Word: goblins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...late to be a Halloween goblin, too early to be a Christmas Santa. Actor Charles Laughton was trapped 'tween seasons with enough facial forestry to make a sensation at a woodchoppers' ball. Actually, he had let himself go to seed for a role as King Lear at Stratford-on-Avon's Shakespearean theater. Leaving London on a brief trip to Paris, where presumably he would roam incognito. Laughton muffled: "I'll be glad to get a lawnmower on this...
Navymen know that the Soviet boats are constantly probing U.S. submarine defenses, testing the detection and tracking proficiency of U.S. goblin hunters. "The Russians," says Vice Chief of Naval Operations James Russell, "are not building submarines in order to drink toasts at launching ceremonies." Russia's Nikita Khrushchev himself stated the submarine threat as baldly as possible: "Our submarines can block American ports and shoot into the American interior, while our rockets can reach any target. America's vital centers are just as vulnerable as NATO bases...
...program for 1958-and far beyond. "The primary mission of every combat ship in the Atlantic Fleet is antisubmarine," says Admiral Jerauld Wright, commander of the Atlantic Fleet. "Everything else is secondary." And Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke has placed a no-limit ceiling on the operations of Goblin Hunter Thach and his Task Group Alfa. "If Alfa wants beefsteak for breakfast," Burke ordered, "give 'em beefsteak...
...months as a goblin killer, Thach has perfected techniques aimed at the mind of the submarine skipper, imprisoned in the ocean's depths. One of Thach's favorite tactics is nicknamed The Other Shoe, and it is designed to take advantage of the submariner's insatiable curiosity about what is happening on the surface. Instead of the expected salvo of two depth charges, Thach heaves only one from a destroyer. The submarine skipper waits anxiously for the second charge-just as a man in bed, hearing his upstairs neighbor drop one shoe, frets sleepily as he listens...
Most frustrating to Thach's goblin killers is the sea's own natural cacophony. Antisubmarine-warfare hands are trained to differentiate the sound of a sub from that of a destroyer or a rowboat. But they must also learn that a school of shrimp sounds like fish frying, that sea robins cluck, that the white whale creaks like the lid on Davy Jones's locker, that the eel makes a zizz like water on a hot stove, and the whistling, jocular porpoise makes enough noise to give any sonarman a headache. Most deceptive of all for Thach...