Sea Control - Sea Control 551 - Chamber Divers with Dr. Rachel Lance

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Links:Chamber Divers – The Untold Story of the D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever, by Rachel Lance, Dutton, 2024.Rachel Lance Twitter: @UnderwaterLanceThis episode was edited by Andrew Frame.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Dr. Rachel Lance joins me today to discuss her book, Chamber Divers, The Untold Story of the D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever. This episode was edited and produced by Andrew Frame. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, we're welcoming Dr. Rachel Lance, and we're going to discuss her new book, Chamber Divers, the untold story of the D-Day scientists who changed special operations forever. So, Rachel, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Hi. All right. Well, the short version is I'm a big nerd for underwater science. I have a PhD in biomedical engineering, and I specialize in patterns of injury and trauma. So I started out in the scientific world looking at the way the lungs function, looking at the way we breathe, which obviously becomes really important underwater. And I worked for the U.S. Navy for nine years as a civil servant doing exactly that, building

underwater breathing systems and examining that question of how we can get operators underwater better, safer, longer. Now I am a part-time writer and part-time scientist still in the underwater field, but no longer with the civil service. And I wrote this book as sort of an explanation of how that field started. But critically, it was after the discovery that the field was related to the landing of the T-Day. And that had been a surprise to me too. Yes. And it should be noted for listeners, like you're literally in a car on your way to Normandy right now is recording this. So very excited to hear what comes of, you're going to do some field research. Well, it's more of the experience and it just, you know, in case I know the word, I did

pull over. I wrote this book and researched the story mostly during the pandemic. And at that time I was working at the Duke University Hospital and I was in North Carolina and obviously travel was more complicated if not impossible. So I never really got the opportunity to go to the D.D. beaches while writing this story, even though I would have liked to. So I relied a huge amount on historical footage. I watched countless hours of videos of the landings,

of photographs, modern day video tours, things like that. But I didn't get the opportunity to physically go and have that experience myself yet. Yes, I'm on my way to do that this week, finally. is a pretty big deal for me. I'm very excited for you. I look forward to seeing you write about the experience. But as a reminder to listeners, all opinions stay our own, not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. Before we kick off the more formal part, too, I want to ask about your writing style, because I've read probably hundreds of pieces of

work by academic writers at this point. And if we were playing Never Have I Ever, like, never have I ever laughed out loud on multiple occasions at choices of metaphors and analogies that you use throughout the book to the point where my wife is actually like, what are you reading? That looks like a serious book. I didn't keep laughing. I was like, yeah, I don't know. I don't get it. This is a very different tone of writing that I find from most academics. So where's that come from? Facilitating social awkwardness is always my goal. If you can come up with one off the top your head. I'd be fascinated to know which ones got you. But a lot of that comes from just the reality of living science and the reality of living these things day to day. When people

talk about military history or people talk about military science, we tend to give it this extreme seriousness because we as safe spectator learning about this story from a couch or a car know that it's possibly going to involve injury or death but human beings when you're actually living an experience like that and and i'm not talking about the military experience i have no personal say in that but at least with theory or science even if you're in a science where it's high risk someone could get injured someone could get dot to die or explore people who might die you still have your normal human reaction to things which is gallows humor and the need to bring some kind of levity to your day-to-day because you can't think about the worst case scenario every minute of every day.

It's just not a sustainable mentality. And I wanted to bring that kind of feeling to the writing too, where you have this group of scientists, they're working on these incredibly serious tasks. They're in the middle of London. It's being bombed. It's the active time period of the blitz. They're doing the experiments on themselves. And so almost every single one of them, I think there's one exception, got very seriously injured by the end of the testing. And we're talking repeated seizures. We're talking broken necks, broken back, dislocated jaws, things like this that are incredibly serious. And they kept going. So every day they showed up to work and they knew today could be the day I rupture my lung. Today could be the day I break my neck.

And, but at the same time, they had jokes in their lab notebooks. They were bringing that humanity, even when they were living this incredibly serious experience. And I wanted to incorporate that feeling into the writing so that people could understand what it was really like to do this kind of a project. Well, if that was your goal mission accomplished, and I know that you can't necessarily speak to it, but I can definitely speak to the military experience part of it. And there is a lot of those times when you're doing something that is physically dangerous or dangerous to the platform that you're working on, where it's just you and four or five other people sort of sitting there awkwardly, and it's either silence or someone's going to say something. And usually that is when the gallows humor comes out because someone just is uncomfortable sitting in the silence. Job well done on the humor front. I will tell you, if you're looking at it as like, ah, another dry academic tone about history, that is not what you were going to find. This is enjoyable read for the humor on its own, and you get all the history on top of it. When I look at paintings of venerated old scientists up on walls, I'm just like, you know, when they were in the middle of their dirtiest, grimiest, hardest experiment, you know that at some point this guy made a fart joke. It's the reality of being a human being. Who were the Haldanes and how did they solve the problem of decompression sickness? So you have a father-son duo here.

John Scott Haldane is his father. John Burden Sanderson Haldane is his son. Now, John Scott later described that he regretted naming his son so similarly. So I'm going to refer to the son as JBS and the father is John Scott. That's how they referred to themselves in life. So as JBS is a little kid, his father, John Scott, is tasked by the British Navy to work on this problem of decompression sickness. As they're building bridges in the late 1800s across the world, including the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, they're seeing people come up from inside the caissons, which are these pressurized gas structures at the base of the bridge underwater.

They're bringing them back up to the surface, to the dry, and they're all of a sudden getting these full-body extreme pains in their joints. They're coughing up blood. They're having all kinds of crazy symptoms. At the Brooklyn Bridge is when they start to die. They get past a certain depth of the water, and they start to die. Now, this problem quickly becomes known as the Benz. We now know it as decompression sickness, or TPS. And John Scott Haldane was one of the first people to really apply math to this problem.

And he said, well, if you're at 90 feet underwater, and we're saying that you're breathing in more nitrogen there, because nitrogen is what usually causes it. It can be any gas, but nitrogen is the most common because it's such a large part of air. Then coming up slowly to 89 feet is not really going to help you reduce that very much, is it? So he figured out the math to do what we now call stage decompression. This is the same way that military divers, recreational divers, literally every diver still decompress this today. And he proved this in the early 1900s off the coast of Scotland. And of course, his son JBS, who's being raised in this community of science, was there with

him. So little kid JBS gets to put on an adult-sized diving dry suit. And it leaked like crazy. But he said he was like, I didn't want to say anything about the leaks because I thought they'd pull me out of the water. And as little as him, early 1900s, he gets the Gulf for his first dive. So that revolutionized diving. It revolutionized decompression, which we use for everything, including high altitude pilots, outer space, astronauts decompress, things like that. But then as the war starts to build up, John Scott Haldane dies in 1938.

So right when Hitler is really starting to rumble, the Allied navies are starting to build submarines as much as possible because World War I, the U-boats have just demolished everyone in the ocean, especially because England is going to be so involved in this. They know that water warfare, sea warfare is going to be so key. But then the summer of 1939, each of the three major allied countries that, you know, I don't want to dismiss the rest of the allied countries, but U.S., Great Britain, and France all have three submarine sinkings within three weeks of each other. So we have the U.S. of Squalus that goes down in summer 1939. We have the British HMS Cetus, which goes down in summer 1939. And we have the French Stingy. What's even worse is all three of these submarines go down in training accidents. These are not combat.

These are not, there was no, apparently there was nothing. So they just sink in the normal course of their operation. And from the British HMS Cetus, there were 103 people on board. They had submarine escape apparatuses, which were kind of these rudimentary devices that they had modified from King Rescue. Only four managed to get out. So the Allied Navy had this collective, like, oh, hell moment. All three of them realized that they'd built these submarines, and they have no idea how to survive really long-term in them, how to survive if things go wrong, how to survive underwater and escape. So since John Scott Haldane, their main go-to underwater guy, has died, they ping his son, JBS.

JBS immediately sees the problem. His first thing he does is he calls up some veteran buddies, because at this point, JBS has been in two words himself. he's been in world war one he's been in the spanish civil war as a volunteer him and his veteran buddies climb inside a hyperbaric chamber which is an enclosed like it's usually steel container they run a series of experiments on themselves jbs goes to court at the military hearing for the sinking of the fetus the next day and with his head still throbbing from the experiments he'd just done on himself, nocturnally through the night before, he performs the math on the stand in front of the Royal Navy to tell them what they would have had to have

on their submarine, the equipment they would have had, the gas processing stuff, in order to just save the rest of the crew, which is incredible. Math with a migraine in front of people? I can't do that. From that moment on, J.B. S. Haldane, this kid who grew up in early submarines, this kid who grew up diving, who's Now, as an adult, just like a mathematician and a geneticist, he becomes the Royal Navy's go-to guy. And the Royal Navy starts working on the underwater problem.

The U.S. military is working on the aviation problem. And they're really just trading from that point forward. So how did the Royal Navy respond to sort of the revelations on the stand and then what came after? They kind of had this desperation where they were like, you're right. We don't know what we're doing. And all of a sudden, in the records, the records of what they were asking for from Haldane and his lab group. So he immediately starts recruiting. He's recruiting his other geneticists who are working there.

He became a really active participant in bringing refugees over from Europe, like scientist refugees over from Europe. So they start to get involved. And the Admiralty just keeps asking them for more and more about underwater knowledge. And so they immediately start testing it all as a self to try and answer the admiralty questions. And then at one point, Haldane suggests to the admiralty, and I don't know if he's the only one who deserves credit for this, but he made this early suggestion or early in the war. And he was like, hey, we're doing all this testing for this submarine escape apparatus. Have you ever considered letting people use these to dive underwater on purpose? Because before that, diving had always required like a Cuba Gooding Jr., Men of Honor surface supply helmet and a surface ship. So DBS Haldane is one of the first people who's like, hey, we can cut this tether and we can do the free swimming if we get this science right. And from that point forward, you see them start to really work on that goal. So you kind of hinted at both of these, but how did Haldane build his team of scientists and then what sort of personal risks were they running as part of their research? Because the personal risk piece was the most shocking part of the entire book.

Oh, really? Yeah. They were in a lot of personal rest because they didn't understand what was happening. Like, that's the whole point of science. Anytime you start a science experiment after, you know, high school chem lab, you're doing it because you don't know what the outcome will be. So this team was originally geneticists who were part of his scientific laboratory at University College London. As the war came on, they basically were like, look, war is not the time for fundamental research. But when we know how to tackle a problem, give us your problems, we're going to listen to them. And that's exactly how they started working with the Admiralty on these problems of diving. So Haldane was pretty gender egalitarian. So a lot of the people in his lab were women. There were a couple of female PhDs in there. And then as the danger to the scientists became clear as well, he became really active in bringing over scientific refugees. So all of these people who had come to London for various reasons, escaping Hitler, whether it was a woman-friendly lab, things like that, they all immediately agreed and volunteered and said, yes, this is absolutely what we should be working on. And they all became test subjects in these dangerous experiments. So some of the things they were looking at were, of course, decompression thickness. They were looking at some of the first guidelines specific for explosive ordnance divers, meaning they wanted to find new ways to bring EOD personnel to the surface as quickly as possible. So they were testing rapid ascent. They were testing the first oxygen-rich gas mixture.

And they were also looking at the maximum depth you could go to with oxygen. Now we know the phenomenon of oxygen toxicity pretty well. Anyone who's a diver will understand this. Anyone who's a military diver will have had it hammered into them and will attest that you can get deeper anyway, because it's kind of like you have a good day and everything is fine until at one moment it isn't. So this group was really some of the first people, if not the first people, to discover that oxygen can cause seizures underwater. So the first person to experience that in water was Elizabeth Derman. She was the group secretary, and she seized so hard that she literally crushed one of the vertebrae in her neck. And then later that day, another scientist went in and ran the exact same protocol because in data, in science, you need repetition. So they knew what was possible, but they knew that if they didn't do it on themselves in the lab, where their colleagues would pull them out of the water and they had a doctor on site,

then the military personnel were going to have to try it for the first time in the field under fire. So they opted to go first themselves in the lab. What problems specific to D-Day were Haldane and his team attempting to solve, and then how did they go about it? The first problem they needed to solve was the problem with beach scouting. So a beach landing on the Scala T-Day has never been done successfully before at this point, right? And so one of the things that some of the niche little people in the Admiralty want to do is they want to build miniature submarines. Now, remember, we just learned in 1939 that we don't really know what we're doing in terms of keeping people alive in a submarine. And when it comes to breathing gas, the smaller you make the space, the more difficult it is to make it survivable, right?

Anyone can survive in an enclosed building for quite some time. But all of a sudden you put someone inside of a plastic bag, you have a much bigger breathing gas problem that happens a lot more quickly. So this is very true with the miniature sun, right? So Haldane and the rest of this lab were putting themselves inside these enclosed volumes and determining what they needed in terms of oxygen supply and carbon dioxide removal in order to let the submariners stay inside these teeny tiny volumes for long enough to escape notice by Germans during the day. What they ended up developing were called the X-Craft. These are phenomenal submarines of a class called Midget Submarines. They're about 40 feet long, and they're at most 15 feet tall. They were designed to glide over the top of minefields, and there's really not enough space for modern-sized people to stand up in these. They're incredibly small. But because of this group's experimentation, they knew what types of gas processing stuff they needed to have inside for them to go lurk off the beaches of Normandy. So in the months before D-Day, and this is in the book too, these X-Crafts get sent over with beach scouts, and they're essentially laying sleeper submarines off the coast of Normandy in the months before D-Day and coming up to the surface only at night. And then the personnel would crawl ashore, they would take soil samples, they would measure the beach, they would bring this all back to England, and then they had a group of scientists and, like, soil experts and machinery experts who would make sure that, like, the tanks would run on this beach, who would make sure that the boats could get to a safe distance, right?

So we see, and then these X-Craft marks those beaches for the British and the Canadians on the morning of D-Day itself, which is why they had perfect aim and we, the Americans at Omaha, unfortunately did. Where did the allies see the results of the team's work when they landed? It's really hard to kind of what if, what would have happened if they didn't have this, right? But I think, personally, the difference with the aircraft is evident with Omaha and Utah versus the other three beaches that had proper marking. Both Omaha and Utah, the troops missed their landing beaches because the weather was difficult. Now, at Utah, they got lucky. They happened to miss the beach in a way that put them under less German fire. But at Omaha, infamously, they landed under several of the major batteries.

And that meant that that beach had over tripled the casualty rate of another beach like Sword. So that made a huge difference. And then afterward, you see these divers, these free swimming divers who are wearing this equipment that's been tested entirely by the UCL lab. All of the divers had no idea. They're using custom gas mixture that, again, has been developed and tested by the UCL lab. The divers have no idea. And they're who are disposing of the obstacle. like i think we've all seen this beach scene in saving private ryan right like the hedgehogs and

the obstacles are infamous and i feel kind of foolish admitting this but i'll be very open i never thought about how they eliminated those after the landing in order to make like a bigger safe passage for the huge amounts of people and material they needed to bring on shore it turned out a lot of that was diverse um at least for the british because they would send them down. They'd wrap strategic pieces of ordinance around those obstacles. They'd get a safe distance away, and then they'd blow them into pieces so that they would collapse on the seabed and clear that passage. They also had EOD teams in the water. These are incredibly early EOD teams. These are on custom-breeding gas mixtures. So the influence of these scientists

is massive, but what's fascinating to me is we never hear about it because these dive teams had not a single diving-related casualty. They were doing this kind of free swimming diving for the first time. This is before Jacques Cousteau. And they had not one casualty. And so we don't hear about them because we focus on the casualties.

So to me, this is the perfect example of everything you dream of as a military scientist, right? You want to have done your job so well that nobody even notices that there was a problem there in the first place. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. Again, for listeners, the book is Chamber Divers, the untold story of the D-Day scientists

who changed special operations forever. You'll find a link in the show notes. Cannot recommend it strongly enough, both again for the humor and then the harrowing stories told about the scientists here. But Rachel, where can we find you online and what are you working on next?

Is this going to be optioned to Netflix for a 10-part series? i will be honest i have no idea what i'm doing in terms of optioning and things like that i would love to see some of this as visual media like as a film or as whatever but i'm 100 leaving that from an agent of publishers because they know what they're doing i don't so um i'm just gonna happily keep writing books um yeah i'm on i'm on twitter and instagram at underwater land and i'm I'm working on a third book where it's not published yet, but we're going to be going to World War I for that one. There will still be plenty of naval activity.

Actually, well, I hope you'll come back and talk to us once that book is out again. But thank you again for joining us. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time. I walked up to the barroom counter. Way high, boogie in the alley. There I met with greasy honey. Boogie down the shimbo now. Now, so help me, Bob-I, put it in the alley.

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Why am I bullied in the alley? Help me, Bob, I'm bullied in the alley. Put it out of your mouth.