by James Jinks
As the first post-war Teacher, Mackenzie ensured that the ‘easier tempo’ did not ‘infiltrate the actual content of the course, which at the same time had to be expanded to incorporate all the accumulated knowledge and experience from the war’:
There was no departure from the strict standards the war had demanded in the conduct of submarine operations. It was a continuing challenge to put all this across in the most effective way I could devise, to a varied intake of pupils over the next two years, mainly British but also including submariners from the Netherlands and Norwegian Navies.92
The course typically started with a four-week period at Fort Blockhouse in Gosport, where students trained in a mock submarine Control Room, known as the ‘Attack Teacher’. The students then switched to a second, more modern Attack Teacher at Rothesay in the Clyde for ‘Blind Attack’ training, when the attack relied on sonar information only. A mini submarine Control Room revolved around a cyclorama inside the building. Two targets were projected on circular walls by illuminating metal ship models with powerful lights. When viewed through a periscope, students were able to see a rather ghostly image from which they were expected to take ranges and bearings.
Perisher broke many young officers. The most common cause of failure, even for those with years of faultless service from Fourth Hand to First Lieutenant, was for Teacher to realize early on that a student lacked 3D vision through a periscope and was unable to size up a situation in full perspective. ‘Towards the end of the Perisher,’ wrote Woodward, ‘that mental picture, fleeting and ephemeral for some, sharp and clear for others, would not only include the usual fishing boats, ferries, islands, yachts and the like, but would also contain the major confusion factor of five Royal Navy frigates tearing about at full speed, deliberately trying to ruin our day.’ Many of those that failed the course lacked the mental agility to cope with a rapidly developing position and were unable to process and hold a mental picture of what was happening on the surface. ‘It’s not a very good analogy,’ explained Woodward:
But imagine sticking your head out of a manhole in Piccadilly Circus, taking one quick swivelling look round, ducking back down into the sewer and then trying to remember everything that you had seen. The idea is to generate sufficiently accurate recall and timing to avoid a double-decker bus running over your head next time you pop up through the manhole.93
Teachers spent a considerable amount of time getting their students to develop an automatic reaction to checking the trim, depth, speed and sonar picture before putting up the periscope to make an observation of a target. Although surface ships generally travel 1000 yards in a minute at 30 knots, many students were tempted to raise the periscope for another quick look in order to reassure themselves that the target was still there. If a student’s range estimate was correct then it was possible to determine when it was safe to come to periscope depth after a run towards the target, or when to take a look through the periscope, or even when they might need to go deep to duck under a surface ship.
Near misses were a natural, frequent and deliberate part of the course. Sonar was still in its infancy so ‘Blind Attacks’ at sea were often over quickly. ‘Blind’ was a good description as the students often had little or no idea of where the target was. Indeed, Woodward seriously doubted whether anyone would have passed had they been able to see the tiny safety margins allowed – a few feet, and split-seconds only, to separate the hulls of the oncoming frigates and the submarines. Crews liked the course. They would always run a book on who was going to get through and who was not.
Teacher’s aim was to push those that possessed a ‘periscope eye’ to the limits of endurance. ‘The real tick in the book that you had to have at the end,’ remembered Geoffrey Jaques, another student who took the course in the early post-war years, ‘was that for six or eight weeks or however long the sea part of the course went on for you had been put under extreme pressure, you had been put in close contact, you had been made to handle the boat in as many situations as they could devise and they were entirely satisfied that you could do it safely and competently and it was specifically designed for you to be under pressure at all times.’94
‘At intervals there were consecutive long days and nights intended to stretch the students and see how they reacted when fatigue blurred their judgment,’ wrote Coote.95 It was common to have a party on the Thursday evening to allow the students to let their hair down and meet the officers from the target ships. There was also an ulterior motive. A tired and hungover student on the Friday morning was a very good example of how an exhausted individual would react when under pressure in a fast-moving situation. ‘Teacher, if he knew you were the duty Captain the next day, would keep you at the bar until 3 a.m. in the morning, drinking, on the basis that he said: “You may be on a visit somewhere and having to give hospitality and then suddenly you’re off to work. I want to see what you’re like.” ’96 Unsurprisingly Perisher was known as a hard drinkers’ course.
Teacher also suffered from exhaustion. Mackenzie found the role both rewarding and exhausting, particularly the long hours at sea closely supervising an endless succession of dummy torpedo attacks, where every latitude had to be given to the embryo CO before possibly having to intervene at the very latest moment and ‘pull the plug’, to prevent the submarine being endangered. ‘It was,’ Mackenzie later said, ‘nerve-wracking work, concentrated tensely on whichever periscope was not in use by the pupil, and by the end of the day I was very conscious of the strain on my eyes.’97 Some Teachers, such as Woodward’s, Captain Brian Hutchings, were also difficult men to work for:
If you made a minor mistake, he’d tend to rant and rave, which, if you were unused to this sort of thing, could be quite upsetting. However, if you made a really serious mistake, he’d quietly do his absolute upmost to help you out of it. But he was tough-minded and you couldn’t pull the wool over his eyes. He generally referred to us collectively as his ‘useless officers’ and felt entirely free to do so before the ship’s company and/or complete strangers. The thing to remember was that he didn’t really mean it, did he?98
Teachers didn’t only have to instil submarine skills; they also had to teach the softer skills of command. John Hervey’s teacher, Rud Cairns, another Second World War veteran, ‘was absolutely meticulous as a Teacher, very, very conscientious and he didn’t just teach you how to do an attack, Rud taught you how to be a CO, including how to write officers’ reports and how to get rid of an unsatisfactory chap, right down to what to do on the day you sail from a foreign port and things like that. Some Teachers were very very unsatisfactory in my view and they didn’t pay nearly enough attention to the general training of the student. In fact one chap I thought disgracefully didn’t even turn up until they got to sea stage, when of course you should be there from the very first day with the student and the Teacher in the base ashore.’99
Compared to the hard years of the Second World War, the early post-war years were relaxing affairs with the Royal Navy’s submarines conducting numerous peacetime roles. The service returned to its pre-war role of providing the Royal Navy surface fleet and RAF Coastal Command with anti-submarine training (and later, as we have seen, the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy). Much of the time of the home flotillas was spent training, what was known as day-running from operational bases such as Portland, the location of an anti-submarine training school, and the Joint Anti-Submarine School, Londonderry. Surface ships would attempt to find submerged submarines participating in the exercises while RAF Shackleton Maritime Patrol Aircraft patrolled the skies above. It was incredibly dull work and many crews, hardened by their experiences in the Second World War, found post-war life at sea very boring. ‘It used to be all right during the war; but it gets monotonous now,’ complained an Able Seaman from HMS Taciturn. ‘This clockwork mouse stuff isn’t much fun … They wind us up at base just like a clockwork mouse and set us running out to sea. We just cruise around and wait for the surface craft to find us. Th
en back to base. Next day they wind us up again and we do the same thing.’100
One of the more exciting events in the calendar was an annual set-piece exercise known as Admiral Submarines Summer War Exercise, later Flag Officer Submarines Summer War Exercise. The first post-war Summer War was held off the Shetlands in late 1946 with up to thirty submarines participating in a series of set-piece encounters spread over a number of days, carrying out dummy torpedo attacks against surface targets, such as ships and convoys. This was the closest submariners came to actual live operations in the immediate post-war years. The service was hardly involved in the only major conflict of the early 1950s, the Korean War.101 In the Far East, submarines were employed on inconclusive anti-piracy patrols in Mirs Bay and the southern approaches to Hong Kong to counter junks attempting to lift the main telegraph cable from Singapore to cut out long lengths of copper which fetched high prices in the markets in Macao.102
The first full-scale mobilization of the Submarine Service was in unexpected circumstances and proved to be a costly and unwelcome distraction. Winter 1947 remains to this day the most severe and protracted spell of bad weather experienced by the United Kingdom in living memory. Towards the end of January 1947 virtually the whole of the British Isles was covered in a blanket of white snow and the sub-zero wind from the east blew for a month without stopping. The Thames froze, Big Ben was silenced (its mechanics were frozen solid) and amid severe snowdrifts most transport ground to a halt. 93 per cent of the nation’s energy came from coal, but due to severe mismanagement, the nation’s coal supplies were in a dire state even before the bad weather descended on the country. During the first post-war winter in 1946, a mere 6.8 million tons of coal remained in reserve, enough to supply the country’s needs for just over a week. In January 1947, coal froze in the pits and there were no trains able to shift it. Power shortages occurred all over the country, and gas too was in short supply, dropping to around a quarter of its normal pressure in most big cities.103 Thousands of people were laid off work and unemployment shot up from 400,000 to 1.75 million.
As the government muddled through the winter crisis the Submarine Service played a vital role in supporting the electrical needs of the Royal Navy’s dockyards. At 2000 on 7 January 1947, a message from the Admiralty in London was brought into FOSM’s Operations Room at HMS Dolphin, which was lit by a solitary candle, in which had been stuck a replica of the National Coal Board Flag. The signal directed FOSM to supply power to Royal Naval Dockyards by HM Submarines. By 8 January, the first submarines had fuelled and were moving towards their allotted stations. The 5th Flotilla based at HMS Dolphin provided power to Portsmouth, Chatham and Sheerness, the 2nd Flotilla from HMS Maidstone to Portland, and the 3rd Flotilla from HMS Forth moved south from the Clyde to provide power to Devonport. The operation was demanding, particularly on manpower, with ninety officers and 940 submarine ratings continuously employed on board the submarines, working in considerable discomfort in sub-zero temperatures caused by the strong draught of cold air that was required by the submarines’ diesel engines.104 Despite these difficulties, the volume of work never overwhelmed the submarine crews and the performance of equipment, both mechanical and electrical, was excellent. Most submarines were rotated in and out of operation for maintenance and the periodical discharge of batteries. One ‘S’ class submarine provided power continuously for twenty-eight days.
The operation, which was codenamed ‘Blackcurrant’, continued monotonously without major incident until 31 March 1947. Although successful, submariners could not fail to weigh up their contribution against the cost and effort involved. Savings amounted to an estimated 7890 tons of coal, the equivalent of less than ten minutes of normal output from the coalmines, and on the basis of wear and tear the engines of the submarines involved had been run for around 29,000 hours, the equivalent of seven engine refits, each costing around £23,000. Unsurprisingly, in September 1947 Flag Officer Submarines was still complaining that the legacy of Operation ‘Blackcurrant’ had ‘still not yet been written off’.105
The service was also involved in trialling new equipment. In April 1946 a ‘T’ class submarine, HMS Truant, became the first Royal Navy submarine to be equipped with an experimental snort mast. Truant spent six days testing the new equipment while transiting from Gibraltar to Portsmouth under the watchful eye of an observer from the Royal Naval Physiological Laboratory, who was tasked with studying the impact of snorting on the crew.106 While the snort enhanced the capabilities of the Royal Navy’s submarines by removing the need to surface to charge batteries, reducing the risk of detection, as well as greatly increasing underwater speed thanks to the ability to use diesel engines while submerged, it was uncomfortable for the crew, especially when a submarine was snorting in rough seas. When the head of the snort mast dipped below the water a valve would automatically close to stop water pouring into the submarine. With the diesels still running, they no longer took in air from outside the submarine but from inside. This created a vacuum which built up over time causing men’s ears to pop. When the mast eventually cleared the surface, the valve would open again suddenly equalizing the pressure inside the submarine. This was often painful for the crew.
Trials to evaluate how new equipment, submarines and their crews performed in different waters/climates were also conducted in the immediate post-war period. In October 1947, HMS Alliance was sent on a thirty-day operation to obtain information about the living conditions on board a submarine during an extended patrol in tropical waters, travelling a distance of 3193 miles over thirty days, completely submerged. Further trials to determine the air quality and the effects of prolonged snorting on a submarine’s crew were conducted by HMS Taciturn and in 1948 HMS Ambush was sent to the Arctic Circle to determine how the snort functioned in northern cold waters. Ambush departed from Rothesay on 10 February and found itself having to endure a three-day gale, navigating treacherous icebergs which threatened to collide with the submarine. The storm was so violent that Ambush’s men were forced to lash themselves in their bunks to prevent their being thrown out.107 The pitching of the submarine made it difficult to maintain adequate depth control and waves rising over the snort mast constantly shut off the valve, making life on board very uncomfortable due to the constant pressure changes. Ambush was eventually forced to surface where it rode out the storm for three days, pitching and tossing in the violent seas.108
Those who joined the Submarine Service in the time immediately after the war experienced what Mackenzie described as ‘an immensely exciting period when everyone was consumed with new thoughts, new ideas, on how submarines, their weapons and operations would develop in the future’.109
A NEW ROLE
Since the end of the Second World War, the Royal Navy and the Submarine Service had been thinking long and hard about how the Service would fight the next war. During the early Cold War submarines were increasingly seen as one of the few opportunities available to the Royal Navy of taking the fight to the adversary. One 1945 Naval Staff paper concluded that submarines were ‘needed to enforce blockade in waters close to the enemy’s shores where surface vessels are unable to operate and for special reconnaissance operations’.110 The Navy recognized that in a future conflict with the Soviet Union involving unrestricted submarine warfare, the submarine was an effective means of intercepting and attacking Soviet submarines deploying from their northern bases into the Atlantic to attack British and Allied merchant shipping. In early 1948, the Admiralty issued the Submarine Service with a new directive:
In war, the primary operational function of our submarines will be the interception and destruction of enemy submarines in enemy controlled waters. Their other main functions, the importance of which will depend on the circumstances, will be the interception and destruction of enemy warships and merchant shipping, reconnaissance, air/sea rescue and special operations.111
Some, such as the Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff, Rear Admiral Geoffrey Oliver, wanted the Submarine Servi
ce to assume an offensive role off the well-defended Soviet mainland, attacking Soviet submarines and warships with torpedoes and mining the approaches to their bases. Oliver later said that submarines were an effective means of ‘getting to the enemy on his home ground’.112
But there was a problem. During the war submarines had been primarily employed against surface ships, attacking enemy warships and convoys, while also conducting other operations such as deploying intelligence agents and Royal Marines. There had been very few submarine versus submarine submerged attacks in the Second World War. The only successful attack occurred on 9 February 1945 when HMS Venturer, under the command of Lieutenant Jimmy Launders, sank the German U-boat U-864. Both submarines were submerged. Post-war training was therefore increasingly directed towards meeting this new role and focused on detecting, tracking and attacking submerged submarines. This was not an easy task and required much-improved sonars.
Everything that moves on or under the surface of the sea transmits some form of noise which can be detected at ranges varying from a few yards up to hundreds of miles. Sound is transmitted in water some 4.5 times faster than it is in the air. The lower the frequency the further it goes; the higher the frequency the greater the accuracy with which the bearing of its source can be measured. In the main, noise sources come from a propeller, through cavitation, a form of turbulence; from main or auxiliary machinery noise, or from the disturbance made by the passage of a ship or submarine hull through the water or the passage of water through piping.113 During and immediately after the war submarines and surface ships were detected by the sounds they radiated in the high audio frequency region (around 10 kc/s) by an operator listening to the ‘hydrophone effect’ (or HE). In the Royal Navy the equipment used to detect these frequencies was known as ASDIC (named after the Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee), or to use the American terminology, sonar (Sound Navigation and Ranging). Active sonar transmitted acoustic signals that then reflected from an object, giving direction, range and, by plotting successive positions, speed; Passive sonar received sounds generated by a submerged object which, when processed, provided bearing information. During and immediately after the war British efforts were directed towards development of active sonar as anti-submarine warfare was primarily the occupation of surface escorts, which were far too noisy to allow the use of sensitive passive sonar arrays mounted on a ship’s hull. For submarines, active sonar had one major disadvantage: it gave away the location of the submarine that was using it. It could also only detect objects a few miles distant.
