One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  Tireless was an ex-wartime ‘T’ Class submarine – streamlined and modernized, she was known as a ‘Streamlined T-Boat’ or sometimes a ‘Slippery T’ to differentiate her from others of the ‘T’ Class which were lengthened and which went much faster underwater, called ‘T-Conversions’ and sometimes ‘T-Confusions’. I took my leading role with the Chaplain when we commissioned her on 25 April 1961. I addressed the Ship’s Company, seeking His blessing ‘upon this ship and all who sail in her’. We spoke the words of Psalm 107 for ‘they that go down to the sea in ships; and occupy their business in great waters’. And then I called on the company to pray, from the Gaelic blessing of 1589…

  Whom do ye fear, seeing that God the Father is with you?

  We fear nothing.

  Whom do ye fear, seeing that God the Son is with you?

  We fear nothing.

  Whom do ye fear, seeing that God the Holy Spirit is with you?

  We fear nothing.

  The Chaplain recited the prayer of Sir Francis Drake which contains the words he spoke before he sailed to meet the Armada: ‘Preserve us from the dangers of the sea, and from the violence of the enemy; that we may be a safeguard unto our most gracious Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth and her Dominions.’ And then we all sang ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’, the sailor’s hymn, and I formally took my place as Commanding Officer of a front-line submarine, with a ship’s company of sixty odd, six days before my twenty-ninth birthday as a lieutenant of six years’ seniority. It was obviously a proud day for me and, looking back, a long way to have travelled already for that small unknown ‘warrior’ who once had sat on his suitcase in a packed railway train trying to find his way to Eaton Hall in 1946. But the Navy does that – keeps pushing you, on and up, until you fall off the ladder somewhere.

  My year in Home Waters in command of Tireless contained many good times in delightful company. There was one highlight, though, as we returned from the long and difficult day of my ‘Work-Up’ Inspection. My Squadron Commander stood on the bridge looking fairly hatchet-faced and saying not very much, while I wondered, pessimistically, how we had done. The final approach to the Depot Ship moored in Rothesay Bay for Clyde Week is often littered with yachts nearing their finishing line, no doubt full of important local figures more concerned to chop up their opponents than make way for the working classes. In order to get alongside in good time, I had to barge my way through the infuriated Dragon Class helmsmen and, in the end, I had to ‘tack’ between the leaders and drive across the finishing line with them. I glanced round nervously – to see my Squadron Commander smiling quietly. A dedicated fisherman, he considered all yachtsmen a bloody nuisance, and coming third, in a submarine, in the Clyde Week Dragons Race had really made his day. I had passed Inspection.

  I left Tireless in early 1962, spent six fascinating months in HMS Falmouth, an anti-submarine frigate based at Londonderry, and then returned to the Naval College at Greenwich for a whole year, to take the Nuclear Reactor Course. This was a highly specialized subject, intended primarily for postgraduate engineer officers. I was now a lieutenant-commander with two and a half stripes and faced the hardest work I had ever done. Nor was the work helped by the worst winter recorded in some years. We had the last of the great smogs in November – it took thirty minutes walking to work or forty-five by car. In February, with the snow lying on the ground for six weeks, I was able to ski in Greenwich Park and we had to put all the electric fires in our house in the attic to stop the water system freezing. All this was celebrated by the birth of our daughter Tessa, at home, in the middle of the cold spell.

  The mathematics started just beyond where I had left off more than ten years before, as did all the other subjects required to begin to understand the theory behind nuclear reactors and their engineering. There were two hours of homework most nights, and we coped with everything from water chemistry to Einstein’s theory of relativity in three-dimensional differential algebra. On top of that, there was a project in the third and last term – design your own reactor. I handed my work in with a huge sigh of relief three weeks before the end of term, only to be asked a few days later whether I’d now be good enough to answer the second half of the question.

  However, they allowed me to pass and I went off to do an Anti-Submarine course for another five months before being given command of HMS Grampus as a fill-in job while I waited for HMS Valiant to complete at Barrow-in-Furness. I was to be second-in-command to Commander Peter Herbert, yet another outstanding man, who ended up Admiral Sir Peter Herbert KCB OBE.

  Valiant, 3500 tons and the first all-British nuclear attack submarine known as a Fleet Submarine, or SSN, was powered by a pressurized water reactor which could give her a speed I had never before experienced underwater. She was 282 feet long, slightly bigger than Dreadnought, thirty-two feet wide, with three decks below the conning tower, and handled something like a very slow jumbo-jet without windows, carrying a crew of 100. She was based on the Clyde.

  We worked her up to join the Fleet and set about the whole series of equipment trials which are always required of a ‘First-of-Class’ ship. The last of these, before I left, was to go underwater from Scotland to Singapore. My time in Valiant ended in 1967 with promotion to Commander. This always seems a most important step, because it is the very first to be made by selection rather than by just passing examinations or serving your time. You also get some gold braid on the peak of your cap and become thereby a ‘brass-hat’, plainly, for all too see.

  At the same time, I was given the job most coveted by all submariners, that of ‘Teacher’ to the Perishers. My preparation was one week with the then present incumbent, Commander Sam Fry. It was the last and most difficult week of the previous Perisher. We were having a quick lunch one day, at periscope depth, while the frigates opened out for the next run, when Sam said, quietly, without even looking up, ‘They’ve turned.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked, in the full knowledge that all five frigates were now at least six miles away. I did not have the first idea how he could possibly have known whether they had turned back towards us or not. The really worrying thing was that neither did he! I questioned him carefully but to no avail. He had no idea how he knew. He just did. This was seriously depressing for me. How do you take over from a bloke who operates on a sixth sense? How could I possibly learn from a mystic, in a dark blue suit?

  And the frigate trick was not all. Sam could also tell the precise passage of a minute, to the nearest second, without looking at a stop-watch. He didn’t even stop talking as he ticked. I began to wonder why the job of Teacher was so coveted. As a student, though you worked very hard not to show it, you always had Teacher there to save you if things went wrong. Because he always held the ultimate responsibility. Now, if things were to go wrong, the responsibility would be entirely mine.

  The first few months were very nervous indeed. I lost a stone and a half during the first course, while I re-taught myself all the things I had learned as a Perisher. That done, I was able to concentrate on teaching properly. I taught them the principles of mathematical timing and the stern rules of submarine safety. I emphasized mental agility and accuracy of observation. For example, it takes a whole minute for a submarine to get down from periscope depth to safety, clear underneath the hull of an approaching surface ship, and the Perishers were required to accomplish this with just ten seconds to spare. You will appreciate that this only left about five seconds for Teacher to catch the errant Perisher, if he’d got it wrong – all in the face of the ‘enemy’ as the frigates thundered past, overhead.

  Sometimes, I’d almost hold my breath, watching the depth gauge, counting the seconds, listening to the mounting roar of the approaching propellers, worrying about the wing frigates on either side and whether there’d be time to pop up for a quick look at the target ship behind the escorts, before any of them could run us over. ‘Flood Q. Group up, full ahead together. Eighty feet…Blow Q…Q blown, Q Kingston shut…Vent Q inboard’ – the
roar of escaping compressed air – ‘Q vented, Q vent shut…’ The sequence runs, the commands and responses rattle back and forth, while the mind races against the clock to hold the surface picture clear. For a very few, this is heaven under water. For most, it is the severest test they may ever face. For some, it is the ultimate nightmare. To be really good, you have to love it.

  And finally, after months of pointed curiosity, I discovered what made Sam Fry say, instinctively, ‘They’ve turned.’ Having sat, for ages, in exactly the same place as he had, hoping for divine inspiration, I hit upon the vital clue. It turned out to be a change in the note of the frigates’ sonar transmissions, as heard over a loudspeaker in the submarine’s Control Room. This is known as the ‘Doppler effect’ – a common acoustic phenomenon, heard every day in the changing pitch of an ambulance’s siren as it goes by. And once I had identified this as the source of Sam’s sixth sense, I was able to apply some fairly ordinary mathematics, which, with some simple electronic equipment to do most of the work, produced all sorts of amazing information previously unavailable to us.

  It is just one example of the submariner’s way of life. You use all of your senses to monitor very carefully all that goes on about you, inside and outside the submarine. The noise of a pump stopping, the click of an indicator, the thump of a valve, the hiss of compressed air, the feel of a fracturing pipe. Sensitivity to every clue buys those critical extra seconds to deal with the unexpected, or the potentially disastrous. Outside is the noise of the sea, a very busy place where the men wandering, in or on it, often wish to hide. And sensibly they seek to mix with its natural inhabitants, who can be a rackety lot. We have our jargon names for many of the strange noises: ‘frying fish’, ‘baby cry’, ‘snapping shrimps’, ‘military fish’ and many others, anything from the cheerful whistles of the porpoises to the mating cry of the killer whale. Amidst this cacophony, you are listening for your enemy, ship, submarine, even aircraft. Each one has its ‘tune’. Every one is a potential ‘enemy’ until identified otherwise.

  Kill or be killed – this is no place for the careless. Even the propeller of an innocent ship tells a tale. How many shafts the ship has. How many propeller blades on each shaft. How fast they are rotating. This is often enough to tell you the type of ship, where it is likely to be going and how quickly. Find only the range, and you have the ‘Firing Solution’ for the destruction of an enemy.

  Like my predecessors, I found I had to fail about one in five of my Perishers. I hated having to do this and I was invariably astonished when, on imparting the dreadful news, they usually smiled. They were, momentarily anyway, glad to be out of it, having knowingly passed the point where they were able to take on any additional information or teaching of any sort. Not only were they increasingly unable to cope during the last few days, but they also had suffered the first symptoms of real, permanent stress, and it was axiomatic that I let no such officers through the net to Command.

  By that time there were three Fleet Submarines – SSNs – in operational service, Dreadnought, Valiant and Warspite. I was appointed, after two years as Teacher and six months improving my golf handicap on the Joint Services Staff Course, to command Warspite. She was named after the famous battleship of the First and Second World Wars, which served as Admiral Cunningham’s Flagship at Matapan, and which met her end aground in Prussia Cove near Land’s End on her way to the scrap yard.

  I joined the new Warspite in early December 1969. It was a good time for me, because by then I was used to command. No one seemed to accuse me of immaturity any more. I was very much Commander Woodward, who’d been through the mill and was as well qualified as anyone in the business to do the job.

  My first week was traumatic, for just about everyone on board. On the Monday, at lunchtime, I had arranged to go down to the Chief and Petty Officers Mess to meet them informally over a half pint of beer. Before I left the Control Room, I told the First Lieutenant, James Laybourne: ‘When you’ve finished taking the wireless routine at periscope depth, go on to fifteen knots, ten degrees bow down to 400 feet, and hurry on to our next exercise appointment.’

  Down in the Mess, glass in hand a few minutes later, everyone chattering away, it was no surprise to me when the bow down angle came on. But all around me, conversation completely halted. I realised I was looking at an extremely worried group. We levelled off a minute later and the conversation very, very slowly restarted. To my horror, I was watching the most reliable, the most experienced men on board go into a total decline over what should have been a routine change of depth. These men, I saw, must have been going through the submariner’s unspoken, universal dread, with voices inside their heads saying, ‘The hull of this boat will crush at about 1500 feet. If you start diving at ten degrees bow down and fifteen knots, and do nothing about it, six minutes from now the lights will go out – permanently.’

  Plainly these men, the backbone of my crew, have let these tiresome thoughts cross their minds once too often. Angles of up to thirty degrees should be ‘normal’ enough. So should higher speeds, if this boat is to be fit for war. My new submarine was non-operational. And I was very unhappy.

  I quietly finished my glass and returned to the Control Room to tell the First Lieutenant what I had seen.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘Didn’t I know what?,’ I said.

  And out it all came. Warspite had been in collision with an iceberg twelve months before, rolled over to horrendous angles, twice, badly damaging her bridge structure (the ‘fin’). She returned home safely enough, but many of the crew never got over it. Some twenty-four members of the crew left the Submarine Service for good as a consequence. Apparently, since that day, she had never routinely been manoeuvred vigorously, in order to spare the rest.

  I took the opposite view from her previous Commanding Officer, and I decided to throw the boat about, an exercise known locally as ‘Angles and Dangles’. I warned everyone what to expect and when. As soon as they were used to this, I threw her about without warning. Day and night, for the rest of the week. I have to say, I did not much enjoy it myself. On the Friday, I again arranged to have a glass of beer with the Senior Rates in their Mess. As I left the Control Room, James and I set our stop-watches, and I said to him carefully: ‘In exactly seven and one quarter of a minute’s time, go on to twenty knots, put on thirty bow down, and make lots of noise as if you’re having problems in the Control Room.’ Seven and one quarter minutes later, no one took a blind bit of notice. No one even spilt their beer.

  On such psychological tightropes are battles won, or lost. Sadly, the net cost was one more member of the crew who asked to leave, that weekend. But he was one more for the benefit of the remaining ninety-seven. Actually yet another ’surfaced’ years later. I discovered, entirely by chance, that a man I had known quite well as a quiet, rather introverted chap, used to be no such person. He had once been a cheerful, noisy extrovert. I wondered, privately, how many years of his career had he spent in silent terror. Sadly he had not been noticed amidst Warspite’s busy life, which was full of incident and excitement around the North Atlantic and the Med. By chance I met him again a few months after the first publication of this book, looking a good deal more cheerful than I expected. He told me, quite simply, that since the day he had read this account, his nightmares had suddenly stopped. After twenty-three years. Over the following eighteen months I learned another whole bookful of extraordinary things in the company of excellent people and enjoyed myself almost as much as I had as Teacher.

  When it ended, I was recalled ashore and, with very mixed feelings, I proceeded to the Royal College of Defence Studies at Belgrave Square in 1972. I commuted each day from our newly bought house in Surbiton to Victoria and walked to the College, where, in company with four other similar grade officers, we did much of the administration and also attended lectures as unofficial students. I took a very poor view of the job I now found myself in – which seemed to entail all the most menial tasks
, barring actually sweeping the floors. I was also expected to be civil to brigadiers, who were not being very civil to me, and see to the minor needs of any student who thought he might have a problem – basically act as a combined ‘Mr Fix-it’ and ‘Cook’s Tour Guide’. I even gave a conducted tour of the River Thames from Westminster to Greenwich in a boat to a senior foreign student, and his wife, in my fractured French.

  This was not what I had joined the Navy for. Nor did I take kindly to being taken down several pegs at a go. My wife put me straight by firmly stating it as her opinion that a few months of humility would be good for my soul, since I had become far too pleased with myself. That was small comfort too, for at this stage of my career, as recent Commanding Officer of Britain’s latest nuclear-powered front-line submarine, I was unused to being argued with or criticized. As a matter of fact, I was unused even to being interrupted! So I wasn’t all that grateful to Char either.

  Such a pity, because there was a myriad of good things to do at that time and I was too busy sulking to take full advantage of the opportunities. But it lasted only one year instead of the two forecast, because, out of the blue, I was informed I was on the promotion list to captain and that unless I did something absolutely unforgivable I’d have a fourth stripe in six months’ time.

  I took a rather more positive view of the College after that and started to think about what I might hope to do as a captain during the eight or nine years I would be on the ‘Captains’ List’. This is an historic phrase, dating back to well before Nelson’s time. You work your way up the list as time passes, eventually to reach the top and either be made an admiral or retired. I was forty by that time, as young as any captain for those days, and it seemed as though I might really have a foot on the top management ladder, slippery though the rungs would be. My boss made several kind remarks about me in his final report at the end of my time at the College, but the sting was in the tail: he described me as having ‘…very great strength of character’, by which I’m sure he meant that I argued the toss on everything and made it plain that I disliked the job as much as he did.