Category: Cold War

The Daily Cold: June 2

1969

  • June 2: The fleet attack submarine USS Sea Leopard (SS-483) was underway on Cold War operations. According to official Navy histories, Sea Leopard “deployed on a special operation to the North Atlantic” on 2 June 1969. She returned to Norfolk on 15 August and then entered the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in January 1970 for overhaul.
Sea Leopard (SS-483) starboard view underway, 8 June 1970 leaving Philadelphia Naval Shipyard after entering a six-month overhaul. (NAVSOURCE

1971

The Seawolf (SSN-575) is about to received her new “Special Projects” hull section at Mare Island on 2 June 1971. She is in dry dock #4. (NAVSOURCE)

USS Seawolf (SSN-575) in drydock at Mare Island on 2 June 1971. The nuclear-powered Seawolf received a new “special projects” hull section on this date.

  • June 2: The nuclear submarine USS Seawolf (SSN-575) underwent a major conversion at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. On that day she received a new “special projects” hull section, as documented by U.S. Navy photographs and archives.

1973

  • June 2: The new Sturgeon-class submarine USS L. Mendel Rivers (SSN-686) was launched at Newport News Shipbuilding. The launch ceremony was sponsored by Congressman Rivers’s daughters Ravenel and Eastman.
    L. Mendel Rivers would later be commissioned into service in late 1974.

Sources: Official Naval archives and photo collections including the Naval History and Heritage Command (DANFS) and contemporary museum and media reports.

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Jack Daniels Old No. 7 Black Label Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey

In the waning days of May 1959, as Cold War tensions simmered just beneath the waves of the North Atlantic, a diesel-powered submarine from the United States Navy quietly made history. The USS Grenadier, a Tench-class submarine commissioned after the Second World War and still active in the early nuclear age, was patrolling a particularly sensitive patch of ocean near the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap. This was no ordinary patrol. Intelligence analysts had begun to suspect that the Soviets were pushing their submarine forces westward, probing closer to NATO territory than ever before. For Admiral Jerauld Wright, the Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, it was a moment of opportunity wrapped in paranoia. He had issued an informal challenge to his undersea commanders: the first one to produce hard evidence of a Soviet submarine prowling the Atlantic would earn a case of Jack Daniels.

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Stickleback

She was born in the final stretch of World War II, commissioned in March 1945 at Mare Island. Like many boats of her generation, she came too late to fire a shot in anger, but the USS Stickleback (SS-415) still made her presence known. She served with quiet distinction in the Pacific, patrolling the waters between Japan and Korea, offering aid to shipwrecked Japanese survivors in the war’s waning days, and returning home in time to parade in Admiral Halsey’s victory fleet. Then she went to sleep in the reserve fleet, waiting, like many others, for a second act.

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