Saved After 54½ Hours
“After this little discovery progress became rapid. The valves, which admitted water between the skins, were closed and it did not take long then to get through. A hole was cut by acetylene flame in the inner skin and the way out was opened at last. It was ten o’clock on Wednesday evening, January 31, fifty-four and a half hours after K-13 had sunk, that her forty-nine survivors emerged into the blazing arc lights which shone from the Ranger’s masts. They could not speak; many of them could scarcely walk. One by one they were helped by kindly hands along a gangway to a tug and thence to the shore. They stumbled ashore, unconscious of the cheers which greeted them, gazing without recognition upon the friends who welcomed them. And so to Shandon, where they were put straight into hot baths and lifted thence into bed. For they were dumb and perished with cold. It is always cold in a deep-diving submarine even in high summer; in the bowels of K-13, lying seventy feet deep in the Northern mid-winter, the cold, though little noticed at the time, had been paralyzing. Forty hours of bad and poisonous air, fifty-four hours of bitter cold, had brought the bright flame of these men’s life down to a poor flicker. But recovery was rapid, and not one of the survivors disappointed by dying those who had saved him.
“Twenty hours after the last man had been plucked out of K-13 the hawsers which held her up parted, and she sank to the bottom of the Gareloch.
“The world did not ring with news of the story which I have told, for the censor forbade. But His Majesty, who was a sailor before he was a King and remains first and always a sailor, sent to Barttelot a telegram of which the purport, rendered in the language of the naval signal book, ran ‘Maneuver Well Executed.’”