One Hundred Days
Page 18
Surely, if they didn’t like it at home, they could get organized sufficiently well to cut out the offending bits? Surely they could understand the different requirements of the front line from elsewhere? ‘Did you, or did you not, Woodward, say it would be a walkover?’ Damned if I cared what I had said. The Press, as far as I was concerned, could do something very difficult to itself. But Sir John remained thoughtful. He made it clear that the government wished me to do the press conference again, in audio only, as we were now too far south to get any film back in time. I finally deferred to his wishes – there wasn’t any choice – and undertook to be something close to craven in my peace-loving statements.
As it happened, I made the situation considerably worse.
‘Er, Admiral…do you think this could be a long war?’
‘Well, it could last a few months which could seem like a long time’ – (pretty clever I thought – after all, I knew that we would be incapable of fighting at all by July – but couldn’t say that, of course).
‘Could a lot of people get killed?’
‘Well, there is bloodshed in most wars. I doubt this will be any exception.’
‘WOODWARD FORECASTS A LONG AND BLOODY WAR’.
‘Oh, Sandy? C-in-C here. The Prime Minister is not terribly pleased with your contradictory remarks – first you say it will be a walkover. Now you forecast it will be a long and bloody war’.
At this point I realized that this was one battle I could not win. I also considered the whole lot of them might be losing their sense of perspective. But I also resolved that the Press and I were going to have to find a way to get along a whole lot better than we had so far. But such conciliatory thought did not long survive. Even then the Sunday Telegraph, behind the by-line of one Ivan Rowan whose experience of high command I suspect may be limited, came right out, three days later, and concluded a long article about me with the words: ‘Seeing him on television, half sitting, half lying back, hiding his mouth behind his knuckles as he reaches hesitantly for the right words, you see what happened on the Hermes (sic) last week. An Admiral got out of his depth.’ This did not of course refer to the business of making our plans for battle. That requires thought, study, intellect and most of the time available. It refers only to the way I had spoken to the Press. That was all that mattered. And there was not, apparently, the least vestige of thought as to the effect that beautiful line ‘Admiral…out of his depth’ could have on those directly concerned, the young men who may have to fight and die in the coming days. The fact was that the Press did not see itself as being on ’our’ side at all. It saw itself as a fearless seeker after truth and I believe they found a considerable amount of it. The Argentinian generals and admirals admitted after the war that they gained ninety per cent of all their intelligence about our activities from the British Press. The BBC World Service was particularly helpful. And the trouble was that they wrote down my every word as though I agreed with their attitude and had made a factual, objective, cold assessment of our chances. I had tried to answer their questions as carefully and as cheerfully as I could, but in no sense could I be some kind of extension of the BBC World Service. We were bound to be at loggerheads, at least at first.
Thus far, with a couple of days still to sail before we entered the TEZ, I now rated the Press one of my biggest problems, and one I felt aggrieved that I had to deal with at all. I did not have the time, the experience, the skill and certainly not the inclination. Plus that every time I spoke to them, the Ministry blew a fuse. We simply did not understand each other and the blame lay fairly equally. None of them had ever gone to war in a Battle Group, or even attended a major Fleet exercise. No more had I been prey to the requirements of a Fleet Street editor, with his quite different motivations. They were outsiders, looking on from a position of safety; we were insiders, watching out with our necks on the line. We just operated on completely different mind-sets. Theirs was a mixture of ‘It doesn’t matter much who wins or loses as long as we report it fairly and as, in our judgement, we see it.’ There was also, on the editorial side, a bit of ‘As long as we can sell it better than our competitors’. My mind-set was: ‘Say and do whatever you have to to win.’ Which is euphemistically worded these days as ‘Be economical with the truth’ by civil servants or ‘Tell the biggest lie you can get away with’ by spin doctors. Hardly surprising then, that we started so far apart. More surprising, perhaps, how quickly we all adjusted in the following few weeks. Perhaps this sort of attitude is another of those naval traditions we must make some compromises on.
Whatever else may be said about the traditions of the Royal Navy, their appropriateness to today and their value, there is one at least that I hold to be fundamental to all the rest. I call it the ‘Jervis Bay Syndrome’. This refers to the armed merchant cruiser HMS Jervis Bay which had formerly been a 14,000-ton passenger liner, built in 1922, and called to duty in the Second World War with seven old six-inch guns mounted on her deck. She was assigned to convoy protection work in the North Atlantic and placed under the command of Captain Edward Fogarty Fegan Royal Navy. In the late afternoon of 5 November 1940, Jervis Bay was escorting a convoy of thirty-seven merchant ships in the mid-Atlantic. Suddenly, over the horizon, appeared the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer. Captain Fegan immediately turned towards the Scheer, knowing his ship would be sunk and that he would most likely die, out-ranged and out-gunned as he was. Jervis Bay fought for half an hour before she was sunk and later, when a ship returned to pick up survivors, the Captain was not among them. Edward Fegan was awarded a posthumous vc. But that half hour bought vital minutes for the convoy to scatter and make the Scheer’s job of catching and sinking more than a few of them too difficult. His was the moment we all know we may have to face ourselves.
We are indoctrinated from earliest days in the Navy with stories of great bravery such as this and many others like it, from Sir Richard Grenville of the Resolution to Lieutenant-Commander Roope vc of the Glowworm who, in desperation, turned and rammed the big German cruiser Hipper with his dying destroyer sinking beneath him. We had all been taught the same – each and every one of the captains who sailed with me down the Atlantic towards the Falklands in the late April of 1982 – that we will fight, if necessary to the death, just as our predecessors have traditionally done. And if our luck should run out, and we should be required to face a superior enemy, we will still go forward, fighting until our ship is lost.
6
The Final Approach
The weather now held us back badly, with great seas, poor visibility, rain and wind. However you looked at it, the hostile vastness of it all made even the 750-foot-long Hermes seem insignificant. For three days we had not seen the sun. The nearest thing to brightness we ever glimpsed was a rare, pearl ray from behind the hurrying clouds, breaking through to paint icy patterns on the blown foam of the wave-tops. It was an altogether forbidding scene even to the eyes of seasoned sailors as we lumbered forward through the long grey swells. It was all very much what we had been led to expect – extremely unpleasant, and very likely to remain so, we thought. I set about negotiating our arrival a day later than originally planned. We must of course hurry, but equally we must not permit these very tough conditions to inflict any more storm damage on our ships than is absolutely necessary. Not at this early stage.
By 27 April, we were less than a thousand miles from the Exclusion Zone. This increasing proximity to real war, plus the foul weather, was beginning to take its toll not only of ships but also of people. Our second stress case surfaced – a young officer had to be relieved of his present duties and given less-worrisome employment. Such personnel adjustments are not difficult to arrange if they are caught early enough. The problem very often comes down to persuading such people to face the facts.
These incidents always made me very sad because I knew that none of those involved were in any way cowards, or even shirkers. It was just that their minds became too pre-occupied with their own worries, entirely against th
eir will. Most psychiatrists accept that a man can operate under immense strain when only half of his mind is pre-occupied with personal fears. However, when that stage is exceeded, the man becomes rapidly less able to respond correctly to external stimuli. He will tend just to go on doing whatever it was he was doing beforehand, as though nothing had changed. It is rarely his fault, and I say this in the face of all the fourth-rate, quasimedical opinions that have been prevalent in the British Services for a very long while, and which are only now beginning to change in the light of hard evidence.
I have often wondered whether my own father, Tom Woodward, was just such a stress case. He must certainly have had an awful time in the trenches of the First World War, and steadfastly throughout the rest of his life would never utter one word about it. Then, towards the end, when his mental resistance was gone and his powers of coherent speech had left him, I shall never forget seeing him seize a chair, pushing it out in front of him and lunging as if it were a bayonet, his face set. The horrors of 1915–1918 must have been with him for all of those fifty years, and in the end they were the last, and still the most vivid, memories in his mind. But there are still too many military men prepared to dismiss the entire subject of stress, both pre-battle and post-battle, with a shrug and an insult about cowardice. Such a waste.
Within a few days a third case surfaced – an intelligent and responsible young man who was found dressed in his immersion suit and anti-gas respirator curled up in a ball, in the foetal position. He was under a table and he was absolutely unreachable. This was a classic example of complete mental breakdown, under the stress of forthcoming battle. I spoke at length about the subject with the Principal Medical Officer of Hermes and told him how I personally had noticed one of the previous cases developing; how I had observed the man unable to accept any more new information; and how he had become slow to react, dangerously unreliable. I explained that I had therefore intended to move him to a less demanding, real-time job to see how he reacted. The PMO confirmed my instincts (I had no real knowledge of the subject), and told me I could expect about a five per cent serious stress case rate during this campaign. He also told me to watch for any sudden, excessive drinking and went on at some length, in the manner of most professionals absorbed in their work. Eventually, getting bored and yawning a little, I asked him what other early symptoms to look for.
‘That’s one, for a start!’
‘Eh?’
‘Yawning, sir.’
I found that a bit of a jolt. Especially as I thought, secretly, that he was absolutely right. I was myself exhibiting several symptoms of stress at the time and have continued to do so in varying degrees and in varying circumstances ever since. The timely warning of the PMO, edged with a touch of his own embarrassment, was a very good warning to me – to watch and take care of my own mental state, as well as remaining alert for observing the symptoms of others. Knowledge in this much-avoided subject is a tremendous help in dealing with it, and a fundamental qualification for modern management. Above all, it need not be crippling, as I hope this book shows.
Looking back on those days of mounting tension, I can now discern more clearly the subtleties of our gradual transition from a peacetime group of ships brought together for an exercise, to a battle group which was actually going to have to fight, to wage war, and thus accept damage, loss of ships, and loss of lives. Commands throughout the force became more terse at all levels. They say the first casualty of war is always truth. In our case, I believe it was politeness: ‘Get that done right now!’ ‘Don’t just stand there, do it!’ Men were more on edge; tasks that once had seemed insignificant now appeared critical. The full range of Navy reasoning and habit which so often in peacetime had appeared petty, pedantic and even churlish, no longer seemed so. Reasons which had once seemed obscure came into sharp focus. It is quite remarkable how the prospect of a possible early demise can bring out the best in everyone.
There was of course a human toll in all of this – not just the stress cases, but also among the men who found it difficult to raise their game. But mostly I would say that everyone suppressed their worries and rose to the task, much as we had thoughtlessly expected, in the unquestioning traditions of the Services. There were the usual macabre jokes as wills were made out and last letters home were written. The men stayed cheerful, determined and, I noticed, slightly righteous about the entire operation, as if the action of the Argentinian High Command was some kind of a personal affront to each and every one of them, entitling them all to an extra display of that rather reassuring (from my point of view) British bloody-mindedness.
The increases in efficiency and activity also had, in a sense, a hidden advantage in that everyone was kept much busier than normal, which left little time to fret and worry about the less attractive aspects of our journey. Quite simply, everyone was trying a lot harder. This brought further complications to my attention and there were constant temptations to embroil myself in the details of various operations, a luxury that was not only hopelessly inefficient but actually downright dangerous. You cannot command any operation effectively if you involve yourself with any form of trivia whatsoever. You need every moment to think and to assimilate the broadest possible picture, in the effort to out-manoeuvre your opponent.
Our chain of command was thus going to need some very serious honing, because in battle it would need to ensure maximum back-up for all decisions, maximum compliance with all commands, and yet an intensive attention to every detail, permitting nothing to fall between the cracks. Throughout it all I also had to try to maintain that essential flexibility to deal with the unexpected. In addition, the chain of command must work autonomously, keeping me informed but also permitting me the time to step back and take stock of any given or developing situation. Calling me every ten minutes all through the night for decisions would, in the end, prove counterproductive. The operation must run routinely, whether or not I am awake. I was thus extremely careful with the staff officers I appointed to occupy the executive positions closest to my own.
I also decided, exceptionally, to provide myself with two deputies, called Group Warfare Officers, to manage the real-time decisions of the whole Battle Group on my behalf. Two were needed so that one could always be on watch. And both would have to be captains. I should mention that it would have been the standard practice to have appointed two or even three relatively junior officers to act as GWOs – a commander perhaps, and two lieutenant-commanders – but this would not have given me the level of authority I wanted in the job. Any man who has reached the rank of captain has already gone through a stringent and individual selection process twice since the time when he was a lieutenant-commander. He has already demonstrated clear qualities of high intellect and confident leadership. If I was to trust the GWO on watch in this Battle Group, I had to have such men. If my commanding officers in the other ships were also to trust the decisions being made from the Flag Ops Room, on my behalf, they too had to have such men.
I do not think it would be betraying too great a sign of human fallibility to admit that I selected an old and trusted friend for my first GWO. He was Captain Andy Buchanan, aged at the time forty-six, a fellow submariner, and former Commander of HMS Devonshire, a ‘County’ Class guided-missile destroyer, like Glamorgan. He had in fact been sent down to join me in case we needed to control, from Hermes, the submarines which were on station with us. In the event, this did not occur, despite my wishes, which left Andy with a new and demanding role in the forthcoming campaign. He was tailor-made for the GWO job. This tall, sandy-haired, freckle-faced Hampshireman had also commanded Britain’s fifth SSN, HMS Courageous, and indeed had served with me years before in HMS Porpoise. Aside from the fact that he knew me so well, and understood precisely what I would expect of him, I had total confidence in his professional background and competence. Also, should tempers ever grow ragged, I knew he would know more or less how to make the boss laugh, a talent which ought not to be underestimated in any walk of life.