Voyage to Hammerfest

Four U.S. submarines--two streamlined snorkel types, Cochino and Tusk, and two older fleet types--left their base at New London, Conn, six weeks ago and headed quietly into the Atlantic. A brief Navy release announced that they were off on a training cruise to Ireland and return. They reached Londonderry all right, on July 29, and left for home--but by an exceedingly circuitous route.

Last week, engaged "in oceanographic research," they were moving unobtrusively as seals through Arctic waters north and west of the Soviet base at Murmansk. One evening, just after the Cochino and Tusk rendezvoused off Norway's North Cape, the mission came to a sudden end. An explosion, apparently caused by hydrogen from storage batteries, rumbled in the Cochino's vitals.

Her sleek sister moved in through the icy, spume-laced seas to her side. It was a deadly task. Both vessels were rolling wildly and constantly awash, and their hulls were as bare of hand holds as two whale's backs. A rubber boat set out from the Cochino, lost a man in the enormous waves.

He was pulled to safety aboard the rescue vessel; then a toppling comber roared in and swept twelve men off the Tusk's slippery deck. Shipmates lashed ropes around their waists, leaped into the swirling water between the two subs; they got only six-back to the perilous refuge of the vessel's streaming deckplates. The other six simply vanished in the tumultuous waves and were never found.

New explosions shook the Cochino. The Tusk's skipper, Commander Robert Worthington of Oakmont, Pa., brought her alongside; as the two subs tumbled and crashed and wallowed, a narrow gangway was pushed across from deck to deck. One by one, eyeing the seas v.ith desperate concentration, the Cochino's men came leaping across.

Robert Philo, a young civilian employee of the Philco Corp., lost his balance, fell, and was gone. But the rest of the Cochino's peop^--five of them badly burned--managed to save themselves. Two minutes after her captain, Puerto Rico-born Lieut. Commander Rafael Benitez, leaped to safety, the Cochino plunged to the bottom.

Next day, as the overloaded Tusk slid into the harbor of Hammerfest, Norway, almost all of the town's tough, seawise population was waiting on its fishing wharves to salute a feat of courage and seamanship.

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