I was on Diodon from 10 Jan 69 to being admitted to
the Orthopedic Service, Naval Hospital, San Diego, California on 28 August 1970 with a diagnosis of internal derangement of right knee.
I was
swapped off to the USS Diodon (SS-349) on 10 January 1969. The Diodon was a "Guppy II" and it's specifications were:
Displacement; surfaced 1870 tons submerged 2420 tons
Length; 307 feet 6 inches, beam 27.2 feet, draft 18 feet
Engines; 3; 1600 hp each
Electric motors; 2; 2700 hp each
Batteries; 4; 126 cells each
Each cell is 4 feet high two feet wide by 18 inches wide
Speed, surfaced; 28 knots, submerged; 15 knots.
H.M.S. TRUMPY
Not long after I reported aboard we were assigned as the other "Mother Ship" for the H.M.S. Trumpy, a British submarine being sent home to England after spending many, many years in the orient, based in Hong Kong, and Singapore. The berthing areas are also the mess decks.
Each berthing area sends a couple of seaman to the galley to bring the food to the division. Because they were returning to England the had stocked up with everything, mostly booze. I spent a week going over there in the morning, going down the forward hatch and starting a tour of the boat. Every time I went into another compartment I was offered a drink. I never finished that tour until I went down the after hatch and went forward.
This boat was very old and it was interesting to see the thinking of other nation's designers. In our boats, the torpedo rooms are one of the largest compartments on the boat. We have "interlocks" on the tubes to prevent dangerous thinks like opening inner and outer doors at the same time.
On the Trumpy there were no interlocks. Instead, there was a bulkhead 3 or 4 feet from the tubes with small watertight doors lined up with each tube. Only one of these doors were opened when loading the tube. There were only two or three men in this compartment, so if flooding occured that is all they would lose. That is a strange way to design, if you ask me.
SEA LAB 3
In late February 1969, we were at sea near San Clemente Island, when we got a request to go to the aid of the USS Elk River, the tender for the "Sea Lab 3" underwater habitat. The habitat was at 100 fathoms (600 feet) and had sprung a leak. They needed a very large amount of high pressure air to force the water out of the habitat.
We anchored near-by and hooked up our air banks. We had six air banks each one consisted of about thirty air flasks two feet in diameter and twelve to fifteen feet long. These were mounted inside our ballast tanks. Shortly after we arrived one of the divers down on the bottom at the lab started having problems with his air tanks. He was Berry Cannon, a civilian working on the project. Unfortunately he died. It was then decided to blow Sea Lab to the surface with our high pressure air. Sealab finally surfaced about midnight.
DEGAUSSING
Every once in a while our subs go through a process called degaussing. Degaussing is a process where the entire ship is de-magnetized. The first thing we have to do is offload all our weapons, magnetic compasses, clocks, wristwatches and anything else that might be effected by strong magnetic fields. Then we move to the degaussing station, tie up to several bouys so we are not touching anything that might effect the station's instruments.
Then readings are taken to see what strength and what direction the magnetic fields must be applied to the ship to remove all magnetism from the ships hull. Then huge electrical cables, about 6 inches in diameter, are strung all over the ship. Next, all personal are removed from the ship and the currents are applied, readings taken again, and currents applied again until the ship registers a low enough magnet field to pass the tests.
The reason for all this is that there is a piece of detection equipment called MAD or magnetic anomaly detector, and there are mine and torpedoes that are set off by changes in the earth's magnetic field.
INJURED
I was injured by a parting towline on 7 March 1969, when we were moving the boat from alongside the USS Nerius (AS-17) (which was anchored out) to the pier so we could load stores, prior to our deployment to WestPac.
I got hooked into being the stern lookout. We were using two Mike boats as tugs. We cast off all lines and started backing down. I reported that we were heading straight for a small fiberglass sport fishing boat with two small kids and a man in it. The man was frantically trying to start his outboard motor to get out of our way. We were bearing down on him at about ten knots.
I was standing aft of the after torpedo room hatch looking aft. A two and one half inch nylon towline parted, whipped around the after room hatch and hit the bull-nose on the stern. Nylon lines will stretch to half again it's length before breaking. When it does break it's like a big rubber band.
I was hit by the bow of the line between these two points just above my right ankle joint. Until I looked down I thought someone had kicked me. The blow did not even knock me down. When I looked down it looked like a grenade had gone off next to my leg. The line hit the outside of my leg just above my ankle joint. It broke the outer bone in two places, drove that piece of bone behind, and broke the tip off the bone on the inside of ankle. My ankle was about one inch thick when I was treated by the ship's corpsman.
As soon as we tied up (sixth boat outboard from the pier) two corpsman from the USS Sperry (AS-12) loaded me into a "Stokes "stretcher, to carry me to sickbay. A Stokes stretcher is made of a metal rod frame, over which chicken wire is stretched in the three dimensional shape of the human body. When they carried me across the brow the stretcher got hung-up on the brow's hand rail.
I ended up upside-down looking down at the hulls of two submarines banging together where I was about to fall at any moment. One of my shipmates cut away the snag and freed me. As soon as they got me to the next boat my shipmates freed me from the prison of the stretcher and helped me hop the rest of the way to the pier and the sick bay of the Sperry.
I had had almost no pain up to this point. Once in the Sperry's sickbay the pain hit me like a hammer! I had just sat up after laying on a gurney for about an hour. I almost passed out with the pain! |
