HMS Olympus (S12): From Special Forces Swimmers to a TV Treasure Hunt

Built by Vickers-Armstrongs

HMS Olympus was built by Vickers-Armstrongs, her keel laid on 4 March 1960, launched on 14 June 1961 and entering Royal Navy service on 7 July 1962, an Oberon-class submarine measuring 241 feet between perpendiculars and displacing 2,410 tons submerged, capable of 17 knots underwater and armed with eight torpedo tubes, crewed by 68 officers and ratings.

Those figures describe one of the quietest submarines anybody had built, and HMS Oberon explains why the class was so good at sitting still and listening. That quality is the thread running through everything Olympus is remembered for: finding a lost aircraft, putting swimmers into the water off a hostile coast, and, as it turned out, surfacing on cue for a television crew.

Searching for a Downed Aircraft

In 1967, Olympus took part in the search for a downed French naval aircraft, exactly the kind of unglamorous but notably useful search and rescue work that submarines were sometimes called upon to perform alongside their more traditional duties.

It is worth explaining what a submarine actually brings to a search like that, because it is not obvious. Ships and aircraft looking for wreckage are looking at the surface. A submarine is the only participant that can listen properly, because she is under the water with the engines shut down and a sonar set designed to pick out very faint noises at long range in a sea full of them. Aircraft carried acoustic beacons, and finding one on the seabed is far more likely from underneath than from above.

Fitted for Special Forces

Olympus completed a substantial two-year refit in 1982 that added a five-man swim-out chamber, allowing special forces swimmers to exit and re-enter the submarine while fully submerged, a remarkably useful capability that made Oberon-class boats valuable platforms for covert operations throughout the Cold War.

Getting Five Men Out of a Submarine, and Back In

The swim-out chamber deserves an explanation, because it is mentioned all over the history of these boats and rarely described. It is a small compartment inside the pressure hull with a door into the submarine at one end and a hatch to the sea at the other, and it works like an airlock.

Five men in diving equipment shut themselves in. The compartment is flooded until the pressure inside matches the sea outside, because the outer hatch will not open until it does. They then open it and swim out, taking their stores and boats with them, and the submarine closes up behind them and goes away. The whole business happens with the boat submerged and usually stopped on the bottom in shallow water, because doing it under way is close to impossible.

Getting back in is the difficult half. The men have to find a submarine that is deliberately invisible, in the dark, in a tideway, at a time agreed days earlier, and then swim down into an open hatch. If they miss the rendezvous, the submarine can wait a limited time and then has to leave. That is the reality behind the phrase "covert operations", and the reason HMS Opossum and HMS Otus were still doing it in the Gulf in 1991 when the Royal Navy had otherwise gone nuclear.

It is also worth noting for the record that Olympus was not alone in being fitted this way. HMS Onslaught is reported to have carried the same five-man chamber, a claim that rests on thinner evidence, and the fact that this refit is well documented makes that one more credible than it otherwise looks.

A Cameo on British Television

In a rather more lighthearted turn, Olympus made an appearance on the popular British television game show Treasure Hunt in 1986, a fun and slightly surreal diversion for a Cold War attack submarine more accustomed to secrecy than the cameras.

The Helicopter That Landed on a Submarine

This deserves to be told properly, because it is genuinely one of the strangest things a Royal Navy submarine has ever been asked to do. Treasure Hunt was a Channel 4 game show in which contestants in a studio solved cryptic clues while Anneka Rice, in a bright yellow helicopter, raced around the country collecting them against the clock. It was enormously popular and its entire appeal was watching somebody run very fast in a jumpsuit.

In 1986 one of the clues was aboard a submarine. The helicopter went out a few miles from Plymouth Sound to a rendezvous, and Olympus, on cue, surfaced underneath it. The helicopter then landed on the submarine's casing, which is a narrow, wet, curved steel deck with nothing to hold on to and the sea a few feet either side, and Rice got out and took the clue from the boat's commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander John Tuckett.

Consider what that involved from the Navy's end. A submarine whose professional purpose is to be undetectable had to be in a precise position at a precise minute, come up in front of a camera, hold absolutely steady while a helicopter put its wheels on her, and have her captain standing on the casing with an envelope. Somewhere there is a set of orders authorising all of it, and it is a fair bet that the wardroom dined out on the story for years.

A Long Wait in Canada

Olympus was transferred to Canadian Forces in 1989 to serve as a training vessel based in Halifax, but was, somewhat unusually, never actually commissioned into Canadian service, and spent years sitting in storage instead.

She finally arrived at International Marine Salvage in Port Maitland, Ontario on 28 July 2011 for scrapping, bringing to a close a long and eventful career that had, at various points, involved special forces training, a downed aircraft search and a spot on prime-time television.

The ending is the bleakest part, and a long wait is exactly what it was. Canada took her in 1989 to use as a static training boat at Halifax, where crews could practise on a real submarine without the expense of running one, and she was never commissioned into Canadian service at all. She was not HMCS anything. She was simply an object at a wall, and she stayed there, in one condition or another, for twenty-two years.

Then she went somewhere no ocean-going submarine expects to end up. Port Maitland is on the shore of Lake Erie, so Olympus was towed out of Halifax, up the St Lawrence and through the Seaway locks into the Great Lakes, and broken up in fresh water about as far from the sea as North America can put you. A boat built on Barrow slipways to hunt Soviet submarines in the Atlantic finished on a lake in southern Ontario in the summer of 2011.

She was not even the only one. A year or so later the Canadian Oberon Ojibwa was towed into the same lake and set up on dry land at Port Burwell, sixty-odd miles along the shore, as a museum boat that visitors can walk through today. Two boats of the same class, the same water, within about a year of each other, and the only difference between being cut up and being preserved was that somebody had decided in advance to raise the money for one of them.