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| Halibut was equipped with a “deep submergence rescue vehicle” that was actually a deep diving chamber on the submarine’s stern. Once submerged, deep-sea divers exited the submarine and wrapped taping coils around communication cables. |
The US Navy’s first atomic-powered, atomic-missile-carrying submarine was NOT the USS George Washington, SSBN-598.
The USS Halibut, SS(G)N 657, was the US Navy’s first atomic-powered, atomic-missile-carrying submarine. Laid down in 1957 at Mare Island and commissioned in January 1960, she made seven patrols as part of the Pacific Fleet, carrying five Regulus I, nuclear-armed cruise missiles, until relieved of deterrent duty by Polaris boats in July 1964. Her final years were shrouded in mystery until the release of “Blind Man’s Bluff”, by Sherry Sontag, and Christopher Drew†. In the book, Sontag and Drew revealed Halibut’s even more secretive life as a spy sub, starting with a two-year overhaul and rebuild that began in 1965. Halibut’s enormous missile hanger, its equally enormous door (22 feet wide) and her nuclear power plant ideally suited her for second and third lives as a cold war spy.
Halibut’s hanger was an order of magnitude larger than any other space available on any other submarine. The hatch was a unique asset in a fleet where almost every other hatch was 26 inches in diameter. And nuclear power, even with the ship’s un-hydrodynamic shape, meant she could run submerged for months. Classed as a “Research” vessel, Halibut served as a mother ship for deep-diving robots and then less-deep-water divers. After many years of obscurity even deeper than that shrouding her nuclear deterrent years, Halibut was decommissioned in 1976, and stricken in 1986.
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| Capt. Charles R. Larson, Commanding Officer of Halibut addresses a crowd of over 500 persons at the decommissioning of the ship at Mare Island in June of 1976. |
The ex-Halibut entered the Navy’s nuclear powered ship and submarine recycling program on July 12, 1993. Her nuclear fuel was removed and sent to the Naval Reactor Facility in Idaho for storage. The reactor compartment itself was removed, sealed and buried at Hanford, Washington. The remaining sections of the hull were recycled after all reusable, hazardous and toxic materials had been dealt with appropriately. She completed the recycling program on September 9, 1994, and ceased to exist as a complete ship
USS HALIBUT, SSGN-587, was the second ship in the US Navy to carry the name. The first USS HALIBUT was SS-232, a Fleet submarine that operated in the Pacific during WWII. She sank 12 Japanese ships before being stricken, because of hull damage from depth charges, in 1944. Her second and last commanding officer, LCDR I. J. Galantin was one of the planners for SSGN-587 and put forward the name of his old ship from the list of WWII subs that had received battle honors. Admiral Galantin, USN (Ret.) has remained in contact with the crew members of both SS-232 and SSGN-587.
The Regulus was the Navy’s follow-on to the Loon program, which was a copy of the German Fi-103 (V-1) pulsejet cruise missile from WWII. Loons had a range of 135 miles, using a second submarine to relay or originate guidance commands, when the missile left the 50-mile range of the launching vessel’s control.
Vought’s SSM-N-8A Regulus program began in 1947 and the first fleet deployment was on the cruiser USS LOS ANGLES (CA-135), in 1955. Regulus (later Regulus I) was a jet-powered, subsonic cruise missile with a 500 mile range and a 3000 lb, 40-50 kiloton, W5 atomic, or 2800 lb, 1-2 megaton W27 thermonuclear, warhead. Guidance was by radio command from the launching vessel or another vessel, for example, a submarine at periscope depth between the launcher and the target. Maximum radio range for guidance was 125 miles, which required the missile to fly at 30,000 feet. Carrier aircraft could guide the Regulus but this was understandably unpopular with pilots.
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| Halibut firing a Regulus missile on March 25, 1960. In the background is CV-16 Lexington. Halibut was the first nuclear powered submarine to successfully launch a guided missile. |
A number of cruisers, aircraft carriers and the submarines USS TUNNY (SSG-282), USS BARBERO (SSG-317), USS GRAYBACK (SSG-574), USS GROWLER (SSG-577) and Halibut carried Regulus I. Tunny and Barbero were Guppy conversions, WWII Fleet-type subs rebuilt with streamlined conning towers, Grayback and Growler were purpose-built diesel-electrics with two, large, forward, hangers, each accommodating 2 missiles, for a total of 4. Halibut was intended to carry the supersonic Regulus II, a streamlined and refined development of Regulus I, with 1200-mile range, twice the weight and a different power plant. By the time Regulus II development was completed, the Polaris ballistic missile program was nearing deployment. Regulus II never went to sea.
Regulus was considered so important as a nuclear deterrent after 1957 that four submarine-carried missiles were kept on station in the Western Pacific at all times. This required Submarine Squadron ONE, stationed in Hawaii, to deploy both of the Guppy conversions or one of the Grayback class, or Halibut, continually.
Late 1959 was the time of the USS GEORGE Washington’s initial Polaris patrol, but for their first half-decade, the 1200 mile range Polaris missiles were stationed only in the Atlantic. The Polaris boats got the glamour of high-tech equipment and “Blue” and “Gold” crews alternating cruises in a single vessel. The SSG/SSGN community in the Pacific has less exotic equipment, and referred to themselves, ironically, as the “Black and Blue” crews, since they did NOT have alternates to take every other cruise.
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| Halibut at Pearl Harbor in 1960, shortly before joining active service with the Pacific Fleet. |
After the extensive refit, Halibut’s next role was that of highly classified mother ship for deep-diving Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs). The ROVs were the brainchildren of Navy scientist John P. Craven, built to gather intelligence material from the sea floor. Halibut figured in this picture because she could deploy and search while submerged. No “unfriendlies” need know she was there. Debris from ballistic missile tests and other weapons or sensors hardware hidden in deep water (20,000 feet and deeper) was the target. Some, but not all, of the SubSafe and Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle (DSRV) programs launched in the wake of the Thresher disaster were used as cover. Technology notionally developed for DSRV would actually be built and operated as ROV “Fish” controlled from Halibut. The “black” program’s entire budget came from DSRV “overruns”.
This explains a minor mystery of my childhood- much was made of DSRV designs by Lockheed in the 1960s, and some were built and have been mounted on the backs of SSN Attack submarines. But DSRV produced no scientific results, no photos, and there never has been an opportunity to use it to save lives. Modern, deep-water, submarine sinkings are more like airplane crashes than traditional ship sinkings. The investigator gets to start with a debris-field rather than a hulk resting neatly on the bottom. There are no survivors. At the time, unhappy Congressional committees tried to understand what the Navy was spending the taxpayer’s money on, without success in open hearings. So that’s what happened.
Halibut had just returned from its first spy cruise, an unsuccessful search for Soviet missile debris, in 1968, when a Soviet GOLF II class submarine, possibly named “Red Star”, exploded, flooded and sank in the Pacific ocean. While the Soviet Navy searched fruitlessly in other parts of the ocean. U.S. Navy sonar triangulation sent Halibut to where her “fish” were able to find the sunken Soviet boat, and photograph the pieces, inside and out. The skeleton of one sailor, dressed in foul weather gear, lay on the seabed next to the hull of the sub. Whatever had picked the poor boy’s flesh from his bones was a surprise to the experts. They hadn’t expected any scavengers in 16,000 feet of water. President Richard Nixon awarded Halibut’s crew the Presidential Unit Citation for finding the GOLF II. This is the highest collective decoration for members of the US armed forces.
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| Halibut was nicknamed “The Bat Boat” and her super secret hanger “The Bat Cave.” Her hull shape was too noisy above moderate speed making the design a dead end. |
By Sontag and Drew’s account, the intelligence recovered by the cameras in Halibut’s “fish” fully repaid the investment made to make them. Five years later, the CIA’s Glomar Explorer, in an episode that remains murky, raised the Soviet GOLF II missile sub to near the surface. Many of us older Bay Area residents remember seeing the Glomar Explorer parked down by the salt pile near Redwood City.
Braced by this success, freshly overhauled again, and equipped with a fake DSRV to serve as a decompression chamber, Halibut then penetrated into the Sea of Okhotsk for her crowning achievement. In a piece of inspired reasoning, U. S. Navy civilian analyst James Bradley had imagined that Soviet practice wouldn’t be too different from American, and that the telephone cable that linked Kamchatka Island to the Soviet mainland would have “Don’t Anchor Here” signs posted on the beach, near where it entered the water, to prevent local sailors from damaging it. Further, he suspected that the Soviet’s Petropavlosk naval base, home to significant submarine and surface forces, would be a significant user of such a telephone line. Bradley was right, and Halibut, under Commander John E. McNish, found the signs and traced the cable to international waters (outside the 3 mile limit).
Breathing a helium/oxygen mixture from umbilicals supplying both this mixture and hot water to warm their wet suits, Halibut’s divers emplaced the first of a series of voice activated telephone taps and recorders. The crew waited for the tapes to fill, then brought home the hardware and a month’s worth of candid conversations between Soviet Far-East commanders and Moscow.
On the strength of the first mission’s results, Halibut began a regular shuttle to the Sea of Okhotsk. There she would drop off a fresh pod with a six-month supply of recording tape, at the submerged telephone line, and bring home the previous pod. A form of nuclear energy, probably similar to the Radioactive Thermal Generators that powered NASA’s Apollo Lunar science packages, powered the pods and deep space probes. Sophisticated electronics could detect and record multiple conversations coming through the cable.
Prepared for the worst, as any ship’s captain does, Commander McNish informed the crew of the nature of their second mission, and that he had decided that, should the Soviets discover them, Halibut would under no conditions be boarded or captured. Demolition charges were placed in the ship. One 19-year+ chief petty officer ‘un-volunteered’ himself at the next port of call, ultimately receiving an honorable discharge. He maintains that his departure from the ship was not prompted by the illegal spying they were doing, or the demolition charges, but declined to give more specifics to Sontag and Drew. Some sailors contacted their Senators or Representatives with guarded tales of the telephone tapping, but Congressional investigations never revealed what was actually happening. Even if the tap seemed awkward in the era of détente, it was awfully appealing, like all high-tech spy stories.
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| Tamiya’s early Halibut kit is of questionable scale and dimension. The kit was really designed as a toy with its over sized propeller and rubber band power-plant. |
Eventually the Soviets found out, from Ronald W. Pelton, a former NSA cryptologist who sold the crown jewels of U.S. Naval Intelligence for $35,000. One day, a flotilla of Soviet ships appeared in the Sea of Okhotsk and dredged-up the tap and recording pod then on station. Part of it, proudly stating that it belongs to the United States government, is on display in Moscow today.
Halibut had retired well before the tapping project, code-named IVY BELLS, ended. Her crew nicknamed her “The Bat Boat”, after the hanger area with its need-to-know security and spooky Intelligence types had become “The Bat Cave”. Her hull-shape was noisy above moderate speed; her design was a dead end. But she’d had a life of adventure and risk as dramatic as any of the more glamorous-looking subs in the Fleet.
My kit of the USS HALIBUT is a very early effort by Tamiya. I bought it in Tokyo in 1981, on a business trip. It appears to have been designed in the early 1960s, well before Tamiya’s heartbreakingly non-scale 1:18 racing cars. No scale is stated and the proportions of the hull (too short) and sail (too tall) are sufficiently wrong that one could work out several quite different ‘scales’ from various dimensions. The hull is about 1:403 scale in length, about 1:320 scale in depth and about 1:348 scale in width.
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| Step six of the Tamiya instruction sheet shows how the Halibut really got is power. Shhhh–tippy top secret. |
The kit was designed for rubber band power, with an oversize propeller mounted underneath the hull proper, and both a keel weight and removable soft plastic caps for the positive buoyancy tanks are provided. Wing-like diving planes at the center of the hull connect to an out-of-proportion ‘radar antenna’ that emerges through a slot in the sail. In theory, under way, the planes cause the completed sub to dive, until the drag of water pressing against the radar forces them to the ‘rise’ position. A Regulus II missile is provided to sit on the launching ramp on the fore deck.
For a mere 180 Yen, I should have bought two of the kits so I could splice the hulls together and at least get the length/depth/beam within approximate proportion. (Getting the flooding holes in correct number in the correct location would be a challenge.) Then I could round off the bow, replace the fore and aft diving planes, install twin screws and rudder(s) and so on. Re-shaping the sail and adding a surface bridge station and retracted periscopes and antennae would complete a basic rebuild. Details like the real shape of the missile hanger fairings and deck details would still be needed, and a Regulus I missile.
An easier, if not cheaper, solution is the 1:350 resin kit made by Combat Subs. Photos and descriptions of two built-up models by Tom Dougherty are on the Internet at ModelWarships.com. Both models were built for the Halibut’s 2002 crew re-union, showing Halibut in her original missile patrol form and in her final telephone tapping form, with fake DSRV and extended sail.
Having served honorably as a bathtub toy (straight out of the box) for my son, my Halibut is now being gently refitted. Perhaps we’ll paint it too.
The USS Halibut would never win a beauty contest but, “purty is as purty does” and Halibut was certainly a doer. Tracing her story through books and web sites has been interesting and informative.
These bare figures, 40-50Kt from a 3000lb warhead, 1-2Mt from a 2800lb warhead, illustrate not only the unprecedented power of atomic weapons but also the exponentially more unprecedented power of thermonuclear weapons. 40-50Kt is approximately three times the energy released by the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while 1-2Mt is approximately 75 to 150 times the energy of those first, primitive, bombs.
References:
Blind Man’s Bluff, by Sherry Sontag, and Christopher Drew, with Annette Lawrence Drew, published by PublicAffairs, New York, 1998.
The Regulus Cruise Missile: A Forgotten Weapon System, by David K. Stumpf, PhD, is available from Turner Publishing, Paducah, KY, (502) 443-0121
Bill Abbott has been a member of SVSM since 1992 and been building plastic models since his dad bought him a McDonnell Banshee in a plastic bag in 1961. He builds airliners, road racing cars, US Navy and RAF planes, as well as balsa and paper flying models. His son Benjamin often helps him with part cutting and assembly.
