Edward Beach - Around the World Submerged

Lining either side of the narrow and cluttered passageway aft of the Ballast Control Panel are interior communication switchboards and various electric panels. Still farther aft, occupying the entire port after corner of the control room and protected by a soundproofed bulkhead and door is the chart room, ample in its original design but, like all other space in the ship, now crammed with assorted equipment mostly relating to radar.

Immediately forward of where I now stood in the control room, beyond a pressure-proof bulkhead and its watertight door, is a big compartment devoted entirely to crew’s berthing, accommodating a total of ninety-five men on two deck levels. Each man has a locker, an aluminum bunk, a foam-rubber mattress, individual ventilation controllable by a louver near his head, and an overhead fluorescent light for reading. Lest the provision for reading in bed seem unwarranted luxury, it must be realized that it is hardly possible—in fact undesirable—for all hands in a submarine to be up and about at the same time, except for certain general duties such as battle stations or emergency drills. The more people in their bunks at other times, the more room for those who must be up.

Still farther forward, the foremost compartment in the ship, is the forward torpedo room, containing four standard-size torpedo tubes, considerable high-powered sonar equipment, and, as always, berthing for as many persons as can be accommodated.

I still had on the blues and bridge coat I had worn as we got underway; so now my immediate destination was in the other direction, aft to the officer’s berthing compartment where I had my tiny stateroom. I glanced swiftly at the Rigged for Dive Panel, which showed that all compartments in the ship had been rigged and checked in the condition of “readiness for diving,” and at the Hull Opening Indicators, which showed that the only hull openings not closed were the bridge hatch and the main air intake valve, and stepped aft.

Triton ’s cruiser size did not extend to the Commanding Officer’s quarters. My stateroom in Triton was about a five-foot capital “T,” with a pull-down bunk filling the entire crossbar of the letter. By stretching out one arm and pivoting, I could touch all four walls. But I couldn’t complain very loudly. Thamm’s room, for example, was the same size as mine, but he shared it with two others. Will Adams’ room was also the same size. He had one roommate and the mechanism of one of the ship’s main vent valves, which took as much space as a man. Normally, these days, the Executive Officer is so besotted with paper work that whenever possible he has no roommate, so that the vacant bunk can be used as an adjunct to his tiny fold-down desk. But there were no spare bunks anywhere in Triton on this cruise, and the extra bunk in Will’s room was assigned to Joe Roberts.

I drew the curtain on my stateroom, in which I was to spend a good part of my time for the next three months. Electric Boat had hopefully painted it a so-called “beach sand” color, thus, perhaps, attempting to apologize for its lack of size. It contained a standard fold-down desk, several drawers for linen and personal belongings, a large safe which Bob Brodie had appropriated for his classified publications, a folding wash stand, a medicine cabinet, a one-foot-wide clothes closet, a convertible bunk—cushioned on the bottom to form an uncomfortable settee when raised—and a single straight-backed chair. Under the folding wash stand, at my request—since I needed a place to have at least one other person in for a conference—had been built a small circular folding stool about eight inches in diameter (dubbed the “hot seat” by irreverent members of the ship’s company). And in every conceivable nook, not occupied by some other equipment, there were lockers.

At the foot of my bunk were depth gauge, speed indicator, and gyro repeater, and when I counted them I discovered that the room contained five telephones and two loudspeaking attachments with which, after learning which buttons to press and which dials to turn, I could talk to anyone in the ship.

In a few moments, having shifted to the sea-going khaki that would be my standard garb until May, I drew back my door curtain and walked aft. On either side of the narrow formica-lined hallway were curtained doorways similar to mine, marking the entrances to the wardroom and the six staterooms Triton had for the seventeen officers assigned. At the extreme after end of the compartment was the yeoman’s office, fortunately rather roomy as submarine offices go.

The watertight door in the pressure bulkhead at the end of the passageway was latched shut. I pulled the latch handle, stepped high over the coaming, ducked my head, and slipped through, carefully latching the door behind me. We were now more than three miles from the nearest land and by regulations could leave the door open, but as a matter of common consent it was habitually kept shut in order to make a sharper division between number one reactor compartment on its after side and the living quarters forward of it.

A few steps aft and I was standing directly over the reactor, on a slightly raised platform surrounded by a heavy pipe-guard rail, and surveying the area with satisfaction.

Triton’ s twin reactors hummed softly as they generated the steam for her two huge engine rooms, but in their watertight compartments there was not a moving thing to be seen. Only the muffled whine of the vital circulating pumps and the whirr of the ventilation blowers could be heard. The general quietness and good order hardly conveyed an adequate impression of the new-found source of power cooking away beneath my feet. A red deck, partly covered by green-shellacked rubber matting and surmounted by the ubiquitous gray boxes, formed a color scheme pleasing to the eye. The reactor spaces are seldom visited; with no watch stations to be manned, they are generally immaculate—Pat McDonald’s twin pride and joy.

Pressed against the skin of the ship on either side of my platform stood two heavily insulated domes, from which large steam pipes rose and went aft. Control equipment of all kinds—valves, dials, gauges, special electrical machinery—lined the walls of the compartment. Yet it seemed extraordinarily spacious, clean, easy to get about in, and uncommonly quiet for a ship making full power.

A few feet below me, beneath the insulated deck, stood one of Triton’ s two huge steel pressure vessels, containing half of the precious uranium fuel for which I was official custodian. Through it raced distilled water at high pressure, extracting heat from the uranium and transmitting it to the steam generators. Over against a bulkhead and also concealed beneath the deck, an array of encased pumps drove the water around its simple circuit. The watertight door in the after bulkhead was latched open, and through it I glimpsed a repetition of the red, green, and gray color scheme in number two reactor compartment—a duplicate of the first.

I knew I had but to step aft another bulkhead or so to have this illusion of quiet thoroughly dispelled. There stood the ridiculously small starboard turbine and one of our two tremendous reduction gears, which at this speed would be filling the engine rooms with their roaring.

The ship lurched impatiently. Probably the sea was building up. I ducked quickly into number two reactor compartment, moved aft another two dozen steps, opened a second closed watertight door, and stepped through the bulkhead into number one engine room.

This was the largest compartment in the ship, in cubic volume not far from the entire displacement of a World War II submarine, and it contained all the massive components of the starboard main engine. A high-pitched roar of machinery reached my ears, and for all its racket it sounded wonderful.