DRAMATIC SUBMARINE RESCUE 50 YEARS AGO RECALLED IN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR OF "THE DIVE"

By Miriam Raftery

June 21, 2023 (San Diego) -- A desperate race against time to find and save passengers and crew aboard a missing submarine at the Titanic wreckage site is making worldwide news. Knocking sounds have led searchers to believe people are still alive aboard the missing vessel, the Titan. But oxygen will likely run out tomorrow.

The effort evokes memories of  a similar story nearly 50 years ago in August 1973, when two San Diegans, Bob Watts and Larry Brady, were involved in the dramatic rescue of two men trapped above a submarine on the floor of the  Atlantic Ocean.

In  September 2021, Reina Menasche interviewed Stephen McGinty, author of the true-story thriller, The Dive: The Untold Story of the World’s Deepest Submarine Rescue during the Bookshelf segment on East County Magazine's radio show.  You can listen to the full  interview aired on KNSJ, and read highlights below.

  The Pisces III submersible was working on a transatlantic cable when a catastrophe sent it plummeting to the ocean floor, buried nose first in a bed of sand a half mile under the ocean’s surface. Rescue was three days away –and the men aboard, Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson, had only a two-day supply of oxygen. 

“They knew they were deeper than any other submarine had ever been rescued from,” author McGinty told  ECM, who likened the situation to being in a “sealed coffin.”

Indeed, as air ran out, the men had to lie still to conserve their limited air supply, suffering headaches and joint pain.

McGinty first heard the story of the dramatic rescue during a cruise, when the captain told the tale to dinner guests. “The story is really quite incredible,” says McGinty, an award-winning journalist and documentary film producer who lives in Scotland. “It was a desperate rescue attempt."

Rescuers came from  San Diego as well as Canada and Britain—all great distances away. First, they had to find the missing submersible. When initial efforts failed,  “they tried to get the men to sing so that higher notes might be able to be picked up on sonar,” McGinty said.

Hope arose when the men saw light through a porthole and realize they’d been found.  But when the Canadian team attached a hook onto the submarine, ”like threading a needle through a suit of armor” according to McGinty, the rope fell off. Another sub was sent down, but was unable to succeed.

Then it was the Americans’ turn.  Yet more things went wrong. A  saltwater intrusion cause a circuit to blow out, requiring rewiring by hand during the roller-coaster rescue effort.

The trapped men were ultimately saved in a harrowing effort  with heroism by Watts and Brady of San Diego, emerging above the surface to find the whole world watching then as during a similar effort now. 

You can read about the rescue of the Pisces III  in McGinty’s book – or view in a movie, since movie rights have been optioned by Mark Gordon Pictures, the producer of Saving Private Ryan.

“It’s about the brotherhood of the sea,” McGinty says of the effort in which crews from around the world rushed to the scene and worked together to perform the seemingly miraculous feat. “We never know what we’re capable of,”  he says of those who survived the ordeal, as well as those who rescued them.

Photo, rightcourtesy of the U.S. Navy:  Rescuers save crew of the Pisces III in 1973

As for how to avoid such near-tragedy in the future,McGinty concluded prophetically,  “The key is not to be in a small submarine when it sinks.”