Chamber Divers

November 1, 2023

Of the many lives put at risk during D-Day operations, one small group included scientific researchers inventing mini-submersibles which they tested in pressure tanks in London--during the Blitz. Their story, filled with maverick characters and including a romance, is based on newly declassified information. Lance, a biomedical engineer, knows the mechanics, having built underwater equipment for the SEALs. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from January 15, 2024
Biomedical engineer Lance (In the Waves) delivers a riveting account of the daredevil Allied researchers who made advances in underwater warfare possible during WWII. Drawing on previously classified documents, Lance profiles academics led by geneticist J.B.S. Haldane at University College London who unraveled the scientific mysteries of diving for the Royal Navy, often using themselves as test subjects inside decompression chambers to simulate the effect of deep underwater pressure on the human body. Researchers frequently paid a heavy toll; one scientist carefully mapped the damage to his own lungs after volunteering to be a subject in an underwater blast test. As research progressed and diving became more tenable, underwater attacks proliferated on both sides of the conflict; Lance narrates numerous clashes, including a 1941 raid against the British fleet in Alexandria, Egypt, by Italian “torpedo riders” (divers literally astride torpedoes that they floated into position). Divers eventually played a crucial role in the 1944 Allied D-Day invasion of Europe, both providing reconnaissance and removing underwater obstacles prior to the amphibious landing. Lance remarks that most of these divers “would never know where their oxygen and guidance came from or at what risk it had been obtained.” Propulsively narrated and full of moments of astonishing sacrifice, this brings a remarkable history to light.

March 1, 2024
A fine history of the discoveries that allow humans to work safely underwater and the brilliant British scientist who led the effort. Former Navy engineer Lance, author of In the Waves, has an irresistible subject in J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964), an eccentric polymath and central figure in the 1920s genetics revolution. His accomplishments in a variety of fields are so numerous that his role in pioneering underwater research is often forgotten. Lance begins with the 1939 sinking of the British submarine Thetis. There was no explosion, and although the crew possessed breathing apparatuses, only a few escaped. Royal Navy leaders appealed to the famous Haldane to learn why. At the time, he was director of a university genetics laboratory, but at the beginning of World War II, he transferred his focus to underwater research. Haldane's experiments took place at a London factory that manufactured breathing equipment and possessed a hyperbaric chamber. In the first half of the book, Lance emphasizes the experiments, the subjects of which were the scientists themselves, who occupied the chamber to experience the pressures and varying gas concentrations encountered by submariners. Many suffered dizziness, headaches, and somnolence but also vomiting, seizures, bleeding, collapsed lungs, and broken bones. Some, Haldane included, never fully recovered, but the results dispelled a great deal of ignorance. At high pressures, nitrogen causes confusion, and pure oxygen becomes poison, so carbon dioxide management may be the key. In the second half, the author describes how these discoveries affected the war, mostly during the June 1944 Allied landing at Normandy, preceded by months during which scouts approached the heavily guarded coastline under water and surveyed the beaches to map defenses, obstacles, and minefields, avoiding the disasters that marred earlier landings. Throughout, Lance makes good use of archival material that remained classified until 2001. A fascinating, hair-raising account of groundbreaking research.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 1, 2024
In this bracing history of an obscure but significant aspect of the D-Day landing, Lance (In the Waves, 2020) combines a staggering amount of research with an array of compelling personalities to tell an unforgettable story. In prose both gripping and erudite, she takes readers back to the disastrous attempted 1942 Allied amphibious landing in Dieppe, France (terming this a ""massacre"" would not be an exaggeration). She then reveals the story of the scientists whose work transformed how such landings would be conducted going forward, contributing enormously to the later, crucial, success at Normandy. The groundbreaking development of breathing apparatus would be critical to the so-called Allied "human minesweepers" who cleared underwater obstacles. Beginning with the maverick, sometimes outrageous, polymath J. B. S. Haldane, whose father had spent decades studying respiratory physiology and instituted the use of canaries in coal mines, Lance introduces the brilliant and eclectic men and women (many of them German Jewish refugees) who experimented on themselves in a race to develop critical technology. Poring over declassified documents, teasing out family stories, and tirelessly tracking down every clue, Lance gifts readers with a big, brash history that will have broad appeal.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.