USS Gudgeon Submarine good SS 567 Zippo Slim Lighter 1976 - Used

USS Gudgeon Submarine SS 567 Zippo Slim Lighter 1976 - Used :

USS Gudgeon (SS/AGSS/SSAG-567), a Tang-class submarine, was the second ship of the United States Navy to be named for the gudgeon, a species of small fresh-water minnow.

Her keel was laid down by the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. She was launched on 11 June 1952 sponsored by Mrs. Robert A. Bonin, widow of the first Gudgeon's last commanding officer, and commissioned on 21 November 1952 with Commander Robert M. Carroll in command.

After builders' trials, Gudgeon sailed for Pearl Harbor, where she joined Submarine Squadron 1 (SubRon 1), Submarine Division 1 (SubDiv 1), 18 July 1953. Local operations and training exercises continued until 11 April 1954, when Gudgeon sailed to the mainland for antisubmarine warfare (ASW) exercises along the Washington coast. A Mare Island Naval Shipyard overhaul occupied the remainder of the year, and Gudgeon returned to Pearl Harbor 9 March 1955. She sailed 21 Jul 1955, for the first of five WestPac tours, visiting Yokosuka, Formosa, Hong Kong, Manila, and Guam before returning to Pearl Harbor on 30 January 1956. Local operations out of the Hawaiian port, overhaul, special secret operations, and a second trip to the West Coast took Gudgeon through the next 18 months.

Sailing from Pearl Harbor on 8 July 1957, Gudgeon began a history-making cruise around the world, making the Pacific Fleet Submarine Force's flagship the first American submarine to circumnavigate the globe. Navigator was Lt. Leon L. Stine, Jr. After exercises at Yokosuka, Gudgeon sailed west 26 August 1957. As she made her way around the world for the next six months, the submarine docked at Asian, African and European ports before a triumphal entry into Pearl Harbor 21 February 1958, eight months and 25,000 miles (40,000 km) since taking departure.

In August 1957, after being detected by the Soviet Navy outside the port of Vladivostok, outside the 3-mile territorial waters limit recognized by the US but well inside the 12-mile limit claimed by the Soviets, the Gudgeon was the first US submarine forced to the surface during the Cold War.

After extensive overhaul, Gudgeon again settled into the peacetime local and special operations, training exercises, and ASW activities. Three WestPac cruises, in 1959, 1961, and 1963, took her to Japan for exercises with the Seventh Fleet as well as to Subic Bay and Hong Kong for liberty. The alternate years, 1960 and 1962, saw Gudgeon heading back to the mainland, where she trained and exercised along the Washington and California coasts.

Gudgeon returned from the Far East to Pearl Harbor 1 August 1963, and for the next two years operated in Hawaiian waters. She departed Pearl Harbor 29 November and arrived San Francisco, California, on 9 December for overhaul at Mare Island. The ship was cut in half and an 18-foot (5 meter) section was added during a conversion which gave the submarine new and larger engines as well as the PUFFS passive sonar installation. Modernization was completed in April 1967 and Gudgeon returned to duty in the Pacific Fleet.

Gudgeon was reclassified a miscellaneous auxiliary submarine, AGSS-567 and later SSAG-567 in November 1979.

Gudgeon served in the Pacific until she was decommissioned on 30 September 1983 and stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 6 August 1987.

In 1983, Gudgeon was transferred by lease to Turkey and renamed TCG Hızırreis (S 342), named for Ottoman Admiral Kurtoğlu Hızır Reis. She was purchased in 1987 and served until 2004. She is berthed as a museum ship at the Kocaeli Museum Ships Command in Izmit and is open to the public.

A COLD WAR FOUGHT IN THE DEEP( From Chicago Tribune 6 Jan 1991)

The submarine that came out of World War II was a crude and imperfect instrument for the Cold War. World War II submarines were in effect surface ships that submerged to attack. They had insufficient air to remain below more than a day without virtually shutting down all operations.

It wasn`t long after the surrender of Japan in 1945 that the Navy began experimenting with a ''snorkel,'' a device to allow subs to ''breathe'' while submerged. It was adopted from German U-boats and made it possible to send submarines on long, dangerous patrols.

In fact, one of the first of those subs, the USS Cochino, suffered a battery explosion and sank as it headed toward Norway after testing the snorkel and new sonar equipment not far from the Soviet naval base of Murmansk in August, 1949. One man from the Cochino and six from a companion sub, the USS Tusk, were washed overboard when the Tusk braved gales and cascading waves to rescue the rest of the Cochino`s crew.

The Cochino`s mission came three months after one of the first major confrontations of the Cold War, the Soviet blockade of Berlin. The U.S. won that encounter by airlifting more than 7,000 tons of food and fuel a day into the city.

But the standoff convinced U.S. policymakers that the Soviets were bent on expanding across the globe. When the Soviets detonated their first atomic device in 1949, U.S. officials began scrambling to broaden U.S. capability to deliver nuclear payloads and to find ways to monitor Soviet military developments.

There was greater urgency throughout the 1950s, as the Korean War and the formation of Warsaw Pact convinced U.S. policymakers that even after Soviet leader Josef Stalin`s death, the Soviet Union was seeking world domination.

In the midst of this scare, Congress eagerly approved the plans to build the first nuclear-powered attack submarine-the USS Nautilus, commissioned in 1954. When the Soviets in 1957 launched Sputnik, the first spacecraft, American leaders became fearful the Soviets might technologically surpass the U.S.

Among the responses to this perception of a growing threat was President Dwight Eisenhower`s accelerating a program to develop and build nuclear subs that could fire long-range missiles and provide a more invulnerable weapon than long-range Air Force bombers and land-based missiles.

In the meantime, the U.S. hurriedly converted several diesel subs to carry primitive missiles that had a range of only 400 to 500 miles. Their crews in the late 1950s had to deal with such unremitting bad weather and Soviet harassment when they came close to the surface to snorkel that they jokingly referred to themselves as the ''Northern Pacific Yacht Club.''

During that period, U.S. leaders also increasingly sent swift, high-altitude planes and diesel subs equipped with still cameras and radio intercept antennas to keep track of developments in the Soviet nuclear-missile program and in the buildup of its naval forces.

Just as the Soviets attacked spy planes, they reacted angrily whenever they detected U.S. spy subs on intelligence missions near their coasts.

In August 1957, the USS Gudgeon, a diesel submarine, was poking around the entrance to the Soviets` largest naval base on the Pacific, Vladivostok. Its goal was typical for a U.S. spy sub of that era: to monitor Soviet ship movements though its periscope and intercept their radio communications.

Several crew members recall that the Gudgeon had staked out a position in relatively shallow water. It may have been just outside the 3-mile territorial limit recognized by the United States, they said, but it clearly was well inside the 12-mile limit that the Soviets claimed.

Suddenly, an alert rang out on Soviet radio channels, and as many as eight destroyers began steaming toward the area where the Gudgeon was hiding. The Gudgeon turned-its 90 officers and enlisted men rushing to take battle stations and load torpedoes into its eight tubes-and sprinted for the open sea, with the bigger, faster Soviet surface vessels in avid pursuit.

As the sub approached, or just after it sped past the imaginary 12-mile line, its skipper, Norman B. ''Buzz'' Bessac, a 34-year-old lieutenant commander, ordered the boat brought to a full stop, hoping it could ''go quiet and lose'' its pursuers, crew members said.

But the ploy failed. As the Gudgeon tried to hide below perhaps 200 feet of water, Bessac instructed his men to get ready for what seemed likely to be a long, frightening and lonely siege, the crew members said.

When a diesel submarine is forced to stay underwater, it depends entirely on power from its electric battery previously charged by the diesel to circulate air, operate interior lights, heat food and provide bursts of speed for a possible getaway, and life aboard becomes much more precarious.

The snorkel sucks in air needed to operate the boat`s diesel engines and to refresh the air that its crew breathes. Diesel subs normally snorkel every night.

In the Gudgeon`s case, the menacing presence of the Soviet destroyers meant that the sub would be unable to go up to periscope depth-about 60 feet below the surface-and snorkel that night. The boat also could not send any kind of plea for help without rising enough to pierce the surface with its radio antenna.

So Bessac ordered that every precaution be taken to preserve electricity and air, the crew members said.

Fans and blowers that pushed air around the submarine were turned off. Lights were trimmed to a dim, candle-like glow. Crystals of lithium hydroxide- a chemical that absorbs the carbon dioxide exhaled by the crew-were sprinkled on cloth mattress covers laid out in various compartments.

Bessac instructed all non-essential crew members to stay in their bunks. Despite the rising tension, the Gudgeon`s officers forbade cigarette smoking, which gives off carbon monoxide.

As the holddown stretched through that night, the whole next day and well into a second night, the sub`s air got so thick and foul that many of the men developed severe headaches.

Every hour or two, one of the destroyers would bounce active sonar beams off the Gudgeon`s 290-foot-long hull, creating chilling metallic ''pings''

that resounded inside the sub and in the minds of its crew members. The destroyer then would steam over the top of the submarine and drop a wave of depth charges that detonated above or around it.

''They would circle, and one of them would make a run and drop'' its depth charges, one Gudgeon crew member said. ''Then they`d go back out and pick us up again (on sonar), and somebody good else would come in and make a run.'' One crew member said the Gudgeon`s officers decided after the first waves of explosions failed to cause serious damage that the destroyers probably had dropped small, practice-sized depth charges similar to hand grenades instead of full-power charges like those that sank scores of submarines in World War II.

The grenade-like charges make a terrifying noise that splinters the water like a jackhammer ripping through concrete, but they are unlikely to cause much damage to the thick steel hull of a submarine.

Still, he said, ''The thing you worry about when they drop the damn things is that the next one`s going to be a real one.''

Several times, the Gudgeon started to creep ahead deep under the water in an attempt to wriggle free. But each time, the crew members said, the destroyers peppered its hull with sonar pings-and laid another string of the grenade-like charges in its path.

At one point, the Gudgeon tried to elude the gantlet of destroyers by shooting a noise-making decoy out of its garbage ejection tube in one direction while it moved in another, one crew member said. Another time, he said, the sub went below its ''test depth'' of 700 feet or so-the maximum depth at which its manufacturer certified it could withstand deep-sea pressures-in a vain attempt to escape the reach of the Soviets` sonar.

Finally, after more than 30 hours under Soviet control, the sub`s battery had gotten so weak, and its air so horrid, a new fear took hold among its crew: If the Gudgeon had to surface in the midst of the destroyers, would the Soviets try to board it and capture the crew?

With this possibility in mind, some of the officers and intelligence operatives on board hastily destroyed a number of classified documents, one crew member recalled.

But there was a hopeful sign: During the holddown, a few of the Soviet destroyers had broken off from the pack and sailed back toward the port.

So Bessac, who had decided he would fight rather than allow the sub to be boarded, tried one last stratagem, crew members said.

He ordered the crew in the control room to bring the sub to periscope depth, where it quickly raised its radio antenna and shot off a message to U.S. 7th Fleet headquarters in Japan asking for assistance.

The sub also stuck up its snorkel mast to try to gulp some fresh air. But a Soviet vessel raced straight toward the pipe, as if to ram it, and ''drove us back under,'' one of the Gudgeon crew members said.

At this point, Bessac had no choice but to risk bringing the Gudgeon fully to the surface.

As the sub rose slowly through the water, Bessac made sure that the doors to its torpedo tubes were open-the last action needed to ensure that the torpedoes could be fired at the push of a button, crew members said.

After the sub broke the surface, Bessac clambered up the ladder inside the sub`s sail and onto the bridge, where he instructed a signalman to point a small floodlight at one of the Soviet ships out in the night and blink a message in Morse code. The staccato light beams identified the Gudgeon as a U.S. Navy warship and asserted its right to be in what its crew believed were international waters.

A few minutes later, the Soviets flashed back a message that was comforting-though somewhat gloating-in its simple statement of the obvious. These blinking lights identified the Gudgeon`s adversary as ''CCCP,'' an acronym of the Russian name for the Soviet Union, and suggested the sub head for home without delay.

The Soviet ships then parted their ring around the Gudgeon and allowed it to set sail. A few hours later, U.S. warplanes passed overhead and could see that the Gudgeon had survived the ordeal.

It wasn`t long after the Gudgeon holddown, however, that the newly energized Soviet navy began roughing up other U.S. spy subs.

Another U.S. diesel sub was held down for more than 35 hours on a patrol in which it tested new sonar gear so close to the East Coast of the Soviet Union that ''the rocks looked awfully big,'' a crew member said.

At one point before the Soviets broke off the encounter, he said, the boat`s commanding officer, known as the ''CO,'' handed each of his fellow officers a .45-caliber pistol.

''This junior officer . . . asked the CO, `What are we supposed to do with this?` The CO said, `I don`t know what you`re going to do with that. But the first one who steps on my ship is dead.` ''

Instead of protesting through diplomatic channels, the U.S. decided to play along in this strange and sometimes vicious game of machismo.

In 1958, Adm. Jerauld Wright, commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, posted a proclamation, scrolled and framed, outside his office offering a reward to the first U.S. sub or anti-submarine plane or ship that inflicted ''appropriate embarrassment'' on any unidentified sub in what he called

''the approaches'' to the United States.

The prize? ''One case of Jack Daniels Old No. 7 Brand of Quality Tennessee Sour Mash Corn Whiskey,'' according to the proclamation.

The payoff came in late May 1959, when the USS Grenadier detected a submerged Soviet sub off Iceland, tracked it until its air got foul and forced it to surface.

The Grenadier`s captain, Theodore ''Ted'' Davis, saved a bottle of the whiskey as a souvenir and divided the rest among the crew. Davis said he kept the sealed bottle on a shelf in his study until a housekeeper helped herself to a taste one day in the late 1970s.

Not long after that, the man who had been his engineer on the Grenadier came to visit, Davis added, ''and I said, `Well, now that it`s open, we may as well drink the whole damn thing.` So we sat down and drank it all.''