THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 24, 1995 TAG: 9509210606
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROBERT MASON
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
SUBMARINE ADMIRAL
From Battlewagons to Ballistic Missiles
ADM. I.J. GALANTIN
University of Illinois Press. 345 pp. $24.95.
As a U.S. Navy Submarine School student in 1936, required to read and report on six books about submarines, Ensign I.J. Galantin had to turn to German and British authors to meet the number. But today, writes Adm. Galatin in Submarine Admiral, his second autobiographical work, ``there is no shortage of American submarine literature; it ranges from the mechanical, to wartime memoirs to the highly imaginative by best-selling novelists.''
In this abundance of books, especially World War II recollections and histories, ``Pete'' Galantin's heroics in fleet submarine Halibut are a standard entry. Under Galantin's command, Halibut scored seven enemy sinkings, two of men-of-war, and survived a battering that left her beyond repair.
Galantin tells his sea stories with verve, charm and humor in Take Her Deep, which appeared in 1987. Submarine Admiral is a more ambitious undertaking. Here the author traces, from close up, his rise from probationary ensign in battleship New York to four-star chief of Navy material; the development of the modern submarine and its armament and the selection of its missions. The philosophical as well as the technical is treated: Galantin's first submarine service was in Argonaut, which was completed in 1928, the year the United States endorsed a British proposal to abolish submarines, only to be blocked by France and Japan.
From the low point of the first two years of World War II, when the U.S. submarine's weapon, the torpedo, was criminally flawed, to the nuclear submarine, ``one of the major accomplishments of this generation,'' and its ballistic missile, the Galantin years spread. Progression toward sufficiency came hard. As the Soviet Union improved a class in speed, depth or silence, or as the Soviets began to overtake a U.S. development, agencies from the shipbuilding industry to the Secretary of Defense would engage in conferences, studies and tests - and in conforming to Vice Adm. Hyman G. Rickover's notion of a proper power plant. U.S. submarines of a dozen designs, half of them singles for special purposes, had been commissioned by 1968, 15 years after the keel-laying for Nautilus, first in the Cold War's ``new order in deterrence.''
Galantin, prominent in the processes he describes, writes of all this.
The author's assignments to submarine billets, ashore and afloat, were so nearly continuous that he feared they would jeopardize promotion; the Navy, like the Army, wished its top officers to be generalists. Yet Galantin and Thomas H. Moorer were the first in their Annapolis class of 1933 to reach flag rank. Moorer's elevation to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was matched, almost, by Galantin becoming Rickover's commanding officer.
``...but, realistically,'' Galantin writes, ``I referred to him as my senior insubordinate.''
Realistically, Rickover, because of congressional adulation, pretty well ran his own navy. His monopoly on the submarine's reactor and propulsion determined a boat's size and speed, both critical to function.
Although Galantin acknowledges Rickover's peculiar genius and, citing his complexities, notes that ``In many years of acquaintance and professional association I would use them all,'' he charges that tolerance of Rickover's ``preordained engineering'' at last resulted in the ``degradation of the combat capability of not one experimental boat but a whole class of ships, 62 subs of the so-called SSN 688 fast-attack Los Angeles class. Some of them will be in service well into the 21st century. Fortunately, they have not had to be tested in combat against enemy submarines and weapons that can run faster and dive deeper.''
Galantin agrees with Secretary of the Navy John Dalton's recent argument that spending be continued on the nuclear-powered Seawolf class. He closes his book with the statement that ``in 1983 the Navy undertook a costly research, development and design program that would become the most advanced submarine in the world'' - the same Seawolf, ``the submarine of the 21st century.''
Having earned the Navy Cross and three Silver Stars for submarine combat and having spent most of his 41 Navy years in submarine operation and development, during which he commanded a submarine squadron and directed submarine warfare and also the fleet ballistic missile program, Adm. Galantin at 85 must be the nation's most experienced and dedicated submariner. His observations and advice deserve serious study in the Pentagon and Congress.
- MEMO: Robert Mason is a former editor of The Virginian-Pilot and author of
``One of the Neighbors' Children,'' a memoir about his Navy service
during World War II. by CNB