Warship Wednesday: HMCS Onondaga
Continuing our Warship Wednesday blog series, we take a closer look at high speed submarine, HMCS Onondaga, who, after being saved from scrappage, featured on her very own television programme.
Pledged to ‘pack an impressive punch’, Onondaga was built at HM Dockyard Chatham in 1964 for the Royal Canadian Navy at a cost of $16,000,000.
The 295 feet vessel was designed to withstand pressure at great depths and travel at high speeds, without generating noise that would betray her to a ‘vigilant enemy’.
Eagerly awaited in Maritime Command National Defence, Onondaga was filled with complex equipment to increase detection capability. Her commissioning marked an important advance in anti-submarine warfare capacity, both as a weapon in her own right and as a training medium.
HM Dockyard Chatham was the only yard in the UK capable of building submarines undercover at the time. Onondaga was constructed by a highly specialized team of naval architects and constructors and mechanical and electrical engineers and came complete with her own library, movie projector and tape recorder.
The 56th submarine to be built at the yard, she kept Chatham in the forefront of technological advance, where ships had been built for successive sovereigns since the first ship was launched there in 1908.
Much thought and ingenuity was devoted to using every scrap of space to maximise advantage. The warship featured six bow tubes capable of firing either diesel or electrically propelled torpedoes and was capable of cruising for long periods at depth and of bursts of highwater speeds.
As Onondaga launched from Chatham in 1965, a local newspaper reported: ‘She carried with her the goodwill and sincere wishes of all who have been concerned in conceiving and building her. Her crew will accept her with confidence from one of the finest teams of designers and builders to be found anywhere.”
The second of three Oberon class submarines to be acquired for the Royal Canadian Navy, Onondaga displaced 2,030 tonnes surfaced and 2,410 tonnes submerged. She measured 295 feet ¼ inch long with a beam of 26 ½ feet and a draught of 18 feet.
Named after a group of North American Indians, which made up one of the nations of the Iroquois confederacy and allied themselves with England during the struggle for Canada, Onondaga was the first ship to bear the name in the Royal Canadian Navy, although she had predecessors which also played a part in the country’s history.
Onondaga was assigned to Maritime Forces Atlantic (MARLANT) as part of the First Canadian Submarine Squadron and served nearly her entire career in the North Atlantic. She spent time training with the Royal Navy on an exchange program set up to allow submarines from both the Royal Navy and Royal Canadian Navy spend time with each other’s forces. This allowed Canadian submarines on intelligence-gathering missions.
Following the end of the Cold War, the Oberons were re-tasked, performing patrols on behalf of federal institutions such as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Solicitor General of Canada between 1991-94.
The last operational Oberon-class submarine in Canadian service, Onondaga was decommissioned by Maritime Command on 28 July 2000. Along with her sister boats, she was left to await disposal in Halifax harbour.
In 2001, it was proposed she be cut into pieces and reassembled inside the Canadian War Museum but the plan was cancelled due to excessive costs.
After being saved from scrappage by maritime museum, Site historique maritime de la Pointe-au-Père in Quebec, Onondaga was eventually displayed as a publicly accessible museum piece in 2009 after three attempts at removing her from the water. Failed endeavours included a snapped tow bridle, the onset of Hurricane Bertha and a fall from a marine railway!
The transportation and removal of Onondaga from the water was featured in the ‘Supersize Submarine’ episode of the British documentary television series Monster Moves.
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