David A. Phoenix

Full Career Included Time As Nautilus Sailor, But Never At Sea With Sub

By Robert A. Hamilton, New London Day, September 12, 2004

 Woodstock -- As a young machinist mate first-class, David A. Phoenix was in awe the first time he saw the Nautilus, reporting as a member of the commissioning crew several weeks before it would be launched at the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton.

            “It was like a palace,” Phoenix said. “This was first class, a lot more room than the fleet boats. Slightly more complex of course, but it looked like a good home.”

            But it was not to be his home. Within weeks of his arrival Phoenix took the examination to go to officer candidate school and was approved for a commission, which required he transfer off the Nautilus before it ever went to sea.

            He was called to a meeting with then-Cmdr. Eugene P. Wilkinson, the captain of the Nautilus, who asked if he was sure he was making the right decision.

            “He asked me, ‘Wouldn't you rather be the leading auxiliaryman on the Nautilus than a commissary officer on some fleet boat?' and he was right, but I was committed by then,” Phoenix said.

            Another officer who was assigned to the office of Naval Reactors under then-Capt. Hyman G. Rickover told him he should probably consider a career in destroyers if he accepted a commission, because he'd never be invited back to the nuclear submarine Navy.

            “That kind of shattered me, but I persisted, and I made it,” Phoenix said. He would go on to command two nuclear submarines and a submarine tender before retiring in 1979 as a captain. But Phoenix never took Nautilus to sea.

            Many of the members of that first crew were scattered over the next few years as well, as the Navy quickly constructed follow-on nuclear submarines that needed experienced nuclear sailors.

            “There was a small group of us who were nuclear-trained, and when the Polaris missile program came along, there was such a big demand for officers they were grabbing everyone they could get,” Phoenix said. “They would take people from the Nautilus, and put them on the other boats as they came into commission so they'd have experienced guys working alongside the new ones.”

            Phoenix grew up in Southern California, and as a boy of 12 was enthralled by the newsreels depicting the rescue of 33 men from the sunken submarine USS Squalus in 1939.

            “The people fascinated me,” Phoenix said. “Instead of being scared by it, I realized I wanted to be one of those guys.”

            He left high school for a Navy apprentice program aboard a drydock in Long Beach, Calif., where he trained as a machinist and finished his high school degree. Two months before he turned 18 in 1945, he enlisted in the Navy, finished boot camp and was accepted at Submarine School.

            His first boat was the USS Cusk in San Diego, which was the first submarine to fire a cruise missile, a modified German V-1 known as the Loon.

            He toyed with the idea of getting out of the service after four years, but a weak job market and two new children made him reconsider his options, and he transferred to the submarine USS Finback to take it out of commission, and later the USS Spikefish out of New London.

            While he was aboard Spikefish the executive officer asked him if he'd like to volunteer for the Navy's newest program, which would harness nuclear power for use on warships.

            “It was something new, so I thought I would give it a try,” Phoenix recalled. He got orders to Pittsburgh, where Westinghouse trained the first nuclear officers, and he struggled with advanced algebra, calculus and analytical geometry, as well as the physics he needed to run a reactor.

            But he said while most people thought of nuclear power in terms of the atomic bomb, he and others in the training were not nervous about the technology because of the explanations they got.

            He said if the first-ever use of gasoline was the powerful fuel-air bombs that are used by the military today, most people probably would be nervous about a car powered by a tank full of the stuff, except for the people who studied the mechanics of internal combustion.

            “It all seemed pretty straightforward, and we all assumed it was going to work, which it did,” Phoenix said.

            He was at the Nautilus prototype in Idaho when the reactor was put into operation the first time. The supervisors nervously shut the reactor down a couple of times as it started to reach sustaining chain reaction, but eventually it started, and surprised everyone because it operated so smoothly.

            “The guys with the slide rules had to go back and re-think everything we thought we knew, because it turned out things were a lot simpler and safer than we thought it was going to be,” Phoenix said. “Controlling it turned out to be easier than we thought.”

            Meanwhile he and some other sailors were busy calculating how many train cars of coal a day it would take to produce the kind of power that the reactor was generating.

            “It was an astronomical number,” Phoenix recalled. “We thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. We knew it was going to change power production forever.”

            After he finished his training at the prototype, Phoenix headed for Groton, and his first meeting with the Nautilus. But he also decided to take the examination for advancement to chief petty officer, and to qualify for a commission.

            He passed both tests, and went to officer candidate school. On graduation, he was sent to Key West to serve on the USS Odex, a diesel-electric submarine, and then to Idaho to train nuclear submarine officers — though he wasn't yet qualified to be an officer on nuclear submarines, he was qualified to teach them.

            But he kept pushing to get back into the nuclear program, and finally earned a sought-after interview with Rickover. He recalled that it was uneventful, so he had no idea as he left the office whether he was in or not.

            “Next thing I knew, I had orders to nuclear power school,” Phoenix said. For the rest of his career, every time he was promoted, he would get a hand-written note of congratulations from Rickover.

            He got orders to report to the nuclear-powered USS Sargo, where he served in several capacities, and made the first trip by a nuclear submarine to the North Pole in the dead of winter — Sargo spent January and February of 1960 under the icecap.

            After a stop at the Naval Postgraduate School where he earned a college degree, Phoenix was transferred to the USS Seawolf first as operations officer and later as executive officer. He later commanded USS Skate and the USS Nathanael Greene, and the tender USS L.Y. Spear, finally retiring as a captain in 1978.

            Despite spending a third of a century in the Navy, and being a pioneer of nuclear power, “The only time I rode Nautilus was the day it was launched,” on Sept. 30, 1954, Phoenix said.

            As a newly minted ensign, he asked to come back to the ship to attend the commissioning, and was invited to ride the ship down the ways to the Thames River in honor of his earlier service.