Thread: Decades later, a Cold War secret is revealed

Navy Lakehurst blimp veterans recall Cold War submarine hunts.
Lakehurst fleet stayed in service until 1961

In all their days of shadowing Soviet submarines during the late 1950s, Robert Stefanski and his Navy airship crewmates laid eyes on their quarry just once — a sight, and a sea story, that the American and Russian sailors alike must have told over and over again.

“We had been tracking this sub off Guantanamo Bay (the American base at the eastern end of Cuba) when they popped up,” said Stefanski, a Middletown resident and one of the last veterans of the Navy’s old blimp fleet at today’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. “The first thing you saw was these guys piling out of the conning tower, and taking our picture. And I’m taking theirs.”

That Cold War cat-and-mouse game was the last hurrah for the Navy’s lighter-than-air program, which shut down in 1961 — and was revived almost 50 years to the day later in October 2011, with the formal commissioning of the MZ-3A, a 180-foot-long version of a commercial airship design.

The new ship is being used to test surveillance radars, cameras and other sensors — the military’s main interest, reflected in more ambitious intelligence-platform airships under development for the Army and Air Force. It’s a return to the last years of the Navy program, when 400-foot ZPG series blimps tracked submarines and carried air defense radar.

“Those Russian subs were working all the way along the coast to Cuba,” said John Lopez of Toms River, who was a chief petty officer in the Lakehurst airship testing and development program.

Navy blimps were an important part of antisubmarine warfare during World War II, keeping pressure on German submarines. As tensions grew between the United States and Soviet Union, bigger airships capable of staying offshore a day or two took up that mission.

“We used to patrol between Cape Cod and the Carolinas,” Stefanski said. The Keansburg native came to Lakehurst as an aviation electronic technician with experience flying in Grumman S2F antisubmarine aircraft.

Compared to the cramped back seats in those airplanes, flying in the ZPG ships was something else. In a massive “car” fuselage under the envelope they carried 18 or more crewmen who worked in watches, operating the APS-20 radar and sonar to detect submarines. The blimp had bunkrooms and a galley with seating. Two internal engines ran the propellers through drive shafts, so the crew could shut down one engine to do repairs in the air if they had to.


NAVY ZPG-3W airships
The last blimps to fly in a combat role for the Navy were the biggest nonrigid airships ever built. The ZPG-3W carried radar for the North American early warning network to guard against aircraft intrusions and attacks.
Length: 404 feet
Diameter: 85 feet
Envelope volume: 1.5 million cubic feet
Crew: 22 to 26
Speed: 80 mph
Endurance record: 58 hours flight time
On the Web: Naval Airship Association at Naval Airship Association, Inc. - HOME
Navy Lakehurst Historical Society at Navy Lakehurst Historical Society

Navy Lakehurst blimp veterans recall Cold War submarine hunts | The Asbury Park Press NJ | APP.com