Recently, the USS Jimmy Carter was seen entering Puget Sound flying the Jolly Roger under the boat’s U.S. flag. A Canadian spotted it and asked the obvious question: Why the Jolly Roger?
We know the Jolly Roger, a black flag emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, was the traditional flag of pirates of old. It would seem an odd flag for an American nuclear attack submarine, but I’ve found out that there is a long-standing tradition of warships flying the Jolly Roger on their return to homeport since WWII.
It began with an admiral and a submarine in the British Navy. Submarines, by their nature, are clandestine warships, and, in the sometimes dark humor of military thinking, the admiral conceived of flying the Jolly Roger to signify a successful, pirate-like, clandestine mission.
This began after a particular mission darkly called “Operation Mincemeat.” According to the story, the sub, HMS Seraph, conducted a clandestine mission off of the coast of Spain, where they set afloat a cadaver on the incoming tide that was carrying supposed top-secret information about Allied military operations in an effort to deceive the Axis forces. Apparently, it was successful, and the HMS came home flying the Jolly Roger for the first time to signify her clandestine success.
Since that time, the US Navy has also adopted the habit on some of its ships, but particularly on subs, to signify successful missions, to imply a “mission accomplished.” This is apparently why the USS Jimmy Carter was flying her Jolly Roger on coming into homeport at Joint Base Kitsap-Bangor.
Another adaptation to this tradition is to place various symbols on the Jolly Roger that might indicate what kind of mission they might have been on. A “U” with a horizontal line through it, for example, indicates that the vessel has sunk an enemy submarine. A pair of crossed guns has come to mean that a deck gun was used to destroy an enemy vessel. A red or white bar stands for each warship or merchant ship sunk.
We may not know what the mission of this particular vessel was until sometime in the future, when it is a matter of history. But we can bet that it was for some clandestine top-secret operation that this particular submarine was specifically designed to do.
The USS Jimmy Carter was one of three Seawolf-class submarines built between the 1990s and 2000s to fight the latest Soviet submarines. They were built to be 70 times quieter than their predecessors, the Los Angeles-class nuclear submarines. They were built with JY-100 steel hulls, which gave them the ability to dive to depths of 2,000 ft, some three times deeper than their predecessors.
The Jimmy Carter was singled out to be modified to support unique, highly technical, and clandestine operations. This was accomplished by adding a 100-foot-long 2,500-ton section called the Multi-Mission Platform (MMP), which gives it unique capabilities. It has hangars for sending and receiving remotely-operated vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), and sea drones. It can also support SEAL delivery vehicles, basically miniature subs. It can provide both workspace and berthing spaces for up to 50 SEALS.
The Jimmy Carter also has been fitted with auxiliary maneuvering thrusters, both fore and aft, which gives it remarkable maneuverability on station, most likely on the sea bed, where it can do things like intelligence gathering by tapping into sea bed communications cables, reconnaissance missions, or launching of special forces (SEALS) for clandestine missions ashore.
We cannot know, for obvious reasons, what the USS Jimmy Carter’s latest mission was, or where it took place, but we can know, by the flying of the Jolly Roger, that whatever it was, it was a success.
The Veterans Site sends a hearty “Welcome Home” to the USS Jimmy Carter. We offer them also a “job well done” signified by their flying Jolly Roger. We wish them and all who serve in the Navy “Fair Winds and Following Seas.”