Skate Breakthrough At The North Pole

On 14 March, after obtaining a radar fix on Spitzbergen at dinner time, the Skate dropped several hundred feet below the surface of the ocean and headed for the North Pole. Although this cruise was under much more difficult ice conditions than Skate's in August 1958, there was not as much tension since 75 percent of the crew were making their second voyage under the Arctic ice pack. During the summer we had found open water in which to surface every day. This winter we had information from an ice reconnaissance flight to the pole that there was some open water, but in the next twelve days, aside from the open water that the Skate broke in the ice, we found only one small puddle of water about two feet square.

At 0800 in the morning on 15 March, after we were deep into the ice pack, the man on watch operating a topside fathometer re­ported a large expanse of thin ice overhead. Our surfacing team manned their stations as we made a Williamson turn to return to the location of the thin ice. When we came to a stop at the spot where the thin ice should be, we were under thick ice. After checking the elapsed time before the dead reckoning tracer was started, we determined that the thin ice was farther back along the track. This was confirmed by our echo ranging sonar which showed the outline of a large frozen lake of thin ice in the pack overhead. We moved under the thin ice and slowly started our ascent. It is difficult to describe my thoughts as I watched on the underwater television the top of our sail approach the ice from under­neath. Heavy damage would mean turning back, and some experts had warned us that we should not try to break through ice be­cause of possible damage. A few calculations had shown approximately how hard we could hit the ice without causing structural damage.

By controlling the momentum with which we hit the ice, we hoped to break through moderately thick ice, but to bounce off un­harmed from ice that was too thick to break safely with our sail. As we approached the ice for our first attempt to break through, I re­member thinking, “One misplaced decimal in those calculations, and we’ve had it.” Then suddenly on the underwater television I could see that we had broken through without even a tremble from the little ship as she became the first nuclear-powered ice pick.

Submariners are accustomed to the water that splashes down through the bridge hatch after surfacing, but we were all surprised when the quartermaster opened the hatch and large chunks of ice came crashing down into the ship. After we had cleared away enough ice to man the bridge, I took azimuths and elevation of the sun to check our position and heading information. Our navigation was in good order, and so we proceeded to the next order of business which was to try to get motion pictures of the ship breaking through ice. Such pictures of the ship breaking through should be of great value for studying the way in which ice breaks, since it would be possible to see how much bending and how much shear there is in the breaking process. As we submerged, the photographic party left up on the ice was one of the loneliest groups in the world. With nothing around but ice and a dark pool of water where Skate had sub­merged, it was not a comforting thought to

At 0800 the next morning (16 March) we started looking for another place to sur­face. Approximately 1430 that afternoon we found a good spot and commenced our pro­cedure for surfacing in the ice. This time as we approached the ice the ship accelerated suddenly. Lieutenant Guy Shaffer, who was the diving officer, flooded in water to slow down our rate of ascent to prevent damaging the ship by striking the ice too hard. We hit and bounced off after having cracked the ice overhead. Lieutenant Shaffer again started pumping water out to bring us up. This time we broke through and then the ship started to settle down into the ocean under the ice. The sail dipped under the ice and the ice drifted overhead again. The third time that we broke through, Captain Calvert ordered a small shot of high pressure air blown into the main ballast tanks; this gave us enough positive buoyancy to keep us from dropping down out of the ice. Our position was now only 220 miles from the North Pole.

While surfaced this time I managed to get two moon lines through a heavy haze. These navigational lines of position straddled our inertial navigation position, proving that our navigation was still right. At 2000 we dived and continued on our track north to the Pole. At 1054 on 17 March the Skate reached the geographic North Pole. We had a strong de­sire to surface. In addition to the fact that no ship had ever been on the surface at the Pole, we had on board the ashes of Sir Hubert Wilkins, a great Arctic explorer, who had requested that his ashes be taken to the North Pole in a submarine. Sir Hubert had tried in 1932 to reach the Pole in a submarine, and we wanted very much to carry out his last request of the Navy. We started criss­crossing the area at the Pole, hoping to find open water or a freshly frozen over spot in which to surface. After searching for more than three hours, our sonars finally found a crack which was approximately 100 yards wide, but quite long. On our first attempt at surfacing, we placed the ship under the mid­dle of the crack and started coming up slowly. The heavy ice at the edge of the crack was drifting down on us quite rapidly. Before we could reach the surface it was apparent that we would hit the heavy ice, and so the nega­tive tank was rapidly flooded to make us heavy, and we quickly dropped back into the depths. When the negative tank was blown to put the ship again in neutral buoyancy to stop its descent into the ocean, a large number of air bubbles made it impossible to tell with sonar where the crack in the ice was. When the bubbles cleared up, our lead (or crack in the ice pack) had disappeared and there was ice fifty feet thick overhead. From the speed and direction of the ice movement overhead, the location of our crack was easy to calculate, and so we had no difficulty in relocating it. This time we positioned Skate under thick ice at one edge of the crack so that as we came up, the crack would drift overhead. Sonar ranges to the deep ice on the far edge of the crack showed a terrific sidewise set. As we slowly ascended, the sonar operator called out the range to the heavy ice on the far side of the crack “85 yards, 75 yards, 45 yards, 30 yards, 15 yards, 5 yards” and then just as it appeared that we would have to flood down again to keep from hitting the heavy ice, the sail broke through the thin ice in the crack, and it held us safely away from the deep ice which was just a few feet off on the starboard side. One hour and 39 minutes after first de­tecting the crack, ballast tanks were blown and the Skate slowly surfaced at the North Pole in surroundings that were dramatic be­yond belief. Our ship appeared to be nestled up against a hummock of ice fifteen or twenty feet high. The visibility was about 500 yards in dark twilight. The air temperature was −24°F., but it seemed much colder since the wind was blowing at twenty knots or so. The crack in which we were surfaced looked treacherous. There were large blocks of ice frozen into a thinner over-all covering. The whole scene looked as if this spot had been ground up several times by movement of the heavy ice on either side of the crack, and if we weren’t careful, it would be pos­sible for sudden shifting of the ice to grip Skate like a vise and prevent us from sub­merging.

While on the surface at the North Pole, Captain Calvert conducted burial services for Sir Hubert Wilkins. The service was simple but very touching. It was indeed an honor for the men of the Skate to be able to pay homage to Sir Hubert by carrying out his wish that his remains be taken to the North Pole in a submarine. Little did we dream five months earlier, when Sir Hubert had come to New London, Connecticut, to visit the Skate and discuss the Arctic, that the Skate would write the final chapter in this world of the man who in 1931 wrote a book entitled Under the North Pole. The service was conducted by red torchlight. I believe that the simple, Christian service held in those rugged surroundings was very appropriate for a man who had devoted so much of his life to the Arctic. After the last rifle salute was fired, we built a small cairn of ice blocks and left an American flag flying atop it to commemo­rate the occasion. The men of the Skate then returned to the ship, and we made prepara­tions to submerge. As we dropped down into the ocean, even the least emotional men of this group of stoic submariners would freely admit that they were moved by the events of the last few hours.

Two days later, on 19 March, the Skate was steaming along several hundred feet be­low the arctic ice pack. Dinner was being eaten, and the officers and crew were quite relaxed and at ease, although we were ap­proximately 1000 miles from open water where the ship could be surfaced immediately if an emergency required such action. Sud­denly. from my seat at the wardroom table, I heard the gyro alarm. By the time I reached the conning station the OOD had ordered the rudder amidships and had slowed to one third speed; this was our prearranged course of action in case of any casualty to the course indication while traveling under the ice pack. This action was taken to minimize any upset to gyroscopic systems. The OOD reported to me that the alarm that I had heard was on our auxiliary gyrocompass, and that simultaneously we had lost course indication from our inertial navigation system. The first picture that came into my mind was that of our submarine, with more than a hundred men on board, wandering around aimlessly, not knowing in which direction we were going. It was quickly apparent, however, that our trouble was caused by a temporary casualty to the power supplies and the result­ing voltage transient had set off the gyro alarm and had also made the electronic com­puters of our inertial navigation system lose their information on course and ship’s posi­tion. Our master gyrocompass, which was being operated as a non-north-seeking direc­tional gyro, had not been affected, and so we used it for steering and adjusted our course periodically to allow for the drift rate of the gyro while we refilled the computers of the inertia] navigation system which we nor­mally used for steering very accurate courses. This incident was the only casualty to any of our navigation equipment during all of the Skate’s under ice travel, which now totals more than 5,500 miles.

On 20 March we maneuvered under a long frozen-over crack which was approximately a hundred yards wide with pressure ridges of ice reaching down fifty feet deep into the water on each side of the crack. It took us about fifty minutes to surface the ship. We found ourselves in pretty surroundings with a clear moonlit night and many stars out. A celestial fix showed that our total naviga­tional error since entering the ice pack was almost unbelievably small. After finishing my navigating duties at sunrise, I watched four of our crew members who were qualified as divers with self-contained breathing appa­ratus. These men dropped down through a hole in the ice alongside the ship and swam around underneath the ice. We had lines tied to them as a safety precaution to prevent them from getting lost, but there was always the possibility that shifting ice would close up the hole through which they had to emerge, so we didn’t let them stray very far from the ship. The divers went swimming one more time several days later. On the second occasion they found a strange formation of six foot icicles hanging down into the ocean from the bottom of the icepack.

On 22 March, with the Skate surfaced in a frozen lead about seventy yards wide and 500 yards long, we had a new experience. We had been surfaced for about an hour and a half when the ice suddenly started shifting and grinding against the sides of the ship. It was shortly before midnight when the ice move­ment started. The scene inside the Skate changed in a few minutes from one of quiet and rest with many men sleeping, to a scene with all men quietly standing near their sta­tions ready to assist the section on watch if they were needed. There have been other Arctic expeditions that have heard these noises. For some, like Nansen’s expedition in the specially designed Fram in 1893–1896, it was just a source of worry about whether the ship had been designed correctly to ride up on top of the ice instead of being squeezed be­tween the ice pack. For others, in the ill-fated Jeanette expedition, these same noises were the sound of impending doom as the ice caught their ship in its grip and noisily crushed it. Most of the men in the Jeanette lost their lives in the attempt to get back to civilization after their ship had been lost. We in the Skate had no intention of testing our strong submarine hull to see if it would with­stand the tremendous pressures that could be exerted by ice flows grinding together. We were standing by, ready to submerge, when the ice movement stopped as suddenly as it had started. The movement had left Skate heeled over several degrees, and the ice had crept up both sides of the ship as if trying to cover us up and to force us back down under the water.

Two days later, on 24 March, we were surfaced in beautiful sunlight, and so an officer from CHINFO and his photographic party from the ship’s crew received an oppor­tunity to redeem themselves by getting some good motion pictures of Skate surfacing through a frozen-over lead. This time they kept the camera from freezing and completed shooting their pictures.

The bright sunlight was so deceptive that I thought it was warm enough to take a bub­ble sextant sight on the bridge with a light pair of gloves instead of my usual leather mittens over heavy woolen mittens (a cum­bersome arrangement). I quickly relearned that you can’t underestimate a temperature of about −30°F. Before I finished getting my navigational sight, I had one little finger which suffered a mild case of frostbite. On one other occasion, when I had to face directly into a twenty-knot wind with a temperature of −20°F. while taking a sight, the eyelashes of my left eye froze together so that I could not open the eye until I had warmed it up.

The next few days were very similar to those already described. We continued to ex­plore the Arctic Basin making a continuous record of the depth of water and the thick­ness of the ice pack overhead while gathering other data that we hope will be of use to future generations. At 0052 on 27 March we cleared the main ice pack after steaming 3,090 miles under the ice in twelve days. At 0145 we obtained a radar fix on Spitzbergen as we passed by, and at 0500 we saw our last ice as we headed south. A helicopter from Iceland picked up a preliminary copy of our patrol report as we passed that island, and the Skate's second Arctic patrol had come to a close except for one final surprise. When we docked in New London, Captain Calvert was awarded a gold star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit and the ship received its second Navy Unit Commendation for this winter patrol through the Arctic Ocean.