by James Jinks
A Board of Inquiry, one of the most controversial in British naval history, was convened to find answers. It adopted a policy of trying ‘to eliminate unfruitful lines of investigation’ and removing ‘at least … a certain amount of inevitable conjecture’. Possible causes that were considered ranged from a battery explosion, metal failure, human error, hitting a mine and collision with another vessel. All were ruled out and the Board concluded that Affray ‘was lost due to the snapping of her snort mast and that this was due to a failure of the material of which that mast was made’. The crack occurred above the point where the bending movement of the snort was the greatest and where a high number of welds were present. As the break occurred the mast fell over to port, the remaining portion twisting so that only a small piece of metal kept the snort from separating from the submarine as it lay down over the port side of the submarine. The circular tube was welded and its material, though of satisfactory composition, was found to have been grossly overheated and untreated after being welded at a very high temperature. This accounted for its extreme brittleness at normal air and sea temperatures. The Board’s description of what they believed happened on board Affray is vivid:
As a result a 14in hole was suddenly open direct to the sea, flooding the Engine Room. A delay of three seconds in closing the valve could allow enough water to enter to produce a stern-down angle of 16 degrees if not quickly rectified. If she had been snorting through the night, she would have reached her actual position somewhere between 0500–0700. It would have been quite reasonable and in accordance with submarine practice for the majority of officers and ship’s company to be turned in and the submarine to be at watch snorting stations. The Commanding Officer would very likely have turned out at dawn (about 0530) and having satisfied himself that all was well, have turned in again.
In consequence, those inside the submarine started at a disadvantage. That something serious had happened would be evident, but precious seconds would be likely to have been lost in diagnosis … Our evidence shows that unless remedial action was taken within 15 – and possibly 10 – seconds, the situation would start to get out of hand … There would have been little chance of escape or even of releasing the indicator buoys or firing smoke candles due to poisonous fumes, pain in the ears, exhausting effects of pressure and lack of concentration and coherent thinking. There would also have been a short-circuiting of electrical equipment causing loss of power and lighting throughout the submarine at an early stage. There would have been electrical fires and fumes.
The chances of escape at a depth of over 250 ft have to be regarded as virtually negligible. Perhaps the odd exceptional man might reach the surface and survive, only to die from the effects of air embolism (the bends). From 200–250 ft the escape rate is down to 10 percent and at over 250 ft the survival rate using the ‘twill trunk’ method is negligible.
All on board would have died within a very short time. If any personnel had managed to shut themselves into the foremost watertight compartment, they in turn would very rapidly have lost their lives.149
In reaching this conclusion the Board had been strongly influenced by a theory put forward by the Flag Officer Submarines known as ‘FOSM’s hypothesis’, which postulated that the snort mast snapped while the submarine was snorting near the surface, water rushed in before anyone could do anything about it and the submarine sank stern down, striking the bottom at an angle of 65 degrees. However, if this was correct the submarine would have hit the bottom with a large stern-down angle, causing considerable damage to the rudder. According to the evidence there was no damage to the stern and many in the Admiralty, such as the Director of Torpedo, Anti-Submarine and Mine Warfare and the Director of the Operations Division, noted that it was ‘difficult to reconcile the absence of any visual damage to the submarine’s stern with the wholesale acceptance of FOSM’s hypothesis’.150 One of the harshest critics was the Director of Naval Construction, Sir Victor Shepherd, who argued that:
The conclusions of the Board of Enquiry as to the cause of the accident are not concurred in. Inspection of the wreck has revealed nothing amiss except the broken snort mast, which may have broken off after the submarine had come to rest on the bottom – in fact, the position in which the mast was found and examination of the fracture suggests this was so.
To conclude that the loss of the ship was due to the fracture of the snort mast merely because no evidence has been obtained pointing to any other cause, ignores the fact that many possible sources of flooding could never be revealed by external inspection. It is also considered that the evidence against the Board of Enquiry’s conclusions has not been given the weight it deserves.
There is no evidence as to the state of the valves in the snort induction system, but the Board’s conclusion implies that neither of them was closed. To explain this, the Board have accepted FOSM’s hypothesis ‘how it happened’. If the snort mast snapped off as is premised in the hypothesis, it is not disputed that a large angle of stern trim would be taken up and that unless one of the valves was closed within a short time the situation would get out of control. There is, however, no satisfactory explanation why the snort mast should snap in perfect weather and at a speed which produced a maximum tensile strength of only one ton/sq.in. in the tube, even allowing for its material defect. Whether this can be explained or not the hypothesis is considered disproved by the absence of damage to the rudder and by the position and state in which the snort mast was found. If the hypothesis does not fit the facts, it follows that grave doubt must be cast on the premise.151
Shepherd’s own theory was that a battery explosion that ‘might have fractured the battery ventilation outboard trunking and valves, so admitting water to the ship and at the same time starting a fire, could explain the ship having sunk with the snort mast up and with little hope of survival of the crew’.152 In June 1950, HMS Trenchant had suffered extensive damage from a battery explosion, caused by a build-up of gas during the charging process. However, the Board of Inquiry concluded that ‘Batteries in Affray were likely to have been in very good condition and that if the ventilation system was in good order and correctly operated, a battery explosion is very unlikely to have occurred, even with batteries in poor condition. As the evidence suggests that both the batteries and ventilating system were in good order, the likelihood of a battery explosion is discounted.’
The Head of Naval Law came away from the Inquiry with the ‘impression that the Board of Inquiry by adopting the policy of trying “to eliminate unfruitful lines of investigation” and to “remove at least a certain amount of inevitable conjecture” has perhaps closed its eyes to too much.’153 But further diving work on the wreck to try and establish what had happened was abandoned in early November 1951 after Affray began to list, making diving operations increasingly dangerous. During the search the Admiralty identified that, compared with other British submarines, the ‘A’ class, because of their narrow underwater lines, had ‘a tendency, if heavily flooded, to bottom with a large list’.154 Thereafter the Government judged that any attempt to salvage the submarine was dangerous, expensive and not at all certain to be successful. In the absence of any other positive evidence, FOSM’s hypothesis was deemed to be the most likely cause of the accident. A flap valve, known as the ‘Affray valve’ was introduced, designed to slam shut in the event of water flow. Locking pins were also installed to ensure snort masts remained upright. On 14 November 1951, the First Lord of the Admiralty, James Thomas, informed the House of Commons that ‘with the high risk of total failure, there is no justification for this substantial diversion of our resources. There will therefore, be no further operations in connection with Affray.’155
Publicly that was the end of the investigation. However, behind the scenes in the Admiralty, their Lordships were seeking to apportion blame. In December, one of the Admiralty’s naval lawyers stated that ‘there is no doubt that the officer responsible … for sailing Affray in such circumstances is deserving of censure’. That o
fficer was Captain Hugh Browne, the Captain of the 5th Submarine Flotilla. The Admiralty’s lawyer argued that as it was Browne who had issued the orders for Affray, and although a copy was received by Flag Officer Submarines, Rear Admiral Raw, and by the Admiralty, ‘the responsibility for ensuring that the submarine was in a fit state for sea and her crew properly worked up for the operation ordered rests with Captain Browne’. Browne was later informed that ‘Although there is no definite evidence as to the cause of the loss, My Lords consider that you made an error of judgment in sailing Affray with a training crew and folboat party, a team of Royal Marines with special canoes, embarked on a training patrol, before she had been given opportunity for the working up which was clearly desirable after her protracted refit and the many changes in her crew.’156 No further action was taken against Browne. There was no court martial and no public announcement. No one outside of the Admiralty knew that the Captain of the 5th Submarine Flotilla had been censured.
For the families and relatives of Affray’s crew, the search for answers continued throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, fuelled by the lack of an explanation and the failure to raise the submarine. In 2007, the then Armed Forces Minister, Bob Ainsworth, rejected a request on behalf of some of the relatives to reopen the inquiry after a number of allegations were made about a cover-up. That year the Royal Navy’s Naval Historical Branch carried out a study of claims that the true cause of the loss was known and suppressed in order to spare the embarrassment of senior naval officers. It found no evidence of a cover-up. Despite this, calls for a new inquiry resurfaced in January 2012, but the then Armed Forces Minister, Nick Harvey, told the House of Commons that:
Submarines are complex ships, operating in an environment that is extremely dangerous, even in peacetime. Submariners operate at the limits of human ingenuity, and that is to their credit. They are among the bravest men in the Royal Navy, and soon to be the bravest women too. The loss of Affray and the men who served on her was a national tragedy, as well, of course, as a personal tragedy for many. We all understand only too clearly why those who were personally affected want definitive answers, but nothing can bring the fallen back, and after more than 50 years, there seems to me to be no realistic likelihood that we can ever provide the answers that, for understandable reasons, they crave. I cannot see that any new evidence is available to us now that was not available to the original Board of Inquiry. The passage of so much time seems to me to make the prospect of discovering anything new infinitesimal.157
Today, HMS Affray and her crew remain entombed on the seabed on the northern edge of Hurd Deep in a site protected by the 1983 Protection of Military Remains Act. The site is strictly off limits to divers, unless permission has been obtained from the Ministry of Defence.
The loss of Affray was crippling to the officer structure of the Submarine Service and only worsened the manpower problem. Not only did the Navy lose an entire ship’s company, an entire officer’s training class was also on board. After the incident the number of officers volunteering for submarines dropped dramatically. Some reflected on the future of the service. In 1952, Captain Bertram Taylor, from the Staff of Flag Officer Submarines, told a conference on anti-submarine warfare that:
The fact is that every single submarine we possess today is either in operational service or under refit or conversion. What is more, there is no prospect of improvement until new construction comes to sea and the additional manpower is allocated. Unhappily the immediate prospects are somewhat gloomy; we may be obliged to pay off 3 submarines into reserve (at least temporarily) for lack of manpower.158
But the Submarine Service was about to be called upon to undertake another important, dangerous task, one that would take submariners into the icy northern waters of the Barents Sea and to the front line of the Cold War.
THE RISE OF UNDERWATER INTELLIGENCE GATHERING AND RECONNAISSANCE
By the mid-1950s the Royal Navy’s submarines were increasingly involved in gathering intelligence and conducting reconnaissance operations in the ice-free areas of the Barents Sea near Soviet waters. The Russians started to introduce new ships, submarines and aircraft, together with new missile, gun, radar and communication systems.159 The Royal Navy and the US Navy recognized that the submarine was ideally suited to collecting intelligence about these new weapons in the areas in which they were tested, the supposedly secure waters adjacent to the Soviet mainland. ‘A submarine collects the high-quality data derived from monitoring opposition activity – when they think no one else is around!’ explained John Hervey. ‘If you send a surface ship to do the job, a marker is put on it and all the interesting activity it might have witnessed is transferred to another area. If a reconnaissance aircraft is sent, all emissions worth recording will be switched off long before it gets close enough to intercept them. The same thing happens during the passage of an electronic orbiting satellite.’160 The existence of these operations, as the Director of Naval Intelligence, Vice Admiral Sir Norman Denning, told the Joint Intelligence Committee in September 1960, ‘had always been kept a very closely guarded secret’.161
The United States Navy conducted the first post-war intelligence-gathering operations in its own recently modernized submarines. The first operation appears to have taken place in the summer of 1949 when the USS Tusk and USS Cochino sailed to the Arctic Circle to gather intelligence on Soviet nuclear-weapon tests.162 The operation ended in disaster when a battery fire on board Cochino resulted in the loss of the submarine north of Norway and the deaths of a number of crewmen from Tusk. It would be many years before the Americans went back. The first post-war Royal Navy intelligence-gathering operation in northern waters took place in 1952.163 The Submarine Service had spent the immediate post-war years ensuring that its submarines designed for patrols in the tropics operated in the Arctic, particularly the Barents Sea, areas of which relatively few Commanders had any experience. What little information there was came from submariners such as Edward Young, who had operated in the Barents during the Second World War. The conditions were challenging:
In our patrols between Kola inlet and North Cape we encountered no floating ice, but during the brief daylight visibility was hampered by the spray which froze on the periscope and by frequent snow storms which blotted out the land for hours on end. And on the surface in the long hours of darkness we faced the beastliness of spray which turned to ice even before it struck our faces. It froze on the gun, on the periscope standards, in the voice-pipe, and all over the bridge. Icicles hung from the jumping wire from one end of the submarine to the other, and sometimes formed so much top weight that the Captain became concerned about our stability.164
In February 1948, HMS Ambush conducted an operation between Jan Mayen and Bear Island in order to obtain information about how the Royal Navy’s new ‘A’ class submarines operated under Arctic conditions. Three years later, in April 1951, the Admiralty informed the Foreign Office that it intended to send a submarine further into the Barents Sea:
Our war plans involve submarine patrols in the Arctic Ocean and Barents Sea north of latitude 67 degrees N., bounded on the west by longitude 80 degrees East. The success of submarine operations in this zone will depend entirely upon the efficiency and reliability of the communications systems, particularly on the reliability of submerged W/T reception by submarines. We have no experience of the conditions in the area in this respect and we therefore propose that in July–August 1951, one of our submarines should carry out a cruise in the Barents Sea approximately between longitude 30 degrees E and longitude 80 degrees E with the object of obtaining as much information as possible on the efficiency of W/T communications in the area …
We appreciate how important it is that we should do nothing at the present time which might be looked upon by Russia as a provocative act, but we attach considerable importance to this trial of communications, and as our proposal involves only a cruise in the open sea and there is no question of the submarine entering, or going anyw
here within miles of Russian waters, we do not consider that even if the submarine is seen by the Russians they can take much exception to the operation.165
The Foreign Office agreed on the condition that the Admiralty stick ‘religiously to their undertaking that the submarine will not go anywhere within miles of Soviet waters (as the Soviet authorities conceive them, not merely what we think they should be)’.166 As one official explained:
The Soviet Government like their Tsarist predecessors have invariably claimed territorial waters extending for a distance of 12 miles from the coast of the Soviet Union. H. M.G. have, of course, never recognised that territorial waters extend more than 3 miles and have reserved their rights as regards Soviet regulations claiming 12 miles.167
British fishing trawlers regularly strayed inside the twelve-mile limit. Although the Russians generally tolerated these intrusions, in 1950 Soviet authorities detained a Hull-based trawler, the Etruria. However, the Foreign Office was supportive: ‘I don’t think we have anything to fear even if the Russians spot it and make some propaganda insinuations,’ noted one official. ‘After all, their submarines, I believe, do the same kind of exercise in the North Sea and Atlantic.’168 HMS Andrew was ordered north but the patrol was abandoned because the Admiralty was ‘not satisfied with the performance of the submarine’s Snort apparatus’.169