by Peter Yule
update program’ was the overture to the Collins symphony.
C H A P T E R 3
The submarine weapons update
program and the origins of the
new submarine project
The British Oberon submarine HMS Osiris had an affinity with
the town of Ilkley in Yorkshire, which had raised the money for
an earlier submarine, also called Osiris, in the Second World War.
In the 1980s the patron of the Ilkley naval cadets was a highly
regarded pianist. For one cadet fundraiser the submarine went
to Hull and a piano was placed on it so the pianist could give
a concert as they sailed down the river. However, the tides are
fierce in the Humber River and following several delays the trip
started with an ebb tide of 7–8 knots. The tug line parted and
the submarine sailed sideways for a mile and a quarter down the
Humber. It was pouring rain but the pianist kept playing, and the
submarine’s skipper thinks he was quite unaware of the drama
or the rain. After recovering the submarine’s heading they com-
pleted the transit of the Humber with no damage other than a
little embarrassment.
The commanding officer was Mike Gallagher, later to be
the commanding officer of HMAS Farncomb, the second of the
Collins class submarines. Gallagher, like many Australian sub-
mariners before him, had successfully completed the stressful and
demanding Royal Navy course for submarine commanders known
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21
as ‘Perisher’ and, again like a select few Australians, he was given
command of a British conventional submarine.
In earlier years ties between the Australian and British navies
had been even closer. Rod Fayle joined the navy as a 16 year old
in 1959, trained at the Naval College at Jervis Bay and spent time
on HMAS Vampire and Melbourne, before going to the Naval
College Britannia in England in 1963. While he was there the
Australian government decided to buy the first four Oberons and
there was a call for volunteers for the submarines. Fayle signed up
and stayed in Britain to get experience on Royal Navy submarines
while the Oberons were being built.
He did the standard British training program, going to the
submarine school at Gosport before posting to various British
submarines. His opinion was that ‘the Brits were always working
with inferior equipment so they had to be good at teaching’, and,
like all Australians, he found their training to be magnificent. It
suited the Royal Navy to have Australians and Canadians to crew
their conventional submarines while British crews were trained
for the new nuclear submarines, and sometimes more than half
the crews would be colonials. Fayle did all the submarine officers’
jobs up to first lieutenant within two years, which was far quicker
than it would have been in Australia because the British officers
were all going on nuclear courses.
In 1967 Fayle came back as navigator on the first Australian
Oberon, HMAS Oxley, and for the next three years served at the
submarine base and at sea, before going to the United Kingdom to
do his Perisher course. He returned to command Onslow and had
two more commands before becoming one of the leading actors
in the early years of the Collins drama.
Primarily because the Royal Navy now has only nuclear sub-
marines, the close ties between the British and Australian subma-
rine forces have since diminished. However, back in 1970, when
the links between the navies were still strong, Geoff Rose – later
to be the third project director of the Collins project – was serv-
ing as engineer on the Porpoise class submarine HMS Walrus.
They took the boat to Germany for Kiel Week, and at one of the
social events he met an elderly German, who introduced himself
as Ulrich Gabler. Herr Gabler was interested in having a look
over the Walrus, so Rose invited him on board. As they went
over the boat, Geoff was startled when the German showed an
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intimate knowledge of the submarine, saying things like, ‘As we
go through this hatch, the ballast pump will be there’. Rose asked
if he had been on one of the British submarines before. ‘Oh, no,’
Herr Gabler exclaimed, ‘I designed submarines in the war and this
is very much like one of my designs.’
The British Porpoise and Oberon class submarines were devel-
oped from the visionary type XXI U-boat, which the Allies found
almost impossible to counter in the early months of 1945, and
when the Australian navy bought Oberons in the 1960s they
came with much equipment that was little advanced on that
of the Second World War. There was no thought of buying a
separate ‘combat system’ – the navy simply purchased Oberon
class submarines, with the sonars and torpedoes that came with
them.1 The Australian Oberons therefore arrived with what Ian
MacDougall, one of the original Oberon officers, described as
‘a Second World War era analogue system, with some curiosities’.
It was a very manual system and had ‘weird old gadgets of cogs and
wheels’ so that ‘you were winding handles to get dials to match’
when planning firing. The sonar was aural rather than visual,
and skill as a sonar operator depended on having good pitch.
Admiral Sandy Woodward, the British commander during the
Falklands war, who took Ian MacDougall’s submarine comman-
ders training course, had developed a system of submarine attacks
based on stopwatches and tuning forks. Greaseproof paper, chi-
nagraph pencils and perspex boards were other essential pieces of
equipment.2
After the introduction of the Oberon class, the focus of the
British navy turned to developing a nuclear submarine force and
there was neither money nor expertise for improving its conven-
tional submarines. Although the Royal Navy remained the design
authority, any upgrading of Australia’s submarines would have to
be run by the Australian navy.
There was never a formal project to give Australia’s Oberons
a new combat system. Although Navy Minister John Gorton had
seen the submarines as playing a vital operational role, the navy
hierarchy believed they were ‘clockwork mice’ for training the sur-
face fleet and aircraft in anti-submarine warfare and saw no need
to upgrade them. However, the young submarine officers, with the
encouragement of ex-Royal Navy submarine commanding officers
such as David Lorimer, Gordon Dalrymple and Barry Nobes, soon
T H E S U B M A R I N E W E A P O N S U P D A T E P R O G R A M
23
demonstrated that submarines could do far more than the navy
had expected. It became impossible to ignore their success against
surface ships in exercises, which forced ships to change their tactics
and not take on a submarine. They also excelled at ‘surveillance’ –
the navy’s euph
emism for operations that might otherwise be
called spying. While the details of the Oberons’ Cold War surveil-
lance missions are still shrouded in secrecy, those involved recall
them with great excitement and believe they showed the value of
submarines to the wider defence community and to politicians.
A mission to the Soviet naval base at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam
showed conclusively that ‘it was more than mice we had bought’ –
an image of a Kirov class battlecruiser’s propeller was taken from
so close that it filled the video screen.3
The improvements to the Oberons’ combat system were carried
out as a series of small projects over a decade from 1972. The first
step was the purchase of a new range-finding passive sonar system
called Micropuffs from the American company Sperry Gyroscope.
Micropuffs triangulated inputs from three sonar arrays along the
side of the submarine, giving target bearing and range instantly.
Previously it had taken seven people up to 30 minutes to work
out the same calculation. This project was initiated by Bill Owen
as director of submarine policy from 1971 to 1975.
Next was the installation of an integrated digital computer
and fire control system from another American company, Singer
Librascope, needed to fire the new American wire-guided Mark
48 torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship homing missiles. The final
project was the installation of a new attack sonar from the German
company Krupp Atlas. Peter Briggs, who commanded two of the
Oberons, recalls that: ‘The old sonar trundled around on wheels
and . . . in practice it could only manage one target at a time. The
new sonar was another revolution – it was digital and could track
six targets simultaneously giving instant information and great
detail.’4
Most of the new equipment was installed on the submarines
during their regular refits at Cockatoo Island, requiring ‘wide-
ranging modifications to the submarines’ systems and structures’.5
These included reconstruction of the control room, radio office
and radar office, considerable alteration to ventilation systems (the
new system required air cooling to overcome the heat produced
by the electronic systems), inserts in the pressure hull for the new
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sonars, and new bow structures to accommodate the larger bow
sonars. In addition all the cables for the old sonars and fire control
system had to be removed and replaced.
At the same time as the submarines were being modernised,
the Australian submarine force was developing its first subma-
rine tactical training courses at HMAS Watson at South Head in
Sydney. A simulator was built with a periscope, real sonar sets
and a room full of computers to provide realistic situations for
training and the ability to test components before putting them
on the submarines.
While it was relatively simple to buy the ‘black boxes’ for these
new weapons and systems, it was a harder task to integrate them
so they worked smoothly and effectively. Much of the work was
done at HMAS Watson, where Terry Roach and Chris Dale devel-
oped the embryonic training establishment into the Submarine
Warfare Systems Centre (SWSC). The three directors during the
Oberons’ update program were Terry Roach, Rod Fayle and Peter
Briggs, while Peter Mitchell as director of naval weapons design
had general oversight of the centre. Briggs recalls that ‘the centre
was needed because we had bought all these boxes and we didn’t
know how to fit them all together’. The new centre rapidly built
up a staff of enthusiastic and capable digital engineers and com-
puter programmers, most of them being ‘mad rough diamonds’.
Computerisation of defence systems was new and there was a real
sense of pioneering among the small group involved, almost all of
whom went on to prominent roles in the new submarine project.
The software team was led by Andrew Johnson, who was ‘far and
away the best programmer in defence and had good engineering
understanding – he knew how to make the software work with
the hardware’.6
Among his team were Mick Millington and John Pascall, who
had both started their careers as apprentices at Garden Island.
Rick Neilson, an instrument fitter in the air force working on
flight simulators until 1975, went to Watson’s Bay as a civilian
because of this expertise. John Pascall recalls that the software
engineers were continually pushed to extend their capabilities by
‘eager beaver’ submariners like Roach and Briggs. Peter Briggs
sees the key to the centre’s success as being ‘the combination of
engineers, programmers and submariners in an environment that
challenged and drew the best from each’.
T H E S U B M A R I N E W E A P O N S U P D A T E P R O G R A M
25
Integrating the Harpoon missiles was an example of the
SWSC’s abilities. The Americans controlled the missiles through a
separate ‘black box’ but Australian submariners wanted to control
the missiles through the submarine’s modernised combat system.
The centre, and defence scientists from the navy’s research labo-
ratories, wrote software to integrate firing of both torpedoes and
missiles. Unlike American submarines, the Australian Oberons
were able to fire up to six Harpoon missiles in a salvo and have
them arrive simultaneously at the target via different tracks.
There was a close relationship between the submarine opera-
tors and the civilian ‘boffins’ at the centre. Mick Millington recalls
that the civilian engineers and programmers were strongly encour-
aged to spend time at sea alongside sailors to learn the real issues of
operating sonars and the fire control system. Some were integrated
into command teams for 60-day patrols in the centre’s simulator,
which was a great way to learn the issues facing the operators.
Engineers understood how things were meant to work, but being
with the operators showed how they really worked and the pres-
sures involved. Bob Clark, who joined the centre as a civilian in
1981 not long after graduation, recollects that civilians spent a lot
of time at sea; he was on Ovens in Hawaii for the first test firing
of a Harpoon missile from an Oberon.7
Andrew Johnson found the navy unsupportive of the update
program and said that those at the centre ‘felt like the early Chris-
tians – continually subject to persecution’. This was not necessarily
a problem as they also reacted like the early Christians, being a
small, persecuted group totally dedicated to the project.
All recall the excitement and enthusiasm they felt working on
the Oberons’ new combat system. The task was demanding and at
the outer edge of current technology – and it was a resounding suc-
cess. The weapons update program made the Oberons probably
the most capable conventional submarines in the world and it gave
the people
who had worked on it enormous confidence in their
ability to tackle complex projects successfully. It was inevitable
that when attention turned from improving the Oberons to plan-
ning for their successors, the SWSC would play a central role.8
As the Oberon update program progressed through the late
1970s, the navy had a crisis in its fleet planning. A program
to build new destroyers had been cancelled in 1973. Admi-
ral Bill Rourke, who worked on that project, recalled that the
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specifications were changed constantly and the proposed ships
grew to the point that it was feared they would capsize. This
‘design creep’ reflected changing and unclear operational require-
ments and poor project management, but cancellation created
uncertainty for the surface fleet. The navy’s only aircraft carrier,
HMAS Melbourne, was nearing the end of its useful life. While
most of the navy desperately wanted a new carrier, there was fierce
debate with politicians and bureaucrats as to whether the enor-
mous cost was justified. At the same time there was a need to con-
sider replacements for the Oberons. There were thus three major
projects that the navy had on its wish list, but in the dire economic
circumstances of the late 1970s and early 1980s there was little
chance of persuading the politicians to fund more than one.
Within the navy there was no doubt that replacing the Oberons
ranked a distant third behind the aircraft carrier and new destroy-
ers. However, the Oberon upgrade had shown that submariners
could use stealth in defence politics as well as in their underwa-
ter operations, and work towards a new submarine project began
quietly and with few aware that it was happening.
In July 1978 the director of submarine policy, Barry Nobes
(one of the original Royal Navy commanders of the Australian
Oberons, who had joined the Australian navy), prepared a brief
on the need to plan for the replacement of the Oberons.9 Nobes
argued that submarines were unique in their deterrent effect and
surveillance capability and that they needed to be able to oper-
ate over long distances. He suggested there was a need for a core
force of eight submarines as the six Oberons were not meeting all
peacetime tasks efficiently. He assumed the replacements would
