Chris Groves – Defining moment to join Submarine service

There was one defining kind of moment I think.

I was on the Bridge in the middle of the night in HMS Ark Royal, and we were partaking in an exercise called ‘Exercise Jolly Rodger’ and basically it started as you approached the bottom of the Bay of Biscay and went down past Portugal and around Spain to get into through the Gibraltar Straits, and several nations take part in this Exercise and it’s a anti-submarine warfare Exercise, so there I was sat in HMS Ark Royal with what was supposed to be the premier NATO Anti-submarine Warfare Task Group.

At the centre of it we had a Sea King Helicopters and all sorts of Frigates and ships with decent submarine hunting capabilities, and I was there in the Middle Watch which is the midnight ‘til 4 o’clock in the morning Watch, so pitch black as we steamed down the coast of Portugal, and in that four hours, the way the submarines signal an attack to the surface ships, is they fire what’s called a ‘green grenade’ which is a flare which they fire out of a small tube.

It’s called the ‘submerged signal ejector’, but it’s a small tube and it’s a pyrotechnic flare which comes to the surface and as soon as it hits the surface, it shoots out a big green flare, and that simulates a torpedo attack on s ship. Well, when I got to the end of my 4 hours, after we’d been attacked six times, I thought to myself, ‘umm, maybe perhaps there’s some benefits in wartime of perhaps being on the other side and being in the submarine.’ 

Simon: And that’s the ship doing its best and the Fleet trying to detect …

Well, we knew there were submarines around and that was the whole idea of the Exercise was to try and find them rather than them find us and avoid that, so yeah, after the sixth attack, I thought, ‘yeah, maybe submarines is a reasonable place to be.’

So, I transferred into the Submarine Service, or made my application to join the Submarine Service and that’s what I did.