the present naval situation. GHQ Pacific Office of Information gives us a prepared summary, which I can read into your machine.
“On Warday there were more than one thousand major combatant U.S. and Soviet ships at sea, of which 380 were submarines, 100 of them American and 280 Soviet. Of these craft, as far as is known, only the S. Shuvakov actually fired weapons, and this ship was responsible for the destruction of the United States Seventh and Third Fleets in the Pacific. In this case, a single submarine of the Typhoon class destroyed the most massive assemblage of capital ships in human history and took, in a few moments, over twenty thousand human lives, utilizing eleven SS-N-20 missiles, each deploying six warheads of four megatons each. The destruction of the other American surface fleets was carried out by land- based weapons, except the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, which was an operation of unknown nature, possibly involving the firing of nuclear-armed SS-N-9 missiles by a Nanuchka-class corvette, or AS-43 fired by a TU22-M bomber. All American operational aircraft carriers on the high seas were destroyed within the first ten minutes of the war, including the four nuclear aircraft carriers and eight of the ten conventional carriers. Of the 190 other major combat vessels in the U.S. surface navy, 141 were destroyed or damaged and later abandoned. With the destruction of the naval staff and all personnel records in Washington, the U.S. Navy ceased to be an operational fighting force on Warday.
“The Soviet surface navy was also rendered nonfunctional on Warday. Both carriers were destroyed, the Kiev in Motovskij Gulf along with approximately one hundred other ships in the immediate area. The Soviet Baltic Fleet attempted to escape into the North Sea, but was substantially repelled by NATO forces, primarily U.K. and Danish antisubmarine forces, which were responsible for the confirmed destruction of eighty-two Soviet submarines of various classes, including numerous nuclear-powered types. The eight Typhoon-class submarines in the Baltic did not sortie. Three of these have subsequently been destroyed by the Royal Navy, one has ceased to be operational, and the other four remain functional, but the political situation in the Soviet area is too unstable to allow a determination of the present loyalties of the crews. These submarines are extremely dangerous, and will be sunk. The Pacific Fleet at Vladivostok was destroyed by American action. Some Soviet ships were found disabled for lack of fuel by French relief forces entering Vietnam in 1989. The bulk of these ships were at Cam Ranh Bay and were scuttled by their crews. The Soviet units stranded at Aden were interned by the Royal Navy. These included the helicopter carrier Moskva, with a complement of eighteen KA-25 helicopters; three GW-ASW cruisers fully armed and lacking only fuel; twelve GW destroyers in the same condition, all of the Kildin class; four GW corvettes of the Tarantul class and three of the Nanuchka class; and four Matka-class hydrofoils, which had been posted down from Black Sea ports during the Syrian affair in 1987. The fleet replenishment vessel Berezina was intercepted in the Indian Ocean at this time, and has been refitted as HMS Triumph.
“Remaining U.S. naval forces are presently attached as the United States Special Detachment to the Royal Navy, commanded by Admiral the Rt. Hon. Vincent D. B. Hughes and Vice-Admiral (U.S.) Charles Greene Phillips. These forces, primarily in the antisubmarine area, constitute a vital and important part of the free world’s seagoing naval strength.”
Now that’s the lot from the Office of Information. I’m supposed to give copies of that to any reporters who approach me, so here are two copies.
So, what can I say about myself? I am captain of the Type 12 antisubmarine frigate Ulysses, operating in cooperation with Fleet Air Arm antisubmarine forces and U.S. Navy antisubmarine forces based in Hawaii, Midway Island, and San Diego. Our theater of operations is the western Pacific. We are attached to STANAVFOR-PAC, the Standing Naval Force Pacific of the International Treaty Organization countries. Our mission is to destroy unidentified submarines.
I am invariably asked, when I am on shore leave, whether we destroy American nuclear submarines. I can only repeat the aim of our mission. We do destroy all unidentified submarine craft. That means that we may or may not know what countries those submarines are from. Perhaps some are American, although that would surprise me. Since they lost communication with their bases, most American submarines have returned to U.S. waters and surfaced, or are in communication with us in some way. The mission of the Royal Navy with regard to submarines is not to destroy the remaining nuclear capacity of the United States and the USSR, or to impede them in the reformation of government in their countries, but to remove the threat of the unknown— submarine crews, loyal perhaps to governments that no longer exist, under severe psychological pressure, suddenly firing their missiles in the mistaken belief that they are obligated to do so. There is also the possibility that both sides left “long-trigger” ships with orders to hide for a period of years, then suddenly attack. These ships must be sunk before they open their orders.
I suppose the greatest engagement of my career was with a pack of one Typhoon-class submarine and three smaller vessels in the Aleutians about a year ago. These ships had been hiding under the Arctic ice for approximately forty-four months and were making a run for Vladivostok, evidently unaware that this port no longer exists. We suspected that they were there because of persistent reports from isolated communities in Alaska and Canada of raiding parties who spoke Russian to one another and who appeared out of nowhere to steal food. Sometimes these reports took as long as six months to reach us, because of unreliable communications, but we felt that they certainly indicated the presence of Soviet vessels under the ice cap. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that there are not still Soviet and American submarines on station there. Present long-range detection techniques do not offer us as reliable an indication of submarine activity beneath ice as we would like.
At any rate, we got a very good signal on these boats just as they were coming round the island of Umnak in the Pox Islands.
Why they were there, and not hugging the coast of Siberia, we do not know.
As you might or might not know, a Typhoon-class submarine was the Soviet equivalent of a Trident, displacing twenty-five thousand tons and armed with twenty missiles of intercontinental range. We identified the presence of a Typhoon-class vessel by the emission signature of its reactor. Naturally, we were eager to destroy this ship, as it was one of four remaining Typhoons and, next to the three Tridents still unaccounted for, is certainly the most dangerous vessel on the high seas. This one ship would, for example, be capable of reducing your California, in its entirety, to the present condition of Washington or San Antonio.
So we were very eager to get a kill while avoiding even the suspicion of detection ourselves. We found that we were out of range of the only Royal Navy carrier operating in the area, the old Hermes with its complement of Harriers. Thus we determined that the Typhoon would have to be located very precisely and then destroyed by Ulysses. The job was quite an exciting challenge, I can assure you.
It was one of those gray, cheerless days common in the North Pacific, when the wind blows with massive force and the sea birds fly before it. When I went on deck, bits of ice quickly formed in my beard. In addition to the winds, we had blowing fog. Earlier we had passed through a vast fleet of Japanese fishing vessels, including a huge automatic whaler. As fish meal is now the primary source of protein for that nation of ninety-seven millions, you can well imagine the size of this fleet. It was operating in INTO-foreclosed waters, meaning that fishing operations there are illegal except to signatories. In this case, the Gulf of Alaska. We had detached a frigate to check the papers of the Japanese fishermen; there have been many reports of Chinese fishing vessels operating illegally in American waters in recent years, and they are to be sunk if they are found. Only the Japanese, the British, the Danes, the Icelanders, and the Norse may fish former U.S.-controlled waters.
We found ourselves approximately 420 nautical miles south-southwest of the target. The Soviet ships were deployed across an area of twenty square miles, with the Typhoon in the center of its group of four support submarines. The pack was moving in a southerly direction at a speed of 20 knots. We were able to deploy a Nimrod aircraft from San Diego and maintain a continuous exact fix on the Soviet ships. Our objective was to destroy all five submarines simultaneously. We began closing at flank speed and prepared our weapons, which consisted of Harpoon missiles delivered via helicopter and directly from shipboard.
As the target was moving in our rough direction, closing time was fairly rapid. We were able to gain a
