Around the World Submerged (13 page)

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 The red circle, indicating that the conning tower hatch was open, had been replaced by a single short bar.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 could 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.

I nodded to Hay. “You have the deck and the Conn, Jim,” I said. “I’m going aft now. Keep the fathometer going and maintain a careful sonar watch. Call me if you hear anything.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Jim. “Course 180, speed full, depth 150 feet, stay 75 feet above the bottom, when we reach 150 feet sounding, follow it on down to running depth. I understand, sir!”

I nodded again and left him.

McKamey was seated on a tool box in the passageway, pulling off his sou’westers.

“Nice job of diving, McKamey,” I said.

His boyish face glowed with pleasure. McKamey had very recently reported aboard from submarine school and had already showed himself to have the makings of a fine sailor. He couldn’t be long out of high school, I thought, forgetting that I had left home permanently at probably an even younger age.

A few feet farther aft, crammed into a corner among a plotting table, some air-conditioning monitoring equipment, a large stack of radar components, and some fire-control equipment, was a tiny compartment labeled “sonar room.” Here was the nerve center
of Triton’
s underwater listening equipment. Lieutenant Dick Harris, known as “Silent Dick,” was there,
along with two of our Sonarmen, rangy “Dutch” Beckhaus, once of the
Salamonie,
and Kenneth Remillard, the shortest man aboard and, by dint of his size, probably the most comfortable. Dick was no doubt checking the cruising organization and laying out initial sonar watches, and none of the three saw me. A few feet farther aft I stepped through a watertight hatch, and in a few more feet entered my tiny stateroom.

William Green, our Chief Steward, for some reason known to most of the crew as “Joe,” was standing in the passageway outside my door. Gratefully, I peeled off the uncomfortable heavy garments and passed them to him.

“Dry them out well, Green, and then put them away,” I said. “I won’t be needing them for a while.”

Chief Green, a heavy-set Negro, could upon occasion assume an artless manner calculated to elicit information. It had more than once worked pretty well, but this time I was ready for him.

“It might be cold on the bridge up there in the North Sea, Captain,” he said. “Maybe I’d better just fold these up and keep them where you can get at them.”

Almost, but not quite, his face assumed the expression of solicitous concern he wanted to convey.

“Get out of here, Green,” I said with feigned severity, “and take that gear with you.”

“Aren’t we going up north, sir?” Green’s carefully contrived expression—his big round eyes and innocently questioning face—were too much to hold, and he broke into a broad, white-toothed grin. “Are we going to keep heading down into the warm water, Captain?”

“Green,” I said, lowering my voice to a confidential tone, “I’ll tell you right where you can go in about five seconds. You’re not about to get around me this time!”

Not a whit abashed, Green exited with his arms loaded, chuckling loudly. I sat at my desk and pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward me. A rather comprehensive report of our trip
was going to be required of us and we might as well start.

“Dived,” I wrote on the paper. “We shall not surface until May.”

But then, with this bit of incriminating information in black and white before me, I carefully hid the sheet for the time being among the ever-present pile in the basket marked “incoming.”

About 2240, traveling deep at high speed,
Triton
crossed the south boundary of the submarine operating area off Montauk Point. The last statutory restriction on our movements had been satisfied. But instead of changing course from south to east, which would have been in order had we intended only to clear Nantucket before heading into the North Atlantic, we changed half as much, to southeast. Some time would pass before the crew recognized the difference, I felt. It was logical to get well clear of the coast before squaring away on our run to the north. But the big secret could not keep very much longer, for submarine sailors are traditionally alert to their ships’ movements.

We had actually started the first leg of our voyage, a 3,250-
mile run to a seldom-visited islet several hundred miles off the Brazilian coast and nearly on the equator.

We had plotted our course to travel the length of the Atlantic Ocean twice: first, on a southerly track; and second, on the return leg, on a northerly course. The shortest route brought us close to South America on our way to Cape Horn; and our return put us on a course for the bulge of Africa after rounding the Cape of Good Hope. From there, we could head for Spain. But following this course had a great disadvantage: though we would two times have traveled the length of the Atlantic, the earth would not be girdled until we closed the gap between our nearly parallel north-south tracks—until arrival home, in other words. Yet by a relatively slight diversion, we could intersect our original track somewhere near the equator. Completing our circumnavigation at the equator made sense, for if our radioed instructions from Washington for the ceremony off Spain called for us to surface the ship, we might be forced to break our submergence record.

Operationally, there was no legitimate reason for a diversion; but morale is most important in ships on long, lonely voyages like ours. It would take us a few extra days—three as I recall—and after urgent argument in Washington it had been agreed that the circumnavigational part of our trip should be completed before any ceremonies, and should have a starting and ending point which could be photographed. A suitable spot was a tiny islet in the mid-Atlantic some fifty miles north of the equator, marked on the chart as “St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks.” And it was there, we decided, we would close our loop around the earth. After that, we could surface if necessary without giving ammunition to some technically-minded heckler. But we hoped to go the entire route submerged anyway, as a submarine should, and we had made preparations to photograph the “Rocks” through the periscope, while submerged.

Before dawn on the morning of the seventeenth of February,
we brought
Triton
to periscope depth for morning star sights and for ventilation. The necessity of doing this was a far greater restriction on our progress than might at first appear, for with periscopes raised the ship had to proceed at slow speed. If
Triton
were to make all the speed of which she is capable, an extended periscope would be seriously damaged, or possibly snapped off at the base, by the force of driving through the water. In addition, before coming to periscope depth, one must first listen cautiously at slow speed for surface ships in the vicinity. The entire process—slowing down, changing course to listen on various bearings and at various depths, coming up and then remaining at slow speed for a variety of purposes while at periscope depth—takes considerable time. Naturally, the time is programmed for the maximum possible use. Not much can be done with the time spent coming up, but while at periscope depth, in addition to making celestial observations, we can raise our air-induction mast and pump in a good fresh supply of air (thus preserving our precious oxygen supply); we try to pick up a news broadcast on our tape recorder for later rerun; and, since there is less resistance from pressure of the sea at shallow depths, it is easier to eject our garbage and to blow out our refuse from the sanitary tanks.

But every minute spent at reduced speed requires many times that minute to recover the distance lost. Every hour was precious, because the high “speed of advance” (SOA) required to complete the trip within the allotted time did not give even
Triton
’s fabulous power plant much leeway. One of our objectives was to determine the limiting factors of sustained high speed, and there was little doubt that the test would be pretty conclusive.

A recently developed device was being tried out this morning. One of our periscopes featured a new development of the Kollmorgen Optical Company by which the altitude of celestial bodies could be observed as accurately through a
periscope as with the trusted sextant. Until recent years, submarines were navigated in the same manner as any other ship, and to get their sights they had to be on the surface. Since nonnuclear subs have to be on the surface every day for long periods anyway, either to charge their batteries or to run at the high speeds which they can’t make while submerged, taking a sight presented no special problem—although I can recall several times during the war when I had to lash myself to a heaving, wet bridge and protect my sextant between sights with a sou’wester hat. The snorkel did not completely release the submarine from the surface, since air was still needed for the diesel engines, but it enabled the engines to be run at periscope depth, and this in turn focused attention upon the need for a new way of shooting stars. With the nuclear submarine’s greatly increased radius of action, taking sights through a periscope became a necessity. Many special periscopes have been built for the purpose, mainly by the Kollmorgen Optical Company, and perhaps a certain Lieutenant Fred Kollmorgen’s tour in the USS
Skate
has had something to do with this.