When I was in the US Navy there was considerable worry about potential conflict with the Soviet Union. The Red Fleet had the largest number of submarines of any power in the world at that time. It’s not surprising to find that the USN devoted a lot of time and training to fighting submarines. One element of this training was a periodic sortie by an American anti-submarine task force to the far frozen North. A group built around an anti-submarine aircraft carrier and her accompanying escort destroyers would sail to the approaches to Murmansk, north of Norway. The Russians would send out their own forces, including submarines, to :keep an eye” on the American ships. This was what the Americans wanted. The American ships and aircraft got a lot of real time practice tracking actual Soviet subs.
My oiler was assigned to support one such operation. We kept the force topped off with fuel while they played tag with the Russians. One of my duties was training our lookouts. That training paid off when one of my lookouts spotted a periscope from a Russian sub right in the middle of our task force. We reported the sighting, and a pair of destroyers peeled off to investigate. The destroyers picked up a Russian nuclear powered sub and managed to keep in contact with it for a considerable time. What nobody asked was how the sub got, undetected, to the place where my lookout saw it in the first place. If it had hostile intentions my oiler, and the carrier, would probably have been sunk.
My own strongest memory of that voyage, which took place in late July, was how cold it was there. I went on watch as officer of the deck wearing my regular cold weather working uniform, plus a heavy overcoat, a pair of foul weather trousers, gloves, and a wool lined cap with ear flaps. And with all that clothing I still felt cold! It ws overcast all the time. One hundred per cent cloud coverage the entire day. Navigation was a nightmare. There was no coverage of the area by electronic aids like Loran and Decca. Satellite navigation was non-existent at that time. We were too far away from land to use radar, and the clouds precluded any kind of celestial navigation
Just how bad things were might be illustrated by the following story that actually took place after we returned to warmer areas around the British Isles. We had taken on more fuel at a NATO installation in the Irish Sea and were about to sail around the Southern end of Great Britain in order to go to a Norwegian port. We were at sea when we lost our radar set. The picture just disappeared. My technicians took the set apart and decided the problem had to one of 2 things; either the magnetron tube was faulty, or the pulse forming network, a fully enclosed unit, was shot.Fortunately, our supply department had one spare of each. We tried replacing them, first separately, and then together Nothing helped. The radar picture remained blank. I sat with my technicians and went through the trouble shooting book with them, step by step. Everything pointed to the same problems. We took apart the set replaced a part, checked everything at that level, and after seeing all the tests looked alright we reassembled the radar, When we turned it on it still didn’t work.
Meanwhile, the ship turned to sail up the English Channel,. Blind. The traffic there was dense. The possibility of a collision was very real. But we made it through safely. I set a course for Stavanger Fjord. It was one of my last actions as navigator. That afternoon the Captain informed me that another officer would take over duties as navigator. No explanation as to why, Just let him take over. No contact relief, no briefings, no turn-over. Of course my reply was a simple “Aye Aye, Sir”.
My cabin was located just under the port bridge wing. When I got up the next morning i saw steep cliffs on both sides of the ship. But directly ahead there was clear open sea, I went up the ladder to investigate, Yes, we were headed back out to sea. My relief as navigator had managed to take the ship into the wrong fjord. Now we were going back out to find the correct one.
We still had no radar, so, with the skippers permission, we contacted the flagship to get some more experienced technicians to help us. They sent 2 senior enlisted radar technicians. The visitors worked for two days. They came to the same conclusions we had. And when the radar was reassembled with new components it still didn’t work.
After our frustrated reinforcements left one of my junior technicians went over the entire process once again. To save time, he tightened only 2 of the 4 screws holding the magnetron in place. When he tested the radar it worked perfectly. He called to tell me, and simultaneously tightened the other screws. The radar failed again. Armed with this new information we checked the ceramic insulators that held the parts in place. We discovered that one of them had a crack on the inside that allowed energy to make a short circuit through the inside of the insulator and grounded out the entire circuitry. Replacing the cracked insulator solved the problem.
Wetherhorn 