“It was over,” he later recalled saying to himself. They’d been told only that the submarine had not yet broken radio silence to signal its approach to port and that bad weather was the most likely reason. Despite universal scorn at his methods, Craven had led the Navy right to the missing weapon. As far as we know they never made contact, they never reported on that.”, “They were due to report in to us shortly thereafter,” Schade went on, referring to the three-day period cited by the court—May 19 through May 21—in which the, ’s surveillance of the Soviet warships was to have taken place. Unlike many of his fellow radiomen at the Atlantic Submarine Force message center, Hannon had actually served aboard a submarine, earning his prize Dolphins insignia in the one-of-a-kind nuclear sub USS Triton before his assignment ashore. There was no doubt—the 99 crew members were dead. RADIOMEN 2ND CLASS MIKE HANNON WALKED TO WORK WITH A PALPABLE SENSE OF UNEASE on the morning of May 23, 1968. At that point, the Navy had to find and examine the wreck. The Scorpion was third in the revolutionary new Skipjack class of nuclear fast-attack subs. At the Atlantic Fleet’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Force Command, the telephone rang at 2:15 p.m., and the duty officer received jolting news: Submarine Force Atlantic headquarters was requesting that the aviation command immediately launch long-range patrol aircraft from Norfolk and Bermuda to search for any sign of the Scorpion along its expected course in the western Atlantic. They found nothing. Working through CINCLANTFLT headquarters and their communications, we organized a search from both ends [of the, ’s presumed course] both by air and surface ships and other submarines.”, Surprised by this totally unexpected disclosure—a secret search for the. Submarine, .” But the previous day no message had come clattering out of the secure teletypewriter that Hannon used. By comparing the detection times of these signals, the position of the SCORPION was determined. 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. And frequently our submarines are sent out on exercises which eliminate any requirement for reporting. Then Craven’s team noted one odd discrepancy. “But the weather may abate, the ship may well have been held back [by the storm], and she could proceed into port.”, This was another lie. By 1968 it was obvious to the Navy’s Bureau of Ships that the submarine was badly in need of major overhaul. “It looked like we needed to do something in the way of a search operation, [and so] I got Admiral 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. At around midnight on 16 May 1968, the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) slipped quietly through the Strait of Gibraltar and paused just long enough off the choppy breakwaters of Rota, Spain, to rendezvous with a Navy ship and offload two crewmen and several messages. Moorer waited until some word had come in from the search ships and planes. Her assigned area was in the northern East China and Yellow Seas. If anyone could unlock the mystery of the, After offering a lengthy review of the search for the, Mediterranean deployment, Schade revealed that COMSUBLANT had dispatched unspecified “exercise instructions” to Slattery once the submarine had entered the Atlantic, including a directive to report its position on or about Tuesday, May 21. RADIOMEN 2ND CLASS MIKE HANNON WALKED TO WORK WITH A PALPABLE SENSE OF UNEASE on the morning of May 23, 1968. Kurt Weill, German-born composer (The Threepenny Opera). Hannon had never seen any of them before. USS Scorpion was a Skipjack-class nuclear powered submarine that served in the United States Navy and the sixth vessel, and second submarine, of the U.S. Navy to carry that name. “Up until 11 a.m., we weren’t that concerned,” he said. A 2019 dedication of a new memorial at Arlington Memorial cemetery to the officers and crew of the USS Thresher, a nuclear submarine that sank in 1963, in Arlington, VA. If Scorpion had experienced a hot run torpedo while on the return voyage to Norfolk, Slattery would automatically have ordered an emergency hard left rudder to turn the boat around as fast as possible. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by Historynet LLC, the world's largest publisher of history magazines. Some [were] diverted and some of them were just told to come over to the track which we presupposed the, would be on. The U.S. Navy says divers have recovered the remains of all 10 sailors from the USS John S. McCain, the naval ship that collided with a merchant vessel last week. 4) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: The Final Secret of the USS Scorpion. WHILE THE SUBMARINE WAS NEARING THE END OF ITS MEDITERRANEAN DEPLOYMENT, Sonar Technician 1st Class Bill Elrod, a crewman on the Scorpion since 1964, had received devastating news: his wife, Julianne, had gone into labor on May 16, but the baby had died at birth. The Scorpion left Rota, Spain, on April 28 and headed west across the Atlantic on or about May 20. A submarine skipper’s immediate response to the warning of a hot run is to order a 180-degree turn. A routine homecoming from sea suddenly escalated into a major crisis as the seven-year-old submarine inexplicably failed to appear at 1 p.m. on Monday, May 27. The previous evening, in an impromptu news conference at the Pentagon, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas H. Moorer had offered a slender reed of hope to the families of the crew. For reasons that even now are a closely guarded secret, that happened in late May 1968 when the nuclear attack submarine USS Scorpion (SSN-589) sank in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean as she was returning from a long deployment. That's then-Vice Adm. Hyman G. Rickover standing on the sailplanes aside another officer. This went on for quite some time, until it was quite obvious that she was long overdue arriving in Norfolk.”, set in motion a research effort that would occupy me, on and off, for the next 24 years. When the Explorer was under construction, the cover story was that its mission was to recover the USS Scorpion. The rapidly changing Cold War arena demanded that each one of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarines be on continual service for the purpose of locating and tracking Soviet attack and missile submarines. Having few options, the Navy accepted his offer. Craven was not above unusual ideas. Opening the door to the message center, he froze in his tracks. But in late October came the stunning news that the wreckage of the submarine had been found. For the next week, dozens of Atlantic Fleet ships and patrol aircraft scoured the open ocean. “We haven’t heard anything from them,” a sailor replied. missing.” “I went totally numb,” Theresa later recalled. After several days, the search effort shrank to five destroyers, five submarines, and a fleet oiler proceeding in two groups down the. “There were officers openly discussing the fact that they believed the Scorpion had been sunk,” Hannon told me. USS Scorpion (SSN-589) was a Skipjack-class nuclear powered submarine of the USN (United States Navy). A. On June 5, the Navy announced that Scorpion and her crew were presumed lost. “Now we had captains and admirals running around wanting more information [about the Scorpion]. Theresa Bishop, the wife of Torpedoman Chief Walter W. Bishop, the, s Chief of the Boat, waited out of the rain with several friends in a car in the parking lot at the foot of the pier. But time and constant service took their toll. Then Schade unwittingly dropped his first bombshell. (Lost 52 Project) 11 Nov 2019. The admiral’s account flatly contradicted what Hannon and his fellow radiomen had seen and heard. Not a single witness revealed what the COMSUBLANT message center staff had known all along: that the Scorpion emergency had begun in the late evening of Wednesday, May 22. Barbara was so eager for a reunion with her husband and their infant daughter, Holli, that she had come out despite the storm. He was particularly upset to learn that on Friday, May 24, COMSUBLANT officials—knowing full well the Scorpion was already lost with all hands—had announced that it would be arriving at 1 p.m. the following Monday, and worse, had said nothing three days later to dissuade several dozen family members from standing vigil for hours in the raging nor’easter. Like all Cold War subs, Scorpioncarried warshots, that is, live torpedoes. Schade was explaining that instead of first sounding the alarm on May 27 after the Scorpion failed to arrive as scheduled, his command knew something was wrong with the submarine within hours of its actual sinking—a full four days earlier than officials had ever admitted. Last Monday, the … Nevertheless, to this day U.S. Navy officials insist that Commander Slattery and his 98 crewmen perished as the result of some unknown malfunction, not from any sinister event. But hours earlier, when his eight-hour shift had ended at midnight, Hannon feared that one of the submarines on his watch might be in trouble—or worse. Ninety-nine officers and men were on board the Scorpion. “However, there were [also] messages sent up the ladder seeking guidance on how to handle the event relative to the press.” From that vantage point, Hannon watched in growing dismay and anger as the navy buried the truth of what had happened to the, . In May 1968, a U.S. nuclear-powered attack submarine was sent on a secret mission to spy on the Soviet navy. It was one of the earliest submarines to be powered by the S5W nuclear reactor; this was subsequently a widely-used reactor model with few problems. As Schade described it, the emergency had not begun until that rain-swept Monday afternoon when the Scorpion failed to arrive back in Norfolk on schedule. The story of the missing submarine soon made the front pages of newspapers across the country. She carried 14 Mark 37 electric torpedoes, seven steam-powered Mark 14s, and two nuclear-tipped Mark 45s. And [Scorpion] reported that their condition was so good that they didn’t even need to stop.” 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. “All messages, incoming or outgoing, were routed through my desk,” Hannon recalled years later. Bellah left to return to his own office elsewhere on the, . His intelligence section provided Commander Slattery with vital information to carry out the Scorpion’s various missions. Still, the two radiomen were aware of a top-secret situation involving the, that suggested potential danger. Even before the fearful family members dejectedly returned home not knowing what had happened to their loved ones, the Navy’s situation room in the Pentagon was full of worried officers who were trying to determine why the submarine had gone missing. Now, I believe you did state that it would be normal, you would not expect to hear from Scorpion after she filed her posit[ion] report and got underway returning home until she got here. In November 2013, I filed a freedom of information act request for more pictures/video of the wreckage of the USS Scorpion. “It was no big deal because boats were always late for any number of legitimate reasons ranging from equipment malfunctions to ‘the radioman just forgot,’ ” Hannon said. Henry Dreyfuss, industrial designer of everything from telephones to the interior of the Boeing 707.