Foreign News: WRECK

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One damp afternoon last week, just nine days after the U. S. submarine Squalus settled to the ocean floor off New Hampshire's Isles of Shoals, the British submarine Thetis (rhymes with lettuce)* nosed down the Mersey from Birkenhead into Liverpool Bay. Like the Squalus she was a brand-new vessel, and this was to be a final diving test run before she was turned over to the Royal Navy. Aboard was an unusually large company—103 men. Besides her regular crew of 53 there were civilian technicians, civilian Admiralty officials, a local river pilot and two waiters brought out from a Liverpool catering establishment to help feed the added group. The waiters had each been asked if they minded taking a dive. Both said they did not. Neither the two waiters nor 97 of the rest came out of the Thetis alive.

Three hours after she had submerged, the Thetis was nowhere to be seen and her accompanying tug, which had lost contact with her, wirelessed ashore: "Something is amiss." A few uneasy relatives of the crew began to gather at the Birkenhead shipyards of Cammell Laird & Co., Ltd., builders of the Thetis. A flotilla of salvage ships, warships, tugs and submarines set out from ports from Birkenhead all the way round the bottom of England to Portsmouth. Royal Air Force planes soared the skies. All were looking for the telltale buoys which distressed submarines try to send to the surface to show where they are. (A buoy located the Squalus.) The crowd around the shipyards grew bigger. After 15 hours the first news came ashore. Fourteen miles off Great Ormes Head, Wales, the destroyer Brazen had spotted something in the sea. It was not a buoy but part of the Thetis herself—her tail, sticking in the air like a diving porpoise.

The Brazen lowered boats. When her wireless operators tapped out messages on the protruding stern they thought they got back reassuring messages from within. The Admiralty released its first statement: "There is nothing to indicate that the men are other than safe."

Just as the Brazen arrived on the scene, a masked man had bobbed up from the depths—the first to escape from the foundered submarine. He wore a Davis lung, a contraption resembling the U. S. Momsen lung, consisting of a life belt, an oxygen container, a breathing tube, a nose clip. Half-drowned, he was Captain H. P. K. Oram, commander of the Fifth Submarine flotilla but not of the Thetis. Before he knew that help was at hand he had volunteered to take his chances getting out of the dangerously tilted escape chamber. He and six others, with messages of the submarine's plight strapped to their wrists, were to act as human marker buoys, dead or alive. Of the seven, only Captain Oram and three others reached the surface. He was surprised to find the Brazen standing by. That news was also flashed ashore.