One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  For the record, Peter Woodhead had been a ‘Jungly’, actually one of a number of quite amazing fliers who perform a unique task under the most hazardous conditions, and who generally reckon that they are the only ones who have any real need for flying skills. Fortunately, Peter was too much of an intellect to subscribe to any of this childish repartee – which must be one reason why he is now an admiral, and Flag Officer, Second Flotilla. In addition he proved to be a most balanced and reliable air adviser, which was particularly important in view of the lack of any such service provided by the Royal Air Force. Not that they hadn’t offered – but the naval aviators at home, I have always assumed, had said they could manage without.

  If I might digress for a few lines, I would like to explain the function of our Junglies. They are specialists, their principal task now being to insert, in secret, under the cover of darkness, the recce forces of SAS and SBS who would report back to us the lie of the land, and where we ought not to be in the face of heavy Argentine defences. If you read that last sentence quickly, it does not sound too bad. In practice, the pilots would soon be required to fly in bad weather, in complete or near-complete darkness, over enemy-held territory, very low indeed. They would not know, until it became all too apparent, where the enemy actually was. Sitting behind them, in the helicopters, would be the teams of Special Forces, ready to go as soon as the pilots, peering down through their passive night goggles, were able to find the right spot. Those goggles they wear do enable them to see quite well in starlight, or better in moonlight. However, any lighted bulb, either in the cockpit or even a distant street light, will blind the pilot until he can get it out of the field of vision. One way and another, the Junglies are a very special breed and understandably they have a very special pride in what they do. Peter Woodhead was one of them, and he understood all the other aviators as well – their prejudices, their problems, their requirements and their attitudes, which made him, one way and another, just about invaluable on an aircraft carrier going to war.

  If I were asked to compare Peter and Andy, I would be tempted to say that Peter would have been well suited to the Army’s ‘Regiment of the Intelligentsia’, the Green Jackets; while Andy would have been more comfortable in a good armoured regiment or, in an earlier century, the cavalry.

  Now, as we approached the final days of our journey to the south, we instituted a system of six hours on, six off, for these two key people. During their watch, they took overall charge of the minute-to-minute stuff, filtering and directing the information, ordering and controlling every activity of the Group to ensure that the plan for each day and event was sensibly carried forward. Both Captain Buchanan and Captain Woodhead answered of course only, and directly, to me. The cry ’Admiral to the Ops Room!’ always available to them in moments of near-panic or major surprise, was never used throughout our long weeks in the Falklands area – not because I was always in the Ops Room, but because they were always prepared, and had prepared me, for the rapidly unfolding events.

  Working alongside them, in an equal but very different capacity, was my Staff Officer, Operations, Commander Jeremy Sanders, a communications specialist who had already commanded his own frigate very successfully. Indeed, had I not instituted the GWO system of two watch-keeping captains, he would have been the senior GWO. As it was, he looked after the bigger picture on a longer-term basis. For example, I would receive more than five hundred signals a day, coming in from Headquarters in Northwood, the Ministry of Defence in London, Ascension Island, other ships in the Group, wherever, and Jeremy saw every single one of them, filtering them by assigning action on each signal to appropriate staff officers, and ensuring that I only saw those signals that I absolutely had to. This relieved me of a vast quantity of unnecessary detail and hassle-factor. No commander in the field can operate without such a person. Great trust is placed in him, but few thanks are given.

  No matter how great the harassment factor, Jeremy would somehow handle it. Every couple of minutes of the day he dealt with sudden needs, obscure commands, implicit suggestions, conversations on Cackle, translating my wishes into clear and precise written instructions for the rest of the Battle Group. And his duties did not stop there. For he was also in charge of what American corporations describe as ‘compliance’, in other words, having issued the orders (for example, that Coventry should take up position off Port Stanley airstrip with Brilliant tomorrow morning), he was the man to check that this did indeed happen and that all who needed to know (COMAW, FAAWC, Warfare Officers, the ships concerned, nearby aircraft, and so on) did in fact know, precisely, and in good time.

  I am very conscious that it would have been totally impossible to have run such an operation without a man such as this. And, as an added asset, Jeremy Sanders possessed the rare gift of tact, always highly valued in the Senior Service, and a commodity which I am often accused of lacking.

  The operations staff planners, a group of commanders and lieutenant-commanders, answered directly to Jeremy Sanders. These were the officers who covered the detail in each major specialist skill – surface, air, submarine, land forces, Special Forces, communications, electronic warfare, supply and logistics, engineering, medical – anything that had to be co-ordinated with other activities.

  That was the senior line-up in my Operations Room in Hermes from where I commanded our naval business against the Argentinians. One deck above me was the Ops Room of the Captain of Hermes, Linley Middleton, another naval aviator, whose function was to run this floating airfield. His responsibility was to drive the ship, get us in the required place, make sure the airfield and its aircraft were operational at all times and to provide a home for the Flag. His responsibilities were entirely separate from mine, and though we were by definition required to work together, as were all of my captains, we followed essentially different paths of responsibility on board this ship.

  By Wednesday 28 April we in the South Atlantic no longer discussed the possibility of war – it was too close for us to think or plan otherwise. From time to time we received reports from London that General Haig was having one final throw at achieving peace, but it was an irrelevance now to us. Our job was simply to be prepared to defend ourselves, to be prepared to attack at the best opportunity and to set about landing a force of perhaps ten thousand British troops on the Falklands. And that is precisely what we were doing.

  Though we didn’t know it, back home this would certainly have been approved of by the editors of the national newspapers who were apparently baying for an old-fashioned sea battle, writing editorials calling for an end to futile negotiations. One can in a sense understand their point. Sea battles probably look quite fascinating, even vaguely romantic, from Orpington, if not quite so entertaining from the front line.

  That day, by signal, we heard that the Junta had rejected Haig’s final attempt at peace. And Mrs Thatcher was, in my opinion, no more likely to back down. She had said we would fight if we had to, she knew the military deadlines as laid down on my bar-chart back at Ascension, and that was an end to it.

  But whatever went on at those high levels, I had other problems. One in particular was the question of who was to control the three nuclear submarines we now had in place in the South Atlantic. There was HMS Conqueror, an improved Valiant Class boat of 4000 tons commanded by Commander Christopher Wreford-Brown; HMS Spartan, of the slightly bigger Swiftsure Class, commanded by Commander Jim Taylor; and HMS Splendid, sister ship to Spartan and commanded by Commander Roger Lane-Nott. All the submarines and their commanding officers were well known to me.

  It was my opinion that I should take control of them myself, rather than have them run directly from Northwood by the Flag Officer, Submarines. I felt there were several good reasons for this:

  a) I had Captain Buchanan on my staff, and one of the main reasons he was with me at all was to act as the local Submarine Force Coordinator.

  b) It made more sense, to me at least, that the submarines should be under my command locally in case it
became necessary to deal with a quickly changing set of circumstances which required very early action.

  c) It might be alleged that I knew something about the subject of submarine warfare in my own right since I had been appointed, admittedly only for a week or two, to command the Submarine Flotilla in 1981.

  d) Hermes was fully equipped with all the necessary submarine communications channels to do the job.

  Above all, I wanted to change the operating methods – make them better suited to the conditions prevailing in the south. Up in the North Atlantic, where in the NATO context the main task is anti-submarine warfare, there are very large numbers of ships, aircraft and submarines operating in quite close proximity to similarly large numbers of the enemy. We thus divide the ocean up into areas. We then allocate them to submarines, so that each one has, so to speak, his own ‘patch’. To minimize the chances of a ‘Blue on Blue’ (attacking each other), they are not allowed to trespass into each other’s patches, neither are our ships or aircraft allowed to attack submarine contacts in such areas, unless they have been positively identified as enemy. Such identification is not an easy thing to do at the best of times, least of all when you need to shoot first in the selfish interest of personal survival. Our policy in war is therefore relatively simple: keep your submarines in their patches; that way, should the occupant of the patch detect another submarine, it must be the enemy and you can shoot ‘from the hip’, confident that you are not about to sink one of your own. Keep them separate – keep them safe.

  Except that these conditions did not apply in the South Atlantic, where our likely enemy, Argentina, actually only owned four submarines, one of which, the nearly forty-year-old Santa Fe was already wrecked at Grytviken. Her sister ship, Santiago del Estero, which was nearly as old, was, we believed, laid up, non-operational. That left them with a couple of small, hardly ocean-going, German-built Type 209s, Salta and San Luis. Best suited to inshore, fairly static operations, I believed that these two, if indeed both were available at the same time, would be given patrol areas fairly close to Port Stanley. This, after all, was the single most likely place for them to find British ships, eventually. Certainly these two little submarines were not likely targets for, or threats to, our own SSNs, which were there primarily to stop the movement of Argentinian surface ships.

  Therefore, I concluded it was no longer necessary to confine our SSNs to separate areas, provided they were forbidden to engage submerged contacts. By releasing the SSNs from the constraints of separate areas, I could attach any of them (or they could attach themselves as the chance offered) to any group of Argentinian surface ships, ready to attack the moment they got final clearance from London.

  However, Northwood, probably for mainly political reasons, did not wish to alter the patch system at this late stage and did not transfer control of the submarines to me. With the Flag Officer, Submarines, and the C-in-C both senior to me and both submarine specialists to boot, I was in no position to continue arguing. So I retired from the debate with as much grace as I could summon, which, as I recall, was not all that much.

  By 28 April the offshore areas around the Falklands had been divided broadly into four quadrants – Conqueror had the south-west and south-east, Spartan the north-west and Splendid the north-east, with the two northerly SSNs being changed around quite frequently. None was allowed to trespass into the areas of the others. This was to have major consequences a few days later, and I am proud to confirm I have never once, to any of them, in all of the intervening years, uttered, or even implied, the phrase ‘I told you so’. Well, not very often, anyway.

  Meanwhile, the days passed and, despite the bad weather and some delay, we made adequate progress south. The whole Battle Group was finally assembled, we achieved a good full-scale air defence exercise on that Wednesday afternoon, which put everyone in a slightly more optimistic mood, and we caught and drove away the ‘Burglar’ a hundred and thirty miles out when he turned up at sunset.

  That evening I completed a letter home to Char which began:

  The days go by surprisingly fast with no real political change. You cannot help feeling – now here’s an extraordinary business. Can we really be going to war? Is it me that’s in charge of fifteen thousand men and the biggest fleet we’ve put together in thirty-five years? I never asked for a place in anyone’s history book, and I don’t view the prospect with any enthusiasm. Particularly if it involves sending old friends up front…the picture is gloomy and politicians are probably going to tie my hands behind my back…and then be angry when I fail to pull their beastly irons out of the fire for them…

  As the day goes on, most of the plans for the first few days of battle are set. They are necessarily very flexible, but I’ve done my thinking about it and consequently feel easier in my mind. Of course, in the final hours/days, options do reduce, so decisions are a bit easier. Even the thought of death has to be faced up to as a not-very-likely outcome, and taken for what it is – like, unavoidable if it happens. But do your best, and maybe it won’t. Generally though, I feel much easier in my mind: our business end is about wrapped up for a few days – it will be a busy time, and it is as well to stop worrying, and ‘rest up’ to be ready.

  From those words you can feel that the possible realities of war were beginning to affect me. My diary written that night just before midnight reads as follows: ‘Weather went down so we got the refuelling done in the lull before the next storm. Final preps for the run-in are mostly complete now – just hope the politicos can pull back in time, otherwise a lot of people are going to stay out here.’

  Thursday 29 April, approximately five hundred miles from the TEZ, we spent much of the day refuelling and replenishing supplies on the assumption that all too soon it might not be so easy. Brilliant and Plymouth rejoined us from South Georgia. Captain Coward flew over to debrief me on the action there, and also to report on a sad incident on board the Santa Fe.

  Apparently, once the Santa Fe had been captured, some Royal Marines had been put on board as guards for the several members of the Argentinian crew who were operating the ship’s systems under our orders. Down below in the Control Room, a Marine had told an Argentinian engineer to stop doing whatever it was he was doing – fiddling with some control mechanism, it seemed. The engineer had continued working to control the submarine’s buoyancy and the Marine, fearful that the man might be attempting to scuttle the boat, issued him one last warning. When this too was ignored, he shot and killed him.

  I think Captain Coward decided that this course of action might be regarded in official quarters as being over-hasty at best, and contrary to the Geneva Convention at worst. Just as well that I should hear it first from him, as he was in charge of the Santa Fe when it happened and anyway he was perhaps instinctively aware that I would sympathize with the Royal Marine, war being war. Sad but unsurprising; misunderstandings and accidents will always happen when people find themselves in strange situations and confronted with apparently menacing behaviour by an incomprehensible enemy.

  That night a real late-autumn fog drew in – like England in November – and enveloped the Battle Group in a swirling grey shroud of cold and damp. The wind dropped and, though the sea dropped too, we cancelled all flying because of the hopeless visibility. After dinner, I spent some time in conference with my captains, and by midnight we all knew there had been no further political progress. Sitting alone in my cabin, I wrote home: ‘The time available has just about run out. I shall have to go in and make aggressive noises off Port Stanley, and start losing lives. Not quite the way we all thought I’d be spending my half-century birthday, in the late Autumn!’

  A quiet night – fog does have its good points – was followed by another busy day of topping up fuel ready for the final run-in. In the late afternoon one of the Harriers on combat air patrol found a fishing vessel which was identified as a Canadian research ship by the name of Narwal. I thought nothing of it at the time.

  Now two hundred and fifty miles out fro
m the TEZ, our new Rules of Engagement came in from London. I had permission to open fire on any combat ship or aircraft in that Zone identified as Argentinian, when we got inside it.

  As we shaped up for our final approach, President Reagan imposed military and economic sanctions on Argentina. Apparently very much to the Junta’s surprise. Plainly they had not known anything about Caspar Weinberger’s orders, by which we had been supplied with air-to-air missiles, ammunition, fuel, the facilities in Ascension, certain critically important satellite communications channels and other less public help. Indeed for several weeks now, little had been spared in the way of help short of AEW aircraft and the big attack carrier required to operate them from. But this would have meant American men directly involved in the front line, and that was much more than we could have reasonably hoped for. Britain was always going to have to fight her enemy alone, if it came to that.

  Very soon after I had read and digested our new ROE, a call came in from the C-in-C on the satellite link informing me that it was now ‘Go’. I was formally given leave to proceed inside the TEZ and start the process of recapturing the Falkland Islands.

  The tactical picture was now becoming clearer as to the whereabouts of the Argentinian fleet. Up to the north-west was their carrier Veintecinco de Mayo, with her two escorting destroyers. On her deck would be some ten A4 fighter bombers – possibly also some Exocet-armed Super Etendards – all well-trained and qualified to attack surface ships. Down to the south-west was the heavily armed cruiser General Belgrano and her two escorting destroyers, each carrying eight Exocet.

  It looked to me as though I would be facing a pincer movement by these two groups as I made my way west in towards the Port Stanley area for my landing deception. My hope was to keep Conqueror in close touch with the Belgrano group to the south, to shadow the carrier and her escorts to the north with one of the ‘S’ Boats up there. Upon the word from London, I would expect to make our presence felt, preferably by removing their carrier and, almost as important, the aircraft she carried from the Argentinian Order of Battle. Uppermost in my mind was the need to avoid any major inter-surface group battle and the risk of anything like the Glamorgan/Coral Sea fiasco: I wanted the SSNs to deal with their surface ships; they were my front line.