Around the World Submerged

by Edward Latimer Beach

  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.

  But that is about all I recall of the interview, for the next thing I found myself saying was that I would like the job, if Mr. Eisenhower wanted me. A friendly Army colonel by the name of Pete Carroll introduced me to a few more people and then showed me out. “When do I start?” I asked him.

  “You’ve started,” he replied.

  The four years I served as Naval Aide to the President are, of course, among the most precious recollections my wife and I have. To be associated in any capacity with the President of the United States and to have had the opportunity to earn his regard is a piece of good fortune which cannot fall to many.

  I soon found that a tremendous amount of official paper flows every day between the White House and the Pentagon. About ninety-five percent of this paper is routine—and the Navy’s portion of this reaches the President through the Naval Aide. Naturally, there were other duties, too.

  One of the more pleasant tasks which fell to me was that of making the arrangements for Mrs. Eisenhower’s christening of the Nautilus. The affair burgeoned from a rather simple expedition to an elaborate operation, involving special trains, special protocol arrangements, and all sorts of intricate details in New London.

  During a moment of leisure after the 1956 campaign, I communicated to the President my feeling that as a career naval officer I should not remain longer than four years in the position I then held. His ready understanding has been one of my warm memories of him.

  The Navy Department concurred in my desire for sea duty, and since I had recently attained the rank of Captain, I was assigned to command one of the fast fleet oilers serving our forces in the Mediterranean. Salamonie, or “Old Sal” as we dubbed her, had been built for the Standard Oil Company as a so-called “super-tanker” just before the war. Taken over by the Navy before completion, she had been a part of the fleet ever since, and when I saw her, she bore the scars of many years of strenuous operations.

  Almost all my time on board was spent at sea in the Mediterranean, fueling ships and fighting rust, and as we prepared to leave that strategic area, I was amazed at the tabulated number of ships we had refueled and the quantity of fuel oil, gasoline, and jet fuel we had pumped through our tanks. We had serviced an average of four ships per day, and on some days we counted as many as twenty-four ships alongside during a twenty-four-hour period.

  During the Salamonie’s return trip to the United States, in December of 1957, she had a brief moment of distinction when three destroyers, caught in a lengthy period of bad weather at sea, began to run perilously low on fuel. We were the only ship in the vicinity, and after three days of struggle at the tail end of a North Atlantic hurricane, we managed to get fuel to the three ships and save the situation. It was a strenuous operation from the heaving, pitching deck of the Salamonie, and it must have been even more so from the destroyers’ point of view.

  During the first day, a heavy sea swept a man overboard from one of them; snatched him, in fact, from the boat deck, a full deck higher than the ship’s main deck. To launch a lifeboat was impossible; we were all pitching too violently, and even “Old Sal” was rolling her decks under. By good fortune, I happened to be looking at the Gearing through my binoculars at the very moment her signal searchlight began to spell out the words, “MAN OVERBOARD,” and read the electrifying message direct. In this situation Salamonie, being the biggest ship present, had the advantage; and we were able to maneuver into position to pick the man up by sending a strong swimmer with a line fastened to his waist into the fifty-foot seas after him. The volunteer who thus risked his life to save another was Lawrence W. Beckhaus, then a Gunner’s Mate Second Class.

  “Old Sal” reached the United States on December 22, 1957. On arrival, Beckhaus received a medal for heroism; and I was home for Christmas. In the mail were orders detaching me from command of Salamonie and directing
me to report to the “Director of Naval Reactors, Atomic Energy Commission, Washington, D.C., for duty under instruction in nuclear power.”

  1

  If there is anything about the redoubtable Vice-Admiral Rick-over which is predictable, it must be his insistence upon the most thorough training, the most complete familiarity with operational and design procedures, the most meticulously careful engineering practice by the designers, builders, and personnel who operate nuclear machinery. A magnificent record of trouble-free operation of his nuclear power plants is one of the results. It is attained by vigilance on the part of all personnel involved—and of all of them, the most vigilant is Vice-Admiral Rickover himself.

  In the case of the Triton, by the time the ship first put to sea in September, 1959, some of her crew had been training for a period of two years or more. Officers and enlisted men alike had to go through a rigorous program, carefully tailored for the needs of each individual case.

  Executive Officer Will Adams and I, for instance, received what we later decided was the most strenuous and yet the most satisfying period of training, testing, and qualification either of us had ever experienced. Before we were finished, we had mapped out the entire power plant of the Nautilus prototype near Arco, Idaho, and had done the same thing for Triton’s own prototype, more recently completed at West Milton, New York. We spent eight weeks in Idaho, during the hot summer of 1958, studying from sixteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, Sundays and holidays included. At the conclusion of this period Adams and I took a comprehensive written examination which, in my case at least, took fourteen hours to complete (Will, to my dismay, walked out of the examination room two hours before me). At West Milton, our eight weeks of training was split up, partly because the prototype had barely begun to operate; but here, too, we made the same slow careful checkout of all systems.

  By the time we arrived at the Electric Boat Division of the General Dynamics Corporation, in Groton, Connecticut, to participate in the launching of our new ship, which took place on August 19, 1958, we had received the best possible training in the techniques of operating her highly complicated machinery and handling all conceivable functions and malfunctions.

  As time went on, and we came to know them intimately, Adams and I developed a deep admiration for the designers of our fantastic power plant, and it is probably proper at this point to state that Lieutenant Commander David Leighton, USN, stands second only to Admiral Rickover in our appreciation of the job done. We also developed a strong regard for the officers and men of Triton’s crew, who had already spent so many days learning how to man her.

  Already, she had created difficulties because of her great size. Among the problems faced by the builders was that her huge bow blocked the space reserved for the railroad which ran just forward of the building ways. This railroad was needed to haul regular loads of ship-building supplies which were needed in the Yard. It had to be kept operating. The problem was solved by cutting away a part of the lower section of Triton’s bow to clear the trains, and replacing it barely a few days before the launching.

  At the other end of the ship, her stern projected so far out over the Thames River that efficient construction was not possible. Therefore, to the considerable consternation of the people on the New London side of the river, who could see only a great unfinished cavern where Triton’s stern should have been, her last fifty-foot section was constructed on the adjoining ways. After the stern was built, a pair of tremendous overhead cranes hauled it into its proper place. (Before this was done, Electric Boat was many times playfully reminded of the importance of finishing a ship before launching her.)

  One segment of the ship could not, however, be installed before the launching ceremony. Triton stood on the ways about seven stories above the ground, too high to slide under the giant overhead cranes of the building ways; the top twelve feet of her sail (the great vertical structure carrying her periscopes and retractable masts) had to be cut off and reinstalled after launching.

  The outstanding feature of Triton, responsible for her unprecedented length and displacement, was that for the first time not one but two reactors were included in a nuclear submarine. The forward reactor would supply steam to the forward engine room and drive the starboard propeller; number two reactor would supply steam to the after engine room and drive the port propeller. The two plants, identical in design, were entirely independent and separate, but could, of course, be cross-connected if necessary. Designed for high speed on the surface as well as beneath it, she had a long slender hull in contrast to the short, fat shape best suited to underwater speed alone. Triton was 447½ feet long, more than a hundred feet longer than any previous US submarine, almost as long as Dad’s lost Memphis of some forty years before. But where the Memphis had over sixty feet of beam, Triton had only thirty-seven. Her surface displacement was approximately six thousand tons; submerged, she would displace eight thousand tons, about twice as much as any other submarine.

  As Triton stood ready for launching, her mammoth hull equaled in size a light cruiser of World War II. Inside, her reactors and machinery were of the most sophisticated design and development yet achieved by any nuclear power plant.

  Her underwater body showed a dull olive green when the scaffolding was cleared and she stood in solitaire on two ribbons of shiny tan-colored wax. Around her towered the black skeletonlike framework of the overhead cranes, and crowning her entire length was a double-strength steel superstructure, painted a brilliant orange. Perched on top of this was the bulky lower section of the sail, truncated by removal of the upper half but still seeming high enough to strike the cranes above.

  Launching a ship is an important point in her construction program. Contrary to the impression some people may have, a ship is far from fully constructed when she is launched. With the exception of small pleasure craft, no ship can be completed before she is floating in the water, for even the most careful calculations cannot foretell the precise manner in which the hull will take up the stresses of being waterborne. Certain extremely precise technical work, such as final boring of the propeller-shaft tubes and lining up turbines and reduction gears on their foundations, cannot be accomplished until after the ship is afloat. Otherwise, a tiny deflection of a sixteenth or a thirty-second of an inch—easily possible in a hull the length of ours—might throw the reduction gears or propeller shafting out of line.

  On the nineteenth of August, 1958, a warm New England summer day, thirty-five thousand guests had come to the Electric Boat Division to see Triton launched—the biggest crowd ever assembled at EB, so the papers said, for the biggest submarine ever built. It was a great day for Triton, for Electric Boat, for Triton’s crew, and for me.

  About half our crew were aboard for the ceremony, in close formation on the forecastle, resplendent in their dress-white uniforms. Also in whites, I waited above them on a makeshift platform provided at the half-level of the decapitated bridge. A few planks had been nailed together to make a platform near the forward end, and this was where I stood. Unfortunately, it was so low I could barely see over the side, but I found that by standing on top of the ship’s whistle, built into the forward section of the sail, and holding onto a girder at its edge, I was able to get a pretty good view of the ceremonies. I could not, however, see the launching platform or the festivities going on there beneath the Triton’s bow.

  The gaily dressed crowd on the ground below spread out in all directions, spilled over the temporary barriers erected by Electric Boat, crowded on top of the stacked lumber and building materials on both sides. Some of them even stood on the roofs of nearby buildings. As I watched, I was amused to see an Electric Boat officer climb to the top of one of the buildings and chase away a number of teen-agers. Most of the uniforms were whites, the prescribed attire for the occasion. There were sailors from other ships acting as ushers; a sprinkling of blue and gray-green-uniformed police officers scattered about, preserving order. Nearly half the crowd were women; and there were a num
ber of children about, too, most of them clutching the hands of their parents. One or two of the smaller tots perched on the shoulders of a uniformed father, and a few raced around in games of tag or follow-the-leader.

  My own children were somewhere in the crowd, I knew, but I searched for them without success. They were supposed to be up near the launching platform in the care of a secretary of Electric Boat, for Ingrid, my wife, could not be here. She was in Boston with her father, whose postoperative condition had suddenly become critical.

  Excited, high-pitched chatter wafted up to me, but soon the crowd grew silent, and I heard the loudspeakers rumble with the voice of one of the presiding dignitaries. Not a word of what was being said could be distinguished, but from the timetable I had studied that morning, I knew that Admiral Jerauld Wright, Commander in Chief of the United States Atlantic Fleet and Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, was about to deliver the principal address. After Admiral Wright finished, there would be an invocation, and then Triton would be christened by Louise Will, wife of Vice-Admiral John Will, USN (ret.), with the traditional shattering of a bottle of champagne. Then, at long last, the trigger holding the launching cradle would be released, and we would slide backward into the water.

  There was a scattering of applause from below, then silence again. The drone of the loudspeakers went on and off several times. Some people near the invisible launching platform bowed their heads. Still not an intelligible word came through the loudspeakers, and I could only assume that the launching was drawing closer. Instinctively, I took a firmer grip on the handrail.

  There is always a little apprehension when a ship is launched. Will she start when the trigger is released? Will the motion be accompanied by a jolt which might knock personnel off their feet or over the side? Poised only on two slender slides for her entry into water, our ship was in its most vulnerable condition. Any miscalculation, any error in fixing the location of the stresses, could easily result in damage. Unthinkable, but conceivable—she might even topple over. Surface ships, usually broader than they are tall and essentially flat-bottomed, are not prone to such mishaps, but submarines are taller than they are wide and their bottoms are round. The catastrophe of rolling over on the crowds below would be appalling. A fine time for me to come up with this, I thought; surely the Electric Boat people ought to know how to launch a submarine, even one as big as Triton.