Douglas attended a naval school at age 10 and started training at sea aged 14 as a cadet. He became the youngest petty officer in the navy and at the start of WW2 he was serving on HMS Coventry, an anti-aircraft cruiser. He later served on the cruiser HMS Fiji and then the battleship King George V which was providing cover for Russian convoys. He was present when this ship and others sank the German battleship Bismarck in 1941. During this time he received news that his brother had been killed in North Africa. By June 1944 he was chief coxswain on board HMS Prince Charles, a ship carrying eight landing craft. He, and others, were given pills to help them stay awake for 24 hours. The ship picked up US Rangers, troops he describes as ‘brilliant soldiers’, at Southampton. They then sailed to Omaha beach, disembarking the Rangers from their landing craft at 7am on D-Day. Despite heavy Allied shelling and bombing the German defences took a heavy toll on the American troops. He remembers one landing craft hitting a mine and parts of bodies being hurled through the air. At one point, during the chaos of the fighting, he jumped into the sea and turned a landing craft around to enable the troops to disembark. He described this not as conscious bravery but something he did spontaneously under the stress of the situation. His only injury of the war was losing some teeth during a game of hockey!

Jeff York offers a gripping tale of his service as a Sonar operator aboard HMS Spartan during the Falklands War. Raised in Northampton, Jeff grew up far from the sea. His first sample of seamanship began after becoming a member of the Sea Cadets. However, at the young age of sixteen, he received permission to enlist in the Royal Navy, seeing it as the natural course for his career. Even before his basic training, Jeff was determined to become a submariner, recalling a trip to Portsmouth where he went down in a submarine. From that moment, he was hooked. Once he was given the choice, he joined HMS Dolphin to do his submarine training. During this period, he served aboard ships from HMS Sceptre to HMS Aurora in the Mediterranean before being assigned to HMS Spartan, a new type of submarine which had a trial system implemented. During an exercise in the Bay of Biscay, the Ship's captain, Jim Taylor received an order to head for Gibraltar to make preparations for something. The young crew remained oblivious all throughout until Taylor revealed that they were preparing to join the Task Force in defending the Falklands from Argentinian rebels. HMS Spartan would become one of the first vessels to reach the islands. Jeff describes some of the ship's systems, including a dependable sonar which was used to locate enemy targets from a long range. He discusses the difficulties of being in unfamiliar waters, from the uncertainty of submarine combat to facing many navigational problems. The crew was not immune to a sense of confusion and vulnerability, feelings that increased after the loss of HMS Sheffield. Their unfamiliarity led to many precarious situations, including the ship getting trapped in a forest of kelp which jammed their systems. This posed a serious threat to the Spartan since it was fuelled by a nuclear power source. Despite these hardships, the crew managed to pull through, benefited by the strong comradery shared among everyone onboard. Jeff reflects on the overlooked contributions of submariners, taking pride in their obscurity whenever the topic of the  Falklands War is brought up in a conversation. His interview reveals their importance to the War effort as well as providing a glimpse into how submarine warfare changed during the period.