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Argentina Invades
Of all the titles in the armed services, I suppose that of Captain is the most romantic, the one most likely to evoke images of swashbucklers and daredevils of the high seas. For it is a rank which has inspired maritime folklore to blur irreparably the line between fact and fiction, between buccaneers and king’s officers, pirates and plain adventurers. The very mention of a few names – Bligh, Cook, Ahab, Kidd, Morgan and Hornblower – there’s legend for you.
In the summer of 1972, I stepped forward, if I might be allowed several thousand yards of literary licence, to join them. Captain J. F. Woodward Royal Navy, and proud of it too. However, I did not immediately take my place on the bridge of some mighty warship and start issuing commands. Rather I bought myself a new brolly, and a brand-new briefcase, checked the daily running of the 7.40 Surbiton – to – Waterloo local, and joined the massed forces of London’s four million commuters.
Each day I made my way to the fifth floor of the Ministry of Defence Main Building in Whitehall. Gone were the glorious vistas of the seascapes I had lived with for so long, the great Scottish lochs, the Western Isles, the open sea and the sky. Instead, if I looked out of my office window, I could gaze straight down into the spectacular granite cleavage of the massive Goddess of Fertility who guards one side of the North Door of the building. A strange symbol to have at the door of the Ministry of Defence but it had been too expensive to dismantle when the Board of Trade moved out, to let us in.
Achieving the rank of Captain in the modern Royal Navy normally requires a fairly stringent piece of career assessment. The general rule is that you will be offered four, perhaps five jobs during the next eight or nine years, after which they will either make you a rear admiral or thank you perfunctorily for all that you have done and dispense with your services. It’s known as ‘Falling off the top of the Captains’ List’ and represents bad news for most. Immediately upon promotion you are required to confer with the officer who masterminds all the captains’ appointments, and you are asked whether you’d like to specialize in Policy, or Operations, or Equipment Procurement, or Personnel, or perhaps volunteer to become an Attaché. Or even, in one case I heard, whether you’d like to retire early as they’d promoted more than they’d intended.
My own policy was relatively simple. I would do one job in the submarine business, to pay back some of what I owed; one in command of a surface warship; and I’d aim for two jobs in the Ministry, preferably in Policy, the first to find out how the Headquarters worked and the second to apply what I had learned. Maybe. Almost any other combination would limit my options for further progress in the Navy.
My first job was in Whitehall in the Directorate of Naval Plans. I was appointed Assistant Director (Warfare), a position which would have much to do with Navy Board policy. I approached this new life with some trepidation, imagining myself soon to be engulfed in several cubic yards of red tape and galloping bureaucratic rubbish, which would prove to be total anathema to the serving officer more accustomed to driving nuclear submarines than pushing a pen. I also feared there would be none of the cheerful camaraderie of mess life which I had enjoyed for all of my career so far; none of the imposed self-discipline which was a way of life to me and my kind; and no real social life. I envisaged dull and sleazy offices, with the inhabitants speaking in some kind of lunatic and foreign jargon. I would be, for the first time in a long while, an outsider, captain or no captain.
As I walked out of the building, at the end of my first mesmeric day, I had by no means found my feet. I was in the company of an RAF group captain, but when I wished him ’Good evening’ and prepared to walk across the footway on Hungerford Bridge back to Waterloo Station, he seemed quite taken aback.
‘Not Hungerford Bridge, old chap,’ he said. ‘That’s known as Other Ranks’ Bridge. Officers – we use Westminster Bridge.’
Misjudging the social order of the bridges was not, however, my only mistake in that first week in the Ministry. Contrary to all my preconceived ideas about civil servants, mostly based on Parkinson’s Laws which I had learnt so early, I found the people in the department to be extraordinarily knowledgeable, companionable and keen to help me settle to a new career. The subjects we had to tackle were nothing short of riveting. They ranged from briefing the First Sea Lord on contentious inter-Service issues to preparing staff papers for the Navy Board on almost anything, from the nature of amphibious warfare to the need for a new type of fighter aircraft at the forthcoming turn of the century. Strategy, operations and procurement of naval systems and ships; manpower, training, World and Alliance trends. What kind of a Fleet will Britain require in the year 2010? How long will the next war be? Who may we be fighting? Just what is British Maritime Policy?
My new duties encompassed the entire spectrum of Royal Navy Defence Policy: one of my first assignments was issued to me by the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff, then Rear Admiral Henry Leach, later to become First Sea Lord. ‘Let me have, on one side of a piece of foolscap, all of the tasks and roles of the Royal Navy – by next Wednesday.’ This has been the subject of entire books written over years by the likes of Mahan, Barnett and Cable; but it was a good three-day exercise for the narrow-minded submariner fresh to the strange ways and wider horizons of the Ministry of Defence.
Another task which befell us was to produce the Royal Navy’s considered opinion on whether Britain could reasonably defend a remote, ill-charted colony in the South Atlantic known as the Falkland Islands. This was in 1973 and we were dealing, as always, with the possibility that the Argentine government might suddenly carry out its constant threat to take by armed force what they described as their ‘Malvinas’. And it seemed to us that Her Majesty’s government would be largely powerless to do anything whatsoever to stop them. We couldn’t afford to station a force large enough in the islands themselves; nor could we get a reinforcement force out there in the time which would probably be available to us. Careful consideration inevitably pointed to the only conclusion: impossible. Strangely, the question of what, if anything, we might do to get the Argentinians out again once they had occupied the islands was never raised.
In addition to such specific problems, I had to learn from scratch the jargon. Without which you cannot survive in the MOD. I had to learn the ‘buzz phrases’, which mean everything to a naval staff director, but little to a non-initiate: ‘size and shape’, ‘wedge’, ‘graduated response’, ‘military years’, ‘bidding minute’, ‘cuts exercise’, ‘force goals’, ‘Rotherham fleet’, ’nuclear sufficiency’, and a thousand others. They were all portmanteau phrases to cover the large concepts and techniques by which the MOD conducted its business and it took me about a year to catch on. But without this unearthly vocabulary, your chances of attaining serious High Command are negligible.
As 1973 drew to a close, our department became aware of a likely new development which would keep us all extremely busy. The winter of the coal miners’ strike led to the embattled Edward Heath – in accordance with most bookmakers’ predictions – losing power to the Labour Party in the General Election of February 1974. For us this meant a Defence Review, with massive cuts being proposed to the MOD’s budget, our own intensive efforts being known as ‘Pain and Grief’ – that is, trying to avoid falling into line financially with the government’s intentions, by exaggerating the dark and dire consequences of the cash cuts proposed.
Happily for us, however, the new Prime Minister Harold Wilson did not choose to return Denis Healey to the Ministry of Defence which he had ruled from 1964 to 1970. Instead he appointed him Chancellor, which we all found very helpful. Healey was determined to cut Defence spending but, with his vast experience in the intricacies of the Services and as an intellect of high standing, he was always prepared to listen and adjust his views in the face of hard evidence. Very like Mrs Thatcher, though I doubt either will be entirely at ease with the comparison.
When Healey argued, he argued from knowledge – knowledge h
e cheerfully agreed he had acquired from making just about every mistake in the book during his previous tenures of office. The experience now served him well and, unlike Mr Nott in 1981, he realized that his cuts could not be achieved overnight and made no attempt to do so. Polaris was the obvious problem, with its relatively high profile, political and financial, but Healey knew all about that and was clear in his own mind that it ought to be kept. By contrast, Harold Wilson adopted his customary role as magician, all things to all men. I remember listening to him talk about Polaris during the run-up to the General Election and deciding that he had said he’d keep Polaris, definitely. Discussing the programme later with an anti-Polaris acquaintance, it seemed to him that Wilson had made it crystal clear that Polaris was to go. This was, of course, something altogether less than bedrock upon which to base a Naval Staff paper, whether it had to argue for, or against.
Did we or did we not have Polaris? I don’t think any of us knew, certainly not I. The only thing I knew for certain was that Mr Wilson was a master at not letting anyone know what was happening in his mind. But personally, I am sure he knew precisely what he was doing. While being quite certain Polaris had to go ahead, the trickiest task was to keep the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament people voting Labour. No one can dispute that both he and his successor James Callaghan achieved both objectives.
During that Defence Review, immediately after Wilson took office, my task was to brief the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Michael Pollock, on how work was progressing and particularly on the latest efforts of the other two Services to avoid the cuts at the Navy’s expense. Sir Michael’s Number Two, the Vice Chief of Naval Staff, then Vice Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, monitored most of my work on its way up. Eight years from then both of them would be taking a much keener interest in what I had to say – Sir Michael because his son was the Senior Pilot of 846 Squadron, the ‘Junglies’ who nightly flew the big Sea King 4 helicopters from Hermes into the Falkland Islands to ‘insert’ the Special Forces; and Sir Terence because by 1982 he was the Chief of Defence Staff and the man on whose professional military advice the Cabinet depended.
In the summer of 1974, I returned to the Submarine Service, journeying north with Char and the family once more to Faslane, on the Clyde. I was now Captain, Submarine Sea Training, with a staff of about 100 to help me train all submarines coming forward from ‘refit’ or ‘new build’ for service with the Fleet.
Put like that, it sounds simple enough. But the process of preparing a submarine, and her crew, for service in the front line is exhaustive, and usually exhausting, for crew and trainers alike. My job was, first, to set the standards of safety, behaviour and operational performance required, then to train the people to meet those standards and, finally, to examine them to ensure they had. I thus became both hatchet-faced inspector and smiling, helpful adviser who encouraged rather than drove. It was a completely new, demanding organization and I did not get many thanks from my ‘clients’. Perhaps I smiled not enough and ‘hatcheted’ too much. The right balance is always difficult to strike and, if pressed, I tend to hatchet first and only get round to smiling if there’s time later.
When I left in 1976, it was to take command of my first surface ship, the 4000-ton Type 42 guided-missile destroyer HMS Sheffield and she proved to be no great pleasure to me. Indeed she was a long saga of defects, difficulties and disappointments. She was in fact the first of a new class of anti-aircraft destroyers, quite a comfortable little ship, as such matters go. She was scheduled to finish her extensive programme of early trials within six months of my arrival. Then I would take her through Work-Up to join the Fleet as an operational unit in late 1977.
But it didn’t happen like that. Her complicated new weapons computer program, delivered the week I joined, insisted on ’crashing’ about every four minutes. It was as well we were not at war because although we could work the guns, or the anti-aircraft missile system – Sea Dart – or even the sonar separately, they could not be persuaded to work all at the same time. The new computer program was so bad I decided to go back to the old version, which had been discarded, and attempt to refine it. ‘Sorry, sir, we didn’t keep a copy, I’m afraid.’ Not for the last time in Sheffield was I to groan with exasperation.
We went into dry dock for eight weeks, but new problems extended this to four months, and included a complete sandblasting and repainting of the underhull. On top of this, Sheffield had been chosen to lead the Royal Yacht out to the Fleet Review at Spithead off Portsmouth, an extremely rare ceremonial occasion being staged as part of Her Majesty’s Silver Jubilee celebrations. This was a considerable honour for the ship and her company of 250 men, and I was faced with a difficult decision. She would be ready only just in time, if all went well from about two months beforehand. But with her recent record I had a horrendous vision of breaking down in full view of the world at the Review. So, with the greatest reluctance, I asked that Sheffield be withdrawn. She was. And later, just out of cussedness, she proceeded to prove me wrong by twenty-four hours…showing up from her refit bang on time, in good running order.
Our autumn trials, however, were fraught with further troubles. The rudders and the stabilizers were too noisy, and during the Naval Gunfire Support trials off Cape Wrath, we had a series of equipment breakages which left me with absolutely no confidence that the gun would work at all when it was needed. This was of course not an especially happy situation, should our very survival one day depend on being able to shoot it. We had to change both sets of gearing primary wheels in the engines, which was a mammoth job. The domestic boilers wouldn’t boil. The evaporators wouldn’t evaporate. The diesel generators preferred holidays. The sewage treatment plants wouldn’t ‘treat’. Even the white paint on the bulkheads went yellow, almost as you looked at it. Of my 406 days in command of Sheffield, I managed only ninety-six at sea, none of them operational.
I did my best with her, to bring her up to the condition needed to start her Work-Up, and I very much enjoyed the excellent people who formed her company. Nonetheless she was a grave disappointment in so many ways. However, she was decent enough to confirm one thing for me – that despite the massive investment in modern, partially automated systems (indeed because of them), in the end it is people that still count. Skill and experience remain at as great a premium as ever, as does good leadership and its natural reward, goodwill.
By January 1978, Sheffield was finally ready for her next phase of life, but it made best sense for me to hand over to a new captain who could take her on for the next eighteen months. I had run out of time and once more returned to join the London commuters. This time as the Director of Naval Plans, head of my old department at the MOD, directly above the granite breasts. Actually, it nearly didn’t happen. Rear Admiral John Fieldhouse, who was Flag Officer, Submarines, wanted me to be his Chief of Staff and was very sure that this was a rare honour which could scarcely be refused.
When he asked me, I told him, ‘I’d rather not, sir.’
‘Why not?’ As in ‘Why on earth not – there can be no better job than this, working for him?’
‘I’m not a volunteer for submarines. I never have been and I’m not now,’ I said, thinking he’d know about the Plans job and would see the humour in such a remark from a man who had spent the best part of fifteen years in the submarine service. However, it soon became obvious that he didn’t know about the Plans job and thought my comment most unfunny. And he said so in no uncertain terms, starting a professional relationship which was never comfortable, but which, now that I look back, didn’t seem to do either of us any great harm.
Anyway, I took my place as head of the Naval Staff’s most fascinating Directorate. In broad terms I oversaw the work of the Assistant Director (Warfare), the AD (NATO) who dealt with all our Alliance business, the AD (Naval Future Policy) who looked thirty years ahead, the AD (Polaris) who dealt with all matters naval and nuclear, and the AD (Ships) who masterminded all the calculations of the cost, size, scope and capability th
at go to make a Fleet. I found myself laying out the entire range of policies and strategies for the Navy in the coming years – for the Navy Board to scrutinize, amend and eventually approve. The job of Director Plans had considerable prestige – one fourth of the directors make First Sea Lord. As such, it was an eagerly sought-after post among the high-flyers of the Navy, and I was very privileged to be retained in the position for three whole years, longer than any other man in the preceding half century.
My first boss was Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, who served as First Sea Lord from 1977 to 1979. I joined in the early summer of 1978 and together we observed the dying months of the Labour government. After less than one year they were gone and we waited quite eagerly to see whom Mrs Thatcher would name as her Defence Secretary, an appointment which would determine the intensity of our forthcoming period of self-examination. In the event, she named the old Etonian Francis Pym, a fresh-faced consummate politician who had served with distinction as a cavalry officer in the war and who proved perhaps too good a friend of the military, occupying the position until the Cabinet reshuffle.
However, during 1979 Sir Terence completed his tenure as First Sea Lord and turned over to the rather more austere Admiral Sir Henry Leach, who, at the age of twenty, had manned one of the guns on the battleship HMS Duke of York during the savage Boxing Night action off Norway’s North Cape in 1943, during which they had finally battered and sunk the 31,000-ton German battle cruiser Scharnhorst. Sir Henry, himself the son of a Royal Navy captain, had married the daughter of the renowned Second World War commander, Admiral Sir Henry McCall. Admiral Leach was a gunnery officer who had commanded frigates and destroyers before achieving the top job by way of the Plans Directorate and command of the Fleet. His creed was simple: what’s right for the Navy is right for Great Britain. He was a tremendous man to work for, and one of the best First Sea Lords this country has ever had. If he lacked a bit of guile in dealing with politicians, that would be no criticism; but he fought the Navy’s corner tenaciously, and possessed the advantages of great charm and calm in adversity.
One Hundred Days Page 10