Human minesweepers01/05/02
Few make the grade. Only the best can join this elite unit of divers and bocome...human minesweepers.
On a dark, moonless night a hand-picked team of Royal Navy divers and explosives experts load their high-speed boat with all of their dive gear from the mother ship, which is well over the horizon from the target. There is no colour, no lights and no chink of metal to give them away to the enemy. Faces are blacked up and all the equipment is black too. The team is small, only a handful of men, and leaves to murmured wishes of luck. Their mission is to carry out reconnaissance of the boat lanes that will be used by a landing party at a distant beachhead, clearing it of mines and obstacles where necessary before troops are landed there the following night. At 50 knots, it’s a kidney-rattling ride to get to the insertion point a few kilometres from the target beach. After a brief review of the various evacuation procedures and timings, the men slip noiselessly over the side into the black water, giving thumbs up to the boat skipper before each man leaves.
Armed and with all they need to survive for the next 24 hours, the team is about to hit enemy territory. Satellite data and intelligence about the area are limited. From now on they are on their own. The pace slows as they fall into the rhythm of the long swim to shore, finning just below the surface burdened with more than 40kg of equipment. Minds run over the agreed search patterns to clear the troop landing-craft shipping lanes. Search pattern completed, the men can begin to relax a little. Some mines have been found and their positions marked. It is clear that the small minefield can be neutralised – made safe before the troops come in. On the following night the mines will be blown with plastic explosive just before the main troop landing. It is time to dig into cover on the beach and wait, warm up a little and catch some sleep before the night’s pyrotechnics.
Just another typical operation for these marine UXB specialists or Royal Navy Clearance Divers as they are officially called. Apart from the Royal Navy, only the US and Australian Navies have the specialised equipment and personnel to conduct these operations in very shallow waters. The ability to sneak in, gather intelligence and leave undetected is vital to the success of the mission.
Bombs away
At their base on Horsea Island near Portsmouth, I met Michael, a 32-year-old Royal Navy lieutenant and the officer in charge of the 18-strong team of Fleet Diving Unit 2 (FDU2). ‘We are responsible for bomb disposal or ‘Explosive Ordnance Disposal’ (EOD) of any weapon below the high-water mark, anywhere in the world outside the UK where Britain has interests. We also step in to assist UK teams in destroying ageing and unpredictable Second World War mines and bombs when needed, on mainland Britain. The team also specialises in submarine rescue, and most recently, Very Shallow Water (VSW) work – from 24m to the surf zone – on a worldwide basis.’
Michael adds: ‘This is a difficult area to work in – waves can churn you about as though you are inside a washing machine, and the sand disturbed can reduce visibility to zero, while we have to conduct an accurate search pattern for ordnance upon which lives can depend. Much of the team’s work is carried out by touch in these conditions, and we all still get a bit of a jolt when fingers make contact with something obviously man-made, until we can make a positive ID’.
After the terrorist attacks of 11 September, special units with skills such as those of this Navy bomb squad are in higher demand because of the increase in the terrorist threat worldwide. For security reasons, they are not prepared to discuss exactly what this means to them, but for a team that is always on short notice to conduct operations anywhere in the world, all that Michael would reveal was, ‘Let’s just say we are at a heightened state of readiness. It is hard on the families, not ever being able to say to your children that you will be there for their birthdays or school plays.’
It is not just under the water that the team’s EOD experience is used. Last year NATO Command sent a team of Royal Navy divers, including Michael, into a very unstable Macedonia where civil war had erupted between government forces and Albanian rebels. Operation Essential Harvest was designed to disarm Albanian forces operating in the border areas.
‘We inserted into rebel-held areas at dusk and during the night it started to rain,’ said Michael. ‘Our job was to take position behind hostile lines in order to gather up and destroy live munitions the next day. There were 50 or 60 of us sleeping in our bivvy bags around a hedgerow, when staggering out of the isolated rebel stronghold at three in the morning came a very drunken Albanian rebel, who was firing his automatic rifle into the air. I’m pretty sure that he would have sobered up immediately had he known how many guns were trained on him, but all that happened was that he staggered back inside after taking a piss.’
Cool under pressure
The divers are undoubtedly big and tough for the most part, but also funny, smart, and clearly enjoy their jobs immensely, working seamlessly together as a team. Swimming in from drop-off points up to 5km from shore to do a job, and then swimming back out again to their support vessel is not a big deal, and though most enjoy the ‘odd’ beer, its hardly surprising that none of them smoke. Most of them go diving for fun, too, when they have the chance.
Michael comments, ‘It is not enough to be super-fit. To do this job well we need men on the team who can be cool under pressure, in life-threatening situations, who can stop, analyse and respond independently rather than just react. We need brains not just brawn.’
The divers have a working slang of their own. Fins are ‘engines’, if you seem reluctant to get wet, you are ‘bag shy’ – a ‘bag’ is a drysuit – and a ‘dockyard oyster’ is a phenomenon that most snorkellers and divers will be familiar with – when the contents of your sinuses end up in your mask. The divers are intensely proud of their qualifications, aware of the physical and mental challenges that they have had to overcome in order to become clearance divers. Some of the more formal military traditions are ignored – diving officers are addressed as ‘Boss’ rather than ‘Sir’, and the cold, wet nature of the working environment means that naval uniforms are rarely worn. Those in command recognise that when you’re halfway up to your chest in tidal mud defusing a Second World War German mine, formal dress codes seem irrelevant.
Winners never quit
Dealing with unpredictable munitions in harsh situations requires intensive training backed up by repeated exercises in different environments, from the Arctic seas to equatorial waters, sometimes in joint operations with other Navy teams such as the American Seals. I asked Chief Petty Officer ‘Rick’ Rickard about diver training.
‘At all stages, the selection process is extremely exacting,’ said Rick. ‘Given this, it’s not surprising that all of the men in the Fleet Diving Units consider themselves to be part of an elite group. The whole point of the process is to provide us with highly motivated, well-trained men. We don’t want quitters.’
Would-be divers must first complete an aptitude test. Horsea Island – an artificial lake initially built to test torpedoes – is used extensively for diver training under the auspices of the Defence Diving School. On a cold, rainy day in February I am visiting Horsea, when the bizarre behaviour of two men attracts my attention. Clad in their black diving suits they are making a circuit – running to the top of a high diving platform, jumping off into a cold dark dock while shouting, ‘Can’t wait to be a clearance diver.’ They then climb into a metal boat, jump out into the water, climb into an inflatable boat, then climb back on to the dock, and repeat the whole process, again and again.
Leading seaman Tony Wood, is a veteran instructor and sheds some light on the matter. ‘These men want to be Navy Clearance Divers. The 17-week course is tough and is expensive for us to run, so they are going through a one-week aptitude course first. If they can’t make it through this, then they won’t make it through the longer course.’
It was only the second day of the course when I spoke to Tony, and he explained that the two men in front of me were the surviving members of a four-strong group that started out the day before. I meet Steve Kennedy, 31, from HMS Quorn, who is very red in the face by now, ‘I’m too old for this, it’s a young man’s game.’ His cohort, Paul Hill from HMS Raleigh, has ten years on him but doesn’t seem to be finding the going any easier. He has a cut on his forehead and another one on his finger but is determined to continue. Of the four that started the week, only Steve made it on to the Clearance Diver course, so it’s clearly not such a young man’s game after all.
At least half of candidates fall at this hurdle, which is designed to test physical fitness with three-mile runs, circuit training and lengthy swims in Horsea Lake. Early on in this week-long course, the trainees are pressurised in a decompression chamber to the depth equivalent of 42m to test for susceptibility to nitrogen narcosis and to see if their ears can cope with the pressures of diving. They are also assessed for any tendency to claustrophobia. Those who pass move on to the longer course that involves training in all of the Royal Naval diving equipment. During that course the divers are subjected to increasingly challenging tasks, culminating in ‘live-in week’, a week of hell, when they are worked extremely hard and get little sleep. Rick claims that getting through this is easier than it used to be. ‘When I did it, we called it “hell week” and we certainly never got as much sleep as they do nowadays,’ he says.
In addition to their diver training, the men learn about explosives, use of tools underwater and diver medical support. A newly qualified diver will then spend up to two years aboard a mine hunter before having the chance to progress to one unit of the Fleet Diving Squadron.
Alan Knowles, nicknamed ‘Knocker’, used to teach the diving courses. ‘It’s character-building stuff,’ he says. ‘At the end of the day, we want to weed out the uncommitted, we don’t want people who will want to pack up at five o’clock. Quitters never win and winners never quit.’ ‘Buck’ Taylor, one of Knocker’s former students, is standing nearby when we are talking and he chips in, ‘Imagine what it’s like for us trainees. The code word is “awkward”, it can be shouted at any time during a lecture or in the middle of the night. Then we have a maximum of two minutes to get into our drysuits, fins and masks, to be ready to splash (get into the water). We have to do 2km swims pulling a boat full of divers, morning circuit training, star jumps, jumping off a 7m board, then swim circuits of Horsea Lake. And then Knocker would tell us to put on full diving gear and make us do it all over again.’ Knocker smiles fondly at the memories, pleased to have been part of ensuring that Buck made the grade.
Trying to extract an admission from these men that there was ever any fear involved in an incident is like pulling teeth, but Michael is prepared to admit to a scary moment in Scotland recently. ‘We were on an exercise off the west coast on HMS Penzance, a mine hunter, when her Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) identified a live Second World War German mine. This was a ground mine, one that sits on the bottom, not a floating mine of the type you may have seen in films, with the spikes sticking out of them. These ground mines are very well engineered and many of them are still capable of doing immense damage even 60 years after they were placed on the sea bed. You have to respect something like that, packed with hundreds of kilos of explosives. It looks like a short, fat torpedo, about 2m long. We decided to send a diver in to attach a plastic explosive to the mine – one that can pack enough thump to blow the thing completely, known in the trade as a “high-order explosion”. The worst thing that can happen is if you fragment the mine or hole it, and leave it in an unstable state. An operation like this is always fairly tense until everyone is safely back on board, and the mine destroyed. Depending on the depth of the explosion, there can be a water plume of up to 75m high. It can be pretty spectacular.’
In the thick of things
Modern mines are increasingly ‘smart’ and contain algorithms which can be selectively aligned to the acoustic and magnetic signature of particular ships, submarines, even helicopters, or the sound of an approaching diver. They are capable of picking out the specific signature of, say, the aircraft carrier within a Task Force, ignoring all the other potential targets. The signature can be recorded by enemy intelligence with underwater recording devices when the ships leave harbour. If an ROV encounters an unknown or intelligent ‘smart’ mine, then its parent mine hunter is at risk and at this point the trained clearance diver takes over, with a view to getting the mine to Navy scientists so that countermeasures can ultimately be developed.
‘The thing that floats my boat,’ says Michael, ‘is the sheer variety of operations. We never know where we could be deployed next. I have to spend about half of each year away from home, but diving in every ocean from the poles to the tropics over the last year has certainly been some compensation.’ To avoid triggering mines, the Navy clearance diver’s equipment must have an extremely low magnetic and acoustic signature – it is very quiet (with no bubbles or ticking) and is largely made of plastic or nonferrous metals. The covert nature of many missions means no bubbles and the Navy uses closed-circuit rebreathers, in which the diver is either breathing 100 per cent oxygen or a gas mixture that has been tailored for the job.
There have been many changes of equipment and tactics over the years but the basic philosophy of the clearance diver putting himself at risk remains. During the Gulf War, sea mines were used in the conflict and even with the advances in robotics and other remote systems there were numerous incidents where divers conducted a ‘hands on’ approach in often difficult and hazardous conditions. In a post 11 September world, the Gulf is unlikely to be the last arena where the human minesweepers of the Navy will be used in wartime. And meeting these men, you get the strong impression that they certainly hope to be there, in the thick of things, next time around.
Diving with satan
The unit uses a prototype diving reconnaissance system know affectionately as ‘SATAN’ – Sonar Acoustic Transponder Aid to Navigation. The shallow waters in which the divers operate are typically low or zero-visibility environments where orientation can be very difficult. Visual systems are virtually useless and it also difficult to use acoustic communications. Shaun Samways, the Ministry of Defence engineer who was responsible for the SATAN design had a tough job. ‘SATAN weighs in at about 5kg at the moment and is pushed through the water by the diver,’ he said. ‘In the future we hope to lighten the unit considerably. SATAN consists of two elements, a forward looking sonar that can record underwater topography and potential mine targets for downloading on to shipboard computers; and a diver directional finding system which lets the diver know where he is in relation to a grid.’
‘GPS does not function below the water so we had to develop our own system. The divers first lay four beacons which are secured to the sea bed in a large grid. By referencing one of the beacons to a stationary GPS fix, the search grid can be overlaid on a conventional chart. After that, a transponder/receiver that floats tethered above SATAN picks up transmissions from the beacons. The transponder uses the individual code from each beacon, and cross references these to pinpoint the diver, represented by a triangle in the middle of the computer screen. This system enables extremely accurate search patterns to be carried out, say when clearing a troop landing craft lane to the beach.’
http://www.divemagazine.co.uk/news/arti ... 1&UAN=1233
