The Impossible Done in Saving Fifty Lives from the Flooded and Sunken
Submarine _K-13_
One of the most dramatic episodes of the war, one in which the tragedy
of suspense was exemplified with thrilling intensity, had nothing to
do with siege or battlefield, though it partook of the nature and
perils of both. It was the salving of the _K-13_. The story was first
made public in its completeness, two years after the event, by Bennet
Copplestone, who presented the facts, as he obtained them at first
hand, in a vivid article contributed to the _Cornhill Magazine_.
The story, which could not be released until the war ended, is of such
absorbing interest that it is here reproduced with little abbreviation.
Mr. Copplestone begins:
“I was in Scotland when this happened that I write of, and I took the
details in all their intimate simplicity from the mouths of the chief
actors—from the salvors who sweated blood that they might be in time
to pluck live men out of a steel coffin; from those who lay below and
who, drugged by poisoned air, remained throughout indifferent to the
issue, whether of life or death. It was a queer paradox of a fight in
which the salvors, not those saved, got all the excitement and all the
thrills.
“_K-13_ was a fleet submarine of a new type, more like a submersible
destroyer than an ordinary underwater boat. Fairfields of Govan built
her, and even now it were unwise to be too explicit in description.
But some few details are necessary for an understanding of my story.
She was over three hundred feet long and displaced two thousand tons
when submerged. Unlike most submarines, which are driven on the surface
by internal combustion engines, _K-13_ was a turbine-engined steamer
with two funnels fitted with watertight covers for closing when she
dived. The ventilators which fed air to her boiler room were also
equipped for rapid closing down. A bulkhead cut off the boiler and
engine rooms from the central control room, and another bulkhead
forward divided the control room from the foc’sle. Thus, like Cæsar’s
Gaul, _K-13_ was divided into three parts. Of her armament, which does
not concern us here, I will observe a discreet silence, though to me
it was of absorbing interest. But I must say something of her upper
works. The conning tower was large and humped forward, so that a man
could stand upright under the hump yet needed to stoop to reach the
hatch, which was on the lower unhumped portion. Above the conning tower
was a chart-house and bridge, and, of course, a mast stayed in the
usual fashion. For a submarine, therefore, the _K-13_ had a lot of top
hamper, and a passage from the conning-tower hatch, when the submarine
was under water, towards the upper air was thickly studded with perils
from the chart-house roof and the stays of the bridge and the mast.
Yet two men did pass out; one was caught and killed; the other’s luck
held—he was not killed.
“At noon on Monday, January 29, 1917, _K-13_ left her builders’ yard to
carry out diving trials in the Gareloch. A large party was on board.
In charge of her was Commander Herbert—‘Baralong’ Herbert—and with him
went Commander Goodheart, who had been appointed skipper of another K
of similar type. Many of Fairfields’s staff were there, for _K-13_ had
not yet been taken over by the Admiralty. There were Percy Hillhouse,
the yard’s Naval Architect, Bullen, the draughtsman in charge of
submarine construction—a man who knew every nut and bolt that went
to her—Searle, the Admiralty overseer, and McLean, the yard manager
of the K submarines. It was no complement of amateurs which manned
the _K-13_ upon her fatal trip. While steaming down the Clyde she
grounded slightly at Whiteinch, but suffered no hurt. No harm was done,
and _K-13_ went on to the Gareloch, and there passed successfully
through her trials. She was accepted for the Royal Navy by the
Admiralty officials.
[Illustration:
Painting by Joseph Cummings Chase.