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MY COLD WAR: Two Years Aboard a Navy Icebreaker

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MY COLD WAR: Two Years Aboard a Navy Icebreaker MY COLD WAR: Two Years Aboard A Navy Icebreaker By Rutherford H. Platt Memoir for family and friends written November, 2013 (Antarctica section published with photographs in Daily Hampshire Gazette, Jan. 30, 2014) Overview At 0900 one fine morning in June, 1962, I led some thirty classmates in the Navy Hymn “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” a role assigned to me as the only Glee Club member among the graduates in the Yale Naval ROTC program. Feeling rather dashing in our dress whites and military hair cuts, we were duly commissioned as Ensigns. the lowliest officer rank in the Navy but still deserving of a salute from a veteran petty officer as we filed out of the room (tipping him by Navy custom). Then on to the university graduation ceremonies “Neath the Elms” of the Old Campus where President John F. Kennedy gave the commencement address and received an honorary degree (“I have the best of both worlds, a Harvard education and a Yale degree”). Unlike my classmates who chose flight training, destroyers, submarines, or the Marine Corps (some of them later serving in Vietnam), I had requested assignment to an icebreaker and, not surprisingly, my request was granted. Three weeks after graduation, the Navy icebreaker U.S.S. Edisto departed Boston Harbor for Labrador and Greenland with me on board. This unorthodox choice of duty was in fact a byproduct of my father’s infatuation with the Arctic where he twice ventured on natural history missions aboard the schooner Bowdoin with the renowned explorer Donald B. MacMillan. (My father’s work on arctic botany was published in a Scientific American cover article, as well as National Geographic and his own books.) My two years aboard Edisto took me northwards for two summer seasons––first a couple of months on the west side of Greenland and second to East Greenland with shore leave in Iceland and Norway. Between those two northern deployments, we headed south to Antarctica via the Panama Canal and New Zealand–– an epic eight-month voyage in the wake of Captain Cook, Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, Byrd––and at times, Captain Ahab. I was duly “baptized” in crossing the Arctic Circle, the Equator, and the Antarctic Circle, all in one year! I missed a birthday as we crossed the International Date Line enroute to New Zealand on November 1. Between our hectic schedule of deployments, we returned to our home port of Boston where the ship was torn apart and its crew indulged in well-deserved revelry. For me––21-years-old when it began–– this was a time of intense challenge and rapid growing-up. I sailed some 40,000 miles to and from the ends of the earth. I learned 1 how to “con” a ship as “officer of the deck” (OOD), how to command crew members twice my age (while learning from them what I was supposed to command them to do), and how to drink beer while circling the ship in a landing craft (alcohol being banned on the ship itself but not its boats). It was a time of high adventure interspersed with periods of utter boredom, or the other way around. There were close calls and brushes with history. As gunnery officer I nearly blew the bow off the ship due to a mechanical malfunction, but months later I saved us from collision with a taunting Russian merchant vessel off of Norway. We steamed past Cuba in October, 1962, but like aborigines, we were blissfully ignorant of the Cuban Missile Crisis a couple of weeks later as we crossed the South Pacific out of radio contact with the rest of the world. But our photographs of the remains of a former Antarctic base sticking out of an iceberg made Life Magazine. It was definitely an interesting two years! The Ship and Its Crew Edisto was built just after World War II, the last of seven “Wind Class” icebreakers designed to support military and scientific missions in polar regions. As compared with sleek destroyers and cruisers, icebreakers were homely stepsisters: short, wide, slow, and heavy. Edisto was 269 feet long, 63 feet wide, and displaced (weighed) about 6,500 tons fully loaded. She was powered by six 2,000 horsepower diesel engines harnessed to two electric motors which drove the ship’s twin massive fifteen-foot propellers. The diesel- electric power plant (similar to conventional submarines of that era) enabled the ship to maneuver in tight places and apply huge bursts of power controlled by throttles on the bridge. The lower face of the bow angled sharply sternward to allow the ship to ride up on ice flows, breaking through them with the ship’s weight and forward momentum. The hull was double-bottomed and rounded to reduce the risk of becoming trapped (“beset”) in heavy ice, and possibly sunk like Shackleton’s Endurance in 1914. As described later, when the ship did become stuck, fuel and ballast water could be rapidly pumped between tanks on either side to wriggle the ship out of a tight spot. Edisto carried a small motor launch (the “Greenland Cruiser”) and a couple of landing craft to ferry personnel and supplies ashore when the ship was at anchor in open water. Since an icebreaker spends a lot of time in ice pack where its boats are useless, she was also equipped with a flight deck and two helicopters, along with flight officers and mechanics to operate them. The ship’s company included about a dozen officers and some 220 enlisted crew members. The officers included a few veterans of previous polar voyages on Edisto. However, the Captain and Executive Officer were both new to icebreaker duty as were my cohort of “college kid” ensigns. The enlisted crew were an assorted group ranging from gangling recent high school grads to veterans of many years and types of naval service. Like the musical South Pacific, there were some real characters who enlivened shipboard life . Many were homesick during our long deployments in remote places. In my early assignment as the ship’s Morale Officer (whatever that meant), I tried to raise all our spirits with pithy accounts of local history and lore from some of the places we visited. (Without Wikipedia, I relied on a few polar accounts borrowed from my Dad and some imagination.) The First Northern Voyage (June–August, 1962) 2 Little did I suspect that I would literally be entering the “cold, cruel world” within three weeks after graduation! But when I arrived on board in the Boston Navy Yard in mid- June, Edisto was preparing to depart within days. So I said my good byes to “folks back home,” pulled out my new khaki sea-duty wardrobe, and settled in to a corner of the junior officers bunkroom which I shared with my fellow ensigns. Our departure from Boston was suitably impressive: the crew arrayed in their dress uniforms, lines released from the pier and hauled aboard, three blasts on the ship’s whistle, a brass band playing something martial, and a gaggle of families and girl friends waving fond farewells. With immense clouds of diesel smoke from the stack, the ship revolved itself and pointed out to sea. Downtown Boston and the harbor islands receded into the dusk and we began to roll, and roll, and roll. I quickly realized that the football- shaped Edisto was built for durability but not comfort. Everything loose flew around until we finally made our belongings properly shipshape. Fortunately, I never became seasick in the many roller-coaster voyages ahead, but some other newcomers on board were not so lucky. (One poor ensign wore a pail around his neck during his first bridge watches at sea). Following the track of my Dad on the Bowdoin years earlier, we steamed (or rather dieseled) northeast along the Maine coast, rounded Nova Scotia, crossed the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and entered the fabled Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador: the gateway to the Arctic. There we encountered our first ice bergs floating majestically towards warmer waters and oblivion, countless miles from their natal glaciers in Greenland, Baffin Island, and Ellesmere Island. Our first port of call was a military base at Goose Bay in Labrador where we were supposed to escort cargo ships through drifting pack ice. But there was very little ice and a great deal of fog. So we anchored and sat for an anti-climactic two or more weeks with nothing to see or do. We were too far from the Goose Bay base for any of the crew to go ashore. So we cultivated the pastime of drinking watery beer while circling the ship in our World War II landing craft. (Are we having fun yet?) Finally, we were ordered to proceed on to Greenland. We continued north, crossing the Arctic Circle which is the southernmost latitude (66 degrees, 33 minutes North) which experiences at least one night of “midnight sun.” All neophyte officers and crew were duly christened as “bluenoses” by those who had crossed the Circle before, with the liberal application of grease and smelly stuff to make us appreciate our new status. After a few days of navigating through rough seas, the fog lifted and the great Greenland coastal mountains and ice cap (two miles thick in some places) loomed ahead. Our first destination was Sondre Stromfjord on the southwest coast of Greenland, the site of a Cold War U.S. air base military air base (it was closed in 1992). We steamed into the fjord with wonder at the sheer cliffs and ice formations towering above us on either side.
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