HMS Otus (S18): A World Record Escape and Special Forces in the Gulf War

Laid Down at Greenock

HMS Otus was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, launched on 17 October 1962 and commissioned on 5 October 1963, an Oberon-class submarine displacing 1,610 tons standard and crewed by 68 officers and ratings.

She was one of thirteen Oberons in Royal Navy service and one of the very best submarines of her kind anywhere. HMS Oberon sets out why the class was so good and why so many other navies bought it. What matters for Otus is that an Oberon could sit still in shallow water, almost silent, for a very long time, which is the quality that decided both of the things she is remembered for.

Missile Trials and a Silver Jubilee

Otus took part in missile trials during her first commission, and joined the wider Submarine Flotilla for the 1977 Silver Jubilee Fleet Review, part of a varied Cold War career that saw her called upon for both weapons testing and ceremonial duty.

The 1977 review at Spithead was the last of the really big ones, with something like a hundred and seventy ships assembled for the Queen's Silver Jubilee, and the submarine flotilla sent its boats to lie in line along with everybody else. HMS Cachalot was there too. It is a peculiar duty for a submarine, whose entire professional purpose is not being looked at, to spend a day being looked at by half a million people from the Solent shore.

A World Record Escape Off Bergen

In July 1987, Otus hosted escape training trials near Bergen in Norway, during which two submariners set a genuine world record by escaping from a depth of 183 metres, a remarkable and dangerous feat that demonstrated just how far submarine escape technology and training had advanced, and one that stands as a real highlight in the history of the Royal Navy's submarine escape programme.

Six Hundred Feet, and About Thirty Seconds

That deserves a great deal more than a sentence, because it is one of the most extraordinary things anybody has done in a submarine and the record still stands. In July 1987, in Bjornafjorden near Bergen, a team of British, Commonwealth and international submariners went to sea in Otus to find out how deep a man could escape from a sunken submarine. They did it the only way it can be done, which is by trying.

They started at thirty metres and went progressively deeper. At ninety metres, three hundred feet, men began dropping out, and there is no shame whatever in that. By then the pressure in the escape chamber is ten times what a body is built for, it arrives in seconds, and it hurts.

At the end of it, two men escaped from 183 metres. Six hundred feet. Nobody has done it since and the record has never been broken.

The number that explains why is the decompression allowance. At 183 metres a diver has something in the order of thirty seconds before the nitrogen dissolved into his blood under that pressure will come out of solution as bubbles on the way up and cripple or kill him. Thirty seconds is not enough time to do anything carefully. The whole escape has to be faster than that: flood the chamber, equalise, open the hatch, out, and up, breathing out the entire way so the air expanding in your lungs does not burst them.

The two who did it came from the place that teaches it. Warrant Officer Norman Cook ran the Submarine Escape Training Tank at HMS Dolphin in Gosport, the hundred-foot water-filled column every British submariner went up before he was allowed to sea, and his ascent was controlled and went to plan. Petty Officer Hamish Jones, an instructor from the same tank, had a worse time of it: he gave the alarm signal while the chamber was still flooding and went up on an emergency release, which is the uncontrolled version of the same event.

Both men came out of it without lasting harm and went back to normal duty, and both were decorated for it, Cook with the MBE and Jones with the BEM. It is worth being clear that neither of them was in trouble. They did this deliberately, in a controlled trial, to establish where the limit actually was, so that the number in the manual would be a real one rather than a guess. HMS Orpheus had done the same sort of work on free ascent a generation earlier.

Special Forces in the Gulf War

During the 1991 Gulf War, Otus deployed under Operation Granby and reportedly conducted special operations involving SAS and SBS personnel, quietly demanding work for a submarine by then well into the later years of her service life.

The word "reportedly" in that sentence is doing honest work and should stay. What Otus did in the Gulf in 1991 has never been officially described, and the boats that did this work do not talk about it. What can be said is that landing and recovering special forces from a submerged submarine was a job the Oberons were uniquely good at and the nuclear boats could not do, which is the argument HMS Opossum sets out, and that HMS Olympus shows the same capability being used two decades earlier.

There is a sharpness to the timing, though. Otus was decommissioned in April 1991, within weeks of coming home. A submarine that had just been doing work nothing else in the fleet could do was paid off almost immediately afterwards, because the decision to end the conventional flotilla had already been taken and events in the Gulf did not change it.

A New Life as a Museum in Germany

HMS Otus was decommissioned in April 1991 and sold to scrappers in 1992, but was rescued from that fate in June 2002 when she was purchased by a German entrepreneur, who moored her in Sassnitz harbour on the island of Rugen as a floating museum ship, giving visitors on the Baltic coast a genuine piece of Royal Navy Cold War history to explore.

There is a better irony in that ending than the sentence lets on. Sassnitz is on Rugen, and Rugen, until 1990, was East Germany. That stretch of Baltic coast was Warsaw Pact territory, watched by the Volksmarine and used by Soviet warships, and it is precisely the sort of coastline a quiet British diesel submarine spent her career loitering off and listening to.

So Otus is now moored, permanently and as a tourist attraction, on the shore she was built to spy on, in a country that no longer exists, having been saved from the scrapyard by a German businessman eleven years after the Cold War she was built for came to an end. Visitors walk through her control room. It is a considerably stranger retirement than most warships get, and a good deal better than the alternative on offer in 1992.