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:
“Service ... is love in action, love “made flesh”; service is the body, the incarnation of love. Love is the impetus, service the act, and creativity the result with many by-products.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 3, ch. 3 (1962)
“The more the specific feelings of being under obligation range themselves under a supreme principle of human dependence the clearer and more fertile will be the realization of the concept, indispensable to all true culture, of service; from the service of God down to the simple social relationship as between employer and employee.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“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)