IN MEMORY

André Galerne
1926-2008
André Galerne was born in Paris in 1926. At the age of 16, with France under Nazi occupation, he joined the resistance. In August 1944, shortly after the allies took Paris, André’s group ambushed a heavily-armed German convoy conveying a colonel to Saint Germain-en Laye, outside Paris, to take command of a tank division whose commanding officer had been killed. The resistance knew the Germans were preparing a counter-attack. The colonel had to be stopped, whatever the cost.

Less than a minute after André’s group opened fire, half the Germans were dead. Two SS troopers jumped down to divert the attackers’ fire, but the truck was badly damaged. The survivors lumbered on, to be finished off by another resistance group. The colonel never reached the tank division.

The next morning the surrounding area was crawling with SS. Betrayed by a former school friend, André and four of his companions were taken away, tortured, and then marched out to be shot. The Germans, worried their prisoners would run, told them to take off their shoes. As the firing squad lined up, the boys knelt down as if to untie their shoelaces—and ran. One was brought down in a hail of bullets, the others escaped. André got away with a head wound and a grenade fragment in his bottom.

For his wartime service, he was made a knight of the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration.

After the war, André served briefly in the French air force (he studied aeronautical engineering during the war but was unable to finish his degree because of his resistance activities) and it was then that he became closely involved with the Boy Scouts. Teenagers and young adults who had been taught to kill in the resistance had trouble adjusting to peacetime society. Many were Boy Scouts. To channel their energies in a positive direction the Scouts instituted special activities such as river canoeing and mountain climbing. André set up a cave exploration group.

Before long, the group had broken several world records for cave penetration. Often subterranean lakes and rivers blocked the way. Diving equipment became a necessity. The group’s first dive was with a carburetor regulator from a truck: the original “demand regulator” developed by Emile Gagnan – which, in modified form, became the Cousteau-Gagnan aqualung. The membrane, made of fabric, was not made to go under water, so the Scouts waterproofed it with aluminum paint.
With such primitive equipment they explored caves and siphons never entered before, gaining a reputation for audacity in the process.

In 1952, encouraged by the success of a project for the French national electricity company done in exchange for two aqualungs, André and seven friends started a cooperative company. They called themselves Société Générale de Travaux Maritimes et Fluviaux, using the acronym SOGETRAM for short. For an office, the friends bought a sunken barge, raised it, tied it to a Paris quay and slowly rebuilt it.

As word of SOGETRAM spread, business mushroomed. Among the more nerve-racking assignments was the repair of a utility tunnel under the Seine at Rouen that caved in and flooded part way through construction. The night he signed the contract André was so scared he was unable to sleep.

Not only was the tunnel filled with mud, it was littered with abandoned dump trucks, buckets, rails and pickaxes. Working blind in water that had the consistency of thick soup, the divers had first to clear the debris, swimming in and out as big chunks of earth rained down on them, then plug the leak with sandbags and concrete. Five of the divers almost died when their hoses parted, saved only by the bail-out bottles André had ordered.

In 1958, André set up a new branch, International Underwater Contractors (IUC), in Montreal. In 1962 he moved to New York, taking with him a French-Canadian who spoke English. André was already president of SOGETRAM and IUC Canada, as well as IUC Venezuela, a branch he started to keep his Canadian divers employed during the long winters.

Following the move to New York, he was president of IUC America as well. At the next meeting of the cooperative in Paris he tried to persuade his fellow shareholders that the time had come to invest all the profits in deep diving equipment. Thirty per cent agreed; the others, who wanted to put the money in their pockets, did not. Out-voted, André was obliged to resign. With his resignation went the responsibility for IUC Canada and IUC Venezuela.

By then André had been in America for two years, he was starting to speak English and he and his family were putting down roots. He decided to stay. Convinced the potential market for sophisticated diving services in America was enormous, he bought out his French partners and continued alone.

Initially, most of the work was around New York harbor, but IUC soon found itself diving in depths that called for helium. Being in construction, André was used to working on a lump-sum basis, which meant he had to be able to cut the cost of everything, including breathing gas—which he accomplished by going to trimix, a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen and helium.

André’s knowledge of gas mixtures and decompression was to pay off time and again. When a barge full of sulfate sank in Norfolk, Virginia, IUC got the contract. The barge lay at a depth of just over 60 feet in an area where the tidal current ran at four to five knots, making it impossible to decompress in the water. Breathing air on the US Navy 70-foot table meant a no-decompression limit of only 50 minutes.

André’s solution was to develop a gas mixture with a much higher partial pressure of oxygen than air that allowed his divers to work for two hours and surface without decompression. The divers got in the water at slack tide, entered the barge and pumped out the sulfate. At the end of the two hours they went up to the open hatch, cleared their hoses and told the man on the telephone they were coming up. They then jumped out into the current and were hauled to the surface by the tenders.

On another occasion, IUC installed the screens at the bottom of a dam in California. The union, imposing a maximum time of 25 minutes on air, wanted the company to employ a crew of 96. André used a mixture and did the job with 12 divers, each putting in 75-90 minutes on the bottom. André's Group

In 1969 André signed IUC’s first offshore oil contract, with Conoco on the Discoverer III off Singapore. When Conoco awarded IUC a second contract, in the North Sea, André set up a hyperbaric hospital in Dundee to which seriously injured divers could be transferred under pressure by helicopter for treatment or surgery. To transport the patient to the hospital chamber, IUC designed and built a helicopter chamber and a one-man transfer chamber, both of titanium.

André’s company was the only private organization to own a submarine capable of going to 6,000 feet. In addition, he operated two shallower-diving submarines, several one-man submersibles and a small stable of ROVs. He also set up his own diving school, the Professional Diving School of New York.

A firm believer that capitalism can only survive if those who benefit from it give something back, in 1989 André became president of the Association of Diving Contractors (ADC). In the view of many, he saved it from collapse. In 1995, the ADC made a one-time exception to its rules by giving André, a board member, the John Galletti Memorial Award.

It was but one of the many honors that distinguished his career, along with the Marine Technology Society Lockheed Award for Science and Engineering, the Explorers Club Lowell Thomas Award, and the New York Academy of Science Sea Award for achievement in Science and Technology.

An avid collector of seafaring books from the 17th and 18th centuries, André was keen to preserve diving history. He joined the Advisory Board of the Historical Diving Society shortly after it was formed, and received the Society’s Historical Diver Magazine Pioneer Award in 1999.

He was also the Honorary President of Scaph 50, a French association of former Sogetram divers. He retired in 1993. He is survived by his wife Jeanine, three sons and eight grandchildren.

~ Christopher Swan

Historical Diving Society USA

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