Ian Moore – Incident with Russian sub – Part 2
so we had Top Secret documentation that we were taking back to NATO. The last thing they want is that, so if they can do as much damage … if they could have sunk us they would have done, because nobody’s going to argue over the toss over it.
Who’s going to say who’s fault it was, and things like this you know? Happens all the time.
So, they chased us around and it got to the point literally where they kept on forcing us deep, where when they were forcing us deep all the time, the air inside the submarine got so bad that everybody was becoming cyanosed. Everybody had blue lips. There was not enough oxygen in the atmosphere. People were starting to sort of wobble from side to side through the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere.
The barometer, which gives you the air pressure inside the submarine was basically round in the red, which is somewhere we should never be, because we kept on releasing air from the air bottles, the blowing bottles. Kept on releasing a bit of air from the blowing bottles into the atmosphere to try and boost up the oxygen content which failed miserably really.
We had the CO2 generators, which is absorbing soda lime canisters, which absorbs carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They were on full flow, we had oxygen generators, they were on full flow, trying to generate oxygen but we were still in a bad, bad way. I mean we’d sustained a lot of damage.
It was just like watching a War Two movie where every time one of these things went off, you’d have paint flakes and water and the lights would go out and all this sort of stuff. Paint flakes would come down off the deck heads and things.
Simon: Can you feel the air pressure …?
Oh yeah. There’s a massive ‘woomph’ when it hits you, and then whichever side it comes from, the whole submarine will move, and especially the ones that landed on top of us and did the most damage.
I mean how we didn’t sustain more damage I don’t know. But they chased us around for probably about a week or so we were undergoing this, until eventually the Captain said, “Right, ok, we’ve got to get away out of this.” By this time, we’d traversed a lot of the Med south, and he decided that he was going to go into Libyan territorial waters, so literally we went into Libyan territorial waters.
The Russian’s wouldn’t go over the line because obviously they can be seen to actually transgress that line, but they sent a submarine after us, which is an Alpha Class nuclear submarine. And an Alpha Class is capable of 40 plus knots. We believed at the time that the hull of the submarine was made of titanium.
High grade carbon steel, and this thing, if they found you they would just drive straight at you at 40 knots and if they hit you, they’d just slice straight through you like butter without any problem at all. Probably wouldn’t even dent them going at that sort of speed. So, we had the Alpha, we knew was somewhere around us.
We were more afraid of the Alpha than we were of anything else that was going on, because we knew that the Alpha driver, the Captain would just drive straight at us without any problem.
So, we managed to get into Libyan waters, the depth charging side of things stopped, and that’s when we managed to get up to the surface and we flashed off a signal to the UK to say, “Hi, we’re still here, we’re still alive, blah blah blah blah.”