My own situation became if anything more isolated as I worked on the formation of what must become a Battle Group, prepared to fight, at short notice but only if necessary, a real war. We began work-up training between pairs of ships, forming Surface Action Groups since it seemed sensible to assume the Argentinians would at some point cause their own fleet to face us in battle on the high seas. I have to say that I found it hard to accept the reality of such a confrontation and I hoped that in preparing carefully for such an eventuality, it would prove unnecessary. However, I was keenly aware that it was almost impossible to predict the nature of such a war, so we went on doing all that we could with the very limited means available at that stage.
On Sunday morning, 4 April, I shifted my Flag back to the more comfortable quarters of Glamorgan, familiar surroundings in which we had once hilariously practised our Indian accents to ruin Tom Brown’s day. We were involved in more serious business now, and I was sure she would be a better Flagship than Antrim for several reasons, one of them being her communications systems.
My staff spent the morning ferrying to and fro with all the cabinets and paperwork. I joined them at midday and we now set about all of the minor preparations for war – painting out bright colours on both ships and aircraft, stripping out soft furnishings and Formica panelling. As in the days of Nelson, a major danger to sailors in battle remains that of flying splinters and they are no less sharp and lethal when made of metal or plastic blown into shards by a missile than when they were made of oak or teak and blasted into the gun-decks by cannon balls. We also recommended, with insufficient conviction for some, that all ships land their silverware and trophies, not because there is any great danger of death by flying soccer cup but because some are irreplaceable and all are uninsurable in war. Coventry complied, with one small exception. On board, always prominently displayed, was a mediaeval cross of three large nails, mounted on a wooden plinth. They had been removed from the old Cathedral of Coventry and presented by the city to the ship that bore her name. One young and rather anxious petty officer requested that Captain Hart-Dyke leave the cross in place as it was a symbol of hope and survival for many of the crew. Captain Hart-Dyke correctly agreed it should stay in place. Morale in a front-line picket is paramount.
On Monday 5 April, the carriers Hermes and Invincible sailed from Portsmouth. I had received a signal from headquarters as to a probable rendezvous somewhere north of Ascension Island. We were all making the best speed we could, intending to use any spare days on arrival at Ascension for maintenance or training. Meanwhile I called a staff meeting and spent the afternoon trying to formulate a plan as to precisely how we should proceed south and what we would do if and when we reached the Falkland Islands. By this I mean the scheduling of such basics as, for instance, what kind of formation do we need for protection of the Amphibious Group in company? From which direction should we approach which part of the Falklands? What and where are the possible landing sites? Where are the Argentinians least likely to be? Where and how should we deploy our Special Forces for reconnaissance? How can we stop them using their main airfield at Port Stanley? Where are they likely to have stationed their submarines? How many mines could they have laid, and where would be most likely? What kind of approach tactics will their aircraft use, and how do we counter them best? All of these questions may seem very pedestrian – they are certainly obvious and easy enough to ask – but they are not at all comfortable when you have none of the answers. And there were plenty more such questions as well.
Thus our meeting was conducted in an atmosphere of moderate disbelief, combined with a mounting realization of our very considerable ignorance. Our Intelligence had never been targeted on Argentina and, since the Falklands had never been thought a likely battleground, and our knowledge of the seas around was absolutely minimal. I had still not had access to a routine topographical study of the islands. I knew nothing of the weather patterns or underwater acoustic conditions. I had scarcely had time to look at the new charts. We really knew nothing of the detail of the enemy we might be asked to attack, nor of the surroundings in which we might find him. Our knowledge was in fact largely confined to that which was in the public domain. Jane’s Fighting Ships, the standard reference book on the fleets of the world, was our main source of information on the strength of Admiral Anaya’s navy. Jane’s companion book on the world’s fighting aircraft was our main source of information on their air force, plus, of course, whatever we could find out from various attachés around the world. But right now it was not coming back in any discernible form – it was simply too early for us to make much of an estimate of the opposing ‘Order of Battle’, too early to establish precisely what we were dealing with and therefore also a good deal too early to be planning with any precision how to deal with it.
From a simple count of opposing air, land and seas forces we doubted whether we could afford to go at him ‘head on’. It is rarely much of an idea anyway, but when you are in a big hurry, as we were likely to be in order to beat the onset of winter, it might be the only way. As it was, we still did not know the size of the force General Galtieri had put on the Falkland Islands, how heavily, or how well, it was armed, and how readily it would be prepared at least to defend its own position or, indeed, attack ours when, and if, we landed. The fact was we were nowhere near to completing our own picture of what to do when battle commenced. In general, as the MOD had originally advised John Nott, the prognosis was poor. Apart from the very substantial Argentinian air threat, it also seemed quite possible that we could be outnumbered ashore. And lacking an ‘amphibious assault’ capability, long since whittled away in serial Defence cuts, a frontal assault, which requires a substantial military advantage, would be a non-starter. The initial reconnaissance was becoming critical to our mission – we simply had to get some Special Forces in there to find out what was going on ashore.
At the conclusion of the meeting I was left with much to think about. The need to become familiar with the vast picture of a whole potential theatre of war was pressing, consciously and unconsciously. But all those years of training were setting off bright little lights in my mind. If we had to fight, I was as ready as could be expected. I had acquired a mind-set that accepted war as a real possibility and now, faced with it, I found no great sense of transformation. I had been trained to believe that one day I might be required to face a live battle and the feeling of reality that was slowly coming upon me was neither new, nor excessively troublesome. Just something that was a part of the job and a job in which I would not be short of all the necessary expert advice, readily to hand. I would have liked the chance to have said goodbye to Char and our grown-up children, Andrew and Tessa, though it would have been both distracting and melodramatic, I guess. But it’s too late to worry about that, they are safe enough at home, prey only to the assaults of the media.
I am not alone out here, but soon there will be all about me thousands of men and dozens of ships. The CTF has given me the frontline job of leading them into the fight. He may relieve me with a vice admiral, but meanwhile I am conscious of my present responsibility, conscious too that I must not let them down; conscious finally that I must not allow those concerns to limit my initiative.
On the following day, 6 April, I made my plans to begin my talks to each individual ship’s company. The big Admiral’s Day Cabin in Glamorgan was now converted into the Admiral’s Operations Staff Office, and I think that in there, on that day, faced with the increasingly familiar charts, tables, signals, plans and telephones I began my own serious ‘transition to war’ process. Various ideas and procedures began to come off the staff production line, and that night I wrote in my diary a little reminder, resolving to ask myself more frequently the question: ‘What is it today that I will wish tomorrow I had done yesterday?’
The two carriers, carrying as many Sea Harriers and Sea King helicopters as they could get on board, were now making their way south towards us with as much speed as possible – though Inv
incible was initially limited to fifteen knots owing to a damaged gear box. On the morning of 7 April I visited Brilliant and Arrow, and in the afternoon I flew across to Glasgow and Sheffield. My message to all of them was identical. I told them that we may be going to war, and that they should prepare for it both mentally and physically. I warned them, starkly, that there was a distinct possibility that we would lose ships, and that some of us may be killed in action. I decided that there was absolutely no point in being soft about this, whatever my personal feelings.
‘Up until now’, I said, ‘you have seen fit to take the Queen’s shilling. Now you must stand by to front up and earn it the hard way.’ I told them there was no possibility of anyone being allowed to opt out now, that this was actually what you joined the Navy for, whether you knew it or not. It’s too late to change your mind, so best face up to it. The British sailor has a phrase for it, well known to all: ‘You shouldn’t have joined if you can’t take a joke.’
All contracts were automatically extended, ‘for the duration’, by the Ministry of Defence, so there was no hope for anyone of avoiding the conflict, and I told them that the best route to survival was to buckle to, learn fast and try harder. The timescale for the forthcoming engagement was, in my view, ‘indefinite’. I also outlined our preliminary estimates of the forces we would face, and I went through a routine ‘threat reduction’ exercise with all of them. ‘The Args’, I said, ‘have nine destroyers and three frigates. We may assume that three of these are out of action, refitting or whatever. Two of them are so old they are probably unseaworthy, and certainly not battleworthy. One of them ran aground in the River Plate a month ago and probably hasn’t been mended yet, and that means we will outnumber them in a sea battle by about four to one. And if we cannot handle that then I don’t know what any of us have been doing for the last several years.’
Those were the sort of words I used in addressing each of the ships. Their main purpose was to avoid frightening people unnecessarily, and my speeches represented the first step on our psychological build-up to convince everyone that defeat is unlikely provided we all do our utmost. Winners must only dream of victory. We had to go in there sure that we were the best and that we would, in the end, win. At heart, however, the British seaman has been, down the centuries, a pretty straight realist. The only question that was asked in every ship I visited was: ‘Could you tell us what the rate of Local Overseas Allowance will be, sir?’ Or, put another way, ‘How much extra are we going to be earning on this little jaunt?’
Shortly after 1330 we received a signal from Northwood ordering one of my fuel tankers, in company with Antrim and Plymouth, to detach from my group and to proceed south to Ascension Island with all speed. This was the start of the South Georgia operation, important to undertake but adding difficulty for me in trying to bring my ships together for work-up as a coherent group, before the carriers and the amphibians came up to make it all a great deal more complicated. By the end of the afternoon I had completed my talk on board Sheffield and returned to Glamorgan absolutely whacked. I think my exhausted condition was due largely to the mental strain of coping with personal anxieties at the same time as trying to reassure and strengthen others. I fear I did not do a very good job. Months later, one man from the Coventry came up to me and said, ‘I remember that day, sir. You knew we were going to be sunk, didn’t you?’ I must have overdone the realism.
At 2130, shortly after supper, the final message of the day came through from Fleet Headquarters, Northwood. The United Kingdom had announced an Exclusion Zone around the Falkland Islands, effective from 0400Z on 12 April, a little over four days time from now. For me at least, that was something of a bench mark. I think I knew as we headed on across the Sierra Leone Basin, that this war was going to be fought. And exclusion zones were things I had already thought about.
I wrote in my diary that night, and my words betray my own focus on events becoming sharper, perhaps more realistic:
Of course, there’s no way the Falklands are worth a war, whether we win it or not – equally there’s no way you should let the Argentinians (or anyone else for that matter) get away with international robbery. It’s the ‘If not here, then where?’ bit all over again. And anyway, they’re in no condition to go to war either.
Thus the message to impart (and we must not lose our cool in the process, particularly when the bullets start to fly) is: ‘We are entirely prepared to fight over this issue – are you, on balance, prepared to fight us?’ If rational, I believe they may well decide they aren’t, though they must be thinking the same about us.
Their reply, being in the stronger position on the escalation scale temporarily (possession is nine points of the law), has to be: ‘Prove it!’
At 0600 the following morning we picked up the BBC World Service which informed us that the Argentinians had responded to the British Exclusion Zone with one of their own – two hundred miles out from the mainland and two hundred miles out from the Falklands coastline. It was impossible now to miss the confrontational nature of the lethal game the two sets of politicians were playing. I realized that, though it was none of my business, none of them were likely to find themselves in the path of an oncoming missile either, as, perhaps, we were.
My diary states that much of the day’s activities were involved in complicated, but to those not directly concerned at least, rather mundane, matters such as the immediate future of the (Hong Kong) Chinese laundrymen, the continued employment of civilians in the NAAFI, their South Atlantic pay scales, their legal status, and right to go home, their insurance and indemnities. I mention them in passing because, while they are all dealt with automatically when the Navy officially goes to war, the fact that we never ‘declared war’ in 1982 left all of these people out on a limb. Their status and terms of employment had to be decided in a hurry. We were also told, formally, that Ascension Island, which is British, yet principally leased to the Americans as a big satellite tracking station, was open for business. The small 1000-yard single runway the Americans had built was now available to the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy.
We pushed on towards the equator and the weather grew hotter and more humid. We had to think about maintenance and machinery breakdowns over the long term, since an ’indefinite’ lack of deep maintenance and continuous sea-time is no way to keep a fleet in being. Problems came and went: Invincible was already well into fixing her still-locked shaft, a major job on a massive piece of equipment; Sheffield was sent ahead to Ascension to transfer urgent replacements for a computer fault in Antrim, and then give herself some badly needed maintenance – she had already been away from the UK for over three months. The helicopters were beginning to show a worrying increase in defect rates, so I ordered them to cut down severely on flying hours, to keep them fit for later.
We also had what I believe was our first human stress case, a man whose mind had been in a silent turmoil over the ordeal we might face, until finally he could take it no longer. We arranged for his immediate return home from Ascension. His illness had nothing to do with ‘funking it’, it was a genuine breakdown induced through no fault of his own, which rendered him quite unfit to cope with his responsibilities. I felt very sorry for him. He had, I know, not wanted to let anyone down.
As you may imagine, the volume of information now beginning to pour in was very considerable, and I had to form a full-time Staff Intelligence Cell in order to cope with it. On paper, we were now sub-divided into three operational entities, the Battle Group (my own), the Amphibious Group (under Commodore Mike Clapp in Fearless) and the eccentrically named ‘Paraquet’ Group (under Captain Brian Young in Antrim) now on its way to South Georgia. I never quite got used to the word ‘Paraquet’ – it lay somewhere between weed-killer and parrot, and was inappropriate to South Georgia on both counts.
As we all made our various preparations on passage south, we listened carefully for news from beyond our narrow world, with its relatively simple problems. General Alexander Haig was s
huttling back and forth from Washington to Buenos Aires, to London, to New York and round again. While I could only applaud his activities, whatever the well-meaning General hoped, wanted, said, thought or promised, there were two facts likely to prove intractable. The first was that Mrs Thatcher was plainly not going to abandon the British people trapped on the occupied Falkland Islands. The second was that the forces of General Galtieri were not about to leave of their own accord. Quite apart from any moral issues, such a course for either government entailed back-down, and subsequent political oblivion.
In any event, General Haig was to me not much short of a disaster in the making. That may seem unappreciative of his great efforts to negotiate peace. But every day he kept everyone chatting was another day’s delay to us, so far from base support, and another day for the Argentinians to reinforce their positions in the islands with ever more troops, aircraft, ammunition and food for a prolonged battle on the ground. We simply could not afford to allow them this leeway if we were going to beat them. And by now, 10 April, we were beginning to receive intelligence of a further build-up of Argentine forces in East Falkland. All the indications from Headquarters were therefore that we would proceed straight on down to the Falklands, the whole Task Force in one group, to establish as firm a foothold on the islands as possible before the United Nations could put a stop to our activities and leave us floundering about offshore, awaiting defeat by the forces of time, weather, and international political procrastination. In my diary I observed: ‘The future looks moderate to long-haul gloomy.’
One Hundred Days Page 13