One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  At the time it didn’t seem a particularly noteworthy event. My diary simply said, ‘Intercepted a Brazilian airliner – international scene?’ But if we had made a mistake, it would have meant the kind of world-news furore that so haunted the Soviets after they shot down the Korean 747 on 1 September 1983. We can only have been one minute away from missile launch when the order ‘Weapons tight’ went out, and once the ‘bird’ is on its way, it’s hard to make yourself abort it.

  I have considered that short scenario many times since, searching for the real reason for hesitating at the last moment. I believe I must have been thinking, ‘This contact is no immediate threat to me. He is not going to bomb us, the worst he can do is report our position, and do I really need to obliterate him if there is even the tiniest risk of being wrong? Have I really met all the criteria for “positive identification” – height, speed, radar, general behaviour?’ Yes. But positive identification? Plainly, I tried very hard to find a reason not to shoot, without having given much consideration to the consequences of getting it wrong. But in the light of the KAL 007 incident a year later, this was another of my lucky days. If we had shot that airliner down, it would have probably left the Americans with no choice but to withdraw their support; the Task Force would have had to be recalled; the Falklands would be the Malvinas; and I would have been court-martialled, doubly damned by the fact that I had not actually been given permission – I just thought I had been, by the verbal advice of the Chief of Staff at Northwood, over DSSS but not by formal, hard-copy signal – that essential part of any major decision for which DSSS was no substitute. These would have been the consequences of the international community’s rightful horror at the news of a battle group shooting down several hundred civilians by mistake. It’s a small word – ‘if’. And it dogs the path of the Royal Navy today as it always has done. As General Moore was to remind me gratuitously some months later: ‘Only the land forces could win the war, but the Navy could always lose it.’ I do not agree with this view about the sole prerogative of land forces, but this was one day when the Navy could indeed have lost it.

  By now the weather was worsening, and we experienced our first taste of severe winter conditions in the South Atlantic. Gales blew up from the south-east and the seas became big enough to hide the hull of a frigate from the bridge of Hermes at half a mile. This sort of swell looks large enough from the Hermes but from a frigate it’s really impressive. But we headed on down towards the Rio Grande Rise, a stretch of notoriously rough water caused by the ocean floor rising from nearly four miles deep to just 650 metres. This was the first time I had seen spray bursting over the high raised bow of Hermes, nearly sixty feet above the waterline.

  There was little, if any, good news around. Our progress was slowed by the head sea and down in South Georgia, which Brian Young and the Paraquet group were trying to take back from the Argentinians, the situation sounded ghastly. Two Wessex helicopters, trying to evacuate SAS from appalling weather conditions, had already crashed on the Fortuna Glacier in strong winds, fierce cold and a snowstorm ‘white-out’. That night, we too lost a helicopter, one of the new Sea King 4s from Hermes, which crashed into the sea a few miles to the south of us. We managed to rescue the pilot, but the crewman was lost, and I ordered Yarmouth, Resource and Olmeda to remain behind and search the area until one hour after dawn, while the rest of us pushed on further south.

  Commander Christopher Craig’s Alacrity trailed behind with engine problems. The Burglar tried again just before dawn but the ‘Deck Alert’ Harrier got to him at eighty miles – so something went right at last. We were now some fourteen hundred miles east of the southern Brazilian town of Port Allegre, steaming right over the Rio Grande Rise. Yarmouth, Resource and Olmeda are a hundred and twenty miles astern, Alacrity somewhere in between, and their positions highlight my concern about the scattering of my Battle Group. I am extremely keen to join Sheffield, Coventry, Glasgow and Arrow with their tanker Appleleaf waiting for us up ahead, and I’m looking forward to the return of Antrim, Brilliant, Plymouth and Tidespring from South Georgia, if that bit of business can be settled quickly.

  My diary on the night of 24 April records my worries:

  Tension is heightening, South Georgia op seems bogged down for fear of Arg submarine (conventional, SANTA FE). Maritime Radar Recce aircraft incapable of useful surveillance at this range from Ascension sadly. We are slowed down by unforecast low pressure area, giving gale force winds and swell from SE. A taste of things to come, I fear. I’m anxious to catch up with my forward group – not having been allowed to bring them back. So I’m caught with our escort force ahead, and my RFAs astern.

  The winds began to die during the night and, shortly after breakfast on Sunday morning, things began to look up. We were through the ‘low’ and pushing on at better speed. Some kind of miracle had happened in South Georgia, where Brian Young, John Coward and David Pentreath, with more than a little help from Nick Barker in Endurance, had somehow managed to put the Arg submarine Santa Fe out of action. She was now beached, at Grytviken.

  By 1700, most of the Sheffield group had rejoined us, and one hour later we received a signal that South Georgia had fallen to us. The message home from Antrim was simple enough: ‘Be pleased to inform Her Majesty that the White Ensign flies beside the Union Jack in South Georgia. God save the Queen.’ Not quite my style, rather too much of an Imperial ring to it – ‘Op Paraquet Completed’ would have done for me – but then I have little sense of occasion.

  That day ended with an uncomfortable shambles when Yarmouth got a sonar contact that seemed very submarine-like to him. It would not have mattered too much had Yarmouth not just been bringing the two RFAs, Olmeda and Resource, back to join the Group. Now we had a ‘probable submarine’ on the loose, in the middle of the Group, in pitch black conditions, with no navigation lights burning, and with ships all over the place as they tried either to track the contact or to take up their new stations in the formation. It was nothing short of a mêlée.

  You can tell from my diary of that night what kind of a day it had been and how concerned I was over almost everything. I thus reproduce the passage in full:

  25 April – we’re through the Low and cracking on. Quiet night. International scene hardening further. I remain very upset that I have still not been allowed to gather the Battle Group together – hence it remains unworked-up, and dangerously vulnerable. During the day, we picked up nearly all the other members of the Group (bar Brilliant) one by one and listened to the South Georgia action. After all the talk about recce and the submarine threat, the Arg Guppy was caught (probably unable to dive anyway) hammered and driven ashore in Grytviken – and the landing and surrender accomplished before the main party of Boots [Royal Marines] [in Tidespring] could be brought to bear from outside the two-hundred-mile limit! On this occasion, the time spent in recce was largely spent rounding up the ‘brave’ Argentinians – one hundred and forty of them. By midnight the Georgia problem appeared to be reduced to wondering what on earth to do with the prisoners.

  My main worry was how to control Appleleaf and Yarmouth as we made the final rendezvous – both were running around like mongrels after a cat having totally lost their cool, apparently. An unseamanlike and dangerous mess.

  I later made a further note on this:

  The Yarmouth/Appleleaf incident in the middle of the rendezvous between the Battle Group and the Sheffield group rejoining could well have been the reason that another surface contact was ‘found’ in among the Group on this occasion. In any language it can be a difficult business bringing such a large number of ships together with no lights in the middle of the night, but when one frigate thinks it has found a submarine in the middle of the whole event, the margin for disaster increases. It was all quite exciting for a while, but order eventually emerged out of chaos.

  So it was all part of the learning process and what a lot there was for us all to learn. But I was no happier about the ROE situation. Some of the captai
ns had been looking very carefully at the small print dealing with what we could, and could not, do. At this point, with diplomatic solutions still not forthcoming as far as I could see, there was an unmistakable increase in tension throughout the Group. Men were beginning to face the fact that someone might try to kill them quite soon and under those circumstances they would like to be empowered not only to hit back hard, but also to strike first if the danger seemed obvious.

  I had already earned a mild rebuke from Fleet Headquarters for assuming, and apparently saying to the Press, that I regarded the Exclusion Zone as applicable to aircraft as well as surface ships. This focused attention on the meaning of ‘Total’ at a time when there had been much confusion in my mind as to nomenclature (although I am told it was crystal clear to the people at home in the MOD!). We seemed to have several choices: Selective/Maritime/Total Exclusion Zone/Area, each with their acronyms, TXA, MEZ, TXZ, MXA, SEZ, and so on. My request for guidance on what it was finally to be called resulted in the shortest signal of the whole operation from Fleet Headquarters: ‘Tis TEZ.’ I suspect that this was dreamed up by my old friend and mentor who was the Chief of Staff there, Vice Admiral Sir David Hallifax KCB, ever a one for the short, precise answer.

  But this was the only light-hearted part of it. I knew that some of my commanders were worried. Mike Barrow, for instance, who had the court-martial hanging over his head from Bandar Jissah. I considered, wrongly as it turned out, that Mike was playing it extra safe, nit-picking over his authority, or lack of it. But the truth was, like the rest of us, he was getting a bit upset about those Rules, which on first reading seemed to render us impotent against an enemy who was becoming a little more real every day. I realized that considerable local amplification of the ROE was going to be critical. I was sure they made excellent sense at the political interface in Whitehall, but they were sometimes less than crystal clear in the front line, where there was no time for debate as to subtleties implied but not stated. In any case I had two senior commanders, in Barrow and Coward, who were basically reading them entirely differently, and I reckoned they, and no doubt others, needed advice as to how we were expected to behave during those vital first exchanges.

  First and above all, I wanted precise control of when and how the ‘war’ started. So I invented a local procedure called ‘Confisticate’. It’s not to be found in the dictionary, and I borrowed it from a country parson who didn’t like to use ruder words when he fell off his bicycle. Said with accent on the ’fist’, it can be quite efficacious. It meant: ‘Start the war’ and could only be given by me. Until the moment I released that signal, the war, as far as we were concerned, had not started. I had, in effect, taken away some of my commanders’ right of self-defence, further restricting the rules from home which allowed them to fire back. But I did not want this war to go off at half-cock, because that would be likely to cause disastrous confusion and loss of control…a state of affairs I had witnessed first hand in the Arabian Sea the previous November in exercises.

  What was worrying me most was that political requirements could result in our entering the TEZ with our hands tied behind our backs. I thought it all too possible that I was going to be told again, ‘The enemy must fire the first shot.’ So, if those rules did prove to be the ones under which we must fight, then the first shot must clearly arrive on board one of my less-valuable frigates. Not too easy to arrange. And not too pleasant for the frigate selected. I wanted to fire the first shot myself and needed to convince my CTF. As far as I was concerned, I said, the first shot was fired on 2 April when they walked into the Falkland Islands. It’s already been fired, so let’s not muck about.

  Our conversation was long and detailed over the DSSS (Long-range secure speech radio via satellite). I went over all the lessons I had learned with the Coral Sea, knowing well what the probable political argument against me would be: that Great Britain wished to be seen as the wronged party, the peace-loving victim who had been unfairly attacked and was now being attacked again. That we should accept the first shot, which would become a new casus belli and which would then, of course, be ‘not our fault’. It was, however, clear to me that if the Argentinians knew what they were doing and hit one of my carriers, we would not need a casus belli, a reason to start a war. The war would already be over.

  Having voiced my fears to Admiral Fieldhouse, and apparently convinced him anyway, I could relax on that front while he went to make our case to the Chiefs of Staff at the Ministry of Defence, and the Chief of Defence Staff took the matter to the Cabinet. My job was to ensure that the C-in-C had as much of the ‘local colour’ as possible before he went in to brief those who would make the final decisions.

  So ended another day – but the next, Monday 26 April, started in the early hours when we detected another surface contact a mere fourteen miles away, too close, and very late on our part. It was eventually identified as a neutral merchantman, but once again I could not help thinking of that faraway night in the Arabian Sea and worrying about my near-total lack of capability for surface search around the Battle Group.

  Finally we got some sleep, but throughout the morning the weather deteriorated, slowing us down yet again. In the afternoon the temperatures dropped rapidly, with wind speed increasing to a steady, chill south-easterly blow of over thirty knots. The seas got up again, but we nonetheless staged a fairly major Anti-Air Warfare Exercise. This was particularly difficult because, as we approached the Falklands, the exercise ’enemy’ could too easily have turned out to be the real one.

  On this day I also ran into trouble from an unforeseen, though probably unwitting enemy, the British Press. I should point out that I had never dealt with this phenomenon before, thus I was unsure how to handle them and what to tell them. I had been given, a week or so earlier, a complicated briefing from Headquarters which instructed me, in one line, to give them ‘every co-operation’. On the next page and a half I was given all the details of what I was not to tell them. This could all be summarized simply enough: ‘Co-operation, yes; information, no’. I was faced with providing a general interview for the reporters on board Hermes, in addition to the television interview I had done with Brian Hanrahan and Michael Nicholson a few days previously. I was not to know at the time, but apparently they all reached the public at about the same time.

  The result was a minor catastrophe in the eyes of the Foreign Office, and on downwards. And upwards for that matter. I was quoted as having said: ‘South Georgia was the appetizer, now this is the heavy punch coming up behind. My Battle Group is properly formed and ready to strike. This is the run-up to the Big Match which in my view should be a walkover. I’d give odds of 20 to 1 on, to win.’ The headline ‘WALKOVER WOODWARD’ haunts me yet. But I am reasonably sure that those of you who have stayed with me since I made my way, somewhat hesitantly, to Eaton Hall several thousand words ago, would agree that it does not sound much like me. And the tape I have of the interview does not contain the phrase ‘…should be a walkover’, though I do remember using the word itself in a slightly different sense. I had been asked what I thought the odds were of Britain being successful, and I can remember the thoughts cascading through my mind. ‘Who is going to hear my reply? The Argentinians? Members of the British Government? The British public? The Americans? The world…? Well, whom do I care about most? Quickly, Woodward, make a decision, at whom will you aim your next words?’

  The answer was obvious enough – none of those. I could only speak to the people who were with me, the thousands of anxious young men facing battle for the first time. I must not, cannot allow them, any of them, nor any of their loved ones at home, to think there is any real doubt about the outcome of any battle to come. The odds were uncertain, but I must not be. ‘20 to 1 on,’ I said. Defeat must be cast from their minds as unthinkable. This is my team we are talking about here, and there is no way I can tell them we might be on to a loser, any more than if I were a football manager giving his team a last-minute lift before the Cup Final. I am go
ing to tell them the biggest single lie I can sensibly get away with, to encourage everyone. And maybe also to frighten the Argentinians a bit at the same time. I added, safely enough I thought, ‘But frankly, I’d really rather be given a walkover.’ I meant this strictly in the tennis sense, that is, a walkover when your opponent fails to turn up for the match. I was not to know that subtleties such as that are rarely respected in the newspaper world.

  After another very rough night, bashing our way into rolling head seas which reduced our speed-made-good to only seven knots, I was very firmly on the carpet first thing the following morning. This was one of the four or so occasions that Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse in person spoke to me on DSSS. He delivered formal notice of the displeasure of Her Majesty’s Government at my remarks. He passed on the message from higher up that I was to do the interview all over again and be: ‘Less jingoistic, more sober, peace-loving and quietly determined.’

  ‘Peace-loving!’ I exclaimed. ‘With respect, sir, here I am, commanding a Battle Group, in a howling gale, seven thousand miles from home, preparing to fight a war most likely starting next Sunday, and they want me to sound peace-loving?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, patiently, rather like Florence in that lovely BBC programme for children, ‘Magic Roundabout’. He went on to point out that there had been a big splash in the home Press. And although I had no idea what he was on about, I did realize that I had not actually seen how it had been reported. However, the natural arrogance of the man in the front line towards the ones who are not, permitted me the luxury of total non-comprehension. Could they not see at home that a press conference ranks about eighty-third in my list of a hundred priorities? Out here, in the real world of big seas, strong winds, Rules of Engagement, missiles, shells, computers, ‘Burglars’, ‘Spooks’, whales and worried people, a few words to the Press ranks with me somewhere near the level of ‘Pass the sausage rolls’. And yet here was the Commander-in-Chief himself, the Task Force Commander, lecturing me about those few sentences said, with some care, in front of a TV camera to encourage the men under my command. Never mind the massive problems we faced, never mind that Alacrity had just reported a man overboard, never mind that the Group gathering around me would soon number some fifteen warships, as many again supporting auxiliaries, with ten thousand men and all the weapons and aircraft. Never mind the distance from home and any base. Never mind the Argentinian Navy and Air Force, waiting to receive us.