Hornfischer’s 'One Ocean' in the Cold War

Review by Bill Doughty––

In his best, pure “The Last of the Tin Can Sailors” style, James D. Hornfischer tells the harrowing story of the fate of the submarine USS Cochino (SS-345) in “Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War, 1945-1960” (Bantam Books, 2022).

USS Cochino and other submarines, including USS Tusk (SS-426), were operating near the Arctic Circle in August 1949, seventy-three years ago this month, four years after World War II and at the start of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Hornfischer writes of the heroism of U.S. Navy Sailors trying to save their submarine after a gas leak, fire, and explosions. “Heroism,” he writes, “was never a function of rank.”

Hornfischer’s account of the Sailors’ valor, both aboard Cochino and the rescue submarine Tusk, is typically gripping and dramatic –– and too long to adequately excerpt here. Readers can find it in Chapter 11, “Abandon Ship.” But readers who invest time in reading all 400-plus pages of this book will be rewarded with an understanding of how the United States Navy and Marine Corps survived, thrived, and helped maintain peace in the aftermath of WWII and in the face of communist expansion, especially by the Soviets.

As a result of America’s commitment to democracy and its alliance with Western Europe –– impelled by the Truman Doctrine –– twelve nations, including the United States, signed the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, four months prior to the Cochino incident. Norway is one of those original NATO members.

Capt. Roy Benson, Commander of Submarine Development Group Two, met with the surviving American Sailors of Cochino and Tusk in Norway. He also met with Norwegian diplomats. Hornfischer writes:

“The relationship between Oslo and Washington, fully reciprocal and secure within NATO, was based on the security needs of democratic Norway and the strategic value of its coast … the Norwegian fjords offered plentiful tactical advantages for an enterprising fleet commander. These included ‘ready concealment; year-round ice-free deepwater paths to the sea by diverse routes, easy protection from surface or ground forces, ideal antiaircraft gun protection possibilities, [and] large seaplane sheltered landing areas. Thus, bases in the fjords could be advantageous to us as denial of them to the opponent would be disastrous to his plans.’ These insights would not be forgotten.

“The Norwegian officers who met Roy Benson and his men were ready to meet Russia in war. ‘Within thirty minutes of declaration of war,’ a host officer boasted to the Americans, ‘every Norwegian male would be in uniform and under arms and in another half hour every Communist would be dead or in custody.’ Scandinavians had known recently the sound of the treads of Russian tanks and held no illusions about Moscow’s continuing ambitions. They knew that Russia coveted naval bases in the fjords as a means of escaping the polar ice prison that constrained their potential to project naval power into the world. As Worthington put it, the Norwegians were ‘happy to see evidence that the U.S. Navy was thinking of their part of the world.’”

In his profound way, Hornfischer observes, “Nations that perceive threats globally were compelled to operate on the outer membrane of the possible.” Freedom and democracy took a stand against Communism and autocracy in the Cold War.

Now there are 30 nations as part of NATO, with Finland and Sweden on their way to becoming members in the face of Russian revanchism after Putin’s unprovoked attack on neighbor Ukraine earlier this year.

Stalin and Putin

Hornfischer examines the mindset of authoritarian Joseph Stalin under “Communism’s self-hypnosis” of blind belief but with the “political reflexes of a perpetually fear-bound despot.” He examines Russia’s national psychology and Stalin’s “mastery of the tools of the paranoid art.” Such feelings of persecution and victimization are familiar in studying other autocrats.

In sharp contrast to Putin, is the pivotal leader who brought about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died today at the age of 91. A generation after the era covered in this book, Gorbachev famously proposed doing away with nuclear weapons. He worked with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush to reduce nuclear arms. Putin, on the other hand, threatens to use them, especially if NATO threatens to help Ukraine directly. Gorbachev’s USSR was brought down in the aftermath of the Chernobyl meltdown; Putin has his military fire upon and otherwise threaten nuclear power plants in an attempt to make Russia great again.

The fifteen-year span covered in this book covers the evolution of submarines and the nuclear navy and the game-changing development of the Polaris missile. Hornfischer briefly covers the Korean War, U.S. nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific, “Revolt of the Admirals,” and threats by Communist China to Taiwan. He reveals sometimes startling milestones that occurred in August or September:

• The secret mission of Operation Sandy near Bermuda, in which USS Midway (CV-41) would test for the first time a Navy ship’s ability to launch strategic ballistic missiles, Sept. 2-6, 1947.
• The creation of the CIA, led by its first director, Navy Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Sept. 18, 1947.
• The discovery by a military “Pole Vaulter” from Misawa Air Base of the Soviet Union’s apparent first nuclear test, Sept. 3, 1949.
• The first time Marines moved from ship (USS Sicily CVE-118) to shore aboard helicopters (HRS-1) into the Inchon area in South Korea, Sept. 1, 1952.
• The U.S. Navy’s confrontation with Communist China over bombardment in the staged attack on Quemoy islands in the Taiwan Strait, Aug. 23, 1958. (USS Midway was deployed from Pearl Harbor to provide deterrence and protection to Taiwan.)
• The first (unsuccessful) attempt by USS Nautilus (SSN-571), captained by William Anderson to find an “undersea Northwest Passage in reverse” under the Arctic, Aug. 19, 1957.
• The second (successful) attempt by USS Nautilus, captained by William Anderson, to transit the Arctic, arriving beneath the North Pole on Aug. 2, 1958.

Hornfischer’s taut style, found in “Tin Can Sailors,” "Neptune's Inferno," and "Ship of Ghosts," captures readers as his words pulsate about USS Nautilus's attempt.

USS Nautilus underway.

The submariners squeeze under and around walls of ice, not knowing what might lie ahead. “Only Neptune knew what kind of ice was in store for them in these tight underwater caves.”

From descriptions of Cochino’s failed attempt to transit the Barents Sea and Arctic Circle in August 1949 to Nautilus’s victorious achievement in August 1958, Hornfischer shows the resilience, commitment, and innovation of the U.S. Navy to “Hold the Sea.”

Echoing ret. Adm. James Stavridis, Hornfischer writes, “Though landsmen speak of the world’s seven seas, there is in fact only one global ocean.”

NATO Response Force and Allied Marines from the U.S., Sweden, Finland, and U.K. simulate amphibious assaults on a Swedish beachhead during BALTOPS June 10, 2015. The 17 Allied and partner countries integrated air, land, and sea operations and procedures to demonstrate the combined-forces capability to respond to threats in the Baltic region. (Sgt. Tatum Vayavananda.)

Chilling with ‘Icebound’

Review by Bill Doughty––

As the summer heats up literally, here’s a way to cool off literarily: Andrea Pitzer’s goosebumps-inducing history-science-adventure true story, “Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World” (Scribner, Simon & Schuster, 2021).

It’s the otherworldly true story of Dutch sailors, led by navigator William Barents, as they attempt to find an open polar sea in the Arctic in the age of sail.

Barents, who pioneered map-making in the Mediterranean, made three voyages for the Dutch Republic in the 1590s. This book covers all three ventures, but zeroes in on the third and final fraught attempt. The Dutch, along with other nations, wanted to discover a northern trade route to China.

It was time of growing empires and growing sea trade in slaves and spices.

It was also a time of war between Spain (Catholic and monarchistic) and the Netherlands (Protestant and based in liberty). While war raged in western Europe, Barents and other Dutch sailors headed East and North, hoping to find a warm sea beyond the ice.

Barents was considered a “magician” for his ability at celestial navigation. “He could look into the sun and fix their ship’s position not he globe. He could watch the stars and tell them the day of the year.”

Though no navigable route was found, the young Dutch Republic would continue to expand over the next hundred years –– thanks to the slave trade, spice trade, exploration, and art –– to become the largest economy and naval power in the world at the time, according to Pitzer.

“William Barents would play a role in that drama, but as he readied himself for his first voyage into the Arctic, his country was a blank slate, its sins and achievements still unwritten,” she writes.

Navy readers will appreciate Pitzer’s recounting of history and science, naval lore, and the courage and commitment of sailors in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

For example, as regards history and science…

We are reminded that Vikings “discovered” Ukraine and that the science of navigation relied on the discovery of trigonometry in 1080 by Arab Astronomers, as well as inventions by Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, and Scandinavians. What they knew in the late 16th century, though, was dwarfed by what Barents and the sailors didn’t know. Many great scientific discoveries were yet to be made.

“As they set forth, they knew some things. They knew how to set the sails on the ship to catch the wind. They knew how to steer. They knew how to work wood, and hunt, and trap. Barents could reckon latitude and knew the stars, and those he didn’t know, he had charts for. Sailors understood that icebergs haunted the northern regions and could stretch for miles. Sometimes rising more than two hundred feet above the waterline, they were capable of rewarding vessels and the tiny human presence guiding them.

“Barents and his fellow crew members knew some things, but it wasn’t enough. They possessed no scientific understanding of gravity, no telescopes, and no calculus. Though they could find their latitude, they couldn’t yet determine longitude from aboard a ship. They were centuries away from deciphering the germ theory of disease. More than a hundred years could pass before humanity would discover that lightning was electricity. Decades remained before doctors would realize that blood circulates in the body, and that a cell is the unit of life. As he sailed into the Arctic, Barents would, in time encounter wonders and terrors without understanding most of the forces at play in his universe.”

Nenets idols, Vaigach Island.

Naturally, in the absence of information and in the embrace of superstition, early sailors believed good –– and bad –– fortune was the will of God. They believed their religion condoned slavery, for example, and ordained “man” to overcome and rule over nature.

Pitzer describes interactions with indigenous people in the far north, including the Sami and Nenets, who worshipped wooden idols, which fascinated the sailors. One sailor stole an idol and took it aboard ship only to be forced to return it later.

As the Scientific Revolution was beginning to blossom in Europe with Copernicus, Descartes, Francis Bacon, Barents and his crew were collecting and measuring polar bear pelts and walrus tusks and studying flora and fauna –– three hundred years before Darwin. Barents explained mirages, experienced the gap between Earth’s magnetic pole and true polar north, and mapped the geography at the edge of the Arctic. He also resolved a centuries-old superstition about barnacle geese: that they did not spontaneously hatch from barnacles (because no one had previously seen their nests and eggs).

Pitzer hides her history and science within harrowing tales of survival aboard their ship, at Vaigach Island, on boats, and at then-ice-covered Nova Zembla.

We feel the cold chill the crew to the bone. We hear chunks of ice hit the hull of the ship, see the men fend off frequent attacks by polar bears, smell the stink of sickness, and taste the desperation as the men are trapped in the ice over the winter: “Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World.”

Arctic fox

Navy history readers will appreciate passages about sails, masts, knees, joint pegs, and planks; scurvy; mutiny; keelhauling; and generally what life was like for age-of-sail sailors at sea –– endless routines, fear of storms, and trying to thrive in a crowded space.

Ultimately, this is a story of perseverance, the strength of the human spirit, and the will to survive.

The sailors relied on trapping Arctic foxes and finding birds and eggs. They rationed what food they could salvage from their ship. And they built a cabin and collected drift wood to keep warm.

Hampton Sides, author of the great “In the Kingdom of Ice,” blurbs: “Engrossing … Andrea Pitzer brings Barents’s three harrowing expeditions to vivid life –– while giving us fascinating insight into one of history’s most intrepid navigators.”

Pitzer visits Nova Zembla in 2019.

Pitzer bases her research on journals, material in museums, and interviews with scholars. She relies on entries in the original diary of Gerrit de Veer, one of the sailors who returned to tell the story.

She also makes a remarkable visit in August 2019 to Nova Zembla, “a numbing, desolate place,” near the ruins of Barents’s cabin. The land is now a Russian Arctic preserve.

The book concludes with a sobering account of the effects of global warming in the Arctic and the loss of ice during summer and over recent decades. Pitzer gives a stunning conclusion about the intersection of Barents’s exploration, our understanding and acceptance of science, and a context for how humans impact the planet.

Survival of individuals, and perhaps the species, depends on the will to endure, adapt, and overcome.

“Icebound” can be a springboard to confront cold, inconvenient truths.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71) prepares to replenish stores and fuel with the Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oiler USNS Laramie (T-AO-203) in the Barents Sea, Oct. 29, 2020. Ross is currently on its 10th Forward Deployed Naval Forces-Europe (FDNF-E) patrol in the U.S. Sixth Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe and Africa. (MCSN Christine Montgomery)

RIP David McCullough Sr.

"It is impossible to conceive that David McCullough is no longer with us. He is among our greatest historians, writing with an almost magical command of language and story." –– Ken Burns

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian, and humanist David McCullough inspired me to start this blog in 2009. I have featured his books and inspiration many times on Navy Reads. He will be missed but long remembered. –– Bill Doughty