Word: squalus
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...Squalus' Door...
...damp afternoon last week, just nine days after the U. S. submarine Squalus settled to the ocean floor off New Hampshire's Isles of Shoals, the British submarine Thetis (rhymes with lettuce)* nosed down the Mersey from Birkenhead into Liverpool Bay. Like the Squalus she was a brand-new vessel, and this was to be a final diving test run before she was turned over to the Royal Navy. Aboard was an unusually large company-103 men. Besides her regular crew of 53 there were civilian technicians, civilian Admiralty officials, a local river pilot and two waiters brought...
...submarines set out from ports from Birkenhead all the way round the bottom of England to Portsmouth. Royal Air Force planes soared the skies. All were looking for the telltale buoys which distressed submarines try to send to the surface to show where they are. (A buoy located the Squalus.) The crowd around the shipyards grew bigger. After 15 hours the first news came ashore. Fourteen miles off Great Ormes Head, Wales, the destroyer Brazen had spotted something in the sea. It was not a buoy but part of the Thetis herself-her tail, sticking in the air like...
...horror of the Squalus' loss of the men in her flooded aft was mitigated by the rescue of the 33 survivors. There was no grain of satisfaction for the British public in the Thetis disaster, worst in submarine history. There were just two cold epitaphs. "Chlorine gas fumes," said a British medical authority, "in a confined space like the interior of a submerged submarine, would cause early asphyxiation, immediately preceded by loss of consciousness." And over the spot in the Irish Sea where the submarine rested, there floated a new green buoy on whose side was freshly painted...
...death, while around them divers worked desperately in the darkness. Finally the jammed cable was cut and the bell hauled up foot by foot. At 12:38 a.m. of the second day the U. S. Navy had rescued its living. Below, in the hull of the deep-diving Squalus, 26 corpses slept...