Word: aswe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...ocean floor, fortunately, is a fixed topography; its changes are minute in time. But detecting the underwater enemy is the first job of Thach and his ASW team, and like the submariner, Thach faces the bewildering phenomenon of the sea itself: its lack of homogeneity, its massive motion, its madness, its strange, deep rivers. One undercurrent, recently discovered in the Pacific, is 200 miles wide, 500 to 1,000 ft. deep, flows east along the equator, 100 ft. below the westerly-flowing surface...
Thach and his men, and the civilian scientists working on ASW problems, hunt this jungle with sonar and radar equipment that has grown in sophistication over the years but is still far from perfect. Heavy seas, hammering the hull of a destroyer, can override the sonar-transmitted sounds of distant submarine screws or reduction gears. The sun heats the thin layer of air over smooth water, and this in turn can bend radar waves. Sometimes a thermal layer, 100 to 300 feet deep, distorts sound-and a knowledgeable sub skipper plays this layer like a shield. He can confound enemy...
...July 1957, Jimmy Thach's experience and versatility were turned to the deepening and long-neglected problem of antisubmarine warfare. He became one of four ASW carrier division Atlantic commanders in the Navy's Hunter-Killer Force (HUKFOR). With the three others, he was called before Arleigh Burke to answer the question: What could the Navy do to improve its submarine defenses? Hardly hesitating, Thach outlined a plan for a semipermanent task force, chartered to experiment with and develop new antisubmarine defense systems. When Thach finished talking, Arleigh Burke grinned. "Jimmy Thach," he said, "has just made...