A tale of two fleets: a Russian perspective on the 1973 Naval standoff in the Mediterranean

Naval War College Review, Spring, 2004 by Lyle J. Goldstein, Yuri M. Zhukov

The principles of detente, however, often proved incompatible with Moscow's foreign policy toward client states. Egypt, which had been able to exploit Cold War rivalries to meet its own agenda--both in the domestic realm and in its ambitions to reclaim territory occupied by Israel in 1967--now fretted that detente would take precedence over Soviet support for Cairo and other Arab regimes. (35) Therein lay the dilemma for Moscow--such support risked direct superpower confrontation, but failure to provide it risked the loss of local port access, which was of tremendous strategic value to the Soviet Navy.

A NATO "LAKE"

The U.S. Sixth Fleet and NATO had long enjoyed such strategic advantages over the Soviet Navy that the Mediterranean was described as a NATO "lake" during the early phases of the Cold War. Most notably, NATO members controlled the two primary choke points into the sea--the Gibraltar and Turkish straits.

U.S. Advantages

The Sixth Fleet benefited from an abundance of local naval bases and facilities-among others Rota (Spain), La Maddalena (Italy), Naples (Italy), and Souda Bay, Crete (Greece). Furthermore, due to well developed underway replenishment techniques, the Sixth Fleet had generally been capable of operating for prolonged periods without shore access.

The Western alliance could draw on its carrier air wings in addition to NATO air bases in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Carrier-based aircraft were capable of dropping conventional or nuclear ordnance and had a range of more than a thousand miles, bringing Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and the southern USSR well within reach. (36) The deployment of even one extra carrier into the region (as had occurred during the October 1973 war) added an additional ninety aircraft.

One notable disadvantage encountered by the U.S. Navy in the Mediterranean, however, was the absence of a deep sound channel that could be exploited by the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), a network of seabed listening arrays deployed to detect submarines from great distances. (37) These arrays of hydrophones spaced along undersea cables had been installed in the Bahamas, along the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and most significantly in the North Atlantic. (38) The lack of SOSUS capabilities in the Mediterranean was somewhat alleviated by the deployment of surface ships equipped with towed-array surveillance systems."

Soviet Disadvantages

The principal constraints on Soviet Mediterranean operations, aside from the Montreux Treaty, included periodic restrictions on shore access, burdensome deployment distances, and air inferiority. Such factors made the exploits the Soviet Navy was able to achieve in the Mediterranean all the more remarkable.

Bases and Anchorages. The Soviets had never had permanent bases in the Mediterranean, and their access to local port facilities had always been tightly regulated by often-erratic host governments. The brief, limited use of Albanian port facilities ended in the Soviet Navy's expulsion and confiscation of its military equipment by Tirana in 1961. Moscow's subsequent Arab hosts were no more reliable. Captain First Rank Yevgenii Semenov, chief of staff of the Fifth Eskadra on the eve of the October War, recalls an occasion when two Black Sea Fleet submarines, having waited for two days to enter Annaba, Algeria, were finally, on 13 June 1973, forced to leave. (40) In such an unpredictable atmosphere, the Fifth Eskadra was compelled to diversify its points of contact along the Mediterranean littoral, maintain a standing force of auxiliary vessels to reduce dependence on local bases, limit on-station times, and request augmentation of Black Sea Fleet elements by Northern and Baltic Fleet forces. (41)