Comfortably relaxed in a wicker chair on board the Elcano at the Cavite Navy Yard in 1909, Ensign Kenneth Whiting declared, “In an emergency, a man could leave a submarine through her torpedo tube.” “Impracticable,” answered Lieutenant Guy Castle, commanding the Submarine Flotilla. “It was tried on a live dog at Newport. He was expelled by a shot of high-pressure air, like a torpedo, and he came up very dead, crushed to pulp by the air pressure.”
Whiting sipped his drink and said nothing.
The laid-up gunboat Elcano provided quarters for the three officers and 12 men who crewed the Asiatic Fleet’s two tiny submarines. The five-year-old submarines, Shark (A-7) and Porpoise (A-6), were moored further out on the same pier. Whiting commanded the Porpoise. Next morning, as he walked out on the pier dressed in dungarees, Ken Whiting was an unremarkable-looking, remarkable young man. His ambition to try everything once had already involved him in numerous escapades, and though he never weighed over 150 pounds, he had been one of the Naval Academy’s most famous athletes. He had starred on the hockey and track teams, won the swimming championship three years in a row, played varsity football for four years, and fought his way to a boxing championship against all comers regardless of weight. He was the most popular and influential midshipman in the school. But never, even in his later years, would he talk about these and other personal accomplishments. At the Academy and afterwards, he was a quiet natural leader, who, without even trying, usually had the whole-hearted assistance of all near him. Regardless of rank, everyone who knew him always wanted to please him.
He was in Manila when the collier Caesar (AC-16) arrived with a 100-ton, A-type submarine cradled on each side of her well deck. They were sister ships of the second submarine accepted by the Navy. Reddish paint gave them the look of fat goldfish about 60 feet long and as high as two tall men. A circular hatch rose a foot or so above the rounded back, like a dorsal fin. The domed cap of a single torpedo tube looked like a parrot-fish’s mouth. After they were launched sideways from the Caesar’s deck, Guy Castle looked for an officer and six men to man each of them. Whiting perceived this as a new experience to sample and asked for duty under Castle. Soon, he was deeply interested in the cantankerous little machines, which developed new problems on almost every dive.
When Whiting reached the end of the pier, the Porpoise’ portable wooden deck and mast lay on the pier. His Chief Gunner’s mate reported the boat ready for the scheduled morning dive—everyone on board, battery and airbanks full, and their charging lines disconnected.
Whiting followed the Chief across the plank to the Porpoise’ hatch. He stepped a few rungs down the vertical ladder inside, and ordered the men on the pier to take away the planks and cast off the submarine’s lines. With his elbows on the rim of the hatch, he ordered the men in the little compartment below to start the gasoline engine. Then he conned the submarine toward the low morning sun which glared across the glass-smooth Manila Bay.
After a few miles he had the engine disconnected and stopped, then went ahead using the electric motor. A few moments later, he closed the hatch and stepped down to the deck of the boat’s only compartment.
The deck was the top of the battery, which, with fuel and ballast tanks, filled the bottom half of the hull. The air compressor, engine, motor, and steering gear filled the upper half of the stern. Banks of high-pressure air cylinders and a torpedo were clamped to the compartment’s sides. The torpedo tube’s inner door was low on the centerline at the forward end of the open space, surmounted by more air bottles and gear. The steel torpedo tube, slightly longer than a tall man, was 18 inches in diameter, its smoothly polished interior rustproofed by a light coating of vaseline. Small pipes near the door admitted high-pressure air to push the torpedo out and start it toward its target.
At Whiting’s order, air rumbled out the ballast tank vents, the boat nosed down, then leveled off for a while with the depth gauge showing 20 feet. When he had the ballast adjusted so she was slightly heavy, he ordered the motor stopped and let the boat settle to the soft bottom of Manila Bay in some 30 feet of water.
Not until then did Whiting announce to the six sailors in the little compartment his plan to go out the torpedo tube. He had neither mentioned his intention to anyone, nor asked Castle’s permission to try it. He never wanted anyone else blamed, or hurt, if one of his ideas went sour. He always carried the responsibility and took the chances himself. He was obviously confident as he described to his men how he would do it. His confidence was contagious. Nobody even thought of how they would explain their captain’s death if his plan failed. His cool explanation to them was part of his carefully thought-out plan.
Whiting stripped to his shorts as he gave each man his individual orders. They rigged the torpedo loading tray before the open door of the tube. Lying on his back on the tray, Whiting put his hands above his head and squirmed his shoulders into the 18-inch opening. He pushed himself with his heels until the tube checked his knees. Then men pushed his feet until his hands grasped the crossbar that stiffened the outer tube door, the one like a parrot-fish’s mouth.
When he said ready, his men removed the loading tray, closed the inner door, and a gunner’s mate raced the cap engine which hinged the outer door up and outward. The crossbar drew Whiting forward as warm seawater gushed down his back and wrapped around his body. He gulped a last breath of air just before the water closed over his face. As soon as the bar pulled his elbows out of the tube, he used hands and arms to muscle himself the rest of the way out.
A man on the ladder peering through a saucer-sized port saw Whiting clear the tube and disappear into the green water. The observer passed the word, and other men moved valves. Air hissed into the ballast tanks driving the water out. Slowly at first, then faster, the submarine rose. When the hatch broke the surface, the man on the ladder snapped it open and jumped out with a heaving line in his hand.
Whiting was floating on his back a few yards away. He rolled over, took a few easy strokes, grasped the sailor’s line and scrambled aboard. It had taken him 77 seconds to get out of the tube and swim to the surface.
That night reporters cabled big stories based on bits picked up in Manila bars. Stateside papers printed florid tripe about “the whistling explosion of compressed air . . . [which] blew him into the embrace of the ocean, and how he surfaced beside the Shark, treading water, and “gave Castle a snappy salute.” Whiting’s name was about the only thing these stories had correct. As usual, Whiting refused to talk. On 17 April 1909, he signed the Porpoise’ log for the week. It included one sentence, “Whiting went out the torpedo tube as an experiment.” For the benefit of other submariners, Castle’s 21 April 1909 report told how it was done—without any crushing air pressure.
Whiting asked for aviation duty before the Navy bought its first airplane but he was kept as a submarine skipper until 1914. Then he became Naval Aviator Number 16. After World War I, his submarine “experiment” became a legend which many submarine officers believed never happened. But Whiting never mentioned it; he was by that time too busy and happy with aircraft carriers.