USS S-5: The Sunken Submarine That Cheated Death off Cape May

Welcome back to Patrol Reports. Today we’re taking you back to September 1, 1920, when the brand-new submarine USS S-5 went down off the Delaware Capes in what should have been a routine dive. Thirty-eight men were suddenly trapped in what one survivor later called a steel coffin on the ocean floor. Their air was fouling, chlorine gas was forming, and the Atlantic was doing its best to finish them. What followed was one of the greatest survival stories in American submarine history. A desperate plan to tilt the boat, a hole chiseled through thick steel, and a white undershirt on a copper pipe as the signal flag that saved them. The S-5 never made another patrol, but her story endures. This is the tale of disaster, grit, and improbable rescue.