Word: subbing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
Alfa's beefsteak includes Thach's flagship, the aircraft carrier Valley Forge, eight destroyers, two submarines, a squadron of Valley Forge-based Grumman 52F sub-hunting aircraft, a helicopter squadron, a land-based patrol squadron of P2Vs, blimps, 5,000 men, a vast electronic network of electronic eyes and ears. Its armament is a marvel of the Atomic Age: included are nuclear depth charges, nicknamed Betty and Lulu, each with sufficient explosive force to lift the entire U.S. Navy (901 ships) clear out of the water...
...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 for the second. The sub skipper waits and waits. Nothing happens. Curiosity becomes overpowering. At length, the curious skipper decides to take just a little peek. Up goes his periscope-wham-the other shoe...
...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 sonar by hiding in the clacking wake of a destroyer, or by backing the submarine through his own wake to lose himself in his own echo...
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...