by James Jinks
The decision not to continue constructing nuclear submarines at Cammell Laird had a significant and longstanding impact on the UK’s industrial capacity to design and build them. Thereafter, Vickers in Barrow-in-Furness was the only shipyard in the United Kingdom capable of designing and constructing nuclear submarines for the Royal Navy. Vickers had accepted the nuclear-submarine programme as a challenge and, as a 1967 report on its impact noted, ‘despite some serious and unexpected setbacks, its purpose has so far been achieved’.102 The programme also had some unexpected benefits across British industry such as a marked increase in the standards of materials and workmanship, improved performance in programme evaluation and discipline, and a greater awareness of the need to get a contract defined more specifically before it was awarded, as well as the elimination of some traditional demarcation problems between particular trades. Vickers concluded that ‘the Nuclear Submarine Programme has served a serious purpose of putting certain companies in a position where they will be more competitive in the international environment’.103 It also estimated that the fallout from having access to the American nuclear-submarine programme, on which vast sums of dollars had been spent on development, ‘could well represent in money, figures comparable to the whole cost of our programme’.104
But the nuclear-submarine programme, which was described in a 1967 briefing to the Minister of Defence (Equipment), Roy Mason, as ‘comparable in sophistication to the most intricate items in the American Space Programme’, was making extraordinary demands on the Royal Navy and British industry.105 Not without reason, in the nuclear-submarine business SSN was said to stand for ‘Saturdays, Sundays and Nights’ and SSBN for ‘Saturdays, Sundays and Bloody Nights’.106 Since April 1963, the Royal Navy’s first SSN, HMS Dreadnought, had been in near constant use and the operational part of the first commission, which involved proving and modifying equipment destined for the ‘Valiant’ and Polaris submarines, was described as an outstanding success. Dreadnought participated in many major Fleet exercises where her speed, endurance and sonar introduced a new dimension into submarine warfare in the Royal Navy. In 1966, the Captain of the 3rd Submarine Squadron reported that Dreadnought was ‘well led, highly trained and fully operational’.107
But there were problems. In October 1966 the first in a planned series of sea trials was abandoned when a number of cracks were discovered inside Dreadnought, initially in two frames that formed part of the submarine’s hull. The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was concerned about safety but also because ‘the costs involved are bound to lead to acid comment by the C. and AG [Comptroller and Auditor General] and by the Public Accounts Committee’.108 Wilson wanted to set up an independent public inquiry, but was convinced not to by Healey due to concerns about the impact on the Anglo-American relationship. The Americans discovered from their own experiences that higher specification steel was required to construct submarine hulls, but they did not tell the British. ‘We now know that they have had similar problems to which they claim to have found the solution,’ Healey wrote to Wilson in October 1966. ‘But they told us nothing until we approached them about our cracks; and even now they remain very reticent, possibly because of the attention the matter has aroused in the British Press, and the cloak of security they have cast around their own difficulties.’109 When looked at in perspective the problem was aggravated by an improvement in testing techniques: as more sensitive tests were conducted, more cracks became evident.110 A number of operational penalties were accepted, but as Healey later told the House of Commons, the ‘cracks are so small that they are only discernible by the most modern techniques of ultra-sonic testing. They represent an additional maintenance task, but they do not involve the crews of the boats in any degree of risk.’111
Cracking problems continued to plague Dreadnought. When the submarine entered Rosyth for the first refit of a nuclear submarine in 1968, investigations revealed yet more significant cracking in the valves and some of the pipework associated with the American S5W reactor system.112 Sir Solly Zuckerman was once again drafted in and asked to raise the problem with Admiral Rickover. Rickover ‘admitted to having had similar experience in American nuclear submarines, expressed his belief that the cracking was due to thermal stress and suggested remedial action. He did not regard the problem as “extraordinarily important” although he has been replacing the valves and pipe sections as and when opportunities arose.’ Rickover was clear that had the cracking constituted a serious safety hazard he would have informed the Royal Navy about it when US Navy submarines first experienced it. He ‘reaffirmed his intention to honour his obligation to inform the Royal Navy of any major safety problem concerning the Dreadnought plant, but he was equally clear’ that he did not consider himself obliged to inform the Royal Navy of every US technological development in the field of nuclear propulsion. He advised the British to look for similar cracking elsewhere in the plant which may not have been observed by the refitters.113
Experience with the first two all-British SSNs, HMS Valiant and HMS Warspite, was far better. Both had shown that the class of SSN the Royal Navy was building could travel long distances at high speed, free from detection by anything but a combination of good fortune and the most highly developed detection equipment. The designers, manufacturers and installation test teams had succeeded in ensuring that the PWR1 plant was extremely safe and reliable. In a fourteen-month period in Valiant, between July 1966 and October 1967, the reactor compartment required less than one man-hour per day on defect rectification, half of which was ‘unskilled work’. The high standard achieved on the reactor plant became the datum against which all other equipment and systems were compared. During one period on Valiant the reactor compartment only required 3 per cent of total man-hours on defect rectification while the remaining propulsion system took 40 per cent and hull systems 25 per cent. Fifteen per cent of the propulsion work was steam leaks, which took up a considerable amount of time and skilled labour.114 But while the Submarine Service was finally producing powerful platforms to fulfil the Royal Navy’s future concept of operations, there were serious problems with the weapons systems that were intended to give these new capital ships teeth.
As we have seen, at the beginning of the 1960s, the only available anti-surface ship weapon available to the Submarine Service was the Second World War era Mark 8 torpedo, which had first entered service in 1940. Although the Mark 8 had been repeatedly modified, these modifications did little to alter its basic characteristics and by the 1960s it was increasingly suffering from age-related defects. Operational limitations were imposed on its use, which reduced its reaction time and forced the attacking submarine to carry out noisy tube operations close to a target, which increased the chances of detection. The relatively short range also limited a submarine’s freedom of movement during the final stages of attack. The ineffectiveness and unreliability of the Mark 8 was demonstrated in June 1967 when HMS Dreadnought was ordered to sink the Essberger Chemist, a German tanker that had caught fire and was considered a hazard to shipping. Dreadnought took two days to cover the 1000 miles from Gibraltar to the Azores area, where the derelict tanker lay. Of the four Mark 8 torpedoes fired at the tanker one missed at a range of a mile, while the other three hit but failed to sink the small (280 foot) long vessel. Embarrassingly for the Submarine Service, the tanker had to be sunk by gunfire from a frigate. The Daily Telegraph later highlighted the implications of this dismal performance for the Navy’s claim that its future strike power lay with the Submarine Service and proclaimed that ‘so long as these vessels are armed with the Mark 8 torpedo such a claim is ludicrous’.115
Although the Mark 8 could also be used to attack submarines, the primary anti-submarine torpedoes in use with the Submarine Service were the Mark 20 ‘Bidder’ and the Mark 23 ‘Grog’. The Mark 20 medium-speed, unguided, passive-acoustic homing torpedo was considered obsolete by the late 1960s as it was slow and could be easily countered by decoys. It was never deployed on the Navy’s new SSNs and S
SBNs. However, it remained in service in the ‘Oberon’ and ‘Porpoise’ class conventional submarines as it was the only torpedo capable of being discharged from stern tubes. The Mark 23 wire-guided anti-submarine passive homing torpedo was also obsolete. It was neither designed to home in on modern Soviet SSNs, nor capable of doing so, and while it had enough speed to deal with conventional Soviet submarines, it could only home in on the 45 Khz radiated noise produced by a snorting/cavitating Soviet ‘Whisky’ class submarine, which was expected to be relegated to second-line duties by the mid-1970s. The torpedo, which had an overall weapon system effectiveness of just 33 per cent, also ‘had a very bad reputation among submariners and would have been entirely useless in a war situation against Soviet submarines’.116 ‘It was a rotten torpedo, being just a Mark 20 with a guidance wire dispenser attached,’ complained Sam Fry. ‘Quite how it was ever accepted into service is beyond me.’117
There was only one conclusion: ‘In the 1970s even conventional submarines cannot be hit by current weapons.’118 The Submarine Service set its hopes on a new wire-guided torpedo known as the Mark 24, which promised ‘a marked advance on any previous weapon’, and was capable of attacking the latest Soviet submarines. The scientists and engineers in charge of the Mark 24 development were so confident of their claim that their new torpedo would be ‘the end of the line for torpedo development’ that they named the development programme Project Ongar, after Ongar station, which was then the last stop on the Central Line of the London Underground. However, in the early 1960s the Mark 24 development programme suffered from setback after setback, aggravated by the closure of the Torpedo Experimental Establishment at Greenock in Scotland in 1959 and the subsequent transfer of its staff to Portland in Dorset. In the early 1960s, wide-ranging reviews, one of which was entitled ‘Whither ONGAR?’, resulted in the torpedo performance specifications being reduced considerably to achieve the in-service target date of 1969. The torpedo’s propulsion system was changed from an internal combustion engine to an electric motor with a silver zinc battery, reducing the planned speed of the torpedo from 55 knots to 24 knots, with a short final-attack-phase capability of 35 knots. The Soviets had also started building submarines that could operate well below the floor depth of the Mark 24. ‘SSNs cannot be hit by current weapons,’ concluded the Admiralty assessment. ‘They can be attacked only by the MK.24, provided that the target is not too deep (over 1200 ft).’119 The original version of the Mark 24 was also incapable of hitting surface ships. It had no anti-surface capability.
Unsurprisingly, the Admiralty’s torpedo experts were not highly regarded. Even the Superintendent of the Royal Navy’s Torpedo Experimental Establishment, Captain G. O. Symonds, admitted that the reaction of any officer who has dealings with torpedoes or the Experimental Establishment was ‘almost inevitably one of horror’. ‘Nothing new ever comes out of that place, except promises and fanciful project names’ was the usual reaction from submariners in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Symonds admitted that ‘there has been justification for such remarks in the past’ and he blamed changes in policy, his establishment, the Admiralty, delays and former project leaders and scientists ‘trying to attain a ridiculously high Staff Requirement, which he has regarded as a challenge’.120 According to Symonds, Staff requirements for the Royal Navy’s torpedoes had often been ‘based on an individual’s pipe dream, who, finding the future very hazy, has doubled the speed, added a couple of noughts to the run and one nought to the depth and then sat back thinking “Well, that should take care of the next fifteen years!” or, possibly, “That should take care of my turn in the Admiralty.” ’121
In February 1969, Admiral Michael Pollock, Flag Officer Submarines, sent a paper entitled ‘Submarine Weapons in the 1970s’ to the Controller of the Navy, Admiral Sir Horace Law, in which he expressed his frustration and anger:
The attached paper analyses the total inadequacy of the weapons at present available to the Submarine Command in the anti-submarine role and forecasts that a similar situation will occur in the anti-warship role within the next five years.
It illustrates the degree to which the viability of the submarine force depends upon the timely introduction of a Mk.24 torpedo of specified performance and proved reliability, and to the further development of this or another weapon to restore anti-surface ship capability.
It records the unsatisfactory effect upon morale which so inadequate a capability would cause in war and the dangerous use to which such a credibility gap in our armoury could be put in disputing the submarine.
The situation portrayed is unsatisfactory in the extreme, but I should be failing in my responsibilities, both as an operational commander and as your advisor on submarine matters, if I failed to draw your attention most urgently to it.122
Pollock concluded that it was ‘rapidly becoming more and more evident how ineffective it is to go on building modern capital ships and arming them with the equivalent of a bow and arrow’.123
This truly dismal record of torpedo development was to get worse. Acceptance Trials for the Mark 24 began in November 1968, with the aim of issuing the new torpedo to the fleet by January 1970. However, the trials ran into ‘significant initial problems’ and by 1969 they were ‘some months behind schedule’.124 By the end of 1969, as development of the Mark 24 continued, the Submarine Service was so desperate for an effective weapon that it explored a number of alternative options, including the purchase of US weapons such as the Mark 45 ASTOR torpedo, which was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, the Mark 40 Mod-1 torpedo or the SUBROC (SUBmarine ROCket) anti-submarine rocket. Pollock also raised the possibility of fitting a WE 177A nuclear warhead to the Mark 8 torpedo ‘as a way to achieve a large increase in the effectiveness of our torpedoes within a relatively short period’.125 He argued that such a torpedo would be ‘much superior to any present British submarine weapon’ and that ‘if urgent action is not taken, we shall find that the “main striking power” of the Fleet consists of an excellent vehicle with no punch’.126 However, the proposal was never taken seriously. The short range of the Mark 8 put the firing submarine well within the destructive range of a nuclear torpedo.127
Despite the fact that the Royal Navy’s newest and most capable SSNs lacked effective torpedoes, the Navy was anxious to send them into northern waters to gather intelligence on the Soviet Fleet and provide strategic warning in the event that the Cold War ever heated up. By the 1960s, the assumption was that prior to a Soviet attack on NATO, the Soviet Northern Fleet would leave its bases and head for open waters, and there would be a marked increase in communications activity on the Soviet side. By collecting information about levels and patterns of Soviet military activity, which could then be used to form a detailed database, major deviations from the normal pattern could be detected and serve as a warning of attack. As in the 1950s with the early conventional submarine operations, the northern waters of the Soviet Union such as the Barents Sea became an important region for surveillance and warning.
UP NORTH
For the Commanding Officers of the Royal Navy’s newest SSNs, these intelligence-gathering operations were exceptionally demanding. At least one former diesel submariner turned down the opportunity to command an SSN because he had had such a bad time up against the Soviets, who hunted his diesel submarine to exhaustion.128 Such were the demands on COs that the Navy would assign an extra command-qualified officer to a submarine conducting an intelligence-gathering operation to ease the burden. In an SSN, the complexity and continuous twenty-four hours a day operations in often hazardous conditions were now well beyond the reach of a single person. While the CO generally set the tone, technically and tactically he needed to have some competent men at his side in every department. The success of a submarine, particularly a nuclear submarine, was the result of a team effort. ‘In the case of an attack,’ wrote one SSN Commander, Sam Fry:
the estimation of the target’s course, speed and range will be made by the Captain. He will be aided by
his observations and experience but the capability of the team, the tubes’ crew, trimming Officer of the Watch and many others will have all contributed to the successful [outcome]. All the same factors applied to a Cold War patrol, and one should never forget the technicians that have been responsible for propelling the submarine, and ensuring that all the complex equipment works.129
When Royal Navy COs were recognized with awards for their exploits, often in the form of an OBE, the crews were rightly proud, but sometimes referred to the OBE as ‘Other Buggers’ Efforts’ or ‘Other Bastards’ Efforts’. ‘Whilst this is a truism,’ acknowledged Fry, ‘someone should show off the reward for all their hard work, and I have always hoped that my crew members shared that view.’130
Like the ‘T’ class submarines that conducted the first intelligence-gathering operations in the mid-1950s, Royal Navy SSNs were extensively prepared before they sailed north. Marine Engineers such as Patrick Middleton ensured that the submarine was ‘extre-e-mely quiet’:
This involved checking that all the rotating machinery was in balance and sitting on its rubber mountings so that no noise was transmitted to the hull and onwards. No easy task. Despite rubber or flexible pipework, machinery sitting on springy rafts and endless examination, it was all too possible for a bucket to slip down in some cloacal corner and short out the insulation.131
