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It was so super secret and essential to the Cold War effort, the U.S. Navy did not reveal the highly classified SOSUS program until the early 1990s.
Yet for decades, one of the SOSUS listening stations was based right under Cape Region residents’ noses at Fort Miles – and no one was talking about it.
Some area residents knew the Naval Facility (NAVFAC) in Lewes, at what is now Cape Henlopen State Park, was a listening station, but they had no idea naval personnel were listening for Soviet submarines as the first line of defense against nuclear war.
SOSUS, the U.S. Navy Sound Surveillance System, has been called one of the most impressive engineering feats of the early Cold War.
“The cover story was it was an oceanographic research facility working on currents and temperature in sea water,” said retired Navy Capt. William Manthorpe of Rehoboth Beach, a member of the Fort Miles Historical Association.
Manthorpe and David Henderson spoke during the association’s annual fall meeting Saturday, Dec. 9, at the Biden Center in Cape Henlopen State Park, the former U.S. Navy headquarters building.
Henderson, coordinator of the Delaware Technical & Community College engineering tech program, presented work his class did on mapping out the area of Battery 519, the location of the future World War II museum. SOSUS operated out of a terminal building at Herring Point from 1962 to 1981, when the base closed. NAVFAC Lewes was one of the most highly decorated bases in naval history, because the base garnered every honor possible, said Manthorpe, who has done extensive research on history of the base.
The base was also the first naval base in history to have a female commander. In 1977, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Peggy Frederick took over command of NAVFAC Lewes.
The Lewes base was built with an initial appropriation of $1.4 million following the loss of the Cape May, N.J. station during an Ash Wednesday, Good Friday storm in 1962.
During its heyday, the Lewes base was staffed by as many as eight officers, 125 enlisted personnel, and from three to 16 civilians, Manthorpe said.
The Navy presence along the coast at Fort Miles actually dates back to 1941 when the Navy established a harbor entrance control post during World War II. The area was a recreation center from 1945 to 1962.
Sounds of submarines
SOSUS was a long-range, early-warning listening system protecting the United States against the threat of Soviet ballistic missile submarines.
Bases were established from Nova Scotia to Barbados when the system was developed with additional sites added, including sites on the Pacific coast, and later in Iceland and Wales.
Manthorpe said the SOSUS program was so successful at the outset that it stymied the Soviet submarine program and gave a decisive edge to the West.
Long cables were laid out on the ocean floor, some as long as 100 miles, to the edge of the continental shelf with 40 hydrophones attached to the end of each cable. AT&T developed the technology, designed to detect deep-running submarines, said Manthorpe.
Signals from the hydrophones were processed at the Herring Point terminal facility and then relayed to the Norfolk Atlantic Command along with data from other bases. Submarines could be detected thousands of miles away.
Part of the cable still remains as does the foundation of the Herring Point communications facility.
Naval personnel were trained to detect the sounds of Soviet subs and distinguish those sounds from other ocean sounds such as crashing waves, other ships, and whales. The directional and frequency bands, called LOFAR grams, were printed out on long paper tapes for personnel to decipher.
Manthorpe said the highly secretive communications center was a 24-hour operation.
Behind history’s scenes
Although only a few were aware of it, SOSUS played a key role in U.S. history. NAVFAC Hatteras first detected a Soviet submarine on June 26, 1962. Then in October 1962, SOSUS played a critical role in the Cuban missile crisis when it detected a Soviet Foxtrot submarine heading for Cuba, said Manthorpe. There were several other detections of Soviet submarines headed for Cuba as well.
Because of the detections, U.S. planes were sent to the area and dropped small depth charges in the vicinity of the submarines, Manthorpe said.
“We later learned that the Soviets had nuclear torpedoes and they didn’t know much about SOSUS, but they knew they had been detected when they heard the planes overhead,” he said.
According to official Navy sources, the SOSUS program was dealt a serious blow by the Walker-Whitworth espionage ring. Starting in 1967, and for the next 18 years, John Walker Jr., a naval communications officer, sold countless naval messages and the keys to decipher them to the Soviets. Some of those secrets involved the SOSUS system.
Because of this information, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Soviets embarked on a submarine-quieting program and by the late 1980s, the ability of the SOSUS system to detect submarines had deteriorated significantly.
But that also coincided with the downfall of communism in the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
In the interim, Soviet submarines pulled back their areas of operations away from the U.S. coastal area, negating the need for listening stations along the East Coast.
In 1963, SOSUS played a crucial role in pinpointing the exact location of the sunken nuclear submarine Thresher and then in 1968 detected the sunken Soviet-Golf class sub sunken off Hawaii.
SOSUS exists today with several operational and standby stations. The program was supplemented in the 1980s by a small fleet of civilian-manned surveillance ships to create the Integrated Underwater Surveillance System, IUSS.
The system has also been used to track migrating whales and to detect illegal driftnet fishing on the high seas.
Stationed in Lewes
Ed Dalrymple of Lewes, a retired Naval commander, was involved with the SOSUS program for all of his 20 years in the military. He spent part of his tour of duty as a young man at the Lewes base.
“We called it the worst kept secret in the military,” he said with a smile.
Even so, he said the SOSUS program was a huge success. “We were able to deny the Soviets the use of the ocean,” he said.
He said the personnel who deciphered the data coming in from the hydrophones were highly skilled. “It was like an art to learn what ships looked like,” he said.
“We learned to track their patterns. We knew when they would be on patrol and off patrol, and this information was all added into other intelligence,” he said.
He said that normally there were five or six Soviet submarines on patrol in the Atlantic during the Cold War years. But every summer, the bases would be on high alert when the Soviet war games would kick into high gear. The number of submarines would increase as high as 100.
Dalrymple said he and his fellow sailors didn’t think much about the secrecy of the work they were doing when they went to town on leave. “Hey, most of us were young, single guys,” he said. “We were more concerned about finding single ladies.”
Contact Ron MacArthur at ronm@capegazette.com
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