HMS Astute (P447): Watching for Soviet Submarines During the Cuban Missile Crisis

Laid Down at Barrow

HMS Astute was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 4 April 1944, launched on 30 January 1945 and commissioned on 30 June that year, an Amphion-class submarine displacing 1,360 tons on the surface and armed with ten 21-inch torpedo tubes and a 4-inch deck gun, crewed by around 60 officers and ratings.

Ten torpedo tubes is a great many, and the reason for it, and for everything else about her, is the Pacific. The A class was designed after Pearl Harbor for a war of enormous distances, where a submarine might spend a month getting to her patrol area before she did anything at all. So she was given more range, more speed on the surface, a higher flared bow to keep the sea out on long passages, and air conditioning, which sounds like a luxury and is not: a submarine in the tropics without it becomes uninhabitable inside a week.

She was also designed to be built fast. The hull was all-welded rather than riveted and made in prefabricated sections, and the calculation was about eight months from keel to launch against roughly fifteen for a T-class boat. Britain was expecting to need a great many of them and expecting the Japanese war to run well into 1946.

Forty-six were ordered. Eighteen were launched, sixteen were commissioned, thirty were cancelled, and not one of the class ever fired a torpedo at an enemy. They were the last conventional submarines the Royal Navy designed under wartime conditions and they spent their entire careers doing something nobody had designed them for.

Early Trials on the Clyde

Fresh out of the builder's yard, Astute spent her first weeks running an extensive programme of trials in Scottish waters around the Clyde, Holy Loch and Arran, including gunnery trials, noise trials and torpedo discharge trials conducted at Arrochar through the second half of July 1945, alongside attack exercises with other submarines, before returning briefly to Barrow for modifications that August, just as the war against Japan came to its end.

Training resumed at Holy Loch that October under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Richard Gatehouse.

Gatehouse had come from somewhere very different. Acting Lieutenant Commander Richard Gatehouse, DSC, had spent the war in the Mediterranean in HMS Sportsman, and in February 1944 he had torpedoed the German transport Petrella off Crete, not knowing she had more than three thousand Italian prisoners in her holds. Something over two and a half thousand of them died.

Five months after the war in Europe ended he was taking a brand new submarine out of Barrow to work up for a war that ended before she got there. There is no neat way to put those two facts next to each other, and the officer who did both of them was in his twenties.

A Coronation and Canadian Training

Astute took part in the 1953 coronation fleet review celebrating the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II, and conducted training with the Royal Canadian Navy in 1950, before being stationed at Halifax as part of the 6th Submarine Squadron between 1955 and 1956, part of the same pattern of Commonwealth submarine cooperation that saw several Amphion-class boats spend time in Nova Scotia during the decade.

The arrangement is worth explaining, because it looks odd until the reason is clear. The Royal Canadian Navy came out of the Second World War as one of the largest anti-submarine forces in the world and took on responsibility for a substantial slice of NATO's North Atlantic. What it did not have was a single submarine of its own.

An anti-submarine navy without submarines cannot train. There is no substitute for a real boat trying seriously not to be found, and a surface fleet that only ever practises on theory will not find anything when it matters. So Britain stationed the 6th Submarine Squadron at Halifax and lent Canada the target it needed, year after year, for two decades.

The submariners called that work being a clockwork mouse, and it was tedious in a very particular way: days of being hunted by people who were allowed to find you, with no possibility of anything happening at the end of it. HMS Alderney spent three separate commissions doing it out of Halifax between 1954 and 1963, and the two boats ended up together for the one occasion when it stopped being an exercise.

On Watch During the Cuban Missile Crisis

Astute's most historically significant moment came when she and her sister boat HMS Alderney were deployed to the Grand Banks to monitor for Soviet submarines during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, one of the tensest moments of the entire Cold War, when the world came about as close to nuclear conflict as it ever has.

The Barrier That Caught Nothing

What the two submarines were actually doing can be stated more precisely. Astute and Alderney were placed under Canadian operational control and formed part of an anti-submarine barrier strung between Newfoundland and the Azores, across the routes a Soviet submarine would use to come south into the Atlantic. They made no detections at all.

That is not a failure, and what was going on out of their sight makes it one of the more remarkable near-misses of the century. Four Soviet Foxtrot-class submarines had sailed for the Caribbean at the start of October. Each of them was carrying one torpedo with a nuclear warhead, and the captains had been given launch instructions that were, at best, ambiguous about who needed to authorise using it.

They went nowhere near the barrier. American anti-submarine forces found three of the four much further south and hounded them, dropping practice depth charges to force them up, which the Americans intended as a signal to surface and the Soviet crews had no way of distinguishing from an attack. The boats were exhausted, the air was foul, and one of them had been out of radio contact for days and did not know whether a war had started.

On 27 October the officers of one of those submarines argued about whether to fire the nuclear torpedo, and did not. The published accounts of what was said differ in their detail, which is unsurprising given the circumstances, but the fact of the argument is well established from Soviet participants.

So Astute spent the crisis listening for exactly the right thing in a place where it never came. That is what an anti-submarine barrier is: an enormous, expensive, mostly futile effort that has to be made because the alternative is not making it.

It was exactly the kind of quiet, watchful patrol work that rarely makes headlines but mattered enormously at the time.

There is a particular irony in the tool used for it. Astute was a 1945 submarine with a 1945 sonar set, listening for boats built in the late 1950s, and a diesel submarine on a barrier patrol has to come shallow to run her engines and charge her batteries, which is the noisiest and blindest thing she ever does. She was doing a genuinely difficult job with equipment designed to find surfaced U-boats in the Western Approaches.

It is also worth saying what the crews knew, which was very little. Nobody aboard was told why the patrol area mattered or what was being negotiated in Washington and Moscow. They were told where to go and what to listen for, and they read about it afterwards like everybody else.

The End of Her Service

HMS Astute was sold for scrap on 1 October 1970 and broken up at Dunston on Tyne, bringing to a close the career of a submarine whose Cold War vigilance had, for a few tense weeks in 1962, placed her at the sharp end of history.

Her sisters had rather more colourful ends. HMS Andrew made the first fully submerged Atlantic crossing by a British submarine and was still firing a four-inch deck gun in 1974. HMS Aeneas finished up on screen in a James Bond film. Astute went to a breaker's yard on the Tyne in 1970 with no fuss at all.

The name came back. HMS Astute (S119) was launched in 2007 as the lead boat of Britain's current class of nuclear hunter-killers, built at the same yard at Barrow that produced the first one. She does the same job in the same ocean, listening for other people's submarines, and she can stay under for as long as the food lasts.

The 1962 patrol is the right thing to remember her for even though nothing happened on it. Most of the Cold War at sea consisted of nothing happening, at considerable expense, to people who were not told why, and the years when nothing happened are the ones that turned out well.