Dan Snow's History Hit - Cold War Submarine Warrior

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

Eric Thompson has had his finger literally on the nuclear button. He joined the Royal Navy submarine service in the early days of the Cold War. He served on WW2 era ships and submarines before ending his career as a senior officer on Britain's state of the art nuclear submarines. Each one is armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear tips. He took Dan to the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport to show him around one of the finest preserved submarines in the world, HMS Alliance. He told Dan how they kept the beer cold and why his main concern at sea was the toilet.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.We need your help! If you would like to tell us what you want to hear as part of Dan Snow's History Hit then complete our podcast survey by clicking here. Once completed you will be entered into a prize draw to win a £100 voucher to spend in the History Hit shop.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Here's a favourite episode from our archive. Enjoy. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got the very brilliant Eric Thompson on the podcast. He's a former Commodore in the Royal Navy. Throughout the Cold War he served on five submarines and ended up commanding Britain's main submarine base, Fastlane on the Clyde, where Britain's nuclear deterrent is based. He retired in 1998, but his love of submarines has never left him, as you'll hear, because for this podcast, I went round HMS Alliance with him. It was laid down right at the end of the Second World War, completed in 1947, and it served in the Royal Navy right the way through the 1970s. It's now

a museum ship in Gosport, just next to Portsmouth. So I was so honoured that Eric took me around this submarine. He talked to me all about his experience submarines and what submarines got up to in the Cold War. Enjoy. As soon as I arrived in the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, just across the water from Portsmouth, we clambered aboard HMS Alliance and straight away, Eric was in the zone. The tour began. This is an A-class submarine and I used to serve in one of these. Tripped down memory lane for you? Yeah, HMS Andrew. It was 1969-70 when I was one of these, which is a rather long time ago.

And what is an A-class? What does it do? I was 39, 70 when I was one of these, which is a rather long time ago. And what is an A-class? What does it do? Well, it's a diesel-driven submarine. And this class was built for high-speed transits in the Second World War from Trincomalee across to the Malaya area, where the Japanese had taken control. And this submarine was very fast on the surface. It could do about 16 knots.

But in the Cold War, it really wasn't much use because it was very noisy. If they were snorting, running the diesels, they're solidly mounted to the hull. But the idea was it would sink surface vessels or other submarines or what? Surface vessels, really. I mean, these Mark VIII torpedoes she would have had are very similar ones. And these are the tubes, are they? These are the tubes, 21 inch in diameter. One is for keeping beer, the other is for keeping water. There is actually, there's a beer in there?

Yeah. Is that something that happened when you were at sea? Yes, yes, we kept stuff up. One of the tubes usually, it keeps the beer cool. Well, glad you're having fun. And so, you say Second World War, so this is basically a World War II submarine, is it? Well, not quite.

It's a World War II design for World War II operational requirements, but I think Alliance herself, this one, didn't actually come into life until after the war was finished. The one I was in actually did clock in a couple of months after the war. But it's got a lot of modern equipment. I'm not sure... this is emergency breathing system. All these little breathing points are what you'd plug into if you were flooding up or whatever. The mind boggles me. And then you've got life jacket here for the KCF.

That's just for escaping. And you'd need that on the surface once you were up there, because once you've escaped, you haven't any lifeboats, you're just bobbing around. I mean, you probably get bored of people saying this, but for those of us who haven't been in submarines, we find it terrifying, the idea of being underwater and emergency breathing and having to escape.

No, I'll tell you what is terrifying, it's being in the London tube in the rush hour and thinking of you know the 777 bombs going off in the tube or the King's Cross fire and there's no chance of getting out. In a submarine you feel you're in control of things, you know you're surrounded by competent people who know the drills. Makes sense. If you're going to suffer from claustrophobia you wouldn't get beyond the hatch. Were there any guys my height?

One or two. I don't know how they slept. So take me through, now we're allowed to call it a boat aren't we? Yes a boat, submarine boats. Why are submarines boats and other vessels are ships? I think because way back in the early days they were quite small compared to all the mighty warships across there and they were very much down market. In the first world war, before the first world war when submarines came in, they came in in 1901

it was our first submarine and it's here by the way in the museum, Holland 1. The people who involved in submarines were seen as dirty, smelly, piratical and nothing to do with the real Navy and in fact the first Sea Lord at the time described submarines as unfair underhand and dandun English and said that any submarines were captured should be hanged as pirates and that is why we fly the Jolly Roger coming back from war patrols. It's not braggadocio, it's actually, it's two fingers up to Admiral Wilson it was, yes. Brilliant, right, let's keep going.

You've got bunks here, torpedoes here. There's not much in the way of sort of separation of space, is there? No, men would be sleeping in here. There would be more torpedoes, of course, when she was in service. And is this your personal kit in here. There would be more torpedoes of course in, when she was in service. And is this your personal kit in here is that? That? No I think that's more likely to be, oops, probably escape equipment.

Okay. I'm not sure. So certainly bunks suspended on top of gear and... Yep yep and I have slept in a torpedo rack so if you go on board as an extra as I did when I was a squadron officer there aren't any bunks for you. Really? And so you get to know each other pretty well? Oh yes yeah. Give me the absolute idiot's version a submarine moves underwater because a bit like a hybrid car today you charge the battery when you're on the surface and use the battery

when you're underwater is that right yes yes and in this old-fashioned class of submarines there's a clutch so you could say in harbour run the engines and the generators to charge the battery yeah when it's seated either propellers you clutch in in fact there's something there but in diesel electric boats which followed um there's no direct drive from the engine to the propellers. The engines just make electricity through a generator and it's electrical wires which go to a motor which drives the propellers. Okay.

Much quieter systems. So a bit like modern electric cars? Sort of, yes. Now these are the cornrods here. They're external. Well, they move Now these are the corn rods here. They're external. Well, they move up and down and work the tap. So those would, again, if you got your hand trapped

in there, that would be. Yeah, when she's steaming along, these are all going up and down all the time. Amazing, isn't it? Really quite noisy. And do you try, in a submarine, do you try and cruise on the surface where possible? Diesel boats did, because it's slightly faster.

Nuclears wouldn't. So, nuclear is because you've got unlimited fuel. You can just cruise along in the water. And also, because of the teardrop hull, it's actually pretty dangerous on the surface. There's no waves at all because you're going through the waves. And in fact, in the early days, there was a lookout when Courageous actually went through a large way off the Hebrides somewhere, and the poor lookout was sucked out and never found. So after that, they had to belt in.

But there's no real reason for a nuclear submarine to be on the surface. And so in the Second World War or your early service, you only went underwater when you were sort of approaching the enemy? Yeah, I mean, a boat like this would have crossed the Indian Ocean from Trincomalee and then dive and gone down the Malacca Straits and then look for targets. It's a matter of interest, that's the exhaust going overboard. When you say dive, I mean you just, this is so revolutionary. This is as important as human beings going into the air is our ability to fight and operate underwater.

Yeah. Well, I think adding to that, in the Second World War, a submarine like this, it was all periscope sightings for your target. In the Cold War, you're into sonar and it's listening and sound analysis, very, very high-tech stuff. And in the Cold War, presumably, unlike your friends in the infantry in Germany who were sitting around looking at the Soviets through binoculars, you were playing games. You were coming up against them and testing yourself against the opposition, right? Well, there were two different branches of the submarine service. One was the strategic nuclear deterrent submarines with intercontinental ballistic missiles. They simply went out and disappeared. Their three main priorities were, one, remain undetected, two, maintain constant

communications, and three, be it 15 minutes readiness to fire. SSNs, which are what we used to call hunter-killers, their role is entirely different. They go out to find Soviet submarines and ships and they did surveillance patrolling so in conjunction with the Americans, we were part of the relay. We always had at least one SSN up in the Barents Sea keeping an eye on what was going on up there. And there were a number of reasons for that. One is you would be wanting to hoover in all the radio signals, radar signals, so that you could record the characteristics of the latest Soviet missile radars or whatever, pick up the communications, see what they're talking about. You'd carry Russian interpreters and also get up close to the ships to get their sound

signatures. And with that intelligence, you could feed it out to all the other submarines and indeed anti-submarine aircraft like Nimrods with sonar buoys and frigates. So we all had these encyclopedias of what the electronic and sonar sound signatures are of as many Soviet craft as we could. So that was that one role. The second role was to see if, in our case, the Soviet Norland fleet was looking like it was getting ready to go to sea big time, and if so, why? Was that an indicator of an impending war? The third role would be to try and latch onto one of their missile submarines as it left

Murmansk and trail it. And we've done that, we've trailed it all the way down to the American coast. So they were quite busy and that was the exciting stuff. But you know, in both cases we don't talk about... I mean one of the nation's most closely guarded secrets is where do our missile submarines patrol? And only three people on board knew where we were. I was the senior engineer of Revenge and only once did I know where we were and that was because we had a particular problem the captain explained to me. But it was normally just the captain, the navigator and the XO knew where we were. And in the surveillance boats,

not everyone knew where they were. They would know they were on a sort of sneaky patrol, but they wouldn't, apart from the captain and the people directly involved, they wouldn't know. So all the crew in here, that's the only thing you have for the outside world, depth in feet. You know how far underwater you are. And apart from that, you don't know anything else. No. You're listening to Dan Snow's History.

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Now that we're all talking about electric cars, I've got range anxiety. How long would you be able to go in a vessel like this just on batteries? Well, it depends what you're doing. If you're sitting in the body and doing nothing, probably, I don't know, a day and a half maybe. If you're going around at a fair speed, then you're using up the battery quickly and you'd have to... Probably you'd be wanting to snort every six hours. So you have to get the snorkel up and put the diesels on and charge batteries up?

Yeah. And what depth do you have to be to do that? 50 feet, just a bit less than that I think. I think from memory the next class was about 54 feet. So this to me looks pretty old fashioned. I mean it's pretty remarkable that you first went to sea in things that were, you know, Second World War, very mechanical, and then you spent the rest of your career on nuclear power.

Yeah, I ended up sitting in front of a bank of dials with just a little... Well, in fact, a nuclear reactor almost needs an extra explanation but the nuclear reactor is so brilliantly well designed it's what you called load following and self-regulating. All we did if we wanted to go faster the guy on the throttles which it's just a little tiny lever on a desk and he just moves it up from stop to full speed and the steam comes off from the steam generators which are heated by the reactor and the reactor then becomes it's getting cold water returning into the cold waters

denser acts as greater moderator and increases the nuclear reaction and it makes more heat and it just kind of automatically follows. It's quite a... It's hands-off. Well, that sounds like a miracle to me. Well, it sort of is, really. Well, now we come into the accommodation space part of the submarine. This is a galley. So how many people would this be expected to cook for? I can't remember the exact numbers.

I think this would accrue about 60. 60 people? And they'd be eating three meals a day and the rest. And the chefs are the most amazing people. They just, I don't know how they do it, it's fantastic. And this is a bathroom. 60 people. What was the smell like on a submarine after a few weeks at sea?

The predominant smell was diesel fumes. Yeah, these are the heads in bathrooms. Now you see, the A-boats, some of them anyway, had this little thing to put your feet on because some naval doctor thought it was healthy to have your knees above your bottom when you're not sitting on the sea. Well, I have heard that.

I have heard that it's better to get your knees up. Now there was one submarine, a German submarine, that sank with a malfunctioning toilet, wasn't there? So there's a- Finally, toilets. If you ask me what's the thing that worried one most on, say, a deterrent patrol, it was blockage of your overboard sewage hull valve.

Actually, that's true. That's not a joke. You know, if you've got 150 blocks, probably operating the bows twice a day, and if the sewage tank fills up and you can't pump it overboard you the problems did you feel when you were in submarines that you were the The the hunters or were you the prey no you the hunters. Yeah, I mean British submarines always were So for the surface vessels were scared of you. Oh, no. No, they wanted to sink us. I mean

Well, no, no, they wanted to sink us. During the Second World War, we lost the entire strength of the submarine force during the war, replenishing it throughout, of course. But the strength we had at the beginning was lost. And a lot of our work was done in the Mediterranean. And in fact, although it's not generally appreciated, submarines played a key part in the victory at El Alamein because we were hitting Rommel supply lines from Italy to North Africa. But I mean, you know, in terms of your ethos, did you, by the time you were serving, how did that technological, how did the technology shift?

Did you feel you had more advantages or did you feel the advantage lay with the surface vessels and the aircraft? Well, you can be a bit myopic about these things we always felt we were invulnerable and that we were a target. I mean we call surface ships targets that's the terminology but nuclear submarines are very difficult to deal with them because they can go as fast and faster than the surface ships and in bad weather like for example when the task force is going down to the Falklands, terrible sea conditions, you can't go very fast as you'll be well aware in high seas, but a submarine can just hammer along at 30

miles an hour at 400 feet. So it can catch up with surface fleets, it can come up from astern and get... And it's quiet. And it's quiet. And surface ships... And this is one of the reasons I volunteered for submarines. My father was in the Navy during the war, and he was on convoy, so he was in the anti-submarine game.

And I fancied originally being captain of a destroyer. I failed the eye test for being a seaman officer, so I became an engineer. But anyway, out in the Far Eastern, I was a midshipman in Barossa, an old battle class destroyer, we used to do anti-submarine exercises against this class of submarine out of Singapore. And we could never find the damn thing. The submarine would fire a green grenade to say, I've just defeated you. And I thought that, well, you know. I want to be on that team. We're now in the era of nuclear submarines

And we can't even handle a submarine like this so I thought the answer is nuclear submarines and I'd grown up with the idea that You boats almost starved the country out during the Second World War and indeed during the First World War And I thought well if this country has got to be an anti-submarine force, the anti-submarine force has got to be submarines. Or is it a gamekeeper to catch a poacher? What is that expression? Poacher turned gamekeeper. Yeah.

And because of the new nuclear submarines, these massive sonar sets, which they could take deep, you know, the surface ships are big sonar sets, but they're bouncing around on the surface. And you get thermal layers on the surface because of the sun. That bends sound rays, et cetera. Submarines duck underneath. You can't hear them. So that's why I volunteer for submarines.

And, of course, one of the other roles of submarines is to let the heroes from the SBS slip ashore. So you'd surface, put a canoe on the nade. Different ways of doing it, yes. For this submarine that's what you did, you surfaced usually at night. Didn't fully surface, you didn't give full buoyancy and just enough to get the hatch open and then you get these guys out and off they go. But with modern submarines we've got sort of canoe release capsules, you know, steel things and they just go up into them and then be let out from there and the submarine wouldn't have to surface.

So this is a Second World War design used during the Cold War. How different would they be today? Oh, massively different. Almost no comparison really, apart from the fact that they're steel tubes. I mean a nuclear submarine for example is twice as wide, well sort of early generation Cold War nuclear submarine, twice as wide as this. She'd be carrying 21 torpedoes or more in her fore ends. But the modern submarines are carrying tube-launched cruise missiles for hitting Afghanistan, as well as torpedoes and indeed things like Sub Harpoon, which is a torpedo tube-launched anti-ship missile.

It's like Exocet, you know. So they've got a mixed bag of armaments, and then you go to the missile submarines, which the ballistic missile submarines, their targets are 4,000 miles away. So they're huge and they are a massive I mean a Trident submarine you probably put two of these inside one sounds like they're big enough

even my gangly frame might fit comfortably into one of those don't forget to watch the full length film of HMS Alliance on History Hit TV hope you enjoyed the pod see you next time.

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