Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

INTRODUCTION The Sword of Damocles

To the generation of Britons born in the 1940s the shadow of the Second World War was long palpable, for the war’s legacy lay all about them. Almost all had fathers who had been in the armed services or, if not, had worked in reserved occupations such as shipbuilding or the armaments industry. For the younger children dwelling in cities or large towns, but with no real recollection of the war itself, there was, nevertheless, a strong perception of its awfulness with the impact upon their landscape of bomb damage, and family members whose lives had been blighted.

Many British families were homeless, food was scarce, and rationing was retained as the realities of the post-war world called for further sacrifices. And so it remained for years as their government struggled with a shattered and worn-out industrial base, the heavy burden of a foreign debt, insurgencies in distant colonies and protectorates, while simultaneously attempting to rebuild an economy and provide a better life for its battered citizenry.

The destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs had been intended to bring the war to a quick end. But the atomic bomb and other weapons developed during the conflict had awakened new possibilities. The German capacity to hit enemy cities and industrial plant with guided bombs and rockets had resulted in both the Americans and the Russians capturing and spiriting away German scientists and engineers who had worked on these fearsome weapons, in order to serve their own ends.

As a result of the appalling upheaval of the war, the world was a vastly different place in the months that followed the defeat of Germany in May 1945 compared with what it had been in September 1939. Stalin’s seizure of the nations of eastern Europe as the Red Army rolled westwards in pursuit of the Germans turned into outright occupation of several countries and manipulation of elections in others, producing Communist regimes in them all. Thus was formed the Warsaw Pact, a vast buffer zone of satellite states, cutting Europe in two. ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, said during a speech made at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, ‘an Iron Curtain has descended upon the Continent.’

It had been clear by the time that the ‘BigThree’ victorious powers met at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, following the disintegration of Germany under the hammer-blows of total war, that there was going to be no post-war accord between the Allies. The Soviet Union had suffered far more than either Great Britain or the United States of America, incurring immense damage to her infrastructure and losing some twenty million people; the consequent Russian obsession with the defence of her borders in depth is, therefore, unsurprising. After a war in which technology had played so profound a part, her natural xenophobia prompted her to seize those scientists and engineers who could serve the future ambitions of the Soviet Union, locating them away far beyond the reach of the West, where they were set to work further developing the use of rocketry to deliver devastation.

The United States, and less successfully the British, acted in a similar vein. The proximity of the British Isles to the western borders of the Soviet empire, combined with the awesome risk of a nuclear strike being launched by long-range ballistic missiles, transfixed the British, from the prime minister and the chiefs of staff to their intelligence chiefs and scientific advisers. There was the awful possibility of a pre-emptive strike by the Soviet Union, a ‘nuclear Pearl Harbor’, particularly pertinent after the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic weapon device in 1949. With the means in existence, and the ideological differences between the West and the Soviet Union providing ends seen by each side as legitimate, Russia was identified as the ‘next enemy’, a conclusion backed by deeper and more visceral convictions than mere conjecture, which had had taken root well before the end of hostilities in 1945.

Although a British admiral and his staff had attended the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, it had been obvious that Great Britain was emerging from the war as a weak partner to her greater ally, the United States of America. While British science had played its part in the technological triumphs of the war, Great Britain herself had borne a huge and disproportionate burden for her size.

Having dissipated one-third of her entire wealth, she was militarily overstretched and her industrial base was worn out by the demands of total war. Her people, tired of war and want, and feeling abandoned after President Truman’s abrupt and ungracious abolition of Lend-Lease in August 1945, confronted very daunting post-war problems at home and overseas. The country needed a rest, but was not able to seek such a luxury, for in her very weakness there remained the problem of her empire.

For the Labour government of Clement Attlee formed in 1945, priority lay with the reconstruction of a damaged country and the introduction of those social reforms the promise of which had so recently defeated Churchill. Notwithstanding these daunting challenges, it became clear that if Britain intended to retain her place in the world, she must exert herself yet further. While her chiefs of the imperial staff mooted the ambition of becoming a nuclear power, pleading it as a necessity, the strategic demands made by independence movements in her colonies, particularly India, demanded attention.

The British Empire had been carved out by its traders and their ships, its services and interconnectivity maintained by its merchant fleet and its order policed by the Royal Navy. As a maritime empire it therefore fell largely to the Navy to supervise the process of dismemberment. As a consequence of its worldwide deployment and the many tasks which it had undertaken during the late war, and despite the impoverishment of the British nation, the Royal Navy remained in the post-war decade a formidable enough force, at least on the face of it. Although its warships were ageing and qualitatively inferior to those of the United States Navy, and although it was sustained until the mid 1950s by conscription, the Royal Navy nevertheless possessed enough glamour to present itself as though little had changed. However, much of its upper-echelon thinking was antebellum in character and it had weaknesses that would occasionally be embarrassingly demonstrable. Nevertheless, to many boys of school age in the 1950s, when Navy Days were popular visitor attractions in the great naval ports of the kingdom, the Royal Navy’s appeal remained potent.

In the early 1950s, Empire Day — 24 May — had not yet been abolished and although the term ‘British Commonwealth’ had long been in use, schoolchildren in Britain still waved the Union flag before being given a half-day holiday to celebrate their imperial legacy. But far away, on the other side of the world the French were fighting the Vietminh in Indochina and the Dutch were bogged down in an East Indies that was less and less ‘Dutch’. When the outbreak of the Korean War involved United Nations forces against the Communist North Koreans and their Chinese allies, Britain was, of course, called upon to play her part. Once again the Royal Navy went to war and small boys watched with fascination, unaware of the horrors of that distant conflict. Although the long promised independence of India had been achieved by 1947, the pressures of domestic reconstruction had made this process precipitate and consequential. Elsewhere, would-be nationalists began to take up arms against the colonial power. With British troops fighting in Korea, a Communist insurgency in the Federated Malay States resulted in a euphemistically defined ‘Emergency’ that committed further resources to stabilising the future of the peninsula. Once this had been successfully suppressed, Malaysian independence followed; in the meanwhile, stirrings in Africa, the West Indies, Arabia and elsewhere required careful managing, all demanding the deployment of the British armed services.

With conflicts raging across the globe, the British and Americans continued to maintain forces in Germany to guarantee the security of the Bundesrepublik of West Germany. Opposite them, largely in East Germany and supported by the nations of the Warsaw Pact, units of the un-demobilised Soviet Red Army were stationed in overwhelming numbers.

Thus the two most heavily armed powers in the history of the world — ideological and socio-economic opposites — confronted each other in armed might. ‘The West’ was led by the United States of America in an alliance known as NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which had been formed in 1948 and had its strategic headquarters in Brussels. While this European confrontation led to military stalemate, for a period China, emerging from its civil war of 1949 as another Communist state, formed a loose alliance with the Soviet Union, very actively supporting the spread of Communism throughout Southeast Asia. It is indeed in retrospect very fortuitous that the several lesser conflicts, in which the West fought the wards of Russia and China in a policy of so called ‘containment’, did not escalate into yet another world war in which a nuclear exchange occurred.

The British Army on the Rhine was the most conspicuous British component of the front line in the stand-off between the West and the Soviet Union and the coerced allies of her eastern European satellites, which had become known as the ‘Cold War’. There were other, perhaps less obvious aspects, particularly the nuclear deterrent maintained at this time by the Royal Air Force’s V-bombers. Having played her part in the development of the atomic bomb, Britain argued her right to a share of American technology and, thanks to the exertions of Atlee’s government and its desire not to allow the country to lose all of its international influence along with its empire, had acquired nuclear weapons.

This enabled the British, a junior partner to the Americans, to threaten any aggressive Russia intent on a ‘first strike’ with a retaliation amounting to ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, a bleak policy whose acronym, MAD, seemed wholly appropriate. Owing to its proximity to the eastern borders of the Soviet Empire, Britain’s early-warning system gave her population merely a ‘four-minute warning’, just sufficient time for its nuclear-armed V-bombers to take off to strike at targets within the Soviet Union.

These land and air defences were those most clearly in the consciousness of the British public. A strong peace movement emerged, along with a ‘better red than dead’ philosophy but, by and large, the popular reaction was that of stoic acceptance. Mutually Assured Destruction did at least offer the icy comfort of there being no winners. But there was besides these obvious realities another manifestation of the Cold War. Beneath the seas surrounding the British Isles, there was another confrontation taking place in which American, British and other NATO submarines — the ‘Silent Services’ — stealthily monitored and followed submarines and surface ships of the Soviet Navy. In operations cloaked in the highest secrecy, submarines of the West followed their Russian counterparts sometimes for weeks, if not months, totally undetected and where, upon occasion, they stole up to their opponents to within a dozen feet. At all times they were ready to fire their weapons and destroy their quarry should they receive that awesome signal indicating that hostilities had been initiated.

This book is about this underwater confrontation and focuses upon the career of one Royal Navy submarine officer, Dan Conley. How the vast and complex pressures of the Cold War affected the British Royal Navy in the years preceding the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, and how it coped with the challenging task of providing the nation’s nuclear deterrent are told through his experiences. Seldom has naval history had so close or revealing a witness to events.