Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

9 Perisher

In June 1975 twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Dan Conley reported to HMS Dolphin at Portsmouth to start the five-month submarine commanding officer’s qualifying course, familiarly known as the ‘Perisher’. He was only too well aware that if he ‘perished’, it was not only the end of his submarine career, but that his future elsewhere in the Royal Navy would be pretty bleak, with limited prospects of promotion. With no second chance or option of retake, it was make or break and he was determined to pass.

Originating in 1917, the Perisher course was a prerequisite for the command of one of Her Majesty’s submarines. In Conley’s time its training focused upon teaching its candidates to conduct a periscope attack upon surface ships, both men-of-war and merchantmen, and there had been only modest changes during the fifty-eight years of the course’s existence. Indeed, the anti-ship, straight-running Mark 8 torpedoes available in 1975 had not changed much in the intervening period either. Conley joined eleven other prospective commanding officers, four of whom came from the allied NATO nations of Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark.

The course was split into two sections each allocated an instructor known as ‘Teacher’, and Conley’s group of four British officers, a Dane and a Norwegian, was supervised by Commander Rob Forsyth, whom he had previously encountered seven years earlier during his trying times in Sealion. Forsyth combined great energy and dynamism with copious encouragement and consideration towards his charges.

Following several weeks of induction and training in an attack simulator, Conley’s Perisher course was structured around two sea phases: five weeks of periscope training in the Clyde, followed by two weeks of operational exercises in both the deep ocean and inshore areas.

During the periscope training each of the students would take turns at being the duty commander for one target run, while his colleagues would fulfil the supporting roles of the command team. During this training phase the Teacher enjoyed the exclusive use of the after and more powerful binocular search periscope and combined the tasks of overall supervision of the submarine’s movements and the all-important monitoring of his charges and submarine safety. The boat was, however, fully manned by her own captain and crew.

The trainees were confined to the smaller monocular attack periscope, the top few feet of which was barely three inches in diameter. The periscope training phase began with visual attacks being made on a single surface warship, usually a frigate, gradually working up in the final week to the penetration of a defensive screen of four escorting warships manoeuvring at maximum speed, in order to attack their charge, a fleet tanker.

In its simplest form a visual attack involves the submarine commander taking a set of periscope target range and aspect (angle on the bow) observations as he tracks his quarry. From this information he is expected to manoeuvre his submarine into a position from which to fire a torpedo. To achieve a successful attack using the then standard Mark 8 weapon, the submarine would ideally achieve the very close range of about 1,500 yards on the target’s beam. Because the Mark 8 was a straight-running torpedo, it required an offset to be calculated which allowed for the target’s movement during the torpedo’s running time; this was known as the deflection angle. An instrument known as the torpedo calculator would produce this, and the command team would plot the target and work out its parameters of range, speed and course in support of the commanding officer’s periscope estimations. To compensate for errors in the calculation of target parameters these torpedoes were normally fired in a spread of salvos of three or four weapons. In the era prior to the 1990s, when the Royal Navy introduced periscope television and digital imaging which allowed the control room team to view the surface picture, the commander would be the only individual who viewed the target through his periscope. The success or failure of such an attack was therefore the commander’s sole responsibility — and if he failed and the target counter-attacked, the survival of his own submarine and her company were jeopardised.

In extremis, a competent commander could, without the aid of his team or instruments, undertake the mental calculations necessary to work out the target parameters, including the correct deflection angle, and then manoeuvre his boat into a firing position. Developing such mental agility was a core part of the Perisher training and demanded strong qualities of coolness and measured deliberation in situations of pressure.

In the vast majority of combat situations, the visual attack involves a number of factors which markedly increase its complexity and difficulty. The most obvious is in order to limit the chances of one’s periscope being betrayed by a feather of wake, thereby inviting counter-attack, the exposure of the periscope must be limited to a few seconds for each viewing, keeping its elevation above the sea surface as low as possible. This, of course, risks even small waves blurring or obscuring the target image. Furthermore, to reduce the amount of wake the speed of the attacking submarine has to be kept low, ideally 4 or 5 knots. While the human eye has a field of horizontal view of over 180 degrees and a lookout may be alerted by that telltale periscope wake out of the corner of his vision, the horizontal view through a submarine periscope is very much smaller, normally less than 40 degrees. This constrained view requires the skill of rapid target location and, particularly where several hostile vessels are on the surface, of retaining a mental picture of where all enemy units are and what they are doing. Further difficulty and pressure are added if the target is protected by a screen of manoeuvring warships determined to hunt and destroy an attacking submarine before she can launch her torpedoes. Even in peacetime conditions, the unexpected close-range sighting of a destroyer’s angry bows heading straight towards one at high speed drastically raises the adrenalin of the observer at the periscope.

With each student required to fire at least one salvo of four Mark 8 practice torpedoes, additional factors added to the trainee’s woes because this element of the Perisher training took place in the Clyde Estuary. The necessity of ensuring a clear range before firing the weapons and then locating them when they had surfaced on completion of their 5,000 yards of run was complicated by the presence of merchant ships, leisure craft and the potential danger of fishing boats using trawls. Risk of collision with one of these was an ever-present hazard which had to be contended with.

A key part of the course was to train the prospective commanding officer to ‘go deep’, diving at the last possible moment to avoid collision with a counter-attacking escorting warship. This had to be done at a maximum range of 1,200 yards, or one minute of run at the combined speeds of a 30-knot warship and the submarine — and to add verisimilitude to actual warfare, the escorting warships were often instructed to try and ram any visible periscope. All this was intended to place the students under a degree of pressure as near as possible to the real thing.

Urgently going deep from periscope depth involved the submarine speeding up and applying a down angle by hydroplane, whilst filling a forward quick-flooding ballast tank — Q-tank — which held four tons of water. This enabled the boat within one minute to reach a depth of 90ft, allowing a margin of 25ft between the top of its fin and the escort’s hull or propellers. If the student had got his calculations wrong, or had missed a threatening escort, the Teacher intervened and ordered the boat deep, earning the errant student a black mark. Conversely, if an over-cautious student went deep too early, this too would count against him. The trainees were taught to hold their nerve and, in reality, there was a small margin of safety because the submarine could reach 90ft in 50 seconds.

Determined as he was not to fail, Conley prepared himself for the task ahead, honing his developing skill at assessing the target aspect by using model ships mounted on a board. He also undertook a number of daily mental exercises to ensure that he was adept at calculating target parameters, periscope sighting intervals and torpedo settings. Early in the course, at the end of the initial shore-training phase, the students were granted their summer leave. During this break Conley and his wife enjoyed a week touring France by car. For an hour or so each day as he drove, Linda, equipped with a submarine attack calculation slide-rule, fired mental arithmetic calculations at him. As a convincing benchmark of his prowess Conley found himself confident that his mental agility was up to the mark after he had successfully answered a volley of questions at the same time as negotiating evening rush-hour traffic in the centre of Paris.

Thus mentally sharpened, Conley and his five course colleagues joined HMS Finwhale at Faslane in late August to start their periscope training. Meanwhile, the other half of the course had embarked in HMS Narwhal. The two boats operated on a daily running routine, returning in the evening to a buoy mooring in the Clyde port of Rothesay where the course staff and students would disembark to stay overnight in a small hotel.

Each day, when the submarines arrived in their respective diving areas to the east of the Isle of Arran, the surface warships would commence a series of north — south orientated runs in specific formations which were geared to train the students in different facets of the visual attack. Once the attack runs commenced, the Teacher would assume command of the submarine from the boat’s commanding officer, although in theory the submarine remained the latter’s ultimate responsibility. The last run completed for the day, the command would revert to the submarine’s captain

One particular type of run involved each of the students going deep, ducking their 2,000-ton submarine under an approaching escort at the prescribed 1,200 yards ‘go deep’ range, then, once the warship had passed overhead, rapidly returning to periscope depth. Having checked the escort was still going away, the students concentrated on the prime target — most likely an escorted tanker — and re-established the overall tactical picture. This was a fraught exercise, completed in just over two minutes against the cacophony of sonar reports, propeller noises of both the passing warship and the submarine speeding up, periscopes being lowered and Q-tank being flooded and then blown empty. In the confines and noise of the cramped control room, the attack runs were highly stressful with the vibration and noise of fast-revolving propellers passing directly overhead reminding all on board of the very real risk of collision. The periodic practice torpedo firings added further complexity, with the student having to deal with internal weapon-readiness reports and tube launch preparations, and external pressure ensuring the range was clear and that no innocent vessel, such as the routine Ardrossan to Brodick ferry, became part of the action. Finally, there was the physical exertion of operating the periscope, crouching down to meet the eyepiece as it emerged from the deck, lowering the handles and then, once the top of the periscope broke the surface, rapidly swinging it onto the predicted bearing of the point of interest — the target. This was followed by determining the target’s range and bearing and then snapping up the periscope handles and ordering it smartly lowered.

Mistakes made by the students were usually very evident to the boat’s crew, who normally did their best to support the trainees. Nevertheless, there was an ongoing unofficial assessment by the more senior of them of the trainee’s fortitude, character and leadership qualities. This boiled down to two essential questions: did his performance inspire confidence and if so, would they trust him sufficiently to have him as their captain? It would also become very apparent to Teacher if an individual was not getting the wholehearted support of the crew through bullying or abrasive behaviour.

The periscope course ran from Monday to Friday with weekends spent in Faslane. Here the students could relax and recharge their own personal batteries. During the week the daily routine would consist of leaving the hotel by bus at 0630, then a boat transfer out to the awaiting submarines, which had already slipped their moorings. The day’s first duty student commander would then take the boat to sea and dive it under the supervision of the submarine’s commanding officer.

Once underwater at around 0830, the attacks would start at intervals of approximately forty-five minutes. They would be relentless throughout the day, stressing not only the students — whether they were in the command role or the supporting team — but also the submarine’s own commanding officer, and in particular his ship’s company. The crew’s responses to successive trainees, whose novice capabilities were all too obvious, demanded qualities of nerve beyond the normal. Needless to say, both their ship control and depth-keeping had to be exact within the tight margins of safety. Perhaps the most stressful job was that of the Teacher. To say that he monitored the students and intervened to prevent disaster when miscalculations occurred is an over-simplification, for within that process lay the crucial element of assessment. In order for the Teacher to carry out properly this essential element of the process on each individual student, a degree of leeway had to be allowed. The Teacher’s intervention did not necessarily occur at the moment a student had made a mistake. Intervention had to be delayed until the precise moment when the student had demonstrated that he had missed the ‘go deep’ point, and the submarine had to be rapidly taken deep for safety reasons. All the time the Teacher was seeking evidence that a student — having made an error — could quickly recover the situation, which was invaluable in terms of assessing that individual’s potential as a submarine captain.

Throughout, the Teacher, at the top of his game and continuously on his mettle, had to maintain the safety of the submarine, a particularly onerous task in the multi-ship high-speed target runs. He would be relieved for a short break at lunchtime by the boat’s own captain, but otherwise his pace was extremely intensive until the last evolution was completed early in the evening. Once an attack was over the student commander would collect up his records and receive a debriefing in the semi-privacy of the captain’s cabin. Conley’s experience under Forsyth showed that he did not over-labour mistakes, such as the missed look on a threatening warship or mental arithmetic which had gone awry, most of which the student would be aware of anyway, but concentrated on advising how improvements could be made — a subtle and effective way of encouraging greater effort without undermining self-confidence.

In undergoing this protracted ordeal, Conley felt nervous and on edge before he assumed the command role, but once he had initiated the attack run, his apprehensions would melt away, replaced by a focus and aggression as he took control of the submarine and bent her to his will. ‘It was all rather like an actor with stage-fright,’ he reminisced self-deprecatingly. ‘Once on stage one simply got on with the business in hand.’

For Conley and his peers, Perisher was the most intense and demanding chapter of their naval careers, requiring stamina and resilience, particularly when things went wrong. As he stood down from each exercise, no matter how it had gone, Conley’s inner and unarticulated sense of feeling that he was fitted for this demanding task was profound.

The day’s work over, the tension eased and the evening meal would be eaten in the submarine’s tiny wardroom on her surface passage back to Rothesay. Finally, having returned to the hotel, both groups of students and the two Teachers would gather for a couple of hours in the bar, where they convivially mixed with the local regulars. Drinking was moderate and there was no implicit requirement for a student to join the gathering, but the Teacher would have thought it odd if a student had sought the solace of his own room.

Despite the intensity of the course there were periods of humour. A petty officer steward was assigned to each Teacher to assist with the course administration and help the boat’s staff contend with the extra wardroom meals requirement. The two ratings were billeted in a separate hotel in Rothesay, and one morning they failed to make the bus as it left the officer’s hotel. Just as the transfer boat was about to cast off and head out to the submarines, a council rubbish collection truck roared down the pier at high speed and as it screeched to a halt, the two petty officers leapt from its rear loading platform, shouting their thanks to the driver. The two Teachers appreciated the levity of the situation and there were no recriminations upon their assistants for oversleeping and missing the bus. For the watching students coping with their own apprehensions for the coming day’s work, the episode was a welcome diversion.

As the course progressed, it revealed those who were struggling with their ability to handle a number of simultaneous periscope contacts, make the right calculations and the consequent decisions in manoeuvring the submarine. They began to lose confidence and became over-anxious, especially when next on to do an attack. Unless confidence was rebuilt by the Teacher through a series of specially structured runs, a descending spiral in self-belief and lack of awareness of what was going on around them in the control room could precipitate failure. Conley recalled his Teacher sorting out one student who was finding ‘ducking under the escort’ difficult. He set up four warships, 3,000 yards apart in line ahead, and coming straight towards the submarine at high speed. The student concerned was compelled to duck under each in succession, after which exhilarating make-or-break challenge, the evolution of ‘ducking under and up’ presented the individual concerned with little problem. While such a special, tailored exercise could steel a trainee and make him rise to the occasion, it was not always the case. A few students lost their nerve and it became evident that, no matter what tuition and encouragement they received, they would never make submarine commanding officers. But that was the purpose of the Perisher.

One of the rather bizarre traditions of the Perisher was the method of dealing with the student who failed. At the conclusion of yet another botched attack run, the Teacher — having over the duration of the course carefully assessed and concluded that the student concerned would never make the grade — would order the submarine to the surface. After a private, compassionate and very considered debrief, the failed student would be transferred to a fast launch and forthwith landed at Faslane. It was the Teacher’s assisting petty officer steward who organised the logistics of this somewhat melodramatic event, including a stopping at Rothesay en route to collect the discharged student’s belongings from the hotel. For the student, the abrupt and all too obvious rejection from the training submarine, over her casing and into a launch, the lone passage up the Clyde by way of Rothesay, and the lonely and conspicuous arrival at Faslane must have been a depressing experience, marking the end of the individual’s ambition to command a British submarine. Although no one in Conley’s group failed the periscope section of the course, twice on arrival at Rothesay, in the boat bringing them ashore it was noted that there was a missing face in the Narwhal section. These occasions rather dulled the evening’s relaxation in the hotel bar.

During the weeks of periscope attacks Conley and his fellow students each conducted over forty attacks. As the course progressed, he inevitably assessed how well he was doing by comparing himself with his peers. Despite making the odd serious mistake, he knew he was up to the mark during the closing stages of these weeks when Forsyth started staging theatrics while he was acting in the command role and at his station on the periscope. These including a terrified rating running through the control room pursued by a ranting cook wielding a carving knife, histrionics that must have eased the tension for the ship’s company, if not for the candidate under pressure. However, whilst feeling modestly confident and competent, Conley did not rate himself as a natural in handling visual attacks and tended to rely upon stopwatch timings, rather than trusting his innate instincts that it was time to look again at a given vessel.

On completion of the periscope attack training there followed several weeks ashore participating in a joint maritime warfare course at the Maritime Warfare School in HMS Dryad near Portsmouth. There the students had the opportunity to meet and work with the prospective commanding officers of several frigates and destroyers, with the benefits of exchanging ideas and tactical initiatives. After this the Perisher candidates started the final two-week operational phase. Conley’s section joined HM Submarine Onslaught at Devonport in early November. Travelling south by car, Conley’s sense of well-being was disrupted by his Irish Setter defecating over the navigational charts in the rear of the car. These he had painstakingly prepared for various anticipated operational scenarios, such as exercising minelaying techniques and photo-reconnaissance of shorelines of interest, during which he would assume the role of duty commanding officer. He cleaned the charts off as best he could, and wryly annotated the resultant brown stains with an indication of their origin.

On her departure from Devonport, Onslaught headed for the Southwest Approaches to participate in a major joint exercise where the opposition was a multinational group of NATO ships supported by anti-submarine aircraft and helicopters. Conley found this phase to be a step-change from the highly structured weeks of periscope attacks and for the first time he had to conduct attack procedures at night in heavy seas. Nevertheless, this element of the course passed without any serious mishaps and was followed by the final inshore phase in the outer estuary of the Clyde. This was the Perisher’s culmination, with each student taking it in turns to command the boat for a day in which to the challenge of close inshore navigation was added hostile opposition from patrol craft and anti-submarine helicopters. In these vital closing stages of the Perisher, Conley realised he was being over-cautious and risk-averse, but he was determined not to make a mistake and jeopardise his chances of success. With hindsight, he considered that he probably did not get the full benefit offered by this final fortnight at sea, but having upped his game and completed the course his achievement was considerable. To emphasise this, the course finally concluded with failure occurring right at the end. The Norwegian officer, who had been given every chance, conclusively demonstrated he could not handle the inshore situation in a safe manner.

As Onslaught headed for Faslane, Conley was called to the captain’s cabin to hear of the outcome. There he found a smiling Forsyth, who informed him: ‘Congratulations Dan, you are the new captain of Otter.’ His elation and relief on being informed he had passed was somewhat tempered by the news that he was being appointed to the one Faslane submarine available, and not one of the six Portsmouth-based boats due for a change of commanding officer. His wife Linda had recently been appointed to HMS Mercury, the communications training school near Portsmouth, and they had set up house in the nearby town of Petersfield. He rightly anticipated that this would cause severe domestic upset and end his wife’s successful career in the WRNS, but fate would have it that command of Otter would set him on course for a unique career path.

The Perisher course equipped Conley to be a competent, safe, confident submarine captain, able to handle the most demanding of inshore situations. He and his fellow students had been tested to the limit, demonstrating that they could handle extreme stress and that they would be able to knit their crews into efficient fighting units. However, ever an original thinker, he later recounted that he was dubious about ‘devoting phenomenal time and effort doing Second World War style periscope attacks, with virtually no training on the underwater target scenario, which required an entirely different mindset. Here we were in 1975, with our main threat the submarines of Soviet Russia, spending little time addressing that potential foe and, specifically, how to successfully approach and attack a submerged target.’

Conley was only too aware that a submarine commander engaging an underwater opponent needed to be able to analyse information from all of his acoustic sensors, some of it imprecise or conflicting, to make rapid and expert assessments of the situation and, most importantly, keep his team appraised of his thoughts and intentions. It was, he was convinced, all about teamwork and trust between those in the sound room and the control room and all much less individualistic than the periscope attacks situation as practised in the Perisher. Indeed, it was a real art which not all successful Perishers would, or could, master. It required a significant degree of training to gain competence, and a further amount of hard work to raise that competence to the excellence Conley envisaged. In reviewing the Perisher privately, Conley quietly questioned the imbalance of resources in what was an extremely expensive course to run. The central problem was one of culture; at that time the Royal Navy’s Perisher course had acquired a mythlike status and its format had been crafted by very accomplished Teachers such as Sandy Woodward, who as a rear admiral went on to command the Falklands campaign naval task group. It would have been very injudicious of Conley as a brand new lieutenant in command to challenge openly the Perisher content and conduct, still less its validity in the era of Cold War.

Across the Atlantic, the equivalent course run by the United States Navy, the submarine prospective commanding officers’ course, committed a far greater proportion of operational training time on the anti-submarine scenario. This aligned with the American strategy in war of deploying their submarine force forward into the enemy’s backyard, with the aim of destroying Russian submarines before they could break out into the Atlantic or Pacific, but the American submarine captain’s prowess in periscope attacks could be less than refined, and as a rule he was not so skilled in handling the shallow water, coastal situation.

It was clear to an ambitious and very new submarine commander that, despite the reforms to the submarine service he had witnessed since joining the Royal Navy, there was still work to be done. Most important for Conley the private man, it was clear that he was increasingly able to be himself an agent of the change he so much desired.