Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

B-36 was sighted by a U.S. Navy spotter plane at 8:19 a.m. eighty miles east of Grand Turk. The glistening black submarine was some three hundred feet long and twenty-five feet across, about twice the volume of a German U-boat. The number “911” in large white letters was clearly visible on its conning tower. The submarine submerged five minutes later. It was on a southerly course, headed toward Hispaniola, making about 7 knots an hour. The fact that it had been tracked and located marked a breakthrough for a new antisubmarine warfare device known as Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS.

Hunting submarines was a classic example of technological competition and escalation. One side would invent a quieter, faster, or less visible submarine; the other side would develop a new technology to counter it. It was difficult to find a snorkeling submarine by radar, but it could be detected by sound. The sound emitted by the noisy diesel engines was magnified beneath the water, and could travel hundreds of miles, sometimes thousands of miles. Sound waves could be plotted and triangulated in much the same way that radio waves were plotted and triangulated.

By the late fifties, the United States had installed a system of hydrophones, or underwater microphones, along the entire eastern seaboard. Once the general location of an enemy submarine had been determined through SOSUS, U.S. Navy aircraft could use sonobuoys and radar to find the precise position. The problem with SOSUS was that it picked up other objects, such as whales. More than eight hundred contacts had been registered with the system in the space of forty-eight hours. None of these contacts had yet resulted in a confirmed submarine sighting.

The naval facility on the tiny British island of Grand Turk—NAVFAC Grand Turk—was one of the earliest submarine listening posts. Built in 1954, the SOSUS station occupied a lonely peninsula on the northern tip of the six-mile-long island. Underwater cables linked the facility to a chain of hydrophones on the seabed. The hydrophones transformed sound waves into electrical charges that burned marks on outsize thermal paper rolls. A strong, clear line was a good indication of engine noise.

Technicians at NAVFAC Grand Turk had begun noticing the distinctive burn lines on Thursday evening. Submarine trackers reported “a reliable contact” at 10:25 p.m. and called in the patrol planes. They christened the contact “C-20,” or “Charlie-20.”

“Plane,” shouted the watchman on the bridge of submarine B-36. “Dive!”

It took just a few seconds for the lookouts to scramble down the ladder of the conning tower. There was a loud gurgling sound as water flooded into the buoyancy tanks, expelling the air that kept the boat afloat. The submarine went into an emergency dive. Pots and plates flew in all directions in the galley.

Crew members rushed around the ship, turning valves and closing hatches. Most were dressed in shorts. Only the officer of the watch put on a blue navy jacket, for the sake of propriety. Many of the men had smeared a bright green antiseptic ointment over their bodies to alleviate the itching from thick red heat rashes, similar to hives. The stuffy air and the extraordinary heat, up to 134 degrees in parts of the ship, had taken their toll on the most hardy sailors. Everybody felt tired and weak, their brains numb with dizziness. Sweat poured off their bodies.

Lieutenant Anatoly Andreev had been keeping a diary in the form of an extended letter to his wife of twenty-five months. Even putting pen to paper was a monumental effort. Great globs of sweat dropped onto the page, smearing the ink. When he was not on duty, he lay in his bunk, surrounded by photographs of Sofia and their one-year-old daughter, Lili. They were his lifeline to a saner world, a world in which you breathed in fresh air and drank as much water as you liked and no one screamed at you for imaginary mistakes.

Everyone is thirsty. That’s all anyone is talking about: thirst. How thirsty I am. It’s hard to write, the paper is soaked in sweat. We all look as if we had just come out of a steambath. My fingertips are completely white, as if Lyalechka was one month old again, and I had just washed all her diapers…. The worst thing is that the commander’s nerves are shot to hell. He’s yelling at everyone and torturing himself. He doesn’t understand that he should be saving his strength, and the men’s too. Otherwise we are not going to last long. He is becoming paranoid, scared of his own shadow. He’s hard to deal with. I feel sorry for him, and at the same time angry with him.

They had been at sea for nearly four weeks. B-36 had been the first of the four submarines to slip out of Gadzhievo in the dead of the night, without any lights. It had led the way across the Atlantic for the other subs. Captain Aleksei Dubivko was under orders from the Soviet navy to reach the Caicos Passage at the entrance to the Caribbean by the fourth week in October. He had to maintain an average speed of 12 knots, an extraordinarily fast pace for a diesel-electric submarine that could only do 7 or 8 knots underwater. For most of the voyage, it had been necessary to travel on the surface, using his diesel engines rather than his batteries and battling waves as high as a four-story building.

Apart from the grim conditions aboard ship, the journey had been fairly uneventful. The diesel engines were still functioning well—in contrast to Shumkov’s experience in B-130, which was trailing four hundred miles behind. As far as they knew, they had managed to escape detection by the Americans until they arrived in the Sargasso Sea. The biggest drama was a crew member falling ill with appendicitis. The ship’s doctor operated on him on the mess table in the wardroom. Since it was impossible to wield a scalpel accurately with the vessel pitching about on the surface, they conducted the operation fully submerged, cutting their speed to 3 knots and losing a day. The operation was successful.

Andreev kept up a steady commentary on his own state of mind and conditions on board ship in his rambling letter to his beloved Sofia. He was alternately awed by the power and beauty of the ocean and struggling with physical discomfort. “How magnificent the ocean is when it’s angry. It’s all white. I have seen bigger storms, but never anything more beautiful than this,” he told Sofia, as the submarine headed across the Atlantic through gale-force winds. “The waves, what waves! They rise like mountain ridges, seemingly stretching on without end. Our vessel looks like a tiny bug next to them.” After dusk fell, the ocean “became terrifying and menacing, and the beauty vanished. All that was left was the dismal blackness and the sensation that anything might happen at any minute.”

When they reached the Sargasso, the sea turned “absolutely calm,” the color of the water “something between navy blue and purple.” But conditions on board ship deteriorated. The temperature in the coolest parts of the sub was at least 100 degrees. “The heat’s driving us crazy. The humidity has gone way up. It’s getting harder and harder to breathe…. Everyone’s agreed that they would rather have frost and snowstorms.” Andreev felt as if his head was about to “burst from the stuffy air.” Sailors fainted from overheating. Carbon dioxide levels were dangerously high. Men who were not on duty would gather in the coolest section of the boat and “sit immobile, staring at a single spot.”

There was not enough fresh water to go around, so the ration was cut to half a pint per crew member per day. Fortunately, there were plentiful supplies of a syrupy fruit compote, which the men drank for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The temperature in the freezer rose to 46 degrees. As the officer in charge of the galley, Andreev ordered an increase in the meat ration, as the meat was all going bad. But hardly anyone felt like eating. Many crew members lost a third of their body weight. The captain accused Andreev of making the food go bad on purpose. “I have become an enemy of the people,” Andreev wrote. “There was a big row and I feel very badly about it. The heat’s been getting to us.”