Watching the whales’ deconstruction gave Ken an idea: Why not conduct a parallel comparative anatomy study using whale lungs as the animal model? His professor endorsed the concept. So several times a week, Ken would stop by the Richmond station and sort through the mountains of oversized organs that Del Monte and Golden Gate discarded as garbage every day. Wading among the maggots that undulated in the ripe tissue and the indescribable aroma of half-rotted offal, Ken would search for an intact lung. It was during one of these gruesome scavenger hunts that Ken discovered his first beaked whale specimen—a rare Baird’s beaked whale head, almost six feet long. It was about to be hauled off with the rest of the refuse when Ken grabbed it with both hands and rolled it off the pile. He was so excited to finally hold a beaked whale head in his hands that he barely minded the stench or the maggots swarming out of its eye sockets.
A week later, Ken heard that a research team had chartered one of Golden Gate’s whaling ships, the Lynnann, for a two-week whale-tagging expedition in the Santa Barbara Islands. When Ken discovered that the expedition was being led by the premier American and Japanese cetologists of the day, Dale Rice and Masaharu Nishiwaki, he begged the Lynnann’s captain for a job. Any job. When the captain said he needed a dishwasher, Ken pounced.
During Balcomb’s first whale-tagging trip aboard the Lynnann, January, 1964. From left to right: Captain Bud Newton, Engineer John Dietrich, Dr. Masaharu Nishiwaki, Cook Bob Young, Dale W. Rice (Expedition Leader), Crewman Ernesto Gonzales, and Ken Balcomb.
Whale tagging dated back to the 1920s when researchers aboard the British vessel Discovery set sail for the Southern Ocean to conduct the first scientific survey of whale migrations. The original Discovery “tags” were foot-long stainless-steel cylinders engraved with date, the sponsor’s address, and—in the 1920s—the promise of a cash reward to any whaler who found one while flensing or cooking the whale’s blubber and mailed it back to the researchers in London. Comparing the location of the tagging to the location of its recovery, the researchers could then plot the migration path of the whale.
Forty years later, Rice and Nishiwaki decided to use the same tags and tagging method. But it was harder than they had anticipated. You had to stand on the deck of a fast-moving boat giving chase to a whale that surfaced for just a few seconds to breathe. In that instant, you had to fire the tag from a 12-gauge shotgun and hit the whale. If the tag lodged in the tissue below the blubber layer, you had a successful “mark.” But fired from a distance of 100 to 300 feet, most of the tags missed their target altogether or else hit the dorsal fin and bounced into the ocean.
Ken turned out to be the only person on board who could handle a shotgun well enough to actually make a mark. After a couple of shots, he figured out that the tags were heavy, so you had to aim high to compensate for gravity. And you had to lead the moving target, just as his stepfather Cal had taught him to do while duck hunting. Before dinner of the first day’s tagging, Ken was promoted from dishwasher to marksman/dishwasher. By the end of their two-week tour, he’ d successfully tagged almost 200 whales.
Those two weeks aboard the Lynnann were bliss. After years as a loner adrift in his own world, Ken had finally found a peer group and a mission. It was his first time at sea, and he loved everything about it: the boat, the whales, the shotguns, and especially the company of two world-renowned cetologists who knew the answers to all his questions about whales.
During that tagging trip, Ken began photographing whales. He’ d been taking nature photos ever since high school, and shortly before the tagging trip Ken had seen a spectacular photo-spread of humpback whales in Life magazine.1 At the time, almost no one had photographed whales in the wild. Fortunately for Ken, the same keen eyes and quick reflexes that made him a good whale tagger enabled him to capture photographs of whales from the deck of the Lynnann.
Aboard the Lynnann, armed with a whale-tagging shotgun and a camera.
By the end the trip, Rice offered Ken the job of expedition leader on another tagging trip over the summer. When Ken returned home, triumphant, Anne wasn’t there to celebrate. She’ d taken their one-year-old son, Kelley, and moved back with her parents in Sacramento. Ken begged her to come home, but she refused. She knew that Ken was doing what he’ d always wanted, but it wasn’t what she’ d signed up for. She missed the clean-cut kid with the winning smile she’ d met at the gas station. The one who was heading to law school, not the one who hung out in whale processing plants, who went to sea for weeks at a time and came home smelling like a fishmonger.
Ken was crushed that his young family was breaking apart. A month later, when Anne began seeing a medical student across campus, Ken couldn’t handle it. He dropped out of grad school and took a volunteer job with Dale Rice tagging whales. After a series of trips marking gray whales in Baja, Rice offered him a full-time job working for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So Ken moved to Berkeley and worked at the Richmond whaling station collecting specimens. Day after day he searched for Discovery tags in the piles of offal and in the cookers, verified the length and legality of the catch, and took samples of their blubber, earwax, stomach contents, and gonads.
His divorce papers arrived that spring. Two months later, he heard from the draft board. Now that he was neither married nor a student, Ken was reclassified as 1-A eligible. It was the summer of 1965, and troop levels in Vietnam were escalating rapidly. Dale Rice suggested a “deferred occupation” that might keep the draft board at bay. The Smithsonian was directing a contract job for the US Army, banding birds in the Pacific, based out of Honolulu. All things considered, the middle of the Pacific Ocean sounded to Ken like a pretty good destination.2
Ken spent a year at sea, moving from dot to dot in the central Pacific and the Hawaiian island chain. From there, he progressed to a seemingly endless string of central and South Pacific atolls. Every few days, he would disembark from the mother ship aboard an inflatable boat packed with a tent, food, and water, and thousands of aluminum leg bands. He’ d find landfall, set up camp, sleep all day, and work all night banding birds that nested on the ground along the shore.
Bird banding on Hull Island in the North Pacific, 1966.
It was classic stoop labor, like planting rice in a paddy. Insects feasted on his arms and legs. Coral sliced his feet and ankles. It was the kind of work that only a masochist, or a man in flight from his mainland life, could tolerate. If it felt a bit like working on a chain gang, that suited Ken too. He felt guilty for making a mess of his family life and for being an absentee father, as Blue had been.
While bird banding on Swain’s Island near American Samoa, 1966.
Then, in August 1966, when his ship was crossing the equator precisely at the international date line, a message came over the ship’s Teletype from Dale Rice: “Sorry, Ken, the draft board rejected your deferral. Report for immediate induction at first US landfall.”
When he returned to Berkeley, Ken crashed with his half brothers, Howie and Rick. In the year Ken had been at sea, the Bay Area had become the epicenter of the antiwar movement. Flower power was in full blossom. Rick had joined the US Navy reserves in college, and Howie, also 1-A eligible, was moving to Canada to escape the draft. But Ken didn’t want to run away to Canada. He wasn’t antiwar or antimilitary. Rather than waiting to be drafted into the infantry—which seemed to him like a death trap—Ken decided to apply to the same Naval Aviation Corps that the colonel’s son had served in before his fatal crash. Despite the colonel’s scorn and abuse, Ken still wanted his stepfather to think he’ d amounted to something.
Ken showed up for basic training in Pensacola, Florida, with long, raggedy hair and a beard, looking like an island castaway crossed with a Berkeley hippy. They gave him the standard issue high-and-tight crew cut, then sent him through the Top Gun indoc routine: break you down and build you back up to fit the mold. By the seventh day of indoc, he was ready to quit. Then he started to notice that he was doing better than his classmates, who were mos
tly three or four years younger. The push-up and sit-up drills were nothing compared to what he’ d endured during his year of bird banding. And he could still clock the fastest mile in his squadron.
In flight training, Ken learned aviation and aeronautics and how to shine his shoes. He grew to appreciate the Navy’s merit system. You learned your shit and did your job, and you got recognition. After 12 weeks, he graduated first in his class.
Every Navy flyboy worth his salt had to get himself a blonde and a Corvette after being commissioned an officer. Ken had no quarrel with that directive. As a connoisseur of vintage cars, he passed on the Corvette and bought himself a ’57 Mercedes Gullwing. He never loved a car like he loved that one. Blondes were even easier to come by. It seemed that every girl from New Orleans to Tallahassee would show up in Pensacola on the weekends to try to snag a flyboy. Julie Byrd was from Mobile, Alabama. She followed Ken to advanced flight training in Corpus Christi, Texas, and they got married in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was assigned to the air group at the naval base. Julie didn’t want kids, which suited Ken just fine. She was a go-along-get-along kind of girl, a useful quality in a Navy wife.
Ken’s second wife, Julie, pinning on his naval aviator “wings” after graduation from flight school in Corpus Christi, Texas, August 1968.
After he completed advanced flight school in the top 1 percent of his class and got his “wings,” Ken submitted his “dream sheet” for his first assignment. He wasn’t keen to pilot bombing runs over Vietnam. His first choice was to fly research aircraft, either as a hurricane hunter or to supply expeditions in Antarctica. His second choice was fixed-wing antisubmarine surveillance.
So what assignment did he draw? Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS, what he considered the most boring flight job in the sky! You take off from a carrier and fly racetrack ovals while the guys back in air traffic control look for bogies on your radar screens. He’ d flown AWACS for a week during flight training, and it bored him to death. He couldn’t believe it. He’ d finished at the top of his class, and he’ d drawn AWACS duty?
Ken applied for an assignment change. He begged for a research job—any kind of research. So they assigned him to oceanographic research and sent him to Fleet Sonar School in Key West, Florida. For a Navy flight officer, sonar was a total dead end. It wasn’t even a flight assignment. He figured it was retaliation for refusing AWACS. But at least it would get him back to sea, or at least seaside.
What Oceanographic Officer Ken Balcomb didn’t realize was that naval sound surveillance would offer him a privileged porthole into the hidden world of whales.
5
In the Silent Service
As Balcomb soon discovered, everything about Navy sonar was cloaked in secrecy. Classes at Fleet Sonar School were held inside a windowless cinder-block building shuttered behind a large green security door—perhaps to prepare the student for the bunkerlike sonar stations where they’ d be working. The curriculum was a rigorous course load of acoustics, physics, sonar, and antisubmarine warfare history and tactics. Less than half the class passed. Balcomb loved it. The math and physics of underwater acoustics came easily to him. Learning the secret science of sound in the ocean made him feel like the sorcerer’s apprentice.
The best-kept military secret of the Cold War was the Sound Surveillance System, called SOSUS for short, that Balcomb was being trained to operate in the Pacific. SOSUS was a radical innovation in antisubmarine warfare that enabled the US Navy to maintain a crucial tactical advantage over the Soviets for 25 years.
• • •
At the end of the nineteenth century, US Navy strategist Admiral Alfred Mahan proclaimed, “Whoever rules the waves, rules the world.” Early in the twentieth century, the submarine quickly emerged as the preeminent naval weapon, trumping surface-based battleships that had ruled the seas for centuries.
The Germans became the world’s most lethal submariners. During World War II, “wolf packs” of German U-boats sank more than 3,000 Allied ships and were neutralized only late in the war when the Allies finally cracked the code of their radio transmissions. After the fall of Berlin in May 1945, Soviet and American naval commanders scrambled for the spoils of war. They seized German U-boats—as well as the German engineers who designed them—in hopes of gaining an edge in the next generation of submarine development.
Just before the war ended, the Germans had launched the fastest, most stealthy submarine ever built. The Soviets adopted the German quiet-diesel designs and moved aggressively to produce an armada of snorkeling submarines that could stay submerged for days, making them almost impossible to detect by visual or radar surveillance.1 By the early fifties, Soviet production lines were cranking out these vessels by the dozens each year. Due to the budgetary politics of peacetime, the US Navy knew that it couldn’t match Stalin’s resolve to produce submarines at a wartime pace. Over the course of the Cold War, the Soviets built almost four times as many submarines as the Americans.2 The US Navy resolved to overcome its numerical disadvantage by excelling at acoustic warfare.
The traditional way to locate a submarine with sound was active sonar. First invented in 1912 in response to the Titanic disaster, the “echo-ranger” that enabled ships to locate submerged icebergs was soon repurposed to track the deadly U-boats unleashed by Germany in the first months of World War I. Active sonar locates submarines the same way bats and toothed whales use echolocation to hunt their prey—by sending out a sound signal and calculating the time and trajectory of the echo to fix the location of the target.
But WWII-era active sonar had a serious limitation: it could only detect submerged submarines at short ranges of a mile or less. During the Cold War, America needed to track a vast Soviet fleet of submarines across wide ocean basins.
Throughout the 1950s, both the United States and the Soviets raced to transform their submarines from fearsome stealth vessels into truly apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction. In 1955 the Soviets deployed the first submarine capable of launching nuclear-armed, ballistic missiles. The Americans soon followed suit. By the end of the decade, both navies had equipped their nuclear-armed subs with nuclear-powered turbines that enabled them to stay submerged for months. Unlike land and air-based ballistic missile systems, submarines were invisible and ever-moving missile silos that could hide and launch from anywhere in the world’s oceans—even under the Arctic ice cap.
Faced with the threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from thousands of miles away, the question driving US antisubmarine strategy became: How can we detect and track Soviet submarines across whole ocean basins?
The answer was simple in concept and wildly ambitious in scope. If—as hypothesized by one of its physicists—the Navy could discover and exploit a hidden whispering chamber that extended throughout the deep ocean, then it could wiretap the world’s oceans and track the movements of every submarine in the Soviet fleet. SOSUS marked the beginning of a bold new era in sound surveillance: passive sonar. Instead of sending out an active sound signal and hoping to hear an echo, SOSUS’ passive sonar simply listened—intently and silently—for whatever sound a submarine or its propeller made as it moved through the water.
It all began in the spring of 1944, while the Allies were still battling German U-boats in the North Atlantic. A geophysicist working at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Maurice Ewing, and his graduate student J. Lamar Worzel, sailed aboard the research vessel USS Saluda to the Bahamian island of Eleuthera. Their mission was to discover a hidden sound pipeline that Ewing was convinced lay deep beneath the ocean surface.
Ewing theorized that low-frequency sound waves, which were known to travel farther with less absorption in water than higher-frequency waves, could be transmitted across great distances in the deep ocean. He deduced that several thousand feet below the ocean surface, the intense pressure and cold temperature combine to create a distinct layer of water—a whispering chamber of sorts—that traps and focuses sound. Any sound that d
escended into what Ewing called the “deep sound channel” would travel horizontally for hundreds or even thousands of miles without diffusion or distortion, as if inside a sound pipeline.
Ewing’s hypothesis was based on the first principle of underwater sound that Balcomb learned in Fleet Sonar School: “Sound is lazy.” Meaning, sound waves always refract toward the slowest sound layer in the water column. Since sound accelerates in warmer water, it refracts away from the heated surface layer toward the slower, colder water below. Eventually, at approximately 3,000 feet, the increasing pressure at depth compresses and speeds the sound up again, refracting it upward toward the slower, lower-pressure water near the surface. Ewing hypothesized that the deep sound channel would attract and trap “lazy” sound waves into this deep ocean layer, and then transmit the sound signal horizontally through this sound channel, more or less indefinitely.
To test this theory, Ewing directed his escort vessel, the destroyer USS Buckley, to drop four-pound bombs timed to detonate 3,000 feet below the surface—explosives being the high-decibel, low-frequency sound source of choice for Ewing and his generation of acoustic experimenters. Detonating explosives at deep-sea pressures of 8,000 pounds per square inch was considered impossible by most physicists. But Worzel, the inventive engineer in their partnership, packed the explosives into automobile inner tubes and jury-rigged a detonator using paper caps from toy pistols.
Ewing suspended an underwater microphone, called a hydrophone, over the bow of the Saluda to a depth of 3,000 feet. After each detonation, the Buckley moved ten miles farther into the Atlantic and detonated another bomb. When the Buckley ran out of bombs, 900 miles out to sea, Ewing could still hear the explosions clearly from the Saluda, with almost no signal loss! He happily set sail for Woods Hole to announce that his hypothesis of a deep sound channel was now fact.3
War of the Whales: A True Story Page 6