Inside the Sunken Ship
“She lay upon an even keel in seventy feet of water. In her flooded after-compartment, shut off from the control room by a strong closed bulkhead, were twenty-eight dead bodies, including that of Engineer Lieutenant Lane. The engine room and boiler room staffs—twenty-three men of the navy and five of Fairfields—had all been instantly drowned when the submarine dived with her ventilators open. The fore bulkhead had also been closed, and in the control room were gathered the fifty-one survivors of the disaster. The air pressure in the compartment, raised by the inflow of water to about two atmospheres, dulled the sense of all and induced an apathy which increased into hopeless fatalism as the slow hours passed. Among the men there was little talking. One heard at first an almost careless comment, ‘Rotten way to die. We would sooner go under fighting Germans.’ That was all; no complaints and no trace of panic. No one expected to be saved, and no one cared very much. With Herbert and Goodheart, his guest, it was, of course, different. Upon them and on Fairfields’s officials rested a nerve-racking responsibility.
“At first there appeared to be little danger that the survivors would lack for air. The high-pressure bottles were far from empty, and the bodies and minds of those within K-13 were suffering from too much air, not from too little. Food they could do without for a long while, for no one wanted to eat, and even after supplies came from above few ate. The men were not hungry, but thirst devoured them, a thirst little appeased by copious draughts of water.