She was one of the most famous submarines of her generation, a sentinel on the front lines of the Cold War; in an operational life spanning from the last days of the Kennedy Administration to the start of George Herbert Walker Bush’s presidency, the USS Thresher played a critical role in maintaining the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union. She also helped avert an incident which under different circumstances could have seriously damaged U.S. relations with Israel, and even enjoyed a cameo appearance in one of the Hollywood film hits of the late 1960s. Today a floating museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the Thresher not only served in the United States Navy longer than many of her sister ships but also outlasted at least a dozen subs from the same design classes that had been meant to replace her.

     Commissioned in 1958 and launched in 1960, Thresher was formally commissioned in August of 1961; after a series of trials lasting from October of 1961 to the spring of 1962, she was forced to head back to drydock for repairs when one of her main ballast tanks was damaged in a collision with a tug at Port Canaveral, Florida. After undergoing a series of overhauls, she was scheduled to begin deep submersion tests in April of 1963....

                             ******

     ...but six days before the tests were due to commence, a routine inspection of Thresher’s hull welds revealed potentially catastrophic structural defects in her engine room which under the right conditions could trigger a flood serious enough to cripple or even sink the sub. Not wanting to risk a repeat of the Squalus incident twenty-four years earlier, the Navy accepted the recommendation of Thresher’s executive officer that the submersion trials be postponed until repairs could be made to correct those defects.

     The deep submersion trials finally took place in October of 1963, just over a month before JFK’s assassination. To the great relief of all parties concerned, Thresher passed those tests with only minimal difficulties, and in January of 1964 she was officially cleared by the Navy for duty in the Atlantic. Over the next two years she would spend the majority of her time at sea patrolling off the coasts of New York and New England; ironically, the course of one of these patrols took her right past the very spot where the ill-fated Squalus went down in 1939.

     After three months’ leave for the purposes of crew rotation and ship maintenance, the USS Thresher returned to action in April of 1966 with orders to proceed to the Mediterranean to temporarily fill in for one of her sister subs which was scheduled for a reactor overhaul. It was during her stint in the Med that the Thresher made what may have been her most vital contribution to the security of the free world...

                               ******

      The date was June 5th, 1967. After just over thirteen months on duty in the Mediterranean USS Thresher was ready to return to her standard patrol routes in the Atlantic. She only needed an order from Atlantic Fleet headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia to begin proceeding back to her normal operational zone; accordingly she surfaced to put up her main radio antenna to begin monitoring the airwaves for signals from home. What she picked up instead was a flurry of radio messages in Hebrew being transmitted on what one of Thresher’s communications officers recognized as a standard Israeli air force frequency. After about two minutes of listening to the pilots’ chatter the submarine’s senior command staff realized that the American guided missile ship USS Liberty, cruising just a few hundred miles away from Thresher’s position, was in danger of being bombed by the Israeli jets because the IDF pilots had mistaken her for an Egyptian warship.

      Thresher’s captain then ordered his radiomen to contact the lead Israeli plane’s pilot. Once a link with the Israeli jets was established, the captain told them the ship they were about to fire on was not an Egyptian destroyer but an American naval vessel; at the suggestion of his wingman, the lead Israeli pilot contacted the Liberty to confirm the guided missile warship’s identity. Minutes later the Israeli jets turned and head headed for home and the USS Thresher’s crew breathed a collective sigh of relief. For his quick thinking, Thresher’s captain would subsequently receive commendations from the U.S. and Israeli governments; on his retirement from service twenty-five years later the Israeli defense ministry would grant him an honorary admiral’s commission in the Israeli navy.

       On their return to the United States the Thresher’s crew began two weeks of much-needed shore leave; during that time Navy nuclear technicians made safety adjustments to the sub’s reactor systems and inspected the warheads of Thresher’s ballistic missile arsenal. After what had happened with the hull welds four years earlier, nobody was willing to take any chances with her survival. The inspections and the reactor adjustments had only just concluded when her NCOs and officers returned to duty....                                              ******

     ...and still more changes were forthcoming for the now nearly five-year-old submarine. Some were strictly a formality, as when the Thresher’s hull registry number was changed from SSN-593 to SSBN-593 to reflect her role as a ballistic missile-carrying sub; others were in response to developments in the U.S.-Soviet arms race, such as the installation of new advanced countermeasures equipment to afford her a better chance at evading detection by Soviet anti-submarine patrols. By January of 1969, when Thresher marked the start of her fifth year of active duty with the U.S. Atlantic fleet, she was almost a whole new vessel. One thing, however, had conspicuously not changed: the dedication with which her officers and crew approached their duties. At a time when traditional precepts about duty and honor were being heavily questioned in other parts of the U.S. armed forces, the men and officers of the USS Thresher were standing by those precepts as fervently as they had on the day when the submarine first put to sea from Portsmouth.

   Thresher spent most of 1968 assisting with efforts to locate the wreck of one of her sister ships, the USS Scorpion. In September of 1969 she was re-deployed to the Arctic Circle region, where she no doubt gave Soviet naval commanders more than a few sleepless nights. She would spend the next five years cruising Arctic waters before returning to her old stomping grounds in the Atlantic in October of 1974.

                             ******

    By the time Thresher resumed her former station in the Atlantic the political climate had changed in Washington in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, and the submarine was beginning to face foes more dangerous than the Soviet navy. Among the more liberal segments of Congress sentiment was beginning to build that America needed to trim back its submarine force in order to encourage Moscow to be more co-operative with Washington on the nuclear disarmament issue. There was talk in some circles that perhaps Thresher should be scrapped, not only as a way to ease tensions with the Soviets but also to save the federal government money on the cost of keeping her operational.

    One man who disagreed emphatically with such views was Thresher’s former captain, Philip Harcourt Allen, now overall third-in-command of the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic submarine force. In January of 1975 he went before the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee to speak in defense of his old ship. Allen’s testimony helped sway a number of critical votes among the Armed Services Committee, and the Thresher was thereby saved from the chopping block. The following year Allen would become second-in-command for the Atlantic sub fleet; shortly after his promotion, Thresher began a six-month stint in the Arctic Circle. When that stint was finished, she returned to her home berth in Portsmouth for a refit to upgrade her most critical onboard systems along with her reactor plant.

     But no matter how many upgrades the venerable submarine got, there would eventually and inevitably come a day when she would have to be retired from active service. By 1984, two decades after Thresher began her maiden patrol in the Atlantic, that time was drawing closer with every passing day; the surest sign of this came when the Pentagon re-assigned her from the regular Navy to the Naval Reserves shortly before Ronald Reagan won a second term in the White House. In June of 1987, when dozens of former Thresher officers and crew gathered at the Oval Office for ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the nuclear sub’s intervention on behalf of the USS Liberty, the head of the Naval Reserve was asked to draw up a list of vessels to be recommended for decommissioning over the next two years in order to trim defense costs in the federal budget. Thresher was the number two ship on that list.

    When the news Thresher was to be put out to pasture reached her crew, it felt like a death in the family. Even those who had long ago moved on to other assignments were stunned to learn the submarine’s career was about to end; in August of 1987 several of her former crew and their families launched a petition drive to save her from being consigned to the scrapyard. Their efforts paid off in March of 1988 when the Defense Department issued an executive order designating the submarine for conversion into a floating museum upon the completion of its final operational mission.

    On December 3rd, 1989 Thresher was formally retired from service with the U.S. Navy; a week later she pulled into her home berth at Portsmouth for the last time, towed in by a contingent of Coast Guard vessels and New Hampshire state police patrol boats. (For safety and environmental reasons the nuclear fuel rods from her main reactors had been removed, essentially deactivating those reactors.) Once the sub had docked, a team of naval engineers began the year-long process of adapting her for her new role as a floating museum. The USS Thresher Naval Historical Center and Park officially opened its doors in the spring of 1991; in its first year the new floating museum attracted over 500,000 patrons, some of them former Thresher crewmen feeling a touch of nostalgia for their old ship. Also among the visitors during that first year were a number of Desert Storm veterans touring the new museum at its trustees’ invitation in tribute to their service in the Persian Gulf.

    By 1997 the Thresher Naval Historical Center was averaging two million visitors a year; in the fall of 1998 the U.S. Senate passed an appropriations package to expand and upgrade visitor facilities at the center and make it more compliant with the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act. In the meantime Philip Harcourt Allen and his former second-in-command, Pat Garner, had helped keep the sub’s memory fresh with their respective autobiographies; Allen’s book, titled On Patrol, would bring Thresher’s story to a new generation when director Kathryn Bigelow bought the movie rights to Allen’s biography and adapted it to the silver screen in 2002. Garner’s autobiography, called Periscope Depth, would be adapted as a three-part miniseries for cable’s History Channel in 2005. But perhaps the most dramatic tribute to Thresher’s legacy would come in the spring of 2007, when First Lady Laura Bush christened the Ohio-class attack submarine Thresher II in San Diego.

    The reader may be interested to learn that at least a fifth of the USS Thresher II’s personnel roster is comprised of children or grandchildren of the original Thresher’s crew. This is just one of the many links between the new sub and the original; another is the metallic scale model of the original Thresher mounted on the wall of the Thresher II captain’s office. One can only imagine how the old sub’s legacy will be renewed in the future if a Thresher III is ever built.