Russian marines and paras seize Crimean peninsula

by Charles Strathdee

A Russian naval infantry brigade tasked with protecting the base at Sevastopol was deployed to spearhead a well-executed operation to seize control of the Crimean peninsula in the Ukraine. Meanwhile, airborne troops from Russia itself were flown in to airheads that had been secured earlier to reinforce the marines.

They completed the take-over within a few days. The Ukrainian Naval Force headquarters in Sevastopol was surrounded while its newly appointed Commander-in-Chief defected to the pro-Russian government of the autonomous Crimea.

A Russian Navy missile boat blockaded a Ukraine Coast Guard base at Balaclava. While it was reported several vessels were allowed to withdraw from the Crimea, the Ukrainian defence ministry said its units were staying where they were in Sevastopol harbour with hatches battened down.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian marines were bottled up in their barracks, literally in a face-off with Russian naval infantry. Calls for a Ukrainian marine battalion to surrender and leave its camp were declined but combat did not yet erupt.

At one naval base an attempt by pro-Russian forces to hijack a marine infantry armoured personnel carrier were thwarted by Ukrainian personnel forming a human chain around it. Even shots fired in the air did not move them and the would-be hijackers retreated according to the Ukrainian defence ministry

With a massive Russian military presence already in various bases in the Crimea, which remains home to the Black Sea Fleet (BSF) under a leaseback arrangement, it was relatively simple for the Kremlin’s take-over to go ahead.

One of the most intriguing twists, however, concerned the flagship of the Ukrainian fleet, the Krivak III Class frigate Hetman Sahaydachny, which was reportedly plunged into a dilemma with echoes of the famed Russian battleship Potemkin.

The Hetman Sahaydachny was concluding a deployment with NATO and EU navies east of Suez, combating pirates, when mass protests in Kiev led to the fall of the pro-Russian regime led by President Viktor Yanukovych.

Russian sources soon claimed the ship had declared continuing allegiance to Yanukovych and would return to Sevastopol to come under the command of the Crimean government. The same sources, claiming the Russian naval ensign was now flown by the frigate, also alleged the Ukrainian government had asked Turkey to stop the frigate coming through the Straits to enter the Black Sea. Ukrainian government sources claimed she had not defected and still flew the Ukrainian ensign.

They released a photo of the warship berthed alongside at a NATO base in Crete to prove their point. The new head of the Ukrainian Navy, Rear Admiral Andriy Tarasov said: “Ukrainian servicemen serve for the Ukrainian people and sail under the Ukrainian flag.” As this magazine went to press it was still uncertain what the frigate’s ultimate fate would be: Would she head for a Ukrainian port such as Odessa or the Crimea? See accompanying news update.

In 1905 the Potemkin’s crew mutinied against cruel officers, killing several, while cruising off the Ukrainian coast. The pre-dreadnought ended up in a Romanian port after wandering the Black Sea pursued by Imperial Russian Navy vessels.  On March 4/5 this year the Ukrainian frigate passed through the Bosphorus, allegedly heading for Odessa.

Meanwhile it was claimed by the Ukrainians that an attempt by the Russians to board and seize their command ship Slavutych, trapped in a Crimean port, was repelled.

HETMAN AT SOUDA Bay

The Ukrainian Navy flagship Hetman Sahaydachny at the NATO naval facility in Souda Bay, Crete following the Russian seizure of Crimea Photo: Ukrainian defence ministry.

SLAVUTYCH 

The Ukrainian Navy command vessel Slavutych, whose crew reportedly repelled a Russian attempt to board and size her. Photo: Ukrainian defence ministry.

HETMAN

Sailors of the Ukrainian frigate Hetman Sahaydachny show their loyalty to the Kiev government by making the national symbol of the Ukraine on the flight-deck of their warship. Photo: Ukrainian defence ministry.

For more details on WARSHIPS IFR magazine, visit the publication’s web site: www.warshipsifr.com The April 2014 edition hits the streets from March 21.

Dawn of Putin’s ‘Golden Fish’: Will the West Tremble?

With the advent of a new class of nuclear-powered attack submarine in the Russian Navy it seems the Kremlin once again has a ‘golden fish’ it hopes will make the West tremble in fear of awesome undersea warfare capabilities.

The first of eight such boats currently planned, Severodvinsk, was commissioned into the Northern Fleet at the turn of the year, having first been laid down as long ago as December 1993. Her construction and completion stalled during that period when the former Red Navy all but withdrew from its old Atlantic hunting grounds.

Today, with President Vladimir Putin determined to project a strong maritime presence around the world – and with the petro dollars to afford it – new submarines are top of the agenda. And so the order was given to get Severodvinsk finished and into service – some sources claim that ultimately a dozen of these new SSNs could be built.

The Severodvinsk Class boats are also designed to be land attack platforms, packed with cruise missiles in addition to being hunter-killers seeking and destroying enemy submarines

The desire to awe the West is clear. When a ballistic missile submarine named Yuri Dolgoruky – the first SSBN completed for Russia’s navy in two decades – was commissioned in January 2013, a former Russian ambassador to NATO no less tweeted: ‘Tremble bourgeoisie! You’re screwed :)’.

While the name boat of the Severodvinsk Class (as NATO knows them, or Yasen if you are Russian) is advanced enough – being a development of the formidable Akula II type – it is the second, Kazan that promises so much.

Currently under construction at Sevmash on the White Sea, rather than being a development of a previous class like Severodvinsk herself, Kazan uses all new technology that aspires to raise the bar. A third in the class, Novosibirsk, was laid down in the summer of 2013 .

Sevrod Submarine 

The new Russian attack submarine Severodvinsk on sea trials. Photo: Sevmash.

Kazan is likely to be the most expensive attack submarine ever (but if the Russians follow Western patterns, the cost will come down the more that are built).

With the final bill for Kazan alone rumoured to be around £3 billion (depending on your sources, it could be ‘only’ £1.3 billion), she exceeds the bill for even the super expensive Seawolf Class boats of the US Navy  (three boats, commissioned 1997 – 2005).

The most recent edition of the US Naval Institute’s ‘Combat Fleets’ guide to the navies of the world suggested Severodvinsk and her sisters will be fast – capable of reaching 40 knots submerged (and with a top stealth speed of 20 knots). Reasonably deep diving, they reportedly have a maximum operating depth of more than 1,500 feet.

The Russians are of course not new to the game of submarine one-upmanship with the West, most notably via the Alfa Class SSNs, which were developed in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Back then – as I explain in book ‘Hunter Killers’ – the Soviet Navy truly shocked the West. For the Alfa could dive deeper and go faster than anything ever seen before. Money was no object for the Alfa either, which is why the type was nicknamed the ‘golden fish’.

One astonished Soviet submarine officer thought the Alfa’s radically streamlined shape was stunningly beautiful – more a work of art than a product of industry. He declared: ‘I felt as if I had just discarded my tractor and boarded a spaceship.’

The amazing acceleration rate enabled the Alfa to go from 6 to 42 knots in just 120 seconds but the use of liquid metal for reactor coolant was extremely radical – and very dangerous. The titanium-hulled Alfa’s reported maximum diving depth was more than 2,400ft, which was twice that of any contemporary NATO or Soviet boat. The problem with such high turn of speed – and the Alfa could actually manage up to 45 knots – was that it created a lot of noise.

The Alfa was fitted with six torpedo tubes and capable of carrying maximum of 18 Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) missiles or torpedoes. However, as pointed out by one of the principal players in the ‘Hunter Killers’ narrative, the likelihood of an Alfa actually being able to fight at maximum depth or speed was slim to non-existent.

Alfa Class Submarine

A port view of an Alfa Class nuclear-powered fleet submarine underway during the Cold War. Photo: US DoD.

In the early 1980s Doug Littlejohns pondered the so-called ‘golden fish’ and asked himself: ‘What was the tactical point of the Alfa?’ At the time NATO worried that its torpedoes would not be able to reach an Alfa at the Russian SSN’s maximum depth, due to pressure crushing the weapons. Littlejohns felt that nobody could deny ‘the Alfa was a huge step forward in submarine design’. There again, while it could go deeper and a lot faster than NATO boats that was nullified by the noise.  Littlejohns asked: ‘What is the point of going down there when there is no one down there? Why spend all that money?’  He decided the tactical advantage for the Alfa was that it could ‘outrun and out-dive a torpedo, but that is about it.’

As soon as the Alfa came back up to actually try and fight NATO boats it would be nailed due to its noise signature. The British response to the Alfa, and other increasingly sophisticated Soviet boats such as the Victor, was the Swiftsure Class – a stealthy, fast submarine that could dive deep and fight well.

As recounted in ‘Hunter Killers’ the honour of bringing the first of the new Swiftsures through trials and into service in the early 1970s fell to Commander Tim Hale. He thought ‘Swiftsure represented an enormous shift in technology, a major increase in the size, endurance and capabilities.’  Having joined his first boat 16 years earlier Hale found the leap forward astonishing, from a comparatively primitive WW2-era diesel, in which water would have to be rationed on patrol and oxygen carefully conserved, to a big nuclear-powered beast that had no limits on either and possessed the power to run sophisticated sonars and weaponry.

Of course the Soviets had to try and equal the balanced capabilities of the Swiftsures and the US Navy’s 688 Class attack submarines (also known as Los Angeles Class). They used espionage to gain the technological leg up to produce the Victor III Class boats, which began to enter service in the late 1970s, and Akula I Class from the mid-1980s.

After the blind alley of the Alfa the Russians achieved their enormous leap thanks to major assistance from traitors in American naval ranks who sold them vast amounts of secrets. They gave the Soviets technical knowledge that was previously lacking to produce submarines that came close to parity with the West’s.

There’s no doubt today’s Severodvinsk Class will be on the cutting edge and formidable vessels. The Russian Navy submarine force has always been the most elite and prestigious element of the Kremlin’s military, so spending billions earned from exploiting oil and gas revenues on new nuclear-powered submarines is entirely in line with that philosophy.

President Putin has made no secret of his determination to build up the Russian Navy to once again act as a powerful global political and military tool in true Soviet style. The fact that his admirals, generals and defence ministers call him ‘Comrade Commander-in-Chief’ is a pretty good indication of how the former Cold War KGB officer sees things.

While they may not necessarily exceed the capabilities of the Royal Navy’s new Astute Class SSNs or the Virginia Class in the US Navy, the Severodvinsks will give the two principal submarine operating nations of the West a run for their money.

The real test of worth for Putin’s 21st Century ‘golden fish’ will, though, reside in the cutting edge sonars and weapons the new boats will be fitted with. If they malfunction and don’t deliver the goods, then Kazan and her sisters will be more bloated whales than killer sharks.

USS Seawolf

The American submarine USS Seawolf, until Kazan, second of Russia’s new Severodvinsk Class boats, the most expensive nuclear-powered attack boat ever constructed. Photo: US Navy.

 

Cold War Under the Sea: Where Fact Blends With Fiction

An academic reviewing Hunter Killers remarked that it shows how sometimes ‘Cold War fiction and Cold War fact blend seamlessly at the edges’. And he’s right, for the Cold War often threw up strange episodes that inspired Hollywood and novelists to create a kind of faction.

For example, Alistair MacLean – who served in the Royal Navy on the Arctic convoys during WW2 – based elements of his 1963 novel ‘Ice Station Zebra’ on real-life events. These included the 1959 loss of a film container from an American intelligence-gathering satellite over the Arctic. The Soviets were said to have recovered it along with whatever secrets it contained.

In May 1962 the CIA parachuted operatives onto pack ice near an abandoned Russian ‘research station’. It was really a listening post for detecting US Navy nuclear-powered submarines. The CIA men collected valuable intelligence material and were then plucked off the ice in breath-taking fashion by a specially converted B-17 bomber that reeled them in.

In ‘Ice Station Zebra’ a British rescue station in the Arctic is the scene of espionage skullduggery and is set on fire, with a US Navy nuclear-powered submarine sent under the Polar ice to carry out a rescue mission. In the novel and 1968 movie of the same name the American vessel also goes to try and recover a film canister containing spy satellite imagery.

A UK-made movie called ‘The Bedford Incident’, released in October 1965 and starring Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark, depicted the pursuit of a Russian diesel submarine in waters off Greenland.

The Soviet boat is kept down until her air has almost run out and launches a nuclear-tipped torpedo when the destroyer USS Bedford accidentally fires anti-submarine rockets.

Not long after an eerily similar episode occurred in British waters, in my book dubbed ‘The Kosygin Incident’. At 10.30 a.m. on 6 February 1967 – the same day Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin’s airliner touched down on British soil for an official visit – a Shackleton maritime patrol aircraft of the RAF picked up a contact about 100 nautical miles to the north-west of Malin Head. Having already dropped a string of sonar buoys as part of a major Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) exercise with the Royal Navy, the aircraft was able to classify it as ‘probably a submarine’.

Frigates, diesel submarines and the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Dreadnought were soon ordered by a senior admiral to ‘close the [suspected Soviet] submarine’s position for the purpose of hunting her’.

As news of this inconvenient incident reached government circles alarm bells rang and the hounds were called away from their quarry (identified as a Whisky Class diesel that departed the Baltic on January 22). Fortunately reality had not mirrored the catastrophic conclusion of ‘The Bedford Incident’.

The archetypal example of Cold War submarine faction was Tom Clancy’s ‘Hunt for Red October’. This was partly the fruit of the late novelist’s trawling for nuggets of fact to inform his fiction while visiting American naval officers to sell them insurance (his job before he broke through as a writer).

Sean Connery - Hunt for Red October

Hollywood fiction: Sean Connery as Capt. Marko Ramius in the movie version of Tom Clancy’s ‘The Hunt for Red October’. Image: Paramount.

Doug Littlejohns – captain of several British submarines during the Cold War and one of the key players in the ‘Hunter Killers’ narrative – got to know the American blockbuster master.

As related in ‘Hunter Killers’, during a trip to the States in the mid-1980s a fellow British submarine officer gave Littlejohns a copy of ‘Hunt for Red October’ to read. Littlejohns consumed it overnight and decided he had to meet Clancy. When they met Littlejohns told Clancy: ‘You’ve put stuff in your book that if I talked about it would see me locked up in the Tower of London.’

The two men became friends, though Littlejohns had to keep a professional distance while still a serving naval officer. Clancy was inspired enough to pay tribute to Littlejohns by basing a character in ‘Red Storm Rising’ (the follow up to ‘Hunt for Red October’) on the British submarine captain. After Littlejohns retired from the Navy he co-founded Red Storm Entertainment with Clancy, specialising in video games.

Nobody should underestimate the impact of Clancy’s Cold War thrillers, which while not works of high literature, offered excitement and also insight into a previously secret world.

The Hollywood movie based on Clancy’s novel, starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin, was a major success despite being released after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its powerful imagery and exciting depiction of life beneath the waves still had pulling power. A few years ago I met a young naval officer who responded, when asked what had inspired him to join the Navy and become a submariner: ‘A movie called The Hunt for Red October.’

Hunt for Red October - sonar

Hollywood fiction : A scene from the movie version of Tom Clancy’s ‘Hunt for Red October’. Image: Paramount.

Someone told me recently that they hoped I would not be insulted by the compliment that ‘Hunter Killers’ reads like a thriller. On the contrary, that is the point – to take people inside the Cold War and show them how exciting and dangerous it really was by, where appropriate, using techniques more traditionally employed by the novelist.

Therefore in ‘Hunter Killers’ we have chapters featuring nerve-wracking rides down undersea canyons, dangerous games of chicken and the long distance hunt for the Russian carrier Kiev across the Mediterranean by HMS Sceptre (in the late 1970s the British SSN was commanded by Rob Forsyth, another major player in the book’s narrative).

A chapter on CIA analysts trying to sort out the fact from fiction of a rumoured new Soviet super submarine (a chapter called ‘The Alfa Enigma’) of course rings bells of similarity with some Cold War fiction.

In ‘The Hunt for Red October’ for instance CIA analyst Jack Ryan tries to get to the bottom of the Soviet Navy submarine Red October’s radical new propulsion. In real life it took years for the CIA’s analysts to persuade the Pentagon the Soviets really had built a super fast, deep diving nuclear-powered submarine (with revolutionary liquid metal reactors). It was called the Alfa by NATO and represented a quantum leap in capability that the West did not want to believe the Russians could achieve.

The reality of ‘Hunter Killers’ matches and betters fiction: Soviets depth charging and trying to ram British submarines off Russia; Royal Navy SSNs colliding with Russian submarines and nearly being sunk (incidents which even today, decades later, the MoD insists were bumps with icebergs); Soviet spy ships attempting to run down one of the UK’s Polaris missile submarines and almost sinking a RN diesel submarine just off the British coast.

And there’s much more besides, not least daring up close espionage, with periscopes just inches away from whirling Soviet surface ship propellers and tricky explorations of sun-kissed foreign anchorages in clear visibility waters (with big black submarines dodging nimbly around anchor cables).

In the end ‘Hunter Killers’ is not a tale of big boys and their toys doing daring things for fun, but a deep dive into a nightmarish period of world history.

The warrior-scientists in their submarines waged a covert, silent war with utter dedication. They were handpicked for mental strength and agility, plus their nerves of steel ability to make the right life-or-death decisions when nuclear-powered, and armed, submarines were sliding by within feet of each other.

Some people with the benefit of hindsight perhaps might regard the undersea confrontation of the 1950s – 1990s as an exercise in futility. All that money poured into all that technology, all that intellect applied to creating vessels of war that could snuff out all life on the planet – yet a war without battles that has faded into the deep dark ocean of legend as if it never was.

Submarine in ice

Submarine reality (below): A US Navy attack submarine surfaced through the Arctic ice pack. Photo: US Navy.

But that’s the point. In maintaining the undersea rivalry at such fever pitch, waging it with such dedication and enduring so much hardship to do so, submariners on both sides ensured politicians had to always calculate that it was never worth taking the gamble on waging conventional war in Europe.

In that way the submariners could be said to have saved millions of lives by preventing a re-run of errors committed in WW1 and WW2 when kings and politicians started conflicts that they could not stop without huge blood-letting, social anarchy and wasted treasure.

During the Cold War the leaders of both East and West knew that to begin a hot war would surely end in the deaths of everybody. The submariners had no desire for the shooting to start, or as Doug Littlejohns puts it: ‘ We don’t want to make war – submariners are among the people that least want to make war.’

In Hollywood movies and pulp fiction the protagonists invariably resort to violence as a means to resolve their conflicts. The aim of the Cold War submariner was to threaten the use of force but to never use it, for to do so would represent failure.

The fact that such lethal beasts as submarines were ultimately weapons for peace was surely the greatest plot twist – and the most fascinating paradox – of them all.

HMS TRIUMPH control room under red light.

Submarine reality: The Control Room of a British nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine. Photo: Nigel Andrews.

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