Operationally, the Seawolf (SSN-575) augmented the efforts of the Nautilus (SSN-571)—and later the Skate (SSN- 578) and the Tullibee (SSN-597)—in developing antisubmarine warfare and environmental controls that led to the Polaris boats. Originally, we operated directly under Commander Submarines, Atlantic, to spare squadron staffs the chores of handling the enormous mail load we imposed. Captain Thomas H. Henry was our honcho and a delight to work for.
After the ship was commissioned in 1957, we had operated extensively in a very successful set of test operations followed by delays to disconnect the superheaters. I had ridden the Nautilus on many operations and was impressed with Commander Eugene P. Wilkinson and his crew. Basically, he demonstrated how much better he could carry out World War II tactics with a nuclear boat, and he was good at it. Since the Nautilus was the Navy’s pride and joy, I thought the Seawolf should cover what Wilkinson didn’t. I also felt that with so much public attention on the Nautilus, it would be a good idea if one submarine were able to operate more privately.
Wilkinson and I found that a certain ASW complacency in the fleet required that we do things with a certain flair and even shock value to bring attention to the enormous ASW problem we would face when confronting hostile nuclear submarines. Whenever an ASW hunter-killer group commander would deny that his carrier had been sunk during an exercise, we would show him pictures of the carrier’s screws and views of the hangar deck. Wilkinson even fired green star clusters that landed on the carrier’s deck. I did not go that far.
The wonderful stubbornness of destroyer sailors, which has always been so much of their strength, here proved a weakness. When the Commander, Destroyers Atlantic (ComDesLant), invited me to lunch on his flagship, I suggested that the destroyer navy establish a school like submarine school, set qualifications, get a badge, set up a development group to aid in getting technological assistance, get destroyers built to be quiet enough to tow a passive sonar, and accentuate the positive.
I think I shocked him when I told him that when I had left the Harder (SS-568) in 1953 to go to the Pentagon, figuring I’d had all the submarine command I could get, I heard that too few officers were willing to accept command of destroyers. I had gone to the submarine detail officer and gotten permission to approach the surface detail officer about getting a destroyer command only to be told that I had already had more than my share. Evidently many officers considered destroyer command too much of a career risk.
Wilkinson and his crew were smart, brash, and very demanding. The attitude was “us against them,” and this created a lot of envy and distrust. I decided that in the long term, a better point of view was to think of all of us as “we.” At Electric Boat, we developed joint-action procedures that smoothed complex test situations, and many of these are still in effect.
Wilkinson demanded more speed; I emphasized quieting and crew reduction. He used the periscope; I made my first 100 attacks without the periscope—depending on passive sonar and a destroyer SQS-4 active sonar I’d had installed. His attack party was loud and exciting; mine was very quiet.
Before commanding the Seawolf, I had been serving at the Pentagon, where we were beginning to develop warheads for future submarine-launched missiles; the engineering of environmental controls would be important during long strategic patrols with the missiles, so we worked on it on board the Seawolf. This turned out to be a surprisingly lengthy job as we uncovered dozens of impurities that had to be controlled. Finally, in 1958 we set a world record of 60 days completely submerged and isolated from the earth’s atmosphere
In anticipation of commissioned operations, I had been talking to one of our finest destroyer skippers, then Commander Sheldon Kinney, who was the skipper of the USS Mitscher (DL-2). He had a splendid record: as the commanding officer of the destroyer escort USS Bronstein (DE-189) during World War II, Kinney had sunk four submarines in one afternoon.
The two of us were planning a dogfight between the Navy’s two newest ships, but, as time wore on. Commander, Destroyers Atlantic, kept adding ships and admirals to the operation—about 13 of each! I went to Rear Admiral Frederick Warder, Commander, Submarines Atlantic (ComSubLant), and requested a full load of expendable Mk-14 exercise torpedoes; he gave them to me, and decided to ride along on the exercise. The day following commissioning, we were at the rendezvous south of Newport, Rhode Island, at 0700. To maximize the aggravation, we were directly under the flagship at precisely 0700 and opened up on underwater telephone—ending the question of why these damned subs are always late. After a few tame contact runs over us, the surface forces opened out, came at us as a search line—and the duel was on.
In the ensuing melee, we managed to put a Mk-14 under the stack of each ship before any had acquired a contact on the Seawolf. The real trick was to sort out which ships had already been attacked. The tactic was to run deep at about 15 knots, get a good passive bearing rate, take a 20° up-angle to the 200-foot maximum firing depth of the Mk-14, check the firing solution on the way up with the SQS-4 sonar, fire, and go deep to seek the next target. The Mk-101 torpedo data computer (TDC) really proved itself; it used the same type of rate-control solutions as we had in antiaircraft directors in the prewar carriers. Even so, one diehard wanted to go back to the older Mk- 4 TDC.
We had a power-reloading capability that functioned well even at high up-angles, a slightly favorable thermocline helped, and the destroyers never detected our sonar pings. When our sonar detected a helicopter, I realized what Sheldon had up his sleeve, and he almost got us once. My report strongly backed his idea of using helicopters, but recommended the development of a drone. This was done a bit too hastily, and the drone antisubmarine helicopter (DASH) came to a bad end. But helicopter use for ASW expanded dramatically.
At midday we surfaced to exchange observers. The afternoon exercise turned out to be a repeat of the morning’s submarine success. The following day I was invited to lunch with Admiral Warder and his staff. One of the staff described the operation, then another pointed out that the Seawolf s crew had used the attack trainers more than all the rest of the Atlantic submarine force combined.
Actually, the dog fighting had started in 1951 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the Trutta (SS-421) when Bill Anderson and I noticed that the destroyers in the two-ship attacks were not adhering to the standard procedure of warily approaching recontacts. They figured that the submarine could not fire if they kept her below periscope depth. So we began to practice tracking using a combination of the QB sonar dome, the ST-3, and the Mk-4 TDC; the QB’s active system was good, but its passive capabilities were inferior to those of the ST-3 so we used the ST-3 for passive bearings and the QB for range.
The technique worked, and we got permission to fire exercise Mk-14s. That afternoon, I loudly warned the destroyer skippers that they would be under fire. They bet us the next afternoon’s beer that we could not do it—we did it three days in a row and thoroughly enjoyed the beer. Unfortunately, our efforts to make this a regular exercise designated Exercise Zulu in Fleet Training Publication-1 fell on deaf ears.
Later we practiced some of the same techniques in the Harder, using the SQS- 10 sonar, which had a better passive capability—though a poorer active one. The Mk-101 TDC continued to work well.
This was an exhilarating start to what turned out to be many fascinating operations with—and against—hunter-killer (HUK) groups. When Rear Admiral John S. Thach took command of the Task Group Alfa ASW force, I knew that innovative tactics were on the way, and I asked to be assigned to the task group for a few weeks. Jimmy Thach had long been one of my heroes. I had been the officer of the deck when he landed his Yorktown (CV-5) fighter squadron on the Hornet (CV-8) during the Battle of Midway. The Hornet aviators worshipped him for his invention of the Thach Weave, which enabled the F4F to beat the Japanese Zero.
We tried various methods of escorting the carrier, with very moderate success— the SQS-4 sonar was just not up to the task. Sprint-and-drift tactics were too slow, there was too much local noise for the passive array to work well, and communications were a problem. Away from the surface forces, we were very successful in detecting snorkeling boats, and even trailing submerged submarines using active sonar. I was later chewed out by the chief of staff for trailing a submerged submarine at about 4,000 yards and inviting planes to make magnetic anomaly detection runs and drop practice depth charges, which we could then spot on our SQS-4. The admiral sent up so many planes, including land-based P2V Neptunes, that he almost used up all of his operating fuel allotment.
We practiced swapping contacts with destroyers, aircraft, and another submarine. We tried everything, including releasing borrowed sonobuoys from our signal ejector so that we could stay deep and still use our underwater telephone to relay information about long-range submarine contacts to aircraft 60 miles away. I had long been concerned about carrier groups’ disregard of emissions control (EmCon); we demonstrated that by traffic analysis alone—without decoding— we could practically rewrite the carriers’ operations orders. Later, with radio direction-finding, it was even easier.
We conducted another interesting series of operations out of Key West, Florida, in connection with the evaluation of Mk-35 and Mk-37 torpedoes. Captain Henry Crommelin, a great destroyer officer, was in charge. We showed that our false targets worked, but that timing the release was critical; if done incorrectly, the false targets could actually draw the torpedo to us. The best solution might have been to tow a controllable electronic device far astern to attract the fish. The Mk-37 torpedo was far superior, and it managed to hit us several times. It also worked well when we fired it, but only out to its limited range.
The early experiments with wire guidance showed great promise. When the operation ended, Captain Crommelin told me that he was very pleased, but felt that his report would be lost in the shuffle and nothing would happen. As a result, we drafted a message and I sent it to ComSubLant, with copies to the Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet; the Bureau of Ordnance; and OpNav, extolling the Mk-37, especially with wire guidance, as the best thing available for some years, and recommended start of production. In informal letters I told people that otherwise a ramming bow might become important for submarines conducting ASW.
An ASW blimp using a dipping sonar was scheduled for evaluation as part of the exercises. When the blimp was positioned and contact made, we were to run ahead at medium speed, the blimp would pick up and reposition his sonar, and we would then go deep and see whether he held contact. Just before going deep on one dive, we heard a slight noise overhead and held the dive only to find that his sonar was entangled in our bridle. I hate to think of the paperwork that would have resulted had we dragged him under.
At the time, pending final approval of the reactor safeguard committee, we were not allowed into any port other than New London. While operating in the Key West area we anchored out next to Sand Key. This proved very popular with the crew in spite of reduced liberty and a long boat ride to shore. The informality, movies, wonderful weather, fishing, and sun bathing on deck all were a delight to them. I got permission to take my first seven-day leave since World War II, and spent it in Cuba. When I got back, we were finally allowed to berth at the naval base.
Our way back to New London, we were ordered to put into Bermuda to take aboard Admiral Jerauld Wright, the Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic, for a brief visit, and I suggested that we expand the visit into a real forum on ASW for the admiral. In our large wardroom, we held a conference of submarine, destroyer, air, ordnance, and sound-operated underwater surveillance system (SOSUS) people. Lieutenant Commander Chuck Carlisle, our chief engineer, took Admiral Wright on a thorough trip through the ship, we demonstrated firing an expendable Mk-37 torpedo at a snorkeling submarine (and we hit it at about 5,000 yards), did some angle maneuvers, and had lunch. Two great things happened: The commander from OpNav who handled the whole SOSUS program made an excellent presentation and the very perceptive admiral (with only slight prompting) wondered why the commander had been passed over for captain; he was later selected.
Later, the discussion turned to my message about producing Mk-37 torpedoes. Admiral Warder agreed, and the discussion proceeded to focus on how many should be produced; many points were raised about the arcane process of establishing requirements. Then Admiral Wright asked how many submarine targets there might be. The answer—400. He then asked Admiral Warder if his submarines could sink more than one submarine per torpedo. The answer—no. He asked if it took more than one hit to sink a submarine. The answer—probably not. Then this wonderful man donned a beatific smile, said he would support an initial requirement for 400 Mk-37 torpedoes—and became another of my heroes. As I remember, the destroyerman sent a message to ComDesLant suggesting that a requirement for destroyers be established Captain Crommelin was elated.
Our interest in wire-guided torpedoes led to one particularly comic operation. The system as developed was complicated by the need to pay out wire from the outer door of the torpedo tube. Even when the firing submarine remained pointed toward the target, the wire still had to run along the side of the submarine with the possibility of being broken. Further, as the torpedo raced toward the target—during a period of several minutes—the range continued to close, lessening the advantage of initial detection. The ideal solution was for the firing submarine to maintain range position ahead of the target. This could be done if the controlling sonar and the wire pay-out were pointed toward the target.
So we went to a depth of 300 feet, about 3,000 yards ahead of the target, and tried to back down at target speed, while keeping our bow aimed at the target. The first thing we noticed was that Karman vortices developed around the sonar dome and the sail structure and the noise completely lighted up the sonar screens. Next, at ten knots the angle became unstable with oscillations of increasing magnitude. We surfaced with a 30° down-angle. I had some Electric Boat designers aboard for the test; they could not stop laughing. Our later efforts to install a couple of aft- facing tubes in the sail for a partial solution were killed by budget problems.
We spent most of our operational time at sea in nuclear- versus conventional- submarine exercises. Many suggestions for improvements were recorded, but the main result was development of the art of submarine warfare.
Some time after I left the Seawolf, an officer from the Bureau of Personnel noted that 85% of the crew had eventually been commissioned and asked my thoughts. I replied that the crew were remarkable people to start with, but that in part the results had been the reaction to me when the men said to themselves, “If that little bastard can do it, I sure as hell can.” I take great delight that my executive officers—Bill Anderson, Jim Calvert, George Steele, and Yogi Kaufman, either were selected for vice admiral—or elected to Congress.
As for the future, what about the fuelcell submarine? More than once have I busted my lance in efforts toward larger numbers of more affordable submarines. The Dutch, Swedes, Italians, and Germans are working on such submarines, and I have been delighted to hear of the recent efforts of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop an unmanned fuel-cell submarine for a variety of uses, as well as their efforts to develop artificial intelligence computers and video periscopes for submarines. Yet it is certainly true that strategic speed is a vital characteristic, especially for U.S. Navy submarines. The trend toward remotely piloted vehicles is strong in air, land, sea, and undersea vehicles and the technology is developing rapidly. The kind of aerospace skills they will get into the program will do wonders.
When I left the Seawolf on 12 December 1958 and reported to the Pentagon, I found that the politics of getting the money to put a pressurized water reactor in the Seawolf had resulted in an exaggerated condemnation of the liquid- sodium reactor; this endangered future programs unnecessarily.
I did my best to correct some of these misapprehensions, because I could not contain my enthusiasm for what had been a submariner’s dream of a submarine.
The Seawolf went on to compile a 30- year career of unique operations under brilliant commanding officers until decommissioninig in 1987. I look forward to a history of these operations.
