by James Jinks
Crews also struggled to maintain personal cleanliness. Water was in such short supply that Taciturn’s crew had to do everything possible to conserve it. At best there was a small mug of water for brushing teeth and the men rarely shaved. Many gave up the struggle to stay clean completely, which meant working and sleeping in the same clothes for weeks on end. Supplies of food were also very short:
We bake our own bread which soon goes, tea, milk, sugar and water must be watched carefully and often dinner is very small as its cold though normally supper is a good large meal. It’s not that we are starved so much as the long gaps between good meals (which are really good) and the fact that if one is hungry there is no bread to fill up on as is normal. But before we are through things will be a lot worse. The 1st Lieut informed us this morning that we had used 300 galls of water a day while the distiller had been running but it is stopped now and we must not exceed 250 galls, if we do he will shut all the water off the next day to make up for it and have a waterless day, no washing, tea, etc. At our present rate of consumption we have 19 days ration left and 29 days to go. As for gash [waste such as empty tins etc.], rags and boxes have now to be kept on board in the trenches [stowage space in the fore-ends] until we return. As one can see things are becoming tighter and living harder.
As conditions inside the submarine deteriorated many of the crew would feel rather ‘crabby’. The temperatures decreased substantially and condensation became a real problem. Hurley complained that ‘one is always getting large drops of icy water on us’. Worse, in order to avoid unnecessary noise, the crew was not allowed to blow the toilets (heads) for several hours. This did ‘not help the general smell’. Tempers would grow short and most people were irritable. ‘It’s surprising how easily things happen, probably due to boredom, lack of regular food, cold and headaches, (which most people seem to have) and Rum which is I think the main cause!’ wrote Hurley.
When on station off the Soviet coast in the winter the crews lived in near constant red lighting. The Arctic sun was only up for a few hours each day and got progressively less as Taciturn moved north. The periscope had an inbuilt light loss of around 40 per cent so good night vision was of paramount importance for the safety of the submarine. There was no alcohol for the CO or the periscope watch keepers. As well as being very wearisome to the eyes and the senses, the near constant red lighting tended to make food less appetizing. Italian tinned tomatoes, a regular on the menu, used to disappear.
As the weeks passed Taciturn’s crew fell into a daily routine:
We do a short burst of snorting in the morning about 1100 to clear the air and start snorting proper at about 1800 until the charge is completed around 0100 in the meantime stopping occasionally for an all round listen. During the rest of the time we just snoop around at about 5 knots. The weather outside is now so cold that we have to raise and lower the Snort Mast every so often when snorting to keep the valve clear and also shut and open the flap valve. This keeps the ice clear from the top of the mast. The weather seems to be calm although there is a swell. Sea temperature is 41f.250
During the operation Taciturn was involved in ‘one of those unfortunate submarine incidents which if a little worse could be fatal’:
We suddenly started to have a stern down angle which got quite bad within two minutes. I was in the Motor Room on watch when suddenly Bellis, the Afterends watchkeeper, came running out and rushed past us towards the Control Room. Such was my state I fully expected to see him followed by a column of water! Even as he was passing we had to break the charge as we were at 65ft. Then the Captain took charge, blew fours [four mail ballast] and increased speed to stop us slipping back. And for about 20 minutes he sorted things out. It appears what had happened was that some officer of the watch, believed to be ‘Engines’ as he was on, had opened Z Kingston with the Inboard vent open, consequently we took water into Z tank at an alarming rate so the watchkeeper shut the vent, when he opened it again the air was compressed and came out like an H.P. jet. So owing to the noise he decided against using the phone or Tannoy and went and told them himself what was happening. Once again the Captain was the one who averted anything more serious by his calmness and quickness.
– calmness and quickness: two of the many essential prerequisites for a good submarine Captain. O’Connor successfully averted a possible disaster. A good CO had to know exactly what was going on in his submarine at every moment of every day.
After a week conducting ‘deep field’ listening and watching, Taciturn’s crew had eaten their way through all the bread. ‘It has lasted well and we did not even have to throw any away although it has been green on the outside for a few days now,’ wrote Hurley, and while the Chef had started to bake a new batch, Hurley complained that it was ‘a mistake to wait for the bread to run out before baking as everyone is so hungry when the new bread is baked it will go in no time’. While on patrol the crew celebrated Easter, with a small service for the Catholics on board, eggs for breakfast and chicken for dinner. ‘It’s peculiar but on days of celebration one is more inclined to think of home,’ reflected Hurley.
As the operation entered its most dangerous phase the need for silence was so great that the Taciturn’s crew were told to stay in their bunks unless they were on watch:
All lights and heaters were off and no meals were cooked all day, so we had sandwiches and tin fruit for dinner and ship’s biscuits and ham and soup for supper. We stooged around all day apart from a couple of quick Snorting runs and remained deep, we were going slow on one Motor most of the time and at one point moved 500yds in an hour! The trouble with being deep is that one cannot blow the ‘heads’ so everything has to go in buckets and sugar tins and after a time that becomes unpleasant. The boat of course becomes pretty cold as well with no heating on so it was quite a relief when we were able to get Snorting properly again in the evening and we completed the Charge one side and nearly did so the other. It had not only been Rackets [contacts detected on radar] which prevented us from charging earlier but the fact that the sea was so glassy our masts left a wake for hours.
After almost forty days dived, rumours started to circulate that Taciturn was due to head home. ‘We have not been told whether we will or not,’ wrote Hurley. ‘Some say we are now staying until Saturday, others that things are as originally planned which means today. One thing is obvious to me and that is that we are going somewhere.’ Taciturn continued north in search of the Soviet fleet, but, apart from a trawler and a suspected submarine contact, found nothing. The next few days were spent dived, occasionally snorting, until Taciturn surfaced and returned to HMS Adamant to find a very relieved Captain Submarines standing on the dockside.
These early Cold War patrols were often stressful experiences. ‘Short of actually being in a “shooting” war,’ wrote Basil Watson, ‘these were the most testing conditions imaginable for a CO and for all the team around him.’251 Many found that the requirements of collecting intelligence were not always compatible with good CO-manship as taught on the Perisher, especially when it came to using the periscope. COs had to strike a balance between remaining undetected at all times and the need to bring home the best possible intelligence. Too much caution would lead to an unproductive patrol, but too little could result in an embarrassing international incident such as surfacing in enemy territorial waters or, even worse, sinking.252 ‘I had to consider my evasion tactics if counterdetected,’ wrote another CO who conducted intelligence-gathering operations in ‘T’ class submarines, Lieutenant Commander Alfred Roake. ‘Balanced against the C.O.’s first duty of saving the lives of the Ship’s Company, was the question “how do you defend yourself to avoid becoming another Pueblo?” ’253
As more and more ‘T’ boats conducted intelligence-gathering operations, a new breed of CO – officers who had refined their craft in icy northern waters – began to assume command of their own submarines. By the summer of 1958 John Coote’s former First Lieutenant, John Fieldhouse, now the CO of HMS Tiptoe, was
preparing for his own operation. Tiptoe departed Faslane on 26 September 1958 as heavily laden as it was possible to be with fourteen specialist intelligence staff and eventually returned ‘with results that far exceeded expectations’.254
Cold War patrols also started to have an impact on the ageing ‘T’ class. In March 1956 the Controller of the Navy admitted that ‘these submarines, particularly the T Class, are getting very old and have been run very hard indeed all their lives’.255 When Lieutenant Commander Alfred Roake assumed command of HMS Turpin in 1959, he found a submarine that was described as the Royal Navy’s ‘latest and best’ but was actually sorely lacking. Turpin’s engines were ex-HMS Tradewind and had already completed over 12,000 hours’ service. This resulted in cracks in the main engine frames due to metal fatigue and Roake’s first patrol ended in a humiliating thirty-day, 5200-mile tow back to Gosport from Kingston, Jamaica. He was ‘very conscious of the limitations of the submarine’. Turpin was ‘nowhere near, for example, up to American standards as an operational vehicle; nor indeed as regards either accommodation or comfort’. Although Turpin was ‘a wee bit primitive for the job it was being asked to do’, Roake did admit that ‘we kept our end up’.
In order to prepare for his first intelligence-gathering operation Roake read other submarine patrol reports, picked the brains of other Commanding Officers and underwent a formal briefing at the Old Admiralty Building in London, and at GCHQ. Roake then put Turpin and her crew through their paces on a number of practice runs:
The boat had been fitted with anti-cavitation very quiet screws, and we carried out comprehensive noise trials in an attempt to eliminate every possible source of noise. As part of the Work-Up we needed to calibrate the tubes in Loch Long, for which we went up to Arrochar … We were fitted with sonar and radar intercept equipment; a useful stubby whip aerial on the periscope; and painted out our identification pennant number. We also embarked periscope cameras, both still and cine. These we gave a trial round the Scilly Isles, producing a panoramic set of pictures from as close inshore as possible.256
Turpin set off on patrol on 21 October 1959 and almost immediately Roake discovered that as CO he had to be prepared for anything, even when sleeping:
I had left the intercom speaker switched on, as I invariably did, to pick up what was happening throughout the boat, and keep in touch with the ‘tune’. In the background, I could hear a muttering: ‘I can’t trim this b. … . boat – the f. … . bubble is all over the place!’ Old Patrol reports always used to warn about the problem of ‘leaky blows’ to the Main Ballast Tanks; so I had given strict instructions to leave the Main Vents open, in order that there would be no build up of air pressure in them. I heard the Engineer Officer on watch say ‘let’s try opening main vents’, which in fact had been shut, contrary to my orders. This was followed by ‘Open one main vent!’ I shot into the Control Room, and gave a stream of orders: ‘shut main vents – blow all main ballast – full ahead together – planes hard – arise’. That was the voice of my Guardian Angel. We plummeted down, and pulled out at somewhere past 350 feet, – our supposed ‘safe diving depth’. Meanwhile we caught a ‘main ballast trim’, until we had sorted things out. With thousands of fathoms under the keel, we could have been crushed like an egg shell. Had my instructions been followed, we would never have got into that situation – but we had to learn the hard way.
Turpin was also fitted with a new design of filter for special oxygen generators intended to prolong the amount of time a submarine could remain underwater without snorting and replenishing the atmosphere inside the submarine. This consisted of a cylinder, with a breach at the bottom, into which was inserted a ‘candle’ whose chemical compound produced oxygen when a hotwire element was switched on. But the new filter was faulty. While Turpin was in northern waters an ‘oxygen assisted’ fire erupted:
In the confined space of a submarine, this was a very unpleasant experience indeed, particularly with three potentially hostile destroyers in the vicinity. It necessitated switching off, isolating it, tackling the fire, and clearing the foul smoke – eventually through the snort mast. Any fire in a submarine is nasty, and in this situation it was particularly so; but the same thing was to occur again on our second patrol. Even so, when we got back, we had a job to convince the pundits that it was not our own fault.257
In addition Roake found himself having to deal with an Electrical Artificer who had developed a very high temperature. There was no doctor on board, only a ‘book of words’ that contained medical advice, together with a wallet of ‘spanners’ (a medical kit). Roake was dogged with ‘much heart searching and worry’ as all of the indicators seemed to point to polio. Worse, this occurred just as Turpin was in the thick of the action:
We were in a very vulnerable situation and unable to break radio silence. With no one to ask you have to make your own decision and decide your own priorities – rather as in Nelson’s day. Supposing he had some contagious disease, or died? Do you head for home? Bury him at sea – in ‘peace time’? These are the sorts of questions that go through your mind; although no different from those which face any other C.O. who may find himself in this sort of operational situation.
Fortunately the man recovered.
Summarizing his patrol years later, Roake wrote that:
We photographed those warships and submarines which came our way, all of which are now very dated. There were a number of unidentifiable bangs and bumps: we heard in the distance ‘close encounters of the third kind’ and once thought we heard a torpedo. We took avoiding action by going deep and silent, and combed the possible tracks – just in case. Submarine activity included a snorting Submarine, which passed close enough for me to see his periscope and snort mast. One of the more interesting occasions occurred on a bright sunny morning, flat calm, when we sighted a submarine, which at the time was of some interest, but now long since overtaken by other developments. I photographed this from his beam, approaching on a 90 track and went to dip under him at the last minute. To my horror he pulled the plug and started diving right on top of us. I went very deep and fast to get out of his way – it was an exciting moment.
Roake took Turpin ‘as far north as the ice line’ and ‘proceeded very cautiously’ as he did not want to damage the masts, which ‘were absolutely vital to both our safety and the operation’. This was ‘not much fun’ as it is difficult to spot low ice at night and poor visibility: ‘It has no navigation lights.’
On another occasion, a group of five or six Soviet destroyers managed to get a ‘sniff’ of Turpin:
Already in strict ‘silent routine’, we again went deep, and took every evasive action in the book, but had great difficulty shaking them off. In ‘silent routine’ we couldn’t speed up too much, nor run pumps, as this would have given them a confirmed contact: so we got heavier and heavier, deeper and deeper, with the stern sagging, and the shafts grinding, as the stern down angle put them in very deep water. We finished up at something like 425 feet. When we got back, the Constructor on the Admiral’s Staff told me we would probably have collapsed [the hull collapsed due to pressure] at about 470 feet – but we had successfully shaken off the opposition. Altogether it was a lucky escape: and I know how it feels to be hunted for real. Good training – but not very nice!
Turpin returned safely, to a reception that gave no hint of her true exploits:
We flew no ‘Jolly Roger’ listing our achievements, and had no special welcoming party … we had left and entered harbour like a ‘thief in the night’. I called on the new Flag Officer Submarines, who had been changed during our second patrol, and the Captain (S/M), neither of whom officially knew where we had been, nor what we had achieved – although they must have had a very good idea. I then went to London for de-briefing. We had no feed-back as to how we had done, and a verbal enquiry only elicited a non-committal reply, so I didn’t pursue it. Meanwhile we were all ordered not to breathe a word about our adventures, so I deliberately expunged it from my consc
iousness.
These submarine intelligence-gathering operations remain one of the British State’s most closely guarded secrets. The crews that took part in them knew little of what they were doing, and they were forbidden from ever speaking about their exploits. Despite these restrictions, many came away with a profound sense that they had been involved in an exciting and unique activity. Hurley later wrote that:
no one really can know what life in a boat is like, not even the General Service ratings until they do a trip. Some of it is unbelievable, the condensation which is like rain at times, the fog (literally) when we surface quickly, the varying pressure when snorting on one’s ear drums, the damp and cold and absolute cramped style, (35 bodies in a space smaller than our kitchen at home), lack of water, fresh air, daylight, sleeping in one’s clothes for weeks. No one is a hero because of this and no one really grumbles, but anyone who says submariners have an easy life and don’t deserve the extra pay ought to see for themselves.258