Cold War Submarine Warrior

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Eric Thompson has had his finger literally on the nuclear button. He joined the Royal Navy submarine service in the early days of the Cold War. He served on WW2 era ships and submarine before ending his career as a senior officer on Britain's state of the art nuclear submarines. Each one armed with inter continental ballistic missiles with nuclear tips. He took Dan to the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport to show him around one of the finest preserved submarines in the world, HMS Alliance. He told Dan how they kept the beer cold and why his main concern at sea was the toilet.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello,
0:00.5	folks, Dan Snow here.
0:01.6	I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history hit.
0:06.1	I'd love for you to be there.
0:07.5	Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London, in England on the 12th of
0:11.8	September to celebrate the 10 years.
0:14.1	You can find out more about it and get tickets with the link in the show notes.
0:17.5	Look forward to seeing you there.
0:26.4	Hi, everybody. Welcome, welcome to Dan Snow's history. I've got the very brilliant Eric Thompson on the podcast. He's a former Commodore in the
0:31.1	Royal Navy throughout the Cold War. He served on five submarines and ended up commanding Britain's main submarine base, Fast Lane, on the cline where Britain's nuclear deterrent is based.
0:43.2	He retired in 1998, but his love of submarines has never left him, as you'll hear, because for this podcast, I went round HMS Alliance with him.
0:51.9	It was laid down right at the end of the Second World War, completed in 1947,
0:55.8	and it served in the Royal Navy right the way through the 1970s. It's now a museum ship in Gosport,
1:02.3	just next to Portsmouth. So I was so honoured that Eric took me around this submarine.
1:07.0	He talked to me all about his experience submarines and what submarines got up to in the Cold War.
1:11.3	If you want to watch a film version of this, you can go to history hit.tv.
1:15.4	It's a digital history channel. It's the best history channel in the world.
1:18.1	Actually, I'm very biased, but I think it is.
1:19.9	And if you use the code January, oh, just, we're still in January?
1:22.0	Yes, we are. If you just use the code January, in the next few days, you can take advantage of the January sale. Use January
1:28.2	and get a month for free and then get your first three months for 80% off. It's a crazy deal. Snap
1:33.3	it up while you have the chance. And you can watch, as well as listen to Eric Thompson, show
	...

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