Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

Father used to say that the place for a young officer was in a big ship; so upon graduation from Annapolis, I applied for the ten thousand ton cruiser Chester. I had been aboard about two months when the war in Europe broke out. Because of a surname beginning early in the alphabet I found myself transferred to the Lea, destroyer number 118.

The Lea was tiny, one-tenth the displacement of the Chester, and she had been “permanently” retired to mothballs some years before. The brass plate on her varnished wooden mast revealed her age as being the same as my own. There were only five officers in the Lea, and I was the most junior. Later on, when the “Third” was transferred, I automatically rose to the high eminence of Fourth, but this, under the circumstances, had little effect on my unofficial title of “George.”

“George,” the traditional name of the most junior officer on board, always served as the ship’s commissary officer, communications officer, ship’s service officer, torpedo officer, gunnery officer, and first lieutenant. In addition, I had to insert a three-year stack of corrections into the ship’s allotment of classified books and pamphlets—a horrendous job—was in charge of the landing party (luckily it seldom got an opportunity to go ashore), stood two four-hour watches a day on the bridge while under way, and while in port stood a twenty-four-hour “day’s duty” every third day (except for a short period when I had the duty every other day).

There was also a Destroyer Officers Qualification Course of some twenty lengthy assignments, which I was required to complete within a year’s time; and the Bureau of Navigation, evidently afraid that Ensigns might neglect their leisure time reading, had decided that we should submit a two thousand word book report each month.

The ship also had a skipper, an engineer, and an executive officer, but I never had time to discover what any of them did.

After two years on the Lea, in September, 1941, a message arrived directing me to submarine school in New London for instruction in submarine duty. By this time, I loved that slender four-stacked race horse of a destroyer, and didn’t want to leave; but my skipper, an old submariner himself, would not send the protest I drafted, so off I went.

The course of instruction at the submarine school, originally six months long, had been curtailed to three by the war emergency, and on December 20, 1941,1 was one of fifty-one graduates who heard the officer in charge of the school deliver a graduation address. In the course of it he said, “Many of you will command your own ships before this war is over.”

None of us believed we could achieve such greatness, but a little later we all noted the other side of the coin, when the first of our group went to eternity in the shattered submarine to which he had reported only a couple of weeks before.

My first submarine was USS Trigger (SS237), then under construction at the Navy Yard, Mare Island, California. During my two years on the Lea, I had finally bequeathed the “George” spot to someone else, but in the Trigger I found myself with that familiar title again. As before, I was greeted by a huge stack of uncorrected confidential and secret publications. The similarity, however, ended here; for Trigger, a first-line ship of war, was designed to operate in an entirely new and unfamiliar medium. The amount of highly technical equipment crammed into her sturdy hull amazed me.

I reported to Trigger on New Year’s Day, 1942, but it wasn’t until May that we arrived at Pearl Harbor. No one in Trigger had ever heard a shot fired in anger. We were all new, green as grass—even the skipper. A feeling of trepidation crept over us as we approached our recently desecrated Pacific bastion.

A short leave during an overhaul period in mid-1943 had great personal significance. I saw Father for the last time, I met Ingrid Schenck, and when I returned to Trigger I became second-in-command.

When I was detached, a year later, Dad had been gone six months and Trigger, now top-ranking submarine in the force, had less than a year to live. With orders to report to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as Executive Officer of the not-yet-launched submarine Tirante, I used authorized delay time to take a ten-day honeymoon with the girl I had courted during three hectic weeks of leave the year before.