Part 40

“_K-13_ was a fleet submarine of a new type, more like a submersible destroyer than an ordinary underwater boat. Fairfields of Govan built her, and even now it were unwise to be too explicit in description. But some few details are necessary for an understanding of my story. She was over three hundred feet long and displaced two thousand tons when submerged. Unlike most submarines, which are driven on the surface by internal combustion engines, _K-13_ was a turbine-engined steamer with two funnels fitted with watertight covers for closing when she dived. The ventilators which fed air to her boiler room were also equipped for rapid closing down. A bulkhead cut off the boiler and engine rooms from the central control room, and another bulkhead forward divided the control room from the foc’sle. Thus, like Cæsar’s Gaul, _K-13_ was divided into three parts. Of her armament, which does not concern us here, I will observe a discreet silence, though to me it was of absorbing interest. But I must say something of her upper works. The conning tower was large and humped forward, so that a man could stand upright under the hump yet needed to stoop to reach the hatch, which was on the lower unhumped portion. Above the conning tower was a chart-house and bridge, and, of course, a mast stayed in the usual fashion. For a submarine, therefore, the _K-13_ had a lot of top hamper, and a passage from the conning-tower hatch, when the submarine was under water, towards the upper air was thickly studded with perils from the chart-house roof and the stays of the bridge and the mast. Yet two men did pass out; one was caught and killed; the other’s luck held—he was not killed.

“At noon on Monday, January 29, 1917, _K-13_ left her builders’ yard to carry out diving trials in the Gareloch. A large party was on board. In charge of her was Commander Herbert—‘Baralong’ Herbert—and with him went Commander Goodheart, who had been appointed skipper of another K of similar type. Many of Fairfields’s staff were there, for _K-13_ had not yet been taken over by the Admiralty. There were Percy Hillhouse, the yard’s Naval Architect, Bullen, the draughtsman in charge of submarine construction—a man who knew every nut and bolt that went to her—Searle, the Admiralty overseer, and McLean, the yard manager of the K submarines. It was no complement of amateurs which manned the _K-13_ upon her fatal trip. While steaming down the Clyde she grounded slightly at Whiteinch, but suffered no hurt. No harm was done, and _K-13_ went on to the Gareloch, and there passed successfully through her trials. She was accepted for the Royal Navy by the Admiralty officials.

[Illustration:

Painting by Joseph Cummings Chase.

Master Signal Electrician E. J. Moore

_89th Division, 314th Field Signal Battalion, Company C_

On November 5th Moore aided in extending and maintaining a line of communication to the assaulting battalion of the 355th Infantry between Beauclair and Lauencille. On the night of November 10th he rendered invaluable aid to the 356th Infantry in Pouilly, extending a telephone line to them, and thence to La Pignepp Farm.]

“ONE MORE DIVE”—THEN SUNK

“Then it was that the unexpected happened, as it always does at sea. Herbert decided to take one more dive—perhaps just for luck, perhaps to satisfy himself upon some nicety of trim. He gave the order to close down and dive and the _K-13_ dived. Though the order had been given to close down, and the reply received that the order had been carried out, the ventilators had been left open. Instantly the water poured into the engine and boiler rooms, drowning those within, and _K-13_ sank by the stern. The water flowing towards the control room bulkhead compressed the air in the room and indicated immediately what had happened to the alert senses of Commander Herbert. ‘Our ears began to sing’ say those who were within the belly of the ship.

“All this occupied a space of time measured in seconds. In a few more seconds Herbert had all compartments closed tight and the forward tanks blown. The hydroplanes, too, were set to rise, but the resources of seamanship could not overcome the loss of buoyancy. Overweighted by her flooded boiler and engine rooms _K-13_ sank to the bottom, grounding upright on the mud in twelve fathoms of water. No blowing of ballast tanks could bring her up, for the calculations of her builders showed that with all tanks empty she would still be too heavy by four hundred tons to float. There is very little reserve of buoyancy about even the biggest of submarines.

“While Herbert in _K-13_ had been struggling to rise, his efforts were detected and understood by skilled seamen above. An E submarine had been attending the trials, and her officers saw at once from the surging mass of air-bubbles that Herbert was blowing his tanks and was in grave difficulties. Submarines dive when trimmed to float awash, and descend or ascend by delicate movements of the horizontal rudders (hydroplanes). In this trim when diving they are lighter than the water displaced, and do not need to blow tanks in order to rise. Much time was saved by the presence of the E-boat, for, when _K-13_ did not rise, and quite evidently could not rise, she dashed off at once to gather assistance. Had Herbert and Goodheart down below known how quickly help was being summoned above they might not have made that fatal though most gallant effort to pass out through the conning-tower hatch.

HURRYING TO THE RESCUE

“It was at 3.30 in the afternoon that _K-13_ came to rest upon the bottom of the Gareloch, and the short winter’s day in the North was drawing towards sunset. As soon as the commander of the E-boat had marked the spot where _K-13_ lay, he pressed at full speed for Greenock, flashing as he went aerial signals to the Senior Naval Officer in Glasgow. A salvage steamer, which was lying at Greenock, went off at once and picked up two hoppers and two tugs as consorts. Telegrams were dispatched to Fairfields and to Glasgow, and the news spread quickly through those circles whose business it is to be well informed. Not a moment was lost by those upon whose shoulders rested the responsibility of the salvage operations. By the early hours of Tuesday, long before daylight, a fleet of seven vessels had collected at the spot below which, seventy feet down, _K-13_ rested motionless in the mud. There were the Greenock salvage steamer, the two tugs, the two hoppers, and two E-boats. With them, in charge of everything and responsible for everything, was the S. N. O., Captain (now Rear-Admiral) Brian Barttelot, and with him was his naval assistant, Captain Corbett.

“The problem before the salvors bristled with novel difficulties. In peace and war we had lost many submarines, but never had a live man been taken out of one which had sunk. Barttelot was limited by what was mechanically possible. He had not—as I confess now that I had when composing ‘The Last of the Grenvillas’—the guiding light of a precedent. First he had to get into continuous communication with the survivors of _K-13’s_ company, for without their coöperation he was helpless to aid them. Then he had to devise a rapid and effective means to supply them with air and food for a period which might stretch into days. And, lastly, he had to get them out. That was the worst of his problems—how to get them out. For remember _K-13_ was a great bulky double-skinned lump of a vessel of two thousand solid tons and of more than three hundred feet in length. She was not the kind of craft which could easily be raised.

“But although Barttelot’s difficulties were great his advantages were greater. He had nothing to fear from bad weather—the Gareloch is narrow and well sheltered. He had within reach the incalculable resources of the biggest shipbuilding center in the world. And there in Glasgow he had, too, just round the corner, the builders of _K-13_, who knew the work of their own hands as a man knows the picture which he has painted or the book which he has written. There was yet another advantage, and one which was not small. There inside _K-13_, if they could be got at, were four of Fairfields’s experts who would supply that intimate technical knowledge of the craft which the salvors themselves could not possess. Once communication had been established, Fairfields in Glasgow and Fairfields in _K-13_ would be linked to the chain of salvage, and would lift success from the barely possible up to the almost probable.

TUBES FOR AIR AND FOOD

“Meanwhile Fairfields in Glasgow were hard at work. A special staff of draughtsmen and mechanics were put on to the construction of two flexible tubes, one designed for the passage of air and food, and the other for bringing up the men one by one, if no other and better means was found to be possible. The first tube, in comparison with the second, was easy of construction. It was seven inches in diameter and fitted with a screw union to connect with the circular ammunition hoist beside one of the deck guns of _K-13_. The other, built of steel sections, was designed to fit tightly over the torpedo hatch by means of a connecting frame. The first was the more immediately urgent, for until it was completed and fixed in place the survivors in the sunken submarine must remain coffined. Both were put in hand long before communication had been established between the salvors and _K-13_, and here one sees how completely the lives of all the imprisoned men depended upon Fairfields’s exact knowledge. Both tubes would have been useless unless their dimensions had been precisely correct. There was no need to press Fairfields’s workmen not to waste a moment; by night as well as by day they threw into their pious task every ounce of energy and every refinement of skill which they possessed. To lay hand to the work was an honor for which all eagerly competed. Though both tubes were completed in an astonishingly short time, and the first proved to be invaluable, the efficiency of the second—the man-saver—was not tested. Other means were successfully employed to get the men out. But this does not detract in any way from the merits of its design and of its rapid accomplishment. Battles may be won without calling upon the reserves, but he would be a very poor general who had not the reserves ready, if need be, at his call.

“For the time being the salvage party could do little except to send divers down and to open up communications with the men whom they had come to save. Until the first tube, which I have just described, was ready to their hands, they could take few active measures. The vessels and plant at Barttelot’s disposal were quite incapable of raising the great hull which lay below them, and the famous Ranger, for which he had telegraphed to Liverpool, could not arrive till the following day. The Ranger, owned by the Liverpool Salvage Association, had been requisitioned by the Admiralty early in the war, and had proved as powerfully effective in war as she had been in peace. She is worthy of her name, for under Captain Young—the most accomplished of living salvage officers—she has ranged over the world, picking up wrecks a dozen times her size with an ease which looks almost miraculous.

A JOB THAT CALLED FOR FINESSE

“I have seen her at work. She is a little old composite steamer built of iron and teak—incredibly old, fifty years at least; she knocks about among wreckage as indifferent to hard blows as was Nansen’s Fram; and she brings to her never-ending jobs gear and brains which make their incredible accomplishment seem easy. _K-13_, emptied of men, would soon have been lightened and raised by the Ranger’s tremendous steam pumps—she will lift a dreadnought if it be not damaged beyond possibility of patching up by her divers—but _K-13_, with fifty living men inside, called for finesse rather than power. It was the men, not the ship, that Barttelot and Young were out to save.

[Illustration:

_Photo by Paul Thompson._

The Result of a Depth-Charge Explosion

The depth charge was the most efficacious means in dealing with the submarine. The charges varied from one to over six hundred pounds of TNT—trinitrotoluol.]

“And while in the cold pale light of that Tuesday morning in the North the salvors sent down divers to call in friendly Morse upon their comrades below, and to cheer them with the assurance of rescue, the unexpected happened again, as it always does at sea. Suddenly before the astonished eyes of the salvage party up shot a column of foam and bubbles, and in the center of an artificial whirlpool gyrated stern upwards a human body. And a very live body it proved to be when up-ended and pulled clear of the water. Involuntarily, without the smallest intention of quitting, Commander Herbert had been boosted by the ill-mannered high-pressure air out of his own ship, and flung, a bedraggled, gasping figure, in shirt and trousers, almost into the arms of his would be rescuers. How he came out I will now tell, and in doing so will return to 3.30 p.m. on the Monday when _K-13_ settled down in the mud of the Gareloch.

INSIDE THE SUNKEN SHIP

“She lay upon an even keel in seventy feet of water. In her flooded after-compartment, shut off from the control room by a strong closed bulkhead, were twenty-eight dead bodies, including that of Engineer Lieutenant Lane. The engine room and boiler room staffs—twenty-three men of the navy and five of Fairfields—had all been instantly drowned when the submarine dived with her ventilators open. The fore bulkhead had also been closed, and in the control room were gathered the fifty-one survivors of the disaster. The air pressure in the compartment, raised by the inflow of water to about two atmospheres, dulled the sense of all and induced an apathy which increased into hopeless fatalism as the slow hours passed. Among the men there was little talking. One heard at first an almost careless comment, ‘Rotten way to die. We would sooner go under fighting Germans.’ That was all; no complaints and no trace of panic. No one expected to be saved, and no one cared very much. With Herbert and Goodheart, his guest, it was, of course, different. Upon them and on Fairfields’s officials rested a nerve-racking responsibility.

“At first there appeared to be little danger that the survivors would lack for air. The high-pressure bottles were far from empty, and the bodies and minds of those within _K-13_ were suffering from too much air, not from too little. Food they could do without for a long while, for no one wanted to eat, and even after supplies came from above few ate. The men were not hungry, but thirst devoured them, a thirst little appeased by copious draughts of water.

DANGER OF POISONOUS GASES

“The real dangers lay unseen below and around. Behind the after-bulkhead stood a wall of water at a pressure of thirty-one pounds to the square inch, against which the strength of the steel, supported by the air pressure in the control room, was a sufficient barrier. But though the bulkhead might have been in little danger of collapse, it could not prevent water from leaking through. Those leaks were the deadly peril. If the oozing salt water had reached the fully charged electric batteries of the vessel poisonous chlorine gas would have been given off and the control room turned into a mortuary. The batteries never were reached, but the risk, even the probability that they would be, was always present to the subconscious minds of officers and men. Perhaps it was this, as much as the air pressure, which caused that disbelief in rescue which remained with them up to the moment of actual safety.

“But though the salt water did not turn the batteries into ministers of death, it did its best to suffocate the unhappy men who crowded _K-13’s_ control room. It reached and short-circuited the switch, causing some of the cables to fuse. Fumes of stinking smoke from the burning insulation befouled the air, and the fire was put out with the greatest difficulty. The switch could not be touched and the current cut off, so no method of extinction remained except to beat out the fire with lumps of wood wrapped in cloth. In this way it was extinguished but the stink remained.

THROUGH THE CONNING-TOWER HATCH—A DARING IDEA

“It was on Tuesday morning that Goodheart obtained permission from Herbert to go out through the conning-tower hatch and to carry news of the disaster to the world outside. No one in the sunken vessel knew anything of the work of salvage which had begun within a few minutes of the _K-13’s_ fatal last dive. To the officers and men of _K-13_ it seemed that they were isolated and already dead to the human family. The risks of the issue from the conning tower were beyond experience, but the attempt at any rate was accepted by the gallant Goodheart as a sacred duty. If he could get out alive, then the survivors of _K-13_ would no longer be dead to the world and might conceivably be saved. If he were killed, well, he would be killed in the way of business. While it was Herbert’s plain duty to stick to his ship, it was equally Goodheart’s duty to clear out and to be jolly quick about it. So he argued, and Herbert, a man of the same fine quality, accepted his arguments as palpably sound. Nothing remained except to devise means and methods of exit.

“It was decided to go forth by way of the conning-tower hatch and to use high-pressure air from the bottles to speed the passage. I have explained how one part of the conning tower was humped. The general idea was for Goodheart and Herbert to climb up into the conning tower and to take station together under this hump, where they had head room to stand upright. They would then close the lower hatch which gave upon the control room and have nothing between them and the upper outside water except a bolted sheet of steel. The density of the air cooped up with them would be roughly two atmospheres (twenty-eight pounds to the square inch) and the water pressure outside about thirty-one pounds. If, then, the sea-cocks were opened the water would flow in not too furiously and would fill the lower part of the tower, but would be prevented by the imprisoned air from rising very high in the hump. There the men could stand in extreme discomfort, no doubt, and under severe pressure, but, nevertheless, alive and active. Then those inside would turn on high-pressure air in large quantities so as to expel the water and to give Goodheart a handsome lift from behind when he sought to be gone through the upper hatch. Herbert went with Goodheart to help him and to wish him Godspeed in his passing, but with no intention of following in his path. His place was with his men. It was a path both tortuous and full of unknown dangers. Above the conning tower was a chart-house, of which the roof opposed a formidable obstacle to a vertical ascent. There was a large manhole in this roof, but, unluckily for Goodheart’s bold scheme, it was not cut directly above the hatch. This inclination of the passage out caused Goodheart’s death.

“DIED A MOST GALLANT OFFICER”

“The two officers made their way to the conning tower, secured the lower hatch, then through the opened sea-cocks in rushed the water, but standing in security under the hump the heads and shoulders of the men remained uncovered. A moment later, according to plan, the high-pressure air from below was driven in and the bolts of the upper hatch withdrawn. ‘Good-bye, sir,’ said Goodheart; I’ll try now,’ and stooping under the open hatch he was carried forth. Those were his last words, for, missing the aperture above, he was caught under the roof of the chart-house and drowned.

“There died a most gallant young officer, to whose memory, months afterwards, a posthumous award was made of the Albert Medal in gold. The powerful air, forced in by the pressure from the bottles, continued to surge into the conning tower, driving the water before it and tearing the helpless Herbert from his retreat under the hump. He was whirled out in the center of a column of air and water, carried safely through the manhole in the roof of the chart-house and clear of the mast stays, and delivered at the surface like a scrap of wreckage. He went up with both hands before his face, and declares, according to my authorities, that he breathed all through his ascent. He was picked up immediately and insisted upon giving all possible information and guidance to the salvors before accepting any of their kind offices for himself.

MORSE CODE CONVERSATIONS

“We have reached noon on Tuesday and the survivors of _K-13_ have been entombed for more than twenty hours. No word had yet come to them from outside of the efforts which were actively in progress for their rescue. But they were not destined to remain much longer in ignorance. Even while Herbert and Goodheart were making that effort at communication, which had been so grievously costly, the leaden soles of a diver were planted on the submarine’s deck. At first attempts were made to flash signals through the periscope, but the surer and simpler method of tapping Morse dots and dashes on the steel plating was quickly substituted. Between the inner and outer skins of _K-13_ were interposed five feet of water, admitted through flap valves in order to distribute the pressure when she penetrated the depths of the sea. Linked together by stays and trusses, these two skins formed an encircling girder of immense strength. Water is an excellent conductor of sound, and the Morse taps of the divers without could have been readily heard and interpreted by those within had their senses not been dulled by the thick bad atmosphere. Conduction was indeed so good that the replies of _K-13_, struck on the frames of the ship, were picked up and read without difficulty by the salvors on the surface of the loch. It happened, therefore, that though outside talked to inside and replies were received, it was by no means easy to get inside, to grasp and to carry out precisely what outside wanted done. And it was found to be particularly difficult to secure the exact and essential coöperation of those within _K-13_ when that flexible tube arrived which had been designed by Fairfields to be screwed into an ammunition hoist upon the deck.

[Illustration:

_Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._

Sergeant Clarence W. Dawson

_168th Infantry, Company “B”_

Near Badonville, on March 5, 1918, a small group of combatants had survived a bombardment on their front line. They were wounded and entirely surrounded. Sergeant Dawson was the Corporal of the group, and when the Germans attempted to mop them up, he bravely resisted them and succeeded in repelling their attempts to raid the position until assistance came to them.]

“THE LIMITS OF HUMAN ENDURANCE”