The Silent Deep

by James Jinks

  For instance, the Navigating Officer used simply to point at the coffee stain on the chart and tell the Captain, ‘We’re somewhere about there, sir.’ Not any more: Renown has a miraculous table gyro known as the Ship’s Inertial Navigation System (SINS) which can fix her position on the earth’s surface to within a few yards. Ship’s course, speed, tides, ocean currents, magnetic variations, make no difference to SINS.

  The First Lieutenant used to trim the boat by the seat of his pants and a few simple calculations. Every dive was likely to be something of a venture into the unknown. The First Lieutenant in Renown still works out the trim, but the depth keeping, steering and planing can all be done automatically, untouched by human hand.

  In the old days, the Coxswain was the boat’s medicine man, and dispensed from the PO’s mess his own empirical brand of diagnosis. Above the waist – aspirin. Below the waist – the Number Nine depth charge, an explosive laxative capable of moving the bowels of the earth. Now they have a qualified doctor on board, and a properly equipped sickbay.

  Submarine food always used to have a certain spectacular unpredictability; quality and quantity depended upon the progress of the Chef’s sex life and the accuracy of the Coxswain’s arithmetic. We seemed to subsist on a staple diet of ‘bangers, beans and babies’ heads’ (babies’ heads: an especially glutinous variety of steak and kidney pudding) often with a rib-sticking Cabinet pudding, known as ‘figgy duff’ or ‘zizz pud’ for afters. And there was always the favourite brand of tinned, skinned tomatoes known as ‘train smash.’

  Actually they do still have ‘train smash’ in Renown, but it looked much less macerated than of old, and it was just one item from a very good menu. The food in Renown was excellent, with a choice of main courses and frequent salads, served cafeteria-style in a dining-hall – a vast compartment by old submarine standards. Polaris submarines carry Supply Officers, the first time officers of this branch have gone to sea in submarines – yet another innovation.

  That smell has gone, that characteristically pervasive submarine attar of diesel oil, rubber boots and boiled veg., underlaid with something more sinister, as though there had been a recent human sacrifice somewhere down in the bilges. Compared with that, Renown smells like a rather superior clinic.

  They don’t even wear the same clothes at sea any more. Where are all those exotic ‘steaming rigs,’ striped football shirts, leather jackets, Davy Crockett hats and woolly caps? All gone, apparently forever. They wear uniform now, blue shirts and trousers, with smart gilt lapel badges.

  No more ‘hot bunking’ – where a man climbed into every bunk vacated by his relief. Every man has his own bunk, with ventilation louvre and reading light. Never more the great glad cry of ‘One all round!’; smoking is virtually unrestricted. They’ve never heard of the old ritual of Ditching Gash, when bins of rubbish were hauled up the conning tower and ditched over the side from the bridge. Renown’s garbage is chopped up, packed in special weighted containers and fired overboard through a garbage ejector – a fitting like a miniature torpedo tube.

  No need to do your dhobeying [a sailor’s term for clean laundry] in a bucket. They have a laundry. No more rationing of fresh water on a long patrol. They have hot showers and distilling capacity to spare. Above all, no more jealous hoarding of every amp in the main battery. The reactor has enough power to supply a small town.

  But surely, I thought, looking around me, it can’t all be changed?469

  Winton took comfort in the fact that ‘at first sight’, the ‘blokes’, the crew, appeared to be ‘typical submarine company: typically cheerful, and cynical, and competent – the very best people in the world to serve with’. Although Renown and her sisters were big compared to other Royal Navy submarines, they still had that unmistakably ‘small ship atmosphere’. There were still some tattooed forearms, the apt nicknames and phrases, and the special submarine brand of black humour was still very much intact. On board Resolution ‘friendly rivalry grew between the different branches, and Polaris people earned the nickname “polaroids”, while the stokers were known as the “propulsion gang” ’.470 New types of crewman, technicians, were also introduced in far larger numbers than on any other submarines. There were seven science degrees in the wardroom of HMS Resolution and many of the junior ratings had specialist technical qualifications.471 Winton was forced to conclude that ‘They have changed.’

  Winton observed that Frewer ‘has awesome responsibilities which hardly bear thinking about’. The COs of Polaris submarines were responsible for leading their crews through the long tedium of patrol, while at the same time keeping them on their toes. ‘In this sense, he is like a coach training a team to run a steady successful marathon and yet be ready to sprint a hundred yards in even time at any moment in the race,’ noted Winton. Those first Polaris COs took their responsibilities very seriously. Each came to terms with the destructive power under his command in different ways. For Michael Henry this involved squaring his new responsibilities with his religious beliefs. He composed a ‘Prayer for Polaris’, which he included in the Christian service he conducted while on patrol:

  Lord thou command us saying ‘thou shall not kill’. Thou knowest that we prepare ourselves constantly to kill, not one but thousands, and that by this preparation we believe we help to preserve peace among nations. Do thou, who gave man the knowledge to fashion this terrible weapon, give him also the sense of responsibility to control its use; so that fear for the consequences may indeed maintain peace until that day when love, not fear, shall control all men’s actions. Give us the will, but never the wish, to obey the order to fire. Oh God, if it is thy will, grant that that order may never need be given, Amen.472

  For Tony Whetstone, the first CO to conduct an operational patrol providing the UK with its nuclear deterrent: ‘Having rationalized my views on this, some people would say sensibly, some people might argue incorrectly, but having rationalized them, I can’t say that I lost any sleep while on patrol by thinking about the destructive power of these missiles. I think one had to sort it out well before you sailed for patrol and if you couldn’t sort it out I don’t think you’ve got any right to be there. In the same way you can’t go through your life continually dreading falling under a bus.’473

  This was a view that was shared by many subsequent COs of the Polaris force. ‘I don’t think any of the other COs ever had any hangups about what on earth they would do if we ever got a firing signal,’ said Geoffrey Jaques, HMS Revenge’s First Lieutenant on commissioning and later its CO. ‘It certainly didn’t worry me. One always felt that in the scenario in which you might have to press this button there would be so much chaos and mayhem going on and that everything you’d ever stood and lived for was probably in smithereens anyway that you would probably be more than delighted to hit the button. There’s no delight in letting loose these megatons … what I really mean is that the scenario would have been so full of doom and gloom that I don’t think you would have had a problem if you’d still got a signal to go, to get on with it. Also, I always had the feeling that it was a deterrent and it was going to work and because we’d got it and because it was so horrible we were most unlikely to ever be faced with a problem. The system itself seemed to be so good, and so reliable, it was so confidence building, you did have a system that was going to work and I think it was recognized worldwide that it was a system that was going to work. If you’re going to have an effective deterrent a) its got to be something which is going to deliver something that the other side does not like, b) they’ve got to know that it is going to work, c) they’ve got to know that in extremis you’ll certainly use it.’474

  But not everyone selected to command a Polaris submarine felt this way. Some officers doubted their resolve. Toby Elliott, a former CO of HMS Resolution: ‘I knew several of my colleagues who went through the commanding officers’ course and who were then selected to command Polaris submarines who said they couldn’t do it,’ Elliott explained, ‘it was because they turne
d down the opportunity, or the invitation, to command a Polaris submarine because they had doubts about their ability to carry out the ultimate act … They were very brave to do so. In [some] cases they lost their sea-going appointment and effectively ended their Naval careers.’475

  As for the crews, Winton discovered that they had been asked the question ‘ten thousand times before’:

  A patient, long suffering look comes over a Polaris sailor’s face when it is asked yet again. Actually there is no clear cut answer. Broad generalizations about a Polaris crew’s feelings can be dangerously misleading. ‘Drop-outs’ on moral grounds are very rare, but that does not mean that the great majority are insensitive. There are, of course, some doubters who suppress their misgivings and say ‘anyway, it’ll never happen.’ There are those who are ‘all for it.’ And there are some who clearly have never thought about it at all: to them it is, in a quite literal sense, unthinkable. But most have given the subject a great deal of thought and now console themselves with the absolute certainty that under no conceivable circumstances would Britain ever start a nuclear war. Polaris is therefore a ‘second strike’ weapon, used as morally justified retaliation. With that certainty to support them, the ship’s company are free to get on with the job they are paid to do, to address themselves to its undoubted professional challenges, and to achieve a high degree of personal involvement.476

  ‘Professional’ is the key word. All the Polaris weapons specialists in Resolution agreed to give up their daily ration of alcohol, known as the ‘tot’, because of the immense responsibility that now lay in their hands.477 That responsibility was embodied in the sixteen Polaris missiles, each with a range of over 3000 statute miles, stowed in colossal vertical tubes, 33 feet long and 7 feet in diameter, which reached down through the three decks that comprised the missile compartment in the centre of the submarine like great white columns.

  Launching the missiles was routinely exercised, both while on and off patrol. ‘To keep us on the ball they used to send us a signal which in every respect resembled a firing signal,’ recalled Whetstone. ‘It had to be decoded in exactly the same way and verified in exactly the same way. But instead of an order to fire, it said WSRT, which stands for Weapons System Readiness Tests. On receipt of a WSRT you had to go through all the procedure except that the missile firing circuits were not activated and you didn’t actually fire a missile. And the whole of the actions taking place during a WSRT were recorded by a black box and analysed to check that your response to a firing signal was satisfactory. We used to have about six every patrol, at odd times, you could never predict it.’478

  Practice launch drills only really amounted to the briefest flurry of excitement in a patrol. After only a few days at sea, the submarines’ pulse would then slow right down and the hours would pass in what John Winton described as ‘a suspended state rather like a controlled hibernation’:

  All the normal parameters of submarine existence – speed, depth, course, even time itself – no longer have the same meaning or relevance. The routine eats time and a patrol passes strangely quickly, in a way which the crew almost resent. ‘It’s two months out of your life, cut out just like that. It’s gone. When you get back and meet somebody, you forget it’s weeks since you last saw them. It hasn’t been weeks to you.’ Although time of day means nothing, the watches change, meals are served, the lights are dimmed and raised again, as though obeying some atavistic memory of a solar day. As one wag said ‘We’re like battery hens.’479

  The standard eight-week patrol tended to pass through various stages, as Arthur Escreet, a member of HMS Resolution’s first Starboard crew, explains:

  For the first two weeks the crew settled down, having just left loved ones at home and not at this stage missing them. The second two weeks became a matter of going on watch, coming off watch and perhaps watching one of the 56 movies which we carried on board. The fifth and sixth weeks saw some of the crew becoming a bit bored and petty niggling took place. Midway through the patrol a ‘Sod’s Opera’ was put on. Items of ladies underwear were produced, making one wonder what sort of people you were at sea with. However, it was an enlightening opera and relieved some of the boredom. By the seventh week morale began to improve as we realized that home was not that far away. The eighth week saw the onset of ‘Channel fever’ and thoughts of an evening in female company. And then back alongside the wall and ‘homers’.480

  Although it was common knowledge that Polaris submarines remained dived on patrol for extended periods Her Majesty’s Customs still insisted on boarding and inspecting each submarine as it came back into Faslane because the Ministry of Defence refused to disclose exactly where each submarine had been while it was on patrol.481

  The Navy paid a great deal of attention to the physical and mental well-being of the Polaris crews while on patrol. A few men studied for GCE ‘O’ levels or took courses, but many spent their leisure time reading, sleeping, playing cards or Uckers. For the energetic there were weight-lifting, rowing, cycling machines and even table tennis. Ship’s contests, quizzes, bridge tournaments, darts competitions were all organized and a film was shown every night. Each man was issued with a daily ration of canned beer and a keg of beer was often on tap in their mess. To foster a sense of community spirit a ship’s newspaper was published, in Renown’s case the Hi-Ho Journal, which included news, contributions from ship’s departments and Andy Capp cartoons, supplied before national publication, courtesy of the Daily Mirror. Personality clashes on board were inevitable, but surprisingly rare – the boats were big enough for crew members to get out of each other’s way.

  While the Polaris force was finding its way in those final months of 1969, work on HMS Revenge continued. Although the submarine had been launched on 15 March 1968, work had been repeatedly pushed back due to delays with HMS Renown. But since Renown was launched progress had been ‘particularly unsatisfactory. Low productivity, weakness in shipyard management and emphasis on commercial work’ all continued to ‘impede her [Revenge’s] construction programme’.482 The submarine finally commissioned into the Navy in December 1969, and following intensive sea trials sailed to Cape Kennedy (formerly, and latterly, known as Cape Canaveral) for the final test firing in June 1970. ‘All on board were fully aware that to date the UK Polaris firing programme had been highly successful – one more ballistic flight down the Test Range and we would achieve a 100% record,’ recalled Captain R. W. Garson, at that time a member of the Royal Navy staff in Washington.483 As the countdown began the ‘atmosphere in all compartments was confident and outwardly calm but with an understandable feeling of excitement and tension’. When it reached zero:

  the boat shuddered responding to the initial vertical movement of the missile as it lifted off, exited the launching tube, and almost immediately the first stage motor ignited – the enormous thrust, while the missile was still below the surface, blasting it upwards on its sub orbital path. As it broke surface all onboard the accompanying Destroyer experienced a thrill one had to be present to appreciate. The flight monitoring reports were eagerly awaited and received with no-one in the submarine wanting to break the silence which had followed the launch. Then it finally came, ‘On Track. All OK’, when an enormous cheer echoed throughout the submarine.484

  The task was done. On return to harbour – as was the custom after each SSBN completed its missile firing – a formal dinner had been arranged in the Patrick Air Force Base Officers’ Club: ‘this one was more special than all the others being the end of programme,’ noted Garson.485

  18 June 1970 was also the date of a general election in the UK. As the crew sat down to eat, the election results started to come in. The Polaris programme ended on the same day that the Conservative Party was re-elected to government. Edward Heath’s administration would have to take the difficult decisions about whether or not to improve Polaris that Labour had been very effective at avoiding.486

  5

  Mixing It with the Opposition: The Cold War in th
e 1960s

  ‘Our generation was incredibly lucky. We joined an illegitimate piratical fringe and nuclear power came up behind us. And having come up behind us we were swept along on the bow wave. There’s no other way of putting it.’

  Captain Richard Sharpe, CO, HMS Courageous, 1974–7.1

  To deter war we must make any potential enemy realise that we have the strength to overcome him in the area where he wants to dominate and force his policy on us. To have a fair chance of achieving this we must have, and be seen to have, weapons systems which can easily be got to scene of action and which, when there, are capable of winning. As for winning a war at sea, were it forced on us, the balance of advantage has swung between the anti-submarine forces on the one hand and the submarines on the other. With the advent of nuclear propulsion the balance is tilting in favour of the submarine: only the addition of SSNs to the anti-submarine forces can prevent the battle from becoming one-sided. Ten years from now our most possible opponents are likely to have nuclear submarines. As we cannot just reach up and take this weapon system off the shelf, we must build them ourselves now, and this is accepted policy.

  Admiral Sir John Frewen, Vice Chief of the Naval Staff, 1964.2

  From the middle 1970’s the main striking power of the Navy, apart from the Polaris submarines, will be provided by the growing force of fleet submarines.

  July 1967 Defence White Paper.3

  The threat is REAL and very much more real to those who have mixed it with the opposition than to most of us who tend to regard it as an academic exercise or an opportunity to score off our contemporaries in fleet exercises.

  Commander John (Sandy) Woodward, 1970.4