A Deep Dive on Submarines

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2:12Think of it. On the surface, there is hunger and fear. Men still exercise unjust laws. They fight, tear one another to pieces. A mere few feet beneath the waves their reign ceases. Their evil drowns. Here on the ocean floor is the only independence. Here I am free.

2:40Oh, whoa, look at this. I'm entirely encased in this strange artificial world. This is very cool. I've got a navigation table, I've got the sonar equipment. Friends, picture the most Hollywood-y periscope you can possibly imagine. It's like something out of, it's Jules Verne, it's Tom Clancy, it's Das Boot, it's all of those things. Folks, as is so often the case, you do not find me in my podcast recording studio, you find me and the team, our trusty podcast team, searching out the history in some of the world's most remarkable places. I am currently aboard HMS Alliance at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum down in Gosport on the south coast of England, just across the water from Portsmouth.

3:26This is the really HQ of Britain's naval effort for the last couple of centuries, and that is why here we have got the only surviving British Second World War submarine that is left. Today, folks, we're fulfilling a dream. Beth, one of the producers of this podcast, has always wanted to go inside a submarine. And in this Royal Navy Museum, you actually can. You can go inside a submarine where you are surrounded by all the original fixtures and fittings. Beth, are you having a good time? I'm having a great time. Yeah, she's having a good time. She's got a smile on her face from ear to ear. It was actually built, well, it was built towards the end of the war, but it was particularly built with a view to send it out to the Pacific.

4:07The submarine is not a natural environment for someone who is six foot five like me. I'm crouching down, the controller is about to stand up, but nowhere else can I do so. And as I'm walking along the hull of this magnificent vessel, there are little rooms. Ah, the famous toilet, the heads, as they call them in the Navy, to my left. That heads is the size of a coffin, folks, and you would not want to go in there after one of your crewmates. You'd want to give them a bit of time, I think, in the heads. And don't forget, a German submarine was sunk during the Second World War because the heads malfunctioned.

4:42And then like that, you come to the stern and you've got massive torpedoes, tubes and a few bunks. Imagine that, imagine sleeping next to the torpedoes all night, every night. Now the reason we are here, apart from Beth, obviously, is that this year marks the 125th anniversary of the Royal Navy Submarine Service. The first Royal Navy submarine was launched in 1901, and that makes it one of the first submarine services in the world. It was a controversial new way of making war, but clearly it was a very effective way of making war that would soon be absorbed into the military mainstream, and there have been submarines produced in vast numbers that have played their parts in all of the great conflicts of the 20th century and into 21st.

5:25And being in here makes me think about that experience for those men and women now in the submarine service. You're working in shifts of six hours on, six hours off, there's a little space to move. You're isolated, you haven't seen sunlight or fresh air. You haven't lived regular day and night cycles for some time. It truly is a life for any of the sturdiest among us.

5:50Submarines have revolutionized our understanding of our oceans and our warfare. Today we're exploring their incredible history from their earliest iterations in the 17th century and the wooden contraptions of visionary inventors through to the first submarine battles of World War I. We'll also look at World War II and the Falklands and what submarines of the future could look like. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, and this is a deep dive, yes, pun intended, into the history of the submarine.

6:41Since ancient times, humans have been preoccupied with what lies in the deep. As a kid, I wanted to dive down on shipwrecks and submerge ancient ruins, voyage through mighty canyons and the seabed, like the heroes of 20 ,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which we opened this episode with. In fact, I read it to my kids the other day. And I am stunned, side note, on just how Captain Nemo is definitely the poster child for all our tech bros today. And all that technology, those possibilities that obsessed Jules Verne and his readers, well, much of that technology has now come to pass. It is a reality. And it's allowed human beings to venture deep beneath the ocean's surface.

7:21That technology has been centuries in the making. Alexandra Geary, curator at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, is our guide through the museum and the history. Alexandra Geary, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Thank you for coming. When do you historians date the beginning of kind of subsea from? The beginning of the submarines really started hundreds of years ago in 1620 when Cornelius Drebbel under the employ of King James I tried to do this basically with an underwater rowboat. It was very rudimentary. At that point they weren't thinking about ballast tanks or anything like that.

7:55Up until 1879 all the first submarines were driven by manpower, not mechanical. So the idea is they'd sit just below the surface and you'd sort of row it along. Row underneath, yes. Weirdly, one of my first jobs at the BBC was in a department where they were rebuilding that particular submarine and they did manage to get it to go briefly underwater. I'm very excited, I've wanted to see this for a long time, because you have got the only model in the world of the Turtle. Yes. Which is, in fact, by chance, we're here nearly on the 250th anniversary of its deployment. We are. It's very exciting. This was designed to go across New York Harbour and attach explosives to the British flagship when the British returned to take New York.

8:34In the summer of 1776, 250 years ago. Tell us all about the Turtle. So the turtle is named because it looks like two turtle shells that were put together. It's often regarded as the first submarine because it has a ballast tank in the bottom. So they knew that they would need to flood part of the submarine with water to make it sink and then pump it out to make it rise. While they were submarine, you would have compressed air. Here they have a physical lever that they pump on the turtle. So you pump the water out? Yes. That's so interesting. So that is how you change your buoyancy in a submarine.

9:10It is, yes. So we're looking at the turtle now. It is like a walnut. It's a sphere almost, made of wood. There's an observation turret, you could almost call it, at the top. And there's a little crankshaft attached to a propeller. I mean, it looks like it would go very slowly through the water, this thing. I think it would go very, very slowly. And there's only room inside for one person. It is absolutely, it's tiny. and there's a drill bit on the top. So is that supposed to drill into the hull of a ship? It is, and it looks like a big screw, doesn't it? So inside there is a lever that you turn here.

9:46And that would drill up inside. And that's connected to a huge box of explosives on the end of a rope that you then detach that drill bit and leave all that... But leave that hanging, yes. It is totally ingenious. It is. The crazy thing about it in the summer of 70s, it very, very nearly worked. It was by sheer bad luck that it didn't. He successfully got all the way to the British flagship. There's Admiral Howell chilling out on board. And he couldn't actually get the drill. It was the wrong part of the hull or something, wasn't it? They were trying to get through the iron part. Yeah. And they just didn't find a nice big bit of wood to drill into.

10:22And you have to remember that visibility underneath a battleship was going to be virtually none. So it's... At night. At night, yeah. Yeah, underwater. Yeah. That would have blown Admiral Howell sky high, which would have had a big impact on the American Revolutionary War. Wow. So David Bushnell, who designs this, builds it. Did he get all the elements? As an expert, you look at this thinking, yeah, basically, he cracked it. They're all the elements of a modern submarine. They are. I mean, it has the first ballast tank and it has a small mini conning tower. Yeah. How do you not run out of air?

10:55Well, there is a ventilation pump to pump out the bad air. So how do we get from this? This is the late 18th century. how do we get from this to the 19th century? Well, thankfully, they realised they needed to go over to mechanical submarines because obviously peddling this would have been really hard work. A surprising figure entered the story of the submarine here, your friend and mine, Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1800, he commissioned the American inventor, Robert Fulton, to design a plunging boat that could secretly glide under the British blockading warships and attach explosive mines to their hulls.

11:31Fulton's Nautilus, as it was called, and yes, exactly where Jules Verne got the name, was hand-cranked and had a copper and iron frame. It did successfully complete some test dives on the River Seine, but when it was put out to sea trials, it failed to sink any ships at all. And pretty quickly, the French Navy lost interest and the project was abandoned. But that didn't stop Fulton, nor any other inventors of the 19th century, whose designs for submarines became increasingly more ambitious. Hand-powered vessels gave way to experiments with mechanical propulsion, engines, even electric motors. By 1901, submarine technology advanced far enough for the Royal Navy itself to launch its very first submarine, the impressive Holland One.

12:11Built in Britain, designed though by the Irish-born inventor John Philip Holland, it marked the beginning of a new era in naval warfare and the birth of the submarine service. Holy mo - whoa this it fills the whole gallery it's much bigger than I thought look at that that is it's the size of a whale isn't it? It is. Doesn't just look like a whale it's enormous. Just over 60 feet long. I love it. Yes. So you've got these metal plates on the outside with all the rivets in and then at the top of it's painted white big propeller at the back That is very cool. So this is the first, the Royal Navy's first submarine?

12:49Yes. When did the Royal Navy decide it needed to get into the submarine game? Well, other navies, such as France, were getting into the submarine game already, so that worried the British Admiralty. However, not everybody was as excited. If you think at this time, it was considered ungentlemanly as a form of warfare. where ships, you know, they were used to ships being broadside and you're looking your enemy in the eye. And in fact, the control of the Navy, Arthur Wilson, in fact, was reputed to have said they were underhand and unfair and I will regard them as pirates and have them all hanged.

13:28Really? Yes. But that didn't stop them getting a few. It did not stop them. This submarine was launched in secret because of that, because it was very experimental at the time. And was the Royal Navy almost embarrassed to be embracing this new form of warfare? I think at the beginning, but they soon realised its implications. Does it fulfil its promise? So mostly its job was kind of pootling about the harbour, seeing what worked, what didn't. It was quite unwieldy. It was okay under the water, but on the surface it was quite hard to control and they did in fact bump into their mothership at one point.

14:05So her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Forster Delafield Arnold Forster said,

14:35poking her big nose right through the ship's side into the berths. Oh my god, so she didn't just hit the ship, she actually smashed through it. Yes. Wow. And so you get a sense, don't you, of just the challenges of dealing with the new technology. What kind of innovations did they come up with? Well, they were still very much experimenting with gases within an enclosed environment, and obviously, you know, the air that they would breathe couldn't become toxic. So they had white mice on the submarines, if you think about canaries in mine, kind of. A bit more humane. The mice got to live. When the gas is built up the mice would squeak and that would mean that they would know the submarine had to surface then to refresh the air in the submarine.

15:16We can walk around and go in the submarine if you'd like. Well let's go inside this is great. Were they volunteers to go on here? Are they specialists or did they just get assigned at random? I do know that the commanding officer only did it because he thought it was going to further his career and then he absolutely hated it. Don't blame the poor man, it's very claustrophobic in here so I've just come in now, I can't even begin to stand up inside here. We're in the bow section and these are the torpedo shoes, these do look like something out of Jules Verne don't they? Like huge long cylinders almost like cannon that are in the front of this submarine and did it ever go into action?

15:54Not this submarine no. Okay, so this was just an experiment, really, and I guess they then would learn and... And basically use it as a template for the next class of submarines. And how long could you stay underwater, really? Only a few hours, not very long. It's amazing to think that within just over ten years, submarines would be going into action during the First World War. Absolutely, and the design had evolved quite significantly. But this is as close as we can get to the feeling of what it would have been like for those men in the First World War and those still pretty primitive submarines.

16:25And there's a lot of equipment that's not in here, so it would have been even more cramped. So should we move forward to World War I? Fantastic. I'll take you back to the historic gallery. Let's go.

16:40You listen to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come.

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19:31So, Alexandra, we've come to the First War Gallery. Was it clear that right from the beginning were submarines, were U-boats, as they're called in Germany, were they going to be involved? Absolutely. There was always a threat right from the beginning of the war. Within an hour of war being declared, the German submarine U-9 sank three British warships and it came to be termed the three before breakfast. Wow, in the English Channel? In the English Channel. I mean, that's a humiliation for the Royal Navy. It really was. And also asymmetric, because one submarine is much cheaper and smaller than these three mighty warships.

20:04So these submarines are a lot more capable now than what we've just seen. Are they able to go out on some longer patrols? Much, much longer. You know, you have British submarines patrolling the Dardanelles. They're out in the Baltic, defending our home waters. These are people, they go out, they've got their kit on board, they're sleeping on board, they're self-sufficient. They are absolutely, yeah. OK, wow. The Germans are going to use submarines, as they will in the Second World War, perhaps more famously for people at home, but they will use them to try and strangle Britain to sink ships, merchant ships, carrying fuel and supplies coming into Britain and Ireland.

20:36They were, yes. So in 1917, the convoy system was introduced into the Royal Navy, so you had warships travelling with merchant ships to protect supplies. So the Germans realised this. A group of submarines would try and single out a particular ship to attack Wolfpack tactics. Here we have the top section of the periscope of HMS E-11, a World War I E-class submarine that was patrolling the Dardanelles Straits. So in Turkey, on the way to Istanbul? Yes, and Dardanelles Straits are quite a narrow stretch of water, very heavily mined, so it was extremely dangerous for submarines to go down. But obviously, unlike warships, they could go down, they could go underneath.

21:18Because the warships, in 1915, they famously try and rush the Straits. That doesn't work. That doesn't work. The Gallipi landings happen. Those don't work. But the submarine can get through. But the submarines got through. And they got all the way through the Gallipi and got to Istanbul, effectively. Yes, got into the Sea of Marmara. On this occasion, they were spotted. And if you look at the periscope, you can see where a shell hit it. I mean, that is extraordinary. The periscope is, it's a perfect periscope. And about halfway down, the metal has been twisted out. Did the submarine survive? The submarine did survive, and the commanding officer was awarded the Victoria Cross.

21:52In Britain, about one in three submariners perished. Wow. So submarine warfare comes close to having a really decisive effect on Britain in World War I, but just doesn't quite do it. The Germans aren't successful in the end. They're not, thankfully. But has technology moved on a lot? By the end of the war, submarines are bigger, longer range, much more reliable. The interwar period is a period of experimentation and design. One of them was the M-class submarines, which were absolutely huge. Almost the guns that they carried were the same weight and size that a warship would have carried. Oh, so the idea is they'd sort of surface and then fire these guns.

22:29Have that firepower. That's interesting. But one of the class was actually designed to have seaplanes on board. Really? A little hanger on board? A little hanger at the back of the submarines. They would surface and the seaplane would exit. And how did that go? Not very well, sadly. Unfortunately, a hangar door was left open and the submarine flooded and sank. Oh, my goodness. The crew managed to get a small help message out, which washed up afterwards, which we have on display here. Is that this thing it let over here? It is. It reads, help, M2 gone down, number two hatch, open. And on the other side, it says help and then the abbreviation for lieutenant because that's who wrote it.

23:06And so they're trapped in an air pocket? Yes. Below? Yeah. That is just... Did anyone survive? No. I guess with the submarine service, there have been these tragedies that have then provided, you know, opportunities to improve and learn from those mistakes. During the Second World War, submarine warfare reached a terrifying new intensity. The Battle Atlantic was the longest continuous campaign of the war, a desperate struggle for control of the seas on which Britain's survival depended. It was fought from the first to the last day of the Second World War. Lurking beneath the surface of the Atlantic, German U-boats hunted Allied convoys, attempting to sever the supply routes carrying food, fuel, weapons and troops to Britain.

23:57In fact, Winston Churchill famously later wrote in his memoirs that the only thing that ever frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. And it's not hard to understand why. World War II is littered with astonishing stories. of submarine warfare.

24:18HMS Uppolda was based in the island of Malta. She was part of the 10th submarine Fertilla, which they coined the Fighting Tenth. Malta was a hugely important base in the war because it was en route from Italy and North Africa, so the Germans would have liked it. They bombarded the island relentlessly, So submarines essentially set up a base there to protect Malta. So it must have been incredibly hard working there because they were constantly being bombarded by bombs at night, but also trying to get the supplies into the island as well. The submarines did what they called magic carpet runs. So on the submarine, they would take out a battery compartment, increase the space on board, and they would fill that with ammunition, aircraft fuel, post, food, anything they could fit on board.

25:09That's how desperate they are to get supplies. Yeah, to get the supplies on board. But did Upholder also sink Axis shipping? Yes. She was very successful. One of the most successful submarines in World War II. She, in fact, sunk 120 ,000 tonnes of Axis shipping during the war. In charge was Lieutenant Commander Malcolm David Wanklin, a 29-year-old officer who'd become one of Britain's most celebrated submariners. And here's why. On the 24th of May, 1941, Upholder spotted a heavily escorted Italian troop convoy of Sicily. Among the vessels was the enormous Italian troop ship, Conte Rosso, carrying thousands of men destined for North Africa.

25:47Despite failing light, damaged listening equipment, and the presence of enemy destroyers, Wanklin maneuvered his submarine into position and launched his torpedoes. They struck the Conte Rosso, which sank rapidly. More than 1 ,200 people lost their lives. The attack was a devastating blow to Italian forces. Wenglin was awarded the Victoria Cross for his courage and determination. Over the following months, Upholder continued to wreak havoc on Axis shipping in the Mediterranean, disrupting supplies to Rommel's forces in North Africa. But in April 1942, Upholder set off from Malta on what was supposed to be her final patrol before returning to Britain for a much-needed refit.

26:27The submarine headed for the waters of Tripoli in Libya. A few days later, Upholder rendezvoused with another British submarine, HMS Unbeaten, but this would be the last confirmed contact with her. Upholder disappeared, never heard or seen from again. On April 14th, other British submarines in the area heard prolonged depth charge explosions. Italian anti-submarine vessel, Picasso, subsequently claimed to have destroyed a British submarine, but there's never been any proof it was Upholder. Some say she could have struck an Italian mine. Either way, all 33 men aboard were lost. There's a very poignant photograph just behind you, as you were saying that.

27:05I'm looking at the crew of HMS Upholder in late 1941, and they're all smiling away. There's officers and men very close. It seems like, is there an informality in the submarine service that perhaps is different from the rest of the Navy? Most definitely. Submarines were a lot smaller than warships, so the officers and the commanding officer in particular would work closer alongside the ratings, than they would in a warship where it was very separate. The uniform was more informal as well. You can see in the photo that they're all kind of wearing overalls. Yeah, they're all smiling. They're standing in a kind of rough group rather than in a neat sort of military fashion.

27:42Uniform would have been kept for best. Uniform would have been put away as soon as they were on the submarine. That would have just only been donned when they came back into harbour to look smart. When they were standing on the casing to greet their families on board, it was very informal. In World War II, 36 % of submariners were lost compared with 7 % of the surface. So a third of people that went to sea in submarines in the Second World War never returned. Yeah. It's extraordinarily dangerous. It was, and mainly due to enemy action, but you have to remember, trying to identify another ship or submarine was incredibly dangerous as well.

28:16And sometimes people got it wrong. Oh, some of it was friendly fire? Some of it was. Wow. So British submarines in the Second World War, obviously, they're trying to sink a lot of Axis shipping. It's useful for intelligence work. What other jobs are the submarines doing in this period? Well, they were trying to get close into harbour as well to sink warships. So you have big warships like the Tirpitz, who would moor up in a very protected anchorage and then put minefields in front of it. Full-size submarines couldn't get that close, so they invented miniature submarines called X-Craft. Oh, have you got one of those?

28:51We do have one of those. Let's go and check it out. Okay, Alex, this is superb. This is, I think you've described this as a sort of midget submarine. It looks like a submarine in shape, but not in size. It's really small. How long would this be? This is about 52 feet long, and it was designed very last minute. The reason was that British warships were sunk in harbour by Italian human torpedoes. And Winston Churchill said, well, why aren't we doing anything about this? why do we not have this technology? So off the back of that, the 12th submarine flotilla was developed where they built British human torpedoes and these miniature submarines, X-Craft, that could get close into fire.

29:31And a human torpedo, just a human torpedo, sort of a torpedo with divers just sat on it. I mean extraordinarily brave and very effective as well for the Italians. Very effective. So no wonder Winston Churchill wanted one. So this is, if we come round, And you've chopped it in half very usefully so we can look inside. We've got an engine in the stern compartment. I mean, you couldn't stand up in there. There's a little seat in there. It's rather nice. There is. So the only place you could stand was by the periscope, and only the commanding officer got that privilege. And he couldn't stand up fully.

30:02So everyone else is crawling along. Everyone else is crawling. I mean, it's what, four foot, maybe five foot high? About that. So it's got all the elements of a submarine. It's just, it's miniature. So what's that? That is called a side cargo, and that would deliver two tons of Amatol explosives. The two big wheels that are in the middle of the submarine, you would turn those to release that. So these submarines would go into a harbour and position themselves underneath a warship, set the timer, release the charge. It's almost as big as, half as big as the submarine itself. Okay, this giant compartment, that's just full of explosives, right?

30:43Nasty. And when was this most famously deployed? In Operation Source, the attack on the Tirpitz. The Tirpitz, Bismarck's sister ship. It was. Very impressive German ship. Stuck in a fjord in Norway. Yep, very protected. It had a torpedo net in front of it and an anti-submarine net. But these submarines actually can go underneath those nets. Really? Or would find a gap and manage to get through. So these submarines, they're just so small, they can just get round the edge or underneath a conventional submarine there. So is it pitch black in the freezing cold North Atlantic, but somehow you're just sort of beetling around trying to find a way around or underneath this submarine there?

31:24Yeah, they would surface and they would use the periscope to try and find gaps in places. As you can imagine, if you surface and put your periscope up, you're basically saying I'm here to the enemy. So that makes them very vulnerable. Yeah, you don't do that very often. They did manage to lay their charges. It was X5 and X6 laid their charges, and they did cripple the Tirpitz, so it couldn't move. But then it's the RAF who get the credit. Get it and swoop in. They swoop in Dam Buster Squadron, swoop in and finish the job. But it's the Navy that put Tirpitz out of action, effectively. Let's not forget that, folks.

31:58We do have a section of the Tirpitz against the wall down there, so you can just see. Really? A bit of Tirpitz. Let's have a look. It's this massive chunk of metal. I thought this was a bench. That's a piece of the armour plating. Yeah. Well, that just shows, doesn't it? That's the armour that is required on those battleships to stop enemy shells penetrating the hull. The success of this aircraft had a big impact on the course of the war. Absolutely. And Winston Churchill indeed said in January 1942, the destruction or even crippling of this ship is the greatest event at sea at the present time.

32:31No other target is comparable to it. And so midget submarines proved their worth. They did. Was that the end of the war for these guys? Absolutely not. Two of her sister submarines would go on to perform a very crucial role in D-Day. In fact, it's a very little known fact that the first two craft off the coast of Normandy were midget submarines, X-20 and X-23. Not only did they carry out the reconnaissance work, so they would go close into the beach and wait until nightfall, and then divers would go up onto the beach and check the beach gradients and the quality of the soil. In fact, they collected soil samples in condoms because they were strong.

33:10Really? Yeah, and brought them back. But they acted as beacons for the incoming landing craft. So they shone a green light out to sea that could only be seen by craft coming in to show the craft which beaches they should go to. So they played a huge role in the Normandy invasion as well. Absolutely. Okay, so the war in the Pacific goes on after the war in Europe And British submarines play a key part, do they? They absolutely do. In fact, midget submarines carry out Operation Struggle and Operation Sabre and Foil. Operation Struggle was attacking a Japanese cruiser by attaching limpet mines to its hull.

33:51That took them 19 hours without much sleep. And as you can imagine, aside the midget submarine, the air would have been getting quite toxic after a while. The bravery of these people is just astonishing. And then what's Sabre and Foil? So in July 1945, HMS XE4 and 5 cut the underwater telephone cables, which forced Japanese to revert to radio communication, which the British could then intercept. The things that you've listed show how versatile these submarines are. They're destroying ships, they're cutting cables, they're putting people ashore before D-Day. They are really versatile. Very versatile.

34:25Very effective.

34:31You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. Submarines in the Cold War and beyond. Coming up.

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35:28Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. Host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department ever, so carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All their delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want. Only at Whole Foods Market.

36:10In the post-war years, submarines evolved again, rapidly. The discovery of nuclear power meant submarines could stay underwater for much longer periods of time, traveling vast distances without needing to surface. But it wasn't just military submarines that advanced after the Second World War. Scientists were beginning to adapt underwater technology for an entirely different purpose, exploring the deepest parts of our oceans. In 1948, Swiss inventor Auguste Picard developed the world's first bathyscaf, a bit like a submarine but with a key difference. Instead of travelling long distance horizontally under the waves, it was designed to plunge vertically down to great depths, a bit like an underwater lift.

36:50Its crew sat inside a tiny reinforced steel sphere, suspended beneath an enormous float, while heavy ballast helped carry the vessel down into the darkness. Picard's next iteration of a submarine was even more ambitious. In 1960, the Trieste carried two men almost 11 kilometers beneath the surface to the deepest known point of the earth, the Mariana Trench. It was an extraordinary breakthrough, making possible what had once been the stuff of science fiction. Humans were discovering new underwater ecosystems, and crucially for me, long-lost shipwrecks. Meanwhile, the world was in the grip of the Cold War, and military submarines were taking on a remarkable new role.

37:34Armed with nuclear missiles, they became a crucial part of the nuclear deterrent lurking undetected beneath the oceans, ready to retaliate in the event of a nuclear attack on their homeland. British, American and Soviet submarines played a deadly game of cat and mouse, secretly tracking one another through the ocean depths. But interestingly, it wasn't a NATO clash with the Soviets that saw the first sinking by a nuclear submarine of an enemy warship. It was actually during the Falklands War. In 1982, Britain's nuclear-powered submarine, HMS Conqueror, described as a hunter-killer submarine, demonstrated just how deadly these vessels had become.

38:13On the 2nd of May, Conqueror torpedoed the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, sinking it. 323 lives were lost. This is Vice Admiral Sir Tim McClement, second in command of Conqueror, on board at the time of the attack. Tim, great to have you back on the pod. Thank you very much. You submariners are a breed apart. What's it like living in such clothes? I mean, is it true what they say about sharing bunks? Yes, to start with, when you're a trainee, you don't have your own bunk. And to make room for the trainees, you have what's known as hot bunking. And that's very easy because you do six hours on watch, six hours off watch.

38:54So you have two to a bunk. When you're sleeping in a bunk, when it's your turn to get up, you take your sleeping bag off, put it underneath the mattress, take your mates up, put it on the mattress, take the picture of your girlfriend down and put the picture of his girlfriend up. and you go off and have a meal and he gets into his bunk when he comes off watch. Do you have any idea where you are in the world when you're on a submarine, if you're a normal enlisted man or woman? If you're on one of the deterrent patrols, no. Only a few people will know where the submarine is for obvious reasons. Does the temperature feel different depending on where you are?

39:27Can you ever tell? Yes, certainly. When I was operating under the ice in my Trafalgar-class submarine, you knew it was cold and the thing was that it was so cold outside the condensation on the inside of the pressure hull was dripping onto all the electronics so we had to design the sailor was brilliant at doing it using plastic sheeting to catch the condensation and make a funnel so it wouldn't get on the machines but if you're crossing the equator you know it's hot but actually the submarine systems are pretty good at maintaining the temperature. Tell me about going down to the South Atlantic in the Falklands conflict.

40:05That was a big change for us because we were Cold War warriors and we were very good at playing with Soviet submarines, three-dimensional chess in the dark in the Atlantic. And that's all we did. Your job was to keep the Atlantic open in the event of World War III. Yes. Our primary role in the SSN fleet was to take out the Soviet SSNs or some of us were tasked with taking out their bombers. But it was submarine versus submarine. That's what we did. So there's an element of submarine to submarine work going on in the South Atlantic. But would you also realise that you might have a role against surface ships?

40:42Yes. When the captain sat down with the three heads of department, myself as second in command, the engineer and the weapons electrical officer, Tuesday the 28th of March, I can remember, at 12 o 'clock lunchtime, he said, gentlemen, we've been ordered to store for war and sail with all dispatch for the South Atlantic. It's not in the public domain, but intelligence believes they're about to be invaded. You could have heard a pin drop. So you have got a Rolls-Royce nuclear reactor on board, which says, so fuel getting down there, not a problem. You could cruise for a thousand years. Yep. We didn't have a problem, so we could sail with all dispatch.

41:15But what we hadn't got time to do on the way down, which is what you alluded to earlier, was train the ship's company up for surface ship attack, surface ship surveillance, close inshore navigation. So my job as second in command was to make sure the crew were trained up. So I had to instigate a 12-hour training program every day on top of the six hours on, six hours on watchkeeping to get everyone trained up just in case we had to do it. Because actually when we sailed, none of us thought we'd go to war. It was hard because a lot of people said, look, we're not going to go to war. You're really winding everyone up.

41:51One of the ships company because, and his words were, you are inciting them to bloodlust with your training regime. And he said, it's 1982. We won't go to war. The Hague initiative will work. And I'm worried about how you're going to unwind the crew when we don't fight. And I said, well, I'll worry about that when we don't fight, but until we do, they will be trained. As you're going down, are you on the surface or are you underwater? We're underwater. We only came out once every 24 hours to take our signals. So you are getting updates, you're to stick your aerial up and you'll get a very brief flash from London.

42:26So you're very well informed about what's going on in the world. We are. We were told to head west of the Falklands and on the way to the Falklands, we were diverted to the southwest of the islands to intercept the Belgrano group with two destroyers. What speed are you making when you're submerged? Over 25 knots. Wow, that's rapid. Okay, so then let's talk about that Belgrano moment. Tell me, I mean, you've got a group of surface vessels. What was their job as far as you saw it? Well, at the time, there was the 200-mile exclusion zone, and our remit was to find them. The two other boats we had down, the S-boat, Spartan and Splendor, were sent to the northwest of the islands to find the Argentinian aircraft carrier and its escorts because Admiral Woodward was worried there was a pincer movement from the aircraft carrier to the northwest and the Belgrano to the southwest coming in on our carriers.

43:18And if one of our carriers was damaged or sunk, that would have been the end of our ability to retake the islands. We were lucky. The Belgrano and the two destroyers were being refuelled by a very noisy tanker, which we picked up in excess of 100 ,000 yards. And we went straight down the sonar bearing and found them. So we were tasked to trail the Belgrano and the two destroyers. And they stayed 15 to 20 miles outside the 200 mile exclusion zone to the southwest and to the south. and we picked them up on the morning of the 1st of May and reported, and then reported their position every six hours.

43:54And they didn't have any idea that you were there? No, none at all. So that was on the 1st of May. So you're reporting her position every six hours. Take me through to the 2nd of May. The morning of the 2nd of May, we got a change of rules of engagement to say that we were to conduct an attack against the Balgrano and not against the destroyers unless in self-defence, in respect of her being outside the 200-mile exclusion zone. And what you now know, I mean, that decision would have come from the very highest levels. That was the decision that was okayed by the Prime Minister. Yes. Were you surprised by that?

44:26We were at war and they were a threat. And for us, it was a very logical thing because the other two submarines hadn't got the aircraft carrier. Admiral Woodward wanted one half of the pincer movement could be taken out. That was the right thing to do. And what was the Belgrano carrying that was such a threat to the British aircraft carriers? Intelligence said, as well as their big guns, which outranged all the guns of our fleet, they also had exoset missiles, they believed. Lots of teeth capable of taking out British carriers. Yeah, a big threat. Yes, big threat. What changed when you received that order?

45:02It was very interesting. Everyone was very matter-of-fact about it. The captain had said, We had two types of torpedoes. We had the Second World War designed Mark VIII torpedo, which had equivalent of 800 pounds of TNT in its nose, diesel engine, 44 knots, but it had to hit the side of the ship to explode. And once you'd fired it, you couldn't do anything with it. It was a fire and forget. So you had to aim off to intercept like shooting grass. or we had a modern torpedo with a much smaller warhead, wire-guided so you could change its speed and direction, but it was designed to go underneath a warship, explode 10 metres underneath it, create an air bubble that would rise up and break the back of the ship.

45:47But the Belgrano was the ex-USS Phoenix that survived Pearl Harbour and had 15 centimetres of armour plating down each side. And so the captain said, will use a Second World War torpedo to sink a Second World War warship. So he said, inform the ship's company. And I remember making the pipe just before lunch. If you hear that, XO speaking, the submarine will go to action stations at 1 ,400 to carry out a marked attack against the Belgrano, hands to dinner. And I can remember it was roast pork on all the trimmings and apple crumble and custard. And what is your job as you're approaching the point of firing on the enemy?

46:23My job is in the control room supporting the captain, and it's called attack coordinator, and I'm known as AC. So my job is to go around the sound room who are listening to the revolution count because he was an old ship, making sure they got the best speed possible. Looking at the navigator's plot where he's plotting all the captain's bearings and ranges and then calculating the speed and course between those. and it all goes on to a single computer, analog computer called a torpedo course calculator, which tells the torpedoes what course to go on. So I coordinate all that for the captain. The captain, meanwhile, is keeping the submarine safe at periscope depth because there's obviously the Belgrana and her two destroyers.

47:06You've done so much training for this moment. Was there anything different about doing it for real? No, everyone did their job better than I've ever known them to do it in training. It was astonishingly absolute concentration and harmony between the team. When the captain said, standby, final target set up, which everyone knew when he put the periscope up and cut the bearing through, meant he would fire. There was a sort of tape recording in the control room, which every submarine had at action stations. And the captain says that, and the next voice on the tape recorder's mind going, do not fire!

47:40The captain put the periscope down, four steps to the port forward corner of the control room where I was, said, why not? There are lots of adjectives in that sentence, but we don't need to hear any of them. And I said, if you fire now, sir, you're going to fire, the three torpedoes we're going to fire will come out and turn to starboard 17 degrees. The target is moving from right to left. If you wait, you can get a zero jar angle shot. So I've done my job giving the best firing solution. And the captain said, got it. And we both turned around and there were about 20 people in the control room looking between the captain and myself, absolutely aghast because the second in command had just stopped the captain firing the first torpedo since the Second World War.

48:23And they were very unsettled. But because the captain was such a good captain, in the four steps back to the periscope, he worked out, A, he had to get his team back behind him. B, he worked out how he was going to do it. And the next thing you hear on the tape recording is the captain saying very nonchalantly, do you mind if I fire now, AC? He instantly had everyone behind him. And then my voice going, carry on, sir. And he fired three torpedoes. First, Mr. Stern, second, two hit.

48:59The Beggarano is very controversial thinking. People objected to it, obviously, as you would whenever there's loss of life. The captain of the Belgrano subsequently agrees it was the right thing to do militarily. Yes, war is brutal. 322 Argentinian sailors died that day. But it was the right thing to do militarily. For many reasons. One is it removed that threat of the Belgrano to the British fleet, but it encouraged the other side of that pincer to return to harbour and play no further part in the war. Yeah, that was an unexpected benefit. Your crew and the submarine force played a huge part in the Falklands War.

49:35Yes, but an important word of that sentence is part. We were part of the task group. Everyone played their part. Harriers played a fantastic role, the surface ship, the hospital ships, the Marines and soldiers ashore. I mean, the important thing for us, particularly when we were to the north, we had been at sea for 50 days. We couldn't replenish the surface ships. We went on to half rations on day 50, and we were going to go on to quarter rations on day 75 if necessary, because our only thought was, how can we help the war effort? That was our focus. Concord demonstrated how a single nuclear-powered submarine could transform an entire naval campaign.

50:20In the 1990s and 2000s, navies invested in quieter propulsion, better sonar technology, more sophisticated torpedoes and cruise missiles that could attack targets on land. Today, submarines house some of the most advanced technology we have. Digital imaging masts have replaced that beautiful thing, the optical periscope. Submarines can produce their own oxygen and turn seawater into fresh drinking water. HMS Vanguard just emerged from the depths earlier this summer, having spent a total of 205 days cruising without a break beneath the waves. That's wild. And of course, not unlike our forebears, the great thinkers Robert Fulton or Auguste Picard, great minds in navies around the world are innovating, testing and working on the submarine technology of the future.

51:08I was very pleased to get the chance to interview the current head of the Royal Navy, the First Sea Lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins. General Gwyn, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's my real pleasure to be here, Dan. Thank you for asking me to come on. We're seeing so much innovation at the moment in all of the military. What about subsea? Is there a future for crewed platforms, these big submarines bustling with crew? Or is there a different future that you're envisaging? It's right to say that the environment is changing. The pace of technological change is outstripping almost any prediction.

51:44But there is definitely still a place for the foreseeable future for the large, crewed nuclear submarines in which we specialise. When you consider the scale of the world's oceans, the environment that we're dealing with, I think uncrewed systems are some way off being able to replicate these phenomenal machines that are our nuclear-powered submarines. You and I have chatted about this before, but I'm always stunned by the range of tasks that you're expected to perform across the Navy and just frankly in the submarine service alone. Can you give us a sense of your priorities when it comes to subsea at the moment?

52:23I always think it is much better to visualize a submarine as a spaceship rather than a submarine. If you think about the technical capability that is involved, you know, nuclear reactors, all those surveillance capabilities, torpedoes, weapon systems, all those specialists that are on board. These are the most technological platforms that we run in the Royal Navy, and I would contend almost anywhere in the world with the possible exception of actual spaceships. You know, nuclear submarines have a number of real advantages for us. They are inherently stealthy. It's not called the silent service by accident.

53:06Stealth is built into these platforms from day one. their ability to sustain themselves is unmatched. So not only do they literally have limitless power because of their nuclear reactors but they can generate their own water, they can generate their own environment and then with that comes range as well. So they can literally go anywhere around the world but when they're out there I want them to do a whole range of tasks. Their primary mission for us is to protect our nuclear deterrent. The SSNs in particular, you know, their job is to be able to counter, in our case, particularly Russian submarines that are very capable platforms in their own right.

53:50But they're also this really powerful surveillance asset. And it is that this unseen, silent, protective umbrella under which we all enjoy the society that we live in, that also protects the rest of NATO. So their ability to be able to conduct surveillance against an opponent and collect data on their submarines or their critical underwater infrastructure, it adds a very rich picture to our intelligence, understanding of what the threats are that we face. There is so much technological change going on at the moment. We cannot avoid it whenever we engage with the news from Ukraine, for example.

54:32How do you balance maintaining and preserving the excellence that you have versus innovating, seeking out new solutions? It is definitely a balancing act, but I think the rise of artificial intelligence, our job is how we blend those capabilities with the crude platforms. I love this kind of analysis that says that artificial intelligence will beat any human at any strategy game now. However, artificial intelligence teamed with a human team will beat any artificial intelligence at a strategy game. It's the teaming that is the powerful combination in this. And it's how we blend these uncrewed and artificial intelligence systems with our incredibly well-trained sailors in this case to get the blend that gives us the edge in performance that we really need.

55:29You know, we have to be dynamic in the way that we do that because the pace of change is so rapid. There are plenty of critics who will say that we're going too fast. I would contend we're not going fast enough. We can't go fast enough. We have to accelerate. We have to have the advantage and the edge in this. And that's why we're pushing on so much with the hybrid Navy within the kind of Royal Navy plans at the moment. Well, sadly, our day at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum is coming to an end. the trusty history hit team are just walking down the jetty here towards where our powerboat is moored up and we're going to leave as one should always arrive and leave by water we're going to new adventures new podcast beckon beth i need to ask did your experience here at the submarine museum live up to your expectations um i would say it exceeded it that's so great we've created another submarine fan thanks very much to alexandra geary the whole team here at the the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, you can come visit yourself.

56:27Look, I've said this before, I'll say it again, the National Museum of the Royal Navy here in Portsmouth is one of the world's great museums. You've got the Submarine Museum, you've got HMS Victory, HMS Warrior. I mean, it's unbelievable. Get yourself down here. Thank you also to Vice Admiral Tim McClement and the First Sea Lord, Sir Gwyn Jenkins. If you want to find out more history about the Royal Navy Submarine Service on this big anniversary, 125, then you can check out the link which we have put in our show notes. We'll point you in the right direction and we'll also obviously point you towards the submarine museum itself.

56:57Now we're going to cast off these ropes. We're going to fire up the engines. We're going to head out to the Solent and see what adventure beckons out there. See you next time, folks.

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