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Artist Riley Geddings' U.S. Coast Guard Service
* * Project "SOSUS", now de-classified * *
Alias SOSUS project names were "Jezebel", "Hartwell", "Michael ", "Caesar". and "Colossus".
The actual secret project name was "SOSUS", standing for: SOund SUrveillance System.
SOSUS development was started by the Committee for Undersea Warfare in 1949. This panel was formed by the Navy in order to further research into anti-submarine warfare. At the time the primary threat was snorkeling diesel submarines, and it was known that the Soviets were in the process of building a large fleet. The group quickly decided that the solution to detecting these submarines was to use sound detectors that would use the SOFAR channel to detect low-frequency sounds from hundreds of kilometers. Each listening site consisted of multiple hydrophones and a processing facility. This then allowed them to estimate the submarine's position by triangulation. They allocated $10 million annually to develop these systems.
At MIT during 1950, the committee sponsored Project Hartwell, named for the director of the committee, Dr. G.P. Hartwell, professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In November, they selected Western Electric to build a demonstration system, and the first six element hydrophone array was installed on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas.
Meanwhile Project Jezebel at Bell Labs and Project Michael at Columbia University focused on studying long range acoustics in the oceans.
My Ship, the USCG Cutter YAMACRAW, installed these actual hydrophones in 1952 working with the British Royal Navy !
The first prototype of a full-size SOSUS installation, a 1,000-foot-long line array of 40 hydrophone elements in 240 fathoms of water, was deployed on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off Eleuthera Island, Bahamas by a British-employed cable laying ship, the USCG Cutter YAMACRAW (W-333) in January 1952. After a series of successful detection trials with a U.S. submarine, the Navy decided by mid-year to install similar arrays along the entire American East Coast, and then opted two years later to extend the system to the West Coast of the United States and Hawaii as well.
These early SOSUS line arrays were positioned on the sea floor at locations that accessed the deep sound channel and oriented at right angles to the expected threat axis. Their individual hydrophone outputs were transmitted to shore processing stations called Naval Facilities ( NAVFACs ) on multi-conductor armored cables.
U.S. NAVY FROGMEN BLEW UP CORAL REEFS TO ALLOW OUR SHIP PASSAGE INTO PREVIOUSLY UN-NAVIGATED WATERS OF THE BAHAMA ISLANDS !
This felt like we were in a Walt Disney movie (even though we were'nt) !
In 1952, The Bahamas were still owned by The United Kingdom, and a very high-ranking official from England awarded our entire crew of the YAMACRAW a special medal each for our work with them in the SOSUS project !
OVER A PERIOD OF ABOUT A YEAR, WE INSTALLED MORE SYSTEMS FROM THE BAHAMAS TO BERMUDA !
By 1953 such progress had been made that top-secret plans were made to start deployment of six more arrays in the North Atlantic basin, and the classified name SOSUS was first used.
The number was increased to nine later in the year, and Royal Navy and USN ships, including USS Neptune and USS Peregrine, started laying the cabling under the cover of Project Caesar. In late 1953 Jezebel's research had developed an additional high-frequency system for direct plotting of ships passing over the stations, intended to be installed in narrows and straits, called Project Colossus.
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