In a glass-enclosed cabinet on display in the Navy Memorial Museum in the Washington Navy Yard is a jagged circular steel plate that resembles a large saw blade.
On its surface is engraved the incredible and nearly forgotten story of the heroic rescue of the 40-member crew of the USS S-5, which cheated death when the submarine foundered off the Delaware Capes while en route to Baltimore on Sept. 1, 1920.
Dr. A.J. Hill, a Navy veteran who lives in Boulder, Colo., is the author of the recently published Under Pressure: The Final Voyage of Submarine S-Five, which dramatically tells the story of the only time in history a crew from a doomed sub was successfully rescued from the cold depths of the sea.
The keel of the 240-foot-long USS S-5, designed to operate at depths not to exceed 200 feet, was laid down at the Portsmouth Navy Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, in 1919.
Commissioned in 1920, the S-5 was outfitted and put through its sea trials before leaving the Boston Navy Yard on Aug. 30 for further speed and dive trials some 50 miles off the Delaware Capes.
As the sub cruised through the Atlantic, Lt. Cmdr. Charles "Savvy" Cooke, standing on the forward gunwale, gave the order to his crew to prepare for a crash dive, a routine wartime procedure that should be accomplished in a minute.
As Cooke slid into the conning tower through a hatch that slammed tightly behind him, the S-5 began its angled dive, racing toward the bottom at a speed of 10 knots.
A main air induction valve jammed during the dive as a desperate crewman fought to close it. Tons of seawater poured into the sub's forward control and torpedo rooms as it plummeted toward the seabed.
"Two-and-a-half minutes later, still traveling at high speed, the S-5 plowed into the sea floor 180 feet below. Rebounding through a cloud of sand and silt, she struck again, and this time buried her nose in the bottom," writes Hill.
"Her propellers spun to a halt. The water around her cleared. From various places along her hull, lines of bubbles and thin streamers of oil wavered up toward the distant surface. Otherwise, nothing moved."
What commenced next was a 37-hour struggle for survival. Equipment failed, the electrical system short-circuited, pumps ground to a halt, the air supply dwindled, and the ship's radio was too weak to send an SOS.
Complicating matters was the deadly mixture of sea water and sulfuric acid from the sub's batteries, which combined to create deadly chlorine gas. And a last-minute course change had taken the S-5 away from heavily traveled sea lanes where a passing steamer might come to its aid.
Faced with few possibilities, Cooke made the decision to blow the sub's aft ballast tanks, hoping the maneuver would raise the sub to the surface. The complicated action caused only the stern to rise, leaving the vessel standing on its head.
"Spilling onto the forward bulkheads and swirling through the narrow doorways, the water roared down the sloping decks in a growing flood that picked up everything: boxes, books, tools, deck plates, floor mats, and men, all went tumbling toward the bow, accompanied by a monstrous rattling and shaking of the entire sub," Hill writes.
Silence settled over the vessel as the crew contemplated certain death.
"For many of the crew, waiting had become the hardest part of their ordeal," Hill writes. "With the sub dead in the water, most of them had no duties to perform and nothing to distract them from what might lie ahead."
Throughout Cooke's gathering ordeal, Hill observed, "if he knew fear or doubt during those perilous hours, it never showed. Calm, focused and outwardly confident, he was always ready with a kind word or a quiet joke to boost morale."
But with options running out and an increasingly fouled air supply, Cooke decided to inform his crew that rescue was unlikely.
"He couldn't let these brave young men go on dreaming about seeing their families, their wives and sweethearts, when it wasn't going to happen. Before long, their real suffering would begin, and he owed them the ability to meet it with honesty and dignity," Hill writes.
But two crewmen who had climbed to the aft motor room in the stern reported to Cooke that they could hear waves slapping the sub's side.
Cooke quickly computed that about 14 feet of the sub's small tiller room miraculously stood above the surface of the water.
He realized that this was the last possible avenue of escape and organized a drilling effort in order to punch a hole through the sub's heavy, riveted three-quarter-inch-thick steel plating.
Working in shifts for 16 hours, and using a hand-cranked drill, hacksaw, hammer and chisel, the crewmen managed to punch a hole 6 inches wide and 8 inches high.
Through the hole, they were able to observe passing vessels, eventually attracting the attention of the SS Alanthus. The ship was drawn to the sub by the waving of a makeshift flagpole to which the crew had attached a white T-shirt and shoved through the opening.
Approaching in a lifeboat, the Alanthus' captain asked:
"What ship?"
"S-5"
"What nationality?"
"American."
"Where bound?"
"Hell by compass."
The Alanthus pumped fresh air into the sub while working feverishly to free its crew. It was later joined by the SS General George W. Goethals.
A little after 1 a.m. on Sept. 3, William Grace, the Goethals' chief engineer, wielding a sledge hammer, punched an opening large enough for the sub's crew to climb to freedom.
"Captain Cooke is a bear. It was his coolness that kept everyone from going bugs," Frank Pendle, a machinist's mate whose wife was a Baltimorean, told The Sun. "If he had shown the least sign of weakening, the rest of the crew would have flopped, but he didn't."
"It was the 'never-say-die' spirit, using the words this time in a quite literal sense, that saved the lives of the officers and crew of the submarine S-5," said a Sun editorial.