SECRET WARRIORS – A Review by Barrie Downer

British Submarines in the Cold War – By Paul Brown

Where to start? Submarines and the ‘Cold War’ is a very big subject to write about! When did it start? When did it finish? Has it actually finished? How were Royal Navy Submarines involved in the Cold War? Who were the people involved?

Most Wars have a definite start date and finish date with a declaration of War, then a period of conflict followed by a cessation of hostilities after negotiations. Not in the case of the Cold War as there are no definite start or finish dates and there were no actual hostilities! And has it now actually finished?

The Cold War seems to have ‘just developed’ at some time shortly after WWII but is now generally accepted to have lasted from the later 1940s and into the 1990s ending following the ‘Glastnost’ and ‘Perestroika’ period of Boris Yeltsin and Michael Gorbachev.

However, what can be seen (as in WWI & WWII) is that Royal Navy Submarines were ‘At Sea’ and ‘On Patrol’ at the beginning, and at the end, were there for the whole duration of the ‘Cold War’ and, indeed, some are still ‘Patrolling’ to the current day.

So, what was the extent of Royal Navy Submarine involvement during those Cold War years and how did the Service develop? At the beginning all Royal Navy Submarines had been designed and built either just prior to or during WWII and were ‘Conventional’ diesel submarines of the ‘S’ , ‘T’. ‘U’ and ‘A’ Classes. Although there were several more classes of Conventional boats (‘O’, ‘P’ & ‘U’) introduced in the 1960s to the late 1980s the Nuclear submarine age began for the Royal Navy in 1963. By the 1990s and the end of the Cold War all the diesel submarines had gone and the Service was wholly Nuclear with two distinct and different roles: ‘General Operations & Intelligence Gathering/Surveillance’ patrols by SSNs and ‘Independent Nuclear Deterrent’ patrols by SSBNs (299 patrols by the RESOLUTION Class Boats) and, probably a similar number by the VANGUARD Class to date.

Paul Brown’s book shows that there were 15 different Classes of Submarines operated by the Royal Navy and that 119 individual ‘boats’ had taken part, some to a to a greater or lesser extent, over the Cold War period. Over the years these ‘boats’ had been manned by several hundred different Commanding Officers, even more hundreds of other Officers and many thousands of Engineering and Seamen Senior and Junior rates. ‘Cold War’ operations generally lasted up to six weeks for the Intelligence Gathering & Surveillance’ patrols and up to three months for the ‘Deterrent’ patrols but, of late, the ‘Continuous at Sea Deterrent’ (CASD) patrols have been lasting up to six months at a time a very considerable effort to maintain for both man and machine.

Paul’s extensive and comprehensive research and his interviews/correspondence with former Submarine Commanders, other Officers and many Submariners have allowed him to identify not only the operations of, and employment of, each of the Classes of RN Boats employed during the Cold War period but also many of the people who actually served in them at the time and some of the close encounters, collisions, incidents and accidents which they recalled from their time onboard. Some names and incidents might be familiar to some readers!

‘Secret Warriors’ is a book you might need to read in more than one sitting – there is so much information there you might not take all in at once – but it is well worth very careful reading and, perhaps more than once, as well as ‘dipping in to’ from time to time.