Women on Submarines

I see that the stationing of women on submarines is under consideration. Again.

When I was on submarines I favored women on submarines – in fact I wanted women ISSUED to us!

My male chauvinist pig attitudes aside, it was simply not possible on diesel submarines. We generated only sufficient fresh water for officers to shower every 11 days, general enlisted showered every four days, and only food handlers were permitted to shower every day.

Further, we had to vent the air from the effluent tanks back into the submarine, and when added to unwashed sweat and the overpowering smell of diesel fuel…well, my wife would not let me in the house. I had to strip in the garage, and march rapidly to a drawn hot tub of bubble bath.

And that was after four days at sea during normal ops. You cannot imagine what 56 days submerged on patrol smelled like. We had no laundry facilities aboard, either. We took three changes of clothes.

Now the nuclear submarines are a great deal different. They make so much fresh water naturally from the reactor that they pump the excess overboard, and they are much larger, but then they have almost twice the number of sailors aboard.

They are still crowded. Bunks are three high, with scant room to roll over. The submerged time runs as high as 77 days – as in the old days the limit is the ability to store food. We stacked food in boxes on the deck of the only passageway, and ate our way through the boxes. We stored potatoes in our “escape hatches” since we were in water too deep to use escape hatches the second we cleared the harbor — the escape hatches were to comfort our wives.

I guess they can work it out, but submarines are not designed like surface ships. They are basically weapons systems without any consideration for crew – crew are just shoehorned wherever can be found. Surface ships have designs with great consideration for crew comfort, submarines are design deficit insofar as crews are concerned.

Good luck getting women aboard. They will have to be a special breed.