Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

11 Torpedo Problems

Having relinquished command of Otter in April 1977, Conley was appointed to the Submarine Tactics and Weapons Group (STWG) at Faslane, heading up the Tigerfish torpedo crew certification team. He was under no illusion that in comparison with his Perisher peers, this was not the most prestigious of post-command appointments. It was cold comfort to learn that the only one of his colleagues who seemed to have come off worse had done so after inadvertently hitting the seabed in his boat, HMS Cachalot. Nevertheless, there were aspects of the job which he considered vital, insofar as future Royal Navy submarine war-fighting capability was concerned. This ameliorated any disappointment he felt as he took charge of a small team of officers, chief petty officers and ratings, whose role was to train submarine crews in the competent handling and control of the new Tigerfish torpedo, a process known as ‘weapon certification’.

Tigerfish was the long awaited anti-submarine weapon which Conley and other young officers of his mettle had been hankering after. Unfortunately, not only was the new torpedo many years overdue, it was rapidly acquiring a reputation for unreliability and poor performance, in consequence of which some of the disdain being heaped upon it by commanding officers was rubbing off onto the certification team.

Possessing a total strength of nine SSNs and four SSBNs, together with more than twenty diesel submarines, the Royal Navy’s Submarine Flotilla was becoming a very potent force. Meanwhile, with an increasing amount of intelligence about Russian submarine movements and locations becoming available from sound surveillance system (SOSUS) chains in the North Atlantic, it had become vital to have central co-ordination for patrolling submarines and aircraft. This also ensured that British and American SSBNs were kept informed of any potentially threatening Russian vessels in their patrol areas. Accordingly, British submarines in the northeast Atlantic were now controlled from the Royal Navy and RAF Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) operational headquarters in Northwood, London.

Thus in 1978 the Flag Officer Submarines and his staff decamped from their old-fashioned offices and facilities in Fort Blockhouse, Portsmouth, to Northwood, a sure sign of the abandonment of its past image of a buccaneering sideline in favour of being the Royal Navy’s crack strike force. With the strategic increase in the activity of Soviet submarines of the Northern Fleet, this elevation of status was, of course, predicated upon having an adequate anti-submarine weapon and no longer relying upon a vintage, short-range antiship torpedo.

STWG was a recent response to this step-change and combined the existing Flotilla tactical analysis group with the new Tigerfish weapons team. This organisational concept was novel in the Royal Navy and was based upon the American model of a single organisation which developed tactics alongside the assessment of both the effectiveness of weapon systems and the competence of crews trained to use them. The logic of this is inescapable; a crew could not be called upon to execute a tactical task without the right weapon or training but, remarkably, comprehensive analysis of weapon system effectiveness was new to the Royal Navy. Its initial introduction at this level of rigour had been established with the adoption of the United States Navy’s Polaris, where all facets of a SSBN’s capability to launch and deliver its nuclear warhead on target were examined — thus underpinning the effectiveness of the terrifying concept of Mutually Assured Destruction — MAD.

The requirement to destroy, or at least inhibit, a potential enemy’s ability to accomplish this had led, as we have seen, to the development of the hunter-killer submarine. Weapon system effectiveness in the submarine versus submarine scenario, therefore, analysed a number of factors from initial target detection by sonar, the approach to a firing position, followed by weapon launch and guidance onto the target. Only by thorough training and high degrees of weapon performance and reliability could this guarantee the destruction of the enemy; not only was a miss as good as a mile, it was likely to result in a possibly fatal counter-attack.

In its early days, some submariners regarded this concept with hostility or suspicion, not least because the resultant cumulative probability calculations often produced results of alarmingly low levels of success. This can be illustrated in the example where there is a 1 in 3 chance of a submarine detecting a given submarine target and achieving a successful firing position, to which similar odds, of one torpedo and its control equipment being reliable, have to be added. Thereafter, a 50:50 chance of the weapon’s performance being adequate to destroy the target produces the startling outcome that a single attack opportunity yields a success rate of a mere 1 in

18. Of course, if two or more weapons were fired then the odds would shorten, but many in the Submarine Flotilla hierarchy did not want too much attention paid to such statistics, particularly when it was apparent that neither surface warships nor the Royal Air Force applied such rigorous analysis to their own weapon systems.

If any justification was needed for assessment of this nature in the submarine versus submarine scenario, it is important to note that, when applied to the effectiveness of Polaris, it produced a figure that was consistently in the high ninetieth percentile.

It was in this highly fervid atmosphere that Conley now found himself. As a douche of cold water, the apparent disinterest many senior submariners displayed in Tigerfish soon dismayed him: few demonstrated much enthusiasm in acquiring an understanding of its characteristics, let alone its nuances. This was very much the antithesis of the culture of the detailed knowledge of submarine systems which had been the basis of his early training. Most of the hierarchy were focused instead upon the Flotilla’s concept of operations at the time, the orthodox buzz phrase for which was — ‘By confronting the Soviet today, being prepared for tomorrow’s war’. In other words, if it were demonstrated that the Royal Navy’s submarines could gather intelligence upon and covertly follow Russian warships and submarines in peacetime, somehow all would be well in war. To Conley it was clear that many of his superiors were almost egregiously ignoring the lessons of history and, in particular, the severe impact that previously mentioned torpedo failures had upon the effectiveness of both the German U-boat campaign against Allied shipping in the Battle of the Atlantic and the American submarine campaign in the Pacific War.

Ironically, Conley fully appreciated that a commanding officer returning from a daring and very successful intelligence-gathering mission was bound to receive a much greater accolade and acclaim than one whose boat had excelled in the much more mundane certification process of handling and firing Tigerfish, the problems of which he now had to wrestle with.

The anti-submarine torpedo employs two principal homing techniques, the first of which uses its own sonar to seek out and guide itself towards the high-frequency noise being emitted from the targeted submarine. Its second homing method is to transmit high-frequency acoustic pulses to detect and intercept the target. Passive homing has the disadvantage that by emitting very little noise in the high-frequency spectrum a quiet submarine may elude pursuit by a torpedo. There is virtually no such emission in the case of a diesel submarine slowly propelling herself by electric motors, hence the necessity for a secondary method, that of active homing. However, the distinct pulses transmitted by the questing torpedo in this mode risks the targeted submarine being prematurely alerted, allowing it to use speed and/or decoys to successfully evade the attack.

The advent of the Russian nuclear submarine, with its much greater speed and agility, demanded a torpedo much more capable than the old Mark 23 wire-guided torpedo which was the Royal Navy’s main heavyweight weapon from the early 1960s onwards. Severely limited in performance by its slow maximum speed of just 18 knots, a very limited depth capability and no active homing mode, it relied upon the targeted submarine making sufficient noise to attract its attention. Conley’s experience indicated that this was not often the case and its modest speed made it highly unlikely to catch a nuclear submarine capable of 30 knots. It was considerations such as those fundamental deficiencies that sharpened the appetite of Conley and his ilk for a change of weapon, and much had been expected of the Tigerfish to answer this urgent need. The fact that it should have been in service in the late 1960s made its introduction all the more necessary, but a number of factors, including the reliability of its components — based to some extent on the failure of available technology to fulfil the designed specification — had delayed its entry into service by almost a decade.

The wire-guided Tigerfish was an electric torpedo which had a maximum speed of 36 knots and could home actively or passively. A number of different commands were transmitted from the attacking submarine down its wire, but its Achilles heel was the already described very unreliable arrangement for paying out the guidance wire. Apart from restricting the attacking submarine to a speed of about 6 knots, the outboard wire dispenser often ‘tumbled’ as it detached from the torpedo, causing the wire to break. Unlike the contemporaneous, much faster but noisier, active homing American Mark 48 torpedo, Tigerfish had to be ‘command armed’ after it had been launched, and a broken wire meant that even though it acquired its target and successfully homed upon it, detonation would not occur. The Mark 48, which armed automatically, was normally fired upon a target intercept course, with its appropriate offset, making it much less reliant upon wire guidance and thus was much more effective.

Tigerfish was, alas, introduced into service at a time when British manufacturing was at a nadir in terms of both quality of output and the industrial relations between management and the shop floor. This was most publicly made manifest by the poor quality of the products from the then leading British car manufacturer British Leyland, but it was common to other manufactories, a product of post-war malaise in management, a lack of investment and an air of entitlement among skilled workmen. It was also a period of parlous government finances, high levels of inflation and the infamous bailout of the United Kingdom by the International Monetary Fund in 1976.

It was against this background that the new Tigerfish torpedo was being manufactured by Marconi Underwater Systems Ltd. Thus poor component manufacture, exacerbated by a paucity of funding for the urgent rectification of its shortcomings, led to the serious delay in both the introduction of the Tigerfish and remedying its extremely poor performance. This situation was convincingly hidden by the Ministry of Defence behind the obvious imperatives accorded to the SSN building programme, though in fact there appeared to be a perverse lack of impetus to ensure that the primary strike force of the Royal Navy was adequately armed.

At Conley’s end of this almost ludicrous situation there were other problems. The practice Tigerfish weapons, used for the crew assessments and certifications that he and his team were expected to carry out, used rechargeable propulsion batteries. These were different from the high performance single-use units fitted to the war-shot torpedoes. The former were prepared for firing by the MoD Armament Depot at Coulport, near Faslane, where the workforce were nicknamed the ‘Coulport Bears’ on account of their strident militancy inherited from their antecedents, who worked in the Clyde shipyards. Their preparation of the practice weapons was often less than thorough, further and significantly compromising an already low reliability.

Conley took over from a highly experienced lieutenant commander who had a brilliant intellect, but suffered from a very debilitating dependency upon alcohol. Most of the weapons firings took place at the British Underwater Test & Evaluation Centre (BUTEC) range, with its headquarters in the small Inverness village of Kyle of Lochalsh. The certification team would be landed overnight and as there was no Service accommodation available they would be billeted in local hotels or bed and breakfast accommodation. Conley soon realised that many of his staff enjoyed serious drinking in the local hostelries, displaying no sense of urgency to get the weapon firings completed as quickly and effectively as possible, let alone pass the records back to Faslane for in-depth analysis. This had become apparent to the submarine crews and was another factor which had done nothing to enhance the image of Tigerfish, or contribute to any sense of importance regarding its introduction.

Conley quickly applied change and made it clear to his subordinates that the days of going onboard a submarine in a lethargic state, suffering from a hangover, were over. From now on, only the highest standards of professionalism would be acceptable. This shake-up soon produced dividends.

The BUTEC tracking range, completed in 1973, was a very poor second in comparison to the American alternative, AUTEC. Only about five miles by three in size, its depth of water was relatively shallow and in its early days its tracking hydrophones on the bottom of the seabed were prone to be damaged by trawlers, until an exclusion area was rigorously enforced around its boundary. The range vessels and equipment required to support the torpedo firings were also not up to the mark, all of which further hampered the effectiveness of the firings conduction, and the testing of the submarine crews. The situation was worsened by the poor quality of the range staff, many of whom also had a penchant for excessive drinking, the curse of many communities in the west of Scotland.

During Conley’s early days at the BUTEC the shore and jetty facilities were still under construction and its senior naval officer was temporarily ensconced in the Kyle of Lochalsh stationmaster’s old office. The station platform was also used to transfer torpedoes on trolleys from the recovery vessels to the trucks which returned them to Coulport. This produced the public benefit of occasional family holiday snaps featuring children astride a Tigerfish, the Royal Navy’s new secret answer to the massive Soviet submarine threat.

Conley quickly made himself unpopular with the range personnel by shaking up the whole BUTEC organisation. Well aware that submarine time was at a premium, he demanded extended range operating hours lasting until sunset, instead of the cosy practice of ending activities at 1600. He also insisted on the instigation of rigorous daily checks to ensure the range equipment was properly functioning at the start of the day’s firings.

Prior to his arrival, the submarine crews undergoing certification only fired their weapons against unchallenging static noise targets which were a leftover from earlier development trials. He soon changed that by introducing mobile targets, both surface ships and submarines, which either by natural characteristics or by noise augmentation replicated closely the characteristics of Russian submarines. These were much more demanding for the crews to engage successfully and revealed a number of new problems, such as that of the noise made by a running torpedo masking that of the target on sonar, making accurate guidance difficult. In addition to testing the crews in conditions as realistic as possible within the constraints of the range, these early firings started the process of developing tactics to achieve optimum use of the weapons, notwithstanding the chronic reliability problems. Another initiative of Conley’s was to start conducting firings away from BUTEC in suitable coastal areas in the west of Scotland which were much more conducive to the firing submarine being able to have more freedom to manoeuvre before weapon firing, thus adding further realism.

With the entire Submarine Flotilla being required to convert to Tigerfish within two years, the pace of certification was intense. Conley and his team took submarine crews through a comprehensive programme which included shore attack simulator training, instruction in the embarking and loading of Tigerfish, and testing and validation of the boat’s weapon control equipment. During the sea phase, the team checked out that each submarine’s crew were competent to use Tigerfish, usually firing up to eight individual weapons. This normally took two or three days to complete, as the torpedo recovery was ponderously undertaken by seamen in a rigid inflatable boat, or RIB, which deployed from a recovery vessel and who hooked the weapon and enabled it to be lifted out of the water. This evolution could only take place in daylight and was weather-constrained to a moderate sea state, unlike AUTEC, where helicopters could recover weapons up to gale-force conditions. There was also a host of other problems, both external and internal to the submarine, such as achieving clear range, which could delay weapon launch. It was hoped that out of the eight torpedoes embarked as standard, there would be at least three or four runners which would enable the certification process to be completed.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the occasional crew failed and had to repeat the whole programme, but this was an exception, as much effort was put in by Conley and his team to ensure that the crews reached the required standards of expertise and capability first time round.

Over his sixteen months at STWG, Conley led the certification of over twenty submarine crews and experienced hundreds of Tigerfish firings. Inevitably, he built up a substantial expertise in the Tigerfish torpedo system, the reliability of which remained doggedly low at about 30 per cent for an individual weapon. In September 1977, a few months into the job, he was tasked to lead a team to Hardanger Fjord in Norway, to fire a randomly selected in-service torpedo in order to demonstrate the reliability of the warhead. The outcome was to prove a low point in Conley’s experiences with Tigerfish.

A remote spot on the west side of the fjord had been used for some time to test straight-running torpedoes of both the Norwegian and British navies. With their limited range of a few thousand yards, these weapons were simply aimed at the steep sides of the fjord, exploding on impact with the sheer rock face. In the case of this first Tigerfish routine warhead proving shot, active homing was ruled out as with multiple echoes likely from the rock face, the weapon could possibly go awry — perhaps even posing a risk to the firing submarine, HMS Ocelot. Therefore, as passive homing was the only safe option, a noise source was suspended into the sea at a suitable point on the rock face. This was an essential prerequisite as the weapon needed to have strong target contact prior to detonation.

The firing did not go well. When the weapon was launched some 3,000 yards from the target, the wire dispenser failed to release. With the additional rear weight and drag caused by this imbalance, the Tigerfish careered on the surface across the fjord where Conley’s shore observer spotted it close to the aim point ‘disappearing behind a clump of trees’. Being unarmed, on impact with the shore the torpedo did not explode, but Ocelot’s sonar team reported breaking-up noises which reassuringly confirmed that it had not actually come up onto the shoreline.

After reporting the failure to the Northwood headquarters, Conley soon learned that the Norwegian naval authorities were extremely displeased. Apparently, they had not been informed by the MoD that the torpedo in question was an electric homing one with a maximum range of fifteen miles, as opposed to the two or three miles of the straight-running types. They took the view that it could have been a danger to numerous settlements or vessels further up the fjord. Conley was consequently summoned to the Royal Norwegian Navy headquarters at Bergen to provide an explanation. He travelled there by one of two Royal Navy Sea King helicopters which had been hastily arranged to collect a specialist diving team intended to recover the wreckage of the failed Tigerfish, and which had been urgently dispatched by commercial airline to Bergen airport. At a meeting with the local admiral and his staff, Conley explained that there were a number of safeguards on the weapon which prevented it exploding other than at deep depth, but the Norwegians insisted that the Royal Navy make every effort to locate the warhead.

The helicopter flight back from Bergen took them over the spectacular Folgefonna glacier before landing on the playing fields of the primary school (the only suitable site) in the village of Rosendal which, situated on the east side of the fjord, was the nearest suitable location to use as a base for the search. The school pupils, joyously pouring out from their classrooms, were thrilled at the noise and sight of the two unexpected aircraft which, having landed, decanted a burly team of divers and their equipment. Conley was more concerned about the bill for the evident damage the downdraught of the helicopters’ blades had caused to the surface of their playing fields. For him, matters seemed rapidly to be going from bad to worse.

Meanwhile, a Royal Navy minehunter had been tasked to join in the search for the 300lb warhead and there was further assistance from a Norwegian Navy diving tender and its crew. Notwithstanding several days of search and the recovery of small fragments of the Tigerfish from a deep shelf on the side of the fjord, the warhead was never located. Accordingly, the search was terminated on the assumption that the warhead was lying in small pieces in several hundred feet of water.

On return home, Conley was required to conduct an investigation into the weapon’s failure. The inquiry did not reveal much and it was duly concluded that the dispenser had been defective, just one of many potential failures in a thoroughly unreliable bag of tricks. The whole incident, of course, had done nothing for the reputation of Tigerfish and left Conley feeling very despondent about its many deficiencies. This was not what he had intended his working life to be when he had joined the Royal Navy’s Submarine Service.

In the spring of 1978 Conley found himself back at AUTEC with his team. Their new task was to conduct a series of Tigerfish tactical evaluation firings from the SSN Conqueror using the diesel submarine Porpoise as the principal target. Conley and his deputy, a weapon engineer officer, had designed each of the firing runs, and his team were there to provide expert support to the Conqueror’s crew to ensure as far as possible perfect preparations for each of the shots. Ashore in the AUTEC headquarters building on Andros Island, a small cell of his staff analysed the firings, providing very rapid turnaround of the results, in order to highlight where improvements could be made on the weapon control.

Cape Canaveral was again used as a shore base and Conley’s team was allocated offices in a building in the NASA Space Centre. This location offered several benefits, including the local NASA staff putting on a tour of several redundant missile-launch blockhouses. Conley later recalled how their visit to the Apollo launch control room had proved very moving; all the instruments and control stations remaining virtually untouched, gathering dust as the programme of manned missions to the Moon faded to become just a remarkable memory. Conley also received an invitation to attend the launch of an Atlas Centaur rocket with a payload of commercial satellites. The night firing under a canopy of stars appeared almost surreal as the ascending missile quickly disappeared into the single cloud created by its venting fuel before lift-off, turning the cloud bright red before emerging and accelerating upwards into space in what had been a flawless launch. Ruefully Conley reflected, ‘If only Tigerfish could have similar reliability.’

There was a substantial cast of Tigerfish project civil servants and Coulport staff attending the weapon evaluations in a support role, many of whom had arrived in Cape Canaveral several weeks earlier and who were very much enjoying the benign spring climate in Florida. They were all under the charge of a senior submarine commander who was responsible for the conduct of the trials, although the purse strings for the whole operation were held by the Tigerfish project personnel. It soon became evident to Conley that, although the civilian staff of even the lowest status had been provided with rental cars for getting around Cape Canaveral and its environs, his own staff members were relegated to using a shuttle-bus service. A firm representation to the trials commander about the inequitable transport arrangements did not achieve any improvement. Conley was then subsequently loaned a car by an American space engineer with whom he had become friendly, but this generous act did not improve the frosty relationship which had developed between himself and the commander. However, it was a lesson to Conley about the power exercised by those in the Civil Service who controlled budgets. As the trials progressed, he also gained a dispiriting insight into a culture of ambivalence within the project team about the firing results, whether they were successful or otherwise. He reflected that it was no wonder that it had taken so long to get Tigerfish into service, and if this project was typical, the Navy’s procurement organisation required a massive shake-up.

During these evaluation firings, an unusually good streak of Tigerfish reliability was experienced and Conley was pleasantly surprised by the efficacy of the weapon’s active homing capability against Porpoise, even at a shallow depth where a lot of false surface returns could be expected. As achievement of the run objectives was exceeding expectations, Conley proposed to the trials commander that the weapon’s active homing capability be explored further in more challenging scenarios. This would involve changing the authorised run plans, but his superior, possessing little knowledge of Tigerfish, refused such a request on grounds that approval would be needed from headquarters and that would take too long. A heated but nugatory debate followed, Conley submitting that a great opportunity was being squandered. This added to his increasing reputation of being a tartar who was not afraid to ruffle the feathers of his seniors.

On his return to the United Kingdom on completion of what had been a broadly successful series of firings, Conley started considering his next job. The duration of his STWG appointment was always going to be a brief one as there was a shortage of command-experienced executive officers (second in commands) needed to man the SSBN squadron and the ever increasing number of SSNs. Much to his concern, his appointer had indicated that he was most likely to be heading for an SSBN, an appointment he viewed with dismay, as he saw it holding limited challenges on very dull and monotonous deterrent patrols. Furthermore it did not make best use of his Swiftsure experience. To Conley’s relief, however, a Campbeltown colleague who was destined to join the SSN Spartan at her builder’s yard asked to be appointed to the SSBN for personal reasons of family stability. Accordingly, he immediately seized the opportunity arising of the Spartan job, to which his appointer agreed, and consequently prepared to go back to Barrow where the SSN was being completed.

Conley had worked very hard in his so-called ‘shore’ appointment, spending a considerable amount of time at sea and together with his team, working very long hours, particularly when at BUTEC. Alongside establishing high levels of crew competence in the use of their new torpedo, he had initiated the development of the optimum tactics to use it to the maximum effectiveness. He also took every opportunity to hammer home the message to his superiors that significant resources needed to be accorded to improving Tigerfish reliability if the Submarine Flotilla was to be effective in war. This was a lonely challenge but gradually by dint of effort he fostered the wholehearted support of some enlightened senior officers, including Commander Michael Boyce, the FOSM staff officer responsible for weapon system effectiveness: this officer was destined to head the Armed Forces as Chief of the Defence Staff at the time of the second Gulf War. Such highly capable individuals were able to make the case for getting an improvement programme underway — but this was to take many years and would be far from plain sailing.