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The backing up of the Queenfish
Underwater story no longer has to be kept under wraps
Alfred Scott McLaren tells a tale: ice above, ice below, and ice water in his veins.
“‘Don’t anybody move!’”
The year is 1970. The speaker is Alfred Scott McLaren, captain of the USS Queenfish, a nuclear submarine snaking along beneath the frozen surface of uncharted Siberian waters. The situation is that his boat is stuck in an ice cave. He can talk about this now with his brother-in-law — also your humble correspondent — after decades of keeping it under wraps.
Intelligence-gathering off Siberia in 1970? Yes: the Cold War was alive and well. (The Soviets, of course, knew nothing about the Queenfish squeezing between iceberg keels and a shallow sea floor.) But McLaren wanted to gather other sorts of intelligence as well. “Prior to taking command of Queenfish, when I was instructor at the Naval War College, I had thought of the idea of retracing the USS Nautilus’s 1958 transpolar Route and remeasuring ice thicknesses overhead — at the same times, and from the same positions as the Nautilus had charted 12 years earlier. Nautilus was the first submarine ever to surface at the North Pole. That achievement put the measurements part of its mission in the shade, but I saw the opportunity to compare the difference between the two, to see how the ice was responding to global warming.”
How far north? All the way.
“Up to that point,” says McLaren, “we had been very successful. Hadn’t hit the bottom, hadn’t hit any ice. We relaxed a little bit, and we were all watching the movie Shane — about the time that Alan Ladd is coming in and is about to shoot Jack Palance — when a messenger of the watch comes in. He grabs me literally by the shoulders. Now that’s not the usual procedure between enlisted and officers. ‘Captain! You’re needed in the control room right away!’ So I go straight up. The submarine is stopped. We’re hovering. I look over at the device that’s measuring how close the ice is overhead, and I also check the depth gauge. Well, we’re about 6 feet above the bottom. Now remember, my submarine’s 292 feet long. So, six feet above the bottom, and the ice is about 10 or 12 feet above us. Plus I’ve got ice all the way down to the bottom in front of us, and on either side, ice is all the way down to the [sea floor]. We were in this ice cage."
The ice overhead was probably 40 feet thick. “So there was no way we could blast our way through that. The other thing is, if we got stuck, nobody in hell knew where we were, and then if they did find us, how would they get through to us, with 40 feet of ice above us? So the odds were not good. We’d have to wait for global warming and the melting of all the ice in the Arctic Ocean to get out. We had food for, say, another 180 days. Nuclear reactor’d probably last another ten years. We could make water forever, take all the showers we wanted, drink all the water we wanted. But we’d start running out of food. And as you probably can guess, what irritates people most is running out of things like salt, coffee. So we didn’t want to get stuck."
McLaren knew that all eyes were on him. "Of course, as commanding officer you’ve just got to stay cool, calm. The only thing I could do was to back out the same way we came in. The trouble with doing that is you’ve got this huge, 17-foot-diameter propellor, single screw. When you back up, it causes the ship to squat, and it causes the stern to move to port. Now you’ve got all this ice close by, bottom’s so close. I had to be able to back up and not have any of this happen. The main thing was to keep everybody else calm. I didn’t want anybody moving anywhere, didn’t want anything moved. Nothing to change your stability or your buoyancy. I didn’t want to come closer to the bottom, I didn’t want to go higher because we were already too close to the ice."
Once he had everybody's attention and cooperation, he calmly explained the situation. "I didn’t use the word ‘trap,’ didn’t call it a cave that we were in. I had a man back in the engineering plant who manned the throttle. He was directing the steam to the turbines, to drive the propellor. So I had him rotate the propellor, but only two or three revolutions, in a stern direction, to get us to move. That enabled us to be slow enough to where the diving officer could maintain the buoyancy, and the helmsman could adjust the rudder to counter the effect of backing to port. He put the rudder to starboard. And this is the way we did it, two revolutions by two revolutions, each time ascertaining that we were maintaining a zero bubble: the bow not moving upward or downward. Because if that happened, the stern of the submarine would be dragging the bottom, and the bow might be caught in the ice overhead. Not one degree up, not one degree down. We just did this and did this and did this again. It took about an hour and a half to get out of this situation. It seemed an eternity."
The Queenfish resting at the North Pole, having successfully followed in the Nautilus' underwater wake.
Once the sub got clear enough, into deep enough water and stable, "I spliced the mainbrace. All the officers got a full jigger. We made a punch for the crew. Chief petty officers got a full jigger. We just took something to relax ourselves. And then we eased back into continuing the survey."
Was he afraid? “I was asked that many times on my Cold War operations. No. More than anything, the thing I felt was heightened situational awareness. I became much more alert. One of the things my dad taught me a long time ago: if you’re going to be in the military, be completely honest with yourself. Don’t ever play 'wish poker.'”
Here's something you might be interested in.
The backing up of the Queenfish
Underwater story no longer has to be kept under wraps
The backing up of the Queenfish
Underwater story no longer has to be kept under wraps
Alfred Scott McLaren tells a tale: ice above, ice below, and ice water in his veins.
“‘Don’t anybody move!’”
The year is 1970. The speaker is Alfred Scott McLaren, captain of the USS Queenfish, a nuclear submarine snaking along beneath the frozen surface of uncharted Siberian waters. The situation is that his boat is stuck in an ice cave. He can talk about this now with his brother-in-law — also your humble correspondent — after decades of keeping it under wraps.
Intelligence-gathering off Siberia in 1970? Yes: the Cold War was alive and well. (The Soviets, of course, knew nothing about the Queenfish squeezing between iceberg keels and a shallow sea floor.) But McLaren wanted to gather other sorts of intelligence as well. “Prior to taking command of Queenfish, when I was instructor at the Naval War College, I had thought of the idea of retracing the USS Nautilus’s 1958 transpolar Route and remeasuring ice thicknesses overhead — at the same times, and from the same positions as the Nautilus had charted 12 years earlier. Nautilus was the first submarine ever to surface at the North Pole. That achievement put the measurements part of its mission in the shade, but I saw the opportunity to compare the difference between the two, to see how the ice was responding to global warming.”
How far north? All the way.
“Up to that point,” says McLaren, “we had been very successful. Hadn’t hit the bottom, hadn’t hit any ice. We relaxed a little bit, and we were all watching the movie Shane — about the time that Alan Ladd is coming in and is about to shoot Jack Palance — when a messenger of the watch comes in. He grabs me literally by the shoulders. Now that’s not the usual procedure between enlisted and officers. ‘Captain! You’re needed in the control room right away!’ So I go straight up. The submarine is stopped. We’re hovering. I look over at the device that’s measuring how close the ice is overhead, and I also check the depth gauge. Well, we’re about 6 feet above the bottom. Now remember, my submarine’s 292 feet long. So, six feet above the bottom, and the ice is about 10 or 12 feet above us. Plus I’ve got ice all the way down to the bottom in front of us, and on either side, ice is all the way down to the [sea floor]. We were in this ice cage."
The ice overhead was probably 40 feet thick. “So there was no way we could blast our way through that. The other thing is, if we got stuck, nobody in hell knew where we were, and then if they did find us, how would they get through to us, with 40 feet of ice above us? So the odds were not good. We’d have to wait for global warming and the melting of all the ice in the Arctic Ocean to get out. We had food for, say, another 180 days. Nuclear reactor’d probably last another ten years. We could make water forever, take all the showers we wanted, drink all the water we wanted. But we’d start running out of food. And as you probably can guess, what irritates people most is running out of things like salt, coffee. So we didn’t want to get stuck."
McLaren knew that all eyes were on him. "Of course, as commanding officer you’ve just got to stay cool, calm. The only thing I could do was to back out the same way we came in. The trouble with doing that is you’ve got this huge, 17-foot-diameter propellor, single screw. When you back up, it causes the ship to squat, and it causes the stern to move to port. Now you’ve got all this ice close by, bottom’s so close. I had to be able to back up and not have any of this happen. The main thing was to keep everybody else calm. I didn’t want anybody moving anywhere, didn’t want anything moved. Nothing to change your stability or your buoyancy. I didn’t want to come closer to the bottom, I didn’t want to go higher because we were already too close to the ice."
Once he had everybody's attention and cooperation, he calmly explained the situation. "I didn’t use the word ‘trap,’ didn’t call it a cave that we were in. I had a man back in the engineering plant who manned the throttle. He was directing the steam to the turbines, to drive the propellor. So I had him rotate the propellor, but only two or three revolutions, in a stern direction, to get us to move. That enabled us to be slow enough to where the diving officer could maintain the buoyancy, and the helmsman could adjust the rudder to counter the effect of backing to port. He put the rudder to starboard. And this is the way we did it, two revolutions by two revolutions, each time ascertaining that we were maintaining a zero bubble: the bow not moving upward or downward. Because if that happened, the stern of the submarine would be dragging the bottom, and the bow might be caught in the ice overhead. Not one degree up, not one degree down. We just did this and did this and did this again. It took about an hour and a half to get out of this situation. It seemed an eternity."
The Queenfish resting at the North Pole, having successfully followed in the Nautilus' underwater wake.
Once the sub got clear enough, into deep enough water and stable, "I spliced the mainbrace. All the officers got a full jigger. We made a punch for the crew. Chief petty officers got a full jigger. We just took something to relax ourselves. And then we eased back into continuing the survey."
Was he afraid? “I was asked that many times on my Cold War operations. No. More than anything, the thing I felt was heightened situational awareness. I became much more alert. One of the things my dad taught me a long time ago: if you’re going to be in the military, be completely honest with yourself. Don’t ever play 'wish poker.'”
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