by James Philip
Remember, although the four submarines were relatively newly constructed they were essentially old-fashioned World War II era vessels. Their underwater endurance was limited and they were obliged to spend a large amount of time cruising on the surface in order to recharge their electric batteries. Consequently, after three weeks at sea in the North Atlantic their crews were battered and exhausted, the vessels stank with oil and rotting food, sweat and all the other rank bad odours with which submariners of the pre-nuclear propulsion age became of necessity intimately familiar. Not for nothing did the fraternity of submariners, irrespective of political persuasion or allegiance the world over, ruefully refer to their vessels as ‘pig boats’. Worse, because the Foxtrots had been constantly shadowed and actively harassed by the US Navy every day since leaving Murmansk life onboard the submarines had become progressively more miserable, stressful and dangerous. Moreover, although the vessels had been able to eavesdrop on American radio stations during the early parts of their voyages they had received virtually no news from Moscow, and by the third week of Operation Anadyr, they were spending so much time submerged attempting to evade American destroyers that their captains were, effectively, out of contact with the Soviet High Command and in possession of no accurate up to date knowledge of world events.
On Friday 26th October, B-59 was cornered by elements of the USS Randolph’s hunting group of eleven destroyers north east of Cuba. Unable to shake off her pursuers and with his electrical batteries nearly exhausted, Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky took his vessel to the bottom where he waited, while two destroyers directed by the USS Beale, dropped small, hand grenade size practice charges all around him. By Saturday 27th October nobody onboard the B-59 had slept for forty-eight hours, the air was fouled and all over the boat systems were breaking down. Suffering from the first stages of carbon monoxide poisoning, frightened, humiliated and desperate, Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky did exactly what he’d been trained to do in time of war. In the circumstances it is easy to understand – but to in no way mitigate - Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky’s actions.
Up on the surface the men of the USS Beale, an aging Second World War vintage Fletcher class destroyer recently refitted with state of the art underwater detection sonar and submarine-killing weaponry, had absolutely no inkling that they’d driven their quarry too far. Why should they have had any such inkling? They were not at war. They were going about what they construed to be their lawful business in what, basically, they regarded as an American ocean. They had been ordered not to attack the trespassing submarine and they assumed their foe knew as much. They weren’t attacking the grounded Foxtrot with guided anti-submarine torpedoes or with patterns of precisely targeted half-ton high explosive depth charges, they were just dropping practice munitions – with puny six ounce bursting charges incapable of harming a submarine’s pressure casing - in the water in her general vicinity. They weren’t even trying to hit the submerged submarine!
The men on the USS Beale had been told that the other three Foxtrots had been ‘rounded up’ without incident and they had every reason to expect – sooner or later – that the B-59 would meekly surface, identify herself and skulk off back to Murmansk with her sisters.
We now know that this did not happen.
We will never know the exact chain of cause and effect that led to Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky’s fateful decision. However, we can reconstruct in general terms what must have happened in those last few minutes.
On the surface the USS Beale went about her business, quartering the sea, taking her turn dropping practice charges around the grounded Soviet submarine. Nearby, two of her sisters had locked their sonar arrays on the trapped Foxtrot. It was a waiting game. B-59 had no alternative but to surface.
Had the hunters had a sounder grasp of the mentality and the command doctrine of their quarry, they might have adopted a less sanguine and rather more measured approach to the hunt. Unfortunately, neither of these things were well understood at the time by the men in the Pentagon, or in the White House, and nobody in the US Navy was aware that the Foxtrots which they had been mercilessly harrying were each armed with a single 13.7 kiloton nuclear-tipped torpedo.
Nor were they aware that Captain Valentin Savitsky was at the end of his tether. B-59’s commander was unaware that the other three vessels in his flotilla had already submitted to the US Navy’s humiliating Submarine Surfacing and Identification Procedures and been allowed to go home. Valentin Savitsky did not know whether war had broken out. Valentin Savitsky, like every man on the B-59 had a blindingly violent headache from breathing the putrid air in the submarine. Valentin Savitsky, his judgement impaired by the onset of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide poisoning, felt himself to be personally responsible as flotilla commander for the honour of the new Soviet Navy. And Valentin Savitsky needed the consent of only two other men onboard B-59 to start a nuclear war.
The names of B-59’s Political Officer and of Savitsky’s second-in-command are lost to history since Northern Fleet’s records were almost entirely lost in the holocaust. However, it is known that Soviet tactical nuclear doctrine held that if all three men agreed unanimously, a nuclear-tipped torpedo might be deployed. Given what happened on the afternoon of Saturday 27th October 1962 it is safe to assume that just such a unanimous decision was reached.
The men in the sonar rooms of the USS Beale and the two other destroyers circling slowly within a thousand yard radius of the B-59 would have detected the outer door of Tube No 1 opening, the explosive rush of compressed air which expelled the torpedo into the grey waters of the Atlantic, the cavitations of the racing propeller.
Onboard the USS Beale alarms sounded.
Shortly afterwards the warhead detonated under her stern.
Chapter 2
02:45 Hours GMT
Sunday 28th October 1962
57 Miles WNW of Lowestoft, North Sea
HMS Talavera was shouldering into the south westerly gale blowing up from the English Channel at twelve knots. The destroyer was a long, lean hunter built to be a good sea boat first, second and last but her recently completed reconstruction as a Fast Air Detection Escort had added weight topside, and now she rolled without the stiffness of earlier years. Nevertheless, she took the ten foot seas on her port bow easily enough without the plunging, corkscrewing motion of many of the smaller, older destroyers in the Fleet.
Lieutenant Peter Christopher, who’d once been a martyr to sea sickness was immensely grateful for his new ship’s relatively sedate sea-keeping characteristics. Especially so, because his duties mostly kept him cooped up in the destroyer’s Combat Information Centre beneath the bridge. In heavy weather standing a bridge watch was actually a welcome relief. He was one of the Navy’s new breed of Electronic Warfare Officers, a radar and electronics specialist and as such, his posting to Talavera – with her suite of expensive state of the art ‘toys’, as the Captain called them - had been like all his Christmases coming at once.
Peter Christopher looked younger than his twenty-six years. He was tall, a fraction over six feet, angular rather than slim, with a boyish face topped with tousled fair hair and his grey blue eyes spoke of a keenly intelligent restless mind that was never really truly at rest. In his eight years – after his induction at Dartmouth the first three at University College London studying physics and applied electrical engineering alternating with detachments to the Marconi Labs in West London and the Telecommunications and the Royal Navy Radar Experimental Establishment at Portland - in the senior service he’d learned not to transmit his surfeit of nervous energy to the men under his command. He’d learned also not to worry about it when he was in the company of friends, or men who’d known him long enough to not treat it as a sign of weakness.
He’d been assigned to HMS Talavera half-way through her conversion at Chatham Dockyard. The Battle class destroyer had the distinction of having been the last of her class commissioned into the Royal Navy. Laid down la
te in the Second World War on 29th August 1944 at the yard of Messrs John Brown and Co on Clydebank, she’d not been launched until 27th August 1945 and then only to clear the slip. The majority of uncompleted War Emergency Program ships had gone for scrap soon after the war ended but Talavera, after lying half-built, apparently forgotten in a Scottish creek for four years, was taken in hand and eventually commissioned into the Royal Navy on 12th November 1950. In typical act of Admiralty bureaucratic muddle she’d been mothballed after a single, eighteen month commission, and but for the decision to convert six aging Battle class destroyers into so-called Fast Air Detection Escorts, she’d probably have been scrapped by now.
So, for all that Talavera had been laid down over eighteen years ago mechanically she was a relatively young ship whose youth had been enhanced by the radical nature of her recent conversion. Of the original ship only the hull, engines, funnel, forward superstructure and main armament remained. A huge new lattice foremast had sprouted immediately abaft the bridge - the base of this great structure straddling the entire beam of the ship – topped with a four ton Type 965 AKE-2 double bedstead aerial. A Type 293Q array was mounted on a platform beneath the huge bedsteads. The Type 965 aerial was the ship’s long-range ‘eye’, the Type 293Q was the most recent derivation of a Second World War vintage gunnery control ‘range and height-finder’. Abaft of the funnel all torpedo tubes and light AA armament had been discarded and a big, blocky deckhouse containing generators and radar rooms had been welded to the main deck. Between this new superstructure and the old aft deckhouse, a new lattice mainmast carried a Type 277Q height finder dish and several – variously temperamental - Electronic Warfare Support Measures (ESM) and Direction Finding (DF) aerials. The existing after deckhouse had been extended and strengthened to mount a quadruple GWS 21 Sea Cat surface-to-air-missile (SAM) system. On what remained of the cramped quarterdeck the ship retained its original Squid Anti-Submarine (A/S) mortar.
Peter Christopher had assumed this latter was a design-bureau oversight since given the new profile of the ship with its towering radar masts and a superstructure sprouting with twenty foot whip aerials, it was hard to see how the Squid could be safely fired over Talavera’s bow. Besides, the destroyer’s sonar was the one element of her electronic armoury that was distinctly not state of the art.
As for the GWS 21 Sea Cat SAM system he was reserving judgement. If the ship was under air attack she’d be manoeuvring like a scalded cat and he didn’t know how his radars were supposed to lock onto a close range fast moving modern jet aircraft in that scenario. He hoped this was something he’d discover during the intensive trials scheduled ahead of the ship’s first deployment. The four completed Battle Fast Air Detection conversions had all been rotated to the 7th Destroyer Squadron in Malta and he’d been wrestling to keep his emotions in check ever since his posting to HMS Talavera.
Thoughts of Malta and the prospect of finally meeting Marija Elizabeth Calleja stirred a welter of perturbing feelings that invariably distracted him from his duties. He’d resolved to try to not to think too far ahead, or to take things for granted which might so easily blow up in his face. He didn’t – for a nanosecond - try to put Marija out of his mind; for that was simply impossible. Instead, he did his best to sit her in a comfortable chair in a side room of his thoughts, somewhere close but just out of his direct line of sight. It wasn’t easy. Just before Talavera had sailed the Captain had taken him aside and informed him, confidentially, that sometime in March the ship was scheduled to transfer to Mediterranean Fleet. HMS Agincourt was due for a refit and when she returned to home waters, Talavera would take her place at Malta. All things being equal next spring he would finally come face to face with Marija and he hardly dared to believe it.
Life was good.
Peter Christopher refocused his attention on his duties, reminding himself that HMS Talavera’s primary role was neither anti-submarine work, nor single-handedly tackling fast jets at close range. The utility of the Squid anti-submarine mortar and the relatively new and unproven capabilities of the GWS 21 Sea Cat System were peripheral to Talavera’s primary role. The Navy was planning to build a new generation of big carriers and the converted Battles, Agincourt, Aisne, Barossa, Corunna, Oudenarde and Talavera were to act as fast radar pickets in the task groups which would be formed around each of the new ships. In each battle group the big carrier’s fighters would deal with air threats; the purpose-built frigates of the carrier’s anti-submarine screen would deal with the undersea menace. Of the six Battle conversions, four had already joined the Fleet, Talavera was running trials, and Oudenarde was still in dockyard hands at Rosyth, work on her having been delayed two months by persistent labour troubles.
Peter Christopher heard the bulkhead door behind him open, booted feet on the steel deck, then the door being dogged shut again. Nobody in the broad, dimly lit compartment moved or looked around. They’d been trying to unwrinkled the mysteries of tuning the foremast Type 965 AKE-2 and the Type 293Q systems in such a way as to eliminate the one interfering with the returns of the other for several days. It transpired that the boffins at Portland had been tinkering with the Type 965 to improve the performance of the single bedstead variant for years but nobody seemed to have considered the ramifications of the most recent modifications for the twin bedstead installations in the last two Battle conversions. The first four Battle Fast Air Detection conversions had older – unmodified bedsteads – and hadn’t encountered the interference problems Peter and his people had discovered within moments of spooling up the array. They’d thought they had the problem cracked twenty-four hours ago but then the wind had started blowing up a Force 8 gale from the south west and they’d realised they’d only half-solved the puzzle.
“Kye, sir,” murmured the gruff baritone voice of Leading Seaman Jack Griffin. Griffin was the same age, within a few months, of his Division Commander but he had a lived in, prize fighter’s face that added years to him.
“Good man,” Peter muttered, accepting the mug of hot cocoa brewed from pure melted dark chocolate, already a middle watch CIC and Radar Room tradition on the newly commissioned destroyer. “What’s it like topside?”
“Blowing up nicely, sir,” the Leading Rate chuckled. “Every third or fourth wave we’re shipping white water over the bow. I reckon we’ll empty a few bunks when we put about.”
There were muted guffaws around the compartment.
“You’ve got an evil sense of humour, Griffin,” Chief Petty Officer Max Crawley grunted. He was a small, sinewy man whose head only came up to Peter Christopher’s shoulder. He’d been in the Navy so long he remembered the last time there’d been a mutiny – at Invergordon, a fortnight after he joined his first ship, the battleship Valiant - and everybody tacitly assumed this would be his last ship. The grizzled CPO had been a tower of strength to Peter in the last few weeks as he struggled to get Talavera’s complicated new electronic systems on line. Peter had been appalled, and continued to be appalled, by the slapdash, careless working practices and the poor quality control of much of the work carried out by Chatham Naval Dockyard. Every second weld on the new superstructure had had to be re-welded, cableways routinely breached watertight compartments rather than following prescribed, pre-prepared conduits, every other seal leaked, and whole sections of wiring were missing, or installed in completely the wrong place. To his chagrin he’d discovered that nothing on the master conversion planning schematics was to be trusted without exhaustive and time consuming checks and tests. Peter’s division had spent so much time putting right the shoddy workmanship, mistakes and omissions of the dockyard that it was only in the last week, five weeks behind schedule that they’d found themselves in a position where they could begin to chase down basic operating faults and start to fully familiarise themselves with their new ‘toys’. Without CPO Max Crawley, the nearest thing to a bull terrier he was ever likely to encounter in uniform, Peter knew they’d still be tied up alongside at Chatham squabbling with the dockyard�
�s battalion of jobsworths.
Max Crawley was always looking for something to knock Jack Griffin down a peg or two. He didn’t think Lieutenant Christopher was lax when it came to discipline, just a little too one-eyed about the number and variety of complex new gizmos on the converted ship. Crawley was a veteran of the Malta convoys twenty years ago. He’d been on a destroyer that had shot itself dry on one run, been forced to dump depth charges over the side to distract charging Italian motor torpedo boats, and attempted to fight off a dozen Stukas with rifles and pistols. But that was twenty years ago, this was now as the old sea salt clung grimly to the back of the EWO’s command chair he conceded that HMS Talavera didn’t like a cross sea any more than any other ship with mostly dry bunkers and empty magazines.
Aye, she’d roll like merry hell when they put the helm over, true enough.
Peter Christopher was thinking the same thought as he sipped his steaming Kye. The rich bitterness took his mind off the imperfect circular sweep of the Type 965 repeater in front of the middle-aged dockyard technician sitting in the chair next to him. Talavera had commissioned with so many niggling problems that there were still nine civilian workers, electricians and specialist radar men like Ralph Hobbs, the thirty-nine year old Marconi assembly supervisor with whom he’d been working for the last two months. Hobbs was bespectacled, six inches shorter than Peter Christopher, balding, and one of those people who lived, ate and drank his work. Having been a wireless operator on Lancasters in the war, he’d worked for Marconi ever since his demob from the RAF in 1945. He and the Talavera’s Electronic Warfare Officer had quickly formed a strong professional bond, strengthened and nourished by the fact that Peter Christopher wasn’t the kind of Navy man who automatically looked down on people in Civvy Street.