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The men in Poseidon’s forward torpedo compartment were lucky, and not just because they were still alive. When the submarine came to rest on the Gulf of Pechihli’s muddy bottom, the watertight door began to leak. It took all six of the navy men to shut it, and even then water still flowed in. Reginald Clarke in particular strained to close the door, and took a few minutes to recover. A gauge said they had sunk in 126 feet (38 meters) of water. The men had only trained on the Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus (DSEA) prior to deployment in a fifteen-foot (five meter) tank at Fort Blockhouse. Still, they were within the device’s rescue parameters. Standing in the cold and dark, Patrick Willis pondered why he needed to reach the surface. Over five thousand miles away, his wife waited with his newborn daughter, Julia. If he did not succeed, he would certainly meet his Maker without ever having seen his first child. For now, he could only contemplate how he and his men would get back to the surface. The torpedo compartment stood about fifteen feet (five meters) from the point where Yuta struck Poseidon. There were no other submariners forward of their position, and they had no idea if any other remained alive in the boat aft of them. Being in a forward compartment gave Poseidon’s torpedo crew an additional advantage: Their air supply would not be contaminated by chlorine gas that may have been created when seawater came into contact with the submarine’s batteries. This design flaw claimed many lives over the years, well into World War II. Submarines from the 1930s were refitted for war but not necessarily overhauled entirely. Trapped, the men were facing the submariner’s worst fear: long, slow suffocation in a dark steel coffin. By the time that Willis and Chapter 5 Escape 46 Poseidon his men went to the bottom, submarines had existed long enough for many of them to sink, and for some lucky submariners to survive. One man’s account of being in a downed submarine described it thusly: “Pitch black. Pitch black and quiet. Quiet like you can’t imagine, just no sound. At that depth, the water is very cold, so everyone tried to get into a position of some kind of comfort,” said a survivor of the USS Squalus sinking in 1939 of the experience. Coincidentally, he was also trapped in the fore end of his submarine . “Waiting, naturally the thoughts go through your head about the people that you know that are aft . . . in fact, most of our friends were in the aft compartment.” 1 “Our plight was one of horror. The water was rising in the engine room bilges and we were surrounded by the mangled bodies of a dozen dead. [The boat] had become a cold steel tomb surrounded by the relentless sea,” said a survivor of the sinking of another Royal Navy submarine.2 In theory, the Poseidon men’s task was not so difficult. All each man had to do was get clear of the submarine, then kick towards the surface, breathing from his oxygen supply while trying not to rise too quickly. They were separated from the surface, and rescue, by less than one length of an Olympic-sized pool. Unassisted escapes from submarines were rare but had been successful . The one that would have been best known to Poseidon’s men was that of Godfrey Herbert, captain of K13, which sank during trials in late January 1917. After calculating that he and his remaining men had only about eight hours of air remaining, Herbert and the captain of K14, Francis Goodhart, who happened to be on board for the submarine’s testing, decided to attempt an ascent using a makeshift escape chamber formed by the inner and outer air locks in the conning tower.3 Both men attempted ascent together. Goodhart drowned, but Herbert made it fifty-five feet (seventeen meters) to the surface, with no equipment. Upon arriving topside, he helped coordinate rescue from the surface, which meant divers connecting compressed air hoses to the submarine to provide breathing gas and buoyancy. Herbert’s successful unassisted ascent ultimately saved the lives of forty-eight other people. The submariners had no choice but to contemplate doing something that no one had ever done before: rescuing themselves from a downed submarine using an experimental breathing device. [3.145.119.199] Project MUSE (2024-04-23...

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