Provincetown's Forgotten Maritime Disaster - Cape Cod History

In the courtyard of a beautiful but unassuming church on the East End of Commercial Street in Provincetown, there stands a wooden cross. For a church, this is hardly a surprise. That is, until one approaches the cross and finds two plaques, one on either side.

On the side of the cross facing the church is a square plaque that reads: ‘In Memory of the Officers and Crew of the Submarine S-4. Sunk Off Wood End. Dec. 17, 1927.’ On the side facing Commercial Street is a much larger rectangular plaque. Here one finds the names of all of the men lost. There are forty of them. This is the story of the USS S-4, a deeply tragic and also mostly forgotten disaster.

Despite seeming like a 20th-century invention, the history of the submarine dates back to the late 1500s. It was in 1578 that English mathematician William Bourne first conceived the idea of an undersea vessel. It would, however, take more than forty years to put that idea into action. Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel is credited with the physical invention of the submarine. He was able to dive underneath England’s River Thames in 1620.

Over the ensuing three centuries, the submarine as a military vessel would grow and evolve. American colonist David Bushnell created a submarine affectionately known as the ‘Turtle’ in 1775. With hand-cranked propellers, it was meant to be used as a weapon against the British during the Revolutionary War. It was a failure.

In 1800, American inventor Robert Fulton designed his Nautilus submarine. It was seen as more modern, coming equipped with adjustable dive planes and a dual-propulsion system. The H.L. Hunley, a Confederate sub, sank the USS Housatonic during the American Civil War in 1864. It wasn’t until World War I that the submarine became a more common piece of equipment, particularly by the Germans with their U-boats.

The 1920s submarines were far advanced than those of the preceding century. Though not without their own operational difficulties, the U.S. Navy’s S-Class vessels represented the first properly functioning designs. S-4 was a diesel-electric submarine commissioned in 1919. The 231-foot-long steel behemoth was one of fifty-one such ‘Sugar’ boats built between 1918 and 1925. Eight years passed with little fanfare or issue with the S-4. That all changed on the afternoon of December 17, 1927.

The USS S-4(Public Domain)

On December 15th, the S-4 had been refitted at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire Navy Yard. After that, it headed for Cape Cod, captained by R.K. Jones. The S-4 was to be engaged in standard speed and maneuverability trials off the tip of Provincetown near Wood End Lighthouse. During the early afternoon of December 17th, while the S-4, with forty men aboard, was performing submerged runs. Up on the surface, a different sort of patrol was happening.

The 1920s were smack dab in the middle of the Prohibition Era in the United States. Provincetown, with its mass of challenging dunes at Race Point, was a haven for illegal alcohol smuggling. The Coast Guard had dispatched a 740-ton destroyer, USCGC Paulding (CG-17), captained by Lieutenant Commander John S. Baylis, to conduct rum patrols around the tip of Cape Cod.

Baylis had just investigated one schooner off Wood End and was headed back into Provincetown Harbor. In the days before radar and sonar, it was incredibly difficult for a ship to know the position of a submarine. What happened next was catastrophic.

The Paulding in 1918(Public Domain)

At about 3:37pm, while the S-4 was surfacing from a submerged run, the Paulding, which was steaming nearby, struck the sub at a speed of 18 knots. Accounts describe the telescope of the S-4 surfacing near the Paulding’s bow, less than seventy-five yards away. Ensign P. Miller, the man on watch for the Paulding, thought it was a fish stick, the marker fishermen use for their nets.

The destroyer collided with the submarine’s hull, punching holes that quickly flooded compartments. The S-4 rolled over and sank bow first within minutes to the bottom, roughly 130 feet down, less than a mile off Wood End.

The Paulding stopped and launched a lifeboat, but there were no men to be found. They all had gone down in the submarine. The ship next dropped a buoy to mark where the S-4 had gone down. To save itself from also sinking, the Coast Guard vessel had to run itself aground at Long Point with a gaping wound.

Immediately, the Coast Guard and Navy dispatched vessels, divers, and salvage specialists. Captain Adolphus Andrews, commander of the Submarine Base in New London, Connecticut, was ordered to send all available vessels to the site. Word reached President Calvin Coolidge, who expressed regret and intense anxiety over the disaster.

Divers reached the hull and established that many of the crew had moved into dry compartments. It was only a slight hope, since sealed compartments could mean survivors if rescuers could keep them supplied with air and prevent flooding.

Communication was established with men trapped in the forward torpedo room by divers and the surface commanders. The men inside replied with a series of taps on the hull, demonstrating that at least six were known to be alive there in the hours after the sinking. Time was of the essence as some of the naval officers gave the crew roughly three days to survive under the water. It was seen as a 1000-1 shot, but it was enough of a chance for the rescuers.

Unfortunately, winter storms, rough seas, strong currents, and the limited depth technology of the era repeatedly hampered rescue operations. Teams attempted to rig air hoses and pumps to the submarine and to use divers to keep lines attached and to feed air into compartments. The weather and wreckage complexity repeatedly forced pauses in the operation. Over several days, rescuers worked frantically; the men in the torpedo room continued to send taps and other signals for some period.

Ultimately, after days of fits and starts in deteriorating conditions, those survivors succumbed before divers could effectively extract them. In the end, all forty on board died. Those aboard the S-4 included officers, enlisted men, a Naval officer, and a civilian. It was noted afterward that the thirty-two men found in the engine room had likely died within hours of the collision due to either drowning or asphyxiation, thanks to carbon dioxide.

The story of the horrific collision and the loss of all on board the S-4 was nationwide news. It stunned locals who could see the buoys that had been left on the surface above the location of the doomed vessel by the submarine tender Wandank. In the end, those buoys would be used for the salvage mission.

Secretary of the Navy Curtis D. Wilbur (2nd from left) during salvage work of S-4 in March 1928. Captain Ernest King and Lieutenant Henry Hartley in charge of the salvage operation, are first and second from right, while Rear Admiral Philip Andrews (left) looks on.(Public Domain)

Despite the massive loss of life on the S-4, the vessel was not a total loss. An experienced salvage force was sent to Cape Cod. This included Captain Ernest J. King, Commander Edward Ellsberg, other senior Navy and Coast Guard officers, and local crews from Provincetown.

Over the winter and into early 1928, divers and salvage crews worked to attach lifting pontoons and cables. After months of difficult work, a successful raising and tow to the Boston Navy Yard occurred in March 1928. S-4 was later repaired and returned to service as a test and training vessel before final decommissioning in the 1930s.

The S-4 being towed to Boston Navy Yard.(Public Domain)

In the end, though it was an accident, there was blame to be placed. Lieutenant Walter J. MacGregor, commanding officer in the Naval Militia, placed the blame on Prohibition. He said in an interview in the immediate aftermath that the vessels out searching for rum runners go where they please, while the submarines stick to very specific routes. The crew of the Paulding was not blamed for the accident. It was however used as a battle cry for those looking for the repeal of Prohibition. This ended up happening in December 1933.

One of the most important legacies of the S-4 tragedy was pressure to improve submarine escape and rescue capability. The limits of the 1920s response, weather-vulnerable diving operations, no standardized submarine rescue chamber, and primitive escape equipment for individual submariners became painfully obvious. The loss of S-4, which came after an earlier disaster involving the S-51 submarine in 1925, pushed submarine professionals and the Navy bureaucracy to accelerate research into reliable rescue tools.

Two major innovations that came soon after the S-4 disaster were first the creation of the Momsen ‘lung.’ These were individual escape breathing devices. The other innovation was the McCann Submarine Rescue Chamber. This was a chamber that could be lowered to a distressed submarine in up to 850 feet of water. The chamber later proved its worth in the 1939 rescue of 33 men from USS Squalus, the first large-scale successful deep submarine rescue.

Beyond equipment, the S-4 tragedy contributed to procedural and cultural changes: improved training, standardized rescue ships and teams, new communications/telephone buoys and mating procedures, better watertight doors and bulkhead designs, and even hazard pay reforms for submariners, all measures aimed at reducing the chance that a similar accident would end in total loss.

Cape Cod paid homage to those lost on the S-4. On the tenth anniversary of the disaster, December 17, 1937, services were held at the Church of St. Mary of the Harbor. After the services, the pastor, Reverend Robert Wood Nicholson, dedicated a timber cross adorned with a pair of plaques commemorating those lives lost. It was fitting that the cross was fashioned from wood salvaged from another shipwreck off Cape Cod.

It has been nearly a century since forty men lost their lives in a horrific but seemingly unavoidable accident off Provincetown. The wooden cross, standing in the courtyard of the Church of St. Mary of the Harbor, is the only reminder of the tragedy that happened just offshore.

Cape Cod, especially the Atlantic Ocean side from Eastham to Provincetown, has a legacy of being a haven for shipwrecks. Sadly, many of those wrecks, and the people who went down on them, become lost to time. Such is the same fate of the forty men lost on the submarine S-4. If one is taking a stroll down Commercial Street, stop into the courtyard and pay respects to those lives lost in Provincetown’s forgotten maritime disaster.

Those lost aboard the S-4