Middleton's The Ultimate Naval Weapon notes that the World War II fleet boat named the USS Gudgeon (SS-21 1) also had a major success: it was credited with the first American kill of a Japanese U-boat.
The Soviets' August 26, 1957, announcement of their first successful intercontinental ballistic missile test is mentioned in "Soviet Scientific and Technical Developments, 1957," ONI Review (May 1958): 214. It also is discussed in Peter Pringle and William Arkin, SLOP: The Secret U.S. Plan for Nuclear War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983).
A series of Navy press releases about the Gudgeon's trip to circumnavigate the globe and take part in Eisenhower's "People to People" program are in the file on the Gudgeon at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park in Honolulu.
One of the young officers on the USS Wahoo when it was caught near a Soviet beach in 1958 was William J. Crowe Jr., who rose to become an admiral and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. He described the Wahoo's perilous encounter with the Soviets in his memoir The Line of Fire: From Washington to the Gulf, the Politics and Battles of the New Military (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).
Russian military officials now say there were several reasons they showed greater restraint in dealing with spy subs than spy planes. Soviet warships dropped low-capacity "drill bombs" instead of full depth charges, officials told our researcher Alexander Mozgovoy, in case American subs like the Gudgeon had made navigational errors and found themselves in Soviet territory accidentally. The Russian officials also said that the smaller, grenadelike charges were used in keeping with their regulations for warning foreign submarines encroaching upon their territorial waters, rules that included this method of signaling them to leave.
Some of the hysteria about the possibility that Soviet subs were coming close to American shores in the late 1950s was fueled by U.S. Representative Carl Durham, a Democrat from North Carolina who chaired a joint House-Senate committee on atomic energy. He was quoted in an Associated Press dispatch on April 14, 1958, as saying that 184 Russian submarines had been sighted off the U.S. Atlantic coast in 1957 alone. Mrs. Gilkinson's sharp eye for foreign submarines was reported in the "Monthly Box Score of Submarine Contacts," ONI Review (January 1961): 38. The man from Texas was mentioned in "Monthly Box Score of Submarine Contacts," ONI Review (January 1962): 27.
In describing the expansion of SOSUS in this and subsequent chapters, we drew on an excellent declassified history of many of the Navy's antisubmarine warfare programs, "Sea-Based Airborne Antisubmarine Warfare 1940–1977," vols. 1–3, prepared by a Navy consultant, R. E Cross Associates, Ltd., Alexandria, Virginia, in 1978. It is available at the Operational Archives Branch of the Naval Historical Center.
Admiral Jerauld Wright's proclamation, the case of whiskey he offered as a prize, and the USS Grenadier's surfacing of the Soviet Zulu are described in "The Wright Stuff," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (December 1984): 74–76. The article was written by retired Navy Captain Theodore E. "Ted" Davis, who was the Grenadier's captain during the chase. In an interview, Davis said he saved one bottle of Jack Daniels as a souvenir and divided the rest among his crew. He kept the sealed bottle on a shelf in his study until a housekeeper helped herself to a taste one day in the late 1970s. Not long after that, retired Navy Captain William L. "Bo" Bohannan, who had been the Grenadier's engineer, came to visit. Recalled Davis, "I said, `Well, now that it's open, we may as well drink the whole damn thing.' So we sat down and drank it all."
The July 1959 issue of the ONI Review also discussed the Grenadier's feat and its importance in confirming the intelligence reports that some Zulus had been converted to carry missiles. This article, "Soviet Submarine Surfaced by U.S. Forces Off Iceland," (292–295), was accompanied by four photographs of the Zulu taken by the Grenadier. The article also noted that as soon as the Zulu surfaced, crew members scurried up onto the deck to paint over the sub's identifying number (82) and rig a canvas over the top rear of the sail. Naval Intelligence suspected that this part of the sail housed two vertical missile-launching tubes, and the article said that an analysis of the photographs indicated that the tubes "may be larger than previously estimated," meaning that the missiles also may have been slightly larger than the United States had expected.
The diary of George B. Kistiakowsky was published as A Scientist at the White House: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Science and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). The entry we quote (p. 153) describes a special intelligence briefing that Kistiakowsky received on November 12, 1959.
The dates of all forty-one deterrent patrols made by Regulus missile subs from September 1959 through July 1964 are listed in the July 1997 issue of the Submarine Review, an excellent quarterly published by the Naval Submarine League, a nonprofit group made up of current and former submariners and other people who support the submarine force. The four diesel subs that carried the guided missiles (the `G' in the standard submarine number designations stands for `guided') were the USS Grayback (SSG-574), the USS Tunny (SSG-282), the USS Growler (SSG-577), and the USS Barbero (SSG-317). One nuclearpowered sub, the USS Halibut (SSGN-587), made seven Regulus patrols from February 1961 through July 1964. Retired Navy Commander Herbert E. Tibbets, who served on the USS Growler, showed us the S-M-F pin designed for members of the "Northern Pacific Yacht Club."
In describing the pervasive safety problems with Soviet nuclear subs, we drew on research by Mozgovoy, our Russian stringer; Joshua Handler, a former research coordinator for Greenpeace, the international environmental group; and a large body of articles that have appeared in the Russian press since the end of the cold war. We recount the reactor accident on the Hiroshima and other similar incidents more fully in Appendix B.
The scrambling of the early Polaris subs during the Cuban Missile Crisis was described to us in interviews with retired Vice Admiral Philip A. Beshany and other former submarine officers. President Kennedy's fears about encountering Soviet subs early in the crisis were quoted by his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, in his book Thirteen Days (New York: Signet Books, 1969), p. 70. For information about the U.S. Navy's surfacing of Soviet diesel subs during the crisis, we drew on "Cordon of Steeclass="underline" The U.S. Navy and the Cuban Missile Crisis" by Curtis A. Utz, a historian at the Naval Historical Center's Contemporary History Branch. His 48-page study was published by the Naval Historical Center in 1993 as the first in a series of reports on "The U.S. Navy in the Modern World."
Main interviews: John P. Craven; former submarine, Naval Intelligence, and Naval Security Group officials; former crew members of the USS Halibut.
Government documents, articles, books, and other sources: In describing the Navy's general lack of enthusiasm for deep-sea exploration and how that attitude changed after the Thresher's sinking, we drew on several news and magazine articles. The June 1964 issue of National Geographic was particularly intriguing, with articles such as "Thresher: Lesson and Challenge" by James H. Wakelin Jr., and "Tomorrow on the Deep Frontier" by Edwin A. Link. We also relied on two books. One, Mud, Muscle, and Miracles: Marine Salvage in the United States Navy (Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center/Naval Sea Systems Command, 1990), was written by Captain C. A. Bartholomew, a top Navy salvage engineer. The other, The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), was written by William J. Broad, a science reporter for the New York Times.