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The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas
The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas
There are some true stories that read like the kind of novel you just can't put down, and one such is The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas.
It's the story of the greatest undersea rescue and, at that time, the deepest salvage operation in history, and of the extraordinary man behind it.
In May 1939 the US Navy's newest submarine Squalus left Portsmouth, New Hampshire. When the time came for her to submerge for a test dive, every light on her control board showed green, signifying that all was watertight.
It wasn't! At 15m, tons of seawater roared into the engine rooms through the main air induction valve, which should have been closed, and the submarine went straight to the bottom of the freezing North Atlantic, more than 70m down.
That 33 of the 59 men on board survived was down to Charles Bowers Momsen, a 43-year-old Lieutenant-Commander, popularly known as 'Swede', and his team of divers.
For 20 months Momsen had headed an experimental deep-sea diving unit testing breathing mixtures of oxygen and helium. He had also been working on apparatus to rescue submariners from sunken submarines.
His initial invention, later known as the Momsen Lung, was constructed out of car inner tubes. The approximate size of human lungs, it was designed to be worn by submariners to escape from depth, breathing pure oxygen.
Momsen's other major breakthrough was to construct a diving bell that could be locked on to a hatch on a submarine's hull to enable crew to exit and be brought to the surface. The early tests to establish its feasibility were conducted with a pickle barrel cut in half.
The first time Momsen's diving bell system was used for real was when the Squalus sank, and the story of the heroic rescues from the sub is astounding and enthralling. Bernard Eaton |
The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas (HarperCollins, 020 8741 7070). Paperback, 272pp, £9.69
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