Revisiting 'The Terrible Hours'

Author Peter Maas' bestseller about a crippled World War II-era submarine is eerily similar to the recent sinking of a Russian sub in the Barents Sea. Except that only one crew survived.

By MARGO HAMMOND

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 17, 2000

Remember those reports last summer of haunting tapping sounds coming from inside the Kursk, the crippled Russian submarine that had sunk to the floor of the Barents Sea?

For investigative journalist Peter Maas, those plaintive messages were chillingly familiar. In his latest book, he had included a similar image of desperate men frantically hammering SOS signals against the steel hull of a disabled submarine.

The men in Maas' book were pounding on the hull of the USS Squalus. The American submarine had gone down in the icy water off the coast of Portsmouth, N.H., during a routine training mission when one of its valves failed to close. It was just three months before the outbreak of World War II.

Maas' gripping account of the tragedy and the dramatic rescue of 33 of its crewman carries a title as heartbreaking as those tapping sounds: The Terrible Hours. Its more hopeful subtitle reads: The Man Behind the Greatest Submarine Rescue in History.

"As I listened to the grim reports of the plight of some 116 Russian submariners trapped aboard the stricken Kursk, I hoped that I would be able to change that subtitle from "greatest' to "first great' rescue," Maas said wistfully in an article published in the Wall Street Journal in the midst of the crisis.

[Photos: Discovery Channel] The Squalus’ accident was the Navy’s first use of the special diving bell, above, on a rescue mission. Charles Momsen, below, helped develop the diving bell.

Maas' subtitle, however, was to remain intact: All 119 seamen aboard the Kursk ultimately perished because time, and oxygen, ran out before rescue equipment could reach them.

Timing, as Maas himself knows only too well, is everything.

Consider Maas' book. A paean to Charles Bowers "Swede" Momsen, the Navy officer who masterminded the "Perils of Pauline" rescue of the Squalus survivors, Maas' book was first published in 1968. It tanked. The year Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated and protest against the Vietnam War was at its zenith was not a year anyone wanted to hear about a military hero. About 300 copies were sold, Maas has joked.

Now the tale, which Maas republished in a new version, has been on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for months. The latest sub tragedy gave it an unexpected immediacy, but even before the Kursk plunged helplessly to the ocean floor, the book, which reads like a thriller, was inching its way up the list. "Ten days before the Kursk went down The Terrible Hours had already reached No. 7," Maas points out.

The time for The Terrible Hours obviously has come. "Now people want to hear about genuine American heroes," Maas explains. The military is back in vogue. "Just look at the success of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation," he says with some awe in his voice. Not to mention the deluge of sea disaster books a la The Perfect Storm.

Maas and I are seated at Michael's, a fashionable watering hole favored by top-level publishers in Midtown Manhattan. Only blocks away is the highrise apartment where for years Maas, a native New Yorker, has based his extraordinarily prolific freelance business. It is also where he nearly single-handedly raised his first son, John Michael, after Maas' first wife, producer and writer Audrey Gellen, died of complications from an automobile accident. Maas lives there with his current wife, Suzanne, a former caterer and now a stay-at-home-mom, and their 8-year-old son, Terrence.

As soon as I am seated at Michael's, Maas tilts his head conspiratorially toward the adjacent table, where Helen Gurley Brown is seated. A few minutes later, I top him in the spot-the-celebrity game by pointing out Caroline Kennedy at a nearby window seat.

Ironically, Maas, who has more than a few bestsellers under his belt, could be almost as famous as these lunch companions. But unlike many other 70-something journalists (from Gay Talese to Tom Wolfe to George Plimpton), Maas has never been much of a self-promoter. Perhaps he's too busy working. Not only is he a regular contributor to Parade magazine, but he often pops up in unlikely places from Gourmet magazine to Mighty Words on the Internet. "Those private school bills are murder," he confesses.

[Photo: Discovery Channel] The Falcon used a special diving bell, above, that could descend to the submarine, attach itself to the hatch and haul crew members back to the ocean’s surface.

But if few people recognize this man's craggy face or his double-voweled name, they invariably know at least one of his books -- or the movies, such as Serpico, based on them.

The best have focused on single characters, whether self-serving gangsters (The Valachi Papers and Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia) or self-sacrificing whistle-blowers (Serpico and Marie: A True Story). Like Serpico, the cop who exposed police corruption in New York City, whom Maas calls the "purest individual I've ever met," some of Maas' subjects are bona fide heroes. But Maas' own hero is the man everyone called Swede.

Maas met the Navy admiral while doing research for the first incarnation of his book on the Squalus disaster. He interviewed him in St. Petersburg where Momsen had come, like many service personnel, to retire. "Swede Momsen may not have been a very good family man. He was away months at a time," Maas concedes. "But I admired the guy immensely."

In the 10 years prior to the Squalus sinking, 700 men had lost their lives in 20 submarine disasters. Back then a stint on a submarine understandably was called "coffin service." Most people just assumed that if a submarine had an accident, its passengers were doomed to a watery grave. Momsen, though, was not most people.

In 1925, he watched helplessly as the entire crew of submarine S-51 -- still alive after the vessel collided with a cargo ship -- was given up for dead. After that, he vowed he would find a way to help submariners out of such a predicament. Those crewmen were only a tantalizing 130 feet of water away: There had to be a way for them to escape.

There was, and Momsen made it happen. He invented an underwater escape device that allowed submariners to swim quickly to the surface without getting the "bends." His rebreather, dubbed by the press "Momsen's Lung," earned him a Distinguished Service medal in 1929. He also helped invent a rescue diving bell that was capable of descending through the ocean's depths to a submerged submarine, attach itself to a hatch and haul crew members to the surface. The nail-biting rescue described by Maas in The Terrible Hours was the first use of such equipment, a rescue that was directed by Momsen, who later also spearheaded the sub's salvage operation.

At the time of the Squalus disaster, Momsen also was developing a new breathing mixture of oxygen and helium that would enable deep-sea divers to descend to greater depths than ever before, depths scuba divers now take for granted.

During World War II, Momsen's heroism continued. Developing a unique pattern for attack submarines, he won a Navy Cross when the group he was commanding in the Japanese-controlled water of the East China Sea sank five Japanese ships and damaged eight others. Later, while testing why so many torpedoes were coming up duds, Momsen dived into the water to help recover a dangerous, live torpedo that had bounced off a target. After the war, he designed a sub for target practice that became the prototype for all modern nuclear subs.

Despite all his accomplishments, Momsen, like Maas, was not into self-promotion. Perhaps that's why Maas is so proud that his book on the man has begun to gain him some long-overdue recognition. "I'm not easily thrilled," Maas admits, but he was busting his buttons last month when he got word that the Navy planned to name a ship after the hero. "They said that Peter Maas' The Terrible Hours played a major role in naming this ship after Momsen," he proudly reports. Since the publication of The Terrible Hours, the Navy also has named its diving school in Pensacola after Momsen.

Momsen's diving bell now sits in a museum, but a high tech version of it is still on call for submarine disasters. All U.S. submarines are equipped with Momsen lungs.

Meanwhile, Maas is haunted by the thought that the men on the Kursk -- at least those who were still alive to tap on that hull -- could have been plucked out of their sub-turned-tomb by something as simple as that antiquated diving bell Momsen used to do the job decades ago.

The situations of the two subs were eerily similar, Maas notes. The 33 crewmen who survived the sinking of the Squalus in May 1939 were in 240 feet of water. The Kursk, one of Russia's most advanced nuclear subs, was less than 100 feet deeper, says Maas. Both lay in frigid water where visibility was poor, the sea stormy, the weather treacherous.

Inside the Squalus, the men were also hammering messages on the hull. "Gasping for breath and chocking down waves of nausea ... they never let up for a moment as they hammered out a steady tattoo of dots and dashes," writes Maas in The Terrible Hours. In both cases the outside world was listening intently to these agonizing messages.

Only the Squalus, however, was fortunate to have a man like Momsen around, says Maas.

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