The Silent Deep: The Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945

"I chose it because it does something which few other people have achieved, or even really tried. Hennessy is very well known as a modern historian. He started out as a journalist on the Times . Then he worked himself into being what he called a contemporary historian—i.e. very recent history. He became an expert on nuclear weapons, on intelligence, and on various aspects of government, on which he wrote a whole series of important books. And then he came to submarines. Now who writes about submarines? Ex-submariners usually. But he wrote about the modern post-war, British submarine service. It’s immensely secret. Pretty well everything he was writing about is very heavily classified. On this subject you’d expect people either to write bland memoirs full of harmless anecdotes and to skirt around all sensitive subjects, or perhaps you might get an official history, full of judicious vagueness whenever it gets anywhere near anything really interesting, with all the personal names left out, and definitely no good stories. But Peter Hennessy—James Jenks is basically his research assistant, but a serious research assistant who’s got his name on the title page—has found an enormous number of friendly submariners who were prepared to steer as close to the wind as they could manage within the Official Secrets Act, and in some cases quite a bit closer, in order to let the world know what they’ve been doing. Modern submariners are really the silent service. The RN is not good at being the silent service. It talks too much. But submariners are genuinely silent. And I’ve never read anything like this before. I knew a few of these stories but there’s a huge amount more in the book which I didn’t know—and I don’t think most people knew. Did you know, for example, that since the Navy acquired nuclear submarines, which is to say from the 1960s onwards, the British submarine force has been spending a very large amount of its time in Russian waters, taking part in Russian exercises, uninvited, and almost always unobserved—though not quite always. Just once in a while the Russians got this sense that there were more people present than there should have been. And there were a few incidents. But actually, the Russians played the game. On at least one occasion a British submarine was depth-charged and forced to surface in the middle of Russian exercise. They were just sent away with a flea in their ear—because, of course, the Russians were doing exactly the same thing, just nothing like as competently. And, for a very long time, they didn’t know that they were being followed because Russian submarines were amazingly noisy. They made so much noise they couldn’t hear themselves think and they certainly couldn’t hear anybody else nearby. But then American traitors, American naval officers known as the Walker spy ring, betrayed the secret to the Russians, who suddenly discovered that they were being tracked everywhere. They discovered that the position of every single Russian missile submarine in the North Atlantic was known, and that, if it had come to nuclear war, most of them would have been sunk before they’d fired their missiles. That was a rather uncomfortable discovery. It precipitated a massive effort to get right all the things they had got wrong and to build new classes of submarines, which didn’t make so much noise and so on. All this is really interesting and really important. If you think that nuclear weapons are of any significance or interest at all, this book is just packed with new information. And it’s also packed full of fascinating, in many cases horrifying, and in some cases very funny, stories. It’s certainly not constrained by fuel running out. It’s basically constrained by the endurance of the crew. I think I’m right in saying that the standard patrol length of a missile submarine now is about two months. They could stay at sea much longer, the reason they don’t is because, humanly speaking, the effects will be too destructive, and also too dangerous. This is a world where you have to think very seriously about the mental state of your people. You don’t want to drive them to a nervous breakdown. They take great care to select people who are calm, stable, reliable characters, not easily given to panic. Nevertheless, it’s a good idea that they should be able to look forward to a nice long time on leave with their families."