Inside Britain's Last Surviving Second World War-Era Submarine | HMS Alliance

commodore eric thompson spent 37 years in the navy much of it aboard submarines both conventional and nuclear today he's giving me a tour of the magnificent hms alliance [Music] now preserved at the royal navy submarine museum [Music] good morning here we go is it like this is an a-class submarine and i used to serve in one of these trip down memory lane for you yeah hms and it was 1969 70 when i was one of these which is a rather long time ago and what is naclos what does it do well it's a it's a diesel driven sub okay and this class was built for high-speed transits in the second world war from trinkum ali across to the malaya area where the japanese are taking control and this submarine is very fast on the surface could do about 16 knots but in the cold war it really wasn't much use because it was very noisy uh if they were snorting running the diesels they're solidly mounted to the hull and but the idea was it would it would sink surface vessels or other submarines or what surface vessels really i mean these these markets are peters she would have had of very similar ones and these are the these the tubes are they these these are tubes 21 inch in diameter one is for keeping beer the other is for 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 i know and so what do i mean you say second world war so this is this is basically a a world war ii submarine is this well not quite it's a world war ii designed um for world war ii operational requirements um but i think alliance herself this one i 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 of the war but it's 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 and then and then you've got life jacket here for the case you have that's that's yes 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 so i mean it's you probably get bored of people saying this but for those who haven't been in submarines we find it terrifying the idea of being underwater and emergency breathing and having to escape yeah i'll tell you what is terrifying it's being in the london tube in the russia and thinking of you know the seven seven bombs going off in the tube or the king's cross fire there's no chance of getting out but the submarine you feel you're in control of things uh you know you're surrounded by competent people you know the drills yeah and uh no it makes sense what 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 mean i don't know i don't know how this slipped i don't know how to do that yes what with the suit so take me let's let's take me through it now we're allowed to call it a boat aren't we yes support right why are submarines boats and and other vessels or ships i think because way back in the early days they were quite small compared to all the mighty warships across there and um they were very much down market in the first world war before the first world war and submarines came in they came in in 1901 as our first submarine and it's here by the way in the museum uh holland one the people who involved in submarines were seen as dirty smelly paratical and nothing to do with the real navy and and in fact the first sea lord at the time described submarines as unfair underhand and damned on english and he and 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 oh yeah 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 uh of space is there no no you men would be sleeping in here um there will be more torpedoes of course in um when she was in service and is this your personal kit in here is that that no i think that's more like to be oops probably skate equipment okay i'm not sure so certainly bunks suspended on top of gear and yep yep and uh i have slept in a torpedo rack something 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 yeah now here's an interesting deal this um electrical switch gears 220 volts uh system they have direct current from a battery this would have been built by whiffenborn and rochdale and uh when i was in andrew which is sister ship to this or a brothership really the name like andrew we we happened to be anchored in of pithelli in wales for the investiture of prince charles prince of wales the next evening we were having a cocktail party on board for the yacht club and this guy was there and the captain sent for me and said eric who made our switch gear i said we've been born rochdale and he said this is mr whip oh really and uh i i brought him back here and the two of us sat in here and he had tears in his eyes and he said my brother designed this wow uh and sadly his brother died testing electrical equipment for polaris submarines it was a very touching little yeah nice to meet the people responsible for it so and in here this would be give me a sense of what this would be like under underway or would it be noisy very very nice this is the engine room as you can see those are the engines there so it's just a singular compartment these are the generators and electrical generators and and notice that this copper here would be live live live yes so no health and safety at work here these bars are to help you if you touch that you would die you would probably be electrocuted yes um okay so you had to wear rubber soled shoes of course in the stupidest give me the absolute idiot's version a submarine moves underwater because a bit like a 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 harbor run the engines and the generators to charge the battery yeah when it's seated either propellers you clutch in in fact this thing there it but in these electric boats which followed um there's there's no direct drive from the engine to the propellers the the engines just make electricity through generator and and it's electrical wires which go to um a motorcycle propellers okay so much quieter so it's a bit like modern electric cars software yes now these are the conrods here they're external well they 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 when she's steaming along these are all going up and down all the time really quite noisy and there's the size of a piston what look at the state that's a huge piston isn't it and for 420 revs i remember is maximum speed just on the surface just order up 420 euros and if you went and do you try in a submarine do you try and cruise on the surface where possible um diesel boats did yeah because it's slightly faster nuclears wouldn't no so nuclear is because you've got unlimited fuel you can just cruise along yeah and also the teardrop hull it's actually pretty dangerous on the surface of any waves at all because you're going through the waves and in fact in the early days um there's a lookout when courageous actually went through a large wave off the hebrides somewhere and the pool lookout was sucked out never found so after the belt in but there's there's no real reason for nuclear submarine to be on the surface and so in the 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 across the indian ocean from drinking malee and then dive and gone down the malacca straits okay and then loot for targets thanks a matter of interest this is the um that's the exhaust going overboard okay it's when you say dive i mean you just this is so revolutionary this is as as important as human beings going into the areas our ability to fight and operate underwater yeah well i think adding to that in the second world war submarine like this it was all periscope sightings for your target um 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 are sitting around you know looking at them perhaps looking at soviets through binoculars you were you were playing games i mean you were coming up against them weren't testing yourself against the opposition well there were two different kind of branches of the submarine service one was the strategic nuclear deter submarines with intercontinental ballistic missiles they suddenly went out and disappeared their three main control priorities were one remain undetected two maintain constant communications and three fifty minutes readiness to fire 15 ssns which are they what used to call hunter killers they're always entirely different they go out to find soviet submarines and ships and they did surveillance patrolling so in conjunction with the americans were part of the relay you know we always had at least one ss end up in the barren sea keeping an eye on what was going on up there and there's a number of reasons for that one is you would be wanting to hoover in all the radio signals radar signals um so that you could uh record the characteristics of the latest soviet missile radars or whatever uh pick up the communication see what they're talking about we carry russian interpreters and uh also get up close to their ships to get their sound signatures and and with that intelligence you could feed it out to all the other submarines and indeed anti-submarine aircraft like nimrod's sonar boys 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 uh so that was that one roll the second roll was to um see if the in our case the soviet northern fleet was looking like it was getting ready to go to see big time and if so why was that an indicator of an impending war and the third role would be to try and latch on to one of their missile submarines as it left mermansk and trade trailer and when we've done that we trail it all the way down to the american coast so they were quite busy and that that was um you know the exciting stuff but you know in both cases we don't talk about i mean one of the nation's closest most closely guarded secrets is submarines patrol and uh only three people on board knew where we were i mean i 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's normally just the caps in the navigator and the exo knew where we were and and in the the um surveillance boats you know not everyone knew where they were what they would know they were a sort of sneaky patrol but they wouldn't apart from the captain and the the people directly involved they wouldn't know it's just it's all the crew in here that you know that's the only thing you have for the outside world depth in feet you know you know you know how far underwater you are and apart from that yeah you don't know anything else no terrifying right let's keep going so terrifying no one would have slept in here because this is this is the engine room yeah well this is where the engine room artifices would have uh control the actual engines from you the engine clutch here you've got the supercharger clutch fuel pump and control of the spray valves and then this is what the instruction is this would be the order to you know stop engines or slow half full ahead is an emergency you only ever use fool ahead for an emergency standing charges from the boats may be in harbor and you want to charge the batteries so you don't want the propellers turning so i've got now that we're ultimate electric cars i've got range anxiety how uh 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 if i don't know a day and a half maybe yeah if you're if you're 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 to put the diesels on and charge batteries up yeah how what depth you have to be to do that 50 feet just a bit less than that i think okay i think from memory there the next class was about 54 feet so so this to me looks pretty old-fashioned i mean it's pretty remarkable that you first went to see in things that were you know second world war very mechanical and then you spent the rest of your career on nuclear power yeah they ended up sitting in front of a bank of dials with um just a little well in fact a nuclear reactor almost needs an extra explanation but um the nuclear reactor is so brilliantly well designed it's what you called um load following and self-regulating all we did if we wanted to go faster the guy on the throttles which um it's just a little tiny lever on a desk it 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 water's denser acts as greater moderator and increases the nuclear um reaction and it makes more heat and it just kind of automatically follows it's quite a it's hands off um well that sounds like a miracle to me well it sort of is really all through this thing here dan that's the the main snort induction hull valve that's um where you let this start your snorkel tube okay and that that's um that's a boat sinker so that's a very important valve if if we ever have to shut it because that is a there's a hole in the hole now yeah right like about um 14 inches in diameter right this looks a bit more domestic through here well now we're coming to the accommodation space part of the submarine this is 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'll be eating three meals a day and the rest and the chefs are the the most amazing people they they just they just i don't know how they do it's fantastic and is this something this is a bathroom 60 people what was the smell like on a submarine after a few weeks at sea the predominant smell was um diesel fumes yeah these are the heads and bathrooms now you see um the about 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 and you're not sitting well i have heard that i've had heard it's better to get your knees up now there was one submarine that a german submarine that sank with a malfunctioning toilet wasn't there so there's a final toilet if you ask me what's the thing that worried one most on um say deterrent patrol it was blockage of your overboard sewage hold on actually that's true that's not a joke you know if you've got 150 blocks um probably operating the bowels twice a day and uh as the sewage tank fills up and you can't pump it over you've got problems uh communications yeah this would be the wireless office quite quite roomy in there it is in fact i have a unique tape recording of a ship's concert which i happen to organize because i'm that way inclined and we did it in here and we put out over the loudspeakers around the mess stakes now this this feels like an important place yeah this is a control room and you have the two periscopes here one is the attack periscope now there's the search periscope this is the search periscope which is the larger one it's binocular this is the attack periscope which is monocular oh it's okay and it's got a very slim top to it so when you're doing an attack you're just exposing this little tiny bit guys this one's quite big what an amazing space and so it would be the skipper in here yeah will you have been in here in your yes i kept as a watch keeper in here and this is very old-fashioned radar and uh it's an admiralty pattern plotting table which kind of followed the movement of the the boat and so when the periscope is down it drops into that down into there yeah and when it's coming up i mean i i'm an engineer so i wasn't i did do periscope watches but i i was not um i never did an attack that was the captain's job and it's very personal to captain and uh you've possibly heard of the thing called the perisher the periscope commanding officer's qualifying course it's called known as the perisher because if um if you feel that you don't get a second chance you're out of submarines and it's a pretty demanding course and they they do a lot of uh periscope attacking they did it mighty i don't know what they do now because i don't think they can do with nuclear submarines what they did with these you know if you're actually playing chicken with frigates we can't play chicken and nuclear submarines in the same way but you know the captain would be down on his the easiness the periscope was coming up and uh saying up slow there'd be a man over there operating hydraulics and he would you know be on it um as it broke surface and then you say well that's the expression we used and he tried to keep as little as possible exposed so really every inch it's above the surface makes a big difference well it's just obviously more to be seen by a ship more to be picked up on radar did you feel when you were in submarines that you were the the hunters or were you the prey no we were the hunters really yeah i mean british submarine is always where um so surface vessels were scared of you well no no they wanted to sink us i mean during the second world war we lost the entire strength of the submarine force during the war replenishing it throughout the course but the strength we had at the beginning was lost and a lot of our work was done the mediterranean and in fact although it's not generally appreciated the submarines played a key part in the victory el alamein because we were hitting rommel's 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 that technological how had the technology shifted did you feel you had more advantages or do you feel the advantage there with the surface vessels and the aircraft well you can be a bit myopic about these things we always felt we were invulnerable yeah the target i mean we call surface ships targets that's the terminology but nuclear submarines 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 into falklands terrible sea conditions up you can't go very fast as you'll be well aware in high seas but a submarine can just hammer along it you know 30 miles an hour 400 feet so it can catch up with surface fleets it can come up from a stair and get it and it's quiet and it's quiet and um 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 east i was a midshipman in barossa i'm an old class destroyer we used to anti-submarine exercises against this class of submarine out of singapore and we could never find the damn things you know they were also the submariners 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 well now in the era of um 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 u-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 it's a portrait of catcher gamecube would catch poaching what is that expression poached returned gamekeeper yeah um 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 in the surface and you get thermal layers on the surface because the sun that bends sound rays etc submarines duck underneath you can't hear them so that's why i volunteer for submarines speaking of is this the um helmsman here that's the helmsman yup so that's where they that's where they're steering the ship from the boat yep and that's the to give you your um the gauge glass that's and this is the instruction to the engine where we just were yeah exactly so so so if you were off to that one so if you uh if you mentioned being in a heavy seat it must be an amazing thing when it's very rough and you dive down and instantly you're just it's flat calm is it yeah all right let's keep going i still haven't seen that many places where people can actually sleep oh you're coming to now this is the officer's mess the wardroom has been very nice yeah uh this is my bunk here i've seen you sleep in here yes yes and this this here is the ship's office it consists of a typewriter so during the day it's for eating and game playing and then in the evening well actually it's it's a problem because these are the upper bunks you can't get them up when people are sitting in the seats of course and sometimes it's difficult to get enough sleep um i mean probably one was living on four to six hours sleep a day well it hasn't done any harm too busy uh so you must have made great friends of those fellow officers oh yes big chums yes it's difficult to believe it was also long ago i always like the abort layout for accommodation it's like a corridor train it's very cozy and chummy i think this was the artificer's mess that's the technicians but they were doing as you can see six blocks lived in there but they're all on much at different times so some of them must want to have a chat and the other ones are trying to sleep yeah well as long as you've got your bunk you'll get sleep that's not a problem um god you got to know each other well this um this is another of the senior eights messes but i mean as a matter of interest we were standing on top of the forward battery hms auriga which the sister ship had a battery explosion so would everyone have their own bunk or would you be hot bunking no i think in in these older submarines where you had their own bunks but in some of the modern ones some of the modern ones finally if you do hot bunk you turf someone out and get in that's an and burns oxygen canisters so when you're low on oxygen that's what you do just top yourself up and that those are carbon dioxide scrubbers and now we're approaching the forward torpedo compartment which seems seems to be so small compared with um you know a nuclear submarine which could carry something like 21 torpedoes but um you see there's a there would have double racks here which i don't know how many torpedoes should carry now one two three four five six eight maybe and four up the tubes twelve torpedoes and your heinz baked beans those baked beans and of course one of the other rules of submarines is to let the heroes from the sbs slip ashore so you'd surface put a canoe on them and then they'd different ways of doing it yes for this i mean that's what you did you sufficed uh usually at night it didn't fully surface you had you didn't give full buoyancy and then just enough to get the hatch up and then you get these guys out and off they go but with um modern submarines we've got um a sort of canoe release capsules you know so steal things and then you just go up into them and then be laid out from there and suddenly wouldn't have to surface and then obviously you can fire from both ends yep so this is a second world war design used during the cold war how different would they be today oh massively different and almost no comparison really apart from the fact that the steel tubes i mean a nuclear submarine for example is twice as wide well sort of um early generation cold war nuclear submarine twice as wide as this she'd be carrying 21 torpedoes or more in her foreign's but the modern submarines are carrying new tube launched cruise missiles for hitting afghanistan uh as well as torpedoes and uh indeed um things like sub harpoon which is a torpedo tube launched anti-ship missiles like exocet you know but um so they got a mixed bag of armaments and then you go to the missile submarines which the the ballistic missile submarines their targets are four thousand miles away so that's a huge huge and they are a massive i mean a trident submarine you probably put two of these inside one but some things about the service haven't changed no well actually funnily enough nuclear technology on or not the critical point was the sewage overboard hell valve and and i don't know why it must have been because the ship designers um were thinking biologically but we had two of everything important starboard generators sport and starboard engines etc but we only had one sewage overboard hull valve and if that blocked you're into corporate constipation and also i mean we exercised the submarine who didn't have that problem um and the crew had to use waste paper baskets as improvised laboratory plans and take their offerings to we used to have a little downward pointing torpedo tube it was called a gas gun it's just a dust spin on but you actually had to sort of um blast i don't think you blasted it out i think you pumped it out but it was like a torpedo tube and so they put their offerings in there and um all very primitive but you in the trade as we call the submarine service these are non-sewage tubes okay there we go so some things are still the same yes managing human sewage well it will be drones well actually it's operationally it's a command decision to empty a sewage tank [Music] [Music] welcome to the history hit youtube channel which we are relaunching we've got all the best exclusive content going straight to this history hit youtube channel and you can find out for example what on earth i'm staying 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Keywords: hms alliance history, hms alliance, royal navy submarine, royal navy submarine documentary, royal navy documentary, world war ii submarine, world war two submarines, submarine tour navy, royal submarine museum, dan snow, dan snow world war two, dan snow documentary, dan snow wwii, torpedo submarine, wwii torpedo, inside submarine, nuclear submarine, nuclear submarine documentary, wwii submarine tour, wwii submarine found, wwii submarine documentary, wwii history hit

Id: 5s2DKjtnL2U

Length: 28min 58sec (1738 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021