Talk About America, 1951–1968 by Alistair Cooke

Author:Alistair Cooke [Cooke, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, essays, history, United States, 20th Century, Social Science
ISBN: 9781497697690
Google: GFMnBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-03-03T23:49:24.477812+00:00

22. The Submariners

It was just after midnight on a Wednesday in April, and my telephone rang. A friend of mine wondered if he might come over for a nightcap. I was delighted. I am what they used to call a night owl and now call more mysteriously one of the night people; but my friend turns into a turtle about nine in the evening and I welcomed him as a convert to the small hours and the life of Riley. ‘You heard what happened?’ he said. I had not heard. The USS Thresher, a submarine, was long overdue on a well-plotted mission. My friend was an old navy man, with the sentimentality but also the compassion of the service, and he came in shaking his head and murmuring about ‘those poor bastards’. Possibly, we reflected, we knew some of the men aboard. For we had gone off together a, couple of summers before, to spend a few days at Groton, Connecticut, at the mouth of the Thames River that flows into Long Island Sound. We had gone to look over the Submarine Training School, where indeed the crew of the Thresher and many more like them had been converted from sailors into submariners, as they call themselves. Offhand, I can’t think of an assignment since the war that sounded so ghoulish at the start and ended in such fascination on my part for a new subject, a new profession, you might go so far as to say a new type of twentieth-century male.

When I arrived at the Groton base, I was as excited as an urchin and as apprehensive as an undertaker at the sight of two submarines at the docks and the thought that I would soon be on one, and in one, and down in one. They look at first like some joker’s attempt to build a whale. The navy engineers are, in fact, engrossed in just this kind of task. They are still trying to decide what is the essential function of a submarine so that they will be led to design the perfect and appropriate shape.

So I started with a submarine designer and hastened to tell him that I was an ignoramus. He looked at me and said, ‘What do you suppose a submarine is basically supposed to do?’ I was about to tell him, but he quickly added, ‘That’s not a leading question. It’s a question. I honestly have no idea.’ (We were both relieved.) ‘We’re beginning to learn,’ he went on, ‘that a submarine is not a ship, and it’s not an airplane, but it’s more like an airplane than a ship. And maybe more like a fish than either.’

I shuffled as you do when you are seeking some practical information from a butcher or an insurance man, worst yet a pharmacist, and find yourself in the presence of an amateur philosopher. You want to tap his special knowledge and he wants to show you he’s a deep, wise man. It took only an hour or two to appreciate that this naval designer was, on the contrary, a troubled wise man.

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