Decommissioning of Daphne class submarines

Four submarines of the Pakistan Navy are being decommissioned today; they are the Daphne Class submarines Hangor, Shushuk, Mangro and Ghazi. After 35 years of meritorious service the hour has come to finally call it a day.
The life of a warship, like that of a human being, is marked by a few major milestones. The first one, the conception in the womb, is the Keel-laying for the vessel; a very important gentleman comes and ceremoniously places a piece of the hull on the slipway (or the dock), from which the vessel starts growing into a recognisable shape.
The second milestone, the birth, is the Launching; a lady smashes a bottle and the ship goes sliding down the slipway to a cheering world. The third, after the vessel has completed her sea trials, is the Commissioning ceremony. That is when she is given a name and is welcomed into the Fleet as a new member of the family. And finally, a long, long time later, comes the Decommissioning Day, the day for the vessel to fade away. Such a day has now arrived for these four submarines.
The Chief guest for this grave ceremony, which will be held in the PN Dockyard, will be the senior-most serving submariner - Vice Admiral Mohammad Haroon, the Vice Chief of the Naval Staff. The Decommissioning Orders will be read out in his presence, the flags that the submarines flew so proudly for over three-and-a-half decades will be lowered for the last time, and a bugler will sound a funereal Last Post. Overseeing all this, with a detached dignity that only age and wisdom can bestow, will be the father of our submarine service, Admiral KR Niazi.
Then, accompanied by other officers who, like him had the honour to command these submarines in their respective times, Admiral Haroon will go down the hatch of one of the Daphnes (the Ghazi) for the last time. And as he takes his formal and nostalgic walk inside her gutted and empty belly, he will no doubt marvel at how his six-foot body (he was the "Little John" of the submarine service) could have slept like a baby on those narrow bunks; nay, even call the place "home".
Another old submariner, Vice Admiral Ahmed Tasnim, will no doubt find time to walk through his old submarine, Hangor, pausing in the Ops Room to stroke the old periscope one last time, and relive the adrenaline-filled moments of the sinking of INS Kukri in the 1971 war. After that naval action there had been no further missile attacks on Karachi from the sea.
The Decommissioning Ceremony will be the last hurrah of these submarines. After this, only one final trip remains for them - a kind of dead man's walk. Stripped of everything, three of these submarines will be towed to Gadani Beach for ship breaking. The Hangor however will be spared this ignominy; she will be cut in sections, transported by road and then reassembled in the Maritime Museum near PNS Karsaz.
The Daphnes of the French Navy have long since been phased out of service, as have the Daphnes in the Portuguese, Spanish and South African navies. The Last Post that will be sounded today will be for the passing of the very last of this wonderful class of submarines.
The Pakistan Navy submarine service started in the early sixties with the induction of the American-origin submarine named Ghazi. She sank in the 1971 War off the East Coast of India, taking all her crew with her. The second class of submarine was the French-origin Daphne Class, now coming to their end. The third class of submarines is the French-origin Agosta class; they now have to take all the strain of fighting the underwater war.
Back in 1969, when the Pakistani crews started arriving in France for manning the Daphne submarines, they found that they had to unlearn a number of deeply ingrained American-type submarine habits. They realised that the saying "vive la difference!" was only too true; the French actually did do things a lot differently. The crews were taken aback, first, by the construction details. While ballast tanks, hull frames and so on were numbered from the front to the rear in the American boats (and boats of most countries) the same in the French boats were numbered from back to front. They noted that pipes didn't go outside the hull to cool hot liquids coursing through them; they came inside the hull carrying seawater to cool liquids inside the hull. After surfacing, residual water in the ballast tanks was not blown out with a special LP Blower, but by cleverly diverting the exhaust gasses of the running main engines into those tanks. They marvelled at how hundreds of rubber pipes and resilient mountings arrested machinery vibrations to make the boats quieter and they were faced with the latest technologies in the electronic world, particularly sonars; the passive ranging sonar was a revolutionary set in those days. But they found to their horror that they couldn't smoke in these boats like they could in the American ones.
There were differences in how these boats were operated also. Each dive of the submarine didn't have to be a crash-dive as was the case in the American submarines. The French ones dived nice and slow; even the sound of their diving claxon was a lullaby in comparison. And once dived, the submarine remained underwater till the time came for her to return to harbour. The COs learnt NOT to go round and round the periscopes, but to sit still in one place (and that too not pointing ahead but to one side) while the periscope itself rotated for them inside a trunk as thick as a tree.
They also learnt NOT to carry out torpedo attacks like noisy cowboys riding in on their periscopes with shouts of, "Fire one! Fire two! Fire three!" They learnt instead to spend most of their time lurking below the layer, and make each torpedo count. The watch-keeping officers had to learn how to lay off angles on the chart NOT with the help of compass roses and heavy brass parallel rules, but with baffling French gadgets called Craas Rules and Taximetres.
Though these boats were much smaller in size than the American ones and therefore more uncomfortable to live in, their very smallness was a blessing in disguise. They made such small sonar targets, particularly when pointing towards the enemy sonar, that many a frustrated Captain on an opposing ship's bridge had to resort to the well-known refrain from The Scarlet Pimpernel:
We seek him here, we seek him there; we seek him everywhere.
IS HE IN HEAVEN? - IS HE IN HELL? THAT DAMMED, ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL?
The Daphnes were very manoeuvrable boats on the surface as well as underwater. With their twin propellers the CO could turn them around as he pleased in harbour.
And with the rudder and stern planes lying in the wash of the propellers, the boats handled like sports cars out at sea as well. In fact the Daphne's bridge being located at the rear end of the sail (quite unlike any other submarine in the world) made standing a watch on such a bridge something like being in the driving seat of a vintage sports car - the type that was all engine and bonnet up front (with a forest of raised periscopes and masts thrown in for good measure), and a very tiny, open and draughty driver's seat right at the rear next to the noisy exhaust pipe.
THE FRENCH DAPHNE SUBMARINES WERE ALL NAMED AFTER GREEK GODDESSES: Daphne, Diane, Venus, and so on. The first three Pakistani Daphnes were named after sharks in provincial languages: Hangor, Shushuk and Mangro (which the French remembered with the convenient sentence: "Allez, mon gros, encore un choushouk - C'mon my friend, one more pill"). The fourth Daphne was not a new one like the others; it was bought second-hand from Portugal about five years later. By then the Navy had run out of shark names so it was decided to call this Johnny-come-lately a Mahasher. It was an impressive-sounding name as names go, but it didn't exactly have the crew jumping for joy because, unlike a shark, Mahasher was a fish that ended up on a dinner plate. The submarine was therefore named after the old Ghazi.
These submarines have had a good innings; the first three are veterans of the 1971 war with India. The first major overhaul, of Hangor, was undertaken in the Dockyard in the mid-seventies; and those of the other Daphnes went like clockwork after that.
Such overhauls, along with regular maintenance cycles and modifications ensured that the Daphnes were always ready for work when called upon. In their middle ages these submarines were armed with missiles and their hearing aids (sonars) were also improved. They have been on countless patrols, taken part in international exercises and shown the flag in distant ports. Hangor for example has steamed the equivalent of ten times round the world and submitted to about half a dozen major overhauls; her longest patrol lasted more than one month.
The Daphnes are weary and content; they have done their bit and run their miles, all with honour. And now the torch has been handed over to the Agostas for carrying on the race.
(The writer was the first CO of the second Ghazi.)