This is a great read.
The Terrible Hours: The Man Behind the Greatest Submarine Rescue in History
May 23, 1939. Television was being advertised for the first time to American consumers. Europe was on the brink of war as Hitler and Mussolini signed an alliance in Berlin. These were the days before sonar and before the discovery of nuclear power revolutionized submarine design. Dependent on battery power, submarines were actually surface ships that "occasionally dipped beneath the waves." If a sub went down, "every man on board was doomed. It was accepted that there would be no deliverance."
Swede Momsen was, according to master storyteller Peter Maas, the "greatest submariner the Navy ever had," and he was determined to beat those odds. Momsen spent his career trying to save the lives of trapped submariners, despite an indifferent Navy bureaucracy that thwarted and belittled his efforts at every turn. Every way of saving a sailor entombed in a sub--"smoke bombs, telephone marker buoys, new deep-sea diving techniques, escape hatches, artificial lungs, a great pear-shaped rescue chamber--was either a direct result of Momsen's inventive derring-do, or of value only because of it." Yet on the day the Squalus sank, none of Momsen's inventions had been used in an actual submarine disaster.
A little more on the Munson Lung in this website:
Naval Combat Demolition Unit (NCDU)
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Very good report -- But more applicable to the thread at the beginning of the SCUBA board titled "Book and Media reviews"
Suggest that it be also listed there.
Please bear in mind that the Munson lung was a early very rebreather and was employed as an escape lung on the Squalus.
Ellsberg also wrote a very good book on the Squalus published in 1940s
Note that you were from SoCal...Where?
I was in Jacksonville Florida last week -- very humid for this Californian
Thanks for the post,
sdm