Spy Sub. Roger C. Dunham
this gigantic steel vessel, we both felt an equal sense of anticipation as we prepared for our secret mission below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
After a couple of weeks, Chief Mathews handed out the rack assignments to the berthing area. Located in the center of the ship, the racks (bunks) were stacked in columns of three. Each rack included a pillow, a thin mattress, a blanket stretched over cotton sheets, an air conditioning vent, a tiny neon light, and a locker under the mattress for personal belongings. Opened by pulling up on the hinged mattress support, the locker was about six inches high and spanned the length of the bunk. Most important, there was actually a curtain that could be pulled across the rack’s opening-privacy on a submarine, a luxury previously unheard of.
My rack was far more than just a place to sleep. When we left dry dock, it would become my sanctuary from the rest of the submarine world. I was assigned the middle rack; by lifting myself up and squeezing sideways into the coffinlike opening and then reaching out and pulling my curtain shut, I was suddenly enclosed in a world of privacy that was unavailable anywhere else on the boat. The mattress, although comfortable, was very narrow and barely six feet long (requiring a slight bending of my knees if I kept my neck straight). In the event of a sneeze, I had to quickly turn my head to keep from crashing into the steel underside of the rack above me. Otherwise, the enclosure offered most of the comforts of a good bed at home.
The months in the shipyard passed, the qualifications continued, and the big day finally arrived when the Viperfish could leave the dry dock and float to the pier at the submarine base. Floating the submarine off the blocks in dry dock and moving her a mere half mile across the Southeast Loch to her new berthing spot was a remarkably complicated operation. As one of the newest men on board, I was assigned a trainee position. I sat next to my friend, Jim McGinn, at a watch station controlling the delivery of steam to the turbine systems turning the screws. During the early hours of the morning, I watched the vigorous work of the qualified crewmen bringing the reactor to an operational status, drawing steam into the engine room, and checking all of the seawater valves. Finally, I heard Chief Mathews announce over the Viperfish loudspeaker system: “Now, station the maneuvering watch! All hands, station the maneuvering watch!”
There was a feeling of excitement as we prepared for the transformation from a stationary mass of steel resting on blocks in the center of the dry dock to a functioning submarine that would soon be ready to go to sea. With Bruce Rossi standing nearby and watching over all of the trainees, Jim and I gripped the throttle wheels controlling the flow of steam to the turbines and awaited orders.
In the engine-room spaces around us, machinist mates, electronic technicians, electricians, and engineering officers took their positions in front of the panels that controlled various parts of the nuclear propulsion and turbogenerator systems. The sound of steam hissing through insulated piping added to the excitement as we waited for orders from the officer of the deck (OOD) in the control center to rotate the steam wheels and open our throttles.
The seawater of Pearl Harbor swirled into the dry dock, covered the blocks under the hull of the Viperfish, and rose around her superstructure. The boat finally floated as the dock filled to sea level. Squeezed into the tiny cockpit at the top of the sail (formerly called the conning tower in the older diesel boats), the captain, a junior officer, and two lookouts took their positions and prepared to call orders to the engine room over the loudspeaker communication system.
Jim turned to me at the instant that we first felt the slight movement of the submarine’s hull.
“We’re off the blocks,” he said, excitedly. “Cheers to the forward pukes-they’re doing something right.”
“All ahead one third!” blared from the loudspeaker over my head, and the bell indicator clanged as the needle pointed to the ordered bell. Jim and I grabbed the wheels in front of us. Cranking them to the left, we heard the whining noises of the main propulsion turbines spooling up. We could feel the vibrations of the hull caused by the screws rotating in the water behind us. I felt a surge of excitement at being a crewman actually controlling the movements of a fleet submarine moving across Pearl Harbor.
In a nearby area called the maneuvering room, the reactor operator and electric plant operator sat rigidly upright in front of the lights and meters of their complex panels to observe any abnormalities that could shut down the reactor or trip a turbogenerator off-line. Except for the sensation of floating, there was no way to confirm that we were moving out of the dry dock or to know our direction and speed. The Viperfish had no windows. With the engine-room hatches all closed and clamped shut, we could see nothing as we moved across the bay. After several minutes of speculation, we tried to guess where we were from the movements of the hull, an effort that proved to be a futile waste of time.
Suddenly, the central 1MC loudspeaker system blared, “Attention to port!”
I looked at Jim. “Attention to port?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. From behind us, Bruce Rossi’s growling voice came to life.
“Attention to port is a call of respect,” he said.
Jim and I looked appropriately confused. I glanced back at Bruce and asked, “Respect to whom, Bruce?”
“Respect for the men of the USS Arizona. They are off our port bow, right about now, and the men topside are giving the traditional salute to show respect as we pass by.”
Jim and I felt the impact of his statement as our enthusiasm turned to somber silence. We spent the remainder of the ten-minute trip with some quiet thoughts about the men still trapped within the steel walls of their destroyed battleship, the men who never had a chance of survival during the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
The sudden and urgent call through the loudspeakers from the officers on the bridge, “Back one third,” gave us a clue that we were approaching our berth at the submarine base. The quick, high-pitched “Back emergency” that came shortly thereafter, immediately followed by the sound of crushing wood, gave us the best indication that we had, in a manner of speaking, arrived at the pier.
“What’s that noise?” I hollered to Jim over the whining sounds of turbines and steam.
“It sounds like we just squashed a wooden rowboat against the pier,” he hollered back.
Rossi gave us the answer. We had just crushed a “camel,” the wooden structure attached near the pilings of the pier. Normally, a submarine gently touches the camel, so that the boat’s superstructure is held away from, and not damaged by, the thick pilings. The floating camel has two functions: to protect the pier from the crushing force of a submarine and to protect the submarine from being crushed against the pier. When the camel is approached too rapidly, as the Viperfish had just done, the device is easily crushed. Inside the boat, the noise of splintering wood is exceedingly loud. I would hear this sound many more times during the months and years ahead when various junior officers, working on their qualifications, tried to maneuver the ungainly hulk of the Viperfish near a pier and took out the camels one by one.
After the reactor was shut down, I climbed up the long ladder that passed through the engine-room hatch to the topside deck. Standing on the black steel hull, I looked at the new world around me. The change of scenery from the shipyard was remarkable. Several black submarines, sitting low in the water and looking extremely sleek in comparison to the Viperfish, stretched out in a long row ahead and astern of us.
I could almost sense the presence of the deep Pacific Ocean, only three miles away, waiting to challenge and test us during our upcoming sea trials. Although the Viperfish had not yet submerged and we had crossed only a small span of calm water, this had been my first real submarine voyage, and I had actually controlled the engine-room steam during the trip. I looked at the western horizon, and I felt an excitement that we now had a functional submarine with an operating nuclear reactor. The Viperfish had floated without flooding, and, deep in our bow compartment, we had a mysterious Fish with miles of cable waiting to fulfill our promise for the future.