A Royal Navy (RN} submarine was paying a goodwill visit to Norfolk naval yard. It was due to arrive at a certain time, let’s say 2 in the afternoon. At 2 precisely there was no sign of the submarine, but it was not a hard and fast rule that they had to arrive exactly on time. By 4 in the afternoon, people were getting a little twitchy as this was really a bit unusual and there was talk of starting to search for the submarine.

Shortly after 4 in the afternoon the RN submarine surfaced, right next to the dock it was supposed to be tied up to. Normally submarines would surface outside the entrance to the naval yard and be escorted in by surface vessels, but this submarine had managed to avoid the naval guard vessels outside the yard, was not detected by any systems that were supposed to detect submarines, and managed to work its way through the rest of the naval yard to it’s temporary berth.

To be honest, the US Navy were not overly impressed by this, firstly if the submarine had been detected without being identified if may have been attacked without warning, and secondly all the defences the naval yard had to prevent submarines sneaking in had been defeated.

The RN captain had a short, one sided conversation with the commander of the naval yard (a conversation without coffee or biscuits, with his hat on and standing to attention…}, followed by a longer conversation with the British naval attache (a much more relaxed conversation with some strong drink}.

So to go back to the original question, I would say the British submarines are pretty good, and don’t think the Americans submarines could match the feat

When I first wrote this some four years ago, I was repeating a story I read on another forum, one that is home to a lot of well respected, learned, and serious people. I posted it a little tongue in cheek, because the original question smacked of blatant “we’ve the best, aren’t we” jingoism, and I felt that an opposing opinion was warranted.

The post I originally read was taken as a bit of light banter, the comments after it were indicative of the “great sea story….” type of thing, and no-one took it too seriously.

When I posted this version of it here, the general comments were similar, those who shared a nationality with the original question derided it and everyone else of other nationalities was happy that perhaps someone had taken the host nation down a peg. I don’t think many people seriously believed it.

Like I said, that was four years ago. Over the interim period it occassionally pops up as someone else commenting or voting, but nothing significant. However for some reason it must have hit a nerve a couple of months ago, and there have been a plethora of derogatory comments (and a few upvotes) since then.

All I can say to those who seem to want to add their judgement on how true this story is based on their perceived knowledge etc, “Get over yourselves”!