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Bunker at State Park Tracked Russian Submarines

 

By Jack Fichter

CAPE MAY POINT STATE PARK – Until 1991, it was top secret information that in 1955, the U.S. Navy built a listening station on top of the bunker here, near the Cape May Lighthouse, to track Russian submarines operating off our coast.
While most locals know the bunker was built in World War II as a gun emplacement, few know of its second life as a SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) station here that tracked the movement of Soviet submarine for long distances off our coast.
The SOSUS station operated until 1962 when it was destroyed by the famous March Nor’easter. Following that event, the Navy moved the SOSUS station across the bay to Lewes. Del. in what is now Cape Henlopen State Park. It operated there until 1981.
Robert Heinly, museum education coordinator for Mid Atlantic Center for the Arts (MAC), said after World War II, the Navy took over the former Army base, Fort Miles, that is now part of Cape May Point State Park. He said there were 24 buildings where the parking lot for park is now located.
“They built a building basically on top of the bunker,” said Heinly. “At its crudest, it was stretching copper cables with big Sonar listening disks way out into the ocean almost to the end of the Continental Shelf.”
The cable extended as far as one mile below the surface.
“There were extremely sensitive SONAR devices meant to pick up Soviet nuclear submarines lurking off the coast which they were doing all the time,” said Heinly. “During that time period, frankly, the government didn’t want the people to know how many of them were lurking so many places, so close.”
The SOSUS system was so sensitive that even in mile deep water if a seagull landed on the surface, it would pick up the sound vibration.
“They had specialists that could tell the difference between the pings between a seagull landing, a fishing boat going by and a nuclear sub,” said Heinly.
The Cape May SOSUS station worked with specially equipped airplanes from Willow Grove Naval Air Station in Pennsylvania that also acted as submarine hunters, he said.
There were rules of engagement on both the American and Soviet sides.
“One side or the other could have violated those and you could have started a nuclear war,” said Heinly.
The SOSUS project was kept secret from the Russians. Their subs were only identified by the airplanes.
“Once the airplane pinged the sub, it was like tag, you’re it and the rules are you leave the area and the airplane would track them out of the area,” said Heinly.
The United States played the same games between our nuclear submarines and Soviet submarines, he said. The bunker and surrounding Navy base were under higher security during the Cold War years than during World War II when the bunker was a coastal artillery battery, he said.
SOSUS bases were located up down the coasts including Nova Scotia, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Shelburne (Nova Scotia), Nantucket, Cape Hatteras, Antiqua, Eleuthera, and Barbados.
Reports from long time residents indicate the huge copper wire is still in the ocean off both Cape May and Lewes, Del.
Heinly said he first heard of a SOSUS station here from a World War II veteran who had piloted one of the submarine hunting airplanes.
In addition, a participant on a MAC tour, that included the state park, told Heinly he was stationed at the bunker after World War II and provided details of the SOSUS operation.
Long time residents may recall be chased away from the area behind the Cape May Lighthouse in the 1950s and early 1960s. This reporter recalls be turned away from the future state park area in the early 1960s by a state police officer.
According to Undersea Warfare: The Official Magazine of the U.S Submarine Force: “The primary threat against which SOSUS was originally designed was snorkeling Soviet diesel submarines at the surface, and the system’s key technical characteristics ­such as frequency coverage ­ were established accordingly. Fortunately, the resulting capability proved even more effective against deep-running Soviet nuclear-powered submarines when the first of these went operational in 1958.”
Undersea Warfare noted that even with acoustic quieting, Russian submarines were 30 decibels louder than U.S. subs which made the Soviet submarines “easily detectable from thousands of miles away.” The Russian subs carried as many as 12 missiles with multiple warheads.

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