Vice Admiral Allan Rockwell McCann was not one to tout his remarkable record as an officer in the U.S. Navy, yet submariners know well one aspect of that legacy—his invention of the submarine rescue chamber. McCann personally directed the use of that chamber in the unprecedented rescue of 33 trapped officers and men of the sunken USS Squalus (SS-193)240 feet down on the floor of the Atlantic off New Hampshire in 1939.
Throughout his naval career (1913–1950), McCann had a remarkable knack for being at the right place at the right time as historic events enveloped him. Among them, he served as liaison officer for the modification of the antiquated O-12 submarine into the privately leased Nautilus that made the first attempt to sail beneath the Arctic ice shelf in 1931. He directed gunfire from the sub tender Pelias (AS-14) at Japanese aircraft attacking Pearl Harbor and commanded the battleship Iowa (BB-61) during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. As chief of staff of the Navy’s 10th Fleet, he helped orchestrate the defeat of a last-ditch U-boat offensive. Later, he headed the Navy task force that transported President Harry S. Truman to the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945.
Perhaps the least known of his many achievements was Operation Blue Nose, the first successful attempt by a diesel-powered submarine to navigate beneath a polar ice cap, accomplished using radical new technology and despite grave risks. Not only did McCann conceive the operation as commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet (ComSubPac), he was in the submarine to relieve the boat captain of responsibility should something go wrong. This is that story, excerpted from Pushing the Limits: The Remarkable Life and Times of Vice Admiral Allan Rockwell McCann, USN by Carl LaVO.
Navy Electronics Laboratory
Point Loma Peninsula, San Diego
1 May 1947
Waldo Lyon was in need of an advocate. As director of the Navy Electronics Laboratory’s Submarine Studies Branch, the 33-year-old physicist had spent months working closely with Canadian oceanologists in British Columbia to understand the nature of cold Arctic sea currents and how sonar scanning devices might be used to navigate under ice. Lyon needed a diesel-powered submarine to test the reliability of the acoustic technology he and his staff of 150 had developed to make diving under polar ice possible. There wasn’t much support for the project, however. Navy higher-ups—even in the submarine community—weren’t interested in the Arctic given other strategic concerns in the postwar world. Furthermore, experience with submarines did not augur well for future attempts to penetrate ice fields.
In January 1946 the USS Sennet (SS-408) had participated in Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s Operation High Jump in the Antarctic to test various types of naval vessels under frigid conditions. Traveling on the surface, the Sennet, with Lyon on board as a research scientist, followed the Coast Guard cutter Northwind (WAGB-282) into the ice pack off Scott Island and conducted excursions under the edge of the ice fields there, according to the boat’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Max Duncan. The sub, under the leadership of Commander J. B. Icenhower, took a battering as the ice broken up by the cutter closed in on the Sennet, being towed by the Northwind.
With the sub unable to continue, the Northwind connected a tow line to the boat and reversed course for an 80-mile run to open seas. The experience was harrowing. “There were icebergs all over the place, and they were huge, running miles in dimensions and depths to the order of 1,200 feet or more in draft,” Lyon recalled. On the way out, slabs of ice scrapped the sides of the boat, “making a shrieking, screeching sound, something like fingernails across a blackboard, only a thousand times worse.” It took nearly three full days to reach open water, and by then all the paint of the hull had been scraped clean, leaving shiny steel. Lyon had hoped to test a modified fathometer pointed upward to measure the thickness of ice while submerged. However, the device flooded out and could not be used.
At the other end of the Earth, two events later that summer raised doubt about submarine operations in the Arctic. In one, famed World War II sub skipper Commander Lawson “Red” Ramage led four submarines from the Pacific Fleet to the Northeast Cape of Siberia, where they practiced cold-water maneuvers by darting about the peripheries of the ice pack. The hostile conditions mortified Ramage, who concluded that the Arctic would never be useful for undersea operations. He predicted that Russian submariners would get lost if they tried to navigate the icy wilderness. Meanwhile, the Atlantic Fleet sub USS Atule (SS-403) attempted to dive below sea ice in Nares Strait off the southwest coast of Greenland. The boat didn’t get far. Her periscope shears smashed into an ice pinnacle; the shears were damaged, and the sub was forced to turn back.
All this conspired to threaten Lyon’s desire to test new equipment that theoretically could make it safe for submersibles to navigate below Arctic ice, chart the underside of the canopy, measure its thickness, and find thin areas where submarines could safely surface to recharge air and batteries before continuing. To the physicist, the strategic threat posed by the Soviet Union in the Arctic was a matter the Navy could not ignore. He was mindful of the experience of German submarines at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in World War II. The U-boats were able to attack surface craft and then hide below cold-water layers that sonar could not penetrate. The possibility of Soviet submarines developing the means to navigate the Arctic Ocean and mask their presence so close to American territory was worrisome.
What was needed was someone high up in the Navy hierarchy who would embrace what Lyon and his fellow scientists were pioneering. To them, that person was likely Rear Admiral Allan McCann, the new commander of the Pacific submarine fleet.
Those at the lab learned that the rear admiral had led a submarine squadron to the Bering Sea in the summer of 1946 out of his own curiosity about anomalies posed by ice and cold water on undersea craft. They also learned that McCann in 1930 had been the Navy’s junior officer involved in the transfer of the antiquated submarine O-12, rechristened the Nautilus, to Australian explorer George Hubert Wilkins for his ill-fated attempt to sail beneath the Arctic ice cap. Norwegian oceanographer Harald Sverdrup, the chief scientist on board the Nautilus, provided Lyon with insights on McCann. Sverdrup had formed a bond with the American physicist after becoming director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in the late 1930s. He told Lyon that McCann was disturbed by Wilkins’ attempt to convert the O-12 into an upside-down sled. Wilkins thought the Nautilus should dive below an ice field, become positive buoyant, and slide around under the ice on rails attached topside. To McCann, that seemed incredibly risky—and it turned out to be so.
McCann’s elevation to ComSubPac now made an Arctic mission within the realm of possibility for Lyon. To Lyon’s surprise, McCann agreed not only to loan the scientist a submarine, but also to provide an entire task force under the command of Captain Lucius Chappell, former skipper of the Sculpin (SS-191) during the war. McCann assigned the USS Boarfish (SS-315), then operating out of San Diego, as the vessel to be outfitted with specialized electronic gear to attempt history’s first dive under polar ice. “Admiral McCann always did things up in a good way,” said Lyon. “He meant that we make a study and so he said, ‘Well, we’ll put everything on and I’ll even go myself.’”
Adak Island, Alaska
15 July 1947
At the Navy base on Adak Island in Alaska, the admiral and the physicist joined Task Force 17.3, sent ahead by McCann. McCann planted his flag on board the 500-foot-long sub tender Nereus (AS-17), the most modern in the Navy and named for the mythical Greek “Old Man of the Sea.” The ship, a floating hotel and repair shop for submarines, also was to serve as an oceanographic research vessel for the many scientists who had joined the expedition. The Nereus and the submarines, seemingly tiny slivers alongside the tender, would sail north from Adak on Operation Blue Nose, whose name was derived from the longtime naval moniker for those who crossed the Arctic Circle.
Adak, a remote island near the western extent of the Aleutian Island chain and a southern gateway to the Bering Sea, proved a harsh introduction to the Arctic environment. Weather was routinely cold and foggy with high winds. Shelter was provided by Quonset huts, often mired in mud. There were no trees on the 274-square-mile island, a forbidding place covered by tundra and mounted by two active volcanoes that often puffed smoke. In July and August, cloud cover blocked out the sun most days. Rainfall was abundant, with measurable amounts falling almost every day of the year.
In this rather grim setting, McCann’s task force prepared for its bold mission. Accompanying the tender were the four submarines promised by the admiral—Commander N. D. Cage’s USS Caiman (SS-323), Commander. O. C. Cole’s USS Cabezon (SS-334), Commander H. B. Dodge’s USS Chub (SS-329), and Commander J. H. Turner’s Boarfish. With the task force and its full complement of officers, enlisted sailors, and scientists gathered together, excitement permeated the air in anticipation of fulfilling a quest imagined by Jules Verne and unsuccessfully pursued by Wilkins in the Nautilus.
Despite nearly a century of exploration, little was known about the Arctic Ocean other than that it was cloaked by a floating ice cap, which connected the Atlantic with the Pacific. And it was deep. Arctic explorer Robert Edwin Peary in 1909 had tried to determine how deep. He and his small team hauled a spool of piano wire to the area of the North Pole, carved a hole in the ice, and lowered one end of the wire, affixed with a metal weight, into the mysterious sea below. When the spool ran out at 9,000 feet, the weight still hadn’t reached the bottom, which, it was later discovered, was still another 8,000 feet down. “There was very little information,” said Lyon. “The chart of the Arctic Ocean at that time just shows a big bowl, just a big basin and nobody knows anything about it.”
Adak Island, 900 miles due south of the Bering Strait, was chosen for the jumping-off point for Blue Nose because of analyses made by Lyon and others in San Diego. The physicist had met often with Sverdrup to determine what he knew about the area north of the strait. Lyon recalled, “I was always in continual contact for everything I could get out of Sverdrup as far as that area is concerned—the type of sonar conditions to be expected, the entire story of the environment, what happened to the sea ice, how it grew, what it was like, anything I could get as far as information was concerned.”
Sverdrup knew much. His research came from an unprecedented six-year voyage across the top of the world on the oak-hulled sailing ship Maud, built as an icebreaker in Norway in 1916. Sverdrup had been the scientific director of the expedition, which was helmed by Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen. Between 1918 and 1924, the ship had forged a drift path from the Northeast Passage in the Atlantic following circular Arctic currents, which eventually landed it in Nome, Alaska.
En route, Sverdrup filled extensive logbooks with data about the Arctic’s meteorology, magnetics, atmospheric electricity, physical oceanography, and tidal dynamics, particularly in the Chukchi Sea, just north of the Bering Strait and named for the indigenous people of the northeastern tip of Siberia. The data not only plotted conditions likely to be encountered on the surface but also the depth and nature of the seabed.
To Lyon, the Chukchi seemed ideal for attempting the first dive under ice. The sea was relatively shallow—90 to 180 feet deep—with an unusually flat, soft mud floor and no rocky outcropping to impede submarine operations.
On 17 July Operation Blue Nose got under way. The Nereus, in league with her submarines, followed the International Date Line north from Adak for nearly two weeks. Along the route, Navy Electronics Laboratory scientists and graduate students, such as Walter Heinrich Munk and Donald W. Pritchard, who in years ahead would become famous oceanographers, took seabed core samples, hauled in plankton, measured sea temperatures, and dropped scores of Nansen bottles to take samples so that they could measure salinity, dissolved oxygen, and other components of seawater.
In the Boarfish, Lyon and his assistants practiced using specialized electronics they had devised, which were critical to the success of the mission. A key component was the boat’s sonar sound head, mounted on the deck forward and known by the acronym QLA. Late in the war scientists in the lab had invented the sound head to enable Navy submarines to get past minefields guarding harbors in Japan. Known as “Hell’s Bells” to submariners for the alarm sent up when mines were detected, the device continually transmitted a conical beam of sound pulses forward of the boat. Any solid object, such as a mine, caused a return pulse. A monitor on board the boat would present what was detected, how far away it was, and its direction. The virtual plot, interpreted by the QLA operator, would guide the sub safely past any obstruction.
For Operation Blue Nose, the thinking was that QLA should be able to detect hanging ice pinnacles and deep drafts of icebergs as the Boarfish proceeded submerged. Using the data, the captain could plot safe passage. Lyon arranged for lab researcher Art Roshon, who invented QLA, to be on board the sub to ensure accurate interpretations of sonar plots. Melting polar ice results in clouds of warm and cold water, a mix that can affect a sonar beam, which is sensitive to temperature changes. Misinterpretation of QLA imagery could be disastrous for a submarine under a sheet of heavy ice.
“It’s like looking through the atmosphere on days over a hot pavement, and you will see an image wandering around,” explained Lyon. “Well, the ocean does the same thing for you. You must understand the ocean, and what the temperature and density layers do to what you’re seeing. The picture that you may see ahead of you may not be directly ahead of you. It may be off here somewhere by bending.”
The Boarfish also had a fathometer in the keel to measure the sub’s distance to the bottom. An additional echo sounder invented by Lyon was positioned topside to measure the space between the boat and the underside of the ice. Theoretically, the Boarfish’s electronic eyes could see forward, topside, and below—everything needed for under-ice travel.
Nereus, Arctic Circle
30 July 1947
The task force passed through the Bering Strait, crossed the Arctic Circle, and entered the icy Chukchi. The subs followed the tender, which skirted east in open water along the ice floe. Lyon and McCann on the bridge of the Nereus surveyed the scene, looking for a place to make the historic dive. The task force continued trolling eastward until a serpentine river of seawater stretched northward in the limitless, fractured ice field. “Then came the decision,” recalled Lyon. “Are we going to do this or not—that is, go under the ice?”
With the Nereus setting her anchor, McCann and Lyon decided to make a personal inspection of the ice up close. The admiral ordered the ship’s whaleboat lowered, and he and Lyon boarded it. They were joined by Art Roshon, Boarfish skipper Turner, his officers, Electronics Laboratory science director Eugene C. LaFond, and a few others.
The boat worked its way north about 20 miles. Lyon measured the height of the ice in order to estimate its maximum draft. “That gave us some idea, by seeing what the thickness of the ice was above the water, and trying to guess how much it was below the water—we could get a picture of what it looked like,” explained the physicist. “We all had a look. Based on that, then, it gave us some picture of the ice and it looked like we should try it.”
By Lyon’s calculations, there would be plenty of room for the Boarfish to pass beneath the ice. The decision was cast: Go for it.
Boarfish, Chukchi Sea
1 August 1947
The whaler made her way back out of the ice pack and came alongside the Boarfish. Lyon, Roshon, Turner, and the others boarded the sub. McCann joined them, making the Boarfish the task force flagship for the historic dive. Roshon manned the QLA sonarscope in the conning tower, while Lyon and others settled into the forward torpedo room to monitor recordings from the keel and topside fathometers.
The Boarfish began her dive with extreme caution at three knots near the surface so that Commander Turner could view approaching ice through the periscope. Down below, Lyon studied echo soundings that revealed a depth of 140 feet to an extremely flat seabed—“the flattest area there is in the world,” in the physicist’s view. The submarine took up 50 feet of that depth, leaving 90 feet, divided above and below the vessel. Step-by-step procedures were followed as the Boarfish slowly descended. With both the QLA and echo rangers working properly, Turner lowered the periscope back into its housing. The Boarfish, now dependent on Lyon’s equipment, proceeded forward, suspended 30 feet off the ocean floor and leaving 60 feet between the top of the conning tower and the surface to avoid thickening ice.
Electronic sensors determined that the ice generally descended 30 feet, giving a safety margin of 30 feet for the 300-foot-long sub as she passed. Sonar detected blocks of ice that looked dangerous. “We were seeing on the screen other stuff that looked much thicker so we’d avoid that,” recalled Lyon. Roshon, in the conning tower, provided McCann and the skipper with continuous interpretations of the QLA data. Reports of fathometer data also came in over the ship’s phone system from Lyon. The trip was nerve-racking for the skipper, who was responsible for the safety of the multi-million-dollar vessel. McCann came aboard for the first dive in part to relieve Commander Turner of responsibility if something went wrong. But unspoken tension remained high.
The submarine’s run continued until it reached four miles. After an hour below ice, the skipper decided to take the Boarfish up for a look through the periscope. The view included chunks of ice all around, some as close as ten feet. The sub continued her ascent, breaking surface. There uncharted ice “skidded over the bow,” Turner noted and bent an antenna stanchion. In his later assessment, the skipper suggested that the QLA needed improvements; it had failed to detect ice blocks three feet high, ten feet long, ten feet wide, and more than seven tons in weight. The commander warned that surfacing without a more precise QLA reading “is not recommended if one desires to keep his periscope.”
The voyage had gone relatively well. The Boarfish easily avoided ice while submerged. McCann, confident the sub faced no imminent peril in successive dives, left the boat to return to the Nereus. The big ship and the rest of the submarine squadron spread out to undertake various experiments, including dragging the bottom, catching biological samples, and recording the sea’s bathymetry. In the meantime, the Boarfish completed two additional under-ice dives, the longest of which was 12 miles, and Lyon’s equipment recorded ice pinnacles extending 50 feet below the surface. The sub encountered no difficulties and avoided collisions with floating ice. McCann, Lyon, and the people from the Navy lab were euphoric. “That told us, ‘Okay, we go from an open sea with the sonar equipment and avoid the ice, in the summertime, and see what we’re traveling under, clear the bottom and avoid what’s ahead of us, and go in and come out,” said Lyon, sizing up the significance of the dives.
McCann asked Lyon to report the results of both the Chukchi Sea expedition and his experience in Antarctica at an upcoming conference of Atlantic and Pacific Fleet commanders. The Boarfish had proved beyond doubt that submarines could navigate successfully below ice fields and that improvements in QLA would better track smaller ice obstacles. Lyon urged the Navy to continue the research he had begun. “I believe the problem of submarine adaption to polar seas has been formulated and that the submarine shows promise of unusual tactical advantage,” he concluded.
USS Carp, Chukchi Sea
1 September 1948
One year after the Boarfish’s historic dives, the USS Carp (SS-327) arrived in the Chukchi, intending to push the envelope. The previous March McCann, as ComSubPac, had given his full backing to a follow-up mission. The admiral was quite satisfied with the achievements of Operation Blue Nose and, in correspondence with Lyon, agreed that there was wisdom in launching another exploration. Because the admiral was about to be relieved of command in August, to return to Washington, he couldn’t go along. However, he had assigned the Carp to make the next dive and ordered the USS Blower (SS-325) to go along as a communications escort.
At the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in San Francisco Bay, the Carp had been equipped with a QLA capable of projecting a wider sonar beam and fathometers of the type the Boarfish had carried to the Arctic. The objective was for the Carp, with Lyon and other scientists on board, to dive under the ice and find an opening, a polynya. Commander J. H. Palmer would position the boat directly beneath the open water and make a stationary ascent to the surface without striking ice. If that could be accomplished, it would prove that diesel subs could extend their range, using polynyas to surface, recharge batteries, and keep going.
McCann was relieved of command on 9 August by Rear Admiral Oswald S. Colclough, who immediately ordered Palmer to avoid undo risks and to safeguard the ship and her equipment. The skipper, realizing the danger of surfacing amid ice, had his crew repeatedly practice the technique of stationary ascents all the way from San Francisco to the Chukchi.
On 3 September, the boat reached the ice pack and dove. Using the improved QLA, Palmer located several ice-free lakes and set a course for one of them. Over the next eight days, the Carp, traveling 60 miles beneath the ice, completed 14 ascents into various lakes without damage to the submarine.
Lyon and his fellow scientists returned to San Diego triumphant. In a report to directors of the Navy lab, Lyon urged that another Fleet boat be prepared for more experiments in 1949. A follow-up request to Admiral Colclough dated 3 December stressed the critical nature of continuing what McCann had started. “The all important objective is to measure a new ocean—determine its oceanography and undersea physics,” Lyon argued. “The objective can be met by present sonar equipment and an experimental Fleet submarine modified for the Arctic Ocean.”
Colclough, not a fan of McCann’s vision or enthusiasm for further Arctic adventures, rejected the overture. He left it up to Lyon to arrange his own resources for any additional experiments. In 1952 a McCann ally—Rear Admiral Charles Momsen—relieved Colclough. Momsen went to work on all kinds of experimental projects. Among them: perfecting under-ice submarines, forerunners of the nuclear subs that would revolutionize operations in the Arctic.