Tubes for Air and Food
“Meanwhile Fairfields in Glasgow were hard at work. A special staff of draughtsmen and mechanics were put on to the construction of two flexible tubes, one designed for the passage of air and food, and the other for bringing up the men one by one, if no other and better means was found to be possible. The first tube, in comparison with the second, was easy of construction. It was seven inches in diameter and fitted with a screw union to connect with the circular ammunition hoist beside one of the deck guns of K-13. The other, built of steel sections, was designed to fit tightly over the torpedo hatch by means of a connecting frame. The first was the more immediately urgent, for until it was completed and fixed in place the survivors in the sunken submarine must remain coffined. Both were put in hand long before communication had been established between the salvors and K-13, and here one sees how completely the lives of all the imprisoned men depended upon Fairfields’s exact knowledge. Both tubes would have been useless unless their dimensions had been precisely correct. There was no need to press Fairfields’s workmen not to waste a moment; by night as well as by day they threw into their pious task every ounce of energy and every refinement of skill which they possessed. To lay hand to the work was an honor for which all eagerly competed. Though both tubes were completed in an astonishingly short time, and the first proved to be invaluable, the efficiency of the second—the man-saver—was not tested. Other means were successfully employed to get the men out. But this does not detract in any way from the merits of its design and of its rapid accomplishment. Battles may be won without calling upon the reserves, but he would be a very poor general who had not the reserves ready, if need be, at his call.
“For the time being the salvage party could do little except to send divers down and to open up communications with the men whom they had come to save. Until the first tube, which I have just described, was ready to their hands, they could take few active measures. The vessels and plant at Barttelot’s disposal were quite incapable of raising the great hull which lay below them, and the famous Ranger, for which he had telegraphed to Liverpool, could not arrive till the following day. The Ranger, owned by the Liverpool Salvage Association, had been requisitioned by the Admiralty early in the war, and had proved as powerfully effective in war as she had been in peace. She is worthy of her name, for under Captain Young—the most accomplished of living salvage officers—she has ranged over the world, picking up wrecks a dozen times her size with an ease which looks almost miraculous.