It was approaching 1830 when the British submarine captain judged they were close enough for the final approach, at a range of just over two miles. He went deep at high speed to take a long swing so as to come up on the port side of the Argentinian cruiser. He wanted to fire his torpedoes from a position just forward of her beam, at a range of about two thousand yards. Having had plenty of time for solid thought, Christopher had decided to use the Mark 8** direct, straight-running torpedoes. The tubes were loaded with three of them, but he had also taken the precaution of loading three Tigerfish just in case it should prove impossible to get in close enough.
By 1857, Conqueror’s captain estimated he could turn in for the firing position, and come to periscope depth for the final fire control set-up. Up forward, in the torpedo space, they were making ready to fire three Mark 8** torpedoes in the standard fan formation, with each of them aimed off, ahead of the Belgrano sufficiently to ensure that torpedo and ship would meet in the identical patch of water.
The tension throughout the submarine was high, as the sonar operators listened carefully to the continuing steady beat of Belgrano’s three-bladed propellers…‘Chuff-chuff-chuff…chuff-chuff-chuff’…rising and falling in the long Atlantic swells, slightly fainter as the stern ploughed deeper. In the control room, Commander Wreford-Brown ordered Conqueror to periscope depth – and, as the ‘eyes’ of the submarine came up out of the floor with that familiar ‘Whoosh!’, his hands grabbed for the handles before they reached knee level, ducking down to use every precious second of sight. (Remember the manhole in Piccadilly Circus I told you about during the Perisher Course? Commander Wreford Brown was now in it.) Time was running out for the big, grey, American-built veteran of Pearl Harbor.
He called out bearing, then the range – ‘Three-three-five…Thirteen-eighty yards’ – then under his breath he said, ‘Damn. Too close.’ But there was no time to correct that. He hesitated for a few more seconds, as Conqueror slid forward, now on a perfect ninety-degree angle to the Argentinian ship. Then he called out the final order to his Fire Controller: ‘Shoot.’
The sonar recorded the double-thump as the first torpedo was discharged from its tube and then the high-pitched whine as the torpedo’s engine started up and it accelerated away at forty knots. Conqueror shuddered. Seven seconds later there was another, then another. As the whine of the third torpedo died away there was again silence, save for the ‘Chuff-chuff-chuff…chuff-chuff-chuff’ which had been with the British sonar operators for so long.
The seconds ticked by, and the big cruiser steamed on, still at thirteen knots, moving ever closer to the fatal patch of water the British captain had selected. Fifty-five seconds after the first launch, number one Mark 8** smashed into the port bow of the General Belgrano, aft of the anchor but forward of her first gun turret. Very nearly blew the entire bow of the ship off. Through the periscope, Christopher Wreford-Brown was astonished to see a big flash light up the sky.
Conqueror’s sonar operator matter-of-factly reported in the same tone of voice you might count sheep, ‘Explosion…’ Then came,‘…Second explosion…’ Three more reverberating explosions combined the sound of the ‘echoes’ with the two torpedoes which struck home, the second one hitting below the after superstructure. The last of the explosions sounded different, more distant, more metallic, lighter. One of the escorts, the destroyer Bouchard, said later that she had been hit a glancing blow by a torpedo which had not gone off.
It had been, by any standards, a text-book operation by Christopher Wreford-Brown and his team, which is probably why it all sounds so simple, almost as if anyone could have done it. The best military actions always do. As the young Commander said rather drily some months later, ‘The Royal Navy spent thirteen years preparing me for such an occasion. It would have been regarded as extremely dreary if I had fouled it up.’
Back in Conqueror they all heard the unforgettable impact of the strike and knew their torpedoes had hit something. Then, as the noise subsided, for the first time for twenty-four hours the ‘Chuff-chuff-chuff’ of the enemy’s propellers had gone. There was only silence, save for an eerie tinkling sound on the sonar, like breaking glass or metal, echoing back through the water, like the far-lost chiming of the bells of hell. So sounds the noise of a big ship breaking apart on a modern sonar perhaps.
Every Argentinian account since has reported a ‘fireball’ rushing through the ship, in which three hundred and twenty-one men were lost. Which suggests the cruiser was ill-prepared for war. If the blast did travel so quickly in this way it must have been because too many bulkhead doors and hatches had been left open, rather than kept tight shut, with their clips on, in readiness to hold back both fire and water. Keeping hatches and doors properly shut is domestically inconvenient because it can then take about fifteen minutes to get from one end of the ship to the other, unlocking, unclipping every door to get through, then clipping up behind you. Captain Hector Bonzo learned to his cost that if you are in the process of invading another country’s islands, and they are, in turn, not pleased with you, it is probably best to remain in a fairly efficient defensive position. But he was acting in a way which suggested he believed he was in no real danger, despite receiving a warning a few days before, from the British government, that Argentinian ships posing any threat to the business of the British Fleet would be sunk, provided only that they chose to go outside the mainland twelve-mile limit. Here, perhaps, was a man who had not yet quite accepted the reality of the situation we were now all in, and of course he was not alone in his attitude.
On board Belgrano the flames, the heat and the damage were merciless, beyond control, and totally ill-contained. Sea water flooding in quickly shut down all power, a combination of fire and water shut down the auxiliary generators, which in sequence shut down the anti-flooding pumps and the fire-fighting emergency equipment. All the lights failed, and the communications systems crashed simultaneously. The captain and eight hundred and seventy-nine of his company managed to abandon the now darkened ship, and it took half an hour for them all to find their way into the inflatable life rafts. A quarter of an hour after Captain Bonzo left the deck, the General Belgrano rolled over on her port side and her stern rose high into the air as she pitched forward and sank. Packed into the surrounding life rafts, almost nine hundred of her crew, some of whom would not survive this freezing night, sang the Argentinian National Anthem as she went. I am always startled by the emotions the Malvinas can stir in the breast of an Argentinian. For us this campaign was a tough and demanding job on behalf of our government. For them it was something close to a holy war.
Commander Wreford-Brown, whose nearest experience to such an event had been on exercises from Faslane, was almost overcome by an immediate instinct to wipe the sweat from his brow, pack up and have a cup of tea, before setting about collecting all the copious records required to establish whether his ‘attack’ had been successful or not. But that lasted for all of a split second, as reality returned. There were a few urgent tasks to accomplish: first, avoid the destroyers, get clear – fast. That means deep, too. Rudder hard over, down they went and away to the south-east, away from the chaos that always surrounds a stricken warship, away from the retribution the surviving ships will hope to exact.
Within a few minutes the sonar operators heard three explosions which the captain assessed to be depth-charges from the Argentinian destroyers. They sounded fairly close. Your first one always does. But this was no time to be curious, so he ran on, still deep, for four or five more miles until the Argentinians faded astern. He wondered, perhaps warming to his new task, whether to go back and have another shot, perhaps sink the other two. However, discretion proved the better part of valour and he elected to ensure that Conqueror stayed in one piece rather than engage in further heroics on this particular day. In the intervening years he has refined that view yet further. ‘In retrospect,’ he told me recently, ‘I do not suppose Mrs Thatcher would have thanked me all that much if I had reloaded and
hit the other two ships.’ An opinion I would have assessed as more or less faultless because, as far as I knew, he only had permission to fire at the Belgrano anyway. I have to add that Christopher is equally sure that he had received permission to attack any Argentinian warship anywhere up to the twelve-mile limit of her shores. I am always amazed at how two trained observers can harbour totally opposed views on a ‘simple fact’! And even more so if it turns out that I am the one who is wrong.
Indeed Commander Wreford-Brown did return on the following day and saw the two destroyers, quite a way south-east by now, because of the wind and current, helping with the search and rescue of the many Argentinian survivors. But they were engaged on a mission of mercy now, not war, and Christopher Wreford-Brown turned Conqueror away, and left them to their unenviable task.
From my own perspective, it was rather a disjointed sort of day. Of course we were unaware of the activities of Conqueror, just as they knew nothing of our pre-occupation with the possible attack from the Argentinian carrier. In turn neither of us knew, at that time, what was in the minds of the Argentinian High Command. In fact, by 0900 Argentinian time it was clear to them that the wind would not return in the next few hours and the dawn strike against us, which was very definitely planned, was called off. Veintecinco de Mayo and her escorts were ordered back to the mainland. At more or less the same time, the General Belgrano was ordered (we learned much later) to proceed to a waiting position. She was already steaming west and she merely needed to keep on going. Admiral Anaya, faced with the non-functioning of one of his ‘pincers’, quite reasonably decided to cancel the whole operation, get his carrier home and maintain an option for a later strike by his southern group if opportunity offered.
We of course knew nothing of this. Thus, as that Sunday morning wore on, we continued to search to the north and north-west for signs of an incoming attack, trusting that Conqueror would deal with the threat from the south. I kept the Group in a high state of anti-air warfare readiness, at least until the afternoon when we began to head west in preparation for the recce insertion that night. At 2200 I once more detached Glamorgan and her group to bombard the Argentinian positions around Port Stanley, with the intention of maintaining their belief that we were about to land in the Port Stanley area and still in hopes of defeating their Fleet, now on the following day.
It was not until 2245 that we received a signal from Northwood to tell us that HMS Conqueror had sunk the General Belgrano. We received the news without excitement. There was only temporary relief that the threat from the south-west had, for the moment, diminished. I did, however, realize that this news would make all kinds of headlines back home and that it would be immensely good for morale. Not wishing to rain on this particular parade, Northwood recommended that I recall Glamorgan and the two frigates, in case one of them should be lost. I agreed. Probably just as well too. On the face of it, it had been another moderately successful day for us: we were still more or less intact, and we had reduced the sea threat to the Battle Group by one cruiser. We were not to know for weeks that the effects of Belgrano’s sinking would be so all-embracing. Even as we planned our next activities, late that night, the entire Argentinian fleet was on the move. The two destroyers in the south were on their way back to Porto Belgrano, the carrier and her Type 42s were heading back towards the River Plate, and the three other frigates had also made an about-turn and were heading west for home.
What no one knew then was that Christopher Wreford-Brown’s old Mark 8** torpedoes, appropriately as old in design as the Belgrano herself, had sent the navy of Argentina home for good. Unwittingly we had achieved at least half of what we had set out to do from those days at Ascension: we had made the Argentinians send out their fleet and a single sinking by a British SSN had then defeated it. We would never see any of their big warships again.
9
The Silence of HMS Sheffield
With the General Belgrano now gone, and no identifiable threat from the south-west to worry us for the moment, I could readily discard the sinking of the enemy cruiser from my mind, and press on with thinking about future business. However, unknown to me, eight thousand miles to the north, there were forces in action dedicated to placing the demise of the Argentinian warship equally firmly into the minds of anyone with even a passing interest in the current proceedings in the South Atlantic.
Fleet Street, the old traditional headquarters of London’s national newspapers, was in the process of going, rather noisily, berserk. Editors were reaching for what I believe is known in the trade as ‘End-of-the-World’ type. Enormous headlines were being set to proclaim, with lunatic nationalistic pride, that the Royal Navy had struck a massive blow for Margaret, England and St George against the evil forces of General Galtieri. ‘GOTCHA,’ bellowed the Sun, rather unchivalrously, in the biggest typeface ever seen on its front page. And many of the others were equally unrestrained, announcing the sinking in terms which could only be described as celebratory, even gleeful, or to use the correct Fleet Street sub-editors’ cliché, ‘jubilant’.
I, of course, knew nothing of all this excitement being foisted upon a shocked world, which was just as well because it was not part of my job to be shocked. Nonetheless I was pretty surprised when it was all over and I was able to look at some of those front pages and see for myself how the news from the war had been treated. Rarely has the huge difference in perspective between the front line and the front page been better illustrated, although I am obliged to admit that the Sun’s ‘GOTCHA’ came perhaps the closest to echoing initial general feeling in the Battle Group. For greater accuracy, it would have required the addition of the phrase ‘YOU BLEEDER’. But in the typeface favoured by that particular tabloid it might not have fitted. There is also the question of nuance, and I trust that the Sun’s perceptive headline writers were tuned in to the subtlety of ‘salvation’ as opposed to ‘jubilation’. Our metaphoric cry of ‘Gotcha, you bleeder!’ was strictly that of the former, of someone who has finally removed an angry wasp from inside his trouser leg without getting stung.
Nonetheless, deep in the Total Exclusion Zone on that night, we were not giving thoughts of the Belgrano one single moment of our time, whether a nationwide party was happening at home or not. The fact was, her removal posed for us a completely new set of problems: from where would the Argentinians strike back in order to take their revenge for such a humiliating loss on the high seas? Where now were the 25 de Mayo and her escorts? What was the plan for the two Exocetarmed destroyers which had been with the Belgrano? Would the Argentinian commanders elect to come back at us from the sea, perhaps using a variation on the pincer movement they had been planning for Sunday? Or would they change direction completely, afraid now of the British submarines, and come at us from the air? No one knew the answers, and all I could do was make my best estimations, beginning with what I would do if I had been in their shoes and had just lost the second largest warship in my fleet. Admiral Anaya, I thought, the Malvinas hawk of the Argentinian Junta, must surely try from the sea again, and unless he wanted to risk something nastily close to ridicule at home, he had better be quick about it.
These were the thoughts that preoccupied me in the immediate hours following the accurate firing of Christopher Wreford-Brown’s torpedoes. My diary records fairly faithfully and succinctly in just three paragraphs the course of events for me on Sunday 2 May 1982:
By 0400 already apparent Args reaction. Their carrier is hurrying through the SSNs to strike at us. Belgrano going south-about at the same time. However, all my chickens will be home to roost by 0800 and we can retire to maintain reasonable arm’s length until dawn. Not much of a ‘day off’, but indeed this could be decisive one way or another. I fear that the SSNs have missed their chances. Of course they should get another go as the Args return to base.
By midday, still no news and no strike, we all began to relax. Conx [Conqueror] at 1400 finally reporting that Belgrano Group had turned back at 0800 having nearly reached the E e
nd of Burdwood Bank. Nothing from the SSNs up north who should have intercepted 25 de Mayo and her team. All in all it seems the Args must have decided that we weren’t the landing force [they were expecting] after all, and that the sally wasn’t worth the risk.
Quite correct. But in the process I have had a free rehearsal of their plan, my response, and greatly improved Rules of Engagement because everyone got a fright when I released (against top orders) Conx to attack. I am no doubt in trouble, but providing I’m not relieved immediately I expect it will be forgotten!
As always, the diary reads very businesslike with a dash of the cavalier thrown in. Perhaps I thought I was writing for posterity, mindful that one day my words might be read post-humously, should the Argentine navy or air forces somehow break through our defences and ruin my day. I suppose any commander would wish in the final reckoning to be remembered for bravery under attack and coolness in assessing the danger, and I do not claim to be any less susceptible to these subconscious vanities than anyone else. In reality, we had been facing the strong likelihood of a full-scale surface fleet action that morning, with all the major units of each country involved, and to this day I have not the least idea how it might have turned out – nor, to my knowledge, has anyone done an analysis of it. The chanciest of circumstances – an unlikely lack of wind near the 25 de Mayo – decreed the battle would not happen that day. The sinking of the Belgrano decreed it would not happen at all.
I was by then becoming accustomed to nights of broken sleep, not to mention dreams, and the one in the aftermath of Belgrano was of course no exception. Shortly before 0130, a Sea King helicopter investigating a well-lit but unidentifiable surface contact was suddenly fired upon with a machine gun. The chopper did an about turn and tracked the vessel from a safe distance, reporting the incident to the Hermes Ops Room. I was summoned from bed just as the ‘Junglies’ made it back from the recce insertions of the night, and we immediately ordered Coventry and Glasgow to despatch their Lynx helicopters up to the north-west to check on this aggressive contact. And its attitude had not changed, because the unidentified boat instantly opened fire on their approach, which prompted Coventry’s Lynx to blow it away with a well-aimed Sea Skua missile. All this was fairly routine except that it seemed the missile had caused a bigger explosion than anyone had expected, suggesting to us that it could have been a bigger ship, perhaps an A-69 corvette and that the British missile had in fact hit an Exocet canister. We never did find out what that target was.
One Hundred Days Page 24