One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  Without question, the most serious issue which faced all of the Service Chiefs during this period was Trident, the new strategic weapons system which made Polaris look like an upmarket firework and which caused passions to run high in the House of Commons whenever opportunity offered. Trident was not cheap, but then no major project is. The question, as ever, was whether it represented value for money in comparison with other systems, conventional and nuclear. It was, and is, a staggeringly effective system, a deterrent to the strongest enemy in the world. Deployed in a submarine, it is invulnerable to any pre-emptive strike and carries up to 128 independently targeted warheads.

  In 1979, the political battle lines had been clearly drawn. Michael Foot, the anti-nuclear pacifist leader of the Labour Party, wanted the entire thing to be put aside, as did most of his colleagues. Now Mrs Thatcher and her new Defence Secretary, the bespectacled banker and barrister Mr John Nott, supported the project from deep conviction. The real trouble for us, I guessed, would be the issue of money – from whose budget would the money come to pay for Trident? ‘Not ours!’ the Army Chiefs would cry. ‘Certainly not ours!’ the Air Force would yelp. And that would leave the Navy, the Service that would own it, to pay. Unless special arrangements were made to finance Trident separately from the rest of the Defence budget.

  My own view was clear enough, not that they would ask a mere Director of the Naval Staff such as myself. But if I had been asked by the politicians whether or not I was for or against Trident, I would have sat on my hands and tried to look vague…a useful and under-rated talent in the Ministry. I realized that the Navy’s vested interest would be obvious to all, but I would have contended that the Trident system, like Polaris, was a political lever and not a military weapons system. So my line would have been: the whole project is of no real interest to the Royal Navy per se. Trident is a national defence system, not a single Service requirement. Faced then with all three Services united against the awful prospect of having to pay for this system out of existing budgets, the Defence Secretary would be forced either to spread the costs evenly or to provide additional funds for the project. That would have been my drift. But such devious, even dishonest, tactics were not to be entertained and the 1981 Defence Review went very badly for the Royal Navy…Trident was taken into the Navy’s budget and our cuts were twice those of the Army, seven times those of the RAF.

  It was an emotional time in many ways and during the frequently acrimonious arguments, the Navy Minister Keith Speed lost his post, as had Christopher Mayhew back in 1966, over the decision to phase out the Navy’s big aircraft carriers. The formal Defence debate, which was to last for two days in the Commons, opened on 19 May 1981. Mr Speed was quickly on his feet voicing his fears that decisions might be taken ‘to impair seriously the effectiveness of the Royal Navy’. He expressed his profound unease that the Review might have ’damaging and lasting’ effects upon the surface fleet. In the end, the Opposition’s motion, that there should be defence cuts and that Trident should be scrapped, was defeated by 313 to 232.

  But five weeks later John Nott stood before the House and read out his Statement on Defence which outlined his plans to lose the aircraft carriers Hermes and possibly Invincible; to phase out the amphibious force; to get rid of nine destroyers and frigates; to cut back between 8000 and 10,000 men, some 15 per cent of the work force; to close the Naval Dockyard at Chatham, home of our largest nuclear submarine refitting complex; to cut back ‘severely’ the work at Portsmouth Dockyard; and all this alongside further reductions in naval shore bases and establishments, stores and fuel depots.

  I had in fact completed my time as Director of Plans a few days before the Parliamentary debate, but nonetheless I shared very much the alarm and distrust felt in naval circles at the time. These were huge changes, to be made in precipitously short order, and they added up to the sale of the carriers, Hermes to India and Invincible to Australia; it meant the early withdrawal from service of the 12,000-ton amphibious assault ships Fearless and Intrepid; and the end of two landing ships (Logistic), such as Sir Galahad or Sir Tristram. The additional reductions in frigates, destroyers and supporting personnel and facilities meant that the Royal Navy would be at its lowest ebb in a very long while. I am quite unable to describe how sad and upset we all were.

  We had argued our best, but our arguments had not been listened to, because, however sound they may have been, they were certainly not convenient. John Nott possessed the cold heart of the career banker, and this was not offset by the cool brain of a military historian, much less any knowledge of things maritime. His military experience was confined to that of a lieutenant in the Gurkha Rifles in his twenties, some twenty-five years previously. It showed. The only admirals who would have supported him were Almirante Jorge Anaya and his colleagues. But they were not consulted.

  With my departure from the Ministry I received a formal letter which read as follows: ‘I am directed to inform you that Her Majesty the Queen has been graciously pleased to approve your promotion to Rear Admiral, to date 7 July 1981 and your appointment to be Flag Officer, Submarines…’ I was to relieve my old mentor Tubby Squires, but this was emphatically not the time to remind anyone else that I was still not a volunteer for submarines.

  In the very best traditions of the Service, or perhaps for good reasons not revealed to me, my assignment was changed within weeks and I was re-appointed to be Flag Officer, First Flotilla, one of only three sea-going admirals in the Royal Navy. I was forty-nine.

  My new headquarters were in Portsmouth Dockyard, in a beautiful Georgian terrace. My offices were on the ground floor, and I was also given a pleasant two-bedroomed flat on the floors above. I commuted back to Surbiton on most Friday nights.

  One of three surface Flotillas in the Navy, mine was made up of twenty-two destroyers and frigates. For my Flagship, I had the choice of two 8000-ton guided missile destroyers of the ‘County’ Class, Antrim or Glamorgan, and I settled for the latter. She was heavily armed with both Seaslug and Seacat missile systems, a twin 4.5-inch gun and four Exocet launchers. Her Captain was an old friend of mine, Mike Barrow, who had joined the Navy on the same day as I and had become one of the two chief cadet captains (sort of joint head boys) at Dartmouth. He was from Hampshire, a veteran Royal Navy captain and an accomplished yachtsman. His father had been a captain too.

  My new job required me to oversee the ships in my Flotilla, to ensure that each of them was being maintained at front-line standard in every respect. This entailed much travelling, from ship to ship, wherever they might be, handing out some stick, and some praise, as I deemed necessary. I was also required to prepare myself to act as the commander of a task group, whose composition might vary from two frigates and a tanker to the full panoply of an aircraft carrier with its large supporting cast. Our tasks could range from Arabian Sea patrol to a Third World War and being sent more or less anywhere on the globe. It was a very exciting prospect.

  I went back to sea in the late summer, just for a short spell, but I was not scheduled to spend more than a few days at sea at a time until November when I was to join Glamorgan in the Mediterranean for one month. This would entail exercises with various navies – Greek, French, American, Omani – as we made our way out to the Persian Gulf to join what was called the Armilla Patrol.

  My Staff and I flew to Italy, to the historic dockyard of Naples, and moved into Glamorgan. We sailed south, then east to Egypt and through the Suez Canal, for my first time. Another first for me was seeing the famous ‘Gully-gully man’ who produced dozens of day-old chicks from his copious clothing, but never a ‘cheep’ from any of them until they appeared in his hand or out of your ear – he charged the ship’s company £80 for his performance, and kept the chicks.

  We turned east up the Gulf of Aqaba for a short official visit to Jordan, and then sailed down the Red Sea, exercising with the French off Djibouti. Thereafter we proceeded to our rendezvous with the US carrier battle group out in the Arabian Sea, with the long hot
coastline of Oman away to the west and the port of Karachi in Pakistan a few hundred miles to the north-east. The heart of the US battle group was their strike carrier USS Coral Sea. She carried some eighty aircraft, about double the capacity of a ship the size of Hermes. She was in fact a floating air force in her own right, under the command of Rear Admiral Tom Brown and, I’m obliged to say, his business in the area was of rather more consequence than mine.

  The situation in the Gulf was very volatile at the time, with American hostages still being detained in the Middle East and Iran fighting a truly terrible war with neighbouring Iraq. Admiral Brown’s eye was very much on the real world and its problems, and he was prepared for trouble in any form or to whatever degree it might occur. However, he had agreed to work with us for two or three days and was kind enough to let me plan and run the last two twenty-four-hour exercises.

  I was clear in my mind what I wanted to practise: the US battle group, with all its escorts and aircraft, was to take up position well out to sea. Their job was to stop my force from getting through their guard to ‘sink’ their carrier before they ’sank’ us. Admiral Brown was happy enough with that – if you had been in his position, you would have been too. He could spot an enemy surface ship more than two hundred miles away, track it at his leisure, and strike it at a comfortable range from himself with any six of his missile-launching attack aircraft. And that was only the first layer of his defence. By any modern military standards, he was well-nigh impregnable.

  I had Glamorgan and three frigates, plus three Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships, two of which were tankers and the third, a stores ship. The frigates were all anti-submarine ships and not capable of doing serious harm to an aircraft carrier, short of ramming it. Only Glamorgan, with her four Exocets and effective range of twenty miles, could inflict real damage on the Coral Sea, and Admiral Brown knew this. Thus my flagship was the only threat to him; his only real target.

  We were due to start not a moment before 12 noon and not a mile less than two hundred from the American carrier. She sat in the middle of this vast stretch of clear blue water, under clear blue skies – effective visibility: two hundred and fifty miles. Admiral Brown was, so to speak, at the centre of a well-defended exclusion zone and I did not even have the benefit of a cloud bank, let alone fog or rain or heavy seas. No cover. No hiding place. No air support of my own either.

  I ordered my ships to split up and take position all around the two-hundred-mile perimeter by 1200 and then to hurry in as best they could – a sort of maritime Charge of the Light Brigade from all directions. Three-quarters of an hour before we were due to start, bless my soul if a US fighter didn’t appear, spot us, identify us and hurry off home to tell the boss what he had found, where it was and where it was going. We couldn’t ‘shoot it down’ – the exercise had not yet begun! But we may just have lost this one before the starting gates were open. Stand by for a decisive American air strike against Glamorgan, just as soon as they can lay it on.

  However, you have to keep on trying and we had nothing left to do but give it our best shot. This basically involved reversing course eastwards and racing around the two-hundred-mile circle, the other way, as fast as we could go. Three hours later, we heard the US strike aircraft go in about a hundred miles to the west of us. They found nothing and went home. Nevertheless, as the day wore on, they picked off my ships steadily. Except for one: they failed to find Glamorgan again, the only ship they really had to stop, the only one who could sink the carrier. We were on the loose, and they could not find us.

  Finally the Americans ‘struck’ my last frigate and, as the sun set over the Arabian Sea and night began to stream in, Glamorgan turned into the two-hundred-mile zone. The dusk faded to darkness and I ordered every light in the ship to be switched on, plus as many extras as we could find. I intended that from any distance we would look exactly like a cruise liner – from the bridge we looked like a floating Christmas tree.

  We barrelled on through the tense night, in towards the USS Coral Sea, listening all the time to the International Voice radio frequencies. Sure enough, eventually one of the American destroyer captains came on to the line, asking us to identify ourselves. My in-house Peter Sellers imitator, already primed for the job, replied in his very best Anglo-Indian: ‘This is the liner Rawalpindi, bound from Bombay to the port of Dubai. Good Night, and jolly good luck!’ He sounded like the head waiter from the Surbiton tandoori. But it was good enough. The Americans, who were conducting a ‘limited war’, were rather obliged to believe us and let us through while they thought about it. Vital minutes slipped by until we were exactly eleven miles from the carrier, with our Exocet system locked on to her. They still thought our splendid display of lights was the Rawalpindi on her innocent business.

  Doubt, however, began to enter their minds. And the signs of confusion were revealed when the carrier’s escorts got over-excited and two of their big destroyers managed to ‘open fire’ on each other, over our heads. We could hear the glorious uproar on the radios. Then one of my officers calmly called the carrier to break the appalling news to Tom Brown that we were now in a position to put his ship on the bottom of the Indian Ocean and there was nothing he could do about it. ’We fired four Exocets twenty seconds ago,’ he added for good measure, knowing this gave them about forty-five seconds to hit the deck…about half as much notice as Sheffield would receive, six months from now.

  The Coral Sea was given no time to get her chaff up – and the American knew as well as we did that he was effectively non-operational. He had lost his ‘mission critical’ unit and with it his air force.

  Understandably, we were all elated, but also a little embarrassed by this at first. We did, however, realize that Tom Brown had a serious and proper preoccupation with the real world, and that our own particular brand of carefree ‘cheekiness’ was undoubtedly born of the unarguable fact that we knew that we weren’t really going to be sunk whatever happened, were we? A debriefing along these lines very soon restored a sense of proportion, and with it a calm assessment of what could usefully be learned. It was nonetheless an important exercise for me because it taught me two vital lessons. The first was to beware of becoming over-engrossed in one area of operations at the risk of ignoring another. The second was that, in a limited war, in perfect weather, under the cover of darkness, one fairly old destroyer or cruiser, or whatever, is capable of getting right up to within eleven miles of a modern strike carrier in a full battle group. We had just done so from over two hundred miles away even in the face of Airborne Early Warning Aircraft up over the top and an armada of strike aircraft against us. We had proved that it could be done.

  Therefore, reads the moral of this tale, take caution should you ever find yourself as a battle group commander in these circumstances, because it is fairly likely that in bad weather, you would lose the battle. This is especially true against a really determined attack in which the enemy is prepared to lose several ships in order to sink your carrier – which he should always be, because when the carrier goes your air force and very likely your entire campaign go with it. Six months on, I was going to face a similar sort of situation, this time for real. And, thanks to these few hours with the Coral Sea, I would have a clearer idea of how to proceed.

  The second of our exercises with the Americans was also fortuitous in its concept. I wrote a scenario for a local, limited war between two relatively minor powers each of which was sponsored by one of the Superpowers, the USSR or the USA. The idea was to demonstrate how neither of the major powers need be drawn in and that the two minor powers could be left to fight it out. Remember this was in the time of the Cold War, with President Reagan just embarking on the process of rebuilding the giant American military arsenal. I ought to state again, my American friends were not playing it quite as seriously as I was, and they rapidly escalated matters to a ‘Let’s start World War Three’ level.

  Understandably they wiped out Glamorgan at an early stage this time, which was fair enough. No do
ubt we were still the least of Tom Brown’s problems, but for my part I was interested, for some near-providential reason, in examining how to use exclusion zones to the best advantage. This also covered the intricacies of Rules of Engagement during those most difficult times when you may be moving from apparent peace to obvious war. Just about everything I achieved, every lesson I learned in those forty-eight hours, had a direct and critical influence on my actions six months later in the South Atlantic in a war I could not possibly have foreseen. I now had a good idea how to operate in three of the most relevant areas – I had observed some of the difficulties of defending a carrier; I knew the military snags and advantages of exclusion zones; and I was also well aware of how carefully you must study the ramifications of your Rules of Engagement, remembering they have been drawn up jointly by both politicians and the military. This was exactly and precisely the knowledge I would need the following spring.

  I have often reflected what an astounding bit of luck this was. When I took those precepts away for myself I never realized I would ever need them. One of them was cast plainly in my mind – that if an enemy is skirting his way around you along the edge of an exclusion zone, there is no way you should allow him to go on doing that. He must not be able to choose where and when he is going to come at you, just because he is a few miles outside the zone.

  With the exercises concluded, we then headed inshore towards Oman where Captain Mike Barrow suffered a major piece of misfortune. On leaving the Bay of Bandar Jissah he caught his extremely expensive propellers on a chunk of rock. Generally speaking, this is regarded as rather dull news since in the Royal Navy it can be a Court Martial offence, with a potential charge of negligence, or even gross negligence. And, if the case is proven, it can be a career killer.