Royal Navy Clearance Diving: A History of the Branch

Rob Hoole

The following article was written by Rob Hoole and appears on the website 'www.mcdoa.org.uk'. It has been reproduced with the kind permission of Rob Hoole. The pictures are also the property of Mr Hoole and have been reproduced with his permission.

On 7 March 2002, the RN Clearance Diving Branch celebrated the 50th Anniversary of its formation and several Golden Jubilee events were held during the year.

Clearance Diving takes its name from the operations carried out towards the end and after the Second World War to clear the ports and harbours of the Mediterranean and Northern Europe of unexploded ordnance and booby traps laid by the Germans. This work was undertaken by RN Mine and Bomb Disposal Units and later by Port Clearance Parties or 'P' Parties, two of which (Naval Parties 1571 and 1572) went into action soon after D-Day to clear the vast quantities of unexploded ordnance and general debris left after the Allied invasion. They were joined later by other 'P' Parties including NPs 1574, 2444 and 3006, many of which had Dutch and Commonwealth naval personnel. Work in the European theatre continued well into 1945 when a total of 6 'P' Parties were involved.

Members of RN Mine and Bomb Disposal Units, and later, 'P' Parties, were among the most highly decorated of the war. While the Mine and Bomb Disposal Units suffered many grievous casualties, not a single member of a 'P' Party was lost despite having cleared the ports of Cherbourg, Caen, Dieppe, Le Havre, Boulogne, Rouen, Calais, Ostend, Terneuzen, Zeebrugge, Bruges, Flushing, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Bremen. 60 mines were cleared at Bremen alone. Lt Cdr Lionel 'Buster' Crabb was one of those involved in clearance operations in Italy having seen success against the limpet mines placed on ships in Gibraltar harbour by Italian charioteers operating from a ship interned across the bay in Algeceiras harbour. On 19 April 1956, he was to disappear in mysterious circumstances when the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze brought Kruschev and Bulganin to Portsmouth.

OTHER NAVAL ORGANISATIONS

Other naval organisations that made a contribution to the CD Branch include:

Standard Divers. These 'professional divers' of pre-war days were trained at HMS Excellent. Among other things, they carried out much research and experimental work in conjunction with eminent scientists such as Sir Robert Davis of Siebe Gorman and Professor J S Haldane for the furtherance of diving knowledge. Officers and sailors, mainly from the Gunnery Branch, became Qualified Deep Divers. For some time after the war, they served in the Fleet as Clearance Divers but gradually they were phased out or transferred to the CD Branch.

Admiralty Experimental Diving Unit. The AEDU was formed in 1942 under the command of the first RN Superintendent of Diving, a submarine officer from HMS Dolphin, Lt Cdr (later Capt) W O Shelford. The unit was based at the Tolworth, Surrey works of Siebe Gorman and Co Ltd and a close partnership was formed during the war years. Here, all the diving equipment was developed for human torpedoes (chariots), midget submarines (X-craft), mine recovery parties and, later, for the 'P' Parties. An exhaustive programme of human experiments was conducted on oxygen diving and other physiological problems associated with diving with Professor J S B Haldane (son of J S Haldane) acting as the adviser. AEDU continued to perform its work at HMS Vernon until shortly before its closure.

The Mining Department and the Mine Design Department of HMS Vernon. During the Second World War, the Mining Department was set up under the Director of Torpedoes and Mining at the Admiralty with responsibility for the recovery of enemy mines, both above and below water. Rendering Mines Safe (RMS) teams were also responsible for the disposal of unexploded mines. Recovered mines were exploited by the Mine Design Department to discover how they worked and, thereby, how they could be swept or countered.

Landing Craft Obstacle Clearance Units. The 'LOCUs' were a vital part of the D-Day invasion forces in Normandy and they laid the foundations for the beach clearance techniques that are used today. Those remaining after the war were eventually incorporated in the Clearance Diving Branch.

Naval Bomb Disposal Teams. These were set up under the Directorate of Naval Ordnance during the Second World War to discharge the Royal Navy's responsibility for dealing with unexploded bombs on its own property.

X-Craft and Chariot Crews. These belonged to the Submarine Branch but the crews were required to train as divers. Much of the work devoted to their training and to the development of their equipment was conducted by AEDU and contributed to the diving techniques and equipment in use today. X-Craft, with divers embarked for cutting through defensive nets and attaching limpet mines, attacked the German battleship Tirpitz in Norway in September 1943 and were also used successfully in the Far East. British charioteers operated in the Mediterranean and the Far East.

With the end of the war, Vernon(D) at Brixham was closed on 1 Oct 1945 and the 'P' Parties moved their headquarters to HMS Vernon but only for a short period. It was decided to integrate the 'clearance' divers more closely with the mine countermeasures establishment at HMS Lochinvar in Port Edgar on the Forth and this is where the members of the last 'P' Party (NP 2444) were sent in March 1946 after having cleared Dunkirk. In the meantime, HMS Vernon became the centre for Deep Diving and AEDU moved here from Siebe Gorman at Tolworth. Something of a division then sprang up between the deep divers at Vernon (the 'Steamers') and the Clearance Divers at Lochinvar (the 'Corkheads').

FORMATION OF THE CLEARANCE DIVING BRANCH

The Clearance Diving (CD) Branch was officially formed under Admiralty Fleet Order (AFO) 857/52 on 7 March 1952 although a training nucleus had been set up some 2 years earlier to take advantage of the few remaining men with wartime experience. These officers and ratings had, in the main, qualified as Shallow Water Divers trained to use the Sladden 'Clammy Death' diving dress and oxygen breathing apparatus. They were joined by other officers and ratings Qualified in Deep Diving (QDD). On 25 February 1966, the Minewarfare and Clearance Diving (MCD) Branch was formed for officers. Those officers already qualified as CD and TAS automatically became MCD Officers while those qualified only as CDOs undertook a conversion course to be trained in Minewarfare, until then, the prerogative of TAS Branch officers. TAS (UW) and (UC) ratings continued to perform Minewarfare duties until 1975 when the Minewarfare (MW) sub branch of the Operations Branch was formed together with the Diver sub branch. In 1981, the MCD Branch took over responsibility for demolitions training from the Sonar (ex-TAS UC) sub branch of the Operations Branch.

DEEP DIVING

In June 1948, HMS Reclaim entered service and was to be the RN's deep diving tender for the next quarter of a century. Almost immediately, she grabbed the world's headlines when, within two months of commissioning, Petty Officer W Bollard claimed the world deep diving record at 535 feet. She went on to undertake several more headline grabbing tasks by finding, and often assisting in the deep salvage of various submarines (including the Affray in April 1951), aircraft, helicopters and weapons lost during trials. On 12 October 1956, Lt G A Wookey dived from HMS Reclaim to set a new deep diving record of 600 feet in Sor Fjord, Norway. The CD branch retained a deep diving capability using the venerable Deep Diving Trials Tender HMS Reclaim, the short-lived Seabed Operations Vessel HMS Challenger and the chartered Seaforth Clansman as saturation diving platforms for NP 1007 until the late 1980s when naval deep diving was abandoned because it became more cost-effective to use commercial resources when required.

OTHER ACHIEVEMENTS

The CD Branch has been kept active throughout its existence. The Mediterranean CD Team undertook the clearance of WWII ordnance in Grand Harbour, Malta. During Operation Rheostat in 1974/5, the Fleet Clearance Diving Team worked with RN MCMVs to clear the Suez Canal of ordnance and other military debris following the Arab-Israeli 6 Day War. The final tally included 209 tons of TNT bombs of various sizes, about 800 ant-tank and anti-personnel mines, 6,000 rounds of ammunition and 70 various missiles. During Operation Hemicarp in 1977, RN CDs co-operated with their US counterparts to clear ex-US and Japanese WW II ordnance from the waters of Tarawa and Tuvalu in the Gilbert and Ellis Islands. On a more peaceful note, 35 RN CDs worked with 18 Egyptian divers in 1977/78 to shift 16,000 tons of mud and 320 blocks of stone during the movement of important Egyptian monuments submerged by the construction of the Aswan Dam to a site replicating Philae on Agilkia island.

CD teams worked in particularly arduous conditions conducting bomb and mine disposal during Operation Corporate in the Falklands in 1982 and in the Red Sea during Operation Harling in 1984. In 1987, they cleared Iranian mines in the Gulf of Oman and in the Persian Gulf during Operation Cimnel. In 1991, they were back in the Persian Gulf during Operation Granby, this time clearing hundreds of Iraqi mines laid off the shore of Kuwait. Most recently, CDs embarked in RN minehunters were involved in Operation Allied Harvest (the clearance of allied bombs jettisoned in the Adriatic during the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts) in 2000, and Operation Cleanex (the clearance of wartime ordnance in the Baltic) in 2001.

RN CDs were again in action in action to clear the Shatt-al-Arab waterway and Basra harbour during Operation Telic, the war to depose Saddam Hussein of Iraq. They remain in Iraq after the war to complete the clearance of Iraqi ports, conduct joint service EOD and search for weapons of mass destruction. Accounts of this activity can be found in the News Archives for 2003.

Today, CD units remain busy around the country conducting explosive ordnance disposal, usually of wartime ordnance washed up on the beach or hauled up by fishing vessels, complex underwater engineering tasks on ships and submarines, search and recovery operations and many other tasks as well as providing Military Assistance to the Civil Powers (MACP) for such tasks as Improvised Explosive Device Disposal (IEDD) and Maritime Counter Terrorism (MCT). Clearance diving elements are also embarked in mine countermeasures vessels (MCMVs) as an integral part of the weapons system for mine disposal. Perhaps uniquely in the RN, members of the CD Branch perform their hazardous wartime role of dealing with live ordnance on a daily basis even in peacetime.

                                                                                                                                                By Rob Hoole

(A full list of references used to compile this article can be found on www.mcdoa.org.uk)