Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

6 Far East Interlude

Lieutenant Conley joined the diesel submarine Oberon in refit at Portsmouth Dockyard in the summer of 1969. Commissioned in 1961, the boat was undergoing an extensive two-year modernisation. This included improved accommodation and, crucially, a much better air-induction system for the engines which, together with a significantly more capable air-conditioning system, would improve equipment reliability and make life much more comfortable for the crew. Despite the Labour government’s declaration of withdrawal of British forces from the Far East at the end of 1971, when her refit and work-up were completed Oberon was to be deployed to this region.

As work in Her Majesty’s Dockyards moved with its usual sluggishness, the refit was suffering delays and the ship’s officers were constantly engaged in dialogue with the dockyard authorities in order to instil somehow a sense of urgency in getting the work completed. The more time in dockyard hands, the less time the boat would be based in Singapore and, as this would be an accompanied deployment, where the families would join married crew members at government expense, there would be less time for the dependents to live there and enjoy the many benefits and pleasures of this foreign posting. Besides generous overseas pay and allowances, Singapore naval base had its attractions of being very family-friendly and offered excellent recreational facilities. Already the completion date had slipped by several months, and departure was now no longer scheduled for early 1970. The Americans might have put men on the moon but Portsmouth Dockyard was incapable of delivering ships and submarines from refit to schedule.

Conley was designated as sonar officer and ‘third hand’, the most senior seaman officer after the captain and first lieutenant. However, on joining he was disappointed to discover that, despite the costly modernisation, there had been no updating of the sonar suite which remained essentially 1950s technology. Indeed, its long-range sonar was much less capable than that fitted in Sealion.

Shortly after he joined, the commanding officer addressed the entire ship’s company and announced the introduction of the ‘military salary’, which put armed forces pay on a comparable basis of remuneration to broadly similar civilian occupations. It meant a substantial pay rise for most. However, for Conley and his bachelor peers the best part of the deal was that in the future they would be paid the same as married men, and the archaic practice of paying marriage allowance would be ended. A few months later what was called a ‘delicate text’ signal was received, announcing the end of the ‘tot’— the daily rum ration. The Royal Navy was moving on. Today it is inconceivable to consider that Polaris missile technicians would carry on their work on nuclear-tipped missiles after having consumed a large slug of alcohol at lunchtime.

Recommissioned in February 1970, Oberon headed north to the Clyde for two months of trials and work-up. Unlike Sealion she was immaculate in cleanliness and appearance and with an experienced and competent sixty-five-strong crew, all bode well for her forthcoming deployment.

The trials and work-up mostly progressed in a highly satisfactory manner, although the two stern tubes, which could only discharge the useless Mark 20 anti-submarine torpedoes, never achieved a successful proving firing. These two tubes were subsequently only used for stowage of beer and the two embarked stern warshot torpedoes were carried out to the Far East and back again, effectively performing no role other than ballast. The quietness of the ‘O’ class was emphatically demonstrated during static noise trials in Loch Fyne with the boat suspended in a dived condition between four buoys above acoustic sensors on the seabed: the trials had to be put on hold on several occasions whilst noisy ducks feeding on weed on the buoy wires, causing more noise than the submarine, were chased away.

The commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Terry Woods, was very keen to ensure that his officers were competent to navigate close inshore in a covert manner without the use of radar. Consequently, during the work-up he made certain that they all experienced the pressure of night watches submerged in shallow water close to navigational hazards. At night, keeping constant watch on the periscope whilst snorting among merchantmen and fishing vessels was good training for the congested waters off Singapore and Malaya.

During a break in the work-up Oberon berthed in Campbeltown for two days. Conley was surprised to see his brother on the pier as they secured alongside. The latter explained he had just attended their grandmother’s funeral and burial. This was the grandmother who, on the night of Sealion’s depth excursion and near-catastrophic accident, had had the premonition that her grandson had drowned at sea. By extraordinary coincidence the old lady was being laid to rest with the submarine as a backdrop a mere half a mile away as it passed Campbeltown cemetery.

Oberon sailed for the Far East in June 1970. To enable the passage to be conducted at a reasonable speed, and to avoid undue strain on the engines, the majority of the 12,000-mile route via South Africa was completed on the surface and, as most of the boat’s tracks were well away from the shipping lanes, the bridge watchkeepers spent many a night under brilliant starlit skies without seeing another vessel, with the only sounds the subdued rumble of the diesel engines and the noise of the sea breaking on the bows. In starting to plan the passage the commanding officer had aired the option of conducting the entire passage to the Far East dived and thereby achieving a first for a diesel submarine and breaking several endurance records (the nuclear British hunter-killer Valiant had completed an entirely submerged transit from Singapore to the United Kingdom in 1967 in twenty-seven days). However, he was soon dissuaded from such a wild notion. As apart from morale factors and the crew forgoing a number of very attractive port visits, the sixty-plus days of snorting with its much increased seawater pressure on the engines would put a real stress on them and other equipment.

Having called at Gibraltar, Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, and the lonely and isolated outpost of St Helena, Oberon docked at Simonstown naval base near Cape Town in mid July during a sleet squall — not quite the South African weather the crew had envisaged. However, they were soon immersed in the remarkable hospitality offered by the local population which had a great affinity for the Royal Navy. This affection had been cemented during both world wars when Simonstown had served as an important Royal Navy base.

The apartheid regime of Prime Minister Verwoerd’s National Party had for several years been subject to embargo, and the denial of British arms equipment made it difficult for the South African Navy to source spares for their predominantly British-built ships. Indeed, an unwillingness on the part of the British government in the 1960s to supply the South African Navy with ‘O’-class submarines had led them to purchase three French Daphné-class boats in lieu. All named after Afrikaner nurses who worked in British Boer War concentration camps, the first of these, the newly commissioned Maria Van Riebeeck, was in Simonstown when Oberon arrived.

Conley and some of his fellow officers were invited to look round this first South African submarine and were immediately struck by how less robust in design it was in comparison to their own boat. Comparatively small, with a less-safe snort induction system and non-enclosed battery tanks, they sensed the Maria Van Riebeeck officers, most of who were not experienced in submarines, were uneasy about operating their boats in the notoriously large and violent seas off the exposed South African coast, which has few sheltered harbours or safe anchorages. No doubt the loss a few months earlier of a second French boat of this class, with its entire crew, was fresh in their minds.

After a few days’ maintenance Oberon was off to sea for anti-submarine exercises with the South African Navy. The opposition consisted of their Clyde-built frigates President Pretorius and President Kruger. Towards the end of the exercises, Conley was transferred by helicopter for two days’ experience onboard the Pretorius. He found many ways in which the ambience in the ship was like the Royal Navy two decades earlier. Even the wardroom china bore the obsolescent Admiralty crest. However, manned by white conscripts doing their national service, these ships did not spend much time at sea, and Conley noted that these men were demonstrably nowhere near as professional as their British counterparts. This observation proved prescient, as several years later the Kruger was to sink with heavy loss of life after collision with the replenishment tanker Tafelberg.

Leaving Simonstown, Oberon headed north towards Mombasa, meeting up with the frigate HMS Lincoln, on her forlorn and futile station off the port of Beira in Mozambique. The Beira Patrol was a blockade intended to choke off oil supplies to the white supremacist regime of Prime Minister Ian Smith in Rhodesia which had repudiated its colonial status by a unilateral declaration of independence. Sanctioned by the United Nations, the blockade lasted from 1966 to 1975 and involved a total of seventy-six Royal Navy ships, but it proved very ineffectual as fuel was trucked through South Africa and other contiguous countries. As a result of the combined effects of guerrilla warfare led by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, and international pressure, the Smith regime conceded to the introduction of universal franchise in 1980 and subsequently Mugabe’s long and often violent and repressive tenure as president of Zimbabwe began. The Beira Patrol and the many years Royal Navy ships spent on this thankless and lonely task have long since been forgotten.

Oberon arrived in Singapore in September and secured alongside the ageing depot ship HMS Forth, sister ship of the Maidstone. As in a few months the Forth would be returning to the UK, Conley elected whilst in harbour to live in the wardroom of the shore base, HMS Terror, a very comfortable, airy, colonial-style building, cooled by overhead fans as opposed to air conditioning. Living in a non-air-conditioned building had the benefits of rapid acclimatisation to the heat and humidity of Singapore where it rained most days, with a tropical downpour occurring generally in the afternoon.

The Singapore naval base of 1970 was very different in character from that which Conley had left in 1965. Confrontation had ended later that same year when President Sukarno’s power base collapsed and the Indonesian threat faded. Fewer warships were now supported by the dockyard which had been taken over by a civilian entity, Sembawang Shipyard. This company had quickly turned it into a thriving commercial ship repair and maintenance facility. Everywhere else it was evident that the Royal Navy was winding its presence down and in the process of shipping equipment and stores back to the United Kingdom.

Being populated predominantly by immigrants from China, Singapore had withdrawn from the Malaysian Federation owing to its increasingly ‘Malaysia for the Malaysians’ policy which favoured those of Malay origin. The latter had sparked riots in several of Malaya’s major cities in 1969 leaving hundreds dead, most from the minority Chinese communities. However, in late 1970 the region was enjoying peace and prosperity, despite the Vietnam War raging with increasing intensity a few hundred miles to the north.

Life in Singapore for the crew of Oberon was a far cry from that experienced at home. What was known as ‘tropical’ routine was worked in harbour, the crews arriving for work at 0700 in the morning and those not on duty securing at 1230. As there was a shortage of naval married quarters, accompanied ship’s company members were found rented housing locally. For reasons of economy, most of the ratings’ families were housed in the Malaysian district of Johor Bahru, across the causeway which linked Singapore Island to the mainland. Although living in very reasonable houses and sometimes electing to employ domestic help, many of the young ratings’ wives found their existence in Johor when their husbands were at sea a very lonely and boring one, with no TV and a lack of family or friends. For this reason, although Oberon experienced few disciplinary incidents during her time in Singapore, a host of family welfare problems occurred, many exacerbated by the tropical climate and refuge being sought in alcohol to counter homesickness.

For Conley and his fellow officers, apart from the many attractions of the very cosmopolitan city of Singapore only a few miles away, there was an excellent officers’ club on the base with swimming pool, golf course and other sports facilities. He and the boat’s other bachelor officers invested in a second-hand ski boat and many afternoons were spent waterskiing on the flat calm waters which separated Singapore from mainland Malaysia, taking picnics onto the smaller islands or many pristine beaches. During weekends there were often trips with his peers and their families into the Malaysian jungle to an idyllic, secluded spot with a river pool suitable for swimming, fed by a very picturesque waterfall. For both officers and ratings it was a very different existence from that of the Clyde submarine base, Faslane, with its cool, wet climate and much more onerous demands upon crews, with longer periods spent at sea and fewer port visits. However, it was somewhat surreal and was, in effect, the end of an era and it would be a real shock to their systems when they returned to Scotland.

As there was no naval threat in the region nor Soviet presence, the boats of the Seventh Submarine Division (Oberon, Finwhale and Orpheus) were primarily tasked to provide anti-submarine training for the still substantial number of Royal Navy warships in the area. Oberon, acting in the role of Soviet submarine, was to take part in several major exercises involving very large numbers of American and allied warships. There was also a fair number of port visits ‘showing the flag’, each involving a very crowded cocktail party in the crammed confines of the wardroom and control room where conversation with people having a limited grasp of English was difficult. On one occasion the commanding officer hosted a black-tie candlelit dinner party for a dozen dignitaries in the torpedo compartment, a table being set out between the weapon racks in close proximity to thousands of pounds of high explosive.

Whilst on long surface passages, in calm seas the opportunity was taken to hold barbecues on the casing or to stop and broadcast ‘Hands to bathe’, keeping a sharp lookout for sharks. At night in flat-calm conditions, the folded-in fore planes provided an excellent means of securing a cinema screen, enabling the watching of movies under the stars.

On one occasion, on surface passage in very poor weather conditions in the East China Sea off the southwest coast of Japan, as the submarine dived in readiness for exercise with Japanese warships, the bridge OOW brought below a racing pigeon which he had found resting in an exhausted condition just above the upper conning tower hatch. With the sea racing up towards the hatch, it had made no resistance to being picked up and stuffed down the OOW’s foul-weather jacket. The bird was taken forward to the torpedo compartment, and having been dried off and given some food and water, made a very rapid recovery from its ordeal. Within a few hours it had made itself completely at home using the top of one of the torpedoes as a roost. On the final day of the exercise the submarine surfaced briefly to embark a party of Japanese admirals. On reaching the torpedo compartment the visitors pointed excitedly to the bird and very clearly thought it was an emergency communications system. Their guides having used sign language to signify it was a racing bird, their excitement gradually subsided on grasping that the Royal Navy Submarine Service did not embark messenger pigeons.

A day later Oberon arrived in the port of Shimonoseki situated on the southwestern region of Japan and the pigeon was released, quickly heading off on its interrupted journey. No doubt a Japanese pigeon racer received his bird safely back, albeit the best part of a week late and, of course, with no idea that it had spent several days under the sea in a British submarine.

Both the civic dignitaries and the naval community of Shimonoseki were outstandingly hospitable to the crew of the British submarine and arranged a host of activities. Perhaps the most memorable of those was a large reception in the city hall, which included a performance of traditional Japanese singing and dancing. On its completion the convivial hosts, fired by copious quantities of sake, demanded that their British guests perform on the stage. A number of very enthusiastically delivered verses of ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm’ had the Japanese audience reeling in fits of laughter.

Sometimes the exercises Oberon took part in involved the clandestine night landing of special forces. One of the most common techniques of doing so was to embark four Royal Marines with two canoes. Surfacing well to seaward of the designated landing spot, the craft and their occupants would be placed on the casing and the submarine would be submerged underneath them. A raised periscope would then pick up a rope rigged between the two craft and the submarine would tow them towards the shore to a suitable release point where they were let go by simply lowering the periscope. The reverse was achieved at a predetermined rendezvous point in darkness by each of the canoes lowering a simple but distinctive acoustic device which the submarine would home onto using its sonar. Steering between the bearings of the two devices would enable the rope between the canoes to be snagged by the raised periscope and the tow out to sea effected. Communication between canoes and submarine was achieved by the means of a simple code passed both ways by red torchlight through the periscope lens.

Conley had but to admire the Marines as they headed towards tricky landing spots such as mango swamps which harboured a variety of unpleasant and venomous creatures. In later years, some of the ‘O’ class were fitted with diver lockout chambers in the fin which enabled Marines to be landed without the need for the submarine to surface. This could be a dangerous operation and one trial involving the Orpheus killed two Marines. The exercise, held in Loch Long, went wrong when the submarine, entering less dense water, suddenly lost her trim and went deep. Her commander increased speed to regain control and the two Marines, having left their chamber loaded with kit, were swept off the casing and were unable to reach the surface.

In November 1970 Lieutenant Conley was informed by his captain that he was to be elevated to the position of first lieutenant, second in command. There had been an evident personality clash between the commanding officer and his ‘number one’ and the latter was to be moved to a shore job in the base. With only three years’ experience in submarines, the twenty-four-year-old Conley knew that he would not have been his captain’s first choice, but presumed there was no alternative at short notice. Difficult months were to follow as Conley bedded into his new responsibilities and headed up a wardroom consisting now of close friends. However, learning from his Sealion experience, he was not to be afraid of privately challenging his superior, whose judgement on occasions could be eccentric.

All too soon the deployment was over, and in September 1971 Oberon left Singapore and headed home on surface passage to join the Third Submarine Squadron in Faslane. On 31 October 1971 the Far East Fleet sailed from Singapore for the last time, ending a ninety-year connection with Sembawang. Most of the remaining barracks and shore buildings were transferred to the Australian army under a five-power agreement (Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Malaysia) but with no permanent Royal Navy units in the region.

Meanwhile, on 1 July that same year the ‘A’-class submarine Artemis had sunk while lying alongside a jetty at HMS Dolphin. Fortunately, no one was killed in the incident and the three ratings trapped onboard overnight escaped successfully from the torpedo compartment. The sinking was not due to material failure, but incompetence and slack practices on the part of key personnel, who failed to monitor the trim of the submarine during fuelling, allowing flooding to occur through an open hatch near the waterline. Indeed, this incident, where there had been a litany of professional failures, was a severe jolt to the Submarine Service that prided itself in its professionalism.

Clearly, it needed to shake off the somewhat cavalier ethos embedded in a number of its officers and senior ratings. Artemis had been in refit at Portsmouth Dockyard at the same time as Oberon and therefore its officers were well-known to the Oberon wardroom who, on hearing about the event the following day, were very relieved to hear that no one had been killed.

Oberon’s return passage was largely uneventful, again spending some time in South Africa visiting the ports of Durban and East London, in addition to a period alongside for maintenance in Simonstown. In early December the submarine arrived in the Clyde submarine base before departing a few days later for Barrow-in-Furness where she was to undergo a two-month routine docking and repair period in the hands of the Vickers shipyard rather than in the Clyde submarine base as originally planned. This was not welcome news for those married members of the ship’s company, whose wives, having moved from Singapore to Faslane in August, now faced further separation from their husbands

The rather grim Cumbrian industrial town of Barrow was a stark contrast to the bright, vibrant, modern Singapore and although it had the redeeming feature of being very close to the stunning countryside of the Lake District, many of Oberon’s crew found it difficult to adjust to the much longer harbour working hours, the routines of submarine life in northern climes and the loss of their generous overseas allowances. Most of the longer serving officers and ratings, having done their standard two-year time onboard, were being posted elsewhere, but their replacements were not always up to the mark in terms of either attitude or competence in comparison to their predecessors. In particular, the new officers were rather an indifferent lot. For Conley’s part, despite having been onboard well over the two-year mark, he was required to remain in post for another six months for continuity reasons.

Conley and Woods had made a good team, despite the significant gap in age and seniority between them, and the latter had delegated well. At sea he trained his second in command in how to conduct visual attacks against aggressive warships and proved a good mentor. He had also allowed Conley on his own to move the submarine between berths in the dockyard, a challenging experience on his first time, manoeuvring in a narrow basin crowded with warships. A year into the job, Conley had matured and gained much experience, developing into a capable second in command, and possessing a superb knowledge of the submarine’s systems. They were both strict disciplinarians who ran a taut and efficient submarine, where the crew knew exactly what was expected of them in terms of standards of behaviour and performance. Therefore, Conley was sorry to say farewell to Woods, and he was never to build nearly the same level of confidence or rapport with his new captain.

With no barrack accommodation available in Barrow, it was a major challenge to get the crew’s accommodation arrangements sorted out in the run-up to Christmas, most being set up in lodgings run by landladies of a very kindly and hospitable disposition. Conley arranged accommodation for himself in a remote Lake District cottage, where several officers standing by the build of the SSN Swiftsure were already ensconced.

In 1971 the Vickers shipyard and engineering works was a vast, sprawling complex which employed over 13,000 people. Barrow and Vickers were almost synonymous, most of the town’s 80,000 population either working for the company or having a close relative involved in it. The shipyard was a hive of activity with two ‘O’-class boats being built for the Brazilian Navy in addition to Swiftsure and two sister submarines in various stages of construction. Besides submarines, the first of the Type 42 destroyers, HMS Sheffield, was being fitted out, and a small liner was on the stocks. However, in marked contrast to Singapore’s Sembawang, the yard was very inefficient: trade demarcation remained rife, the layout and geographic spread of its facilities were not in the least conducive to good working practices and planning/project management procedures were weak. That said, the management and workers exuded a great deal of pride in their work, and were scornful of many aspects of the standard of work which had been undertaken during the Portsmouth Dockyard refit.

The early 1970s were a dark chapter in British industrial history, with high levels of strikes and stoppages and very poor management — worker relations. In January 1972 there occurred the first of a series of strikes by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) which severely interrupted fuel supplies to power stations. An unprepared Conservative government led by Edward Heath declared a state of emergency on 9 February, which led to factories and offices being restricted to a three-day working week. This did not help Oberon’s passage through the repair period, which had already had been significantly extended by unforeseen defects and the shipbuilder’s inclination to complete the work to a costly, gleaming, new-build standard.

During the national state of emergency, frequent planned power cuts occurred which made life challenging for Conley and his peers in their cottage. However, their local inn, demonstrating both resilience and initiative, lit by candles and oil lamps, remained warm and hospitable and somehow managed to provide hot food. Not that food was an issue as lunch was provided in one of three directors’/senior managers’ dining rooms in the yard, the three known as the ‘gold, silver and bronze troughs’, where even the lunchtime repast was consumed strictly accordingly to seniority.

Oberon eventually left Barrow in April 1972 and started work-up and post-repair trials in the west of Scotland. This was a period of great difficulty for those members of the crew who had enjoyed a halcyon existence in the Far East. Whilst satisfactory results were achieved in the work-up, owing to a number of inveterate troublemakers amongst the crew, morale was very fragile and there had been several disciplinary cases, aggravated by what could be regarded as weak leadership on the part of some of the officers. In particular, in disciplinary matters Conley found it very difficult to work with his new superior, whom he felt had a rather laissez-faire attitude to standards of crew behaviour. The situation was made worse by the boat’s new coxswain, the senior rate vested with the responsibility for crew discipline, who was both mercurial and perhaps not as loyal to the officers as he might have been. The three individuals were not in the least a team, with strong tensions between them, which in the confines of the submarine must have been evident to the crew. All this was exacerbated by several of the new officers proving to be short of competence and this contributed yet further to the atmosphere of poor spirits and motivation within the tight spaces of the boat. With four SSBNs in commission in 1972, each with two crews, and thirty other submarines needing to be manned, the Royal Navy was finding it difficult to find good people when it came to crewing Oberon.

Events reached a nadir whilst the submarine was secured to a buoy in Loch Fyne, off the picturesque town of Inveraray. Several of the off-duty junior ratings, when ashore and enthused by copious quantities of alcohol, decided to attempt to acquire the Duke of Argyll’s flag flying from the top of the highest tower in his lochside castle. Breaking a window at ground level to gain illegal entry, one individual severely lacerated his leg on the broken glass and was abandoned unconscious in the Duchess of Argyll’s dressing room whilst his compatriots, giving up on stealing the flag, instead removed four ancient muskets from the walls of the grand hall. Further damage was perpetrated on their leaving the castle, when they attempted to remove a cannon from the balustrade surrounding the building, and this ended up in a damaged state in a ditch.

The following day, when undertaking noise trials in the loch, an urgent signal was received from the captain of the Third Squadron requiring a full investigation into events in the Duke of Argyll’s castle the previous evening. The duke was a personal friend of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Michael Pollock, and consequently a great degree of disquiet was voiced at several levels of the command chain about the above happenings. This was further exacerbated after a search of the submarine revealed the four stolen muskets which had been brought onboard undetected, owing to the absence on the casing of the duty officer when the liberty boat arrived back from Inveraray. The local police handed the case over for the Royal Navy to deal with and disciplinary proceedings swiftly followed onboard against the miscreants, all of whom received suspended sentences of detention, but Oberon’s name had been very much sullied at a high level. All this confirmed Conley’s view that it would have been best to change the entire ship’s company when the submarine returned from the Far East.

Work-up was followed by several weeks during which Oberon was designated the training boat for a class of prospective NATO submarine commanding officers. This commitment gave Conley further insight into the severe stresses and demands of the Perisher course, which in the case of the NATO students was intensified by their unfamiliarity with the boat’s equipment and the necessity of conducting their attacks issuing rapid orders in their second language, English.

This period at sea was to be Conley’s last in Oberon and he was extremely pleased to be relieved and to hand his responsibilities over to someone else. Owing to a poor relationship with his captain and his feeling of isolation from several of the new officers, his last six months in the boat had not been a happy period. Furthermore, Oberon was no longer the elite, smart, efficient boat it had been in the Far East. After leave and professional courses, Conley was destined to join his first nuclear submarine, the brand new first-of-class Swiftsure, which he had enviously eyed some months previously when in Barrow.