October Fury

Prologue
In the fall of 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came as close as they ever would to global nuclear war. The confrontation came after Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev was caught in the act of secretly deploying nuclear-capable ballistic missiles to Fidel Castro's Cuba. What is not widely known is that the showdown with the Soviet Union nearly led to an exchange of tactical nuclear weapons at sea between ships and submarines of the opposing navies. We now know from participants on both sides that a naval shootout very nearly happened. This is an account told by those with the fingers on the triggers

The gravity of the encounter was first revealed shortly following the 1992 disclosures from the long-guarded files of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, CPSU, Although many KGB and Ministry of Defense files were released to researchers shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Central Committee files were stored separately and guarded as politically sensitive. Items from these files have since been only selectively released by the government of the Russian Federation.

CPSU files released in January 1992 state that the Soviet Politburo had given their military commander in Cuba in 1962, Genera1 Issa Pliyev, the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons against United States ships and landing forces without prior approval from Moscow. The fo1lowing is quoted from orders made public in 1992 in a dispatch from Soviet Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky to General Pliyev in Havana in early October 1962:

Only in the event of a landing of the opponent's forces on the island of Cuba and if there is a concentration of enemy ships with landing forces near the coast of Cuba, in its territoria1 waters... and there is no possibility of receiving orders from the USSR Ministry of Defense, you are personally allowed as an exception to take the decision to apply the tactical LUNA missiles as a means of local destruction of the opponent on land and on the coast with the aim of a full crushing defeat of troops on the territory of Cuba and the defense of the Cuban Revolution.

General Anatoly Gribkov, who was chief of operational planning on the Soviet General Staff in 1962, stated during a Cuban crisis reunion hosted by Fidel Castro in Havana in January 1992, that in addition to medium range SS-4 missiles in Cuba, LUNA (NATO name FROG) missiles with nuclear warheads had already been provided to Soviet forces. These had one hundred kiloton warheads had a twenty-five mile range. We have since learned from Soviet records that the four submarines sent as the advance brigade to be homeported in Cuba as part of Operation Kama, the naval phase of Operation Anadyr, had been equipped with tactical nuc1ear-tipped torpedoes, and given the same authority to use them if an attack by U. S. Navy ships appeared imminent.

The Cuban missile crisis and its outcome provide a classic study of the successful use of dip1omacy backed by superior sea power. The Soviet Navy was operating in unfamiliar waters with inferior naval forces and without air support. The advantageous naval position enjoyed by the United States forced a choice on Khrushchev between hostilities and certain defeat, or withdrawal and a major diplomatic setback. The major reversal for the Soviet leader eventually resulted in his political defeat and forced retirement.

The confrontation was a pivotal moment for the Soviet fleet, leading to resumption of an aggressive naval construction program which continued until the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991. By that time, the USSR had achieved status as the wor1d's largest, and second most powerful navy.

Historians and Command and control experts have pondered the Cuban missile crisis in great depth and continue to offer new analysis. During the thirty-year anniversary observations of the Cuban episode in 1992, a number of surviving senior decision-makers from the three sides met in Havana and Moscow for reunions and round-table critiques. New information revealed at those gatherings confirmed that the situation was even closer to a nuclear exchange than either the United States or the Soviet Union leadership realized. Escalation to a nuclear exchange might have resulted in grave injury to the United States but it would certainly have led to a disastrous Russian defeat. The results of the crisis had profound impact on subsequent overall Soviet military policy as well as the naval construction program.

The Soviet navy before the Cuban confrontation consisted of twenty-five conventional cruisers, fewer than one hundred destroyers, plus large numbers of small combatants. It also included more than 300 diesel powered submarines, more than half of which were 1ong range attack boats, The Soviet Union already possessed more than the total number of diesel attack submarines Nazi Germany operated in the peak of their World War II strength.

Until 1962 however, Soviet naval forces se1dom deployed far from home waters. Despite our suspicions of the quality the fleet at the time, we learned only in 1995 that Soviet submarine forces deployed during the crisis, a11 long range diesel subs of the Project 641, in the west cal1ed Foxtrot class, had been equipped with nuclear-tipped torpedoes in Sadaya Bay.

The Cuban confrontation served as a dramatic arena where the U.S. Navy, for the first time since World War II, looked seriously into the eyes of a genuine naval opponent, which, although still a 1ightweight, was capable of inflicting serious damage.

As Peter the Great was known as the father of the Russian navy, surely Admiral of the Fleet, twice Hero of the Soviet Union Sergei Geogevich Gorshkov was father of the modern Soviet Navy. Gorshkov who joined the navy at age seventeen, became an admiral at age thirty-one, and served for twenty-seven years as its commaoder-in-chief – presiding longer and through more significant changes than any other single Soviet naval leader. His rapid rise to the rank of admira1 was due largely to his bri1liance as a naval commander during the Great Patriotic (War World War II). He emerged from the war one of the few senior Soviet naval heroes, mostly due to his actions during the campaign in Odessa on the Black Sea and as commander of the Danube River Flotilla.

In October 1955, two years after Nikita Khrushchev became Communist Party First Secretary, Soviet Black Sea Fleet 24,000 ton flagship, battleship Novorossysk, exploded and sank in Sevastopol harbor with the 1oss of 608 navymen. In the aftermath of the official investigation into the causes for the sinking – to this day still a major controversy in Russia – Khrushchev summarily removed and demoted navy Commander-in-Chief Admiral Nikolai Khrushchev, and abruptly reversed Stalin's post-war naval expansion. Khrushchev directed the disposal of many large surface warships and a halt to their further construction. According to non-sailor Khrushchev:

Navy surface ships are good only for carrying heads on state on official visits; they have outlived their time. They're good only as missile platforms. This year to date we have destined practically all cruisers to the scrap heap.

Khrushchev stopped the aggressive heavy cruiser construction projects in mid-course. He redirected naval thinking to a defensive strategy anchored on a strong submarine force and a surface fleet restricted to coastal defense on the flanks of a massive ground army. Khrushchev, with the support of his first defense chief celebrated World War II ground army commander, Marshal Georgii Zhukov, sought to cut costs of new military construction, while retaining a gigantic land force. Expenditures for new naval building were drastically reduced. As a result, by 1957 the Soviet navy was reduced to a force of less than 500,000 men; more than 350 ships were mothballed. The navy cuts were accompanied by a controversial debate on the value of conventional surface navy dominated by cruisers. The large diesel attack submarine construction program was also reduced and deferred in favor of building nuclear and missile submarines with more sophisticated capabilities.

The new navy chief Gorshkov then presided over the transformation of the defensive Soviet fleet into a powerfu1 navy of the nuclear era. He proceeded with the disposal of obso1cte battleships and older cruisers fo11owing Khrushchev's dictum, and stopped the new all-gun cruiser building plans scrapping many unfinished hulls still on the building ways.

Gorsckov activated the droning jargon of the Communist Party Central Committee which ca1led for a revolution in military affairs, and began transforming the conventiona1 navy into an offensive, long-range missile and nuclear force. But the transformation was late starting and fraught with difficulty. During the ensuing quarter-century of extraordinary Soviet navy expansion, the pattern of the enormous loss of life aboard Novorossysk would haunt the Soviet Navy as they launched unprecedented numbers of submarines and modern, lighter and missi1e-equipped surface ships in the race to become the world's largest navy. The stampede into the nuclear power arena resulted in scores of serious accidents aboard their prototype c1asses of submarines. The first nuclear sub K-3 burned killing thirty-nine and their first nuclear powered ballistic missile sub, K-19, suffered so many fatal accidents she was nicknamed ”Hiroshima.”

In 1962 in Leningrad however, during the height of the Cuban crisis, the mercurial Khrushchevwas already reproaching Admiral Gorshkov while they searched frantically for appropriate escortsfor their merchant ships being challenged enroute Cuba: ”We need ships with autonomy andlong range as escorts to Cuba,” roared the angry Khrushchev. ”How could you be without any?”

”But sir,” replied Gorshkov, you ordered them destroyed.”


”I ordered no such thing,” countered the First Secretary.


Khrushchev later denied that he gave the order to destroy all large surface combatants,that he ever knew about the sinking of battleship Novorossysk, or that he knew of the sacking of Admiral Kuznetsov.

These were the conditions which existed in 1962 when the Soviets' secret Operation Anadyr backfired. Here, presented for the first time, are personal accounts from both sides of the near-catastrophic nuclear confrontation which occurred in the Caribbean between Soviet submariners and U.S. Navy destroyermen, which but for the Grace of God, could have changed the destiny of mankind.

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