Cold War sub-texts: the submarine and the popular imagination in post-war Britain

Cold War sub-texts:
the submarine and the popular imagination in post-war Britain

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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1. Contexts

ONE OF THE MOST significant characteristics of the Cold War was the use of military-technological confrontation as a surrogate for actual military conflict – a process that reached its fullest expression in the nuclear arms race itself. As a result the technology of the Cold War became a high-profile part of contemporary popular perceptions of the conflict. The Soviet Union and its satellites had a strong and continuing tradition of celebrating military hardware and according it symbolic status,[1] and in Western societies too certain aspects of Cold War military technology achieved iconic status in the contemporary popular imagination: the tank, the bomber aircraft, the nuclear missile, and, not least, the submarine.

The submarine emerged from the Second World War as a military success story and a potent symbol of technological achievement in the service of aggression and destruction. In Britain it can be argued that, in terms of wider cultural perceptions, the public profile and status of the submarine were never higher than they were in the aftermath of the Second World War. The submarine had not only proved its value as a weapon in the course of that war,[2] it had also established itself in the public mind, perhaps for the first time, as a legitimate and honoured branch of the naval service whose exploits could be as celebrated as those of destroyers and battleships. Within the Royal Navy, the status and morale of the formerly marginal submarine service were high, and became still higher as the nuclear boats came into service with the American and British navies in the 1950s and 60s.[3] A string of memoirs and reminiscences by submarine combatants, most notably perhaps One of our Submarines by Edward Young, published in 1952,[4] confirmed the reputation of the submarine service for acts of heroism in every theatre of the naval war. Factual accounts and histories of submarine technology and wartime submarine campaigns similarly proliferated in the post-war years.

A representative example is The British Submarine (1954) by F. W. Lipscomb (Commander RN, OBE), in which the enterprising wartime record of the British submarine service is used to strengthen claims for the importance of the submarine arm in the modern, Cold War, navy, and in the navy of the future. As Rear Admiral G. W. G. Simpson, who was at this time Flag Officer Submarines in the Royal Navy, observed in the foreword to Lipscomb’s book, ‘to-day the submarine and its impact upon our lives and the defence of this country is a topic of real importance and interest to us all’.[5] In Lipscomb’s view the submarine in the year of his writing, 1953, was ‘in a more rapid stage of development than ever before in its history’, and he looked forward to the ‘momentous’ significance of the atomic submarine with enthusiasm.[6]

Lipscomb’s book is typical of its era in its concern to draw a parallel between the threat it posed in the post-war world by the rapidly-growing Soviet submarine fleet and the Royal Navy’s experience of submarine warfare in the 1939-45 war, with Admiral Sir George Creasey observing in his foreword to the English translation of Wolfgang Frank’s account of the German submarine war, The Sea Wolves (1955), that ‘Submarine warfare is clearly one of the forms of attack which have survived into the Atomic Age … The Sea Wolves tells, in essence, the story of a British and Allied victory in what was only a phase in the development of submarine warfare. The end is not yet’.[7] The high profile of submarines in contemporary British naval planning also played a role in keeping the submarine service in the public eye,[8] as the advent of the nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) in the 1950s and the nuclear ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) in the 1960s brought this type of vessel into the first rank of Cold War weaponry.[9]

On both sides of the Cold War the details of submarine missions were naturally concealed behind varying degrees of secrecy, but the legacy of wartime experience, combined with what was publicly known about contemporary submarine activities, ensured that these vessels retained a highly significant place in Cold War culture, not least in maritime-minded, culturally navalist Great Britain. The submarine combined advanced technology with the timeless human virtues of courage and daring; it operated in the front line of the Cold War, on the enemy’s doorstep; it had the allure of secrecy and stealth; it possessed global reach; and, in the form of the SSBN – ‘this killer whale in our midst’, as The Times put it in 1967[10] – it symbolized the balance of terror that ultimately embodied the Cold War confrontation. Submarines were among the weapons used to challenge the other side most directly; in a war characterized for many of its participants by passive waiting and watching, they were used aggressively throughout the Cold War by each side against the other, in intelligence-gathering, covert operations, locating, shadowing and warning off the opposition and exerting control over territory through deliberately confrontational patrolling.[11] It is above all this experience that lies behind the claim of one former British submarine commander that during the Cold War ‘The submarine flotilla fought the longest battle of the whole bloody lot’, and the trenchant assertion by another that ‘There was a war and we won it’.[12]

It is against this background that I will be examining aspects of the image of the submarine in British culture in the Cold War, focusing in this paper on some popular fictional works of the period. Throughout the years of East-West confrontation, and particularly from the mid-1950s onwards, submarines featured prominently in many Cold War novels, from Nevil Shute’s pessimistic On The Beach (1957) to Tom Clancy’s flag-waving The Hunt for Red October (1984). In the limited time available today I am going to look at only two books in detail, both by British authors and both dating from periods of high tension Cold War confrontation: Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra (1963) and Craig Thomas’s Sea Leopard (1981).

2. Ice Station Zebra and the Cold War frontier

Alistair MacLean (1922-87) was one of the most successful thriller and adventure authors of the 1960s and 70s. Born in Glasgow, he served (in surface vessels) in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, seeing service on the Atlantic convoys, in the Mediterranean and in the far east, where he was captured and ended the war as a prisoner of the Japanese. On his return home he worked as a schoolteacher and wrote short stories until the success of his first novel, HMS Ulysses (1955), enabled him to turn full-time to writing. He published two highly successful war novels, The Guns of Navarone (1957) and South By Java Head (1957), before turning to the Cold War spy thriller genre with The Last Frontier (1959), The Dark Crusader (1961), The Satan Bug (1962), and Ice Station Zebra (1963).[13]

The plot of Ice Station Zebra is, typically for MacLean, straightforward in its essentials. A British meteorological station in the Arctic has been destroyed by fire; many of the personnel have been killed and the survivors – injured and with limited food and power – are in a parlous state. The weather conditions are severe, and the position of the station, adrift on the Arctic pack-ice, is unknown despite searches by British, American and (in an apparent gesture of humanitarian co-operation) Soviet aircraft. The United States Navy submarine Dolphin is despatched from Holy Loch in Scotland with the task of locating the station, surfacing through the ice and rescuing the survivors. Aboard Dolphin for this mission is the mysterious Dr Neil Carpenter, the narrator of the story, whose status and interest in the ice station are highly enigmatic. It rapidly becomes clear that there is more to Ice Station Zebra, to the USS Dolphin’s mission, and to Dr Carpenter, than first appears and a complex tale of murder, sabotage, espionage and deadly East-West rivalry unfolds through the book’s 250 action-packed pages.

Carpenter is a classic MacLean hero: capable, calm, resourceful, robust, equally handy with his fists or his ‘plain downright wicked’ Mannlicher-Schoenaur automatic pistol.[14] His co-star is the submarine, the USS Dolphin. From the opening scene of the book, on the cold dark Holy Loch quayside, the vessel is a commanding presence:

I stared down at the great black shape … This was my first sight of a nuclear-engined submarine and the Dolphin was like no submarine I had ever seen. She was about the same length as a World War II long-range ocean-going submarine but there all resemblance ceased. Her diameter was at least twice that of any conventional submarine … About a hundred feet back from the bows the slender yet massive conning-tower reared over twenty feet above the deck, for all the world like the dorsal fin of some monstrous shark … [ISZ, 11]

With the exception of brief, perilous excursions across the Arctic ice, USS Dolphin is the exclusive setting for the rest of the story. The submarine is a paradoxical environment, simultaneously enclosed and capacious; it is a ‘city under the sea’, of ‘staggering’ size, with its interior giving ‘an overwhelming impression of lightness, airiness and above all, spaciousness’ [ISZ, 32]. It is also, despite its vast size, power, and advanced engineering, delicate and vulnerable: ‘The hull of the Dolphin can withstand terrific pressures, but a relatively minor tap from a sharp-edged object can rip us wide like an electric can-opener’ [ISZ, 37]. Its use of nuclear energy, too (in 1963 a recent development in submarine technology) gives a feeling of ambivalence, with Carpenter remarking on the ‘nightmarish coalescence of green and violet and blue, the new “dreadful light” of mankind’ at the heart of the atomic pile, and asking ‘What happened when this dreadful light ran amok? I didn’t know, but I suspected I didn’t want to be around when it happened’ [ISZ, 202].

Yet the essential point about the Dolphin is that these dangers are controlled and managed. The submarine is an environment of calm, ordered power, in which no voices are ever raised and nothing dramatic ever happens; even when diving, Carpenter observes, there is ‘No frenzied activity, no Tannoy calls of “Dive, dive, dive,” no blaring of klaxons … It was about as exciting as watching a man pushing a wheelbarrow. And there was something oddly reassuring about it all’ [ISZ, 44]. Dolphin’s commanding officer, Commander James D. Swanson, is characterized by ‘repose’ and ’glacial calm’ in even the most pressing emergencies: ‘If ever there was the right man in the right place at the right time it was Commander Swanson in the control room of a runaway submarine diving to depths hundreds of feet below what any submarine had ever experienced before’ [ISZ, 123-4]. Aboard Dolphin there are no dramas and no tension – until drama and tension infiltrates her womb-like, cocooning interior spaces from the cold, chaotic outside world.

As a setting, the submarine beneath the Arctic ice-cap can be seen as partly an updated version of the fog-bound English country house – an enclosed, self-sufficient society, isolated from the outside world, an ideal setting for a murder. This is emphasized for the reader of Ice Station Zebra by the inclusion, at the front of the book, of a diagram of the interior layout of the submarine, just as a conventional murder story might include a plan of the country house in which the drama unfolds. The reader can thus check up on the location of the control room, the captain’s cabin and the garbage disposal chute (which performs an important role in the story), and follow the characters as they clamber, plot and murder their way around the innards of the Dolphin.

The submarine is much more than just a convenient dramatic device, however; it serves as a connection between centre and periphery, operating at the ‘front line’ of the Cold War, and acts as a symbol of the dangers the West faces in the Cold War world and the resources, human and technological, with which those dangers will be overcome. It is also symbol of the Cold War as a real, active war, reminding the home population of the risks and dangers faced by those who serve in the front line of that conflict. Against the threat from without, USS Dolphin is capable, watchful, always ready; the greatest dangers to her come from within the very society she is tasked to defend, whether it is saboteurs on ‘Red Clydeside’ (‘You’ll find Communists in practically every shipyard in the country – and, more often than not, their mates don’t know who they are’ [ISZ, 239]) or traitors within the ice station’s surviving personnel. MacLean summons up a world of active, rather than passive, Cold War conflict, in which the deadliest dangers are insidious rather than openly apparent. The Dolphin has a lesson to teach, not least about the human qualities required by this conflict. The ‘casually informal and familiar attitude’ that characterizes the relationships between the members of Dolphin’s crew ‘was a token not of a lack of discipline but of the complete reverse: it was the token of a very high degree of self-discipline, of the regard one man held for another not only as a highly-skilled technician in his own field but also as a human being’ [ISZ, 19]. Carpenter draws a parallel between the close-knit Cold War submarine crew, drawn together by isolation and shared danger, and the ‘first-line RAF bomber crews’ [ISZ, 19] of the Second World War. As a community, the Dolphin’s crew offers a model of the wartime virtues upon which the continuing freedom of Western society depends, and which that society would do well to emulate.

3. Sea Leopard and the decadent Cold War

The author Craig Thomas, born in Cardiff in 1942, is probably best known for his 1977 novel Firefox, which was a best-seller in Great Britain and the United States and which was made into a successful film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood (1982). The success Thomas achieved with this second novel enabled him to leave his career as a school-teacher and become a full-time writer. He has been described as the founder of the ‘technothriller’, a genre distinguished by its emphasis on high technology, usually military in nature, although he professes to dislike the term, considering his own books to be ‘political adventure stories’ in the tradition of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. His books deal with espionage, high technology, shadowy military adventurism and tangled geopolitics. Many of them have an aviation background – notably Firefox – but the 1981 novel Sea Leopard has a submarine at the heart of the plot.[15]

HMS Proteus is a British nuclear-powered fleet submarine fitted with a new, highly secret device codenamed ‘Leopard’, a sophisticated electronic warfare system which makes the vessel effectively invisible to enemy sonar. While on a covert mission in the Barents Sea, Proteus is captured by the Soviet Navy in a daring operation masterminded by Admiral Dolohov (who says things like ‘Come, let us begin. Set course for Tanafjord, and sail into our elaborate trap. Come’ [SL, 25]). Seized by an elite commando unit led by the heroic but embittered Captain Valery Ardenyev, the submarine is taken to a naval base near Murmansk; the Soviets claim that they have salvaged the vessel and rescued its crew following an accident and that they will return it to the British once repairs have been completed. Before it is returned, of course, they will have investigated the boat and its Leopard technology thoroughly and discovered all its secrets. Meanwhile Quin, the difficult and maverick scientist (‘a pain in the backside’ [SL, 227]) who invented the Leopard system, has disappeared and is hunted – along with his daughter, Tricia, who alone knows where he is hiding – by both the KGB and British intelligence. In company with the vulnerable but feisty Tricia, intelligence agent Patrick Hyde (a rough-hewn, straight-talking, macho Australian) manages to grab Quin from beneath the noses and the guns of the KGB; meanwhile, American naval officer Ethan Clark (of US Naval Intelligence Command) is flown secretly into Russia tasked with either rescuing or destroying the Proteus before its technology can be compromised. Guided by Quin and relying on his own desperate courage and a screwdriver, Clark succeeds in enabling the escape of the submarine and its crew, despatches Ardenyev in a last-minute fist-fight in the ‘Leopard’ control centre, and foils the Soviet plot.

Despite the impression perhaps given by this summary, it would be wrong to class Sea Leopard as a simplistic, flag-waving Cold War thriller. In the end the whole Proteus affair comes over as a rather sordid and ugly game played out by the representatives of two sides that are certainly not morally equivalent (the Soviets are clearly the bad guys) but that are similarly adrift in a cynical and amoral world of power politics. In particular, this is a book which has a British technological triumph – HMS Proteus with its formidable sonar system – as its central element, but which is suffused with a sense of Britain as a nation in decline. The Britain of Sea Leopard is an inferior, failing power, living in an illusory world of past greatness, seeking to gain advantage with the United States through its development of superior submarine technologies but proving itself weak and lacking in judgement in the way its higher command echelons use that achievement – despatching Proteus on an ill-considered and misjudged mission that results in the submarine’s capture.

Significantly, the heroes of the book are not British; Captain Ethan Clark is American, SIS agent Patrick Hyde is Australian. If Proteus represents Great Britain then it is clear that the nation is decadent, mired in a mess of her own making, and must look to outsiders for salvation. Early in the novel, Captain Clark (who is treated with barely-concealed contempt by the immaculately dressed and smugly tea-drinking British naval officers in the Proteus command centre) reflects that the folly of the Barents Sea mission perhaps ‘had its basis in a buried sense of inferiority’:

For years, the contracting Royal Navy had belied its great history, and now, quite suddenly, they had developed ‘Leopard’ and installed it in a nuclear-powered fleet submarine … Their high summer had returned. NATO needed them as never before, and the USN wanted greedily to get its hands, and its development budgets, on the British anti-sonar system. [SL, 16]

Similarly, Patrick Hyde – who is fond of playing up his Australian-ness to irritate his British colleagues (‘Too bloody right, Blue … It’s a bloody cock-up!’ [SL, 10-11]) – looks with an outsider’s eye on a British establishment typified by ‘Too many post-Imperial hang-ups in Whitehall, sport’ [SL, 12] and brings a bracing colonial frontier mentality to grappling with Soviet intelligence: ‘Bloody Russians wouldn’t last five minutes in Brisbane’ [SL, 13].

When the captured submarine is brought by the Soviets into their base at Pechenga, a satellite port for Murmansk, this sense of inferiority is brought home to Lloyd, Proteus’s commanding officer, as he gazes at the vast scale of the installation and the serried ranks of Soviet warships: ‘The sight, the numbers, overawed him, ridiculing Portsmouth, Plymouth, Faslane, every naval port and dockyard in the UK’ [SL, 233]. The apparent size and potency of the British submarine – ‘three and a half thousand tons of vessel’ possessing ‘a menace not unlike that of a shark’ – simply underlines her helplessness, with ‘Russian fitters clambering and crawling all over her; Liliputians performing surgery on a helpless Gulliver’ [SL, 253]. The submarine is described on several occasions as a ‘toy’ [SL, 229-30], emphasizing both her powerlessness in the grip of her captors and the folly of the naval high command in risking her unnecessarily on an ill-considered operation.

The vessel which should be a superb expression of British strength, discipline and achievement has been comprehensively betrayed by her political and military masters and rendered vulnerable, impotent. Repeatedly her weakness and fragility are emphasized: her twin hulls are ‘like plasterboard walls’ [SL, 55], her sophisticated control room offers no more than ‘a fugitive sense of security’ [SL, 167], she is ‘beaten, defenceless’ [SL, 166]; at the moment of her capture Thomas stresses the ‘helplessness of the huge submarine’ [SL, 188] as it lies trapped on the seabed. The great hull that keeps her crew safe also threatens to betray them with every noise and vibration it transmits to the outside world [SL, 333]. The fragile security represented by the great technologically advanced, complex and powerful submarine is symbolized by the ‘Leopard’ system itself, which betrays the men relying upon it by developing an intermittent fault, threatening to reveal their location to the encircling Soviet ships and submarines at any moment:

As he headed for the control room, the image of the opened useless cabinets [of the Leopard computers] remained with him, like a sudden, shocking glimpse of a body undergoing surgery. Hideously expensive, sophisticated almost beyond comprehension, impossible to repair. So much junk … [SL, 167]

Once in Soviet hands and brought captive to Pechenga, the impotence of the submarine, the formerly virile and purposeful engine of war, is made clear; no longer moving under her own control, ‘Proteus was slipping, in an almost lurching, ungainly fashion’ into the harbour’ [SL, 232], and is even down at the bow, drooping and limp in the hands of her captors: ‘The bow of the Proteus was still angled slightly below the horizontal, because of the crudity of measurement employed in inflating the [flotation] bags’ [SL, 232]. The significance of the submarine as a symbol of national impotence could hardly be spelled out more clearly. In contrast to the vigour of Alistair MacLean’s USS Dolphin, HMS Proteus embodies the late-1970s, pre-Thatcher, pre-Falklands Britain of Cold War complacency and decadence.

4. Conclusions

It is not hard to find reasons for the significant presence of the submarine in Cold War military/espionage thriller fiction. There is the fascination of advanced technology and potent weaponry; the opportunity for exciting scenarios presented by the submarine’s relative independence and freedom of movement; the dramatic potential of the vessel’s self-contained and isolated character; the human drama of the close-confined crew in dangerous situations; the appeal of secrecy and concealment. I think there is more to it than all this, however. The two writers I have been discussing, along with many others, and alongside film-makers, journalists, photographers and – not least – anti-war demonstrators, who fastened onto the submarine very early as an embodiment of all that was worst about conflict in the atomic age, saw in the submarine a device that was particularly well-suited to serve as a symbol of Cold War societies, as a metaphor for the nation and national will, and as an exemplar of the qualities this global military confrontation demanded.

This paper was originally given at the ‘Cold War Cultures’ conference held at the Institute of Contemporary British History, University of London, in September 2003. I would like to thank the organizers of that conference for the opportunity to present these ideas. I would also like to record my particular gratitude to Olivia Cooper for her help in locating certain hard-to-find texts.

© Ralph Harrington 2005. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

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Notes

1. See e.g. Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (London: Faber, 2000), p. 383.

2. Robert Gardiner (ed.), Navies in the Nuclear Age (London: Conway Maritime, 1993), p. 70.

3. John Wells, The Royal Navy: An Illustrated Social History 1870-1982 (Stroud: Sutton, 1994), pp. 250-1; Jim Ring, We Come Unseen: The Untold Story of Britain’s Cold War Submariners (London: John Murray, 2001), pp. 38-9.

4. Edward Thomas, One of Our Submarines (London: Penguin, 1952).

5. F. W. Lipscomb, The British Submarine (London: A. & C. Black, 1954), foreword, p. vi.

6. Lipscomb, British Submarine, p. 3.

7. Wolfgang Frank, The Sea Wolves (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), p. 8.

8. Eric Grove, ‘The Royal Navy, 1945-90’ in Phillips Payson O’Brien (ed.), Technology and Naval Combat in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (London: Frank Cass, 2001), p. 185.

9. David Miller, The Cold War: A Military History (London: John Murray, 1998), pp. 110-12; Gardiner, Navies in the Nuclear Age, pp. 82ff.

10. Quoted in Ring, We Come Unseen, p. 62.

11. This refers to SSNs rather than SSBNs, which sought to avoid the enemy and patrol undetected.

12. Quoted in Ring, We Come Unseen, p. 251.

13. Information about Alistair MacLean from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/maclean.htm (visited 1 September 2003). MacLean published both The Dark Crusader and The Satan Bug under the pseudonym ‘Ian Stuart’.

14. Alistair MacLean, Ice Station Zebra (London: Collins, 1963), p. 147. Henceforward cited as ‘ISZ’ and page number, in square brackets within text.

15. Craig Thomas, Sea Leopard (London: Michael Joseph, 1981). Henceforward cited as ‘SL’ and page number, in square brackets within text.