Tag: Silent Service history

41 Cold War Sentinels – USS Benjamin Franklin SSBN-640

She was built to disappear.

Not in the romantic sense, not like a magician’s flourish or a ship slipping into fog for the sake of poetry, but in the colder, more disciplined sense of Cold War necessity. USS Benjamin Franklin was designed to vanish into the acoustic shadows of the ocean, to become a rumor instead of a presence, a probability instead of a target. That was the deal struck between the Navy and history in the early 1960s. If the submarine could not be found, then war itself might be kept at bay.

Continue reading “41 Cold War Sentinels – USS Benjamin Franklin SSBN-640” →
0

The Water Wolf – USS Muskallunge at Camranh Bay

The USS Muskallunge (SS-262) was one of the U.S. Navy’s steel hunters, a Gato-class submarine that prowled the Pacific during the Second World War. Her name, chosen in honor of the fierce fish that lurks in the lakes and rivers of North America, could not have been more fitting. Fishermen know the muskie as the “fish of ten thousand casts,” a prize hard to land and nearly impossible to forget. For the crew of Muskallunge, the boat became their own elusive prize, tested in battle, hounded by escorts, and remembered today as one of the submarines that carried the Silent Service into the heart of the Pacific war.

Continue reading “The Water Wolf – USS Muskallunge at Camranh Bay” →
0

Getting Tight

At a quiet submarine base in the Pacific in July 1945, the war still raged, but the mood had shifted. The end was near, and with it came time for reflection. Two veteran submariners sat nursing beers, their bodies young but their eyes older than they had any right to be. One of them was Chief Machinist Ray E. Cain, better known throughout the Silent Service as “Stinky.” His grin told half the story. His words, printed in the Winchester Sun that summer, told the rest.

“We’re not an ice cream navy,” he said, raising his glass. “We want a drink when we can get it.”

Continue reading “Getting Tight” →
0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑