ARMY & NAVY: De Profundis

Grey moonlight lay on the waters. Plunging through the choppy little waves at twelve knots slipped a submarine, perhaps six feet of her hull above the surface. The Commander, Lieutenant Dobson, strolled across the bridge, thinking perhaps of nothing more weighty than a party a few nights before in New London. Through the speckled gleam of the tiny cluster of ship lights around the conning tower, sparks glowed along the deck, where seamen smoked their customary cigarette before going below.

In the engine room the Diesel droned, in their berths some of the crew already slept, all was well aboard the S-51 as she patroled the Atlantic off Connecticut on that cool September night last fall.

Three blasts of a whistle . . . “Put your wheel hard over!” . . . bells clamored full speed reverse . . . a red flare gashed the night . . . the crash . . .

The 3,000-ton freighter City of Rome loomed over the battered and sinking hulk of the submarine. Commander Dobson cried his orders. Every man on the submarine snapped to obey. The Rome backed water. “Throw me a line!” Water streamed down the open conning tower hatch. Eight men asleep in the torpedo room catapulted from their beds. The wireless operator pressed his key frenziedly. Water, heavy and pitiless, swung open doors, sloughed about carelessly. “For God’s sake, throw a line to us!” Six men on duty in the engine room reached for levers, were whirled away by the inrushing torrent. In the choppy waves struggled sailors knocked overboard by the impact. Sinking fast into the ocean were the men caught below, clambering frantically up onto the pipes as the black water pursued. Deadly chlorine gas swirled from the battery compartment. With a swish the glistening submarine sank beneath the moonlit waves. Three were saved.

In port, Dewey Kile: “I came off at 8 o’clock. At 8:30 I went to my bunk. At 10:30 I was awakened by a crash. Some of the cork from the lining of the inside of the submarine hit me in the face.

“I saw water spurting into the compartment from the battery room duct. I jumped out of the bunk and ran to the door and tried to shut it, but couldn’t on account of the pressure of the water rushing in. The water swept me back through the compartment to the control room. I tried to close the doors of the control room, but the pressure of the water was once more too great.

“All this time I saw nobody else. There were 20 men in the officers’ quarters (where the submarine was struck). I rushed to the ladder of the conning tower. There were two men ahead of me. Water was already splashing when I got to the top. I was washed overboard as soon as I got out. I was picked up by a lifeboat of the City of Rome, which . . . steamed away for Boston in forty-five minutes.

Two weeks ago (TIME, July 12) the persistent salvagers completed their trying task, raising the S-51 132 feet from off her ocean bier by means of pontoons. They towed her into drydock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

There naval officials descended into the gruesome, barnacled grotto of the dead, and as they fumbled through the rusty, sea-fouled compartments, scenes of the death struggles were revealed. Men had stuck to their posts. Inside the gash where the Rome had bitten, pinned between the bent steel plates and the engineroom bulkhead, was the body of a seaman. One arm was stretched out in an effort to grasp the lever which would have closed an emergency valve and perhaps have saved the lives of some of his fellows.

Through an opening in the radio room they saw the body of the operator huddled over his keys. Dead men hung on the valves as they died. Searchers found a body hanging on a pipe in a passageway, its position telling vividly of the man’s last gasping struggle for life. The corpses, for the most part, were to be buried with honors at Arlington Cemetery. Six of the ill-fated crew still sleep unredeemed on the ocean’s bed.