The early 1970s were a dark chapter in British industrial history, with high levels of strikes and stoppages and very poor management — worker relations. In January 1972 there occurred the first of a series of strikes by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) which severely interrupted fuel supplies to power stations. An unprepared Conservative government led by Edward Heath declared a state of emergency on 9 February, which led to factories and offices being restricted to a three-day working week. This did not help Oberon’s passage through the repair period, which had already had been significantly extended by unforeseen defects and the shipbuilder’s inclination to complete the work to a costly, gleaming, new-build standard.
During the national state of emergency, frequent planned power cuts occurred which made life challenging for Conley and his peers in their cottage. However, their local inn, demonstrating both resilience and initiative, lit by candles and oil lamps, remained warm and hospitable and somehow managed to provide hot food. Not that food was an issue as lunch was provided in one of three directors’/senior managers’ dining rooms in the yard, the three known as the ‘gold, silver and bronze troughs’, where even the lunchtime repast was consumed strictly accordingly to seniority.
Oberon eventually left Barrow in April 1972 and started work-up and post-repair trials in the west of Scotland. This was a period of great difficulty for those members of the crew who had enjoyed a halcyon existence in the Far East. Whilst satisfactory results were achieved in the work-up, owing to a number of inveterate troublemakers amongst the crew, morale was very fragile and there had been several disciplinary cases, aggravated by what could be regarded as weak leadership on the part of some of the officers. In particular, in disciplinary matters Conley found it very difficult to work with his new superior, whom he felt had a rather laissez-faire attitude to standards of crew behaviour. The situation was made worse by the boat’s new coxswain, the senior rate vested with the responsibility for crew discipline, who was both mercurial and perhaps not as loyal to the officers as he might have been. The three individuals were not in the least a team, with strong tensions between them, which in the confines of the submarine must have been evident to the crew. All this was exacerbated by several of the new officers proving to be short of competence and this contributed yet further to the atmosphere of poor spirits and motivation within the tight spaces of the boat. With four SSBNs in commission in 1972, each with two crews, and thirty other submarines needing to be manned, the Royal Navy was finding it difficult to find good people when it came to crewing Oberon.
Events reached a nadir whilst the submarine was secured to a buoy in Loch Fyne, off the picturesque town of Inveraray. Several of the off-duty junior ratings, when ashore and enthused by copious quantities of alcohol, decided to attempt to acquire the Duke of Argyll’s flag flying from the top of the highest tower in his lochside castle. Breaking a window at ground level to gain illegal entry, one individual severely lacerated his leg on the broken glass and was abandoned unconscious in the Duchess of Argyll’s dressing room whilst his compatriots, giving up on stealing the flag, instead removed four ancient muskets from the walls of the grand hall. Further damage was perpetrated on their leaving the castle, when they attempted to remove a cannon from the balustrade surrounding the building, and this ended up in a damaged state in a ditch.
The following day, when undertaking noise trials in the loch, an urgent signal was received from the captain of the Third Squadron requiring a full investigation into events in the Duke of Argyll’s castle the previous evening. The duke was a personal friend of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Michael Pollock, and consequently a great degree of disquiet was voiced at several levels of the command chain about the above happenings. This was further exacerbated after a search of the submarine revealed the four stolen muskets which had been brought onboard undetected, owing to the absence on the casing of the duty officer when the liberty boat arrived back from Inveraray. The local police handed the case over for the Royal Navy to deal with and disciplinary proceedings swiftly followed onboard against the miscreants, all of whom received suspended sentences of detention, but Oberon’s name had been very much sullied at a high level. All this confirmed Conley’s view that it would have been best to change the entire ship’s company when the submarine returned from the Far East.
Work-up was followed by several weeks during which Oberon was designated the training boat for a class of prospective NATO submarine commanding officers. This commitment gave Conley further insight into the severe stresses and demands of the Perisher course, which in the case of the NATO students was intensified by their unfamiliarity with the boat’s equipment and the necessity of conducting their attacks issuing rapid orders in their second language, English.
This period at sea was to be Conley’s last in Oberon and he was extremely pleased to be relieved and to hand his responsibilities over to someone else. Owing to a poor relationship with his captain and his feeling of isolation from several of the new officers, his last six months in the boat had not been a happy period. Furthermore, Oberon was no longer the elite, smart, efficient boat it had been in the Far East. After leave and professional courses, Conley was destined to join his first nuclear submarine, the brand new first-of-class Swiftsure, which he had enviously eyed some months previously when in Barrow.
7
Submarine Activities in the Cold War
In October 1973 Lieutenant Dan Conley joined his first nuclear submarine, HMS Swiftsure. This vessel and her sisters were being constructed in response to the relentless build-up of the Soviet fleet and the increasing level of confrontation under the sea which had its beginnings at the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s.
After the Second World War the Soviet Union embarked upon a construction programme geared towards establishing a very large submarine force, which culminated in the 1970s with more than 350 boats. Potentially, the Russian submarine fleet had the capability to choke off lines of communication in the Atlantic and Pacific and to win at sea without pursuing an all-out war on land.
Consequently, a technological race started between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, where each had the respective aim of gaining and retaining superiority in this highly charged undersea confrontation. This, for the nations of the Western alliance, was cruciaclass="underline" if the alliance lost superiority at sea it would have lost the Cold War.
This arms race, besides incurring great expenditure of national treasure, cost the lives of several hundred submariners on both sides, as technology was pushed to the very edge of operational safety. Each side constantly jockeyed for position, both in equipment design and capability, and in operational performance at sea. In the end by the late 1980s, losing the extremely expensive technological challenge, the costs of this arms race contributed directly to the Soviet Union’s collapse. Staring into the abyss of financial bankruptcy, it was impotent to prevent both the break-up of its eastern European empire into constituent republics and the demise of what had been its all-powerful Communist Party.
In the post-war development of their conventional submarines, the Western naval powers, chiefly the United States, Britain and France, built up forces of submarines designed to destroy other submarines. These would be part of the vast armada of ships, aircraft and helicopters ranged against the Soviet submarine threat at a time when the memories of the experiences of the crucial war against the German U-boat were still fresh in the minds of military planners. Submarines have the advantage of stealth and with it the ability to approach and attack an enemy submarine undetected. Also much less vulnerable than ships and aircraft, they can deploy forward to choke points in the enemy’s backyard where maximum damage can be achieved. The new prime role for the West’s submarines was also reinforced by the consideration that in the first two decades after the war the Soviet surface navy was not seen as a major threat.