Around the World Submerged

by Edward L. Beach

  In a few moments, having shifted to the sea-going khaki that would be my standard garb until May, I drew back my door curtain and walked aft. On either side of the narrow formica-lined hallway were curtained doorways similar to mine, marking the entrances to the wardroom and the six staterooms Triton had for the seventeen officers assigned. At the extreme after end of the compartment was the yeoman’s office, fortunately rather roomy as submarine offices go.

  The watertight door in the pressure bulkhead at the end of the passageway was latched shut. I pulled the latch handle, stepped high over the coaming, ducked my head, and slipped through, carefully latching the door behind me. We were now more than three miles from the nearest land and by regulations could leave the door open, but as a matter of common consent it was habitually kept shut in order to make a sharper division between number one reactor compartment on its after side and the living quarters forward of it.

  A few steps aft and I was standing directly over the reactor, on a slightly raised platform surrounded by a heavy pipe-guard rail, and surveying the area with satisfaction.

  Triton’s twin reactors hummed softly as they generated the steam for her two huge engine rooms, but in their watertight compartments there was not a moving thing to be seen. Only the muffled whine of the vital circulating pumps and the whirr of the ventilation blowers could be heard. The general quietness and good order hardly conveyed an adequate impression of the new-found source of power cooking away beneath my feet. A red deck, partly covered by green-shellacked rubber matting and surmounted by the ubiquitous gray boxes, formed a color scheme pleasing to the eye. The reactor spaces are seldom visited; with no watch stations to be manned, they are generally immaculate—Pat McDonald’s twin pride and joy.

  Pressed against the skin of the ship on either side of my platform stood two heavily insulated domes, from which large steam pipes rose and went aft. Control equipment of all kinds—valves, dials, gauges, special electrical machinery—lined the walls of the compartment. Yet it seemed extraordinarily spacious, clean, easy to get about in, and uncommonly quiet for a ship making full power.

  A few feet below me, beneath the insulated deck, stood one of Triton’s two huge steel pressure vessels, containing half of the precious uranium fuel for which I was official custodian. Through it raced distilled water at high pressure, extracting heat from the uranium and transmitting it to the steam generators. Over against a bulkhead and also concealed beneath the deck, an array of encased pumps drove the water around its simple circuit. The watertight door in the after bulkhead was latched open, and through it I glimpsed a repetition of the red, green, and gray color scheme in number two reactor compartment—a duplicate of the first.

  I knew I had but to step aft another bulkhead or so to have this illusion of quiet thoroughly dispelled. There stood the ridiculously small starboard turbine and one of our two tremendous reduction gears, which at this speed would be filling the engine rooms with their roaring.

  The ship lurched impatiently. Probably the sea was building up. I ducked quickly into number two reactor compartment, moved aft another two dozen steps, opened a second closed watertight door, and stepped through the bulkhead into number one engine room.

  This was the largest compartment in the ship, in cubic volume not far from the entire displacement of a World War II submarine, and it contained all the massive components of the starboard main engine. A high-pitched roar of machinery reached my ears, and for all its racket it sounded wonderful.

  Chief Engineman Hosie Washington, an ex-Navy steward who had changed his rate and was now our Chief Chemist, grinned happily at me. “She sure sounds nice, Captain!” he shouted, his eyes dancing in his handsome Negro face. I nodded my agreement as I passed him, and walked a few feet farther aft to the main control center of the engine room.

  Lieutenant Commander Donald G. Fears, Les Kelly’s assistant during the building period, had taken over as Triton’s Engineer Officer. Fears, a slightly built man with an intense face which belied his relaxed leadership, had the forward engine room watch, and I could see that he, too, was exhilarated by the performance of the machinery under his charge. He stood at a small watch-stander’s table before a low gaugeboard, displaying dials and switches. To one side, surveying two large consoles covered with a profusion of instruments, a Chief Petty Officer and a First Class Electronics Technician were perched on built-in stools, standing watch on the nerve center of the starboard reactor. Directly forward of Don, the starboard throttleman faced a similar console that recorded steam conditions.

  This was “Maneuvering One,” the control station for the starboard engine. The efficient way in which the men moved about their tasks no doubt filled Don with pride, for their actions were a result of his training and indoctrination.

  The purposeful noise of the great reduction gear beat upon our ears. It was not a shriek of protest, but the powerful frequency of a finely meshed set of gears doing their job without fuss, so solidly constructed and so perfectly matched that they transmitted a minimum of vibration into the water even though some of them were spinning thousands of revolutions per minute. Could they continue to run this way, without stopping, for almost three months? This was one of the answers our voyage was to determine.

  Bidding Fears a silent farewell I continued my journey aft. Number two engine room contained identical equipment to number one, although arranged somewhat differently because it drove the other propeller, and I passed through it rapidly with only a brief greeting to Lieutenant George Troffer, in charge. Satisfied that the same atmosphere of calm confidence was evident here, I opened the watertight door into the after torpedo room.

  Triton has torpedo tubes at each end, and as the name implies, this compartment contains Triton’s stern set. In the after part, brightly lighted in contrast to the dimmed lights farther forward where forty-two men had their berths, I found Allen W. Steele, Torpedoman’s Mate Third Class, on watch. A sandy-haired, serious-faced sailor, twenty-one years old, he had made a good try for the Naval Academy Preparatory School a few months ago, but with insufficient time to prepare, his marks in the competitive examination were not high enough. He had done his best, as we had for him. Steele rose from the tool box upon which he had been sitting and gave me a cheerfully respectful salute.

  Here, I had no trouble appreciating the power of our two huge bronze propellers, which clearly could be heard spinning in the water just a few feet away. As during our initial trials, the drumming of the steel fabric of Triton’s great pressure hull could be felt through the soles of our feet or through our fingertips resting against the solid structure of a torpedo-loading skid.

  I grinned. “How is it going, Steele?”

  “Fine, sir!” he answered soberly, “but I’ll be glad when we dive and get rid of all this racket.”

  Only a couple of years in submarines, he already had the submariner’s outlook. I found myself agreeing with him, as I made my way forward again.

  On the bridge, the shrill wind sweeping over our exposed cockpit was cutting cold. I quickly became chilled through, despite the heavy coat, gloves, and old cap I had slipped on. Triton’s course was still due south, and her throttles were open to allow full steam flow. It was now a little after five in the afternoon. The sun lay low in the southwest and dusk was gathering.

  I turned to Lieutenant Hay. “What’s the latest sounding, Jim?” I asked him.

  “We just got thirty-three fathoms a few minutes ago, Captain,” he said. “Do you want me to go ahead and dive at thirty-five fathoms?”

  “Go ahead and get the bridge thoroughly secured, Jim,” I told him. “By the time you are ready, we’ll probably have reached the thirty-five-fathom line. I’ll let you know when to dive.”

  As Hay busied himself with these last-minute preparations, I raised my glasses and scanned the sea to the horizon. There was a slight chop, with whitecaps coming from the south. Spray and spume closed Triton’s foredeck, and occasionally the waves buried her sharp snout as our ship s
plit them with her knife-blade stem. Our wake, a long, straight, broad furrow of white water, reached aft beyond the visible horizon. The lighthouse and radar towers of Montauk Point were long out of sight, and the coast of Long Island had receded from view.

  The “21 MC” speaker on the bridge blared: “Bridge—Control! Sounding, three five fathoms!”

  “That’s it, Jim,” I said. “When you are ready in all respects, take her down.” I deliberately spoke loudly for the benefit of the lookouts who, I knew, were eagerly hoping to get an inkling of where our mysterious trip was to take us. They were to get no satisfaction from me, yet. But there would be nothing wrong with teasing them a little. I swung myself on the ladder to go below.

  “Be sure you get everything tightly secured,” I said. “We’re going to be a mighty long time down before we come up, and we don’t want any of this stuff shaking loose up here where we can’t get at it!” I chuckled inwardly. In a few minutes that bit of information would be all over the ship.

  As I passed down through the conning tower into the control room, everyone sensed that this time my appearance heralded the time to dive. In the control room, Chief Radioman Joe Walsh, in charge of Triton’s radio gang, was Chief of the Watch. When he saw me, he put down the cup of coffee he was holding. Slight, with blond hair and aquiline features, Walsh had been one of the first to check out on our Ballast Control Panel. It must have been Walsh who had been operating the fathometer. No one was near it at the present time. Tom Thamm stood unobtrusively in the background. To Walsh’s left stood Bob Carter, Machinist Mate First Class, Auxiliaryman of the Watch. In build and size similar to Walsh, though darker and with jet black hair, Carter might have posed for illustrations of the lanky sailor so often characterized as the ideal man-o-war’s man. Career Navymen and submariners for years, Walsh and Carter both had thoroughly checked out Triton’s complicated equipment. We were in good hands.

  Noting my attention, they self-consciously pretended unconcern. Inwardly, I smiled to myself. Diving was routine; Triton had already dived many times. But this was the start of our shakedown cruise, and they sensed that something out of the ordinary was planned. That this cruise was to be no ordinary cruise, this dive no ordinary dive, everyone on board must have realized.

  I gripped the handrail of the ladder beneath the conning tower hatch through which I had just descended. Without even realizing they were doing it, Walsh and Carter ran their eyes over each of the individual controls before them, mentally checking them at the proper position and reviewing what they would do when the diving alarm sounded. For a moment or two nothing happened. Jim must be making a final check of the bridge, I thought. I hoped everything was tightly secured up there. Finally, I heard his voice through the bridge speaker system. “Clear the bridge. Clear the bridge!” Simultaneously, the diving alarm—an old-fashioned automobile horn—resounded through the ship.

  Walsh’s hands flew to the controls for the hydraulic plants, started the stand-by pump, then waited, with his right hand hovering near the switch to the air inlet valve. It was a similar valve which somehow failed to close in 1939, when USS Squalus sank near the Isle of Shoals off Maine, losing nearly half her crew. In Squalus, this valve had been much larger than our own, for it supplied air to four great diesel engines in the engine room, whereas in our case it only provided ventilation below decks. But it was still important that it be closed when we dived.

  The horn stopped; then came a second blast. I stepped clear of the hatch, and moments later a pair of legs clattered down the ladder, followed closely by another pair. Tom Schwartz, Torpedoman’s Mate Third—known variously as “the nose,” “the face,” or “the profile”—scrambled off the ladder and threw himself into one of the seats at the diving stand. William A. McKamey, Seaman, practically on Schwartz’s heels, settled himself at the other seat.

  Jim Hay, as Officer of the Deck, would be the last man off the bridge. His next duty was to see that the watertight hatch leading to the bridge was properly shut. He would be up there right now checking it.

  With the second blast of the alarm, Walsh snapped the switch to shut Triton’s main air valve. Then, playing upon the Ballast Control Panel as though it were an organ console, while intently eying the board of indicator lights glowing before him, he swept his hand swiftly and precisely across the face of the panel to open the twenty-two main ballast tank vents with which Triton was fitted. That done, he remained poised, one hand on the master switch which would shut at least half of the ballast tank vents, the other on the main air blow valve control. The bridge hatch still indicated open on his panel—as it should until completely closed. This is one of the crucial operations in diving; no skipper can completely divest himself of the urgent need to know that the bridge hatch has been properly shut. As soon as McKamey had passed me. I stepped back to the ladder and looked up into the conning tower. The ordered bustle there reassured me, as it always did, and as I looked up, Beacham’s voice sang out to Hay, “Hatch secured, sir!”

  I cast my eyes quickly back to Walsh. He had relaxed ever so slightly. The red circle, indicating that the conning tower hatch was open, had been replaced by a single short bar.

  McKamey and Schwartz, each pulling the steel pin which had locked their control columns in the neutral position, pushed the bow and stern planes forward, positioning them to a dive angle. Approximately fifteen seconds had passed since the end of the second blast of the diving alarm, and Triton’s surface motion had already changed. Our wide open main ballast tanks had taken aboard nearly all of the two thousand tons of water they could hold—and our six-thousand-ton Triton, cruising powerfully on the surface of the sea, had become an eight-thousand-ton submarine. Her bow began to incline; Jim Hay slipped around me and took his station behind the two planesmen. The depth gauges were showing that our keel was forty feet below the surface and going deeper.

  “Depth, Captain?” asked Jim, his eyes on the depth gauges.

  “One hundred and fifty feet, Jim,” I told him. “Keep the fathometer going and don’t get any closer than seventy-five feet from the bottom.”

  This area had been well swept by many years of submarine operations south of Montauk Point. All wrecked ships or rock outcroppings, which might present a hazard to a submarine operating close to the bottom, had been discovered and plotted. Nevertheless, and particularly at the speed we were going, it was desirable to be more than careful.

  A thirty-five-fathom sounding from Triton’s fathometers indicated an actual depth of water, counting our own draft, of nearer to forty fathoms, or two hundred and forty feet. A keel depth of one hundred and fifty feet, therefore, should leave us ninety feet of water between our keel and the bottom of the sea. At this depth our periscopes could not extend to the surface, but our speed would have rendered them useless anyway. On the other hand, even if the biggest ship in the world were to pass directly overhead—though we’d probably be startled at the noise she’d be making—there would be no danger of collision. The only thing we needed to worry about at all was the possibility of encountering another submerged submarine, and this had been taken care of administratively, so far as our own subs were concerned, by assigning Triton a sea lane from which all other submarines had been excluded. There was, of course, a chance that a submarine belonging to another country might have chosen this precise moment to be submerged in this very area. But it was a remote possibility, barely worth consideration.

  “Jim,” I said, “the bottom drops away very gradually on the continental shelf until it reaches the hundred-fathom curve. From there on out, it drops much more rapidly into the deep ocean. Stay at this depth until the fathometer indicates a hundred and fifty feet of water under us; then follow the bottom on down until you get to our running depth.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain!” said Jim, and looked up at me expectantly. I knew what was in his mind. He was thinking, “Are you going to announce where we’re going, now that we’ve dived?”

  I shook my head slightly, hoping he coul
d read the answer.

  Taking a gentle inclination by the bow, Triton effortlessly descended to her assigned depth. With our tremendous speed and the shallow water, an easy angle was indicated. With practiced ease, though I knew they were watching their controls carefully, Schwartz and McKamey drove her down and leveled her off, coached occasionally by a few words from Jim. Directly behind Hay, Walsh had a number of additional duties on the Ballast Control Panel, which he carried out automatically and without command, occasionally checking with Jim or vice versa.

  Carter, in the meantime, and Bruce Gaudet, the IC Electrician stationed on his far side, had a number of operations to carry out, consisting mainly of securing topside electrical connections, speaker talk-back circuits, and the like. Thamm, apparently satisfied, quietly departed.

  It was considerably warmer in the control room than on the bridge, and I felt it. Jim was struggling out of his bridge gear, while he kept close attention on the diving station in front of him, and in a few minutes, when the bustle of diving had pretty well died away, Seaman Jim Smith, evidently the off lookout—he must have been hiding somewhere for I had failed to see him earlier—came forward in a light dungaree shirt and trousers and offered to relieve McKamey.

  With the ship steady at one hundred fifty feet, the depth gauges no longer moving, Jim gave the permission. Smith squatted alongside McKamey, and in a low voice McKamey passed over the instructions he had received.

  “OK,” said Smith in a moment, grasping the control stick. “I’ve got it.” In a long-practiced motion, with his left hand he swept up the right arm of the seat in which McKamey was seated—it had been built with a hinge at the back for precisely this purpose—and at the same moment, McKamey, releasing the control column to Smith, flipped up the arm on the far side of the seat, shifted his feet, rose, and stepped back. Effortlessly, Smith slid into his place, and as McKamey passed behind him, he pushed back both arm rests. Triton was already settled into her normal submerged routine.