The Cold War: A MILITARY History (39 page)

This trend continued throughout the Cold War, with the Soviet navy building a series of powerful, well-armed, well-equipped cruisers and destroyers. The Russians appear, however, to have always been fascinated by sheer size, and the culmination of their naval building programme was the Kirov class, three of which were commissioned between 1980 and 1988 (a fourth was completed in 1996). With a full-load displacement of 28,000
tonnes
, these were the largest surface warships to be built for any navy during the Cold War and were intended to serve as flagships for surface-warfare groups, which would consist of missile-armed cruisers. The Kirovs mounted a heavy armament, consisting of a mix of anti-surface, anti-air and anti-submarine missiles, together with guns, torpedoes and three helicopters. Apart from their size and armament, however, one of their most impressive feature was the power plant, which consisted of two nuclear reactors plus oil-fired steam boost. Again, the superstructure of these ships was covered with antennas and sensors.

The Soviet navy also built three Slava-class cruisers,
^fn3
which, with a displacement of 12,500 tonnes, were among the largest surface ships of the Cold war. They were armed with sixteen SS-N-12 missiles mounted in four pairs on either side of the forward superstructure, making them look very menacing.

Soviet ship design was followed with great interest in the West, not least because Soviet designers seemed much less reluctant than their Western counterparts to make daring innovations. For all their powerful weapons, their impressive electronics and their excellent performance, however, the Soviet surface fleet never overcame the basic problem, referred to earlier, of being split into four widely separated fleets. Thus, by the time the ships had been split between the fleets and allowance had been made for ships in refit, the numbers actually available in any one area were much less impressive than the overall figures might suggest.

THE BRITISH NAVY

The British navy had for many years rested its strength on its surface fleet, and it entered the Cold War as the second most powerful navy in NATO – a position it retained, despite successive reductions, to the end of the Cold War. Early in the Cold War, the British, having been the principal victims of the German ‘commerce raiders’, felt particularly vulnerable to the Soviet Sverdlov-class cruisers, but a class of cruisers intended to deal with this threat was never built, and reliance was placed instead on the carrier-borne Buccaneer low-level anti-shipping bomber.

The numbers of frigates in service tell the story of the decline in British sea power. In 1960 the navy was operating sixty frigates of various types, but this had decreased to fifty-five by 1970, although that figure was held until 1981, when major cuts began. At the end of the Cold War only thirty-four were in service.

Fleet Escorts

Defence from air attack clearly had to be a major priority, although the first attempt to provide it was not a particularly happy one. Three cruisers which had been launched in 1944–5 were, after repeated delays and at very considerable expense, completed between 1959 and 1961. These ships, the Tiger class, originally had a traditional cruiser armament of four 152 mm guns, although these were of a new, fully automatic type, with water-cooling, giving a rate of fire of twenty rounds per minute per barrel.
^fn4
It had, however, already been accepted that the most effective defence against modern aircraft was missiles, and little use was found for these ships. As a result, between 1965 and 1972 two were converted to ASW helicopter carriers by installing a huge hangar and flight deck aft – again at considerable expense – but even this was not really satisfactory and the ships were disposed of in 1980.

The next attempt at an air-defence ship was the County-class destroyers, of which eight were completed between 1961 and 1970. These were armed with the inelegantly named Seaslug missile, which was launched from a twin launcher at the stern, using a beam-riding guidance system which was already obsolescent when the system entered service. All eight were deleted in the early 1980s. The only other large ship to be completed,
Bristol
, was the first of a group of four to provide air defence for the new carrier CVA-01. When the carrier was cancelled only
Bristol
was completed, but it was employed mainly as a trials and training ship.

Ocean Escorts

The navy’s ASW force subsisted for many years on Second World War destroyer hulls, many of which were converted into ASW ships in the early 1950s, but new-design ships began to enter service from 1957 onwards, and in considerable numbers. These new frigates included twenty-six of the Leander class, which entered service between 1963 and 1967 and proved a great success; they also achieved major export orders. These were followed by the Broadsword class (also known as the Type 22), of which fourteen were completed between 1979 and 1990, and the Duke class (Type 23), which was just entering service as the Cold War ended.

The Falklands War

Uniquely among the Cold War navies of both alliances, the British fought a major naval conflict – the 1982 Falklands War – which particularly affected the surface fleet. In that conflict two destroyers and two frigates were lost as a result of air-launched-missile or bombing attacks, and one destroyer was
damaged
by a land-based missile. In addition, the threat posed by Argentine submarines resulted in great efforts being expended in hunting for them.

Among the many lessons of the war, three were of particular importance. The first was that air-launched anti-ship missiles represented a major threat to a fleet – a threat which had previously been underestimated. The second lesson was that airborne early warning was essential to the safety of the fleet. The third lesson was that a long period of peace had resulted in damage control being reduced from an essential feature of warship design to a low priority, where economy and the fashion of the moment prevailed. Every navy in the world learned lessons from the British navy’s experience in the Falklands, as a result of which the design of surface warships and the relative priorities of numerous design features altered radically.

FRANCE

The French fleet emerged from the Second World War in a poor state. A few pre-war French cruisers and destroyers survived, and the French were given a generous allocation of ex-German and ex-Italian ships.
^fn5
The Americans and British also supplied a number of modern ships.

As with the army and the air force, the navy moved rapidly to equip itself with French designs, armed with French weapons and using French equipment. This resulted in some fine ships, but the navy was dogged throughout the Cold War by the high costs of two major programmes: first, the nuclear-propelled missile submarines and, second, the
Charles De Gaulle
aircraft carrier. There was also a commitment to expenditure at the other end of the scale, since the French navy’s contribution to the country’s continuing colonial responsibilities was met by two series of small frigates, known as
avisos
, which were produced in relatively large numbers. Squeezed in the middle, the fleet- and ocean-escort programmes were frequently subjected to delays and deletions in an effort to balance the budget.

Fleet Escorts

The cruiser
De Grasse
, which had lain unfinished in 1945, was completed in 1956 as an anti-aircraft cruiser, while a similar ship,
Colbert
, was built after the war, joining the fleet in 1959. Both these ships originally had an all-gun armament, but in the early 1970s
Colbert
underwent a refit which included installing a twin air-defence-missile launcher aft. Seventeen fleet escorts of the closely related Surcouf (T47) and Duperre (T53) classes (3,740 tonnes) were commissioned between 1956 and 1958, these were intended to provide
area
air defence and air control, but their all-gun armament was plainly inadequate for modern conditions. As a result, in the mid-1960s four were converted to take a single launcher for the US Tartar missile, making them much more effective, while the remainder were converted into ASW escorts.

Next came two ships in the Suffren (FLE60) class, which were commissioned in 1967 and 1970. These were much larger, displacing 6,090 tonnes, and were equipped throughout with French weapons, sensors and equipment. Meanwhile, replacing the T47 air-defence conversions became a serious problem and it was planned to build four ships of the Cassard class, which would have entered service in the mid-1980s. In the event, budget problems resulted in the programme being stretched and two ships being cancelled, with the first ship being commissioned in 1988 and the other in 1991, and the T47s had to be kept in service for much longer than had been planned. In fact, again as an economy, the two new ships were equipped with launchers taken from the T47 ships, although the missiles were newly acquired US Standard SM-1 SAMs.

Ocean Escorts

In the 1950s France accepted a tasking from NATO to produce convoy escorts, and quickly produced eighteen ASW ships with a 1,700 tonne displacement, of which ten were funded under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program. Completed between 1955 and 1960, these French-designed ships were handy and served until the late 1970s. Next came
Aconit
, a much larger ship, displacing 3,900 tonnes, which was similar in general design to the contemporary US Knox class and which, unusually for a large French warship, had only a single propeller.
Aconit
’s main limitation was the lack of a helicopter, and so the next three ocean escorts, commissioned between 1974 and 1977, were much larger ships, displacing 5,800 tonnes. Designated the Tourville class, they used the extra length to accommodate two Lynx ASW helicopters.

The need to replace the ASW versions of the T47 and T53 classes resulted in the Georges Leygues class, whose ships, with a displacement of 4,350 tonnes, were larger than those they were to replace, albeit not as large as the Tourville class. As with the contemporary Cassard-class fleet escorts, the programme was delayed and one ship was cancelled as an economy measure, with the result that seven ships joined the fleet between 1979 and 1990. These ships reflected the larger size of 1980s ASW ships and were powered by a mixed power plant of British gas turbines and French diesels.

Small Escorts

Alone among the major navies, the French produced a series of small ships, usually known as
avisos
, which were intended to combine the roles of colonial patrolling in peacetime and ASW escorts in war. Nine of the
Commandant
Rivière class (2,230 tonnes) were commissioned between 1962 and 1965, followed by seventeen of the D’Estienne D’Orves class (1,250 tonnes) in 1976–84.

BATTLESHIPS AND BATTLECRUISERS

The battleship, once the very symbol of naval power, survived – just – into the Cold war, and deserves a postscript of its own. At the start of the Cold War a few battleships were still in service, although experience in the recently concluded Second World War had shown that they were extremely vulnerable to air attack. The Japanese
Yamato
, for example, the largest super-battleship ever built, displaced some 70,000 tonnes and was armed with nine 460 mm guns and numerous anti-aircraft guns; it also had heavy armoured protection. Despite all this, when it was caught in the open sea on 7 April 1945 and attacked by some 400 US navy aircraft,
Yamato
was reduced to a blazing wreck within one hour and sunk within three.

As a result of such wartime experiences, by 1950 most navies had either scrapped their battleships or placed them in reserve. Many navies considered a number of plans to utilize the battleship hulls for a variety of other purposes, such as missile ships, but, except in the United States, these all came to naught, and the leviathans were eventually scrapped.

Two French battleships survived the war:
Richelieu
, which had taken part in the fighting, and
Jean Bart
, which was not only unfinished but had also been badly damaged. Popular pressure forced the government to authorize
Jean Bart
’s completion, which was done at vast expense. The two battleships looked very impressive, but their operational value was minimal, and they required huge crews. Both saw service during the first decade of the Cold War, and
Jean Bart
took part in the 1956 Suez operation, but they were withdrawn from service in 1959–60 and were scrapped in 1968–70.

Italy possessed five battleships in 1946, of which three were assigned as war reparations. The Soviet Union, the UK and the USA received one each, with the latter two immediately selling theirs for scrap. That left two, which saw brief service as training ships and were then scrapped in 1957.

In the USSR the situation was different, since early post-war naval plans were heavily influenced by the close interest being taken in maritime affairs by Stalin, who was determined to build up a large ocean-going fleet. Initially he laid heavy emphasis on battleships. Two very elderly Soviet battleships were retained in service until the early 1950s, while a battleship borrowed from the British during the war was returned in 1949 and replaced in the Soviet fleet by an ex-Italian ship, which was commissioned as
Novorossiysk
. Various plans were made in the late 1940s for three or more battleships, but these were cancelled in 1950, and when
Novorossiysk
was sunk on 29 October
1955
by a Second World War German mine the battleship era in the Soviet navy came to an end.

The British retained four King George V-class ships after the war. These were used actively for a very short period, but all had been placed in reserve by 1951 and they were scrapped in 1957. The last British battleship,
Vanguard
, was not completed until 1946, but was paid off in 1954 and scrapped in 1960.

In the US, however, four Iowa-class battleships were kept in reserve and were brought back into service during the Korean War and then returned to reserve again.
New Jersey
was briefly reactivated for the Vietnam War. President Reagan, however, had all four thoroughly modernized and then, with Tomahawk land-attack and Harpoon anti-ship missiles added to their armament, they were recommissioned:
New Jersey
in 1982,
Iowa
in 1983,
Missouri
in 1986 and
Wisconsin
in 1988. They were employed in surface-action groups, and
New Jersey’s
awesome shore-bombardment capability was employed off Lebanon in the early 1980s. They served on until the end of the Cold War, then all were decomissioned between 1990 and 1992 and were stricken in 1995.