They are the Godzillas in the oceans. They are stealthy, moderately fast and as dangerous as a water moccasin in your bathtub water. The bite of one of these steel whales would be catastrophic.
From 1966-68, I was aboard the U.S.S. Courtney DE1021 (DE is a Destroyer Escort), a Russian submarine hunter. We were part of a group of dozens of ships that were fast and with excellent sonar capabilities. We were the Antisubmarine Warfare (ASW) group.
The Sonarmen found and tracked the subs. We Radiomen delivered the subs positions to strategic Navy base on the east coast. Once we found a Russian sub (engines manufactured differently, so they sound different) we were like burrs securely attached to its tail. We periodically reported the positions of these steel monsters of the deep to strategic naval bases, especially the Atlantic Naval Force Command center in Norfolk, Virginia.
Each submarine hunter ship had a designated area to search within a much larger area that spanned from the Equator to the North Pole (in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans). It was a constant vigil, a twenty-four-hours a day search and follow. Most of the time there was no search needed because we would replace another sub-hunter who was already following a Russian sub. When our time in that area was over, we were replaced, so we returned to our naval base in Rhode Island for a week of rest, light duty, maintenance, supplies, minor health issues, etc.
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I remember one specific encounter that occurred in 1966. Sonar found a Russian ship. At that time submarines were fat whales while ships like mine, submarine hunters, were Destroyer Escorts which were sleek, streamlined, light and amazingly fast.
In that era, Russian subs were powered by internal combustion engines, which burn fuel inside the engine itself. Since combustion simply means burning something in the presence of oxygen you may think I’m being simple-minded. However, I mention it only to inform you that a diesel-powered submarine has a limited supply of oxygen. A sub is a sealed, metallic, subsurface vessel so a fresh oxygen supply is necessary. That can only happen if the sub surfaces at regular intervals, much like a whale, usually every couple of days, depending on their speed. But surfacing is not only to replenish oxygen. Batteries must be recharged, minor maintenance to the external structure may be needed, plus the diesel engines produce waste gases that get trapped inside the sub and surfacing let’s those gases escape.
We were constantly dogging this Russian sub and each attempt to escape failed, even its last resort which was to make a dangerously deep dive (possible structural damage due to the tremendous pressure in the deep ocean, then turn their engines off. Now they really do act like a whale, but a stationary whale is extremely rare. They can’t be heard, but sonar doesn’t need sound. It just needs a large metallic object to reflect sound. Plus, like a whale, the sub must eventually surface to replenish its oxygen supply.
This dangerous move by the sub was worthless. It’s a Hail Mary Ploy made in desperation, panic or frustration, exactly the same reasons the Hail Mary Pass in used in American football. The chance of it succeeding is astronomical. Future subs rarely used this ploy due to an overwhelming failure rate. In this diesel engine era, both Russian and American subs were trying new techniques, testing new equipment, experimenting with alternate systems, which will enable a sub to perform new maneuvers. Because of new technology focused on submarines, they were improving at a great rate.
All that is needed, however, is patience. In the old days, sonar and listening technology was not so well developed and the “deep dive” trick worked on the impatient sub-hunter commander who assumed they had lost track of the sub. Not anymore.
This makes patience much more important. The sub-hunters may even go to quiet mode where no unnecessary noises are mandated to give sonar an added advantage.
Back in the late 1960s the commander of my ship was a cool cat, calm and silent, like a cat on velvet feet, as the poet Emily Dickinson would say. If a deep dive occurred, he would order the ship to take a slow, circular route around the area. The bridge was a three-sided thick plexiglass enclosure. The windows were huge, thick and raised off the bridge deck. He’d relax a bit, sitting in his welded down, cushioned chair, drink coffee with the XO (executive officer, second in command) and, sometimes, after a joke, the bridge would sound like muffled, canned laughter without the giddy carelessness.
The Russian sub had reached a point where they were forced to surface, and they did. It was about 10:00 a.m. on a clear, sunny day, when the bubbles, ripples and waves made the ascending sub seem to appear out of boiling water. It’s a majestic sight to see it happening. I was on the bridge with the commander as he wrote a message about the Russian sub’s location, what type and class he thought it was, it’s approximate length, approximate age (new? old?), anything that could distinguish that sub from other Russian subs, perhaps a hint of a new design, visible equipment, and structures, etc.
It’s difficult to image accurately what a surfacing subs does to the water, and how a sub suddenly appears a foot of two at a time. The waves created by the sub would travel to our light ship and make it rock and sway. Some of the guys, feeling happy, called it “rock and roll” and pretend to dance to music for a few seconds.
With permission, a few crew members were allowed to stand on the foredeck (bow) because we all knew what would happen, with one surprise.
A smiling, waving Russian exited the escape hatch, reached back into the hatch and pulled something shiny out of it. He unfolded it into an aluminum chair. The center control-tower, looked like a huge bump on a huge, long log, as is rose above the surface. The Russian sailor looked our way, waved half-heartedly and smiled, as our sailors waved back and laughed at them.
The Russian pulled a paperback book from his rear pocket, sat down on the unfolded chair, then pretended to read undisturbed and not distracted by our presence. The laughter from our ship got louder, the result was the Russian giving our sailor’s the middle finger. It was a simple ploy to let us know that they weren’t embarrassed by us making them surface and watch them. On the bow of our ship, as a result to the middle finger greeting, voluminous, riotous howling, accompanied with double-hand waving, jumping up and down with more stomach-hurting, extended hooting.
After a two hour wait, the sub descended, and it could not escape us. We followed it all the way to extremely aggravated boredom before our ship was relieved by one just like us.
Now we had a good story to tell but were ordered not to mention the incident in our letters or to anyone who was not a crew member. That was disappointing. Encounters like this were considered to be classified. That’s like not being able to tell your best joke to friends.
There were few exciting encounters as this one was, and I’m certain that if the Russian sailors, on their own sub-hunters, did the same if they caught one of our diesel subs having to ascend to the surface.
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Another event took place in total darkness. I was the team leader in the radio shack’s graveyard shift. In the early morning hours, our ship was cruising on calm waters, it was quiet, not much movement in any department. No messages were transmitted, none received, the shredding of old messages was completed so we were all on the brink of sleep. That was bad news. The good thing is that officers, including the ship’s commander, had to gain entrance by knocking and being recognized through to door peep hole, so we always had a warning, but sleeping was to be avoided. If caught sleeping, severe punishment would be waiting when arriving back to our Newport, R.I. port. (Brig, or court martial, or reduction in rank and pay, but the worse one was a dishonorable discharge). All of them? One or two of them? It depended on the decision of a few top-ranking officers who were not assigned to the ship.”
Being cautious I got the guys together and had a joke contest. The winner got the other guy’s (me too) dessert at dinnertime. It woke us up and made us alert with laughter and teasing.
Suddenly there was slamming on the door, plus the sound of running along the passageway. A sonarman told me to prepare for possible emergency messages. He said, “Russian sub,” then ran off. The team leader of the sonarmen had sprinted to the commander’s quarters and woke him up. I heard shouting in the passageway and thought I heard something about a Russian sub threatening us off the starboard side and partially surfaced. I didn’t understand that. If true it would be the most careless, dangerous and extremely stupid action I’d ever heard of or read about. It was hard to believe. It was impossible, I thought. Then my brain screamed back at me, repeatedly saying, “WTF, WTF.”
Had a Russian sub successfully snuck up on us without detection? How? Did the Russians develop an advanced technology for fooling sonar? Impossible. It couldn’t be happening. But I knew the sonarmen because we worked closely with them, so I found this hard to accept, until my doubts collapsed. Was I in denial? Fuck it. I needed to have the guys ready and waiting for any emergency messages rather than overthink what was happening. The guys and I were nervous. We might be swamped with messages to transmit soon and we were prepared (I hoped).
Breaking the early morning quiet came a message through the loudspeaker. “Mr. Sheehan, report to the bridge.” It was the XO’s voice.
I thought, Why me? Since becoming a team leader, I no longer ran to receive outgoing messages from officer and delivering messages to them. The other guys normally did the legwork. I asked a close friend to double check (triple, if needed) the transmitters to make sure I’d calibrated them to it optimum power (this was done each time a new team came to relieve another team from duty). I then departed immediately for the bridge (the upper most ship’s command center for the commander, navigator, consulting officers, etc.).
The General Quarters alarm rang throughout the ship (a command for the crew to go to their combat stations).
I walked into the bridge and stood on the commander’s port side while the XO stood on his starboard side. The commander asked the XO to draft a message to the Norfolk, Virginia command center, while he was furiously drafting a message SECNAV (Secretary of the Navy, Department of Defense) in Washington, D.C.
The atmosphere was dense with the smell of sweat and people unconsciously wiping it off their foreheads. It was dark on the bridge, so it was difficult to see faces, but the eyes of people looked larger than usual. More of the whites were showing as if the upper and lower eyelids had retracted from shock, showing more of the sclera.
I looked off the port side into the glaring reflection of the spotlights. Fuck, I thought when I saw the long black bow of sub that was mostly submerged except for a couple of feet of blackness which rose above the midnight black ocean water.
“Wow,” said someone looking out the window on the port side. “It’s a whale! Commander, it’s a whale.”
Damn good thing it was dark in the bridge, so the redness of faces did not show. A huge whale seemed to think we were a whale and decided to accompany us.
Later I found out that my boss, a chief petty officer, had slipped and fallen in the shower, thus making him unable to come to the radio shack or the bridge. I had to temporarily take his place, at least until morning and I wanted morning to come quickly because I was quite nervous and ill-equipped, mentally, to handle that position of authority over the four teams of radiomen. I figured that I just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time. I remember wiping the sweat off my forehead, wiping my hand on my shirt, and the guys laughing at the wet spot and at me. I told them to “Fuck off,” which was a mistake because the laughter got louder. I silently wished for the next shift to arrive so I could leave the radio shack.
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Another time in the Mediterranean, we had returned to our small Fleet. The aircraft carrier is positioned in the center of the fleet like the hub in a wheel, then it’s surrounded by destroyers. After the destroyers, in the outer circle are the ships like mine. I may have forgotten to mention that sub-hunting destroyer escorts are so swift because they are so light. Seen from directly overhead, the task force would look like a target with the carrier being the bull’s eye.
We were on our way to Naples, Italy. We were a day out from the Naples harbor when two Russian MiG-29s from their air base in Tunisia broke away from their squadron and buzzed the superstructure of our aircraft carrier. The topmost part of the superstructure is where a tall, fifty feet antenna rises high into the air.
The entire Fleet went to General Quarters (combat ready). The Fleet was waiting for orders about how to handle the situation. While that was happening one of the Russian MiGs buzzed close to the carrier’s antenna then flew away. The second Russian MiG came too close to the antenna and one wing was half sheared off.
I happened to be off duty, but my General Quarters combat ready station is the radio shack. I was outside smoking and wondering what the hell is going on. I looked toward the carrier and saw the second plane’s sheared off wing flying away. It flew away looking like a wobbly, drunken duck, then crashed into the water. I immediately refocused on the Russian plane with only half a wing on one side and knew what was coming. The pilot could not keep the unbalanced plane stable. The whole wing outweighed the half-wing, so the plane tipped downward due to the weight of the full wing. It was losing altitude quickly. The tip of the heavier, whole wing, hit the water and the MiG cartwheeled at a tremendous speed. Plane parts kept flying off until hardly anything was visible. The metal parts sank, the lighter parts floated. Two bodies lay among the floating parts. I was frozen in place and I remember thinking, “The Russians pilots are crazy, undisciplined bastards. It’s a wonder we haven’t had a limited war with them.”
Navy helicopters from the carrier picked up the bodies and delivered them to one of the Russian trawlers that are always following us and picking up anything that goes overboard from our ships, mainly the double-shredded, outdated, and declassified messages that are in weighted canvas bags. Up to date classified messages are kept on board. The commander keeps all top-secret messages in a vault in his room. Radio men have to have unblemished lives to be clear for handling such messages. Classified messages are brought back to port to be destroyed. The FBI and Navy Intelligence agencies go over our lives with a fine-tooth comb annually. I, and other team leaders, had to check each message to be positive that it didn’t go in the weighted bag. We often worked together double checking each other’s pile of messages. Occasionally one canvas bag may not sink. The double-shredded information is already outdated so it was not a serous worry for the commander.
This was simply another time when I was in the right place at the right time. The radio shack has no windows, just the door peep hole, so there were other events I did not see, but heard about in conversations.
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Another time I was on land duty at the ASW base in the Azores. Being a team leader I was the only one in the radio shack with permission to decode a top-secret message. It was much stricter than onboard my ship. There was a separate room built like a bank vault, filled with decoding machines, Navy regulation rules, decoding catalogs, a desk, a lamp and shelves for of miscellaneous items related to decoding messages.
I have no idea why, but I seem to get this kind of crap late at night. This was no exception. At about 4:00 a.m. a team member came to me quickly (that’s a sign of trouble of some sort). He handed me the coded message saying, “Secret or top secret, Bill”. The coded messages didn’t distinguish between the two until they were decoded. The very first word(s) decoded would indicate the classification.
The message involved Russian submarine(s). That was no surprise. After decoding the top-secret message, I got on the phone (also in the decoding vault) and called the Navy base commander directly. I heard his sleepy voice and thought he sounded irritated (I would be, too). I told him who I was, where I was, what time it was when we received the message. He just said, “I’ll take care of it now.” I asked if I should call any other officers (sometime that’s required). He responded, “No. I’ve got it. I’ll handle it,” and he hung up. I never did find any interesting details, and even if I did, I wouldn’t mention it (duty, honor, loyalty).
******* CODA *******
Russia never had, from what I’ve learned, a super-sophisticated sonar system like the U.S. but their spy and intelligence agencies would steal or buy it soon. Money doesn’t just talk, it screams. When loud enough it eventually brings buyer and seller together. Money encourages traitors, power increased their self-made pseudo egos.
Rumors: In the late 1960s there were rumors saying that the Russians were not after our sonar system technology, and that they wanted to build alternative technologies that did the same as sonar. Supposedly knowledgeable people ridiculed reports of Russian’s alternatives to sonar systems.
But technology was advancing at an accelerated rate, so the Russians focused on developing alternate technologies. How could it be discounted automatically? Super bloated, superiority egos, led to denials of what our own informants were reporting to the defense department even though some of the rumors sounded reasonable.
The Russians were probably thinking, Why endanger their own spies and waste the financial expenditure for spying and paying informers when their own scientists were on the cusp of surprisingly new alternative systems that put them far ahead of the Americans.
One rumor was that the Russians were developing a non-acoustic system. A system without sound? Hard to believe; few did. It was said that the non-acoustic system tracked a submarine’s turbulent waves created by their propulsion system.
Another rumor said Russians could follow the path of a submarine by detecting water density, a side effect created by the bow of a sub as it forced its way through water that got compressed.
Then there was a laser system that the Russians were developing.
Also rumored was the Russians had developed a way to detect the increasing number of nuclear subs by following their radiation trail. Huge amounts of water are needed to cool the nuclear power. The water must circulate. New water is drawn in, as old water is flushed out. The flushed-out water had minute, but easily detectable amounts of radiation.
Following the heat trail of a sub was also a possibility, especially with the nuclear subs because they heated the ocean water around their sub by ten or more degrees higher than the normal water temperature.
After a couple of years, 1974, there was confirmation that the Russians had some of these alternate systems and they were rapidly advancing them, especially the “radiation trail” system. Diesel was outdated. Nuclear power was the future, so they were now far ahead of us with their alternate technology.
They surprised the U.S. in 1957 with their Sputnik satellite. Now they were taking the lead with alternate, new underwater detection systems.
Chances are you will never hear these technologies talked about. Like the aggressive actions of Russians, the technologies were classified. More hush, hush from the Defense Department. Much more embarrassment, also. Probably the only way civilians will know about these things are if there is a limited war with Russia. Then the technology will be talked about openly.
Secrets will always be guarded, but stolen anyway, new more advanced technology are always discovered. Far more advanced technology in the future will develop at an incredible rate, especially by the few military scientists who survive the nuclear apocalypse.
Humans are determined to annihilate other humans that are different in beliefs, government, influence, power, religion, politics, etc.
Thinking of the future? Then think about the sleeping dragon, China. They are positioned to replace the U.S. and Russia as superpowers. They have the technology advances; their economy is booming (America created that for them. “Made in China.”). Their navy is more advanced than that of the U.S. and Russia. They are waiting for their opportunity to fill a vacuum created by a U.S. vs. Russia conflict where the two sides are so busy fighting each other that they can’t be watchful of China’s actions.
Even more dreadful is the possibility that if Russia allies itself with China, then freedom in all forms will be written in the morning mist.
Added Note: In an October. 23, 2017 POPULAR MECHANICS magazine. Cover title says, HOW SOVIET UNION SNOOPED THE WATER FOR ENEMY SUBS WITHOUT SONAR.
Many of the fifty-year-old rumors that I mentioned are confirmed in this article. Apparently, the information has become declassified for decades. Also declassified, via common sense, is the continuing weakness of the American Oceanic Defense System.
But those days of Russian sub-hunting are long gone for me. The only sub-hunting I do now-a-days is at Subway.
The joke most often heard on my sub-hunter ship was that when asked what your performance rating was. “Sub-standard” became the most frequently used answer.
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