The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas (3/5)

This book is about an engineer named Charles “Swede” Momsen who created an underwater device that could save submariners if they happened to get stuck while diving. Specifically in this book, there was a brand new submarine called the “squalus” that was going for a test dive when it got stuck on the coast of New Hampshire. 50 men were stuck underwater on the coast of New Hampshire, one of the men being a civilian. While getting stuck 260 meters below the sea 26 men died immediately. After the men had been stuck long enough Momsen eventually came up with the idea to create a device to save the 30 men that were still alive. The Momsen's lung was a device that made the carbon dioxide go away and transformed it into oxygen so that men could breathe and then eventually would bring them back up to the surface. Throughout this rescue mission, it took 40 hours for all of the men to be brought back up to the surface. Once all the men still alive were brought back up, they still had to come up with a solution to get the Squalus back to the harbor. The process of tying ropes to the submarine placing and dealing with malfunctioning pontoons and waiting for the right weather to complete the extraction of the Squalus, 113 days later the navy brought the squalus to the surface on the New Hampshire coast and eventually transported it back to the port of Seattle were it was salvaged and repaired and eventually renamed the Sailfish and was commissioned for numerous patrols in the pacific part of the world wide battle that was commencing in the pacific and eventually earned nine battle stars. The Sailfish was decommissioned in 1945 and was scrapped. Overall, the main idea of the book was that Charles Momsen saved 30 young enlistees and brought the Squalus back up to the surface with his ground-breaking design the Momsen Lung which was then applied and in stock to almost all submarines at the time in case of an event like this happening again.