Fire in the Control Room!

 When we returned from a war patrol, the first order of business was rest and recreation for the crew.  A re-fit crew would come aboard and do all the repair and maintenance while we relaxed, this time at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach.  When the SEALION was declared ready for sea we would have a meeting and review our situation.  The crew would be mustered and we would start training drills at sea. This was to indoctrinate any new people aboard and get the rest of us back up to speed.  The drills were merciless and very tiring and went on endlessly.  There was a war and we were needed back in the war zone. 

We were running submerged off Barber’s Point a few miles from Pearl Harbor.  I have forgotten just what kind of a drill was in progress at the time, but suddenly there was a fire in the control room.  A fire while running submerged is the worst possible catastrophe for a submarine.  The water was about 6000 feet deep!  I was in the conning tower right above the control room.  All the hatches were quickly shut and we could only guess what had happened.  My best friend, Dan Brooks, had the dive and he managed to close the vent on Safety Tank manually.  This ballast tank is mid-ship and designed to get you to the surface if the vent is closed and the water is blown out of it.

It takes a lot of turns on that big valve handle to close the vent, but Dan held his breath and got it done.  The auxiliaryman, Gorski, was on the air manifold and he fed the air to the tank.  Slowly we began to surface.  In the conning tower all we could do was watch the depth gage.  When we knew the bridge was out of the water we opened the hatch and Eli was up the ladder.  I was right behind him.  I had already decided I could swim the six or seven miles to the beach if I got to the surface.

We got some ventilation going and got the smoke out of the boat and discovered that a souvenir rifle one of the crew had liberated in Guam had been stored behind the secondary electrical panel and had fallen into the panel creating a short and a fire.  Very coincidentally, we had a civilian aboard, Neil Nunan, who had been my Prof. in electricity at USC.  He sat down on the deck in front of the panel and assessed the damage and figured out what it would take to get us back in business.  We had lost all secondary electrical power throughout the boat, but Dan Brooks had saved all of us that day. 

I never knew to whom the rifle belonged, nor do I think Eli knew.  There was no investigation or recrimination or discipline that I knew about.