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

by Roger C. Dunham

  Because the motor was so large, the wires connected to it were enormous. The electricians became excited about what kind of monster circuit breaker could be used to turn it on and off. Their stress levels increased when they thought about the huge motor's load on the electrical system, a load that might dim the lights and leave us without enough power for anything else. The captain therefore decided to test the thing before going to sea again by using shore power from gigantic cables stretching from the pier.

  Because the motor was in the air on the top deck and water was necessary for the test, we needed a pool.

  The shipyard workers descended on the Viperfish again. Several hours later, a high circle of boards surrounded the bat-cave hump and the bow-thruster pump. The captain asked me to coordinate communications with the electricians after the pool was filled with Pearl Harbor water; I donned earphones and a microphone, and soon we were ready for the test.

  "Are the electricians in the engine room ready?" the captain asked.

  When I called down to the electricians, they were near the circuit breaker and ready to turn it on. "Yes, sir, ready to go!" I called out.

  The captain inspected the pool a final time, and I noticed several crewmen from nearby submarines gathering at the edge of the pier to watch the test.

  Finally, the captain was ready. Standing back from the area, he joined the Special Project engineers nearby and ordered, "Energize the thruster motor."

  "Turn on the thruster motor!" I shouted into the microphone. In the distant bowels of the ship, I heard a loud thumping sound of the huge circuit breaker closing. The motor jumped as it came to life, blasting water out the sides of the diverter system. Water from the pool was sucked into the motor system as jets of water blew out the wooden sides of the pool. Several of the planks fell overboard, as others were swirled inside the pool and headed for the motor.

  "Turn it off! Turn it off!" the captain hollered.

  "Turn it off! Turn it off!" I called to the engine room. The motor ground to a halt just before one of the bigger planks was sucked into its blades.

  I waited next to the demolished pool while the captain and engineers conferred about the test results and the near destruction of the motor. After considerable arm waving and debate, they finally decided that the energy consumption, the noise, and the motor's cumbersome inefficiency outweighed any potential benefit that might allow the Viperfish to make smaller turns. The electricians removed the cables, and the shipyard workers removed the planks and what was left of the swimming pool. For reasons never clear to me, they left the bow-thruster pump in place. For the next two years, we cruised around the ocean with a pump on a hump, both of them good for nothing.

  We finally began loading supplies for the shakedown voyage across the Pacific Ocean to Seattle and San Francisco. Between loading more garbage weights and working on my seemingly endless qualifications, I took some time off to surf the then uncrowded waters at Ala Moana and spectacular Sunset Beach on the north shore. I used a long board and surfed as often as possible. The biggest problem was trying to protect my skin (now totally white as the result of three weeks spent under the ocean surface) from the bright tropical sunlight.

  My evenings were free for steaming in Honolulu, and I took advantage of every minute. Thoughts of the upcoming submerged isolation fueled a compelling need for social adventures. Marc and I quickly recovered from our misfortunes in Waikiki. With vigorous scrubbing and the passage of a week or so, our residual submarine smell slowly faded and ladies once again enjoyed dancing with us.

  Before leaving Oahu, we propelled the Viperfish across Pearl Harbor to a "deperming" station, where we spent a full day wrapping the boat's superstructure with electrical cables. It was nasty work in the hot Hawaiian sun, but morale was extremely high. Everybody worked enthusiastically to lower the thick wires into the water and pull them up on the other side of the boat until she was fully wrapped in wire.

  After the final cable was pulled out of the water and bolted to the high-voltage generating station, we were all drenched in sweat and our hands were black from the rubber insulation around the cables. We were ordered to leave the immediate area so deperming could take place. This process used current generated by massive voltage to remove any magnetic fields in the Viperfish that could trigger the detonation of underwater mines. Because most of us still had no clue about our upcoming mission, any consideration of going into mine-infested waters was something that nobody wanted even to think about.

  I packed more fruit into my bunk locker, stuffed in another box of cigars, and tucked some John D. MacDonald novels among my clothes. Most of us would wear the same dungarees or the new lint-free overalls called "faboomer suits" for a week at a time, so stocking fresh clothes was limited to one change per week. The trip to the mainland would take about a week. We each needed only three pairs of underclothing, dungaree shirts, and pants, in addition to dress blues, a black silk sailor tie, and a clean white sailor hat to wear during liberty in Seattle and San Francisco.

  Just before we left Pearl Harbor, a new electrician, Brian Lane, reported on board the Viperfish. He was married and took a soft-spoken, low-key approach to the qualifications work that eventually would lead to his running the engine room's complex electrical control panel. As was the case for so many of us, this boat was Brian's first assignment after nuclear power training and submarine school. He quietly began studying the Viperfish systems under the watchful eye of Donald Svedlow and the other qualified electricians.

  On a brilliantly sunny day, we steamed down the Pearl Harbor channel, rendered honors to the USS Arizona as we passed the general area of the sunken vessel, and departed Oahu. The crew shut and dogged the hatches on the topside deck, and the Viperfish moved out of the channel, past the Pearl Harbor ("Papa Hotel") demarcation point that marks the end of the channel, and into the deeper waters of the Pacific Ocean. With the announcement, "Dive! Dive!" the captain cleared the bridge; the lookouts raced down the ladder from the top of the sail and slammed the control room hatch shut as the chief of the watch hit the levers to open the ballast tank valves. Our white-foam wake lingered behind us like a long feathery trail that abruptly ended in a final swarm of bubbles as the ballast tanks filled with water and we angled down to a depth of three hundred feet below the surface. We pushed through the waters off Diamond Head on the east end of Oahu and aligned our navigation system for the Strait of Juan de Fuca at the U.S.-Canadian border-nine days and 2,500 miles away.

  Feeling suspended in our submerged world hundreds of feet below the surface, which seemed much like floating to the far reaches of outer space, we were unaware of any movement to suggest that the Viperfish was, in fact, pushing her way through the ocean toward Seattle. In the engine room, we couldn't even tell if it was day or night because the bright white lights remained on continuously. All sense of direction and time became distorted as the days passed slowly and we had no sensory contact with the world around us.

  For me, existence was a surrealistic process of waiting until the clock said it was quarter to twelve, at which time I assumed my watch at the steam throttles. It didn't matter if it was fifteen minutes before noon or fifteen minutes before midnight, so long as I was sitting in front of the throttles at quarter to twelve. Twice each day, I repeated the process — climbing through the tunnel, walking down the upper-level engine-room passageway, and sitting down to begin my four-hour watch. Four hours later, I left the throttles for eight hours off watch. During this time, I wandered around and worked on qualifications or climbed into my rack and went to sleep.

  If a movie was showing in the crew's dining area before I went on watch, I knew it was nighttime; otherwise, it was daytime. The crew's sleeping area was darkened twenty-four hours a day, so no matter when a crewman awakened it seemed like night. To resolve any lingering uncertainties between day and night, if I really wanted to know, I could climb up to the control center and see what lights were on. White lights indicated daytime and dim red lights meant that
the sun had gone down and the world above us was dark. The red lights allowed the crew's pupils to dilate so that they could see better if the boat suddenly had to surface or move up to periscope depth. For the first few days, I tried to keep track of day and night, but I finally gave up because it was of no significance.

  In the middle of the first week, I was tracking down some obscure system in the engine room when the sudden thunderous roar of flooding water drowned out the whining of the turbogenerators. I was in the upper-level area of the compartment at the time. Wedged between a heat exchanger and a bank of reactor control electronics, I was trying to read the number on a valve to identify its position on my schematic. I was tightly trapped between the solid steel of heavy equipment. For the next ten seconds, I fought furiously to free myself, while my mind screamed total terror and the loudspeakers announced the obvious.

  "Now, flooding, flooding, flooding! We have flooding in the engine room! Lower level, starboard!" the engineering officer hollered. The lower-level engine room, similar to a basement, was below the main engine room and accessed by ladders connecting the two levels.

  "Jesus Christ!" I hollered to nobody in particular as I finally popped free from the equipment and jumped into the central engine-room passageway. A herd of running machinist mates almost knocked me over, but I joined them in an all-out sprint down the passageway. As they disappeared down a ladder toward the bilge, I ran to the compartment's watertight door and began spinning the bar that dogged the door shut to isolate the engine room from the rest of the boat.

  "Main seawater system, starboard condenser!" the engineering officer announced as the roaring noise became louder. "Lower-level engine room, isolate the starboard condenser!"

  "Now, all hands, we have flooding in the engine room!" the captain's voice announced from the control center. "Surface, surface, surface!"

  I began climbing down the ladder into the dark areas of the lower-level engine room. My hands shook violently as I tried to grip the ladder's steel sides. The roaring intensified as several other men and I moved closer into the area of the bilge; I knew there was little time before all the valves would be underwater and the engine room would be lost.

  Suddenly, half the lights throughout the submarine went out, and I could hear the distant sound of high-voltage circuit breakers popping open. The lower-level engine room became darker, and the engineer announced, "Now, we have lost the starboard turbogenerator! Lower-level engine room, report the status of the flooding!"

  The Viperfish assumed a steep up-angle. The screaming sound of the turbine propulsion system was deafening as we tried to accelerate toward the surface. I jumped off the ladder and landed on the steel plates above the bilge as the engine room lights flickered. Finally, I ran aft down the steeply angled decking toward the main condenser. The passageway was completely dry.

  Looking around the area, I tried to find the source of the flooding. On the outboard side of the passageway, a pipe with an open valve was blasting water straight down into the bilge. Several men were sitting next to the condenser, all with big grins on their faces, and ignoring the roar. Milling around the passageway were the machinist mates who had jumped down the ladder in front of me; they were also grinning. One of them, more sympathetic than the rest, told me that the ballast control panel operator was pumping the water overboard as fast as it came out of the pipe.

  Bruce Rossi handed me the communications headset as a chief machinist mate reached down and cranked the valve shut.

  "Tell the engineer we have isolated the flooding, Dunham," Bruce said.

  I stared at the men as I pressed down on the microphone button. "Maneuvering, this is the lower-level engine room," I barked into the communications microphone. "We have found the leak, and we have isolated the flooding."

  "Very well," someone replied. Immediately, the captain's voice broadcast over the ship's main loudspeaker system: "Now, secure from flooding drill, secure from flooding drill."

  And, so, that is how I learned about submarine drills.

  The drills, always realistic to the extreme, forced us to react intentionally and automatically, improving our response time. The concept of "only a drill" allowed a mental dissociation from the fear that would normally accompany the ever-present possibility of a real problem. Although the initial reaction to seeing smoke billowing from the control room or hearing water roaring into the engine room might have been raw panic, the drills instilled the fastest possible response to each type of disaster without potentially fatal hesitation. Finally, the drills kept all of us from getting complacent; instead of expecting the equipment to work properly (as it usually did), we came to expect things to go wrong. In future months, when some of the Viperfish's systems did malfunction, our automatic responses learned during the drills would help to save us from disaster.

  After the flooding drill, I decided that my next step should be to learn everything possible about the boat's emergency escape chamber. Before the next flooding drill or, even more important, in case of a real disaster, I should be qualified on the only system that allowed escape if we were unable to surface. The escape chamber was located in the hangar compartment, where the civilians were-the compartment with the biggest hole. Ironically, the huge hangar was the only compartment that could take on so much water (in the event of a flooding disaster) that the submarine would become too heavy to surface. If it flooded and com- pletely filled with water, there would be no way for any of us to escape.

  I caught Chief Mathews as he came off watch in the control room.

  "Chief, would you run me through the emergency escape chamber?" I asked.

  "That flooding drill get to you, Dunham?"

  "No problem," I lied. "Just thought this would be a good time to learn — it's the next system on my quals list."

  He looked at my list. "It's one of the next systems. All right, let's look it over."

  When we were inside the hangar, we stood below the escape chamber. It was a large, juglike steel structure attached to the overhead escape hatch that connected to the outside of the boat. A ladder extended from the passageway to an opening at the base of the chamber. Paul and I climbed up the ladder and into the chamber while he explained its operation. The interior of the chamber was crammed with valves and pipes, and it took him about fifteen minutes to explain the proper sequence of opening valves to attain pressure equal to that of the surrounding ocean. When the pressures matched, the chamber hatch could then be opened and one could escape from the Viperfish.

  "Remember your free-ascent training in submarine school, Dunham?" he asked.

  "Fifty feet, blow and go," I said. "I remember it well."

  Successful ascent up the top half of a hundred-foot tower of water was a requirement for graduation from submarine school. Placed in the middle of the tower (through a special entry chamber that allowed access) without pressurized oxygen or other breathing equipment, the students were told to blow out the air from their lungs as they floated upward toward a tiny circle of light fifty feet above their heads. Being so deep underwater with-out air tended to focus attention on the immediate matter of survival. If anyone panicked and did not exhale air as he floated toward the circle above, a diving bell holding a bubble of air was dropped down to enclose the man's head. An instructor then blasted the student with one final minute of intense lecturing. If he panicked again, the hapless student was promptly flunked out of submarine school.

  "Correct, fifty feet for the sub school students, one hundred feet for the divers. Blow and go! Excellent training for doing exactly the same thing from the Viperfish, if the opportunity ever arises." The chief pointed to an opening at the top of the escape chamber that allowed an exit from the boat. "If the boat sinks, do the right things with the valves, climb right through that hole, and you're on your way to the surface."

  After we reviewed the sequence of valve operations again and discussed potential problems, the chief said that there was nothing else to learn about escaping and I was now ready to hav
e the system checked off by one of the other crew members.

  "By the way," I called out to him after leaving the chamber, "how far down would we descend, if there was flooding?"

  He turned around and smiled. "If we sank to the bottom?"

  "If we had a leak and sank to the bottom during our trip to Seattle."

  After considering the question, he said slowly, "I just talked to the navigator. About an hour ago, we passed well south of the Mendelssohn Seamount and moved into the mid-Pacific. It's a little more shallow back there, but-"

  "How shallow is the top of the Mendelssohn Seamount?"

  "Oh, somewhere close to fifteen thousand feet."

  I stared at the chief.

  "A little less," he said, without expression. "It gets deeper during the next couple of days, dropping down to about twenty thousand feet before we finally reach the Juan de Fuca Ridge."

  "Chief, our crush depth is-"

  "I know all about our crush depth, Dunham. Best thing to do is not spend too much time thinking about the escape chamber"

  For the first time since reporting on board the submarine, I fully realized that we could never escape the pressures waiting for us below if we became disabled and sank anywhere in the Pacific Ocean. Our craft could not survive any accidents that destroyed the lifesaving buoyancy of our submarine. There could be no safe landings, no settling on terrain spanning the harsh ocean bottom, no escape for any of us if flooding took us down. During the remainder of the trip, the Viperfish seemed to become more confining and our claustrophobia intensified as we each worked to conquer our own fears inside the steel machine that we called our home.

  5. The Sea Bat and other creatures