Authors: Kenneth Sewell
When K-129 returned to Avachinskaya Bay after its seventy-day patrol in the Pacific on that frigid day in early January 1968, the Soviet Pacific Far East was the front line in the escalating Cold War. Bombs were not falling, but the Kamchatka Flotilla was at the highest level of wartime readiness.
No family members were waiting to greet the returning crew, and civilians along the shore went about their business, inured to the sight of a submarine returning from some deep-sea mission. In America, tourists would line the causeways to gawk at submarines arriving at Pearl Harbor or San Diego, and Navy wives and children thronged the piers for home-comings. In this isolated part of the Soviet Union, the Cold War was waged in grim earnest.
The very isolation of the Kamchatka submarine base, four thousand miles from Moscow, provided the required cloak of obscurity for the most dangerous Soviet-American confrontation of that undeclared war.
U
NDERSEAS WARFARE WAS FOREVER
changed in the summer of 1960, when the Americans achieved a breakthrough in submarine technology. On July 20, off Cape Canaveral, Florida, the USS
George Washington,
a hybridized attack submarine modified as the first nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarine, fired two Polaris A-1 missiles. The Polaris had a range of twelve hundred miles. It was not only the breathtaking range of the new missile that astounded the world’s admirals, but the fact that these missiles were successfully launched while the
George Washington
was completely submerged.
This single event set off an arms race that would ultimately break the bank in the Soviet Union, as Moscow desperately tried to keep up with the West. By the late 1960s, the United States had nearly completed the conversion of its underseas missile fleet to nuclear-powered, multiwarhead carriers. Though Soviet technology lagged behind that of the Americans, a few new nuclear-powered, Yankee-class submarines were beginning to come off the production line.
It was apparent that the Soviet Union’s limited industrial capacity, coupled with technological weaknesses, would cause a shortage of modern submarines for many years to come. The urgency to remain competitive forced the Soviet navy to continue its dependency on older diesel submarines such as K-129 to carry sea-launched ballistic missiles during this critical transition period.
K-129 looked rawboned next to the newer and larger Yankee-class, nuclear-powered submarines that had arrived at the Rybachiy base in 1967. While most of the new sixteen-missile subs were assigned to European fleets in the Baltic and Black seas, two had been sent to the Kamchatka Flotilla.
The new boats were slow in coming and plagued with reactor problems. By necessity, the Soviet navy’s older missile boats, the diesel-electric Golf class and the nuclear-powered Hotel class, remained the first-line weapons of the Pacific Fleet.
In the second week of January, the sailors of K-129 were performing the routine repair and maintenance required after return from a long mission. The seamen, with one lieutenant still aboard as duty officer, moved unhurriedly about their chores; everyone expected a long stay in port.
The volcanic peaks, visible from time to time when winter winds blew breaks in the overcast skies, gave the Rybachiy Naval Base a false sense of security, as if the submarines tied up at the piers were protected by a natural mountain bastion. But these submariners knew better than most that in this age of nuclear missiles the circle of high peaks would provide no protection from attack. A single intercontinental or sea-launched ballistic missile such as the ones they carried could obliterate the base and the city across the bay in a single thermonuclear flash.
The crew of K-129 was happy to be back in port with its relatively comfortable quarters on dry land. Another autonomous mission was certainly the last thing on their minds as they worked in the frigid air. Now the wind, which had felt so refreshing the day they sailed into the bay after weeks of breathing foul fumes of diesel oil and sweat, was a miserable 12°F at midday. Any pleasure they had initially derived from the fresh air was supplanted by the ache of freezing fingers and toes for those sailors whose tasks required them to work on the deck or make trips to supply rooms for replacement parts. The bay water splashing over K-129’s deck and the adjacent pier froze almost immediately, making their chores uncomfortable and footing hazardous.
From the outside, the K-129 appeared ready for retirement to a naval museum. It looked much like the advanced German U-boats the Allies had captured at the end of World War II. Soviet engineers and captured Nazi scientists, who had been brought back from Germany as prisoners, worked from looted blueprints to design a better boat. They kept the best technology of the most advanced German submarine of World War II and added a number of improvements. The result was the development of the attack submarine designated as Foxtrot by NATO naval intelligence. The design for the highly reliable and successful Foxtrot submarine was later modified by adding three launch tubes in the center of the boat to make it the Soviet Union’s first production ballistic missile submarine. This missile boat was called the Series 629 by the Soviets and designated the Golf by NATO.
In appearance and operational characteristics the Foxtrot and Golf submarines were close copies of the German U-XXI electro-diesel submarines. The snorkeling system copied from the German model was state-of-the-art technology, which allowed submarines to remain submerged while recharging their main batteries.
The Soviet innovations to this design included greatly extended battery life, quieter electric motors and diesel engines, an acoustically muted five-blade propeller, and other operating features. Some American Navy men, charged with stalking this class of boat, believed it was even stealthier than the first generation of nuclear-powered Soviet subs.
These improvements, along with extended mission range of twenty thousand miles and a top submerged speed of fifteen to sixteen knots, brought the boat into the postwar era.
The Golf submarine was 324 feet in length and 27 feet wide. Fueled and armed, the submarine displaced approximately 2,850 tons submerged.
Because the submarine was basically powered by diesel engines and electric motors that had been improved and tested in years of service, the Golf soon became the most dependable boat in the Soviet submarine fleet. It had a problem-free propulsion system. The Golfs were driven by three 2,000-horsepower diesel engines, two 1,350-horsepower electric motors, and one 2,700-horsepower electric motor. In addition, they employed one 180-horsepower electric motor for slow-speed, ultraquiet operations. A similar system had been in use since the 1940s in the German electro-diesel submarine, which had approximately the same configuration of motors.
Golf submarines served in Soviet fleets from 1960 until the early 1990s. Many are still in service in the navies of former Soviet clients. In all the years this class of boat was in active service with the Soviet navy, there is no record of a Golf being lost due to mechanical failure—a record that sadly would not be duplicated by any of the newer Soviet nuclear-powered submarines. Because of its reliability, the Golf—far from being ready for the mothball fleet—remained in the Soviet naval arsenal through the end of the Cold War, and was one of the weapon systems most surveilled by NATO forces.
During the late 1960s, more Soviet nuclear-propelled submarines were tied up in shipyards for repairs than were on station in the Atlantic or Pacific, or any of the seas adjoining those oceans. As U.S. submarine and sea-launched missile technology was advancing rapidly, the crews on the Soviet nuclear-propelled subs were still suffering crippling or mortal injuries in accidents and equipment failures. For this reason, the workhorse diesel submarines were considered to be among the safest, and therefore choice, assignments for career officers and senior enlisted men in the Soviet navy.
While the Golfs were based on World War II designs, any similarity between the Soviet Golfs and their Nazi predecessors ended when it came to weaponry. The mission of the Nazi U-boat was to sink ships with torpedoes, as was that of the Soviet attack boat, the Foxtrot. But the Golf was developed as a strategic weapons platform with a mission to obliterate cities and sink whole armadas with nuclear missiles. In addition to its three ballistic missiles, the Golf submarine had six torpedo tubes and could carry as many as sixteen torpedoes. The Soviet mission planners designated two of the torpedoes on each Golf to be armed with nuclear warheads. These nuclear torpedoes were meant to destroy U.S. carrier groups or seashore installations.
But the main threat of this submarine was its ballistic missiles. As the Golfs steadily came off the assembly lines, they provided the Red Navy with a sea-launched ballistic missile capability that nearly tripled the range and destructive yield of earlier Soviet subs.
The Golf-class subs’ vertically mounted missiles were enclosed in tubes built into the sail and located immediately behind the conning tower bridge. The first generation of Golf-type submarines to be deployed could stand off more than 375 miles from an enemy’s coast and hurl three one-megaton missiles at cities or military targets. Before the Golfs were introduced, the combat role of Soviet missile submarines was limited to close-in missions near coasts, in support of ground forces. These earlier missile submarines carried one or two missiles, each with a yield of only ten kilotons, and a limited range of approximately one hundred miles.
The first of the twenty-two Golf submarines to enter service were assigned to operational squadrons beginning in 1960. Boats for the Atlantic and Baltic fleets were built in Europe at the closed city of Severodvinsk on the White Sea. These first European boats may well have been built by slave labor, since Severodvinsk itself was entirely built by Stalin-era political prisoners. A huge gulag in the city provided most of the labor at that shipbuilding plant.
The Golfs for the Pacific Fleet were built at Plant 199 in eastern Siberia, at Komsomolsk-on-Amur. This closed city was created exclusively as a military-industrial supply and manufacturing center to service the Soviets’ Far East armies. Because of the great distances from the industrialized western Soviet Union to the Far East, all fleet submarine maintenance and repair facilities were duplicated in shipyards in Soviet Asia, a continent away from Moscow. This military-industrial center was located far inland, to provide maximum cover from the prying American submarines that might lurk off a port city. The planned secrecy did not work for long. By the time the Soviets were launching the Golf submarines, the United States had penetrated the veil with spy satellites.
Every submarine built at Plant 199 and at the other shipyards of the Soviet Union was photographed by U.S. satellite cameras from the time it left the plant to its arrival at an assigned naval base. The Americans went a step beyond simply watching the progress of shipbuilding. Each Soviet submarine that sailed was catalogued. U.S. Navy intelligence also made acoustical sound tracks of engine, motor, and propeller noises recorded by tracking spy submarines. Information on Soviet submarines in the active-duty fleets was entered into a database in the U.S. Navy’s Cray computers. When a submarine left port the Americans knew exactly the type, capabilities, and weaponry the Soviets were sending against them.
Even though they proved to be operationally reliable, the Golfs were not without defects. Whether slave labor was used in the shipbuilding plant at Komsomolsk-on-Amur is not known, but the United States Navy would later learn that some of the workmanship on the K-129 was quite shoddy. The welds and steel used in hull plates were inferior. Wooden timbers were used in parts of the frame. Such built-in structural weaknesses would have been considered criminal in U.S. and Western submarines, which used the highest quality steel and advanced alloys to ensure that underseas boats could withstand the pressure of the depths and stressful maneuvers required of this type of war machine.
One of the major design flaws in the Golf submarine resulted from adapting the boat as a missile carrier. A long, reinforced, keel-like structure was added to strengthen the frame in the center of the submarine to support the weight of the missiles. But the boat still could not make sharp-angle turns or withstand steep dives without putting dangerous stress on its structural integrity.
The Golf was built with double hulls that gave the submarine the ability to operate at a maximum depth of 853 feet. The submarine could withstand a maximum depth of 984 feet. The space between the hulls provided storage for diesel fuel, fresh water, and compressed air. Some of the space was used for ballast, allowing the boat to take on seawater for extra weight in diving. The double walls and the liquids stored between them also provided insulation from the cold waters of the deep ocean.
At about the time the Soviets began introducing the Golf submarines into service, the People’s Republic of China was clamoring for assistance in upgrading its own navy. To placate their Chinese ally the Soviets agreed to provide one of the prototype missile submarines. The submarine they gave to the Chinese was one of the original test Golf boats, which had a much less advanced weapons system and had never been produced in any quantity by the Soviets. It was armed with a missile designated R-11FM, which was little more than an upgraded SCUD surface-to-surface missile of the type used on the earliest Soviet missile submarines. That missile system was limited in range, accuracy, and maximum throw weight. These limitations restricted the operational range to less than one hundred miles and the nuclear warhead yield to ten kilotons. Prelaunch preparations had to be performed on the surface and took more than an hour, making the boat an easy target for any antisubmarine aircraft or ships guarding an enemy’s waters.
Along with this prototype Golf, seven of the R-11 missiles were transferred to the Chinese in late 1959 or early 1960. The Soviets would rapidly come to regret supplying the Chinese with a ballistic missile submarine, because relations soured soon after this transfer of technology.
The first Golf submarines deployed by the Soviets had been vastly improved over the prototype model they gave to the Chinese. Soviet engineers had adapted a new weapons system to provide for greater flexibility of missions before their boats were assigned to the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. This system was designated SS-N-4, and featured an improved launcher called the D-2. It was designed to launch a new R-13 missile, with a maximum range of 372 miles and a warhead yield of one megaton. The system also provided for more rapid deployment and launch of the missile. The new R-13 missile was called the Sark. Though preparation for launch could be accomplished while the boat was still submerged, the submarine still had to surface to fire the missile. Thus, it remained vulnerable in the face of the Allies’ rapid deployment of antisubmarine aircraft, ships, and submarines.