The terrible hours

Question: Why would anyone want to even agree to having this type of job?

After World War I, the Navy began working on developing submarines to counteract the German U-Boats. The living conditions were wretched. Would you want to live in a metal can that has no shower, no laundry, no refrigeration, no air conditioning, no fresh water, and NO BATHROOM?

• Peter Maas, author of The Terrible Hours (910.9163 MAA), writes about these dreadful conditions and more. Men lived close together, with no way of bathing, smelling of body odor. When the sub surfaced, the men draped themselves over the main deck railing to go to the bathroom. Not my idea of a good time.

In 1939 the Army was testing a new submarine called the Squalus. It might have been new and improved for that time, but it still lacked comfort (as listed above). The engineers who designed the Squalus that they had developed a fail-safe way of preventing the sub from sinking. A sinking sub was almost a sure death for all the crew, a metal coffin slowing sinking to the ocean floor. This one was different; it was divided into compartments that could be sealed off from one another with watertight doors.

The trial dive was to the continental shelf with an average depth of 250 feet, however there were some depressions that were more than 600 feet deep. Everything was fine until they were down about sixty feet. That's when water started pouring into the engine rooms. When it rested on the bottom of the ocean, it was total darkness - even the emergency lights stopped working.

Charles "Swede" Momsen was a U.S. Navy officer knew about the extreme dangers submarine crew members had been in, all those lives that could not be saved. He thought there had to be a way to save stranded crew members. Because Momsen had developed new technology for rescue, he was called in to try to save the crew from the watery grave.

The Terrible Hours is a disturbing, yet fascinating, book to read.

c Waterloo Public Library 2008