Diving & Salvage

In the annals of the Naval Institute’s published works, the skills, innovations, and achievements of the Navy’s divers and salvors shape a remarkable history. One sterling example is the story of Master Chief Boatswain’s Mate Carl M. Brashear, captured in the Naval Institute’s Oral History Program. Raised on a sharecropping farm in Kentucky, Brashear enlisted in the Navy in 1948 and pushed past discrimination to become one of the Navy’s first African American master divers.

He rose through a career shaped by skill, determination, and courage. In the process, he lost a leg in a violent shipboard accident while salvaging a nuclear bomb in 1966. He then drove himself in recovery as an amputee to train and demand that the Navy recertify him for full duty as a diver. He retired from active duty in 1979 as a master diver. The 2000 movie Men of Honor captured some of his inspirational story.

Dropping back to January 1894, Navy Lieutenant Commander U. Sebree’s “Cleaning the Bottoms of Steel Ships by Divers, When Docking Is Impracticable” provided an account of the work on the fouled hull and propellers of the cruiser USS Baltimore (C-3) when she was in Chilean waters in 1891. His article captured some of the unique surface-to-underwater world of the diver. The crew involved with the work on the Baltimore included two seaman gunners who had qualified as divers at the Torpedo School in Newport, Rhode Island, and a gunner who had also taken a course at the Torpedo School. As Sebree noted,

The divers were allowed $1 per hour in addition to their regular pay. They were allowed 15 minutes in each hour for a breathing spell. But after a little experience, they did not take this spell, and would often remain down at work two, and even three hours without coming up. . . . The time taken to clean the bottom once, and to clean one-third of it a second time was a little over two months. The actual number of hours of diving work, as taken from the Paymaster’s vouchers, was 200 hours 14 minutes.

“From the experience on the Baltimore,” Sebree continued, “I think that two divers, working, each on alternate days, can . . . clean the bottom of a 5,000-ton ship in from 120 to 140 diving hours.”

Proceedings built on its record for authoritative, professional writing in other early articles on diving and salvage. In “Salvage Operations on Submarine F-4” in the November 1915 issue, then-Naval Constructor Julius A. Furer documented each phase of the titular operation. The F-4 had headed out on patrol from Pearl Harbor on 25 March 1915 with a crew of 21 and not returned. As Furer wrote,

With the vessel submerged to a depth of at least 300 feet, as seemed probable, the only chance of saving any lives was to drag the craft into shallow water, so as to make it possible for the divers to work. . . . [The submarine’s] weight would have been about 260 tons. There was, of course, not the slightest possibility of dragging any such weight in-shore and up hill. To have made no attempt at dragging would, however, have meant giving up at once all chance of saving the lives of the crew, because no lifting gear could be improvised and made fast at this depth within the time available for rescuing the men.

Unfortunately, because of the conditions of the wreck, none of the crew were recovered. “The divers,” Furer wrote, “from the submarine flotilla had to work from five to nine hours a day from August 21 to August 29, while placing the chains under the vessel, securing the clamps after the pontoons had been landed, closing flood and vent valves, and, later on, connecting the hose leads for blowing out. This work could not have been done at a depth of 300 feet, as most of it was extremely arduous and fatiguing.”

In April 1918, Lieutenant Commander E. W. Strother published a companion piece to Furer’s work with a report on “Diving and the Diving School”:

The knowledge of diving, which includes the reasons why deep-water diving is dangerous, the precautions which are necessary to take in deep-water diving, and the remedy for the bends or caissons disease, has not been taught [to] the commissioned personnel. The better an officer in charge of a diving party realizes the limitations of a diver, and in case of emergency what to do, the better it will be for the diver; fewer accidents will then occur, and more will be accomplished.

While diving had been taught earlier on a less formal basis, the diving school was officially established at the Naval Torpedo Station, Newport, Rhode Island, on 1 November 1915 by orders from the Navy Department.

In his Naval Institute Oral History, Chief Machinist’s Mate William Badders recounted some of his legendary Navy diving career, including his receipt of the Navy Cross for his dives during the salvage of the sunken USS S-51 (SS-162) in 1926 and the Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism during his rescue of members of the crew from the sunken USS Squalus (SS-192) in 1939.

Diving on the Squalus off Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Badders recounted:

The rescue chamber was put in the water ready for operations. The crew went aboard to operate it, a diver by the name of Harman and my later partner, operator Mike Mihalowski, were the two operators for the first trip. The chamber went down, and everything went fine. And they brought up seven men to the surface.

[The chamber was designed] for seven passengers and two operators.

I was put in the chamber for the second trip with Harman, and I got to thinking on the way down I had operated this chamber probably more than anyone else in the Navy, and I knew that it could handle more than seven men. . . .

So on my first trip, I brought nine men up. I hadn’t said a word to anyone topside about it. . . . Of course, they’re counting these men when they get out of the chamber on the Falcon. We unload them out of the chamber on the deck of the Falcon, and a doctor would examine them real quick. Then they’d load them up to take them to the hospital in Portsmouth.

Well, I was also going to make the third trip in the chamber, and I knew that when I made the second trip. I got the men out of there as soon as I could, dogged the hatch down, and got started again. I think it was Momsen—[then-Lieutenant Commander Charles Momsen]—who said to me on the phone, “You brought out too many men on that trip but do it again and bring up nine the next time.” So I brought up nine on the next trip, which left only two trips to bring the rest of the men up. I brought 18 men out of there. . . .

The next day, after all survivors were off, [Rear Admiral Cyrus W. Cole, U.S. Navy], who was the admiral in charge of the operations . . . said, “We’ve got to determine if there’s any life left aft in the submarine. It will require a trip of the rescue chamber, open the hatch aft and determine for sure if the aft part is flooded or dry. . . .”

To make this trip, the chamber had to be secured over the hatch and then pressure built up in the chamber equivalent to bottom pressure; otherwise if you unscrewed that hatch and the after part of the submarine was flooded at 240 feet of depth, and the rescue chamber was under atmospheric pressure, the water would have come right up out of the submarine into the rescue chamber. . . .

We got everything all set and let the pressure build up, then opened the hatch and, sure enough, when I first partially undogged the hatch a gush of air came out of the submarine into the rescue chamber. . . . As soon as [Mihalowski] built up a little more pressure in the rescue chamber, the air stopped coming in, and I opened the hatch the rest of the way and it was flooded right up to the neck of the hatch, which indicted there couldn’t possibly be any life down there.

“The losses of the S-4 and the S-51 and the inability of their crews to get to the surface made it mandatory to contrive some apparatus by which those in a sunken submarine could get safely to the surface,” Lieutenant Harley F. Cope wrote in his November 1932 article, “Lung Training at the Submarine School.” Thus, a 100-foot tank was built at the Submarine Base New London, Connecticut for instructional purposes in connection with the school. Cope continued,

The object of the school is not only to teach the uses of the escape apparatus . . . but also to give all possible aid and information to the salvage vessel if it arrives in sufficient time.

The “lung,” constructed and perfected by Lieutenant [Charles] Momsen, forms the keynote of the escape apparatus. It is an appliance designed to enable men to escape from a sunken submarine and furnishes a respiratory supply of air during ascent and decompression. The bag is initially inflated with oxygen which is mixed with air from the wearer’s lungs as soon as breathing begins. During the ascent, compressed air from the lungs is eliminated by exhalation in ratio to the decreasing external pressure.

Surface ships had been wrecked and salvaged with their crews lost or imperiled for eons. Proceedings authors have written very detailed reports on the storms and tidal waves, the errors of navigation that had caused the damage, and the technical aspects of such salvage operations.

Lieutenant Colonel A. Guidoni, Italian Navy, gave a November 1921 report on “The Salvage of the Leonardo Da Vinci,” an Italian dreadnought that had sunk and almost completely overturned off Taranto on 2 August 1916 following an explosion in the aft magazine:

Following the opinion of a committee, it was decided to salvage the ship, adopting a system proposed by Lieutenant General of Naval Constructors Edgardo Ferrati. The method consisted in making the ship float by filling her with compressed air, after repairing the leaks in the hull and closing all the airports and other side openings. . . .

The work was at first hindered by the war, which did not permit the detail of many people and made it hard to get the supply of materials. This last difficulty was the main reason for a more important modification of the first plan which provided for the construction of a floating dock in order to keep dry and repair the overturned ship, when she had been freed from the bottom with the use of compressed air. . . .

After overcoming many difficulties, the ship was finally lifted from the place of disaster and put in dock, September 17, 1919, after a little over three years since she was overturned.

In his May 1922 article, “Der Tag,” Captain J. F. Hellweg described salvaging ships from the German High Seas Fleet scuttled at Scapa Flow in June 1919, seven months after their internment. As he described,

A more dismal sight than the ex-German destroyers can hardly be pictured. Moored by pairs to buoys in the Firth of Forth, rusted and stripped, sides stove in, masts carried away, rails bent and twisted, bridges sagging, bridge screens tattered and flapping in the sharp wind, decks littered with wreckage, and guns pointed skyward, they looked like battle-stained, disheveled, beaten German troopers with both hands in the air. . . .

Our Navy will long remember the damage done to the ex-German ships by German sympathizers in the early days of the war while the ships were lying in our ports interned. The later surreptitious attempts which were made will also be long remembered. Armed with this previous experience, we made careful plans to block any such efforts, or to minimize the results of such efforts. It need only be added that the Germans ran true to form, and that the only reason their efforts were not completely successful is because we had prepared to counteract them.

In the August 1925 issue, salvage off a beach’s sandy bottom focused on Nauset Harbor, near Orleans, Massachusetts. In “The Salvage of S-19,” Commander Robert B. Hilliard described the more than two-month effort to get the submarine back afloat for towing to Boston:

Probably no two stranded vessels present the same problems in the matter of salvage. Each case will have individual difficulties which cannot be foreseen and which previous experience will not entirely dispel, but it is doubtful if there is any more refractory combination than that of a submarine and a sandy beach. There is something about the circular section with the square duct keel and the bilge keels of the submarine which makes the grasp of the sand very hard to break.

Intense work and progress in deep-sea diving—depths exceeding 150 feet—continued in the early decades of the 20th century. Navy doctor Captain Ernest Brown reviewed several advances in technology and scientific understanding in his June 1937 article, “The Human Machine in Deep-Sea Diving.” “It is common knowledge,” he wrote,

that low barometric pressures, as encountered in flying, and high barometric pressures, as met with in deep-sea diving, may interfere with the normal workings of the human machine. . . . Certain compensatory adjustments are necessary to adapt the body to the changed environment. The capacity to feel or sense conditions underwater and to respond with the proper reflexes is attained only through training, based on certain bodily characteristics not inherent to an equal degree in all individuals. . . .

An important advance has recently been made in deep-sea diving in the British Navy, whereby salvage work can be performed between 200 and 300 feet in depth, whereas it was formerly not considered feasible to carry on such activity much beyond 150 feet. . . .

The Davis Submersible Decompression Chamber . . . [acts] when submerged as a diving bell and when closed as a decompression chamber. It is of steel construction, cylindrical in form, and provided with two doors—one at the top for entry and exit of the attendant and exit of the diver after decompression; the other door at the bottom for entry of the ascending diver at the 60-foot stop. When the lower door is open, the chamber is supplied with air at a pressure somewhat in excess of that at which it is submerged. The chamber is large enough to enable the diver to carry out physical exercises and breathe oxygen in order to accelerate decompression.

Navy diver H. O. Austin, first as a chief metalsmith, then as a chief journalist, wrote in 1949 and 1951 on the development and the experiments with the oxy-helium mixture for breathing at deeper diving levels and on the broader work of the Navy’s Experimental Diving Unit. In “The Experimental Diving Unit: Pioneer in Pressure,” he wrote,

Considering the small number of people stationed at the Experimental Diving Unit, the activity seems to have had more than its share of unorthodox members . . . Three of four EDU men, in years past, developed outstanding physical qualities through their own efforts. One of these strong men often passed away leisure time by walking up and down the stairway on his hands. He and another spent hours exercising with bar-bells every afternoon after quitting time. While most of the men could continue the step-up test for only half an hour or so, one of the muscle-men could begin in the morning and proceed, untiring, until the sun was low in the west.

New oxy-helium mixtures for the divers had great pluses and significant minuses, as the Experimental Diving Unit discovered in untiring work. Among the findings, Austin noted in “Deeper Diving with the Oxy-Helium Mixture for Breathing” in the April 1949 issue:

Oxygen and helium must be mixed to proper proportions to suit the depth of the particular dive involved. During decompression, the diver can be shifted to pure oxygen at 60 feet to hasten helium elimination from his body. . . . Apparently, divers are more mentally alert when breathing oxy-helium under pressure than when breathing normal (compressed) air. Also, they work considerably harder and for longer periods.

The February 1956 Proceedings carried an article by Italian Navy Commander Luigi Durand de la Penne. As relayed to Italian Navy Captain Virgilio Spigai, it covered de la Penne’s role in “The Italian Attack on Alexandria Naval Base,” in December 1941, to secretly penetrate the harbor, plant mines on the hull of the Royal Navy battleship HMS Valiant and sink her:

Among the members of the assault crews there was complete awareness of the difficulties of the impending operation and the risks about to be undertaken. Nevertheless, a very cheerful spirit was evident in the group. . . . On arrival in the midst of the British Fleet, and while it was still completely dark, we would have to attach the warhead to the bilge keels of the most important targets. What would happen to us upon completion of the assignment interested us only up to a point. If we were lucky, it might mean imprisonment for the duration of the war; if unlucky, it meant death. Being very young, none of us believed the worst would happen. Perhaps this was because we had been so lucky during our dangerous assaults against the British Fleet at Gibraltar.

In the September 1956 Proceedings, Naval Reserve Commander F. D. Pane and Major Don W. Moore, U.S. Army, reported on “The Naked Warriors*,” the U.S. Navy’s new breed of divers and swimmers, members of the new underwater demolition teams. Navy Lieutenant Commander Draper L. Kauffman was their designer and first leader, and Saipan, mid-1944, was the first major test:

In preparation for the Saipan operation, Lieutenant Commander Kauffman was ordered to Hawaii, where a UDT training base had been established on Maui. . . . Admiral [Richmond K.] Turner showed him a chart of Saipan’s west coast, with a shallow barrier reef eighteen hundred yards off the chosen beaches.

“I want you people to swim into the beach about nine on D minus One Day,” Turner said. “Make a detailed survey of the depths of the water, the obstacles, anti-boat mines, the gun positions ashore, surf conditions, and a lot of other details important to the landing forces. I also want you to blow out all obstacles in that 1,800 by 6,000 yard area.”

The UDT team, under enemy fire, carried out the mission. Pane and Moore added,

In operations such as those described here, the Underwater Demolition Teams won hard-earned recognition for bravery, efficiency, and usefulness in amphibious operations. These men helped to make history, and the example they set is being followed today by their successors. Despite the increasing reliance of modern warfare on machines of metal, the naked warrior has many advantages. He is extremely difficult to see or to detect. He can operate surreptitiously far behind enemy lines. When equipped with submersible propulsion units, and armed with high explosives, the underwater swimmer can inflict damage out of all proportions to the expenditure of men and equipment involved.

Following the war, with the coming of the nuclear age and the danger of Soviet intercontinental airborne attack, the Air Force’s new surveillance stations included Texas Tower No. 4, in the Atlantic off Long Island, New York. A hurricane damaged the big tower in 1960, and a January 1961 winter storm caused its collapse. In his March 1963 Proceedings article, “Diving on the Wreck of Texas Tower No. 4,” Lieutenant Commander Alan B. Crabtree, who commanded the submarine rescue ship USS Sunbird (ASR-15), was on scene shortly after the tower went down and its wreck was located on the sea floor. He reported,

The wreckage of the tower legs and braces was in such an unbelievable tangle that very little agreement could be reached among the various sets of divers as to what they had seen and how it lay on the bottom. . . . While the Navy divers were trying to familiarize themselves with the layout of the submerged wreckage, one of the civilian divers with a Navy diver as a buddy was photographing everything which he could positively identify. When their time was up, another pair took over the photo chores.

Unfortunately, all 28 personnel on board the tower were lost and only two bodies were ever recovered. Crabtree added,

Many readers may be wondering if there was ever any life in the tower after its collapse. Our search of the tower was thorough and complete and I believe that the body we found was the only one inside the tower when it went down. All evidence indicated that this victim died almost instantly. . . . Civilian divers, as well as Navy divers, deserve every bit of credit they received for their magnificent and courageous efforts under the long and trying conditions connected with this operation.

Navy diving opened an important new chapter in the mid-1960s. In his article “Sealab I” in the February 1965 issue, Lieutenant Commander Don Groves, along with the research program of the Office of Naval Research overseeing the project, offered a look at the experiment:

An odd looking, 40-foot vessel, equipped with pontoon-shaped appendages, was launched from the Navy’s oceanographic research tower, Argus Island, on 20 July 1964. Instead of floating, this vessel—the Sealab I—promptly sank to the bottom, 192 feet below the surface. Twelve hours later, four Navy divers entered the Sealab I, prepared to begin a unique 21-day experiment. Their assignment was to participate in the Navy’s first protracted physiological-engineering test to determine how men can work freely and for extended periods in the hostile underwater environment.

Groves concluded:

It could become accepted practice for such men to live in ocean floor shelters emerging to the ocean outside to perform various naval operations, oil drilling and mining tasks, fish farming and sea crop harvesting. Ships could be repaired and reconditioned without removing them from the water. Salvage and rescue techniques now considered impossible could become possible. A vast, new spectrum of ocean engineering and naval operations would become possible.

A Sealab II project—with a larger habitat and deeper depth—followed in 1965. In his September 1972 article “Saturation Diving,” retired Master Chief Torpedoman (Master Diver) Robert C. Sheats assessed the pluses and minuses of those projects and other underseas/saturated-diver research. He over optimistically predicted far-greater advances in the next few years—e.g., nations competing for seamounts to allow structures of military value to be built and completely autonomous seafloor habitats with electricity provided by nuclear power.

In his January 1969 article, “The Deep Questions,” Ensign Jay M. Cohen addressed another dimension of deep-submergence advances. As a Naval Academy Trident Scholar, Cohen had toured U.S. plants building the new generation of underwater vehicles, and he wrote now about their different designs, construction, and capabilities. He noted the Navy’s need for a deep submergence rescue vehicle (DSRV) capability:

When, in April 1963, the Thresher (SSN-593) was lost in 8,400 feet of water with 120 men on board, the public learned that, even if the Thresher had bottomed above her crush depth, the men could not have been rescued by present rescue methods. The need for a DSRV was thus made imperative. . . . Plans to incorporate the best of state-of-the-art technology, and a rapid R&D program in sensors and control were initiated. . . . The DSRV, when completed, will have a length of 50 feet and a weight of approximately 73,000 pounds so that she and her support equipment can be airlifted by three Air Force C-141A aircraft to the site of a submarine disaster anywhere in the world.

In June 2013, Navy submarine chief Vice Admiral Michael J. Conner addressed “Sustaining Undersea Dominance”:

What we call undersea warfare actually encompasses activity that ranges from the seabed to space. Military effects from the undersea domain support the air, surface, cyber, land, and space domains. Therefore, the degree to which we are successful in sustaining undersea superiority will affect the military outcomes and strategic influence in multiple domains. . . . Spanning the range of our strategic categories are Navy SEALs. They are the people with whom we partner closely and who function as the world’s most rapidly evolving undersea payload. As land wars start to wind down and we re-establish our habitual working relationship, they are already energizing our creativity in our most vigorous experimentation programs as we work together to fully leverage the impact of undersea access.

Commander, Naval Special Warfare Command, Rear Admiral H. W. Howard added a footnote in his article, “Frogmen Solve Hard Problems—From and On the Sea,” in the April 2022 issue:

In March 2021, Naval Special Warfare Master Chief Bill King and I conducted clandestine infiltration training on board a Virginia-class submarine—something I had not done since I was an ensign at SEAL Team Eight out of the escape trunk of a Sturgeon-class submarine. We were there to experience firsthand the warfighting competence, complexities, risks, and capabilities of these distinctive operations and identify ways to increase options in today’s complex, contested operational environment.

He continued,

A principal responsibility of leaders is to understand what has changed—and then boldly, fearlessly lead their organizations to adapt. . . . This is what our frogman forefathers taught us, and their spirit remains deep within Naval Special Warfare’s culture and ethos. It is what makes our transformation possible.