Polar Saga

NAUTILUS 90 NORTH (251 pp.)--Commander William R. Anderson, U.S.N., with Clay Blair Jr.--World ($3.95).

When that atomic Moby Dick, the nuclear submarine Nautilus, charged 1,830 miles under the North Pole and its ice pack last summer on its historic ocean-to-ocean passage, it was almost like a brilliantly calculated triumph of matter over matter. Perhaps the most striking drama was not the conflict of man v. the elements, which characterized the 19th century, but the contrast between that traditional conflict and the mid-20th century ease with which the sonar-watching, fathometer-reading, Coke-drinking crew of the Nautilus defied the elements. In Nautilus 90 North (the message Nautilus radioed to indicate it had reached the North Pole), the supersub's skipper, Commander William R. (for Robert) Anderson, adds little to the specifics of the polar victory. But in footnote-to-history fashion, he captures something of the human effort behind the excellence, the personalities behind the perfection.

Rickover's Rakeover. With a seaman's instinct for omens, Commander Anderson early spotted his future. As a boy, in Bakerville, Tenn., he and a playmate would seal off most of the decks of a couple of rowboats, invert the craft on the river, poke their heads into the unsealed air pockets and stage mock U-boat fights. Annapolis trained, with an outstanding submariner record in World War II and Korea (Trutta, Tang, Wahoo), Anderson was tapped for duty with Admiral Hyman Rickover's NRB (Naval Reactors Branch) in January 1956. First came an interview with the caustic godfather of the atomic sub. The Rickover Takeover was part of Navy lore, including such props as a chair with shortened front legs, designed to slide an interviewee forward in disease while a deftly flicked Venetian blind let in eye-dazzling bursts of sun.

Anderson's ordeal was relatively gentle, but the martinettlesome admiral ambushed him with a request for his last two years' reading, by title and author. Poor Commander Anderson could only fumble up the title of one book, no author. Dispiritedly, he mailed in his reading list after he got home, just so Rickover would not think him "a total stupe." The list of 24 books won Rickover's respect and helped Anderson join NRB as a potential atomic sub commander.

Longitude Roulette. Anderson and the crew of the Nautilus began to rate their jobs in the summer of '57 when, in effect, they painstakingly eliminated in advance some of the hazards that might have tragically marred "Operation Sunshine" the following year. They cruised some 1,400 miles under the polar ice but were trapped more than once in sandwich-close quarters between the massive roof of ice (which on the 1957 trip extended as much as 100 ft. below the surface) and the shallow ocean floor. Once, Anderson nosed his sub to the seemingly ice-free surface but jarred against thin ice and blacked out both his periscopes. A 15-hour repair feat, in a choppy sea and bone-numbing wind, restored No. 1 periscope to use. Constant fear: that the conditions at the top of the world, which confuse both magnetic and gyro compasses, would doom Nautilus to a game of "longitude roulette," in which the directionless ship might wander aimlessly around the Arctic Ocean without finding either of the two water exits--like a sort of latter-day Flying Dutchman. This fear was banished on the historic '58 voyage by the installation of a complex inertial navigator.

A Piece of Ice. For all its scientific, precision-tooled marvels, the Nautilus sometimes developed quirks that only homely ingenuity could resolve. A few months before the '58 transpolar run, a leak "no larger than a human hair" developed in the steam-condenser system. An agonizing search by experts failed to track it down. In a do-it-yourself mood, Commander Anderson had the crew pour 70 quart cans of "Stop Leak," a $1.80-a-can remedy for auto radiator leaks, into the Nautilus condenser system, and it stopped the leak that might eventually have cost the life of the $100 million ship.

Of the honors heaped upon the Nautilus and her commander, at least one was unparalleled: the first Presidential Unit Citation ever awarded in peacetime. Of highly personal pleasure to Commander Anderson was a private ceremony in which he presented a piece of polar ice, brought back in the Nautilus' freezer, to his old boss, Rickover. The admiral's gaunt face creased into childlike smiles of delight as he examined the memento ("that piece of ice meant more to him than all the rank . . . and fame that have been showered upon him"). In its way, it was a not unfitting symbolic link in man's chain of progress from the ice age to the undersea conquest of the ice-girt Pole.

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