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Royal Navy comes to ‘rescue’ of Swedish submarine during major NATO exercise
19 June 2025
The Royal Navy came to the rescue of Swedish submariners when they suffered an ‘emergency’ on NATO exercises in the Baltic.
HMS Dasher responded to the plea for help and conducted what is believed to be the first ever re-supply by the class of fast patrol boats and a submarine in their near-40-year careers, sending ground coffee across to their allies in the mid-ocean.
The special delivery was a light-hearted moment in the middle of an otherwise very serious NATO exercise to bolster safety and security in the region which has been taking place for the past ten days or so.
Baltops has been running since the early 1970s with the 54th run-out involving around 50 ships, submarines and support vessels, more than two-dozen aircraft, and around 9,000 personnel from 17 nations, spread across an area from Jutland and the Great Belt in the West to the Bay of Gdańsk – about 40,000 square miles or roughly the size of the Netherlands.
Six Royal Navy P2000 patrol boats from the Coastal Forces Squadron have been committed to Baltops, and end participation by attending the world’s largest sailing/yachting festival, Kiel Week, which begins on Saturday in the namesake German port.
The fast boats – HMS Archer, Biter, Dasher, Example, Pursuer and Smiter – are committed to the exercise; two are conducting extensive work with the Royal Navy’s Mine Threat and Exploitation Group, who’ve been using the craft as launchpads for the latest robot tech monitoring the underwater battlespace through uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs).
The remaining four vessels will work with US Navy surface and aerial drones (uncrewed air vehicles or UAVs), frequently ‘attacking’ the participants to test their responses dealing with small, fast and highly-manoeuvrable craft intent on harming much more powerful warships.
Although on this occasion it was only ground coffee, we’ve demonstrated allied co-operation, the ability to communicate between a P2000 and a Swedish submarine via NATO, and the ability for a P2000 to deliver critical stores at short notice to assist with submarines maintaining their operational readiness
It was during a break in one of these ‘attacks’ that Dasher’s crew received orders to help out the submarine – or u-båt (pronounced ‘ew-boht’) in Swedish – in the mid-Baltic after the two-dozen crew reported they’d nothing left aboard their boat to wash down their morning pastries.
Due to their size and regular role, patrol boats like Dasher do not have the full panoply of weapons, sensors and systems you’d expect to find in a major warship and need special NATO communications kit on board to deal with top-secret submarine communications (the name of the boat and the location of the rendezvous are classified).
When the two met up – thankfully on a glassy Baltic – due to the submarine pumping out pressurised gas, Dasher had to remain at least five metres away.
Rather than simply handing over the emergency rations, Seamanship Specialist Able Seaman Cody Prince threw a heaving line to the submarine. A waterproof bag, stashed with coffee and Italian biscuits, was passed over safely and the coffee crisis averted.
After the transfer was complete, Dasher sped away at 20 knots back to her base for the evening.
As for the rest of Baltops, it’s proved to be extremely useful: HMS Example and Smiter have been working with UK and Lithuanian dive teams experimenting – successfully – with underwater autonomous devices to locate contacts on the seabed.
The tactics being developed by the remaining four P2000s for surface attacks, has shown them that working in groups of two or more is far more effective than individually, not merely when it comes to charging at major warships, but in building up a comprehensive picture of targets to determine the best place and time to strike.