HMS Spartan (S105): First on Station in the Falklands

Barrow-Built

HMS Spartan was built by Vickers Limited at Barrow-in-Furness, launched on 7 April 1978 by Lady Lygo, wife of Admiral Sir Raymond Lygo, and completed on 22 September 1979, a Swiftsure-class fleet submarine measuring 272 feet, capable of diving beyond 1,000 feet and exceeding 30 knots submerged, under her first commanding officer Commander Nigel Goodwin.

Racing South

Spartan was deployed south even before the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982, and became the first Royal Navy vessel to arrive on station, going on to enforce the maritime exclusion zone declared around the islands.

She got there first because she was already at the right end of Europe. Spartan was in the Mediterranean on Exercise Spring Train, the Royal Navy's annual work-up out of Gibraltar, when the signal came. She was pulled out of the exercise, put alongside at Gibraltar to land her practice torpedoes and take on live ones, and sailed south on 1 April, inside forty-eight hours of being told to go and a day before Argentine troops came ashore at Stanley. A nuclear submarine leaving Gibraltar can be off the Falklands in a fortnight without surfacing, which is why she was on station and enforcing an exclusion zone while the surface task force was still crossing the Bay of Biscay.

She observed Argentine ships laying mines in Stanley harbour but received no order to attack, and on 1 May, while tracking the Argentine aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo, was ordered away by naval headquarters in a decision that reportedly ran against Admiral Sandy Woodward's tactical preferences at the time.

There were two reasons for that and neither was timidity. The first was political: in the first half of April London was still hoping the thing could be settled without shooting, and sinking an Argentine merchant ship off Stanley would have made that impossible. The second was tactical, and colder. A submarine that fires reveals that she is there. Doing it to destroy a minelayer would have told the Argentine navy exactly what it needed to know and would have kept the far more valuable target, the carrier Veinticinco de Mayo, safely in harbour. Spartan was being saved for something bigger and had to watch the mines go down.

The carrier was worth that restraint. She had begun life as HMS Venerable, a British-built ship sold on twice, and her Skyhawks were the one Argentine asset that could reach the British fleet from beyond the fleet's reach. Three British submarines circled that problem for a month. HMS Splendid found her on 23 April, well outside the exclusion zone, and was refused permission to attack. Spartan was marking her on 1 May from just outside the twelve-mile limit when Northwood ordered her off, over the strongly expressed objection of the task force commander at sea. Nobody ever got a shot at her.

The problem solved itself the next day and by other means. On 2 May HMS Conqueror sank the General Belgrano, and the Argentine fleet, carrier included, went home and stayed there. The three submarines that had spent April being told not to fire had, between them, achieved exactly what they were sent to achieve, and the only one that could point to anything in a logbook was the one that fired.

One thing about those first three weeks deserves stating, because it is the clearest measure of what Spartan was doing. Britain declared a Maritime Exclusion Zone on 12 April 1982, a circle two hundred nautical miles across the Falklands, inside which any Argentine warship or naval auxiliary was liable to be attacked. The Total Exclusion Zone that replaced it did not come into force until eleven in the morning on 30 April.

For those eighteen days the zone was enforced by three Royal Navy nuclear submarines and nothing else whatever. No surface ship was within a thousand miles of it. Spartan was one of the three, and the entire British claim to control two hundred miles of the South Atlantic rested on three submarines and on the Argentine Navy believing they were there.

It worked, which is why the phrase about never firing a shot understates her rather badly. The threat did the work, and HMS Conqueror turned it from a threat into a demonstration on 2 May.

A War Without a Shot

Unlike her sister submarine HMS Conqueror, Spartan never fired in anger during the Falklands War, though she earned battle honours for 74 days of submerged operations during Operation Corporate, providing the Task Force with valuable reconnaissance on Argentine air movements and helping to keep the Argentine Navy largely confined to port, a quieter but no less important contribution than a torpedo attack would have been.

Seventy-four days submerged is the figure that measures what she actually did. That is two and a half months without surfacing, in the South Atlantic in winter, at the far end of the longest supply line the Royal Navy has ever run, watching Argentine air movements and reporting them north. HMS Onyx, the one conventional boat sent, took five weeks simply to get there. Spartan was on station before the war started and still there when it ended.

Later Service and Retirement

Spartan ran aground off the west coast of Scotland in October 1989 and again struck the seabed off Scotland in January 1990, sustaining rudder damage on the latter occasion.

Two groundings in four months is a poor run for any ship and it is worth saying where they happened. The west coast of Scotland is where British submarines do their working up, their command course and a good deal of their exercising, because the water is deep, the sea lochs are quiet and the approaches are complicated. Complicated is the operative word. It is steep-sided, irregular ground with rock rising sharply out of deep water, much of it charted to a standard set long before anybody imagined a nuclear submarine would be manoeuvring through it at speed and at depth. More Royal Navy submarines have come to grief off western Scotland than anywhere else in home waters, and Spartan collecting two incidents there in one winter puts her in a large and unlucky company.

She was fitted to carry Tomahawk cruise missiles in 1999, and before her decommissioning in January 2006 completed a five-month, 30,000-mile global deployment across three oceans and four continents, including the first Royal Navy nuclear submarine visit to Brazil in twenty years, complete with goodwill activities and humanitarian work at a Brazilian orphanage, a warm final chapter for a boat whose most famous moment had been a war she never got to fight.

That last deployment is worth setting out, because it is a very different kind of naval work from the rest of her career and she was rather good at it. Five months, thirty thousand miles, three oceans: Rio de Janeiro, La Reunion, Fujairah and Dubai, home in time for Christmas 2005. The Rio visit was the first by a Royal Navy nuclear submarine to Brazil in twenty years and included a two-day exercise with the Brazilian navy alongside the goodwill work her crew did ashore.

She paid off on 20 January 2006 after twenty-six years, the third of the six Swiftsures to go, leaving HMS Sceptre to be the last of them in 2010. It is a curious shape for a career: the boat that got to the Falklands first, watched the mines being laid, held the carrier in her sights twice and was told to stand off both times, finished by taking her ship's company to an orphanage in Rio. Both halves of that are what a submarine is for, though only one of them makes the newspapers.