Today had been, I felt, a day of success and hope, and, I regret to say, we were feeling rather pleased with ourselves. This war had started, and we were doing well. No one had died on our side and we were a lot wiser than we had been fourteen hours ago when the first bomb had gone off on Port Stanley runway. My diary provides a personal view of the events of 1 May 1982:
Fifty today, and first day of the war. Vulcan went in as planned and did his business, as confirmed by Sea Harrier strike on Port Stanley (three other Harriers to Goose Green). Many alarms and excursions about Arg mainland air strike [a major strike by aircraft from the Argentinian mainland against the Battle Group] but I think not somehow.
Mirages bobbing about over the Falklands, but not coming in strongly, suggests Port Stanley Combat Air Patrol and Arg strike held in reserve until they get a handle on us. Cat and mouse. Meanwhile Naval Gunfire Support [bombardment] and Anti-Submarine Warfare inshore groups going in, and Fleet telling me not to risk the NGS.
But I think I have to do so: firstly they are nearly there, like halfway! (by the time Fleet recommend no), secondly we have to loosen the Args. It should make them keep a submarine there in future if there’s not one there already. Thirdly the Args will hate it. It may be risky but I believe we have to take some.
Everyone (me included, I guess) very jumpy, periscopes, torpedo HE [propeller noise], Exocet release, columns of smoke – but actually very little other than the strike of ours has come to anything yet.
2100 – and the day wore on in very good weather, thank Heavens. I wouldn’t have cared to fly at these rates and notice in typical bad weather. So far we’ve been lucky. The NGS Group were bounced by four Mirages. The covering DLG (Glamorgan) was too close in (in the gun-line, I think) to cover properly and Glamorgan and Arrow received minor damage having completed the first barrage.
CAP splashed a Mirage in front of Alacrity but others bombed and went away. Three Canberras went past Brilliant off the N. coast, and disappeared low in our direction, but never made it. Invincible CAP splashed one other, two went home, one badly, one lightly damaged.
The Canberra attack tells me that:
a) They are out of AAR [Aircraft-to-Aircraft Refuelling].
b) They want to hit us.
c) They probably can’t.
So far so good – but I don’t really see how it can last. They clearly had very little idea where we were – the Canberras were groping a bit. Glamorgan and team then resumed NGS after a tiny bit of needle. But only a straight suggestion which I think they would have eventually made for themselves. Brilliant continuing with Yarmouth overnight in their little area bashing the living daylights out of some wretched sardine!
Come the morning, after a talk with David Hallifax [Chief of Staff to C-in-C Fleet] we intend going offshore to E for a quiet day leaving it to the Args to react.
Late that evening I ordered the Brilliant group and the Glamorgan trio (or the Three Musketeers, as they were now calling themselves) to return to the main Battle Group before dawn. It had been a long and eventful day, and we had achieved much of what we had planned – mainly that we had got this war under way in no uncertain manner. Back in the middle of April at the big staff meeting on board Hermes, my chart had specified that we must begin the campaign on 1 May, on the basis that every day we missed at the beginning of May was just another day we might have to fight in the middle of June – with the South Atlantic winter closing in on us, and the inevitable attrition and general break-downs of the ships which occur when you have been too long out of the garage.
At least we have started on time, I thought, which may prove a critical factor when we approach the other end of the war. But there was another critical factor which I was sure would encroach upon my sleep this night. It involved the Argentinian Navy and its general whereabouts. Remember we had still not found their carrier, the 20,000-ton Veintecinco de Mayo, with her two escorting destroyers and her deckful of aircraft. We are also uncertain where three other Argentinian frigates have disappeared to, up in those north-western waters. It was an awful blow to me when neither Spartan nor Splendid could find them. At that time I knew the whereabouts only of the heavily gunned cruiser General Belgrano, with her Exocet-armed escorts, and their behaviour so far suggests that they are waiting, they may think safely, out in the wastes of the Antarctic for the order to close in on us. They were about two hundred miles away from Hermes, uncomfortably close, to my mind. I was not sure how good they were, but six months ago I had crept up on the Americans in the Arabian Gulf, in circumstances very nearly identical to these.
I walked slowly along to my utilitarian little cabin, with mixed feelings of relief at what was just past and anxiety about the immediate future. I sipped a small glass of whisky to round the day off, wondering whether I should perhaps have issued one last instruction to the GWO in the Ops Room: ‘If the local Tandoori phones, don’t hesitate to sink them.’
8
The Bells of Hell
We established, I believe, several thousand miles back, that while truth is generally recognized to be the first casualty of war, the second is almost certainly politeness. After just one day in battle, I now know the third. Sleep. A commodity rapidly becoming as rare as the first two. I replaced it, largely, with adrenalin. Having retired to bed in the small hours of 2 May – the first night of my second half-century on this earth – I was awakened about one hour later at 0320 with the message: ‘Possible Arg Tracker (recce aircraft) to the north. Harrier despatched to investigate.’
I got up, went to the Ops Room, asked a few questions and returned to bed, pre-occupied with the careful advance of their surface fleet, and wondering how to deal with it. Sleep was just about impossible and anyway, within the hour, they called me again, when one of our probing Harriers reported several surface contacts on his radar out to the north-west, range two hundred miles. My feet hit the floor before they had finished telling me.
As I walked quickly along the short corridor to the Ops Room it was becoming all too clear what we were up against. The contacts were just about where we expected them to be – north-west of the Battle Group and north of the islands. They represented, almost certainly, the Argentinian Carrier Battle Group: the 20,000-ton Veintecinco de Mayo, pride of Admiral Anaya’s Fleet, and her escort of perhaps five ships. Two of them, I suspected, might be the Type 42 anti-aircraft destroyers Santissima Trinidad and Hercules, sister ships to Coventry, Glasgow and Sheffield.
The moment I entered the Ops Room this was confirmed in my mind. The Harrier pilot’s report said he had been ’illuminated’ by a Type 909 Sea Dart tracking radar – and that had to be from one of the Args’ Type 42s. It took only a very short meeting with my staff to assess the situation and to conclude that they were about to attempt a dawn strike, launched against us from the deck of the carrier. Since she could carry ten A-4Q Skyhawks, each armed with three five-hundred-pound bombs, we could expect a swift thirty-bomb attack on Hermes and Invincible at first light – around 1100Z for us. She might also have Exocet-armed Super Etendards to add to our problems.
And in the middle of that rather sombre night, out near the edge of the British Total Exclusion Zone, we perforce prepared to ‘form Line of Battle’ for the first major set piece action of the war. The Royal Navy versus the naval and air forces of Argentina, quite the last kind of action I wanted and incidentally anything but a ‘Line of Battle’. Modern tactics require formations which look completely haphazard at first sight, and anything but a ‘set piece’. The commander who so indulges himself makes it altogether too easy for his opponent.
I elected to finalize my arrangements two hours from that staff meeting, at around 0700, when the Glamorgan and Brilliant groups returned. For the moment we had a great deal more thinking to do, because Veintecinco de Mayo represented only one half of our problem. The other was situated two hundred miles to the south-west of me and to the south of the islands – the General Belgrano and her two destroyers. In addition to all of the above
Argentinian ships, there were three frigates in the area, plus their only tanker.
Rear Admiral Gualter Allara, their Commander at Sea, was in the carrier, and it all looked to me very like a classic pincer movement attack on the British Battle Group. To take the worst possible case, Belgrano and her escorts could now set off towards us and, steaming through the dark, launch an Exocet attack on us from one direction just as we were preparing to receive a missile and bomb strike from the other. Our choices of action were varied, but limited. We could of course take immediate evasive action and head away from our position to the south-east, making it more difficult for the bombers to find us, and possibly placing ourselves beyond their effective range, for lack of fuel or useful weapon load. We had worked specifically towards bringing their fleet to action with the SSNs, and I did not want to be squeezed out of our own Total Exclusion Zone like a pip from an orange. That would have given added complications to the ROE, it would scarcely have been in the traditions of the Royal Navy, however sensible, and anyway I had work to do inshore tomorrow night too. No, I could not allow that. But equally I could not just stay there and do nothing. I had to make a move, and since we were in contact with the Belgrano group, but no longer so with the carrier group, my thoughts began to centre on the cruiser.
The Belgrano, on her own, was not that big a threat, but neither was she likely to be a push-over. A cruiser of 13,500 tons, and over six hundred feet long, she carried fifteen six-inch guns, and eight five-inch guns – all bigger than any guns in my entire Force. She was old, built in the United States in the mid-1930s as the ‘Brooklyn’ Class light cruiser Phoenix and had seen active service in the Pacific during the Second World War, having survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. In the American naval archives there is a picture of her coming out of the Harbor under her own steam, past the enormous wreck of the Arizona. A year later she became the flagship of General MacArthur’s navy commander Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, and for extended periods MacArthur himself was on board, conducting the Pacific campaign. Phoenix saw service in exalted company for many months as MacArthur and Kinkaid drove the Japanese back, all through the southern islands. She was purchased by the Argentine Navy in 1951 and, five years later, re-named the General Belgrano, immediately after the overthrow of President Peron.
Now she was ranged against us and, in a sense, against America, whose total support we now had. Commanded in this war by Captain Hector Bonzo, she was an historic ship with a thousand tales to tell. But I was rather afraid this venerable armoured veteran was approaching the end of her journey. I simply could not risk her group launching an attack on us with ship-to-ship guided missiles – the same Exocets with which we in Glamorgan could so very easily have eliminated the USS Coral Sea six months ago. And should it come to the point where I considered ourselves in danger of attack, when it may be us or them, my choice was simple enough – them.
So now I and my team, gathered high in the ‘Island’ of Hermes, had to ‘Appreciate the Situation’, that rather grand military colloquialism for ‘thinking it through’, in short order. Both of the Argentinian surface groups could now be less than two hundred miles away, north and south of the Falklands, outside the TEZ. The aircraft of the one, and the Exocet-carrying destroyers of the other, could both get in close to us very quickly in the present calm weather. The long southern nights gave them fifteen hours of darkness, and between now and first light there was still six hours, during which either Belgrano or Veintecinco de Mayo, or both, could have moved comfortably within range for a decisive battle which would give them, tactically, all the advantages. We assessed that we could probably shoot down five or six of the incoming Skyhawks – but that it would be very bad news if sixteen Exocets arrived from the south-east at more or less the same time. Also we wished fervently we knew a little more about the strength of the Argentinian warships in the inshore waters around East Falkland, which might have been waiting their chance to slip out and join in with the other attacks.
It was clear enough that unless we were extraordinarily lucky we could find ourselves in major trouble here, attacked from different directions, by different weapons requiring different responses, all in the half-light of a dawn which would be silhouetting us. At the very least, it was going to be a two-pronged strike, a straightforward pincer movement on us, from the south-west and the north-west. Coral Sea had failed to deal with a much lesser threat, with a far greater capability.
There was but one fast solution. I had to take out one claw of the pincer in order to free up my movements. It could not be the carrier, because our SSNs Spartan and Superb up there were still not in contact with her. So it would have to be the Belgrano and her destroyers. I am obliged to say that if Spartan had still been in touch with Veintecinco de Mayo I would have recommended in the strongest possible terms to the C-in-C that we take them both out this night. But as things were I had no right hand, just a left, and the best I could do would be to use it with as much force as I could manage.
The situation in the south-west was fairly clear. Conqueror, commanded by Commander Christopher Wreford-Brown, had been tracking Belgrano throughout the night, having picked up her tanker more or less by accident late on Friday afternoon, and had stayed close until Belgrano turned up to refuel. Christopher, a thirty-six-year-old former pupil of Rugby School, was married with three children and had served as my correspondence officer in Warspite. I knew him quite well and took some pride in the fact that I may have influenced his career in one or two minor ways during our time together. In manner he was rather shy and very restrained even in his delivery of important information. But he was very steady in controlling a situation, thoughtful, and correct. There was, I always thought, rather more to him than his obvious intelligence and courteous, rather droll manner. I could be sure enough that in battle, should it ever come to that, he would be coolly effective, even though he had only taken command of Conqueror a few weeks ago.
On this night, as we conferred in Hermes, he had come to precisely the same conclusions as we had. Remarkable, you may think, given our vastly different perspectives. But remember, we both had the same picture of what was going on, we both had the same training, and we both had the same operational doctrine. So it’s hardly surprising that Commander Wreford-Brown was accurately tuned in to the mind of his old boss. I may be an ex-submariner but in spirit I am always a member of that strange brotherhood which fights its battles from underwater. Having already put in an enormous amount of work in finding and tracking Belgrano this far, Christopher privately considered it would be a bit of a waste to do absolutely nothing. Thus he was hoping for a signal changing his Rules of Engagement, giving him permission to attack, outside the Total Exclusion Zone but inside the general warning area announced back in April, giving him permission to attack any Argentinian warship, giving him permission to sink the General Belgrano and her Exocet-carrying destroyers.
He also had to ponder the intricacies of torpedoes. He had two types, the first being the old Mark 8** of Second World War vintage, with a fairly accurate and very reliable close-range capability, plus a sizeable warhead, amply powerful to penetrate the hull of the big Argentinian cruiser and do great damage. This is a pretty basic torpedo which travels at a pre-set depth and on a pre-set course with no ‘ears’ or ‘eyes’ in the front. Basically, it is dead stupid and runs straight until it either hits something or runs out of fuel. It is nothing more intelligent or subtle than a large, motorized lump of TNT, which will do about forty knots in whatever direction you fire it. It is called a ‘salvo’ weapon because we usually fire at least two and possibly as many as six at a go. This is done because, although it is necessary to aim as correctly as possible, all sorts of errors can creep in to ruin your ‘solution’ to the torpedo attack problem: you may have misjudged the target’s course or speed or range marginally; the target may alter course or speed after the torpedoes have left the submarine; the torpedoes themselves may not run entirely accurately. The ‘salvo’
is also used because you may want more than one torpedo to hit the target, particularly if you are trying to sink a large warship, and submariners do not relish having to go back for a second attempt against heavily armed and now alert opponents. Conqueror also carried the wire-guided Tigerfish torpedo, a ‘single-shot’ weapon with a longer range and the ability to be guided from the submarine all the way to the target, but which had become a cause for concern due to its rather doubtful reliability at the time. To use the Mark 8** Christopher was going to have to get in close, to less than a mile. If the attention of the two destroyers and their depth charges should be too great, he would have to give it a shot with the Tigerfish from further out. The trick was to stay undetected, as I had taught so many of my ‘Perishers’.
Back in Hermes my own view of the situation was more simple: the relatively heavy armour plating on the cruiser was such that I had only two weapons that could put her out of action – thousand-pound bombs, which would be nearly impossible to deliver, or Christopher’s torpedoes. The decision was obvious. However, we had to face the added problem of the Burdwood Bank, a large area of fairly shallow water which sits on the edge of the South American continental shelf. It runs over two hundred miles from east to west, passing some hundred miles to the south of East Falkland, at which point it is about sixty miles across, north to south. Further south, the Atlantic is more than two miles deep, but around the Falkland Islands and inshore to the continent, the sea-bed slopes up to the continental shelf, giving a general depth of about three hundred feet. On the Bank, however, the bottom rises to shallows just one hundred and fifty feet below the surface. These shoals are quite well charted, but they can be a lethal place for a submerged submarine trying to stay with a cruiser making more than twenty-five knots through the water. To do that speed in a nuclear-powered submarine, it is necessary to run at a minimum depth of two hundred feet to avoid leaving a clear wake of disturbed water on the surface. At one hundred feet, which is where they would have to be as they crossed the shoals, they would leave a marked wake which would be fairly obvious to the hurrying surface ships.
One Hundred Days Page 22