Soviet navy in 1950s /1960s

The Soviet Navy's submarine fleet at this point was intended to replicate the near-success the U-boats had in cutting the transatlantic trade routes. They were the only platform the Soviets had that could even reach that far. The coastal defense fleet (outside the Baltic) was there to keep NATO ships far enough from shore that the submarines could get out of port without immediately being tracked, followed, and destroyed. Soviet doctrine depended on and probably could have provided a fairly quick ground victory in at most a few months, so the submarines would only have to stop a few convoys before Soviet air from occupied Benelux and France could close the British ports.
 
But don't the diesel boats
1 have to surface to charge batteries frequently
2 very slow and noisy underwater and very vulnerable to ASW planes and surface ships
3 heavily outnumbered by NATO ASW platforms
4 cannot chase and attack contemporary destroyers and frigates forcing the subs to be on the defensive
5 will be forced to pass through chokepoints before they can reach the atlantic further increasing their vulnerability
How can they possibly hope to survive on their own in a new battle of atlantic ?

Yes to 1.
Yes to 2.
Maybe to 3. Depends on the distribution at point of contact.
Torpedoes can chase. Russians put a lot of work into wake-homers.
Yes to chokepoints. Pass through is possible during peacetime and under war conditions by using weather, underwater terrain and sea-life as masking to defeat visual, radar and sonar search. The Russians became very good at it.
 

Dave Shoup

Banned
Because fast attack craft versus airpower = dead fast attack craft. Plus a Nanutchka does nothing to stop REFORGER.

It wasn't REFORGER at the time (GYROSCOPE), but yeah. In the 1950s, the US, RN, and the other Allies navies had a huge ASW capability against the Soviet version of Type XXIs, which is what a Whiskey was, essentially. Along with the ships and aircraft built and/or modernized and/or cascaded to the minor Allies, there was the option of ASW at the source, which would have been pretty conclusive.
 

Khanzeer

Banned
Torpedoes can chase. Russians put a lot of work into wake-homers.
Yes to chokepoints. Pass through is possible during peacetime and under war conditions by using weather, underwater terrain and sea-life as masking to defeat visual, radar and sonar search. The Russians became very good at it.
Thanks
Can you recommend a source on russian torpedoes? Norman palmer book does describe it in some detail but maybe now more russian sources have been translated
 
You're not getting any sort of meaningful air defense on a corvette, let alone a missile boat.
true but atleast in a purely defensive role the corvettes would be under the umbrella of shore based interceptors

I should also note that the P-15 Termit is the first surface-launched antiship missile the Soviets made that was small enough to mount on a missile boat/corvette. And it entered service in 1960. The Komars actually began life as torpedo boats before being converted to missile boats.
will it be possible to mount a ship launched version of KS-1 komet and KSShch on ships that are bigger than FAC but about WW2 destroyer escort size ?

One more thing: Soviet bastion defense strategy isn't a thing at this point in time. That strategy was to defend their ballistic missile submarines - and their ballistic submarines are, in this era, Golf and Hotel-class submarines that need to travel almost to the American coast to hit any targets of worth. It wasn't until the Deltas and their R-29 missiles arrived in the 1970s that Soviet ballistic missile subs could hit targets from the Arctic, making the Bastion strategy viable.
valid point and I defiantely overlooked that but maybe the soviet navy should not have relied on the earlier SSBN to conduct attacks on North america but retained them as assets to conduct attack on western southern europe and Japan [ essentially the role given to them after Delta/typhoons came into service]

To summarize what I'm suggesting is that [ it seems to me that ] resources of soviet navy were spread too thin to effectively perform any of its essential roles in 50s/60s so much so that the most basic role of any navy to protect its shores and its army from flanking operations could not be reliably performed.
So even if they do choose to build hundreds of DE boats as in OTL , they could have been more useful in sea denial role in coastal areas and seas surrounding the USSR effectively preventing the carriers and US submarines from getting too close to attack the homeland.Also here some of their flaws could have been minimized e.g noisy boats are probably better off in coastal areas than in vast open expanses of atlantic and their range /speed would not have been such disadvanatges
I doubt it. Both are nearly 1000 pounds heavier than the Styx; the Komet probably can't be surface-launched at all without an unacceptable reduction in range. In fact, the Scrubber was not mounted in anything smaller than a destroyer, and even then only two of them.

The Soviets don't have enough options for attacking the continental US to retain their Hotels and Golfs for attacking Europe, where they have plenty of shorter-range bomber aircraft and intermediate-range missiles anyway. They're only just getting the Tu-95 bomber and their first ICBMs into service, have a limited number of M-4s, and none of them are viable second-strike platforms. Getting the Yankees in the water changes the calculus somewhat, but those subs still need to pass through the GIUK gap to attack targets in the US. Tl;dr the Soviet Navy, for a variety of very good reasons, are not going to just sit on the ability for submarine launches against the continental US until 1972.

Okay, first of all, of all the flaws of Soviet SSKs in this period, range was not one of them. Anyway, for the rest...

X87ww3a.jpg


The Soviet Navy, as of 1960, has north of 200 diesel attack submarines, 90 modern destroyers, 70 modern ASW frigates with torpedo capability, have a truly staggering number of coastal ASW and torpedo combatants, eighteen decently modern gun cruisers, and whole mess of missile boats and missile-armed destroyers and cruisers under construction. Oh, and they're converting their force of Badger bombers to cruise missile carriers for attacking American carrier groups. Even with most of the diesel subs attacking NATO SLOCs... what the hell else do you think the Soviets need to defend their coasts? For a coastal defense force this is a truly, spectacularly large force.
 

Khanzeer

Banned
^ yes it's a large force but
1 coastline of USSR is enormous
2 they face practically all other world navies combined
3 their 4 fleets cannot reinforce each other easily
4 as defenders they would always be at a disadvantage against attackers esp if USN decides to concentrate 3 or so CVBG at one front , in that case if defences only consist of surface vessels and bombers they can easily be overwhelmed.
Would it not be beneficial to add 30 or so subs to each fleet for ambush ? Rather than waste them in Atlantic in a suicidal mission for little return.
5 arctic fleet subs and Baltic subs will probably face considerable attrition at GIUK and danish straits so even if all 200 subs are operational at one time only half will probably get to interdict convoys in Atlantic.
Ofcourse that's just my opinion [ quite amateur- ish let me assure you ] that's why I appreciate input of experts and veterans on this forum.
 
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Khanzeer

Banned
The coastal defense fleet (outside the Baltic) was there to keep NATO ships far enough from shore that the submarines could get out of port without immediately being tracked, followed, and destroyed. Soviet doctrine depended on and probably could have provided a fairly quick ground victory in at most a few months, so the submarines would only have to stop a few convoys before Soviet air from occupied Benelux and France could close the British ports.
I get this part , basically 100 or boats can be expended if that ensures enough disruption of NATO SLOC until british ports can be closed thanks
 
^ yes it's a large force but
1 coastline of USSR is enormous
2 they face practically all other world navies combined
3 their 4 fleets cannot reinforce each other easily
4 as defenders they would always be at a disadvantage against attackers esp if USN decides to concentrate 3 or so CVBG at one front , in that case if defences only consist of surface vessels and bombers they can easily be overwhelmed.
Would it not be beneficial to add 30 or so subs to each fleet for ambush ? Rather than waste them in Atlantic in a suicidal mission for little return.
5 arctic fleet subs and Baltic subs will probably face considerable attrition at GIUK and danish straits so even if all 200 subs are operational at one time only half will probably get to interdict convoys in Atlantic.
Ofcourse that's just my opinion [ quite amateur- ish let me assure you ] that's why I appreciate input of experts and veterans on this forum.
The coastline is enormous, yes, and they face all the navies of the world combined, yes... but practically speaking, most of their coastline is in the Arctic and doesn't need to be actively defended as long as Murmansk and Vladivostok retain operational fleets. The Baltic is a no-go for NATO ships bigger than a coastal combatant, and the Black Sea fleet can simply plug the Bosporus and that'll stall any sort of naval attack. Further, equally practically speaking the US Navy is all they really have to worry about; most other navies are too small to make much of a difference.

And I don't think even 3 CBGs are going to have an easy time of attacking one of the Soviet fleets. First of all, that's a truly enormous commitment of force. The US Navy has 23 carriers, but eight of them are dedicated ASW platforms. With only 15 proper attack carriers, committing 3 CBGs means either withdrawing the majority of their carrier power from abroad, or else it's a massive surge deployment that cannot be long sustained. Worse, the US Navy does not have a decent missile-armed interceptor, nor do they have much in the way of SAM platforms. Badger strikes are going to be flying into Crusaders, Demons, and the alpha version of the Terrier missile. This not long before the missile system completely whiffed on hitting a target drone.

And it's not like the Soviets won't have subs available for coastal defense. We've been talking mostly about ocean-going diesel-electric subs, but the Soviets have a good number of coastal submarines, both WWII-era M-series and newer Quebecs. And throwing 200 ocean-going subs at the Atlantic SLOCs still leaves about 40-odd boats for defensive purposes. Plus the small handful of November-class nuclear attack subs the Soviets have completed. Noisy and unreliable though they may be, those are manageable weaknesses in defensive operations.
 
If you’re talking about the US Navy of that era fighting the Soviet surface Navy of that era it’s not even close. Once US SSNs make an appearance the Soviet Navy of that era doesn’t stand a chance. They would have to go through the GIUK gap. The Soviet ships of that era just didn’t have the sensors or weapons to deal with subs that went 25-33 knots submerged and had almost unlimited endurance.
 

SsgtC

Banned
If you’re talking about the US Navy of that era fighting the Soviet surface Navy of that era it’s not even close. Once US SSNs make an appearance the Soviet Navy of that era doesn’t stand a chance. They would have to go through the GIUK gap. The Soviet ships of that era just didn’t have the sensors or weapons to deal with subs that went 25-33 knots submerged and had almost unlimited endurance.
Hell, no one had the ability to counter that. In exercises against the surface fleet, Nautilus routinely wiped the floor with surface units. It wasn't until helicopters, homing torpedoes, ASROC and passive sonar were perfected that surface ships could effectively counter a nuke boat
 
And yes, they're slow and noisy, but this is the 1960s at the latest. Sonar's not that good either, and this is before serious attempts to make submarines quieter.

SOSUS was good enough to find every boat the Soviets had in the Atlantic by time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that capability rolled in by 1957 or so.
It wasn't till Walker spilled the beans on how noisy the Sov DE Subs were, and how easy to find, in 1968 that the USSR got serious on making things quiet
 
Now, the Soviets were at no point trying to redo KM's campaign to cut trans-atlantic communications. Task of the Soviet Navy was to support land force operations (ie. Baltic, Black Sea, Northern Norway) and to defend Soviet Union. This meant, especially after 1955, not as much operations against landings in a long war but against carrier forces and later on, SSBN's, capable of hitting Soviet homeland. As the range of USN increased dramatically due to introduction of Polaris missiles, thus increased the scope of Soviet naval operations.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publica...viet-navy-cold-war/soviet-navy-historical.pdf

The idea of Soviet Navy trying to do what KM tried and USN succeeded in WW2, ie. cutting SLOC's, was a classic mistake of hoping your adversary to do what you wanted her to do.
 
I feel that soviet navy is even less likely to stop REFORGER in 50s and 60s than KM in the 40s
I would argue the bulk of their subs always would have operated in seas where soviet airforces and AVMF can provide cover otherwise they would be needlessly wasted
....They're offensive platforms for a new Battle of the Atlantic.
Might simply forcing NATO to escort and form convoys reduce the shipping available especially very early on setting up the convoys, sufficiently to be a win for the Soviets especially in the first few weeks of a land campaign?

That and forcing NATO to spend on lots of expensive ASW systems to counter it.
 
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Might simply forcing NATO to escort and form convoys might reduce the shipping available especially very early on setting up the convoys, sufficiently to be a win for the Soviets especially in the first few weeks of a land campaign?

That and forcing NATO to spend on lots of expensive ASW systems to counter it.

I think it was not as much a Soviet plan but simple NATO gut reaction.

NATO countries, primarily USN and RN but also Italy, spent an excessive amount of money for their naval armaments, for reasons of geography but also because of organizational inertia. When NATO's core naval functions were thought over in late 40's and early 50's the memory of both USN's massive strikes against Japan and RN-RCN-USN massive ASW effort were in fresh memory. It surely seemed a reasonable idea to be ready to brace a massive Soviet sub campaign. But, we know now it was not the Soviet plan at all. And even from the early 50's perspective there would be a lot of good reasons to question the massive naval investments.
 

Khanzeer

Banned
@Jukra
were the soviet SS and older SSN tasked with defending SSBN mostly from NATO's hunter killer subs ?
and if they were not designed for battle of atlantic then what was the purpose of subs like foxtrot, whiskey zulu, romeo classes?
 
It wasn't REFORGER at the time (GYROSCOPE), but yeah. In the 1950s, the US, RN, and the other Allies navies had a huge ASW capability against the Soviet version of Type XXIs, which is what a Whiskey was, essentially. Along with the ships and aircraft built and/or modernized and/or cascaded to the minor Allies, there was the option of ASW at the source, which would have been pretty conclusive.
That's interesting.

I seem to recall the U.S. and Canadians were sufficently concerned about the threat of Soviet type XXI subs that they embarked on significant post war construction and conversion programs for surface ASW forces.

My understanding is the world war 2 era escorts were not considered to be suitable.

Edit to add: I presume many other NATO navies also reacted in a similar fashion to the U.S. and the Canadians.
 
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I feel that soviet navy is even less likely to stop REFORGER in 50s and 60s than KM in the 40s
I would argue the bulk of their subs always would have operated in seas where soviet airforces and AVMF can provide cover otherwise they would be needlessly wasted
I believe the Soviet approach was reasonable given the technology of the day and my understanding of their goals and constraints.

At first glance building a large fleet of diesel subs based on the XXI concept seems reasonable.
 

SsgtC

Banned
My understanding is the world war 2 era escorts were not considered to be suitable.
At I understand it, the Destroyer Escorts and Corvettes were considered too small and too slow to properly escort convoys against nuclear submarines and modern diesels that could stay submerged for up to two weeks verses the day/day and a half a WWII boat could stay down. Plus their small size meant they were unable to be retrofitted with modern ASW and Aviation facilities. Even the WWII destroyers didn't all get modernized. The FRAM programs were primarily focused on the larger Gearing and Sumner classes for their increased ability to handle newer weapons
 
@Jukra
were the soviet SS and older SSN tasked with defending SSBN mostly from NATO's hunter killer subs ?
and if they were not designed for battle of atlantic then what was the purpose of subs like foxtrot, whiskey zulu, romeo classes?

Basically, the idea of various SS classes was to conduct a defense in depth against NATO navies, primarily carrier task forces or, in earlier scenarios, amphibius forces. Zulus (just 26) and Foxtrots for long range recon and effect, Whiskeys (236) and Quebecs (100) for closer in defense. One has to remember, that even Whiskeys had just some 8500nm range surfaced, at 10kts speed. Snorting speed 7kts. It's endurance was 30 days. Operating from Soviet Kola bases, that's not enough to conduct offensive operations in the North Atlantic, as even getting through GIUK gap would take some 1400nm's or 9 days, leaving just some 11 days for operations.

Later on, with bastion strategy enabled by Delta -class submarines from 1970's onwards, the defense of bastions became a priority.

Whiskey was not based on XXI class, Zulu did incorporate a larger amount of XXI ideas but had various problems.
 
At I understand it, the Destroyer Escorts and Corvettes were considered too small and too slow to properly escort convoys against nuclear submarines and modern diesels that could stay submerged for up to two weeks verses the day/day and a half a WWII boat could stay down. Plus their small size meant they were unable to be retrofitted with modern ASW and Aviation facilities. Even the WWII destroyers didn't all get modernized. The FRAM programs were primarily focused on the larger Gearing and Sumner classes for their increased ability to handle newer weapons

Using hindsight, obviously, DE's and frigates would have been very useful against Whiskey's which did not match XXI performance. (Whether XXI would have been able to meet it's design performance is an entirely different question altogether).
 
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