USS Gudgeon (SS 567)

  "It is easy to rule using incompetent people, but it's much more difficult to have a functional society with incompetent people in charge.  It all depends on what your priorities are.  The West is run by incompetent, vain, narcissistic, entitled, greedy, deviant clowns.  A society pervaded by sociopaths from top to bottom is doomed to implode" - Unknown commenter

 It's OK to talk about this, since there was a newspaper article written about it in a major newspaper - the Chicago Tribune on January 6, 1991.  Otherwise I'd identify this as scuttlebutt - Navy slang for poorly passed down tribal knowledge, or rumor.   But this is something that actually happened, and it's been reported previously, so we can safely discuss it on the blog today.

USS Gudgeon (SS 567) was a Tang Class submarine, launched in June 1952 and commissioned in November 1952.  Tang Class submarines were not nuclear powered, but they were by far the best diesel-electric boats of their era.  Before nuclear power, submarines were highly dependent on snorkeling to recharge the ship's storage batteries - which plays into this story.

Photo of USS Gudgeon courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command.

Clipped from the linked Chicago Tribune Article:

In August 1957, the USS Gudgeon, a diesel submarine, was poking around the entrance to the Soviets` largest naval base on the Pacific, Vladivostok. Its goal was typical for a U.S. spy sub of that era: to monitor Soviet ship movements though its periscope and intercept their radio communications.

Several crew members recall that the Gudgeon had staked out a position in relatively shallow water. It may have been just outside the 3-mile territorial limit recognized by the United States, they said, but it clearly was well inside the 12-mile limit that the Soviets claimed.

Suddenly, an alert rang out on Soviet radio channels, and as many as eight destroyers began steaming toward the area where the Gudgeon was hiding. The Gudgeon turned-its 90 officers and enlisted men rushing to take battle stations and load torpedoes into its eight tubes-and sprinted for the open sea, with the bigger, faster Soviet surface vessels in avid pursuit.

As the sub approached, or just after it sped past the imaginary 12-mile line, its skipper, Norman B. ''Buzz'' Bessac, a 34-year-old lieutenant commander, ordered the boat brought to a full stop, hoping it could ''go quiet and lose'' its pursuers, crew members said.

But the ploy failed. As the Gudgeon tried to hide below perhaps 200 feet of water, Bessac instructed his men to get ready for what seemed likely to be a long, frightening and lonely siege, the crew members said.

When a diesel submarine is forced to stay underwater, it depends entirely on power from its electric battery previously charged by the diesel to circulate air, operate interior lights, heat food and provide bursts of speed for a possible getaway, and life aboard becomes much more precarious.

The snorkel sucks in air needed to operate the boat`s diesel engines and to refresh the air that its crew breathes. Diesel subs normally snorkel every night.

In the Gudgeon`s case, the menacing presence of the Soviet destroyers meant that the sub would be unable to go up to periscope depth-about 60 feet below the surface-and snorkel that night. The boat also could not send any kind of plea for help without rising enough to pierce the surface with its radio antenna.

So Bessac ordered that every precaution be taken to preserve electricity and air, the crew members said.

Fans and blowers that pushed air around the submarine were turned off. Lights were trimmed to a dim, candle-like glow. Crystals of lithium hydroxide- a chemical that absorbs the carbon dioxide exhaled by the crew-were sprinkled on cloth mattress covers laid out in various compartments.

Bessac instructed all non-essential crew members to stay in their bunks. Despite the rising tension, the Gudgeon`s officers forbade cigarette smoking, which gives off carbon monoxide.

As the holddown stretched through that night, the whole next day and well into a second night, the sub`s air got so thick and foul that many of the men developed severe headaches.

Every hour or two, one of the destroyers would bounce active sonar beams off the Gudgeon`s 290-foot-long hull, creating chilling metallic ''pings''

that resounded inside the sub and in the minds of its crew members. The destroyer then would steam over the top of the submarine and drop a wave of depth charges that detonated above or around it.

''They would circle, and one of them would make a run and drop'' its depth charges, one Gudgeon crew member said. ''Then they`d go back out and pick us up again (on sonar), and somebody else would come in and make a run.'' One crew member said the Gudgeon`s officers decided after the first waves of explosions failed to cause serious damage that the destroyers probably had dropped small, practice-sized depth charges similar to hand grenades instead of full-power charges like those that sank scores of submarines in World War II.

The grenade-like charges make a terrifying noise that splinters the water like a jackhammer ripping through concrete, but they are unlikely to cause much damage to the thick steel hull of a submarine.

Still, he said, ''The thing you worry about when they drop the damn things is that the next one`s going to be a real one.''

Several times, the Gudgeon started to creep ahead deep under the water in an attempt to wriggle free. But each time, the crew members said, the destroyers peppered its hull with sonar pings-and laid another string of the grenade-like charges in its path.

At one point, the Gudgeon tried to elude the gantlet of destroyers by shooting a noise-making decoy out of its garbage ejection tube in one direction while it moved in another, one crew member said. Another time, he said, the sub went below its ''test depth'' of 700 feet or so-the maximum depth at which its manufacturer certified it could withstand deep-sea pressures-in a vain attempt to escape the reach of the Soviets` sonar.

Finally, after more than 30 hours under Soviet control, the sub`s battery had gotten so weak, and its air so horrid, a new fear took hold among its crew: If the Gudgeon had to surface in the midst of the destroyers, would the Soviets try to board it and capture the crew?

With this possibility in mind, some of the officers and intelligence operatives on board hastily destroyed a number of classified documents, one crew member recalled.

But there was a hopeful sign: During the holddown, a few of the Soviet destroyers had broken off from the pack and sailed back toward the port.

So Bessac, who had decided he would fight rather than allow the sub to be boarded, tried one last stratagem, crew members said.

He ordered the crew in the control room to bring the sub to periscope depth, where it quickly raised its radio antenna and shot off a message to U.S. 7th Fleet headquarters in Japan asking for assistance.

The sub also stuck up its snorkel mast to try to gulp some fresh air. But a Soviet vessel raced straight toward the pipe, as if to ram it, and ''drove us back under,'' one of the Gudgeon crew members said.

At this point, Bessac had no choice but to risk bringing the Gudgeon fully to the surface.

As the sub rose slowly through the water, Bessac made sure that the doors to its torpedo tubes were open-the last action needed to ensure that the torpedoes could be fired at the push of a button, crew members said.

After the sub broke the surface, Bessac clambered up the ladder inside the sub`s sail and onto the bridge, where he instructed a signalman to point a small floodlight at one of the Soviet ships out in the night and blink a message in Morse code. The staccato light beams identified the Gudgeon as a U.S. Navy warship and asserted its right to be in what its crew believed were international waters.

A few minutes later, the Soviets flashed back a message that was comforting-though somewhat gloating-in its simple statement of the obvious. These blinking lights identified the Gudgeon`s adversary as ''CCCP,'' an acronym of the Russian name for the Soviet Union, and suggested the sub head for home without delay.

The Soviet ships then parted their ring around the Gudgeon and allowed it to set sail. A few hours later, U.S. warplanes passed overhead and could see that the Gudgeon had survived the ordeal.

This is sadly a story that Hollywood will probably never tell.   Nothing heroic, just a bunch of scared men getting caught in someone else's house.  And next, being depth charged until all their options ran out, until they were forced to essentially surrender.  

This very noteworthy Cold War story merits just a single short paragraph on the ship's Wikipedia page.