Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

3 Midshipman

The cadets disembarked from Wizard in late July 1964, the deployment ending the elderly frigate’s service in the Dartmouth training squadron. Paid off the following year, she was sold for scrap three years later. For the cadets, however, their naval career was about to begin in earnest, for they were about to be promoted to midshipmen, Conley being destined for five weeks’ training aboard the aircraft carrier Eagle. This was to be followed by appointment to the destroyer Cambrian, which was due to deploy to the Far East as part of the build-up of British forces assisting the Malaysian Federation in its ‘Confrontation’ with an aggressive Indonesia.

This would prove a long-lasting crisis which erupted in 1963 when President Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia threatened to withdraw his country from the United Nations (the first to do so since its establishment) and announced a policy of ‘Confrontation’ against the newly formed Malaysian Federation. This was little short of a declaration of war. Sukarno objected to the unification of the Federated States of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah (until recently British North Borneo), and claimed Sarawak and Sabah as Indonesian territories. To support the legitimate aspirations of the peoples of the new state, a significant proportion of the Royal Navy was deployed to the Far East, to be based in Singapore.

Although not a Communist himself but heading up strong nationalist armed forces, Sukarno’s relationship with the well-organised Indonesian Communist Party had troubled Western intelligence services since the Second World War. During the late 1950s the latter had supported rebellions in the Indonesian territories of Sumatra and Sulawesi, the American CIA participating in some strength, including clandestine bombing. Sukarno’s unfounded suspicions as to Western involvement in the establishment of the Malaysian Federation led him to declare ‘Confrontation’ with the new state. Incursions across the long, indistinct Borneo — Kalimantam border, combined with hit and run raids on isolated communities in Borneo and Sarawak, together with the threat of raids on international shipping in Singapore’s Keppel Harbour and elsewhere in Peninsular Malaysia — where in the event parachutists were landed — led to major elements of the British armed forces being committed to support the Malaysians. Confrontation might have been a euphemism, but it became a war by any other name, forming part of the Western policy of ‘containment’ wherever Communism or its destabilising influences manifested itself. The Indonesian-Malaysian Confrontation ran concurrently with the first movements of American forces into Vietnam, which would in time lead to the United States’ ultimately unsuccessful engagement in the long, bloody and very costly Vietnam War.

The commitment of the Western nations to a mutual containment policy encouraged the Royal Navy’s high command, despite constraints on material resources, to nevertheless view hull numbers as an overriding factor. Set against the limitations in its warships’ anti-aircraft defence systems this was a risky strategy, particularly since the major air threat to the Royal Navy in the 1960s was assessed to be the Soviet anti-ship cruise missiles launched from ships, submarines or aircraft. These missiles after launch would guide themselves to the target.

The first line of defence was the fighter or attack aircraft embarked on the five fleet carriers. However, although four of these ships had been completed after the Second World War, they were built to wartime design and were fitted with old-fashioned, inefficient steam propulsion machinery which was very expensive in fuel consumption and manpower-intensive to operate and maintain. Two, HMS Hermes and HMS Centaur, were not really big enough to operate efficiently and safely the 20-ton Sea Vixen and Buccaneer fighter and strike jets coming into service and whilst the others, Victorious, Ark Royal and Eagle, had the advantage of armour protection, particularly on the flight deck, this was at the cost of the number of aircraft embarked. Although the 45,000-ton Ark Royal and Eagle were the largest in the Fleet, they carried a maximum of fewer than fifty aircraft compared to the seventy or more carried by their American equivalents.

Ideally, the carriers would be operated in battle groups of two, which enabled comprehensive, continuous airborne protection to be maintained, together with the necessary capability to contend with multiple attacks. However, with a maximum of four operational carriers about to be reduced to three following the paying off of Centaur in 1965, it would have been impossible in practice to provide carrier air cover in more than two combat scenarios. The incoming Labour government of 1964 was quick to realise how costly the carrier force was. However, their 1966 decision to phase out the fixed-wing carrier force ignored the considerations that it provided vital early airborne warning to the Fleet, and that the capability of its destroyers and frigates to protect themselves from air attack was very limited. These shortcomings were to make the Falklands War in 1982 a close-run thing, highlighting severe vulnerabilities in anti-aircraft defence of the Royal Navy.

In the early 1960s, besides the aircraft carriers, the Royal Navy possessed only four guided missile destroyers, the County class. These were armed with the rather cumbersome Sea Slug missile which was designed to destroy high-flying anti-ship missiles. As demonstrated in the Falklands War, this system was totally ineffective against attacking aircraft. The Fleet’s medium-range gunnery systems depended upon the target remaining straight and steady so that the prediction systems could place the shells near the attacking aircraft: this type of co-operation could, of course, not be expected from an attacker. The Sea Cat missile was being introduced to provide short-range defence, but it was highly unreliable and was of low effectiveness. The remainder of the Fleet’s short-range anti-aircraft capability depended on the 40mm Bofors gun, a weapon of Swedish design and Second World War vintage, which was also very limited in its effectiveness.

Indeed, it was not until the 1970s that the much more capable medium-range Sea Dart system was introduced into service. However, this was another missile much more effective at eliminating high-flying missiles, with their inherent predictability of trajectory, than successfully engaging a low-flying aircraft or missile, owing to its sluggish reactivity. This, then, was the state of play when Conley joined HMS Eagle at Plymouth, in company with a dozen or so fellow midshipmen.

The aircraft carrier had just emerged from an expensive five-year modernisation where she was fitted with a much better angled flight deck, a state-of-the-art and very capable detection and tracking radar, improved aircraft maintenance facilities and upgraded accommodation.HMS Eagle was, therefore, regarded as the premier ship in the Fleet, very smart in appearance as she emerged from the dockyard with spotless, comfortable accommodation which seemed to possess the ambience of a new ship. Against this was the depressing fact that she still had her original propulsion machinery fitted in 1946, including eight inefficient low-pressure open-furnace boilers.

On the arrival of the midshipmen, Eagle was undergoing a maintenance and leave period before completing a series of post-refit trials with no aircraft embarked. She was destined to take on onboard squadrons of twelve Buccaneer low-level strike aircraft and sixteen Sea Vixen fighters. Aerial reconnaissance and radar early warning would be provided by flights of Scimitar and Gannet aircraft, with a squadron of six anti-submarine Wessex helicopters topping out the complete air wing of over forty aircraft.

For the newcomers, familiarisation tours of the ship quickly revealed how complex she was internally. With a crew of over 1,500 required to navigate, operate her machinery and weapons systems and to meet the necessary logistical demands of stores, catering and personnel administration, she was a complex floating community. With the air wing embarked the complement would increase to 2,500. Armoured and subdivided into many watertight compartments to enable the ship to sustain substantial damage and yet remain afloat, Conley and the three of his colleagues who were also destined for small ships, and thus only onboard for a few weeks, were soon to get to know these compartments well.

Her fixed-wing aircraft would be launched over her bow by either of two steam-propelled catapults. On landing they would be arrested by hooking onto one of four wires which provided incremental hydraulic resistance. This was a crude but effective system which, although dating back to the early days of naval aviation, nevertheless proved adaptable to the jet age.

Conley and his three companions were initially allocated to train with the engineering department. However, on their first day with the department they soon realised there was a major problem which threatened the operation of this complex vessel. Inadvertently, seawater had been used to feed two of the ship’s massive boilers. If the consequent salt deposits were not promptly removed, the intricate boiler tubes would suffer severe and disabling damage. Conley and his mates were soon into overalls, joining the boiler-room staff in the clean-up. This filthy task involved crawling into the pipework of the lower boiler, choking in the scale dust, and collecting small wire brushes which had been injected into the boiler tubes and propelled down them by compressed air. This abrasion would, it was hoped, remove the salt deposit. When all the brushes had been retrieved into a bag they were then carried up to the top of the boiler where a petty officer mechanic would again restart the process of firing them down though the mass of boiler tubes. Two days of continuous shift work completed the clean-up and gave the midshipmen experience of the many very unpleasant tasks they would expect their subordinates to undertake as a matter of course.

Having completed his fortnight’s stint with the engineering department, Conley was sent to assist one of the officers in the air department. Without aircraft embarked there was little to do, and it soon became evident that in this situation many of the more than one hundred officers in the ship were seriously underemployed. This was due to an excessive specialisation; many of the roles could have been delegated to a senior rate such as boats officer or ‘double bottoms’ engineer, the specialist whose prime task was to look after these voids and tanks on the very bottom of the ship. During this participation in the daily work of the air department, Conley was given the unlikely task of hand-drawing graphs copied from a manual, in order to provide easy interpretation of the maximum landing weights of the newly introduced Buccaneer S2 variant against a range of relative wind speeds and angles of wind over the flight deck. He could not conceive then, or long afterwards, the Commander Air, situated in the ‘Flyco’ position on the wing of the bridge, clutching one of his scruffy drawings whilst asking the captain to alter the carrier’s course to enable a safe landing.

Part of Conley’s air training focused upon the stand-off attack techniques practised by the Blackburn Buccaneer strike bomber. These involved a very low and fast level approach at an altitude of less than 100ft. The Buccaneer would attack at around 600mph and then abruptly begin a steep climb, releasing its bomb at a range of about seven miles from its target, before immediately tightly turning onto a reciprocal course. The bomb’s release velocity would then propel it until over the target. It was neither discussed nor admitted at the time, but this skilled and highly demanding form of attack was designed for use with a nuclear bomb and was an intrinsic element of the British aircraft carrier’s Cold War capability of delivering tactical nuclear strikes against enemy targets at sea or ashore. The 25-kiloton atomic bombs which Eagle had on onboard were codenamed ‘Red Beard’ and required final assembly before being loaded onto the aircraft.

In their exploration of the bowels of the ship on one occasion, Conley and another midshipman, having ignored security signage, were chased out of a magazine wherein they had encountered specialists undergoing training in the bomb assembly procedures. At the time there was a strong rumour doing the rounds that a test version of one of these weapons (containing no fissile material) had been loaded onto a Sea Vixen at sea for transfer to a shore base. However, on taking off, the aircraft could not get its undercarriage up, and as a consequence had insufficient range to reach its destination. Since a Sea Vixen carrying this particular weapon could not land back safely on the carrier, there was no option but to jettison the device in deep water in the Southwest Approaches to the English Channel.

By this time Eagle had made her way into the English Channel, where she underwent machinery trials, working up to a speed of over 30 knots with all eight boilers on line and generating 150,000 shaft horsepower (shp). Vast quantities of boiler oil were consumed in the process. From time to time the ship would anchor and shore leave be granted to off-duty men. The Eagle spent one such weekend off Weymouth and Conley was assigned to act as coxswain of one of the large ship’s boats. During his day of duty his boat had been used as a backup and all the trips to Weymouth harbour, over a mile away, had been for relatively few passengers. However, when it became apparent that there were still many of the ship’s company ashore after the last scheduled trip had departed Weymouth — by which time it was assumed that the pubs would all have been shut — Conley and his crew were dispatched to do a final trip to collect the handful of men believed to be still ashore. The maximum number of passengers allowed in the 60ft launches was 100 but, as he approached the jetty, Conley realised that the assembled number far exceeded this. As he ran the boat alongside, it proved impossible to stop the sailors from boarding, most of them being the worse for drink.

As Conley headed the overladen boat seawards, he could feel her sluggish response to the sea as her bow dug into the waves and shipped spray. He was, therefore, greatly relieved to turn in under the lee of the carrier. However, his troubles were far from over and he could see, at the head of the gangway, an array of duty staff and regulators to deal with those among his human lading who were all but incapacitated. Failing to compensate for the additional weight of his excessive number of passengers, by reversing his engine too late the boat hit the landing platform with a loud noise of splintering timber and tortured steel guardrails. About 150 inebriated voices roared in appreciation of the hilarity of this miscalculation, leaving the duty officer high above to glower down in disapproving anger.

There remained one final task for the four short-term midshipmen to complete and that was to devise shutdown routes for crew members closing hatches, watertight doors and ventilation flaps in the different damage control configurations which might have to be ordered. It struck Conley as surprising that these routes had not been established long before the Eagle had begun her sea trials. It was even more of a surprise that the task, which was the responsibility of the senior shipwright officer, should be given to four trainee officers whose familiarity with the ship’s complex internal compartmentalisation relied, up to this point, upon their own talent for exploration.

For over a week they gave it their best shot, each of them clambering round the many compartments of their respective quarter of the ship trying to develop fast, efficient routes which avoided those men assigned to the task of closing off and isolating compartments then being unable to return to their watch-keeping station. Later they learned that, when tried, their selected routes had led to ‘utter chaos’, but by that time they had left Eagle, on their way to their respective ships.

In September 1964 Conley arrived at Chatham Dockyard with two other midshipmen, one of whom had come with him from Eagle. Here they joined the destroyer Cambrian as she completed a refit. Like Wizard she was the result of the war emergency building programme, a destroyer of the CA class completed in 1944. Having spent fourteen years in reserve after the end of the Second World War, she was, with six of her sister ships, taken in hand for extensive modernisation and by January 1963 had been recommissioned. Fitted with a radar-controlled gunnery system to direct her three single, open 4.5in mountings, two forward and one aft, her superstructure had been modified to take the short-range Sea Cat system, though this was never installed and for close air defence Cambrian relied upon three vintage 40mm Bofors guns.

HMS Cambrian was of the classic destroyer profile, with an elegantly raked funnel and a raised forecastle approximately one-third of her length, and a low ‘iron deck’ that occupied the remaining two-thirds. The condition of her long, slender hull had been barely adequate after the long idle years in reserve had taken their toll. Corrosion had in several places proved so severe that whole plates had had to be replaced during her refit. A large amount of her internal space was taken up by the propulsion machinery required to generate the 30,000shp needed to drive her at over 30 knots. Her two boilers each consumed over 7 tons of furnace fuel oil per hour when steaming at maximum power (80 per cent of the energy generated going up the funnel) and her 500 tons of fuel gave her a maximum economical range of only just over 3,000 miles. Therefore she required frequent replenishments from oilers or larger warships which had spare fuel capacity. Entry into the machinery spaces was directly from the open after deck. The boiler rooms had an air-lock entry system which enabled powerful intake fans to keep these compartments pressurised, thereby improving boiler efficiency. But this crude arrangement risked a dangerous flame blow-back from the open furnace burners if the over pressure was inadvertently collapsed.

Besides the huge power plant, a large part of her hull was taken up by armament, ammunition handling gear, magazines, storerooms, fuel and freshwater tanks, so that the accommodation for her company of some two hundred ratings was extremely cramped and very uncomfortable. In harbour, with a minimum number of men on watch, many of the junior ratings slept in blankets and sheets on the tops of mess tables and benches. Most workshops were occupied by individual members of the crew berthing in camp beds to avoid their confined mess decks and the consequent smell of overcrowding. This became especially acute on the tropics. Whilst the ship had been fitted with localised air-conditioning units, these were unreliable, and in the tropics the heat generated from the additional electrical equipment fitted in the modernisation compounded an already torrid situation if the air conditioning failed.

The galley and food counters were situated in front of the funnel, requiring those in the after mess decks to carry their trays of food along the exposed iron deck. In rough weather Cambrian proved to be a very wet ship, the iron deck often out of bounds, awash in several feet of water. In these conditions the men accommodated aft messed in the fore part of the ship wherever they could find a space. In heavy weather the fetid mess-deck conditions were exacerbated by the clattering of loose gear rolling up and down the decks and the reek of vomit. In sum, the junior rates’ accommodation could at best be described as squalid. Little wonder that the traditional ‘tot’, a generous slug of rum, was so welcome at lunchtime.

The officers fared much better, most occupying single-berth cabins, while the compact but comfortably appointed wardroom provided a pleasant area to relax in. The tradition of dressing for dinner even when at sea had endured, and most enjoyed a glass or two before sitting down to eat in the evening. The officers on the whole worked as a strong team and were a convivial bunch, which made a refreshing improvement from the anonymity of Eagle’s huge wardroom population, or Wizard’s dysfunctional leadership. Conley and one other midshipman shared a two-berth cabin situated in what was effectively a steel box on the upper deck, directly abaft the funnel and adjoining the radio transmitter room, which was packed full of hot equipment. When on one occasion in the Arabian Sea the cabin’s air conditioner failed, the cabin temperature soared above 50 °C.

Apart from these shortcomings, Conley was soon made aware of the ship’s deficiencies in the way of armament. In the development of the modernisation specification for the CA-class gunnery system, one key element was missed out: that of aircraft target acquisition. A gunnery system relies upon the target being promptly detected by radar or visual means in order to direct the narrow radar-beamed gun director onto the target at adequate range for the prediction process to calculate precisely the offset required for the shells to be placed within detonation range of the target. The modern anti-aircraft shell transmits a high-frequency signal which within 100ft or so of the target causes detonation, with the intention of destroying or disabling the target. With a maximum effective anti-aircraft range of 7,000 yards, against an incoming aircraft flying at 600 knots, there were only 20 seconds available to defend the ship. Prompt target acquisition was therefore of vital importance but, in the case of the CA-class destroyers, radar target detection depended upon radar equipment from the Second World War, developed for defence against piston-engined aircraft of little more than 300 knots. Conley noted in his midshipman’s journal that ‘the Type 293 Radar did not perform satisfactorily as sometimes the test aircraft flew overhead still undetected’.

This poor performance, exacerbated by the proximity of land, was troubling. The alternative, visual target acquisition, relied upon a very rudimentary arrangement of a pair of standard binoculars being fixed to a crude device which transmitted target bearing and elevation to the gun director, and of course depended upon good visibility and sharp eyesight if the target was to be acquired in plenty of time to achieve successful engagement. There was much better and not over-expensive equipment available at the time of the Cambrian’s upgrading, but such additional expenditure was not considered an important enough matter to compromise the prime objective of maintaining an impressive number of hulls in the Fleet, for reasons already touched upon. In terms of anti-aircraft effectiveness, the resources expended upon the CA-class modernisations were squandered in the name of economy. What impact this would have had in the achievements of the class in a shooting war may be left to the reader’s imagination.

Any anti-aircraft gunnery system depending upon the prediction of the aircraft’s position is going to be seriously challenged by a low-flying aircraft adopting an evasive flight path — precisely what the Fleet Air Arm pilots flying the Buccaneers were trained to do to fox the enemy’s radar tracking. In theory at least, the high-altitude Soviet cruise missile flying straight and steady should have been a much easier target. However, this proved a faulty premise when the Israeli destroyer Eilat, which was of very similar capability to the Cambrian, was sunk off Port Said in 1967 by cruise missiles fired from Soviet-built Komar-class missile boats of the Egyptian navy. This was exactly the type of opposition Cambrian was likely to be up against when deployed against the Indonesians in the Far East. That said, within the limitations of the gunnery system, the Commanding Officer, Commander Conrad Jenkin, himself a gunnery specialist, was determined that the ship would be as efficient as possible. Consequently, the ship’s weapons maintenance team were to work very hard ensuring the system fully performed to its limited capability.

Notwithstanding the high-level reasons for doing so, reliance upon such local make-do and mend seemed to Conley extraordinary, the more so since it was a deficiency from which the Royal Navy had taken dreadful losses during the Second World War. Despite these hard lessons, for many decades afterwards the Royal Navy would continue with inadequate anti-aircraft weapon systems accompanied by a seeming lack of political or Service will to rectify this. The losses of ships to aircraft or missile attack in the Falklands War was to deliver a tardy and expensive wake-up call to the Ministry of Defence, but even then it was to take almost thirty years before the Royal Navy had a ship capable of effectively dealing with most types of air attack in the shape of the Type 45 Daring-class destroyer.

On the other hand, the Cambrian’s gunnery system would have been effective against surface ships and for use in shore bombardment. This had been dramatically demonstrated in her part in helping put down the East African mutinies that had occurred early in 1964 and which almost overthrew the government of Tanganyika which had gained independence in December 1961. The new nation’s military forces consisted of only two battalions of the former King’s African Rifles, reconstituted as the 1st and 2nd Tanganyikan Rifles, but still largely commanded by the same British officers who remained in the country. In January 1964 civil unrest occurred in the port city of Dar es Salaam and the 1stTanganyikan Rifles mutinied, disarming their officers and packing them over the border into Kenya. The 2nd Regiment, stationed in Tabora, followed suit and with the British High Commissioner detained in his residence, the key points in the capital were occupied.

With his entire armed forces in revolt the Tanganyikan president, Julius Nyerere, appealed to London for help. The aircraft carrier Centaur was despatched from Aden with a portion of the garrison and an escort of destroyers including Cambrian. The Centaur and her consorts stood off Dar es Salaam until a request was received from Nyerere in writing, whereupon Royal Marines were landed on 25 January under the cover of a brief bombardment. As part of this intimidation, Cambrian fired at the mutineers’ barracks, using anti-aircraft shells which, bursting in the air, did minimal damage. Casualties were light and little resistance was put up as the Royal Marines stormed ashore and attacked the barracks. Destroying the guardroom with an anti-tank missile, the cowed mutineers soon afterwards capitulated. Later that day the armoured cars of the Queen’s Royal Lancers were landed and soon afterwards the remaining mutineers of the 1st Rifles threw in the towel. Hearing of the collapse of the rebellion in Dar es Salaam, the 2nd Rifles signalled their willingness to surrender, and a party of Royal Marines arrived at Tabora the following day to secure this. Within a week of the outbreak Nyerere’s government was secured.

So much for Cambrian’s main armament, but what of her anti-submarine weaponry? This consisted of short-range sonars of Second World War vintage and six Squid mortars which, contrary to logic, were fitted aft. These had range of less than 400 yards and could only be effectively fired ahead. When discharged, the 300lb bombs soared in an apparently leisurely arc over the foremast to plunge into the sea a short distance ahead of the ship. In live firing trials they were invariably fired with the ship proceeding at slow speed and the bomb fuses set to explode quickly at a shallow depth to minimise the risk of damage to the warship. This system was no different from the final stages of anti-submarine weapons development during the Second World War and its effectiveness was limited to the conventional submarine of the day.

Programmed to sail for the Far East in January 1965, the inefficiency of Chatham Dockyard delayed her departure by prolonging her refit. Regarding the very sizeable workforce of 4,000 as they worked around the yard, Conley’s sceptical opinion of the Royal Dockyards was confirmed. Frequent instances of work avoidance and poor efficiency, to which the upper management appeared indifferent, guaranteed that Cambrian’s departure date slipped further and further. Far from any sense of urgency to get the ship completed and ready to rejoin the Fleet, Conley sensed an almost palpable inclination in the opposite direction.

At last, in mid December, having completed post-refit trials, Cambrian finally left Chatham to the sound of a Royal Marine band on the jetty playing the tune of a popular song: ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. This hit by a group called Peter, Paul and Mary had been adopted by the crew, reflecting the ship’s badge of the red Welsh dragon. Although HMS Cambrian was due to undergo several weeks of trials and work-up off Portland before deploying to Singapore, she was not at sea long, for Christmas was imminent. A few days later she entered Portsmouth, which was noticeably busy with more than sixty warships and submarines alongside, their crews enjoying leave over the festive period.

On New Year’s Eve, all members of the wardroom went ashore to welcome the New Year in one of Portsmouth’s pubs. Although this fell short of the spontaneity of a Scots Hogmanay, retreat to the home of one of the officers enabled conviviality to be maintained into the small hours of New Year’s Day. However, 1 January was the day appointed for the port admiral’s inspection which, despite the endemic hangovers, went well. The following day Cambrian sailed for Portland where her work-up would begin, her crew in a high state of morale, adopting the slogan ‘Keepa sensa huma’ for the duration of the forthcoming period of intensive training.

By the time of Cambrian’s departure for Singapore, the Indonesian-Malaysian Confrontation had become a hot war in all but name. Strenuous diplomatic efforts to suppress any sense of escalation had proved successful, but in the dense rainforest of Borneo/Kalimantan, the probing patrols of both sides had engaged in fierce and deadly skirmishes, while it seemed that the old piratical days of the Orang Laut had been revived, with incursions from the sea on peaceful but isolated settlements along the littoral.

The importance of Singapore extended beyond the economy of the fragile new Federation of Malaysia, for it was an important port where cargoes were exchanged between oceangoing and smaller vessels and vice versa. Of global significance, Singapore was a great hub of world trade whose long curved sweep of Keppel Harbour was always fully occupied by vessels loading and discharging cargoes, with tankers servicing the offshore oil refinery and tank farm at Pulo Bukum, and two extensive anchorages, the Eastern and Western Roads, in which vessels of all descriptions either awaited berths, or transhipped cargoes from coasters or smaller craft. Protection of the port, and of the comings and goings of merchant shipping, was an important strategic concern and although the Royal Navy maintained a dockyard and naval base at Sembawang on the northern shore of Singapore, the island itself, situated at the southern extremity of the Malay Peninsula, was only a few miles from the northernmost islands of the vast archipelago that constituted the hostile state of Indonesia. Vulnerable to commando raids, or to the planting of limpet mines on ships at anchor or alongside, defence of the port and approaches to Singapore was the responsibility of the Royal Navy in its support of the Malaysian naval forces. Further offshore, the Malacca Strait lay between peninsular Malaysia and the large island of Sumatra. The strait was an international waterway of great importance, while Indonesian raids could be launched across it towards Port Swettenham.

There had been several exchanges of gunfire between British warships and Indonesian gunboats, the Leander-class frigate Ajax having engaged several of the latter in the Malacca Strait. Meanwhile, the minesweeper Fiskerton had suffered several casualties, including a midshipman killed, when she had encountered an enemy craft off Singapore.

With battalion-strength raids by Indonesian forces across the disputed border between Borneo and Kalimantan increasing, British troop reinforcements had been flown out to increase the strength of the land forces opposing the Indonesians. In support of these operations small craft of the Royal and Malaysian Navies were involved in intelligence-gathering operations, a role in which several submarines were also utilised. Four British minesweepers and two inshore patrol craft had been taken out of reserve to bolster these inshore operations and these joined a force in excess of sixty allied warships in Malaysian waters. Besides the Royal and Malaysian Navies, these were drawn from Australia and New Zealand, and comprised men-of-war of all descriptions, from large warships to high-speed launches. Knowledge of this activity made the ship’s company of the Cambrian eager to reach the scene of action.

The Cambrian’s work-up, undertaken in harsh winter conditions, more than put the ship and its crew through its full paces, comprehensively testing the stamina, competence and teamwork of the ship’s company. There were numerous gunnery ‘shoots’ at various targets which did little to improve Conley’s confidence in the ship’s ability to contend with attacking aircraft, and many anti-submarine exercises. Considerable time was spent in dealing with the fast patrol-boat threat, in boarding suspicious vessels and in protecting Cambrian herself from saboteurs when at anchor or in harbour.

Replenishment at sea was frequently exercised with a Royal Fleet Auxiliary, combining re-storing with refuelling, while other ‘evolutions’ included rendering assistance to a stricken ship and taking a casualty in tow. Matters were even taken to an extreme, with a full nuclear fallout exercise when the Cambrian was shut down with ‘pre-wetting’ pipework used to cover her with a fine spray of seawater as, with her crew hunkered down in their citadel, she passed through a notional ‘hot zone’. This evolution conveniently ignored the fact that it was impossible to shut down the boiler rooms and after a real nuclear attack, these would have become heavily contaminated, as would the open gun mountings.

Although risk of a nuclear encounter was minimal, in such an operationally variable theatre as the Far East it was necessary to consider all possibilities. Mindful of her last active engagement off Dar es Salaam and in common with all foreign deployments, Cambrian’s crew trained to ‘aid the civil power’. In a war such as the Confrontation was, landing shore parties for a variety of purposes was highly likely. To these ends Cambrian’s ship’s company were taught to assist in the suppression of riots and how to provide disaster relief. It was not all serious stuff; one evening, when alongside and at short notice, the crew were required to put on VIP entertainment, including a short son et lumière production which, using searchlights and piped Gilbert and Sullivan music, passed off surprisingly well, one positive result of training in the art of making-do. On another occasion, Cambrian entered harbour entrance in full ceremonial order, her ship’s company manning the side in their Number One uniforms to carry out a ‘Cheer ship’ to a fictional state president. All in all it was a thoroughly testing few weeks during which Cambrian, despite her age and obsolescent equipment, did well, earning a commendation and passing her final inspection with flying colours. Not with-standing the limitations of their ship, her company emerged as a strong, bonded team. This was, of course, the essential point of her work-up for, whatever the poverty of its pocket and the shortcomings of its weaponry, when it came to push of pike the Royal Navy retained the great asset of its tradition and the effect it could produce from its people.

For the minions aboard it had been a period of stimulation. It was fortunate for Conley that his commanding officer had been keen to delegate and he had been allowed to keep bridge watch on his own during daylight hours when things were reasonably quiet. The sense of satisfaction and responsibility that Conley experienced when Jenkin handed the ship over to him for the first time and disappeared down the bridge access ladder was memorable. To an eighteen-year-old, manoeuvring a powerful warship in close proximity to other vessels was exhilarating in the extreme, although mistakes risked the strong invective of the captain.

Their work-up completed, Cambrian returned to Portsmouth for a few weeks storing and maintenance, during which members of the crew were granted leave. Finally, however, their sailing orders arrived. It was now late March 1965. On the Friday before departure many of the ship’s company brought their wives and families aboard and that evening a dance was held in a local sailors’ club. This was one of the few opportunities the officers had to meet the wives and girlfriends of many of the crew. On the Monday the ship’s company would be saying goodbye to their families for at least six months, able only to communicate by letter, but to a man they were looking forward to the deployment.

The morning of Monday, 26 March was overcast, dull and drizzling when Cambrian slipped from her berth, passed Fort Blockhouse and proceeded to sea. She was bound first to Aden by way of Gibraltar. The brief stay in Gibraltar proved enjoyable for the ship’s company, but was marred by cases of drunkenness among the crew. There were several arrests, two junior ratings ending up in a Spanish jail in the border town of La Linea, charged with breach of the peace after a fight in the streets. Another was in hospital after being beaten up by a taxi driver. Excessive boozing, leading to trouble ashore and sometimes onboard, was an enduring feature of naval life, cheap alcohol and high-spirited young men being a fatal mixture, especially in foreign ports.

A few days after Cambrian’s departure from Gibraltar she arrived off Port Said. Entering the Suez Canal she led a southbound convoy of about thirty merchant ships of several nationalities. Passing a military airfield between the Great and Lesser Bitter Lakes, her officers noted some forty MiG-17 strike fighters, together with a score of obsolescent MiG-15s of the type which had so startled the Americans over Korea fifteen years earlier. To the observing British naval officers, the latter appeared in reserve but the increasing tension between Israel and her neighbours — which would culminate in the Six Day War of June 1967 — made the sight more interesting.

Clear of the canal Cambrian headed south down the Red Sea with temperatures onboard steadily increasing. Passing through the Strait of Babel-Mandeb, course was altered along the coast of Yemen until Aden was reached in early April.

At the time the Aden Protectorate was being rocked by civil unrest stirred up by armed and active groups backed by Yemen and Egypt, whose aim was to foment trouble compelling a British withdrawal. A number of deaths had been caused, large areas of Aden City were out of bounds to servicemen and their families and after midnight there was a curfew in place. This unrest was to touch Cambrian herself when, on the evening of their arrival, her captain, first lieutenant and two other officers were attending a formal dinner ashore. Despite being in a heavily guarded building, a grenade was thrown into the room. Fortunately, it failed to detonate properly and there were no serious injuries.

The Cambrian was further involved when the following day she was unexpectedly directed to proceed to sea to search for and intercept an Iraqi cargo vessel suspected of running arms to the rebels. For two days the ship slowly searched eastwards along the coastline, hoping to detect her quarry when she was within territorial waters but locating only a few dhows. In the prevailing light airs and high temperatures, life in the non-air-conditioned compartments became very difficult. For the ratings, toiling in the boiler and engine rooms in temperatures in excess of 40 °C, frequent drinks and salt tablets were essential if they were to avoid heatstroke.

Returning to Aden for a few days’ self-maintenance allowed an excursion or two. Conley joined a party of the ship’s company on a trip to the Royal Engineers’ camp in the Radfan Mountains. Bumping some fifty miles up the rough, unmetalled Dhala road in a convoy of army trucks led by a Scimitar light tank, they passed up into the arid highlands, an area which had been a hotbed of insurgent activity. Each member of the party was issued with an ancient .303 rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition, triggering a debate as to whether, if they got into a real firefight, twenty rounds would prove sufficient. Told to sit well forward, clear of the truck’s rear axle, to minimise injuries if they detonated a landmine, they complied assiduously after passing the remains of several vehicles wrecked by mines. They were, however, blissfully unaware that there had been ferocious fighting on the Dhala road only a year earlier between British forces and insurgents.

The two-hour journey through the stark and barren mountain valley exposed them to the poverty and basic living conditions of the few villages through which they passed. Most male adults, they observed, carried a rifle of sorts, subsistence relying upon the sparse cultivation of a few vegetables and the tending of goats. It was an insight for Conley, the huge divide between the affluent West and the austere poverty of the Yemeni tribesmen they came across that day making a lasting impression upon him, in the light of which the emergence of al-Qaeda proved no real surprise.

They saw more Yemenis, men of the local militia who manned an ancient mud-walled fort which could have been straight out of the novel Beau Geste. This rag-tag band was of dubious reliability and loyalty. The Royal Engineers’ tented camp was close by, and their hosts advised them that their neighbours frequently fired their guns in celebration and were not averse to occasionally shooting up the camp by way of amusement. Several of the soldiers’ tents had bullet holes in consequence, and their more exposed facilities, such as the toilet blocks, were protected by armour plating.

The officers in the party enjoyed a very pleasant lunch in the officers’ mess; even in this remote and forlorn spot the regimental silver was on the table. On the other hand, the naval officers detected a degree of scepticism regarding the building of a road which led to nowhere, the task which the engineers were engaged upon. After lunch they were given a tour of the camp and its outposts before heading back towards Aden. The return journey was memorable, the army drivers showing off by leaving the road and tearing over the rocky scrub to hoots of indignation from their passengers.

After nine days in Aden undertaking self-maintenance and exerting a naval presence, Cambrian sailed for the island of Abd al Kuri, which is situated about sixty miles west of Socotra off the Horn of Africa. The island was at that time part of the Aden Protectorate and a British possession, and the ship’s mission was to conduct surveys of beaches on its northern coast. The purpose of this was to establish whether the beaches would be suitable for landing materials in order to construct a military airfield as part of the putative but, in the event, impracticable strategy of providing RAF air cover of the Indian Ocean. This policy was intended to compensate for the demise of the strike carriers by providing a circle of airfields around its periphery but, needless to say, it never got off the starting blocks.

The island of Abd al Kuri is about fifteen miles long and three miles wide; with mountains rising to about two thousand feet, falling away to a narrow and desolate coastal plain with few trees and little vegetation. Although the crew saw no sign of human habitation, fires were spotted at night on the eastern extremity, indicating that there were members of the local population about. The Cambrian first approached the more exposed southern coast where the British cargo ship Ayrshire lay beached. Two months earlier this eight-year-old ship had struck an uncharted rock to the south of the island and her master had deliberately driven her ashore in a sinking condition. The passengers had been lifted off, but her crew was still onboard and Dutch salvage tugs had arrived to patch her up and pull her off before the onset of the southwest monsoon.

The Cambrian’s captain and several of the crew visited the stricken vessel. Clearly, the warship’s presence was welcomed, as some of the Ayrshire’s crew were becoming agitated about their prolonged isolation on such a remote island. The Ayrshire’s master offered Commander Jenkin any of the cargo which was transportable and of use. Two days later, Cambrian having anchored off the more sheltered northern shore of the island, a working party was landed and crossed the island to the Ayrshire to see what sort of loot they could acquire. On the way back, the party left a trail of discarded goods as the return traverse across the hot and rugged interior of the island proved too much for them. Nevertheless, a large Persian rug survived the land crossing, only to be lost into the sea on being hoisted aboard; after the strenuous efforts to get it thus far, it was observed that some of the raiding party were almost reduced to tears. The fate of the Ayrshire herself was no better for, sadly, the Dutch salvage attempt was not successful and she became a total loss.

While this diversion was in progress, surveying had begun on a beach on the northwest side of the island which was considered suitable for landing craft. The survey technique involved deploying the ship’s whaler and taking hand lead-line soundings on the run into the shoreline, each sounding being fixed by observing the angles between three fixed and known points ashore. These angles were measured using a sextant horizontally and back onboard the destroyer were carefully and accurately transferred to a chart. However, the method suffered from being difficult to execute in a small whaler rocking in an ocean swell, and required both practice and time to accomplish successfully.

Conley learned something of its difficulties when on the third day of work he joined the survey team. After only two hours of surveying, the whaler worked too close inshore, where she was caught up and swamped by an incoming roller. With a saturated and defective engine the boat was beached, Cambrian was informed of the whaler’s plight by radio, and her sodden crew awaited the ship’s motor cutter to tow the whaler back to the ship. Offshore the odd shark could be seen, while the beach itself was littered with millions of dead blowfish forming a spiky obstruction at the high-water mark. With the waterlogged whaler baled out and towed back to the ship for repairs by the motor cutter, Conley and company were left ashore until finally assisted by some of the ship’s temporary Royal Marines detachment (embarked to assist in the survey), who arrived in an inflatable to return them to the ship late that afternoon, most of them badly sunburned after being exposed on the beach for several hours.

This incident ended the survey. Enough data had been collected to verify the beach was indeed suitable for landing craft but that was the end of the matter. Abd al Kuri was in due course ceded to Yemen but in later years and in light of subsequent events, Conley often considered that had Britain retained the territory and built an airfield on it, how important it would have become in supporting both operations in the Persian Gulf and the protection of merchant shipping against piracy.

After leaving the island Cambrian made a rendezvous with HMS Eagle and her escorts, being assigned the duty of plane guard. The purpose of this was soon made crystal-clear, for very shortly after taking up her station on the carrier’s quarter, one of Eagle’s Scimitar strike fighters experienced engine failure and the pilot ejected. He was quickly rescued by helicopter but Cambrian’s motor cutter, under Conley’s charge, was lowered to recover one of the Scimitar’s wings which was floating nearby. Unfortunately, the attempt proved futile, though they did pick up the pilot’s helmet, a disconcerting experience since, at the time, they had no way of knowing whether the pilot was under it.

The following day Conley and his fellow midshipman who had served in Eagle were transferred by helicopter to the carrier to witness flying operations. The twenty-four hours the two young men spent aboard the carrier proved exciting, as from a grand vantage point they watched the Vixens and Buccaneers landing onboard in the dusk and darkness. Their pleasure was ruined after being spotted by the shipwright officer, who lambasted them for their incompetence in developing the damage control shutdown routes mentioned earlier. They also ran into a pilot instructor from their Dartmouth days who had impressed upon them the very high casualty rate incurred in flying Sea Vixens. Dressed in full flying gear and about to climb into his Vixen cockpit, he looked distinctly tensed up.

A few days later, having left the Eagle and her consorts, Cambrian headed for Singapore where she arrived in mid May. She was to conduct several patrols aimed at inhibiting Indonesian infiltration of Singapore or the Malaysian mainland. Prior to this and in the light of the experience of others, vertical steel plates were secured down either side of the iron deck. This was to provide some protection to any boarding party assembling where the freeboard was lowest, prior to scrambling onto an intercepted vessel. This was a vulnerable moment for those involved and several incidents of exploding booby traps had been encountered, the most recent aboard a minesweeper when a member of her crew had been killed by such an anti-personnel device on a boat ordered alongside for inspection. In addition to this extemporised armour, a Bren gun was set up above the bridge and this was complemented by two sharpshooters with high-velocity rifles.

During daylight hours the boarding and inspection procedures were exercised with any random small craft encountered at sea, but by night the ship was darkened, bereft of navigation lights, all noise suppressed as far as possible. A listening sonar watch was maintained in an attempt to detect any craft attempting a high-speed dash across the strait. In the event, there was an overwhelmingly high density of sonar contacts, and no suspicious craft were identified; nor were there any meaningful interdictions made during the course of the patrols.

In late May Cambrian returned to Singapore for storing and refuelling prior to proceeding to Hong Kong for an informal visit. The ship sailed with about fifty Chinese unofficially embarked on the upper deck for the passage, all of whom were reputedly ‘cousins’ of Cambrian’s Chinese laundrymen, and who brought with them an array of possessions: bicycles, sewing machines and laundry equipment.

As the Cambrian brought up to her anchor in Repulse Bay, prior to entry into Hong Kong, Conley received another shock at the world’s poverty when he observed Chinese approaching in sampans to scoop up the garbage which had been dumped over the stern. In the main the Royal Navy maintained a benevolent attitude to those less privileged: in addition to the unofficial passage granted to the extended families of the Cambrian’s laundrymen, the official engagement of a local ‘side party’ was a long-standing tradition of the Service in Hong Kong. The side party invariably consisted of half a dozen women to which, on this occasion, a young girl was attached. They were supplied with paint, rollers and brushes, and undertook the painting of the Cambrian’s grey topsides in exchange for collecting unused galley food and some worn and redundant nylon mooring rope.

When the Cambrian put to sea a week later, the side party, dressed in their finery, accompanied the ship out of the harbour in their decorated sampan, detonating firecrackers of fulminate in appreciation of the ship’s largesse; it was a strangely touching, even numinous moment, as they worked the long sculling oar or yuloh over the sampan’s stern in an attempt to keep up with the lean grey shape of the destroyer. Eventually, they dropped astern and out of sight, an odd link between two vastly different cultures and part of the hail and farewell of seafaring.

On her return to Singapore, Cambrian undertook yet another maintenance period, berthed alongside the repair ship HMS Triumph. Owing to their own vessel being shut down, the ship’s company were moved into temporary accommodation aboard the former aircraft carrier. On dumping his gear into the cabin allocated to him, Conley discovered in the wardrobe the uniforms of two midshipmen who had died in action during the Confrontation. Clearly, nobody had thought about the clothing’s prompt return to the next of kin.

Life, Conley was quickly made aware of, went on and midshipman’s examination boards were convened aboard the commando carrier Bulwark, with the practical engineering oral tests on board Cambrian herself. During the course of the predominantly oral examinations, in answering set questions Conley failed to cite correctly the formula used to determine the weight of an anchor cable link or to describe the ‘Canterbury’ test for the purity of the ship’s boiler feed water. These examples were notable only for the futility of some of the detail a midshipman was supposed to absorb. Despite his failure on these two arcane points, Conley’s board results were satisfactory, if unremarkable, marking his progress.

In early July, towards the end of her deployment to Singapore, HMS Cambrian joined the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and a number of other warships to carry out an exercise in the northern part of the Strait of Malacca. Despite her frequent stops for maintenance, Cambrian was showing her age, her smooth running interrupted by a series of defects culminating in a fire in pipe lagging in the engine room. It was minor and soon extinguished, but the threat of such occurrences only made the demanding duty of acting as plane guard even more stressful.

This role required the Cambrian to take up a station on Ark Royal’s port quarter at a range of half a mile. Keeping station at night at speeds of up to 30 knots, while frequent heavy tropical rain squalls markedly reduced visibility and caused severe sea clutter on the radar, was very challenging. The situation was exacerbated by Ark Royal’s occasional tardiness in communicating intended changes in her course and speed. On one occasion the carrier’s stern loomed unexpectedly out of the darkness as Cambrian almost overshot her, not having received any signal indicating a drop in speed. Since this incident occurred shortly after the Australian carrier Melbourne had rammed and sunk her plane-guard consort, the destroyer HMAS Voyager, and eighty-two of the destroyer’s crew had perished, it might have been assumed that procedures would have been tighter.

On completion of the exercise Cambrian headed for the island of Penang for a week’s visit. One of the ‘A’-class diesel submarines which had been engaged in operations off the Indonesian coast, HMS Amphion, was berthed alongside and her crew were very grateful to be offered showers and other facilities aboard Cambrian. Conley was struck by the high morale of the submariners, who had just enjoyed a very successful exercise as the opposition against Ark Royal and her escorts. At the end of a memorable run ashore, several of the ship’s wardroom, including Conley himself, took part in a trishaw race in heavy rain. In this the trishaw owners were bundled into their own conveyances and relaxed under their hoods, pleased to earn a fare whilst the high-spirited naval johnnies did the pedalling.

Penang was the last port of call for Cambrian in the Far East and she soon afterwards left for Aden. After refuelling at Gan, the most southerly of the Maldives, she escorted the commando carrier Bulwark across the Indian Ocean. In early August the two men-of-war entered Aden, where the security situation had deteriorated further. All ships in the harbour, both men-of-war and merchantmen, were on high alert for fear of attack by saboteurs.

Since Conley’s year as a midshipman was coming to an end, he left the Cambrian on 6 August and transferred by boat to the British India Steam Navigation Company’s Waroonga, which was bunkering in the harbour. He had arranged to complete his homeward passage aboard a merchant ship for the experience it offered. The Waroonga was a cargo liner, not quite the luxurious passenger liner he had hoped for, but a ship bound to a schedule, unlike a tramp ship. In the event, the several weeks he spent in her, visiting Djibouti (at the time a French Foreign Legion outpost), Genoa, Marseilles and Dunkirk, served to broaden his maritime knowledge. With a lascar crew, life in the Waroonga was comfortable and Conley was impressed by the professionalism of her officers, but for the young midshipman, with his sharp eye and quick perception, it seemed a life dictated by routine and commercial imperatives. With individual officers standing the same watches each day, this seemed a dull existence compared to the Royal Navy. Even the menu was governed by the day of the week, so that he began to expect curried chicken on a Sunday.

These comparisons forced on him during his passage home made him focus on his achievement so far. He had, he considered, learned a great deal during his midshipman’s year about the workings of the Navy, how ‘Jolly Jack’ functioned, and what was expected of a junior officer undertaking basic seamanship and the more abstruse skills of bridge watch-keeping. He had been afforded and accepted responsibility, had had several adventurous experiences and served with a friendly wardroom alongside a resilient and committed ship’s company in a happy ship. One of the most enduring benefits of his period as a midshipman in Cambrian was encountering and engaging with people from very different cultures and possessing values other than those of the West; like most seafarers, his eyes had been opened to a wider world.

On his return to the United Kingdom, Conley was promoted to acting sub lieutenant and returned to Dartmouth for his year of academic studies. When this socially very enjoyable but academically disappointing period was over, he spent a further twelve months in the Royal Navy’s specialist schools — aviation, navigation, gunnery, etc — which existed at the time. When the year of courses ended, he and his fellows would be stuffed full of detailed information, a large proportion of which they would never refer to again, but from the social perspective, it was a very enjoyable time. Travelling round the country, staying in a number of stone-frigate wardrooms where a strong sense of camaraderie and first-class facilities existed, Conley was able to enjoy most of his evenings and weekends. Unsurprisingly, it was the serendipitous pleasures that left the most lasting impressions, and the highlight of these was a low-level flight over the north of Scotland from the Lossiemouth naval air station in a twin-seat Hawker Hunter jet trainer. It proved ‘absolutely thrilling’ to fly up a glen in brilliant sunshine at over 500mph, following the contours before cresting the summits of snow-covered mountains. However, kitted out in a tight fitting G-suit, the downside to the experience was a slight feeling of claustrophobia in the cockpit, a worrying paradox for Conley as he had already volunteered for submarines.

In 1967 the Labour government under the leadership of Harold Wilson had made the decision to withdraw British forces from east of Suez and, as mentioned earlier, started to pay off the aircraft carriers. On the other hand, they remained committed to the introduction of Polaris-armed nuclear submarines, despite many of them having been active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, better known as the CND. However, the number of submarines to be built to carry the missile would be reduced from the planned five to four. In addition Wilson’s government also confirmed a commitment to build up a potent force of the nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) following the commissioning of HMS Valiant, the first all-British nuclear submarine.

Thus the Royal Navy with its limited resources was to shift focus from naval aviation to submarines, a clear indicator of Wilson’s intention to abandon underwriting an increasingly outdated foreign policy and move towards shouldering more of the burden of Cold War confrontation. This appealed to Wilson both as an advocate of the ‘white heat of technology’ and as a means of signaling to Washington that in laying down her imperial burden, howsoever reduced her circumstances, she remained a key ally.