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CHAPTER 12
Phoenix from the Ashes -
Modern Coast Defence Ships
T
HE APPARENT LESSON OF
the success of D-Day, notwith-
standing the US Army's sufferings on 'bloody Omaha'
beach, was that a determined attacker with sufficient re-
sources could overwhelm any coastal defence system.
Rommel had demanded millions of mines and anti-
invasion obstacles and many of these were indeed laid. The
one thing he could not know - although he was always
privately worried about Normandy - was where the Allies
would strike. Hence he was obliged to spread his forces
comparatively thinly and, to add insult to injury, he was not
allowed control of the German Army's immediately avail-
able armoured reserve. For several crucial hours on D-Day
this was held back, removing any real chance of defeating
the Allies on or close to the beaches.
That the Germans still managed to give the Allies a very
hard time on Omaha, and during the battles north of Caen,
and later also at the Falaise gap, shows that had Rommel
been given complete control of all the available forces, the
outcome of D-Day might have been very different, even
with the hindrance of the Luftwaffe being unable to ser-
iously contest Allied air superiority. It should be recalled
that the Germans did manage to hold out until the very end
of the war in several French coastal fastnesses.
The island-hopping campaign of the Pacific war, in which
the Japanese were even more determined to hold on to the
last, proved that coast defence is also as dependent on the
quality and even fanaticism of the defender as it is on the
material available to defend the coast in question. The
simple tunnel networks of the defenders at places like Iwo
Jima, which even the heaviest pre-landing bombardments
could not destroy, lengthened many an island campaign by
weeks or months. But despite the ferocity of the Japanese
defence, the Pacific war demonstrated that an attacker with
the magic combination of air and naval superiority, and suf-
ficient soldiery to commit to the assault, could eventually
overcome the most dogged resistance.
But the first line of defence, at sea, was wholly inade-
quate in both Normandy and in the Pacific. In the case of
Operation Overlord, the most serious warship loss which
the motley collection of large torpedo boats, S-boats and U-
boats of the Kriegsmarine could inflict on the Allies was the
sinking of a single Norwegian destroyer.
After the Second World War, coast defence went into an
apparently irreversible decline for several years. Air power
properly deployed, together with command of the sea,
could surely ensure that there would no repeats of the fiasco
at Gallipoli. That copious air and sea power did not prevent
the near disasters at Omaha and Iwo Jima was forgotten.
Some countries though still preserved the integrated
coastal defence systems which they felt were their best first
line of defence. Although Sweden was the dominant mili-
tary power in the Baltic for several years after the war,
building up a very powerful air force of some 800 aircraft
and retaining a strong fleet of fast cruisers of the
Gota Lejon
class and sundry destroyers and two dozen submarines, she
did not feel content to abandon her previous preoccupa-
tions, although the coast battleships were all disposed of
after the war. The Swedish Coastal Artillery remained, with
its dense network of guns, controlled minefields, torpedoes
and a veritable armada of ramped landing craft to enable
units to be moved swiftly around the skerries.
Denmark and Norway too had little to fall back on except
some wartime tonnage provided by the British and some
captured German vessels. Yet defending their now very
exposed coasts against a new threat even more powerful
than Germany only reinforced the need for an effective
coastal defence, only this time both countries made efforts
to get it right.
The sheer quantity of wartime naval tonnage of all types
available after the Second World War had the effect of
slowing down the pace of naval construction almost every-
where except in the USSR. New classes of large warships
commissioned by the West demonstrated some new ideas
of how to use warships in the atomic age, but the impera-
tives driving them were the threats posed by fast snorkel-
equipped submarines and jet bombers of the Soviet Navy
and Air Force. The abiding reality was that sea power alone
could no longer decide the course of most wars (the Falk-
lands conflict being a notable exception), although the naval
staffs of all the major powers made assumptions about con-
flicts which were expected to last a surprisingly long time
and planned accordingly.
1
The lesser powers, especially in Scandinavia, continued
to put effort into the development of torpedo boats, which -
as long as a war remained conventional - would always pose
a credible defensive threat to any adversary which ventured
too close. Sweden, Norway and, later, West Germany de-
veloped several classes of new torpedo boats which were
heavily influenced by the German S-boat designs, as did the
Soviet Union and other countries. Also, the development of
and 1954, including fixed steel obstructions, boom defences
and submarine and mine detection equipment.
3
As for propulsion, the British tested two different propul-
sion systems on their fast attack craft (FACs) of the 1950s:
gas turbines and new lightweight diesels. This work paved
the way for a new attitude to the FACs survivability, as
they became progressively more seaworthy and with longer
endurance than their wartime forebears. The new British
lightweight diesel, the Deltic, powered the Dark class and
proved such a success that the US Navy, not having pur-
sued its wartime lead in engines, was obliged to import
Deities for its PTF craft which served in the Vietnam war.
Meanwhile the Rolls-Royce RM60A 5,400shp gas turbine
was trialled in the steam gunboat
Grey Goose
in 1953, and the
operational installation which followed, three Bristol Pro-
teus 3,500shp engines installed in
Brave Borderer
and
Brave
Swordsman,
marked a new departure for coastal forces. This
in turn led to the export of no less than sixteen derivative
craft to Brunei, Denmark, West Germany, Libya and Mal-
aysia, as well as the construction of the RN training 'target'
vessels
Cutlass, Sabre
and
Scimitar.
These used the same
Proteus engines which had been installed in the two 'Brave'
class vessels, but uprated to 4,500shp.
As for hulls, the argument in Britain in the early 1950s
veered between long, short and medium-length MTBs and
designers also fretted about the problems of adequate speed
and gun stabilisation, the latter being a problem which has
proved surprisingly difficult to tackle on high speed small
craft up to this day, although the new US Navy
Cyclone
class
patrol boats entering service in the 1990s are fitted with a
stabilised weapon system which goes a long way towards
solving the problem.
Hull forms were still mostly traditional in the Royal Navy
and the US Navy during the immediate post-war period:
hard chine or planing MTB hulls which rode the water's
surface and thus achieved high speed at the cost of pound-
ing heavily in any kind of sea. The S-boat design which
continued to influence many navies had a conventional hull
shape which could handle rough seas better, but at a cost in
speed. Most current FAC use this more conventional hull
design, and the S-boat itself was the basis of the immediate
post-war Danish, West German and Norwegian FACs, not-
ably Norway's
Tjeld
class MTBs - all of them diesel-
powered. However the Japanese drew on a different in-
spiration, adopting British hull concepts for their post-war
high speed MTBs.
The whole British seaward defence programme of the
1950s depended on mobilisation of very large numbers^of
vessels. In 1954, this comprised a fleet of eighteen
Fords
and 104 ex-naval motor launches plus fifty-five trawlers.
This would have allowed twenty-seven so-called 'Group 1'
ports to be adequately defended after six months' warning
and eight key ports given 30 days' notice. (Presumably the
USSR would have helpfully neglected to attack during this
the wire-guided torpedo provided the torpedo boat with a
new lease of life. Vessels like, for example, the Swedish
Navy's
Spica
class could lie in wait and despatch an enemy
at a considerable range using their wire-guided Tp61 tor-
pedoes. The threat of the torpedo in coastal defence, prop-
erly employed, has not diminished with the development of
sea-skimming surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs), as they
are a low-cost alternative which is far less prone to detection
via electronic support measures (ESM) and seduction by
electronic countermeasures (ECM).
During the 1950s and 60s, new propulsion systems such
as gas turbines and even heavy-calibre guns were proposed
or used on some of the major powers' small craft, such as the
4.5in (114mm) Mkl on the Royal Navy's 'Gay' and 'Dark'
class convertible motor torpedo boats (MTBs) or the 3.3in
(84mm) CFS 2 gun on the RN's motor gun boat (MGB)
Bold Pioneer.
2
Meanwhile America's Cuban preoccupations
prompted the development of the
Asheville
class patrol craft,
armed with a 3in (76mm) 50cal gun, as it was realised that
something smaller than a frigate might be needed for
engagements with Cuban vessels. But nonetheless these
were the exceptions which proved the rule, namely, that the
larger powers had little sustained interest in coastal
defence.
Sustained is the operative term in Britain's case, because
for a time that interest was indeed intense. Britain's
Ford
class seaward defence boats and the MTBs and MGBs of
the 1950s were part of a network of fixed and mobile coastal
defences primarily aimed at countering Soviet submarines
and mines by the use of depth charges, mines and (on just
one of the
Ford
class) even the triple-barrelled Squid ahead-
throwing anti-submarine (AS) mortar, of which a single-
barrelled version was planned for the rest of the class, but
never installed. (Squid was, however, installed on the simi-
lar Finnish
Ruissalo
class of the late 1950s.)
Although 'existing coast defence guns and mortars were
considered ineffective', as Friedman observes, extensive
fixed defences were constructed in Britain between 1949
build-up.) But because this entire seaward defence arrange-
ment 'contributed nothing to Cold War', as Friedman put it,
the British government decided in 1956 to concentrate the
RN's NATO effort on the Atlantic, effectively sidelining
coastal defence of the UK. The decision was confirmed by
the 1957 Defence Review.
As an aside, it should be added that worries over seaward
defence did not die off before the Royal Navy had dis-
played its very real concern over the threat to British
harbours posed by atomic weapons. The first British nuclear
test, in October 1952, was of a 25 kiloton device installed
inside the frigate
Plym
which was to demonstrate, among
other things, what the effects might be of a nuclear weapon
exploding in a harbour. The British even considered the
development of their own atomic sea mine, dubbed Cudgel.
The idea was to carry Cudgel to Soviet harbours as a side-
mounted charge on a midget submarine, which would have
itself been towed to Soviet waters by a larger 'mother' sub-
marine. Four such midget X-craft were built in the 1950s
and official papers describing Cudgel, released by the Pub-
lic Record Office, have confirmed that the carriage of this
weapon was part of the midget subs' mission.
4
Cudgel, a
variant of the 15 kiloton tactical bomb Red Beard, was
never built. Ironically, the midget submarines were orig-
inally designed to test British defences against similar pos-
tulated Soviet craft.
A curious feature of postwar naval development was that
despite the clear potential of guided rocketry during the
war, so little was done to make more of its use as a tactical
offensive weapon. The US and UK expended copious
efforts on developing practical surface to air missiles
(SAMs), American weapons like Talos and Terrier being
somewhat more practical than the British Seaslug. But little
was done in these countries or elsewhere (with the excep-
tion of Sweden) to develop SSMs for use at sea, although
the British did have an idea of using Seaslug as the basis for
an offensive weapon - Blue Slug.
It was the Soviet Union which took the logical next step.
The USSR saw itself as being very vulnerable to attack by
US carrier-based jet bombers armed with nuclear weapons
and the development of aircraft like the Douglas Skywarrior
justified their concern. Although Stalin had launched a very
ambitious naval plan after the war which included cruisers,
destroyers and submarines of several classes, the guardship
and torpedo boat remained key components of the Soviet
naval defensive fabric.
While it would be incorrect to conclude that it was solely
the scepticism about conventional warships and tech-
nologies displayed by Stalin's eventual successor, Nikita
Khruschev, which launched the Soviet Navy into the mis-
sile age - serious work began immediately after the war - it
was not until the late 1950s that the idea of putting tactical
SSMs on small craft was adopted.
5
The result was a curious hodge-podge of the old and the
new. The missile boat with the NATO codename 'Komar'
used what was essentially the same hull as the Project 183
('P-6') torpedo boat - dubbed Project 183R - onto which
two bulky SSM launcher-containers were added aft. These
turbojet and rocket-powered SSMs were designated P-15
and have been far better known in the West by their NATO
codename, SS-N-2A or B Styx, while the P-20 and P-21
were jointly codenamed the SS-N-2C Styx. Various Chi-
nese derivatives exist in the HY-1, HY-2, HY-4 and C-201
series, and are known in the West as CSS-N-2 Silkworm.
The 'Komar's only defensive armament was an open twin
25mm AA mounting forward. A target acquisition radar pro-
vided location of the enemy and, as long as the little 25.5m
long 'Komar' managed to get within 40km of the target, a
viable radar-homing threat could be presented to any
threatening fleet. Such vessels were still highly vulnerable
to air attack and it was partly because of this - and because
the NATO powers did not perceive themselves as having
any need for such capabilities - that the 'Komar' and suc-
ceeding 'Osa' (Project 205) classes (the latter with four
SSMs) were not taken very seriously, even though the 39m
long 'Osas', with two radar-controlled twin 30mm AA can-
non, were far more practical propositions.
These craft were simple and cheap to produce and pro-
vided an effective means with which the Soviets could
equip their allies and client states during the Cold War.
Among the countries so equipped was Egypt, which ac-
quired several 'Komars' and 'Osas' during the 1960s.
Following the shattering experience of her defeat by Israel
in the Six Day War of June 1967, Egypt was nursing her
wounds when an opportunity presented itself to wreak a
little revenge. The Israeli Navy, then still equipped with a
few Second World War-vintage destroyers, was itself wait-
ing for its own domestically developed SSM - the Israel
Aircraft Industries Gabriel - with which to equip a new
generation of 'Sa'ar' class patrol boats ordered from France.
It is now said that Gabriel used the beam-riding command
guidance system of the early Italian Sea Killer SSM.
6
It is
necessary to mention this because the Israeli Navy really
had no excuse for not understanding the potential of the
SSM.
On 21 October 1967, the Israeli destroyer
Elath
(also
known as
Eilat)
was unwisely patrolling very close to Port
Said when two Styx missiles, fired from two Egyptian
'Komars' which never left harbour, wrecked her machinery
spaces. The ship was finished off an hour later by a third
missile. The panic in Western naval circles which followed
this event was akin to the torpedo boat scare of the 1880s.
The scale of the panic was a little misplaced - if only
because there were soon some effective counters to the
SSM - but the missile boat had certainly arrived. Apart from
the bruised Israelis, who quickly learned the lesson and
concentrated on building up their Gabriel-equipped flotilla,
another country which now launched a crash development
of an effective SSM was France, whose state-owned Aero-
spatiale quickly produced the MM38 Exocet sea-skimmer -
a far greater threat than the Styx with its parabolic arc trajec-
tory. Even so, Styx remained a potent weapon, as Indian
'Osas' were to show when they sank Pakistan's destroyer
Khaibar
during the 1971 war. However the Gabriel-armed
Sa'ars which savaged the Egyptian and Syrian fleets without
loss to themselves in 1973 were able to shoot down Styx
with 0.50in (12.7mm) heavy machine gun fire. Some fifty
Styx were fired and failed to hit a single Israeli vessel. The
Israelis by contrast sank three Syrian 'Komars' and two 'Osa
Is', among other craft, while Egypt lost three to five FAC,
including two 'Komars' and some of the four 'Osa Is' which
Egypt is known to have lost around this time. This extraor-
dinarily one sided performance was ascribed to better sea-
keeping in battle and, crucially, better ECM.
The October War's first night included the first missile
boat against missile boat engagement, the Battle of Latakia
in which five Israeli boats avoided two Styx salvoes and
sank three Syrian craft with Gabriel, although the third was
finally despatched by gunfire. In another key battle two
days later, off Damietta, six Israeli FAC sank three Egyp-
tian vessels, two with Gabriel and the third with gunfire.
7
These engagements proved that the missile-armed FAC
represented a quantum leap over the torpedo boat and, with
their long range punch, could be rightly regarded as the
worthy successor to the powerfully armed coast defence
ship of old, not simply as a better-armed torpedo boat. Just
as powerful 8in to 11 in guns on coast defence ships of a
previous generation could deter and just as the ships which
carried them could represent a convincing fleet in being, so
also the missile-armed FAC represented a completely new
form of naval warfare: the small craft with a weapon which
could truly contest large expanses of sea space.
But it is instructive to bear in mind a few key points.
Israel's early triumphs were at least as attributable to the
quality of Israeli electronic warfare as to the reliability of the
Gabriel itself. The importance of the electronic innards of
the modern SSM cannot be overstated.
There is a story from the Falklands War, relating to Ex-
ocet, which illustrates this point. It is said that the British
asked the French government precisely what standard of
electronic counter-counter measures (ECCM) fit was in-
stalled in the seeker heads of Argentina's Exocets. Subse-
quent events cannot be described for legal reasons, but the
alleged upshot was that the British learned that the French
defence ministry had no way of forcing the manufacturer of
the seeker to reveal details of the microchip and its circuits
intended to defeat countermeasures. The British had been
promised that the most advanced seeker would be re-
stricted to themselves and the French Navy. They were
angry that the French could not prove that they had kept
their promise, although subsequently it turned out that the
Argentine Exocets did not have the advanced seeker. Ex-
ocet, being vulnerable to 'chaff because of its so-called
'pseudo-proximity' fuse which works through the seeker to
calculate where a target should be, partly on the basis of
information fed into the missile before launch, needs an
ECM system which can discriminate between true and false
targets.
Another point is that SSMs are not necessarily designed
to sink a target. The key issue is to impair or shatter a
target's ability to continue its mission. With a 165kg war-
head, Exocet was clearly going to badly damage any target it
hit, the Mach 0.9 impact of such a warhead being compared
by some to the impact of a 13.5in battleship shell. But single
shells did not sink their targets, unless the hit was very
lucky. At least as damaging to a target besides the warhead
is the remaining fuel contained by a sea-skimming SSM.
Naval sources say the warhead of the Exocet which hit the
British destroyer
Sheffield
on
2 May 1982 during the Falk-
lands War did not explode, but the missile's fuel nonethe-
less started a fierce fire. The ship itself was rendered
inoperable, despite the efforts of damage control teams, but
the ship itself did not sink until 9-10 May, as she was being
towed to Ascension Island. The sinking was unexpected.
During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, the frequent Exocet and
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