Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific

by Roger C. Dunham

  The conversations always ended with just the right amount of admiration and respect. For a twenty-one-year-old man ready to travel around the world in a submarine that was already an enigma, I could not have asked for more.

  I flew to Hawaii on a civilian airliner contracted to the military at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California. The aircraft was packed with soldiers en route to Vietnam, and the atmosphere was filled with their gloom. The conflict in Southeast Asia was undergoing a rapid escalation at that time, and the depressed mood of the soldiers left little doubt about the fate they perceived at the end of their flight. The burly master sergeant sitting next to me looked miserable and said almost nothing throughout the entire trip.

  When the plane landed at Honolulu, the sergeant just stared out the window at the clusters of vacationing tourists disembarking from nearby aircraft. As the plane doors opened, the sound of Hawaiian music entered the cabin, the fragrance of Plumeria blossoms floated through the air, and the lucky few of us assigned to Hawaii could not get off the plane fast enough. Jim arrived in Hawaii on a different day, but his flight carried a similar sad group of men. The memory of the unfortunate soldiers on that flight stayed with me during the tough times of the Viperfish's submerged operations and somehow made my work seem easier by comparison.

  I called Pearl Harbor from the airport and was quickly connected to the Viperfish.

  "USS Viperfish, Petty Officer Kanen speaking," the young voice fired out. "May I help you, sir?"

  Thirty minutes later, a chief petty officer from the Viperfish jumped out of a car, asked my name, and firmly pumped my hand.

  "Welcome to Hawaii, Dunham, I'm Paul Mathews, from the Viperfish-you're one of the new nukes, aren't you?" He was in his middle thirties, I guessed, a strong-looking man of average height and weight, and full of enthusiasm when I told him that I was a reactor operator ready to report on board.

  "Throw your seabag in the back of the car," he said with a smile, "and we're on our way to Pearl. I'll give you a ride even though you are a goddamn nuke."

  As we drove down Kamehameha Highway under the blue sky and brilliant tropical sunlight, Chief Mathews told me more about the Viperfish. He confirmed that the submarine had been designed to launch Regulus missiles, each equipped with a large nuclear warhead and fired from a rail launching system on the topside deck of the Viperfish. He told me that, during the past few years, the Viperfish had made several deployments to the western Pacific Ocean with nuclear missiles stored inside the cavernous hangar compartment in the front half of the submarine. During this time, she was the front line nuclear deterrent force for the United States.

  The Viperfish had made a total of thirty-two test firings of Regulus missiles at sea. Each shot required the crew to surface, open a large door (christened the "bat cave" by the crew), roll a Regulus missile out of the hangar and onto its track, establish radio contact with the guiding system of a nearby American jet, and then finally fire the thing into the sky. The entire operation took about twenty minutes. Immediately afterward, the crew rapidly closed the bat cave and rigged the boat to dive so that, as quickly as possible, the Viperfish could disappear beneath the sur- face. The Regulus system provided nuclear protection prior to development of the Polaris missile program and construction of the first Polaris submarine, the USS George Washington (SSBN 598).

  "With the Polaris missile system now going ahead full steam, the Viperfish isn't involved with Regulus missiles, right?" I asked Chief Mathews the obvious as we entered Pearl Harbor's main gate.

  "Right," he answered. "They unloaded the missiles and changed her back to SSN." There was a period of silence, and I waited for him to continue.

  Finally, feeling stupid, I blurted out, "Okay, what does the Viperfish do now, Chief?"

  He hesitated, then began speaking in slow, measured tones. "Although her mission is secret, she has been redesigned to perform activities that you will find extraordinary. Because of these changes, there are now three crews on board the boat. There is the nuclear crew, composed of goddamn nukes like yourself, and the others who keep the reactor on the line and the steam in the engine room."

  After turning left past the main gate, we were moving in the opposite direction from the arrows pointing to the submarine base.

  "And then there is the forward crew, the men who really run the boat," he said. "They are occasionally called the forward pukes by the nukes-our shipmates to the rear. The non-nukes run the ballast control systems, the diving station, navigation, sonar, fire control-"

  "I understand all that, Chief," I interrupted. "And the third crew?" He took a deep breath, stared straight ahead, and softly said,

  "The third crew is for the Special Project."

  We turned right, drove down Avenue D and into the naval shipyard. "What kind of special project, Chief?" I asked, sensing that I was going to learn little.

  "You'll find out all about that from your security briefing, Dunham. All you need to know for now is that we are developing a combined civilian and military project, a cooperative effort, so to speak, that expands the capabilities of the Viperfish."

  Although the prospect of civilians being assigned to a nuclear warship seemed unusual and even a little unsettling, it was apparent that the chief was not going to say anything more on the subject. We made a right turn off South Avenue to 7th Street, where a cluster of towering shipyard cranes came into sight. Mathews began talking about cranes as we approached the dry dock area. He said that the largest cranes were of the "hammer-head" style, as unique to Pearl Harbor as the Arizona Memorial.

  The Viperfish was not moored at the Southeast Loch submarine base with the other submarines. The Viperfish wasn't even in the water. Mathews parked the car, and we walked in the direction of the biggest dry dock, looming like a gigantic rectangular hole ahead of us. I stopped at the edge of the massive concrete chamber and stared down at the submarine that was to be my new home for the next three years.

  2. Preparation for sea

  Since the early 1960s, the waters off the eastern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula have been closely monitored by United States surveillance systems that acoustically track submarines as they approach and depart the naval bases at Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk. One of the most comprehensive of these systems is the passive hydrophone array, known by the Department of Defense as the sound surveillance system (code-named SOSUS), capable of accurately identifying the positions of ships at sea. Installed at a cost of $16 billion and stretching for thirty thousand miles, the SOSUS microphones were arranged in a highly classified manner throughout the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for the primary purpose of detecting Soviet missile-carrying submarines. By 1966, this system was already in operation and quietly analyzing the acoustic signatures of Soviet submarines sailing from their home ports into the Pacific Ocean from the Sea of Okhotsk and the Kamchatka Peninsula.

  The ocean is filled with noise spanning a wide range of frequencies emitted by abundant biological life-forms. From the train of sharp clicks generated by the sperm whales (often rattling thirty to forty clicks per second, they sound like a cadre of carpenters hammering simultaneously) to the growling of the fin whales, the rasping and drumming of the triggerfish, and the whistles of the killer whales, SOSUS heard them all. With regularity, the sensitive microphones of SOSUS detected the deep-throated rumbles from the screws of passing freighters mixing with the clatter of Soviet diesel submarines as they ran their engines to charge their batteries. Less commonly, SOSUS picked up the sounds of explosive charges detonated by antisubmarine aircraft and ships, along with a profusion of underwater communications, during war game activities.

  Every ten or twenty years, maybe once or rarely twice in the career of a SOSUS specialist, there were the loud noises of collapsing steel and rupturing compartments as a vessel on the high seas lost her integrity and began to break apart. On these infrequent occasions, the noise continued for a minute, sometimes longer, as the ship dropped below the surface and, falling thousa
nds of feet, broadcast her trail of progressive destruction into the sensitive microphones on the bottom of the sea. When the reverberations finally ceased and the ocean was returned to the sounds of the whales and the fish, the SOSUS analysts were left with a final epitaph to the men and the vessel that no longer existed.

  The Viperfish was a monster of a submarine.

  Stretching 350 feet from bow to stern, she was bigger than any vessel I had seen at New London. Sitting high on blocks arranged across the sunken floor of the dry dock, she looked like an ominous black trophy on display. Any sleek lines envisioned by her designers never made it to the final product. Flapperlike bow planes sticking out near her nose gave her the appearance of a 1930s submarine, the huge tumorous hump bulging out of her skin disrupted her shape, and the square limber holes along her sides looked like a colossal engineering mistake.

  Torrents of water shot straight out from holes in her flanks and, arcing far into the air, fell to the concrete floor below. Workmen scurried over the various steel protrusions and sent streams of sparks across the hull as their grinders and air hammers clattered a dissonant cacophony. In the background, barely audible through the bedlam from the dry dock, curious clanging sounds announced the movements of the enormous cranes rolling across railroad tracks around the perimeter of the dry dock as their cables lowered open crates filled with men to the deck of the submarine.

  "Ugly bastard, ain't she?" Mathews hollered over the noise of the chaos in front of us.

  "Never seen anything like it," I called back.

  "There is nothing like the Viperfish anywhere in the world."

  The chief and I each donned a blue plastic hard hat from the stack near one of the cranes and climbed into an open wooden box at the side of the dry dock. After a shipyard worker signaled the crane operator, the cable over our heads snapped tight. The crane abruptly lifted us high into the air over the cavernous dry dock and then propelled us in the general direction of the Viperfish.

  I looked down at the dark concrete far below. At the same instant, the chief yelled, "Don't look down, it's a long drop!"

  We landed on the Viperfish deck with a jarring thud. Mathews led the way to the forward hatch-a circular hole on the surface of the deck-and down a long vertical steel ladder to the central control station.

  The inside of the Viperfish appeared to be in a state of total dis-order. As military and civilian personnel worked side by side on numerous pieces of electronic equipment, the tight compartment was buzzing with the electricity of energized circuits. I sniffed the pungent odor of diesel oil mixed with the smells of new linoleum, fresh paint, and sweat and wondered about the oxygen levels inside this tight enclosure of human activity.

  The bulkheads (walls) of the compartment were covered with hundreds of red, yellow, and green lights blinking on and off like a Christmas tree. Several drawers, filled with electronic equipment, had been pulled out from the bulkhead. Wires were hanging out of them-some connected to other wires from other drawers, others poking freely into the air. Men in blue dungaree uniforms were busy working on the periscope lens assemblies at the ends of long shafts extending down from the overhead spaces. Others were cursing and struggling with the steering wheels at the diving station, where a pair of cushioned chairs had been bolted. Later, I learned that the chairs were for the planesman and helmsman as they controlled the depth, course, and trim angle of the submarine.

  The men in front of us occasionally glanced in my direction. I felt awkward in my clean white uniform. Standing next to Chief Mathews at the bottom of the ladder, I was moving my head back and forth, with my eyes wide open in wonder. I knew that I presented the unmistakable appearance of a rookie.

  A couple of the men nodded a greeting to us as the chief guided me out of the control center and up a passageway to the yeoman's office. I signed a stack of papers filled with legal jargon; the yeoman mumbled something about gamma rays and handed me a clip-on radiation film badge. We moved forward again to the captain's stateroom. Mathews rapped on the door, and the commanding officer of the Viperfish promptly invited us into his cramped quarters.

  Capt. Stuart Gillon was a short man with a worried expression on his face. He looked like the burdens of the world were weighing heavily on him. He was of small frame and spoke with a soft voice that was hard to hear. My first thought was that this could not possibly be the captain of a nuclear warship. The captain should look more like a skipper, I thought-tall, strong voice, square jaw, and the other features that I considered to be requisites for such an important position.

  And then I noticed the intensity of the man's eyes. They reflected a perceptive intelligence as he studied me closely, sizing me up, listening to what I said, and taking measure of the newest enlisted man who would, someday, run his boat's nuclear reactor. Although his voice was kindly, his words were concise and his thinking tightly organized. He displayed intense concentration and focus of thoughts. Quietly, he began to tell me about future activities on the Viperfish and encouraged me to begin qualifications promptly because the mission mandated a fully qualified crew.

  "We're coming out of dry dock in a couple of months," he said, "and we'll be conducting sea trials, followed by a shakedown cruise to Seattle and San Francisco. We'll be testing the Fish soon thereafter, and, by that time, you should be standing watches at the reactor control panel. Do you think you can handle all that?"

  "Yes, sir," I answered briskly, wondering what fish he was referring to. Jane's Fighting Ships didn't mention anything about a fish, and submarine school hadn't described fish equipment on any submarines in the fleet. Before I had the chance to ask questions, he told me how pleased he was to have me on board and dismissed me with a quick nod to Chief Mathews.

  "You'll find out about the Fish when you start qualifications," Mathews said after we left the captain's stateroom and headed aft. "The next stop is the engine room, where you'll have the pleasure of meeting Bruce."

  We climbed through the thick oval doors into a confining corridor leading to the engine room. Mathews paused and called back to me, "This is the reactor tunnel and the nuclear reactor is directly below you. When we're at sea and the reactor is running, you'll want to move through this area pretty fast." I looked down at my feet and discovered a large circular ring carved in the floor, presumably "ground zero." The constricted area around me was jammed with valves and pipes, and several signs displayed the nuclear symbol that warned of radiation. As I ducked my 6'2" frame around various steel obstructions protruding from the tunnel's overhead, we continued to move aft until we reached the last watertight door and the engine room. The room was hot and filled with the suffocating odor of burning diesel fuel. Surrounded by insulated pipes, gauges, valves, and circuit breakers, I came face to face with the man who was in charge of the Viperfish's nuclear reactor operators.

  "Bruce, this is Dunham, fresh from New London, your new reactor operator," Mathews said. Bruce Rossi was a tough, powerful man with a burr haircut and coal-black eyes that scrutinized me closely. He barked a loud greeting and gave me a tight smile. With his heavily muscled right hand, he reached out and crushed my hand.

  "Reactor operator trainee, Paul. Glad you're here, Dunham," he growled.

  "Happy to be on board, Bruce," I replied. His pulsating jaw muscles suggested a significant measure of controlled anger.

  He stared at me. "Let me get right to the issue at hand because there's a lot of work to be done," he said. "The Viperfish is powered by a complex water-cooled S3W nuclear reactor, and our division requires three ROs[2] qualified to control the system. Two of the ROs will be finishing their tour of duty and will be leaving the boat after the sea trials and our shakedown run. The Viperfish will, therefore, need replacement reactor operators. You are one of the replacements, and Petty Officer Richard Daniels will be the second replacement when he arrives in the next few days. Both of you are going to work your tails off to learn every system in the engine room and on the Viperfish. You need to become qualified on this bo
at. Fall behind on the qualifications schedule, and you will find yourself on the dink list."

  Mathews smiled and turned to leave. "Don't be too hard on the guy, Bruce," he said over his shoulder. "This is his first boat."

  "The dink list?" I asked Bruce.

  Rossi's face looked tougher. "The delinquent list," he said. "If s updated every day, posted in the control center near the periscope station, and in plain sight for everyone to see. If you fall behind on qualifications, you will land on the dink list, you will remain on board the Viperfish, and your liberty will be curtailed. That means you can't leave the boat and you don't visit Waikiki. You will eat here and sleep here until you get caught up. I don't want any of my trainees on the goddamn dink list, and I don't want any of my qualified ROs standing goddamn port and starboard watches."

  An old chief told me, a long time ago, that the Submarine Service is unique because the men are pleasant and they get along so well together — I decided that chief had never met Bruce Rossi. Although the dink list program sounded almost like a prison system, I figured it would never become a threat to me; Rossi looked like he would kill, with his own bare hands, anybody who dared to come close to getting on the dink list.

  I nodded to Bruce that I understood and then glanced at the engine-room equipment around us. There were thousands of pipes, valves, and large pieces of powerful-looking steel machinery jammed into every available space. To become qualified, I knew I would have to know where each pipe went, what each valve controlled, and how every piece of machinery worked.

  I turned back to Bruce. "Port and starboard watches refers to-?" I asked, trying to remain polite.

  His faded blue dungaree shirt tightened across his chest as his muscles tensed with annoyance.

  "Six hours on watch, six hours off, six on, six off, over and over again, week after week, month after month" he growled. "Somebody has to control the nuclear reactor, Dunham, and it can't be a man who isn't qualified. Furthermore, when we leave on our mission, the captain doesn't want his boat filled with non-qual pukes. If you and Daniels are too slow to get there and we end up with only two qualified reactor operators, they are going to be standing port and starboard watches and I am going to be pissed. Get yourself checked into the submarine barracks, pick up your qualification card from the chief of the boat, and start your quals-today. I want those systems signed off; I want you to be well on your way to becoming an RO before the Viperfish leaves the dry dock."