One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  Alas, the first development was not good. Though Spartan was closest to our best estimate of the Veintecinco de Mayo’s position, she had already been diverted twice by her masters in Northwood from what I viewed as her prime task (which was finding the 25 de Mayo) – to go and look for other, less important or threatening targets. Now, she was too close to the edge of her patch. She was forbidden to cross the unseen line beyond which we believed the 25 de Mayo was steaming.

  At this point the North Atlantic rules were still operative, and they were very clear – unless in ‘hot pursuit’ of an enemy ship, the SSN must stop short. Spartan’s Captain felt he could go no further, that he should not trespass in Splendid’s patch. But he had no idea Splendid was too far away, since Commander Jim Taylor had spent the day responding as best he could to confusing intelligence reports. Now it was too late. To my complete frustration, I had to face the fact that neither of the two SSNs could reach the only target we really wanted. Thus, my SSN shield to the north failed to mark (naval jargon for ‘locate and shadow’) the Argentinian carrier. And Anaya’s Naval Air Force lived to fight another day, sadly to inflict great damage upon our ships.

  On the profit side, we re-identified the Narwal as an Argentinian trawler, maintaining rough station on us at a respectful distance. I thought she might be shadowing us and so Alacrity was sent out to warn her off, which he did. Narwal duly disappeared, and not a moment too soon, as the last thing I wanted was an Argentinian shadow during the final approach telling his beastly friends precisely where I was. ‘What’s more, you horrible man, if you put another foot wrong, you’ve had your last warning, whether I’m officially allowed to shoot at fishing vessels or not,’ I thought.

  My day ended with a little more to Char:

  We’re off then. Tomorrow is called ‘C’ Day (my invention, to avoid confusion with ‘D’ Day, and because navalese for ‘C’ is Charlie), so the auguries are good at least, whatever actually happens. Naturally rather nervous, but actually no more so than on the racing start line, or just before starting a speech. Maybe worse tomorrow, once it starts in earnest, and we are finally committed.

  I did not go to bed after my short note, however, because we were about to sail into a kind of no man’s land…the Argentinian Exclusion Zone, which was about sixty miles further out from the Islands than our own. Whether or not we, the British, recognized it, we did have to face the possibility that they might well feel free to attack us as soon as we entered it. The problem was that I could only defend myself if attacked. I was not free to shoot first unless I found the enemy inside our own Exclusion Zone, some sixty miles further inshore…a dangerous, unmilitary and unsatisfactory state of affairs. I could only hope the Argentinians would not take advantage of our vulnerable situation, as we hurried across. Anyone who was not nervous on this night, did not understand the realities.

  Meanwhile the Battle Group maintained its course to the south-west in anti-air formation, with the Type 42s, Glasgow, Sheffield and Coventry, out to the west, their long-range air warning radars alert for approaching aircraft. Down in the Ops Rooms, three decks below the bridge, there existed a state of war, unmistakable in its urgency, hard in its purpose. The quiet watchkeepers, in their anti-flash gear, continuing their babel of business, terse comments into microphones, in the strange half light, to the accompaniment of clattering keyboards. The Principal Warfare Officers usually standing, the better to monitor the overall conduct of the Ops Room; the supervisors moving softly behind the young operators in front of their screens, concentrating now perhaps as they had never done before. And every time the ship hit a big wave, the sudden dull thump of it against the hull, once just routine, now ping-ed your fears.

  There was a natural tendency for people to gravitate towards the Ops Room. Anyone who could find a reasonable excuse to look in, would do so. And be told to bugger off for fear he would get in the way. It was as if somehow the closeness, the singleness of purpose, and the extra concern of the officers, made them all less vulnerable. As I mentioned earlier, in the Royal Navy, we do not send anyone anywhere. We all go together.

  Those of us in Hermes were well aware of what was going on. Lin Middleton was on the bridge, I was in the Flag Ops Room with Andy Buchanan, and no one was saying much as we steamed across the unseen line that marked the Argentine Exclusion Zone at 0130 that black Atlantic morning. 1 May. The war starts today. It’s my fiftieth birthday.

  7

  1 May – The War Begins

  Sir Walter Scott’s epic two-hundred-page war poem Marmion – a tale of Flodden Field – contains the words that every child learns in kindergarten, either the best advice, or perhaps the sternest warning, on the subject of telling lies:

  O, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!

  The tone of the learned nineteenth-century Scottish writer and historian is both wise and disapproving. Which does, in a sense, highlight one of the major shifts in military behaviour since King James fell to the English in that brutal but nonetheless straightforward battle at Flodden in 1513. By 1982, almost 470 years after Sir Walter’s Lord Marmion died heroically for England, it had become standard practice in modern warfare to surround your opponent with Scott’s ‘tangled web’. Lies, disinformation and a string of elaborate deceptions are deliberately employed to lead the enemy into misunderstanding your actual intentions. Only in this way can a weaker force prevail over a better-placed but less devious opponent, or a stronger force minimize its casualties.

  In any event, in the South Atlantic we certainly ‘practised to deceive’, but the web we wove for the benefit of our opposite numbers, on land and on sea, was not going to get tangled if we could possibly help it. I do not suppose the author of Ivanhoe would have thought much of it, but basically I had been in the deception game for several thousand miles now. Indeed, as far back as the 8th parallel, we had started that long feint towards the South American mainland, just to let General Galtieri know that it was not impossible that we might strike straight at Buenos Aires. Also all the way south we had tried to deceive the Argentinians into believing that the amphibians were with us. This was achieved by the use of ‘chaff’, small fragments of radar reflective material, cut to specific sizes to deceive specific radar frequencies. We deploy it in rockets and shells, and from aircraft, in packets. It is used principally to baffle incoming missiles: we send it up from the ships, in giant fireworks called chaff rockets, and when they explode the millions of chaff particles ‘bloom’, forming a cloud, larger than the ship, which we hope will cause the radar-guided missile to change its mind about us and take a swing to the bigger and more inviting radar contact of the chaff. Clearly you do not want to send the cloud up, straight in front of the ship, or else the missile will fly straight through it and hit the ship anyway. There is considerable skill involved in getting the chaff up; in the right place, at the right time, and keeping it there. The men who are trained to do it are a vital link in the defensive chain.

  The other useful function of chaff concerns the deception of reconnaissance planes watching your group with cloud-avoidance radar from a distance of say two hundred miles. The moment we caught a glimpse of that Argentinian Boeing (the Burglar) on our radar, we would send up about a dozen ‘chaff stations’ which from that distance would look exactly like ships on his screen. Thus the enemy could be made to believe we were a battle fleet of, say, twenty-five ships instead of only fifteen.

  Actually, at this juncture, the words of Sir Walter had to be heeded. This web of deception which we had now woven needed to be carefully tended: for instance, we had to replenish the chaff as it faded, in order to perpetuate our fabrications to the Argentinian Air Force. So helicopters had to clatter off tirelessly into the sky with packets of chaff which the pilots ‘sowed’ into the old chaff clouds, re-seeding them, until the Burglar went away. The overall effect of this particular deception was, I hoped, that the occupiers of the Falkland Islands would believe we were accompanied, in our front line, by the
Amphibious Group, which we were not. In this way I suspected, rightly, they would believe, wrongly, that we were on our way to Port Stanley for a full-frontal assault, straight in, with the Royal Marines and the Paras landing and charging up the middle of the High Street, so to speak. This, we thought, should cause the Argentinian land forces to stay concentrated in that area, while we actually looked elsewhere, because it was the doctrine the Args had been taught by the US Marines, whose instinct in the field of amphibious assault has usually been to go straight through the front door, kicking it down whether or not it happens to be locked.

  Thus I felt sure I could second-guess the Argentinian military mind. They would assume that we would act as the Americans – their mentors, and our traditional allies – would act under the present circumstances. In fairness to the warriors who have fought beneath the Stars and Stripes, they have achieved a great deal by charging through the front door, and indeed have won many a remarkable victory with such tactics, for they are unfailingly bold, and usually brilliantly equipped.

  We, on the other hand, down here in the lonely windswept wastes of the South Atlantic could afford no such John Wayne manoeuvres. We shall win this battle, I often thought to myself, but it’s going to take an element of stealth and slyness, which would perhaps have seemed pretty ungentlemanly to the creator of Young Lochinvar. Not to mention the English knights who fought at Flodden Field. But times have changed, and we had to fight our battle in the Age of Deceit. So we encouraged them in every way possible to believe that dawn on 1 May, or possibly the 2 May, was ‘D-Day’.

  Our plans were now simple enough. We would strike hard at Port Stanley Airfield with the Vulcan raid from Ascension first and then, at dawn, use the Sea Harriers against Port Stanley Airfield again at the same time as we hit the strip at Goose Green. Whether or not these raids proved successful in disabling these airfields, they would benefit us in other ways: firstly, they would keep the Argentinians convinced for at least another twenty-four hours that we planned a straightforward landing at Port Stanley; and secondly, the dawn strike would take the Argentinian heat away from our really serious purpose of the day/night – to land the Special Forces reconnaissance troops on to the darkened islands to begin the perilous business of assessing the enemy defensive positions. But the real spin-off from the opening attacks was that we would be forcing the Argentinians to reveal their defences to us in a way which no intelligence can, on its own, match. I hoped to draw their air force into action in some form or another, for a day or two. I hoped to use the Carrier Battle Group to draw their navy out for the SSNs to deal with, without the amphibious ships in company to slow me down. And I hoped, with the aid of a major naval bombardment from the sea, to be able to concentrate the minds of their land troops on an assault mission which was not about to happen.

  The profit side for us, on this the opening day of the war, was in my opinion very good. The downside – losing a dozen Sea Harriers or several ships – was unthinkable. The opening attacks in any war are inclined to be a risky business at best and an essential ‘feeler’ for later operations. But, as they say, you won’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.

  Meanwhile the ‘brains trust’ which surrounded me at this particular stage of the proceedings was having its own steel tested down in the Ops Room where it had been concentrated throughout this night. In deadly secret, high above us and far from us, one of the most difficult long-distance bombing raids ever attempted was unfolding in a tenuous, complicated manoeuvre which will probably be talked about long into the twenty-first century. At least in Royal Air Force circles it will be. They were attempting to fly a Vulcan bomber on an 7860-mile round trip from Ascension and back with one specific purpose – to blast a bloody great hole in the middle of the runway of Port Stanley airfield. We all knew it would take a very large bomb dropped from a very great height to penetrate and break up the tarmac sufficiently to stop its further use by fast jet aircraft, and hopefully for others as well. But by any standards this was an air-raid of heroic proportions, and one which many of my officers doubted could ever be done. In fact when it was first mentioned to us, some aviators – not entirely unsurprisingly – thought it sheer folly to attempt, since it was unlikely to succeed and anyway, would bring all other air activity at Ascension almost to a standstill.

  My own view was more succinct: ‘The mission has my unqualified support.’ This is not meant to demonstrate special knowledge on my part, merely to confirm that anything anyone can do to help prevent the Args fighter/attack aircraft getting off the ground from Port Stanley to bomb my ships has my automatic ‘unqualified support’. I did not have to give the matter more than about three seconds’ thought, and for every mile they flew they carried my heartfelt good wishes.

  I did not of course know, but the mission ran into trouble almost from the start. One of the eleven re-fuelling tankers, the Victors, developed a fault, still within sight of Ascension and had to turn back. Then the Vulcan bomber itself developed a problem in its pressurization system, and that had to turn back. But the immaculate planning of the Royal Air Force had taken care of both these upsets before they occurred. They had a spare Victor with its tanks full already up there and they knew they only needed ten re-fuellings anyway. And of course they had sent up a reserve, fully laden Vulcan bomber with an equally competent crew. The mission proceeded as planned.

  Flight-Lieutenant Martin Withers of 101 Squadron was now at the controls of the lead Vulcan, with twenty-one thousand-pound bombs aboard. It was going to take five air-to-air refuelling rendezvous with the tankers just to get the Vulcan to the target. Martin Withers was a brave and determined man, as were all of those who flew with him. The operation was code-named ‘Black Buck’. It had been agreed that no conversation would pass between the Battle Group and the Vulcan, save for one word, to announce that he had dropped his bombs in roughly the right place. The word was to be: ‘Superfuse’. Then, once more in silence, they would begin the long four-thousand-mile fuel-starved, nerve-wracking journey back up the Atlantic to Ascension.

  And now we could only sit and wait for the codeword. The seconds ticked by until we estimated they were about fifty miles from the target, and by that time Withers would be pulling the big Vulcan into a steep climb to reach ten thousand feet, the attack altitude necessary to give his bombs sufficient velocity to penetrate the runway, disrupt it and thereby render it unusable by fast jet aircraft. This was the most dangerous part in terms of being spotted, although there was not a whole lot the Args could do about it in the short time left before Withers would deliver his attack.

  He came in over the airfield in the pitch dark at four hundred mph, heading south-west – textbook RAF bombing procedure. The twenty-one bombs were spaced fifty yards apart, and they were released from the aircraft five seconds apart, two miles short of the runway to allow for the throw-forward effect of an aircraft travelling at this speed.

  No one knew it yet, but the first bomb had hit close to the centre of the runway, the rest caused considerable damage around the airfield and also woke up the entire town. However, the Vulcan was round and heading for home, fourteen miles away and climbing before the bombs arrived and the Args guns opened up. Too late. This war had started, and they had lost Round One. ‘Superfuse!’ said Withers’s radio operator, quietly. It was reported somewhere that clenched fists had punched the air in the Ops Rooms of the British Battle Group, but I never saw them.

  While the arrival of the bombs announced formally that Margaret Thatcher’s government was not best pleased with the antics of Galtieri’s forces, they achieved little more. Indeed, while just one of the total of sixty-three bombs dropped in three sorties actually hit the runway, even that one only stopped Argentine use of the runway for twenty-four hours. For this remarkable feat of flying, the Chief of the Air Staff became known in naval circles as ‘One-bomb Beetham’. Sadly, as an act of war, a very expensive operation remained largely symbolic. Meanwhile we steamed into the Total Exclusion Zone – ro
ughly a hundred and forty miles from the coastline of East Falkland, on an east-north-easterly bearing from Port Stanley.

  There were twelve warships in my Group, and we did not yet need to be concerned for the safety of the far-distant amphibious ships. Right now we were here on our own, and every one of us was here to fight. I trusted that the events of the past few minutes had sent a message to the Argentinian troops that we were irrevocably committed to their removal. Nonetheless on that dark morning the general mood in the Battle Group remained grim. We were about to launch our own opening attack and Hermes was to become the single busiest spot in the South Atlantic. Our plan had been refined to the last detail, and now we were going to test our ability to carry it out.

  We made fourteen Sea Harriers available from Hermes, two of which were ‘spares’ in case of unserviceability. The plan was to send in twelve of them, splitting into three groups as they headed into range of the shore defence batteries. Speed and surprise were the keys to this, of that we were certain. The first wave against Port Stanley airfield was designed to make the Argentinian anti-aircraft defences keep their heads down. The second wave was to damage the runway. Simultaneously, the third raid would hit the airfield at Goose Green where we guessed there would be considerable back-up aircraft and personnel.