The ‘O’ class and their immediate predecessors, the ‘P’ class mentioned earlier, although of new post-war design, were built on traditional lines of a relatively long hull length, two propeller shafts and torpedo tubes in the bows and stern. Curiously, the earliest Royal Navy submarine, the Holland I of 1901, had a much more efficient underwater design than those that followed. This was because the short, rounded, single shaft hull design — known as an ‘albacore’ in shape and not dissimilar to the profile of a whale or porpoise— whilst highly manoeuvrable under water, tended to make for very wet, unstable operation on the surface. Since the traditional submarine was still essentially a submersible rather than a true submarine craft, until the adoption of the snort it was more important to design for surface efficiency.
This tradition was broken by the Americans one year after the lead vessel of the ‘P’ class, HMS Porpoise, entered service. In 1959 the United States Navy commissioned the conventional submarine Barbel, which was albacore in design. Submerged, she and her two sisters proved to be much faster and handier than the Royal Navy’s ‘P’ and ‘O’ classes and they proved the superiority of the albacore hull form, sometimes called the teardrop, over the accepted style based upon the empirical development to that date. The true significance of this return to the form of the Holland I was that by this time the United States Navy possessed the means to drive a fully submarine warship: a nuclear power plant.
Nevertheless, the Os and Ps had many excellent features, chief of which was their absence of noise when running under electric motor propulsion. This was exemplified by one of these boats passing over an array of highly sensitive seabed hydrophones when the only noise detected was the patter of rain on the surface of the sea. They were also very seaworthy on the surface, possessed an excellent range of about 15,000 miles and were able to remain at sea for up to sixty days. With eight torpedo tubes, they carried an impressive outfit of up to twenty-six torpedoes and — for a limited duration of about forty minutes — could achieve a submerged maximum speed of 17 knots. Their accommodation was considered reasonable enough for long patrols, with separate mess areas, each fitted with bunks and tables, although some of engine-room staff lived between the after torpedo tubes.
Their disadvantages in handling lay in their slow turning rate, large turning circle and a relatively low speed of 7 knots at periscope depth, when the propellers would start making a significant noise owing to the onset of cavitation. Furthermore, unlike the submarines of some other navies, when running on the surface under diesel power, the engines did not have a separate air induction system. Instead, their air was sucked down the conning tower hatch and through the control room. Wet and salt-laden, this rapidly moving airstream did little good to the increasing amount of electronic gear being fitted in this location. In very rough weather, where lots of spray and the occasional lump of solid water could be expected down the conning tower, a plastic fabric trunking was mounted below the control room hatch. This in turn was lashed into a 3ft-high canvas receptacle with a hose connected to a pump set up to remove any overflowing seawater, an expedient known as the ‘bird bath and elephant’s trunk’.
In rough weather at night, with the control room in near-darkness, going on bridge watch, dressed in foul weather gear and safety harness, involved negotiating a wet, moving and slippery deck, climbing into the ‘bird bath’, avoiding falling into water it contained, before battling up the plastic trunking by way of the conning tower ladders through a very noisy and violent 100mph rush of indrawn air. Emerging onto the bridge, even the conditions of a force 8 gale would seem serene after the experience of the vertical climb against such odds. Fortunately, the later major modernisation of the ‘O’ class, which incorporated improved lockout arrangements, where the submarine ran on the surface with all conning tower hatches shut and the snort system open, mercifully consigned the ‘bird bath’ to history.
Such things might be tolerated up to a point. Less easy to accept were the more important deficiencies in ‘warfare capability’. Both the ‘P’ and ‘O’ classes were originally built with sensors and torpedo control equipment which had advanced little since 1945 and, indeed, this was still the case when Conley joined Odin. While these submarines had to be able to sink surface shipping, their primary combat role was to hunt and destroy other submarines, a task for which they required efficient sonar equipment and a capable anti-submarine (ASW) weapon. Their sonars, nearly always operated in the passive mode (not transmitting) to avoid counter-detection, had only a single narrow trainable beam and the long-range sonar, which had its hydrophones fitted in the ballast tanks, required the submarine to slowly circle to conduct an all-round search. The control room attack equipment relied upon a number of rudimentary paper or Perspex plots which, although foolproof, were manpower-intensive and required a considerable degree of skill to develop target parameters and solutions.
As to their offensive weapons, they could deploy the Mark 8 torpedo, which was of pre-Second World War vintage and, although reliable and capable of use against both surface ships and submarines at periscope depth, it was relatively short-ranged. For use against a hostile submarine the prime weapons were the Mark 23 and Mark 20 homing torpedoes, described by Conley as ‘totally ineffective’. The former were wire-guided versions of the latter, but the wire arrangement was very unsatisfactory and, coupled with both poor homing performance and component reliability, made for a total system performance which was utterly inadequate. Although of course he could not know it, rectifying these deficiencies would occupy a significant part of Conley’s naval career and would not be fixed until the eve of the end of the Cold War, a quarter of a century after the Royal Navy commissioned its first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, in 1963.
Throughout this period, when the Royal Navy replaced the Royal Air Force as ‘the nation’s sure shield’ as steward of Great Britain’s nuclear deterrent, the Submarine Service’s senior officers on the whole reluctantly accepted these deficient weapons, somewhat failing in their duty to adequately thrust the issue under the noses of their civilian counterparts at the head of the Ministry of Defence, or those politicians responsible for the defence of the realm. In a period of such prolonged tension, with the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction ever present, the irony of this is inescapable.
Those responsible who regarded these serious deficiencies with such complacency focused upon the number of submarines, seemingly imbued with a touching confidence that, in event of hostilities, success would still be achieved even with inadequate weapons. Here the lessons of history were being thrown away with cavalier abandon. Clearly, these senior officers had failed to acknowledge the generally poor performance of torpedoes in the Second World War. They appeared ignorant of the wretched history of American and German torpedoes, the latter of which ameliorated Allied losses in the early stages of the Battle of the Atlantic — to the fury of Dönitz — whilst the former probably extended the Pacific War by at least six months.
Appreciation of all this lay in the future for Conley, who arrived at Faslane when Odin was still at sea. He checked into the brand new wardroom of the Clyde submarine base, HMS Neptune, which had been built specially to support the four new Polaris submarines which would become operational shortly. The base possessed new submarine jetties, workshops, shore accommodation and a floating dock, but was still under construction, with many other facilities in various stages of completion. To Conley it seemed that no expense was being spared in meeting the imperatives of the Polaris programme which was running to schedule and, despite the obvious outlay surrounding him, was on budget.