warships, and earned nine battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation.
The rescue of the Squalus crew went down in history as the one of the most difficult successful rescue operations ever completed.
