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

by Roger C. Dunham

  For the next several weeks, I chased back and forth throughout the boat and learned system after system as if my life depended on it. I quickly discovered that trying to learn about the complex equipment in the engineering spaces of a submarine in dry dock was nearly impossible. Because of the disassembled state of the engine room, I found it difficult just to walk around the passageways, much less to learn anything about the equipment. Parts of motors, pumps, and circuits were strewn everywhere. Just moving across the decking area required great care to avoid stepping on some vital component.

  Although I had just completed several years of rigorous nuclear training, I found it even more difficult to figure out the operation of a submarine system that was partially in pieces. Also, the most critical parts always seemed to be missing. I searched through the thick Reactor Plant Manual for pictures of each system that I needed to learn, but finding the essential components in the maze of pipes and meters was a daunting challenge. Often, I had to locate a qualified crew member to tell me what I had missed.

  When the qualified man was finished with his instructions, it was quiz time: Did I know everything there was to know about the system? If not, "Start over again, you non-qual puke, and pay attention this time." If the quiz went well, the system was signed off, there was one less thing to learn, and I was one tiny notch farther along the tortuous pathway toward submarine qualifications.

  The electricity was always turned off when equipment was dis-assembled. To lessen the risk of accidentally energizing a circuit during repair work, red tags were placed all over the circuit breaker and not removed until it was demonstrated that no danger of electric shock or other problems existed. When it was time to turn on the electricity, however, I discovered that things often went very wrong.

  "Okay, remove the red tags and turn it on!" the electrician hollered down the passageway to the man standing next to the tagged circuit breaker when a repair was completed.

  "Okay, here it goes!" the man hollered back as he removed the red tags and placed his hand on the breaker.

  The electrician threw the switch, and there was a brilliant electrical flash with the "clap" noise of current flowing through the circuit breaker. The men standing around the equipment watched closely as the current raced through repaired circuits and brought the device to life. When equipment did not function properly, which seemed to happen with amazing regularity, a moment of silence was followed by furious arm waving and screaming: "Turn if off! Turn it off! Turn it off!"

  That scenario was followed by a torrent of cursing, which often included phrases unique to the submarine service and words that I had never heard before. When the cursing was over, the circuit breaker was locked open again and the painful process of repairing equipment started again.

  Although the crew of the Viperfish appeared to be a single unified group of men, I soon discovered that it was actually an accumulation of 120 volunteers for submarine duty who were in a state of flux. Someone was always coming in or going out. The men on board the boat at any time were significantly different from those who had been there one year before and those who would be there a couple of years later. Members of the crew reported on board or left for reasons of seniority, completion of denned tours of duty, and many other factors. I did not know it at the time, but the personnel turnover was less than was usual in the Navy. Washington's BuPers (Bureau of Personnel) had worked to stabilize the crew of the Viperfish to a relatively fixed complement of men for this mission.

  The veteran group was the core of the crew when I reported on board. These men had been qualified on all of the systems for several months or years, and several had been previously qualified on one or more other submarines before reporting to the Viperfish. They were the recognized pros, the men who had their dolphins.

  The "dolphins," an internationally recognized pin, is worn above the breast pocket of dress uniforms. The pin depicts a pair of dolphins, on either side of a World War II submarine, guiding it to safety. The dolphins represent "qualified in submarines," a symbol that is the coveted treasure awaiting non-qual pukes struggling to learn about their submarines. Wearing the dolphins means that the individual has been granted membership in one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.

  To me, the qualifications process was almost like a mandate from God: until I earned my dolphins and until the captain certified me to be qualified on all of the Viperfish systems, I could not belong to the club.

  The men of the qualified crew on the Viperfish knew exactly what they were doing. They knew which valves should be shut and which should be open; they knew which electrical and mechanical systems should be on and operating and which should be in standby. The man sitting in front of the ballast control panel knew how to maintain neutral buoyancy, important for proper depth control. The men controlling the reactor systems, those high above us in the cramped cockpit of the sail, and those who would later prepare our food and tend to our medical needs were all skilled in their areas of expertise, thus allowing the crew of the Viperfish to function as one cohesive unit of qualified men. The confidence that the qualified men had in each other was the force behind the enduring shipmate camaraderie, the essence of life for the men serving on board the Viperfish.

  Those who were not yet qualified in submarines were treated as if they knew nothing, regardless of their rank or intelligence. Officers often needed instruction and signatures from enlisted men, while enlisted men frequently turned to officers for information. If a man was not qualified and was on the dink list, he was at the absolute bottom of the pecking order.

  The civilian scientists in the bow compartment (also called the hangar compartment) where the mysterious Fish was supposed to be, were not involved in the qualifications process, and their interaction with the crew was minimal. They were on the Viperfish to accomplish a mission. Clearly, they did not want to talk about their work to any of us, so we simply treated them, in a polite manner, as civilian outsiders and left them to their own work on the Special Project.

  The heart of the Special Project operation was in the forward third of the submarine, in the cavernous hangar compartment that formerly contained the Regulus missiles. With no understanding of what the project was about and with nobody inclined to say anything specific about it, I simply added Special Project to the vast number of mysteries on board the Viperfish.

  Whenever I went through the bow compartment as I studied the location of various cables and valves, I moved past the cluster of civilians looking down into a huge hole that penetrated the decking of the compartment. Walking around the men gathered above the hole and ignoring their hushed conversations, I continued forward until I either bumped into the torpedo tubes or identified the location of the equipment I was studying. With the wrath of Bruce hanging over my head if I didn't move ahead with qualifications at full speed, I felt that civilian scientists looking down big holes were of little importance.

  Richard Daniels reported on board within a week of my arrival, and now two potential reactor operators studied Viperfish tech manuals, searched for crewmen who knew the systems, and struggled to show progress with qualifications. In his early twenties, Richard was a tall, intelligent man with a Georgia accent. He immediately developed a respect for Bruce Rossi's grinding jaw muscles and scowling looks. Early in the qualifications process, he informed me that he had little inclination to die at the hands of Rossi, especially before getting qualified. Richard also had never been on a submarine before. Inside this gigantic steel vessel, we both felt an equal sense of anticipation as we prepared for our secret mission below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

  After a couple of weeks, Chief Mathews handed out the rack assignments to the berthing area. Located in the center of the ship, the racks (bunks) were stacked in columns of three. Each rack included a pillow, a thin mattress, a blanket stretched over cotton sheets, an air conditioning vent, a tiny neon light, and a locker under the mattress for personal belongings. Opened by pulling up on the hinged mattress support, the l
ocker was about six inches high and spanned the length of the bunk. Most important, there was actually a curtain that could be pulled across the rack's opening-privacy on a submarine, a luxury previously unheard of.

  My rack was far more than just a place to sleep. When we left dry dock, it would become my sanctuary from the rest of the submarine world. I was assigned the middle rack; by lifting myself up and squeezing sideways into the coffinlike opening and then reaching out and pulling my curtain shut, I was suddenly enclosed in a world of privacy that was unavailable anywhere else on the boat. The mattress, although comfortable, was very narrow and barely six feet long (requiring a slight bending of my knees if I kept my neck straight). In the event of a sneeze, I had to quickly turn my head to keep from crashing into the steel underside of the rack above me. Otherwise, the enclosure offered most of the comforts of a good bed at home.

  The months in the shipyard passed, the qualifications continued, and the big day finally arrived when the Viperfish could leave the dry dock and float to the pier at the submarine base. Floating the submarine off the blocks in dry dock and moving her a mere half mile across the Southeast Loch to her new berthing spot was a remarkably complicated operation. As one of the newest men on board, I was assigned a trainee position. I sat next to my friend, Jim McGinn, at a watch station controlling the delivery of steam to the turbine systems turning the screws. During the early hours of the morning, I watched the vigorous work of the qualified crewmen bringing the reactor to an operational status, drawing steam into the engine room, and checking all of the seawater valves. Finally, I heard Chief Mathews announce over the Viperfish loudspeaker system: "Now, station the maneuvering watch! All hands, station the maneuvering watch!"

  There was a feeling of excitement as we prepared for the transformation from a stationary mass of steel resting on blocks in the center of the dry dock to a functioning submarine that would soon be ready to go to sea. With Bruce Rossi standing nearby and watching over all of the trainees, Jim and I gripped the throttle wheels controlling the flow of steam to the turbines and awaited orders.

  In the engine-room spaces around us, machinist mates, electronic technicians, electricians, and engineering officers took their positions in front of the panels that controlled various parts of the nuclear propulsion and turbogenerator systems. The sound of steam hissing through insulated piping added to the excitement as we waited for orders from the officer of the deck (OOD) in the control center to rotate the steam wheels and open our throttles.

  The seawater of Pearl Harbor swirled into the dry dock, covered the blocks under the hull of the Viperfish, and rose around her superstructure. The boat finally floated as the dock filled to sea level. Squeezed into the tiny cockpit at the top of the sail (formerly called the conning tower in the older diesel boats), the captain, a junior officer, and two lookouts took their positions and prepared to call orders to the engine room over the loudspeaker communication system.

  Jim turned to me at the instant that we first felt the slight movement of the submarine's hull.

  "We're off the blocks," he said, excitedly. "Cheers to the forward pukes-they're doing something right."

  "All ahead one third!" blared from the loudspeaker over my head, and the bell indicator clanged as the needle pointed to the ordered bell. Jim and I grabbed the wheels in front of us. Cranking them to the left, we heard the whining noises of the main propulsion turbines spooling up. We could feel the vibrations of the hull caused by the screws rotating in the water behind us. I felt a surge of excitement at being a crewman actually controlling the movements of a fleet submarine moving across Pearl Harbor.

  In a nearby area called the maneuvering room, the reactor operator and electric plant operator sat rigidly upright in front of the lights and meters of their complex panels to observe any abnormalities that could shut down the reactor or trip a turbo-generator off-line. Except for the sensation of floating, there was no way to confirm that we were moving out of the dry dock or to know our direction and speed. The Viperfish had no windows. With the engine-room hatches all closed and clamped shut, we could see nothing as we moved across the bay. After several minutes of speculation, we tried to guess where we were from the movements of the hull, an effort that proved to be a futile waste of time.

  Suddenly, the central IMC loudspeaker system blared, "Attention to port!"

  I looked at Jim. "Attention to port?" I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. From behind us, Bruce Rossi's growling voice came to life.

  "Attention to port is a call of respect," he said.

  Jim and I looked appropriately confused. I glanced back at Bruce and asked, "Respect to whom, Bruce?"

  "Respect for the men of the USS Arizona. They are off our port bow, right about now, and the men topside are giving the traditional salute to show respect as we pass by.'

  Jim and I felt the impact of his statement as our enthusiasm turned to somber silence. We spent the remainder of the ten-minute trip with some quiet thoughts about the men still trapped within the steel walls of their destroyed battleship, the men who never had a chance of survival during the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

  The sudden and urgent call through the loudspeakers from the officers on the bridge, "Back one third," gave us a clue that we were approaching our berth at the submarine base. The quick, high-pitched "Back emergency" that came shortly thereafter, immediately followed by the sound of crushing wood, gave us the best indication that we had, in a manner of speaking, arrived at the pier.

  "What's that noise?" I hollered to Jim over the whining sounds of turbines and steam.

  "It sounds like we just squashed a wooden rowboat against the pier," he hollered back.

  Rossi gave us the answer. We had just crushed a "camel," the wooden structure attached near the pilings of the pier. Normally, a submarine gently touches the camel, so that the boat's superstructure is held away from, and not damaged by, the thick pilings. The floating camel has two functions: to protect the pier from the crushing force of a submarine and to protect the submarine from being crushed against the pier. When the camel is approached too rapidly, as the Viperfish had just done, the device is easily crushed. Inside the boat, the noise of splintering wood is exceedingly loud. I would hear this sound many more times during the months and years ahead when various junior officers, working on their qualifications, tried to maneuver the ungainly hulk of the Viperfish near a pier and took out the camels one by one.

  After the reactor was shut down, I climbed up the long ladder that passed through the engine-room hatch to the topside deck. Standing on the black steel hull, I looked at the new world around me. The change of scenery from the shipyard was remarkable. Several black submarines, sitting low in the water and looking extremely sleek in comparison to the Viperfish, stretched out in a long row ahead and astern of us.

  I could almost sense the presence of the deep Pacific Ocean, only three miles away, waiting to challenge and test us during our upcoming sea trials. Although the Viperfish had not yet submerged and we had crossed only a small span of calm water, this had been my first real submarine voyage, and I had actually controlled the engine-room steam during the trip. I looked at the western horizon, and I felt an excitement that we now had a functional submarine with an operating nuclear reactor. The Viperfish had floated without flooding, and, deep in our bow compartment, we had a mysterious Fish with miles of cable waiting to fulfill our promise for the future.

  3. Sea trials

  During the first half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union built twenty-nine deadly submarines designed to perform one specific function: deliver high explosives and nuclear warheads from launching platforms at sea. Built in the Severodvinsk and Komsomolsk shipyards, these submarines were deployed to improve the Soviet's ability to counter the perceived threat from Western strike carriers while simultaneously threatening American naval bases, such as shipyards, operational bases, airfields, and supply depots.

  As Soviet submarines left their home port of Vladiv
ostok, the microphones of the SOSUS array tracked them across the Sea of Japan and through the choke points at the Kuril Islands. As the SSGN submarines carrying guided missiles patrolled across the Pacific Ocean in the direction of the Hawaiian Islands and the West Coast of the United States, the Soviet Union stepped up its pattern of saber rattling and threats to compete with "sharp swords" for international military supremacy.

  By summer 1966, Soviet anger at the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam conflict increased as B-52 bombers from the U.S. Strategic Air Command began bombing enemy forces in Southeast Asia. Thousands of Americans were drafted into military service, and many participated in ground combat activities, in which U.S. Ranger battalions fought the Vietcong in actions that resulted in large numbers of casualties on both sides. The U.S. Navy became more directly involved in the combat as jets from the USS Enterprise and USS Hancock bombed North Vietnamese tar- gets, including a variety of boats carrying supplies for the Vietcong. The American public became increasingly aroused at the mounting U.S. casualties, and new antiwar activities began to spread throughout the United States.

  With the Viperfish floating alongside the pier at Pearl Harbor, qualifications on her systems began to assume a brisk pace. Overhauled equipment, now reassembled, was working; electronic panels with their array of lights and meters were energized; and piping diagrams could be followed until the systems were thoroughly memorized.