HMS Odin (S10): A Steady Three Decades in the Oberon Class

Built at Birkenhead

HMS Odin was built by Cammell Laird, launched on 4 November 1960 and commissioned on 3 May 1962, an Oberon-class submarine that carried forward the Porpoise class's proven dimensions and external design while benefiting from updated equipment, improved internal fittings and a higher grade of pressure hull steel.

Her keel had gone down at Birkenhead on 27 April 1959, one of four boats of the class the yard contributed, so a little over three years passed on the stocks and fitting out before she was accepted. The name was either a strange choice for a submarine or exactly the right one. Odin, chief of the Norse gods, gave up an eye at Mimir's well in exchange for a drink of wisdom, and the badge borne by ships of the name shows him in profile against a red field beneath a naval crown, with the motto Attamen video: in spite of my blind eye, I see. For a vessel that works without windows and finds its way by sound, inference and arithmetic, the heraldry is unusually well chosen.

The name had been carried before her, and not happily. The previous HMS Odin, an O-class boat completed in 1929, sailed on her first Mediterranean war patrol in June 1940 and did not come back. Italian official history credits the destroyers Strale and Baleno with sinking her in the Gulf of Taranto on 14 June, though the attribution has never been settled beyond doubt and a mine has never been ruled out. Birkenhead sent another boat to the same stretch of water twenty months later. HMS Tempest was hunted through the small hours of 13 February 1942 by a single Italian torpedo boat, which spent six and a half hours and very nearly all of its depth charges before forcing her to the surface.

She displaced 2,410 tons submerged, armed with eight 21-inch torpedo tubes carrying 24 torpedoes, and crewed by 68 officers and ratings.

Those are the numbers, and they explain very little. What the Oberons were prized for does not appear in a specification table at all. They were, by the standards of their day, exceptionally quiet, and quietness was the entire point of them: a diesel-electric boat running on her batteries makes almost no noise, and a boat that makes no noise can sit and listen in places where a louder one would be found and chased off. That virtue sold well. Twenty-seven Oberons were built between 1957 and 1978, thirteen of them for the Royal Navy and the remainder for Australia, Canada, Brazil and Chile, which makes the design the most commercially successful British submarine of the postwar era. HMS Oberon (S09), the lead boat, had commissioned at Chatham the year before Odin was accepted.

Nearly Three Decades of Service

Odin went on to serve the Royal Navy for close to three decades, part of the highly successful Oberon class that formed the backbone of Britain's conventional submarine fleet through much of the Cold War.

Establishing what she did across most of those years is harder than it ought to be. Cold War submarine patrols were not written up for publication, and a great deal of what boats of this type did in the Norwegian Sea, the Western Approaches and the Baltic has never been released. The published record of Odin's home service is correspondingly thin, and it would be wrong to dress the gap up as anything else. One stretch of her career, though, is documented in unusual detail, and it took place twelve thousand miles from the Mersey.

A British Boat Under Australian Command

The Royal Australian Navy ordered eight Oberons in 1963, then trimmed the order to six. The first four, Oxley, Otway, Ovens and Onslow, had all arrived by 1970. The last two took considerably longer: Orion was not commissioned until June 1977 and Otama not until April 1978. That left the Australian squadron several years short of the boats it had planned for, at precisely the point when the four it did have were coming due for major refits.

Britain lent a hull to cover the gap. On 5 December 1972 Odin joined the First Australian Submarine Squadron at Sydney, a Royal Navy submarine on loan to the Australian fleet for training, and she worked from HMAS Platypus on the north shore of Sydney Harbour for the best part of three years. This is easily confused with an earlier arrangement and is worth separating out. The Royal Navy had kept its own 4th Submarine Squadron in Australian waters for years, and that ended on 10 January 1969 when HMS Trump was escorted out of Sydney Harbour for home, the last boat of a British squadron based there. HMS Tabard had served eight years with the same squadron before her. Odin was not a revival of any of that. She was one British submarine, flying the White Ensign, taking her orders from an Australian squadron commander.

The word training covers a good deal of ground. A submarine attached to a fleet in that role spends much of her time as the quarry, giving destroyers, frigates and maritime patrol aircraft something genuine to hunt instead of a practice target that behaves itself, and the rest of it helping to work up the submariners of a navy still assembling its own service. What she did went into her Reports of Proceedings, and those survive. The Australian War Memorial in Canberra holds three volumes of them, running from September 1972 to September 1975, filed not among British records but in the series kept for Reports of Proceedings of HMA Ships and Establishments. For three years the filing clerks treated her as one of Australia's own.

She was not tied to Sydney either. In December 1973 the Royal Australian Navy announced her return from Singapore to Sydney by way of Fremantle, and the Western Australian port kept something of the visit: her ship's plaque, the one-eyed god painted on a wooden shield, is held in the City of Fremantle's civic collection to this day. She left the squadron on 15 September 1975, by which time Orion was building and the Australian shortage was drawing to a close.

The End of Her Service

HMS Odin was decommissioned on 18 October 1990 and sold for scrap in Greece in October 1991, bringing to a close a long and steady career as one of the reliable workhorses of the Cold War submarine fleet.

Several of her sisters escaped that ending. HMS Ocelot sits in dry dock at Chatham Historic Dockyard, preserved in the yard that built her and open to anybody curious about how little room sixty-eight men actually had. Odin was not among the fortunate ones. She had done what was asked of her for twenty-eight years and five months without once troubling the newspapers, and that is the sort of career that finishes at a breaker's yard rather than in a dry dock with a ticket office. For a submarine, being unremarkable is closer to a compliment than it sounds.