WRECK

One damp afternoon last week, just nine days after the U. S. submarine Squalus settled to the ocean floor off New Hampshire's Isles of Shoals, the British submarine Thetis (rhymes with lettuce)* nosed down the Mersey from Birkenhead into Liverpool Bay. Like the Squalus she was a brand-new vessel, and this was to be a final diving test run before she was turned over to the Royal Navy. Aboard was an unusually large company--103 men. Besides her regular crew of 53 there were civilian technicians, civilian Admiralty officials, a local river pilot and two waiters brought out from a Liverpool catering establishment to help feed the added group. The waiters had each been asked if they minded taking a dive. Both said they did not. Neither the two waiters nor 97 of the rest came out of the Thetis alive.

Three hours after she had submerged, the Thetis was nowhere to be seen and her accompanying tug, which had lost contact with her, wirelessed ashore: "Something is amiss." A few uneasy relatives of the crew began to gather at the Birkenhead shipyards of Cammell Laird & Co., Ltd., builders of the Thetis. A flotilla of salvage ships, warships, tugs and submarines set out from ports from Birkenhead all the way round the bottom of England to Portsmouth. Royal Air Force planes soared the skies. All were looking for the telltale buoys which distressed submarines try to send to the surface to show where they are. (A buoy located the Squalus.) The crowd around the shipyards grew bigger. After 15 hours the first news came ashore. Fourteen miles off Great Ormes Head, Wales, the destroyer Brazen had spotted something in the sea. It was not a buoy but part of the Thetis herself--her tail, sticking in the air like a diving porpoise.

The Brazen lowered boats. When her wireless operators tapped out messages on the protruding stern they thought they got back reassuring messages from within. The Admiralty released its first statement: "There is nothing to indicate that the men are other than safe."

Just as the Brazen arrived on the scene, a masked man had bobbed up from the depths--the first to escape from the foundered submarine. He wore a Davis lung, a contraption resembling the U. S. Momsen lung, consisting of a life belt, an oxygen container, a breathing tube, a nose clip. Half-drowned, he was Captain H. P. K. Oram, commander of the Fifth Submarine flotilla but not of the Thetis. Before he knew that help was at hand he had volunteered to take his chances getting out of the dangerously tilted escape chamber. He and six others, with messages of the submarine's plight strapped to their wrists, were to act as human marker buoys, dead or alive. Of the seven, only Captain Oram and three others reached the surface. He was surprised to find the Brazen standing by. That news was also flashed ashore.

At first the rescue crew frantically tried to connect an air hose with the conning tower. They failed. Then they prepared to burn a hole through the tail with an oxyacetylene torch, while a tug and the salvage ship Vigilant attached a line to the slippery hull, tried to haul the 265-foot, 1,090-ton vessel to shallow water. Neither operation was successful. The submarine's nose stuck in mud 130 feet below. The tough double hull resisted blow torches. Suddenly a wave swept over the tail with unexpected force and the Thetis rolled down and out of sight. But divers could still hear tapping on the inside of the hull, and as a last desperate effort, they went down with more lines from flotation tanks, hoping to raise the boat again. Then as the strong tidal current changed, all the cables snapped. When, hours later, the tide ebbed and rescue operations were resumed, the tapping inside the Thetis had ceased.

At Birkenhead, an executive of Cammell Laird confronted the crowd in the company's offices. He held up his hand. The murmuring subsided. "I am sorry," said he, brokenly, " but there is no hope for the 99 men remaining in the submarine. The best thing you can do is to disperse and go quietly home." For an instant the silence continued. Then a harsh voice shouted: "Where are your experts?"

Where the experts were--and what they had and had not done to save the 99--was something which all Britain soon wanted to know. In salvo the British press turned its guns on the Admiralty. Exploded the London Daily Express: "It seems almost an intolerable thing that the vessel should be visible for hours and yet the crew remained unsaved." "Why," the London Daily Mail wanted to know, "was the Thetis allowed to do her tests in a bay notorious for sunken wreckage; why no naval escort vessel was attached to this new type submarine . . . ?" Asked the London Daily Mirror: "Why, five hours after that stern had been above water . . . had not a hole been made?"* Why had the British Navy turned down the U. S. Navy's life-saving rescue bell? Why was the Thetis so dangerously over-manned? What caused the disaster? Not only the British press and public but the British Parliament wanted answers to these grim questions.

Less than 72 hours later, no less an informant than Prime Minister Chamberlain rose in the House of Commons to give some of the answers.

"So far as can be ascertained, the sinking of the Thetis was caused by flooding of the two forward compartments through one of the bow torpedo tubes. The rear door of one of these tubes came open or was open through reasons which cannot be fully explained. . . . Presence of additional personnel in no way contributed to the sinking of the submarine. At 1:40 p. m. she dived for three hours. She failed to reappear at the appointed time.

"The impact on the bottom destroyed the vessel's signaling apparatus and she was unable to communicate with surface vessels. Marker buoys were released from the vessel and smoke floats were sent up, but these were not observed by the escorting tug, which had followed the expected course of the submarine."

In view of the difficulties under which rescue operations had to be conducted, Mr. Chamberlain had no criticisms to make against the Royal Navy. But he promised a public investigation.

As to why the Thetis' crew could do so little to save themselves, there were two major explanations: 1) the tilted escape chamber proved a death trap; 2) the Thetis' crew did not start to save itself until its air was fouled and bilge water had begun to wet the batteries, releasing chlorine gas. Says the escape manual of the U. S. Navy, father of the submarine: "It is emphasized that if attempted individual escape is delayed until the first stages of asphyxia have developed, it will probably be too late successfully to accomplish it."

The horror of the Squalus' loss of the men in her flooded aft was mitigated by the rescue of the 33 survivors. There was no grain of satisfaction for the British public in the Thetis disaster, worst in submarine history. There were just two cold epitaphs. "Chlorine gas fumes," said a British medical authority, "in a confined space like the interior of a submerged submarine, would cause early asphyxiation, immediately preceded by loss of consciousness." And over the spot in the Irish Sea where the submarine rested, there floated a new green buoy on whose side was freshly painted one big white word: WRECK.

* Thetis, a sea nymph, was the mother of Achilles. * Ironically, while the British press fumed, the German press soft-pedaled criticism, offered condolences. Said the usually inflamed Volkischer Beobachter: "Events such as these unite the world above all political differences in a common hope and a common sorrow. Today we extend our warmest sympathy. ..."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.