Rescue Extraordinary
The Impossible Done in Saving Fifty Lives From the Flooded and Sunken Submarine K-13
One of the most dramatic episodes of the war, one in which the tragedy of suspense was exemplified with thrilling intensity, had nothing to do with siege or battlefield, though it partook of the nature and perils of both. It was the salving of the K-13. The story was first made public in its completeness, two years after the event, by Bennet Copplestone, who presented the facts, as he obtained them at first hand, in a vivid article contributed to the Cornhill Magazine.
The story, which could not be released until the war ended, is of such absorbing interest that it is here reproduced with little abbreviation. Mr. Copplestone begins:
“I was in Scotland when this happened that I write of, and I took the details in all their intimate simplicity from the mouths of the chief actors—from the salvors who sweated blood that they might be in time to pluck live men out of a steel coffin; from those who lay below and who, drugged by poisoned air, remained throughout indifferent to the issue, whether of life or death. It was a queer paradox of a fight in which the salvors, not those saved, got all the excitement and all the thrills.
“K-13 was a fleet submarine of a new type, more like a submersible destroyer than an ordinary underwater boat. Fairfields of Govan built her, and even now it were unwise to be too explicit in description. But some few details are necessary for an understanding of my story. She was over three hundred feet long and displaced two thousand tons when submerged. Unlike most submarines, which are driven on the surface by internal combustion engines, K-13 was a turbine-engined steamer with two funnels fitted with watertight covers for closing when she dived. The ventilators which fed air to her boiler room were also equipped for rapid closing down. A bulkhead cut off the boiler and engine rooms from the central control room, and another bulkhead forward divided the control room from the foc’sle. Thus, like Cæsar’s Gaul, K-13 was divided into three parts. Of her armament, which does not concern us here, I will observe a discreet silence, though to me it was of absorbing interest. But I must say something of her upper works. The conning tower was large and humped forward, so that a man could stand upright under the hump yet needed to stoop to reach the hatch, which was on the lower unhumped portion. Above the conning tower was a chart-house and bridge, and, of course, a mast stayed in the usual fashion. For a submarine, therefore, the K-13 had a lot of top hamper, and a passage from the conning-tower hatch, when the submarine was under water, towards the upper air was thickly studded with perils from the chart-house roof and the stays of the bridge and the mast. Yet two men did pass out; one was caught and killed; the other’s luck held—he was not killed.
“At noon on Monday, January 29, 1917, K-13 left her builders’ yard to carry out diving trials in the Gareloch. A large party was on board. In charge of her was Commander Herbert—‘Baralong’ Herbert—and with him went Commander Goodheart, who had been appointed skipper of another K of similar type. Many of Fairfields’s staff were there, for K-13 had not yet been taken over by the Admiralty. There were Percy Hillhouse, the yard’s Naval Architect, Bullen, the draughtsman in charge of submarine construction—a man who knew every nut and bolt that went to her—Searle, the Admiralty overseer, and McLean, the yard manager of the K submarines. It was no complement of amateurs which manned the K-13 upon her fatal trip. While steaming down the Clyde she grounded slightly at Whiteinch, but suffered no hurt. No harm was done, and K-13 went on to the Gareloch, and there passed successfully through her trials. She was accepted for the Royal Navy by the Admiralty officials.