Under Pressure. Richard Humphreys
the fuss was about. Even though I’d had three months of training, this was the first time I’d ever stepped aboard a nuclear submarine. I was shitting it. The main access hatch was a straight drop down a ladder of about 10 to 12 feet, starting off vertical, then halfway down kicking out towards 1 Deck, as the top deck of the submarine’s three decks was known. The first thing I noticed was the claggy heat as I reached the bottom and turned 180° to carry on down to 3 Deck, where my locker and bunk were located. There was a distinctly stale odour down here: the ghosts of farts long dead, mixed with heat, oil and the CO2 absorption-unit chemicals they used to recycle air back into oxygen. Add to that special cocktail the collective sweat of a crew of 143 men and bingo, you had the submarine smell. It was grim all right.
The second thing to strike me was what lay immediately above my head – and the need to duck. I cracked my forehead on the overhang of the steps down to 3 Deck, giving me a nice egg of a swelling above my left eyebrow. Although Resolution was the biggest submarine built by the Navy at that time, it was hellishly cramped in terms of living space, and moving around its tiny passageways required all manner of contortion. The raison d’être of the submarine is first and foremost machinery and functionality, with the bodily needs of men coming a distant second. I noticed valves, gauges, low ceilings, wires, switches and dials all round, and wondered how in hell I was going to cope learning the mechanics of all of this.
Two people couldn’t pass on a corridor without one moving aside. You could stand in the middle of the passageways on 1, 2 and 3 Deck with your outstretched hands and touch either side of the sub. It was impossibly tight. Then there were the protruding pipes to bang your head on, bulkheads to trip through, small hatches to navigate, valves and dials all over the place, plus vertical ladders between decks … there were risks everywhere. I had to pass through hatch after hatch and ladder after ladder before getting to my bunk at the bottom of the boat. The lack of space was giving me the fear. I couldn’t let on, but on first impressions I wasn’t sure life in a steel cigar-shaped tin can was going to work for me. It was all the equipment, for fuck’s sake. It was everywhere you looked, coupled with those passageways and ladders eating up all available living space. Plus, there were nuclear weapons and a nuclear reactor to worry about, never mind their impact on the space. I was already starting to regret my ballsy decision to become a submariner.
The walls started to close in as panic got a hold of me, so I ran to the toilets to take some deep breaths. Christ, we hadn’t even left the dock yet and I was getting into a state. I just needed to regroup a moment. Anyone who tells you they’re not nervous when they first step on board a submarine is talking nonsense; the machinery, claustrophobia and alien smells, it’s not good for the uninitiated.
Fortunately, the crew were mostly friendly and eager to help me settle in. I started to calm down after about five minutes as I messed about and put my kit in my locker along the passageway near my bunk space, although ‘locker’ is probably overdoing it. Was I really supposed to fit my kit for a two-month patrol in there? It was about half the size of one you’d find in a local swimming pool. There was a drawer back in my sleeping compartment where I could put my shoes and boots, but storage-wise that was it. I rolled out my Navy-issue green sleeping bag on my bunk and left my own pillow on top. The lack of privacy was plainly obvious. I was going to have to put my faith in the hands of my fellow crewmates and needed to be a good judge of character.
Submariners hanging out in 9 Berth, where I spent my time in the land of nod. My bunk was the top one in the middle rack of three, never the bottom. (Wood/Express/Getty Images)
My main fear was that I couldn’t do it, that it would all be too much. How would I cope? What dangers would lie ahead? How the hell was I going to remember everything – both my job and everyone else’s – while contending with this ever-present claustrophobia. I’d only experienced being cramped in an escape hatch at the SETT at HMS Dolphin, but ten minutes in the submarine and I was already having a crisis of confidence. How would I manage being underwater without daylight for anything up to 80 or 90 days? And nuclear weapons? What if we had to use them?
It was still the height of the Cold War, with Gorbachev only recently having come to power, and the Soviets were hard at it. The Navy’s hunter-killer nuclear subs tracked their aggressive submarines across the North Atlantic, in the waters between Greenland, Iceland, Scotland and the Arctic Ocean, while our diesel-electric O-boats penetrated Soviet waters via the Barents Sea. It was like time had stood still for the last 15 years, each side trying to gain the upper hand.
The Americans, too, in their ‘Los Angeles’ fast attack submarines, were playing cat-and-mouse games in the Pacific, with Reagan well into his second term as president and hawkish as ever, despite the apparent friendly overtures from the Soviets now that the affable Gorbachev wielded power.
I wasn’t the only new starter; Philip, a bright, introverted lad from the Lake District whom I’d gone through training with at HMS Dolphin, was joining the boat at the same time. In addition, there were a couple of other junior rates,* all of us within the warfare team in the boat and collectively under the guidance of the coxswain.
As a submarine ship’s company is notably smaller than, say, that of a frigate or aircraft carrier, the coxswain is the de facto master-at-arms, a person to keep on the right side of. His main duties include being in charge of operating ship control while diving, surfacing and returning to and from periscope depth (PD); supervising the ratings who control the foreplanes and afterplanes, which regulate the depth and pitch of the boat; and overseeing new members of the crew. He would keep a steely eye on us throughout the forthcoming patrol.
The coxswain, like every other submariner on board, does more than one job. The leading steward, for example, will serve the captain his meals, then half an hour later will be on the foreplanes helping to bring the submarine to periscope depth. The beauty of this is that all qualified submariners can do their own jobs very well, but unlike other members of the armed forces they’re also proficient at everyone else’s. I might have been the nearest person to an emergency – be it fire, flood, hydraulic burst or ruptured air pipe – and I had to know how to deal with it and isolate the various systems involved in order to make the boat safe. This level of responsibility is unique within the services. Everyone here is in the same boat, and as JFK said, ‘We all breathe the same air’ – quite literally on a submarine, and for three months with no escape. You have to get along with each other.
In order to get to become a member of that rare club I had to undergo Part 3 training with a mentor at sea, and then an oral exam with the XO, the second-in-command, who himself had passed the Perisher course. Our XO had already captained a submarine, so was biding his time until his own bomber command came through. The coxswain and usually one of the chief MEMs (marine engineering mechanics), comprised the remaining members of the exam board. All the knowledge I’d picked up at submarine school seemed worthless, for while it might help with my own job, it was of no use in terms of the many skills required to make the boat function, nor did it mentally prepare me to keep on top of everything. Everyone I met on board said the same: ‘Forget all that shit, complete waste of time.’ This was big-boy stuff, so it was time to knuckle down.
Resolution was 425 feet long by 33 feet wide and pulled a draught (distance from waterline to keel) of an inch over 30 feet. Her displacement when surfaced was 7,700 tonnes, and while diving 8,500 tonnes. The speed of the boat was roughly 20 knots surfaced and 25 knots submerged. The tear-shaped hull of a submarine is designed to be more aerodynamic when it is surrounded by water on all sides, hence it is faster underwater. The optimum depth to which the submarine can dive is over 750 feet.
As for her armaments: six Mk 24 Tigerfish torpedoes with a maximum range of 39 kilometres, travelling at a speed of around 35–40 knots, and 16 Polaris A-3 ballistic missiles with two Chevaline warheads per missile, with a staggering nuclear yield of about 225 kilotonnes. To put that into perspective, ‘Little Boy’, the Hiroshima bomb, yielded around 13–18 kilotonnes, while ‘Fat Man’, the Nagasaki bomb, weighed in at 20–22 kilotonnes. A deeply sobering