Watching for Sea Goblins

As the national colors fluttered aloft last week on Brazil's first aircraft carrier, the 17,000-ton Minas Gerais*, her new skipper, Captain Helio Leoncio Martins, called the ship "a powerful arm for the defense of Brazil and the Americas." While he spoke, the first of 58 pilots who will fly from the carrier's canted deck were arriving at Key West, Fla., Naval Air Station for six months' training on the twelve Grumman 52F tracker planes and six Sikorsky 555 helicopters donated by the U.S. as the Minas Gerais' air group. By May, the flattop and her accompanying destroyers will be on station in the South Atlantic with an important mission: watching for Russian submarines.

Strategic Waters. In deciding how to employ its carrier, Brazil's navy had been influenced by a little-publicized but increasingly effective U.S. drive aimed at mobilizing the hand-me-down ships of South America's navies. If war should occur, the U.S. Navy's sub hunters will need all the help they can get. During World War II, German U-boats sliced into the shipping lanes, even managed to cut off Brazil's northeast bulge from Rio except by heavy Allied convoy. The new danger is Soviet Russia's fleet of 450 to 500 subs, a considerable number of which have been casing South America's shorelines and harbors. Plenty of these Soviet "goblins," as they are nicknamed, have shown up, and U.S. Navy hunter-killer teams have dumped garbage cans instead of depth charges over the skulking Red subs.

Four years ago Admiral Arleigh Burke, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, decided that South America's navies--at times the butt of jokes--could patrol their own waters with the proper equipment and know-how. Burke saw real defense potential in the total of 390 vessels (see map) and 55,000 men. Only landlocked Bolivia has no navy; backward Paraguay, with a 1,100-mile river link its only outlet to the sea, boasts two gunboats--and two rear admirals.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed Burke's idea, have since concentrated a large part of the U.S.-Latin American military program on antisubmarine warfare. This fiscal year the U.S. allotted $9,000,000 worth of aid to Latin American navies (v. $3,000,000 to $4,000,000 annually prior to the buildup), will spend $5,000,000 to train crews. Latin navies have been supplied with no sonar-equipped destroyer escorts, destroyers, minesweepers and subs under the program, and plans call for 18 more in the next few years. Argentina (which, like Brazil, has a modernized, British-built aircraft carrier) is organizing its own sub-hunting task force.

Successful Maneuvers. Last August Burke and his aides launched Operation Unitas, an unprecedented, four-month, South American antisub exercise. A U.S. task force centered around the sub Odax rendezvoused first with the Venezuelan and Colombian fleets in the Caribbean, then maneuvered with Ecuador's navy, turned south and linked up simultaneously with the Peruvian and Chilean navies. Finally, it conducted a four-nation maneuver with Argentine, Uruguayan and Brazilian ships. The operation's longest air patrol, 11 hr. and 15 min., was flown by a Brazilian Neptune, which circled so aggressively over its sub-contact area that a reporter aboard wrote, "It looked like the dipping wing tank was going to hit the wave crests."

For the first time, old naval rivalries were cast aside as the four nations learned to work together. There were no major arguments, few errors, and the commanders got around the language barrier by carrying out maneuvers via the International General Signal Book. As the Odax pulled every trick in the submariner's book, the South Americans learned the newest ship-maneuvering techniques, how to handle the most modern MAD (Magnetic Anomaly Detector) and sonar gear to track, corner and kill the sub. Sonar operators even learned how to tell the type of sub by the quality of its "ping."

Off Brazil, the Odax joined Brazil's two subs in a "wolf pack" that attempted to ambush the four-nation exercise fleet. Two Neptunes, one Brazilian and the other U.S., quickly spotted the subs, dived low simulating rocket attacks, called in 13 destroyers of four countries for depth-charge runs. Umpires ruled all three subs sunk. Announced Burke later: "Unitas was a great success. It improved the capabilities of all." Plans for next year: more and bigger joint maneuvers.

* Formerly H.M.S. Vengeance, bought by Brazil from Great Britain for $16 million and rebuilt in Holland for another $14 million.

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