HMS Turbulent (S87): One Hundred and Ninety Days Submerged

The Build: Barrow

HMS Turbulent was built by Vickers Shipbuilding at Barrow-in-Furness and commissioned in 1984, a Trafalgar-class submarine based at HMNB Devonport that was originally designed for the specialist Cold War task of hunting Soviet ballistic missile submarines before adapting, after the Cold War's end, to intelligence-gathering and commando insertion work.

The dates in full: laid down on 8 May 1980, launched on 1 December 1982, commissioned on 28 April 1984. She was the second of the seven Trafalgars, following HMS Trafalgar into service by less than a year.

That change of role is the whole story of her generation and is worth spelling out. She was built for one job: to find a Soviet ballistic missile submarine in the deep Atlantic and stay behind her, silently, for weeks, so that in a war she could be sunk before she launched. It is a job requiring enormous patience, extraordinary quietness and essentially no offensive action at all. Then in about eighteen months the target went away, and the Royal Navy was left with a fleet of exquisitely quiet hunters and nothing much to hunt.

What they were given instead was almost the opposite. Land attack with Tomahawk, which means announcing your presence in the most emphatic way available. Intelligence gathering close inshore, often in shallow water the class was never designed for. Putting special forces onto beaches. Turbulent's career divides almost exactly in half: eight years doing the thing she was built for, and twenty doing things nobody had imagined when her keel was laid in 1980. Almost everything she is remembered for comes from the second half.

First Home from Iraq

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Turbulent fired thirty Tomahawk cruise missiles in the campaign, and became the first Royal Navy vessel to return home from the war, arriving in Plymouth on 16 April 2003 flying the Jolly Roger, the traditional mark of a successful submarine mission.

She was not alone in that. HMS Splendid fired in the same campaign, and between them the two boats made up the Royal Navy's entire submarine contribution to the opening of the war. Thirty missiles from one submarine is a substantial number, and being first home afterwards was partly a matter of a nuclear boat simply being faster than a task group: she could leave when released and be in Plymouth while the surface ships were still forming up. The Jolly Roger she flew coming in is a submariners' tradition explained in HMS Triumph, who did the same thing coming back from Afghanistan.

A Gruelling Final Deployment

In 2011, Turbulent undertook an East of Suez deployment lasting 268 days, taking in operations off the Libyan coast in the Gulf of Sidra during the intervention there, as well as patrol duties in the Indian Ocean.

The Libyan part of it deserves naming properly. She sailed from Devonport in February 2011 expecting a routine East of Suez patrol, and was diverted when the intervention began, ending up in the Gulf of Sidra relieving HMS Triumph on station off the Libyan coast. Her sister had fired the Tomahawks that opened the campaign in March; Turbulent took over the watch afterwards. Then she went back east and carried on with the deployment she had originally been sent on.

Of roughly 268 days away, she spent an extraordinary 190 days entirely underwater, covering more than 38,000 miles before returning to Devonport on 14 December 2011, a particularly gruelling test of endurance for both boat and crew.

A hundred and ninety days submerged is worth sitting with. That is more than six months in which nobody aboard saw daylight, felt weather, breathed outside air or spoke to anybody who was not already in the tube with them. Post arrives in occasional short messages that are read by somebody else first. There is no privacy anywhere, the food gets worse in a strict and predictable order as the fresh stores run out, and the only thing that changes is which watch you are on. Submarines are engineered to do this indefinitely. The limit is entirely human, and on this deployment the limit was very nearly found.

Some of it was filmed. Channel 5 followed this deployment for a series called Royal Navy Submarine Mission, first broadcast on 5 September 2011 while she was still at sea, with Commander Ryan Ramsey and a company of about a hundred and thirty. It is one of the very few occasions on which cameras have been allowed inside a British nuclear submarine on an operational patrol, and it is worth watching for the ordinary detail rather than the drama: how people eat, where they sleep, and what a hundred and thirty adults do with each other for six months in a space the size of a large house.

A Hidden Ordeal

During that same deployment, a failure in her air-conditioning system caused internal temperatures to climb to 60 degrees Celsius, resulting in 26 crew members suffering heat exhaustion, eight of them seriously enough to be life-threatening, after barnacles had clogged the cooling system while she lay for an extended period at Fujairah, a notably serious incident that remained undisclosed publicly until 2014, when it finally came to light just how demanding conditions aboard her had become during that record-breaking patrol.

The circumstances were these. She had lain alongside at Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman long enough for marine growth to block her cooling water intakes, and the failure came just after she sailed on 26 May, while she was still on the surface. The temperature inside went to sixty degrees at total humidity, which is not survivable for long by anybody doing physical work, and twenty-six of her people went down, eight of them badly enough that their lives were in danger. That it happened on the surface was the one piece of luck in it. The same failure dived, with no possibility of opening a hatch, does not bear thinking about.

None of it was made public for three years. There is no suggestion of a cover-up in the ordinary sense, since submarine deployments are simply not discussed while they are happening or for a long time afterwards, but it does mean that when the Royal Navy publicised the endurance record on her return in December 2011, the fact that a quarter of her crew had been carried out of the boat in a state of collapse six months earlier was not part of the story anybody was told.

The End of Her Service

HMS Turbulent was decommissioned on 14 July 2012, having undergone modernisation and a nuclear refuelling in 1997, and now awaits dismantling in the number 3 Basin at Devonport Dockyard, a boat whose final deployment tested her crew's endurance quite literally to the limit.

She was the second of the seven Trafalgars into service, after HMS Trafalgar, and among the first out. Twenty-eight years, two shooting wars, a nuclear refuelling in 1997 and one deployment that came closer to breaking her crew than any enemy ever did. She lies in 3 Basin at Devonport now, alongside HMS Tireless and the others, in a queue that the dismantling programme has barely begun to work through.