The Goblin Killers

Monday, Sep. 01, 1958

Article Tools

Reprints

(See Cover)

Ominous, black and still was the sea. It was 0200, Aug. 22, 1958. Position: 35° N. 73° W—about 200 miles off the North Carolina coast. A periscope sliced through the surface, and the playing reflections of stars rippled in retreat like scattering minnows. Fifty-eight feet below, in the control room of the submarine, men stood their watches in the eerie green glow of instrument lights. The prison silence was broken only by the whir of a generator, the purr of a hydraulic pump, the leaky-faucet sound of water trickling down the packing gland of the periscope barrel. The sub broke water, the bridge hatch swung open, the skipper and his lookouts scrambled topside. There they began the countdown required before launching a 1,000-mile Regulus-type missile. The sub rocked quietly, like a metronome. After precisely 15 minutes came the fire command. A light flashed skyward, headed northwest—in the direction of Washington, D.C.

The light, in fact, was the small green flare of a Very-pistol shot from the submarine's bridge. And the sub was the U.S.S. Sea Leopard, participating in an eight-hour hunter-killer exercise ordered by a man with one of the most critically important jobs in the U.S. Navy: lean, brown-eyed Rear Admiral John Smith ("Jimmy") Thach, 53, boss of the Navy's new ASW (antisubmarine warfare) Task Group Alfa.

Thach's assignment is no less than that of rewriting the Navy's antisubmarine book, of finding defenses against a new submarine revolution that began when the nuclear-powered U.S.S. Nautilus first slid into the sea four years ago. That revolution reached its highest point only last fortnight, when the nuclear submarine Skate poked up in a North Pole ice gap within atom-armed Polaris range of the Soviet Union (TIME, Aug. 25). In its atomic-age revolution, the submarine is no longer a mere marauder against ocean-borne commerce; it is a potential offensive weapons carrier of the first strategic importance.

The Black Diamond. The U.S. submarine revolution has its concomitant fact of cold-war life: every U.S. advance in submarine science is presumably within technological reach of the Soviet Union. U.S. intelligence indicates that the Russians have not yet built any nuclear subs. But the U.S.S.R. has the biggest submarine force ever known—500 boats, almost ten times the number Hitler had at the start of World War II. At least half the Soviet subs are new and big enough to have missile-launching capability, powerful enough to make long-range patrols into western Atlantic waters. In the last six months of 1957, the U.S. Navy recorded 186 separate reports of what may have been Soviet subs. Only last week, in the Navy's secret ASW plotting room at Norfolk, Va., a black, diamond-shaped marker indicating a "goblin"—a Russian submarine—went up on the wall-to-wall map. The goblin's position: perilously near Iceland, where NATO maintains an important airbase.