Cutting a Hole in the Side
“The supreme risk had to be taken of cutting a big hole through the outer and inner skins. If when it was cut the hawsers parted, or K-13 by burying her stern still more deeply escaped from their embrace, all would be over. The men remaining in the vessel, forty-nine of them, would follow into the shades their dead messmates whose bodies lay in the boiler and engine rooms. But whatever the risk the hole had to be cut, and that quickly.
“Inside the submarine, hope, which may have flickered a little when the air-tube was first opened, had given place to the old dull apathy. Food and drink had been passed down the tube, but appetite for them had vanished. They struggled mechanically, as trained British seamen always will so long as life is in them; they struggled mechanically like automata against the incoming water. It was difficult to move about upon the most urgent duties. The wet and slippery floor of the control room lay now on a long upward slant upon which the half-dazed seamen stumbled and fell. There was no lack of courage; no one grumbled or lamented; but frail human bodies have their limits of endurance, and those limits had been reached.
“Yet the men worked on and did their utmost to carry out the directions of those who led them. The place where the hole was about to be cut lay far towards the bows, and to reach it from within the fore bulkhead must be opened. But when it was sought to unclose the bulkhead which divided the control room from the foc’sle, it was found that the door had jammed and would not slide back. For hours this miserable shut door stood between these men and freedom. Somehow at last it was got open, but no one has clearly told me how. It was not until the survivors of K-13 had for a long time been above water that they became voluble—and untrustworthy. At the moment of rescue, or shortly afterwards, they remembered as little as one on awakening in the morning remembers the details of a dream. Yet they remembered that door, how it stood there obdurate for hours and at last yielded. Though how it had stuck or why it yielded they could not say.
“A DEVIL OF A LOT OF WATER”
“Meanwhile the hole in the bows was being cut, and the cutting of this holes supplies me with one pleasing bit of comedy with which to round off this rather grim story. Any acetylene plant makes butter of steel plates, and it was very rapid work to draw the spouting white flame, fed from the Ranger’s plant, round a rough circle marked out on K-13’s bows. The outer skin was quickly cut through. Within lay water filling up the space honeycombed with cross ties between the inner and outer skins. Before the inner hole could be cut, this water must be pumped out. The place selected for the hole could not be reached by the steam salvage pumps, so the men working upon the submarine’s hull were compelled to fit gear for pumping the water out by hand. They knew that it was no more than five feet deep, so they bent their backs to it cheerfully. But they were less cheerful when they found that their efforts produced no appreciable result. ‘There must be a devil of a lot of water between these skins,’ said they, and bent to the task once more. Shift followed shift, and the pumping went on. It was a tiresome, backwearying business, but precious lives were at stake, and they would get that water down and the inner hole cut if they died of disgust in the doing of it. But the water showed no sign of going down. How long this pumping went on I cannot say with precision. Admittedly it was hours, probably as many hours as it took to pry open that obtrusive bulkhead door, for some of the survivors of K-13 had got through their job and arrived under the pumpers’ feet while they were still pumping.
“It then occurred to the slaves of the hand-pump to seek after enlightenment from those whom they were pumping to save. ‘How long is it going to take,’ asked they, ‘to get rid of this damned water between the skins?’ They were asked by one of Fairfields’s experts how long they had been pumping. The reply was ‘Hours.’ ‘Have you closed the flap valves?’ dryly asked the man of Fairfields. They hadn’t; the water was coming in just as fast as they pumped it out; they had been trying with hand-gear to pump out the ocean!