Notwithstanding the US Navy’s loudly voiced and plaintively expressed concerns, the Kennedy Administration initially reacted with a moderation that infuriated CINCLANT, ordering that the four Soviet submarines were not to be attacked. However, the USN was directed to intercept, signal and compel the Foxtrots to surface, if necessary, by harassing them with hand grenades and practice depth charges. Aware of the perils involved — even in this compromise with CINCLANT — to lessen the possibility of an incident the Pentagon sent Moscow a Submarine Surfacing and Identification Procedures message, so that the Soviets could inform the captains of the Foxtrots that they were not under attack.
When he was interrogated several months later the Captain of the B-36 denied any knowledge of ever receiving this message. Most contemporary historians now assume that the contents of the USN’s communication — if it was ever transmitted, a moot point because the Pentagon has never claimed that the Kremlin formally acknowledged its receipt — was not passed on to the four Foxtrots by the Soviet High Command.
That this critical message was apparently lost in translation is key to comprehending what followed because it transformed what might, in other circumstances have been a tense comedy of errors, into a hemisphere-wide catastrophe. This oversight, or perhaps, the Soviet High Command’s deliberate decision not to be intimidated by the US Navy, was further compounded and confounded on 23rd October. It was on this date that the merchant ships carrying the final consignment of missiles and weaponry to Cuba were turned around by Moscow.
Logically, this implied that the four Foxtrots should have been recalled. However, if the evidence of the Captain of the B-36 is to be trusted, it seems that the four Foxtrots were not notified of this change of plan, nor was their mission in any way modified. One is tempted to suspect that the Soviet High Command in the heat of the moment, had forgotten — like a drunken chess player — that they’d already placed four hostages to fortune in desperately exposed and isolated positions on the global geopolitical board. In any event after 23rd October the four Foxtrots found themselves in a dire situation.
Remember, although the four submarines were relatively newly constructed they were essentially old-fashioned World War II era vessels. Their underwater endurance was limited and they were obliged to spend a large amount of time cruising on the surface in order to recharge their electric batteries. Consequently, after three weeks at sea in the North Atlantic their crews were battered and exhausted, the vessels stank with oil and rotting food, sweat and all the other rank bad odours with which submariners of the pre-nuclear propulsion age became of necessity intimately familiar. Not for nothing did the fraternity of submariners, irrespective of political persuasion or allegiance the world over, ruefully refer to their vessels as ‘pig boats’. Worse, because the Foxtrots had been constantly shadowed and actively harassed by the US Navy every day since leaving Murmansk life onboard the submarines had become progressively more miserable, stressful and dangerous. Moreover, although the vessels had been able to eavesdrop on American radio stations during the early parts of their voyages they had received virtually no news from Moscow, and by the third week of Operation Anadyr, they were spending so much time submerged attempting to evade American destroyers that their captains were, effectively, out of contact with the Soviet High Command and in possession of no accurate up to date knowledge of world events.
On Friday 26th October, B-59 was cornered by elements of the USS Randolph’s hunting group of eleven destroyers north east of Cuba. Unable to shake off her pursuers and with his electrical batteries nearly exhausted, Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky took his vessel to the bottom where he waited, while two destroyers directed by the USS Beale, dropped small, hand grenade size practice charges all around him. By Saturday 27th October nobody onboard the B-59 had slept for forty-eight hours, the air was fouled and all over the boat systems were breaking down. Suffering from the first stages of carbon monoxide poisoning, frightened, humiliated and desperate, Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky did exactly what he’d been trained to do in time of war. In the circumstances it is easy to understand — but to in no way mitigate — Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky’s actions.
Up on the surface the men of the USS Beale, an aging Second World War vintage Fletcher class destroyer recently refitted with state of the art underwater detection sonar and submarine-killing weaponry, had absolutely no inkling that they’d driven their quarry too far. Why should they have had any such inkling? They were not at war. They were going about what they construed to be their lawful business in what, basically, they regarded as an American ocean. They had been ordered not to attack the trespassing submarine and they assumed their foe knew as much. They weren’t attacking the grounded Foxtrot with guided anti-submarine torpedoes or with patterns of precisely targeted half-ton high explosive depth charges, they were just dropping practice munitions — with puny six ounce bursting charges incapable of harming a submarine’s pressure casing — in the water in her general vicinity. They weren’t even trying to hit the submerged submarine!
The men on the USS Beale had been told that the other three Foxtrots had been ‘rounded up’ without incident and they had every reason to expect — sooner or later — that the B-59 would meekly surface, identify herself and skulk off back to Murmansk with her sisters.
We now know that this did not happen.
We will never know the exact chain of cause and effect that led to Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky’s fateful decision. However, we can reconstruct in general terms what must have happened in those last few minutes.
On the surface the USS Beale went about her business, quartering the sea, taking her turn dropping practice charges around the grounded Soviet submarine. Nearby, two of her sisters had locked their sonar arrays on the trapped Foxtrot. It was a waiting game. B-59 had no alternative but to surface.
Had the hunters had a sounder grasp of the mentality and the command doctrine of their quarry, they might have adopted a less sanguine and rather more measured approach to the hunt. Unfortunately, neither of these things were well understood at the time by the men in the Pentagon, or in the White House, and nobody in the US Navy was aware that the Foxtrots which they had been mercilessly harrying were each armed with a single 13.7 kiloton nuclear-tipped torpedo.