HMS Warspite (S103): One Hundred and Eleven Days Beneath the Waves

Barrow-Built

HMS Warspite was built by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow, ordered on 12 December 1962, laid down on 10 December 1963 and launched on 25 September 1965 by Mary Wilson, wife of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, entering service on 18 April 1967 as Britain's third nuclear-powered submarine and the second of the Valiant class.

The name she was given carried more weight than almost any other in the fleet list. HMS Warspite (03) was the battleship that fought at Jutland with her steering jammed, went round in circles under the fire of the German fleet and survived it, then fought a second world war from Narvik to Normandy and finally ran herself aground in Prussia Cove rather than be towed to the breakers. Handing that name to a nuclear submarine in 1965 was not a casual decision.

She was also the second of her class, following HMS Valiant, and therefore among the first British submarines with an entirely British reactor. Everything the Royal Navy operates underwater today descends from those two boats.

A Cold War Collision

In October 1968, while conducting surveillance operations, Warspite collided with the stern of a Soviet Echo II-class submarine, damaging her own fin, an alarming close encounter typical of the cat-and-mouse intelligence-gathering that defined so much Cold War submarine activity, carried out at real risk to both crews involved.

The First Iceberg

The details of that encounter are worth having, and so is what was said about it afterwards. On 9 October 1968 Warspite was in the Barents Sea, shadowing a Soviet Echo II class guided-missile submarine, K-131. Trailing a Soviet boat meant sitting in her baffles, the blind arc behind her propellers, close enough to record everything about her and far enough back not to be heard. It is precise, exhausting work and the margin is small.

K-131 reduced speed sharply, and Warspite ran into her. Her fin struck the Soviet boat twice. K-131 took a heavy list, men and loose equipment were thrown about inside her, and there were several injuries. Warspite came away with a badly damaged fin. Both boats were nuclear powered, one of them was carrying nuclear-armed missiles, and they had just hit each other underwater in the Arctic.

What happened next is the part that has kept the story alive. Warspite went to Lerwick in Shetland, and overnight a carpentry team erected a scaffold over the top of her fin and covered the whole thing in black tarpaulin, so that anything flying over the next morning would see a submarine with nothing wrong with her. On Sunday 19 October The Times reported that she had struck an iceberg.

The Ministry of Defence has never withdrawn that account, and officially it remains an iceberg. Against it stand the recollections of people who were there and a good deal of subsequent research, and the awkward fact that the Barents Sea is not somewhere icebergs are commonly found. It is fair to say the collision with a Soviet submarine is the widely accepted version and that the official one has simply never been changed.

And here is the thing that makes it worth telling at all. The Royal Navy used the same story again. HMS Sceptre hit a Soviet submarine in 1981 and an iceberg was offered a second time, thirteen years later, in circumstances close enough to be embarrassing. Whoever chose the explanation on the second occasion evidently thought it had worked well enough on the first.

A Dangerous Fire

On 2 May 1976, Warspite suffered a serious fire in her diesel generator room while alongside in Liverpool, with dense smoke filling the aft end of the submarine for some four and a half hours before civilian firefighters helped bring it under control.

Her crew's response to the emergency was serious enough to earn gallantry awards, a genuine testament to the discipline and courage required to fight a fire in the confined spaces of a submarine.

Four and a half hours is the figure that should stop a reader. A fire in a submarine is different in kind from a fire anywhere else, because there is nowhere for the smoke to go and nowhere for the men to go either. The compartments are small, the passages are narrow, everything is steel and gets hot, and the atmosphere fills with the products of burning insulation and oil, which are poisonous long before the flames reach you.

Fighting it means going into that in breathing apparatus, in the dark, in a space you can barely turn round in, knowing that if it reaches the wrong compartment the boat is finished. That is why the awards were made. It also explains why submariners spend so much of their training on fire and flood: those two things kill far more submarines in peacetime than anything an enemy does.

A Record-Breaking Patrol

Following the Falklands War, Warspite undertook the longest submerged submarine patrol in history to that point, spending 111 days entirely underwater between 25 November 1982 and 15 March 1983, covering 57,085 kilometres. Notably, she was commanded at one stage by Sandy Woodward, who would go on to lead the British battle group during the Falklands War itself and eventually rise to the rank of admiral.

One distinction is worth drawing carefully, because our own record contains a bigger number that measures something else. Warspite's hundred and eleven days is time SUBMERGED, continuously, without surfacing at all. HMS Trenchant later recorded three hundred and thirty-five days AT SEA, which counts a boat that came up, went into harbour and went out again. They are not the same measurement and the later figure does not beat this one.

What limits a submerged patrol is not the submarine. The reactor will run for years, and she makes her own oxygen and fresh water out of the sea. What runs out is food and, rather sooner, people. A hundred and eleven days is nearly four months without daylight, without fresh air, without post, without news that has not been vetted, in a space where the same hundred or so men pass each other in the same passages every day.

Woodward is the right name to end that paragraph on. He had commanded Warspite from December 1969, having learned the trade in diesel boats like HMS Grampus, and in 1982 he took the carrier battle group to the South Atlantic. The patrol described here came immediately after that war, and it was the Falklands that made such endurance necessary: the South Atlantic is eight thousand miles from Britain and there is nowhere friendly to stop.

The End of Her Service

HMS Warspite was decommissioned in 1991 due to mechanical failure associated with her reactor, and remains today laid up afloat at Devonport Dockyard, awaiting the disposal facilities needed to deal with her radioactive components, a long wait for a boat whose own patrols had once tested the very limits of submarine endurance.

She has now been waiting considerably longer than she served. Warspite was in commission for twenty-four years and has been laid up at Devonport for more than thirty-five, defuelled, afloat, and going nowhere, alongside HMS Valiant and the rest of the early nuclear boats. Britain built these submarines for decades before deciding how to dispose of one, and the bill for that decision is still being paid.

There is a certain irony in it given the name. The battleship Warspite refused to go to the breakers, broke her tow in a gale and put herself ashore in Cornwall, and had to be cut up where she lay. The submarine has not gone to the breakers either, though rather more quietly, and for reasons that have nothing to do with defiance and everything to do with the fact that nobody has yet taken a British nuclear submarine completely apart.