HMS Trafalgar (S107): First to Strike Afghanistan

The Fifth of Her Name

HMS Trafalgar was the lead boat of her class and the fifth Royal Navy vessel to bear the name, commemorating the 1805 battle, and was distinctive within her class for retaining a conventional seven-bladed propeller rather than the pump-jet propulsion fitted to her sister boats.

She was built by Vickers at Barrow, laid down on 25 April 1979, launched on 1 July 1981 and commissioned on 27 May 1983. Being lead boat also made her the guinea pig, and that is the reason for the propeller she alone carried.

The propeller is not a piece of trivia. A conventional propeller has open blades that beat the water, and at the wrong speed the pressure drop off a blade tip boils the water into bubbles which then collapse: cavitation, which is a loud noise announcing a submarine to anybody listening. A pump-jet encloses the whole thing in a shrouded duct, which suppresses that and makes the boat quieter at higher speeds. Trafalgar went to sea with the older arrangement and every boat after her had the pump-jet, so the lead ship of the quietest class Britain had yet built was the noisiest member of it. That is the usual price of being first.

The First Strikes on Afghanistan

Following the September 11 attacks, Trafalgar took part in Operation Veritas against Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces, becoming the first Royal Navy submarine to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles against targets in Afghanistan. She returned to Plymouth Sound on 1 March 2002 flying the Jolly Roger, the traditional mark of a successful submarine operation.

The dates are worth having, because they place her at the very start of it. The Royal Navy's Tomahawks were fired on the first night of the campaign, on 7 and 8 October 2001, and again on 13 October, alongside a much larger American effort. Britain's entire contribution to the opening of that war was launched from two submerged submarines, Trafalgar and HMS Triumph. No aircraft, no ships anybody could see, and nothing for a photographer to point at: the first British shots of a twenty-year war left the water somewhere in the Arabian Sea and nobody watching knew where from.

An Unlucky Streak of Groundings

Trafalgar ran aground near the Isle of Skye in July 1996, and suffered a far more serious grounding at Fladda-chuain in November 2002, causing some £5 million worth of damage to her hull and injuring three sailors.

Between commissioning in 1983 and that first grounding lies the part of her career the record is quietest about, and it is the part she was built for. She had eight years of Cold War before the Soviet Union dissolved, in a class specifically designed to find and follow Soviet submarines in the deep Atlantic and under the Arctic ice, and essentially nothing about what she did in that time has been released. The shape of the work is known from boats whose patrols have been declassified, and the specifics of hers are not, and inventing them would be worse than leaving the gap where it is.

The name is worth a word too. Trafalgar has been carried five times, and the holder before her was HMS Trafalgar (D77), a Battle-class destroyer completed in 1944 whose career was a great deal more visible and a great deal less consequential. That is the shape of the century in two ships of one name: the ones everybody could see spent it being photographed, and the ones that mattered most by the end of it were the ones nobody was allowed to look at.

The cause, when it emerged, was almost farcical for something so costly: during a submarine command course exercise, the navigation chart had been covered with tracing paper, obscuring the very hazard that put her aground.

The circumstances make it worse rather than funnier. She was fifty metres down and doing better than fourteen knots when the alteration of course was ordered that put her onto the rocks, and Fladda-chuain, off the north end of Skye, is a small islet but a thoroughly charted one. The tracing paper was over the chart for a sensible reason: students on the course mark charts up, and covering it kept the chart clean for the next man. It also obscured the hazard. The cause did not become public until reporting in 2008, six years after the event.

It is the second time the Submarine Command Course turns up behind an accident. HMS Trenchant sank the trawler Antares off Arran in 1990 immediately after finishing a Perisher exercise, with four men killed. Two incidents twelve years apart do not make a pattern, and the course exists precisely because handling a submarine at speed in confined water is difficult enough to need teaching. But it is a reminder that a training run is not a safe version of the real thing, and what the course actually demands is set out in HMS Oracle.

A Security Scare

In November 2012 a Royal Navy submariner was sentenced at the Old Bailey to eight years, having pleaded guilty to breaching the Official Secrets Act and to misconduct in public office. He had telephoned the Russian embassy from his girlfriend's mobile, offering information on the operation of Trafalgar and two other nuclear submarines, and had photographed classified material on his phone. He was at the time a communications engineer aboard HMS Vigilant, one of the deterrent boats.

The important part is what did not happen. The people who met him were not Russians. They were MI5 officers running a sting, the approach having been picked up almost immediately, and nothing he offered ever reached a foreign government. It is less a story about a submarine's secrets escaping than about how narrow the margin is: one disaffected man with a phone, and the only reason it came to nothing is that somebody was already listening.

The End of Her Service

HMS Trafalgar was decommissioned on 4 December 2009 at Devonport, closing out the career of the boat that had led her entire class into service and into its first combat operations against Afghanistan.

She was the first of the seven to go and, at twenty-six years, the shortest-served of them. The lead boat of a class usually is: she was built to the earliest standard, she had the features her sisters were given improvements on, and by the late 2000s modernising her would have cost more than she was worth against boats five and ten years younger. HMS Torbay followed in 2017 and HMS Triumph held on until 2025. Trafalgar lies at Devonport still, in the queue of laid-up nuclear submarines waiting to be taken apart, seventeen years after she last went to sea.

It is worth totting up what she managed in those twenty-six years, because the Afghanistan strikes were a single night of it. She was the boat that proved a class of seven, all of which served into the 2020s and between them covered the Cold War, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. She fired the first British shots of the war in Afghanistan. She also went aground twice and had her name dragged through the Old Bailey by a man she had never carried. Lead boats tend to collect both the credit and the trouble, and Trafalgar collected a fair share of each.