by James Jinks
It was now increasingly clear that the information from the Walker Spy Ring had enabled the Soviets to narrow the technological gap that once existed between the Soviet Union and both the US Navy and Royal Navy. The broadband radiated noise levels of modern Soviet nuclear submarines were beginning to bear comparison with the oldest US Navy and Royal Navy submarines and the quietness of the Soviet narrowband signature was decreasing long-range detection ranges and leading to only fleeting contact. Soviets tactics also eroded advantages previously enjoyed by the West. The Soviets continued to employ a number of anti-SOSUS tactics, shifting their transit routes away from SOSUS arrays in deep water. They also adopted disruptive steering tactics, zig-zagging every 30–60 minutes, attempting to reduce the uninterrupted periods that US Navy and Royal Navy SSNs could remain in contact.
All of this was evident in late 1986 when HMS Conqueror conducted Operation ‘Beverash’ in the northeast Atlantic. Conqueror spent six days trailing a Victor I/II over 1400 nautical miles as it conducted a high-speed transit to the Mediterranean. Although the Victor was ‘a well handled submarine, employing frequent alterations of course … in what were, at times, poor sonar conditions’, Conqueror’s crew were able to remain undetected and conduct two simulated Tigerfish attacks. ‘I seized the opportunity with confidence that he was in within weapon range,’ wrote Conqueror’s CO, James Burnell-Nugent. ‘He was a bit close to my bow for choice but there is no doubt that in wartime I would have been happy to fire. I assess that with accuracy of the NB bearings … that the attack had a good chance of success.’168 Conqueror closed the range considerably on the second attack but ‘After what appeared to be an excellent opportunity for a short range attack’, the Victor ‘completely vanished’ and Burnell-Nugent was forced to admit that the attack was unsuccessful. The Victor appeared to be deliberately utilizing the then poor sonar conditions of the northeast Atlantic to protect itself. ‘The tactical lesson learnt is that if better sonar conditions are coming up – wait,’ wrote Burnell-Nugent. He also noted that ‘The complete lack of cavitation, the probable lack of transmissions, the clean broadband signature and the disruptive steering plan are all marked improvements in the handling of a Victor I/II over earlier years.’169
Conqueror was then ordered to locate a Type II/III nuclear submarine that had been picked up on SOSUS rounding the North Cape. After two days of searching, Conqueror located the Soviet submarine, which it assessed as another ‘Victor’ class, and started to trail it as it transited towards the Shetland–Faroes Gap. Once firmly in the trail, Burnell-Nugent carried out yet another simulated attack that was judged to have been successful. As Conqueror continued to follow the Victor, Burnell-Nugent concluded that it was ‘generally well handled and by “Victor I” standards quiet both narrowband and broadband’. But he noted that there was a ‘difference in modus operandi’ between this particular Victor and the one Conqueror had encountered earlier on in the patrol. ‘Both were VICTOR class SSNs bound for the Mediterranean,’ noted Burnell-Nugent, but whereas the first Victor did not transmit on active sonar, the second Victor did. Both submarines also made use of ‘disruptive steering plans and both had clean broadband signatures’. The second Victor had an ‘atypical narrowband signature’, which led Conqueror’s crew to conclude that it was ‘a non-standard “Victor” derivative with possibly significantly different auxiliary machinery’.170 Conqueror eventually handed over the trail to an RAF Nimrod and returned to Faslane with a considerable amount of intelligence information about both submarines.
The ‘Trafalgar’ class continued to demonstrate a discernible acoustic and sensor advantage over the latest Soviet submarines. In February 1988 HMS Torbay, under the command of Robert Stevens, conducted Operation ‘Links’, a covert intelligence-gathering and training ASW patrol in the north Norwegian, south Greenland and west Barents Seas, as well as the Marginal Ice Zone north and south of Jan Mayen Island, in order to gain operation experience in the challenging conditions associated with the area. Over the period of one month, Torbay detected, trailed and reached attack criteria against four different Soviet submarines: a Yankee I, a Victor II and two Delta Is, while also detecting two other possible submarines, one of which may have been an acoustically quiet Victor III. Torbay left Faslane in late January 1988 and spent three days exercising in the Royal Navy’s Northern Fleet Exercise Areas against HMS Churchill and two US submarines, the USS Baton Rouge and USS Pargo. Torbay then departed for patrol and after three days of searching unsuccessfully for a Victor III at the entrance to the Barents Sea, moved north to search for a possible Delta I that had been tracked on SOSUS for over seventy days and was beginning its southeasterly homeward transit.
Torbay easily detected the Delta and closed the range and after obtaining a good fire control solution simulated firing a salvo of two Mark 24 Tigerfish torpedoes, which were assessed as having hit their target. As Torbay established a trail on the Delta’s port quarter, its sonars detected a separate submarine contact to the south. Stevens immediately suspected that this was a ‘Victor III’ SSN about to delouse the Delta as it returned home. Torbay slowed moved away and allowed the range on both submarines to open so that it could monitor the delouse operation from a distance. Once contact with the second submarine was lost, Torbay reestablished its trail of the Delta until breaking off to search for a ‘Yankee’ class SSBN that SOSUS indicated was loitering in the southwestern approaches to the North Cape. Torbay’s search for the Yankee was complicated by the heavy traffic noise from fishing and merchant vessels along the Norwegian coast, but it was able to use the noise to disguise its own broadband signature when closing at high speed. Torbay established a trail of the Yankee until it moved out of Torbay’s allocated operating area. Stevens was ‘confident that if required to fire, the Target’s solution would have supported a Tigerfish attack’, but just as Torbay was chasing the ‘Yankee’, Northwood suspended the requirement to simulate attacks on Soviet submarines because of an incident on 12 February when a Soviet frigate rammed the USS Yorktown and USS Caron.171
Torbay was then assigned to search for another SOSUS contact, a ‘Victor II’ class SSN operating in the Norwegian Sea on the Vϕring Plateau and heading southeast. Although the Victor II was acoustically quiet and the presence of fishing vessels made trailing difficult, Torbay was able to conduct yet another simulated firing of two Tigerfish torpedoes before moving to the northwest to intercept the Delta it had encountered early on in the patrol, which SOSUS now indicated was patrolling in the Jan Mayen Polar Front on the edge of the Marginal Ice Zone. Torbay struggled to locate the Delta, and with only fleeting contact concluded that it was ‘slow, very quiet and probably close’. Torbay’s crew eventually concluded that the Delta and Torbay were in fact facing each other bow-to-bow and if Stevens had not taken immediate action and ordered a course alteration a very close pass or a collision would have occurred. As Torbay went deep, attempting to act like a biological contact – a whale – and disappear, Stevens paused, levelled Torbay off briefly and simulated firing two Tigerfish torpedoes at the Delta. This close-in, ‘white of the eyes’ attack was considered successful and there was no indication that the Delta, which remained on a steady slow course, had any indication that Torbay was nearby. ‘I cannot believe my luck,’ wrote Stevens. ‘This submarine is very quiet narrowband and broadband in comparison to my previous contacts but he appears to be very naïve tactically.’172 Confident of Torbay’s superiority over the Delta, Stevens moved his submarine across its stern to examine the various aspects of its acoustic signature before breaking contact and returning to the UK.
After thirty days at sea Torbay returned from a 7985-mile patrol with a considerable amount of acoustic and operational intelligence, including a comprehensive recording of the Yankee’s acoustic signature and confirmation that the Soviets were transiting their SSBNs through noisy areas. Stevens’s patrol report contained some initial conclusions. He argued that ‘The reduced Soviet narrowband signature, the aspect dependency
(generally only seen abaft the beam) and their disruptive steering has reduced the uninterrupted periods in contact significantly. This meant that all too regularly contact was lost permanently before bearing ambiguity had been resolved and relocations became something of a gamble.’173 He concluded that ‘The halcyon days of long range Narrowband detections are disappearing fast. The effects of the Soviet noise quietening techniques observed this patrol, even on the older generation submarines, are impressive.’174
THE FINAL ACT
In the late 1980s, the Submarine Service continued to collect intelligence on the latest Soviet ships, submarines, weapon systems and tactics. HMS Conqueror was allegedly involved in one such operation shortly after the Falklands conflict, codenamed Operation ‘Barmaid’. Conqueror, under the command of Chris Wreford-Brown, was fitted with special hydraulic pincers which were used to cut through a 3-inch-thick steel cable attached to a Polish AGI trawler that was deploying an experimental towed-array sonar. Conqueror then separated the towed array from the AGI and returned it to Faslane, from where it was flown to the United States for analysis.175
One submariner who was involved in intelligence-gathering operations in the mid-to late 1980s, Lieutenant Charles Robinson, commented that ‘The problem is that you are operating in very confined conditions. The main worry is collision. You have a number of submarines running around in a small stretch of ocean. Submarines have hit each other.’ Sonar ranges on the latest Soviet submarines had decreased to such an extent that contacts could be as close as 1000 feet before they were picked up. ‘You can’t actually see the thing or what it’s doing, you can only hear a noise. You have 30 seconds to do an initial assessment and in that time you’ve probably halved the distance. You rely on how the noise is shifting to get an idea of what the vessel is and where it is heading, whether it’s on the surface or underneath. If it’s on the surface, you’re likely to pick it up much quicker.’ According to Robinson, the Soviets started to ‘play games like moving in a little closer to see if the other sub picks them up. They check each other’s detection range. Often round there, they’re doing exercises and trials, and there is a need to find out what’s happening, particularly with torpedo testing. The worry then is to make sure you don’t get shot at because you’re hanging around in that area. Or you might even be trying to run under a surface ship or a submarine. You can’t make mistakes.’176
Such operations were highly sensitive and each was approved at the highest levels of the British Government.177 Mrs Thatcher visited the Submarine Operations Centre at Northwood and received personal reports from submarine commanders after they returned from sensitive intelligence-gathering operations. In 1989, the future first Sea Lord, Mark Stanhope, then the CO of HMS Splendid, alongside Robert Stevens (the CO of HMS Torbay) and members of the senior Admiralty Board personally briefed the Prime Minister. Mrs Thatcher was shown the results of various operations, including photographs of ships, submarines and missile firings obtained by Royal Navy submarines. ‘That’s not what I’m normally told,’ said Thatcher after the briefing. Everyone in the room thought they had just killed the Royal Navy’s intelligence collection programme. But the Prime Minister immediately saw the worth of the Royal Navy’s SSNs. ‘She absolutely recognized the value that we were achieving and more than that she recognized the politics, that these submarines are not cheap and she absolutely got in her mind how she could defend these submarines politically.’178 Mrs Thatcher was also extremely interested in what she was agreeing to when she authorized such operations, what the risk was, both the military risk and the political risk. She totally understood the risk versus gain balance. She said she would continue to authorize operations but she wanted to be absolutely certain that she was going to be told the truth if something went wrong, telling senior Admiralty Board members at the briefing: ‘You make sure I know.’179
To stay ahead of the Soviets, the Submarine Service was continuously seeking to enhance its capabilities. In the late 1980s sonar systems, such as the narrowband Sonar Type 2047, were upgraded and new specialist equipment that aided in the detection and tracking of Soviet submarines was installed on all Royal Navy SSNs. But by the late 1980s there was a growing imbalance between the operational capability and the acoustic vulnerability of the Royal Navy’s oldest SSNs. Without further efforts to upgrade them, to reduce their radiated noise signature, they risked becoming increasingly vulnerable to new Soviet shipborne and airborne narrowband sonars.180 In 1980, special anechoic tiles were applied to the outer hull of HMS Churchill in order to absorb the sound waves from active sonar, reducing and distorting its return signal and thus its effective range. The tiles also absorbed self-noise, reducing the range at which Royal Navy submarines could be detected by passive sonar. Following the fit to HMS Churchill they were applied to all the Royal Navy’s SSNs and SSBNs.181
Accurate and timely intelligence was also instrumental to retaining an operational edge over the Soviet Navy. During HMS Torbay’s thirty-day patrol in 1988, the submarine received 798 intelligence signals. In the mid-1980s, the United States also injected new life into SOSUS by enhancing its underwater capabilities. SOSUS evolved into the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System, IUSS. IUSS included the addition of a mobile SOSUS array that provided mobile detection, tracking and reporting of submarine contacts at long ranges known as the Surveillance Towed-Array Sensor System, SURTASS. SURTASS consisted of a long, wide array towed by civilian-crewed ships, where data was uplinked back to shore via satellite communications and analysed by powerful land-based modern computers situated in Dam Neck, Virginia.182 The first of these systems were installed on US auxiliary Ocean Surveillance Ships commissioned between April 1984 and January 1990.
There were also significant developments in the torpedo field. By 1988, the Tigerfish consolidation and development programme was, after almost thirty years, complete. The reliability of the torpedo had been improved significantly and its capability to destroy submarines hiding under the Arctic ice pack had also been enhanced. In March 1988, the Submarine Service once again returned to the Arctic to conduct a series of Mark 24 Tigerfish under-ice firings. HMS Turbulent and HMS Superb travelled north of Alaska to the Beaufort Sea, 120 miles northeast of Prudhoe Bay, to a tracking station set up by the Applied Physics Laboratory Ice Station from University of Washington State. Alongside two US Navy SSNs, USS Lapon and USS Silversides, both Superb and Turbulent fired sixteen Mark 24 Tigerfish Mod 2 torpedoes in a series of evaluation trials. Most were fired against other submarines, but some were fired at simulated acoustic targets, configured to represent a ‘Typhoon’ or ‘Delta IV’ SSBN hiding underneath the ice. According to Dan Conley, ‘the weapons performed extremely well in the quiet Arctic conditions, achieving long-range passive homing detections. Even in the active mode, where the torpedoes’ homing systems had the problem of resolving the real target from the contacts generated by returns from the ice features, the weapons homed remarkably reliably.’ When FOSM Rear Admiral Frank Grenier briefed the Prime Minister about the successful trails she was ‘absolutely spellbound’ that the Submarine Service had both a reliable torpedo and the capability to attack Soviet submarines hiding underneath the ice pack.183
Despite these achievements, there were still doubts about the ability of the Mark 24 Tigerfish to home in on modern, increasingly silent Soviet submarines. In the mid-1980s, the Submarine Service placed a contract with GEC-Marconi to develop a more advanced and even more reliable torpedo known as Spearfish. Capable of attacking a fast-moving target at a distance of fourteen miles and a slow-moving target at thirty miles, Spearfish was guided by either a copper wire attached to the submarine or by an advanced inbuilt sonar. Spearfish carried a 660 lb explosive charge, which could either strike the hull of an enemy submarine, or explode underneath a surface target, breaking the back of an enemy vessel. Like its predecessors the Spearfish development programme suffered from technical problems, which delayed its in-service date until the early 1990s. It remains in service
with the Royal Navy today.
These upgrades allowed even the Royal Navy’s oldest SSNs to maintain an edge over the Soviet Union right up until the end of the Cold War. In August 1989, the recently refitted HMS Courageous, under the command of P. J. Ellis, conducted Operation ‘Vaughan’, a covert ASW-training war patrol in the Norwegian and south Greenland Seas. Courageous was tasked with trailing a homebound Victor I that appeared to be taking an unusual and unpredictable route back to the Barents Sea from the Mediterranean.184 Courageous detected the Victor at the western edge of the Rockall Bank and established a trail through the Iceland–Faroes Gap. The Victor was manoeuvring vigorously and erratically at variable speeds, making any approach to carry out a simulated firing very difficult. Despite the best and erratic efforts of the Victor, Courageous eventually obtained a good fire control solution and carried out a simulated Tigerfish firing.185
Courageous continued to follow the Victor until late one August evening, when it suddenly conducted a 180-degree turn and shot straight towards Courageous, passing down the port side, at a range of 500 yards. The Victor then used its active sonar, known as ‘Shark Teeth’. Fearing counter-detection, Courageous evaded and opened to the north, and moved away at high speed, making frequent course alterations. The Victor had probably detected Courageous on passive sonar as it was closing in to conduct a simulated attack. Even so, Ellis was confident that he had not been classified. ‘The trail of MO1 [Victor] was at times exhilarating, and at other times frustrating,’ wrote Ellis. The Victor ‘proved to be an atypical transiter and was handled in an interesting, vigorous and aggressive manner with an obvious knowledge of the environment. Periods on transit were not long and the use of different speeds always made it difficult … His random manoeuvres further complicated the issue and the lack of pattern made for a demanding trail.’186
