Publisher's Synopsis
Childhood for Bill Green was a nightmare. Dumped by his parents when four years of age, he was farmed out to five different foster homes. Never knowing where his next meal was coming from, and homeless at age seventeen, he joined the Royal Navy. Through self-discipline, mental toughness, and hard work, he transformed himself from a seventeen-year-old boy with no future, into a British Royal Navy submariner.
"SILENT AND INVISIBLE" is a true story of Bill's life in submarines at the height of the Cold war. Still in his teens, he did his first patrol in a WW2 diesel/electric submarine, spending weeks below the icy waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans secretly gathering information on the Soviet fleet. The resulting game of cat and mouse had the advantage shifting from one adversary to the other, creating an impasse which could keep the war going indefinitely.
During the years of the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation, (1962 -1966) Bill spent weeks patrolling the South China Seas in search of Guerrilla forces running arms to mainland Malaya.
As a ship's diver, he was engaged in clearing ships in Singapore Harbour of limpet mines, whilst helping to clear unexploded WW2 bombs from the Johor Straits.
In 1970, he was part of a team, from the Submarine Escape Training Tank in HMS Dolphin, to set a world record (600 feet) for escaping from a submarine.
After a third near-death experience whilst escaping from a submarine on a routine exercise, he finally decided he had pushed his luck far enough. In this poignant memoir, Bill shares unforgettable fragments of both his personal and submarine life, whilst giving a harrowing glimpse of what it was like to serve in submarines of the Royal Navy amidst the clamour of the Cold War. Chased, harassed, and depth-charged, "SILENT AND INVISIBLE" captures the life and times of those eventful years.
