Ron Gordon – Experiencing fear onboard – Beer kegs and Ballast tanks

Simon: Did you ever experience fear when you were onboard the submarine? I remember you talking about looking up at the missiles but …

No, well that wasn’t fear, that was just awareness wasn’t it? But the only time really was … we were out on a Bomber on Resault on an Index.

Now, on this Index the man in charge of all the submarine fleet was onboard, Flag Officer for Submarines, and an Index is, you know, you go out after you’ve done your maintenance period alongside and you go out for an Index to check the submarine out. All sorts of dives and angles and stuff. Just make sure it’s ready to go to sea, and we were out and in the middle of the night, I was on Watch in the Missile Compartment and there was this flood alarm went off and it was ‘Flood, Flood, Flood, Emergency Stations, Emergency Stations, Flood, Flood, Flood, Flood in the fore ends’ and immediately the submarine just went like that.

Front end went down, and I thought, ‘shit’ ‘cos it must be a flood fore end. There was a moment of fear and panic but then your training sets in and you think, right, what’s happening? The strange thing about this incident and I’ve talked to one of my mates about it recently, is that when these Bombers are at sea, I don’t know if it happens now but in my day you could still have two pints of beer a day, the guys on board.

I didn’t drink, I didn’t drink it at all, I just kept mine for when I got back alongside, but we had a trouble stowing these kegs of beer at sea, so somebody came up with this idea that in between the missile tubes, the 16 tubes, you’ve got this guide rail that runs right down there and then the alignment systems there’s little windows that look into the gyros on the bombs, and when you start to fire them, this alignment gear goes right down between them and looks in alternatively to these missiles just before they’re firing them just to get the right data in there ready for them to be launched.

Underneath that they decided they’d put these brackets and weld them on and then put all these kegs of beer underneath there. So, they did that before we sailed, they’re all underneath there, brilliant idea.

Unfortunately, they didn’t account for the submarine doing a bow down angle like this and the next minute I’m hearing all this crashing and banging and what had happened is that the weight of these kegs had gone right against the stanchion, the bracket right at the end of this row, all the way underneath the tubes, and it snapped it off straight and these kegs of beer started tumbling down.

Now that was in the upper level. There’s three levels in the Missile Compartment. The middle level is where we were, where we monitor the missiles and then you’ve got a lower deck which is where the gas generator is and where you get access to underneath the rockets.

These things just came tumbling down, started to tumble down from the upper hatch, and just as it happened, my AB who was on patrol down the lower decks, opened the hatches.

“What’s going on Ron?”

I said, “get your ass back down and shut the hatch.”

He shut the hatch just as this beer barrel just right on top of him, on top of the hatch. So, that was fear and then I thought I wonder what depth we’re going to, and I looked at the depth gauge and we were actually going up the way.

So, what had happened is in Bombers, in the Control Room, you know if you surface and dive a submarine, you flood the ballast tanks and then if you want to surface, you blow the ballast tanks.

On the Bombers there was two blowing panels, two parts to it, forward and aft and seemingly there’s been a false alarm been happening with the flood alarm in the fore ends, and it invariably went off now and again just for no apparent reason, and the Watch Keepers in the Control Room had been aware of this, so they waited until they got confirmation that it was a real flood alarm, so they delayed five seconds.

But in the middle of the night, for some reason they hadn’t done a proper handover to the guys that were on the panel, and when the flood alarm came through, the guy on the after panel reacted straight away while the guy on the forward panel knew they had to wait for a … so he didn’t know, so he blew aft so the after end of the submarine went ‘pfhht’ so that give us the effect that we thought we were sinking, but actually once they realised what was happening, they blew forward as well but by that time the submarine is like that, and all these barrels are tumbling down and then we surfaced.

Of course, Flag Officer of the submarine wasn’t impressed by this but that was the closest on a Bomber.