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I’ve dreamed about going on a submarine since childhood, but now that my request to join one on exercise has been granted by the Royal Navy and the Ministry of Defence, I’m nervous.

Three weeks on a nuclear submarine in waters off the UK may seem nothing compared with the many consecutive months submariners spend under the oceans, but for me it will be testing.

The first challenge is at the quay alongside HMS Torbay. It has never occurred to me how you get into a submarine.

HMS Torbay has five decks and is about 280ft by 32ft by 32ft; a double-decker bus is 32ft by 16ft by 10ft, a football pitch is 330ft long.

But what, and where, is the entrance? A door at the side? A porthole? But a submarine has no windows (although whether they do or not is the most common question submariners are asked), so once submerged, there’s no view of sea life.

As for getting on board, I discover you take the gangplank, turn towards the back end of the fin and climb up to the main access hatch.

Then you ease yourself on to a ladder that takes you straight down. At the bottom you can turn left into the reactor compartment or right forward to the control room.

Oh, and don’t bring a suitcase, it would never fit. Of about 300 military submarines worldwide, 11 are British.

HMS Torbay is a Trafalgar-class hunter-attack submarine built in 1984. It has torpedoes that can engage targets a dozen miles away, missiles that fly 1,000 miles with astonishing accuracy and sonar that picks up vessels up to 70 miles away.

In October 2001, it launched Tomahawk missile strikes into Afghanistan. It can also be involved in inserting land forces and intelligence gathering.

It has a nuclear reactor that could power Plymouth. It makes its own water, electricity, oxygen and, on a daily basis, bread.

It can get called to go anywhere at any time. The passageways are narrow, the ceilings low and numerous valves, pipes and ancillary pieces of machinery swoop down – even experienced submariners bang their heads.

There’s a constant hissing from pipes and the corridors are illuminated by a pitiless, high-wattage fluorescent light.

Everything forward of the control room is either a living, operating or fighting space, while everything aft is related to propulsion.

The nuclear reactor is in the middle. The layout can be split into five compartments. The first, at the front, houses one of the two submarine escape compartments and most of the sleeping areas.

Next is the services section. This has the control room, from where the submarine is driven, navigated and where the weapons control panel is located.

It also has the sound room, from where sonar is operated; the galley; mess areas and, at the bottom, the weapon-stowage compartment – the ‘bomb shop’.
Hidden depths: HMS Torbay comes to the surface out of the ocean as the sun rises

Hidden depths: HMS Torbay comes to the surface out of the ocean as the sun rises

Behind this is the reactor compartment, with the reactor heavily shielded in a container no bigger than a wheelie-bin.

Aft of this is the manoeuvring room where the Propulsion Watch monitor the reactor.

Below are the switchboard room and diesel generators. In the final compartment is the engine room.

The ship’s company is divided into four departments: warfare, which operates and fights the submarine; marine engineering, which looks after the reactor, propulsion and fire; weapons engineering, which maintains the missiles and torpedoes; and logistics, which handles food and something about all aspects of the sub, no matter if they’re a propulsion guy or a weapons expert.

If something goes wrong, the nearest person to it has to be able to handle it. ‘You don’t have the time to save a submarine that you would with a surface ship,’ explains an officer.

Virtually everyone has a secondary and often a tertiary role – the leading steward, who serves the officers their meals, will also spend time steering the boat.

There are many potential emergencies: the most dangerous is a administration.

There are 125 submariners, all dressed in dark-blue heavy canvas trousers and a blue cotton shirt.

I’m invited back on the bridge to watch our departure. Gareloch in south-west Scotland is calm as Torbay leaves Faslane Naval Base.

As a submarine has no keel, it is difficult to manoeuvre on the surface in tight waters, so we’re pulled by two tugs.

Once free from hazards, the submarine can move under its own steam. On reaching the open sea, Commander Ed Ahlgren gives the order: ‘Dive the submarine.’

A few moments later the reply on the intercom comes: ‘Diving now, diving now.’ I clamber back down the vertiginous ladder and take a last deep gulp of fresh air as the main access hatch is shut.

A few minutes later we slip under the waters. Once we’re under, there’s no rolling or pitching and unless you look at the depth dial you could be ten metres, 100 metres or 20,000 leagues under the sea.

It’s the same with time: with no natural light, it soon becomes irrelevant if it’s day or night.

In any case, a submarine never sleeps. The crew are divided into two watches; everyone works six hours on and six hours off, so unless you get to sleep immediately after your watch, you’ll be averaging a lot less sleep than six hours – it’s an exhausting gig.

Every crew member knows flood. Submarines are mainly lost because of floods, usually the result of a breach caused by hitting something or being hit. It is one of the few emergencies where a submarine will surface: this reduces the pressure, relieving the amount of water coming in.

As for accommodation, the ‘racks’ are small, narrow bunks, piled three high in a pitch-dark compartment – and there’s no dark darker than the part of a submarine with no lights.

The smell, with about 80 men, is hideous. After a few days I cease to notice it.

A metal pallet with one thin blanket and no pillow was to be my bed. I’m given a plum middle bunk, so I need to do a sort of swallow dive to get into it, followed by a silent prayer that I remain lodged there throughout the night.

On my second night, the fellow above me falls out. On either side of the bed, which was literally wedged between them, were stacks of Spearfish torpdeoes, and even bigger Tomahawk land attack
missiles, each so close I could have reached out and cuddled one.

There are often more men on board than there are bunks, so crew members use vacant bunks while other are on their watch.

The heads – naval term for loos – are one deck above the bunks. To reach them it’s a steep climb up a metal ladder while carrying toothbrush, razor and towel.

The submarine makes its own water, so everyone is parsimonious with it when washing.

After a while, in this all-male boat, I decide that there’s little point in showering at all.

In the control room, there are two periscopes: search and attack. Each complements the other, providing a television feed, high magnification for looking at long-range shipping and a thermal-imaging function for low-light conditions.

They do have an intelligence-gathering function, but periscopes aren’t used much now apart from ensuring ship safety – the days of submarines using a periscope to see what they are doing in a fight are long gone.

At periscope depth – when the submarine is lying just below the surface of the water – it is in quite a dangerous position as it can’t be seen and if it were hit by a ship it could be cut in two.

When the search periscope is raised, the navigational aids are updated by GPS.

However, when deep, the submarine’s position is calculated using tidal-stream predictions with recordings of the submarine’s speed and log.

Apart from when the periscope is raised, the captain can’t see where he’s going.

Communications are complex, ranging from UHF (ultra-high frequency) down to very low-frequency waves, which can be received only when just below the surface.

On a ‘sneaky’, intelligence-collecting patrol, a submarine won’t communicate for six weeks, but receives information daily by satellite when at periscope depth.

Once it has surfaced, submariners can use email and go out on the casing to make phone calls and have a cigarette.

At the port forward end of the control room is the boat’s control console, where a team of three drives the submarine. The planesman operates the control column, which is similar to an aircraft joystick.

But unlike an aircraft there are 12 people on watch in the control room. Planesman Andy ‘Robbie’ Robinson admits this can prove trying.

‘You’ve got so many backseat drivers. It’s a nightmare.’ Forward of the control room is the sound room.

When it comes to sonar, a submarine operating off Land’s End can detect a ship leaving Bristol and the operators are able to determine the number of shafts it has and the number of blades on each shaft, and so identify the type of ship.

So, what do the oceans sound like? ‘The Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Pacific are all much the same, but the Arctic is my favourite ocean,’ says Richie Barrow, a senior sonar rating.

‘When ice is starting to form, you hear ambient sound all around, cracking and groaning. Further inside the marginal ice zone, there are larger blocks of ice which creak, crunch and smash against
each other.

Then, as you reach the ice cap, it goes completely quiet.’ Apart from squeaking porpoises, it’s listening to whales that proves popular among submariners.

‘It really gets to the guys,’ says Barrow. ‘When you’re stuck on board, a million miles away from your family, the whales will make a grown man cry. They sound so sad and lost.’

Food has to last for three months and anything fresh is eaten within the first fortnight. But pizza bases and pastry are made by hand and, says one officer, ‘if you’re on the early morning watch, there’s nothing nicer than the smell of baking bread drifting up from the galley’.

The menu follows the same pattern every week: Wednesday night is curry, Friday lunch is fish and chips, and on Sunday there’s a roast.

The standard is superior school food. Once, when the Torbay’s task was extended by eight weeks, the crew were simply served less food to make it stretch until they reached port.

‘Effectively you get put on the Atkins Diet,’ says Lieutenant Craig Spacey. ‘You’re fed tins of meat and not many carbs. I lost over a stone-and-a-half. We ended up with one slice of bread per day.’

Being in a submarine takes a while to adjust to, even for experienced submariners. ‘You feel lethargic because of the lack of fresh air and your sleep schedule gets out of whack,’ says Lieutenant-Commander Dan Reiss, on exchange from the US Navy.

‘Then there’s the confinement and bumping into people all the time, which builds up over the first few days – guys get kind of angry with each other. But it becomes . . . I won’t say peaceful, but a comfortable way to live.’

As for health, viruses spread like wildfire in the closed atmosphere with coughs and colds in the first couple of weeks and in the final weeks when the men are run down.

But I manage to experience little more than a fortnight aboard. The Torbay is retasked to go on a secret mission and I, as a civilian, have to cut my time short and am let off at the nearest port.

It’s been tough living without contact with loved ones. And with no exercise, three hearty meals a day and constant access to the ‘nutty basket’ (chocolate bars),

I’ve put on nearly a stone. In contrast, these men spend up to 300 days of the year away from wives, girlfriends, parents, children and fresh air and sunshine.

They do a dangerous and demanding job in uncomfortable conditions and don’t get the recognition they deserve.

Adapted from Sub, by Danny Danziger, published by Sphere Books, priced £17.99 . To order a copy at the special price of £15.99 with free p&p, call the Review Bookstore on 0843 382 1111 or visit MailLife.co.uk/Books

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