14 NAVY NEWS, JUNE 2011


‘Nothing s THANK you very much,


NATO. It’s because of them that I’m in the Control Room of HMS Tireless at 3.45 on a Sunday morning, awake in body if not necessarily in spirit. The nature of Allied submarine operations means that the hunter-killer has been given an invisible ‘box’ – 100 miles long, 20 miles wide – in which to dive after passing through the Strait of Gibraltar on the surface. The box ‘opens’ at 4.14am. Thirty seconds after the deadline, 5,500 tonnes of sleek black messenger of death begins her descent – the last she will make after more than 300 days away from home. If you’re expecting something Das Boot-y, forget it. There’s no bearded bloke yelling “Alarm” on the bridge before hurriedly sliding down into the control room. For a start the trip


bridge is a dog-legged affair – three ladders winding their way down from the top of the fin. For another, diving’s a slow


process. No crash diving these days. It takes a good hour to prepare Tireless for her descent – removing or retracting various pieces of


equipment, radar and the like. The stern vents open and the boat begins to tip gently, before another series of round red indicator lights flash on and the bow vents follow suit. Red’s the only light at this


hour; it’s still before dawn off the gateway to the Mediterranean and bright lights will severely affect the vision of the crew. They, of course, haven’t just risen. They’ve been up since a little after midnight ready for the latest watch change, the first of four of the day, at 1am. As the boat descends there’s


the constant ‘click click click’ of the depth metre as it cycles through every ten centimetres until the rate of clicking slows and the boat reaches 60 metres. Back to bed.


But not for the 60 or so souls currently on watch.


They’ve had ten months of it. communications to the


On Wednesday May 11 HMS Tireless returned to Devonport after the longest submarine deployment in a decade. Richard Hargreaves joined the boat for the final four of her 307 days away.


Just four days to go.


Rewind those ten months and it takes you to Friday July 9 2010. That’s before the World Cup final (although after England’s inglorious exit), before the royal engagement (let alone the wedding), before the Defence Review, before the Ashes, before the Arab spring, before the Japanese tsunami, before Bin Laden was killed. It’s not just major events that the boat’s missed – it’s how they’ve happened. News is restricted to a dot- matrix print out – a mix of global political events, hard news from the UK, a bit of sport. No celebrity tittle-tattle. But the crew have no concept of the outpouring of celebration for the royal wedding, the violence of the revolution in Egypt, the scale of the devastation in Japan – there are no photographs, no moving images. A couple of hundred words written in a typewriter font with minimal punctuation don’t do the events justice. “You really miss real news,


real newspapers, pictures. I had no idea what Kate Middleton looked like until I saw the royal wedding on TV in Crete,” says Navigator Lt John Cursiter. And they have little idea of


what’s been going on in Libya – although they do know that their sister boat Triumph played a brief, but key, role launching her Tomahawk missiles at government targets. Triumph returned to Devonport with the Jolly Roger flying and not a little publicity. Tireless returned to a warm welcome from families. No submariner’s


battle ensign.


Limited publicity (local rather than national media). “Would I swap what we’ve


done for what Triumph did? Not a chance,” says Tireless’ youthful Executive Officer Lt Cdr Dan Knight. “Something like Libya is the public face of the Submarine Service and although I am disappointed that Tireless wasn’t part of that operation, Tomahawk is only one aspect of what we do.”


SO what has Tireless done? Well, we can’t really tell you.


She’s spent 120 days gathering intelligence – a lot of listening to chatter and the like between various groups of pirates, smugglers, drug runners and other criminals east of Suez. “We’re not allowed to say what we’ve done for 50 per cent of the time away, or where we’ve been – there’s no point letting the cat out of the bag. That would surrender the stealth of a submarine,” Tireless’ Commanding Officer Cdr Jason Clay explains.


“I can tell you that the deployment has been a success. A lot of what we’ve done has been just as important as what’s been making the headlines, but quite rightly we have to keep it under wraps.”


The commanding officer is one of four men aboard to have completed every one of Tireless’ days on deployment – crew rotation means that most crew have ‘only’ done six or so months at sea.


For the majority of the 130 souls aboard, the routine’s six hours on, six hours off. There’s no Sunday routine on board – no lie-ins, no slackening of the pace. Every day it’s the same. And as for those 12 hours’ down time in every 24, it’s not just sleeping: you have to squeeze in eating, washing, admin, a bit of PT, maybe send an e-mail home. As a rule, you


l XO Lt Cdr Dan Knight leans over the side of the fin as HMS Tireless comes alongside in Devonport after ten months away


pictures: la(phot) shaun barlow, frpu west, and lt cdr mark harrison, po(et) joe joiner and et(me) bungy williams, hms tireless


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