Themes

David Cragg on the danger involved in being on a ship during the Gulf War and how he felt. (RNM)

Transcript: “There was only one occasion when I think it actually worried me being on a ship and that was with HMS Exeter one of the destroyers. Once the ground war had started we went to replace HMS Gloucester as the guard ship with the American battleships right at the north of Gulf near to the Kuwait coastline. And we knew that the Iraqi troops were on the run. There had been a lot of chemical biological alarms on the ships at various points during the war. And this one night the alarms began ringing on Exeter and we were aware that it was the time when Saddam Hussein might make his last ditch effort and it might be a sort of kamikaze effort to destroy the forces that were slowly destroying his army and navy. And you really felt that this might be the first real chemical biological attack of the war. And when we were sitting, or standing at our action stations that night with our gasmasks on and our anti-flash equipment, that was when you really felt it was for real for the first time.”

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