Table Of ContentFor Linda
Copyright © Richard Woodman & Dan Conley 2014
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Seaforth Publishing,
Pen & Sword Books Ltd,
47 Church Street,
Barnsley S70 2AS
www.seaforthpublishing.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84832 769 6
eISBN 9781473837683
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing of both
the copyright owner and the above publisher.
The right of Richard Woodman and Dan Conley to be identified as the authors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
Typeset by MATS Typesetting, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex SS9 5EB
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Contents
Foreword
Prologue
Introduction: The Sword of Damocles
1 The Twilight of Pax Britannica
2 Dartmouth
3 Midshipman
4 Joining Submarines
5 A Very Close Call
6 Far East Interlude
7 Submarine Activities in the Cold War
8 First Nuclear Submarine
9 Perisher
10 First Submarine Command
11 Torpedo Problems
12 From Barrow to Bear Island
13 Serving under the American Flag
14 To the South Atlantic
15 The Black Pig and the Red Banner Fleet
16 Arctic Bears and Torpedoes
17 A Kind of Victory
18 Back to the Shipyards
19 The Awesome World of Nuclear Weapons
Epilogue
Glossary
FOREWORD
Admiral the Lord Boyce,
KG GCB OBE DL
AS THE COLD WAR unfolded after the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union
commenced building up a large submarine force which posed a serious potential threat to
the vital sea lines of communication of the Western alliances. The nations of the West, and
in particular those comprising the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), aware of
the devastating effects of submarine attacks upon shipping in both the Atlantic and Pacific
during the Second World War, accordingly moved to counter this threat. As a part of this
high-priority response, most of its member nations’ submarines were modified or designed
to fulfill a prime role in anti-submarine warfare (ASW), making them capable of seeking
out and destroying Soviet submarines. The advent of the nuclear submarine in 1955,
marked by the commissioning of the USS Nautilus, with its superior equipment and much
greater endurance, range and mobility, enabled submarine operations against submarines
to reach a new level of success. Meanwhile, covert intelligence gathering upon Soviet
naval forces, which had been hitherto the province of diesel submarines, was to become an
important peacetime task of nuclear attack submarines, colloquially known as ‘hunter-
killers’. Indeed, these vessels were routinely deployed to seek out and secretly follow
Soviet submarines – particularly those capable of launching intercontinental ballistic
missile attacks on Western cities – in order to be in a position pre-emptively to destroy
them should hostilities break out. Such was the underwater confrontation of the Cold War.
In the decade after Britain’s first nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought was
commissioned in 1963, the Royal Navy’s Submarine Service changed from a force of
conventional diesel submarines, many of which were of Second World War vintage and
whose crews exuded a somewhat raffish buccaneering and independent spirit, to a highly
professional – and arguably the most important – branch of the Royal Navy. It fully rose to
the challenges of safely and effectively operating nuclear submarines, on the one hand
delivering the nation’s deterrent by means of the Polaris – and more latterly the Trident –
intercontinental ballistic missile systems; and on the other providing a highly capable anti-
submarine force of ‘hunter-killer’ submarines. The introduction into the Royal Navy of
nuclear-powered submarines armed with Polaris was a remarkable achievement in itself,
as the first British ballistic missile-armed submarine, HMS Resolution, went on patrol in
1968 only six years after the 1962 Nassau agreement – whereby the United States offered
to provide Polaris technology and equipment to the United Kingdom in order to enable the
Royal Navy to sustain a British independent nuclear deterrent.
At the same time, the Royal Navy underwent the painful contraction from a force
deployed worldwide – at the core of which was a strike force of aircraft-carriers – to a
much smaller navy, focused upon the ‘Cold War threat’. Accordingly, in the three decades
prior to the end of the Cold War, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United
Kingdom invested a substantial proportion of defence expenditure in establishing and
maintaining a potent flotilla of nuclear-powered submarines whose role was to maintain
and support Britain’s nuclear deterrent, and to counter the potential enemy’s maritime
threat directly by shadowing his units and covertly gathering intelligence.
During all these developments the Royal Navy benefited from its unique and close
operational partnership with the United States Submarine Force. Whilst by no means on
the same scale as the latter, by 1989 the Royal Navy Submarine Flotilla comprised twenty
nuclear submarines complemented by twelve diesel boats, making a very substantial
contribution to confronting and countering an ever expanding and increasingly capable
Soviet nuclear submarine force. Indeed, the professionalism and the tactical adeptness of
the Royal Navy’s submariner, and the quality of his vessel, fully matched those of the
major partner. This branch of the Royal Navy was truly in the ‘premier league’ of
maritime fighting capability.
For very good reasons the part played by the submarines of the Royal Navy, United
States Navy and those of other nations in the NATO Alliance during the tense years of the
Cold War has been shrouded in secrecy. Even today many operations which occurred
remain highly classified. In Cold War Command, Captains Dan Conley and Richard
Woodman have succeeded in delivering a unique and evocative narrative which
authentically captures the tensions and drama of this undersea confrontation which the
West could not afford to lose. Cold War Command gives the reader thrilling insights into
the physical and mental demands of operating a ‘hunter-killer’ in the Cold War era, and
provides the reader with a hitherto undisclosed narrative of events based upon vivid and
challenging experiences.
Cold War Command makes a significant contribution to charting the history of the
Royal Navy Submarine Service in the latter half of the twentieth century when it
underwent its greatest ever peacetime expansion. In particular, it describes the long and
difficult gestation of reliable, effective anti-submarine weapons which it so sorely needed.
And it is so important that individuals such as Captain Dan Conley who actually served
throughout this era, witnessing many of its important events and milestones, record their
experiences and observations. Having myself commanded a ‘hunter-killer’ and
experienced first-hand similar encounters and events as are herein narrated, I can relate to
much of its content – including the immense engineering and operational challenges
which were so successfully met by the remarkable dedication and competence of the
crews who manned the Submarine Flotilla during the uncertain years of the Cold War.
Admiral the Lord Boyce
Prologue
It was an evening in May 1985 and the sun was setting over the empty, heaving, grey
wastes of the North Atlantic Ocean, where almost half a century earlier Great Britain had
struggled to maintain her supply line in a world at war. On that day the world was at
peace. The people on the western shore of the vast ocean were still about their business,
those on the eastern side were on their way home from the toils of the day. Both were, for
the best part, untroubled by thoughts of death and annihilation. The threat of the ‘Mutually
Assured Destruction’ implicit in the stand-off between the countries of the NATO alliance
and those of the Warsaw Pact kept that peace by the unrelenting maintenance of a crude
but effective balance of power. For the NATO alliance, this strategic stalemate – the Cold
War – depended largely upon the deployment of nuclear weapons in submarines deep in
the North Atlantic Ocean.
On that May evening Britain’s contribution to this delicate mechanism was the
nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine Revenge, patrolling somewhere in the North
Atlantic. She was armed with Polaris intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of striking
at strategic targets deep inside Soviet Russia with their nuclear warheads, but she could be
vulnerable to location and – if the international situation deteriorated due to some
escalating circumstance – to potential destruction by Soviet submarines before she could
launch her deadly weapons. That, at least, was the theory.
To protect her, and to ward off the inquisitive Russians, British submarines of a
different type were also on patrol. These were smaller, highly manoeuvrable and also
nuclear-powered, but conventionally armed, known in the naval jargon as ‘hunter-killers’,
though all submariners, in acknowledgement of the unorthodoxies inherent in their branch
of the naval service, continued to buck tradition and call their craft ‘boats’. It was a
grossly misleading simplification.
On that particular May evening, Commander Ian McVittie’s Revenge had the distant
support of Her Majesty’s Submarines Trafalgar and Valiant, the latter of which was under
Commander Dan Conley, a friend and neighbour of McVittie. The Valiant was then the
Royal Navy’s oldest nuclear-powered ‘boat’ which, thanks to the demands of maintaining
her prototype propulsion plant and machinery, was known throughout the Submarine
Flotilla as the ‘Black Pig’.
Dan Conley was among those for whom the Cold War was a protracted test of
professional skill, of pitting his wits against an opposition that was always an operation
order away from becoming an enemy. For the first – and perhaps only time – this account
reveals the true nature of the submarine brinkmanship that was played out off our shores.
INTRODUCTION
The Sword of Damocles
TO THE GENERATION of Britons born in the 1940s the shadow of the Second World War was
long palpable, for the war’s legacy lay all about them. Almost all had fathers who had
been in the armed services or, if not, had worked in reserved occupations such as
shipbuilding or the armaments industry. For the younger children dwelling in cities or
large towns, but with no real recollection of the war itself, there was, nevertheless, a
strong perception of its awfulness with the impact upon their landscape of bomb damage,
and family members whose lives had been blighted.
Many British families were homeless, food was scarce, and rationing was retained as
the realities of the post-war world called for further sacrifices. And so it remained for
years as their government struggled with a shattered and worn-out industrial base, the
heavy burden of a foreign debt, insurgencies in distant colonies and protectorates, while
simultaneously attempting to rebuild an economy and provide a better life for its battered
citizenry.
The destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs
had been intended to bring the war to a quick end. But the atomic bomb and other
weapons developed during the conflict had awakened new possibilities. The German
capacity to hit enemy cities and industrial plant with guided bombs and rockets had
resulted in both the Americans and the Russians capturing and spiriting away German
scientists and engineers who had worked on these fearsome weapons, in order to serve
their own ends.
As a result of the appalling upheaval of the war, the world was a vastly different place
in the months that followed the defeat of Germany in May 1945 compared with what it
had been in September 1939. Stalin’s seizure of the nations of eastern Europe as the Red
Army rolled westwards in pursuit of the Germans turned into outright occupation of
several countries and manipulation of elections in others, producing Communist regimes
in them all. Thus was formed the Warsaw Pact, a vast buffer zone of satellite states,
cutting Europe in two. ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ Britain’s
wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, said during a speech made at Fulton,
Missouri, in 1946, ‘an Iron Curtain has descended upon the Continent.’
It had been clear by the time that the ‘BigThree’ victorious powers met at the Potsdam
Conference in July 1945, following the disintegration of Germany under the hammer-
blows of total war, that there was going to be no post-war accord between the Allies. The
Soviet Union had suffered far more than either Great Britain or the United States of
America, incurring immense damage to her infrastructure and losing some twenty million
people; the consequent Russian obsession with the defence of her borders in depth is,
therefore, unsurprising. After a war in which technology had played so profound a part,
her natural xenophobia prompted her to seize those scientists and engineers who could
serve the future ambitions of the Soviet Union, locating them away far beyond the reach
of the West, where they were set to work further developing the use of rocketry to deliver
devastation.
The United States, and less successfully the British, acted in a similar vein. The
proximity of the British Isles to the western borders of the Soviet empire, combined with
the awesome risk of a nuclear strike being launched by long-range ballistic missiles,
transfixed the British, from the prime minister and the chiefs of staff to their intelligence
chiefs and scientific advisers. There was the awful possibility of a pre-emptive strike by
the Soviet Union, a ‘nuclear Pearl Harbor’, particularly pertinent after the Soviet Union
detonated its first atomic weapon device in 1949. With the means in existence, and the
ideological differences between the West and the Soviet Union providing ends seen by
each side as legitimate, Russia was identified as the ‘next enemy’, a conclusion backed by
deeper and more visceral convictions than mere conjecture, which had had taken root well
before the end of hostilities in 1945.
Although a British admiral and his staff had attended the Japanese surrender aboard
the USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, it had been obvious that Great Britain was
emerging from the war as a weak partner to her greater ally, the United States of America.
While British science had played its part in the technological triumphs of the war, Great
Britain herself had borne a huge and disproportionate burden for her size.
Having dissipated one-third of her entire wealth, she was militarily overstretched and
her industrial base was worn out by the demands of total war. Her people, tired of war and
want, and feeling abandoned after President Truman’s abrupt and ungracious abolition of
Lend-Lease in August 1945, confronted very daunting post-war problems at home and
overseas. The country needed a rest, but was not able to seek such a luxury, for in her very
weakness there remained the problem of her empire.
For the Labour government of Clement Attlee formed in 1945, priority lay with the
reconstruction of a damaged country and the introduction of those social reforms the
promise of which had so recently defeated Churchill. Notwithstanding these daunting
challenges, it became clear that if Britain intended to retain her place in the world, she
must exert herself yet further. While her chiefs of the imperial staff mooted the ambition
of becoming a nuclear power, pleading it as a necessity, the strategic demands made by
independence movements in her colonies, particularly India, demanded attention.
The British Empire had been carved out by its traders and their ships, its services and
interconnectivity maintained by its merchant fleet and its order policed by the Royal Navy.
As a maritime empire it therefore fell largely to the Navy to supervise the process of
dismemberment. As a consequence of its worldwide deployment and the many tasks
