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A Connecticut man recounts the harrowing 39 hours that survivors spent on the ocean floor.

By SETH HARKNESS, Staff Writer August 5, 2007

Launched a few months earlier at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, the USS Squalus was completing its sea trials just southeast of the Isles of Shoals when it went down for a test dive on the morning of May 23, 1939.

Whether by human error or mechanical malfunction, a valve remained open and sea water poured into the sub's rear engine rooms. Crew members did as they were trained and raced to close watertight compartments while the sub settled to the ocean floor.

Of the 59 crew members on board, 26 drowned in the flooded sections of the sub. The remaining 33 men were trapped 243 feet below the surface of the ocean in the sub's forward compartments. At this time, there had never been a successful deep- water submarine rescue.

One of those huddled in the dim light was a young machinist's mate named Carl Bryson. Today, Bryson, an 89-year-old resident of Groton, Conn., is the only living survivor of the pioneering rescue effort led by Commander Charles Momsen.

After the sub went down, Bryson said the ship's commanding officer, Lt. Oliver Naquin, told crew members to remain quiet and still so they wouldn't use up the limited supply of oxygen. Bryson and four others waited in the forward battery compartment, where they began to notice an acrid smell. Sea water was sloshing over the batteries below deck and reacting to create chlorine gas.

The sub's electrician threw a switch and everything went black. Bryson and the four other men moved to the forward torpedo room to escape the lingering gas. They tried to stay warm as the sub became chilled by the frigid ocean water.

"It was freezing cold," Bryson said. "Every place there was moisture, there was ice."

Soon after the sinking, the Squalus released a buoy containing a telephone that floated to the surface and was attached to the sub by a communication cable. Five hours later, the Squalus' sister ship, USS Sculpin, found the phone buoy, and there was a brief conversation before the cable broke.

In the afternoon, two Navy ships arrived. One had a mechanism for sending underwater messages down to the submariners in Morse code. The ship's crew said that another ship, the Falcon, was on its way with a rescue chamber.

The submariners attempted to respond. "We tried to pound out messages on the hull," Bryson said.

One of the designers of the rescue chamber, Momsen had left Washington, D.C., for Portsmouth, N.H., as soon as he received news of the sinking.

For years, Momsen had worked to develop methods of saving crew members on sunken submarines, often with little support from the Navy bureaucracy. Prior to the Squalus, a submarine that sank in deep water was considered lost.

Under Momsen's direction, the Falcon anchored above the sunken sub on the morning of May 24 and sent down a diver to secure a cable between the Squalus and the rescue ship.

Next, a 7-ton rescue bell descended to the submarine with hot soup and returned with seven men. It took three more trips to remove the remaining crew members from the sub. Thirty nine hours after the sinking, the rescue was complete, and all 33 men had been saved.

Bryson, who came up on the last trip, said there had been no time to spare.

"The air was horrible," he said. "We wouldn't have lasted too much longer in that air, that's for sure."

After the rescue, Bryson served under Momsen in the months- long effort to raise the Squalus. Like many of the surviving crew members, the 30-year Navy veteran returned to submarine duty during World War II.

The Squalus was recommissioned as the USS Sailfish, and it spent the war years compiling a distinguished combat record in the Pacific.

Today, the bridge and conning tower of the Sailfish stand in a park at the center of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as a monument to the 26 men who died on the Squalus.

Staff Writer Seth Harkness can be contacted at 282-8225 or at:

sharkness@pressherald.com