On the morning of August 26, 1988, the Peruvian Navy submarine BAP Pacocha was sailing peacefully back to the El Callao naval base after completing routine exercises.
None of the 49 crew members on board that 94-metre vessel imagined that they were about to experience a nightmare.
One of the officers on board was a young engineer lieutenant named Roger Cotrina Alvarado. He had no idea that life would put him to the test that day and that he would become a hero.
He recalled his epic for the program Outlook from the BBC World Service.
“It was around 6 pm and the submarine was sailing calmly on the surface. I had finished my dinner when we felt a crash so violent that it made me jump out of my seat and hit my head against the ceiling. “What we heard was, more than a crash, an explosion.”
All of the Pacocha’s systems began to fail. The electricity, the radio, the rudder… The ship’s commanding officers were overcome with confusion.
In those years, Peru was experiencing a conflict between the State and the Maoist guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso and the first thing Cotrina thought was that they had suffered an attack or sabotage.
“I arrived at the command room and they told me: ‘We’ve crashed.’ ‘But with what?’ I asked.”
Cotrina knew the Pacocha well. He was fond of it and had studied in detail this veteran submarine that had had a previous life as the USS Atule in the service of the United States Navy, for which it was built in the midst of World War II.
Even so I had no answers for what happened.. No time to look for them.
A fishing boat was the cause
A fire had broken out on the bow and panic was spreading on board. Sailors had put on their gas masks to protect themselves from the smoke and were running frantically amid the chaos.
No one knew it at the time, but the culprit had been a Japanese fishing boat called the Kiowa Maru. Equipped with a reinforced hull to break through Arctic ice, it had caused a two-metre hole in the engine room when it collided with the Pacocha.
The captain of the Kiowa Maru He sailed for a few more miles before stopping to assess his own damage and reporting that he had hit an object he could not identify, but He did not notify the Peruvian naval authorities, but rather his own company bosses in Lima, so the Peruvian Navy took hours to learn that the Pacocha was in serious trouble.
On board, Cotrina felt the submarine begin to sink.
“He leaned back. I felt like she was on a horse that bends its hind legs before jumping.”
He wanted to run to the control room to alert the captain, Daniel Nieva, that the submarine was sinking, but he found that water was already flooding the interior of the submarine through the main hatch.
The waves were flooding the stern, and the bow was now the only part of the deck that was not underwater.
Some of the sailors began to jump into the water to try to save themselves by swimming.. It was not easy. They paddled desperately to escape the suction caused by the sinking of the submarine, already mortally wounded.
Cotrina was about to do it too, but something made her change her mind.
“I was thinking ‘what should I do? I need to save myself, but I am an officer and I have the responsibility to help those left inside save themselves. I can’t abandon them.’
“I prayed and asked God to save my life if I acted bravely. And I decided to climb back into the submarine. That turned out to be the most important decision I have ever made in my life.“he recalled, years later.
He went back into the submarine and managed to reach the control room, where he informed the captain of the situation.
He ordered him to retrace his steps and give instructions to everyone else to abandon the ship.
The submarine was now tilting so much that it was becoming increasingly difficult to stay upright.
“Then things started falling. A typewriter, metal tools, the kitchen dishes, everything started falling and hitting. It was like being on board the Titanic“.
Amid the hail of objects, Cotrina advanced toward the bow and the torpedo room, shouting the captain’s orders. By then, the only light was the red alarm that came on intermittently.
It was the signal for the so-called Alpha closure. Those who had not made it out had to stay where they were, make sure to batten down all the hatches, and wait.
The objective of this emergency measure is to minimize the entry of water and ensure the conservation of a very scarce asset in a sinking submarine: the Oxigen.
“I was heading back to the torpedo room and other crew members were joining me. We were closing all the hatches in our path,” Cotrina recalls.
“I told them to put on their life jackets and get ready to abandon ship. By then it was impossible to stand up.”
He helped four out, but then seawater began to pour through the hatch.
“I realized that from that moment on it would be impossible to escape.”
An electrician who was trying to escape had been trapped. Neither he could get out nor could the hatch close with him stuck.
Cotrina pushed him out and then closed the hatch.
A powerful jet of water launched him violently and he hit the edge of the chamber containing the torpedoes. He thought that was the end.
“Everything went dark and I saw my whole life flash before my eyes,” she said. “I felt myself leaving my body and then I saw that famous light.”
From the outside, the sailors who had had time to abandon the ship saw the bow in a completely vertical position before finally disappearing under bubbling water.
“A lieutenant who saw the submarine sink later told me that he was witnessing the death of all of us who had remained inside.”
As he struggled to get up after the blow he had received, amidst the roar of the water that was entering the interior of the submarine, He saw the hatch slam shut. Cotrina has no doubts: “That was a miracle.”
Barely seven minutes had passed since the collision with the Japanese fishing boat.
When he regained consciousness, the young officer tried to keep a cool head and understand the situation.
He realized that he was the highest-ranking officer in charge and the entire crew depended on him.
“I thought the captain had managed to escape, but later I learned that he had died in the shipwreck.”. He had climbed towards the main hatch to try to close it, but the sea engulfed him and he drowned when he tried to escape.”
For Cotrina, it was a heroic act that gave the others a chance to survive by preventing more water from entering the submarine.
In the torpedo room, Cotrina began to calculate how long it would take for the water pressure to cause the total collapse of the submarine’s structure and the death of all its occupants.
He asked his subordinates how deep they were. They replied, 42 metres. He asked again and the answer was the same.
That meant that the submarine had reached the bottom of the seaso the pressure had ceased to be a threat.
The officers gathered the crew in the torpedo room to take stock. There were 22 of them. The rest had managed to escape or perished with the ship.
“God had given me the opportunity to save myself. Now my crew had to have the same opportunity,” he said to himself.
Cotrina, who had become the commanding officer, gathered his subordinates who had been trapped in the submarine like him and gave them a message of optimism. “They will rescue us,” he told them.
The crew welcomed his words of encouragement. “That’s how you talk, captain,” they told him, but he knew that the problems were not over.
Many of the men were trained in service tasks. They were cooks, assistants, etc. None were members of the special forces and nine of them didn’t even know how to swim.
They were 42 meters underwater, oxygen was running out and the submarine had several open water leaks.
Some decisive calculations
They had no drinking water or food, and were all crowded together in the torpedo room in near darkness.
Under such adverse circumstances, engineer Cotrina began to do the math. He spent more than four hours immersed in calculations that only he understood.
The sailors thought he had gone crazy, but he knew they were crucial to everyone’s lives. He was trying to determine the exact location of the Pacocha and how many hours of oxygen they had.
He concluded that The submarine was so flooded that it was impossible to refloat it.. Your only chance of survive was to abandon ship before oxygen ran out.
“If we were 42 meters deep, it was possible to escape.”
But his companions did not agree. They remembered that during some exercises they had seen a sailor die trying to float just 15 meters deep. They preferred to wait for the Peruvian Navy to rescue them.
Roger Cotrina knew that time was not on his side.
A few more hours passed, with the crew trying to remain calm. Until this was interrupted by some blows to the hull of the ship.
“At first I thought that [los ruidos] They were caused by the submarine sinking to the seabed, but they were too rhythmic.” It seemed as if someone was hitting the hull of the submarine.
Between hope and disbelief, the castaways responded by hitting the hull as well.
The joy overflowed when they got a reaction to their answer.
“The Navy divers had found us and, upon hearing noise inside the submarine, they understood that we were alive,” he said.
“We were bursting with joy. I was shouting to them, ‘See, guys?! I told you that you would find us!’”
They then began to communicate with the rescuers. Cotrina sent a message through the submarine’s pressurization tube.
He explained the situation to his commanders. He told them how many men were on the Pacocha and asked that the divers bring them supplies and, most critically, bottles of oxygen to breathe.
They also received a written response.The Peruvian authorities had asked the United States for collaboration, which promised to send sophisticated equipment that would allow them to be removed. of the submarine.
But Cotrina knew that the arrival of that material to Peru and their cargo on a suitable ship that would transport them to the area of the sinking could take days and they didn’t have that much time.
Cotrin He had calculated that they would have oxygen for 48 hours, but only seven had passed and they were already beginning to have difficulty breathing.
“By the time the Americans arrived they were only going to find corpses,” Cotrina feared.
Shortly after, things got even more complicated.
“The man on guard told me reported that there was a fire in the battery room.”
Cotrina ordered the compartment to be sealed and told the sailor not to tell anyone what happened to avoid panic.
He watched through the glass as the fire was dying out from lack of oxygen. But that was the same oxygen he and his men needed to stay alive.
There was only air left in the torpedo room.
The last chance
“The fire changed everything. By 6am, I was having trouble breathing again and decided that we had to start preparing for our departure.”
He gathered the crew to explain to them how critical the situation was and that their only chance of survival was through evacuation. He also sent a message informing his decision to his superiors on the surface.
“They replied that I was authorized to act at my discretion based on the circumstances on the submarine.”
There was no alternative anymore. They had to swim out. 42 meters at full lung through the cold waters of the Peruvian Pacific..
The instinctive reaction would have been to paddle desperately until reaching the surface, but things were more complicated and Cotrina knew how to keep a cool head to explain to his men that, despite the urgency, they had to proceed calmly.
“We had to wear life jackets, but they had to be inflated only a third of their capacity. There was a danger that if the vest didn’t have enough air, it wouldn’t be enough to reach the surface, but if it was fully inflated, we would float too fast and our lungs might burst.
“We had to put in exactly the right amount of air so that the vest would slowly inflate as we surfaced,” Cotrina recalled.
He ordered that the men would leave the ship in groups of between three and five. The first one entered the evacuation chamber. The others watched with anguish when Cotrina ordered the floodgates to be opened to let the water in and watched them leave with a heavy heart. Others on board did not believe in the plan.
“’What are you doing, captain? He’s going to kill them,’ they told me.”
Cotrina had agreed that the rescue divers would hit the hull five times if the members of the first group reached the surface alive. Otherwise, it would mean that they had not succeeded.
A few eternal minutes passed in a heavy silence. Until… knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. The divers’ knocks confirmed it. They had succeeded.
There was no time to lose. It was the others’ turn.
A second group evacuated. Then a third. They decided that Cotrina would go out second to last, so he could guide the rescue of the last three sailors from the surface.
“I took a deep breath. Ten seconds passed, then 20, then 30, and I could see the sunlight getting closer and closer. Finally, I could see flashes of light and clearly see the surface, but I felt like I wasn’t going to make it.”
Almost out of breath, he finally surfaced. “It was like breathing for the first time.” and the best breath of air I have ever breathed in my life.”
Lieutenant Cotrina was immediately transferred to receive medical attention.
He was suffering from an acute case of the so-called decompression syndromea dangerous illness that afflicts divers who emerge too quickly without giving their lungs time to expel the nitrogen accumulated during the dive at the proper rate.
“Everything hurt and I could barely speak, but I could only think about the three who were still downstairs.”
Finally, 24 hours after the collision with the Japanese fishing boat, the last three crew members of the Pacocha reached the surface and were rescued.
The “miracle” of Pacocha had been consummated.
The captain and second in command on the Japanese fishing boat were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served prison terms in Peru before being extradited to Japan.
Lieutenant Cotrina spent 23 days hospitalized. Once recovered, he returned to service in the Peruvian Navy.
Nine of the submarine’s 49 crew members died in the shipwreck, including the captain.
The rest never forgot his feat.
* You can listen to the complete Outlook program with the story of Pacocha and Lieutenant Cotrina here.
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