“In spite of himself, he imagined the scene: Mary answering the door, her hair done up in the scarf she wore when she was cleaning. In the control room of the submarine, several hours in, Grisham was thinking about his wife, Mary. The crew made several attempts to pump water from the submarine to raise it from the sea floor. The account of those harrowing 37 hours is detailed in the book “Under Pressure, The Final Voyage of Submarine S-Five” by A.J. She fondly remembers her grandfather coming home from work, putting on his silk smoking jacket and sitting with her in a big, red leather chair in the den of his home in Hamden to 'talk about things 10-year-olds wanted to talk about.' It wasn't until after he died in 1977 that her mother, the youngest of Grisham’s five kids, told the story of the S-5 in “a very heroic, loving way.” “It was like a gift,” Steward said of the call. She spent the next hour on the phone with Cassaway, who explained what he and Petkovic wanted to do: dive to the wreck to photograph it, and they wanted Steward to join the excursion. Steward, whose husband, Dan, served as first selectman of Waterford for 14 years, said she was originally skeptical when she answered a call from an unknown number one morning several months ago. That led them to Kathy Steward of Waterford, whose grandfather Charles F. The men began perusing the internet in search of the obituaries of the crew members, now long gone, to find any living descendants whom they could contact. Rustin Cassway, operator of the Cape May, N.J.-based shipwreck diving boat Research Vessel Explorer, about planning a dive to the final resting place of the submarine to commemorate the 100th anniversary of its sinking and the historic rescue that followed. This past winter, he began talking with Capt. It's a heroic tale he said many are not familiar with. For the next 37 hours, the crew would be trapped.ĭiver Erik Petkovic, who lives in Maryland, came across the story of the S-5 about 15 years ago, when he was researching Navy shipwrecks. Protocol dictated that the main air induction valve, which fed oxygen to the submarine’s diesel engines, be left open until the engines came to a complete stop and then close just before the submarine submerged.īut a faulty valve prevented it from closing, pouring seawater into the submarine, which, pointed at a downward angle, hit the bottom of the sea floor. 1, 1920, before heading to Baltimore as part of a recruiting trip. The submarine USS S-5 (SS-110) was off the Delaware Capes practicing a crash dive on Sept. One hundred years later, it remains one of the greatest survival stories in Navy history. The boat was on a recruiting tour in September 1920 when a valve malfunctioned during a test crash dive, causing the vessel to sink, trapping nearly 40 sailors for 37 hours. A diver looks at the wreckage of the USS S-5 submarine.

1920 personal submarine