HMS Dauntless was hit by three bombs, two of them in the same spot, which just about broke her back, one single explosion destroying the engine room and causing an upward blast that literally caved in the entire upperworks. More than a hundred men were dead, and almost everyone else was wounded. The destroyer would sink into the freezing ocean in under fifteen minutes.
Captain Day’s Gloucester fared best. She took only one bomb, fine on her starboard bow. But it was a big thousand-pounder from one of the Daggers, and it smashed deep inside the ship before exploding with a blast that obliterated her foredeck, ripped apart her missile-launch systems, and blasted overboard the forward Vickers 4.5-inch gun. She, too, instantly began to ship water from the gaping hole on the waterline on her starboard side, and there was a terrible fire raging dangerously close to the missile magazine.
At this point hardly anyone, aside from the ships’ companies in the pickets, knew what had happened. There was no communication from either the Daring or Dauntless , but Captain Day sent a signal back to the flag reporting his own fairly drastic damage, which might yet cause the Gloucester to sink.
However, the loss of life on his ship was negligible compared to the others, just twelve men killed and fifteen wounded. It took only another minute for the lookouts on the frigate line positioned just a few miles behind them, to see three plumes of thick black smoke and flame on the horizon.
Captain Day, who was closest, now reported the Dauntless was sinking. He was out of contact with the Daring , and two of the frigates, the Kent and Grafton , were nearer. The CO of the Gloucester knew the fire was raging toward his missiles, which would blow the entire ship into oblivion.
His firefighting teams were down there trying to work in incinerating heat, but they were fighting a losing battle. At 0642 Captain Day gave the order to abandon ship. And Admiral Holbrook ordered his frigates forward to assist with the rescue of the wounded.
The trouble was, information was very limited. And he was not to know that eight more Skyhawks were already in the air from Rio Grande, refueled and heading east at maximum speed. The Admiral, of course, understood the likelihood of further attack, but without a Harrier CAP, he was reliant on his downrange helos, and then the medium-range radar of his destroyers’ missile systems, and the Argentinian pilots were flying below that.
There was, however, quite sufficient information for one commanding officer. Captain Gregor Vanislav, still moving at minimum speed out to the east of the Ark Royal , had already picked up on his sonar the savage iron bomb detonations that had decimated the British picket line.
And now, shortly after 0700, he came quietly to periscope depth for a visual sighting of his quarry. He could see the Ark Royal out on the horizon through the telescopic lens, and there was no doubt in his mind. This was the Royal Navy’s only active aircraft carrier. He’d come a long way for this, and now he intended to carry out the instruction issued to him with such firmness and clarity by Admiral Vitaly Rankov in person.
The carrier had in fact moved three miles farther east and was now well astern of the other warships, in readiness for its lower deck hospital to begin receiving the wounded from the burning destroyers. Right now this was the only hospital the Task Force had since the other main medical facilities were on the Ocean and Largs Bay .
Captain Vanislav, now almost stationary, was no more than three miles to her southeast. His plan was to circle the carrier, staying deep and slow, five hundred feet below the surface, a depth at which his Akula was more than comfortable. He intended to launch his attack from two miles off the Ark Royal ’s starboard beam, and it would be made easier by the fact that the carrier was scarcely moving, and that there would, he knew, be a great deal of diversionary action taking place. His last satellite communication, relayed from Moscow, had made that absolutely clear.
Down periscope…helmsman, steer course three-zero-five, speed four…bow down ten…three hundred…
At this speed, the Viper was absolutely silent, undetectable, as it crept through the water, slowly drawing a bead on the 20,000-ton Royal Navy carrier. The submarine was transmitting nothing, her Captain relying on a visual fix when his ship was in position.
At 0708 Viper K-157 was precisely where he wanted her. They came to PD and he took one final look. Even then, for the fleeting seconds his periscope was jutting eighteen inches out of the water like a telegraph pole, he was not detected.
Admiral Holbrook had already signaled for two escorts, the Batch Three Type-42s York and Edinburgh , to position themselves on his port and starboard quarters and use intermittent active sonar, since they were all alerted to the bizarre outside possibility of a submarine threat, from Russia! But there was plainly no point having both destroyers passive, eight miles up-threat from the bombs and missiles.
But the destroyers were still a couple of miles short of this new station, and the British Admiral had so much on his mind after the destruction of his picket line that he was giving scant regard to the very real danger of a torpedo attack on his own flagship.
Right now there was something close to havoc in his ops room. Everyone was handing out advice, how best to deal with the crisis on the picket line, the urgency of getting the GR9s into the air and launching a major bomb and missile attack on the airfield from whence, it was assumed, the Skyhawks had come.
No thought was being given to the classic evasive maneuvers a big warship might take to avoid a submarine attack—moving in a zigzag pattern, varying speed drastically from twenty-five knots to six, forcing any tracking submarine to show its hand by forcing it to increase speed.
Captain Vanislav intended to fire three torpedoes at his massive target from a range of 5,000 yards. Right now they were a little over five miles away, and ready for the final approach. Viper ’s CO ordered her closer.
Meanwhile, the two flights of Skyhawks were clear of the Falkland Islands and headed at wave-top height toward the Battle Group, making in excess of six hundred knots. The frigates Kent and Grafton were still about two miles short of the disaster area, with the St. Albans and Iron Duke farther to the left, and about three miles astern of the other two.
The four lead Skyhawks cleared the horizon and could now see the blazing destroyers, but their targets were two miles back, and all four of the Argentinian fighters unleashed their thousand-pound bombs straight at the Kent and Grafton .
Both frigates acquired and opened fire with their Seawolf missile systems. They hit the first two Skyhawks, missed the others, and attempted to swing around to the right.
The Grafton was not in time and took two bombs hard on her port beam, both of which smashed into the interior of the ship, detonated, and blew apart the ops room, the comms room, and the engine room, killing thirty-two men and wounding forty. The ship was crippled. In fact she would never sail again. Like the Daring , like the Dauntless , she was on her way to the bottom.
Much luckier was Captain Mike Fawkes’s Kent. She swung around fractionally faster, and while two of the bombs sailed right past, two of them came screaming over the top, fifty feet above the upperworks.
The second four Skyhawks now cleared the horizon, and the first ships they saw were the two frigates in the rear, Captain Colin Ashby’s St. Albans and Commander Keith Kemsley’s Iron Duke.
The very sharp, short-range Seawolf systems in both frigates locked on immediately, and both ops rooms had the missiles away in a matter of seconds. But again not before the iron bombs were released. And there was absolutely nothing the Royal Navy Commanders could do. The first two smashed into the St. Albans , one through the port-side bow, one amidships. The second two, on the rise, slammed down the communications tower and blasted the radar away from the Iron Duke.
The carnage in the St. Albans was truly shocking. Forty-seven men were killed instantly. Somehow the Captain survived, perhaps protected from the blast by his own high, television-style screen. But the ops room was on fire and three other survivors helped Captain Ashby to get out, leaving behind them a scene from hell as the bodies of the computer and missile operators burned.
The missiles from the two ships knocked down two more Skyhawks. The trouble was, without a squadron of Harriers, there was no early air defense from a high CAP, and no early warnings from the Harrier pilots. As General Sir Robin Brenchley had warned the Prime Minister not so very long ago in the small hours of a February morning in Downing Street, the loss of the Harrier FA2s represented the loss of the Royal Navy Fleet’s ability to defend itself.
And with a total of six warships ablaze in the south Atlantic—four of them sinking—and at least 250 men killed and even more wounded, many of them badly burned…well, this was a catastrophe that had, perhaps, been very well foreseen by the Navy, but totally ignored by their political masters.
Eight miles astern of the wrecked warships, Captain Vanislav came to PD for his final visual. HMS Ark Royal was less than four miles away, moving slowly, her starboard beam exposed to the submarine’s line of sight.
The CO prepared to fire. He would launch his big TEST torpedoes quietly at thirty knots, running in toward the carrier, staying passive all the way.
0725: “Stand by, one!”
“Last bearing check.”
“Shoot!”
The Russian torpedo came powering out of the tube, seemed to pause for a split-second as her engine fired, and then went whining off into the dark waters.
“Weapon under guidance.”
“Arm the weapon.”
“Weapon armed, sir.”
Ninety seconds to go. “Weapon now one thousand meters from target, sir.”
“Weapon has passive contact.”
At that moment Viper K-157 fired her second torpedo, and within seconds it too was streaking straight at the massive starboard hull of the carrier.
With the lead weapon only eight hundred yards out, Viper ’s third torpedo was under way, and at this precise time the sonar men inside the Ark Royal picked up the incoming ship-killers. At least they picked up one of them…
Admiral—sonar…Torpedo! Torpedo! Torpedo! Bearing green zero-zero-four…Really close, sir, really close!
That meant about five hundred yards, which put the lead torpedo about thirty seconds from impact, directly off the beam. It was out of the question to fire back—the old 20,000-ton carrier was simply not built for close combat of this type.
Someone bellowed, “Decoys!” But that was at least two minutes too late. The Combat Systems Officer alerted all Task Force ships still floating that the flag was under attack, along with everyone else. But he never even had time to yell, “Unknown submarine!” before the big TEST-7IME Russian torpedo slammed into the hull amidships and blew up with stupendous force.
The second torpedo struck home farther forward, and the last one almost blew off the entire stern area, fracturing both shafts, rupturing the flight deck, blasting four helicopters over the side. It was a classic submarine attack, conducted with the utmost stealth, and executed with total brutality. When Captain Vanislav came to PD for the last time, what he saw in those seven seconds would remain with him for however long he lived.
Gregor Vanislav could see the aircraft carrier was ripped almost in two, her back broken by the blast of the first torpedo, the entire stern of the ship sagging back into the water. And even as he watched, a huge fire suddenly broke out right below the island, the big chunky superstructure on one side of the flight deck.
The immediate inferno was almost certainly caused by a ruptured aircraft fuel line, and now Captain Vanislav could see British seamen jumping from the flight deck into the ocean, their clothes on fire. It reminded him of the gruesome pictures from the World Trade Center disaster in New York ten years ago. Surely none of the one-thousand-strong crew, save those working high in the tower, could possibly have survived.
The huge warship was swiftly ablaze from end to end, but the fires would not be long lasting, since the ship was also sinking. For the moment, however, the only part not burning was the upper floor of the island, where presumably the Admiral and the Captain were still alive. The Ark Royal , now with thousands of gallons of jet fuel blazing, was an inferno, and Captain Vanislav, a very senior Russian career naval officer, almost went into shock at the catastrophe he had caused.
The only thought in his mind was a feeling of profound regret, and a realization that if he could live the last ten minutes over again, he would not have done it. Because, knowing the reality as he now did, he would have been incapable of committing this act upon a British ship that, so far as he knew, wished him no harm. Captain Vanislav ordered his ship deep again, and with a surprisingly heavy heart, accepted that his grotesque mission was accomplished. He turned north for Mother Russia.
Meanwhile, on board the carrier, Admiral Holbrook was still alive, but the heat was becoming too intense. He and Captain Reader were together until the last, knowing, as the flames leapt toward their quarters high above the flight deck, their only chance was to jump, before they were burned to death.
That was like leaping from the George Washington Bridge. But others had done it. There was no other way down, except to walk down the companionway into the flames, and there was no time to wait for helicopter rescue, even if that were possible.
The two senior officers walked outside and climbed to the platform area above the Admiral’s ops room. They were both still wearing their life jackets and antiflash gear, hoods and gloves, and they stood there in the stifling smoke as the great ship, now in her death throes, suddenly lurched violently, thirty degrees to starboard. This reduced the distance down to the water, but confirmed the inevitability that the Ark Royal was sinking. The GR9s, mostly in flames, were slewing across the flight deck and falling overboard.
So far as the two officers could tell, there was no enemy in sight. And the rails were growing hot, almost too hot to hold, and they just stood there, until Captain Reader said quietly, “We never had a chance, did we?”
“No, David, we never did. And I’m not sure we’ll ever know what hit us.”
Ten seconds later, as the ship listed even farther, they both jumped, and hit the water, now forty-five feet below, feetfirst. Both men miraculously survived the fall, but not the almost-freezing water. When the destroyers moved in to pick up survivors two hours later, both senior officers were found floating, but no longer alive.
Anyone in water that cold has approximately two minutes to live, which meant there were no survivors from the crew of the Royal Navy carrier. Historians would in future regard it as the greatest single Royal Naval disaster since the old 41,000-ton battle cruiser HMS Hood was sunk by the Bismarck in the Denmark Strait seventy years earlier. Fourteen hundred and twenty men were lost tha
t day, but even the Hood had three survivors.
It rapidly became apparent to all the British officers the flagship had been hit and almost certainly destroyed. Captain Mike Fawkes, on the bridge of the amazingly lucky frigate HMS Kent , now assumed command of the remnants of the fleet.
But there was not much left, and the rescue operation was by now the most colossal task. No one knew what was happening on the landing beaches. It was obvious the Army must now be devoid of any air cover whatsoever, and their situation, exposed on the shores of Lafonia, must be critical.
In fact, during the final moments before Viper fired her salvo, two of the GR9s did get off the deck and were making their way toward Lafonia, when the ops room in the frigate Kent informed them of the disaster to the carrier. This, of course, left the British pilots stranded with nowhere to land.
They both made a swing around the southeastern coast of East Falkland and came in over the landing beaches, where they ejected, sending their aircraft forward to ditch in the Atlantic. This avoided the possibility of Argentina claiming them as the spoils of war, which would most certainly have happened if the aircrew had requested permission to land at Mount Pleasant.
Both pilots survived the landing, right behind the beach, but they quickly understood this was no place to be. Four minutes after their arrival, two Argentine bombers came in low and hit the assault ship Albion , which had mercifully unloaded its Marines.
Then two more fighter attack aircraft came in low and strafed the beach, firing four rockets in among the parked Apache attack helicopters. Then another bomber came in and hit the Largs Bay with a thousand-pound bomb. The British Army, like the Navy, was a sitting duck before the onslaught of Argentine bombs. And there was no Harrier CAP to protect them from air attack.
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