Silent and Unseen

by Alfred McLaren

  Icebergs Galore!

  As we proceeded through the Davis Strait between Baffin Island and Greenland shortly after midnight on 10 August, excitement gripped the crew on sighting the first ice on Seadragon’s upward-beamed fathometer, and mounted with each passing minute as more and more ice and what appeared to be icebergs were detected northward toward Baffin Bay.

  At approximately 4:20 a.m. Captain Steele decided to bring us to periscope depth and then to the surface. There we found ourselves in the vicinity of a cottage-size piece of glacial ice, termed a bergy bit, that sonar had held for the better part of an hour. Beyond lay the southern edge of the Baffin Bay ice pack, glistening in the sun, as it stretched across the horizon from east to west just a mile ahead of us. Also in view some fifteen miles to the north and across the Arctic Circle was our first huge iceberg.

  Every member of the crew was given an opportunity to come up on deck and briefly view the vast and mysterious white world that we had entered and under whose depths we would be operating for the next month. Their serious expressions and atypical quietness attested to its sobering effect.

  Once all had taken a good look and were safely below, the deck hatches were shut, and the officer of the deck and two lookouts cleared the bridge, slamming the two sail trunk hatches shut as they quickly dropped down into the control room. The diving officer, Lt. Logan Malone, took charge of the dive, and Seadragon submerged and set course toward the nearby bergy bit in order to calibrate both the iceberg detector and the upward-beamed fathometer. After several passes beneath from a depth of six hundred feet, we determined that the berg extended eighty-two feet beneath the surface and was two hundred feet wide. We also found that the AN/SQS-4 sonar could detect and display bergy bits as a back-up to the iceberg detector.3

  Seadragon returned to the surface to close and visually inspect the much larger iceberg to the north, projecting some seventy-four feet above the surface, with its longest axis about 313 feet. We then descended to become the first submarine in any navy to pass directly beneath a full-sized iceberg.

  At a depth of six hundred feet we made a series of sonar runs at various speeds in the near vicinity of the iceberg. Even at a flank speed of 20.5 knots, both the iceberg detector and the SQS-4 tactical sonar were able to make initial contact at three thousand yards, which appeared to confirm that Seadragon would have more than ample time to avoid any icebergs we might suddenly encounter. We now felt ready to undertake the more difficult and history-making task of navigating directly beneath a typical large, deep-draft iceberg.

  Seadragon eased down to a depth of 650 feet and headed directly toward the iceberg at a moderate speed of less than ten knots. As we made several passes beneath, the upward-beamed fathometer registered a draft of 108 feet—not as deep as we expected. It also revealed the longest underwater axis of the iceberg to be 822 feet. Our hydrographer and sea ice expert Walt Wittmann calculated that this baby had a staggering total mass of 600,000 tons. The day’s work bolstered our confidence in the under-ice sonar equipment and in our ability to maneuver in and around icebergs inside or outside the Baffin Bay ice pack.4 We were now ready for even bigger game.

  Course was taken at sixteen knots toward the northwest and the Baffin Bay middle pack, later perfectly described by Capt. Gerald E. Synhorst as “a huge raft of pack ice that remains even in the summer. Icebergs travel in a counterclockwise fashion around this middle pack. Baffin Bay’s middle pack is distinctly different from the ice pack of the Arctic Basin. Frozen into it are large icebergs that sometimes penetrate more than a thousand feet into its depths.”5

  We had reached the middle pack and been transiting under it for several hours when, early on 11 August, Captain Steele decided it was time to come to the surface and send a position report to the ComSubLant in Norfolk, Virginia. Our under-ice suite was working perfectly, with the upward-beamed fathometer showing a continuously varied and jagged under-ice topography directly above us. The underwater TV camera mounted on Seadragon’s bow recorded a never-ending stream of sea ice passing like clouds overhead.

  Shortly thereafter we reached a large area of open water. Seadragon’s conning officer executed a Williamson Turn and returned to the center of the open-water area.6 The special under-ice diving and surfacing team then conducted Seadragon’s first real surfacing, using the standard procedures we had developed for making vertical ascents in ice-covered waters. We emerged within a very large polynya that contained a vast gleaming field of broken, rotting ice floes and pressure ridges. A few small icebergs were in evidence, although nothing of the scale that we wanted to examine.7

  Rogovin’s Missing Salami

  Toward the end of our last Portsmouth upkeep, Torpedoman 2nd Class Ira Rogovin was put in charge of Seadragon’s after-torpedo room. This compartment contained two 21-inch torpedo tubes, four Mk-37 acoustic torpedoes, and an emergency signal ejector. The compartment provided bunking for as many as eight of the crew, including at least one or two other torpedomen.

  Rogovin was a self-described gourmet of the smelliest sausages, the more potent the garlic-loaded salamis the better. His mother sent them to him, and he generally had two or three of the sausages hanging from the compartment overhead. The after-torpedo room was both Rogovin’s regular watch station and his berthing area. He had pretty much made himself at home in this compartment following Seadragon’s commissioning. From time to time during the course of each day Rogovin would slice off pieces of one sausage or the other as he felt the need for a snack, and heaven help the lower-rated crewmembers occupying this compartment who complained of the smells. Even the off-going conning officers who inspected this compartment, along with all others following the completion of their watches, found its general odor, combined with human sweat, hard to stomach.

  One day as we approached Baffin Bay the unthinkable occurred. Rogovin had been out of his compartment—some called it his cave—for a few hours during a series of training lectures in the crews mess. On his return to the after-torpedo room, he discovered that one of his most precious salamis was missing and all hell broke loose. Everyone who happened to be in the after-torpedo room, even those asleep in their bunks, were put to work searching for the errant sausage. This one, we were told, was a mottled dark brown on the order of a foot and a half long. Rogovin was beside himself.

  The search party looked everywhere, and scoured the bilges almost inch by inch because the stomach-turning bilges were a receptacle for everything dropped accidentally or intentionally.8 No luck. Rogovin’s search gradually moved forward from compartment to compartment as Seadragon proceeded across the Arctic Ocean. He suspected all who shared the after-torpedo room with him, plus anyone who had ever emitted a rude remark or two about the smell or appearance of the sausages.

  Rogovin continued his search through the entire transit of the Arctic Basin, the voyage south from the Bering Strait to Pearl Harbor, and during our first repair upkeep in Pearl Harbor. Then, one morning halfway through our third week in port, Rogovin happened to open the after signal ejector, and out slid a long, green, mold-covered, dripping, reeking cylindrical shape: his long-missing sausage.

  Rather than rejoice and share his good fortune with the rest of the crew, Rogovin swore the two witnesses to his find to absolute secrecy. He further kept it from the commanding officer and exec and the chief of the boat, to whom he had complained about the theft of his sausage. Why was this? Because Rogovin was supposed to inspect, clean, and test for proper operation at least once a week Seadragon’s two signal ejectors and torpedo tubes that penetrated the hull and through which emergency flares and torpedo evasion devices might be fired should there be dire operational need, and he wasn’t doing it.

  It is useless to try to keep a secret on board any submarine, and Rogovin’s discovery came to the attention of the chief of the boat and the exec. They in turn informed the commanding officer. Although I knew that Captain Steele was secretly amused, a Captain’s Mast was scheduled. At the Mast he gave Rogovin a stern che
wing out for his neglect of the after signal ejector and dismissed him with the warning that it must never happen again.

  Rogovin took the long-lost sausage to the nearest water spigot on the pier and spent well over an hour cleaning it up with soap and brush. After rinsing it off, he restored it to its usual place, swinging from the overhead of the after-torpedo room. I never observed him cutting off and eating a piece from this particular sausage, but those who had the misfortune to do so reported that the smell was overpowering.

  Who put the sausage in the signal gun? We never found out, but our guess was that it was a fellow torpedoman.

  Baffin Bay’s Iceberg Alley

  We were now well within Baffin Bay. Navigator Al Burkhalter and Leading Quartermaster 1st Class Frances Wines fixed our position navigationally and sent off the required position report. The ice pack was in constant motion, requiring the officer of the deck to continually maneuver Seadragon to keep our twin bronze screws well clear of an endless procession of wicked-looking floes. The screws were vulnerable since they extended several feet beyond the widest part of the boat’s hull.

  Scientific personnel came topside to take water samples, measure wind velocity, and collect environmental data. I went up to the bridge, as deputy plankton-catching officer, to empty the plankton sampler. The latter was a truly Rube Goldberg device that caught these miniscule sea organisms in twenty-four fine net bags. Either Dick Thompson, the project officer; Sonarman 1st Class George Harlow; or I did this every time we came to the surface. We unloaded each bag into a special container and replaced it with a fresh bag. We then carried the bags below decks and loaded them into a special box located within Seadragon’s freeze box, the same freeze box that stored our meat. (It didn’t take long for some wag to suggest maybe it was plankton making the canned hamburger taste so foul.) Crewmen constantly asked me how many I had caught, were they zoo- or phytoplankton (I had no idea), and could they see one of each? Very funny, when all we could see was goop in the bottom of each bag.

  Captain Steele decided it was time to move on, because a very large iceberg was what we were looking for. The decks were ordered clear, and the boat was submerged using a stationary dive or descent procedure that we had developed for operations within ice-covered waters. At a depth of 150 feet, propulsion was shifted to the main engines.

  The radar operator, Electronic Technician 2nd Class Anthony Balestrieri, reported what might be a large iceberg some fifteen miles to the north. A course toward the radar contact was taken as Seadragon continued on to a keel depth of three hundred feet, increasing speed to sixteen knots. The radar contact, however, turned out to be just a bergy bit, drawing no more than fifty-seven feet.

  Shortly before lunch, leading sonarman George Harlow reported a loud echo on the AN/BQS-4 sonar, indicating the presence of a massive iceberg approximately four thousand yards dead ahead of us.9 The iceberg detector, manned by Sonarman 3rd Class Owen Carlson, revealed it to be one of extremely deep draft, possibly reaching as much as 400 to 440 feet beneath the sea.10

  We closed to a thousand yards. In the course of maneuvering around and acoustically examining it, we found the berg to be indeed massive. It appeared surrounded by pack ice, with no surfaceable polynya in the immediate vicinity. Having determined that we could safely pass beneath it, we moved several miles away, came to all stop, and hovered at three hundred feet as we took time out for lunch.11

  It was during this first hovering beneath the icepack that many of us discovered the wonders of underwater TV. The monitor in the control room revealed all sorts of fish in our immediate vicinity. We thought we were seeing some cod. Larger dark-gray shapes appeared to be sharks or even small whales. Several of us were sure we had seen a killer whale. Exciting! Subsequently, most of us spent as much time as possible at the monitor looking to see what else might turn up.

  Following lunch, Captain Steele took the conn, ordered seven hundred feet, an increase in speed to seven knots, and a course that would take us directly beneath what turned out to be a truly monstrous iceberg. The suspense in the control room intensified as we closed and its great size became apparent. All active sonar contact was suddenly lost several hundred yards short. Then, as we passed under, loud gasps went up as the trace on the upward-beamed fathometer showed a gigantic mass of ice plunging rapidly and sharply toward us and continuing on for another hundred feet, much deeper than predicted. I fully expected the captain to order “Emergency deep!” Suddenly the behemoth’s deepest penetration leveled off. It then shallowed as we traversed beneath an ice keel almost nine hundred feet wide.

  Captain Steele brought Seadragon around on a different heading to make a second pass beneath this monster. All eyes were fastened on the upward-beamed fathometer as we once again closed the iceberg, lost sonar contact, and observed an unbelievably huge amount of ice plunging toward us again. Would an even deeper spur a few feet away have come closer? Not satisfied, Captain Steele brought us around for one final pass beneath. As we again watched in utter suspense, we closed from an entirely different direction. I am sure I was not the only one who prayed that the third time would not be our downfall. The keel depth of the iceberg proved to be about the same. This time, however, we traveled for some 1,470 feet along its axis before we emerged from beneath her. Walt Wittmann later calculated the iceberg to have a mass of some 3 million tons.12

  Buoyed by our success, Captain Steele resolved, in his own words, to “demonstrate beyond question the ability of a nuclear submarine to enter an area of high iceberg concentration with safety” before we left Baffin Bay.13 To do this, Seadragon had to reposition to an area of much higher iceberg concentration. After a discussion with onboard experts, Waldo Lyon, Walt Wittmann, Art Molloy, and Commodore Robertson, the captain added two days to the expedition and headed us to the northeast for Greenland’s famous Kap York in northern Melville Bay.14

  The Kap or Cape is roughly 150 miles due south of Thule, Greenland. It is in this section of northern Melville Bay that the West Greenland Current carries most of the icebergs that have been calved from the western Greenland glaciers north. They subsequently slowly sweep to the west, just south of Smith Sound, where they are picked up by the south-flowing Baffin Island current and, south of Hudson Strait, the Labrador current. They eventually reach the northern Grand Banks. Here the current divides, with some bergs carried to the east, to the north of Flemish Gap, and out into the Atlantic. There they are picked up by the northeasterly flowing Gulf Stream. The remainder of the bergs are carried southward past Newfoundland, to the area between the Flemish Gap and the Grand Banks, to the area is known as Iceberg Alley.

  Early on 13 August Seadragon entered open water that contained a large number of icebergs. We surfaced in heavy fog some forty nautical miles off Kap York. By midmorning the fog began to lift and revealed, from the report of our lookouts, more than forty very large icebergs.15 We spent the next several hours moving slowly among and photographing them, as we decided which might be the most suitable for conducting underwater examinations.

  Seadragon’s scuba divers, headed by photographer Lt. Glenn Brewer, prepared to enter the subcooled water for some conditioning dives and equipment checkout. A thousand yards away was an interesting iceberg 135 feet high and some 560 feet long at the surface, with a huge hole in the middle. On close examination, we could see a profile on its port side that was the exact image of former president and famous explorer Teddy Roosevelt. Since the seas were quite calm, and there was only open water between us and the iceberg, permission was granted for Brewer, diver Robert Harmon, the exec Jim Strong, and the ship’s doctor Dr. Lew Seaton, as extra photographers, to take a life raft and paddle over to the iceberg. There they would take pictures, sketch its spurs, and bring back samples. For fun a diver would climb up into the huge hole in the middle and be photographed as he sat or stood within the hole. These were certain to be spectacular, first-ever photos.

  USS Seadragon (SSN 584) encounters gigantic iceberg with Teddy Roosevelt prof
ile, Baffin Bay, August 1960. U.S. Navy

  It was not to be. When the party was halfway there, a loud cracking noise was followed by a huge mass of ice crashing into the water. This generated a sizable wave, which sped toward and completely swamped the life raft. All within were thoroughly drenched. The iceberg teetered back and forth as more large chunks continued to break off and fall into the water. It finally settled on a new water line, which was considerably closer to the large hole in its middle. The photoreconnaissance mission was regretfully scrubbed, and the party quickly scrambled back on board.

  We spent the remainder of the afternoon examining five good-sized icebergs and making a total of eleven passes beneath them.16 It was at this time that we discovered that icebergs give off a loud seltzer or hissing noise as they melt. The noise could be heard as a fine pinpoint of energy as far away as seventy nautical miles. Much discussion followed in the control room on how we might one day apply what we had learned about icebergs and iceberg-infested waters in actual combat situations with our most likely adversary, the Soviet submarine. Certainly an excellent tactic, upon detecting one, would be to move up as close as possible to the ice canopy overhead to better hide one’s presence.

  There were frequent opportunities to view the undersea life of Baffin Bay on the underwater TV as we cruised in and around the icebergs of this area. The number and variety of fish and marine mammals were unbelievable, and many of us gave up the daily movies just to see what might appear next. There was much chuckling when a certain type of fish seemed unable to avoid running into Seadragon’s sail. I saw numerous killer whales, a beluga whale or two, and at least one narwhal at close range. One of the most startling and unsettling experiences of my life occurred while I was manning the periscope as we cruised slowly just beneath the surface. I thought I saw something pop up and quickly trained the scope in that direction, shifting to high power, and suddenly found myself looking directly into the super-intelligent eyes of a large bull killer whale that was spy hopping. As we held each other’s gaze I could feel the intensity of his penetrating stare right down to my toes. It took considerable effort to break away from his hypnotic stare.