I'm watching Run Silent, Run Deep on TCM. Question.

[geetrue]

Originally Posted by Red October1984

Why are they starting attacks on the surface? They always go til they get detected and THEN dive.

Why? Just go in silent, kill, go out silent.

I was on board a diesel submarine USS Salmon SS-573 18 years after WWII.

We did the same thing in training exercises ... except we made sweeps with our radar and line of sight with our tbt on the bridge before going under.

We were constantly charging batteries with our four fairbanks morse diesel engines to give us more time under the ocean with a top speed of perhaps 8 kts if we were in a hurry while submereged, but usually just 4 kts to maintain a heading.

We sank the USS Hornet a brand new (at the time) ASW carrier just out of the yards from being converted to ASW. We sank her and two escorts and our captain big daddy Liscomb (all American half back at Navy) playing John Wayne went under the Hornet and came up on the other side to get one escort and then finished off an oiler following the fleet.

They even had a nuke the USS Sculpin protecting them.

We never saw or heard her and they never even saw or heard us.

One pesky Neptune patrol plane spotted us while snorkeling the night before the attack, but from quick reporting a plane in the area, which is very hard to hear on sonar while snorkeling, we were able to avoid her pdc's and made a clean get away.

The Admiral of the first fleet over at the Coronado Island debriefing got to see all of our pictures proving the above was true, plus the thud's of practice mk 16's on their hulls surely left an impression that our Navy was not yet ready.

Not in 1963 that is