On patrol, watch time consisted of me spending all my days in and around the control room as part of the tactical systems team, which in turn was part of the warfare team, the boat’s fighting arm. The main aspect of the job was the interpretation of data fed through from either the sound room (sonar contacts) or periscopes (visual contacts made by the captain, XO or OOW at periscope depth). With all this data, it would then be possible to create a tactical picture for the skipper to use, figuring the course, speed and ranges off pretty much everything we came into contact with – the only exception being planes that we picked up on the electronic warfare (EW) equipment. In this instance there’d be no hanging around – all masts were immediately lowered and off we disappeared into the abyss, like a game of hide and seek, but with the added frisson of nuclear weapons.
My part in terms of helping to compile the tactical picture was five-fold: contact evaluation plot (CEP), local operations plot (LOP), fire-control system, periscope assistant and EW operator. Going into more detail, the CEP was a constantly rolling time-bearing plot in relation to our own ship’s position, which was also plotted on the graph, highlighting our course and any changes we made. The plot was started as soon as we dived and finished the moment we surfaced. I sat in front of it, headphones on, which linked me through to the sonar guys in the sound room, who would update me every three to five minutes with the latest contacts they had on sonar. I’d then plot them against time on a chart that would also have a 360° area of location.
I’d plot all this on rolling graph paper that could be wound on by me, so it would show a plot of approximately two and a bit feet of ship sonar contacts at any one time. Its main purpose was to help the OOW work out rough courses of contacts, and then ultimately be used by the captain to work out and evaluate the complete tactical picture. Contacts were plotted and kept together by lines indicating target movements relative to us.
All contacts were assigned a contact number and were tracked until they were lost in the far distance or indeed they became so close that we had to alter course to keep safe. The basic principle of safety was that if a contact was moving to your left you’d want it on the port side of the boat, and if it was moving to your right you’d want it on the starboard side; it didn’t matter even if it was a fast-moving contact because it would still be moving away from the boat. Things could get hairy when this principle was reversed; the contact might then be in a situation where it could have crossed our bow and collided. This would only have occurred at periscope depth if it was a ship contact. The nightmare scenario, however, was a fast-moving submarine contact moving left on our starboard side, coupled with uncertainty on our part as to the depth of the boat. That could have led to a serious collision.
In 2009, when HMS Vanguard was returning from patrol in the Atlantic Ocean, it collided with the French submarine Le Triomphant, causing an almighty shit-storm. Initially, the MOD denied that anything had happened, but it was subsequently forced to admit that a collision had indeed taken place while the boats had been dived. Substantial damage was inflicted on both boats, highlighting how inherently dangerous submarine operations can be.
Both of the submarines were nuclear powered, Vanguard being one of the Trident missile-carrying submarines that had replaced Resolution and her sister ships, while Le Triomphant was also equipped with nuclear missiles. Potential disaster was only avoided because of the slow pace at which both boats were travelling. The impact was still sizeable, and a report in the Daily Telegraph put the total bill for repair at £50 million. With both vessels covered in modern-day anechoic tiles and operating at slightly different depths, it’s probable neither would have picked up on the other’s sonar signature. If either of the submarines had been going at a faster speed the results might have been catastrophic for Britain, France and the whole of NATO.
The CEP allowed the plotter some artistic flair. After my initial removal during my first patrol I’d worked very hard and had become a very efficient operator. It wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci, but I gave everything an individual flourish, with big, bold lines, classifications and course plotting. This was partly driven by boredom, as on any four-hour watch I might spend half the time on the plot with no contacts whatsoever. They tended to come in fits and starts – two hours might pass without any contacts, and then we might have four or five to deal with in quick succession. We’d try to fill the empty hours with jokes back and forth with the guys in the sound room or philosophical debate with my fellow watch-keepers in the control room. Who was worse, Stalin or Hitler? Is there life after death? Whose farts smelt worse, the coxswain’s or the skipper’s? These and various other questions were pondered, usually through the night watches, to alleviate our tiredness and overcome the tedium. Politics, however, was a no-go area – it would inevitably come round to the pros and cons of nuclear weapons, which seemed a bit pointless given we were 15 minutes from launching them.
Just behind the CEP lay the fire-control system. This was usually manned by three men on the attack team, but on patrol two men were left to manage (except when the submarine was returning to periscope depth, when it would be fully manned), plus the petty officer tactical systems (POTS); he would sit in the middle on an open line to the chief operating officer in the sound room discussing contacts and establishing which was the closest, a vital piece of information when coming up to periscope depth as the skipper needed to know where to focus when operating the periscope. Some captains liked to be told where the nearest contact was – ‘Red 25’, for example, meant the nearest ship contact was 25 degrees on his port bow.
The fire-control system was fairly state of the art for a late-1980s computerised firing set-up. In hindsight, it was like a computerised version of the CEP, with shit graphics where contacts looked more like human sperm bearing down on us from all directions. The contacts would be sent through from the sound room with their bearing and appear on the fire-control system, where we’d allocate them a target number (the same one as the CEP), so everyone knew which was which, and no cock-ups occurred.
Further details could then be entered into the system, such as how many propeller revs the contact was making as heard by the sound room. By the use of algorithms – yes, even 30 years ago the Royal Navy was well ahead of the technological curve – we could constantly update existing information to give us the target’s best course, speed and range. It was particularly good when at periscope depth, as the skipper could pass on extremely accurate information and send a true bearing from the periscope onto the fire-control system. With that extra visibility we’d be able to get some seriously accurate data on contacts.
The fire-control system was powered by Ferranti computers and could track a large number of ships or submarines at any one time. It was considered the successor to all the manual plots, but it wasn’t completely trusted as the sole provider of target information to the command. The manual plots, which could be tracked back in some form or other to the Second World War, were still the bread and butter of patrol life.
One plot that had become virtually extinct elsewhere was the LOP (local operations plot), which was situated aft of the fire-control system on the aft starboard side of the control room, on the nav plot table. It was the oldest of the manual plots still in use, and was particularly useful with fast-moving contacts as it gave a clear indication of how a target was behaving.
The last area I spent time in while watch-keeping was the electronic warfare shack, where the EW kit was kept. This helped detect radar transmissions from both surface and air contacts, and the strength of the signal would determine whether contacts were in a position where they could pick us up on their own radar. We’d try to see what operating band each individual contact was transmitting on and the type of signal it was sending out. Military vehicles tended to emit a different signal to a commercial airplane or ship.
Returning a submarine to periscope depth was probably the most dangerous manoeuvre we undertook. It was fraught with potential risks, mainly due to the change of depth and where the submarine surfaced; hopefully not under an oil tanker or similarly large vessel, which could rip the conning tower off and send everyone to the deep. The other main problem could be with an undetected submarine patrolling at a different depth, and if we changed our position it could lead to an underwater collision; unthinkable, but as HMS Vanguard proved, you never know.
Nearly all returns to periscope depth were for a BRN pass. This involved locking onto a satellite to get a highly accurate latitude and longitude bearing so we knew exactly where the boat was, which was necessary to determine the extent of our patrol area and ensure the accuracy of our missiles. For anti-detection purposes, periscope-depth excursions usually took place at night. The control room would be in black lighting and the blackout curtains were rigged up, with the passageway of 1 Deck so dark I felt as if I were blindfolded as I made my journey to the EW shack, careering off the side panels on my unsteady way.
The electronic warfare kit was inside another room set off the shack, tiny and compact. I’d sit down, switch it on and carry out pre-checks to make sure it was working properly, then wait with a certain amount of fear and adrenaline as the sub made the move back up to the shallows. I’d be listening in to the control room comms via the POTS, as the skipper ordered, ‘Six up, keep 65 feet.’
The hulking 8,500-tonne boat would pitch quick as a Boeing 737 at the moment of take-off, seemingly weightless as the foreplanesman pulled back on his hand wheel and the aftplanesman pushed down on his to maintain the correct pitch of 6° up as the boat powered its way up to 65 feet, its set depth. Periodically, the chief ops came over the loudspeaker from the sound room, ‘No contacts scanner, watcher clear,’ shorthand for no close contacts were detected in the immediate vicinity on sonar. There was always the possibility of missing something altogether, but the consequences of that were best not talked – or even thought – about.
On passing 100 feet, the search periscope would be raised as the skipper got ready for action. It would also be time for everyone to stop talking unless asked a direct question by the captain or instructed to carry out one of his orders. Once the periscope broke through the water, he’d take an all-round look, first in low power, then another in high power, concentrating on where the POTS had indicated the nearest audible ship contact. He’d then ask for the electronic warfare mast to be raised. This was my moment of truth – hopefully it would be silent and I’d be looking at a blank display with no rackets.* Occasionally, the worst did happen and I’d pick up a contact. I could then judge the strength of that signal on our electronic warfare kit – above a certain strength, I’d be straight down the loudspeaker comms to the control room: ‘Racket dangerous, racket dangerous, strength three.’ The captain would then order, ‘Down all masts,’ and we’d be diving away to the deep.
If nothing was picked up, which was more the norm, especially on patrol, I’d sit there in the dark of the EW shack, monitoring the kit until our time at periscope depth was complete. On one patrol excursion to periscope depth I had a very strong contact, giving all the hallmarks of being a Soviet Tupolev Tu-142, a submarine-hunter aircraft with the NATO code name ‘Bear’; we dived very quickly to the depths and didn’t venture anywhere near periscope depth for around three weeks. It was normally very difficult to come up with a classification† in the very limited amount of time the boat was at periscope depth, but I felt it was always better to be safe than sorry, and the skipper was never going to get on our backs for being overly cautious with our classifications.
The EW shack was also one of the best hiding places on board to get away from everyone else, particularly at periscope depth. If I was on watch I could get an hour in there at the very least, time to switch on the equipment beforehand, then perform the system checks and powering down afterwards. It would break up the watch nicely and grab me some more valuable time on my own. The shack was also a space we used for recreation. Believe it or not, the EW kit was so sensitive that if it was switched on when we dived deep, it could pick up the BBC World Service or some other foreign stations, depending on where we were in the world.
In my present job I was once lucky enough to meet the legendary American boxer Sugar Ray Leonard while he was in the UK on a book-signing tour. I told him I’d tuned in to his infamous grudge fight with Marvin Hagler while ensconced in a steel tube deep under the ocean. He found it difficult to understand and gave me a pre-fight stare – either that, or he thought I was a complete tool. While underwater I also listened to Maradona’s famous ‘Hand of God’ goal at the 1986 World Cup, the first time England and Argentina had played each other in any sporting capacity since the Falklands War, with Bryon Butler’s wonderful commentary fading in and out as we changed course in the deep. It wasn’t until I returned from patrol that I fully understood the significance of it.
It was mainly sporting events we tried to pick up, so we could relay the results to the rest of the guys in the boat. As well as the World Cup and Hagler vs Leonard, there were some other memorable moments, all picked up far below the waves, like the late, great and supremely talented Seve Ballesteros’s extraordinary last round of 65 at the Open in 1988, Steffi Graf winning Wimbledon in 1988 on the way to the Grand Slam, Boris Becker retaining his Wimbledon title in the same year and England’s calamitous showing at that year’s European Championship. We’d also try to catch the football scores most Saturday evenings if at all possible; if not, at least my dad tended to send me some of them on a familygram.
It wasn’t all sport, though. We’d try to tune into the World Service news to keep abreast of global events – Reagan and Gorbachev held various summits while we were at sea, with Thatcher continuing her autocratic style of government. But it was disasters that kept my mind focused: the Challenger space shuttle tragedy, the Intifada that broke out in the occupied Palestinian territories, China’s brutal repression of student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, and the Troubles in Ireland (a long way from where we are today). The Chernobyl nuclear disaster was the most unnerving to us as a crew. A systems test had gone badly wrong, which led to the reactor massively overheating, followed by a series of explosions that released catastrophic radiation into the atmosphere, killing numerous emergency workers and civilians as a result. I remember being very upset about the accident, as were a lot of the crew. We knew the media were now going to be putting all of the UK’s nuclear industry under the microscope – and there was none more newsworthy than the nuclear deterrent.
The general feeling on board was that our reactor was a lot easier – and indeed safer – to run and maintain than the one at Chernobyl, and that an accident was unthinkable and didn’t bear contemplating. Nonetheless, the unthinkable could happen, and it was thanks to our highly trained, elite engineering team that everything ran smoothly. It still does.
The radio didn’t only deliver sport and periodic bursts of gloom and doom, though. Desert Island Discs was a favourite, if we could have got to hear the bloody thing. I remember Michael Parkinson doing one with Kenneth Williams as the castaway; it further opened my eyes to the world of classical music after listening to Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 1. When I got back shore-side after patrol, I remember pouring half my wages on Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Barber, Mozart, Bach, Handel, Wagner, Strauss and Elgar.
At the systems console on the other side of the control room there was a tiny model of the sub – I think the chief wrecker had made it – sitting on a numbered scale, which would be pushed along a day at a time, which was somewhat disheartening; Day 1 complete, only another 80 to go. Whoever thought that was a good idea must have been a masochist. Every time I looked, it didn’t appear to have moved, which just made everything worse.
Sitting on watch, I’d often think about us being cocooned in this undersea world, the extreme pressure of the water seemingly trying to crush the hull in this constant battle of extremes, us against the sea in one of the harshest of all man-made environments. It was quite normal for me to have feelings of impending disaster; sometimes I imagined the control room springing a leak and water gushing in so quickly we didn’t have time to react, all hands lost to a watery grave. I always hoped if we did have some kind of life-threatening emergency that I would be fast asleep in my bunk, and death would be instantaneous and without drama. The deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean is nearly 28,000 feet deep, and the North Atlantic covers around 16 million square miles, so there’s plenty of room for something to go wrong. At these operating depths, if something badly malfunctioned – loss of power, fire or flood – we would have had to ascend to the surface under emergency-blow conditions, whereby high-pressure air was forced into the ballast tanks to expel water, which in turn would dramatically lighten the boat so it could rise.
Before a submarine was able to surface like this, the OOW or captain would announce to the ship’s company: ‘Shut bulkhead doors, shut bulkhead doors, submarine surfacing in emergency.’ Stopping loss of life was the first and only consideration. The command of ‘Full ahead’ would be given, the foreplanes whacking on a 10° bow up and the emergency tanks blowing us up there, the noise deafening as we launched ourselves out of the water after hitting the surface. On the flip side, if the emergency was a flood, with water pissing in everywhere, an emergency surface procedure might not have been possible, and a rushed escape would have been the only way to exit the submarine. Only those crew in the forward or aft escape hatches at either end of the boat would have managed to get out with the bulkhead doors shut, however. It wouldn’t have mattered whether you were an officer or a rating – if you were in the middle of the boat, then it was game over. It was not something I wanted to consciously dwell on, but precisely this scenario occasionally played itself out in one of my coffin dreams in my cramped bunk.
While still formal, relationships within the boat between officers and ratings were slightly less regimented than they were on surface ships, where a somewhat outdated approach to interpersonal skills tended to prevail, one that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Victorian workhouse. Bordering on condescension, it was widespread at the time I served and probably remains the same to this day. On submarines, however, due to the fact that you’re cooped up with the same people for months on end – which can lead to tensions within the ranks – it tends to be different. We eschewed the military rigour of ‘Yes, Sir, Yes, Sir, Three bags full, Sir’ and used first names or nicknames for most of the crew, including the chief ops and the nuclear chief of the watch, aka ‘Taff’ and ‘Smudge’. Officers were still addressed as ‘Sir’, but it wasn’t like Tom Brown’s School Days; instead it was affable and low-key. I could take the mickey, within reason – I’d never take the piss out of the captain or the XO; I didn’t have a death wish – without it getting out of hand; it was always a laid-back but professional atmosphere while on watch in the control room. In many ways we were a boat of equals, with everyone fully aware that every person’s job was as important as the next.
Most of my watches on board were under the command of the OOW, a seaman officer of varying degrees of experience – usually the TASO or the navigator. They were on the way to the ultimate test, the Perisher course, five to ten years further down the line. To pass, they required a keen knowledge of submarine operations, and while this was best gained playing hide and seek with the Soviets in a hunter-killer or diesel-boat environment, it was just as important to gain valuable experience on the nuclear deterrent to acquire the evasion techniques required to pass undetected for months on end.
They would work a one-in-three shift-pattern, and were de facto captains in charge of the sub while the skipper or XO got some shut-eye. All the captains I served with tended to be up at 7 a.m., and stayed awake right through till midnight – or else they’d catnap in the afternoon and be awake most of the night, with the XO working a slightly different pattern so they would complement each other. The captain had most of the main comms in his cabin, and one I served under used to scare the shit out of everyone in the control room by suddenly asking a question or querying an order at 2.30 a.m. I guess he was just keeping the crew on their toes. Although the OOW began every watch after completing a handover by saying, ‘I have the submarine,’ in reality he didn’t; for the captain or XO could take it off him at any minute if they thought something were amiss, if we had to return to periscope depth or had a close sonar contact. In a case where the skipper was asleep and there was an emergency, the OOW couldn’t afford to wait for him to get out of bed, so he would have to make life-and-death decisions and deal with the situation as best as he could.
* A racket is a contact picked up with the electronic warfare mast, usually a ship or aircraft radar.
† A classification in this instance refers to determining what type of aircraft or ship we had picked up on the EW kit.