Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

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 this entailed by way of ritual and, of course, discipline. Up until the 1948 change to a sixteen-year-old entry, the latter included the administration of physical punishment for serious misdemeanours, the cane being applied in the college gymnasium under the supervision of a medical officer. Although the practice of matching a pair of new entrants in the boxing ring and encouraging them to beat the living daylights out of each other had been abolished, this was a comparatively recent reform. Indeed, the college retained many traditions and customs which were more in keeping with an imperial past, epitomised by the prominent inscription under the main building parapet which confidently declared — ‘It is on the Navy under the good providence of God that our wealth, prosperity and peace depend’. It was soon, however, clear to Conley, among others, that much of the college training was unsuited to a modern navy, especially as that navy took on the challenges of the nuclear age where the age of officer entry would move from the late teens to the early twenties.

At the time, the majority of the college academic staff had not significantly developed their lecturing skills from those of teaching schoolchildren to delivering a graduate-level education. Therefore, whilst there were exceptions, the overall quality of tuition was at best unremarkable. This became particularly true when the young officer returned to the college for his sub lieutenant academic year. For the full career General List executive and supply branches this followed a first year as a cadet in college and a second at sea in the Fleet as a midshipman. The sub lieutenants specialising in engineering had after their midshipman’s time, meanwhile, gone instead to Manadon College, Plymouth, to undertake their degree-level studies, a shift which acknowledged an inherent maturity not provided for their colleagues returning to Dartmouth.

For those returning to Dartmouth, the academic year consisted of indifferent teaching of English, physics, mechanics and mathematics to first-year university level. However, there was little encouragement of logical and challenging analysis, or focus on original thought. In particular, the opportunity was missed to inculcate contemporary naval strategy or the processes of decision-making in the Ministry of Defence. Significantly since it underpinned strategic thinking, curricular naval history was not only limited, but very badly taught, and there was no serious discussion or debate regarding force structures and the strengths and weaknesses of the Royal Navy, particularly in the Second World War. Unlike the United States Navy of the day, the Royal Navy did not take education sufficiently seriously and four decades were to elapse before the first Chief of Naval Staff (First Sea Lord) possessed a degree.

Perhaps more important, few junior officers leaving Dartmouth had an understanding of how the higher echelons of the country’s defence management worked, let alone comprehended the interface between the other armed services, the civil servants and the politicians.

A product of the post-war baby boom, the seventeen-year-old Conley found himself among three hundred cadets. These included a number from Commonwealth and other countries, including Iran, Morocco and the Sudan. Later, on his return to Dartmouth as a sub lieutenant, among the foreign officers were half a dozen fiery individuals from Algeria who claimed they had most recently been Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) guerrillas, who had killed French citizens and should not, therefore, be messed around with. In later years, many of these overseas trainees were to die in civil wars in their respective countries, several of the Iranians being assassinated by their fellow countrymen.

On their first entry the cadets were organised into six junior divisions, each supervised by two divisional officers assisted by a sub lieutenant under training. A divisional chief, normally a retired chief petty officer, looked after their routine requirements and completed the management team of each division. On arrival, each cadet was allocated a bunk in the divisional dormitory, issued with a basic uniform and an all-important pay book which, amongst other detail, required the declaration of ‘smoker’ or ‘non-smoker’. Smokers were entitled to coupons for the monthly purchase of 300 cigarettes especially produced for the Royal Navy and rumoured to consist of the floor sweepings of a well-known tobacco company. These were at a ludicrously low price, yet another hangover from a bygone era, and a benefit which could hardly be considered as conducive to good health. Almost the first lesson the cadets learned was to sign up as smokers in order to acquire the coupons, these being a negotiable currency.

Roughly half of the British cadets were from public-school backgrounds, most of the remainder coming from grammar schools. The General List entrants had been educated to university entrance qualification. There was also a sprinkling of so-called ‘upper yardsmen’, the quaint title for those individuals who, starting out as ratings, possessed outstanding qualities commending their promotion at an early stage in their careers from the lower deck into the General List. The former public schoolboys settled most easily into an existence with which they were already familiar. For many of the others, Conley included, induction was a more painful process as they struggled with the college routines and the very strict discipline which was enforced by all levels of the staff. Punishment for even relatively trivial offences, such as being late for lectures, involved extra drills, physical exertions or tedious changes of uniform. The practice of making recalcitrants run up and down the many steps leading to the River Dart had ended the previous year when an unfortunate youth under punishment had collapsed and died of heart failure.

Seemingly interminable time was spent undertaking training on the parade ground. Even with the Royal Marine Band attached to the college providing stirring martial music, there were those who found drill difficult, while taking charge of a squad and barking orders introduced Conley and many of his peers to a very novel and not entirely comfortable experience. Inculcating a parade-ground voice required in some cases the undertaking of ‘backward shouting’ classes, a public indication of a shortcoming somewhat hard to take. Moreover, much was made of defects in dress, such as wearing gaiters upside down, a mistake the consequences of which Conley afterwards recalled as ‘the biggest humiliation in my entire Service career.’

The over — arching aim of the first two terms at Dartmouth was to instil basic naval knowledge and discipline, while developing character and leadership skills through adventure training or boat — work aboard one of the college’s many boats. An apparent infinity of detail about the workings of the Royal Navy was instilled into the neophytes. However, a considerable amount of the instruction was of total irrelevance to their future careers such as, for example, a lecture upon the means of dealing with the anchor system on a long-scrapped battleship such as HMS Nelson. The cadets were also introduced to the more common weapon systems such as the antisubmarine mortar, all of which would be re-taught several times during the following years, just in case they had failed to hoist in the details on this first occasion.

Despite these intellectual shortcomings, as a quintessentially British institution the college offered a very wide range of sports, with recreational facilities second to none. Notably, the college possessed a very long-established beagle pack and fondly remembered hounds had their graves scattered throughout the college grounds. Other activities included flying in Tiger Moth biplanes from Roborough airfield, near Plymouth, horse riding and — besides boat-work in the college pulling boats and sailing dinghies — more extensive coastal cruises aboard one of the college’s 36ft yachts. Before joining one of the warships attached to the Dartmouth Training Squadron, Conley spent a very enjoyable week aboard one of these, sailing round the south coast of Ireland. The yacht was skippered by Conley’s divisional officer and his performance onboard the yacht was, he considered, a turning point from a rather poor start in his time at Dartmouth, as he felt that he had at last achieved the full confidence of this officer, Lieutenant Commander Chris Schofield. He was to be killed when the Avro Shackleton aircraft in which he was flying as an observer crashed into the English Channel.

Notwithstanding its deficiencies, or perhaps because of them, Britannia Royal Naval College successfully instilled the ethos, spirit and heritage of the Royal Navy, producing an elite, each of whom had an immense sense of pride in being part of a long-established armed service of the British Crown. The corridors of the college were arrayed with group photographs of previous cadet entries, and the knowledge that many of those faces staring out from the pictures had subsequently died serving their country endowed the impressionable young cadets with a profound sense of respect for what the college had achieved in the past. However, this pride was not to discourage Conley from being critical of the Royal Navy; on the contrary, his high regard for the institution was to create a desire to improve it, an aspiration formed within the hallowed precincts of the college.

The one fundamental issue Dartmouth failed to address, or even emphasise, was the requirement for reliable, effective weapon systems to enable British warships to be capable when in harm’s way. Instead it bred an ethos of making-do, whatever the odds. After all, it seemed that, despite all its inadequacies, during the Second World War the Royal Navy had nevertheless emerged victorious. In this bland assumption, the often unnecessary loss of both warships and numerous merchant ships with their crews and cargoes was ignored. Such avoidable losses were in part a consequence of the failure to make historical discourse and operational analysis central to the development of the young and aspiring naval officer. Although Conley had yet to grasp fully the extent of all this, it was clear to him that the lacklustre college teaching left much to be desired.

In April 1964, along with fifty or so other cadets, Conley joined his first ship, HMS Wizard, an emergency-class destroyer completed in 1944, which had been converted ten years later to an anti-submarine frigate. The conversion had consisted of removing the ship’s main armament and building up the superstructure with aluminium to keep the topweight down. The most up-to-date sonar had been fitted, supported by two triple-barrelled anti-submarine Squid mortars. The Wizard’s gunnery armament had been reduced to a high-angle twin 4in turret, facing aft, controlled by an obsolescent radar-driven gun director which would have been near useless in action. As a unit of the Dartmouth training squadron, Wizard had also been fitted with an additional open bridge above the enclosed one, abaft of which was a classroom which replaced a twin Bofors anti-aircraft gun mounting. Whilst her anti-submarine armament would have proved competent to deal with the conventional diesel-engined submarine of the day, like most former small warships of her era, Wizard lacked endurance and was incapable of crossing the North Atlantic without refuelling.

Conley and his classmates joined her in Devonport dockyard as she was completing a maintenance period. Here he first encountered the legendary ‘dockyard matey’, along with the many archaic and inefficient practices then commonplace in both private and state shipbuilding and ship repair facilities at the time. These very serious problems ensured that such places, run largely on assumptions of superiority which seamlessly begat complacency, were guaranteed a rapid demise as world competition exposed their actual chronic inferiority. Union demarcation was rife, leading to a bewildering number of different tradesmen assigned to simple tasks, resulting in great loss of working time and the high unit cost of each item on a ship’s repair specification. Working hours were arcane, men clocking on at 0700, almost immediately breaking off for breakfast at 0800. Although this was only supposed to last half an hour, in effect little work was done before 0900 when the first dockyard mateys boarded a ship under repair. Management was in general very incompetent, individual managers rarely appearing on board the ships whose repair they were supervising, preferring to closet themselves in their warm and comfortable offices and allowing their foremen to run the show.

The average worker was relatively poorly paid and depended upon overtime to secure a reasonable income. This encouraged a management— worker relationship which, at best, could be described as abrasive, and at worst, hostile. However, perhaps the most shocking aspect of the dockyard matey was his attitude. Few felt any sense of loyalty to the Royal Navy, and many had little pride in their work. Too often too many arrived at their workplace intending to do the minimum possible during the course of the day, and it came as little surprise that under such conditions Devonport dockyard needed a workforce in the order of 16,000.

After the shock of this industrialised aspect of the Royal Navy’s supporting infrastructure, Wizard herself proved to be an unhappy ship. Despite her recent winter training cruise having been to some delightful ports in the Caribbean, and in spite of imminent visits to Scandinavian ports, crew morale was depressed. Being new-entry cadets and therefore of low status on board, it did not take Conley and his colleagues long to smoke out the reason why the ratings were unhappy. They perceived themselves to be held in low esteem by their officers, while many of the senior leading hands and petty officers, no doubt similarly demotivated, failed to provide them with any leadership.

As for the officers, there was over-emphasis upon the cleanliness and appearance of the ship, which appeared to be the executive officer’s only priority. One soon grasped that the life of many sailors revolved around very mundane and repetitive cleaning. Those recruiting posters depicting seamen manning guns or missile systems had clearly portrayed a very false picture of life at sea on a British man-of-war in the 1960s.

The cadets had first-hand experience of this, living and working as junior sailors, cleaning, storing and keeping watches accordingly. One of the most unpopular tasks was that of maintaining the unpainted aluminium upper deck, a job accomplished on one’s knees and entailing the erasing of any marks with wire wool and soapy water. This was then finished by the application of Brasso and a vigorous polishing until the deck gleamed like silver. Apart from this being a damp, uncomfortable task, it was rather nugatory; at sea, a dollop of spray or deposit of funnel soot would quickly stain the bare metal.

HMS Wizard boasted two cadets’ mess decks where the youngsters slept in hammocks. Conley never quite got used to this, either in or out of his berth. His usually badly stowed hammock which, when not in use, was supposed to be available to plug the hull in event of damage in action would rarely have been fit for purpose. Happily, however, being largely free from the curse of seasickness, he quickly settled into the cramped confines of living and working on a frigate, even one as miserable as HMS Wizard.

Under supervision, the cadets manned many of the watch-keeping and weapon system stations including the high-angled 4in anti-aircraft guns during live firing exercises. The most demanding position on the mounting was that of the loaders, who were required by hand to ram the 100lb combined shell and charge into the gun, keeping their fingers well clear as the breech block closed automatically once the cartridge was in place. This was followed by the piercing crack as the twin guns fired simultaneously, whereupon the gun recoiled, ejecting the brass cartridge casings which could catch an unwary cadet a nasty blow should he be in the way. The whole process was repeated at an interval of once every four seconds. Below the gun mounting, the aluminium bulkheads would audibly protest, bits of insulation fell from the deckhead, while loose gear flew around. It was all quite thrilling, despite the fact that the chance of hitting any of the aircraft targets was slender. Furthermore, the standard antiaircraft shell fuse only exploded if the shell came close to the target. This differed from the earlier form of timed fuse which detonated a shell, thereby creating an intimidating barrage through which an attacking pilot must fly. Unless very close to the target, the proximity fuse produced nothing visible to put the attacker off his aim.

HMS Wizard was the oldest vessel of the Dartmouth training squadron and was accompanied by the more modern Type 12 antisubmarine frigates Torquay and Tenby, then both about eight years old. That summer the three warships visited Bergen in Norway and then Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, before passing into the Baltic Sea. Here the squadron was met by a Soviet minesweeper which was soon joined by a Riga-class frigate, which were to be the squadron’s constant escorts until it passed into Finnish territorial waters approaching the port of Turku.

This was Conley’s first encounter with the Soviet Navy, the Royal Navy’s principal Cold War opponent, and the actions of the Russians were but a foretaste of what he would come to know well as a game of intimidating cat and mouse as the two Soviet men-of-war came within a few hundred yards of the British warships. On leaving Turku, heading south, the three British frigates were again accompanied by Soviet warships units until they passed into Danish waters, a clear and demonstrable marker that the Soviet Navy regarded the Baltic as mare nostrum — ‘our sea’.

After very enjoyable port visits to Gothenburg and Steinkjer in Norway, Wizard headed back home across the North Sea. It was noticeable on the homeward passage that three of the crew had been incarcerated in separate, temporary cells, and when not locked up could only move about under escort. This did not help an already fragile ship’s company’s morale and later the cadets found out that the three prisoners faced charges of serious assaults upon their shipmates. After being court-martialled, all three were given prison sentences.

The cadets’ final week on Wizard was spent in the Firth of Clyde with her two other squadron consorts, acting as a targets for the strenuous command course undertaken by submarine officers. Known as the ‘Perisher’, owing to its relatively high failure rate, the unsuccessful suffered an instant termination to all hopes of a promising career in submarines. This was clearly an indication of standards of excellence as yet unseen by Conley and his fellows, an emphatic reflection of an elite, placing submarine commanders firmly and demonstrably in a class of their own. The lesson was not lost on Conley.

Each evening the three frigates anchored off Rothesay, where they were joined by the participating submarine, which emerged from the dark waters with an air of mystery. Along with other cadets whose interests were inclining them to consider specialising in submarines, Conley volunteered for a day at sea aboard her. The course submarine involved was HMS Narwhal and on the passage down to her diving position Conley found himself alongside the officer of the watch on her bridge. Wearing spectacles, very unusual for a seaman officer at that time, the officer of the watch (OOW) was a studious looking Lieutenant Gavin Menzies, who in later years would not only command a submarine, but would go on to write the highly acclaimed but provocatively controversial bestseller 1421, which rather convincingly set out the theory that in the fifteenth century the fleet of the Ming Emperor of China, commanded by the eunuch Zeng-He, had ventured as far as the North American continent and beyond.

Once Narwhal had dived, the ‘Perisher’ students, taking turns as commanding officer, were then put under the great pressure of having to contend with several warships proceeding at full speed towards their position with the instruction to ram the periscope if sighted. Of course there were copious safeguards to avoid this happening and the course instructor, known as ‘Teacher’, ensured the submarine went deep, well below the keel depth of the frigates, with plenty of margin to avoid collision. Spending some time in the control room, observing the students perform, gave Conley a vivid insight into the extreme intellectual pressures and emotional stresses he would place himself under if he made as far as the Perisher command course. As he returned that evening to the unhappy Wizard, Conley had a lot on his young mind.