Under Pressure

Sometimes you just have to read about submarines. Like when a friend gives you a book about them. In my case, it was "Blind Man's Bluff", published in 1998, or as soon as the end of the Cold War would permit the authors to dig up these stories from archival research and interviews with members of the top-secret submarine crews that secretly trailed (and sometimes collided with!) Soviet conventional and nuclear missle subs throughout the Atlantic and Pacific. These stories are shocking if you haven't heard them before. DID YOU KNOW that throughout the 1970s and 1980s United States submarine crews were placing taps on undersea Soviet telephone cables, then returning months later to retrieve the tap recordings to be translated by the CIA? DID YOU KNOW that one cable-tapping sub crew nearly perished in 400 feet of water in a Soviet port? DID YOU KNOW that part of this operation was betrayed to the enemy by a U.S. Navy traitor?

I didn't know any of these things. Nor did I understand the critical "second wave" role played by the U.S. and Russian sub forces in both countries' nuclear war strategies. (Once all air- and land-based missles had been launched or taken out by the enemy, the mobile, silent submarines could surface just off the enemy's coasts and launch a couple of dozen warheads per boat.) I also never understood the critical technology edge U.S. submarines had over the Soviets right up until the end of the Cold War, when the Soviets began to catch up, mostly thanks to the U.S. Navy traitor who handed over U.S. secrets about how to make submarines quieter (sound-based sonar being the only way for submarines to track each other under the seas).

One of the authors' goals was to tell the heroic, death-defying stories of what some of these submarine crews did in utmost secrecy. Several of the spy subs received multiple Presidential Unit Citations, the highest honor available to them, but seldom were the crews' families even aware of the awards, much less what the crews did to deserve them.

Impressive stuff, and I'm glad my friend passed it on to me.

Of course, he may have triggered an obsession on my part. It's like I took my first dose of a powerful and drug and can't look back; I've had to read every submarine book and watch every submarine movie I can find in my house. First was "The Terrible Hours", a book I purchased several years ago after reading a compelling review. Every American school kid should learn the name of U.S. Navy officer Charles "Swede" Momsen, the man who singlehandedly invented submarine rescue techniques and did more than anyone else to push the technology of deep sea diving forward to break the "nitrogen narcosis" barrier (if you breathe oxygen mixed with nitrogen below 150 feet or so, the nitrogen poisons your brain for several technical reasons you can google to understand, but if you mix the oxygen with helium instead of nitrogen, you can think clearly at depth and surface more quickly without developing the bends; of course, your voice sounds like Mickey Mouse, but that's better than the alternative). As if that weren't enough, in World War II he went diving to retrieve a torpedo that hadn't exploded upon impact to figure out why U.S. submarines were scoring direct hits against Japanese shipping yet failing to cause any damage when the torpedos didn't explode.

The main story of the book is the rescue of the crew of the Squalus, hopelessly sunk during sea trials due to some kind of on-board accident in May 1939 off the coast of New England in 243 feet of water. Yes, I said "rescue". Using techniques he had pioneered for over a decade, at first in the face of Navy resistance, Momsen managed to rescue all the crewmen who remained alive after the sinking. The author does a superb job of presenting this compelling story of dogged persistence coupled with cunning insight and pure heroism. It's not clear why we all don't know this story already.

These books reminded me of a couple of submarine movies I'd seen before:

U-571: It's World War II, and the Germans have a secret encoding device on their submarines that permits them to transmit coded messages across the airwaves back to their bases. The Allies have to crack the code. The only practical way to do this is to steal one of the encoding machines. But the only practical way to do that is to capture a submarine. That's a tricky proposition (think about it!). But the movie tells the (relatively) true story of how the Allies pulled it off. For reasons I can't fathom (no pun intended), the screenwriters changed the heroes from British to American, but the story is tremendous compelling, and at times downright terrifying, nonetheless.


K19: Harrison Ford is captain of the first Soviet nuclear sub. K19 fulfills its mission, surfacing through the polar ice cap to practice firing a nuclear missle at the United States. Then on its way home the reactor cooling system breaks down. The only way to repair it requires several men to enter the reactor room for several hours to construct an improvised cooling system using the crew's drinking water. They all endure massive radiation poisoning, of course, and almost all die within days. The Soviet admirals back home won't authorize an evacuation or any request for Western aid, which could have saved all the men (and this movie was before the Kursk disaster!). They get the job done in the best tradition of seamanship, but at immeasurable cost to the poor crewmen who were given nothing but chemical-proof clothing to protect them from radiation. The movie is "based on true events", and I wondered for a couple of years how "based on" it was versus "true", but reading an account of the actual events in "Blind Man's Bluff" (see above) makes it clear it was accurate in all relevant respects other than the fact that Harrison Ford's character actually died about three weeks after the event, while he lives to old age in the movie. But I guess you can't really let Harrison Ford die if you want your picture to be a hit. Frozen in carbonite, maybe. But not die.

I'm not big on watching movies a second time, at least not most movies, so it was back to the DVD shelf to see what else I could dig up. Here's what I found . . . .

Run Silent, Run Deep. Clark Gable as the Captain Ahab of the US World War II Pacific submarine fleet, angling for a chance to get back at that Japanese sub force that sank his previous boat. Burt Lancaster, his executive officer, at first resists Gable's drive into the "submarine graveyard" of Japanese shipping lanes, but comes through in the end to carry out the illegal mission. 1958, Black and White, 93 minutes. A movie from a different time but still with a story to tell.





So what next? Back to the bookshelf, of course. First American edition, autographed and inscribed by the author to my wife's grandfather. The best kind of book!


So any more submarine recommendations?