Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton

Submerged, the control room is one of the most important nerve centers of the ship, but while a submarine is on the surface there is very little going on. The seats in front of the diving stand were at the moment unoccupied; on diving, the two lookouts on the bridge would come down below and take over the two stations. The Officer of the Deck is the last man down; he personally shuts the bridge hatch and then swings below to take his station as Diving Officer. Up to now this would have been Bob Brodie, but as he was being relieved, Jim Hay would be the “Diving Officer of the Watch.” I saw with approval, however, that Tom Thamm, the ship’s official Diving Officer, was still on hand, sitting on the cushioned top of a tool box located just in front of the ship’s fathometer. Apparently, he had finished his compensation calculations, for the circular slide rule he had devised for this purpose was nowhere to be seen.

Thamm rose to his feet, “Afternoon, Captain,” he said. “How is it on the bridge?”

“Cold and windy.”

“How soon do you think we’ll be diving?” he asked.

“A couple of hours,” I said. “It’s a pretty long run out here you know—have you got your trim in yet?”

Tom shook his head. “It’s still going in, sir. We’ll have it in about fifteen minutes more. It takes a while to compensate this big boat.”

“Ship.”

“Sorry, sir. ‘This ship,’ I mean.” Tom grinned at me.

Submarines have been called boats ever since 1900 when our Navy’s first submarine, USS Holland, was indeed a “boat”—only fifty-four feet long, twenty-feet shorter than Triton’s sail. Since then, the term has been affectionately perpetuated, despite great changes in the craft themselves. Even before World War II, however, submarines were for various purposes officially designated as “major war vessels,” and since that time their significance and importance have increased still further. Triton, with the size and horsepower of a cruiser, with unmatched operational versatility, speed, and endurance, is far more than a boat. With bigger craft sliding down the ways, Rear Admiral Warder, the “Fearless Freddie” of World War II renown and Admiral Daspit’s predecessor as ComSubLant, had directed submariners henceforth to refer to their boats as ships. But old habits die hard, and no one in the Triton was so constant an offender as I. This was the reason for Tom’s grin.

“If we’re not going to dive for two hours, Captain, I’d like to secure here as soon as we get the compensation in. I’ll be back about”—Tom looked at his wrist watch—”1700.”

“That will be plenty of time, Tom,” I said. “Will wants to dive at about thirty-five fathom curve, and even at this speed we won’t be there until some time after five o’clock.”

The continental shelf on the eastern seaboard runs for many miles out to sea. The water is actually much deeper in parts of Long Island and Block Island sounds. We had arbitrarily picked thirty-five fathoms as the depth we wanted under us before diving; here, in the open sea, there would be a long surface run before the continental shelf dropped off to that extent.

Triton’s control room is really two spaces. Her periscopes and some of her radar masts are so long that when retracted they project into the hull of the ship nearly to the keel. Consequently, the control room is bisected in the middle by the periscope and radar mast wells. The Diving Station takes over most of the port side; the fire control gear and sonar compartment are located to starboard, where there is also room for passage fore and aft. Gray boxes containing a great amount of complex equipment are mounted on the center structure, thus making it a solid mass several feet thick.

Flush against the port side of the ship, but with a bulk that leaves barely enough room between its face and the periscope well structure for a crew member to man it, is the Ballast Control Panel, looking rather like a large electronic instrument console, which is exactly what it is. The face of this BCP is covered with dials and gauges; and a line of switches, contrived so that each knob has a different shape, borders its face. One of the requirements of the Chief Petty Officer in charge of the control room, whose post is a built-in swivel chair facing the BCP, is that he be able to distinguish all the operating switches blindfolded.

A prominent section of the Ballast Control Panel is devoted to the Hull Opening Indicator system, by which the condition of the crucial valves and hatches in the ship, whether open or closed, can be told at a glance. In the old days, this was done with red and green lights and the Chiefs customary report on diving was “Green Board.” In the war it was found, however, that wearing red goggles to preserve night vision made it impossible to distinguish between red and green. In the new system, all the lights are red; a circle represents open and a straight bar means closed. And “Green Board” is now reported as “Straight Board.”