Was the submarine sunk by her own torpedo? A large segment of the after section of the sail, including the deck access hatch, is missing. Officials at Submarine Squadron 6 in Norfolk were expecting the The squadron staff had already arranged for a harbor tug to stand by and had mustered a working party of line handlers to tie the submarine to the pier on its arrival.

She was commissioned at the Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, on July 29, 1960. As he prepared to leave for the night, Hannon had briefed Radioman 2nd Class Ken Larbes, the petty officer coming on duty, about the overdue message. “There were officers openly discussing the fact that they believed the The SOSUS hydrophones in the Atlantic “did hear the explosion,” Hannon said. Masts are visible extending from the top of the sail (located at the lower portion of the photograph). Now, for the first time, Schade was admitting that the Asked to amplify, Schade noted that Slattery had transmitted a position report whose heading read “212354Z May 68,” or 2354 GMT (7:54 p.m. EDT) on May 21. And, he added, “a Soviet submarine was tracked leaving the area at a high rate of speed.” What Hannon, Larbes, and the other radiomen learned that fateful Thursday in May 1968 — and in the weeks that followed — is stark confirmation that the Navy’s expressed shock and surprise over the missing submarine was a sham. Some [were] diverted and some of them were just told to come over to the track which we presupposed the During that time the U.S. Navy declassified most — but not all — of the official And after his arrest in 1985, John Walker, who had been the supervisor on duty at the COMSUBLANT message center the night the More than four decades after the disappearance of the In 2010, after reading my book on the disappearance of the Larbes, in an interview in 2018, confirmed Hannon’s account. Photos taken in 1986 by Woods Hole Alvin, released by Navy in 2012, shows the broken inboard end of the propulsion shaft.

According to the official account, the incident began unfolding in the morning hours of May 27.

The elder Fennick was a fire control technician on board the Skipjack-class nuclear submarine USS Scorpion (SSN 589). Schade was explaining that instead of first sounding the alarm on May 27 after the Schade recalled that he had been out at sea when word came that the “It looked like we needed to do something in the way of a search operation, [and so] I got Adm. Holmes [Ephraim P. Holmes, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet] on the radio and said, ‘Would you place the facilities of CINCLANTFLT [the Atlantic Fleet] at my disposal for the next day or two until we can organize a search operation?’ In fact, he placed them all at our disposal, and this was quite an amazing set of operational circumstances, because we controlled the entire resources of the Atlantic Fleet from a submarine at sea. After completing those assignments, her commanding officer (CO) received a Cold War pressures had prompted U.S. And [ Schade then confirmed a finding of the Court of Inquiry that a Soviet naval exercise that included at least one nuclear submarine was underway southwest of the Canary Islands. The Ordnance Systems Command (OSC), the department that oversaw the development and operation of every weapon in the Navy’s inventory, steadfastly insisted that it was impossible for a sub’s torpedoes to explode inside the hull; however, OSC did not deny that hot runs did occur.

Instead of the normal half-dozen radiomen quietly at work, a large group of senior officers — including several admirals and a Marine Corps general — had taken over the workspace and were talking among themselves in hushed voices. Theresa Bishop, the wife of Torpedoman Chief Walter W. Bishop, the Nearby was Barbara Foli, the wife of Interior Communications Electrician 3rd Class Vernon Foli. The radiomen reversed the process for incoming messages, taking encrypted transmissions from the submarines and “breaking” them back into clear text by using the same encryption gear. But time and constant service took their toll. It was one of four mysterious submarine disappearances in 1968, the others being the Israeli submarine INS Dakar, the French submarine Minerve, and the Soviet submarine K-129. Despite a fierce nor’easter that was lashing southeastern Virginia that morning, several dozen family members were huddled under umbrellas at the foot of Pier 22 with banners and balloons to welcome their men home from sea. The system’s array on the sea floor filtered out all noise except that of machinery such as what was used on Soviet subs. It was Schade who had selected the His intelligence section provided Cmdr. This triggers a fail-safe device in the torpedo that shuts down the warhead.