SECRET RENDEZVOUS
OKC man took part in historic Cold War mission
On the night of Aug. 7, 1958, Chuck Hamrick eased his UH-19 Chickasaw rescue helicopter into the air over Iceland and headed out into the clear but pitch-black night.
During his one-year stint at the base, Hamrick flew several search and rescue missions, but this one carried an extra air of seriousness.
His helicopter was in otherwise good repair, except for the hoist that didn’t work because it was missing a part that couldn’t easily be obtained on short notice in his far-off outpost.
Given the mission, a short flight to extract a commander from the deck of his submarine, a broken hoist was more than a small detail.
Hamrick wasn’t told the name of the submarine, or why he was picking up its commander.
“It was top secret,” Hamrick recently recalled, sitting in a recliner in the living room of his northwest Oklahoma City home. “And my clearance was only up to secret.”
The vessel turned out to be the USS Nautilus. The first-ever nuclearpowered submarine had just navigated its way under the polar ice cap, the first vessel ever to do so. The historic voyage would capture the public’s imagination, prompt headlines worldwide, provide America a morale boost in the midst of the Cold War and make a hero of the ship’s skipper.
Historic voyage
Six days earlier, on Aug. 1, 1958, Nautilus had slipped beneath the waves at Point Barrow, Alaska.
Late on Aug. 3, the boat passed under the North Pole.
After traveling beneath the ice for 96 hours and 1,830 miles, Nautilus surfaced northeast of Greenland.
Dubbed Operation Sunshine, the mission’s stated goal had been simply to prove it could be done, possibly clearing the way for “cargo subs” to use the route as an underwater sea lane in the future, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said after the mission’s completion.
But the mission was also part Cold War public relations. With Sputnik’s launch the year before, America needed a splash on the world stage, and Nautilus doing something that had never done before filled that void, especially since the Soviets didn’t have an operational nuclearpowered submarine of their own at the time.
The journey of the Nautilus was arduous. The Bering Strait proved to be a challenge with ice extending 60 feet below the surface, forcing the sub to go deeper. At one spot, the ice was so deep there was barely enough room for the sub to pass safely.
The mission
At the air base, Hamrick and his two-man crew lifted off wearing bulky orange survival suits,
essential if their chopper went down in the Atlantic which was still icy cold, even at the height of summer.
“It was the one time I wore that suit in the entire time I was in the Air Force,” Hamrick said.
Hamrick was used to tough flying. During the Korean War, he’d earned a Purple Heart flying a single engine-plane as a forward observer.
“I was directing fighters to drop their ordnance below a ridgeline and that’s when I got hit by groundfire,” Hamrick said. “I had a bullet come up through the fuselage and hit my leg in the cockpit. Luckily it didn’t cause any damage but a flesh wound, and I was able to fly it home.”
The UH-19 climbed into the sky and headed toward the coast and the ocean beyond. If everything went right, they’d be back on the ground in less than 45 minutes.
“It was black,” he said. “Pitch black. When I crossed the coast going out to the sub I had to go to instrument flying because I had no reference. My co-pilot helped watch to make sure we didn’t deviate from the course.”
Hamrick had requested the submarine put a light on its deck and it didn’t take long to see it flickering in the distance.
“We were maybe five or six miles out and I saw the lantern, so we homed in on that,” Hamrick said.
As Hamrick drew closer, the broken hoist was still on his mind. Without it, he would need to be more precise than ever before. One slip, and he’d wreck at the very least a helicopter, and at worst, an expensive submarine, the first of its kind.
“I had the Nautilus put their bow into the wind so I could come in on the stern with my approach,” Hamrick said. “When I turned in I started letting down. My co-pilot was giving me information and I just kept coming in to the submarine.”
He flipped the helicopter’s
searchlight on, illuminating the back half of the Nautilus.
“We kept going down, from 20 feet to 10 feet, and then I stopped and hovered,” Hamrick said. “I had a man in the cabin downstairs to tell me my height off the sub. I went down again until we were just about a foot off the deck and he told me to stop. I hovered there.”
At that point, two men emerged from the hatch, with one carrying a bag that was tossed into the helicopter. The crewman in the cabin then helped Nautilus Cmdr. William Anderson into the helicopter.
“We lifted off, and I flew over the bridge,” Hamrick said. “When we cleared the submarine, I climbed to about a thousand feet
and made a left turn toward Iceland. There was a radio beacon and we homed in on that and just kept flying.”
In his own book, “The Ice Diaries: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Daring Mission,” Anderson recalled waiting off the coast of Reykjavik, spotting the helicopter in the periscope and ordering the Nautilus to surface.
He remembered being helped aboard the hovering helicopter and being handed a note.
“To the officers and crew of the NAUTILUS:
Congratulations on the magnificent achievement — well done.”
It was signed by Eisenhower.
When the helicopter touched down, Anderson
went straight to a waiting government Boeing 707 that shuttled him off to Washington where he briefed Eisenhower on the mission and received the Legion of Merit.
“We knew he was somebody important to go to all the trouble of getting him from the sub and then having the plane waiting to fly him out of there,” Hamrick said.
Later years
Anderson became a national hero and wrote about the historic voyage in the Saturday Evening Post and Life magazine where his face made the cover.
After retiring from the Navy, he returned to Tennessee where, as a Democrat, he would be elected
to three terms in Congress, becoming a vocal critic of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. He died in 2007. He was 85.
Hamrick stayed in the Air Force for another 10 years, flying helicopters in Vietnam before his retirement in 1968. In another highlight, he escorted Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, on a visit to South America in 1962. The prince’s autograph can be found in Hamrick’s Air Force scrapbook.
But the story of plucking a commander off a submarine deck is perhaps the story he tells most. Without even knowing it at the time, the dedicated Air Force man played a key role in modern Navy history in a mission that could pass for the opening scene of a spy movie.