by Peter Yule
ties of building in Australia as a way of ensuring better long-term
support for the new submarines. About a month after he became
project director he gave Bill Rourke a presentation on the strategy
for the project and he recalls that: ‘As I began to make a strong
argument for an Australian build (largely based on the Oberon
logistic experience) he politely terminated the presentation and
said “demonstrate to me the merits of building in Australia”.’
White agreed this was a wise direction as it disciplined the project
team into ‘doing its research thoroughly and developing cogent
arguments for every aspect of the project before engaging the
approval process’.
While the fundamental requirements for the new submarine –
size, range, propulsion – were being developed by the project
office and debated through the various defence committees, the
specifications for the combat system were undergoing a dif-
ferent gestation process. At the SWSC the talk over beers at
the end of a long day was often about the ideal submarine
combat system. Encouraged by their success with the Oberon
upgrade, staff at the centre scoffed at the mundane technology
on existing submarines and dreamed of designing the world’s best
combat system. While they believed they were only anticipating
technological developments, others thought their vision took on
elements of fantasy that were never fully removed from the formal
requirements.7
Rick Neilson recalls that when he and Andrew Johnson heard
about the new submarine project in about 1980, they immedi-
ately said: ‘Whatever boat we buy, we don’t want the combat
system that it will have in it.’ This prompted them to brief Ian
MacDougall, the commander of the submarine squadron, on their
vision of the combat system for the new submarine. Flushed with
confidence from the success of the Oberon update, they felt they
knew what the next generation combat system should be like.
It would not be purchased ‘off the shelf’ – they knew what was
T H E N E W S U B M A R I N E P R O J E C T
35
available and none matched what they had done with the Oberons,
let alone their vision of the future.
In the early 1980s it was revolutionary to think of the com-
bat system separately – the combat system had been standard
equipment in the Oberons. Andrew Johnson, Rick Neilson and
the team at the SWSC were not interested in the selection of the
submarine hull and thought no submarine builder would provide
them with the combat system they wanted, so they broke the two
things apart. By the time the acquisition strategy was put together
in 1982 it was clear that the platform and the combat system
were two different things – they should be developed and built
separately and then integrated.
The new Oberon combat system worked well but had a wide
variety of displays, consoles and software, and the control room
was crammed with black boxes that could not talk to each other.
It had seven different types of display, seven different processors
and seven different languages. Spares for all the displays and pro-
cessors could not be carried on board and training was extremely
complicated.8
Andrew Johnson was the development leader and conceived
the idea of using common consoles, common processors and a
common language to avoid these problems. Instead of a central
mainframe computer performing all the data analysis, the new
system would use a data bus to distribute information to a num-
ber of computers, each of which would be capable of acquiring
and processing information from any of the submarine’s sensors –
what was known in the computer jargon of the time as distributed
architecture.
The submarine operators at the SWSC and at the project office
quickly seized on this vision. Peter Briggs recalls that they began
giving a series of good lunches at HMAS Watson for the various
combat system makers and told them of their ideas for the new
system. ‘They all shook their heads and said it couldn’t be done.’9
Despite the scepticism of those who would be asked to build it, the
concept of a fully integrated combat system with distributed archi-
tecture became part of the requirements for the new submarine.
The attitude of the submariners, inspired by the Oberon update,
was: ‘We don’t want yesterday’s system. We want tomorrow’s!’
In 1981 Captain Orm Cooper was the director of naval
weapons design, and recalls that one thing that particularly
36
T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y
worried him with the new combat system specifications was Peter
Briggs’ insistence that it be able to assimilate and correlate up to
1000 contacts simultaneously, and reduce them to the six most
threatening contacts. This demanded enormous data processing
power and was a major technical challenge, but Briggs always
postulated sitting off the straits of Malacca where the submarine
had to know what was going on when there were ships and boats
everywhere.
The requirements that emerged from the combined efforts of
the various groups over several years and were issued in February
1983 were for a large submarine with a range of 10 000 nautical
miles; submerged endurance of 10 weeks; an indiscretion rate and
noise signature significantly better than the Oberons; 25–30 per
cent faster; better availability for operations; cheaper, quicker and
less frequent refits; and a modern combat system.
But where were the new submarines to be built? At Vickers’
yards at Barrow alongside the Royal Navy’s mighty nuclear sub-
marines? At another European shipyard? At one of Australia’s
historic naval dockyards, Cockatoo Island or Williamstown? And
how would they be built? By the traditional craft methods of
Vickers at Barrow or Electric Boat at Groton, Connecticut? Or
with the new modular construction techniques being developed
by European submarine builders? And would Australian indus-
try be tossed a few crumbs off the table or did the project offer
genuine potential for industrial regeneration and technological
progress? The surprising answers that were developed to these
questions came from an even more surprising source – a little-
known and now forgotten engineering company, headed by a
German described as ‘the most difficult man you will ever meet’10
and an Australian engineer with expertise in falling bridges and
offshore oil platforms.
C H A P T E R 5
‘We can’t build submarines, go away’:
Eglo Engineering and the submarine
project
The story of the Collins class submarines is full of larger than
life characters, but none more so than the inimitable Hans Ohff –
fiery, dedicated, dogmatic and brilliant, he played a little-known
but critical role in the birth of the project, before returning to cen-
tre stage as the manag
ing director of the Australian Submarine
Corporation in the project’s most controversial phase. Hans Ohff
grew up near Hamburg and came to Australia in 1967 after train-
ing in engineering and economics. During his engineering training
he did a full apprenticeship in marine engineering and when he
signed up to come to Australia ‘for the adventure’ on a £10 fare
he was accepted on the basis of his tradesman’s certificate rather
than his university qualifications, which were not recognised in
Australia.1
Ohff got a job with Eglo Engineering Services counting nuts
and bolts in their workshop in Sydney. Eglo had been founded in
about 1952 by Eric Glowatsky and became a public company in
1966, when it had about 300 employees.
Hans Ohff moved to Melbourne to become Eglo’s chief esti-
mator and procurement manager, working on the Shell refinery
at Corio and building oil and gas platforms for Bass Strait. Eglo
37
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T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y
received an enormous boost when it won the contract to do the
mechanical installation for the world’s largest copper mine on
Bougainville. The job was bigger than the company several times
over, but it was completed successfully and the profits from that
one job were greater than the shareholder equity in the firm.
Hans Ohff became engineering manager of Eglo in 1972 at
the age of 31, with overall technical responsibility for the group.
Two years later the company’s major competitor ‘fell down with
the lower Yarra Bridge’, leaving Eglo as the leading mechani-
cal engineering contractor in Australia. In 1979 turnover was
$46 million and the annual report noted that: ‘The principal
activities of the Group centre around the engineering and fabrica-
tion of production platforms for companies engaged in offshore
oil and gas production and onshore petroleum production, the
petrochemical industry, materials handling pipelines, the mining
industry, near shore marine structures such as jetties and loading
terminals as well as extensive workshop fabrication of such items
as cranes, marine barges, drilling platforms, pressure vessels, steel
tanks, heat exchangers and condensers.’2 During the late 1970s
and early 1980s the company built all the Bass Strait platforms for
Esso-BHP and many other projects in the minerals and petroleum
sector. Its achievements were capped in 1982 when Eglo was voted
the ‘most successful public company in Australia’.
Eglo was one of the first major Australian companies that
sought to circumvent the rigidities of the Australian industrial
relations system. Union demarcation disputes caused continuing
problems during oil platform construction and Ohff decided there
should be no more than 300 workers on any one job to restrict
union problems. Consequently, Eglo established a new yard at
Osborne near Port Adelaide to build a variety of marine structures
including ships. Supported by the South Australian government,
Eglo sought to limit the number of unions at the new yard and
worked with the unions to introduce more flexible working meth-
ods. At an Arbitration Commission hearing, evidence was given
that the
South Australian Government had a deliberate policy to
prove that ship building can be done along modern
engineering lines with modern engineering techniques, and at
the Osborne site the State Government was trying to show
W E C A N ’ T B U I L D S U B M A R I N E S , G O A W A Y
39
that it could be done. Instead of building a ship on
conventional lines in a shipyard, the work at the Osborne site
was showing that you can take a heavy engineering
establishment and build a ship.3
The site was later to expand into that which built the Collins class
submarines. It was an Australian pioneer of novel shipbuilding
techniques and more flexible working arrangements.
As the 1970s resources boom faded in the early 1980s Hans
Ohff realised that future work for Eglo Engineering lay beyond
the resources sector. It was then the British Vickers company
approached Eglo to assist with the feasibility study for the
next Australian submarine. Hans Ohff, always fascinated by
submarines, quickly became enthusiastic about Eglo becoming
involved in building them. However, he concluded that Vickers did
not want to build in Australia but at most to assemble imported
submarine ‘kits’ at Cockatoo Island or send some Australian com-
ponents to Britain.
But Hans Ohff was convinced that submarines could be built in
Australia. Often angered by Australian insecurity and reluctance
to take on big projects, Ohff was sure all the capabilities were
present and proof was all that was needed. As he says, ‘I was
innocent enough to believe that we would be capable of doing
it, but once you’re in it you curse yourself for being so stupid
in taking it on’. He saw the submarine project as providing a
massive contract for his company but, beyond this, as revitalising
Australia’s manufacturing industry.
Eglo was an Australian listed stock and had majority Aus-
tralian ownership but was partly owned by a German company,
and with Hans Ohff as its public face it was widely regarded as
German. Ohff felt it needed an Australian image, so he recruited
Dr John White from Woodside Petroleum. White had ‘a good
engineering brain and very clear thought processes’ and Ohff
approached him to run a campaign to build the new submarines
in Australia, with Eglo as the prime contractor.
John White had trained in civil engineering at the University
of Adelaide before working at the federal Department of Works,
where he was a structural engineer on projects like the Black
Mountain telecommunications tower and the Casuarina Hospital
in Darwin. He was involved in the investigation into the collapse
40
T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y
of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne, and then began studying
the engineering of deep water off-shore platforms. There had been
some structural failures in the North Sea rigs due to buckling of
steel plates under large loads. Observing that the legs of offshore
platforms were not dissimilar to submarine hulls, he went to the
Naval Construction Research Establishment at Dunfermline to
study the construction of submarines.
White returned to work for Woodside Petroleum after finish-
ing a PhD at Cambridge in 1977. He supervised the design and
construction of the North Rankin A platform and then built a
flare tower for Eglo Engineering at its new yard at Osborne on
the Port River. By the early 1980s White felt that the Woodside
project was finishing its exciting phase and he was receptive to
Hans Ohff’s invitation to come to Eglo at a time when the end of
the resources boom had left engineering in recession.
John White and Hans Ohff began to lobby for the subma
rines
to be built in Australia, talking with federal and state governments,
industry, unions, the navy – to anyone who would listen and to
many who would not. They argued that Australia had built off-
shore platforms such as the flare tower for Woodside, with large
diameter legs able to withstand sea pressure at 125 metres. It could
build submarine hulls with the same skills and technology, which
would create many jobs and lead to the acquisition of important
new technologies.
Eglo realised that its vision could be achieved only in partner-
ship with a British or European submarine designer. In the early
1980s there were only seven companies in the world with the
skills to design and supervise the construction of submarines
in Australia.4 Ohff was sceptical of Vickers’ commitment to
Australia, and its ties to Cockatoo Island would see little work
for Eglo. He feared naval traditions would favour Vickers so he
and John White went to Europe to manufacture a competition in
partnership with the submarine builder most likely to help them
beat the British.
They looked at all the contenders: Vickers in Britain, Kockums
in Sweden, HDW and Thyssen in Germany, the Rotterdam Dock-
yard in Holland and Chantiers Dubigeon in France. HDW gave
them little recognition; there was more interest from Thyssen, yet
they felt that HDW probably had the best submarines. It also had
experience of technology transfer through its Turkish and Indian
W E C A N ’ T B U I L D S U B M A R I N E S , G O A W A Y
41
projects. Ohff and White were intrigued by the Swedes. They had
known little about them before the visit, but were impressed by
their good English, engineering skills, technical innovation, hon-
esty and general likeability. The Dutch had the only submarine
that approached compliance with the Australian requirements,
but it was hard to build and expensive. Ohff and White felt Vickers
treated them with complete disdain, despite their archaic facilities
and union-dominated yards.
Ohff and White decided that pro-British sentiment in Australia
and a lingering anti-German feeling would prevent the Germans
beating Vickers in a head-to-head contest, so they decided that
Eglo should try to create a viable, if unlikely, third competitor.
Consequently, they continued talking with the Swedes, and pro-
