Andy Dinsdale – Why I wanted to become a submariner
Simon What was it … can you identify what it was that made you hanker for the submarines?
Yes, it’s interesting. It goes back to my time on ships as an Apprentice, and I guess I would have aspirations of doing my Apprenticeship and then sort of moving on to be an Officer and I guess on a surface ship serving out the Gulf, I was conscious that … I was looking at what the Weapon Engineer was doing onboard a ship.
I remember talking to people at the time that they seemed to be just there to … and I use the term, a jumped up stores chaser, so just responsible for chasing stores, and sending signals and getting stores, but the bit I enjoyed and I guess I was lucky enough to do it as an Apprentice, is more of the operational side of it as well, so yes, I wanted to be responsible for the Engineering System onboard, but I also wanted to do operational stuff and understand the tactics and things like that, and I found that as a Weapon Engineer onboard a ship, you didn’t typically do that.
And I guess the other thing that I find when I was in General Service, is that what I enjoyed, you know the idea of an Engineer and I’d done some sort of research about a Submarine Engineer, is that ability to understand the wider context as well, so understand what’s happening.
In a nuclear submarine it’s called ‘back aft’ so the Marine Engineering described, whereas I was finding in surface ships, you know you get a lot of Weapon Engineers who whilst maybe once or twice in their early training, but have no idea what’s happening down the Engine Room, and actually some of them really quite anti , “Well that’s for the Marine Engineers, we don’t go down there” and likewise, you know going into places like the Bridge, and the Ops Room, they say, “Well no, that’s for the Warfare Officers, we don’t go there and do that” so I guess the bit that I wanted to do as an Engineer is, absolutely do the Engineering, but also you know, try and do a bit more of the Warfare side as well, as a Weapon Engineer Submariner it gave me that balance between being absolutely being responsible for the engineering but onboard as a Weapon Engineer, you know one of my day jobs was to give tactical advice to the Command on the use of the weapons.
So, because of that, I had to understand a) the weapons which was my day job but understanding sort of you know, deployment of weapons and understanding the threat tactics and things like that, so it was that balance that gave me what I wanted as a Submariner.