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    If you were a WWII US submariner trapped below the waves in a disabled sub, this device represented a hope of escape and survival. Every officer and enlisted sailor who served on submarines in WWII had to train with this apparatus in an 80-foot deep, escape training tank at sub school.  

    In October 1944, crewmen trapped inside the USS Tang who had survived the blast and flooding inflicted by her last torpedo’s circular run, and that were also not asphyxiated by fumes from a raging battery fire, were able to use it to escape through the forward escape trunk.  

        Its inventor was the indomitable Charles ‘Swede’ Momsen, who as a young submariner in 1925, was motivated by frustration at the loss of the crew of S-51 – a submarine that was accidentally rammed and sunk with hands trapped aboard.  Momsen’s S-1 was ordered to search for her, and successfully located the oil slick, but to no use since there was no equipment for rescuing trapped submariners at the time. This incident inspired him to design a submarine rescue diving bell, which was tragically slow to gain approval within the maze of US Navy bureaucracy.  Following yet another lost submarine crew (S-4), Momsen began work on a device that would give trapped sailors the possibility of rescuing themselves – an individual rebreather that he personally tested to a depth of 200 feet in 1929.  (The diving bell was finally approved and built in 1930 with final design adjustments by LTC Al McCann, and was put to good use rescuing all 33 trapped survivors aboard Squalus in 1939.)

 

    The Momsen lung is a counterlung rebreather, initially charged with oxygen and containing a canister of soda lime, which scrubs the carbon dioxide from the user’s exhaled breath, and then the oxygen replenished air can be inhaled in the next breath.  It went through several design revisions, most recognizably going from an early two-tube system (inhale / exhale, through one-way valves) mounted on the front of the bladder to a large junction at the top with an adjustable angle mouthpiece.

 

     The example offered here is set up for wear high on the user’s chest, with the mouthpiece at a right angle. This appears to be the more common setup for wartime use- if photographs are any guide.  It is of laminated rubber with corrosion resistant finish on the metal components, marked with a Navy “US” and anchor stamp, and complete with the chest strap, attachment clip, nose clip, and mouthpiece.  The rubber all remains in remarkably excellent pliable condition.  A very rarely encountered item, and in outstanding condition!  

 

-JEFF SHRADER, BANERMAN AUCTIONS