Going deep

'SSBN Patrol', by Johnny Milnes. 'It’s like flying a Tornado in a hangar, blindfolded.'

I had the very good fortune to spend a few days holed up at Ardtaraig on Loch Striven last week (training site for the Royal Navy’s X-craft during the Second World War) with Commodore Johnny Milnes. He regaled us with tales of life underwater as a submarine ‘driver’ in a Polaris SSBN, and fascinating the stories were too. He recently published an article describing life as a submariner in the Marine Quarterly, and he (and Sam Llewellyn, editor of the Marine Quarterly) has agreed to allow me to republish it here. Its a superb account of going deep. Enjoy!

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HMS Repulse, courtesy of the National Museum of the Royal Navy

Three good science A Levels got me to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, which for a Yorkshireman with a grammar school background was a bit of a shock. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the surface navy, nor I think they with me. I liked technology and was drawn to the less formal approach of submariners. So after general training I joined submarines. My first boat was HMS Orpheus, a diesel submarine, which took me around the world before returning to the UK for nuclear training at Greenwich. I enjoyed the maths and physics of nuclear engineering, and was swept up in the aura of our expanding nuclear fleet. Newly wed, my wife and I set off to start our new lives together in Faslane. After five patrols in HMS Repulse I then went as second in command of the diesel submarine HMS Otter before being selected for ‘Perisher’ and going on to drive HMS Porpoise.

Being invited to command one of Her Majesty’s warships was the peak of any naval officer’s ambition. I had enjoyed every second of driving Porpoise, but an operational SSBN1 was in a different league. 425 feet long – eighty feet longer than Wembley football pitch – a beam of 33 feet, 8500 tons, powered by a nuclear reactor with unlimited power, range and endurance limited only by the food and loo paper we carried; designed to carry sixteen Polaris Chevaline missiles weighing sixteen tons each and carrying a multitude of thermonuclear bombs. The crew comprised fourteen officers and 140 senior and junior ratings, but with additional seariders and trainees we regularly went to sea with up to two hundred people. The new Trident submarines are much bigger, but the Polaris boats were the giants of their day.

We had two crews, Port Crew and Starboard Crew – sharing the submarine to achieve maximum sea time (a luxury not afforded our SSN2 colleagues). The operational cycle allowed the crew coming back from patrol to go ‘Off Crew’ and take some leave and the other crew, having requalified in all the simulators and trainers ashore, to go ‘On Crew’. Once back on crew it was our boat again in all its entirety.

After going back on crew we usually had three to four weeks, working seven days a week, preparing the boat to go back to sea again. This maintenance period was an intense period of checking, counting, restoring, topping-up, refurbishing and renewing every aspect of this complex underwater machine. There were the reactor, propulsion and secondary systems – a mini underwater power station; the Polaris systems, sonars, communications and cyphers, torpedo firing gear; and the more mundane but equally vital systems such as hydraulics, HP air, ballast, hover, sewage, deep freezers and cold stores – the list was endless, and a failure in any one of the interlinked systems could well have broken UK’s CASD, continuous at-sea deterrent. During this time we were likely to be subjected to a snap NWI, nuclear-weapons inspection, in which a team would descend on the submarine, usually at some Godforsaken hour, with the authority to grill anyone on board, conduct whatever drills or exercises they wanted and put us through our paces. Just after we had taken over, on my first ‘On Crew’, at two o’clock in the morning the NWI team descended. Though we passed well, my Weapons Engineer was sacked on the spot. Fortunately his relief was highly capable and experienced.

At the end of the maintenance period we went to sea for Index – Independent Exercise – to make sure it all worked. Nominally this was a week to ten days, but it was often extended to conduct trials, inspections, torpedo firings or noise ranging. It was a busy period to make sure that all systems functioned correctly at sea and that we were working together as a team.

The West Coast of Scotland has many islands, lochs, sounds and trenches, both shallow and deep. We used a variety of them for our Index shakedowns, seldom in the same places. Up until this point the purpose of the Captain has been to manage the team, but the job ratchets up a gear or two when one gets to sea and clear direction is needed. In those days, going to and returning from sea was the only time a Commanding Officer was entitled to a staff car. On arrival at the jetty the Squadron Commander and staff were usually lined up to bid you a successful Index and to reassure you that they were there to help if anything went wrong (or to crucify you if you made a mistake). After a final salute it was down the gangway to the twittering of a bosun’s call, then up to the bridge in foul-weather gear, heart pumping a little. Then it was ‘Let go forward – Let go aft,’ and after the tugs had pulled us off the jetty we were off down the Gareloch on our own steam, heading back out to sea again. Even diluted by lashing wind and horizontal rain it was one of the most amazing, uplifting feelings that I have experienced.

After negotiating the upper reaches of the Clyde on the surface, heading down to the Cumbraes Gap, one could relax just a little and muse on being the Captain of one of the most powerful warships Britain has ever built, sitting on top of a reactor, a forest of nuclear missiles, a quiverful of torpedoes and around two hundred crew. Such romantic moments are short-lived, however, and the reality of diving and getting underwater takes over. Diving the submarine for the first time after an off-crew and a period alongside is an exciting event.

My first dive in Revenge was in the Arran Trench in about 450ft of water – the same depth as the length of the boat. With all the ship's company closed up at Diving Stations comes the familiar order to the OOW on the bridge: ‘Officer Of the Watch, Captain. I have the submarine. Clear the bridge, come below, shut the upper lid’.

In any nuclear submarine, especially an SSBN, getting underwater is not a gung-ho crash dive, as portrayed in the movies, but a measured, controlled event. All the air from the main ballast tanks that support the submarine whilst on the surface vents to atmosphere like giant whale spouts. Then the First Lieutenant (XO) makes adjustments to the internal tanks to compensate for the extra stores, torpedoes etc that we have taken on board since the boat was last dived. This takes some time. When it is done, the Captain takes the boat down to safe depth, around 200 feet, to check for leaks, and we all settle down to the routine of being underwater again. It’s a great feeling, but it doesn’t always go smoothly.

After a few hours dived, or after an overnighter, we would surface and head around the Mull of Kintyre into the North Channel, then either up to Rona and Raasay in the Hebrides to Noise Range, where we passed over fixed hydrophones on the seabed to monitor our radiated noise and fired torpedoes, or straight out into deep water in the Atlantic for a few days to practice being on patrol. Remember we are still on Index, examined and monitored by experienced sea-riders to get us up to speed and ready for deployment. Going out through the North Channel at night in rough weather surfaced or dived, or surfaced through the Corryvreckan, concentrates the mind a little, and as often as not there would be a Soviet AGI intelligence collector waiting to rot us up by crossing our bows or trying to chop off our towed array by crossing close astern. Noise Ranging deep at high speed in the Inner Sound up at Rona is not for the faint-hearted, either. As I said to a visiting Air Marshal, it’s like flying a Tornado in a hangar, blindfolded.

Ten days or so later, the Index over, we headed back up the Clyde to the Armament Depot at Coulport for two or three days, to top up with rockets, torpedoes and fresh food, and receive final briefings and intelligence updates before sailing on patrol.

We sailed for my first SSBN patrol at midnight, using silent procedure, into a Force 12. It was pitch black, no lights and no communications, pouring with rain. The tugs pulled us off the jetty and had started turning us out to sea when there was an almighty bang as the headrope snapped. Still, we turned well, remained safe and nobody was injured. A loss of power, steering gear failure or communications failure to the Control Room below could have spoilt my whole day, and not helped continuous at-sea deterrence.

That was about to change.

We dived early next morning in the Arran Trench, much as we had done on Index a couple of weeks earlier, for a quick dip to make sure all was well before heading out into the Atlantic. Soon after we had dived my new Weapons Officer reported seawater ingress in Missile Tube 7 – water was leaking in from a large ball valve at the bottom of the missile tube, probably through a defective ‘O’ seal; and as we went deeper, surprise, surprise, the flow increased. If the missile got damp the propellant would swell, and if we had lit the blue touchpaper the missile would have stuck in the launch tube and blown a hole in the bottom of the submarine - not good for career enhancement or CASD. What to do? The only option was to surface, return to Coulport, offload the missile, go back round to the Faslane Floating Dock, change the ball valve, go back to Coulport, top up with a new missile, then get back out again – about a week's delay, providing all went well. Meanwhile with only two boats in cycle my pal in in Renown, who had already been on patrol for eight or nine weeks, would be itching to get back alongside.

So we blew main ballast, surfaced, and started heading back to Coulport with our tail between our legs. I was drafting a signal to Headquarters when the WEO knocked on my cabin door, accompanied by one of the missile compartment watchkeepers. The missileman vaguely remembered a similar incident in Resolution some years ago. They had gone deeper, and with the increased sea pressure the distorted ‘O’ seal on the sea valve had suddenly flipped and reseated itself in its correct position. Wow, I said, let’s give it a shot. So we turned round and dived again. At 150 feet water was still pouring in. At 200 feet it was getting worse. At 300 feet it started to ease. At 400 feet there was a serious bonk, and the ‘O’ seal reseated. The leak suddenly stopped. By now, however, we were only forty or fifty feet above the seabed – not a place to take eight and a half thousand tons of nuclear submarine carrying Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Furthermore, having surfaced only an hour or so earlier, we had used up all our high-pressure air, and had not had time to recharge the bottle groups. This meant that we had dived with no air to get us back to the surface if we had a major problem. This procedure was not in the operating manual, but we got away with it, cracked on into the Atlantic and relieved Renown on time as planned.

Setting QRA – Quick Readiness Alert – is the special moment when you and your submarine, somewhere deep in the Atlantic, formally take on the baton of being Britain’s deterrent. It is a very sobering moment. It has taken two or three days to get into the patrol area, set the Target Plan, arm all the missiles, settle the navigation systems, ensure good one-way communications, remove the fuses from all the transmitters and get the boat quiet. Then, very quietly, you disappear...into...nowhere.

There are three patrol aims. One, to remain undetected. Two, to maintain constant communications. And three, to be able to fire within fifteen minutes.

Aim One had the highest priority, and it wasn’t just the bad guys – the Soviets – that we were trying to evade. We were also trying to keep away from the good guys on our side, who were trying to find the Soviets who were looking for us. There were towed-array frigates, UK and US SSNs, RAF Nimrods and US P3Cs, as well as transiting Task Groups, numerous NATO exercises, sonar trials, oil exploration vessels dropping huge TNT charges, and the usual merchant shipping. The Atlantic was sometimes like Piccadilly Circus, and none of us wanted to be detected by anybody. Fortunately, UK SSBNs really are black holes in the ocean. Charging around is not what we do; slow is very beautiful. We have to alter course regularly to clear our stern arcs, and resolve ambiguity on towed-array contacts, and allow the Sound Room team to listen carefully to everything around us. Slow allows the floating wire aerial to receive constant communication. I will not mention the areas we patrolled or where we went, but if you worked on a range of 2500 miles for a Polaris missile and slightly less for Chevaline, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that we weren’t sunbathing in the South Pacific.

Aim Two, maintaining constant communications, was easier said than done. Apart from a huge sonar array we also towed a long floating wire aerial which received VLF communications through which, God forbid, we would receive the firing signal. We also received a constant stream of intelligence updates via our Headquarters in Northwood. But there were VLF blind arcs, which were usually different from the blind spots of the Loran C we used for navigation. All of this limited us on how we got from A to B. If we went too fast, the aerial would dip below the surface and we would lose communications. All in all it was a continual struggle for the Officers of the Watch. Of this, as with everything else, we kept records for subsequent analysis ashore. A cumulative loss of communications of a few minutes over a ten- week patrol, made up of a few seconds of signal loss now and then, would incur considerable disapproval from the analysis authority.

Aim Three was to be able to fire within fifteen minutes, the time taken from receiving and authenticating a firing signal to getting the first missile away. Firing 256 tons of ballistic missiles in a ripple salvo is not a simple case of pressing the trigger sixteen times. In addition to the authentication procedure there were many other checks and balances made, as well as manoeuvring a large submarine stopped and hovering in the missile launch- depth bracket. To test the whole firing chain, we received practice firing signals called WSRTs – Weapon System Readiness Tests – about once a week, any time of day or night, sometimes from the Prime Minister in the Cabinet Office, to prove we could actually do it – all recorded, like everything else, for scrutiny after the patrol. As soon as a possible firing signal was starting to be received, the W/T Office made the chilling Main Broadcast: ‘XO/WEO, W/T Office.’ The whole submarine immediately knew that we were about to go to action stations, and at that stage nobody knew whether the signal was for real or for practice. This might be at four in the morning, in red or black lighting in the Control Room. Once it was confirmed that it was a WSRT, a simulated tactical launch, a whole lot of things started happening. Taking any submarine to periscope depth, or in this case to launch depth, just below periscope depth, beam to sea, in a storm or severe gale, took took forty minutes or so; then it was back down to patrol depth, fall out from action stations, bright red lighting, have a cigarette, a cup of coffee and start writing up the records.

So there we were, somewhere on patrol in the Atlantic. Where should we go, what should we do? Our programme was generally driven by the intelligence picture. On one patrol, just as we were on our way out, five of the latest Victor III’s – the Soviets' best hunter-killer SSNs, deployed from Northern Fleet with the intention of detecting Western SSBNs – came looking for us. We were out there not only avoiding the bad guys but also keeping out of the way of most of NATO’s anti-submarine forces, who were out there looking for them looking for us. We had to dodge them as they all went thundering across the Atlantic to the Eastern Seaboard of the US, then dodge them again six weeks later when they all came back. There wasn’t much time for beauty sleep. Importantly, we remained undetected.

Revenge and the other boats had been designed and built almost twenty years earlier, and in spite of the TLC we gave them they were starting to show their age. On one patrol we detected a steam leak deep in the reactor compartment – not a big deal in itself, but one thing tends to lead to another, and steam leaks slowly get bigger and bigger. To repair the leak we had to scram the reactor – shut it down – go to battery drive and put a two-man team into the reactor compartment (RC) to investigate and then repair the leak. We didn’t really know how difficult the job would be, or how long it would take. Even with every piece of non-essential machinery switched off, with the reactor scrammed we only had forty minutes before the battery would be flat and we would have to restart the reactor. But after scramming we had to wait until the radiation levels had decayed to a safe level, otherwise we would have fried the repair team. This gave us effectively twenty minutes to get the team in and out, which coincidently was the maximum radiation exposure time they were allowed. Timing was crucial, and we were still on QRA, rolling around deep under the Atlantic. Led by the second Nuclear Chief, the team quickly found the leak and started the repair; but it took longer than expected, and after the third reactor scram and third RC re-entry, after twenty minutes we had to almost drag him out of the reactor compartment as he put the finishing touches to a successful repair. He received no plaudits for his unselfish efforts, and expected none; it was his job.

A significant training load filled the daily programme – reactor scrams and propulsion drills, torpedo firing exercises, fire drills, hydraulic and HP Air bursts, and qualification boards for new officers and ratings. We also conducted Exit and Re-Entry drills on patrol. With the submarine stopped and in the hover, a couple of ship's divers would go into the forward escape tower, flood it up, equalise the sea pressure, open the upper hatch and go out – it was just like spacewalking, but underwater, somewhere in the Atlantic: scary stuff. All the time we were on patrol we had to update our navigation system via satellite, Loran, bottom contour navigation or long bathymetric surveys so that we knew exactly where we were. It all took a lot of time and there was a lot to pull together.

On the more mundane side of life, towards the end of a patrol I conducted Captain’s Rounds, a formal cleanliness inspection of every compartment – it took a good four hours for three to four days – but it was a useful process and good for inter-crew rivalry.

Most evenings each mess would show a movie, and if things were quiet towards the end of a patrol the boys would put on a Sods' Opera. With an all-male crew they were not very PC, but they were harmless and good fun. One very quiet Sunday evening the XO asked me to draw the ticket of the weekly Tombola, and I grumpily accepted. He escorted me to the Senior Rates Mess, where I was met by Eamonn Andrews, complete with black tie and Red Book. ‘Johnny Milnes,' he cried, 'This is Your Life!’ It was my fortieth birthday. All the crew not on watch were there. The finale was the arrival of my wife, Sally, who sashayed in, 6' 2", high heels, short skirt, very well endowed, and sat on my knee. It was the Killick For-endy, very tasty – well, it had been a long patrol.

At the other end of the spectrum, I used to hold a low key non-denominational church service each Sunday, vaguely in accordance with the Articles of War. One patrol on Christmas Eve in Repulse we held a candlelit Carol Service with seventy or eighty in the congregation – perhaps the largest religious service ever held underwater, it was very moving. We seemed to be the only warship in the world at sea. While the rest of the world was waiting for Father Christmas, we were out there doing our thing for Queen and Country.

Towards the end of my first patrol the doctor started developing acute stomach pains that were getting steadily worse and eventually, having scoured all the medical manuals, we decided that he was very seriously ill. This was not in the operating manual. Fortunately we were coming off QRA and Renown had just relieved us. But we were in shallow water in the middle of a fishing fleet with SSBN-sized nets. We spent the night at periscope depth, trying to sidestep scores of fishermen who couldn’t see us, attempting to send a signal. We eventually got through at four in the morning. Two hours later a Sea King helicopter appeared out of the night sky, we surfaced and the doctor disappeared. It had been a long night.

On patrol we received a weekly forty-word Familygram from our next of kin. In theory we could choose whether or not we wished to receive bad news. In practice all Familygrams were heavily vetted by the off crew and again by the W/T Office and myself, so bad news never actually got through. One or two days before getting in, it was usual for the Captain to break any bad news that he might have been harbouring for some weeks. It was never an easy task.

A day later, after some serious scrubbing-out, we got in, to be met by a senior VIP – after my first patrol it was the First Sea Lord. I gave him and a team of grownups from London a hot debrief and a smart lunch, after which we parked alongside at Coulport and started shutting down the reactor and offloading missiles, torpedoes and sacks of records while preparing to hand the boat over to the other crew. Two days later, physically and emotionally drained, we took a standard four-day patrol weekend.

During my time in command of Revenge and Repulse we missed a lot of things going on in the world. While we were on crew our lives were totally consumed by our jobs. We missed births, deaths, birthdays, weddings, funerals, elections and TV series. If you had a summer patrol, with the Faslane weather you could go two to three years without seeing the sun.

But mainly we missed our wives and children, and I now realise just how much they put up with, with no recognition or credit.

Each patrol was different. The Aims remained crystal clear, but everything else – the opposition, the weather, new people, defects – was a variable.

Politicians argue about deterrence, academics talk about it, and historians write about it, but we did it. The great thing about it was the belief and quiet professionalism of all the people involved – from Prime Ministers of various colours down to lower- level stokers deep in the bowels of the machinery spaces. It was a fantastic team effort, and I for one am proud to have done my bit for Britain and for peace.

1 Ship, Submersible, Ballistic, Nuclear

2 SSN is a nuclear-powered submarine carrying non-nuclear armament

3 The Soviets called it Operation Atrina. It’s on U-Tube!