With conflicts raging across the globe, the British and Americans continued to maintain forces in Germany to guarantee the security of the Bundesrepublik of West Germany. Opposite them, largely in East Germany and supported by the nations of the Warsaw Pact, units of the un-demobilised Soviet Red Army were stationed in overwhelming numbers.
Thus the two most heavily armed powers in the history of the world — ideological and socio-economic opposites — confronted each other in armed might. ‘The West’ was led by the United States of America in an alliance known as NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which had been formed in 1948 and had its strategic headquarters in Brussels. While this European confrontation led to military stalemate, for a period China, emerging from its civil war of 1949 as another Communist state, formed a loose alliance with the Soviet Union, very actively supporting the spread of Communism throughout Southeast Asia. It is indeed in retrospect very fortuitous that the several lesser conflicts, in which the West fought the wards of Russia and China in a policy of so called ‘containment’, did not escalate into yet another world war in which a nuclear exchange occurred.
The British Army on the Rhine was the most conspicuous British component of the front line in the stand-off between the West and the Soviet Union and the coerced allies of her eastern European satellites, which had become known as the ‘Cold War’. There were other, perhaps less obvious aspects, particularly the nuclear deterrent maintained at this time by the Royal Air Force’s V-bombers. Having played her part in the development of the atomic bomb, Britain argued her right to a share of American technology and, thanks to the exertions of Atlee’s government and its desire not to allow the country to lose all of its international influence along with its empire, had acquired nuclear weapons.
This enabled the British, a junior partner to the Americans, to threaten any aggressive Russia intent on a ‘first strike’ with a retaliation amounting to ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, a bleak policy whose acronym, MAD, seemed wholly appropriate. Owing to its proximity to the eastern borders of the Soviet Empire, Britain’s early-warning system gave her population merely a ‘four-minute warning’, just sufficient time for its nuclear-armed V-bombers to take off to strike at targets within the Soviet Union.
These land and air defences were those most clearly in the consciousness of the British public. A strong peace movement emerged, along with a ‘better red than dead’ philosophy but, by and large, the popular reaction was that of stoic acceptance. Mutually Assured Destruction did at least offer the icy comfort of there being no winners. But there was besides these obvious realities another manifestation of the Cold War. Beneath the seas surrounding the British Isles, there was another confrontation taking place in which American, British and other NATO submarines — the ‘Silent Services’ — stealthily monitored and followed submarines and surface ships of the Soviet Navy. In operations cloaked in the highest secrecy, submarines of the West followed their Russian counterparts sometimes for weeks, if not months, totally undetected and where, upon occasion, they stole up to their opponents to within a dozen feet. At all times they were ready to fire their weapons and destroy their quarry should they receive that awesome signal indicating that hostilities had been initiated.
This book is about this underwater confrontation and focuses upon the career of one Royal Navy submarine officer, Dan Conley. How the vast and complex pressures of the Cold War affected the British Royal Navy in the years preceding the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, and how it coped with the challenging task of providing the nation’s nuclear deterrent are told through his experiences. Seldom has naval history had so close or revealing a witness to events.
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The Twilight of Pax Britannica
In 1956, as Britain disentangled itself from its imperial past, its complex Middle East embroilments threw up a new problem. Although India was no longer the jewel in the British imperial crown, the security of Britain’s trade routes to the east and the Antipodes relied upon her part-ownership of the Suez Canal, which ran through a ‘canal zone’ leased from Egypt. The seizure of the Suez canal zone in July by the Egyptians led by Colonel Nasser so infuriated the British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, that he ordered its retaking. In a parlous co-operative venture with the Israelis, who were in a state of more or less constant war with the countries on their newly established borders, and Britain’s canal co-owners, the French, Operation Musketeer was launched.
As Russian tanks rolled into the Hungarian capital of Budapest to suppress an uprising, in a demonstration of naked aggression by the Soviet Union, it appeared in Washington that the Anglo-French operation was just as unacceptable an example of neocolonialism. Despite Eden’s protest that to capitulate to the Egyptians was appeasement such as had precipitated the Second World War, the American president, Dwight D Eisenhower, former commander of the Allied forces of America, Britain and Canada, vetoed the operation. Realising that the venture was doomed without American support in the United Nations Assembly, the British and French halted their successful landings and rapidly withdrew their troops. Even British schoolboys recognised this was a national humiliation, but there was one aspect of pride. Whatever the political misjudgements, one thing shone brightly: the amphibious operation had been all but flawless; the Royal Navy had accomplished its part to the letter. If they thought about it at all, the American reaction seemed like a betrayal and, coming from a much admired ally, a betrayal of the worst kind.
By the time those boys moved by these events came to sit their all-important eleven-plus examination, many considered a career in the Royal Navy a very desirable aspiration. A grammar school education, compared to that of a privileged public school, had its prejudiced detractors even in post-war Britain, but was nevertheless accepted as one possible route of entry as an officer-cadet. And so, with young heads stuffed full of a confusing mixture of paternal war stories, of politics gone wrong, of a vague but glorious past and, a few years earlier, of having been witness to a coronation of a young and glamorous Queen, many young lads of all backgrounds applied to join Britannia Royal Naval College in south Devon. This institution is perhaps better known by the name of the town above which its imposing structure stands — Dartmouth.
History aside, those among them in the early 1960s who had mugged up sufficiently to impress the fearsome Admiralty Selection Board would have been aware that the Royal Navy had recently acquired a new national status as the future guardian of the nation’s nuclear deterrent. All would have comprehended the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction, and most would have known that the nuclear deterrent was no longer exclusively in the hands of the USAF and the RAF, the responsibility for the ultimate deterrent having passed in America to the United States Navy, while in Britain it would in due course be handed over to the Royal Navy. Amongst the young men aspiring to become an officer in the Royal Navy of 1963 was a young Scotsman named Dan Conley.