HMS Splendid (S106): Twenty Tomahawks Over Kosovo

The Build: Barrow

HMS Splendid was built by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Limited at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 23 November 1977, launched on 5 October 1979 by Lady Eberle, wife of Admiral Sir James Eberle, and commissioned on 21 March 1981 under Commander R. C. Lane-Nott, taking her name from the celebrated S-class submarine that had fought so successfully in the Mediterranean forty years earlier.

The submarine she was named for is worth meeting. the earlier HMS Splendid was a wartime S-class boat that ran up a formidable score in the Mediterranean in barely a year before she was sunk off Capri in 1943, and giving a nuclear hunter-killer that name in 1979 was a deliberate piece of continuity. What neither the Admiralty nor anybody else could have guessed is that the new Splendid would spend her career being told, repeatedly, not to shoot.

Shadowing the Falklands Task Force's Opponents

Splendid arrived in the South Atlantic in mid-April 1982 during the Falklands War and shadowed the Argentine aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo, and while she never fired a shot in anger during the conflict, her reconnaissance on Argentine aircraft movements and her mere presence helped restrict the Argentine Navy's freedom of manoeuvre throughout the campaign.

The Carrier She Was Not Allowed to Sink

That is a very restrained way of putting it. The Veinticinco de Mayo was the single most dangerous ship the Argentine Navy had, because her A-4 Skyhawks could reach the British task force from a position the task force could not reach back. Removing her was worth a great deal, and on 23 April 1982 Splendid found her, near Puerto Belgrano and a long way outside the exclusion zone Britain had declared.

There is a detail here that borders on the absurd. The Veinticinco de Mayo was British built. She had been launched in 1943 as HMS Venerable, a Colossus-class carrier of the Royal Navy, sold to the Netherlands after the war and on to Argentina in 1968. So on 23 April 1982 a British nuclear submarine lay off the Argentine coast lining up a torpedo attack on a ship that had been commissioned into the Royal Navy before her own commanding officer was born.

Being outside the zone was the whole problem. Splendid could see the carrier and could have attacked her, and instead her commanding officer could do nothing but take photographs through the periscope while a request went back to London for the rules of engagement to be widened. Downing Street refused it. So a British nuclear submarine sat within torpedo range of the ship posing the greatest single threat to the fleet she had been sent to protect, and was not permitted to fire.

What followed was a long and frustrating trail. Splendid shadowed the Argentine ships along the edge of their own territorial waters, running about a mile outside the twelve-mile limit, beyond which she was forbidden to attack anything at all. By the time she had worked into a firing position, everything of consequence had crossed the line into safety except one large, slow contact. She came up to periscope depth to identify it before shooting, which was the correct and careful thing to do, and found she had been lining up on the cargo ship Formosa.

The problem solved itself a fortnight later and not by her hand. On 2 May HMS Conqueror sank the General Belgrano, and the Argentine fleet, carrier included, went home and stayed there for the rest of the war. Splendid had spent a fortnight being the reason the Argentine Navy could not move freely and had nothing whatever to show for it in a logbook. HMS Spartan had reached the area before her and HMS Onyx arrived later as the only conventional boat in the campaign, but it was Splendid who came closest to changing the shape of the war and was told to stand down.

First to Fire the Tomahawk

In November 1998, Splendid achieved a genuine milestone when the Royal Navy attained initial operational capability for the American-built Tomahawk cruise missile aboard her, and during the Kosovo War the following year she fired twenty Tomahawks against targets ashore, the Royal Navy's first operational use of the weapon.

She fired further Tomahawks against Iraqi targets in 2003, and her commander, Commander Burke, was awarded the OBE for his leadership during Gulf operations.

It is worth being clear about what those firings represented, because "first to fire the Tomahawk" can sound like a formality. A submarine-launched cruise missile is ejected from a torpedo tube inside a buoyant capsule, breaks the surface, sheds the capsule, unfolds its wings, lights a small turbofan and then flies itself several hundred miles at low level to a point on a map. It gives a submerged submarine the ability to hit a target inland, from a position nobody can locate, with no aircraft and no aircrew at risk. For a navy that in 1998 had just spent a decade shrinking, and whose carrier strike capability was thin, that was a very large addition indeed, and Splendid was the boat it arrived in.

The Kosovo firings began in March 1999 as NATO's campaign opened, and across the war she fired twenty of them, the first time a British submarine had used the weapon in anger. After eighteen years of being manoeuvred into position and told to hold fire, she had finally been given something to shoot at.

Four years later she did it again. In the opening of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Splendid was one of two Royal Navy submarines firing Tomahawks against targets ashore, the other being HMS Turbulent, who fired thirty of them to Splendid's share and was the first Royal Navy vessel of any kind to reach home afterwards. In the space of five years a boat designed in the early 1970s to hunt Soviet submarines under the Atlantic had twice been used to bombard inland targets in the Balkans and the Middle East, which is not a role anybody had in mind when they laid her keel at Barrow in 1977.

The Youngest of Her Class

HMS Splendid was decommissioned at HMNB Devonport in 2004, the youngest of the six Swiftsure-class submarines, bringing to a close a career that had carried her from the tension of the South Atlantic to the front rank of the Royal Navy's cruise missile capability.

There is something odd about that which the bare sentence hides. Splendid was the newest of the six Swiftsures and she was the second of them to go, at twenty-three years old, while older sisters carried on: HMS Sceptre served until 2010 and HMS Swiftsure until 1992. Retiring the youngest boat in a class first is not how navies normally behave. It happened because a nuclear submarine is retired when the cost of her next major refit stops making sense against what is coming to replace her, and by 2004 the Astutes were on order, the fleet had been cut again, and the money for another full overhaul was not there. She had fired the Royal Navy's first Tomahawks in anger five years earlier and was scrapped anyway, which is a fair summary of the period.