“We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all! We will not disgrace our Navy!”
Chapter 1
The B-59 was less than two years old when her commander, Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, conned the diesel-electric submarine out into the cold waters of the Kola Inlet to depart from Murmansk the home port of Northern Fleet for the last time on the first day of October 1962.
Sailing under sealed orders that were only to be opened after the B-59 reached the open sea neither Captain Savitsky nor his crew of seventy officers and men could have guessed that within days their vessel was destined to become the trip wire at the leading edge of the most reckless — and possibly the most ill-considered — act of international brinkmanship in history.
The B-59 was the flagship of a flotilla of four Project 641 submarines — the others being B-4, B-36 and B-130 — dispatched from their icy Arctic bases on the Kola Peninsula to the warm waters of the Caribbean to participate in Operation Anadyr, the mission to deliver medium range ballistic missiles and to set up a permanent Soviet military presence on the island of Cuba. Each Project 641 (designated Foxtrot by NATO) Class vessel was equipped with ten torpedo tubes and armed with twenty-two torpedoes, of which one was nuclear-tipped with a warhead generating an explosive potential approximately equivalent to that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Back in May 1962 the Soviet high command dreamed of establishing a major blue water naval base at Mariel, some forty kilometres west of Havana. The initial plan had been to station cruisers, destroyers, several support and repair tenders, and a large squadron of diesel-electric submarines — including seven Golf (Project 629) submarines armed with SSN4 medium range ballistic missiles — opposite the Gulf coast of the USA. However, by the time the B-59 nosed out into the White Sea at the beginning of October, the grand plans for Mariel had been quietly scaled down and only the four Foxtrot class boats were actually dispatched. However, even this reduced Soviet gesture — four newly built but old-fashioned, essentially updated versions of German U-boat designs captured in 1945 — set deafeningly loud alarm bells ringing across the other side of the Atlantic.
In October 1962 the United States possessed the biggest navy in the world. Although many of its units were modernised World War II vintage hulls, the USN stood astride the oceans of the globe unchallenged in ways the British Royal Navy, even its halcyon years in the late 19th Century might have envied. Each of its big fleet carriers carried scores of strike aircraft and up to forty nuclear warheads in its magazines. The US submarine service had stolen a giant march on the rest of the world with its rapidly growing fleet of nuclear powered attack and Polaris armed ballistic missile boats. In comparison to the United States Navy the Soviet Fleet was obsolete, hardly more than a coastal defence force. Yet, like all great behemoths the USN was strangely insecure in its overwhelming power. While the Soviets gazed on the imperious grey wall of steel that contemptuously blocked their access to the world’s oceans, and yearned to get their hands on the glittering prizes of western technological advances that were routinely built into their enemy’s battle fleets, they failed to appreciate that their foe’s greatest maritime weakness — his Achilles heel — was his own fear and paranoia.
In October 1962 the USN tracked the four Foxtrots from the moment they left port. When it became evident that they had been ordered to approach closer to the East Coast of the United States than any previous Soviet submarines this so alarmed CINCLANT — Commander-in-Chief of Atlantic Fleet — Admiral Robert L. Dennison, that he warned ‘it demonstrates a clear cut Soviet intent to position a major offensive threat off our shores.’
Given that the USN had based six George Washington and Ethan Allen Class Polaris-armed ballistic missile submarines at Holy Loch in Scotland — each with sixteen missiles capable of hitting Moscow from British or Norwegian waters — and was about to deploy a seventh vessel with a similar capability, Admiral Dennison’s risk assessment bordered on hysteria but such was the mood of the times. Lest it be forgotten, Soviet-US tensions had been ratcheting up, gear by gear for many years by late 1962. The Cuba Crisis was just the latest confrontation in a Cold War that in retrospect had begun with the fall of Berlin in May 1945. Seventeen years later Berlin remained a red hot potential flashpoint; first there had been a blockade of the city eventually broken by the great airlift of the late forties, now the Soviets had recently cut the city in half with a wall. Then there’d been the Korean War, which many in America regarded as a proxy war fought with Chinese blood and Soviet weapons; later the brutal crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 left nobody in the West in any doubt as to the ruthlessness of their enemy. There had been the theft of American nuclear secrets and the Soviets’ desperate attempts to match US atomic weapons advances. Barely a year before the Cuban confrontation the Soviets had tested an air-dropped hydrogen super-bomb with an estimated explosive yield of between 50 and 58 megatons of TNT — the so-called Tsar Bomb — over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago at Sukhoy Nos. Coming so soon after the Soviets had beaten their American rivals into space it was explicable — for all that it was somewhat surprising — that successive American Presidents had allowed themselves to misinterpret their own strength for weakness.
In the early 1960s paranoia was very much in vogue not just in Washington DC but in many if not all western capitals, including London, Paris, Bonn and Ottawa. That the paranoia was largely misplaced; that it was not generally appreciated that the Soviets were militarily outmatched in every respect barring the number of tanks and conscripts on the ground in Central Europe and knew it, was in retrospect the great tragedy of the age.
Viewed through the long lens of history any balanced, rational, semi-informed assessment of the actual strategic balance of forces in late 1962 would have concluded that it was the Soviets alone who had firm grounds for their paranoia.
American and British troops stood ready to meet a Soviet invasion on the northern plains of Germany, American B52s and Royal Air Force V-Bombers stood at the end of runways ready to strike. American Polaris submarines roamed the depths of the northern oceans, Thor ballistic missiles in the United Kingdom and Turkey circled the industrial vitals of western Russia, almost daily the Americans commissioned a new buried ICBM silo in the mid-west. The West’s response to the ‘scares’ of the late fifties and early sixties had been massive and overwhelming. Mounting Operation Anadyr and in so doing provoking the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis was the Kremlin’s disastrously miscalculated response to its intense feeling of, for want of a better word, helplessness, and in less fevered times, the Kennedy Administration might have understood as much.
Unfortunately, the Kennedy White House was a particularly fertile medium upon which to sow the seeds of Armageddon. The Soviet Union’s attempt to place nuclear missiles on neighbouring Cuba came as a shock to a country scarred by previous ‘scares’. First there had been the ‘bomber scare’ of the Eisenhower years, then the ‘missile gap’, both the poisonous products of abysmal Western intelligence and the vociferous, money-grabbing lobbying of powerful defence contractors. There had never been a time when the USA and its allies had lagged behind the Soviets in either respect. Then the Soviets had put the first man into space. Was nothing sacred? Now there was another ‘scare’; the Russians were moving into Cuba. What next? A sudden rain of nuclear fire upon the heartland of the North American Continent? Or perhaps an invasion? In the febrile atmosphere of those times, brazenly sending submarines into waters that the United States Navy — and the entire American body politic — regarded as its own, private sea was in retrospect a provocation of monumentally inept proportions.