Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

5

Tracing its origin to the glacial period during which our country’s outlines were formed, the Thames River in New London flows southward through a cleft between massive piles of time-worn New England granite. For tens of thousands of years the river has worn its way through the channel left by the receding ice, smoothing the rough edges of the stone and carving its channel deep amid the silt and debris which has ineffectually tried to choke it. Sometimes the river between the rocky headlands is roiled by a storm sweeping to the south, and at these times it takes on the gray colorless hue of a lowering overcast; at more quiet moments the river is blue with the reflection of the sky, as it courses past the massive stone-and-brick lighthouse at the entrance to the buoyed ship-channel.

On the sixteenth of February, Triton stood out in a channel whipped by a cold north wind. Low in the water, extraordinarily slender in proportions, sinisterly beautiful as only a submarine can be, her huge size dwarfed the bald domes of granite on either side. On deck, a few men busied themselves housing the capstans, stowing away mooring lines and other equipment. Upon the forward part of the long, clean silhouette jutted the angular outline of the ship’s “sail”—some twenty feet high by seventy-five feet long—which provided the support structure for periscopes, radar masts, radio antenna, and other retractable submarine gear. A number of men clustered on the forward part of the sail, which served as Triton’s bridge.

We were beginning the voyage submariners had been dreaming of ever since nuclear energy had made it possible. Gently, the ship clove the sea-blue water, as though loath to leave yet eager to be on her way. My pulse, had I permitted anyone to take it, might have belied the calm demeanor with which I outwardly surveyed the conning of the ship.

From my exposed position on our “flying bridge”—on the very top of the sail and unprotected by bulwarks—I had a clear view in all directions. In the wrong kind of weather this could be an unpleasant watch-keeping station, but today, with the north wind at our backs, I was not uncomfortable by the standards to which seamen are accustomed. Little, if any thought, however, was being wasted by anyone on personal comfort or discomfort. Taking a ship to sea, even through a familiar and uncomplicated channel, requires unremitting attention. I was the only person on the bridge who could be said to have any free time at all, and between checks on our navigation in the channel, I focused my binoculars on a prominent boulder at the eastern mouth of the river.

There she stood as she had said she would, alone on a granite ledge where the Thames River meets Long Island Sound. The chill February wind whipped the red scarf about her head. Feet thrust into wool-lined galoshes, one hand holding her coat tightly around her, she waved a mittened hand at me. Well I knew that the distance was too great for Ingrid to distinguish me with the naked eye. But I waved my white uniform cap in answer.

This was the same blue-eyed girl who had married me during the flaming years of World War II, when both of us feared so desperately that life would pass us by. Many times during the war, and many more times since, she had watched my ship dip below the horizon. For sixteen years she had minded the home and the children when I was at sea, and whenever there was a mail bag from home, a letter from her was always there.

As I waved at that rapidly receding figure—she had now taken off the scarf and was holding it as a banner, the better to be seen—it suddenly came to me: “She knows! She must know!” After nearly sixteen years facing the unpredictable vicissitudes of Navy life together, sixteen years during which our mutual dependence had steadily deepened, the more I thought the more certain I became. I had also learned to appreciate the strength of character and depth of loyalty my Ingrid had inherited from her Swedish forebears, and I knew that if she had indeed guessed, the Navy need have no fear of her speaking out of turn.

I couldn’t wave my cap continuously, for there were many demanding duties. Every time I turned my binoculars back toward the point of land, however, the red scarf was still streaming. Several more times I waved my cap through a wide arc, in hopes she could still see it. Finally a point of land came between us, the spot of red drew out of sight, and my last tie with land was broken. In a few hours, as soon as the water was deep enough to dive Triton’s huge bulk, we would submerge for almost three long months.

Despite all the arguments in favor of doing it earlier, there were sound technical reasons why a submerged circumnavigation of the world was not attempted until Triton was built, and the most important of these, stated simply, was the factor of dependability. Our two main power plants were completely separate and independent. No conceivable casualty in one could affect the other. Thus, while the dependability record of Triton’s single-reactor predecessors was unsurpassed in our Navy, a ship with two reactors would be able to complete the voyage safely even if one of them were to break down.

Another factor was adequate provisions for a long voyage. Triton’s size gave her a tremendous amount of room for storage. And, of course, it was her great carrying capacity which made our ship the ideal vehicle for the scientific aspects of our mission.

As we passed New London Ledge Light—a square, solid structure marking the mouth of the Thames River—we increased to standard speed, about fifteen knots, and angled our course slightly to the left to head for Race Rock, the wave-lashed lighthouse at the western tip of Fishers Island which marks the division point between Long Island Sound and Block Island Sound.

In a few minutes, Triton described a large curving sweep around it, as we squared her away on a nearly easterly course for the run down Block Island Sound toward the open sea. Once set on the new course, we increased speed to “full,” clipping our way through the small chop in Block Island Sound in a manner more akin to a destroyer than a submarine. Triton rode easily, with hardly a quiver in her big hull—the well-ordered activity below decks barely evident from the small noises by which well-attuned persons keep informed of what is going on.

Doubtless, I felt, some of the crew were experiencing the emotions which were also crowding upon me. Approximately one-third of them were on watch and therefore occupied, but others were preparing themselves for a lengthy cruise, settling into the routine which would be ours until we returned to port. With the exception of the officers and Chief Quartermaster Marshall, no one knew where we were really going, but I wondered whether some of the men, observing the unusual activity in getting ready and the secrecy with which Will Adams and Marshall had gone about their plotting chores, might not have surmised that something special was in the offing. They were to find out soon enough, I thought to myself, but I could not tell them until we were well on our way.

According to our log, it was at 1543, approximately an hour and a half after our departure, when Triton swept across the bar at Montauk Point, turned due south, and, free of the shore, increased speed to flank.

Lieutenant James Hay came on the bridge to relieve Brodie as Officer of the Deck about fifteen minutes before the hour, in accordance with custom. At the same time, Quartermaster First Class Beacham would be taking over the watch from Quartermaster Second Class Honeysette in the conning tower; one after the other, the oncoming lookouts bawled for permission to come on the bridge to relieve their opposite numbers. With the extra people, it was becoming a little crowded.

“Bob,” I said to Brodie, “I’m going below for a while. The course is south. I’ll let you know when it’s time to dive.”

Bob interrupted his turnover to Hay, nodded gravely at me. “Aye, aye,” he said, a surprisingly deep voice booming out of his slender physique. Bob was the tallest officer on board and ate like a horse, but it seemed to have done little to fill him out. Perhaps a few more years of service would put enough pounds on him to go with that voice.

Triton was beginning to feel the sea. There was a longer period to her impatient motion as she pierced the ocean rollers, a slight tremor from the increased power as she drove through them. She rolled gently from side to side, but the whistle of wind coming over the bridge cockpit, the spume of angry spray flung back from her razor-sharp prow, and the white foam racing down her dark sides testified to the power and urgency with which she drove southward. Astern and to starboard the looming mass of Long Island reflected the rays of the southwesterly sun. Montauk Point Lighthouse and the nearby radar towers jutted prominently into the sky. At their foot, extending for some distance to the west and at right angles to the frothing wake we were leaving straight behind, could be seen a white, almost steady line where the small Atlantic surf met the white sand beaches of the land.

Ahead was the sea, the horizon, and the cold blue sky. I swung onto the ladder leading below, climbed down to the lower bridge level and through the watertight hatch into the conning tower.

“—that’s about it, Beach,” I heard Honeysette saying. Beacham and Honeysette looked just the slightest bit startled as I appeared.

“Quartermaster of the watch properly relieved, Captain,” Honeysette quickly said. “Beacham has the watch.”

“Aye,” I acknowledged, and then mocked severity: “How many times do I have to tell you that while I’m captain of this ship, Beacham’s nickname is abolished!”

Both men grinned self-consciously. Honeysette strove to retrieve the situation.

“Sorry, Captain, I didn’t see you come down, and it just slipped out by accident.”

Beacham has probably been known as “Beach” to his cronies ever since he enlisted in the Navy some twelve years ago. But, claiming prior rights in the circumstances, I had decreed that so long as he and I were both in the same ship something was going to have to give, and that it was going to be Beacham. I frowned. “It’s a court-martial offense, you know.”

Beacham took a well-chewed cigar out of his mouth. “I’m doing my best to teach all these guys, Captain,” he said, “but some of them don’t seem to want to learn.”

“Humph!” was all I could think to say, as I stepped on the rungs of the ladder and started below into the control room.

Honeysette’s intelligent face was framed above the circular hatchway as I passed through. “If we have a court martial, Captain, we’ll have to go back!”

“Humph!” was all I could say again. Honeysette had got the best of this interchange. It was also obvious that he had guessed that this cruise might be more than it purported to be.

Directly beneath the conning tower is the control room. Its bulkheads and overhead are painted a soft green, but the color scheme as a whole, with all the instruments, is predominantly instrument gray like the conning tower above. In this area Triton is three decks high—and the control room, occupying the highest compartment, has the basic shape of the attic of a Quonset hut. The curved cylindrical pressure hull of the ship, insulated with an inch of smooth cork glued directly to the steel, sweeps in an unbroken arc from starboard to port.

Covering the entire port half of the forward bulkhead is the diving panel: a large gray metal affair in which a great number of instruments are mounted. Here are depth gauges, gyrocompass repeater, speed indicator, engine-order telegraphs (frequently called “annunciators”) a “combined instrument panel” for the bow planesman and another for the stern planes-man, and controls for our automatic depth-keeping equipment. Two armchairs, upholstered in red plastic, face the diving panel. Directly before each of them is a control column that would make a bomber pilot feel right at home.

Submerged, the control room is one of the most important nerve centers of the ship, but while a submarine is on the surface there is very little going on. The seats in front of the diving stand were at the moment unoccupied; on diving, the two lookouts on the bridge would come down below and take over the two stations. The Officer of the Deck is the last man down; he personally shuts the bridge hatch and then swings below to take his station as Diving Officer. Up to now this would have been Bob Brodie, but as he was being relieved, Jim Hay would be the “Diving Officer of the Watch.” I saw with approval, however, that Tom Thamm, the ship’s official Diving Officer, was still on hand, sitting on the cushioned top of a tool box located just in front of the ship’s fathometer. Apparently, he had finished his compensation calculations, for the circular slide rule he had devised for this purpose was nowhere to be seen.

Thamm rose to his feet, “Afternoon, Captain,” he said. “How is it on the bridge?”

“Cold and windy.”

“How soon do you think we’ll be diving?” he asked.

“A couple of hours,” I said. “It’s a pretty long run out here you know—have you got your trim in yet?”

Tom shook his head. “It’s still going in, sir. We’ll have it in about fifteen minutes more. It takes a while to compensate this big boat.”

“Ship.”

“Sorry, sir. ‘This ship,’ I mean.” Tom grinned at me.

Submarines have been called boats ever since 1900 when our Navy’s first submarine, USS Holland, was indeed a “boat”—only fifty-four feet long, twenty-feet shorter than Triton’s sail. Since then, the term has been affectionately perpetuated, despite great changes in the craft themselves. Even before World War II, however, submarines were for various purposes officially designated as “major war vessels,” and since that time their significance and importance have increased still further. Triton, with the size and horsepower of a cruiser, with unmatched operational versatility, speed, and endurance, is far more than a boat. With bigger craft sliding down the ways, Rear Admiral Warder, the “Fearless Freddie” of World War II renown and Admiral Daspit’s predecessor as ComSubLant, had directed submariners henceforth to refer to their boats as ships. But old habits die hard, and no one in the Triton was so constant an offender as I. This was the reason for Tom’s grin.

“If we’re not going to dive for two hours, Captain, I’d like to secure here as soon as we get the compensation in. I’ll be back about”—Tom looked at his wrist watch—”1700.”

“That will be plenty of time, Tom,” I said. “Will wants to dive at about thirty-five fathom curve, and even at this speed we won’t be there until some time after five o’clock.”

The continental shelf on the eastern seaboard runs for many miles out to sea. The water is actually much deeper in parts of Long Island and Block Island sounds. We had arbitrarily picked thirty-five fathoms as the depth we wanted under us before diving; here, in the open sea, there would be a long surface run before the continental shelf dropped off to that extent.

Triton’s control room is really two spaces. Her periscopes and some of her radar masts are so long that when retracted they project into the hull of the ship nearly to the keel. Consequently, the control room is bisected in the middle by the periscope and radar mast wells. The Diving Station takes over most of the port side; the fire control gear and sonar compartment are located to starboard, where there is also room for passage fore and aft. Gray boxes containing a great amount of complex equipment are mounted on the center structure, thus making it a solid mass several feet thick.

Flush against the port side of the ship, but with a bulk that leaves barely enough room between its face and the periscope well structure for a crew member to man it, is the Ballast Control Panel, looking rather like a large electronic instrument console, which is exactly what it is. The face of this BCP is covered with dials and gauges; and a line of switches, contrived so that each knob has a different shape, borders its face. One of the requirements of the Chief Petty Officer in charge of the control room, whose post is a built-in swivel chair facing the BCP, is that he be able to distinguish all the operating switches blindfolded.

A prominent section of the Ballast Control Panel is devoted to the Hull Opening Indicator system, by which the condition of the crucial valves and hatches in the ship, whether open or closed, can be told at a glance. In the old days, this was done with red and green lights and the Chiefs customary report on diving was “Green Board.” In the war it was found, however, that wearing red goggles to preserve night vision made it impossible to distinguish between red and green. In the new system, all the lights are red; a circle represents open and a straight bar means closed. And “Green Board” is now reported as “Straight Board.”

Located on the BCP are the controls for diving and surfacing, blowing tanks, closing or opening vents. Variable tanks and trim pump are regulated, as are the hydraulic systems and the high-pressure air systems. The post is the charge of the senior enlisted man on watch in the control room, the Chief Petty Officer of the Watch, and it is located so that he can control the dive and give instructions to the planesmen should the OOD be slow in arriving from the bridge.

Lining either side of the narrow and cluttered passageway aft of the Ballast Control Panel are interior communication switchboards and various electric panels. Still farther aft, occupying the entire port after corner of the control room and protected by a soundproofed bulkhead and door is the chart room, ample in its original design but, like all other space in the ship, now crammed with assorted equipment mostly relating to radar.

Immediately forward of where I now stood in the control room, beyond a pressure-proof bulkhead and its watertight door, is a big compartment devoted entirely to crew’s berthing, accommodating a total of ninety-five men on two deck levels. Each man has a locker, an aluminum bunk, a foam-rubber mattress, individual ventilation controllable by a louver near his head, and an overhead fluorescent light for reading. Lest the provision for reading in bed seem unwarranted luxury, it must be realized that it is hardly possible—in fact undesirable—for all hands in a submarine to be up and about at the same time, except for certain general duties such as battle stations or emergency drills. The more people in their bunks at other times, the more room for those who must be up.

Still farther forward, the foremost compartment in the ship, is the forward torpedo room, containing four standard-size torpedo tubes, considerable high-powered sonar equipment, and, as always, berthing for as many persons as can be accommodated.

I still had on the blues and bridge coat I had worn as we got underway; so now my immediate destination was in the other direction, aft to the officer’s berthing compartment where I had my tiny stateroom. I glanced swiftly at the Rigged for Dive Panel, which showed that all compartments in the ship had been rigged and checked in the condition of “readiness for diving,” and at the Hull Opening Indicators, which showed that the only hull openings not closed were the bridge hatch and the main air intake valve, and stepped aft.

Triton’s cruiser size did not extend to the Commanding Officer’s quarters. My stateroom in Triton was about a five-foot capital “T,” with a pull-down bunk filling the entire crossbar of the letter. By stretching out one arm and pivoting, I could touch all four walls. But I couldn’t complain very loudly. Thamm’s room, for example, was the same size as mine, but he shared it with two others. Will Adams’ room was also the same size. He had one roommate and the mechanism of one of the ship’s main vent valves, which took as much space as a man. Normally, these days, the Executive Officer is so besotted with paper work that whenever possible he has no roommate, so that the vacant bunk can be used as an adjunct to his tiny fold-down desk. But there were no spare bunks anywhere in Triton on this cruise, and the extra bunk in Will’s room was assigned to Joe Roberts.

I drew the curtain on my stateroom, in which I was to spend a good part of my time for the next three months. Electric Boat had hopefully painted it a so-called “beach sand” color, thus, perhaps, attempting to apologize for its lack of size. It contained a standard fold-down desk, several drawers for linen and personal belongings, a large safe which Bob Brodie had appropriated for his classified publications, a folding wash stand, a medicine cabinet, a one-foot-wide clothes closet, a convertible bunk—cushioned on the bottom to form an uncomfortable settee when raised—and a single straight-backed chair. Under the folding wash stand, at my request—since I needed a place to have at least one other person in for a conference—had been built a small circular folding stool about eight inches in diameter (dubbed the “hot seat” by irreverent members of the ship’s company). And in every conceivable nook, not occupied by some other equipment, there were lockers.

At the foot of my bunk were depth gauge, speed indicator, and gyro repeater, and when I counted them I discovered that the room contained five telephones and two loudspeaking attachments with which, after learning which buttons to press and which dials to turn, I could talk to anyone in the ship.

In a few moments, having shifted to the sea-going khaki that would be my standard garb until May, I drew back my door curtain and walked aft. On either side of the narrow formica-lined hallway were curtained doorways similar to mine, marking the entrances to the wardroom and the six staterooms Triton had for the seventeen officers assigned. At the extreme after end of the compartment was the yeoman’s office, fortunately rather roomy as submarine offices go.

The watertight door in the pressure bulkhead at the end of the passageway was latched shut. I pulled the latch handle, stepped high over the coaming, ducked my head, and slipped through, carefully latching the door behind me. We were now more than three miles from the nearest land and by regulations could leave the door open, but as a matter of common consent it was habitually kept shut in order to make a sharper division between number one reactor compartment on its after side and the living quarters forward of it.

A few steps aft and I was standing directly over the reactor, on a slightly raised platform surrounded by a heavy pipe-guard rail, and surveying the area with satisfaction.

Triton’s twin reactors hummed softly as they generated the steam for her two huge engine rooms, but in their watertight compartments there was not a moving thing to be seen. Only the muffled whine of the vital circulating pumps and the whirr of the ventilation blowers could be heard. The general quietness and good order hardly conveyed an adequate impression of the new-found source of power cooking away beneath my feet. A red deck, partly covered by green-shellacked rubber matting and surmounted by the ubiquitous gray boxes, formed a color scheme pleasing to the eye. The reactor spaces are seldom visited; with no watch stations to be manned, they are generally immaculate—Pat McDonald’s twin pride and joy.

Pressed against the skin of the ship on either side of my platform stood two heavily insulated domes, from which large steam pipes rose and went aft. Control equipment of all kinds—valves, dials, gauges, special electrical machinery—lined the walls of the compartment. Yet it seemed extraordinarily spacious, clean, easy to get about in, and uncommonly quiet for a ship making full power.

A few feet below me, beneath the insulated deck, stood one of Triton’s two huge steel pressure vessels, containing half of the precious uranium fuel for which I was official custodian. Through it raced distilled water at high pressure, extracting heat from the uranium and transmitting it to the steam generators. Over against a bulkhead and also concealed beneath the deck, an array of encased pumps drove the water around its simple circuit. The watertight door in the after bulkhead was latched open, and through it I glimpsed a repetition of the red, green, and gray color scheme in number two reactor compartment—a duplicate of the first.

I knew I had but to step aft another bulkhead or so to have this illusion of quiet thoroughly dispelled. There stood the ridiculously small starboard turbine and one of our two tremendous reduction gears, which at this speed would be filling the engine rooms with their roaring.

The ship lurched impatiently. Probably the sea was building up. I ducked quickly into number two reactor compartment, moved aft another two dozen steps, opened a second closed watertight door, and stepped through the bulkhead into number one engine room.

This was the largest compartment in the ship, in cubic volume not far from the entire displacement of a World War II submarine, and it contained all the massive components of the starboard main engine. A high-pitched roar of machinery reached my ears, and for all its racket it sounded wonderful.

Chief Engineman Hosie Washington, an ex-Navy steward who had changed his rate and was now our Chief Chemist, grinned happily at me. “She sure sounds nice, Captain!” he shouted, his eyes dancing in his handsome Negro face. I nodded my agreement as I passed him, and walked a few feet farther aft to the main control center of the engine room.

Lieutenant Commander Donald G. Fears, Les Kelly’s assistant during the building period, had taken over as Triton’s Engineer Officer. Fears, a slightly built man with an intense face which belied his relaxed leadership, had the forward engine room watch, and I could see that he, too, was exhilarated by the performance of the machinery under his charge. He stood at a small watch-stander’s table before a low gaugeboard, displaying dials and switches. To one side, surveying two large consoles covered with a profusion of instruments, a Chief Petty Officer and a First Class Electronics Technician were perched on built-in stools, standing watch on the nerve center of the starboard reactor. Directly forward of Don, the starboard throttleman faced a similar console that recorded steam conditions.

This was “Maneuvering One,” the control station for the starboard engine. The efficient way in which the men moved about their tasks no doubt filled Don with pride, for their actions were a result of his training and indoctrination.

The purposeful noise of the great reduction gear beat upon our ears. It was not a shriek of protest, but the powerful frequency of a finely meshed set of gears doing their job without fuss, so solidly constructed and so perfectly matched that they transmitted a minimum of vibration into the water even though some of them were spinning thousands of revolutions per minute. Could they continue to run this way, without stopping, for almost three months? This was one of the answers our voyage was to determine.

Bidding Fears a silent farewell I continued my journey aft. Number two engine room contained identical equipment to number one, although arranged somewhat differently because it drove the other propeller, and I passed through it rapidly with only a brief greeting to Lieutenant George Troffer, in charge. Satisfied that the same atmosphere of calm confidence was evident here, I opened the watertight door into the after torpedo room.

Triton has torpedo tubes at each end, and as the name implies, this compartment contains Triton’s stern set. In the after part, brightly lighted in contrast to the dimmed lights farther forward where forty-two men had their berths, I found Allen W. Steele, Torpedoman’s Mate Third Class, on watch. A sandy-haired, serious-faced sailor, twenty-one years old, he had made a good try for the Naval Academy Preparatory School a few months ago, but with insufficient time to prepare, his marks in the competitive examination were not high enough. He had done his best, as we had for him. Steele rose from the tool box upon which he had been sitting and gave me a cheerfully respectful salute.

Here, I had no trouble appreciating the power of our two huge bronze propellers, which clearly could be heard spinning in the water just a few feet away. As during our initial trials, the drumming of the steel fabric of Triton’s great pressure hull could be felt through the soles of our feet or through our fingertips resting against the solid structure of a torpedo-loading skid.

I grinned. “How is it going, Steele?”

“Fine, sir!” he answered soberly, “but I’ll be glad when we dive and get rid of all this racket.”

Only a couple of years in submarines, he already had the submariner’s outlook. I found myself agreeing with him, as I made my way forward again.

On the bridge, the shrill wind sweeping over our exposed cockpit was cutting cold. I quickly became chilled through, despite the heavy coat, gloves, and old cap I had slipped on. Triton’s course was still due south, and her throttles were open to allow full steam flow. It was now a little after five in the afternoon. The sun lay low in the southwest and dusk was gathering.

I turned to Lieutenant Hay. “What’s the latest sounding, Jim?” I asked him.

“We just got thirty-three fathoms a few minutes ago, Captain,” he said. “Do you want me to go ahead and dive at thirty-five fathoms?”

“Go ahead and get the bridge thoroughly secured, Jim,” I told him. “By the time you are ready, we’ll probably have reached the thirty-five-fathom line. I’ll let you know when to dive.”

As Hay busied himself with these last-minute preparations, I raised my glasses and scanned the sea to the horizon. There was a slight chop, with whitecaps coming from the south. Spray and spume closed Triton’s foredeck, and occasionally the waves buried her sharp snout as our ship split them with her knife-blade stem. Our wake, a long, straight, broad furrow of white water, reached aft beyond the visible horizon. The lighthouse and radar towers of Montauk Point were long out of sight, and the coast of Long Island had receded from view.

The “21 MC” speaker on the bridge blared: “Bridge—Control! Sounding, three five fathoms!”

“That’s it, Jim,” I said. “When you are ready in all respects, take her down.” I deliberately spoke loudly for the benefit of the lookouts who, I knew, were eagerly hoping to get an inkling of where our mysterious trip was to take us. They were to get no satisfaction from me, yet. But there would be nothing wrong with teasing them a little. I swung myself on the ladder to go below.

“Be sure you get everything tightly secured,” I said. “We’re going to be a mighty long time down before we come up, and we don’t want any of this stuff shaking loose up here where we can’t get at it!” I chuckled inwardly. In a few minutes that bit of information would be all over the ship.

As I passed down through the conning tower into the control room, everyone sensed that this time my appearance heralded the time to dive. In the control room, Chief Radioman Joe Walsh, in charge of Triton’s radio gang, was Chief of the Watch. When he saw me, he put down the cup of coffee he was holding. Slight, with blond hair and aquiline features, Walsh had been one of the first to check out on our Ballast Control Panel. It must have been Walsh who had been operating the fathometer. No one was near it at the present time. Tom Thamm stood unobtrusively in the background. To Walsh’s left stood Bob Carter, Machinist Mate First Class, Auxiliaryman of the Watch. In build and size similar to Walsh, though darker and with jet black hair, Carter might have posed for illustrations of the lanky sailor so often characterized as the ideal man-o-war’s man. Career Navymen and submariners for years, Walsh and Carter both had thoroughly checked out Triton’s complicated equipment. We were in good hands.

Noting my attention, they self-consciously pretended unconcern. Inwardly, I smiled to myself. Diving was routine; Triton had already dived many times. But this was the start of our shakedown cruise, and they sensed that something out of the ordinary was planned. That this cruise was to be no ordinary cruise, this dive no ordinary dive, everyone on board must have realized.

I gripped the handrail of the ladder beneath the conning tower hatch through which I had just descended. Without even realizing they were doing it, Walsh and Carter ran their eyes over each of the individual controls before them, mentally checking them at the proper position and reviewing what they would do when the diving alarm sounded. For a moment or two nothing happened. Jim must be making a final check of the bridge, I thought. I hoped everything was tightly secured up there. Finally, I heard his voice through the bridge speaker system. “Clear the bridge. Clear the bridge!” Simultaneously, the diving alarm—an old-fashioned automobile horn—resounded through the ship.

Walsh’s hands flew to the controls for the hydraulic plants, started the stand-by pump, then waited, with his right hand hovering near the switch to the air inlet valve. It was a similar valve which somehow failed to close in 1939, when USS Squalus sank near the Isle of Shoals off Maine, losing nearly half her crew. In Squalus, this valve had been much larger than our own, for it supplied air to four great diesel engines in the engine room, whereas in our case it only provided ventilation below decks. But it was still important that it be closed when we dived.

The horn stopped; then came a second blast. I stepped clear of the hatch, and moments later a pair of legs clattered down the ladder, followed closely by another pair. Tom Schwartz, Torpedoman’s Mate Third—known variously as “the nose,” “the face,” or “the profile”—scrambled off the ladder and threw himself into one of the seats at the diving stand. William A. McKamey, Seaman, practically on Schwartz’s heels, settled himself at the other seat.

Jim Hay, as Officer of the Deck, would be the last man off the bridge. His next duty was to see that the watertight hatch leading to the bridge was properly shut. He would be up there right now checking it.

With the second blast of the alarm, Walsh snapped the switch to shut Triton’s main air valve. Then, playing upon the Ballast Control Panel as though it were an organ console, while intently eying the board of indicator lights glowing before him, he swept his hand swiftly and precisely across the face of the panel to open the twenty-two main ballast tank vents with which Triton was fitted. That done, he remained poised, one hand on the master switch which would shut at least half of the ballast tank vents, the other on the main air blow valve control. The bridge hatch still indicated open on his panel—as it should until completely closed. This is one of the crucial operations in diving; no skipper can completely divest himself of the urgent need to know that the bridge hatch has been properly shut. As soon as McKamey had passed me. I stepped back to the ladder and looked up into the conning tower. The ordered bustle there reassured me, as it always did, and as I looked up, Beacham’s voice sang out to Hay, “Hatch secured, sir!”

I cast my eyes quickly back to Walsh. He had relaxed ever so slightly. The red circle, indicating that the conning tower hatch was open, had been replaced by a single short bar.

McKamey and Schwartz, each pulling the steel pin which had locked their control columns in the neutral position, pushed the bow and stern planes forward, positioning them to a dive angle. Approximately fifteen seconds had passed since the end of the second blast of the diving alarm, and Triton’s surface motion had already changed. Our wide open main ballast tanks had taken aboard nearly all of the two thousand tons of water they could hold—and our six-thousand-ton Triton, cruising powerfully on the surface of the sea, had become an eight-thousand-ton submarine. Her bow began to incline; Jim Hay slipped around me and took his station behind the two planesmen. The depth gauges were showing that our keel was forty feet below the surface and going deeper.

“Depth, Captain?” asked Jim, his eyes on the depth gauges.

“One hundred and fifty feet, Jim,” I told him. “Keep the fathometer going and don’t get any closer than seventy-five feet from the bottom.”

This area had been well swept by many years of submarine operations south of Montauk Point. All wrecked ships or rock outcroppings, which might present a hazard to a submarine operating close to the bottom, had been discovered and plotted. Nevertheless, and particularly at the speed we were going, it was desirable to be more than careful.

A thirty-five-fathom sounding from Triton’s fathometers indicated an actual depth of water, counting our own draft, of nearer to forty fathoms, or two hundred and forty feet. A keel depth of one hundred and fifty feet, therefore, should leave us ninety feet of water between our keel and the bottom of the sea. At this depth our periscopes could not extend to the surface, but our speed would have rendered them useless anyway. On the other hand, even if the biggest ship in the world were to pass directly overhead—though we’d probably be startled at the noise she’d be making—there would be no danger of collision. The only thing we needed to worry about at all was the possibility of encountering another submerged submarine, and this had been taken care of administratively, so far as our own subs were concerned, by assigning Triton a sea lane from which all other submarines had been excluded. There was, of course, a chance that a submarine belonging to another country might have chosen this precise moment to be submerged in this very area. But it was a remote possibility, barely worth consideration.

“Jim,” I said, “the bottom drops away very gradually on the continental shelf until it reaches the hundred-fathom curve. From there on out, it drops much more rapidly into the deep ocean. Stay at this depth until the fathometer indicates a hundred and fifty feet of water under us; then follow the bottom on down until you get to our running depth.”

“Aye, aye, Captain!” said Jim, and looked up at me expectantly. I knew what was in his mind. He was thinking, “Are you going to announce where we’re going, now that we’ve dived?”

I shook my head slightly, hoping he could read the answer.

Taking a gentle inclination by the bow, Triton effortlessly descended to her assigned depth. With our tremendous speed and the shallow water, an easy angle was indicated. With practiced ease, though I knew they were watching their controls carefully, Schwartz and McKamey drove her down and leveled her off, coached occasionally by a few words from Jim. Directly behind Hay, Walsh had a number of additional duties on the Ballast Control Panel, which he carried out automatically and without command, occasionally checking with Jim or vice versa.

Carter, in the meantime, and Bruce Gaudet, the IC Electrician stationed on his far side, had a number of operations to carry out, consisting mainly of securing topside electrical connections, speaker talk-back circuits, and the like. Thamm, apparently satisfied, quietly departed.

It was considerably warmer in the control room than on the bridge, and I felt it. Jim was struggling out of his bridge gear, while he kept close attention on the diving station in front of him, and in a few minutes, when the bustle of diving had pretty well died away, Seaman Jim Smith, evidently the off lookout—he must have been hiding somewhere for I had failed to see him earlier—came forward in a light dungaree shirt and trousers and offered to relieve McKamey.

With the ship steady at one hundred fifty feet, the depth gauges no longer moving, Jim gave the permission. Smith squatted alongside McKamey, and in a low voice McKamey passed over the instructions he had received.

“OK,” said Smith in a moment, grasping the control stick. “I’ve got it.” In a long-practiced motion, with his left hand he swept up the right arm of the seat in which McKamey was seated—it had been built with a hinge at the back for precisely this purpose—and at the same moment, McKamey, releasing the control column to Smith, flipped up the arm on the far side of the seat, shifted his feet, rose, and stepped back. Effortlessly, Smith slid into his place, and as McKamey passed behind him, he pushed back both arm rests. Triton was already settled into her normal submerged routine.

I nodded to Hay. “You have the deck and the Conn, Jim,” I said. “I’m going aft now. Keep the fathometer going and maintain a careful sonar watch. Call me if you hear anything.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Jim. “Course 180, speed full, depth 150 feet, stay 75 feet above the bottom, when we reach 150 feet sounding, follow it on down to running depth. I understand, sir!”

I nodded again and left him.

McKamey was seated on a tool box in the passageway, pulling off his sou’westers.

“Nice job of diving, McKamey,” I said.

His boyish face glowed with pleasure. McKamey had very recently reported aboard from submarine school and had already showed himself to have the makings of a fine sailor. He couldn’t be long out of high school, I thought, forgetting that I had left home permanently at probably an even younger age.

A few feet farther aft, crammed into a corner among a plotting table, some air-conditioning monitoring equipment, a large stack of radar components, and some fire-control equipment, was a tiny compartment labeled “sonar room.” Here was the nerve center of Triton’s underwater listening equipment. Lieutenant Dick Harris, known as “Silent Dick,” was there, along with two of our Sonarmen, rangy “Dutch” Beckhaus, once of the Salamonie, and Kenneth Remillard, the shortest man aboard and, by dint of his size, probably the most comfortable. Dick was no doubt checking the cruising organization and laying out initial sonar watches, and none of the three saw me. A few feet farther aft I stepped through a watertight hatch, and in a few more feet entered my tiny stateroom.

William Green, our Chief Steward, for some reason known to most of the crew as “Joe,” was standing in the passageway outside my door. Gratefully, I peeled off the uncomfortable heavy garments and passed them to him.

“Dry them out well, Green, and then put them away,” I said. “I won’t be needing them for a while.”

Chief Green, a heavy-set Negro, could upon occasion assume an artless manner calculated to elicit information. It had more than once worked pretty well, but this time I was ready for him.

“It might be cold on the bridge up there in the North Sea, Captain,” he said. “Maybe I’d better just fold these up and keep them where you can get at them.”

Almost, but not quite, his face assumed the expression of solicitous concern he wanted to convey.

“Get out of here, Green,” I said with feigned severity, “and take that gear with you.”

“Aren’t we going up north, sir?” Green’s carefully contrived expression—his big round eyes and innocently questioning face—were too much to hold, and he broke into a broad, white-toothed grin. “Are we going to keep heading down into the warm water, Captain?”

“Green,” I said, lowering my voice to a confidential tone, “I’ll tell you right where you can go in about five seconds. You’re not about to get around me this time!”

Not a whit abashed, Green exited with his arms loaded, chuckling loudly. I sat at my desk and pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward me. A rather comprehensive report of our trip was going to be required of us and we might as well start.

“Dived,” I wrote on the paper. “We shall not surface until May.”

But then, with this bit of incriminating information in black and white before me, I carefully hid the sheet for the time being among the ever-present pile in the basket marked “incoming.”