Seventy years ago, off the Greek island of Kefalonia, the British submarine HMS Perseus hit an Italian mine, and one survivor, John Capes, made an incredible escape:
The engine room door was forced shut by the pressure of water on the other side. “It was creaking under the great pressure. Jets and trickles from the rubber joint were seeping through,” said Capes.
He dragged any stokers who showed signs of life towards the escape hatch and fitted them and himself with Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus, a rubber lung with an oxygen bottle, mouthpiece and goggles.
This equipment had only been tested to a depth of 100ft (30m). The depth gauge showed just over 270ft, and as far as Capes knew, no-one had ever made an escape from such a depth.
In fact the gauge was broken, over-estimating the depth by 100ft, but time was running out. It was difficult to breathe now.
He flooded the compartment, lowered the canvas trunk beneath the escape hatch and with great difficulty released the damaged bolts on the hatch.
He pushed his injured companions into the trunk, up through the hatch and away into the cold sea above. Then he took a last swig of rum from his blitz bottle, ducked under and passed through the hatch himself.
“I let go, and the buoyant oxygen lifted me quickly upward. Suddenly I was alone in the middle of the great ocean.
“The pain became frantic, my lungs and whole body as fit to burst apart. Agony made me dizzy. How long can I last?
“Then, with the suddenness of certainty, I burst to the surface and wallowed in a slight swell with whitecaps here and there.”
But having made the deepest escape yet recorded, his ordeal was not over.
His fellow injured stokers had not made it to the surface with him so he found himself alone in the middle of a cold December sea.
In the darkness he spotted a band of white cliffs and realised he had no choice but to strike out for those.
For the next year and a half, local families hid him from the Italian occupiers.
His story seemed fantastic, but in 1997 diver Kostas Thoctarides found the Perseus — and in it Capes’s empty torpedo-tube bunk, the hatch he’d opened, and the blitz bottle he’d drunk out of.
The Diver magazine story includes this passage that seems too WWII-era British to be true:
Using all my weight, I put my remaining strength on the tommy bar in the tube spanner to undo the dog nuts.
Reminds me of a scene from the Cryptonomicon:
“My God….someone got out of that U-Boat.”