I’ve been doing research and taking notes on sub deployments and the Cuban Navy during the early 1960s. The information will be used in a story I’ve tentatively titled “The Komar Incident.” One of my favorite Cold War movies was The Bedford Incident with Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier. It was a tense thriller that takes place in the North Atlantic with a US Navy guided missile destroyer dogging a Soviet submarine.
Widmark was the US Captain and Poitier was a correspondent from a magazine. I don’t know if anyone remembers a short nerdy actor by the name of Wally Cox, but he played the overworked Sonar technician on board.
“The Komar Incident” will place the crew of the USS Whitefish (SS-432) between a rock and a hard place. After an incident involving Cuban patrol boats, the Whitefish is hunted both by the US Navy and an unknown fifth Soviet Foxtrot submarine armed with a nuclear torpedo. This is all framed within the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A fictitious event, but tenser by the minute in the greater political theater of October 1962. There were four Foxtrots the Navy prosecuted during the blockade of Cuba. There was a fifth already in the Caribbean, south of Cuba, but it retired home under tow as a result of an engineering casualty.
What if it didn’t?
-John
Sounds like a winner, John! I love sub stuff and that era was very real to me. I was 11 years old when this was going on.