While I was in the Navy, I was on a WWII submarine. As you might have guessed, it was not nuclear. It was a “diesel boat.” This type of submarine earned the nickname “pig boats” because living conditions were so bad. No, it was terrible and if you were seasick like I was, it was even worse.
When I mustered on board for the first time, The USS Becuna SS319 was 24 years old, 307 ft long, 1,800 tons and was getting ready to reach the milestone of 11,000 dives. I know this because I was on board for that historical dive. We even had a cake with the name of the Becuna and 11,000 dives on it. I don’t know if that made me feel safe because it lasted that long or if I felt that this thing was going to fall apart any day now. What would have been your thoughts?
The diesel submarines were powered by the same engines that ran diesel electric railroad trains. The power plants were 2,000 hp, 500 volts DC, and 3,600 amps. We had four engines on board in two compartments. We had a speed of 18 knots on the surface and a speed of three knots that could be sustained for 36 hours below the surface.
When we made a dive, we only had the air that was trapped inside the sub to breathe. This air lasted at most 18 to 20 hrs. Then the carbon dioxide levels would get too high, and the air would get very stale. At that point, it was imperative that we surface. Just a side note, when the CO2 levels got too high you start to feel claustrophobic. With a crew of 60 to 70 guys, that could be an unpleasant problem.
I write a bit about the living conditions in Damn the Pressure, Full Speed Ahead. The conditions were cramped, and storage space was slim. Since we had hardly any personal space, we could not take a lot of personal things onto the boat. Things like clothing. For the most part we were limited to three pair of dungarees, five pairs of skivvies, five pairs of socks, one white, and one navy blue dress uniform. That’s not much when you are out to sea for weeks or months at a time.
When we pulled into a port you could smell us coming not just because our clothes were not clean, but we also smelled of diesel fuel. We called it “The Smell of Money.” We called it that because we made more money than the surface ship sailors. It was about $75 a month extra in our pay and the local town’s girls it! So, guess who was most popular when we got to shore?
Besides the diesel smell, there were other reasons we smelled so bad. Believe it or not, water was scarce on a submarine. We could not take showers and brushing teeth was a challenge. We could not take showers, and we could not wash our clothes. There was no washer or dryer on board.
Some of our patrols would last six or more weeks. It was common to wear our skivvies around five days and then change them out for a better pair. You could always tell when a shipmate was going to change his clothes because he would be smelling his skivvies to see which one smelled better. When you would walk by, he’d thrust a couple out at you and say, “Here smell these. Which one is better?” What would you say? Sometimes we could point to one or the other and say, “That was only worn for three days.” Not to say that got you out of smelling a shipmate’s skivvies!
Whenever we got to port, the first thing on the agenda was to go looking for bars filled with drinks and girls. At least it was for the first or second port. After we got our fill, our attention turned elsewhere: we had to find a laundromat.
We would combine our clothes and share a washing machine. We would pack it full to the top just like a trash compactor. The clothes would move as one big pile in the machine when it started and sometimes just turned with a clunk, clunk, clunk. We did this to save money. We wanted our extra pay to spend in the bars and not be deposited into the slots in a laundromat. To us the laundromats were expensive. You could just hear the groans when we’d have to add more quarters.
Sometimes the clothes at the bottom of the washer never saw any of the soap and wouldn’t really get clean. That didn’t matter to us, we knew they had at least gotten wet and rinsed some. We called them washed.
After drying them with scores of dimes, we would all stand around a big table to sort whose was whose and fold our clothes. Clean (or somewhat clean) clothes didn’t mask the diesel odor we brought along with us all the time, but at least it didn’t add to the smell – the submariner’s “Smell of Money.”
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