The Cold War: A Military History

COMMAND OF THE seas was at least as important in the Cold War as it had been at any time in history. Indeed, for both the USA and the USSR it became more important than ever with the development of nuclear-powered submarines carrying long-range ballistic missiles with the ability to deliver strategic weapons of devastating power against land targets anywhere in the world. In terms of surface warfare, however, the Cold War had a different importance to the two alliances, since NATO depended on the sea, while the Warsaw Pact did not.

The USA was able to deploy aircraft carriers, with their increasingly potent air wings, to any part of the world, while for NATO the Atlantic Ocean was the sea line of communication (SLOC) along which huge numbers of men and vast quantities of heavy military equipment would travel to support Europe in time of war. The sea was also the means by which many NATO forces would be deployed or redeployed, particularly to the flanks, depending upon the Soviet threat; thus the great majority of reinforcements for Norway, Denmark and Turkey were all scheduled to arrive by sea. In addition, western Europe would have required vast amounts of oil – much more in war than in peace – which would have had to continue to be brought to European oil terminals.

For the Warsaw Pact, naval surface warfare was of considerably lesser importance, since it was not essential for survival. Thus Warsaw Pact nations with access to the sea maintained only small navies – with the sole exception of the USSR, which built up a sizeable fleet, but principally in order to provide a counter to US naval might.

The opening balance between NATO and Soviet naval forces is shown in Appendix 18.

THE US NAVY

The United States navy emerged from the Second World War as the largest, most efficient and best-equipped navy in the world. The Japanese navy had been the only force able to challenge US naval power in the Pacific, but it had now ceased to exist, as had the German and Italian navies across the Atlantic. The UK, on the other hand, had entered the war as the world’s strongest naval power and its navy had expanded rapidly between 1939 and 1945, but, even so, it had failed to match the phenomenal growth of the US navy. As a result, in the early post-war years the British found that, while they were still strong, they had nevertheless been relegated to second place – a position they initially found hard to accept, as the row over the demand that a British admiral be SACLANT in the early 1950s showed. The traditional friendship between the US and UK navies, which had become even closer during the war, did, however, make the change in status less unpleasant than it might otherwise have been and, once the British had adjusted, the two navies continued to enjoy a very close relationship.

The US navy found itself in 1946 with a role that was not very clear-cut and a huge surplus of warships, many of them less than three years old. The active fleet was reduced dramatically, building programmes were cut to the bone, many ships were transferred to allies or scrapped, and the remainder – still a large number – were placed in reserve. Development work continued, including detailed examination of German designs and many tests of captured German equipment, particularly missiles and submarines, but it was the emergence of the Soviet threat, particularly in Europe, that first provided a post-war focus for the fleet.

The establishment of NATO, coupled with the military weakness of the west-European nations, made it inevitable that the United States would become involved in any conflict in Europe and that the majority of its help would go by sea. Maintaining the sea lines of communication across the north Atlantic thus became a major commitment, taking two forms: anti-surface operations against Soviet navy surface groups and anti-submarine operations.

The United States’ position in the world also meant that the navy had to undertake missions in the Third World in support of the national policy of containing Communist expansion. This involved active naval operations in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in numerous minor conflicts, such as in Lebanon. The major confrontation throughout the Cold War period, however, was with the Soviet navy, where the US navy saw its potential enemy grow from a relatively minor coastal force to the second greatest navy in the world.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s the main emphasis was placed on carrier groups which would carry bombers to attack the Soviet navy’s ship and air bases supporting the Northern, Baltic and Black Sea fleets. The growing numbers of Soviet submarines were countered by a variety of means. There were large numbers of Second World War destroyers and frigates still available which were capable of accommodating the anti-submarine-warfare sensors and weapons of the time, as well as large numbers of ASW aircraft. Also, in the late 1940s a new type of ‘hunter/killer’ submarine was developed, which was equipped with large and highly sensitive sonars and whose intended mission was to wait off Soviet naval bases and to attack enemy submarines as they deployed; it was, however, not a success, and attention returned to more traditional designs. The US navy also devoted considerable funds to the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), a series of microphones lying on the seabed across choke points such as the Greenland–Iceland–UK gap and linked by seabed cables to control centres ashore, which gave advance warning of submarine deployments.

One of the key developments was the introduction of nuclear propulsion for both submarines and surface ships, which was masterminded by one of the most remarkable figures of the post-war era in any navy: Admiral Hyman Rickover.[1] He applied nuclear propulsion to submarines and later to aircraft carriers and cruisers, producing ships whose endurance was limited only by that of the crew, although the nuclear carriers still needed to be replenished with fuel, weapons and ammunition for the air wing.

The Vietnam War was a major preoccupation for the US navy for over a decade, but the absence of any significant naval opposition meant that naval air and surface power could be used almost totally in support of the land battle. Despite its many commitments in the Pacific and other areas, however, the north Atlantic was the principal concern of the US navy throughout the Cold War, and virtually all US ship designs were judged against their value in a potential Atlantic conflict against the Soviet navy.

For many years the ‘massive retaliation’ and ‘tripwire’ strategies meant that any war in Europe would escalate fairly rapidly to a nuclear conflict. This, almost by definition, would be of relatively short duration; thus war stocks of ammunition, fuel and supplies in western Europe were relatively small, and there would have been little point in fighting expensive convoy battles across the Atlantic. Once the strategy changed to that of ‘flexible response’, however, it became possible that the war would be much longer and that fresh supplies of both men and matériel would have to be transported to Europe across the Atlantic.

In the 1970s, therefore, the US navy faced up to the new requirement, setting itself a goal of a ‘600-ship’ navy. Large-scale building plans were initiated, and the programme was well under way when the Cold War came to an abrupt halt. The plans were then very quickly adjusted downwards, with orders cancelled, building slowed down, and many older vessels scrapped before the scheduled end of their operational lives.

Throughout the Cold War, one of the key components in the US navy’s ability to deploy overseas was its under-way replenishment force. This comprised a large number of specialist vessels which could resupply warships with all their needs, enabling them to undertake operations anywhere in the world’s oceans and for an almost unlimited time. The most sophisticated of them, the Sacramento class, carried 177,000 barrels of fuel oil, 1,950 tonnes of munitions, 225 tonnes of dry stores and 225 tonnes of refrigerated stores, and had a speed of 26 knots, enabling them to keep pace with a carrier task group.

One of the great achievements of the US navy during the Cold War was that it posed a very direct threat to any Soviet war plans. It could sustain movement along the transatlantic SLOC; it threatened the Soviet navy’s fleet of SSBNs, even in their bastions; its carrier groups threatened attacks against major naval bases; its SSBNs threatened the very survival of the USSR; and the amphibious-warfare groups threatened landings on the Soviet flanks. Finally, the US navy possessed two intangible assets in its prestige as one of the major victors in the Second World War and in its ability to deploy large and impressive ships anywhere in the world. The combination of these factors led the Soviet Union to undertake a major naval expansion and building programme, which proved not only to be extremely costly but also to be one of the key components in its eventual collapse.

The predominance of the United States navy in the Cold War was beyond anything that had gone before – except, perhaps, the British navy at the height of its influence in the late Victorian era. Between 1945 and 1990 the US navy produced ships of a size, complexity and sophistication far beyond the capability of any other navy, and in numbers which no other nation could match. To take just four examples: thirteen supercarriers were built, thirty-one Spruance-class destroyers, sixteen Ticonderoga-class cruisers and thirty-eight Los Angeles-class SSNs, all of them world-leaders in their types.[2]

OTHER NATO NAVIES

All NATO nations except Luxembourg and Iceland contributed naval forces to the Alliance. These navies were of varying sizes and degrees of sophistication, and were developed and organized according to each nation’s perceptions of its requirements. A degree of standardization was achieved in areas such as station-keeping, weaponry, communications, data links, replenishment techniques and some equipment, although the basic ship designs and tactical deployments were a national responsibility. Standardization was also achieved as a consequence of international programmes, particularly those involving ships procured under US aid programmes.

Belgium’s allotted NATO maritime roles included the defence, in conjunction with its allies, of the North Sea, the English Channel and the Western Approaches. The early post-war expansion programme was based on ex-US and ex-British warships, but four Belgian-designed frigates were constructed in the 1970s and ten ‘Tripartite’ (Belgium, France and the Netherlands) minehunters in the 1980s.

The Canadian navy expanded from very small beginnings in 1939 into a sizeable and efficient force by 1945, and it endeavoured to maintain a large-ship capability in the early post-war years, operating an aircraft carrier and two cruisers, all of British design. The financial and manpower costs were, however, too great, and the two cruisers were paid off in the 1960s and the aircraft carrier in 1970. Thereafter the navy concentrated on its NATO-assigned ASW mission in the North Atlantic, for which it built a series of escort vessels of unique design and pioneered the use of ASW helicopters from small warships. The Canadians also operated a small number of submarines and some minesweepers.

Denmark had virtually no navy at the war’s end in 1945, but on joining NATO in 1949 it was allotted the role of Baltic defence, in which it was joined by West Germany when the latter became a NATO member in 1955. Denmark’s second naval task was the mining of the Kattegat and the Belts to deny the Soviet fleet an exit into the North Sea. The navy also had the national task of patrolling Greenland waters.

To fulfil these missions, the Danish navy maintained a small number of frigates, all designed and built in Denmark, together with three unusual corvettes (Nils Juel class), and also provided a small number of submarines and fast-attack craft. To meet its minelaying commitment the Danish navy was equipped with a number of dedicated minelayers.

The Danish navy found itself facing a major re-equipment problem in the 1980s, which unfortunately coincided with a general domestic feeling of opposition to defence (it was the time of NATO’s ‘twin-track’ approach to the Soviet SS-20 programme). As a result, the navy produced a novel type of warship, the Stanflex 300 (Flyvefisken class), which employed a single basic hull constructed of fibreglass and a common propulsion system, but with changeable weapon and sensor containers, which enabled the ships to be employed and equipped for either fast attack, minelaying, mine counter-measures (MCM) or ASW duties.

The French navy started the post-war era with a mixture of pre-war French warships, war-built British and American ships, and German and Italian prizes, which were used to re-establish France as a naval power – a process which was aided by the acquisition of two aircraft carriers from the UK and a third from the USA. The fleet also included two battleships: Richelieu, which had taken part in the war, and Jean Bart, which had lain incomplete throughout the war and was eventually completed, at very considerable expense, in 1949.

France was a founder member of NATO, but, while committing a substantial part of its naval forces to the Alliance, which involved the construction of large numbers of escorts, the navy also retained substantial colonial responsibilities and in 1947–54 was heavily committed to the war in distant Indo-China.

The Mediterranean was also of particular importance to France, which had a large number of dependent territories along the southern littoral, and, as a result, the US and, to a lesser extent, British domination of the NATO command structure in the Southern region caused deep resentment. Matters came to a head when General De Gaulle returned to power in 1958, and when a French request for a greater share of the command appointments was turned down he removed the French fleet from the NATO command structure – an act which led eventually to the complete withdrawal of all French forces. Thereafter the French navy acted independently, although there was still a degree of co-operation with NATO and with the US navy.

The navy also played a key role in De Gaulle’s aspirations for French strategic power, and he placed an increased priority on its nuclear weapons programme, which had been in place for some years. This enormous undertaking was successful, but at the expense of other naval programmes, and very few other warships were built in the 1960s. Indeed, the nuclear development programme coupled with the operations of the submarine force absorbed a growing proportion of the available naval funds for the remainder of the Cold War, rising to some 37 per cent in 1990.

French naval aspirations also led France to develop a nuclear aircraft carrier to replace the two Clemenceau-class carriers. Although the new carrier, Charles De Gaulle, was completed some years after the end of the Cold War, the expense of the ship and its associated aircraft was having an effect on the rest of the fleet from the early 1980s onwards.

The economies necessary to fund these programmes included keeping ships in service longer than had been planned, delays in construction of surface ships, and the construction of a very unsophisticated ‘colonial corvette’, the Floreal class (designated an ‘aviso’ or ‘fregatte de surveillance’ in French service). In addition, the two Clemenceau-class carriers, commissioned in 1960–61, were required to operate to the end of the 1990s, as were their aircraft, including the F-8 Crusader and Étendard naval fighters and the Alizé early-warning aircraft.

The West German navy (Bundesmarine) was created in 1956 and from then on was firmly integrated within NATO, its principal tasks being the defence of the Baltic and North seas, in conjunction with other NATO navies. Initially the ships were a mixture of surplus US and British types, with a few German-built ships which had been transferred to the Allies as war reparations being returned as well, but the warship-building industry was rapidly restored.

The largest units were destroyers, of which the first six were ex-US Fletcher-class ships, supplemented in the mid-1960s by four German-designed and -built ships. Next to be acquired were three US-designed Adams-class destroyers and then eight frigates based on a Dutch design. The German navy also provided a large number of fast-attack craft and mine-countermeasure vessels (MCMVs), but, not surprisingly in view of its history, one of its main strengths lay in its U-boats. These were all of German design, and by the 1970s eighteen 500-tonne-displacement Type 206s were in service. West Germany also proved particularly successful in exporting submarines, which helped to sustain its design and construction capability at times when there were no domestic orders.

The Greek and Turkish navies operated in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, but, unlike Greece, Turkey also had major commitments in the Dardanelles and the Black Sea. Although their countries were traditional enemies, the two navies were of similar size and followed very similar development patterns during the Cold War, largely because assistance from the USA and other NATO allies had to be demonstrably even-handed to ensure that neither felt the other was being favoured.

Both navies operated large numbers of ex-US destroyers until the early 1980s, when Greece acquired two ex-Dutch Kortenaer-class frigates. The Turkish navy did not buy any Kortenaers, but when it started to acquire German-designed MEKO frigates the Greek navy followed suit.

Both navies also operated large submarine forces, and here again they used ex-US boats of Second World War vintage, until they both started to acquire German Type 209s in the early 1970s. Both also operated a number of landing ships, since much of their maritime rivalry revolved around the islands in the Aegean.

The Mediterranean was a very important area both to NATO and to Italy, with a substantial Soviet threat. There were Soviet air and naval bases on the Black Sea and a steadily growing naval squadron in the Mediterranean itself. In addition, the Soviet navy maintained a submarine base in Albania until the diplomatic split in December 1961, and also operated naval and air bases in Egypt (until 1976) and in Libya. The Italian navy had ended the Second World War with a fleet consisting almost entirely of Italian-built vessels, but some of the best of these were lost when they were allocated to former Allied powers under the terms of the 1949 peace treaty.

During the Cold War the Italian navy built up a substantial force of large, fast and well-armed cruisers and destroyers, and also built the Giuseppe Garibaldi, a highly effective carrier for V/STOL aircraft, displacing 13,850 tonnes. These were all Italian-designed and -built, and the first generation of post-war submarines which were provided from US navy surplus stocks were also steadily replaced by Italian-designed boats. The Italian navy also maintained a substantial number of corvettes and fast patrol boats for operations close to the Italian coast, particularly in the Adriatic and in the Strait of Messina.

The Dutch navy was rebuilt after the war with help from both the USA and the UK. On the establishment of NATO, the Dutch were given two tasks: helping in the provision of ASW forces in the eastern Atlantic and in the anti-submarine and anti-mine defence in the North Sea. Three large ships were operated for some years: the ex-British carrier Karel Doorman (acquired in 1948) and two large Dutch-built cruisers which had been laid down in 1939 and were completed in 1953. All three proved too expensive, however, and the carrier was sold in 1969, while the cruisers lasted until 1973 and 1976.

The Dutch navy provided a task group for employment in the north Atlantic, comprising a flagship (a Tromp-class destroyer), a number of frigates and a replenishment ship, all Dutch-designed and -built. The Dutch also operated a small number of diesel-electric submarines and a large MCM force.

Norway occupied a particularly important place in NATO’s maritime strategy, since it lay alongside the only route by which ships and submarines of the Soviet Northern Fleet could sail out into the Atlantic. The Norwegian navy was far too small to challenge the large Soviet surface action groups, and it concentrated instead on anti-submarine warfare, particularly in its many fjords. Its equipment included a number of frigates built to a US design in Norwegian shipyards (the Oslo class), and sixteen small diesel-electric submarines (the Kobben class), which were designed and built in Germany. Replacement of the latter by the new Ula class (also German-built) was just beginning as the Cold War ended. Norway also operated some coastal-attack craft and MCMVs.

Although Portugal was a long-established maritime nation, the Portuguese navy remained relatively small throughout the Cold War. This was in part due in the early years to colonial commitments in Africa and Asia, but also, throughout the period, to the fragile state of the Portuguese economy. The navy sustained a small force of frigates and corvettes, but managed eventually to obtain three large and modern German-built frigates, for which a group of other NATO nations provided 60 per cent of the funding. The navy also operated four small submarines and a number of patrol vessels.

Spain did not join NATO until 1982, and even then it did not become a part of the integrated command structure, although from 1953 onwards it had received considerable assistance from the United States under a bilateral agreement. Some ships were supplied from surplus US stocks, but others, such as the Baleares and Numancia classes, were to US designs but built in Spanish yards. The Spanish navy also operated an aircraft carrier, with a V/STOL air wing, and a number of submarines, which were licence-built in Spanish yards to French designs.

The United Kingdom emerged from the Second World War essentially bankrupt, but still retaining a large empire and with the second largest navy in the world. The manpower needs of the civil economy, combined with the need to reduce expenditure, ensured that the navy was reduced very quickly. Despite all these factors, the navy failed to appreciate its reduction in status and, while strongly supporting the founding of NATO, it challenged the paramountcy of the US navy in areas such as the Atlantic and Mediterranean, although it eventually had to be satisfied with the Channel command.

In the early years the British navy had to combine its Cold War duties in European and Atlantic waters with a wide range of imperial and post-imperial duties. There was an understandable wish to retain larger ships, although the largest of them all, the battleships, were quickly disposed of. Cruisers were smaller and cheaper to run than battleships and were retained for somewhat longer, but even they proved large and expensive by post-war standards and the last of them were phased out in the late 1970s.

Great efforts were put into retaining a carrier capability, as carriers were of great value in both NATO and ‘out-of-area’ operations. Numbers and effectiveness both peaked in the early 1960s, but thereafter a steady reduction saw the final fixed-wing carrier paid off in 1978. Fixed-wing carriers were succeeded by a smaller and innovative design, the V/STOL carrier, which was originally envisaged as an ASW platform, operating helicopters for anti-submarine duties and Sea Harrier fighters for self-defence, although the Falklands War (1982) showed that they were also capable of serving as attack carriers in a limited-war setting.

The main strength of the British navy in the Cold War, however, lay in its surface escorts (destroyers and frigates), of which it built 123 new ships between 1950 and 1990. Other types like amphibious-warfare ships, MCMVs and coastal-attack craft were also built, but in much more modest numbers.

In the field of nuclear propulsion, the British followed closely on the US lead – a process which was eased by considerable US help, another tangible result of the close relationship between the two navies. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the navy operated four SSBNs and fifteen SSNs, although, unlike the US navy, it also continued to produce and operate diesel-electric submarines.

In NATO, the UK’s principal task was anti-submarine warfare in the north Atlantic, the Channel and the North Sea, which also involved air-force maritime-patrol aircraft. The British navy also made modest contributions to the Alliance’s amphibious-warfare capabilities.

STANDING NAVAL FORCES

As evidence of Alliance solidarity, NATO navies contributed to three standing naval forces, which were maritime equivalents to the land-based Allied Command Europe Mobile Force (AMF). The Standing Naval Force Atlantic (STANAVFORLANT) was formed in 1967 and consisted of one destroyer or frigate each from Canada, West Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA, with periodic additions from Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Portugal. This force operated as a group and came under command of SACLANT, with command delegated to CINCLANT when in European waters.

A second force, the Naval On-Call Force Mediterranean (NAVOC-FORMED), was formed in 1969 for service in the Mediterranean. As its name indicated, the ships were ‘on call’ and not permanently assigned, although they exercised together once per year. This force was later upgraded to standing-force status, becoming STANAVFORMED.

A third force, Standing Naval Force Channel (STANAVFORCHAN), was formed in 1973 and consisted of MCMVs from Belgium, West Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, with periodic additions from Denmark, Norway and the USA. The force came under the command of CINCHAN.

These standing forces carried out an annual programme of exercises, manoeuvres and port visits, and provided a practical demonstration of NATO’s naval solidarity. Within each group, command was exercised by one of the captains, rotating on an annual basis between nations. The groups carried out NATO tasks and could be deployed at short notice to a crisis area.[3] They also provided continuing experience in multinational tactics and operations, command-and-control procedures, communications, data links, and replenishment at sea.

NATO’S STRENGTHS

Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were dominated by a single navy whose resources, technical skill and sheer size were far greater than those of any of its allies. The essential difference, however, was that in NATO the United States allowed the allied navies to play a full role and to develop their fleets according to their traditions and abilities. This resulted in a great disparity in ship design and internal operating procedures, but also in a greater sense of mutual confidence and common purpose, as was particularly demonstrated by the standing naval forces.

UNLIKE THE USA and the West, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact did not depend upon the sea, since they were all part of a contiguous land mass and thus operated on what strategists define as ‘interior lines’. During the Second World War the Axis powers suffered an inherent disadvantage because Germany and Italy were each separated by thousands of miles of Allied-dominated ocean from their only other important ally, Japan, and contact was confined to a few submarines and a diminishing number of merchant vessels. For the USSR in the Cold War, however, there were no overseas allies of any significance, and minor allies such as Cuba, Angola, Vietnam (post-1974) and Egypt (pre-1972) were countries whose loss in a war with NATO the Soviet General Staff could have viewed with total equanimity. There was therefore no inherent requirement for the Soviet Union to move troop reinforcements, military equipment, supplies or oil by sea and, as a result, the fleets of the two rival power blocs were intended to meet totally different requirements and developed in quite different ways.

THE SOVIET NAVY

During the Cold War the Soviet navy underwent a more fundamental change than any other navy in the world. The German, Italian and Japanese navies having been destroyed, the Soviet fleet emerged from the Second World War as a very poor third to the US and British navies in size and modernity, and, of possibly greater importance, with extremely limited experience of open-ocean (‘blue-water’) operations. During the Cold War, however, the Soviet navy rose to become second in size only to the US navy, while its designers produced ships, weapons and electronic systems which in most cases were at least the equal of those in the West, and in some cases well in advance. During this process it became a highly professional and competent naval force which was at home in any part of the world’s oceans.

Although it was considered a major threat to the West, however, the Soviet navy suffered from four inescapable problems. The most intractable of these was that its naval resources had, of necessity, to be split between four major fleets: the Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific fleets. (A fifth, much smaller, fleet in the Caspian Sea was of little strategic significance.) This geographical separation was so great that there was no practical way in which these fleets could provide mutual support for each other. It was at least theoretically possible for ships to transfer between the Northern and Pacific fleets via the Arctic Ocean (in summer) or via the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, but whether either route would have been feasible in wartime was improbable, and a rerun of Admiral Zinovy P. Rozhdestvensky’s fatal voyage would have been a distinct possibility.[1]

A further problem was that each of the four major fleets could reach the open ocean only by passing through choke points which were not under Soviet control. Thus the Northern Fleet had to sail past the long Norwegian coastline and then transit through either the Greenland–Iceland, Iceland–Faroes or Faroes–UK gap to reach the Atlantic. The Baltic and Black Sea fleets had even tighter gaps to pass through: the former through the Danish Belts, the Kattegat and then the Skagerrak, and the latter through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. In the Far East the fleet, except for units based at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, had to pass through either the Korean, Tsugaru or La Pérouse straits to reach the Pacific.

In addition, most of the Soviet navy’s home ports were ice-bound for at least part of the winter, and the navy lacked the many forward bases that were available to the US navy, which could use harbour facilities around the world, except in Communist-controlled countries, while the Polaris/Poseidon-armed SSBNs were permanently forward-based in Scotland (Holy Loch), Spain (Rota) and Guam. Until late in the Cold War, this Soviet problem was exacerbated by the lack of under-way replenishment ships which could resupply task groups in distant waters with everything they needed.

Finally there was an intangible factor: the lack of recent naval combat experience. The Soviet navy had played only a very limited role in the Second World War; indeed, almost one-third of it – the Pacific Fleet – had played no part at all. The rest of the navy had fought a small-unit war in motor torpedo boats, submarine-chasers (small escorts), submarines and river flotillas. They had fought hard, certainly, and the submarine service had lost no less than eighty-nine boats in action (107 in all), but the overall results had been negligible. Thus, although the Soviet navy expanded very rapidly from the 1950s onwards, built many large and innovative warships, and became a true blue-water navy, it was all based on theory. On the other hand, the larger NATO navies, and in particular the Americans, British and French, had great experience in large-ship operations, the use of carriers, the employment of naval air power, the use of amphibious forces, the need for and the practice of damage control, and maintaining fleets in distant waters. Above all, they had experience of the command, control and communications needed to tie all this together.

Four external factors spurred the major developments in the Soviet navy. First was the deployment in the 1950s of US navy carrier groups operating aircraft such as the North American AJ-2 Savage, which could carry nuclear weapons to attack targets deep inside the Russian homeland. Second was the Soviet realization during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that they were unable to influence events in the Atlantic and Caribbean because they lacked blue-water surface forces. Third was the requirement to combat the threat posed by the US navy’s strategic missile submarines. The fourth and final factor was the perceived need to develop amphibious forces to deploy land forces on distant shores – something it had seen the US navy do on numerous occasions and was unable to match.

The Soviet navy’s operational priorities for surface warfare changed as the Cold War progressed and the threat from the USA and NATO was seen to alter. In the late 1940s the coastal navy was capable of little more than the defence of it bases, but the 1950s threat posed by bombers launched from US aircraft carriers forced the Soviet navy to become more of a blue-water navy. This US threat was supplemented by cruise-missile-armed submarines in the mid-1950s and then totally replaced by the submarines armed with Polaris SLBMs. Against all of these, however, the Soviet fleet’s tasks were still defensive in nature.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet navy, under the leadership of the redoubtable Admiral Gorshkov,[2] espoused offensive strategies. Foremost was an oceanic role in a general war, which might, according to some Soviet naval strategists, even have been an entirely naval conflict, at least in the initial stages. In addition, a peacetime role was seen in protecting pro-Soviet revolutionary movements in the Third World.

Soviet naval strategy could not, however, be developed in isolation and was subject to intense criticism from the army, air force and strategic rocket force, all of which opposed plans to increase the resources allocated to the most junior of the Soviets’ services. The other influence was the Western response to Soviet naval expansion, which was to plan to take the offensive in war and to fight the naval battle as close to Soviet shores as possible. It thus became noticeable that, whereas Soviet naval exercises in the 1970s and early 1980s were essentially aggressive in nature, by the middle and late 1980s they were once again defensive in character.

In the immediate post-war years the only naval units of even marginal significance were three battleships: a Russian vessel dating back to tsarist times and two British ships of First World War vintage, which had been lent to the USSR during the war. One of the latter was returned to the UK in 1949, having been replaced by the ex-Italian Giulio Cesare, which the Soviets renamed Novorossiysk.[3] There were also some fifteen cruisers – a mixture of elderly Soviet designs, nine modern Soviet-built ships, a US ship lent during the war (and returned in 1949), and two former Axis cruisers, one ex-German, the other ex-Italian. There was also a force of some eighty destroyers, also of varying vintages and origins.

During the 1940s and 1950s these Soviet warships were rarely seen on the high seas, apart from a limited number of transfers between the Northern and Baltic fleets, which tended to be conducted with great rapidity. The only exception was a series of international visits, mainly by the impressive Sverdlov-class cruisers, which were paid to countries such as Sweden and the UK. The navy suffered a major setback in 1955 when the battleship Novorossiysk was sunk while at anchor in the Black Sea by a Second World War German ground mine, an event which led to the sacking of the commander-in-chief, Admiral N. M. Kuznetzov; he was replaced by Admiral Gorshkov.

In the early 1960s, however, individual Soviet units began to be seen more frequently in foreign waters, as did ever-increasing numbers of ‘intelligence collectors’, laden with electronic-warfare equipment. These ships, generally known by their NATO designation as ‘AGIs’, monitored US and NATO exercises and ship movements. The original AGIs were converted trawlers and salvage tugs, but, as the Cold War progressed and the Soviet navy became increasingly sophisticated, larger and more specialized ships were built, culminating in the 5,000 tonne Bal’zam class, built in the 1980s. In addition to such ships, conventional warships regularly carried out intelligence-collecting and surveillance tasks, particularly when Western exercises were being held. Apart from general eavesdropping on Western communications links and studying the latest weapons, such missions helped the Soviet navy to learn about US and NATO tactics, manoeuvring and ship-handling.

The Soviets also put considerable effort into espionage (human intelligence, or HUMINT, in intelligence jargon) against Western navies. This included the Kroger ring in the UK, which was principally targeted against British anti-submarine-warfare facilities, and the Walker spy ring in the USA, which gave away a vast amount of information on US submarine capabilities and deployment.

The growth and increasing ambitions of the Soviet navy were best illustrated by the size, scope and duration of its exercises. The first important out-of-area exercise was held in 1961, when two groups of ships – one moving from the Baltic to the Kola Inlet and the other in the opposite direction (a total of eight surface warships, four submarines and associated support ships) – met in the Norwegian Sea. There they conducted a short exercise before continuing to their respective destinations.

In early July 1962 transfers between the Baltic and Northern fleets again took place, coupled with the first major transfer from the Black Sea Fleet to the Northern Fleet. This was followed by a much larger exercise, extending from the Iceland–Faroes gap to the North Cape, which included surface combatants, submarines, auxiliaries and a large number of land-based naval aircraft. The activity level increased yet again in 1963, and the major 1964 exercise involved ships moving through the Iceland–Faroes gap for the first time, while units of the Mediterranean Squadron undertook a cruise to Cuba. By 1966 exercises were taking place in the Faroes–UK gap and off north-east Scotland (both long-standing preserves of the British navy) and also off the coast of Iceland.

In 1967 the naval highlight of the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War was the dramatic sinking of the Israeli destroyer Eilat by the Egyptian navy using Soviet SS-N-2 (‘Styx’) missiles launched from a Soviet-built Komar-class patrol boat. Not surprisingly, Soviet naval prestige in the Middle East was high, and the Soviets took the opportunity to enhance it yet further by port visits to Syria, Egypt, Yugoslavia and Algeria, employing ships of the Black Sea Fleet.

The following year saw the largest naval exercise to date; nicknamed Sever (= North) it involved a large number of surface ships, land-based aircraft, submarines and auxiliaries. The exercise covered a variety of areas, but the main activity took place in waters between Iceland and Norway. One of the naval highlights of the year, for both the Soviet and the NATO navies, was the arrival in the Mediterranean of the first Soviet helicopter carrier, Moskva.

Further exercises and deployments took place in 1969, but in the following year Okean 70 proved to be the most ambitious Soviet naval exercise ever staged. This involved the Northern, Baltic and Pacific fleets and the Mediterranean Squadron in simultaneous operations, with the major emphasis in the Atlantic. A large northern force, comprising some twenty-six ships, started with anti-submarine exercises off northern Norway between 13 and 18 April, and then proceeded through the Iceland–Faroes gap to an area due west of Scotland, where it carried out an ‘encounter exercise’ against units from the Mediterranean Squadron. The two groups then sailed in company to join the waiting support group, where a major replenishment at sea took place. Other facets of the exercise included units of the Baltic Fleet sailing through the Skaggerak to operate off south-west Norway, and an amphibious landing exercise involving units of the recently raised Naval Infantry coming ashore on the Soviet side of the Norwegian–Soviet border.

This was a very large and ambitious exercise, from which the Soviet navy learned many major lessons, one of the most important of which was the falsity of the concept of commanding naval forces at sea from a shore headquarters. Such a concept had been propagated for two reasons: first, because it complied with the general Communist idea of highly centralized power and, second, because it also avoided the complexity and expense of flagships. Once Okean 70 had proved this concept to be impracticable, ‘flag’ facilities were built into the larger ships,[4] although the Baltic Fleet continued to be commanded from ashore.

The exercise which took place in June 1971 rehearsed a different scenario, with a group of Soviet Northern Fleet ships sailing down into Icelandic waters, where they reversed course and then advanced towards Jan Mayen Island to act as a simulated NATO carrier task group, which was then attacked by the main ‘players’. Again, a concurrent amphibious landing formed part of the exercise.

There were no major naval exercises in 1972, but in a spring 1973 exercise Soviet submarines practised countering a simulated Western task force sailing through the Iceland–UK gap to reinforce NATO’s Northern flank, while a similar exercise in 1974 took place in areas to the east and north of Iceland. Okean 75 was an extremely large maritime exercise, involving well over 200 ships and submarines together with large numbers of aircraft. The exercise was global in scale, with specific exercise areas including the Norwegian Sea, where simulated convoys were attacked; the northern and central Atlantic, particularly off the west coast of Ireland; the Baltic and Mediterranean seas; and the Indian and Pacific oceans. Overall, the exercise practised all phases of contemporary naval warfare, including the deployment and protection of SSBNs.

In 1976 an exercise started with a concentration of warships in the North Sea, following which they transited through the Skagerrak and into the Baltic. Although not an exercise as such, great excitement was caused among Western navies when the new aircraft carrier Kiev left the Black Sea and sailed through the Mediterranean before heading northward in a large arc, passing through the Iceland–Faroes gap and thence to Murmansk. NATO ships followed this transit very closely, as it gave them their first opportunity to see this large ship and its V/STOL aircraft.

The following year saw two exercises in European waters, the first of which was held in the area of the North Cape and the central Norwegian Sea. The second was much larger and consisted of two elements, one involving the Northern Fleet in the Barents Sea, while in the other ships sailed from the Baltic, north around the British Isles and then into the central Atlantic. Also in 1977 the Soviet navy suffered the second of its major peacetime surface disasters when the Kashin-class destroyer Orel (formerly Otvazhny) suffered a major explosion while in the Black Sea, followed by a fire which raged for five hours before the ship sank, taking virtually the entire crew to their deaths.

In 1978 the passage of another Kiev-class carrier enabled an air–sea exercise to take place to the south of the Iceland–Faroes gap. Similar exercises followed in 1979 and 1980. The 1981 exercise involved three groups and took place in the northern part of the Barents Sea.

There were no major naval exercises in 1982, but the following year saw the most ambitious global exercise yet, with concurrent and closely related activities in all the world’s oceans, involving not only warships, but also merchant and fishing vessels. In European waters, three aggressor groups assembled off southern Norway and then sailed northward to simulate an advancing NATO force; they were then intercepted and attacked by the major part of the Northern Fleet.

The major exercise in 1985 followed a similar pattern, with aggressor groups sailing northeastward off the Norwegian coast, to be attacked by a large Soviet defending task group which included Kirov, the lead-ship of a new class of battlecruiser,[5] Sovremenny-class anti-surface destroyers and Udaloy-class anti-submarine destroyers, as well as many older ships. There was also substantial air activity, which included the use of Tu-26 Backfire bombers. Although not apparent at the time, this proved to be the zenith of Soviet naval activity, and in the remaining years of the Cold War the number and scale of the exercises steadily diminished.

These major exercises enabled the Soviet navy to rehearse its war plans and to demonstrate its increasing capability to other navies, particularly those in NATO. There were, of course, many smaller exercises, such as those involving amphibious capabilities, which took place on the northern shores of the Kola Peninsula, on the Baltic coast and in the Black Sea. It is noteworthy, however, that the vast majority of the exercises held in European waters, and particularly those held from 1978 onwards, while tactically offensive, were actually strategically defensive in nature, involving the Northern Fleet in defending the north Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea and the area around Jan Mayen Island.

Soviet at-sea time was considerably less than that of the US and other major Western navies. The latter maintained about one-third of their ships at sea at all times, while only about 15 per cent of the Soviet navy was at sea, reducing to 10 per cent for submarines. The Soviets did, however, partially offset this by placing strong emphasis on a high degree of readiness in port and on the ability to get to sea quickly.

OTHER WARSAW PACT NAVIES

The non-Soviet Warsaw Pact nations made only a small contribution to the Warsaw Pact naval capability; those with navies maintained them at a relatively small size, while Czechoslovakia and Hungary had no access to the sea at all. The Bulgarian, East German and Polish navies were closely directed by the Soviet navy and their roles were subordinated to the Black Sea and Baltic fleets respectively. They were supplied with Soviet ships, weapons and technology, but were seldom allowed access to the very latest developments, receiving instead modified ships with downgraded armament and sensors; in particular, they were never supplied with any naval nuclear weapons. As in other spheres, the Romanian navy had an intermittent relationship with the Soviets, but might have joined Warsaw Pact naval operations in war if Ceauşescu had deemed it advantageous to do so. Until 1961 there was also the Albanian navy, but this could have contributed nothing of significance in a war.

Albania was a close Soviet ally from 1945 onwards and was one of the founder members of the Warsaw Pact, allowing the Soviet navy to construct a greatly valued Mediterranean base at Sazan in the Gulf of Vlorës. In return, it received a number of small Soviet warships, including two Whiskey-class submarines, at favourable prices. A rapid decline in the relationship with the USSR led to a split in December 1961, when the Albanians ejected the Soviet navy from Sazan, taking the opportunity to seize two Whiskey-class submarines in the process. Thereafter Albania depended on China for naval equipment, but its naval potential was extremely limited.

The Bulgarian navy was subject to a ceiling of 7,250 tonnes and 3,500 men under the terms of the 1947 peace treaty. Its first significant military aid from the USSR was a destroyer supplied in 1947, although the vessel concerned had actually been built for the Russian navy in 1917. This was followed by several small frigates and diesel-electric submarines, but the Bulgarian navy was never a significant force in the Black Sea.

The East German navy started as a small police marine unit in 1949, becoming the Seestreitkräfte (Naval Strike Force) in 1956 and the Volksmarine (People’s Navy) in 1960. It originally undertook coastal patrol and minesweeping tasks, but in the late 1970s it assumed amphibious and ASW responsibilities as well, and a naval air division and a regiment of marines were also formed. Numerous warships were supplied by the USSR, but never included any surface ships larger than frigates, nor any submarines at all. An increasing number of warships were designed and constructed by the Peenewerft shipyard at Wolgast, some of which were supplied to the Soviet navy.

The East German navy’s operational role was always subordinated to that of the Soviet Baltic Fleet, and from the late 1970s it contributed, together with the Polish and Soviet navies, to the Baltic Joint Squadron, which was intended to be the Warsaw Pact’s response to NATO’s three standing multinational units.

Throughout the Second World War the Polish navy had maintained a small force which operated as part of the British navy, with most of the ships and men involved returning to Poland after the war. On the formation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955 the Polish navy, small as it was, was the second largest after the Soviet navy – a position it retained until the early 1980s, when it was overtaken in size by East Germany’s Volksmarine. Several modernization and enlargement plans were produced, but, although some successes were achieved, full implementation was always frustrated by the weakness of the Polish economy and the higher priority accorded to the army.

Throughout the Cold War, the navy operated at least one destroyer (two between 1958 and 1970), a small number of diesel-electric submarines, and a larger number of amphibious-warfare vessels, patrol craft and minesweepers. The one indigenous shipyard (the Polnocna yard at Gdańsk) constructed warships including the Polnocny-class landing ships, eighty-six of which were built: twenty-four for Poland, fifty-one for the USSR, and the remainder for various Soviet-approved export customers.

The only other Warsaw Pact nation to maintain a sea-going navy was Romania, which followed an erratic development pattern. A tonnage limit of 15,000 tonnes was imposed by the 1947 peace treaty, although the Romanians failed to approach even this comparatively low ceiling for many years. The USSR supplied some ships, and in 1951 it also returned two Romanian destroyers which had been seized by Soviet forces in 1944. The transfer of Soviet ships stopped in 1964 as Romania became more difficult to deal with, and for a while China was the principal supplier of new vessels (all small missile-armed patrol craft) or of designs which were then built in Romanian yards.

By the late 1970s the Romanian navy operated a collection of Soviet- and Chinese-supplied patrol boats and was urgently in need of modernization, but unfortunately for Romania this coincided with President Ceauceşcu’s grandiose dreams, resulting in an over-ambitious construction plan which played a major role in the eventual collapse of his regime. The largest single result was the 5,800 tonne Muntenia, a destroyer which was far larger than anything required by the Romanian navy for operational reasons, although, despite its size, the armament was weak and its sensor equipment derisory, while the ship suffered from serious stability problems. A somewhat more successful frigate design was developed, of which six were built. The Romanian navy also had a tradition of operating submarines, operating four small Soviet boats from 1957 to 1967, which were followed by a gap until 1986 when a single Soviet Kilo class diesel-electric submarine was acquired, although it proved too large for Black Sea operations.

DESPITE THE SUCCESS of diesel-electric submarines during the first half of the twentieth century, it was clear that they suffered from an inherent weakness, in that there was an inescapable requirement for the submarine to surface regularly in order to recharge its batteries. During the First World War and the early days of the Second this was normally done at night, but the introduction of radar, initially aboard ships but later aboard aircraft, rendered surfaced boats increasingly vulnerable. As a result, the German navy developed the snorkel tube, which enabled the submarine to cruise at periscope depth while simultaneously recharging its batteries and clearing the foul air inside the submarine.[1]

This was, however, only a palliative, and in the 1930s forward thinkers in the Soviet Union[2] and Germany saw that what was really required was a submarine which could spend protracted periods underwater without having to approach the surface at all. In other words, they needed some form of air-independent propulsion (AIP) system. The US and British navies came to the same conclusion during the war, and both realized that nuclear propulsion would offer a very effective solution, although the potential costs were extremely high at the time, and the small amounts of plutonium then available were earmarked for bomb programmes. After the war, the Soviet navy examined a possible alternative to nuclear propulsion, the hydrogen-peroxide system developed in Germany by Dr Helmuth Walter, and developed submarines to test the system, but, having experienced its inherently dangerous nature, they abandoned it and, like the Americans, turned to nuclear propulsion.

THE US NUCLEAR SUBMARINE PROGRAMME

The US nuclear-propulsion programme started just after the war, when a team of officers was sent to the Oak Ridge nuclear research plant, their leader being an obscure electrical specialist who was due to retire shortly: Captain Hyman G. Rickover. More by luck than judgement, the US navy had placed the right man in the right place at the right time: the acerbic and energetic Rickover overcame initial official indifference, and the first two nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs), Nautilus and Seawolf, were launched in 1954 and 1955 respectively. Their overall designs were generally similar, the main difference being that in Nautilus the reactor was cooled by pressurized water, while in Seawolf the coolant was liquid sodium. The former quickly proved its superiority, and all subsequent US nuclear-propelled submarines have had such a reactor, while Seawolf itself was changed to a pressurized-water system in 1959. Despite their prototype status, these first two submarines were used as operational submarines, and they were followed by four smaller boats, the Skate class (2,584 tonnes), which were commissioned in 1957–9 and remained in service until the mid-1980s.

These first six SSNs all had the traditional long, thin hull and twin propellers of the German Type XXI, but in the early 1950s the US navy examined the whole question of submarine shape and manoeuvrability, and tested the conclusions with one of the most influential submarine designs of all time, the Albacore. This diesel-electric boat had a ‘teardrop’ hull (i.e. it was shorter and fatter than the traditional design), new types of control, and a single propeller. The shape of the hull not only made the submarine much more manoeuvrable, but also gave a great increase in internal volume, resulting in a much larger battery and thus much greater submerged speed: initially 27 and later a remarkable 33 knots.

The immense success of this experimental design led to a new SSN class with an ‘Albacore’ hull, the Skipjack class, of which six were commissioned between 1959 and 1961. These were, however, quickly followed by the Thresher class, which were larger and had a stronger hull, enabling them to dive to greater depths, and a much improved sonar, mounted in a dome which fully occupied the bows. Eleven Thresher-class SSNs were built, followed by forty-two of the slightly different Sturgeon class, all with a primary ASW mission.

Just as this massive programme was getting under way, however, the US submarine service suffered a major blow with the loss of Thresher on 10 April 1963. The submarine was undergoing routine diving tests with 104 crew and twenty-five observers aboard when it experienced what it reported as a ‘minor problem’, but shortly afterwards it dived out of control, lost communication with the surface, and imploded as it neared the seabed. This loss led to a total re-examination of the SSN design, resulting in delays in the construction programme, but improvements were made and building restarted.[3] The Skipjack-class submarine Scorpion was later lost, also with all hands, off the Azores in May 1968. These have, however, been the only losses in the US nuclear-powered-submarine programme.

Finally came the Los Angeles-class SSNs, which were commissioned from 1976 onwards and continued in production throughout the remainder of the Cold War, until the sixty-second was commissioned in 1995. They were designed for three principal missions. The first was anti-submarine warfare, in which these boats would have patrolled off Soviet ports, in choke points and in the Soviet SSBN bastions, with the task of tracking Soviet submarines in peacetime and tension and of sinking them in war. The second role was to serve as part of an aircraft-carrier task group, particularly to detect and attack Soviet cruise-missile-launching submarines. The third role was as covert signals-intelligence (SIGINT) and electronic-intelligence (ELINT) surveillance platforms.

These boats displaced 6,260 tonnes and were equipped, like the previous Permit/Sturgeon class, with a sonar which occupied the entire bows, so that the four launch tubes had to be mounted amidships, firing outwards. The original weapon load was twenty-six torpedoes, but there were various changes. First it was decided to add SubRoc (an anti-submarine missile), then Sub-Harpoon (an anti-ship missile), and finally, from 1983 onwards, Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles. All these missiles were carried internally, were launched from the torpedo tubes and had to be within the overall total of twenty-six,[4] which made the question of weapon mix for each patrol a matter of nice judgement. This problem was, however, later alleviated when it was found possible to locate twelve vertical launch tubes for Tomahawk outside the pressure hull but within the outer casing, which enabled the original torpedo load to be restored.

Differences in weapon load were, however, only an outward indication of improvements, since the Los Angeles class also improved dramatically internally during its nineteen-year production run. Analogue fire-control and sonar systems gave way to digital systems, new silencing methods were introduced, while from San Juan (SSN-751) onwards numerous changes were incorporated, including moving the foreplanes from the sail to the bows (to ease surfacing through ice in the Arctic), as well as a new integrated command system.

Not surprisingly, such highly effective weapons platforms were very expensive. Sample figures for a single Los Angeles-class submarine (in ‘then-year’ dollars) were $225 million in 1976, $326 million in 1979 and $844 million in 1983.

SOVIET NUCLEAR-POWERED ATTACK SUBMARINES

With the commissioning of the first US nuclear-propelled attack submarines in 1955, NATO naturally looked for the arrival of the first Soviet SSN, and the first November-class boat, Leninsky Komsomol, duly ran on nuclear power on 4 July 1958, some three years after its US counterpart. Despite having watched so carefully for this event, however, Western intelligence was still taken by surprise when three different types of nuclear-powered submarine all appeared within a year of each other: a ballistic-missile class (Hotel) a cruise-missile class (Echo) and an attack class (November). All were powered by the same propulsion system, consisting of two separate power trains, each with a 70 megawatt reactor and a single turbine set driving a motor-generator; there was also a creep motor on each shaft. This propulsion system was known as the ‘HEN’ power plant in the West (derived from the initials of the NATO reporting names, Hotel–Echo–November). As can be seen from Appendix 19, this system was somewhat unreliable in its early days, resulting in numerous accidents and a large number of deaths and injuries to the crews.

Like the early US SSNs, the November class had been designed along the lines of the German Type XXI, with a long, thin, figure-of-eight-section hull and twin propellers, but with the next class, the Victors, Soviet designers changed to a shorter, body-of-revolution design with a single propeller.[5] As in most navies, the naval staff was very reluctant for change, and it took some time for the design bureaux to persuade the naval leadership that this was the best way ahead. In the end, forty-nine Victor-class SSNs were built, to three slightly different designs.[6]

At this point the Soviet navy sought to make a major leap in design practice by replacing the high-grade steel traditionally used in hull construction with titanium, to produce a submarine capable of diving to a depth of 700 m. Designated the Alfa class, this new design also had a very high-powered and highly automated propulsion system, which gave it a very high maximum speed. A submarine of this class created consternation in Western navies when it ran under a NATO task force at a speed in excess of 40 knots and then dived deep, indicating a performance which contemporary Western ASW ships, sensors and weapons could not begin to match. The Soviet programme was very expensive, but it also compelled the West to initiate some even more expensive programmes, to deal with it, including faster and more capable surface ASW ships, ASW helicopters, faster submarines, and faster, deeper-diving torpedoes.

The Soviet navy next developed two new designs in parallel – a practice already observed in ICBM development, where a radical design was backed up by a second which was more conventional and less risky technically. In this case the more advanced design was the Sierra class, which had a titanium hull, and was both fast (35 knots) and deep-diving (700 m or more). It was also the quietest Soviet SSN yet produced, but it was also extremely expensive, and the programme was cancelled after four had been completed. The parallel design was the Akula, which had a steel hull and was considerably cheaper; sixteen were produced before production ceased after the end of the Cold War.

THE UK

As in the USA, early British design work on nuclear power plants for submarines started during the Second World War, but it was given a low priority and eventually the British purchased US propulsion technology, resulting in Dreadnought, which was commissioned in 1963. This was followed by five of the slightly larger Valiant class, commissioned between 1966 and 1971. One of these, Conqueror, established a record as the first (and so far the only) nuclear-powered submarine to have sunk an enemy ship in battle, when it dispatched the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano on 2 May 1982, during the Falklands War (although it had to use two Mark VIII torpedoes of Second World War vintage to do it). Subsequently, a very small number of British SSNs patrolled off the Argentine coast and not only were able to confine the Argentine navy within its national territorial waters, but also were able to give early warning of Argentine strike aircraft taking off from shore airfields and starting offensive missions towards the Falkland Islands.

After their slow start, and despite the smallness of their SSN fleet, the British introduced some innovative design features, including the pump-jet propulsor and anechoic (sound-proofing) tiles, and claimed that their SSNs were the quietest in any navy. Six Swiftsure-class SSNs were commissioned between 1973 and 1981, followed by seven of the improved Trafalgar class between 1983 and 1991.

The tasks of British SSNs included countering Soviet SSBNs in their bastions, operations in choke points (e.g. the Greenland–Iceland–UK gap) and ensuring the safe departure and return of British SSBNs from their base in the Clyde.

FRANCE

Although the first French SSN programme was started in 1964, it was then postponed so that all efforts could be devoted into getting SSBNs into service; only when that had been achieved did France turn to developing SSNs. The four Rubis-class boats were commissioned between 1983 and 1988; displacing 2,670 tonnes, these were the smallest operational SSNs to enter service in any navy, and were also reputed to be the noisiest.

CANADA

The only other Cold War country to give serious consideration to SSNs was Canada, which in the 1980s needed to replace three British Oberon-class diesel-electric submarines which had been purchased in 1965–8. What started out as a fairly simple and modest project rapidly turned into a large, sophisticated and extremely expensive undertaking, principally because the Canadians wished to establish proper control over their northern waters. The eventual requirement was for twelve SSNs, and not surprisingly France and the UK fought tooth and nail for the order. The project eventually came to naught, but only after much money had been spent without a single piece of hardware to show for it.

DIESEL-ELECTRIC SUBMARINES, WHICH were also known as ‘conventional’ submarines, played a significant role in the Cold War from the very start. When NATO became operational in the early 1950s the Soviet surface fleet was generally considered to be of minor importance, since it had achieved little of strategic significance during the Second World War and by the late 1940s most of its ships were obsolescent, if not obsolete. The Soviets were outnumbered in every category, and had no ships at all to match the West’s aircraft carriers and amphibious shipping. There was, however, one area in which they were believed to pose a significant threat: that of attack by diesel-electric submarines on Allied sea lines of communication across the Atlantic. With the memories of the German U-boat attacks in the north Atlantic still fresh, this perceived Soviet threat became one of the driving influences in NATO fleet development and deployment throughout the Cold War.

Fortunately for the Allies, the revolutionary new German submarines, the ocean-going Type XXI and the coastal Type XXIII, were only just entering service as the war ended, but there was no doubt as to their excellence. Both were real submarines, whose natural habitat was below the surface and which surfaced only when forced to do so. Compared with its predecessors, the Type XXI had a stronger and much more streamlined hull, a larger battery and new control systems which enabled it to fight underwater, and its snorkel tube enabled it to recharge its batteries while remaining submerged. Its underwater speed of 17 knots made it faster than most contemporary ASW ships, especially when there was bad weather on the surface. The Type XXIII was a smaller, coastal equivalent; it too was fast and capable, although its value was limited by its ability to carry only two torpedoes.

At the war’s end, the victorious Allies shared forty U-boats between them, with top priority being given to the Types XXI and XXIII; they then scuttled the rest. On receipt of these prizes, only the French and the Soviets put a few Type XXIs into service, while the Americans and British, after very careful examination and trials, used the design innovations, first to adapt their existing submarines, of which both had very large numbers, and subsequently as the basis for new designs.

US SUBMARINES

The US navy found itself in 1946 with a vast stock of very recently built and virtually identical Second World War submarines, and a wide variety of conversions was made to these between 1946 and the mid-1950s. Most were modified under the Greater Underwater Propulsive Power (the so-called ‘Guppy’) programme, in which they were streamlined, given much more powerful batteries, and fitted with sonars and snorkel tubes. These conversions remained in service with the US navy until the early 1970s, and many were transferred to overseas, navies, within NATO in particular, where for some (e.g. Greece and Turkey) they formed the backbone of the submarine service for the remainder of the Cold War.

Numbers of Second World War submarines were also converted for special roles. These included radar pickets, which were fitted with large radars to enable them to give mid-course guidance corrections to carrier-launched bombers and, later, to the Regulus submarine-launched cruise missile. Some were converted to troop transports to deliver covert parties to hostile shores, and others as seaplane refuellers.

One development in early US Cold War naval strategy was a plan to prevent Soviet submarines leaving their home ports in war by positioning large numbers of specially-developed ‘hunter/killer’ ASW submarines outside the ports. In 1951–2 three such submarines (Barracuda class) were commissioned. These were intended to be prototypes for a large class which would have been built during a future mobilization process, but the whole scheme was dropped in 1959. Meanwhile, a new class of attack submarines was built (Tang class), which incorporated the design lessons of the German Type XXI. Only six were built, followed by three of the more advanced Barbel class, before the US navy abandoned diesel-electric submarines altogether in favour of nuclear propulsion.

THE SOVIET DIESEL-ELECTRIC SUBMARINE FLEET[1]

IN 1945 THE Soviet navy operated some 285 submarines, all of Soviet design and manufacture, of which 159 were ocean-going and 126 coastal types. These were, however, all of pre-war design and lacked modern refinements such as streamlined hulls and snorkel tubes, having been, like the submarines of other Allied navies, outdated at a stroke by the German Type XXI.

Soviet submarines were supplemented in 1945–6 by a number of ex-German submarines. Twenty Type XXIs were found incomplete when the Red Army captured Danzig, and it was assumed by Western intelligence that these were completed and pressed into Soviet service. With the knowledge available at the time, this was a reasonable conclusion, but it has since come to light that they were scrapped, still incomplete, in 1948–9. In addition, four serviceable Type XXIs and one Type XXIII (plus four Type VIIc and one Type IXC) were handed over to the Soviet navy in 1945–6 from the stock of captured U-boats administered by the British on behalf of the Allies, and all served in the Baltic Fleet until the mid-1950s. The Soviet navy also received two Italian submarines as part of the peace settlement with Italy.

Design of the first post-war submarines began in 1946, and these, based on earlier Soviet designs, entered service in the early 1950s, quickly building up in numbers. The early versions of the two larger classes, Whiskey and Zulu, were armed with deck guns but did not have snorkels. Contemporary Western intelligence assessed that these types were Soviet adaptions of the German Type XXI, but this was incorrect: they were developments of previous Soviet designs, but incorporating a few German ideas.

Western intelligence was convinced that the Soviet navy was intent on repeating the German U-boat war on the NATO sea lines of communication across the Atlantic, and the large-scale production programmes for the Whiskey and Zulu classes appeared to reinforce this theory. There was therefore some surprise when the production of both types ceased in 1957–8, and this was thought to be a prelude to production of the first Soviet SSNs, until it was discovered that a new conventional submarine was in production: the Foxtrot class.

The Foxtrot design was larger, and was in fact the first Soviet design properly to incorporate all the lessons of the Type XXI. Sixty-two were produced for the Soviet navy, and the type became the workhorse of the fleet, being found in every ocean of the world. A second, and very similar, class, the Romeo, was produced by another design bureau, but presumably the Foxtrot proved the better boat, as production of the Romeo finished with the twenty-first unit. The Romeo was, however, exported and the design and tooling were sold to China, where it was built in large numbers.

It was then expected in the West, once again, that the Soviet navy would follow the US lead and build only nuclear-powered submarines in future, but this too proved to be erroneous, and twenty Tango-class boats were built between 1971 and 1982. Displacing 3,900 tonnes, these were the largest diesel-electric submarines to be built during the Cold War and were intended to contribute to the ASW defences for the SSBN bastions. Significantly, although all other Soviet diesel-electric submarines were exported, no Tango-class submarine was ever passed to another navy.

Construction of diesel-electric submarines continued with at least twenty-four Granay-class (NATO = ‘Kilo’) boats built from 1979 onwards for the Soviet navy. A very similar but less sophisticated design, the Washavyanka class, was designed for the export market, particularly for Warsaw Pact navies.

The Soviet navy also experimented with unconventional, but non-nuclear, air-independent propulsion systems. Thirty Quebec-class boats were built in the 1950s which ran on a Russian-developed ‘Kreislauf’ system, using liquid oxygen, while the German Walter hydrogen-peroxide system was tested in the single Project 617 submarine. Neither type proved successful, but intelligence reports of the existence of the Walter project caused some alarm in the West.

Perhaps the greatest significance of the Soviet submarine fleet was that throughout the first twenty years of the Cold War its strength, capabilities and intentions were consistently overestimated by Western intelligence. This was partially due to the imposition of an information blackout by the Soviets themselves, which led to Western naval experts taking the worst-possible view (from the Western aspect) of Soviet capabilities and production, as was their wont. These estimates were reinforced by debriefings of repatriated German prisoners of war and scientists who were abducted to the USSR in 1945 and returned in the 1950s. These men gave reports which were frequently incorrect or exaggerated, or were based on the knowledge of just one element of a large programme. Western intelligence, alarmed by other elements of the Soviet threat, extrapolated from these and all too often came up with conclusions which were widely wrong. The Soviets, of course, did nothing to contradict the Western estimates.

BRITISH SUBMARINES

In 1945 the British had the third largest submarine fleet and, as in the USA, early post-war efforts were devoted to converting Second World War boats. The hulls were streamlined, new and more powerful batteries were fitted, and new sensors were installed – all of which enabled these boats to serve until the 1960s and 1970s.

The British pursued the Walter hydrogen-peroxide design (and even used the services of Dr Walter from 1945 to 1948), mainly because they thought that the Soviets had a similar design and they required fast underwater boats with which to train their ASW forces. One ex-German Type XVIIB was trialled, and two British-designed boats were built. The Walter system proved to be very hazardous in service, however, and (to the great relief of the crews involved) further development was dropped.[2]

Another British idea was to deliver 15 kT nuclear mines to the entrances to the main Soviet ports, such as Kronstadt, using specially built mini-subs, designated ‘X’ craft. These would have been towed to the vicinity of their target by a larger submarine, as had happened during the war in attacks such as that on the German battleship Tirpitz. Although four of these mini-subs were completed, the project was cancelled in 1956.

Despite developing nuclear-powered attack submarines, the British did not follow the US example by ceasing to construct diesel-electric submarines, since they considered the conventional boats to have continuing roles in the hunter/killer role (e.g. in the Greenland–Iceland–UK gap) and in clandestine operations. Accordingly, they built the eight-strong Porpoise class between 1956 and 1961, the twelve-strong Oberon class between 1957 and 1967, and, after a long gap, the four-strong Upholder class between 1983 and 1992.[3]

FRANCE

In 1946 France operated a small number of pre-Second World War submarines and received five ex-German U-boats in the Allied share-out, only one of which was a Type XXI. Study of the latter boat led to the Narval class, six of which were built between 1951 and 1960 and remained in service to the late 1980s. A class of four smaller boats was built at the same time, the Arethuse class; these were enlarged and much heavier-armed versions of the German Type XXIII, designed to prevent Soviet submarines attacking French convoys between North Africa and France in war. Two more classes, the Daphne class (eleven boats, 1958–69) and the Agosta class (four boats, 1972–8), completed the post-war rehabilitation of the French navy’s submarine arm.

WEST GERMANY

Germany was banned from constructing U-boats after the Second World War, but when the Federal Republic entered NATO it was decided to create a new submarine service, whose mission would be to defend the Baltic and North seas in co-operation with other NATO navies. Whereas the German surface fleet was restarted using foreign ships, the submarine service used entirely German-designed and -built boats. To start with, three sunken Second World War U-boats were raised, repaired and returned to service: two Type XXIIIs in 1956 and a single Type XXI in 1958.[4]

All post-war U-boats for the West German navy have been relatively small, with the largest, the Type 206, displacing only 500 tonnes. Twelve boats were originally to have been constructed of the first post-war design, the Type 201, but the hull was constructed using non-magnetic steel, which suffered from severe corrosion, and a new type of steel had to be developed, resulting in the Type 205. This was succeeded by the Type 206, eighteen of which were built between 1971 and 1974, and which then served as the navy’s main submarine for the rest of the Cold War.

The German submarine industry, however, remained extremely healthy, owing to orders for some seventy-three boats from overseas customers, both within NATO and from some twenty customers in South America and Asia. The main NATO customer was Norway, which purchased fifteen Type 207s, followed by six of a new design, the Type 210, for service in the fjords and the Norwegian Sea.

OTHER NATO NAVIES

Other NATO navies started their post-war submarine arms using American Second World War boats supplied under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program. Italy, which had the world’s largest submarine fleet in September 1939, subsequently produced its own submarines in small numbers, as did Denmark. Greece and Turkey both opted for the German export submarine, the Type 209, with the former buying complete boats from Germany, while the latter bought a few boats direct and then undertook its own production at the navy yard at Gölcük. Spain and Portugal both bought French designs. The Netherlands produced their own, very sophisticated submarine designs, albeit in small numbers.

Thus, although the largest navy ceased to build diesel-electric submarines, the type remained very active in other navies. All Warsaw Pact members with navies operated them, as did all NATO navies except that of Belgium.

THROUGHOUT THE COLD War the mightiest concentration of usable military power lay in the US navy’s carrier task groups (CTGs). The carrier force had been the core of the US surface navy since about 1943, when carriers replaced battleships as the capital ships of the fleet, although their huge costs – especially when the air wing, purpose-built replenishment ships and escorts were added in – made them a subject of almost constant criticism. Nevertheless, the US navy ‘supercarriers’ were a force which no other nation could challenge, while their ability to move anywhere in the world in international waters provided a facility which the US air force – like other air forces, limited by overflying rights and the need for foreign bases – could never match.

The Soviet navy entered the Cold War without any tradition of carrier warfare at all, but gradually accumulated expertise and experience which, towards the end of the Cold War, enabled it to build some unusual and innovative carriers. The expense and complexity of carrier operations restricted the number of other operators, however. The British navy, which had the second largest carrier fleet in 1945, managed, by a huge effort, to rebuild its carrier fleet and to produce new aircraft, so that by the early 1960s it was an effective force; but thereafter it decreased rapidly, and at one time nearly disappeared completely. Other countries managed to operate small carrier forces for some years, and the advent of the V/STOL aircraft, specifically the Anglo/US Harrier, brought carrier operation within the reach of a number of new operators from the 1970s onwards.

The most important technical innovation in the early post-war years was the jet-powered aircraft, first with straight and later with swept wings, but greater performance was matched by ever-increasing demands on the carriers. The speed and weight of the new aircraft presented totally new requirements for take-off and landing, while their ever-increasing size made new demands on handling facilities, hangar and deck space, and deck lifts, their fuel consumption increased the bunkerage requirement for aviation fuel, and their load-carrying capacity demanded more armament space. The US navy’s reconstructed Essex class, for example, was the typical front-line carrier of the 1950s and carried 1,135,620 litres of fuel and 736 tonnes of ordnance for its aircraft, while a 1980s carrier, the Nimitz class, carried 12,730,000 litres and 2,611 tonnes, respectively.[1]

To provide longer and wider flight decks and hangars, the ships simply became bigger, while aircraft handling was greatly improved by installing side (as opposed to centre-line) lifts – a US innovation. Many other inventions, however, came from line officers of the British navy, including the angled deck, the steam catapult and the deck-landing mirror, although all three innovations first went to sea with the US navy’s first supercarrier, USS Forrestal, in 1955.

US CARRIERS

At the end of the Second World War the US navy found itself with a large fleet of carriers, but these were rapidly made obsolescent by the advent of jet aircraft. The first attempt at a modern carrier was the design for the USS United States (CVA-58), but this was rejected by the defense secretary (largely at the prompting of the newly formed air force) and there was then a pause until the Korean War demonstrated the continuing need for carriers. This resulted in the Forrestal-class carriers, which were the largest warships built up to that time.

The last of the Second World War carriers, the Essex class, had a full-load displacement of 31,643 tonnes, whereas the Forrestals displaced 71,222 tonnes and were over 30 m longer. These proved a most successful design and, with regular modernizations, the four ships, which joined the fleet between 1955 and 1959, each gave some forty years of service. They were followed by two carriers of the Kitty Hawk class, both commissioned in 1961, which were essentially a refined version of the Forrestal and were intended to be the last to use conventional propulsion. Thus the next carrier, Enterprise (CVN-65), was the first to have nuclear propulsion, which made it extremely capable, but so expensive that Congress baulked at the idea of more at the same cost and insisted that the navy revert to conventional (i.e. fossil-fuel) propulsion, which it did, building two more Kitty Hawk class.

Thereafter, the navy managed to persuade Congress that it really did need nuclear carriers, and the result was the Nimitz class, the first of which was commissioned in 1975 and was followed by four more before the Cold War ended. The cost of these carriers was enormous and became a matter of dispute within most administrations and within Congress. There were also criticisms from inside the navy itself as various factions fought for larger slices of the budget.

One consequence of these criticisms was that designs for smaller and cheaper carriers were repeatedly examined. In the 1960s the Medium Carrier Project was considered, which was initially a 40,000 tonne, conventionally powered carrier, but, as almost invariably happened, the design grew to 60,000 tonnes in the course of the examination. This design was dusted off and re-examined in 1973, again in 1975 and, finally, in the early 1980s, but, when the navy managed to persuade Congress of the need for nuclear propulsion, more Nimitz class were built instead.

Another 1960s project was for a ‘Sea Control Ship’, displacing some 12,400 tonnes and operating V/STOL (i.e. Harrier) aircraft; and the then chief of naval operations (CNO) spoke enthusiastically of obtaining eight such carriers for the price of one nuclear carrier. The next CNO dropped this in favour of the V/STOL Support Ship, which would have been somewhat larger and operated more aircraft (a mix of Harriers and helicopters), but this too was dropped.[2] In the end, and despite repeated examinations of the alternatives, the US navy continued to build its super-carriers.

The huge size of the US carriers since Forrestal has enabled them to accommodate numerous facilities apart from those directly related to the air wing. These included an integrated combat information centre and an airborne ASW classification and analysis centre, with the latter being on-line to the United States and also enabling the carrier to share its ASW information with other ships in its task group.

In the years immediately following the Second World War the US navy planned to deploy as many as six carriers to the Barents Sea and eight (including some British carriers) to the Mediterranean. Later in the Cold War the British no longer operated attack carriers, and the US planned to maintain four carriers in forward areas – one each in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Pacific and Indian oceans – with eight others in refit, in pre-deployment training or in transit.

Less immediately obvious was that the carrier did not prowl the ocean alone, but moved in company with a number of other ships in a carrier task group. Typically, a later Cold War CTG comprised one, or sometimes two, aircraft carriers, two missile-armed cruisers, four frigates and two fast replenishment vessels.

The US navy quickly appreciated that a significant area for future naval warfare lay with atomic bombs delivered against targets well inland, and as early as 1945 the service began to formulate plans for delivery systems. One area of development was ship- and submarine-launched cruise missiles, but the second was a new attack bomber, the North American AJ-1 Savage. As only a few could be accommodated by existing carriers, however, plans were made for a new class of carrier, the United States, displacing some 75,000 tonnes, of which four were planned.

As mentioned above, the newly created air force took exception to this plan, as it considered strategic bombing to be its business and was already heavily engaged in building up a force of strategic bombers with intercontinental capabilities. It therefore carried out the first of several successful congressional campaigns, in which it not only achieved the cancellation of the carrier programme in 1949 (and the transfer of the funds to the air force) but also succeeded in having the strategic role of naval aviation restricted. Once tempers had cooled, however, the navy reached an accommodation with the air force, whereby the latter would undertake the strategic nuclear role while the navy would concentrate its nuclear weapons on ports and on inland targets which could affect the naval battle, such as airfields.

From 1945 to the early 1960s nuclear weapons were both large and heavy, the Mark VI atomic bomb, for example, weighing some 4,500 kg. The US navy’s first attempt at a nuclear bomber was to convert twelve Lockheed P2V-3C Neptune ASW patrol aircraft to carry one Mark VI atomic bomb each. These aircraft had twin piston engines, their wings did not fold, and they were not fitted with arrester hooks for carrier landings. As a result, they would have been loaded on to the carrier flight deck by crane and, with rocket assistance, would have been launched on a one-way mission against Soviet targets from as near to the Soviet coast as was feasible.[3]

The first nuclear-capable carrier bomber, which had caused such problems with the air force, the AJ-1 Savage, was powered by two piston engines and one turbojet, giving it a mission radius of 1,850 km carrying a single nuclear weapon, which was delivered at a speed of 720 km/h and a height of 9,150 m. It entered service in September 1949 and could be operated from both the Midway-class (eight aircraft) and Essex-class carriers (three aircraft) then in service, but only at the expense of a large number of fighters. The Savages were based at Port Lyautey in French Morocco from 1949 and at Atsugi in Japan from 1953, and served in the nuclear-strike role until 1959.

Nor was the size of the aircraft the only complication. According to the rules for the safety of nuclear weapons at the time, the plutonium cores had to be stored in the United States and were flown out in transport aircraft to an airbase near the carriers only on receipt of warning of warlike conditions. On arrival in the theatre of operations they were transferred to TBM-3 Avenger aircraft for delivery to the carriers, but, since the protective packaging was so heavy, each aircraft could carry only one core. On arrival a team of some forty specialists then assembled each bomb in turn.

From 1956 onwards the Savage was succeeded by the twin-jet, swept-wing A-3 Skywarrior, which also carried a single nuclear weapon, but with a mission radius of 3,220 km, at a height of 12,000 m. This aircraft was designed to take advantage of the newly introduced Forrestal-class super-carriers, whose air wing included twelve A-3s, although the A-3 also served in the air wings of the older carriers, such as the Midway class (nine A-3s) and the Essex class (three A-3s). Sometimes, however, the Midway-class carriers went to sea with an air wing consisting entirely of nuclear-capable bombers: eleven A-3 Skywarriors, sixty A-4D Skyhawks and twelve AD Skyraiders.

The final aircraft in the series was the A-5 Vigilante, which entered service in 1965 and was the largest aircraft ever to operate from carriers. This had a maximum range of 5,150 km and overflew the target at 15,000 m at a speed of Mach 1.5. It was the first bomber in any air force to carry an inertial navigating system, which, since it was passive, emitted no electronic radiations. Another feature of the Vigilante was its linear bomb bay, which ejected the nuclear weapon through a large hole in the tail.

With the entry into service of the Polaris missiles, however, the need for specialized nuclear-bombing aircraft disappeared and the aircraft still in service in 1961 were switched to other roles. The US navy still continued to operate numerous aircraft types which could deliver nuclear weapons, but by this time the weapons were very much smaller and lighter, enabling them to be carried by much smaller planes.

In the 1950s US carriers were fitted with relatively heavy gun and missile armaments, but these were gradually decreased until only a few close-in weapons were carried. Thereafter, carriers relied on their aircraft and escorting vessels for protection.

In addition to the nuclear bombers, the carrier-borne aircraft developed rapidly. The straight-wing Grumman F9F-1 Panther of 1950, for example, had an all-gun armament, a top speed of 1,110 km/h and a range of 1,600 km, while the F-4 Phantom of 1960 had swept wings, a mixed missile and gun armament, a top speed of 2,400 km/h and a range of 2,800 km. The fighter of the late 1970s was the F-14 Tomcat, which employed swing wings to combine great speed (maximum 2,500 km/h) with a reasonable landing performance and a range of 3,200 km. As with the F-4, the F-14’s armament was a mix of guns and missiles. These figures show an increase in speed of 125 per cent and in range of 100 per cent over thirty years, but less easily quantifiable were the increases in manoeuvrability and in the range and capabilities of the sensors, the much more sophisticated electronic-warfare capability, and the greater safety – all of which resulted in a major increase in combat capability.

US carrier tasking developed during the period of the Cold War. In the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s carriers were divided into two types: attack carriers (which were known by their US navy designation of CVAs) and ASW carriers (CVSs).

The CVA force during this period consisted of three Midway-class and two Essex-class carriers, which had been built at the end of the Second World War, plus a steadily increasing number of supercarriers. The core force aboard a CVA usually comprised three attack squadrons (one medium, two light) and two fighter squadrons, which were supported by squadrons or detachments for specialist roles such as airborne early warning, air-to-air refuelling, electronic warfare and reconnaissance.

ASW carriers (CVSs) were found from the Essex-class carriers and a decreasing number of other Second World War carriers. They embarked specialist ASW fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, supported by a few airborne-early-warning aircraft and, possibly, a few A-4 Skyhawks as a token fighter force.

The Essex-class carriers reached the end of their useful lives in the mid-1970s, which coincided with the arrival in service of the first jet-powered ASW aircraft, the S-3 Viking, which not only replaced the piston-engined S-2 Tracker, but also provided a far greater ASW capability with many fewer aircraft. As a result, the supercarriers were re-roled as multi-purpose carriers (CVs) and the Essex-class and Midway-class carriers were paid off.

Appendix 22 shows a typical multi-purpose-carrier air wing in 1980, which consisted of eighty-nine aircraft. The functional spread included airborne early warning, air superiority, air defence, attack, fighter-bomber, anti-submarine warfare, electronic warfare, air-to-air refuelling, search-and-rescue, and photographic reconnaissance.

The fighters represented the ‘glamorous’ side of the air wing, but in fact made up only some 27 per cent of the 1980s air wing. The offensive reach of the carrier was provided by attack aircraft such as the long-range Grumman A-6 Intruder and the medium-range Vought A-7 Corsair, both of which were capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Photographic reconnaissance was provided by three RF-8 Crusaders (converted fighters), while electronic warfare was the responsibility of four EA-6 Prowlers (converted A-6 bombers). Long-range radar surveillance was provided by five Grumman E-2 Hawkeyes, while ASW protection was provided by four Lockheed S-3 Vikings (long-range) and four SH-3D Seaking helicopters (close-range). The air wing was completed by two KA-6D tankers and four SH-3D search-and-rescue helicopters. This was, in effect, a greater combat capability packaged into one hull than most countries had in their entire air force.

BRITISH CARRIERS

Between 1945 and 1990 the British navy had an astonishing record for originating some of the most exceptional new concepts in carrier design, even though its own force of carriers was rapidly diminishing and at one point almost reached zero. One British idea of the late 1940s for a flexible landing deck for use by aircraft without undercarriages was a failure, but the others were very successful, enabling carrier aviation, especially in the US navy, to flourish throughout the Cold War. Three of these British innovations appeared in the late 1940s, at a time when jet-propelled aircraft were coming into service; these were much heavier, much faster, and generally more difficult to take off and land than the previous generation of piston-engined aircraft.

The first British innovation was the angled deck, which was offset to port and enabled the take-off and landing areas to be separated, thus speeding up the aircraft handling rate, increasing the deck space available, and adding considerably to the overall safety of flying operations. Next came the steam catapult, which provided much greater energy to launch the heavier aircraft then entering service. Third, came the mirror deck-landing equipment, replacing the ‘batman’ who had stood on the flight deck, using brightly coloured bats by day and luminous sticks by night to assist the pilot in the final stages of his approach. This mirror system was very popular with pilots because it not only was much safer, but also put them back in charge of landing their aircraft. Some time later the British navy was the first to take the fixed-wing V/STOL aircraft to sea, and it also invented the ‘ski jump’, which dramatically increased the V/STOL aircraft’s take-off payload.

The British emerged from the Second World War with six fleet carriers, all of which had been hard worked throughout the war, and nine of the smaller light fleet carriers, with a further two fleet and six light fleet carriers in various stages of construction. Some of the light fleet carriers were sold to Commonwealth and foreign navies, and the navy then endeavoured to operate a viable force of carriers to support its role as a major sea power. As with the Americans, the situation was complicated by the advent of jet aircraft, and, while the British were not short of good ideas, they suffered the frustration of seeing most of them come to fruition aboard American carriers rather than their own. Great efforts were also devoted to developing British aircraft, but the numbers required were small and the British development programmes were very protracted by comparison with those in the USA, so that, in general, British aircraft came into service some years after their US equivalent and did not have such a good performance.

The one exception was the Blackburn Buccaneer low-level bomber, which originated in 1953 with an operational requirement for an aircraft capable of approaching the target below the enemy’s radar beam at a speed of some 890 km/h. At the time this was an unheard-of requirement, although it became commonplace thereafter, and the Buccaneer was so successful it was ordered by the UK air force (which had rejected it some twelve years earlier).

The British carrier fleet peaked in effectiveness and efficiency in the early 1960s, when the front-line strength consisted of five fixed-wing carriers (Ark Royal, Eagle, Hermes, the completely rebuilt Victorious and the light fleet carrier Centaur), plus two commando carriers. The fixed-wing carriers operated Scimitar fighters, Sea Vixen night fighters, Buccaneer strike bombers, Gannet anti-submarine and airborne-early-warning aircraft, and Whirlwind anti-submarine/rescue helicopters.

An important limiting factor, however, was that, as the aircraft became larger and heavier, the numbers embarked gradually decreased. Thus in the 1960s Victorious carried twenty-eight fixed-wing aircraft plus eight helicopters, which reduced in the last few years of her service to twenty-three fixed-wing plus five helicopters, while Eagle and Ark Royal operated thirty-five fixed-wing (plus ten helicopters). The smaller Hermes, which entered service in 1959, could operate only twenty-eight fixed-wing (no helicopters), and when it was realized that it would not be able to operate the F-4K Phantom it was converted to a commando carrier.

The situation was made worse by the troubled project for a carrier intended to replace Eagle and Victorious. Designated CVA-01, the new carrier project dragged on from 1963 to 1966, and many ingenious ideas were produced to design a ship which was within the size and financial limitations – a problem made more severe by the fact that the latter were not only stringent but tended to change regularly. In 1966, however, it was finally decided that CVA-01 should be cancelled and that the navy would cease to operate fixed-wing carriers when the current ships had wasted out. This duly took place, with the last of the fixed-wing carriers, Ark Royal, being paid off in 1978.

The British navy is nothing if not ingenious, however, and very rapidly produced a totally new concept in order to retain a fixed-wing capability. A design was already under preparation for a helicopter-carrying cruiser displacing 12,700 tonnes, and the design was steadily amended until it had become a V/STOL carrier, capable of embarking five Sea Harriers and nine Seaking ASW helicopters. Three of these ships were ordered, joining the fleet in 1980, 1982 and 1985. The oldest carrier, Hermes, was converted to a helicopter carrier in 1977 and then into an interim Sea Harrier carrier in 1980. The effectiveness of the Sea Harrier-carrier concept was demonstrated during the Falklands War in 1982, but an additional benefit was shown when air-force Harriers were able to fly direct to the Falklands and then operate from the carriers there – something which would not have been possible with any other type of aircraft. The soundness of the concept was also shown by its adoption by the Indian, Italian and Spanish navies.

SOVIET CARRIERS

Unlike its US and British counterparts, the Soviet navy had no tradition of operating aircraft at sea, and its first efforts involved fitting some destroyers to carry one or two helicopters in the late 1950s. When the USSR found itself faced by US Polaris-armed SSBNs in the Mediterranean, however, it designed two dedicated helicopter carriers, the Moskva class, the first of which was commissioned in 1967. This was greeted in the West with some admiration, as not only was the purpose-built Moskva a far more efficient design than the former cruisers which had been converted to helicopter carriers in several European navies, but it also carried an impressive missile armament on the foredeck.

The Soviet navy’s dynamic leader, Admiral Gorshkov, was, however, determined to catch up with the US navy in every respect, including the construction of a force of fixed-wing carriers. Intense efforts were devoted to espionage and other methods to derive as much information as possible from US and British sources, and Soviet warships and intelligence-collecting auxiliaries (AGIs) regularly deployed with NATO carrier task groups to monitor every detail of their activities.

Next to appear was the Kiev class, the first of which was commissioned in 1975. This again was unusual, in that it had a flight deck aft angled to run abreast the superstructure (which was offset to starboard), leaving the fore-deck covered in guns and reloadable missile launchers. Most Western observers considered that the ships were designed to defend the SSBN bastions in the Sea of Murmansk and the Sea of Okhotsk, using helicopters to counter US and British SSNs, Yak-38 VTOL fighters against ASW aircraft such as the P-3 Orion, and missiles against surface ships. Whether they would have been effective in such a role is difficult to assess.

The final carriers to be produced by the Soviet navy were the two ships of the Kuznetsov class, the first of which entered service as the Cold War was ending. They had a displacement of 67,000 tonnes, were fitted with a large, angled flight deck, and carried a predominantly fixed-wing air group. As so often, however, the Soviet navy produced some surprises, including launching the conventional-take-off aircraft over a ‘ski jump’[4] and a missile battery inset in the flight deck. The air wing, however, numbered only some eighteen fixed-wing aircraft and twelve helicopters, which was about one-quarter of that of a US carrier. One vessel only, Kuznetsov, was completed, giving the Soviet navy the world-class aircraft carrier it had hankered after for so long, but it was too late.

OTHER NAVIES

In the early years of the Cold War a number of other navies appreciated the value of sea-borne air power and established naval air arms to exploit it. Virtually all were based on the British light fleet carrier, a design prepared in 1943 for utility ships which would last until the end of the war. Fifteen were laid down and, of these, nine were completed for overseas navies, only three of which belonged to NATO, the recipients being Argentina (one), Australia (two), Brazil (one), Canada (two), France (one), India (one) and the Netherlands (one).[5] Like the British navy, most of these found great difficulty in keeping their carriers up to date, and, as a result, several countries ended their involvement with carriers: Argentina in 1985, Australia in 1982, Canada in 1970 and the Netherlands in 1968.

Meanwhile, France operated one British-built and one US-built carrier until they were replaced by two French-designed and -built carriers in the early 1960s. Italy had made several false starts into naval aviation, but eventually succeeded with a very handsome V/STOL carrier, Giuseppe Garibaldi (13,850 tonnes), operating AV-8B Harriers, which entered service in 1985. Spain also saw the Harrier as a means of gaining a fixed-wing capability and acquired a surplus US carrier for this purpose in 1967. This was replaced in 1968 by a Spanish-built ship, Principe de Asturias, which was based on the US navy’s earlier Sea Control Ship design.

ANTI-CARRIER WARFARE

The Soviet Union considered itself particularly vulnerable to the threat posed by the US navy’s extremely powerful carrier task groups – a belief which originated with the AJ-1 Savage, and which was responsible for the development of the Northern Fleet over the years 1950–72. Marshal Sokolovskiy, first writing in the late 1960s, described how it was ‘essential to attempt to destroy the attack carriers before they can launch their planes… these units are highly vulnerable during ocean crossings, during refuelling, at the moment they are preparing to launch their planes, and also when the planes are landing again on the carriers’.^{1} He then went on to describe how such attack carriers were vulnerable to nuclear strikes and to attacks by torpedoes with nuclear warheads, by naval and long-range aviation using air-to-ship missiles, and from coastal missile batteries. This agreed with the perceived strategy of the Northern Fleet in the 1950s, which was to seek to prevent US carrier task groups from reaching the launch areas, using co-ordinated attacks by aircraft, surface ships and diesel-electric submarines.

In the late 1950s, with the entry into service of the A-3 Skywarrior, with its 3,220 km radius of action, the launch point was moved beyond the reach of current Soviet land-based aircraft, which meant that Soviet naval strategy was forced to swing towards attacks by nuclear-powered submarines and by specialized, long-range, anti-shipping aircraft, operated by the navy. When the US naval threat changed yet again, to Polaris missiles launched from SSBNs, the increasing range of the missiles took the launch submarines further from the northern waters, but the threat from US carrier groups remained, both in the north against Soviet SSBN bastions and in the Mediterranean and Pacific against the Soviet land mass and against fleets at sea.

Thus the Soviet navy developed an ‘anti-carrier warfare’ concept, which was regularly practised in major seagoing exercises. The submarine component of this concept was the specialized cruise-missile submarine, of which there were two versions: the diesel-electric Juliett class and a succession of nuclear-propelled classes (SSGNs). (The US navy had briefly deployed such specialized missile-carrying submarines, but in the land-attack role, and the Soviet navy was the only one to develop this type of submarine for anti-ship missions.)

The original Soviet anti-carrier weapon was the SS-N-3 missile, which entered service in 1963. It was very large, weighing 4,500 kg, carried a 350 kT nuclear warhead, and was launched in pairs from a surface warship, a surfaced submarine or a Tupolev Tu-95 Bear-B patrol aircraft. Its range was some 450 km, and it cruised at Mach 1.2 and a height of some 4,000 m. The SS-N-3 was tracked and guided by the launch vessel until the missile’s own radar acquired the target, whereupon it began a diving attack. The system had several inherent drawbacks. First, a submarine had to surface in order to perform three functions: deploy its radar, obtain the latest target information from a co-operating aircraft (usually a Bear-D), and, finally, launch the missiles. Second, the ship or submarine radar was unable to track more than two missiles at once, and had therefore to continue with one pair of missiles until their onboard radars had locked on to the target before the next pair of missiles could be launched. Despite these disadvantages the SS-N-3 weapon system was formidable for its time and certainly posed a substantial threat to US carrier task groups. Its effectiveness was further enhanced when some of the submarines (Echo IIs and Julietts) were fitted with the Punch Bowl satellite targeting system.

The anti-ship SS-N-3 weapons system was carried by two types of submarine: the Echo II nuclear-powered submarine (twenty-nine built) carried eight missiles, while the diesel-electric-powered Juliett (sixteen built) carried four. Both designs suffered from large, blast-deflecting cut-outs in the hull sides, which generated much noise when submerged, making them easily tracked by Western submarines.

In the submarine-launched role, the SS-N-3 was complemented by the SS-N-7/SS-N-9, which was launched from Charlie I/II submarines. This was a short-range system with a range of some 40 km and cruised at a height of some 90 m at a speed of Mach 0.9, but it possessed a major advantage over SS-N-3 in that it was launched from a submerged submarine. These weapons compounded the problems facing a US carrier task group, since it now had to defend itself against two different missile threats.

The final weapon in this sequence was the SS-N-19, which entered service in 1983 aboard Oscar-class SSGNs and, like previous Soviet anti-ship missiles was also carried aboard surface warships – in this case the aircraft carrier Kuznetsov and the Kirov-class battlecruisers. The SS-N-19 had a turbofan engine with a rocket booster and was extremely fast, enabling it to be fired from a submerged Oscar on the basis of information received from a satellite via the Punch Bowl data link, thus avoiding the need for mid-course guidance. It could carry a nuclear 350/500 kT warhead, high explosive, or bomblets.

For many years the ship- and submarine-launched missiles required mid-course corrections to enable them to find their targets, and this was usually supplied by high-flying aircraft such as the Tupolev Tu-95 Bear-B, operated by the Soviet navy. Mid-course guidance could also be supplied by versions of the Kamov Ka-25 shipborne helicopter.

The ultimate threat to the US navy carrier task groups was that a small proportion of the Soviet Union’s SS-18 land-based ICBMs were available to be targeted against US carrier task groups.

THE MAJOR ELEMENT in every navy, and also the most visible to the public, the media and other navies alike, was the surface fleet, and vast amounts of money were expended on its vessels. These ships were given a variety of traditional designations – cruiser, destroyer, frigate and corvette – but these terms not only were interpreted differently by different navies, but were also applied in a contradictory manner within some navies. This has caused considerable confusion in the past, so two functional designations will be used here: fleet escort and ocean escort.

The fleet escort was designed to provide area air and anti-submarine defence for a fast task force, usually centred on an aircraft carrier. Such a task group typically consisted of one carrier, six fleet escorts (usually three for air defence and three for anti-submarine warfare) and one or more fast replenishment ships. Towards the end of the Cold War surface-action groups made a somewhat surprising comeback, centred upon an Iowa-class battleship in the case of the US navy and on a Kirov-class battlecruiser in the Soviet navy. Such high-value assets also needed an escort.

The primary mission of the ocean escort was to defend convoys against attacks by Soviet submarines. This function was of far greater importance to NATO than to the Warsaw Pact, since the former depended upon transatlantic convoys to bring men, equipment and supplies to Europe in the event of a war.

THE US NAVY

The fleet escort was required to accompany surface task groups and to operate at fleet speeds, which meant good sea-keeping with a high cruising speed (which can be translated as a speed in excess of 30 knots in rough weather) and long range. There were, in essence, two types: the area air-defence ship and the anti-submarine ship.

The area air-defence ship stemmed from the realization in the late 1940s that guns were no longer capable of providing effective air defence against modern high-performance jet aircraft and that missiles were therefore required. Contemporary radars and missile systems were bulky and heavy, and large magazines were needed to accommodate the number of missiles judged to be necessary. This, in conjunction with the speed and sea-keeping requirements, meant that large hulls were required, and, in order to get the systems to sea quickly, eleven Second World War cruisers were converted to the new role, entering service as missile ships between 1955 and 1964. Some had their main guns completely removed and replaced by missile launchers both fore and aft, while others retained their gun turrets forward and had the launchers on the quarterdeck. These ships served as a ‘quick fix’ for air defence and gave the navy valuable experience in operating missiles, but they were never intended to provide more than an interim solution and their service lives were relatively brief.

This line of development led to the Long Island, the first purpose-built, post-war fleet escort, which joined the fleet in 1961. Displacing 15,060 tonnes, this ship was the largest surface combatant (apart from aircraft carriers) built in the United States during the Cold War, and was the first escort ship to have nuclear propulsion. It had a huge fixed array for the air-search radar and carried a very substantial armament, including three SAM launchers for air defence and an anti-submarine-missile launcher, as well as more conventional weapons such as two 127 mm guns and twelve 533 mm torpedo tubes. Proof of its capabilities came in 1968 in the Gulf of Tong-king when, on two separate occasions, its missiles engaged and destroyed MiG fighters flying over North Vietnam at a range of some 105 km from the ship.

Long Island was very expensive, even by US standards, and the eight missile-armed, nuclear-powered fleet escorts which followed were somewhat smaller, displacing between 8,200 and 10,000 tonnes, the reduction in size being achieved by halving the number of missiles carried and deleting the flag facilities. These nuclear-powered ships were paralleled by two classes, each nine strong, of conventionally powered ships.

The capability of the air-defence systems carried by these ships developed steadily over the years, culminating in the Aegis system.[1] This versatile, sophisticated and very expensive radar/computer system was designed to integrate the management of a task group’s weapon systems, with the emphasis on air operations. Among many other attributes, it could control up to eighteen missiles simultaneously on a time-share switching system.

The original plan was to install Aegis in nuclear-powered cruisers, but after a long debate it was eventually decided to install it in the same hull as the Spruance-class destroyers. Twenty-seven of these fleet escorts were built under the designation Ticonderoga-class cruisers, joining the fleet between 1983 and 1994. Two Ticonderoga-class ships were used very successfully to control US aircraft in the Gulf of Sirte during the US air strikes on Libya in 1986. One of the class, Vincennes, subsequently achieved considerable notoriety when, while operating in the Persian Gulf in 1988, it shot down an Iranian civil airliner with heavy loss of life, mistaking it for a combat aircraft carrying out a diving attack.

The other type of fleet escort was optimized for anti-submarine warfare. The ships were, in effect, large destroyers, their size being dictated by the 30 knot, rough-seas requirement. Originally, these ships were required to make a contribution to the fleet air-defence umbrella and they therefore carried missiles, but, as the Soviet submarine capability grew and began to threaten even fast-moving surface task forces, these escorts became increasingly oriented towards ASW. Ninety of these ships were built over a period of forty years: Mitscher class (4,404 tonnes) – four (1953–4); Farragut class (5,124 tonnes) – ten (1959–61); Forrest Sherman class (4,460 tonnes) – eighteen (1955–9); Charles F. Adams class (4,106 tonnes) – twenty-three (1960–64); and, finally, the Spruance and Kidd classes.[2]

The Spruance and Kidd classes, which joined the fleet between 1975 and 1983, were large, displacing 8,350 tonnes, and all thirty-five were built at the same shipyard – a volume of business which no other country could match. As was usual with US warships throughout the Cold War, they came in for considerable criticism, being described as too large for their purpose, poorly armed and with inadequate sensors. The size was, once again, a consequence of the requirement to maintain a 30 knot speed in rough seas. Adverse comments on the armament and sensors arose from comparison with contemporary Soviet ships, which had decks bristling with weapons and masts covered with antennas. The facts were, however, that US sensor systems were far more sophisticated and capable than their Soviet counterparts and required many fewer antennas, while the missile magazines, which were below decks, held a greater number of missiles. The Spruance design predated the British experience in the Falklands War and, having carried out a detailed analysis of this experience, one of the many changes decided upon by the US navy was to add armour protection to these ships, lining all vital spaces with Kevlar.

Like other NATO navies, the US navy was seriously concerned at the threat posed by Soviet submarines to convoys crossing the north Atlantic – a problem which was exacerbated by the fact that Soviet submarines grew in both numbers and capability as the Cold War progressed, becoming quieter and carrying greater numbers of more effective weapons. The most significant feature of these submarines’ design, however, was their underwater speed, which in the Alfa class, which entered service in the early 1970s, was in excess of 40 knots. During the Second World War the corvettes, frigates and destroyer-escorts used in the ASW role had a maximum speed of between 10 and 12 knots in a rough sea. Their quarry, the German U-boats, however, had a maximum submerged speed of about 6 knots, but spent most of the time at much lower speeds in order to conserve the charge in their batteries. As a result, the surface ships had an adequate margin of speed over the submarines.

The Soviet Whiskey-class diesel-electric submarines which entered service in the 1950s had a maximum submerged speed of 13 knots, but the nuclear-powered attack submarines raised this to 30 knots or more. As a result, the war-built destroyer-escorts, of which a huge number were in reserve, were simply of no use, since such small ships simply could not be designed to operate at the necessary speeds. The inevitable result was a move to much larger ASW ships, and great numbers of Second World War destroyers were either converted or, in cases where construction had been halted at the war’s end, were completed so as to meet the demand for ASW ships. Some forty ships fell into this category, and most of these were subsequently given a major upgrade in the 1970s.

The first post-war design for an ASW escort was the Dealey class, of which thirteen were built between 1954 and 1957. They displaced some 1,730 tonnes and were expensive to build, even though their construction had been simplified in order to make them easy to produce in large numbers in the event of a war. Both the Dealey class and a cheaper design (the Claud Jones class) were disliked by the navy, which was forced to produce a proper ocean-escort design. This led to a series of four classes, which were originally designated destroyer-escorts, although in 1975 this was changed to frigates. All of these were much larger than previous ASW escorts, displacing between 2,730 and 3,640 tonnes, and some were built in considerable numbers: Bronstein – two; Garcia – seventeen; Knox – forty-six; Perry – fifty-one.

All were criticized. The Bronstein class was considered to be too slow; the Garcia and Knox classes had only one propeller, limiting their manoeuvrability; the steam plant in the Knox class was too complicated and difficult to maintain, and all were considered to have insufficient weapons. Nevertheless, they gave valuable service and were effective ASW platforms. One feature of the last of these classes, the Perry, was its use of major items of equipment which originated in other NATO countries: the Mark 92 fire-control system was of Dutch (Signaal) origin, while the main gun was a 76 mm weapon designed by OTO Melara in Italy.

THE SOVIET NAVY

The Soviet navy’s first major post-war building programme included fourteen new Sverdlov-class cruisers, which began to enter service in 1951, causing considerable alarm in Western navies. They were fast, had a long range (9,000 nautical miles at 18 knots), and were well armed, with twelve 152 mm guns, twelve 100 mm anti-aircraft guns and ten torpedo tubes. They were considered to pose a major threat as ‘surface raiders’, following the pattern of German operations by ships such as Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Graf Spee and Scheer during the Second World War; these had caused considerable problems to the British, since they had required a large number of ships and aircraft to track down each of them. In addition to this, the Soviet cruisers were handsome, well-balanced ships and looked powerful – a factor of some significance, since it enabled them to create a major impression during numerous visits to foreign ports in the 1950s and 1960s.

Khrushchev cut back drastically on the surface fleet in his 1956 review, but allowed the navy to build four light cruisers (Kynda class) and twenty destroyers (Kashin class), which started to enter service in 1962. Both types created further alarm in the West. The main armament of the Kynda class comprised two quadruple SS-N-3 missile launchers, giving them a 250 nautical mile anti-ship capability, with one SA-N-1 anti-aircraft-missile launcher, guns and torpedoes for self-defence. The Kashin-class destroyers were the first major warships in any navy to be powered exclusively by gas turbines, and mounted a primary armament of two quadruple SA-N-1 anti-aircraft-missile launchers. Both Kyndas and Kashins also exhibited a Soviet trend that was to increase with time, mounting a plethora of antennas and sensors whose function and capability Western experts could for many years only guess at.

This trend continued throughout the Cold War, with the Soviet navy building a series of powerful, well-armed, well-equipped cruisers and destroyers. The Russians appear, however, to have always been fascinated by sheer size, and the culmination of their naval building programme was the Kirov class, three of which were commissioned between 1980 and 1988 (a fourth was completed in 1996). With a full-load displacement of 28,000 tonnes, these were the largest surface warships to be built for any navy during the Cold War and were intended to serve as flagships for surface-warfare groups, which would consist of missile-armed cruisers. The Kirovs mounted a heavy armament, consisting of a mix of anti-surface, anti-air and anti-submarine missiles, together with guns, torpedoes and three helicopters. Apart from their size and armament, however, one of their most impressive feature was the power plant, which consisted of two nuclear reactors plus oil-fired steam boost. Again, the superstructure of these ships was covered with antennas and sensors.

The Soviet navy also built three Slava-class cruisers,[3] which, with a displacement of 12,500 tonnes, were among the largest surface ships of the Cold war. They were armed with sixteen SS-N-12 missiles mounted in four pairs on either side of the forward superstructure, making them look very menacing.

Soviet ship design was followed with great interest in the West, not least because Soviet designers seemed much less reluctant than their Western counterparts to make daring innovations. For all their powerful weapons, their impressive electronics and their excellent performance, however, the Soviet surface fleet never overcame the basic problem, referred to earlier, of being split into four widely separated fleets. Thus, by the time the ships had been split between the fleets and allowance had been made for ships in refit, the numbers actually available in any one area were much less impressive than the overall figures might suggest.

THE BRITISH NAVY

The British navy had for many years rested its strength on its surface fleet, and it entered the Cold War as the second most powerful navy in NATO – a position it retained, despite successive reductions, to the end of the Cold War. Early in the Cold War, the British, having been the principal victims of the German ‘commerce raiders’, felt particularly vulnerable to the Soviet Sverdlov-class cruisers, but a class of cruisers intended to deal with this threat was never built, and reliance was placed instead on the carrier-borne Buccaneer low-level anti-shipping bomber.

The numbers of frigates in service tell the story of the decline in British sea power. In 1960 the navy was operating sixty frigates of various types, but this had decreased to fifty-five by 1970, although that figure was held until 1981, when major cuts began. At the end of the Cold War only thirty-four were in service.

Defence from air attack clearly had to be a major priority, although the first attempt to provide it was not a particularly happy one. Three cruisers which had been launched in 1944–5 were, after repeated delays and at very considerable expense, completed between 1959 and 1961. These ships, the Tiger class, originally had a traditional cruiser armament of four 152 mm guns, although these were of a new, fully automatic type, with water-cooling, giving a rate of fire of twenty rounds per minute per barrel.[4] It had, however, already been accepted that the most effective defence against modern aircraft was missiles, and little use was found for these ships. As a result, between 1965 and 1972 two were converted to ASW helicopter carriers by installing a huge hangar and flight deck aft – again at considerable expense – but even this was not really satisfactory and the ships were disposed of in 1980.

The next attempt at an air-defence ship was the County-class destroyers, of which eight were completed between 1961 and 1970. These were armed with the inelegantly named Seaslug missile, which was launched from a twin launcher at the stern, using a beam-riding guidance system which was already obsolescent when the system entered service. All eight were deleted in the early 1980s. The only other large ship to be completed, Bristol, was the first of a group of four to provide air defence for the new carrier CVA-01. When the carrier was cancelled only Bristol was completed, but it was employed mainly as a trials and training ship.

The navy’s ASW force subsisted for many years on Second World War destroyer hulls, many of which were converted into ASW ships in the early 1950s, but new-design ships began to enter service from 1957 onwards, and in considerable numbers. These new frigates included twenty-six of the Leander class, which entered service between 1963 and 1967 and proved a great success; they also achieved major export orders. These were followed by the Broadsword class (also known as the Type 22), of which fourteen were completed between 1979 and 1990, and the Duke class (Type 23), which was just entering service as the Cold War ended.

Uniquely among the Cold War navies of both alliances, the British fought a major naval conflict – the 1982 Falklands War – which particularly affected the surface fleet. In that conflict two destroyers and two frigates were lost as a result of air-launched-missile or bombing attacks, and one destroyer was damaged by a land-based missile. In addition, the threat posed by Argentine submarines resulted in great efforts being expended in hunting for them.

Among the many lessons of the war, three were of particular importance. The first was that air-launched anti-ship missiles represented a major threat to a fleet – a threat which had previously been underestimated. The second lesson was that airborne early warning was essential to the safety of the fleet. The third lesson was that a long period of peace had resulted in damage control being reduced from an essential feature of warship design to a low priority, where economy and the fashion of the moment prevailed. Every navy in the world learned lessons from the British navy’s experience in the Falklands, as a result of which the design of surface warships and the relative priorities of numerous design features altered radically.

FRANCE

The French fleet emerged from the Second World War in a poor state. A few pre-war French cruisers and destroyers survived, and the French were given a generous allocation of ex-German and ex-Italian ships.[5] The Americans and British also supplied a number of modern ships.

As with the army and the air force, the navy moved rapidly to equip itself with French designs, armed with French weapons and using French equipment. This resulted in some fine ships, but the navy was dogged throughout the Cold War by the high costs of two major programmes: first, the nuclear-propelled missile submarines and, second, the Charles De Gaulle aircraft carrier. There was also a commitment to expenditure at the other end of the scale, since the French navy’s contribution to the country’s continuing colonial responsibilities was met by two series of small frigates, known as avisos, which were produced in relatively large numbers. Squeezed in the middle, the fleet- and ocean-escort programmes were frequently subjected to delays and deletions in an effort to balance the budget.

The cruiser De Grasse, which had lain unfinished in 1945, was completed in 1956 as an anti-aircraft cruiser, while a similar ship, Colbert, was built after the war, joining the fleet in 1959. Both these ships originally had an all-gun armament, but in the early 1970s Colbert underwent a refit which included installing a twin air-defence-missile launcher aft. Seventeen fleet escorts of the closely related Surcouf (T47) and Duperre (T53) classes (3,740 tonnes) were commissioned between 1956 and 1958, these were intended to provide area air defence and air control, but their all-gun armament was plainly inadequate for modern conditions. As a result, in the mid-1960s four were converted to take a single launcher for the US Tartar missile, making them much more effective, while the remainder were converted into ASW escorts.

Next came two ships in the Suffren (FLE60) class, which were commissioned in 1967 and 1970. These were much larger, displacing 6,090 tonnes, and were equipped throughout with French weapons, sensors and equipment. Meanwhile, replacing the T47 air-defence conversions became a serious problem and it was planned to build four ships of the Cassard class, which would have entered service in the mid-1980s. In the event, budget problems resulted in the programme being stretched and two ships being cancelled, with the first ship being commissioned in 1988 and the other in 1991, and the T47s had to be kept in service for much longer than had been planned. In fact, again as an economy, the two new ships were equipped with launchers taken from the T47 ships, although the missiles were newly acquired US Standard SM-1 SAMs.

In the 1950s France accepted a tasking from NATO to produce convoy escorts, and quickly produced eighteen ASW ships with a 1,700 tonne displacement, of which ten were funded under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program. Completed between 1955 and 1960, these French-designed ships were handy and served until the late 1970s. Next came Aconit, a much larger ship, displacing 3,900 tonnes, which was similar in general design to the contemporary US Knox class and which, unusually for a large French warship, had only a single propeller. Aconit’s main limitation was the lack of a helicopter, and so the next three ocean escorts, commissioned between 1974 and 1977, were much larger ships, displacing 5,800 tonnes. Designated the Tourville class, they used the extra length to accommodate two Lynx ASW helicopters.

The need to replace the ASW versions of the T47 and T53 classes resulted in the Georges Leygues class, whose ships, with a displacement of 4,350 tonnes, were larger than those they were to replace, albeit not as large as the Tourville class. As with the contemporary Cassard-class fleet escorts, the programme was delayed and one ship was cancelled as an economy measure, with the result that seven ships joined the fleet between 1979 and 1990. These ships reflected the larger size of 1980s ASW ships and were powered by a mixed power plant of British gas turbines and French diesels.

Alone among the major navies, the French produced a series of small ships, usually known as avisos, which were intended to combine the roles of colonial patrolling in peacetime and ASW escorts in war. Nine of the Commandant Rivière class (2,230 tonnes) were commissioned between 1962 and 1965, followed by seventeen of the D’Estienne D’Orves class (1,250 tonnes) in 1976–84.

BATTLESHIPS AND BATTLECRUISERS

The battleship, once the very symbol of naval power, survived – just – into the Cold war, and deserves a postscript of its own. At the start of the Cold War a few battleships were still in service, although experience in the recently concluded Second World War had shown that they were extremely vulnerable to air attack. The Japanese Yamato, for example, the largest super-battleship ever built, displaced some 70,000 tonnes and was armed with nine 460 mm guns and numerous anti-aircraft guns; it also had heavy armoured protection. Despite all this, when it was caught in the open sea on 7 April 1945 and attacked by some 400 US navy aircraft, Yamato was reduced to a blazing wreck within one hour and sunk within three.

As a result of such wartime experiences, by 1950 most navies had either scrapped their battleships or placed them in reserve. Many navies considered a number of plans to utilize the battleship hulls for a variety of other purposes, such as missile ships, but, except in the United States, these all came to naught, and the leviathans were eventually scrapped.

Two French battleships survived the war: Richelieu, which had taken part in the fighting, and Jean Bart, which was not only unfinished but had also been badly damaged. Popular pressure forced the government to authorize Jean Bart’s completion, which was done at vast expense. The two battleships looked very impressive, but their operational value was minimal, and they required huge crews. Both saw service during the first decade of the Cold War, and Jean Bart took part in the 1956 Suez operation, but they were withdrawn from service in 1959–60 and were scrapped in 1968–70.

Italy possessed five battleships in 1946, of which three were assigned as war reparations. The Soviet Union, the UK and the USA received one each, with the latter two immediately selling theirs for scrap. That left two, which saw brief service as training ships and were then scrapped in 1957.

In the USSR the situation was different, since early post-war naval plans were heavily influenced by the close interest being taken in maritime affairs by Stalin, who was determined to build up a large ocean-going fleet. Initially he laid heavy emphasis on battleships. Two very elderly Soviet battleships were retained in service until the early 1950s, while a battleship borrowed from the British during the war was returned in 1949 and replaced in the Soviet fleet by an ex-Italian ship, which was commissioned as Novorossiysk. Various plans were made in the late 1940s for three or more battleships, but these were cancelled in 1950, and when Novorossiysk was sunk on 29 October 1955 by a Second World War German mine the battleship era in the Soviet navy came to an end.

The British retained four King George V-class ships after the war. These were used actively for a very short period, but all had been placed in reserve by 1951 and they were scrapped in 1957. The last British battleship, Vanguard, was not completed until 1946, but was paid off in 1954 and scrapped in 1960.

In the US, however, four Iowa-class battleships were kept in reserve and were brought back into service during the Korean War and then returned to reserve again. New Jersey was briefly reactivated for the Vietnam War. President Reagan, however, had all four thoroughly modernized and then, with Tomahawk land-attack and Harpoon anti-ship missiles added to their armament, they were recommissioned: New Jersey in 1982, Iowa in 1983, Missouri in 1986 and Wisconsin in 1988. They were employed in surface-action groups, and New Jersey’s awesome shore-bombardment capability was employed off Lebanon in the early 1980s. They served on until the end of the Cold War, then all were decomissioned between 1990 and 1992 and were stricken in 1995.

THE NATO MINE-WARFARE programme of the 1950s showed the Alliance at its best. A threat was identified, concerted action was agreed, and a small number of designs were produced quickly.

Mine warfare has been a major feature of the naval scene for well over a hundred years, but interest in the subject has alternated between spurts of enthusiasm, with an attendant allocation of funds and resources, and periods of almost total uninterest, when the mine-countermeasures community has been starved of funds, manpower and resources. The latter periods end abruptly when a major ship is sunk or severely damaged by a mine, at which point the subject suddenly receives the highest priority, accompanied by renewed enthusiasm and funding.

The late 1940s was a period of uninterest, despite the fact that mines had been a major feature of naval warfare during the Second World War, during which the Axis and Allied navies laid some 350,000 mines each.[1] Casualties are sometimes difficult to attribute, but a British analysis concluded that Axis mines sank 281 British warships and 296 merchant vessels, while British-laid mines sank 1,047 enemy ships and damaged 5,412. Further analyses of the Second World War showed that, important as they were, the number of sinkings achieved was not the sole criterion of success and that mines had a number of additional and significant effects. First, they diverted enemy naval and merchant vessels into areas where they could more easily be attacked by other means; second, they forced the enemy to divert considerable manpower to mine-countermeasures (MCM) tasks; and, third, enemy production capacity was diverted into manufacturing both mines and MCM equipment.

Such telling evidence was ignored in the face of post-war manpower and financial cuts, and in the late 1940s other naval threats, particularly those posed by fast submarines and high-speed cruisers, were accorded a higher priority. As a result, minesweepers were given a very low priority for retention, although, ironically, the only elements of the defeated German and Japanese navies to serve on after the war were special minesweeping forces, which worked from 1945 until the early 1950s clearing the vast minefields which had been laid between 1939 and 1945.

There were a number of additional reasons for the lack of enthusiasm for MCM activities at this particular time. First, since the minesweepers had to go into minefields to ply their trade, their losses were inevitably heavy. Second, all existing sweeping methods were slow, and the speed of clearance could be increased only by having large numbers of sweepers, which would require considerable manpower to operate them. The problem was exacerbated by the requirement to construct the vessels using materials such as amagnetic steel, aluminium, wood or, later, glass fibre, which would be less likely to trigger a magnetic mine.

In the Korean War, however, United Nations naval forces found themselves severely hampered by the minefields laid by the weaker force, the North Korean navy. Some 4,000 mines were supplied to North Korea by the Soviet Union, 75 per cent of which were actually laid during a period of three weeks, using very primitive laying methods. There were two types of mine – a relatively modern Soviet magnetic mine and an ancient contact mine whose design dated back to the Russo-Japanese war – and both caused repeated problems, especially at the Wǒnsan landings, where four minesweepers and one fleet tug were sunk and five destroyers were damaged before the swept channel was fully cleared.

Having observed the Korean War closely, NATO planners concluded that, if war came, the Soviets would make massive use of offensive mining around the coasts of western Europe, where just a few mines could close vital ports, estuaries or choke points for days – perhaps even weeks. It was also assessed that mines would be one of the measures used to disrupt US and Canadian reinforcements reaching Europe.

This threat to NATO was made even more serious by technological developments. The traditional moored contact mine was still in use, floating at a fixed height above the bottom, held in place by a cable anchored to the seabed. Such mines were swept by one or more minesweepers towing ‘mechanical sweeps’ consisting of long cables which engaged the mooring cable and then cut it, whereupon the mine rose to the surface, where it was detonated by rifle or gunfire. Magnetic, acoustic and pressure mines were introduced early in the Second World War, but, after initial successes, their modis operandi were identified and countermeasures were developed which reduced, although they did not totally remove, their danger.

While all NATO navies faced the same type of threat, there was a significant difference in the scale, since the Soviet navy of the early 1950s was unlikely to be able to mine the US coast or harbour entrances, although there was a small threat from submarine-laid mines. European waters, on the other hand, were within easy reach. As a result, an urgent programme was started to build mine countermeasures vessels (MCMVs) for many European navies. Both the American and the British navies had been working in parallel on the mine problem since the late 1940s and came up with generally similar countermeasure designs, which were adopted, in one form or another, by most other NATO navies, with the great majority of construction being funded under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program. In addition, foreign designs which had been approved by the US navy were built in foreign yards under the Off-Shore Purchases scheme, funded by the US Military Supply Agency. Further ships were also acquired by the foreign countries concerned, using national funds. The programme involved three types of MCMV.[2]

OCEAN-GOING MINESWEEPERS

Ocean-going minesweepers built during the Second World War had steel hulls, since it was considered that the dangers of the new magnetic and acoustic mines were less in open waters. Nevertheless, the threat from more sensitive Soviet mines led the US navy to develop a new wooden-hulled ocean minesweeper, the Agile class, with a hull constructed of laminated timbers and in which fittings were made of bronze or stainless steel, to reduce the magnetic signature to the absolute minimum. Despite their small size (they displaced 735 tonnes) these were extremely sophisticated ships, whose cost per tonne was equalled only by contemporary submarines. Ninety-six were built between 1953 and 1960, of which sixty-two went to the US and thirty-four to other NATO navies.

COASTAL MINESWEEPERS

Two wooden-hulled coastal-minesweepers designs were developed: the US Bluebird and the British Ton classes. The Bluebird class was an enlarged version of a wartime design, with improved sweeping capabilities and better sea-keeping – particularly stability. One hundred and twenty-eight were built in the USA (twenty for the United States and the remainder for overseas), and many more were built abroad.

The British Ton was somewhat larger than the Agile, although it generated a less powerful sweeping current to counter magnetic mines. A total of 205 were built, of which twenty were built in Canada as the Bay class (ten for Canada, six for France, four for Turkey), thirty-four were built in France (all for France), thirty-two were built in the Netherlands (all for the Dutch navy), four were built in Portugal (all for Portugal), and the remaining 115 for the British navy.

INSHORE MINESWEEPERS

There were also two designs for inshore minesweeper. Fourteen of the US Cove class were built – two for the United States and the rest for other NATO countries – but the British Ham class was built in considerably larger numbers. One hundred and eight were built in the UK, of which fifteen went to France and the remainder to the British navy, while another twenty were built in Italy (all for Italy) and sixteen in Belgium. Sixteen more were built in the Netherlands to a Dutch design which was generally similar to the Ham class. The British also built a further eleven minehunters of the Ley class, which was adapted from the Ham class.

AN IGNORED LESSON

This MCM programme showed just what NATO was capable of, when all the member nations put their minds to it. As shown in Appendix 24, the 1950s MCM programme resulted in the production of 703 vessels and totally transformed the Alliance’s capabilities. Furthermore, by restricting the origins of the designs to two sources (the USA and the UK) a large degree of commonality was assured, which was further strengthened because the recipient navies naturally found themselves using common equipment and procedures. In the following decades there were many more areas where such a common approach would have resulted in more equipment, produced more quickly and at less cost, but sadly it was not to be.

THE END OF the Second World War found the US and British navies with huge fleets of amphibious-warfare ships and a wealth of expertise in their use, arising from landing operations in North Africa, in Sicily, mainland Italy, Normandy and the south of France in Europe, and in the US island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. Although the Soviet navy had conducted over 100 amphibious landings, those were almost always as a flanking move in support of a land operation, typically involving 3,000 troops, which was minuscule in comparison with the scale of their Western allies’ operations, and without the benefit of specialized shipping.

In the late 1940s there was little perceived requirement for amphibious landings, and it was thought at high levels in the Pentagon that the atomic bomb had outdated such massive concentrations of ships. The Inch’ǒn landings in Korea (September 1950) and the Anglo-French landings at Suez (6 November 1956) brought the subject back into focus, but with a marked change in emphasis. Second World War amphibious tactics had centred on large fleets of flat-bottomed landing vessels running on to a beach to deliver their loads of men, tanks, vehicles and equipment. Such vessels were relatively cheap, easy to build (most were constructed by non-specialist shipyards), could be produced in vast numbers, and were usually able to take their loads direct from the port of loading to the target beach without any need for cross-loading.

Unfortunately, they were also very slow – even the US navy’s post-war tank landing ships (LSTs) were not capable of more than 15 knots – while the landing beaches had to be carefully selected to meet stringent criteria for slope and composition. In addition, there was a firm commitment in the US navy to a 20 knot speed for task groups, which no LST design could ever meet. As a result, there was a steady move away from such ships to dock landing ships (LSDs), which carried small landing craft internally, to be launched offshore and used for the final run-in to the beach. A second type of ship was the helicopter carrier, which not only enabled troops and equipment to be delivered ashore, but had the great advantage of missing out the very dangerous beach-line altogether and delivering the troops to a point of the commander’s choosing, which could be anything from 500 m to 50 km inland.

Above all, the advantage of amphibious troops, as was repeatedly demonstrated during the Cold War, was that they could move around the globe in international waters, ‘hover’ just over the horizon from a trouble spot, and then land within a few hours of being given the order to deploy.

THE US MARINE CORPS

Throughout the Cold War, the US Marine Corps (USMC) was in a class of its own as regards size, complexity, equipment and capability. In 1987, for example, it numbered 199,600 men and women and fielded three mobile divisions, equipped with their own armour and artillery, and with their own logistic support. It should be noted that a USMC division is far larger than a division in any other armed force in the world, and consists of some 18,000 Marines, including attached navy personnel, but excluding the support personnel who would normally deploy with the division.

Until the late 1980s each of these Marine divisions was composed of three regiments, each of three battalions. Combat support troops included an artillery regiment (each of three artillery battalions), a tank battalion, a reconnaissance battalion, a light-armoured assault battalion and an engineer battalion. Support units included a service battalion, a shore-party battalion, a service battalion, a medical battalion and a motor-transport battalion.

Each division had an associated Marine Air Wing, which operated some 315 aircraft, including fighters, attack aircraft and helicopters. There were also some sixty amphibious-warfare ships dedicated to moving and landing Marines. Even just one USMC division and its associated air wing represented a greater concentration of power than the totality of the armed forces possessed by most nations.

USMC doctrine was to tailor forces to the requirement, and the basic building block for this was the Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU), which combined an infantry battalion, an aviation squadron and a service/support unit. Two to five MAUs could be combined into a Marine Amphibious Brigade (MAB).

The Reagan administration made strenuous efforts to strengthen the Marine Corps. Not only did the president and his supporters advocate a strong corps, but they actually made the money available to achieve it, increasing USMC funding from $5 billion in 1975 to $7.5 billion in 1985 (at 1985 dollars). This included replacing or upgrading virtually every weapon system in service, replacing old M60 tanks by the new Ml, for example, and funding a series of new ships, including the Wasp-class assault ships, which could each carry 1,900 troops. On top of all this, the elderly Iowa-class battleships were returned to service, with their nine 406 mm guns and Tomahawk missile launchers intended primarily for shore bombardment. Curiously, however, in the midst of all this modernization one item remained unchanged: the CH-46 helicopter, which had entered service in the early 1960s and was fated to remain the workhorse of the Marine Corps well beyond the end of the Cold War.

One of the major achievements of the USMC in the Cold War was the plan to reinforce Norway. In this, the majority of the combat equipment required by a full Marine Amphibious Brigade was pre-positioned in Norway, housed in specially built caves in the Trondheim area. (In order to comply with Norwegian sensitivities about stationing non-Norwegian troops in the country during peacetime, the stocks were maintained by the Norwegian authorities.) The task of the MAB, reinforced by up to two more USMC brigades, a Canadian brigade and the Netherlands–UK Amphibious Group, was to reinforce the Norwegian armed forces in repelling any Soviet invasion.

THE SOVIET NAVAL INFANTRY

The Soviet Naval Infantry fought during the Second World War, but was then transferred from the navy to the coastal-defence forces before being disbanded in the mid-1950s. On 14 July 1958, however, the president of Lebanon requested urgent aid from France, the UK and the USA to counter a threat by the USSR to deploy Soviet ‘volunteers’ to support pro-Nasser rebels. The US Sixth Fleet was able to land three Marine battalions the very next day, and the threat from the Soviet ‘volunteers’ immediately disappeared. The Marine battalions withdrew on 21 August after what had been a classic exhibition of the value of sea power and amphibious capability

The Soviet leadership, never slow to learn from such experiences, responded by re-establishing the Naval Infantry, which rapidly became a corps d’élite. The force expanded, peaking in size and effectiveness around 1988, when it was some 18,000 strong. It fielded:

• one division (7,000 men) of three infantry regiments, one tank regiment and one artillery regiment;

• three independent brigades (3,000 men), each of three infantry battalions, one tank battalion, one artillery battalion and one rocket-launcher battalion;

• four spetsnaz (special forces) brigades, each of three underwater battalions and one parachute battalion.

The Naval Infantry was transported by a growing number of amphibious-warfare ships. Largest were two Ivan Rogov-class dock landing ships, displacing 13,100 tonnes, which carried one Naval Infantry battalion and forty tracked or larger numbers of wheeled vehicles, plus helicopters and surface-effect ships. Fourteen Alligator LSTs were similar in many respects to the British Sir Galahad-class logistics landing ships (LSLs); with a large cargo capacity and bow and stern doors, these were intended for follow-up operations rather than the assault wave. Principal assault vessels were the thirty-seven Ropucha LSTs, which were built in Poland. Smallest were forty-five Polnocny-class small tank landing ships (LCTs), also built in Poland, which displaced some 1,000 tonnes and had a payload of six battle tanks.

The Naval Infantry seized on the surface-effect ship (SES) as an effective way of transporting marines ashore, and developed a number of types including the Pomornik, which could carry three battle tanks, and the Aist, which carried two. Under development at the end of the Cold War was the Orlan-class wing-in-ground-effect (WIG) vessel,[1] designed to transport up to 150 troops at speeds of up to 300 knots. Both the SES and the WIG vessels were very fast compared with normal amphibious shipping, and were designed for short ‘hooks’ in support of a ground advance, or for lightning attacks on crucial targets in the Baltic and Black seas, both types of operation having precedents in the Soviet experience in the Second World War. These craft were another example of the flexibility of thought in the Soviet forces, which produced some novel solutions to the problems facing them.

OTHER AMPHIBIOUS UNITS

The British Royal Marines generally numbered around 7,000–8,000 and formed one self-supporting commando brigade, plus the Special Boat Squadron (special forces). The amphibious shipping available to the Royal Marines varied, but at its peak it included two commando carriers (former aircraft carriers converted to handle helicopters, and to accommodate marines and their equipment), two dock ships, and six LSLs.

Other nations involved in the Cold War also produced marine units. In the Warsaw Pact, the Polish army fielded one amphibious assault brigade, while the East Germans had an army amphibious regiment; both had sufficient landing craft to transport these on short-range operations.

Among the NATO nations, the main amphibious forces, apart from those of the USA and the UK, were provided by the Netherlands (two commando groups), Portugal (three battalion groups) and Spain (11,500 men organized into one marine regiment and five marine garrison regiments); Turkey had one brigade.