Around the World Submerged (2 page)

TECHNICAL AND SCIENTIFIC PERSONNEL

CDR Joseph B. Roberts, USNR, Office of Information, Navy Department

Earnest R. Meadows, PH1

Dr. Benjamin B. Weybrew, Psychologist, Naval Medical Research Laboratory, Submarine Base, New London

Mr. Michael Smalet, Geophysicist, USN Hydrographic Office

Mr. Gordon E. Wilkes, Civil Engineer, USN Hydrographic Office

Mr. Nicholas R. Mabry, Oceanographer, USN Hydrographic Office

Mr. Frank E. McConnell, Engineer, General Dynamics

Mr. Eldon E. Good, Inertial Guidance Division, Sperry

In the account of
Triton
’s voyage which follows, I have drawn freely upon the narrative section of the official report of our trip. When assembled, this report formed a tome about three inches thick. It contained many detailed tabulations and much succinctly presented raw information, and all the officers of the ship participated in its preparation. My contribution was the narrative section, which was made public when we arrived back in the United States.

Here, interspersed between the sections of the “Log” and forming the major portion of this book, are my own personal thoughts and observations as later reconstituted at my typewriter at home after all the excitement had died down.

All portions of this manuscript have been submitted to the Navy Department for clearance, and each chapter bears the stamp “no objection to publication on grounds of military security.” Over and above this, the entire responsibility for everything which appears in these pages obviously must be my own.

—Edward L. Beach

Captain, United States Navy

Mystic, Connecticut

*
Did not complete voyage.

PROLOGUE

As a small boy, I had the good fortune of being a Navy Junior while living a settled life in a small community, without the frenetic shifts of locale inherent in a Service life. My father, as a Captain, after a long and rewarding career in the Navy, retired when I was four years old to accept the post of Professor of Military and Naval History at Stanford University. He had served the Navy thirty-seven-and-a-half years, and his sea duty had culminated with command of the American flagship in the European war zone during World War I.

During the course of his career, Dad had written thirteen books about naval life, most of them for teen-aged youths, plus several others aimed at a more mature audience. He had made a lifetime avocation of the study of history, with a natural inclination, of course, toward naval history; he had fought in three minor and two major wars (and was fond of saying that the minor ones were far more dangerous, so far as he personally was concerned, than the major). He had commanded one repair ship, two armored cruisers, and two battleships; I was born while he skippered the new “superdreadnaught”
New York,
in 1918.

My formative youth was spent in Palo Alto, California, where, after his years as a professor at Stanford, Father held the combined posts of City Clerk and Assessor. Among my childhood recollections were the stories Father used to tell about his experiences in the Philippines during and after the Spanish-American War, at the Naval Academy as a midshipman and
later as an instructor, and particularly about that dreadful day in 1916 when his ship, the armored cruiser
Memphis,
was engulfed and destroyed by a tidal wave. The latter was my favorite yarn, and I never wearied of forcing my poor father to repeat all the details of the catastrophe which had blighted his career.

Father said that I would do well to study medicine, but I felt his heart wasn’t in it. My only thoughts were of going to the Naval Academy and becoming, like him, an officer in the US Navy.

The long-sought fulfillment of my ambitions came in 1935. So great was my anticipation I couldn’t understand why Mother was crying when my parents took me to the train station, nor the meaning behind Father’s faraway look. I was then just seventeen years old.

Four years at the Naval Academy had more ups than downs and were most satisfying, but when I graduated on the first of June, 1939, it was with the sad knowledge that Father was slipping away from me. His long and interesting letters had become increasingly difficult to read. The thoughts in them of late had begun to wander, and I noticed that more and more he relived the past, particularly the loss of his old
Memphis
and the crew members he had had to watch drown.

Father used to say that the place for a young officer was in a big ship; so upon graduation from Annapolis, I applied for the ten thousand ton cruiser
Chester.
I had been aboard about two months when the war in Europe broke out. Because of a surname beginning early in the alphabet I found myself transferred to the
Lea,
destroyer number 118.

The
Lea
was tiny, one-tenth the displacement of the
Chester,
and she had been “permanently” retired to mothballs some years before. The brass plate on her varnished wooden mast revealed her age as being the same as my own. There were only five officers in the
Lea,
and I was the most junior. Later on, when the “Third” was transferred, I automatically rose
to the high eminence of Fourth, but this, under the circumstances, had little effect on my unofficial title of “George.”

“George,” the traditional name of the most junior officer on board, always served as the ship’s commissary officer, communications officer, ship’s service officer, torpedo officer, gunnery officer, and first lieutenant. In addition, I had to insert a three-year stack of corrections into the ship’s allotment of classified books and pamphlets—a horrendous job—was in charge of the landing party (luckily it seldom got an opportunity to go ashore), stood two four-hour watches a day on the bridge while under way, and while in port stood a twenty-four-hour “day’s duty” every third day (except for a short period when I had the duty every other day).

There was also a Destroyer Officers Qualification Course of some twenty lengthy assignments, which I was required to complete within a year’s time; and the Bureau of Navigation, evidently afraid that Ensigns might neglect their leisure time reading, had decided that we should submit a two thousand word book report each month.

The ship also had a skipper, an engineer, and an executive officer, but I never had time to discover what any of them did.

After two years on the
Lea,
in September, 1941, a message arrived directing me to submarine school in New London for instruction in submarine duty. By this time, I loved that slender four-stacked race horse of a destroyer, and didn’t want to leave; but my skipper, an old submariner himself, would not send the protest I drafted, so off I went.

The course of instruction at the submarine school, originally six months long, had been curtailed to three by the war emergency, and on December 20, 1941,1 was one of fifty-one graduates who heard the officer in charge of the school deliver a graduation address. In the course of it he said, “Many of you will command your own ships before this war is over.”

None of us believed we could achieve such greatness, but
a little later we all noted the other side of the coin, when the first of our group went to eternity in the shattered submarine to which he had reported only a couple of weeks before.

My first submarine was USS
Trigger
(SS237), then under construction at the Navy Yard, Mare Island, California. During my two years on the
Lea,
I had finally bequeathed the “George” spot to someone else, but in the
Trigger
I found myself with that familiar title again. As before, I was greeted by a huge stack of uncorrected confidential and secret publications. The similarity, however, ended here; for
Trigger,
a first-line ship of war, was designed to operate in an entirely new and unfamiliar medium. The amount of highly technical equipment crammed into her sturdy hull amazed me.

I reported to
Trigger
on New Year’s Day, 1942, but it wasn’t until May that we arrived at Pearl Harbor. No one in
Trigger
had ever heard a shot fired in anger. We were all new, green as grass—even the skipper. A feeling of trepidation crept over us as we approached our recently desecrated Pacific bastion.

A short leave during an overhaul period in mid-1943 had great personal significance. I saw Father for the last time, I met Ingrid Schenck, and when I returned to
Trigger
I became second-in-command.

When I was detached, a year later, Dad had been gone six months and
Trigger,
now top-ranking submarine in the force, had less than a year to live. With orders to report to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as Executive Officer of the not-yet-launched submarine
Tirante,
I used authorized delay time to take a ten-day honeymoon with the girl I had courted during three hectic weeks of leave the year before.

Tirante
was a very successful submarine, earning Lieutenant Commander George L. Street, her skipper, a Congressional Medal of Honor. In June of 1945, the prediction of three and one half years was fulfilled when I was given command of my own ship, the
Piper.
The war, however, was
drawing to a close. I strove mightily to get
Piper
into action, but the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki got there first. Instead of killing and destroying, we rescued six bombed or torpedoed Japanese (we could never determine what had sunk their ship) from the middle of the Sea of Japan, and I have since felt grateful, after all the depth charges and torpedoes, that this, instead of destruction of my fellow man, is my last memory of the war.

Life in the peacetime Navy was, of course, very different from the war years. I spent periods in the Navy Department in Washington and periods at sea. There was a moment of deep grief when our first child, little Inga, aged three years and a week, died suddenly in Key West, Florida. There was a period of professional triumph when my ship, the
Amberjack,
pioneering new tactics to exploit her revolutionary streamlined shape, was for a time the most battle-worthy submarine in the force.

Happily, we had more children; two boys and another little girl. I spent some time on the staff of General Omar N. Bradley while he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then went to sea in command of the newly constructed submarine,
Trigger
(SS564). Despite the heritage of her name, this ship, named after my old destroyed
Trigger,
was a great sorrow. Her engines, poorly designed and put into service after insufficient testing, were not dependable.

My indignation ran high. Diesel engines had long since been perfected. At one time submariners had assisted in their development, but that job had been done, the principles proven. Now, our job, as I saw it, was to operate the ships, develop tactics for them, and test their combat capabilities—not help to build diesel engines any more. One of the three types of diesel engines with which we had fitted our boats before the war had proved to be an inglorious failure, thus endangered the lives of the crews. The most worth-while contribution
Trigger
II could make, I felt, was to prevent this from happening
again by being forthright about the deficiencies. But condemnation of the new engines was not well-received in the Navy Department, where a more popular view was that submarine skippers should spend their time stoically trying to make their boats run instead of documenting their faults. Vainly, I argued that glossing over its manifest undependability for war service was precisely what had been done with the pre-war HOR engine (sometimes, with a deep tone of disgust, the initials were pronounced as a word), with the result that it was not taken off the line soon enough. Ultimately all of them were replaced, but not before men had fought the enemy in defective ships and come back in passionate anger. It was one lesson we had learned well: no operational commander would send a ship like the new
Trigger
on any important mission in war, I said.

The controversy was still going on when we had occasion to put
Trigger
in dry dock one day in January, 1953. During dry-dock operations, there is a short time when your ship is completely out of communication with the outside world. It is impossible for anyone to go ashore, and telephones are not yet hooked up. Temporarily, you are entirely incommunicado. It was while
Trigger
was in this condition that a large overhead crane swung toward us from the dock, and someone noticed a telephone hanging from the crane’s hook. Seconds later, the crane, capable of lifting twenty tons, laid the five-pound telephone gently on our afterdeck. It was ringing steadily.

“It’s for you, Captain.” The sailor answering the phone still wore the surprised look with which he had picked it up. The caller was an officer in the Bureau of Naval Personnel. He wanted me to come to Washington as soon as possible, but would not say why. I spent the next several hours worrying. The only reason anyone would want me in Washington, so far as I could guess, was to be unpleasant about my attitude toward the Navy’s new submarine diesel engines.

I caught the night train, was in Washington early the next morning, and was directed to report to the headquarters of the President-elect of the United States at a downtown hotel. There, after several minutes of aimless conversation with busy people, a singularly pleasant, soft-spoken, and slender gentleman, whom I later discovered to be Major General Wilton B. Persons, USA (ret.), suddenly asked, “Would you like to be the President’s Naval Aide?”

The question caught me by surprise, as no doubt it was intended to do. What I knew about naval aiding a President was not impressive. I remember wondering whether it would be anything like working for General Bradley, and, in virtually the same thought, whether he might have had anything to do with suggesting me. And I remember also thinking quickly that coming ashore meant I would no longer be “attached to and serving on board a submarine.” This would automatically result in a pay cut amounting to $180.00 a month.