The Goblin Killers

(See Cover)

Ominous, black and still was the sea. It was 0200, Aug. 22, 1958. Position: 35DEG N. 73DEG 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.

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."

The Beefsteak Priority. Reducing that vulnerability is the top-priority enterprise in the Navy's 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."

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.

Dropping the Shoe. But hardware, however sophisticated, is far from Jimmy Thach's major problem. Before he can even begin to answer the challenge of the submarine revolution, he must understand, as has no man before, the mind of the submariners he is trying to kill--and the mystery of the sea itself.

In his few 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 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.

But Thach's worst problem is neither the submarine nor the submariner. It is the submarine's element, the sea itself--12 million sq. mi. of ocean surface in the North Atlantic alone. Surface surveillance, given enough men and equipment as well as allied cooperation, is a technical possibility. But it is of the unknown depths of the sea, the mysteries of the 2 billion-year-old undersea world, that man knows pitifully little. More is known of the near side of the moon than of the ocean floor.

Probing the Deeps. Hidden from the sun, the black bottom is an unimaginably terrifying land of ancient mountain ranges and valleys, somnolent volcanoes, Gargantuan canyons, bottomless chasms (see map)--a land filled with hiding places for a future generation of deeper-diving submarines. Knowledge of this topography as well as of the mysterious currents that flow there will decide the future's underwater wars. Though the seas cover 70% of the earth's surface, oceanographers have carefully mapped only about a third of the world's ocean floor. The Russians have gone full steam on oceanography, have built the world's biggest fleet of floating oceanographic laboratories--14 large vessels v. the U.S.'s half-dozen*--and have explored much of the floor of the Arctic Ocean.

The 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.

Lost in an Echo. The captious sea is at once Admiral Jimmy Thach's ally and enemy. Sound, his chief means of detection, travels almost five times faster through water than through air, and it plays more tricks than a Soviet delegate at a peace conference. "The ocean," says Thach, "is a liquid jungle. Survival depends on how well we know this environment and whether, like Tarzan, we can tell the friendly sounds from the unfriendly ones--the monkeys from the tigers."

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 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's sound detectives are the pings, for all the world like those from submarines, that bounce off sunken wrecks. And for precisely that reason, the wise enemy submariner would be most likely to launch his attack from the area of Cape Hatteras, historic graveyard for ships.

Facts in the Field. To cope with the awesome threat of the submarine revolution, the Navy chose one of its most versatile hands, long noted as one of the Navy's most skilled and thoughtful aircraft pilots, a tactical innovator, an experienced operator both on a ship's bridge and in the Big-Think climate of the Pentagon.

John Smith Thach was born in Pine Bluff, Ark. in 1905, the third of four children. His mother was a schoolteacher and a beauty in her day ("Men still whistle at her," he says fondly, "and so help me, doctors don't believe that she's 80"); his father was an insurance executive and an enthusiastic outdoorsman. The family moved to a big ten-room house in Fordyce, 37 miles away, when John was four.

Thach was barely big enough to lift a 12-gauge shotgun when his father taught him how to shoot. On his first hunting trip, says Thach, "I learned an astonishing fact: in any organization, even a two-man hunting party, each has a share of work to do." He learned other lessons that still serve him well. "Don't shoot at the bird," his father warned on early quail hunts. "Shoot where he's going to be."

In his high school days, Thach was a fine athlete, only a fair student; happily, his football coach was his math teacher, and his track coach was the physics instructor. He was in his third year at Fordyce High when his brother, James Harmon Thach Jr., was admitted to Annapolis. Says Submarine Hunter Thach, with a sense of wonder: "I remember how surprised I was when I first thought about the seas and realized I had never even given them a thought before. I knew so little I was under the impression that if you took a handful of ocean water it would actually look blue."

The Hell Divers. In the predictable course of events, Thach followed brother Jim to Annapolis, where he quickly became known as "Little Jimmy" (the name has stuck, and among Navymen there are two Admirals Thach--Jim, now a retired vice admiral, and Jimmy of Task Group Alfa). As a crack plebe quarterback, Jimmy Thach showed a remarkable fighting instinct, but he never made the "A" team: a collision with a husky fullback dislocated his shoulder, ended his football days. "What shall I do?" he asked the doctor plaintively. The tongue-in-cheek reply: "Try wrestling." Jimmy Thach did just that, made the wrestling team--and learned to horrify his bigger opponents by throwing his game shoulder out of socket at strategic moments.

Academically, Jimmy Thach ('27) was a less than middling middy, but his first plane ride, in a yellow twin-engined H16 seaplane, sent him soaring into a pilot's career. In 1930 he became a member of the U.S. Navy's famous Fighting Squadron 1, the High Hat Squadron (skipper of the High Hats: Lieut. Commander Arthur W. Radford). Nine of the High Hats, including Thach and Radford, barnstormed the nation in Curtiss F8C4 Hell-divers, tied wingtip to wingtip with Manila rope. Bound thus, Thach and some of his comrades astonished crowds with loops, snap rolls and high wing overs--and never snapped a rope or a wing. When Hollywood filmed Hell Divers in 1931, the High Hats flew all the stunt scenes. Clark Gable's flying standin: Art Radford, now retired after topping his career with four years of service as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Jimmy Thach lived airplanes. He was an ace test pilot, flew patrol duty in the Aleutians in Martin PBM-15 ("The bearskin flying suits stank like hell"), catapulted off a turret top of the cruiser U.S.S. Cincinnati in SOC-15, patrolled the Canal Zone in PBYs. Stationed in San Diego in the 19305, Thach met and married Madalyn Jones (they have two sons, John Jr., an experimental psychologist, and William Leland, about to enter William and Mary), became gunnery officer of Fighting Squadron 3. He set up mock dogfights, gave new pilots the advantage of altitude and invited them to "stay on my tail." Few could. Invariably. he sat in his cockpit eating an apple as a gesture of contempt for his foe, almost invariably evaded his pursuer before the apple was eaten.

Tactics from Matchsticks. He was also working relentlessly at solving tactical problems, and late one night, after jockeying matchsticks across his table for hours, he arrived at a memorable maneuver. Based on the premise that the traditional three-plane fighter element was an inefficient formation for aerial battle, Thach had figured out a two-plane weave pattern. It was soon to be used. Within hours after Pearl Harbor, Lieut. Commander Thach, now in command of Fighting 3, sailed out across the Pacific aboard the Saratoga. The carrier took a torpedo before the airmen ever got into a fight. Switching to the Lexington, Thach got his chance in combat off the Gilbert Islands. He and his squadron climbed into the sky, knocked down 19 out of 20 Japanese planes; Thach himself got three, and then-Lieut. Edward ("Butch") O'Hare, whose performance that day won him the Congressional Medal of Honor, killed five, damaged a sixth within six minutes. Used exclusively was the now famous "Thach weave."

"An Unfortunate Speech." Jimmy Thach finished out the war as air operations officer of the loo-ship Fast Carrier Task Force, first under Admiral Marc Mitscher, then under Admiral John S. McCain. Five years later, he commanded the escort carrier Sicily off Korea, and in 1955 he went to the Pentagon as senior naval member of the Defense Department's Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. "Forget the Navy," Arleigh Burke told him then, "and think Defense."

In 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 an unfortunate speech. He doesn't know this, but he has talked himself into a job." The job: commander of Task Group Alfa ("A" in the communications phonetic alphabet), created as a Navy floating laboratory for antisubmarine warfare.

Thach swung into characteristically blurring motion, gathering his components and his men, laying out his experimental course over a 100-by-100-mile section of the Atlantic ("My large outdoor schoolhouse"). Alfa's job was "very simple," he explained. "There's 10,000 square miles of water out there, and ours is just a problem of conversion. We've got to convert all that to 350 feet by 35 feet--the space that a submarine occupies out of all that area."

The Exercise. Airman Thach himself needed training in submarine warfare. He took a short course at Norfolk's ASW Tactical School, whizzed through studies in sound detection in New London, dropped anchor at Key West's weapons-testing center, climbed aboard every nuclear submarine in the Atlantic, visited destroyers, jawed with officers and bluejackets. Next he ordered a "cross-pollination" program, sent his aviators aboard submarines, his sub skippers into helicopters, his destroyer men into 52Fs. He put airplane pilots at the helms of submarines to help work out tactical underwater maneuvers.

Skipper Thach works his people hard. "We pay overtime," says he wryly, "after 24 hours a day." Task Group Alfa fuels its destroyers during mealtimes to save precious hours. He has cut his 10,000-mile outdoor classroom into four segments, runs off exercises in each one--as many as a dozen in a day and night. With the completion of each exercise, he folds his 160-lb., 6-ft. frame over the chart tables, carefully puts on his reading glasses for a close, almost wordless examination of the results. And the exercises continue unceasingly, each one posing new problems, each one bringing some disappointment, yet each one bringing Thach and Alfa a step or so closer to vital answers. Such an exercise was that in which the Sea Leopard recently "destroyed" Washington with its Very-pistol flare.

As the flare shot skyward, Sea Leopard's skipper, followed by his lookouts, dived for the hatch. ''Take this boat down," he called, still on the ladder. Eleven seconds later, Sea Leopard was buttoned up, and the water closed around her conning tower. Pumps whammed away. "Periscope depth," the skipper ordered. Water closed over the boat, and the skipper once again shouldered the scope to watch the progress of the "missile." "She's going hot, straight and normal," he cracked. "She's heading straight for BuShips [the Navy's Bureau of Ships'], 17th and Constitution, Washington. Take her down to 200 feet." Soon the boat was enveloped in the vast, protective opaqueness of the deep. On the surface, the sea erased her presence, and once again the silvered starlight wrinkled upon the water.

Aboard his flagship Valley Forge, Admiral Thach ordered a catapult plane launched to scout the datum point area of a sighting reported an instant earlier. Within minutes, a twin-engined 52F leaped from the deck of the flagship Valley Forge. Two more followed. To all Alfa destroyers snapped the signal to alter course with the Forge, to steam up to screen position ahead of the carrier.

The ships sped east, and like a giant fan, swept the seas in their search path with sound gear and lazily turning antennas. Blinker lights sparkled from bridges, and on the Valley Forge, pilots scurried to briefing rooms, helicopter crews climbed into their whirlybirds. Armed with a constant flow of information--water temperature, weather reports, sea condition--Thach and his operations officers called the plays.

At the datum point, the Forge's planes searched, circling like patient, tireless gulls. One dropped a smoke flare to mark the spot of the radar sighting, then sono-buoys fell into the water, and the sonar-men listened for a telltale ping. The planes skimmed down to a belly-soaking 15 ft., began a search with MAD (magnetic detection) gear.

Sea Leopard dived into the thermal layer at 200 ft. The skipper ordered a heading of two-two-two degrees. "Make that zero-nine-zero," suggested his navigator. "We've got a three-knot current going that way." The skipper changed course. The boat's loudspeaker played back the sonar pickup: fish. The sub moved on.

Three helicopters thrashed their way into the area and took command. They fanned out from the marker, 120DEG apart. Then they lowered their sonar gear into the water. Slowly, dragging the gear in the sea, they began to circle. Wider and wider they turned. Then--contact. One "helo" flashed on its spinning red light; the others closed in. The red light went off; the contact was lost. But on went the light of another helo. Blinking on, then off, the helos flashed as they picked up the sub, then lost it, then found it.

Sea Leopard swished like an excited fish. She turned, dived, sped on, stopped abruptly. She was fenced in. She could not break through.

A helo dropped a Bloodhound--a practice acoustic torpedo of a type that would carry a nuclear warhead in battles. The orange tube disappeared into the water, spiraled down in its hunt for the right depth, leveled out and rammed the submarine, its wooden nose smashing forward near the port torpedo tubes. The aircraft turned and headed back to the flagship. Sea Leopard was destroyed. Nothing was left. Only the sea, ominous and black and still. And 40 miles away, on the bridge of the Valley Forge, Admiral Jimmy Thach silently studied the reports of the submarine's death. The kill had come under relatively soft circumstances: Sea Leopard was nonnuclear, its "missile" countdown had required it to expose itself on the surface for 15 minutes--yet it still got off its shot. As compared to a nuclear submarine, able to fire a Polaris-type missile while still submerged, Sea Leopard was a mere seagoing perambulator. Indeed, submariners swear that to stop their boat of the future will be impossible. It is the job of Admiral Jimmy Thach, calling on all U.S. scientific and military resources, to achieve the impossible.

* For news of the Navy's newest oceanographic instrument, see SCIENCE.

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