Service
The first of the class to be commissioned into the Royal Navy was Orpheus in 1960, followed by the name vessel in 1961. The last to be commissioned was Onyx in 1967. Six were commissioned between 1967 and 1978 for the RAN. In 1982, HMS Onyx took part in the Falklands War, the only conventional submarine of the RN to do so, landing members of the SBS. All Oberons in service, including boats exported, have now been decommissioned; the last RN boats were decommissioned in 1993, with the final Canadian and Australian Oberons decommissioned in 2000.
Like the Porpoises, the Oberons were far quieter than their American counterparts. They performed remarkably well in clandestine operations, performing surveillance and inserting special forces, vital during their heyday in the Cold War. These operations were primarily carried out by the British across Arctic Europe; the Canadians across the North Atlantic; and the Australians throughout south-east Asia and as far north as the Sea of Japan.
The Oberon class was arguably the best conventional submarine class of its time, with an astonishing reputation for quietness that allowed it to exist into the 21st century until replaced by newer classes such as the Collins and Victoria classes in Australia and Canada respectively.
Read more about this topic: Oberon Class Submarine
Famous quotes containing the word service:
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
Of one whose promised thoughts of other days
Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The man of large and conspicuous public service in civil life must be content without the Presidency. Still more, the availability of a popular man in a doubtful State will secure him the prize in a close contest against the first statesman of the country whose State is safe.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)