Hey, everybody happy Saturday. I hope it's going grandly Today. We are going back to our November episode on the sinking of the submarine known as S five, which happened during the vessel's first mission and involves some very dramatic and heroic efforts by the crew to keep themselves alive while they awaited rescue. If you're thinking on hearing this episode of sending us a note to let us know that traditionally submarines are called boats instead of ships, We've got it. There, you go, enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Him, I'm Holly Fry And you know, uh, people sending it seemed to love the stories about shipwrecks. Yeah, we have a lot of maritime history fans. Yes, that lots of people who love the shipwreck stories and who want to hear more shipwreck stories, and we haven't really talked a lot of about submarine disasters. After looking through our archive and also polling on Facebook and Twitter, I think the only submarine disaster that has been on the podcast ever in its history is a brief part about the Huntley, which was a Civil War submarine from an episode on five Battleship Shipwrecks. So, uh, we're gonna talk about a submarine disaster today, and there been bigger submarine disasters in history than this one. Also maybe even actually I've put this in my notes before I got to the end of doing my research. It says, maybe some more dramatic submarine rescues, but this one's actually pretty dramatic. Uh. The reason that I wanted to start with this one, Number one, it's a listener request from listener Stephen. Number two, I personally find the idea of being trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. The second most terrifying thing in the world surrounding is my big death fear. Yeah, the first most terrifying thing is floating into outer space with no hope of rescue. The second most terrifying thing is being trapped in a submarine on the bottom of the ocean. Um. So the reason we're doing this one is spoiler alert, everyone gets out okay, which is I think the only way that I would be able to tolerate recording this episode of being trapped in a submarine. Uh, this is the submarine S five And as we said earlier, it is a listener request from Stephen. So today, when something goes wrong aboard a submarine, most developed countries navies have these tools on hand to try to rescue the crew. And relatively shallow water, it could be a matter of the crew just putting on a suit that will let them breathe and keep warm while they ascend, and in deeper water, a rescue vessel can descend down to the submarine and then carry the survivors back up to the surface. And during peacetime, rescuing a sunken submarine crew is usually an international effort, So whoever's closest and has the technology to handle the situation is who goes. This is not a case in at that point the United States Submarine Force had only been officially established for about twenty years, and even the submarines themselves had really limited means of escape if they were in any depth of water because the pressure of the water would hold all of the hatches closed. So if your submarine sank, really the only way to get out was through the torpedo tubes, and that was a maybe maybe the torpedo tubes could be used as an emergency exhibit. Maybe not. But even if you could get out the torpedo tubes and most depths, it would be impossible to swim to the surface before you either succumbed to the bends or drowned. Your odds are survival were they were extremely low, almost zero. But even so, by the time this story takes place, the U. S. Submarine Force had a relatively good track record as far as crew safety, and prior to that year, the United States had only seen two major accidents. One of them was in nineteen fifteen and the other one was in nineteen seventeen. And to be clear, this is that was those numbers for once the Submarine Force was officially established, because there were some other submarine issues before that and the extremely limited limited tinkering with submarines that went on before that point. So the ship from today's episode was part of the S class, and these were U. S. Navy submarines from World War One. The S five was just like its name suggests, the fifth and its class, and it was launched in November nineteen nineteen and commissioned the following March. On Monday August nineteen twenty, the S five left the Boston Navy Yard on its first mission with the crew of thirty six officers and enlisted men. The vessel was expected to reach Baltimore, Maryland, on September three. The ship and crew had by then spent six months in testing and training. This mission was part of a longer voyage to the southeastern United States, and they were going to be making stops at all these Navy ports along the way with the hope of recruiting X servicemen to be part of the submarine fleet. This was really a pretty posh assignment, and Lieutenant Commander Charles M. Cook Jr. Also known as Savvy, who was in command of the S five, was extremely pleased with both the skill and the demeanor of his crew. They all worked really hard, they could learn to do their jobs really well, and for the most part, they all got along and we're my skies to be around. And in addition to these recruitment stops, the S five was also to undergo a number of speed and endurance trials as part of a performance evaluation. After all these months of training and tests, the performance evaluation was, for the most part kind of a cake walk. As Tracy just said, this crew was they worked well together, they all worked hard, they knew their stuff, they had just been through six months of intensive training. It was just sort of a happy coincidence that their performance evaluation immediately followed all that. But the big exception was the crash dive. So other than during trainings and this evaluation, crash dives normally took place only during wartime and when done perfectly. They took a submarine from the surface of the ocean to periscope depth, which is about forty ft and under a minute, and the first time the crew of the S five tried it, so this is when they were learning how to all do it. It had taken them more than four minutes, and they had steadily reduced that time during training. And the reason that this particular maneuver was the outlier and their performance evaluation wasn't just the level of difficulty involved. These evaluations were scored and used as a competition among the submarines in the fleet. Every extra second would incur a penalty in the overall scores, and they all wanted to break that one minute record, during which time they had a highly orchestrated series of jobs to do in order to make the vessel watertight and then dive very rapidly. So before we get to the crash dive and how it went wrong, a brief about submarines for those who may not know. A submarine rises and falls through the water depending in part on how much ballast it has in its tanks, and the ballast mostly comes in the form of sea water, and as class submarines, the ballast level, so how much water was in the ballast tanks, was regulated by valves called Kingston valves. Uh. These valves were controlled using waste high levels which connected directly to the valves through a system of rods which opened and closed the ballast tanks, and they were incredibly difficult to move. It took multiple men to open and close each of them because the Kingston valves were so temperamental. When preparing for a crash dive, what the crew would do would be to seal off all the events that let air in and out of the compartments, and then they would open the Kingston valves. So because the air couldn't get out, the water couldn't get in, and that meant that the level of ballast in the tanks to stay the same, so the air vants were just a lot easier to deal with, and that meant that they could deal with the easier job when it was time to dive. Opening the vents was faster than opening the valves, so they were basically getting a little ahead of the game, and when it was time to dive, they'd open those vents and the air would flow out and the water would flow in from the already opened Kingston valves. So when it came time to do their crash dive test on September one, this didn't go as planned. The crew closed all of the air vents and they opened the Kingston valves, and it turned out that one of the air valves hadn't sealed properly, so water started seeping into one of the ballast tanks, and that meant that the submarine almost immediately started to list to the starboard, which means to the right for non maritime people. Uh. This was something that could cause some pretty serious problems if it wasn't corrected, so the crew immediately got to work opening and closing other Kingston valves to get things back on an even keel. One of the people who helped out was Percy Fox, the gunner mate and the senior most man on the ship except for the lieutenant commander. They probably could not have gotten the Kingston valves taken care of without Fox's help. It was. There was a lot of opening and closing that had to be done to level things out, but Fox had his own job to do when it was really critical. Both he and Lieutenant Commander Cook had major sources of ventilation to the submarine that they personally had to close before diving. Cook had to close the hatch at the top of the conning tower and Fox had to close the main induction valve, which was the valve that diverted air to all the parts of the ship from the outside. So these two men had these two jobs because they were the two most senior men on the ship, and these jobs were the two most important when it came to making the ship uh watertight so that it could dive, plus when it came to the induction valve itself. It had proved to be a little temperamental on the S five as well as on her sister ships. Cook had some trouble getting the conning tower hatch to close. It was caught on something but Fox overlooked his task entirely because he was trying to handle this other stuff that was going awry. Right, So, when it was time to dive, Cook sounded the diving Clackson and the crew did all their tasks to get the ship to dive, and because Fox had overlooked his part while wrangling with another crisis, water started pouring into the submarine. I know how this ends, and I'm even kind of scared already, So let's take a brief moment for a word from a sponsor that sounds grand. With water pouring into the submarine from outside, Fox immediately realized his mistake and started trying to close the main induction valve, while Cook gave the order to blow the ballast tanks to try to clear them of the water that they were taking in. But Fox couldn't get the main induction valve to move, so the rest of the crew started manually closing all of the smaller events that led to the outside, while sea water was literally pummeling them in the face as they did. The torpedo room, which had been the first compartment of the ship to part to start taking on water, was really too far gone for them to try to save. So they evacuated it and then sealed it behind a watertight door. I can't imagine trying to I mean, I can't change the temperature in the shower if it's hitting me in the face, like I can't imagine a much higher pressure situation and the stress situation, Yes, it would be intense. So with the torpedo room essentially open to the sea at that point, it filled with water and the S five sank to the sea floor. Knows first. When it came to rest four minutes later, it was under about a hundred and eighty feet of water, more or less upright. So a running theme and then this whole story is that they keep having some good news and some bad news. So the good news was everyone had survived this initial sinking of the ship. The only injuries at this point we're pretty minor. The hull was still intact, they still had emergency power provided by batteries, and they still had about half of their supply of compressed air. The bad news was the torpedo room was about two thirds full of water, and the bilges also had water in them. All in all, the submarine had about seventy five tons of extra ballast thanks to all the water, which meant that unless they figured out a solution, they were basically completely stuck. There was no way for them to get out of the sub and even if they could, it would have been virtually impossible for any of them to survive a swim to the surface from that depth. So Cook blew the red the residual ballast out of the tanks, hoping that he would be able to bring the ship back up to the surface, but it didn't work, and his efforts were also hampered because one of the drive motors had been damaged when all the water started pouring in. The other drive motor also burned out while they were trying to maneuver out of the mud at the bottom of the ocean, which left them with no way to maneuver the ship, and because of where they had sunk, they weren't really in the like path of any ships that might be passing um. It was really unlikely that they were going to be able to get the attention of another ship, and their presence in Baltimore was not going to be missed for several days. So for the next couple of hours, Cook tried to force water out of the torpedo room using a number of pumps, and he was not making a lot of headway. So he decided to try to use some of their compressed air to try to pressurize the room. And while this did help, it quickly became obvious that there was not enough air to do this job. Yeah, the idea was that if they were able to pressurize the room, it would force the water out and they would rise back to the service. Different accounts kind of vary in their explanations of why Cook tried the next thing that he tried, which was to use what was left of the compressed air to clear out the aft ballast tanks, and this actually worked. It meant that the stern of the sub now was a lot more buoyant than the bow, so it rose up, lifting the submarine off of the sea floor. Uh, but also re orienting it so that it was more or less vertical. So just imagine for a moment a submarine which is a confined, cramped space on a good day. If you have ever done like a tour of a military submarine, you probably have that moment of holy smokes, this is really tight space live down here. So then to think about all of these people in this tiny space. Uh, it's it will give you a moment of pause, at least it does me. So everything is wet aboard at this point. There is a lot of broken stuff, and now it's about sixty degrees from horizontal, so not quite straight up and down, but really close to vertical. So I just imagine people stacking on top of each other as they try to get footing. Yeah, for another round of good news bad news. The good news was they weren't stuck on the floor of the ocean anymore. They were tracking their depth and the vessel was very slow, really inching upward towards the surface. But there was bad news, which is that now the lowest point of the ship was the battery room, which had filled with water. The water started interacting with the sulfuric acid in the batteries, producing chlorine gas. In such a confined space, no vent delician. Remember, the chlorine gas had the potential to become deadly. So the crew started evacuating the parts of the ship that we're filling up with chlorine gas by basically hauling themselves over one another, climbing the previously horizontal surfaces of the ship. Which were now vertical, until they were all out of the battery room, and then they sealed that off behind them. They also started trying to funnel some of their air into the torpedo room to try to keep it from refilling back with water. And at this point, uh, this had all been going on for about five hours. We're gonna take another brief break before we resumed their efforts to rescue themselves. So five hours after sinking to the sea floor, the men aboard the S five were not in good shape. Everything as we said before, it was wet and slippery. There was debris everywhere thanks to the combination of stirred up bilge, water and fuel and exhaust, and the lack of a functioning toilet. It smelled awful, and Cook had come to the conclusion that his effort to use compressed air to clear water out so that they could rise faster was not working. He was preparing to tell the men that hope was lost and that they were going to die. Not long after that, some men who were sheltering in the submarine's motor room, which at that point was the highest point in the submarine, reported that they could hear waves breaking against the side of the vessel. So that sounds awesome, right, like we have cleared the water. Uh. Since they weren't oriented in the correct direction, they used math plus the ship's inclinometer to figure out just how far up they were. When the good news was now about twenty ft of the ship were above the water line. That's all, But there's also bad news. The actual escape hatch, though, was still submerged by a good thirty feet, and even if they'd been able to shift their angle from sixty degrees to ninety degrees from horizontal, the hatch still would have been underwater, and that shift would not have been enough to clear it of the waterline. But now having part of the vessel above the waterline gave everyone a tiny glimmer of hope, and they came up with a plan to cut their way out of the ship. So it's a tiny glimmer of hope because they're planning to cut their way through three quarter inch thick steel that was made specifically to keep the ocean out of the submarine to not be easy to break. Correct. Uh, that sounds like just a sprit plan, but it is what they decided to do, and they did it. Cook climbed up to the tiller room, which was a small compartment off the motor room, and he and several men took turns, starting with an electric drill until it's motor burned out, and then they turned to a manual drill. And that's what blows my mind. Like, but I guess if you feel like life of both yourself and a lot of men that you are, you know, close with at that point they've worked together really closely, I'll do it. You have the choice of we can try to drill through three quarter and still with a manual drill, or we can die. Yeah. Uh so slowly but surely. They drilled a quarter inch hole through the side of the sub and that took twenty minutes, Sarah, quarter inch hole. So it's not like any anybody's getting out of that. No, and unfortunately that also doesn't mean that fresh air is coming in. Yeah. Um, so they were finding you know, they were successful. Yeah, they had managed to make a hole. They decided that what they would do was to drill holes close enough together that they could then knock out the spaces between them with a hammer and a chisel, hoping to create a hole large enough for the men to escape through. But based on the fact that it took them twenty minutes to make the first hole, they all expected that this effort was just going to take more time than they have, but they persisted anyway. By morning they had a space large enough to scan the horizon for ships, and they were actually seeing some, but those ships were too far away for them to get their attention. And since they had opened a hole in the ship, it was no longer as pressurized as it had been, so there was more water seeping in as air was escaping out of this hole that they had punched. And even though in theory they had a source of fresh air, now it was not enough to keep the air in the ship clean. The air was in fact increasingly disgusting, and the oxygen levels were low enough that the men couldn't keep at their drilling task for long. Having this source of of you know, air from the outside, like fresh air from outside wasn't coming in. Gross air from in the ship was going out and being replaced from up underneath by water, right is what was happening. So basically, now they were in this process of trying to make the whole big enough to escape from before the size of the hole, let enough air out, the submarine sank back below the waves. I'm just gonna let that set for a minute, like it's a race against time to try to make the whole bigger before the ship sinks again. I keep saying ship, and I think somebody might write in and say, we should have said sub the whole time. So if if that's a nautical faux pa, I'm very sorry. Twenty four hours after the initial incident, so a full day they have been in peril. They had a hole in the side of the ship that was about six inches by eight inches. But basically everyone was unable to work at that point to make it any bigger because there was just a lack of oxygen. Uh, and many of the men had lost consciousness, so it wasn't And when you're doing something like drilling a hole, and with the manual drill, it's really hard, it's really difficult, and you consume a lot of oxygen. So when there's not much there, well, and all of the oxygen, not all, but a lot of the oxygen at this point had been replaced by carbon dioxide and breathing that is not good for you and can lead you to all kinds of other health effects by your body not being able to clear that out as waste um. Plus some of the guys who had already as the whole situation with chlorine gas started, some of them had started to have other breathing problems because of the toxic gases that were inside the ship. It was a really bad situation. But just then a ship came by, and Cook, who was still conscious, roused some men to try to find a way to signal it. And what they wind up doing was tying a sailor's shirt to a ten ft long length of copper pipe and sticking out, sticking that out the hole that they had made, and waving it around. So the ship in question was a merchant ship, the s S. Atlantis, which was actually headed away from them, but good fortune, someone on deck turned back and actually saw their signal, and so they came about to see what was going on. I'm just trying to imagine the mind of the man who sees like a piece of pipe sticking out of a hole, of something sticking out of the ocean, Yeah, going, what the heck is that? Yeah? The Atlanti, says Captain Ernest A. Johnson, maneuvered close to the S five and then he rode the rest of the way himself in a dinghy or a little skiff or something, and he had the following conversation with Cook through the hole in the sub which is just fantastic. And I will do one part in Holly can do the other part. What ship are you? Submarine? S five? What nationality? United States? Where are you bound to hell by compass? I love? Why is this not a film? I feel like it has to be And I should have thought IMDb before we came in here. Um. And then just like we laughed, the men who were still conscious on the submarine laughed. Um. And after you know, his confusion kind of cleared up. Johnson realized that this was a crisis like this was an emergency that he needed to help with right now, and so he tied the S five to his ship with chains and cables to keep it from sinking, and then he ordered his men to build an improvised wooden platform so that they could have better access to try to work on the ship. And then they also made an improvised air pump to try to get some fresh air into the ship or into the submarine for the men. I also just loved the cook in the most dire circumstances is finding a way to correct chips like he gets my unending respect and admiration for Yeah. Well, and the one of the there are two primary sources for for this episode, and one of them is a book called Under Pressure, The Final Voyage of Submarine S five, And one of the remarks that comes up was that the situation like it's really difficult to live on a submarine and people tend to have really dark senses of humor and to be able to make a joke about anything. Um, but the jokes had ceased for quite some time before he said to hell by compass, and like that was one of the things where he realized, like how di are the men's mental situation was that no one was laughing about anything anymore. Uh So the Atlantis Is radio operator unfortunately was not on board. Also not on board or any sorts of tools or equipment that would have made it easier to drill through the side of the submarine. So the exhausted and at this point delirious crew of the S five passed the gear that they had been using out of the hole to the crew of the Atlantis, who then could resume drilling from the outside, and then, quite fortunately, another ship appeared. This one was the s S General George W. Girtles and Johnson ran up an emergency flag on the Atlantis to get the other ship's attention, and that ship's master, Captain EO. Swinson, uh moved his ship over and anchored nearby. Being a much bigger and more equipped ship and having a radio operator on board, the George W. Gettels was able to radio the Navy and let them know what was up with the submarine, but it was going to take at least until the next morning for a Navy vessel to arrive, so Captain Swinson and Johnson decided that they would keep on working to try to free the crew of the S five. Swinson's chief engineer, William Grace and his first assistant, Richard McWilliams, headed up the task, working with another manual drill, and this one was kind of a ratcheting one that seemed to work a little better, as well as chisels and a sledgehammer. They finally managed to make a hole big enough for the crew to crawl through thirty six hours after the original incidents. Ugh uh. They were taken aboard the Atlantis, where a makeshift sick bay had been put together so that they could receive them. And at this point, as you would imagine, the men were in really bad shape. Two actors from the George W. Gettles were on hand to look after the men, and they agreed that the rescue had really been in the nick of time. It took so long to evacuate everyone just because they were so exhausted and they were basically having to climb up the interior of a vertical submarine. They weren't done getting all the men off of the S five until about the same time as the Navy ships arrived, and Cook was the last man to leave the S five and at that point he had been awake for two days. He he gets the captain goes down with his ship. Award. Yeah, for sure. The Navy tried to salvage the submarine, but eventually gave up. Two different ships were not up to the task of trying to haul it back to the surface and just they decided it was just gonna it was more trouble than it was worth. Basically, as of two thousand two, which is when the book that I referenced earlier was published it was still on the bottom of the ocean. The Navy investigated, and they found that Fox's failure to close the intake valves was probably the cause of the sinking, But they also chalked up all those extenuating circumstances, including that the valves themselves were apparently defective. Uh, and that you know, those valves that were extremely hard to wrangle, were really what had caused Fox to leave his post in the first place. And Fox had also gone way above and beyond during the whole survival effort. Pretty much any time they needed a volunteer, he was it. I have to wonder personally if that was motivated by guilt over it was the whole thing going on. Uh. Cook also took some of the blame for having not ensured that the ship was clear before giving the order to submerge. Yeah, so there's a there's a lot that went on, like specific things that went on and all of their efforts to save themselves that we didn't go into. One of them is that before the motor burned out in their drill um, they needed to go get more batteries, and so somebody was going to try to go into the battery compartment, which was filled with chlorine gas, and foxes like, I'll go like he was the volunteer time. Um. There's also a note in the book that that Cook, Uh, at one of these points when Fox volunteered to go do something dangerous to try to help them, realized that at no point had he heard any of the men criticize him for having messed up in the first place, which is kind of incredible to me, Like, like, I can see how a person's impulse might be, like Fox, You've had one job, like what is the matter with you? But instead, like all the men are really focused hard on not laying blame on anybody and not arguing about it, but on doing whatever they needed to do to keep themselves alive. Uh. The Navy also recognized Captain's Swinson and Johnson and their cruise for how their lengths they had gone to to try to rescue the crew once they found the submarine sticking partly out of the water, and they also put more safety measures into place so that the same thing would not happen again. Cook was also a career Navy man, and he eventually retired as a full admiral in for more than thirty years of service. Apparently, after the S five was sunk, most of the crew really petitioned to be placed under him again, which is not surprising to me at all. I feel like this story could be used in corporate leadership manuals. Yeah, his nickname was savvy. He had been nicknamed that long before and to this just because that was his demeanor. He was a savvy guy. He knew how to how to handle things. So yes, so happy and the happy and the harrowing story, but a happy end name it is harrowing. I I do wish that I had made sure that there's not a movie of this at i amdb, because their absolutely should be. If there is not, Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address or a Facebook you are l or something similar over the course of today's episode, since it is from the archive that might be out of date now, you can email us at History podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, everybody happy Saturday. I hope it's going grandly Today. We are going back to our November episode on the sinking of the submarine known as S five, which happened during the vessel's first mission and involves some very dramatic and heroic efforts by the crew to keep themselves alive while they awaited rescue. If you're thinking on hearing this episode of sending us a note to let us know that traditionally submarines are called boats instead of ships, We've got it. There, you go, enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Him, I'm Holly Fry And you know, uh, people sending it seemed to love the stories about shipwrecks. Yeah, we have a lot of maritime history fans. Yes, that lots of people who love the shipwreck stories and who want to hear more shipwreck stories, and we haven't really talked a lot of about submarine disasters. After looking through our archive and also polling on Facebook and Twitter, I think the only submarine disaster that has been on the podcast ever in its history is a brief part about the Huntley, which was a Civil War submarine from an episode on five Battleship Shipwrecks. So, uh, we're gonna talk about a submarine disaster today, and there been bigger submarine disasters in history than this one. Also maybe even actually I've put this in my notes before I got to the end of doing my research. It says, maybe some more dramatic submarine rescues, but this one's actually pretty dramatic. Uh. The reason that I wanted to start with this one, Number one, it's a listener request from listener Stephen. Number two, I personally find the idea of being trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. The second most terrifying thing in the world surrounding is my big death fear. Yeah, the first most terrifying thing is floating into outer space with no hope of rescue. The second most terrifying thing is being trapped in a submarine on the bottom of the ocean. Um. So the reason we're doing this one is spoiler alert, everyone gets out okay, which is I think the only way that I would be able to tolerate recording this episode of being trapped in a submarine. Uh, this is the submarine S five And as we said earlier, it is a listener request from Stephen. So today, when something goes wrong aboard a submarine, most developed countries navies have these tools on hand to try to rescue the crew. And relatively shallow water, it could be a matter of the crew just putting on a suit that will let them breathe and keep warm while they ascend, and in deeper water, a rescue vessel can descend down to the submarine and then carry the survivors back up to the surface. And during peacetime, rescuing a sunken submarine crew is usually an international effort, So whoever's closest and has the technology to handle the situation is who goes. This is not a case in at that point the United States Submarine Force had only been officially established for about twenty years, and even the submarines themselves had really limited means of escape if they were in any depth of water because the pressure of the water would hold all of the hatches closed. So if your submarine sank, really the only way to get out was through the torpedo tubes, and that was a maybe maybe the torpedo tubes could be used as an emergency exhibit. Maybe not. But even if you could get out the torpedo tubes and most depths, it would be impossible to swim to the surface before you either succumbed to the bends or drowned. Your odds are survival were they were extremely low, almost zero. But even so, by the time this story takes place, the U. S. Submarine Force had a relatively good track record as far as crew safety, and prior to that year, the United States had only seen two major accidents. One of them was in nineteen fifteen and the other one was in nineteen seventeen. And to be clear, this is that was those numbers for once the Submarine Force was officially established, because there were some other submarine issues before that and the extremely limited limited tinkering with submarines that went on before that point. So the ship from today's episode was part of the S class, and these were U. S. Navy submarines from World War One. The S five was just like its name suggests, the fifth and its class, and it was launched in November nineteen nineteen and commissioned the following March. On Monday August nineteen twenty, the S five left the Boston Navy Yard on its first mission with the crew of thirty six officers and enlisted men. The vessel was expected to reach Baltimore, Maryland, on September three. The ship and crew had by then spent six months in testing and training. This mission was part of a longer voyage to the southeastern United States, and they were going to be making stops at all these Navy ports along the way with the hope of recruiting X servicemen to be part of the submarine fleet. This was really a pretty posh assignment, and Lieutenant Commander Charles M. Cook Jr. Also known as Savvy, who was in command of the S five, was extremely pleased with both the skill and the demeanor of his crew. They all worked really hard, they could learn to do their jobs really well, and for the most part, they all got along and we're my skies to be around. And in addition to these recruitment stops, the S five was also to undergo a number of speed and endurance trials as part of a performance evaluation. After all these months of training and tests, the performance evaluation was, for the most part kind of a cake walk. As Tracy just said, this crew was they worked well together, they all worked hard, they knew their stuff, they had just been through six months of intensive training. It was just sort of a happy coincidence that their performance evaluation immediately followed all that. But the big exception was the crash dive. So other than during trainings and this evaluation, crash dives normally took place only during wartime and when done perfectly. They took a submarine from the surface of the ocean to periscope depth, which is about forty ft and under a minute, and the first time the crew of the S five tried it, so this is when they were learning how to all do it. It had taken them more than four minutes, and they had steadily reduced that time during training. And the reason that this particular maneuver was the outlier and their performance evaluation wasn't just the level of difficulty involved. These evaluations were scored and used as a competition among the submarines in the fleet. Every extra second would incur a penalty in the overall scores, and they all wanted to break that one minute record, during which time they had a highly orchestrated series of jobs to do in order to make the vessel watertight and then dive very rapidly. So before we get to the crash dive and how it went wrong, a brief about submarines for those who may not know. A submarine rises and falls through the water depending in part on how much ballast it has in its tanks, and the ballast mostly comes in the form of sea water, and as class submarines, the ballast level, so how much water was in the ballast tanks, was regulated by valves called Kingston valves. Uh. These valves were controlled using waste high levels which connected directly to the valves through a system of rods which opened and closed the ballast tanks, and they were incredibly difficult to move. It took multiple men to open and close each of them because the Kingston valves were so temperamental. When preparing for a crash dive, what the crew would do would be to seal off all the events that let air in and out of the compartments, and then they would open the Kingston valves. So because the air couldn't get out, the water couldn't get in, and that meant that the level of ballast in the tanks to stay the same, so the air vants were just a lot easier to deal with, and that meant that they could deal with the easier job when it was time to dive. Opening the vents was faster than opening the valves, so they were basically getting a little ahead of the game, and when it was time to dive, they'd open those vents and the air would flow out and the water would flow in from the already opened Kingston valves. So when it came time to do their crash dive test on September one, this didn't go as planned. The crew closed all of the air vents and they opened the Kingston valves, and it turned out that one of the air valves hadn't sealed properly, so water started seeping into one of the ballast tanks, and that meant that the submarine almost immediately started to list to the starboard, which means to the right for non maritime people. Uh. This was something that could cause some pretty serious problems if it wasn't corrected, so the crew immediately got to work opening and closing other Kingston valves to get things back on an even keel. One of the people who helped out was Percy Fox, the gunner mate and the senior most man on the ship except for the lieutenant commander. They probably could not have gotten the Kingston valves taken care of without Fox's help. It was. There was a lot of opening and closing that had to be done to level things out, but Fox had his own job to do when it was really critical. Both he and Lieutenant Commander Cook had major sources of ventilation to the submarine that they personally had to close before diving. Cook had to close the hatch at the top of the conning tower and Fox had to close the main induction valve, which was the valve that diverted air to all the parts of the ship from the outside. So these two men had these two jobs because they were the two most senior men on the ship, and these jobs were the two most important when it came to making the ship uh watertight so that it could dive, plus when it came to the induction valve itself. It had proved to be a little temperamental on the S five as well as on her sister ships. Cook had some trouble getting the conning tower hatch to close. It was caught on something but Fox overlooked his task entirely because he was trying to handle this other stuff that was going awry. Right, So, when it was time to dive, Cook sounded the diving Clackson and the crew did all their tasks to get the ship to dive, and because Fox had overlooked his part while wrangling with another crisis, water started pouring into the submarine. I know how this ends, and I'm even kind of scared already, So let's take a brief moment for a word from a sponsor that sounds grand. With water pouring into the submarine from outside, Fox immediately realized his mistake and started trying to close the main induction valve, while Cook gave the order to blow the ballast tanks to try to clear them of the water that they were taking in. But Fox couldn't get the main induction valve to move, so the rest of the crew started manually closing all of the smaller events that led to the outside, while sea water was literally pummeling them in the face as they did. The torpedo room, which had been the first compartment of the ship to part to start taking on water, was really too far gone for them to try to save. So they evacuated it and then sealed it behind a watertight door. I can't imagine trying to I mean, I can't change the temperature in the shower if it's hitting me in the face, like I can't imagine a much higher pressure situation and the stress situation, Yes, it would be intense. So with the torpedo room essentially open to the sea at that point, it filled with water and the S five sank to the sea floor. Knows first. When it came to rest four minutes later, it was under about a hundred and eighty feet of water, more or less upright. So a running theme and then this whole story is that they keep having some good news and some bad news. So the good news was everyone had survived this initial sinking of the ship. The only injuries at this point we're pretty minor. The hull was still intact, they still had emergency power provided by batteries, and they still had about half of their supply of compressed air. The bad news was the torpedo room was about two thirds full of water, and the bilges also had water in them. All in all, the submarine had about seventy five tons of extra ballast thanks to all the water, which meant that unless they figured out a solution, they were basically completely stuck. There was no way for them to get out of the sub and even if they could, it would have been virtually impossible for any of them to survive a swim to the surface from that depth. So Cook blew the red the residual ballast out of the tanks, hoping that he would be able to bring the ship back up to the surface, but it didn't work, and his efforts were also hampered because one of the drive motors had been damaged when all the water started pouring in. The other drive motor also burned out while they were trying to maneuver out of the mud at the bottom of the ocean, which left them with no way to maneuver the ship, and because of where they had sunk, they weren't really in the like path of any ships that might be passing um. It was really unlikely that they were going to be able to get the attention of another ship, and their presence in Baltimore was not going to be missed for several days. So for the next couple of hours, Cook tried to force water out of the torpedo room using a number of pumps, and he was not making a lot of headway. So he decided to try to use some of their compressed air to try to pressurize the room. And while this did help, it quickly became obvious that there was not enough air to do this job. Yeah, the idea was that if they were able to pressurize the room, it would force the water out and they would rise back to the service. Different accounts kind of vary in their explanations of why Cook tried the next thing that he tried, which was to use what was left of the compressed air to clear out the aft ballast tanks, and this actually worked. It meant that the stern of the sub now was a lot more buoyant than the bow, so it rose up, lifting the submarine off of the sea floor. Uh, but also re orienting it so that it was more or less vertical. So just imagine for a moment a submarine which is a confined, cramped space on a good day. If you have ever done like a tour of a military submarine, you probably have that moment of holy smokes, this is really tight space live down here. So then to think about all of these people in this tiny space. Uh, it's it will give you a moment of pause, at least it does me. So everything is wet aboard at this point. There is a lot of broken stuff, and now it's about sixty degrees from horizontal, so not quite straight up and down, but really close to vertical. So I just imagine people stacking on top of each other as they try to get footing. Yeah, for another round of good news bad news. The good news was they weren't stuck on the floor of the ocean anymore. They were tracking their depth and the vessel was very slow, really inching upward towards the surface. But there was bad news, which is that now the lowest point of the ship was the battery room, which had filled with water. The water started interacting with the sulfuric acid in the batteries, producing chlorine gas. In such a confined space, no vent delician. Remember, the chlorine gas had the potential to become deadly. So the crew started evacuating the parts of the ship that we're filling up with chlorine gas by basically hauling themselves over one another, climbing the previously horizontal surfaces of the ship. Which were now vertical, until they were all out of the battery room, and then they sealed that off behind them. They also started trying to funnel some of their air into the torpedo room to try to keep it from refilling back with water. And at this point, uh, this had all been going on for about five hours. We're gonna take another brief break before we resumed their efforts to rescue themselves. So five hours after sinking to the sea floor, the men aboard the S five were not in good shape. Everything as we said before, it was wet and slippery. There was debris everywhere thanks to the combination of stirred up bilge, water and fuel and exhaust, and the lack of a functioning toilet. It smelled awful, and Cook had come to the conclusion that his effort to use compressed air to clear water out so that they could rise faster was not working. He was preparing to tell the men that hope was lost and that they were going to die. Not long after that, some men who were sheltering in the submarine's motor room, which at that point was the highest point in the submarine, reported that they could hear waves breaking against the side of the vessel. So that sounds awesome, right, like we have cleared the water. Uh. Since they weren't oriented in the correct direction, they used math plus the ship's inclinometer to figure out just how far up they were. When the good news was now about twenty ft of the ship were above the water line. That's all, But there's also bad news. The actual escape hatch, though, was still submerged by a good thirty feet, and even if they'd been able to shift their angle from sixty degrees to ninety degrees from horizontal, the hatch still would have been underwater, and that shift would not have been enough to clear it of the waterline. But now having part of the vessel above the waterline gave everyone a tiny glimmer of hope, and they came up with a plan to cut their way out of the ship. So it's a tiny glimmer of hope because they're planning to cut their way through three quarter inch thick steel that was made specifically to keep the ocean out of the submarine to not be easy to break. Correct. Uh, that sounds like just a sprit plan, but it is what they decided to do, and they did it. Cook climbed up to the tiller room, which was a small compartment off the motor room, and he and several men took turns, starting with an electric drill until it's motor burned out, and then they turned to a manual drill. And that's what blows my mind. Like, but I guess if you feel like life of both yourself and a lot of men that you are, you know, close with at that point they've worked together really closely, I'll do it. You have the choice of we can try to drill through three quarter and still with a manual drill, or we can die. Yeah. Uh so slowly but surely. They drilled a quarter inch hole through the side of the sub and that took twenty minutes, Sarah, quarter inch hole. So it's not like any anybody's getting out of that. No, and unfortunately that also doesn't mean that fresh air is coming in. Yeah. Um, so they were finding you know, they were successful. Yeah, they had managed to make a hole. They decided that what they would do was to drill holes close enough together that they could then knock out the spaces between them with a hammer and a chisel, hoping to create a hole large enough for the men to escape through. But based on the fact that it took them twenty minutes to make the first hole, they all expected that this effort was just going to take more time than they have, but they persisted anyway. By morning they had a space large enough to scan the horizon for ships, and they were actually seeing some, but those ships were too far away for them to get their attention. And since they had opened a hole in the ship, it was no longer as pressurized as it had been, so there was more water seeping in as air was escaping out of this hole that they had punched. And even though in theory they had a source of fresh air, now it was not enough to keep the air in the ship clean. The air was in fact increasingly disgusting, and the oxygen levels were low enough that the men couldn't keep at their drilling task for long. Having this source of of you know, air from the outside, like fresh air from outside wasn't coming in. Gross air from in the ship was going out and being replaced from up underneath by water, right is what was happening. So basically, now they were in this process of trying to make the whole big enough to escape from before the size of the hole, let enough air out, the submarine sank back below the waves. I'm just gonna let that set for a minute, like it's a race against time to try to make the whole bigger before the ship sinks again. I keep saying ship, and I think somebody might write in and say, we should have said sub the whole time. So if if that's a nautical faux pa, I'm very sorry. Twenty four hours after the initial incident, so a full day they have been in peril. They had a hole in the side of the ship that was about six inches by eight inches. But basically everyone was unable to work at that point to make it any bigger because there was just a lack of oxygen. Uh, and many of the men had lost consciousness, so it wasn't And when you're doing something like drilling a hole, and with the manual drill, it's really hard, it's really difficult, and you consume a lot of oxygen. So when there's not much there, well, and all of the oxygen, not all, but a lot of the oxygen at this point had been replaced by carbon dioxide and breathing that is not good for you and can lead you to all kinds of other health effects by your body not being able to clear that out as waste um. Plus some of the guys who had already as the whole situation with chlorine gas started, some of them had started to have other breathing problems because of the toxic gases that were inside the ship. It was a really bad situation. But just then a ship came by, and Cook, who was still conscious, roused some men to try to find a way to signal it. And what they wind up doing was tying a sailor's shirt to a ten ft long length of copper pipe and sticking out, sticking that out the hole that they had made, and waving it around. So the ship in question was a merchant ship, the s S. Atlantis, which was actually headed away from them, but good fortune, someone on deck turned back and actually saw their signal, and so they came about to see what was going on. I'm just trying to imagine the mind of the man who sees like a piece of pipe sticking out of a hole, of something sticking out of the ocean, Yeah, going, what the heck is that? Yeah? The Atlanti, says Captain Ernest A. Johnson, maneuvered close to the S five and then he rode the rest of the way himself in a dinghy or a little skiff or something, and he had the following conversation with Cook through the hole in the sub which is just fantastic. And I will do one part in Holly can do the other part. What ship are you? Submarine? S five? What nationality? United States? Where are you bound to hell by compass? I love? Why is this not a film? I feel like it has to be And I should have thought IMDb before we came in here. Um. And then just like we laughed, the men who were still conscious on the submarine laughed. Um. And after you know, his confusion kind of cleared up. Johnson realized that this was a crisis like this was an emergency that he needed to help with right now, and so he tied the S five to his ship with chains and cables to keep it from sinking, and then he ordered his men to build an improvised wooden platform so that they could have better access to try to work on the ship. And then they also made an improvised air pump to try to get some fresh air into the ship or into the submarine for the men. I also just loved the cook in the most dire circumstances is finding a way to correct chips like he gets my unending respect and admiration for Yeah. Well, and the one of the there are two primary sources for for this episode, and one of them is a book called Under Pressure, The Final Voyage of Submarine S five, And one of the remarks that comes up was that the situation like it's really difficult to live on a submarine and people tend to have really dark senses of humor and to be able to make a joke about anything. Um, but the jokes had ceased for quite some time before he said to hell by compass, and like that was one of the things where he realized, like how di are the men's mental situation was that no one was laughing about anything anymore. Uh So the Atlantis Is radio operator unfortunately was not on board. Also not on board or any sorts of tools or equipment that would have made it easier to drill through the side of the submarine. So the exhausted and at this point delirious crew of the S five passed the gear that they had been using out of the hole to the crew of the Atlantis, who then could resume drilling from the outside, and then, quite fortunately, another ship appeared. This one was the s S General George W. Girtles and Johnson ran up an emergency flag on the Atlantis to get the other ship's attention, and that ship's master, Captain EO. Swinson, uh moved his ship over and anchored nearby. Being a much bigger and more equipped ship and having a radio operator on board, the George W. Gettels was able to radio the Navy and let them know what was up with the submarine, but it was going to take at least until the next morning for a Navy vessel to arrive, so Captain Swinson and Johnson decided that they would keep on working to try to free the crew of the S five. Swinson's chief engineer, William Grace and his first assistant, Richard McWilliams, headed up the task, working with another manual drill, and this one was kind of a ratcheting one that seemed to work a little better, as well as chisels and a sledgehammer. They finally managed to make a hole big enough for the crew to crawl through thirty six hours after the original incidents. Ugh uh. They were taken aboard the Atlantis, where a makeshift sick bay had been put together so that they could receive them. And at this point, as you would imagine, the men were in really bad shape. Two actors from the George W. Gettles were on hand to look after the men, and they agreed that the rescue had really been in the nick of time. It took so long to evacuate everyone just because they were so exhausted and they were basically having to climb up the interior of a vertical submarine. They weren't done getting all the men off of the S five until about the same time as the Navy ships arrived, and Cook was the last man to leave the S five and at that point he had been awake for two days. He he gets the captain goes down with his ship. Award. Yeah, for sure. The Navy tried to salvage the submarine, but eventually gave up. Two different ships were not up to the task of trying to haul it back to the surface and just they decided it was just gonna it was more trouble than it was worth. Basically, as of two thousand two, which is when the book that I referenced earlier was published it was still on the bottom of the ocean. The Navy investigated, and they found that Fox's failure to close the intake valves was probably the cause of the sinking, But they also chalked up all those extenuating circumstances, including that the valves themselves were apparently defective. Uh, and that you know, those valves that were extremely hard to wrangle, were really what had caused Fox to leave his post in the first place. And Fox had also gone way above and beyond during the whole survival effort. Pretty much any time they needed a volunteer, he was it. I have to wonder personally if that was motivated by guilt over it was the whole thing going on. Uh. Cook also took some of the blame for having not ensured that the ship was clear before giving the order to submerge. Yeah, so there's a there's a lot that went on, like specific things that went on and all of their efforts to save themselves that we didn't go into. One of them is that before the motor burned out in their drill um, they needed to go get more batteries, and so somebody was going to try to go into the battery compartment, which was filled with chlorine gas, and foxes like, I'll go like he was the volunteer time. Um. There's also a note in the book that that Cook, Uh, at one of these points when Fox volunteered to go do something dangerous to try to help them, realized that at no point had he heard any of the men criticize him for having messed up in the first place, which is kind of incredible to me, Like, like, I can see how a person's impulse might be, like Fox, You've had one job, like what is the matter with you? But instead, like all the men are really focused hard on not laying blame on anybody and not arguing about it, but on doing whatever they needed to do to keep themselves alive. Uh. The Navy also recognized Captain's Swinson and Johnson and their cruise for how their lengths they had gone to to try to rescue the crew once they found the submarine sticking partly out of the water, and they also put more safety measures into place so that the same thing would not happen again. Cook was also a career Navy man, and he eventually retired as a full admiral in for more than thirty years of service. Apparently, after the S five was sunk, most of the crew really petitioned to be placed under him again, which is not surprising to me at all. I feel like this story could be used in corporate leadership manuals. Yeah, his nickname was savvy. He had been nicknamed that long before and to this just because that was his demeanor. He was a savvy guy. He knew how to how to handle things. So yes, so happy and the happy and the harrowing story, but a happy end name it is harrowing. I I do wish that I had made sure that there's not a movie of this at i amdb, because their absolutely should be. If there is not, Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address or a Facebook you are l or something similar over the course of today's episode, since it is from the archive that might be out of date now, you can email us at History podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.