Author: Peter Maas
Publisher: Harper Collins, New York 1999 259 pp

“At the sudden cry from Kuney that the engine rooms were flooding, everyone in the control room froze, hypnotized by the Christmas Tree board. It was still unaccountably green. This could not be happening!”

Peter Maas, describing the flooding of submarine SQUALUS in ‘The Terrible Hours’. Peter Maas writes in a straightforward, journalistic style describing the first successful submarine rescue by Charles ‘Swede’ Momsen (inventor of the Momsen Lung) in May of 1939. The book provides a good picture of the technical and political difficulties encountered by Momsen prior to and during the rescue of the crewmen of SQUALUS. The book is not a detailed historical narrative, but is riveting reading.

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