ARMED FORCES: The Killer Whales

At fit-out docks in two New England ports last week, weird green-painted boats lay shrouded in secrecy. Yard workmen swarmed along their bulging sides, finishing up their hulls, cramming their innards full of deadly equipment. One bore the name Trigger, the other the name Tang. They were the first of six new, fast attack submarines built for the U.S. Navy.

Shorter by 50 feet than the lean, 310-foot fleet “boats” of World War II, the new Tang-class subs looked like a cross between a whale and a shark. Gone was the familiar deck gun and the round conning tower, with its crest of periscopes, radar and radio masts. The decks of the new subs were clean and knife-narrow. Down the center reared a thick, sliced-off fin to house their twelve masts and the snorkel, which will enable them to run on engines instead of batteries at periscope depth. They had bow planes that whipped out automatically from pockets at their sides, and they could dive at a steep 40° angle. Fast and silent as barracuda, the new Tangs are the deadliest new weapons in the Navy’s underwater arsenal.

The trouble is, they are not deadly enough. The Russians have all the U.S. has, and more. With almost no surface fleet (a few old battleships, a handful of cruisers, no carriers), the Russians have concentrated on subs until their underwater fleet is now the world’s largest: 300 operational subs (against 88 for the U.S.); a goal of 1,000 ocean-going boats. In a war with Russia, the U.S. Navy would be fighting mostly submarines.

Silent Service. No one knows better than U.S. submariners themselves how deadly a sub can be. In 1941, when the proud surface Navy suffered the disaster of Pearl Harbor, a handful of nerveless men had pointed the sharp prows of so-odd U.S. subs toward Japan and written a record of blood and battle unsurpassed in U.S. naval history. Not one of them had ever before fired a torpedo in battle (U.S. subs engaged mainly in uneventful patrol work in World War I), but for two years they were almost the entire U.S. offensive force in the Pacific.

They called themselves “the silent service” and their exploits were inscribed in greasy logbooks and terse messages (“Sturgeon no longer virgin”) radioed back to COMSUBPAC headquarters at Pearl Harbor. From their voyages came stories of watching horse races in Tokyo Bay through their periscopes, of torpedoing a new Jap carrier as it slid down the ways, of receiving as many as 400 and 500 depth charges. Subs became the work horses of the fleet: they rescued 504 downed flyers, carried high-priority cargo and VIPs, charted enemy beaches before invasions, staged commando raids, acted as radio and weather stations for the Air Force. Threading their way through plodding Jap convoys, sub skippers set up targets at night on radarscopes. Then they surfaced and steamed through the panicked convoys, shotgunning torpedoes right & left.

By the end of the war, the U.S. had 169 submarines operating in the Pacific. Fifty-two had been lost, and one out of seven U.S. submariners never returned. But the “silent service” had sent 6,000,000 tons (one battleship, seven carriers, 16 cruisers, 45 destroyers, 23 enemy subs, 1,322 other ships) of Japanese shipping to the bottom. Not even the much-publicized carrier task forces could match their record.

All this U.S. submariners accomplished with inferior equipment. Torpedoes often failed to explode after a direct hit, many ran too deep, the boats were too thin-skinned to dive much beyond 300 feet. Identification systems were poor (two U.S. subs were almost certainly sunk by U.S. planes). Subs could cruise only at two or three knots submerged.

Snorkels & Figure Eights. The Germans, the Navy discovered after the war, had done much better in submarine design. After V-E day, the U.S. had gotten two grimy, eerie-looking Nazi XXI U-boats that made U.S. subs as obsolete as the first chugging steel cigar delivered to the Navy by John P. Holland in 1900. Luckily, only a few of those Nazi subs got into operation. With U.S. crews aboard, the German XXIs sliced underwater at 16 knots. They had snorkel tubes, long-range homing and pattern-running torpedoes that swept through convoys in figure-eights. They had periscopes and sonar (sound navigation and ranging) listening devices superior to anything the U.S. had.

All too slowly, the Navy started grafting the German inventions on to its own 76 active subs (another 91 were in mothballs). It spent $175 million on its modernization program, called the refitted subs “guppies” and sent them out to see what they could do. They couldn’t quite match the German XXIs, but even so the results were astounding. The snorkel tube, the Navy found, made a sub 16 times as effective. The U.S.S. Pickerel, a guppy type, traveled 5,200 miles across the Pacific in 21 days without surfacing. On maneuvers, the Amberjack swept through the fleet, “sank” 250,000 tons of shipping before being caught.

Sub v. Sub. Guppies have also revolutionized antisubmarine warfare. The men who man them boast that it takes three destroyers to kill a sub; one destroyer alone would fall victim to a guppy. The Tang class, entirely new subs built on the German XXI model, would be even tougher. In any future war, submen argue, it may take a sub to kill a sub, a process which Rear Admiral Charles Momsen describes as like “two blindfolded antagonists armed with baseball bats, each waiting for the other to break silence.”

Unfortunately, the Russians also got hold of the German XXI after the war—not just two but a fleet of more than 25 of them, and parts for many more. Still worse, they walked off with an even more fearsome sub which the Germans had on the ways as the war ended. Called the XXVI, it is the first true underwater craft ever built. For long stretches at a time, it needs no snorkel tube to suck air down to its engines, but runs entirely submerged on a new type of engine in which hydrogen peroxide is used to oxidize the fuel. It can swim full speed on engines at its maximum depth. The U.S., though it knows how the XXVI works, never got one of them. The Russians captured the whole business—enough parts and prefabricated sections to build 75 XXVis, and enough German scientists and submen to show them how to run them.

Inside Siberia. Not far from where the new Trigger was being fitted out at Groton, Conn, last week, a special section of the Electric Boat Co. yard known as “Siberia” was under a tight, 24-hour guard. There, civilian sub builders and the Navy’s top engineers and designers are engaged in a giant gamble. They are working, not on a U.S. version of the XXVI, but on what the Navy hopes will be an answer to Russia’s super-subs: an atomic killer submarine. Longer and wider than present-day subs, she would be powered by virtually noiseless atomic engines. Fully submerged, she could cruise for 40 days off enemy sub bases, be able to walk away from surface ships. If all goes well, the Navy hopes to have a working model by 1953. The Navy is thus betting on a maybe of the future instead of trying to duplicate the known present. But, says one high-ranking subman, “with a fleet of atomic submarines, we could clean anything from the sea.”