Seven-Tenths (16 page)

So we huddled over the wireless and kept pace with the rescue attempt as it grew ever more protracted and the BBC’s voice ever more solemn. There was, we were told, a plentiful supply of ‘oxygen candles’ on board. These could be used at intervals to release fresh quantities of the life-sustaining gas. What these candles really gave off was
time
, of course: the extra minutes and hours fuming up as the men lay side by side in their bunks in the dim glow of emergency
lighting, their whole world canted at an angle and with drops of condensation falling from the ceiling. Only a couple of inches of steel held back the press of black water outside. Some wrote letters home, others played quiet games of chess. Everyone was in good spirits, patient. No one wanted to be the first to say that although their prison was achingly cold, it was also becoming unbearably stuffy.

Until finally, after many days, we up there in the bright sunshine were told there was now no further hope for the crew of the lost submarine. The searchers knew where she lay but she was too deep. Or she was at the wrong angle. Or the special cutting equipment was still on its way from Rosyth. And somewhere hidden away in the black and icy depths the captain, his breathing now painfully laboured but his voice still level, would hand round to every man on board a little black capsule. The bulletins stopped abruptly and other news displaced the lost submarine. Ignored, it now lay in silence except for an occasional creaking as it stirred gently to a deep current. After another few days (but how long? Weeks, even?) and in the absence of a living hand to turn it off, the emergency lighting faded to a red glow and finally winked out. Only then did utter darkness cover the dead crew lying in orderly fashion in their bunks, with here or there an outflung arm or scattered chess set to betray a final struggle.

This was how, as a haunted pre-adolescent, I had imagined the drama to which the whole nation was made privy. Even now, some fifty years later, I can recapture an elusive wraith of the original terror and sadness I carried about at the time, and visiting the
Arizona
and the
Bowfin
jolted my memory still further. An atmosphere at once solemn and filmic inhabits one’s contemplations of all sunken tombs, airless but watertight as they might variously be.

I also remember wanting to know the real details. What happened to the bodies? In the absence of oxygen and in the near-zero temperature, how much would they decay? Would the submarine eventually fill with water from the combined seepages of hatchways and torpedo tubes and sprung plates? Before that would the batteries split, leaking acid to react with whatever seawater had pooled in the bilges and release chlorine? And would that in turn arrest any
further bacterial activity, just as in tiny concentrations it could sterilise whole swimming pools?

Or maybe they had finally salvaged the submarine so that one morning it resurfaced, streaked with rust and shaggy with weed? Perhaps they had been advised to use caution as they released the steel dogs securing the main hatch and, as the last one was thrown, the heavy slab was hurled back on its hinges while a roar of putrid gases blew a column of rotting papers, naval caps and pocket chess sets high into the air. And once this dreadful pressure cooker had been opened, the first brave men wearing breathing apparatus and carrying flashlights would descend. … Was that how it had been?

So many and efficient are the ways of deferring or obliterating curiosity in adulthood that it was not until visiting Pearl Harbor that I realised I still really wanted to know the answers. The nameless demanded to be named. I decided to track down this doomed submarine, to discover how much I and my friends had embroidered. For instance, it was inconceivable that the BBC would have described a submarine commander having a supply of suicide pills he could dole out when he judged a crisis hopeless enough, as if his men had been spies. After some research I narrowed down a handful of possibilities to a sinking which fitted all the criteria. In April 1951, HMS
Affray
went down in nearly 300 feet of water off the Isle of Wight. Aboard her were seventy-five ratings and officers. She also, according to a contemporary newspaper report, carried ‘a large quantity of oxygen candles’.

The
Affray
had sailed from Portsmouth on the evening of 16 April on a training exercise, part of which was to involve putting four Royal Marine commandos ashore on the Cornish coast. She was last heard of at 21.16 that evening, diving south of the Isle of Wight. Her commander, Lt. Com. John Blackburn, had been ordered to report daily between 0800 and 0900 hours. At 10 am on the 17th, having heard nothing, the radio room at Fort Blockhouse, Portsmouth, alerted the authorities with the executive ‘Subsunk’ code. An hour later a search was under way which over the next two days would involve Royal Navy, US Navy, Belgian and French craft as well as the RAF. It was thought there was enough oxygen on board
Affray
to
support the crew for three days, barring damage to the system. There was a suit of Davis escape gear for each man which included breathing apparatus and immersion suits.

That night other submarines reported asdic contacts and Admiral Sir Arthur John Power, Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth, announced
‘Affray
has been located on the bottom 35 miles southwest of St Catherine’s Point in just over 30 fathoms of water.’ At daybreak an aircraft dropped small explosive charges to tell the submarine’s crew she had been found and that ships were standing by to pick up anyone who came to the surface. Nobody came. Several of the searching submarines reported hearing faint, distorted signals and sounds which might have been made by someone tapping on a hull, but nobody managed to get a reliable bearing. In the afternoon the asdic room of HMS
Ambush
picked up the code letters which meant ‘We are trapped on the bottom.’ By this time thirty-four ships were taking part in a search which was becoming desperate.

Next morning hopes were raised again when an RAF Coastal Command aircraft spotted oil and dropped a smoke canister which was mistaken by another plane for a marker buoy from
Affray
. That evening, sixty-nine hours after she had dived, the submarine was officially given up for lost.

Because the
Affray
was only one of sixteen ‘A’-class submarines it was vital that the reason for her sinking be ascertained. For the next eight weeks the search continued under Captain W. O. Shelford. By early May she still had not been found, and Shelford was reluctantly driven to take notice of the large number of letters and phone calls being received at Portsmouth from members of the public who claimed to know where she was. He plotted these alleged positions on a chart and found to his surprise that they mostly fell within a small area outside the main search zone.
*
Shelford told Admiral Power, somewhat hesitantly, and a ship was dispatched to investigate. When it arrived at the location it at once obtained a strong asdic echo; yet as it turned out it was not the
Affray
at all, nor any other wreck or rock.

Probably every such sinking generates its own aura which profoundly affects not merely the public at large but those involved in the search. There is an account of a strange experience which the wife of a Rear Admiral at Portsmouth had on the night of 17 April, the first evening of the search for
Affray
.

The lady had promptly phoned her husband, who said he had no idea this officer had even transferred to the submarine service, still less that he was aboard HMS
Affray
. Since the Hurd Deep was well outside the main search area, ships could hardly be diverted on the basis of a ghost story. That, of course, was while there was a chance the crew might still be alive. It was to be some weeks before Captain Shelford gave enough credence to the other seers and clairvoyants to tell his superior.

Affray
was eventually found by HMS
Reclaim
, using an underwater TV camera, a new technology’s first major success. She was lying in 43 fathoms of water on the edge of the Hurd Deep with a slight list to port. It was 67 miles from St Catherine’s lighthouse. At first sight she appeared undamaged. All hatches were shut and none of her indicator buoys had been released. Her hydroplanes were set to rise. Then serious damage was found to her snort tube. This was a hollow mast, 35 feet tall, through which the diesel engines could
breathe, enabling the submarine to run on her surface engines while shallowly submerged. The cameras found it was almost completely snapped off at the base and the hull valve inside was open. The mast was winched up and examined. It was thought at first there might have been a collision, but it was soon found the fracture had been caused by the design not having been strong enough, combined with faulty material. Probably her commander had radioed his last message, dived, and the snort tube fractured on the way down. Even at a depth of only 40 feet, water would have poured through the open valve at a rate of three-quarters of a ton per second. It would have been impossible to have closed the valve against such a flow even if somebody had been standing by it. The water would at once have flooded the engine room and caused electrical short circuits followed by explosions, fire and the release of noxious fumes.

So it seems after all that the
Affray
was overwhelmed quickly and without warning, and that by the time the alarm was raised her crew had already been dead several hours. The ‘signals’ heard during the search, the code word, the tapping, all were imagination on the part of anxious young men with headphones clamped to their ears in submarines identical to the one that had vanished. The powerful asdic return from the clairvoyants’ recommended ‘position’ was almost certainly from the DSL, or Deep Scattering Layer.
*
As for the Rear Admiral’s wife, her visitant had been completely accurate.

It would just have been possible to salvage
Affray
, given her depth, the currents at that point and the technical capabilities of the day, but it would have been expensive and dangerous. ‘Since the cause of the disaster had been established little was to be gained from such an operation, her scrap value being no more than about £5,000. Salvage was abandoned.’
†
In 1990 her wreck was resurveyed. An officer in the Wrecks Department at Taunton Hydrographic Office added that he himself had been aboard one of the submarines searching for
Affray
and the story of messages being picked up by
asdic was ‘quite without foundation’. He said the
Affray
had flooded instantly. ‘It was chaos out there – messages whizzing about – and no doubt some people imagined what they most wanted to hear. It was a very emotional business, of course.’ As for the ‘suicide pills’: ‘Absolute poppycock. Never been such a thing. Pure bosh.’

Concerning the bodies themselves, my schoolchild’s fantasy had presupposed a watertight submarine. It is possible to form a few tentative theories as to what might happen in the circumstance of seventy-five people dying of oxygen starvation. Much would depend on things such as temperature and the fungi in the remaining atmosphere, though it seems likely the air scrubbers would have removed most floating yeasts. From that point of view a submarine is probably a comparatively sterile place. In any case the hypoxia and high carbon-dioxide levels would initially accelerate decomposition due to venous congestion. This would be followed by a slow process of mummification during which the skin hardens and the gaseous cavern of the stomach contracts. It is likely that adipocere would form, especially in dependent limbs. This is the condition when fat changes to an off-white, waxlike substance smelling slightly rancid or musty. Adipocere itself being preservative, this would prevent further decay in affected portions. Provided a sunken submarine remained watertight, a trip down her interior with a flashlight would probably reveal a majority of mummifying bodies, some partly decomposed, a few even skeletonised entirely. Here and there where a head had been subject to adipocere a face might be seen whose features had scarcely changed.

In the case of sudden flooding, as in the
Affray
, things would be entirely different. The first, powerful inrush of water would have caused extensive injuries, including rupture of the eardrums by the rapidly increasing pressure. Since any opening, even one only 10 inches across like a snort valve, would give access to marine animals the stripping of the bodies would begin within hours. In the sea it is generally the lips, eyes and fingers which go first, being most easily seized by creatures with small mouths or pincers. Cod are especially voracious and as soon as the seawater softens the flesh the remainder will be torn off quite rapidly.

Except in terms of size, the
Arizona
is no more of a tomb than the
Affray
, but its status is quite different. It is a national shrine because it fell victim at a turning point in US history, on ‘a date which will live in infamy’, in President Roosevelt’s words. Part of her power as a symbol comes from being visible but inaccessible. One can touch a mausoleum; a relative might put flowers on an actual grave in Arlington National Cemetery and pass a musing hand over the carved name. But no relatives may touch the
Arizona
. Not even the memorial from which they gaze down touches her. Everything about the ship has passed out of the realm of the personal. A further part of her power derives from being monumentally a heap of junk. Most war debris is cleared away, especially if it is blocking a harbour. To have left this hulk in the face of expediency or even aesthetics (for, shorn of its symbolic value, there is nothing very beautiful about bits of rusty steel poking up above the water) is a powerfully contrary gesture. It is a solemn act, going against every urge to tidy away, clear up or edit the past. This being the case, it is hard to imagine what might happen to any blithe infidel who took it into his head to don scuba gear and loot the
Arizona
.