06 January 2007

Listening to the Bear Swim

Cape Henlopen State Park is located one mile east of Lewes, Delaware, near the boarding station for the Cape May Lewes Ferry. It is not far from Washington, as the crow flies, and you can get there by car or train. Americans can now go crabbing, surf-fishing, sunbathing, swimming, and walk the beach. They could even scale the Great Dune, the highest sand mound between Cape Hatteras and Cape Cod, which rises 80 feet above the shore.



The park has been home to other and larger adventures, it its time. it was an Army Coastal Artillery installation called Fort Miles, part of the long-range gun defenses that ringed the entire continental US, parts of Alaska and the tranquil island of Oahu.

It was also a major factor in the Cold War underwater Sound Surveillance System, the system that tracked Soviet submarines worldwide. We called it SOSUS, and gave us the capability to attack the Russian nuclear threat in its watery bastion, if we were ordered to do it. It was a big deal in its time, and it helped keep the peace.

It was quite a secret, back in the day. Not one of the Great Mysteries, perhaps, since it was so big and omnipresent. The cover story was quite true. It was oceanographic monitoring, of a sort, but a very specialized sort of monitoring.

I was one of the legion of people who worked with the acoustic locating data that was provided to the Ocean Surveillance Information System, managed by Naval intelligence. It was so profound an experience that I took my last job, just for the chance to work with Bell Labs, the outfit that was responsible for developing the technology of categorizing the sound in the waters and creating a system so sensitive that it could identify a Soviet submarine operating a thousand miles away.

AT&T, the mighty old phone company of yore, was the only institution that could have managed it, from laboratory concept to deep-water installation. It was executive agent for the biggest single acquisition project the Navy ever chartered. I recall seeing a number long ago. It was something like $20 billion, and I do not think it was in "constant dollars." It is just what it cost to wire the world ocean for sound.

In the early days the technology was relatively crude, and only the sea approaches to North America were wired. The network was primitive, and required stations all along the Atlantic, Pacific and Caribbean shores. I recall visiting the Turks and Cacos islands a decade ago, dispatched on another crisis, and discovering an abandoned American naval facility on a point on the northeast corner of the lozenge-sized main island.

The Navy had been gone long enough that a tree grew from the vicinity of the pitcher's mound on the ball field, since the locals were more inclined to cricket than baseball. Drug dealers and worse used the dilapidated government-issue buildings for their illicit activities. But from the eerily bereft alignment of the buildings, I knew precisely what it had been. A SOSUS Station, or what we delicately called "a naval facility,” or “NavFac,” for short.

Ft. Miles was a Coast Artillery fort in WWII, and it is now being restored to its authentic 1942 condition. Volunteers are providing the labor to refurbish guns, barracks and Headquarters buildings, all ticked out in WWII paraphernalia. AmeriCorps volunteers will guide visitors through the installation and help the visitors interpret what they see. 



The Coastal Artillery sites have thousands of aficionados, but no one thought of the Navy's presence, which, in fact, was greater and longer than the Army. It was a passive and secret presence, masquerading as something innocuous.

>From 1941-1945, the Navy commanded a joint Harbor Entrance Control Post to defend the entrance to Delaware Bay.  It controlled the Navy hydrophones, magnetic anomaly detectors and submarine nets, as well as the Army coast artillery and minefields. It also coordinated the surveillance activities of the Navy and Coast Guard ships at the Naval/Coast Guard base at Cape May, a prototype of the sort of fusion operational intelligence centers the government is struggling to create today to deal with the terrorist threat from the water.

The traditional threat came from under the sea, and the Navy at Ft. Miles was concentrating on submarines from the beginning. U-858, an Unterseeboot of the Type IXC class, flying the American flag, arrived at the Delaware Breakwater off Cape Henlopen on Monday, May 14, 1945 and arrived at the Fort Miles pier at 3:20 p.m. Rear Admiral M.F. Draemmel, Commander of the 4th Navy District, accepted the surrender of Lt. Thilo Bode and his crew at the "Navy Pier" at Ft. Miles. They were turned over to Army 1Lt. Leonard Brunt, Provost Marshal, and 15 MPs, who carried  regulation Army clubs and sidearms for the occasion.


Navy Pier had been the landing point for more than 200 victims of torpedoed Allied ships. The irony of the u-boat men being brought here was not lost on any of the military personnel present.

Bode and his men had been dispatched from Norway by Grossadmiral Karl Doenitz with six other U-boats as part of “Operation Seawolf,” the last offensive operation of the German Navy. Their orders were to destroy anything they saw in a last paroxysm of violence, and not worry about returning.



U-858 had the distinction of being the first German unit to surrender to US forces, and did not have a casualty in her year of service as a “front boat.” Her crewmen were held at Ft. Miles, while she was taken up to the Philadelphia Naval Yard. She was scuttled at the end of 1947 after being used for torpedo trials off the coast of New England, another of the nearly four hundred unterseeboots that litter the floor of the Atlantic.

>From 1945 into the 1960s, while the Army still owned the land, all the Services had designated recreation areas on the beach. Naval Intelligence conducted a two-day course there on how to collect coast and landing beach intelligence.

Among the first SOSUS stations established in 1955 was the NavFac at Cape May, New Jersey, though by 1960 the erosion of the beach was such that the navy was convinced they had to relocate.  In 1961, construction began on the Headquarters/BOQ/BEQ/Mess buildings and a separate Operations building on the southern portion of the Army recreation area. Enlisted and officer housing was also built in downtown Lewes, which still exists and is used today for the staff of the University of Delaware College of Marine Studies.

In 1962 the "Great Ash Wednesday-Good Friday" Nor'easter (as its know up there) completely surrounded NavFac Cape May with ocean.  The erosion was complete, and the Navy packed everything aboard a Tank Landing Ship and moved the equipment across the water to the Army recreation area.

Unfortunately, NavFac Lewes was not yet operational by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis to hear the Soviet submarines heading for the potential conflict with the Navy on the approaches to the Fidel's island. Others were, though, and the system was providing locational information to destroy them, if it became necessary, and it appeared that it very well might.  When the Army turned Ft. Miles over to the State of Delaware in 1964 for a park, the Navy retained the southern 353 acres as part of the comprehensive web of cables that wired the Atlantic Ocean.



The NavFac continued operations until 1981. Sea-based missiles were dramatically improved in range and lethality, and the Soviets were no longer had to patrol in areas covered by the hydrcoustic arrays tied to NavFac Lewes. Besides, the Walker spy-ring had betrayed the secrets of SOSUS, and Soviet research ships had been busy investigating the wired ocean. The cable was cut far at sea and the ops building stripped and vacated.  The Navy turned over to the State all of the land except 16.8 acres around the headquarters building and some beach area, which was retained as a Naval Reserve Facility.

Reserve Mobile Inshore Underwater Warfare Unit 205 trained there and prepared for deployment to the Gulf for DESERT STORM/DESERT Shield from there.  Finally, in 1996, the Navy closed the Reserve Center and returned that remaining land and building to the State.  Senator Biden (D-DE) arranged for the money and the Navy headquarters building became the appropriately-named Biden Environmental Center, now utilized for off-site meetings.

An associate of mine has been walking the beach in the Cape Henlopen area almost every day for the decade since he has been retired. He is an old Cold Warrior, and knew the secret of the SOSUS cable, which still descends from the dune and runs off into the ocean. He knew that the concrete block building at the top of the dune had been the NavFac ops building.  Walking one day in 2003, he heard the noise of bulldozers atop the dune and, upon running up there, arrived too late to lie down in front of the dozer and stop the destruction of the building.

But, good always comes from bad.  In the course of the destruction they turned up a large concrete block that the connection from the land to sea cable and, this being a Park, the superintendent and historian were called.

The state is now marking the Headquarters building with a NavFac Lewes plaque, provided by a former NavFac officer who lives in the area plus a brief explanation of how SOSUS worked, and its impact to the history of the Cold War.

It will explain how things worked, though not all of it, since there are those that are listening still. But it will provide a little light on an increasingly distant time, when Navy listened to the Soviet Bear swimming in the dark water to the east.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www..vicsocotra.com

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