by James Jinks
As soon as the incident occurred, the Subsunk procedure went into operation and diving teams and salvage vessels quickly arrived. A rescue operation began, with a salvage tug putting a line under the submarine’s stern, while another was placed under the bow. After working through the night, communication was eventually established with the three men stranded in the forward torpedo compartment, who reported that the air inside was starting to foul. After ten hours, the most senior of the trapped men, Coxswain David Guest, was ordered via radio to flood the hatch and escape. At first light, the ten-hour ordeal ended as all three men bobbed to the surface, one after the other, in front of hundreds of officers and men on the quayside. ‘There was a slight leak and the next compartment was flooded,’ recalled one of the trapped men, Tom Becket. ‘It was coming up through a hole and the air got very, very thick. We had trouble breathing.’56
The Board of Inquiry concluded that the fault lay entirely with the submarine’s personnel, who ‘were unaware of the circumstances prevailing in their submarine at the time, and of the dangers towards which they were heading’.57 From the moment Artemis arrived alongside at Gosport, a number of apparently disconnected events began to build up to disaster. They had one common thread: bad submarine practice. Poor communication, the incorrect issue of and failure to carry out orders all contributed to the accident. The CO, Lieutenant Commander Roger Godfrey, who was not on board at the time of the sinking, was charged with negligence in failing to take personal charge of his submarine or to ensure that she was entrusted in his absence to an officer competent to take charge. In his absence, and the absence of the submarine’s First Lieutenant, who was on leave, Godfrey arranged for Lieutenant John Crawford to take charge of the undocking. Crawford had little experience of conventional submarines, having served in an SSBN for two years before joining Artemis. Other officers’ submarine experience varied between two years for the Engineer Officer, to four months for the sixth hand. The senior ratings all had at least five years’ conventional submarine experience.
One of the most striking features of the resulting court martial was the inability of both senior and junior officers giving evidence to answer questions on subjects such as the differences in weight between fuel and water in fuel tanks and tons per inch of immersion, the height of hatches above the waterline and the angle of inclination and draught of submarines on the surface and at different stages of flooding and fuelling. Lieutenant Commander Michael Everett, defending Crawford at the court martial, said that the accused had insufficient training and experience as a duty officer and that his ‘actions were a clear indication of his lack of training or awareness of the situation. His brain was not programmed to recognise the danger signals.’ Everett argued that since the war the Submarine Service had forgotten many valuable lessons. ‘The sense of urgent self-preservation kept alive by the constant contact with the enemy is falling off,’ he said. ‘Officers with wartime service are now senior officers no longer at sea. Nuclear submarines, too, meant that many experienced senior ratings have left conventional patrol submarines.’58 Although the CO, Godfrey, was cleared of failing in his duty, Crawford was severely reprimanded for negligence. The Board of Inquiry, in reviewing the standards and practices of the Submarine Service, made over sixty-five recommendations and highlighted a number of areas that it was concerned about and which it strongly suggested needed further study, including a lack of emphasis during training on basic submarine practices.
The Board also suggested that the impact of the nuclear-submarine programme on the conventional Submarine Service needed further investigation. In its view, the SSN and SSBN programme had contributed to the accident and had had a direct effect upon standards in conventional submarines. Although Roxburgh adhered to the principle that ‘there should be no question of a “second eleven” and people should move freely between Polaris [SSBNs], Fleet [SSNs] and Patrol submarines [SSKs]’, he recognized that:
because of the more demanding task in the nuclears it has been inevitable, particularly in the technical field, for the brighter officers to be selected for nuclear training and the lesser brethren have tended to gravitate to the Patrols. Over the years the level of competence in Patrols has thus reduced and this has led to the development of bad practices and disregard for safety rules.59
‘The only answer’, wrote Roxburgh, ‘is for Captains SM and their COs to insist on the maintenance of proper standards and basic submarine practices. I have been at pains to ram home to Captains SM their prime responsibilities in this respect.’60
There were other problems with the Submarine Service in the early 1970s; one of the biggest concerned operational command and control. While the SSBNs were controlled centrally from Commander Task Force 345 based in Northwood, the Royal Navy’s SSNs and SSKs were under control of the remaining individual submarine squadrons, who would surrender control to other authorities such as Flag Officer Scotland and Northern Ireland or Flag Officer Portland during exercises. There was no centralized command and control. Communications and intelligence remained independent, and little consideration was given to clearly defining areas in which submarines could safely operate, a system known as water space management. In February 1972, confusion between operational authorities and a serious lapse of liaison over interaction between submarines and their operating areas caused an incident which was later labelled the ‘great submarine chase’. HMS Conqueror was exercising its active sonar in the Clyde outer areas when it gained contact with an unknown submarine. After hearing Conqueror’s active sonar, which at high power was easily identifiable, the submarine contact took off at high speed. Conqueror’s crew, believing they had detected a Soviet SSN, gave chase. In fact, they had detected a friendly NATO submarine that did not want to identify itself. For several hours, as Conqueror chased the contact, shore staffs failed to realize what was happening and the charade continued with commendable enthusiasm.61
A VICTOR PENETRATES THE CLYDE
Eleven months later, in January 1973, a Soviet submarine was detected in the sensitive Clyde approach areas, where it appeared to be waiting for Royal Navy and US Navy SSBNs to sail from Faslane and Holy Loch.62 For six days, the Soviet submarine, which was eventually classified as a ‘Victor’ class SSN, remained sixty miles northwest of Donegal and fifty miles off Colonsay, where it was kept under twenty-four-hour surveillance by RAF Nimrods operating out of RAF Kinloss.63 At 0400 on 27 January 1973, Commander Chris Ward, the CO of HMS Conqueror, which was based in Faslane and acting as what was known as the ‘Ready Duty SSN’ – at short notice to deploy – received the following orders:
IMMEDIATE
270400Z
JAN 73
FROM …
TO: HM SUBMARINE CONQUEROR
INFO: FLAG OFFICER SUBMARINES
COMMODORE CLYDE
CAPTAIN SM3
FROM FIRST SEA LORD
A SOVIET NUCLEAR POWERED SUBMARINE HAS BEEN DETECTED IN THE NORTH WEST APPROACHES. YOU ARE TO SAIL FORTHWITH AND SWEEP THE RUSSIAN FROM OUR WATERS.64
Eight hours after receiving the signal Conqueror sailed from Faslane to find the Soviet intruder, which was still approaching UK territorial waters. ‘It was an unusual situation,’ recalled Ward.65 ‘Normally we would be pursuing the opposition as it were in his general area. But this Soviet submarine was quite plainly determined to act as bait. What were they trying to prove?’ Roger Lane-Nott, a young Navigator on board Conqueror, was ‘horrified that a Soviet submarine should consider let alone be able to enter the Clyde Inner Areas, which were absolutely our backyard’. ‘How dare he come in here,’ he said, remembering the operation. ‘We had to get rid of him. And yet I took it as perfectly normal that we could and would operate in international waters in the Barents Sea, in the Soviets’ backyard. It was just we were not used to this type of aggression in our home waters. Nor was it expected, even though we knew that the Soviets wanted to keep track of our SSBNs.’66
It was left to Ward to determine exactly how to ‘sweep’
the Victor from a busy shipping environment, where noise from merchant vessels significantly reduced the chances of detections on passive sonar. ‘My task as I knew it was to get this bloody submarine away from the Firth of Clyde and rattle my brain as to how to bloody do it,’ he explained.67 ‘What could I do to seduce this bastard? Talk to him on the underwater telephone with the few words of Russian that I still remembered?’68 Ward concluded that the best means of luring the Russian away from UK waters was to disguise Conqueror by adopting the silhouette and lights of a Polaris SSBN and move out in the Atlantic, with the Soviet submarine trailing behind.
At first the Victor refused to participate in Ward’s plan. ‘It proved incredibly difficult to get him to get into contact with us,’ he said.69 Conqueror’s crew resorted to making the submarine as noisy as possible to increase the chances of the Victor being able to detect it. ‘It was ridiculous. We were at action stations for hours trying to move the submarine into a position where he was bound to pick us up. But he didn’t.’70 After consulting with Conqueror’s officers, Ward decided to use Conqueror’s Type 2001 active sonar. ‘We were all quite nervous about that,’ recalled Lane-Nott.71 Active sonar would almost certainly alert the Victor to Conqueror’s presence – Type 2001 active sonar transmissions were unmistakable – but they would also give away Conqueror’s exact position, which the Victor could then exploit to acquire a fire control solution and potentially carry out an attack. ‘What I wanted to do was try and make it like we were really going out on patrol. That we had been doing trials on our sonar, hence all the active stuff,’ said Ward.72
Ward took Conqueror to 235 feet and ordered the use of the Type 2001 Active Sonar, the noise of the transmissions reverberating throughout the submarine. ‘After the first transmission we got him at 5000 yards, then 3000 yards, then 500 yards. I can remember it now,’ said Lane-Nott.73 With the Soviet submarine now aware of Conqueror’s presence Ward increased speed and set course to the southwest, out into deep water. ‘I felt that if we got about a half day’s steaming away with him stuck behind me then that would be absolutely fine. That would leave enough clear water for our submarines without any interference from him.’74 It worked. The Victor followed Conqueror as it moved south at full speed on 100 per cent reactor power. Once clear of the Clyde areas and into deep water, Ward took his submarine deep and then stopped, ‘like a log in the water’, and switched off all non-essential machinery and equipment, attempting to stay as quiet as possible. Tension in Conqueror’s Control Room then reached fever pitch as the Sound Room provided update after update of the Victor’s possible position, counting down the range of the Soviet submarine as it moved closer and closer to Conqueror. ‘Eventually we got this incredible noise of the submarine going over the top of us,’ said Ward. The Victor passed right over Conqueror. ‘The boat rocked slightly,’ remembered Lane-Nott, ‘it was a strange situation because we all felt it, but we could not define what it was we had felt.’75
Conqueror continued to quietly track the Victor as it moved away, before handing over responsibility to an RAF Maritime Patrol Aircraft. Ward then signalled the Admiralty:
IMMEDIATE
311605Z
JAN 73
FROM: HM SUBMARINE CONQUEROR
TO: …
INFO: FLAG OFFICER SUBMARINES
COMMODORE CLYDE
CAPTAIN SM3
FIRST SEA LORD’S 270400Z JAN 73
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. SOVIET SUBMARINE HAS BEEN LURED INTO THE ATLANTIC AND DISENGAGED. OUR WATERS ARE SANITIZED. AM PROCEEDING IN ACCORDANCE WITH PREVIOUS ORDERS.76
The incident marked the first known penetration of the Clyde area by a Soviet submarine, and a number of procedures were later developed to deal with any future intruders.77
Both events involving HMS Conqueror highlighted the inadequate state of SSN/SSK submarine command and control and the potential for mutual interference with SSBN operations. In 1972, the wartime submariner Admiral Anthony Troup was appointed Flag Officer Submarines. Troup, who at the age of twenty-one had been awarded command of the training submarine H32, was a distinguished submariner who recognized that a more professional, competent operational command and control organization was required. By the early 1970s the waters in the North Atlantic were becoming increasingly crowded as more and more submarines from many nations began to put to sea. Soviet SSKs and SSNs would transit through the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic to the Mediterranean and elsewhere while Soviet ‘Yankee’ class SSBNs continued to transit from their Northern Fleet bases to patrol areas off the United States’ eastern seaboard. US Navy, French and Royal Navy SSKs, SSNs and SSBNs also deployed from their European bases to patrol areas in the North Atlantic. Surveillance operations continued as well, in the Barents Sea, the Mediterranean and the Baltic, and SSKs and SSNs acting on intelligence were increasingly diverted at short notice to intercept Soviet forces. This was all ‘an amalgam of activity that required very careful control, both of measures to avoid mutual interference and of aggressive moves to place our submarines closely alongside those of the potential enemy’, wrote one submariner.78
Troup recommended the establishment of a new command and control organization located alongside that for Polaris, CTF 345 at Northwood, and the relocation of FOSM and the transfer of the submarine command from HMS Dolphin in Gosport. However, when Troup retired in 1974 his successor, Vice Admiral Iwan Raikes, whose father, Admiral Sir Robert Raikes, had been FOSM from 1936 to 1938, adopted an ‘over my dead body’ attitude towards the proposed move to Northwood and vowed to stay put at Fort Blockhouse, fearing that FOSM would ultimately be absorbed into the Fleet staff and lose his identity and independence.79 While Raikes held out at Gosport, Troup’s new twenty-four-hour organization, known as CTF 311, was nevertheless established in Northwood in 1974/75 to control Cold War submarine operations. Led by a submarine-qualified Commander, with a twenty-four-hour staff, it was responsible to C-in-C Fleet’s Assistant Chief of Staff (Operations). FOSM allocated submarines to the new organization and was kept informed of developments, but because of his location at Gosport and the lack of twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week staffing at HMS Dolphin, he was largely isolated from day to day operations.
The twenty-four-hour operational arrangement at CTF 311 brought many benefits. All the Northwood communications, real-time intelligence and SOSUS information was channelled into one location, analysed, and made available to submarines for the first time. The Americans based in Northwood were also informed about when and where Royal Navy submarines would be operating, in order to avoid any conflict with US submarine operations. An innovative and complex water space management system known as Area Allocation was also established to avoid mutual interference and to manage and coordinate the large number of submarines, both friendly and unfriendly, operating in the vast oceans. US Navy and Royal Navy SSNs and SSBNs were allocated to geographical patrol areas in different sections of the ocean, and were sometimes depth-separated. This meant that an SSN or SSBN operating in a designated patrol area could be certain that any contact it detected was not a friendly SSN or SSBN.
A NEW CONCEPT OF OPERATIONS
The Submarine Service had also started to rethink how it used its SSNs, particularly in the support and escort of surface ships. In the early 1970s, the introduction of Soviet submerged-launched anti-ship missiles considerably altered anti-submarine warfare. Until the early 1970s the United States Navy and the Royal Navy followed separate paths in anti-submarine warfare. The United States Navy independently deployed its SSNs away from a surface force, using passive sonar as the primary means of detecting enemy contacts. In contrast, the Royal Navy concentrated on what was known as the Link Ship/SSN combination, which involved an SSN sitting in front of a surface force and using its high-powered active sonar to search for contacts. Once a contact had been detected the SSN would report to the link ship (surface ship), which in turn would launch a helicopter to carry out an attack. This divergence of view between the two navies arose beca
use the Royal Navy developed the Type 2001 long-range high-powered active sonar, which was fitted in its SSNs; whereas the US Navy developed low-frequency passive sonars whose effectiveness as an ASW sensor was degraded in the close vicinity of surface ships because of the high ambient noise in the proximity of surface forces. By the 1970s the Royal Navy had amassed a considerable amount of data and experience of the use of the SSN in ASW operations and had concluded that the linked-SSN concept, while a useful addition to the ASW armoury for defence against torpedo-firing submarines, was not the final answer to the threat of Soviet submarines.80
With the vast increase in the size and composition of the Soviet SSN fleet, in particular the entry into service of missile-firing submarines, which were regarded as the Soviet Navy’s main offensive weapon, Royal Navy surface forces could no longer expect to encounter short-range torpedoes fired from patrol submarines, but medium- and long-range missiles. In other words, an opposing submarine no longer always needed to approach a surface ship to make an attack. As a result, detection opportunities for an SSN operating in the linked role, using active sonar ahead of a surface force, decreased. Experience at sea had also shown that when used in the wrong circumstances the linked combination was highly vulnerable due to its comparatively slow speed, the beacon effect of the Type 2001 active sonar out to some fifty miles, and the intelligence disclosed by the insecure means of communication between submarine and surface ship. Experience had also shown that an attacking SSN was often able to avoid the linked unit by using sonar intercept equipment to work its way around the force, shadowing it and then closing to attack. One Royal Navy SSN that was lying in wait for a linked SSN and surface force during an exercise reported that ‘they sounded just like a circus coming over the hill’.81