Secret Warriors - British Submarines during the Cold War (446)

31:47They didn't want to change their course because that would make them much more detectable. Unknowingly, Warspite had actually come up right under the stern of the Soviet submarine and hit the ballast tank of the other boat. And the crew described there was an awful bang and crushing and scraping. We're pushed right over in our chairs. There are alarms on all of the panels, bells ringing, red lights flashing. The boat had violently healed 74 degrees to starboard. Swinging back from that impact, she passed under her quarry and hit the Soviet boat again, this time rolling 65 or 70 degrees to starboard and leaving many of the crew disorientated.

32:36Men and equipment were thrown about the boat, causing several injuries and a struggle for survival on board the boat. And the heavy list threatened to trigger the automatic safety procedures that would shut down Warspite's reactor. And the first lieutenant had to react very quickly to execute the emergency procedure that would stop that happening. And he managed to achieve that. The boat had to surface and because there had to be some assessment, for all they knew, the pressure hold could have been damage, ultimately even sinking the war spite. They had to surface to assess the damage. They found that the other boat, the Soviet boat, also had surfaced, and they were preparing to offer the Soviet boat medical assistance, but they intercepted a radio signal from the Soviet boat to say that there were no casualties, and eventually the Soviet boat was able to make it back to its base but heavily damaged and similarly the war spike was very heavily damaged the whole of her conning tower or her sail as it was called was wrecked and she had to withdraw and gingerly get back to get back to the UK for repairs now to this day the MOD won't admit that this incident occurs and they say that that warspite had hit an iceberg attempts were made to cover the damage um as the boat returned to its base at faz lane with tarpaulins and she had to proceed to barrow where the whole of the fin or the sail was replaced with one that was actually intended for another submarine that was under construction there at the time which i suppose was quite lucky So yeah, that was certainly one of the biggest The other major collision occurred in 1981 When HMS SEPTA was trailing a strategic submarine A Delta-class ballistic missile submarine Again up in the Barents Sea And there are different accounts of what might have happened here The one I find most plausible was very similar, in fact, to the war spike incident that the delta had slowed down and the change of range was not detected by Scepter.

35:10A collision again occurred and there was major damage to the casing and the conning tower and the Scepter. But again, luckily, the hull wasn't pierced. But both boats were heavily damaged and the Scepter managed to make it back to base where both the commanding officer and the executive officer, it was actually the executive officer who had charge of the boat when the incident occurred, they were both taken off the boat in a rather summary fashion and a new CO was appointed. So it was certainly a black mark on a submarine officer's record when an incident like this had happened. In some cases, it was career-ending.

35:58In other cases, the officers concerned went on to have stellar careers. So there's not always a lot of logic in what was happening. In the case of Scepter, it was reported that the crew believed their CO was going to stay in place. But the Americans, knowing about hearing about the incident, insisted that a more severe punishment should take place. So whereas with war spike, the CO continued him in his command, perhaps because the Americans weren't involved, I don't know. And so that basically, I won't give his name, but he was given a desk job. And that was it, as far as his career was concerned.

36:39Whereas his executive officer went on to command both an attacks nuclear submarine and a ballistic missile nuclear submarine and be promoted after that. So there isn't always a lot of logic. And I put in freedom of information requests to obtain the Board of Inquiry reports, perhaps optimistically. And I've got nothing because they will not admit this occurred. And in the case of SEPTA, again, when word of something had happened, got out, the MOD insisted she'd hit an iceberg. The sailors at the base at Fas Lane said, it's rather funny Scepter hit a phosphor bronze iceberg because what had happened was the phosphor bronze propeller of the Delta had chewed into the casing of Scepter and some of them, the crew on board, maintained that to this day they have still got a piece of that phosphor bronze from that incident.

37:39Dr. Paul Brown:Brilliant, brilliant. Because I think with Warspite, that was so terrifying terrifying for some of the crew that they left the navy as a result or went to other service some left the navy a few left the navy others asked to be transferred out of the submarine service it was obviously a pretty traumatic experience because for all they knew that the boat could have been terminally damaged the whole incident was just right completely outside their comfort zone. So the COs who took over SEPTA, because there was a change of CO, had a job, he says, I recount this in the book, to rebuild the confidence of what the majority of the crew stayed on board the boat.

38:27And he had to go through a confidence building process with them, he says, so that they could get back to their previous levels of efficiency and confidence.

38:37Dr. Paul Brown:yeah you talk in the book of him taking the war spy on something called angles and dangles which is that's right manoeuvring it and throwing it about a bit that's right they could do that and they obviously enjoyed doing that on nuclear submarines because they were actually faster submerged than they were on the surface um so they could make 25 to 30 knots submerged and were highly manoeuvrable so that was one tactic used to sometimes buy a new co to show a crew what he could do and to instill some confidence in him and that that particular co says that's what he did there yeah yeah and talking of angles and dangles and submarine terminology i'm delighted to see mention of crazy ivans oh yeah in the book because obviously my main reference to submarines is hunt for Red October.

39:30Dr. Paul Brown:Yes. Yeah, and a lot of... Crazy Ivans was a tactic which our submarines occasionally encountered when they were trailing a Soviet submarine. For some reason, and this was rare, but the CO of the Soviet boat might completely reverse course, turn through 180 degrees, and in their terminology, the Brits terminology, charge down on them in this crazy Ivan. Now, why would they do that if they did that? Two reasons. Either A, they had detected they were being trailed, and they wanted to let the other boat know they were being trailed and give them a scare. But, of course, it was a dangerous manoeuvre because neither boat knew the depth at which the other boat was operating.

40:15They might be able to guess it, but they didn't know it. So that's one possible reason. The other reason might be because they had blind spots in their stern arcs, If they wanted to find out if there was anything following them, then the best way might be to reverse course and see what their sonar picked up. There's no doubt it probably occurred. And it was quite scary because the submariners in, say, the British boat could be totally aware that this was happening because the Soviet boat would pass so close. They could feel the churning of its screws and the turbulence caused by the other boats.

40:52So it was a very real experience.

40:56Dr. Paul Brown:Yeah, nerves of steel, nerves of steel. But by the late 70s, there's an introduction of a new feature called toad array sonar, which helps with detection because it's towed behind the submarine. It's away from the machinery and other noise that might give erroneous sounds to the sonar. That's right. Border-raid Sonas seemed to have been around in a very primitive form for a while, but unsurprisingly, it was the Americans who affected it, probably, I think, in the early 70s. But we didn't get it till the late 70s on British submarines. As you say, it could be more effective than Sonas on the boat because it was not affected directly by the noise of the submarine's own machinery.

41:50And the total ray sonar, these could be massive arrays of hydrophones, perhaps a 500 meter long length of cable with hydrophones on it, on a much longer cable, which could be perhaps up to two kilometers long. And it was incredibly effective at detecting sounds from a very long range. now as an example of that in we're going to switch to something very different the Falklands War when HMS Conqueror detected for the General Belgrano the Argentine cruiser and her task group she was 90 miles away 90 nautical miles away so that was the sort of range or greater on some occasions that Todoray Sona could make detection so Conqueror had that Todoray sonar and was able to pick up Balgrana, was able to then close on her and trail her for 29 hours, actually, before the final permission was given from Whitehall for Conqueror to actually attack a torpedo of Balgrana.

43:06So that was one quite dramatic example, if you like, of Todoray. Total raid was used by surface warships as well. But we had the technology. The Americans had the technology. And we got quite a lot of technology from the Americans, of course. And initially, the Soviets didn't have the technology. But through the activities of spy rings and so on, at Portland and in America, they began to acquire the technology. And we had an interest in finding out quite what they were up to, how good were their toad array sonars. And so actually it was HMS Conqueror again, oddly enough, was equipped to try and capture one of the Soviet toad array sonars.

43:55And this was after the Falklands War, and there were a couple of abortive attempts to do it. Basically, on the bow of the Conqueror, there were massive pinchers which could grab the toad array, the cable, the hawser of the toad array sooner, and sever it at a clamp or clamps that could then grip it so that it was retained by the submarine, in this case Conqueror.

44:25Dr. Paul Brown:Now, if you've listened this far, you must be enjoying the show. At least I hope you are. The reason I say this is on the Spotify app, you can now leave comments on individual episodes. So do me a favour and hit that pause button and leave a comment. It'd be great to hear from you, and your interactions help push Cold War conversations up the Spotify rankings. Whatever you do, thanks very much for listening, and now back to your episode. and after the Falklands War very soon after actually Falk Conquer had only been back in the UK for just over a month before she was back in the Barents Sea because word had come through that there was a towed array sonar being trialled up there and she went up and this time it was successful she managed to approach the towing vessel and sever it without being detected it was severed in a way that looked as if it might have jagged on something on the seabed or something like that rather than a clean break so the soviets may not even have known that it was captured by nato and it was brought back to the uk and promptly put on a plane at crestwick sent over to the states to be examined by american scientists so that development of Tona-ray sonar a major development at the time when Swiftshaw did that underwater look on the Kiev.

45:55Swiftshaw had Tona-ray sonar, which was brand new then. Kiev didn't, and so she wasn't very good at detecting. Tona-ray sonar could also be used to cut through different layers of what's called the thermocline, different layers of temperature and salinity in the water, seawater, which affected the propagation of sonar. So it could make it quite difficult for hull-mounted sonars in a submarine to detect something through different layers. Whereas total-array sonar, because it had so many hydrophones, could actually dip through a range of depths and pick up things that previous sonars just hadn't been able to find.

46:41Dr. Paul Brown:and the americans are also tapping communications cables did you find any evidence of the royal navy participating in that no no i think we'd probably know about it obviously it would never it would if it happened it would be highly classified the americans did do it even modified or built i can't remember a submarine it was specially equipped to do this and they managed to do it both in the Barents Sea and also in the off Vladivostok in that area which were the two big areas of big Soviet submarine bases so yeah the Yanks certainly did it and there are accounts of it in for example a book called Blind Man's Buff but it's never been reported that this was done by the British.

47:32Dr. Paul Brown:Hi, it's Ian again with an update. After I finished this interview, I remembered that I'd done an episode with David Arnold, who was an officer on HMS Valiant, a nuclear-powered Royal Navy submarine, and have a listen to his tale. The other trip was up north. Now, how much should we say about up north? what secret that happened 55 years ago, I don't know. I presume you were somewhere around Murmansk or somewhere like that. Yes, somewhere like that. Let's just hypothesize, hypothesize. Let's pretend you've got Archangel up the White Sea. You've got Murmansk, which is on the tip as you go around.

48:23got the Barents Sea and across from those places those two which are connected by telegraph cables on the seabed there is a place called Nevea Zemlea which is a long island shaped like a banana and in the middle of it is a town which I can't remember where there is a gulag where they make nuclear depth charges the NATO name of which I think was Lucy or something. It's always a matter of some debate that if they dropped a nuclear depth charge it was meant to vaporize everything within a mile. And we didn't think this was very sociable really but nobody ever dropped a nuclear depth charge as far as I know, not on us anyway.

49:11Anyway, the Berenc Sea isn't very deep and it is pretty flat. and you can bottom a submarine on it. If you, this is a hypothesis, if you bottom a submarine and if you have a couple of swimmers, you can put them in a two-man tower and you can shut one end and flood it up and then you can open the other end and out they go. And let's assume they have a little gadget with spikes on it and a lashing with a tape recorder that lasts about six months. So they swim away and find a spot where there's such a gadget that's been there for six months. They take it off. They put a new one on and come back. And away you go.

50:04So on the thing is all the traffic from Murmansk to Novaya Semilea to Archangel up in the White Sea. There's several of these cables, but then they had several of these little gadgets. And you do that every six months. and the Americans, they did the same thing off Vladivostok and the cycling islands and around the top corner of Russia that abuts America, Alaska, that way. So the Americans did that bit and the Brits did our bit. Well, I'm not saying they did it, but they could have done. And so that was an interesting navigational exercise.

50:54Dr. Paul Brown:If you'd like to hear more of David Arnold's account, it's episode 388, entitled From Merchant Navy to Covert Hunter Killer Nuclear Submarine Missions. I'll leave a link in the episode information. You've done well to get these stories, I must say, Paul, from what you've got here. Now, one area of the Royal Navy Submarine Service we haven't really covered that much so far is the ballistic missile submarines. So in the 1960s, the UK decide that their nuclear deterrent will be moved from being air launched by the Royal Air Force to being submarine based and the Polaris system is commissioned. Yeah, that's right.

51:41Millen had managed to get the Yanks to agree to us having Polaris missiles, and we promptly set about building quite quickly the resolution-class submarines in the mid-60s. So the resolution went to sea in 1967, and there were a lot of trials and so on. By 1969, the resolution-class boats had taken over the independent nuclear deterrent from the RAF. So there were four resolution class submarines equipped with Polaris, which had a range of something like 2 ,500 miles. And they carried 16 missiles after the conning tower. They were basically an elongated version of the Valiant class, but elongated to allow for the large missile compartment that they had.

52:40Now, they were based at Fas Lane, and the idea was that ideally two, but certainly always one, would be on patrol at any one time. And now, the only two people who would know on board the boat where they were patrolling was the commanding officer and his executive officer, possibly the navigating officer as well. So to this day, we don't know where they patrolled, but we know what the targets were. You might guess they were up in the Norwegian Sea or somewhere like that. And each boat had to remain undetected. And it's said that no British ballistic missile submarine was ever detected whilst it was on patrol.

53:26There were Soviet boats trying to detect them when they left Faslane and so on. But there were various ruses to deploy, for example, a decoy attack submarine to lead a Soviet boat that was going to trail the ballistic submarine in the wrong direction. And each of those patrols last seven or eight weeks. That was the routine when they were first introduced. So we're talking about 50 to 60 days, something like that. Interesting to note that the most recent Trident submarine patrols have lasted up to, in one case, 200 days. It's really stretching the endurance of the crew. But in those days, it was seven or eight weeks.

54:11In the early days, the boats were presumably all in good maintenance order and so on. And possibly for as much as 70 % of the time, there would actually be two boats on patrol. That wasn't achieved 100 % of the time. Gradually, that degraded a bit over time as the boats needed more and more maintenance and long refits and stuff like that. That was the first generation of ballistic missile submarines. And they lasted until the early 90s when the Vanguard class Trident submarines were introduced again, four of them. And the trident missiles had a much longer range. Now, of course, the Soviets weren't going to miss out on all this.

54:55And they had large numbers of ballistic missile submarines. For example, in the mid 80s, there were something like 37 ballistic missile submarines in their northern fleet based at Murmansk. And then they had another whole load based at Vladivostok. And so they had very large numbers of them. And one of the biggest missions of British nuclear SSNs, the attack submarines, was to locate the Soviet ballistic missile submarines and, if possible, trail them to their patrol areas. so we would always know where they were which they never did with ours or the american boats at that time if we take for example the northern fleet um they had to pass through the greenland iceland uk gap so they either went through the denmark strait between greenland and iceland or further east through the Iceland-Faroes-UK-Shetlands gap, which meant they weren't too difficult to detect because we could have maritime patrol aircraft like Nimrods.

56:10We had SSNs, the attack submarines patrolling, and we had the American social system of undersea sonar arrays on the seabed. All of those things would probably detect. We knew their sound signatures. So when one of them crept out from Mimansk and came through the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, it was probably detected and it may well have been trailed to its patrol area. So we knew in those days, for example, they were patrolling off the east coast of America because of the comparatively shorter range of their missiles. Now, that changed in the late 70s, early 80s, because by then the range of these ballistic missiles was much greater.

56:59So the Soviets by then had ballistic missiles with an 8 ,000 mile range. And that meant they didn't have to sit off the coast of America and go through the Greenland Gap to get there. They could get up to the high latitudes of the Arctic Ocean. And this introduced a whole new dimension to the war theatre, the submarine warfare, because what the Soviets, and don't forget the Americans, could also do, was to send the submarine up to the high latitudes, including very often under the ice pack. And the ballistic missile submarine could sit there, very difficult to detect. Because under the ice pack, if the boat just sat there very silently, with perhaps its sail, fin, just touching the underside of the ice, then any attack submarine approaching it would be by far the loudest thing around.

58:03Alternatively, it could sit in the marginal ice zone, which was the fringe area of the ice pack, where there was a lot of broken ice and so on. That was incredibly noisy because all the pieces of ice were bashing against one another. And it was, again, very difficult to detect. And in fact, the Americans throughout the Cold War never perfected a way of detecting a submarine in the marginal ice zone. So that was a jolly good place for a Russian submarine to hide. or if it was right under the ice pack it could surface in Apollina which is a small lake somewhere in the ice and launch its missiles from the Arctic Ocean any target in Europe or the United States and it was in a huge sea area of goodness knows how many million sea miles and therefore very difficult to find so all of that meant there was a whole new technology if you like, of how you operate these submarines under the ice in a very different and more challenging environment than they'd been used to in the past.

59:16And the Yanks started investigating this very presciently in the late 40s with conventional submarines. But it was soon realized that nuclear submarines, when they came along, were going to be much, much better at this because they had much greater endurance under the ice and didn't need to surface if they didn't want to. So by 1959, the Americans were getting quite proficient at under-ice operations, and they began to see this, in the nuclear submarine era, as being vital if they were to have any chance of intercepting Soviet submarines that were taking refuge or passage under the ice cap. Three or four years later, the first Russian submarine surfaced at the North Pole, and the Russians continued to develop their under-ice technology and science.

1:00:15It wasn't until 1971 that HMS Dreadnought became the first British submarine to surface at the North Pole, with the Americans each year had at least one major under-ice exercise. And invariably, from about 1976 onwards, mid-70s onwards, right through the 80s as well, at least one of our submarines was involved in those exercises. They're acting as a target Soviet, in inverted commas, submarine, which the others were trying to get fire control solutions on, find and attack. So those exercises went on right throughout the remainder of the Cold War and up afterwards as well.

1:01:03Dr. Paul Brown:Is there evidence that the Soviets were capturing acoustic signatures of our boats? Yes, they did try to trail our boats, but we could turn the tables on them and trail them. But the Soviets built some particularly fast submarines that were much faster than any of our submarines, like the Alpha class, for example, which could make about 35 knots, had a titanium hull, could do about 35 knots submerged. And they were quite adept at, if we had a submarine in the Barents Sea, actually tracking it down and trailing it. And if we tried to turn the tables and get to the other side of it, the Alpha, I don't know one or two other classes had this capability, was able to outstrip us and get back into a trailing position again.

1:01:53Yes, they did. And if nothing else, they knew for most of the Cold War how much quieter our submarines were than theirs. And it wasn't really till the last years of the Cold War that the Russians were apparently producing submarines that were anything like as quiet as the British and American ones.

1:02:14Dr. Paul Brown:Yeah, I think they had a spy in the US Navy who revealed that their submarines were noisier and they got a Japanese metal cutting system to improve the quality of their propellers or something like that. Okay. Anyway, I think it was something like that. A lot of the noise, you might think it's the machinery, but a lot of the noise comes from the propellers. So yeah, that sounds quite feasible. An update from Ian, it was the Walker spy ring who informed the Soviets that the US Navy could track their submarines using the SOSUS underwater hydrophone network, which detected the unique noise, otherwise known as cavitation, produced by Soviet propellers.

1:02:57Dr. Paul Brown:In the 1980s, the Soviets illegally acquired advanced multi-axis computer-controlled milling machines from Japan's Toshiba Machine Company and Norway's Kongsberg Vapenfabrik. These machines allowed the Soviet Union to produce high-precision, skewed blade propellers, which are much quieter than the older designs. Previously, NATO could detect Soviet submarines from 200 miles away. After the improvements to the propellers, that detection distance decreased to roughly 10 miles. certain soviet submarines such as the akula class were sometimes referred to in naval circles as walker submarines because their enhanced silence was directly attributed to the intelligence and technology acquired during the time of the walk aspiring so presumably the soviets they're coming in close to our bases as well so they're sniffing around holy lock and fazlay they were there was one incident where an American boat, I can't remember whether it was a ballistic missile boat, out of Holy Lock collided with the snooping Russian SSN, yeah, out in the Clyde approaches.

1:04:07So they certainly were, they were around there, they had intelligence trawlers, had one permanently virtually stationed off of Malin Head, monitoring whatever was going on in that area but the Clyde approaches were a regular covert patrol area for their submarines so they could detect very often our ballistic submarines at very early stage in their patrols but not successfully trail them because they were so quiet

1:04:38Dr. Paul Brown:I can't remember who I interviewed it could have been Rob Forsyth where he mentioned that what they tended to do was to wait until there was a football match on because the the Mallinhead AGI would then move closer to the Irish coast to get good TV reception. Okay, well that makes sense. It must have been rather boring sitting there all that time with probably nothing much happening most of the time. And similarly, one of our exercise areas in those years was Portland, because that was our main anti-submarine base, where all the anti-submarine training was done. And so again, it was a hunting ground for the Soviets to have intelligence trawlers, or even a snooping submarine off Portland.

1:05:22Dr. Paul Brown:Were there any accidents or incidents with any of our ballistic missile submarines during the Cold War? There were no incidents of a sort of collision type. There were one or two close calls where some sort of defect occurred in the submarine and it was touch and go whether the submarine was going to have to return to base and abort its patrol. We're told that never happened and that to this day there's never been a time when one of our SSBNs has not been on patrol over that huge period of time from 1969 to 2026. No. Hi, it's Ian again with an update. I just want to point you in the direction of another episode.

1:06:07Dr. Paul Brown:I'm going to give you a short excerpt now. it's with Commodore Eric Thompson and he served on Polaris boats and he describes a dangerous situation with a nuclear reactor but this was quite a big leak and we knew that because of the amount of water to keep pumping out of the reactor compartment bilge the reactor compartment unmanned because of the radioactivity in it so I felt we had to do something about this We're on, I think, the first week of our patrol. We've been on nine weeks to go. So that involved very complicated nuclear procedures. We basically had to shut the reactor down at sea on patrol.

1:06:56Now, a nuclear-powered submarine, it's not like a diesel submarine. You don't have huge batteries to keep it going for lengthy periods. Our battery was really just enough to allow us to shut down the reactor and start up again. which is probably about an hour in total, 20 minutes to shut down, let the radiation levels drop. You've got about 20 minutes to go into the reactor compartment and then you've got to come out and it takes 20 minutes to get the reactor started up again. So you've got to do quite a lot of things in that hour.

1:07:28Dr. Paul Brown:If you'd like to hear more from Eric, his episode is episode 162. It's entitled On Her Majesty's Nuclear Submarine Service. There'll be a link in the episode information. There was one incident later, wasn't there, when I think it was Vanguard, so after the Cold War, actually collided with a French ballistic missile submarine because the French weren't sharing information, whereas we shared with the Yanks information of where our boats were. The French at that time weren't doing that. So there was a collision between one of the French ballistic submarines I don't think it was a major damage cause, but it was publicised at the time.

1:08:11But that was after the end of the... sometime, I think, probably in the late 90s.

1:08:16Dr. Paul Brown:But there were some problems with the cracking in the whole of the nuclear submarine fleet. Yeah. Yes, one of the problems was cracking. What was trouser legs cracking of the stainless steel pipes in the primary coolant circuit of the nuclear reactor. Now that really became evident in the 80s and started to affect the reliability and the availability of the submarines. And particularly the Valiant and the Swiftshire class submarines were suffering from this and they were spending quite a lot of time out of action. To some extent, the resolution class did as well. So that started to contribute to this sort of degradation.

1:09:06And this was something that was experienced by the Americans as well, we are told. And so there were increasingly large amounts of time spent on boats having to stay alongside having these pipes repaired. and it even became the reason why as the end of the Cold War came why several boats were paid off because they were going to need extensive extensive repairs because of trouser leg cracks and one of the the attack submarines was on patrol in the South Atlantic after the Falklands War had ended because they were still being sent down there to monitor whatever Argentine activity there might be which was very little and one of them suffered this problem and it had to abort its patrol in the South Atlantic and return home slowly.

1:09:59So that kind of incident certainly did occur, but it never caused a ballistic missile submarine patrol to be aborted as far as we know.

1:10:08Dr. Paul Brown:I think one of my favourite stories, and I've probably got a lot of favourite stories in this book, is where you describe the visit of HMS Opossum to Sverre Morsk in 1993, where the CO is quizzed about how effective the British submarine forces have been against them. Yeah, that was quite a landmark occasion. And during Opossum's last month of service, she made a historic visit to Sverre Morsk, which was one of the main submarine bases at Murmansk. And she came there. She was, by this time, of course, an old submarine. This was 1993, by which time she was not quite 30 years old, but not far off.

1:11:02And she was escorted into the base by a very modern Russian submarine of the Kilo class, a three-year-old. And a military band stood on the pier playing the Northern Fleet's wartime anthem, Farewell the Craggy Hills. I assume that's a translation. And she was the first Western submarine to visit that submarine base, although many others had spied on the base and its environs in the past 40 years. And whilst exchanging drinks and stories, Russian officers quizzed their guests to find out how far they might have come undetected in the past. How close? Well, the opossum's captain replied, I'm afraid I can't discuss operations that I've done in the past.

1:11:50And this was his rather stiff reply, because it was the admiral commanding the Northern Fleet who had asked the question. So his lips were sealed, just as they've probably remained ever since. And that's why it's so difficult getting these stories about what the

1:12:06Dr. Paul Brown:boats actually did the book is called secret warriors british submarines during the cold war you've been listening to dr paul brown there will be links in the episode notes for you to buy the book it's a glorious coffee table book with excellent photos and fascinating content as you've just heard from paul it definitely comes cold war conversations recommended so it doesn't get better than that. If you'd like more Cold War submarine stories, tales of daring do beneath the sea, then do check out the episode information where there'll be a list of the relevant episodes on the podcast. The episode extras such as videos, photos and other content are available via a link in the episode information.

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