Cold War Command

The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

Dan Conley, Richard Woodman

• Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473837461
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

A British nuclear submariner sheds critical light on the Royal Navy's Cold War operations in this revealing military memoir. The role played by the Royal Navy's submarines throughout the Cold War remains largely shrouded in secrecy. In Cold War Command, Captain Dan Conley, RN (Ret.), offers an insider's look at commanding nuclear hunter-killer submarines. As captain of the HMS Courageous and HMS Valiant, Conley was tasked with covertly following Soviet submarines in order to destroy them should there be any outbreak of hostilities. Conley recounts his early career in diesel submarines, as well as his exceptional success against the Soviet Navy at the height of the Cold War. He was involved in the initial deployment of the Trident nuclear weapon system and divulges previously unknown facets of nuclear weapons strategy and policy during this period. He also describes the Royal Navy's shortcomings in ship and weapons procurement, assessing how these failures led to the effective bankrupting of the Defense budget as it entered the 21st century.

1

The Twilight of Pax Britannica

IN 1956, AS BRITAIN disentangled itself from its imperial past, its complex Middle East embroilments threw up a new problem. Although India was no longer the jewel in the British imperial crown, the security of Britain’s trade routes to the east and the Antipodes relied upon her part-ownership of the Suez Canal, which ran through a ‘canal zone’ leased from Egypt. The seizure of the Suez canal zone in July by the Egyptians led by Colonel Nasser so infuriated the British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, that he ordered its retaking. In a parlous co-operative venture with the Israelis, who were in a state of more or less constant war with the countries on their newly established borders, and Britain’s canal co-owners, the French, Operation Musketeer was launched.

As Russian tanks rolled into the Hungarian capital of Budapest to suppress an uprising, in a demonstration of naked aggression by the Soviet Union, it appeared in Washington that the Anglo-French operation was just as unacceptable an example of neocolonialism. Despite Eden’s protest that to capitulate to the Egyptians was appeasement such as had precipitated the Second World War, the American president, Dwight D Eisenhower, former commander of the Allied forces of America, Britain and Canada, vetoed the operation. Realising that the venture was doomed without American support in the United Nations Assembly, the British and French halted their successful landings and rapidly withdrew their troops. Even British schoolboys recognised this was a national humiliation, but there was one aspect of pride. Whatever the political misjudgements, one thing shone brightly: the amphibious operation had been all but flawless; the Royal Navy had accomplished its part to the letter. If they thought about it at all, the American reaction seemed like a betrayal and, coming from a much admired ally, a betrayal of the worst kind.

By the time those boys moved by these events came to sit their all-important eleven-plus examination, many considered a career in the Royal Navy a very desirable aspiration. A grammar school education, compared to that of a privileged public school, had its prejudiced detractors even in post-war Britain, but was nevertheless accepted as one possible route of entry as an officer-cadet. And so, with young heads stuffed full of a confusing mixture of paternal war stories, of politics gone wrong, of a vague but glorious past and, a few years earlier, of having been witness to a coronation of a young and glamorous Queen, many young lads of all backgrounds applied to join Britannia Royal Naval College in south Devon. This institution is perhaps better known by the name of the town above which its imposing structure stands – Dartmouth.

History aside, those among them in the early 1960s who had mugged up sufficiently to impress the fearsome Admiralty Selection Board would have been aware that the Royal Navy had recently acquired a new national status as the future guardian of the nation’s nuclear deterrent. All would have comprehended the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction, and most would have known that the nuclear deterrent was no longer exclusively in the hands of the USAF and the RAF, the responsibility for the ultimate deterrent having passed in America to the United States Navy, while in Britain it would in due course be handed over to the Royal Navy. Amongst the young men aspiring to become an officer in the Royal Navy of 1963 was a young Scotsman named Dan Conley.

Despite its supplanting by the United States Navy as the world’s most powerful navy, the Royal Navy of the early 1960s remained a substantial force, with over two hundred and fifty warships and submarines, manned by more than 100,000 officers and ratings, supported by an equivalent number of civil servants and dockyard employees. In the twenty years following the end of the Second World War, Britain also possessed the world’s biggest merchant fleet and a large deep-water fishing fleet. British shipbuilding continued to enjoy boom times, constructing a large proportion of the world’s merchant shipping and directly employing a workforce of over 150,000. Everywhere there were symbols of Britain’s maritime status: busy ports reached up rivers to penetrate centres of cities whose streets contained the offices of shipping companies, their windows filled with models of their latest vessels. Maritime influence was enshrined in such trivia as the nautical names of leading cigarette brands and the names of pubs; even the newfangled airlines adopted nautical terms and styles.

Naval recruiting posters, displayed at railway stations and on buses, portrayed a highly attractive life at sea in tropical climes. As if to cement this perception in the British psyche, the audience at the last night of the summer festival of promenade concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London listened to a medley of orchestrated sea songs before participating in the culmination, a communal singing of Rule Britannia. Meanwhile, politicians murdered metaphors derived from seafaring, from ‘the ship of state’ to ‘steady hands on the helm’, a propensity that endured long after Britannia had ceased to rule very much, least of all the waves, a circumstance that was to overtake Conley and his fellow cadets within a decade of their obtaining their commissions.

In 1963 there was a very positive sense of opportunity, challenge and widening horizons in the Royal Navy. At its core was a force of five strike carriers armed with Buccaneer low-level bomber aircraft and Sea Vixen fighters which, together with radar-equipped airborne early warning Gannets, provided the Fleet with air cover. Plans were in place to build a new aircraft carrier of about 60,000 tons displacement, while to protect these heavy units and to provide trade protection to merchant ships in convoy in time of war, there was a force of ninety frigates and destroyers.

The submarine force of over forty ‘boats’ was being overhauled with the introduction of twenty one ‘O’- and ‘P’-class diesel submarines. Significantly, the navy’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the prototype HMS Dreadnought, had been commissioned. Of even more importance, following the Nassau Agreement of 1962, the construction of five Polaris-armed nuclear-powered submarines had been started. These vessels, known to their crews as ‘boats’ but to NATO and the high command as ‘SSBNs’, would carry the British nuclear deterrent to sea undetected beneath the dark waters of the North Atlantic. Furthermore, to defend them by both acting as a distant support to their patrols and reconnoitring enemy countermeasure forces, a class of five nuclear-powered but torpedo-armed strike submarines was planned. Formally known as ‘SSNs’, the first two of these ‘hunter-killer’ submarines, HMS Valiant and HMS Warspite, were already under construction.

To maintain the security of inshore waters, the Royal Navy possessed about one hundred minesweepers, and an amphibious force capable of deploying a full brigade of Royal Marine commandos by means of helicopters was spearheaded by two commando carriers. To support these men-of-war at sea, over forty tankers, supply and ammunition ships were provided by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. Ashore in Great Britain there were four Royal Dockyards: at Portsmouth, Plymouth, Chatham and Rosyth, with another at Gibraltar and a sixth at Sembawang, on the island of Singapore. Besides these shore establishments there were eight naval air stations and a number of naval bases scattered throughout the remnants of the empire including Bermuda, Malta, Hong Kong and Aden. For those officers and senior rates so inclined, these overseas locations offered the prospect of far-distant foreign postings. Well-appointed residences, generous allowances and, for the more senior, a retinue of domestic staff, added to their attraction.

It was not unusual for ships to undertake foreign service commissions of up to eighteen months’ duration, operating from such exotic stations. Although officers could afford to fly out their families when their ships were alongside during extended maintenance periods, this was not the case for most of the crew, who would not see their kith and kin until their ship returned to the United Kingdom. The naval rating of the early 1960s required a robust outlook and a resignation to a disrupted, if not dysfunctional, family life. In such circumstances the character of a seaman’s wife was of paramount importance in holding a family together during a husband’s absence.

Such societal demands were increasingly old-fashioned as mainstream British society evolved during the permissive decade of ‘the sixties’. If the situation of a seaman’s wife was anachronistic, there were parallels in her husband’s warship, where the inevitable entrenched perceptions of recent conflict reflected upon the overarching ethos within the naval service. Just as the ‘Big Gun Club’ of gunnery officers had predominated in the pre-war Royal Navy, aviators were pre-eminent in the Royal Navy in the early 1960s.

This naval aviation cadre had seen the post-war introduction of jet aircraft, often operating from carriers which were really too small and unsuited to this role. Coupled to aircraft with sometimes unreliable engines this was a highly dangerous occupation; even in peacetime 892 Squadron of Sea Vixen fighters embarked in HMS Hermes suffered a fatality rate of almost one in eight during a two-year commission. Although never actually used in aerial combat, of the 155 Sea Vixen aircraft entered into service, over sixty crashed and more than half of these accidents involved fatalities.

A particular hazard was a ‘cold shot’ when the steam catapult launching an aircraft from the bows of the carrier failed, tossing it into the sea ahead of the carrier. This then required its crew to exercise very great courage and incredible coolness, remaining in their sinking aircraft until the carrier’s propellers had passed overhead and then ejecting safely to the surface to await rescue. Such stories were the stuff of legend and, remarkably, there was to be no shortage of volunteers for pilot training. However, the same could not be said for the ‘observers’ who undertook the navigation and weapon-system control in the navy’s two-man jet-propelled strike aircraft and fighters. Many of them were pressed men who had entered the service with no inclination to volunteer for flying. Naturally, being positioned in a cramped space underneath the cockpit of a Sea Vixen fighter known as the ‘coal-hole’ did not appeal to many of Conley’s Dartmouth peers, since the fatality rate for Sea Vixen observers was even higher than that of the pilots.

In the early 1960s the Royal Navy’s core strategy was geared to maintaining two strike carriers east of Suez. The tasks occupying the Royal Navy east of Suez smacked somewhat of the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ of the previous century, though it was usually in support of the civil power, rather than forcing British interests upon the citizenry of other countries. Among a number of influential interventions, in 1959 a British carrier-led task force successfully repelled the threat of Iraq invading the then British protectorate of Kuwait.

Despite the possibility of conflict in the Far East arising from the insidious spread of Communism fostered by the Chinese, the biggest maritime threat to the Western alliance of NATO at that time was that of over three hundred Soviet submarines. Considering that Hitler only possessed some forty operational U-boats at the outbreak of war in 1939, the Russians had profited from the German example, fully aware of the close-run nature of the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic. The Soviet Union’s submarine force, principally operating out of the Northern Fleet base at Polyanoe near Murmansk and increasing in numbers of nuclear boats, had the potential to seriously threaten the lines of communication across the world’s oceans, but chiefly the North Atlantic. However, in the early 1960s the Royal Navy was principally focused upon Far and Middle East operations as opposed to putting the greatest proportion of its resources into Cold War containment, this task principally being that of the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR) and the Royal Air Force. In general, the Russians were not inclined to venture far from their own waters to any degree and arrayed against their submarines there was a large, if polyglot, NATO antisubmarine force which numbered in total hundreds of escorts, maritime patrol aircraft, submarines and helicopters.

Dan Conley joined the Royal Navy in 1963 through a cadet scholarship scheme. A Scottish grammar school boy from an Argyll fishing family, following the precedent of several generations of his forebears, he was set on a career at sea. An infant of the post-war baby boom, Conley had been born in Edinburgh in September 1946. His father finished his war serving in motor torpedo boats in the Far East, where hostilities did not end until August 1945 and demobilisation was slow to follow. He then returned to his traditional job, that of a herring fisherman who hunted fish for a living. The family owned a herring trawler which operated from Campbeltown on the southeast tip of the Kintyre Peninsula, Argyllshire. The port boasted a local fishing fleet of about fifty boats which, together with its supporting infrastructure, formed the town’s principal source of employment. Like all who live close to the sea, the young Conley was impressed by its awesome power in wild weather and the risks involved in making a living from fishing although, remarkably, serious accidents were few and far between in the Clyde herring fleet.

Clyde-based submarines frequently visited Campbeltown, allowing their off-duty men an evening’s run ashore. Black, sleek and sinister, they inevitably attracted local attention, particularly on the part of curious boys who would rush down to the pier to watch as they came alongside. One stormy evening such a visiting submarine ran aground in the approaches to Campbeltown harbour, an event marked by a framed picture in a local hostelry of a postman in wellington boots, accompanied by his dog, standing underneath her bows delivering mail. Conley developed an early admiration for the crews, fascinated by their air of professional swagger that carried with it more than a hint of the buccaneer. Perhaps most influential was their demonstrable and characteristic cheerfulness. Later, these insights would prove influential in his decision to become a submariner.

Campbeltown was also often used as the forward base for the trials of the high test peroxide (HTP) propelled submarines, Explorer and Excalibur. Both had acquired a reputation, owing to the tendency of the volatile HTP to catch fire or explode. Nevertheless, hints that these submarines were capable of very high submerged speed added to the appeal of the Silent Service.

The appearance of submarines in the tranquil waters of the loch only emphasised the existence of a world beyond the horizon that remained inextricably linked with the upheavals and separations which occurred after the Second World War. During their schooldays Conley and his contemporaries were well aware of the nuclear threat posed by the ideological hostility of the Soviet Union, not least through the activities of the civil defence organisation which included occasional radio or television information programmes and the distribution of leaflets describing in facile terms how to contend with a nuclear strike – hiding under the staircase or the dining-room table – and its fearsome aftermath of radiation risk. To a boy, however, such horrors seemed remote, and were easily forgotten.

In 1954 Conley’s father became seriously ill. Although he recovered after a prolonged convalescence, he was no longer able to work at sea; his fishing career was over. The family boat was sold and in the summer of 1955 the family moved to Glasgow. Here Conley passed the eleven-plus examination and attended grammar school, where his education continued to be first-rate, but he conceived no fondness for the city and decided to join the Royal Navy as a seaman officer as soon as possible. Aged fifteen he applied for a scholarship to Dartmouth and was invited to attend the Royal Navy Reserve headquarters in Leith, where he was granted a preliminary interview by a captain and a rather benign Edinburgh headmaster. An aviator, the captain tested Conley’s knowledge of naval aircraft, while the headmaster assessed the lad’s potential. Conley progressed to the next stage, two days of interviews and tests at the Admiralty interview board in the shore establishment HMS Sultan at Gosport in Hampshire. Opposite Portsmouth itself, Gosport was also the home of another stone frigate, the submarine base HMS Dolphin. One evening the dozen young aspirants comprising Conley’s selection group were taken aboard the new diesel submarine HMS Finwhale, which was lying alongside. Thirteen years later Conley, undergoing commanding officer’s training, was to become better acquainted with the cramped control room of this particular submarine with its myriad of gauges and valves; at the time he was merely awed by its complexity. Subsequent to this unwitting peep into his future, Conley’s full interview process was followed by an extensive medical examination in London, which included very stringent tests of colour vision. A failure in this courted instant rejection.

A few weeks later Conley’s parents received a letter: their son’s application had been successful. Subject to his achieving the required grades in his Scottish Higher examination, he was offered a scholarship. A year later Conley had cleared the final hurdle and, after a further trip to London for pre-entry medical tests and uniform measurements, in September 1963 the seventeen-year-old caught a train to join Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth.

Unlike the other two armed services, or the indenture required of an apprentice in the Merchant Navy, where a formal process was undertaken, Cadet Conley was accepted for training as an executive (seaman) officer on the permanent career General List on the basis of a gentlemen’s agreement.

2

Dartmouth

THE SUNNY AFTERNOON of 17 September 1963 witnessed the arrival of dozens of young men at Kingswear station, in the South Hams of Devon. They walked out of the station and boarded the ferry for the short crossing of the River Dart. Although possessed of a common purpose, all having been selected to train as potential officers for the Royal Navy, they remained individuals, staring about them and catching sight of the glitter of the sun on water, their nostrils filled with the scent of the sea. As soon as they disembarked at Dartmouth on the farther side of the river they began the process of conversion. Met by immaculately–dressed gunnery instructors, chief petty officers in naval uniform, they were ordered to put their luggage into parked lorries and then, with much shouting and direction from the instructors, they were formed into squads and began the march up the steep hill to Britannia Royal Naval College.

Seventeen–year–old Dan Conley marched among the loose ranks and files of the column. Like those marching with him, he was wondering what lay ahead. Of one thing he had little doubt: in going to sea as a naval officer he had chosen the right career. However, one of his new-entry colleagues was not so convinced about his forthcoming naval vocation and was observed two hours later boarding a taxi at the main college entrance, heading back to civilian life.

The imposing structure of Britannia Royal Naval College stands upon high ground overlooking and dominating the town of Dartmouth and the valley of the Dart. Completed in 1905 at the height of Britain’s imperium, it replaced the old hulks of Her Majesty’s ships Britannia and Hindustan, former ships of the line which had been used to accommodate and train several generations of officer cadets, despite the unhealthy conditions which prevailed aboard these ancient men-of-war. The college owed its existence to Admiral of the Fleet ‘Jacky’ Fisher, who wished to improve the professionalism of the Royal Navy’s officer corps.

Despite Fisher’s high-minded ideal, until 1948 the college had been little more than a public school, admitting fee-paying boys at the age of thirteen. The cadets passed out of the college at sixteen, going to sea in designated warships to complete their basic officer training. Although this had changed by 1963, the college retained a traditional British public school ethos, with all that th...