Simon Collingwood was one of only a handful of serving officers who knew the whole story of the Royal Navy’s race, against all odds, to join the nuclear submarine club. HMS Dreadnought as a project would have been impossible without the transfer of the US Navy’s most secret and most advanced technologies. Dreadnought incorporated all the lessons learned in the design, construction and operation of the USS Nautilus, enabling the Royal Navy to bypass at least five and probably as many as ten years of horrendously costly development time. That this had been possible at all was down to two remarkable men, and a little known secret clause in the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement.
The first remarkable man was Admiral the Earl of Mountbatten, the First Sea Lord, whom Simon Collingwood considered himself honoured to have been introduced on several occasions. The second remarkable man was Admiral Sir Wilfred Woods, Flag Officer Submarines in the mid-1950s and between 1958 and 1960 Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic based in Norfolk, Virginia, on whose staff Collingwood had been lucky enough to serve for several months. Mountbatten was the political powerhouse with a trans-Atlantic contact book unrivalled in history; Sir Wilfred Woods was the supremely professional and technically brilliant master submariner who’d spent every minute of his time in America making friends.
Initially, the two men planned to build a new generation of all-British nuclear boats. Given that the Americans had shut Britain out of the nuclear research loop almost as soon as the Second World War ended, this had seemed the only realistic basis on which to proceed. As late as 1956 Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, the high priest and implacable guardian of the US naval nuclear power programme had gone so far as to veto Mountbatten’s request to visit USS Nautilus. In retrospect this incident proved to be the high water mark of US-British non co-operation in the field because later that year Rickover came to the United Kingdom with a formal offer to supply third generation S3W reactor technology — which was then being deployed in the American Skate class nuclear powered attack boats — to the Royal Navy. Behind the scenes Mountbatten had been hard at work, capitalising on his old friendship with Arleigh Burke, the US Navy’s Chief of Operations and subsequently Rickover was persuaded — presumably reluctantly — to agree to the transfer of the latest reactor technology under the terms of the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement. Thus, HMS Dreadnought was built around an American power plant; a British hull populated with British combat systems heavily influenced by virtually unrestricted access to the Electric Boat Company’s yard at Groton where vessels of the Skipjack class were currently under construction.
General War Order…
Dreadnought was only weeks, possibly days away from ‘reactor initiation’ and her first scheduled ‘in dock’ dive trial.
Simon Collingwood stared into the darkness beyond Dreadnoughts tall, looming sail to where the first of her ‘improved’ sisters was already taking shape in an adjacent dock.
The Americans had transferred so much reactor and systems technology and divulged so much operational information that even before Dreadnought had been being laid down, Rolls-Royce, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and the Admiralty Research Station at Dounreay had begun work on a wholly British nuclear propulsion suite. The first of a new class of nuclear powered attack boats, HMS Valiant, had been ordered in August 1960 and laid down in January 1962. The partially formed skeleton of the Royal Navy’s second nuclear boat was invisible in the night on a covered nearby slipway.
More people were collecting on the dockside.
Civilians, men in uniform, milling around, waiting for orders.
“You there!” Collingwood bawled. “You should all be somewhere! If you don’t know where you are supposed to be report to your ships or take shelter! Now!”
From across the other side of Dreadnought’s dock diesel generators were roaring into life. Acrid smoke began to drift to seaward. Thank god somebody’s got their heads screwed on, Collingwood thought. He took one last look around and strode up the gangway. He went to the forward hatch, which was unguarded, clambered down the vertical steel ladder into the bowels of the submarine, turned at the foot of the ladder and stepped into the control room.
Collingwood was pleasantly surprised to find more than a dozen men waiting for him. Cables snaked everywhere, through open hatches, coiled on the deck, hanging in tangles from overhead control panels.
“The radio room is manned, sir,” reported Lieutenant Richard Manville, the boat’s Supply Officer. “The General War Order is being re-broadcast every five minutes in the clear, sir. I’ve verified its authenticity. This is no drill…”“
“Very good,” Collingwood acknowledged, pleased that the second most senior officer in the compartment was showing no signs of panic. “I have the boat, Mr Manville.” He looked around at the faces in the control room. “Until we know what’s going on I want all our people onboard.” He briefly considered disconnecting the umbilicals and dogging down the fore and aft hatches, decided against it. Theoretically, the boat had viable internal battery power but he had no idea what charge was in the batteries or even if they were fully operable. He stepped through to the radio room. “Do we have a telephone link to the Dockyard Supervisor’s Office?”
“Yes, sir.”
Then he heard it.
The banshee wail of air raid sirens that he remembered so well from his boyhood in London filtering distantly, eerily down through the open hatches into the equipment cluttered spaces inside the pressure hull of HMS Dreadnought.
With a horrible, sickening foreboding Simon Collingwood realised that this was indeed no exercise…
“What is it?” Marija Calleja asked, sleepily.
“I don’t know,” her mother complained irritably in the gloom.
Marija blinked into a more wakeful state. Why was her mother holding a lighted candle? And what was that noise, that commotion in the distance? Gradually, her ears became a little more attuned to the background clutter. She heard car and truck motors, many, many of them, dozens, perhaps scores of them. There were raised voices in the street outside leading down to the sea, and there was a glare of bright light behind the thick curtains of her bedroom.
“Your father says for us to go down to the cellar,” Marija’s mother said, growing ever more vexed.
“Papa?”
“Soldiers from the barracks at Tigne woke us up,” the older woman explained. “Didn’t you hear all the banging! Oh, never mind! You always could sleep through an air raid! Your father went off in the car they sent for him.”
“Oh.” Marija could hear the rest of the house coming to life. Her second floor room was at the back of the building on the quiet side of the block with no direct view of either Sliema Creek, or the street outside leading down to the harbour. “What happened to the lights, Mama?”