Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

“Submarine to starboard,” yelled the spotter on the tracker plane. The sub was heading north, attempting to hide behind a squall line. Several men were visible in the tower.

By the time the S2F came round for a second pass, the Soviet sailors had disappeared and the decks of the Foxtrot were underwater. On the third pass, the sub was fully submerged. The Americans dropped practice depth charges to signal the Soviet sub to surface and identify itself. American helicopter pilots maintained sonar contact with the sub, and could hear the clanking of heavy machinery and the suction noise caused by a propeller. One pilot even heard the slamming of hatches from the area of the underwater explosion “leaving no doubt that we had a submarine contact.” But B-59 remained below water.

Three American destroyers arrived on the scene, circling the area where the Foxtrot was lurking. “Dropped five hand grenades as challenge to submarine for identification,” recorded the logbook of the USS Beale at 5:59 p.m. “No response. Challenged submarine on radar. No response.” The USS Cony dropped another set of five practice depth charges half an hour later.

The purpose of the signals had been described in a Pentagon message transmitted to the Soviet government via the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Wednesday. “Submerged submarines, on hearing this signal, should surface on easterly course.” Both Kennedy and McNamara assumed that the Soviet submarine captains had been informed about the new procedures and understood the meaning of the signals.

They were mistaken. The Soviet government never acknowledged receipt of the message about the underwater signals, and never relayed the contents to the commanders of the four Foxtrots.

While the American destroyers dropped hand grenades into the Sargasso Sea, a thousand miles away in Washington, Maxwell Taylor briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the results of the afternoon ExComm session. “The president has been seized by the idea of trading Turkish missiles for Cuban missiles,” he reported. “He seems to be the only one in favor of it. He has a feeling that time is running out.”

The other chiefs were suspicious of their chairman. They felt he was too “political,” too close to the administration. Bobby Kennedy had even named one of his many children after the former D-Day paratroop hero. The president respected him as a soldier-scholar, very different from the no-nonsense military type personified by Curtis LeMay. Slightly deaf in one ear from an explosion, Taylor spoke Japanese, German, Spanish, and French. The word at the White House was that if you presented Max Taylor with a problem on the Middle East, “he would want to know how Xerxes had handled it.”

With his keen sense of history, Taylor was beginning to wonder whether there was a danger of getting “bogged down” in Cuba. He felt it was necessary to keep in mind the experience of “the British in the Boer war, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish, and our own experience with the North Koreans.” He was worried about the latest intelligence information suggesting a much larger Soviet troop presence than previously suspected. The American invasion plan, code-named Operations Plan 316, seemed “thin” to him.

The chairman had to straddle a delicate line between his loyalty to the president and his loyalty to his fellow chiefs. He shuttled back and forth between the two camps, conveying the views of the White House to the Pentagon, and vice versa. In the ExComm debates, he consistently spoke in favor of tough action against the Soviets, and had initially preferred air strikes to a blockade. But once the president made a decision, he implemented it loyally, and tried to explain the reasons behind Kennedy’s thinking to his fellow generals.

Taylor told the chiefs that he had passed on their unanimous recommendation for air strikes against the missile sites by Monday at the latest. “Then we got word of the U-2 loss.” By now, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Major Anderson had been shot down by a SAM missile. Electronic eavesdroppers on board the USS Oxford had intercepted a teletype message saying that the Cubans had recovered his body along with wreckage from his plane. The National Security Agency also possessed a couple of minutes of Soviet air defense tracking suggesting that the U-2 went down somewhere near Banes in eastern Cuba.

“Should we take out the SAM site?” the chairman wanted to know.

Some members of the ExComm, including Taylor himself, favored an immediate attack on one or more SAM sites in retaliation for the downing of the spy plane. The Pentagon had drawn up a plan, code-named FIRE HOSE, for attacks on three sites in the Havana area. But the other chiefs were opposed to strikes against individual SAM sites and “piecemeal” measures like the proposed drop of propaganda leaflets, which they dismissed as “militarily unsound” because it could lead to the pointless loss of the delivery plane. They preferred to wait another day and destroy all Soviet military installations in Cuba, beginning with the air defense system. The minimum acceptable response for the Joint Chiefs was the elimination of all the SAM sites, not just one or two.

“We would only expose ourselves to retaliation,” objected LeMay. “We have little to gain and a lot to lose.”

“I feel the same way,” agreed General Earle Wheeler, chief of staff of the Army. “Khrushchev may loose one of his missiles on us.”

Like the other submarine skippers, Valentin Savitsky was near the end of his tether. The U.S. Navy had been chasing his submarine for the last two days. His batteries were dangerously low. He had been unable to communicate with Moscow for more than twenty-four hours. He had missed a scheduled radio session that afternoon because American airplanes had appeared overhead and he had been forced to make an emergency dive. For all he knew, World War III might have broken out while he was underneath the waves.

The four-week journey had been physically and emotionally draining for the skipper of B-59. His vessel was not in quite as bad shape as that of his friend Nikolai Shumkov, which had lost two of its three diesel engines, but it was still plagued with mechanical problems. The ventilation system had broken down. The diesel coolers were blocked with salt, the rubber sealings were torn, and several electrical compressors were broken. Temperatures aboard ship ranged from 110-140 degrees. The presence of carbon dioxide was approaching critical levels and duty officers were fainting from a combination of heat and exhaustion. The men were falling “like dominoes.”

The hottest place in the ship was the engine room, next to the stern torpedo room. The noxious fumes from the three noisy diesels created an unbearably stuffy atmosphere. The electric batteries were housed in the adjoining compartment, together with the recharging equipment. Most of the crew had their bunks in the next compartment forward. The central part of the vessel was taken up by the command post, where the periscope was raised and lowered, a cubbyhole for the captain, and a radio room. The forward section consisted of the officers’ quarters and the bow torpedo room. Men who were not on duty often lay down alongside the torpedo tubes, as far as possible from the suffocating engine room. This was also where the nuclear torpedo was located.

A lieutenant commander was assigned full-time to look after the torpedo and service its 10-kiloton warhead. He even slept next to the shiny gray container. According to regulations, a nuclear torpedo could only be fired on receipt of a coded instruction from Moscow, unlike a conventional torpedo, which could be fired on the orders of the flotilla commander. In practice, however, there were no special locks on the weapon that blocked its unauthorized use. If the officer in charge of the torpedo and the captain of the submarine were in agreement, it was physically possible to launch it.