Adventure classics – Secret rendezvous, Cold War crisis

Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

by Edward L. Beach

***

At 2 a.m. on March 5, 1960, in a drizzling South Atlantic rain, the USS Macon stands by in response to a distress call: a seriously ill sailor needs to be transferred from a submarine to receive medical aid. Five hundred yards from the Macon, its lights blazing as it lowers its boat, the submarine rises only high enough bring its sail, with numbers effaced, above the surface. The ship’s main deck is a few inches out of the water, with an occasional wave splashing over.

The Macon’s lifeboat nears, its gunwale level with the submarine deck. A sailor steps from the deck into the boat. Within a few minutes, the submarine disappears as mysteriously as it had come.

But who is the sailor? What is the unknown submarine where he was so lately a crew member? And what was the reason for the secrecy in which it operated? The only clues are personal letters of thanks from the submarine’s commander. More information than that must wait another two months until the submarine – USS Triton -- can finally make its identity known.

The reason for the secretive transfer began a few days earlier, Edward Beach reports in his 1962 volume, Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton, when the ship’s doctor came to him.

“Captain, I’m afraid we have a pretty sick man aboard.”

This, Beach says, was one of the happenings he had most feared during the shakedown cruise of the Triton, the world’s newest and largest nuclear submarine, whose secret mission was to circumnavigate the globe – while remaining completely submerged.

Captain Beach, US Navy photo

“I’m afraid he might have a kidney stone,” the doctor reported.

“My tone of voice must have indicated relief that it wasn’t something highly contagious like smallpox or meningitis,” Beach writes.

But although not contagious, the sailor’s condition failed to improve. Medical aid, the doctor feared, of a kind not available on the submarine might be needed. But the Triton was nearing Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America, where the sailor would be far beyond aid. Weeks’ old information had indicated that the USS Macon was the closest US Navy ship, due to dock soon at Montevideo.

Despite the secrecy of its mission, the Triton might have risked surfacing in a foreign port except for reports that the Argentine Navy had blocked the exit to one of its bays due to reports of – of all things – submarine activity, ending the possibility of help from outside the U.S. or its vessels. If the Macon couldn’t help, the next nearest source of medical aid would be Pearl Harbor, nearly eight thousand miles away in the Pacific.

“There never was a question of taking any chances with (the sailor’s) life,” Beach writes. “Both my orders for the trip and the traditions of the US Navy for peacetime operations categorically forbade it. . . We calculate that we will have gone 2,000 miles out of our way on this mercy mission (with the Macon) . . . almost equal to an Atlantic transit.”

In spite of the delay, the tension that had strained the atmosphere in the Triton lightened after the ailing sailor's transfer. Not until the ship returned to the U.S. on May 11, 1960 would its crew know that an even tenser situation was brewing in the skies overhead.

“Have you heard about the U-2?” Beach was asked as he was ushered out of the White House office where he had received President Eisenhower’s congratulations on his mission.

"No," Beach answered. "What is it -- a new German submarine?"

He would find out when he caught sight of the newspapers later that day. The U-2 episode was the downing of a U.S. spy plane piloted by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers over USSR airspace. On the very day of the Triton’s triumphant return, Eisenhower acknowledged his awareness of the spy program. And the Paris summit talks which might have led to an early détente between the US and the USSR were cancelled as the world struggled through decades more of Cold War.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a September of young adventurers with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter.)

Adventure classics: Spies in the air, spies under the sea

Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

by Edward L. Beach, USN

***

One of a class of radar picket submarines intended for long-range defense during the Cold War, the USS Triton, when commissioned in 1959, was the biggest submarine ever built – and the most expensive. Within two years, still newer technology would make it obsolete, but not before it had performed one of history’s most spectacular voyages – the circumnavigation of the Earth, while remaining submerged.

The time was mid-February 1960. Within three months, the leaders of the U.S. and the USSR were scheduled to meet in Paris to discuss a possible détente between their countries. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, still smarting from the USSR’s initial lead in the space race, wanted a spectacular military achievement to wow the Soviets.

There was a possibility at hand – the newly commissioned nuclear giant USS Triton, ready to make its maiden “shakedown” voyage under the command of World War II naval hero Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr. Would demonstrating the U.S.’s ability to use its radar anywhere in the world’s oceans while remaining submerged, and therefore virtually undetected, be enough to quiet Soviet Premier Khrushchev?

It was worth a try, Eisenhower decided. But to preserve deniability if the ploy failed, the Triton’s voyage must remain a closely-guarded secret until it was concluded.

Accordingly, as Beach wrote in his 1962 volume, Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton, “Late in the evening of the first of February, (with) all tests and evaluations complete. . . on my desk, as I came down from the bridge after Triton had been safely moored, (I found) a soiled envelope, slightly crumpled as though it might have been carried some distance by hand.”

Following the directions in the envelope, Beach met a few days later with a room full of admirals, captains and commanders. He had been directed to wear a civilian suit in order to mislead anyone who might question the nature of the rendezvous.  The question put to him: instead of its expected shakedown cruise in the North Atlantic, could the Triton go all the way around the world – while remaining submerged?

All he could say was, “Yes, Sir!”

And of course, could he keep the greatly extended voyage a secret from his crew members, some of them family men and expectant fathers. And still more urgent – could he keep the secret even from his wife?

“No one volunteered an explanation as to why the timing – and secrecy – were so vital,” Beach wrote, “and I did not ask.”

Most likely, Beach was aware of the impending Paris summit, scheduled for May 1960. It was possible, although less likely, that Beach may have known that the U.S. already an eye of the Soviets Since July 4, 1956, the U.S. had operated high-altitude U-2 spy planes over Soviet airspace. These flights at 70,000 feet were believed to be undetectable by ground radar, an important issue because unauthorized invasion of a country’s airspace could be considered an act of war.

But if the U.S. didn’t dare reveal its aerial overflights, it would be happy to trumpet an oceanic circumnavigation – provided the voyage was successful.

And so the Triton set off, its mission unknown to anyone on board save for Beach and a few of his officers.

“Dived,” Beach wrote on the first page of his report of the voyage. “We shall not surface until May.”

How much more than anyone realized would happen before that surfacing took place.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues an August of adventures at sea with Edward Beach’s Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton.)