A submarine alongside is always manned. Alongside, well, that's at a wharf. Manned? A skeleton crew to keep an eye on things, to run routines and so forth. Life on a sub, at sea and alongside, was a life of routines and orders. And lots of them. For example, opening and shutting a valve in particular was quite a process.
'Control room, fore-ends, open number one Hull Valve.'
'Fore-ends, Control room, Number one hull valve open.'
'Control room, fore-ends, shut Number One hull valve.'
'Fore-ends, Control room. Number One hull valve shut.'
And so it was done, quite the process, quite the palaver.
Anyways, back in the day, there were two submariners, both able seamen in the after ends of a boat, yup, we called them boats. The aft end, especially on an Oberon, is an interesting space: the tiniest of the seven compartments, each able to be shut off to stop the ingress of water through the boat once sealed.
In that compartment, though, 18-odd fellows lived amongst all the pipes, and dare I say two old torpedo tubes, the torpedo racks having been converted to bunks. The tubes themselves? Well, I know we stored beer in them sometimes. Anyways, I digress.
For the same reasons, to accommodate more crew, the small compartment was further cut in half by a Formica wall, to enable the racking up of more bunks.
The two able seamen were in the after mess, or one was, and the other entered with his lunch: a sandwich on a plate. An unspoken gesture of acknowledgement passed between the two. Let's call them Fred and Albert.
As Albert sat in the walled-off area of the compartment, a plate landing on the table, a book in hand, he was going to get a bit of reading in. It was a Sunday. He wasn't due to do the rounds for a few hours. He was essentially off watch onboard as a safety number. The time was his own. Not unlike Fred, who was sitting around in the walled section of the compartment.
Now, something I've not mentioned: this aft compartment had one of two large openings, a torpedo loading hatch. A big, roomy hatch that opened to the world, big enough in the case of the aft ends to thread a Mk8 torpedo or a sea mine through. Not that either of those had passed through such a hatch in a while. It was still convenient, this hatch, allowing ingress and egress of things that other, smaller hatches could not.
It was open on this day, and Albert was now sitting beneath it, the ladder down from it in front of him on the other side of the table. Then the pipe came through.
'Aft-ends, control room, shut the after-torpedo hatch.'
Fred, the closer of the two to the handpiece, slid out from behind the table he'd been sitting at and replied: 'Control room, aft-ends, shut the after-torpedo hatch.'
He then waited a moment. Albert was in there. He'd do it.
'Control room, aft-ends, after-torpedo hatch shut.'
Something tugged at Albert's mind. He'd heard the pipe. Fred had answered it. He who replies is accountable. He went back to reading his book.
'Aft-ends, control room, after-torpedo hatch shut.'
I can only imagine, moments later, when the ingress of water through the open hatch overwhelmed them, that the two of them had realised their mistake. They'd had it drilled into them since their first days of training: shared accountability was no accountability.
They died.
NOTE: the above story is a 'Fictional' conflaguration of two events, HMS Artemis (S 49), an Oberon submarine, which I know and a story of a Russian Sailor behaving this way in a book called Few Survived. Note - on HMS Artemis No one died, lessons were learnt, and the boat never went to sea again.
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