2/26/43 0620 hours – Near Electric Boat

The wind was blowing from the sea, cold, bitter and biting. Barry Arnold stood on the beach with ten other men, looking out to sea, watching a whale boat making its way toward shore. Six platoons of armed soldiers were further ashore for security. Nobody would be allowed near this beach. Further inshore other soldiers were preparing a fence line with guard posts and barbed wire. Several Quonset huts had already been assembled on the hill above the beach. When the boat was as close as it could come without its occupants being dumped into the sea, they pulled abeam of the shore and lay to. A figure kneeled at the center of the boat and braced himself. Seconds later a rocket soared toward them trailing a line. The rocket landed about fifty yards to the north. They retrieved the line and made it fast to a reel of heavier line they brought with them. For now there was more chance the line would be parted by the motion of the boat than lost by being pulled to sea. The men in the boat pulled the heavier line to the boat and made it fast. Barry and his men would control the tension on the line as the men in the boat moved toward the large ship laying nearly a half mile offshore.

The whale boat moved off, the line was played out, and soon there was a line, albeit a delicate one between the ship and the shore. Now came the hard part. A rope was connected to the small line and it was pulled to shore, this was followed by a light cable and then a heavier cable, made of steel and over a half inch in diameter. The two cables were pulled ashore by a pair of D-6 CAT’s. With this in place the men on the ship began playing out the three quarters of a mile of submarine cable, every fifty feet a float was inflated and placed under it, each time the tractors advanced and the line of floats approached the shore. Soon there were seventy floats and the cable was approaching the shore. The men were wet and cold, hands were barely able to handle the equipment but they pressed on.

They finally pulled the cable to land and brought the end of it to one of the Quonset huts on about a quarter of a mile from the shore. The CAT’s cut a shallow trench aside the cable and the men pushed it into the trench and CAT’s covered it. By the time the cable was covered the men on the ship were nearly done deflating the floats, starting at the shore. As each was deflated the cable sank to the ocean floor. By the time the sun was setting the cable had been spliced to the equipment in the hut. A few tests were made and the signal was given to the ship to pull out. The signal was given through the cable, the ship would maintain radio silence during the remainder of the voyage. The decision had been made to lay fifty miles of cable on each test leg to better simulate the actual lays. By noon the following day the ship sealed and dropped the end of the cable into the Atlantic, then steamed back to shore twenty miles to the south of this installation.