Captain William R. Anderson was commander of the Nautilus when it made that journey, and he brings the voyage vividly to life in “The Ice Diaries,” a book he wrote with the assistance of Don Keith.
Anderson begins his story with a brief account of his experiences during World War Two, where he saw action aboard a sub in the Pacific Theatre. He then moves quickly on to his postwar Navy career, which found him posted in the Naval Reactors Branch under Admiral Hyman Rickover (Anderson paints a colorful portrait of the legendary – and legendarily difficult – father of the Navy’s nuclear program).
Rickover had early on grasped the potential for using nuclear reactors to power submarines.
Conventional diesel-powered subs were essentially surface vessels that could submerge for up to eight hours before fresh oxygen was needed for their engines.
Nuclear subs, on the other hand, could remain submerged almost indefinitely, making them infinitely more versatile in warfare.
The Nautilus was the first nuclear submarine to float off the assembly line, and Anderson was appointed its second skipper. From the time he set foot onboard, he was obsessed with one goal: taking it to the North Pole, something a conventional sub could never do.
After assuming the helm in 1957, Anderson convinced his superiors to allow him to do some under-the-ice explorations north of Greenland. His orders did not expressly tell him to attempt a run at the Pole, but neither did they rule it out.
As Anderson tells it, this first trip was a difficult learning experience for the crew. On their first dive the equipment installed for tracking conditions above the sub gave inaccurate readings, resulting in a collision with the ice when they attempted to surface where an open lead should have been. This caused a fair bit instrument damage including the loss of one periscope and reduced the capacity of the other. Two more trips under the ice were made at the time, but problems with the compasses and other gear kept the crew from attaining its goal.
Shortly after this trip, the Soviet Union successfully launched its Sputnik satellite, and Americans suddenly experienced deep concern over their country’s ability to keep up in the technology race.
President Dwight Eisenhower, caught in a lame-duck presidency and beleaguered by problems at home and abroad, needed something to boost the spirits of his countrymen.
That something, as it turns out, became ordering Anderson to fulfill his goal of an Arctic journey. For multiple reasons that included keeping the Soviets in the dark, as well as concern over the public fallout if the mission failed, the order was kept classified.
Anderson and his crew quietly prepared for the upcoming trip, not an easy job to keep hidden as Nautilus was then the most famous ship on Earth, and every time it pulled into shore it was swarmed with media and VIPs.
Despite the endless attention, the crew kept mum and in June of 1958 secretly set course for the north. More technical glitches occurred on this trip, including a slow but persistent saltwater seepage into the condenser system that the crew managed to fix with Bars Leaks radiator sealant.
The approach from the Pacific side proved impassible at this time of year. Ice in the Chukchi Sea, coupled with the shallow depth of the water, made squeezing through too dangerous. Once again, the ship turned back.
Anderson, however, had no thoughts of giving up. And fortunately, neither did Eisenhower.
The boat was soon churning northward again, and on Aug.
1, a bit west of Barrow, it went down once more. Two days later it passed directly over the pole and, Anderson writes, “I could not help but think of Peary, Cook, Byrd, Amundsen, and all the others who had braved this inhospitable frontier. I wondered what they would have thought if they could have experienced our seventy-twodegree comfort, with very little immediate danger, and witnessed this magnificent crew and our superb, tried-and-true ship.”
A couple of days later Nautilus emerged near Greenland. For the first time ever, the fabled Northwest Passage had been sailed, albeit in a way no one would have imagined until a few years previous. After Eisenhower announced the news, Anderson and his crew became overnight heroes, feted everywhere they went. America felt it was back in the technology race with its Cold War foe.
Anderson bemoans his writing skills at one point in the text, wishing for the gifts of a poet in describing what he saw. But this shortcoming is more than made up for with his talent for moving his story quickly — a skill born no doubt from writing endless military reports. He also pays repeated tribute to his crew men, not only mentioning many by name throughout the text, but also listing their hometowns and where they went after the historic voyage. His brevity never gets in the way of his insistence on honoring the efforts of every man on board. Capt. Anderson passed away in 2007, prior to this book’s publication, but we can all be thankful that he worked so hard to get it written while he could. It’s a great story, told well, and deserves to become a core book in the evergrowing library of Arctic exploration.
David A. James lives in Fairbanks.
The Ice Diaries
Captain William R. Anderson with Don Keith
Thomas Nelson Publishers
384 pages 2008
$24.99
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