At fit-out docks in two New England ports last week, weird green-painted boats lay shrouded in secrecy. Yard workmen swarmed along their bulging sides, finishing up their hulls, cramming their innards full of deadly equipment. One bore the name Trigger, the other the name Tang. They were the first of six new, fast attack submarines built for the U.S. Navy.
Shorter by 50 feet than the lean, 310-foot fleet "boats" of World War II, the new Tang-class subs looked like a cross between a whale and a shark. Gone was the familiar deck gun and the round conning tower, with its crest of periscopes, radar and radio masts. The decks of the new subs were clean and knife-narrow. Down the center reared a thick, sliced-off fin to house their twelve masts and the snorkel, which will enable them to run on engines instead of batteries at periscope depth. They had bow planes that whipped out automatically from pockets at their sides, and they could dive at a steep 40° angle. Fast and silent as barracuda, the new Tangs are the deadliest new weapons in the Navy's underwater arsenal.
The trouble is, they are not deadly enough. The Russians have all the U.S. has, and more. With almost no surface fleet (a few old battleships, a handful of cruisers, no carriers), the Russians have concentrated on subs until their underwater fleet is now the world's largest: 300 operational subs (against 88 for the U.S.); a goal of 1,000 ocean-going boats. In a war with Russia, the U.S. Navy would be fighting mostly submarines.
Silent Service. No one knows better than U.S. submariners themselves how deadly a sub can be. In 1941, when the proud surface Navy suffered the disaster of Pearl Harbor, a handful of nerveless men had pointed the sharp prows of so-odd U.S. subs toward Japan and written a record of blood and battle unsurpassed in U.S. naval history. Not one of them had ever before fired a torpedo in battle (U.S. subs engaged mainly in uneventful patrol work in World War I), but for two years they were almost the entire U.S. offensive force in the Pacific.
They called themselves "the silent service" and their exploits were inscribed in greasy logbooks and terse messages ("Sturgeon no longer virgin") radioed back to COMSUBPAC headquarters at Pearl Harbor. From their voyages came stories of watching horse races in Tokyo Bay through their periscopes, of torpedoing a new Jap carrier as it slid down the ways, of receiving as many as 400 and 500 depth charges. Subs became the work horses of the fleet: they rescued 504 downed flyers, carried high-priority cargo and VIPs, charted enemy beaches before invasions, staged commando raids, acted as radio and weather stations for the Air Force. Threading their way through plodding Jap convoys, sub skippers set up targets at night on radarscopes. Then they surfaced and steamed through the panicked convoys, shotgunning torpedoes right & left.
By the end of the war, the U.S. had 169 submarines operating in the Pacific. Fifty-two had been lost, and one out of seven U.S. submariners never returned. But the "silent service" had sent 6,000,000 tons (one battleship, seven carriers, 16 cruisers, 45 destroyers, 23 enemy subs, 1,322 other ships) of Japanese shipping to the bottom. Not even the much-publicized carrier task forces could match their record.