"A Voyage of Importance"

The sleek steel hull of a nuclear submarine moved easily and rapidly through the quiet depths, its reactor-driven geared turbines purring, its coffeepots perking, its jukebox playing, its 116-man crew caught up with an unusual sense of excitement. On the submarine's closed-circuit TV screens, the crewmen could see an upward-pointed camera-eye view of an ice pack, lit up by the Arctic's 24-hour-a-day sunlight, like a translucent cloud racing by. In his cabin, a slim U.S. Navy commander wrote out in longhand a couple of messages--one addressed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the White House, Washington, the other to his crew. His ship, he wrote in the crew's message, was about to achieve "goals long sought by those who sail the seas."

It was Aug. 3, 1958. Time: 11:15 p.m. E.D.T. That day in Peking the Kremlin's Khrushchev had wound up four days of secret conferences with Red China's Mao. In Washington U.S. officials were again on tenterhooks about a parley at the summit. In the quivering Middle East more U.S. ground troops were pouring ashore. But there beneath the peaceful, sunlit icecap, the 116 U.S. Navymen were making more pages for the history books than anybody else. They were setting a new sea tradition for their countrymen, to rate alongside Jones, Farragut, Peary, Byrd. The submarine was blunt-bowed Nautilus, world's first nuclear-powered ship. Nautilus' position: under the ice at the North Pole.

Trutta, Tang, Wahoo. The sea saga began at 2 a.m. July 23, when Nautilus pulled clear of its berth at Pearl Harbor, its destination announced as the Panama Canal. Only a handful of Americans knew Nautilus' secret mission--an 8,146-mile voyage from Pearl Harbor to Portland, England, via the North Pole. Last August and September Nautilus had probed under the ice pack in a little-noticed voyage, got within 180 miles of the Pole and closer than any ship had gone before. Last December Nautilus' developer, Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, predicted that Nautilus would go to the Pole "in the not too distant future," added, "I venture to say that it will go down as one of history's greatest feats of exploration."

In January and again in June, the young officer slated by the Navy to do the job flew to Washington to brief President Eisenhower on the possibilities. Nautilus' commanding officer: Commander William R. Anderson, 37, Tennessee-born Annapolis standout (class of '42), submariner veteran of Tarpon, Narwhal, Trutta, Sarda, Tang and Wahoo in World War II and the cold war, recent staffer in the Atomic Energy Commission. After Anderson's June briefing, the President gave the Navy its orders: Go ahead. And as he pulled out of Pearl Harbor last fortnight and set course almost due north toward the Aleutians and the Bering Straits, Nautilus' captain began to set about record-cracking in a way that justified the Navy's high hopes. First record: Nautilus covered the 2,900 miles submerged from Pearl Harbor to the Bering Straits at an average speed of just under 20 knots, then set a record in the fresh new speed books on long voyages under the sea.

Swim By Instrument. In the narrow Bering Straits between Alaska and Soviet Siberia, Nautilus kept well within U.S. waters, popped up its radar antenna only once for about 30 seconds to take a radar fix. Did the Russians detect them? Anderson thought not. Detouring along Alaska's northern coast to avoid clogged-up ice, Nautilus surfaced for the first time since Pearl Harbor to get a sure fix on a DEW-line radar station, then headed down again into the fantastic beneath-the-sea new world of mountains and deeps that is the nuclear submarine's true element. Its course: along the Barrow Sea Valley, a deep underwater canyon that leads and widens out from Alaska's Point Barrow into the 12,000-ft.-deep Arctic Sea basin.

Nautilus now headed directly toward the North Pole, the place that had drawn Nansen, Amundsen, Wilkins, Peary, now flown over by scheduled airlines but never yet reached by ship. Its speed was rapid, probably in excess of 20 knots. Its depth was below 400 ft. Its reactor was functioning perfectly. Its ship's inertial navigational system--an amazing complex of gyroscopes, accelerometers, depth finders, integrators, trackers, etc. (TIME, April 29, 1957) taken over in a rare salvage from the Air Force's defunct Navaho missile program--kept Nautilus on course and on depth, gave its captain instant readings of position. Ten sound-detection devices measured the distance to the ice above and the thickness of the ice while three other devices sounded the sea bed. Findings: polar ice is generally about 12 ft. thick, although some ridges bulged down 50 ft. or more. Crew comforts were also measuring up: the sub's crew was treated to more than 30 movies, e.g., Katharine Hepburn in Desk Set, and cribbage, chess and acey-deucey tournaments were under way as the Nautilus headed toward history.

Fresh Fruit Salad. At 11:15 p.m. on Aug. 3 Nautilus made it. And just as the North Pole was history, it was also routine as the measuring of never-known-before statistics went on without letup. The water temperature at the North Pole, Nautilus found, was 32DEGF. The sea depth there was 13,410 ft., exactly 1,927 ft. deeper than previously estimated. An electrician's mate first class was sworn in for re-enlistment--the first man, the Navy pointed out, who had ever re-enlisted at the North Pole. Eleven new crewmen got their qualification on nuclear submarines. And as they headed on from the Pole, the 116 crewmen--the most men ever assembled at the North Pole at one time--sat down to a meal of steak, French fries, creamed peas and carrots, fresh fruit salad and a North Pole cake that signified their first celebration. Inscription on the cake: SUBMERGED POLAR TRANSIT 1958.

About 36 hours later Nautilus came out from under the ice pack, surfaced between Greenland and Spitsbergen right where it expected to be, broke radio silence for the first time since leaving Hawaii to send off a three-word encrypted signal to the Navy that said something like: "Here we are!" Thirteen miles off Iceland a helicopter arrived out of nowhere, lifted Anderson off for a preplanned hop to Iceland's Keflavik Airfield, where a Navy plane was waiting to fly him to Washington. The helicopter lowered the crew's first outside-world tribute direct from the President of the U.S. It read: "Congratulations on a magnificent achievement. Well done."

The Golden N. Commander Anderson flew back to a Washington that was soon agog with suspense. Reason: White House Press Secretary James Hagerty was planning a showcase presentation, warned newsmen to be on hand at the White House for a major story "with the President participating." Nautilus' Anderson went to the White House, briefed the President for 25 minutes. Then the President, Anderson and his wife Bonnie, and a small group of Navy and Atomic Energy Commission brasshats formed up before 75 newsmen in the White House conference room. (Not invited and thus snubbed: A-Sub Pioneer Rickover, whose prickly personality is still anathema to some Navy brass.) There the President pinned the Legion of Merit on Commander Anderson, awarded the first Presidential Unit Citation ever given in peacetime to SSN 571--U.S.S. Nautilus.

After that the presidential party pulled out, left Anderson to tell the trip's story to the reporters (and that done, to pay a courtesy call on Admiral Rickover). Said he: "You know I am a little dazed by all this." But it was not only Anderson, but the newsmen, the Navy, the nation, the world that was more than a little dazed.

In one voyage of one U.S. nuclear submarine--one of six operational, 23 on the way--the Navy had 1) increased the power of the U.S. deterrent by laying bare the Communist empire's northern shores to the future Polaris-missile-toting nuclear submarines; 2) pioneered a potential though difficult underwater commercial trade route that remakes the map of the world. And as Anderson flew on from Washington at week's end to reboard Nautilus and take her into harbor at Portland, England, he left behind with President Eisenhower the letter he had written in longhand at the big moment. "Dear Mr. President," it read. "I hope, sir, that you will accept this letter as a memento of a voyage of importance to the United States. Signed at the North Pole at 2315 EDST."

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