Word: fleetly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Shorter by 50 feet than the lean, 310-foot fleet "boats" of World War II, the new Tang-class subs looked like a cross between a whale and a shark. Gone was the familiar deck gun and the round conning tower, with its crest of periscopes, radar and radio masts. The decks of the new subs were clean and knife-narrow. Down the center reared a thick, sliced-off fin to house their twelve masts and the snorkel, which will enable them to run on engines instead of batteries at periscope depth. They had bow planes that whipped out automatically...
...trouble is, they are not deadly enough. The Russians have all the U.S. has, and more. With almost no surface fleet (a few old battleships, a handful of cruisers, no carriers), the Russians have concentrated on subs until their underwater fleet is now the world's largest: 300 operational subs (against 88 for the U.S.); a goal of 1,000 ocean-going boats. In a war with Russia, the U.S. Navy would be fighting mostly submarines...
...COMSUBPAC headquarters at Pearl Harbor. From their voyages came stories of watching horse races in Tokyo Bay through their periscopes, of torpedoing a new Jap carrier as it slid down the ways, of receiving as many as 400 and 500 depth charges. Subs became the work horses of the fleet: they rescued 504 downed flyers, carried high-priority cargo and VIPs, charted enemy beaches before invasions, staged commando raids, acted as radio and weather stations for the Air Force. Threading their way through plodding Jap convoys, sub skippers set up targets at night on radarscopes. Then they surfaced and steamed...
...able to walk away from surface ships. If all goes well, the Navy hopes to have a working model by 1953. The Navy is thus betting on a maybe of the future instead of trying to duplicate the known present. But, says one high-ranking subman, "with a fleet of atomic submarines, we could clean anything from...
...security as many another defense plant. In an emergency, Comet's diemakers have turned out models of a weapon in 72 hours, from drawing board to finished product. At the time the first Walker Bulldog tanks rolled off the Cadillac production line, Comet was working on a whole fleet. Since the Korean war began, business has boomed again...