HMS Superb (S109): Three Submarines Meet at the North Pole

Built at Barrow

HMS Superb was built by Vickers Shipbuilding Group at Barrow-in-Furness, launched on 30 November 1974 and entered active service on 13 November 1976, a Swiftsure-class fleet submarine that would go on to compile a truly distinguished record over more than three decades.

Two years between launch and entering service is normal for a nuclear submarine and worth noticing anyway: the hull goes in the water long before the reactor is running and the boat is anything more than a very large empty tube. The name she was given had last been carried by HMS Superb (25), a Minotaur-class cruiser that was shot at in the Corfu Channel in 1946 and spent her career doing the visible business of showing the flag. There is a pleasing symmetry in the pairing of the two Swiftsure classes as well: the wartime cruiser HMS Swiftsure (08) led one, and the submarine that took her name led the other.

Breaking New Ground Under the Ice

Three Submarines at the North Pole

Superb is often described as the first British submarine to reach the Arctic Ocean and sail under the polar ice, and she was not. British boats had been going under the ice for more than a decade before she existed. HMS Grampus spent three weeks up there and came home with a damaged hull in the spring of 1963. HMS Dreadnought surfaced at the North Pole itself on 3 March 1971. Her own sister HMS Sovereign came up through the ice on 21 October 1976, three weeks before Superb had even entered service.

What Superb actually did up there is better than the claim made for her. On 19 May 1987 she met the American submarines USS Billfish and USS Sea Devil at the North Pole. It was the first time British and American submarines had met at the Pole, and the first rendezvous of three boats there by any navy. Three nuclear submarines, from two countries, arriving independently beneath several feet of moving pack ice and finding each other at a point on the earth with no landmarks, no satellite fix available under the ice and no seabed features worth the name.

The navigational problem is the part worth appreciating. A submarine under the ice cannot come up for a position fix, cannot see the sky and is running on inertial navigation that drifts steadily the longer it goes uncorrected. At the Pole itself an ordinary magnetic compass is useless and the lines of longitude converge to a point, so the conventional apparatus of navigation simply stops meaning anything. Arranging for three boats to be in the same place at the same time under those conditions, and then for all three to find openings to surface through, was a demonstration aimed squarely at Moscow: the Arctic was not a Soviet lake, and NATO submarines could operate there in company.

From the Falklands to Afghanistan

During the Falklands War, Superb's departure from Gibraltar generated considerable press speculation about a deployment south to enforce the maritime exclusion zone, though in the event it was her sister boat HMS Spartan that made that journey.

The interesting part is what the Ministry of Defence did about it, which was nothing. The reporting that Superb was heading south was wrong, HMS Spartan being the boat that actually went, but a false belief that another British nuclear submarine was somewhere in the South Atlantic was worth a great deal more than a correction. It was allowed to stand. For a fortnight one of the more effective British assets in that war was a submarine that was not there, which is as neat an illustration as exists of what a submarine force is actually for. An enemy who does not know where your boats are has to assume they are everywhere.

In 2001, Superb operated in the Indian Ocean in support of Operation Veritas, the British contribution to the War in Afghanistan, continuing a long tradition of the class quietly supporting operations far from home waters.

Striking an Uncharted Pinnacle

On 26 May 2008, Superb struck an underwater pinnacle in the Red Sea, roughly 80 miles south of the Suez Canal. The crew were unharmed and the submarine remained watertight, but sonar damage left her unable to resubmerge, and she required temporary repairs at the NATO facility in Crete before returning to UK waters by 28 June 2008.

A pinnacle is the worst thing in the sea for a submarine: a steep isolated spike rising off the bottom, too narrow to show as a gradual shoaling on a depth sounder and, in poorly surveyed water, quite possibly not on the chart at all. The Red Sea is narrow, busy and less thoroughly surveyed than the Atlantic approaches, and she hit it at depth. That the hull stayed watertight and nobody was hurt says a good deal for the way she was built.

The damage that finished her was not to the hull. It was to the sonar in the bow, and the reason that mattered is that a submarine which cannot hear is not a submarine at all. She could float and she could steam, but she could not safely dive, because diving without sonar means going blind into water she could no longer examine ahead of her. So a nuclear submarine came home from the Red Sea on the surface, in plain view, which is the precise opposite of the condition she was designed to live in.

The Royal Navy decommissioned her on 26 September 2008, ahead of schedule, and nearly two years later her commanding officer and two other officers received reprimands for failing to detect the hazard in time.

She was thirty-one years old and had perhaps a year or two left in her, so the accident brought forward a decision rather than forcing an unexpected one. Repairing a bow sonar on a boat that age, with the Astutes ordered and the fleet shrinking, was never going to be worth the money. Of the six Swiftsures only HMS Sceptre was still running after her, and she went in 2010. The class that had been built to trail Soviet submarines finished its life firing cruise missiles at targets ashore, which nobody had in mind in 1974, and the boats that took over that work, HMS Trafalgar among them, are themselves all gone now too.

The reprimands two years later are worth a closing note. Two years is a long time, and it is how long a board of inquiry, a review of the charts and the survey data, and a service disciplinary process take when the question is not simply who had the watch but whether the obstruction could reasonably have been known about at all. Three officers were reprimanded, which is a formal blot on a record rather than the end of a career, and that outcome tells you the finding sat somewhere between bad luck and insufficient care. Not every accident has a villain in it.