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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, March 26, 2025: First of 65

Above we see the USS F-4 (Submarine No. 23) along with her three sisters, USS F-2 (SS-21), USS F-3 (SS-22), and USS F-1 (SS-20), proud and flying their “fish” flags and 13-star “boat” ensigns with their crackerjacks waiting either for a division inspection or shore leave– or both.

Taken in Pearl Harbor in 1914, these early boats were the first based in Hawaii, predating the construction of the submarine base, and as such were simply docked at Pier 5 at the end of Richards Street in Honolulu near where the Aloha Tower is today.

Less than a year later, on 25 March 1915– some 110 years ago this week– F-4 would take her final dive and a lot of those brave young men on her deck would vanish.

The F-class boats

The story of early American submarines was one of John Philip Holland’s Torpedo Boat Company which became the Electric Boat company in 1899.

Holland and his company would provide the Navy’s first steel boat, the 53-foot USS Holland (Submarine Torpedo Boat #1) in 1900, followed by the seven 63-foot USS Plunger (SS-2) or A-class boats, and three 82-foot B-class boats– all very small, basically midget submarines. EB’s five follow-on C-class boats, designed by Lawrence York Spear after Holland’s death, were steadily larger, at 105 feet, and used twin engines and twin motors, giving them a measure of reliability. Nonetheless, all these early boats, and those that immediately followed, were known as “pig boats” due to their downright foul living quarters and unusual and downright unship-like hull shapes, which tended to wallow and hog on the surface.

Then, as now, the U.S. Submarine arm is all-volunteer.

Spear’s D-class boats– the first American boats to run four torpedo tubes, were subcontracted out to Fore River and were the largest yet, at 134 feet. Spindle shaped and single-hulled with short sails, they would become the basis for Navy sub hull forms for the next decade.

By 1909, less than a decade after the first Holland boat was bought by the Navy, Fore River began construction of a more modern pair of boats, dubbed the E-class, that were roughly the same size as the D-class that preceded them but, importantly, ditched the dangerous gasoline engines of the previous designs for a pair of NELSECO diesels. Importantly for maneuverability while diving, they were also the first U.S. submarines to have bow planes.

Further, they incorporated both a search and attack periscope along with a narrow-windowed conning tower, complete with deadlights.

This gives us the F-class, which are just improved Es, and were only the second group of American designed and built diesel-electric submarines.

F-class boats were the first U.S. Navy submarines built on the West Coast, with the first two, F-1 and F-2, constructed by Union Iron Works in San Francisco as Yard No. 94 and 95 using NELSECO diesels. The second pair, F-3 and F-4, were the first subs launched into Puget Sound, built as Yard No. 55 and 56 by The Moran Company, which soon after became Seattle Construction and Drydock Co. The latter pair used Craig diesels.

The D, E, and F classes were the first American submarines (and some of the first anywhere) to have permanently installed radios, and the latter class used telescoping aerials as well.

An improved version of the E-class subs, Fore River provided the design sheets to Union and Moran, which each respective company used in building their first submarines.

Running some 142 feet overall and able to float on the surface in just 12 feet of water, the F-class were still designed more for coastal and harbor defense than blue water patrols. Just 330 tons when surfaced, they used two small 390 hp NELSECO or Craig diesels to make 13.5 knots on trials. Submerged, at 400 tons, they used a pair of 120 kW Electro Dynamic electric motors fed by two 60-cell steel-jar batteries to make 11.5 knots, a speed they could only maintain for about an hour or so before the batteries were drained.

Overall, they were designed for patrols lasting no more than a week and only carried 33 tons of diesel oil- enough to allow for a 2,300nm range at 11 knots.

Constructed of mild steel, riveted in place and depermed, they had a test dept of 200 feet and could submerge in just 45 feet– although the aerials would still betray them. While on trials in 1913, F-1 dived to 283 feet in tests, but after her hull groaned and she started taking on water within ten minutes, she quickly made it to the surface.

Armament was a four-pack of 18-inch torpedo tubes in the bow behind a rotating torpedo tube muzzle cap– a main battery pioneered just a few years earlier in the D-class– with one set of reloads, allowing for eight fish maximum if all spots were filled. There was no provision for a deck gun and the fairwater or conning tower was short and thin, prone to spray and wash while underway.

The F-class were, to be blunt, just an evolutionary step for the Navy, who soon after would order larger and more sophisticated G, H, K, L, and M-class boats– all before entering the Great War, accumulating 51 commissioned submarines by 1917.

Meet F-4

Laid down on 21 August 1909 at Moran as the future USS Skate (Submarine No. 23)– the first American warship to carry that later storied name- our subject was renamed a more generic USS F-4 on 17 November 1911. Launched on 6 January 1912, sponsored by the wife of a shipyard executive, she was commissioned 3on  May 1913.

The four F-boats were assigned to the First Submarine Group, Pacific Torpedo Flotilla, based at San Pedro and operated on the West Coast as such until August 1914.

Then, with war in Europe and a German cruiser squadron roaming the Pacific pursued by British and Japanese fleets, our little F-boats were towed to Hawaii behind armored cruisers to provide presence in the islands.

The Final Dive

The early days of submarining were highlighted by the tendency for these submersibles to claim the lives of their crews. After all, the infamous Hunley sank three times during her seven-month career, on each occasion with a total loss of her complement.

The U.S. Navy was lucky for a time, while European powers and Japan suffered no less than 21 fatal submarine losses between 1903 and 1914, claiming over 200 lives. That luck ran out on the morning of 25 March 1915 when an accident occurred on F-4 while she was off Oahu on maneuvers, sinking to the sea floor 306 feet below with two officers and 19 enlisted aboard.

She had left her tender, the old gunboat USS Alert, at 0900 for a submerged run at a maximum depth of 30 fathoms (180 feet) for target runs but failed to return to the surface by noon. While her emergency buoy was not seen, a sheen of diesel oil appeared on the surface some 1.5 miles off Fort Armstrong between Diamond Head and Barber’s Point, about a mile and a quarter from the channel entrance.

As described by the Submarine Force Museum:

When the F-4 was at a depth of something less than 60 feet, chlorine gas began seeping into the middle, or control, compartment of the boat, indicating that somehow salt water had reached the batteries. F-4’s commanding officer, LT(JG) Alfred Ede, ordered the boat to return to the surface but soon the engines, straining to lift the weight of the sub plus tons of added seawater from what was obviously a substantial leak, overheated and quit. Before the Sailors in the control section retreated to the engine room—several already having passed out after breathing too much of the chlorine gas—they tripped the system that blew air from the high-pressure tank into the main ballast tanks.

But it was too late; water was pouring into the boat faster than the air could blow it out and soon the F-4 came to rest on the bottom, 300 feet below the surface, about 100 feet greater than her test depth. The pressure of the surrounding water soon overcame the rivets that held the torpedo hatch in place and the two forward compartments flooded quickly. Although the crew had secured the hatch behind them when they moved back to the engine room, the bulkhead around it couldn’t hold out against the weight of water and collapsed.

Rescue…turns to recovery

For two days, the Navy combed the waters near where F-4 had been lost and, using drags followed up by divers, was able to approximate her position on the sea bottom. Two Navy hard hat salvage divers attached from the submarine flotilla, GMCs John “Jack” Agraz and John Evans, descended rapidly to 190 feet without seeing the sub. Agraz attempted again and made it to 215 feet- a record at the time for open ocean work- in an unsuccessful attempt to reach the bubbling sub.

A hairy-chested hero, Agraz did the bounce under helmet only with no suit to save time, and somehow never suffered from the bends.

An experimental 54-inch diving bell owned by the Hawaiian Dredging Company was sent for, to be rented for $750 per diem.

On 27 March, two days after F4’s dive to the bottom, as the Alert stood by some 500 feet from the lost submarine in water just 160 feet deep, the tugs USS Navajo and Intrepid, accompanied by the 150-ton derrick dredge California, the latter towed by the steamer SS Claudine, arrived on scene with a plan to use a cable loop to lift F-4 and shift her close enough to the tender for divers to attach chains to her and bring her slowly to the surface via crane. The equipment involved amounted to two 110-fathom wire hawsers, with 45 fathoms of chain in the middle.

Heartache came as the clock ticked past 55 hours with F-4 submerged and the cable loop, which had reportedly managed to lift the boat from the bottom, slipped and the submarine careened back to the floor, bow first. The sweep brought to the surface a piece of brass from the submarine’s fairwater, believed to be a section of one of her periscopes.

With the desperate rescue making headlines across the country, SECNAV Josephus Daniels ordered a Navy-wide task force to head to Hawaii and join the effort. From the New York (Brooklyn) Navy Yard, one of the first dive medicine experts, Passed Asst. Surgeon George Reuben Williamson French, USN, (UPenn ’08) was dispatched by express train to Mare Island. French brought five of the Navy’s most experienced divers: Warrant Gunner George D. Stillson and GMCs Stephen J. Drellishak, Frank Crilley, Frederick Nielson, and William Loughman.

The men had spent the past 28 months in a program to evaluate diving tables based on English Dr. John S. Haldane’s theories on staged decompression. The divers had previously reached the amazing depth of 274 feet in experimental tests from the destroyer USS Walke (DD 34) in the relatively sheltered waters of Long Island Sound, developing the first U.S. Navy Diving Manual (the 252-page “Report on Deep Diving Tests”) in the process.

The team had developed a three-wire telephone connection for the divers to remain in constant contact topside the entire dive. It was dubbed the Stillson Phone for years.

Oh, yeah, and they also helped vet and design the iconic Mark V diving rig, adopted in 1916, based on the British Siebe-Gorman 6-bolt diving helmet but with significant improvements. Air was supplied to the divers from charged torpedo flasks, with pressure controlled through a reducing valve and by throttling.

The dive team traveled with 10,756 pounds of specialized equipment in 27 crates, including a large recompression tank and 1,450 feet of air hose. Another 700 feet of hose was rushed from Norfolk. Mare Island was able to scrounge an additional 500 feet. Daniels dutifully told the press in Washington that, using “special appliances,” he was confident they could reach F-4. This would be their first practical test of their experimental diving techniques and what could be accomplished under service conditions.

Still, Daniels noted, “The Department fears there is not room to hope for the lives of the crew but is determined to do all that is humanly possible to raise the vessel and is undertaking to send the Navy divers to an unprecedented depth if necessary to accomplish this.”

Arriving at Mare Island, they boarded the armored cruiser USS Maryland (ACR-8), which in the meantime had been filled with six lifting pontoons- capable of lifting 520 tons- to be used in the salvage attempt.

The cruiser, the experimental dive team, and their accumulation of gear arrived in Hawaii on 12 April, sadly 18 days after F-4 was lost.

In the meantime, back at Pearl, RADM Charles B. T. Moore (commandant of the naval station), LT. Charles E. Smith (1st SubGrp skipper) and Naval Constructor Julius “Dutchie” Furer had been working on a series of mechanical lifts and sweeps to try to secure F-4, with the tugs Navajo and Intrepid joined by the dredge Gaylord.

On 7 April, with the experimental dive team still a week away, dragging continued with the tugs Navajo and Intrepid.

Furer acquired two mud scows from the Hawaiian Dredging Company, each some 104 feet long by 36 feet beam by 13 feet deep, and rigged them with four slings “made from the heaviest cables procurable” attached to purpose-built windlasses on each vessel. The windlass drums were made from 16-inch diameter sugar mill shafts and spooled with 2.5-inch galvanized steel cables obtained from the Pacific Mail Steamship Company with the 10-inch by 14-inch steam engine, geared to 6 drums, on the dredge used to reel.

With the dive team from Brooklyn arriving on the scene on 14 April, GMC Frank Crilley was the first diver to reach the submarine, dropping to a new record of 288 feet of seawater, and walked along the boat’s upper deck. He found F-4 on a smooth sandy bottom with no coral growth to impede hoisting operations, and her bow pointed shoreward. He noted two parted lines from previous snagging and recovery efforts attached to the craft. The dive took two hours, with a five-minute descent, 12 minutes on the bottom, and the balance on the slow rise to the surface to decompress.

Stillson, following immediately after, reported the superstructure was caved in, and the hull under it was filled with water.

The salvage equipment devised and employed by Furer to lift F-4 to the surface was slowly attached to the vessel over the next several days, with the divers only able to work 15-20 minutes per dive due to the exertion of working at such depth and the prerequisite decompression time. At least 13 dives went past 275 feet in depth, with five reaching the sea floor at 306 feet, struggling with 10 atmospheres of pressure (130-140 pounds per sq. inch).

To say this was dangerous for the divers was an understatement.

On 17 April, one of the men, Loughman, almost perished, adding his soul to the 21 already lost on the submarine. Entangled in lines on his ascent, he was trapped more than 250 feet down and helpless. Chief Crilley, who had already dived that day, volunteered to don a helmet and return to the deep to help his shipmate return to the surface.

Loughman, who spent more four hours at depths over 200 feet, was brought to the surface in semi-conscious conditions and had to spend nine hours in the recompression chamber, then was waylaid for two weeks with severe pneumonia and Caisson’s disease (the Bends). He was only released from Mare Island Naval Hospital at the end of June.

Dr. French on Loughman, via the 1916 Naval Medical Bulletin:

Crilley would later (in 1929!) receive a rare peacetime MoH for his actions.

Medal of Honor citation of Chief Gunner’s Mate Frank W. Crilley (as printed in the official publication “Medal of Honor, 1861-1949, The Navy”, page 106):

“For display of extraordinary heroism in the line of his profession above and beyond the call of duty during the diving operations in connection with the sinking in a depth of water 304 feet, of the U.S.S. F-4 with all on board, as a result of loss of depth control, which occurred off Honolulu, T.H., on 25 March 1915. On 17 April 1915, William F. Loughman, chief gunner’s mate, United States Navy, who had descended to the wreck and had examined one of the wire hawsers attached to it, upon starting his ascent, and when at a depth of 250 feet beneath the surface of the water, had his life line and air hose so badly fouled by this hawser that he was unable to free himself; he could neither ascend nor descend. On account of the length of time that Loughman had already been subjected to the great pressure due to the depth of water, and the uncertainty of the additional time he would have to be subjected to this pressure before he could be brought to the surface, it was imperative that steps be taken at once to clear him. Instantly, realizing the desperate case of his comrade, Crilley volunteered to go to his aid, immediately donned a diving suit, and descended. After a lapse of time of 2 hours and 11 minutes, Crilley was brought to the surface, having by a superb exhibition of skill, coolness, endurance and fortitude, untangled the snarl of lines and cleared his imperiled comrade, so that he was brought, still alive, to the surface.”

Slowly, using manila reeving line, by 18 April, all four lifting hawsers had been placed and transferred to the scows, but F-4 remained stubbornly on the bottom, drawn closer to shore into a shallower 275 feet depth.

Re-rigging the lifting hawsers with lengths of Maryland’s 2⅝-inch stud-link anchor chain for extra strength and reinstalling them, the next lift was tried on 20 May. Over the next four days, through a complicated series of lifts and tows, with the tugs, scows, pontoons, and dredge all working together day and night, F-4 had been lifted to a depth of just 84 feet by 24 May and 50 feet by 25 May. The plan was to bring her into a flooded dry dock that allowed a depth of 25.5 feet.

Then came a three-day storm that buffeted the lifting vessels and translated down the hawsers to the suspended water-filled submarine below as diving and salvage operations were suspended. When Furer sent divers down on 29 May after the waters calmed, it was found that the top of the sub was caved in and torn almost halfway through to the keel.

With F-4 upside down, suspended 46 feet under the water by hawsers, it was decided to transfer the rest of the lift to the six submergible pontoons and bring the submarine to the surface before transfer to a dry dock. Twenty charged torpedo air flasks were installed on a coal barge, then linked by pipe and a dozen 150-foot lengths of hose to the pontoons to bring them to the surface, with F-4 along for the ride. This took until 29 August to set up.

Then the lift started, with the flasks charging the pontoons and F-4 rising slowly. Importantly for diving history, this segment saw one of the first uses of several divers connected to the surface via telephone line for communication to coordinate the careful rise as one pontoon, rising too slow or too fast or at the wrong angle, could upend the whole operation.

Towed into port with the pontoons surfaced, F-4 was finally transferred to the dry dock of the Island Steam Navigation Company at the Quarantine Station dock.

It was determined that the loss occurred due to leaking battery acid that corroded F-4’s hull rivets in the port wall of the battery steel tank at Frame 51, which allowed progressive flooding, chlorine off gassing due to salt water interaction with the battery jars, loss of depth control, and eventual catastrophic hull failure. This led to design changes in future submarine classes.

The salvage of F-4 is well covered in more detail at PigBoats.com. 

Epilogue

Four sets of remains were found in the middle compartment of F-4, while the rest were found in the stern engine compartment. Of the four recovered that were identifiable, two, Ashcroft and Herzog, were identified due to dental records, while the other two, Wells and Mahan, were identified due to the contents of their pockets. The remains were wrapped in cotton, surrounded by oakum, and placed in caskets.

The four who were able to be identified were repatriated to their families for interment, sent to California, Utah, and Virginia.

The 14 unidentified sets of remains were arranged in four sealed metal coffins, marched in a somber funeral parade through Honolulu to the California-bound USS Supply, and were eventually buried with honors at Arlington.

Her crew is remembered as the first of the American submarines listed on Eternal Patrol and appear on markers and monuments as such across the country.

Following the investigation of her doom and the removal of remains, the wreckage of F-4 was refloated on 15 September 1915– the dry dock was rented after all– and towed under the pontoons by Navajo into Magazine Loch until she grounded in the shallow inlet. There she sat in the shallows until 1940 when the area was turned into the Sierra submarine piers. She was rolled into a trench by the pier and buried.

In 1999, a magnetometer survey near pier Sierra 13/14 detected a large object, some 80 feet from the pier, under some 20 feet of sediment. A sign has since been erected to note this resting place.

Meanwhile, the small original headstone for her 17 crew members buried at Arlington was installed at the USS Bowfin Museum at Pearl.

Some of her construction notes endure in the National Archives. 

In November 1915, Dutchie Furer, who directed the recovery of F-4, largely with improvised equipment, submitted an extremely detailed article on the salvage operation to Proceedings. A 1901 Annapolis grad who fought against the Spanish in 1898 while still a midshipman, he was a proponent of small craft operations and campaigned successfully for the 110-foot subchasers in the Great War. Earning a Navy Cross, he later helped supervise the modernization of the battleships USS Pennsylvania and New Mexico in the 1930s and, still on duty in 1941, became Chief of Navy Research and helped coordinate new technology into the fleet in WWII. He retired in November 1945.

Likewise, Dr. French would publish “Diving Operations in Connection with the Salvage of the USS ‘F-4″ in the Naval Medical Bulletin in 1916. He retired from the navy as a commander in 1937, then returned to the colors during WWII, later passing at the Oakland Navy Hospital in May 1955. He is regarded as the Navy’s first Diving Medical Officer. 

The hard hat divers of the experimental team that set and repeatedly broke their own deep-sea records also kept at it.

When there was another accident in 1927, when the USS S-4 (SS-109) became disabled and was lost with all hands, a familiar face hit the news again, with now-Ensign Grilley again earning a peacetime decoration for bravery.

Navy Cross citation of Ensign Frank W. Crilley (as printed in his official biography):

“For extraordinary heroism and fearless devotion to duty during the diving operations in connection with the salvage of the USS S-4, sunk as a result of a collision off Provincetown, Massachusetts, 17 December 1927. During the period 17 December 1927 to 17 March 1928, on which latter date the ill-fated vessel was raised, Crilley, under the most adverse weather conditions, at the risk of his life, descended many times into the icy waters and displayed throughout that period fortitude, skill, determination and courage which characterizes conduct above and beyond the call of duty.”

The current Navy Experimental Diving Unit was formally established in 1927 at the Washington Navy Yard and the equipment and procedures developed at NEDU, including the McCann Rescue Chamber and mixed gas diving, were essential to the rescue of the crewmen who survived the initial sinking of the submarine USS Squalus on the bottom off the Isle of Shoals near Portsmouth in 1939.

The disabled Squalus was located on the sea floor at a depth of 240 feet in 29°F water, and a rescue ship with a diving chamber came to the site. The 33 crew in the non-flooded compartments were transferred to the surface within 40 hours via four trips of the diving chamber.

Now moving towards its 100th year in operation, the NEDU, still under SUPSALV, continues its research to save lives in the worst-case scenario.

They retain the Mark V on their insignia.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

***

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