My staff arrived on board with all their hampers later in the afternoon. It was a major struggle to make the transfer while continuing normal business. Already we were receiving signals that Arrow, Glasgow and Coventry had developed propulsion defects, probably due to their high speed run south. These reports came in as purely routine, regardless of their seriousness. At my twice-daily staff meetings, we always went through the ships’ defects, in order to keep a firm and accurate handle on every vessel and her state of health. A frigate with a suspect propeller shaft that we had known about for several days is plainly going to be of no use for high-speed work. But the last thing I want is a ship which only tells me her problems when she is told to go. Too late.
It was an even greater struggle to take in the vastly increased responsibilities of the operational management of an entire Carrier Battle Group with the Amphibious Group about to become an integral part of it for a rapid passage south. Plainly, I needed to talk to the Amphibious Group naval commander, as much as my own staff. And while there was a set form and order to all these meetings, it was easily lost. We were speculating, trying to bring all the myriad pieces of this enormous jigsaw into shape, and at the same time trying to muddle through the mountain of homework. We tried to put together every thought, every piece of information, every possibility, to lay out, eventually, a picture which would contain clarity, direction and purpose. It was no easier for us than it was for all the many other staffs at sea and at home, trying to cover the kaleidoscope of Operation Corporate, from high strategy to the commercial and legal complications of hiring the liner Queen Elizabeth. From fitting air-to-air refuelling to the Hercules transport aircraft to bringing forward weapons and equipment still in the earliest development stage. And poor inter-group communications did not help.
The main thrust of our thinking was still towards assembling all information pertinent to the selection of a landing site. Although most of that would have to come from the Amphibians and nothing could be finalized until reconnaissance was complete there were many other critical factors to take into account as well as their highly specialised requirements for the Amphibious Operations Area.
The following day, I flew over to Fearless for discussions with the Commodore, Amphibious Warfare, Mike Clapp, known as COMAW, and Brigadier Julian Thompson, Commander of the reinforced 3rd Commando Brigade. Mike Clapp had invited me to come over by signal some days earlier: my reply to say I was coming only reached him about five weeks later – such were our communications difficulties. As a consequence, I arrived all fired-up to discuss how we were to set about proceeding straight on down as an integrated group, with myself in charge of it, ‘obeying the last pipe’ as it is called, from our CTF – anxious to try to agree the many matters falling out of that, since it appeared to be the very next thing we’d have to do – and just as anxious to get back to Hermes and my new and wide range of responsibilities there.
For their part, they had not been expecting me at all, much less to drop out of the sky unannounced. Mike had other matters on his mind and believing we only had to decide what to discuss with our CTF, he felt the meeting would be of little interest to him. It seems he was unconscious of my ‘Hurry south’ instructions or the questions that were being fired at me about the efficacy of blockade or the consequences of a UN freeze on operations. By contrast, the captain of Fearless had told Julian that I knew ‘absolutely nothing about amphibiosity’ and he decided to brief me thoroughly on their detailed business, rather than pass me the one essential fact I needed – that they were unready to land in any kind of fighting posture before they had restowed their ships. In other words, the orders I was working to were no longer remotely practicable.
With such disparate starting points and no agreed agenda, the meeting was probably doomed. After the usual greeting civilities, and at about ten minutes’ notice, their briefing started with a detailed description of the topography of the Falklands by Major Ewen Southby-Tailyour, Royal Marines, very much the force expert on the subject. While immensely valuable to the amphibians, as far as I was concerned this was detailed information on a level with the engineering problems of keeping Sea Harrier radars maintained. It was emphatically not what I needed unless there was ample time for me to do a ten-week refresher course on amphibiosity with particular application to the Falkland Islands. So I interrupted him less than kindly, and tried to go on to matters I felt were relevant to the problems of inter-group interest if we were to go straight on south in the days immediately ahead.
They obliged, reluctantly it later emerged, perhaps because they already had enough worries of their own without my producing some more for them to think about. Mike Clapp had largely stayed clear of the meeting to get on with his own business and had left it to Julian Thompson. Julian was understandably put out by my abrupt refusal to listen to his detailed briefing. For my part, if they had serious amphibious concerns about the overall plan at that stage, I assumed they would have told me about them at this, the first opportunity. And if their problems were matters of detail only, they knew I had a colonel and a major, Royal Marines, on my staff to keep me straight on that sort of thing.
After I had left to go back to Hermes, the whole meeting was debriefed to Mike Clapp as interference, arrogance, total lack of sympathy or even ‘wish-to-know’ from an admiral who plainly thought he was in charge of everything, including them. Hardly surprising, because at that particular moment and for the next day and a half, I believed I was in charge and that as they had presented no major problems standing in the way of obeying my C-in-C’s orders, there was a range of matters I needed to settle with them, there and then. Hardly surprising also, from their point of view, that suspicion of the Battle Group Commander’s reliability developed within the Amphibious Group from command level down from that day. It is best described by Ewen Southby-Tailyour in his book, Reasons in Writing: A Commando’s View of the Falklands War:
This meeting and its lack of success was to dominate our thoughts. It certainly hardened opinions. In the days to come whenever signals [known irreverently by the Naval Staff as Windygrams] were received from the Battle Group they were read against the background knowledge that it was likely to be a dictum and would not be seeking advice or confirmation. The meeting did nothing for morale nor our faith in the Admiral’s ability to support any amphibious phase with the degree of concern we felt it was due. This may not have been the case in practice but it was our perception, and a most genuine cause for concern in Fearless at the time – an unnecessary and added worry…We realised that sympathy for, and understanding of, our problems was going to be in very short supply.
It is also hardly surprising either that this misplaced attitude persisted for so long when communications between us continued to be so limited. But at least there was no difficulty agreeing that the landing should only be made where the Argentinians were not. We all knew we had no substantial amphibious assault capability. After that, it was not so easy, and while discussion seemed amiable enough to me, several others have reported it quite differently. We were worrying about different things. My immediate concern at that stage remained the major problem of how to look after everyone while we all went together straight on down to the Falklands. Their chief and probably still unconscious, concern was to avoid going straight on down altogether, as they were anything but ready to do so and just beginning to understand the full scale of their own specialist problems. As to the choice of eventual landing place, we plainly still had a wide range of possibilities. Stevelly Bay, out in West Falkland, held particularly good prospects for the early construction of an airstrip it seemed. Low Bay in Lafonia (South-east Falkland) offered clear arcs of fire for our anti-aircraft systems and a good, large, well-protected anchorage. Cow Bay, in the north-east, gave good beaches for landing and a fairly short trek to Port Stanley. San Carlos looked good for several reasons, none obviously outstanding. Teal Inlet was another good possibility, much closer than Carlos. So it went on – all subject to reconnaissanc
e.
But Stevelly was way out to the west and we would still have to cross the Falkland Sound if we were to take Stanley. Similarly, Low Bay meant having to get through the narrow strip of land at Goose Green: fine for a long-term defensive position but not so good if we wanted to advance on Port Stanley. Cow Bay meant little protection from heavy seas. Carlos seemed on the small side and required the entrance to the Falkland Sound to be free of mines. Teal had a narrow entrance, fairly easily blocked by accident or design. All needed examination by Special Forces, just to narrow down the options. None yet stood out as the only sensible choice.
Nor could it ever have been a decisive meeting on this as on many other matters. Most of the big decisions would have to be made by the CTF at Ascension in a few days’ time. Then, hopefully, a concrete plan would emerge for the first time, agreed by all the commanders and taking account of all the politico-military factors from home. Some of that plan would still have to wait for more information. All we needed to do at this stage was agree what subjects we might need to raise with him and prepare to present our ideas on how we might set about our joint business in accordance with such vague directives as I presently had. In my haste, I failed to make all this clear – I assumed they had the same instructions.
Years later, I discovered from their own accounts that they concluded I was untrustworthy on a variety of counts, broadly as debriefed to Mike Clapp. For my own part, I left that meeting with the same high confidence in them to do their particular job that I had arrived with. Mike Clapp was an old, if not very close, friend who seemed calm and collected enough in these difficult circumstances. Our career paths had not crossed for many years but the cultures of aviators and submariners are seldom far apart, and all our training demanded that mutual trust should be the starting point. Unconsciously, and imperceptively perhaps, I thought I had it, but their books told me otherwise. I am sad to have added to their problems; they are perhaps sad that they didn’t feel able to tell me about them.
By early evening our small fleet was back at Ascension. It comprised now Hermes, and Invincible (fully repaired), under Captain Jeremy Black, Glamorgan, the Type 12 frigate Yarmouth under Commander Tony Morton, the Type 21 frigate Alacrity under Commander Christopher Craig, the Type 22 frigate Broadsword under Captain Bill Canning, and the Fleet Replenishment Ship Resource under Captain B. A. Seymour RFA. We returned to Hermes by boat to prepare for the arrival in the early hours of the next morning of Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, the Commander-in-Chief, Fleet. He was to be accompanied by some twenty of his Headquarters Staff including his Land Forces Deputy, Major General Jeremy Moore. They arrived in Hermes at 0815 and within the hour we were joined by COMAW and the Brigadier. The programme included a briefing by the C-in-C’s staff, another by my own, followed by COMAW’s team and then four seminars, dealing with Command and Control, Intelligence, Logistics, and Communications. This was all completed by lunchtime but by the end we felt there was still a lack of form to it all. There seemed to be no hard facts on which to base anything. After lunch, the senior members met in the Admiral’s harbour quarters right down aft, to mull things over.
I still remember standing down there, on the starboard side of the cabin, with some cardboard and a pair of scissors, cutting out differently coloured strips, representing various lengths of time. On each I wrote down a date, or an objective, or the name of a ship. Basically, it was necessary to work the campaign out backwards, starting from the chilling thought that the Task Group would be falling apart by mid to late June without proper maintenance and with winter setting in. This did not allow for enemy action, since reinforcements and replacements from the UK should cover that. So we were obliged to make a crucial assumption, there and then – that the land battle would have to be over at least by the end of June, and preferably a good two weeks before that. The retaking of Port Stanley was obviously a ‘critical path’ for military planning, unless the politicians of the UN said different. On that basis, therefore, if the land forces were to be given reasonable time to do their stuff, we had to put them on the beaches by about 25 May. That would give them about a month to establish the beachhead, break out, march to the likely main positions around Stanley and defeat the Argentinians on the ground. Say by mid-late June. During this time, in addition to our own tasks, expressed simply as ‘neutralising the Argentinian Navy and Air Force,’ the Battle Group would provide them with all the artillery and air support we could; hopefully enough for their needs. And throughout the operation we had to keep the sea and sky sufficiently clear to allow reasonably safe passage to and from the beach-head, with stores, people, ammunition, food and fuel – by ship and by helicopter. We had to prevent the Argentinian sea or land forces playing a serious part in their essentially land battle. And when that was done, we would still need to keep that air and the sea wars won, indefinitely. There could be no guarantee that success on land would end the air/sea war.
I duly pinned my cardboard dates into place on the overall calendar. It was a mobile ‘bar-chart’ of the kind dearly loved by all planners. We continued to work backwards: we must be here by X, there by Y, have established an airstrip by Z. In the end, I remember one piece of cardboard proving to be the key to most of our problems. Upon this was written the name ‘Intrepid’, the sister ship to Fearless. We had to have her in the South Atlantic as a stand-by amphibious headquarters ship, just in case Fearless should be sunk. The problem was that in late March, Intrepid had been ‘destored’ and put in reserve, as an early step in Mr Nott’s singular strategy for reorganizing defence towards concentrating our efforts on Central Germany. To get Intrepid south, we now had to reverse that complicated process. As far as we could estimate, there was no way she could get down to the Falklands, properly prepared, before 16 May. She would be the last ship to arrive, the last piece in the jigsaw, and so all the timings depended on her.
There were still, of course, unknowns like the weather, enemy action, accidents, political initiatives and settlements. But here was a hard plan, give or take about ten days. It was a military plan from which there could be no political diversions if we were to fight and win. The ‘landing window’ extended from 16 May (the first day Intrepid could arrive) to 25 May. Inside that time frame we had to have most of the land forces ashore. And, to be in good shape by mid-May, we were going to have to get the Special Forces ashore for reconnaissance very soon. It was now 17 April, and the bar-chart showed us we could enter the Exclusion Zone by 1 May if we pressed on hard. South Georgia should be clear by then, and sixteen days should suffice for the reconnaissance phase.
The amphibians would be able to wait behind, stay in hard training at Ascension, re-stow their equipment in better order, and set off south ten days from now, prepared to go ashore any time after arrival, wherever recce suggested was the best place. This part of the plan had the added merit of allowing the Battle Group the option of entering the Exclusion Zone without the encumbrance of the amphibious ships. The possibility of taking on the Argentinian fleet and air force with a large convoy of amphibians and merchant ships requiring simultaneous protection – all wallowing about at twelve knots – had been a considerable source of worry to me for the last week or so, hence the need for a meeting with COMAW. Now we had the option to fight without one hand tied behind our backs, which was a good idea, really. Rather better than going all that way as escorts to a large convoy.
One way and another it was emerging as a pretty good plan of operations. And somehow, we would manage to keep it, almost to the day. Step One was critical – the entire thing pivoted on our initial departure time, which meant the Battle Group must clear Ascension by tomorrow at midday, no ifs, ands or buts. There were also two refinements we would make. Firstly, we intended to set off on a course which might just suggest we were approaching Buenos Aires rather than the Falklands. Secondly, we would use chaff to make it appear (to any radar that ‘saw’ us) as if we had the Amphibious Group in company. The first aim was to encourage the Args to leave some of thei
r navy and air force in the north. The second aim was to make them commit their sea and air forces in defence of the Falklands against an apparent British landing on 1 May.
So Admiral Fieldhouse was able to return to London that night to advise the Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Terence Lewin that the line to take in Cabinet, from the military point of view, would have to be as follows: ‘To eject the Argentinians by force, we must be on the edge of the Exclusion Zone by 1 May. You thus have until that date to succeed in your political negotiations, because every day you slip past 1 May is one day less for us to complete the land campaign. Don’t forget, it is only in the Argentinians’ interest to prevaricate. We are already right up against the stops.’
It had been a grim day with little light relief but at last we had a good foundation for our actions. We now had a plan which would take us, with reasonable chance of success, through to the end. It also gave plenty of opportunity for political settlement at its various stages. The vital thing was to have identified the military milestones at which options for political solutions had to change. The good thing about milestones is that they give a hard indication of how far you have travelled, how far you have to go, and a check that you are still on the right road.
I trusted Admiral Fieldhouse to make our case in Whitehall trenchantly, because our margins were too small for comfort. Before he went he told me he had been pressed to find an alternative to relieve me. Vice Admiral Derek Reffell was an obvious choice, since he knew Hermes, the carriers and amphibious ships were part of his Flotilla and he’d been COMAW some years before. He was senior, better and all round more suitable. And Mr Nott was keen to send someone like Reffell, ‘because’, as John Fieldhouse with a grim smile reminded me, ‘when – not if – it all goes sour, he wants somebody important enough to sack!’
One Hundred Days Page 15