Ron Gordon – Every person on a diesel submarine must know how everything works

Most of the work I did was on conventional submarines and there are 70 guys there in a small tube and you’ve got to work together.

You’re relying on every single person. Every single person on that submarine has got to do their job and they’ve got to do it properly or they could be the one that sinks that submarine if they don’t do it, whereas on a big ship, if you’re not doing your job, you know, it won’t cause any harm, whereas this … and the other big thing I found later on was that when I was on the big ships, you knew all about your own little empire.

115 Electricians in this one Mess, you knew all those guys and what we did and where we operated but you didn’t know what’s going on in the rest of the ship. You hadn’t got a clue. And you never got involved in it.

You were never asked to go out and do … find out about what happened in the Flight Deck, what happened in the Engine Rooms and Boiler Rooms, what they did.

You just did your own thing, whereas if you’ve got a submarine, you have to learn every single thing about that submarine in case you’re the one man that’s in that compartment when something goes wrong.