Luxury cruise as USS Nautilus submariners dived beneath the North Pole
FIVE months before the USS Nautilus dived under the North Pole in July 1958, an Australian explorer predicted the event.
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FIVE months before nuclear submarine USS Nautilus dived beneath the North Pole in July 1958, Australian Arctic explorer Hubert Wilkins confidently predicted the event.
Wilkins, in Sydney after his ninth Antarctic voyage, also forecast that huge nuclear-powered submarines “bigger than aircraft carriers” would eventually explore the Antarctic.
Then a geographer with the US Army Research and Engineering Command, he said submarines could travel beneath the North Pole, but doubted it was then possible to get near the South Pole in a submarine because of the great thickness of ice.
Wilkins may also have known of plans to send the Nautilus, under the command of World War II veteran William Anderson, to dive under Arctic ice. Anderson, with 111 officers and crew and four civilian scientists, left Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on July 23, 1958, on Operation Sunshine. Their destination was Point Barrow, Alaska, where Anderson would send
the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, under ice for almost 3000km.
Wilkins had made a similar attempt in another Nautilus submarine, a retired US Navy vessel purchased for $1. Carrying 25 crew members. Wilkins’ Nautilus, named for Captain Nemo’s fictional submarine in Jules Verne’s 1870 science fiction novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, sailed from Bergen, Norway, on August 5, 1931. Repeatedly delayed by storms and mechanical problems, the crew encountered their first ice floe on August 19. As mechanical failings continued, Wilkins was persuaded to abandon Arctic waters after a few days.
America’s atomic-powered Nautilus was authorised in 1951, to launch in January 1954. Nuclear propulsion allowed the vessel to remain submerged much longer than diesel-electric submarines, and the Nautilus was also much larger, at 97m long. It could remain submerged for almost unlimited periods, as its atomic engine needed no air and only a small quantity of nuclear fuel. Its uranium-powered nuclear reactor produced steam to drive propulsion turbines, giving the Nautilus underwater speeds of more than 20 knots.
Anderson, also a Korean War veteran, was head of the US submarine school tactical department and later assigned to the Atomic Energy Commission reactor development division in Washington. He became an aide to Admiral Hyman Rickover, known as father of the US nuclear Navy, and took command of the Nautilus on June 19, 1957.
Anderson suggested a submerged voyage beneath the North Pole to test the Nautilus, but a first attempt in 1957 failed when ice blocked the mission.
A magazine article in September 1958 revealed the Nautilus was also equipped with a jukebox and Coca-Cola machine; travelled at an internal temperature of 22C, and had sun lamps if crew became claustrophobic.
The Nautilus had arrived at Pearl Harbor on June 28 to wait for better ice conditions, and set out towards the North Pole for a second time on July 23. The vessel submerged in the Barrow Sea Valley off Alaska on August 1.
Anderson admitted that navigating under the ice, sometimes 122m below it, was unpredictable, and crew members had plotted every hole in the ice in case of emergency.
As the Nautilus inched below the pole, the crew crowded into its attack centre where Anderson waited, holding a microphone. He counted down the final minute, then said: “Sunday, 3 August 1958; 2315 Eastern Daylight Saving Time. For the US and the US Navy: the North Pole,” then asked for a moment of silence. From the North Pole the Nautilus continued on, to surface northeast of Greenland after 96 hours and 2945km under ice.
President Dwight Eisenhower awarded Anderson, who in 1965 was elected to Congress as a Democrat for Tennessee, with the Legion of Merit for the successful mission.
Anderson, who died in 2007, again made headlines in 1970, when he described conditions at the South Vietnamese Con Son island prison as “atrocious” after witnessing political prisoners being held in “tiger cages” of 1m by 3m during an unofficial tour. In 1971 he criticised FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for inflaming “an outrageous pattern of fear and repression” after Hoover accused two prominent Vietnam War opponents of plotting to kidnap a government official and blow up electrical systems at Washington.
The Nautilus had covered almost 800,000km when it was decommissioned on March 3, 1980. In 1986 it was added to the Submarine Force Museum in Connecticut.
Originally published as Luxury cruise as USS Nautilus submariners dived beneath the North Pole
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