Every organization has one person who gets called when something has gone catastrophically wrong.

The copier is smoking. The computer has deleted payroll. Someone has accidentally locked the vice president inside the conference room. Everyone else gathers around the problem, offers theories, and quietly hopes somebody else knows what to do.

Then the fixer arrives.

For much of the 20th century, the United States Navy’s fixer was Charles Bowers “Swede” Momsen.

When submariners were trapped beneath the ocean with no reliable way to escape, Momsen developed equipment to bring them home. When the Navy’s newest submarine sank during testing, he directed rescue operations that saved 33 people from a depth previously considered beyond hope. When American torpedoes repeatedly struck Japanese ships without exploding, Momsen helped prove that the weapons—not the increasingly exasperated officers firing them—were defective.

He was an inventor, submariner, combat commander, deep-sea diving expert, battleship captain, and persistent enemy of the phrase “That can’t be the problem.”

This frequently placed him in conflict with the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, whose confidence in its torpedoes remained impressively buoyant even when the torpedoes themselves were not.

Every Navy Needs a Swede

Charles Momsen was born in Flushing, New York, in 1896. His nickname was “Swede,” although his family background was Danish, suggesting that the Navy’s difficulties with precision began somewhat earlier than the torpedo scandal.

He graduated in June 1919 with the U.S. Naval Academy’s Class of 1920, trained as a submarine officer, and commanded three submarines during the 1920s.

At the time, submarines were becoming increasingly important weapons, but they possessed one awkward design feature: when one sank, the crew usually died inside it.

The Navy had developed increasingly sophisticated methods for putting submariners on the bottom of the ocean. Getting them back had received considerably less attention.

A Submarine With No Way Out

On September 25, 1925, the submarine USS S-51 collided with the passenger steamer City of Rome near Block Island. The submarine sank in approximately 132 feet of water.

Three men escaped the rapidly sinking submarine and were rescued. The other 33 men aboard died.

Momsen, then commanding the submarine S-1, was sent to help locate the wreck. An oil slick marked the general area, but rescuers lacked the equipment necessary to find the submarine quickly, reach anyone who might still be alive, or bring survivors safely to the surface.

The disaster made a lasting impression on Momsen. He began thinking about a rescue chamber that could be lowered from a surface ship. The chamber would attach itself to a submarine’s escape hatch, create a watertight connection, and carry survivors to the surface.

It was, in essence, an underwater elevator—although one operating in darkness, under crushing pressure, above a vessel full of rapidly expiring oxygen. Installation instructions presumably began with “Remain calm.”

Momsen prepared drawings and submitted his proposal through the proper channels. The proposal traveled into the Navy’s administrative machinery and disappeared.

More than a year passed without an answer. Momsen assumed engineers had found some flaw in his design. Later, while assigned to the Bureau of Construction and Repair, he discovered what had actually happened: the proposal had been rejected as impractical.

No one had bothered to tell him.

The Navy had taken an idea for rescuing men from sealed metal compartments and buried it in a sealed metal filing cabinet. There is a certain thematic consistency to that.

“Is There Any Hope?”

On December 17, 1927, another submarine, USS S-4, collided with the Coast Guard destroyer Paulding off Cape Cod. The submarine sank in approximately 110 feet of water.

Six men remained alive in the forward torpedo room. Divers located them and communicated by tapping messages through the hull.

The trapped sailors waited while rescuers struggled against freezing water, tangled wreckage, and deteriorating weather. At one point, a message came from inside the submarine: “Is there any hope?”

There was not.

The weather worsened, rescue efforts failed, and all 40 men aboard S-4 died.

Two submarine disasters had now demonstrated the same problem. Sailors could survive the initial sinking, but the Navy had no reliable way to reach them before their air ran out.

Momsen responded by working on two solutions. One would allow submariners to escape individually. The other would bring a rescue chamber down to them.

The Navy had rejected his first proposal, but the ocean had submitted a forceful request for reconsideration.

The Momsen Lung

The first solution became known as the Momsen Lung.

The device was a compact rebreather worn over the chest. A rubber breathing bag supplied oxygen while a canister of soda lime removed carbon dioxide from the user’s exhaled air. It also helped control the sailor’s ascent so he would not rise too quickly and suffer a potentially fatal air embolism.

Using it required the trapped sailor to enter a submarine escape chamber, flood it with seawater, open the outer hatch, and swim toward the surface while breathing through a mouthpiece.

This was considered the less frightening option.

Momsen did not merely design the equipment and ask someone with less seniority to see whether it worked. He repeatedly tested it himself.

The salvaged S-4 became a test vessel for submarine rescue and escape experiments. Momsen made repeated practice ascents using the breathing apparatus, testing it from depths of up to approximately 200 feet.

Modern product development generally discourages inventors from using themselves as the crash-test dummy, particularly when the product’s failure mode involves drowning. Momsen apparently regarded this as an unnecessary limitation on progress.

In 1929, he received the Navy Distinguished Service Medal for his work developing and testing the device. His citation praised his initiative, courage, and perseverance and described the breathing apparatus as an extraordinary contribution to submarine escape.

The Momsen Lung became standard equipment aboard American submarines. It was not a perfect solution. Escaping from a sunken submarine remained dangerous, especially for injured, exhausted, or frightened sailors.

Momsen therefore continued pursuing his original idea: instead of making each submariner swim to safety, bring safety down to the submarine.

The Rescue Chamber the Navy Almost Didn’t Have

Working with Commander Allan McCann and other Navy specialists, Momsen helped develop what became known as the McCann submarine rescue chamber.

The chamber was a heavy steel capsule lowered by cable from a rescue ship. It was pulled down onto the disabled submarine’s escape hatch, where a rubber gasket formed a watertight seal.

Water in the chamber’s lower compartment was blown into its ballast tanks, and the air pressure inside the chamber was equalized with the submarine. Once the connection was dry and secure, both hatches could be opened and survivors transferred into the chamber.

The chamber could then be raised to the surface.

It was the same basic concept Momsen had proposed after the loss of S-51. The Navy had initially rejected it as impractical, which is one of history’s more generous ways of saying, “We will adopt this after enough people die.”

By the late 1930s, the rescue chamber had been built and tested. It had never been used during an actual submarine disaster.

That changed in May 1939.

The Sinking of the Squalus

On May 23, 1939, the newly commissioned submarine USS Squalus conducted a test dive off the coast of New Hampshire.

The main air-induction valve failed to close properly. Seawater rushed into the submarine’s aft compartments, flooding the engine rooms, crew quarters, and aft torpedo room.

The Squalus sank to the bottom in 243 feet of water.

Twenty-six men died in the flooded sections. Quick action by the survivors prevented the water from spreading through the rest of the vessel, leaving 32 crewmen and one civilian naval architect alive in the forward compartments.

The submarine released a marker buoy containing a telephone line. Its sister submarine, USS Sculpin, found the buoy and briefly made contact with the trapped men. Then rough seas pulled the vessels apart and snapped the cable.

The men below were once again cut off.

This time, however, the Navy had Momsen.

He reached the site aboard Sculpin and directed the diving and rescue-chamber operations. The submarine rescue ship USS Falcon arrived carrying the McCann rescue chamber, divers, cables, pumps, and the equipment necessary to attempt the first true submarine rescue in U.S. Navy history.

The rescue chamber descended through the dark water and settled onto the Squalus escape hatch. The seal held. The hatches opened.

For the first time in U.S. Navy history, survivors from a deeply submerged submarine entered a rescue vessel and returned alive to the surface.

The chamber made four rescue trips. The operation was anything but routine. Cables tangled. Divers became fouled in lines. Weather and currents complicated nearly every movement.

During the fourth and final rescue trip, tangled cables trapped the chamber on the bottom. The downhaul wire eventually had to be cut, after which the crew aboard Falcon hauled the chamber toward the surface by hand.

All 32 surviving crewmen and the civilian naval architect were brought safely to the surface.

Not every sailor trapped inside a sunken American warship would be as fortunate. Two years later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, three men remained alive inside USS West Virginia for more than two weeks, with rescuers unable to reach them.

For years, naval authorities had assumed that rescuing sailors from a deeply sunken submarine was essentially impossible. Momsen and his team revised that assessment by doing it.

They then helped raise the Squalus itself. The recovered submarine was repaired, renamed USS Sailfish, and sent into combat during World War II, where it earned nine battle stars.

The Navy never again used the name Squalus. Apparently, even bureaucracies can become superstitious when sufficiently encouraged.

More Than an Inventor

The Squalus rescue would have been enough to secure Momsen’s place in naval history, but he was not merely an engineer who wandered around the fleet repairing things.

During World War II, he commanded Submarine Squadrons Two and Four in the Pacific. He helped develop coordinated submarine attack tactics—American versions of the wolf pack—that allowed groups of submarines to operate together deep inside Japanese-controlled waters.

His Navy Cross citation credited submarines under his coordinated command with sinking five Japanese ships totaling more than 38,000 tons and damaging eight more totaling approximately 63,000 tons.

Later, he commanded the battleship USS South Dakota during combat operations between December 1944 and July 1945. The ship participated in air actions and shore bombardments while Momsen maintained what his award citation described as a high level of fighting efficiency.

In other words, Momsen was not simply an eccentric inventor with a rubber breathing bag and an unfortunate habit of disagreeing with headquarters. He knew how submarines worked, how combat worked, and how quickly a theoretical defect became a funeral when sailors carried it into battle.

This became important when the Navy’s torpedoes began refusing to cooperate with the war.

The Torpedo That Did Almost Everything Except Explode

When the United States entered World War II, its submarines carried the Mark 14 torpedo, equipped with the Mark 6 exploder.

On paper, it was an impressive weapon. It could be set to detonate when it struck a ship or sense the vessel’s magnetic field and explode beneath its keel. An underwater explosion below the hull could break a ship’s back rather than merely punch a hole in its side.

Unfortunately, the Mark 14 had been developed under intense secrecy, limited budgets, and a testing philosophy best summarized as “Let us assume it works.”

Live torpedoes were expensive. Destroying them during realistic tests would have cost money. Consequently, the Navy entered the largest war in human history with a weapon that had received remarkably little realistic testing.

Combat quickly revealed three separate defects.

First, the torpedoes ran deeper than their depth settings indicated, allowing them to pass harmlessly beneath targets.

Second, the magnetic exploder was overly sensitive and frequently detonated before the torpedo reached the ship.

Third, when submariners disabled the magnetic system and relied on direct impact, the contact exploder often failed to detonate.

The ideal textbook shot—striking a ship squarely at a 90-degree angle—was especially likely to produce a dud.

The Mark 14 was therefore capable of passing beneath the enemy, exploding before reaching the enemy, or hitting the enemy and doing nothing.

Admittedly, this covered an impressive range of possibilities.

The Navy’s wartime torpedo difficulties were not limited to the submarine-launched Mark 14. In 1943, USS William D. Porter accidentally fired a Mark 15 torpedo toward the battleship carrying President Franklin Roosevelt. The Navy thus had torpedoes that refused to strike the enemy and torpedoes that appeared disturbingly eager to strike the president.

The Bureau of Ordnance Defends Its Honor

Submarine commanders reported the failures. The Bureau of Ordnance responded that its torpedoes were functioning properly.

Therefore, the problem must be poor maintenance, incorrect settings, bad firing angles, or incompetent submarine captains.

This was comforting news for everyone except the men who watched their torpedoes strike Japanese ships with an audible clang and fail to explode.

Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood and other submarine officers eventually arranged practical tests by firing torpedoes through suspended fishing nets. The holes showed that the weapons were running as much as 10 to 15 feet deeper than their settings.

The Bureau initially resisted the findings and continued suggesting operator error.

Eventually, its own tests confirmed the depth problem. The torpedoes really were running too deep.

This should have inspired a period of institutional humility. Instead, BuOrd treated it as an isolated misunderstanding and continued defending the rest of the design.

Submariners disabled the magnetic exploders, eliminating many of the premature detonations. That still left the defective contact mechanism.

The Target That Refused to Sink

On July 24, 1943, Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Daspit attacked the Japanese tanker Tonan Maru No. 3 from the submarine USS Tinosa.

Of the first four torpedoes, two struck and exploded, leaving the enormous tanker stopped and listing.

Daspit then moved in for what should have been a straightforward execution. The target was damaged, nearly stationary, and too large to overlook unless the submarine crew had accidentally aimed at a different ocean.

He fired additional torpedoes one at a time. The crew watched them run toward the tanker and heard them strike the hull.

Again and again, nothing happened.

By the end of the encounter, Tinosa had fired 15 torpedoes. Only two had exploded.

The tanker survived.

Upon returning to Pearl Harbor, Daspit met with Lockwood. The admiral later recalled that the submarine commander was nearly too furious to speak.

That is the naval equivalent of a restaurant customer being too angry to send back the entrée, except the entrée weighs 3,000 pounds and has just failed to destroy an enemy oil tanker.

Even Einstein Had Thoughts

The Bureau of Ordnance had even enlisted Albert Einstein as a consultant on torpedo problems.

Einstein was an obvious person to call if officials wanted the world’s most famous genius, but not necessarily if they wanted someone with practical experience firing torpedoes from a submarine. Contrary to one of history’s more persistent myths, he had never failed mathematics. He had not, however, spent much time expounding on the theoretical physics of underwater explodey things.

Beginning in 1943, Einstein corresponded with Navy officials about magnetic detonators, the placement of explosive charges, and the destructive forces produced when a fast-moving torpedo struck a ship’s hull.

At one point, he considered whether the torpedo’s nose might be crushed before the explosive charge could complete its work and proposed designs intended to provide a few additional thousandths of a second.

Einstein did not specifically identify the defective firing-pin mechanism that Momsen and the Pearl Harbor investigators eventually exposed. His work concerned broader but related problems.

The irony was not that the Bureau rejected Einstein’s exact solution. It was that the Navy had Albert Einstein thinking about torpedo physics while continuing to resist the testimony of submarine captains who had been conducting increasingly expensive experiments against actual Japanese ships.

The correspondence survives in the National Archives, complete with Einstein’s handwritten calculations and sketches.

Perhaps officials believed Einstein was impressive in theoretical physics but lacked the practical experience necessary to understand what happens when one object strikes another.

After all, he had only spent several decades rethinking humanity’s understanding of matter, energy, space, time, and gravity. Torpedoes were a specialized field.

Einstein was not the only famous civilian applying an unexpected intellect to torpedo warfare. Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr helped invent a frequency-hopping guidance system intended to prevent radio-controlled torpedoes from being jammed. World War II apparently required physicists, movie stars, and submariners to solve the problems the Bureau of Ordnance had already certified as solved.

Send Swede

Lockwood turned to Momsen.

This was the logical choice. Momsen understood submarines, engineering, explosives, underwater operations, and the occasionally delicate procedure of proving senior officials wrong without being transferred to an observation post in northern Alaska.

Momsen and Commander Art Taylor selected a stretch of coastline on the Hawaiian island of Kahoʻolawe where steep cliffs descended into deep water above a sandy bottom.

Beginning on August 31, 1943, the submarine USS Muskallunge fired live Mark 14 torpedoes into the cliffs.

The first torpedo exploded.

The second torpedo exploded.

The third struck the cliff and did not.

Momsen entered the water to locate and help recover the unexploded warshot.

It is worth pausing here.

A live torpedo had just slammed into a cliff without detonating. No one knew whether the firing mechanism was completely disabled or merely reconsidering its schedule.

Momsen went into the water after it.

Most managers demonstrate confidence in a project by sending an encouraging memorandum. Momsen demonstrated confidence by swimming toward several hundred pounds of high explosive that had already shown itself to be temperamental.

The torpedo was recovered and taken back to Pearl Harbor for examination.

The Perfect Shot Was the Worst Shot

Pearl Harbor investigators then conducted additional tests using torpedo warheads filled with sand but equipped with working exploders. The warheads were dropped from a 90-foot tower onto a steel plate, reproducing the speed and force of a torpedo striking a ship.

When the warhead struck squarely, the exploder failed approximately 70 percent of the time.

The impact distorted the firing-pin guide assembly. The firing pin jammed or lost so much force that it could not strike the primer hard enough to detonate the warhead.

A glancing impact produced less distortion and was more likely to explode.

In other words, generations of submarine officers had been trained to seek a perfect 90-degree shot. The torpedo’s design transformed that perfect shot into the angle most likely to fail.

The Bureau had created a weapon that rewarded bad aim.

This was innovative, although perhaps not in the manner intended.

Investigators developed lighter components that reduced the forces jamming the mechanism, while a stronger firing-pin spring was also recommended. These and subsequent changes finally produced a reliable contact exploder.

By the fall of 1943—nearly two years after the United States entered the war—American submarines finally had torpedoes that ran near their intended depth, did not routinely explode prematurely, and detonated when they struck the enemy.

Once American submariners finally received reliable weapons, they demonstrated what the campaign might have looked like from the beginning. Under Commander Eugene Fluckey, USS Barb sank ships, launched rockets against Japan, rescued prisoners of war, and even destroyed a train.

The Cost of Being Certain

The torpedo scandal was not simply an amusing story about stubborn bureaucrats and defective machinery.

For roughly 21 months, American submariners entered enemy waters carrying weapons they could not trust. They risked detection by approaching targets, fired limited supplies of expensive torpedoes, and often revealed their positions without damaging the ships they attacked.

Japanese transports carried troops and supplies that should have been sunk. Tankers delivered fuel. Warships survived attacks. American submarines remained exposed to destroyers, aircraft, depth charges, and mines after their torpedoes failed.

Some defects were understandable. The Mark 14 was a complex machine, and wartime conditions exposed weaknesses that had not appeared during development.

What was less understandable was the refusal to listen to repeated reports from experienced officers in combat.

BuOrd’s greatest failure was not that it produced a flawed weapon. Engineers have been producing flawed machinery ever since the first inventor tried to improve the wheel by making it triangular.

Its failure was treating evidence as insubordination.

The Bureau assumed that because its calculations said the torpedo worked, every torpedo that failed merely demonstrated that someone else had used it incorrectly. When tests proved that the weapons ran too deep, it resisted. When combat reports showed premature explosions, it resisted. When submariners heard torpedoes strike enemy hulls without exploding, it resisted.

Reality kept submitting reports. The Bureau kept returning them for additional documentation.

Momsen’s Final Assignments

Momsen continued receiving difficult assignments after the war.

He administered the Japanese merchant marine and helped support the enormous operation that returned millions of displaced Japanese nationals from former wartime territories.

He later served as Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Undersea Warfare and commanded the Submarine Force of the Pacific Fleet. He also supported the development of the streamlined experimental submarine USS Albacore, whose hull design influenced later generations of American submarines.

Momsen retired in 1955 with the rank of vice admiral. He died in 1967 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The guided-missile destroyer USS Momsen was later named in his honor.

Submarine technology continued evolving in directions even Momsen might not have anticipated. Modern Virginia-class submarines use sophisticated photonic masts in place of traditional periscopes—and the Navy discovered that sailors could operate them with familiar Xbox controllers. We like to think Momsen would have approved.

The Man Who Saved the Navy From Itself

Charles “Swede” Momsen spent much of his career solving problems that official experts insisted could not be solved—or, in the case of the torpedoes, insisted did not exist.

He watched submarine disasters claim lives and developed a way for others to escape. He revived a rejected rescue-chamber proposal and helped use it to save 33 people from the bottom of the Atlantic. He led submarine forces against Japan, commanded one of America’s most powerful battleships, and personally entered the water to help recover an unexploded torpedo that the Bureau of Ordnance had confidently assured everyone should have worked.

Momsen understood something that bureaucracies frequently forget: expertise does not mean never being wrong. It means recognizing evidence quickly enough to stop being wrong before someone dies.

The ocean was dangerous. The enemy was dangerous. The defective torpedoes were dangerous.

Fortunately for the United States Navy, Swede Momsen was more stubborn than all three.

A tip of the hat to Shadow of Yesterday, who suggested Swede Momsen as an article topic. Visit the site for more fascinating trips into the lesser-traveled corners of history.

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