Sighted Sub, Surfaced Same

The warm Caribbean night was electric with tension as the destroyer sliced at flank speed through the quarantine zone east-northeast of Cuba. Just a few moments before--an hour after sunset on last Oct. 29--a blue-green blip had appeared on the radar screen of the U.S.S. Charles P. Cecil. Almost immediately, the blip began to fade. To Commander Charles P. Rozier, 42, the Cecil's skipper, that meant a diving submarine. The loudspeaker barked: "ASW attack team, man your stations."

Crewmen scrambled to torpedo mounts, readied depth charges and "hedgehogs" (rocket-fired bombs thrown ahead of an attacking destroyer). From a small compartment just over the keel, sonarmen sent quick bursts of sound stabbing through the sub's last position --and heard a satisfying "ping" as the sound waves bounced off moving steel. When a relay in the sonar gear failed, a sonarman quickly unscrewed the cabinet facing, triggered the set by hand until it was repaired.

Then began a game of seagoing hide-and-seek that lasted 34 hours. The Russian sub commander was no amateur. At first he tried to duck into the Cecil's wake--a boil of water some 70 ft. deep providing a perfect baffle against the ship's sonar. When that failed, he ejected noisy, motor-driven decoys from his hull. He stopped his engines and slid under thermoclines--blanketlike water layers of varying temperature, which cause sonar beams to scatter.

During the long, dogged pursuit, Rozier and his crew grudgingly came to respect the enemy below. Said one sonarman: "He was a smart cookie, all right. He had a whole bagful of tricks and he tried them all." But Rozier, who spent all but two hours on the bridge, kept his sonic knuckles rapping steadily on the sub's hull.

Finally, just seven minutes before reveille on Oct. 31, the Cecil's hydrophones began roaring with the sound of blowing ballast tanks. The loudspeaker crackled: "Russian submarine on surface." Sailors sprang from their bunks, lined the rail clad in skivvies. There in the red dawn, black superstructure glistening, the sub rolled on a gentle swell, the hammer and sickle fluttering atop her sail-shaped conning tower.

Then Destroyerman Rozier administered the final indignity. Up the signal yard ran the two international code flags that spell: "Can we be of assistance?" The Russian made no reply.

Last week at Norfolk, Rozier and six of his crew received the Secretary of the Navy's Commendation Medal. Though some 30 Soviet sub contacts were made during the Cuban crisis, only the Cecil brought her quarry to the surface singlehanded.

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