HS-13 Sub Choppers

HS-13 "Sub Choppers" (Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 13) · USN · 1961-1962

Stood up at NAS Quonset Point, Rhode Island on 25 September 1961 as the helicopter element of Anti-Submarine Carrier Air Group 62, HS-13 was a Cold War experiment in how fast a hunter-killer squadron could be built from scratch in the wake of the Berlin Crisis. Its Sikorsky HSS-1N Seabats — night and all-weather dipping-sonar aircraft — peaked at sixteen airframes by June 1962, flown by roughly 49 officers and 262 enlisted men. The insignia says the mission plainly: a black cat fitted with its own tail rotor swoops off the deck with a bloody axe raised over the shadow of a submarine. The squadron never made it to sea; its aircraft were gone by August and HS-13 was disestablished with CVSG-62 on 1 October 1962, so brief that some sailors later insisted the unlucky-numbered squadron had never existed at all.