Following graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1932, Ensign Odale D. Waters Jr. rose through surface, ordnance, and mine warfare assignments to the rank of rear admiral. His distinguished career culminated in a five-year tour as Oceanographer of the Navy, from 1965 to 1970. He picked up the nickname “Muddy” along the way. Just before, during, and after the 1956 Suez Crisis, he had command of Destroyer Squadron 2 with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. “A very noisy body of water from the standpoint of acoustics, underwater sound operations,” he recalls in these edited excerpts from his Naval Institute oral history:
It’s an oceanographer’s nightmare to predict the undersea characteristics of the Med, because of the shape and size, a lot of runoff of fresh water into a relatively small body of salt water in the rainy season. That changes the salinity and gives you layers, which affect sound transmission. You get higher salinity in the dry season. You can count on the Med to have very bad sonar conditions for catching submarines.
After Suez, the squadron worked for about six months with a hunter-killer task force.
We were just completing a very busy morning of replenishing, when one of the destroyers that was lifeguarding astern of a replenishment ship spotted a submarine’s periscope in the middle of our formation. He turned and picked him up on his sonar, obviously a Soviet submarine spying on the replenishment formation.
The submarine went down; we put a half dozen destroyers on it; and I became the scene-of-action commander of a hold-down operation. You hold this fellow down until he has to resurface to renew his batteries—at which time you render passing honors, salute his flag, but you still have one up on him. You’ve made him disclose himself.
It has since been successfully done, but it hadn’t been done then, and everybody was very much interested in pulling off one of these hold-downs to get one up on the Soviets. We had this fellow dead to rights, but the sonar conditions in the Med are very, very poor. I think we held him down there for about 36 hours. I had my destroyers working him over. I had air support from Sardinia and patrol planes with sonobuoys and MAD gear, all sorts of things. They even shipped a tanker out to us; we refueled just so that we could stay on the job.
If he was just lying doggo and not using his engines, he could have stayed quite a long time, probably a week if he was not using any of his battery. Or he could have poked his snorkel up some distance from us, then gone on for a longer time. Everyone in the whole Navy—and all the way up to the White House —was interested. We had to send a situation report every four hours, and it went right to the top.
Admiral Arleigh Burke was the Chief of Naval Operations, and he was most interested in trying to catch one of these guys, just to hold him down until he had to come up and holler “Uncle!” This fellow really was lying doggo on a layer, I think, and conserving his battery. He was fairly shallow. We even put a boat over with divers to see if they could possibly see him and prove what we had. We couldn’t quite do that. We dragged a grapnel through the water, and it caught on something, straightened up the tines on the grapnel. I kept reporting all that we were doing, and I kept getting encouragement from the CNO. I ended one situation report with, “I have tried everything on this bird except salt on his tail.” This went out secret, priority.
About four hours later, I got a message in plain language from the CNO to me, and I know who wrote it. It said, “You So-and-so: Try salt.”
The sub finally slipped away on us, but they gave us an E for effort.