You have to keep in mind that at this point the S-49 was no longer a Navy ship. It was a privately-owned floating exhibit officially owned by the National Marine Exhibiting Company, which was basically William M. Keevey and Francis J. Chrestensen, a couple of Revere, Massachusetts politicians (they were also a shipfitter/inspector/instructor and a salesman, respectively). The sub they purchased had been stripped by the Navy before being put out to scrap. There were holes bored in the Diesel cylinders, the batteries had all been removed, the periscopes (three of them) taken away, the deck gun removed, the torpedoes taken away, and the diving controls locked. What they had was not so much a submarine as a submarine-shaped float that could no longer propel itself or dive. It rode high out of the water without the weight of all those lead Plante batteries.
So they had it towed up to a shipyard in Chelsea where it was fixed up for show. They took out several bulkheads to make it easier to walk around. They took off the torpedo-loading hatches for and aft (the S-49 had a rearward-facing torpedo tube, in addition to four forward-facing ones) and had nice, big stairways put in them, so customers could go in and out without having to twist themselves through hatches. They had it all painted and greased and polished up for show. But they couldn’t disguise the lack of periscopes or the deck gun.
For the former, they simply said that periscopes were a.) expensive and b.) covered by super-secret patents, so they didn’t have any on board. Sorry. Later on they added the excuse that, if they had a periscope, it would slow down the tours, because everyone would want to look through it.
As for the deck gun, the glaringly vacant gun deck with its unoccupied mounting hardware showed to even to those unfamiliar with submarines that something significant was missing. This hadn’t bothered them for the more than a year that they had the sub on exhibit at Point of Pines, Revere, but evidently they wanted to remedy this when they took the sub “on the road” to the big 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. They might have gotten it even sooner, but there isn’t enough photographic evidence to tell, and no documentary evidence says anything about it. None of the photos of the sub at Point of Pines shows a deck gun. It’s possible that they put one on when they took the sub to display it at the Warren St. Bridge in Boston (near the current Boston Garden). There’s a drawing of the sub advertising it, though, and that doesn’t show a deck gun. It appears that there might be something there in the photograph showing the S-49 with its tug, the Honeywell, in Boston harbor just before they left. But the photo is taken from an angle that makes it hard to see.
So where did it come from? Maybe it’s a mockup, made out of random hardware and pipes. Maybe it was given or loaned to them by one of Keevey’s Navy Yard contacts. If it was an old Maxim “Pom Pom” gun, that makes some sense. That gun was definitely an old model, predating the Spanish-American war. It was used on several Navy vessels (but not submarines), so it was somewhat plausible. They didn’t put the S-40 on exhibition on her trip up to the St. Lawrence, up the river, then through the Great Lakes (except for an ill-advised and disastrous showing in Ogdensburg NY, on the St. Lawrence. This was rapidly cancelled when the crowd got much bigger than anticipated)
The very first photo of the S-49 at the Chicago Fair seems to show something where the gun was placed, but it’s too poor to get a good view of it. By two days later it was gone, and appears in no more photographs.
So why was it taken away? Several possibilities:
1.) It was only a bogus mock-up made our of pipes bolted together to givde the impression of a real gun. But once they started letting paying customers come on board and see it close up, its nature would be immediately evident. So it had to go.
2.) If it was a real gun, maybe it was only a “loaner” – somebody had to get it from Boston to Chicago, and the S-49 was already going that way.
3.) The Naval officers at the Chicago Fair objected to the improper, non-submarine-based Maxim gun being on the sub. There were several Naval liaisons at the Fair, and they frequently clashed with the S-49’s owners (especially Chrestensen) about all sorts of topics, ranging from inaccurate claims in the shipboard spiels to the guides’ uniforms looking too much like Navy uniforms to the personal conduct of the guides to other things. They might have insisted on the removal of an inappropriate gun. One military man I spoke to said that, if there were such a gun on board, they might even have confiscated it as US Government property. I think, though, if that were the case I’d find complaints about such action in the Chicago Fair papers, and there aren’t any.
So why was it removed? I don’t know. There are several possibilities, but deciding between them depends, in part, upon the nature of the gun that they had on the deck of the S-49. Which I don’t know. Hence my starting this thread.
