One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  The general analysis of the Sheffield calamity concentrated our minds on a number of these peripheral points as well as on the main event of trying to stop a six-hundred-knot missile coming inboard. We did not, as a result, make any drastic changes to our modus operandi, but there were many minor details which were swiftly refined. Nonetheless, I was personally left with the nagging worry that I just could not quite understand how the disaster had happened. And to me it fell to ensure that it did not happen again. My personal irritation factor was, of course, high, because the absence of straight, irrefutable logic in such matters tends to prey on my particular sort of mind. And, at that time, I still did not know precisely how that missile had got through. I couldn’t afford Admiral Beatty’s famous Jutland pronouncement – uttered as his battle-cruisers blew up, one by one – ‘There’s something wrong with our ships today.’ I kept wondering. Have I missed something? Am I too close to see? But I could get no further, and had to accept the given evidence as fact, with the single reservation that I would ‘watch this space’ closely for the future.

  Meanwhile we put together our analysis and passed it out to all commanding officers. It was in no sense a rallying cry, much more a plaintive message: ‘Now come along, chaps, we must all do better’ – what else can you say when you don’t quite know what went wrong? But we did have a close look at our decoys, our jammers and chaff patterns to see what improvements could be made, and there were some that looked useful. More significantly, though, we decided to fire chaff regardless of the warning we had received – which meant that we would too often respond to a cry of ‘Wolf’ in order never to miss the real thing. This put us almost immediately into a state of chronic chaff shortage, a situation saved only by the prompt action of a certain Ian Fairfield, the chairman of Chemring, chaff-makers of Hampshire. He moved heaven and earth, opened a new factory in weeks, and increased his output eightfold, all more or less on spec. He was, of course, paid for it all in the end, but the CBE he was awarded for his efforts carried with it the grateful thanks of a good few thousand British sailors.

  We also finally understood what the signal ‘AIR RAID WARNING – WHITE’ actually meant. Not – ‘There are no enemy aircraft coming our way’ – a sort of ‘All clear’ from the Second World War days. It indicated only that we have not detected any yet. There is a big difference – there is no guarantee in the White warning. There may be an Etendard detected in the next three seconds, with a missile three minutes behind. Nor, after Sheffield, was there any further need to exhort people to wear their anti-flash gear – the light, yellowish, cotton head-masks and gloves which will protect our skin from instant burns in the sudden flash-fire explosion of a bomb, shell or missile. Sailors and officers alike had been prone to wear them round their necks below their chins rather than suffer the inconvenience of covering all the face except the eyes. The speed and heat of the hit on Sheffield ensured that only those with a particularly contrary turn of mind would ever again walk around without the full protection of their anti-flash gear instantly available.

  Sheffield had told us that you can get badly hurt out here. Very quickly. Some did not have to be told but it was now obvious to all – and immediately the differences began to show. People started to sleep above the waterline. There were many camp beds and mattresses ranged along the passages. People just stopped going down to the mess decks below, preferring to sleep ‘upstairs’. This sort of self-protection was really only applicable in the Second World War when a torpedo could come in below the waterline, but it made people feel safer, sleep better, in the South Atlantic, and both the captain and his master-at-arms smiled benevolently upon this new breed of gypsy sailors who littered the passageways. Another difference, and perhaps the most positive spin-off we had from the incident, was in general attitudes. There were those who never thought they would start pressing triggers or buttons and actually killing people. After Sheffield, that was no longer so; life became more precious, more earnest and getting the job exactly right became a great deal more important. I concluded my own analysis with the thought that today, on Day Five of the war, I fully expected us to be sharper, quicker and altogether more effective under attack than we had been yesterday. At least if we planned to stay alive, we had better be.

  Out beyond the horizon, Sheffield went on burning. The fires which had begun in the engine room, and in the galley, spread forward and aft and were never brought under control, despite all the efforts of Sheffield’s crew and the help of Arrow and Yarmouth close by. Abandoned now, she burned alone out there, with little we could do except watch and wait. And see if the Argentinians came to have a look – with their little submarine perhaps. While the Battle Group retired to the south-east, I considered the possibility of sinking her by gunfire, or with a torpedo. But on reflection, I decided to wait, for two reasons. Firstly we still suspected that the Argentinians did indeed intend to send their submarine to the spot, with orders to sink any ships that came to help Sheffield. Not calculated to make us feel more kindly towards our enemy. And secondly, if she didn’t blow up, we might just be able to tow her to South Georgia and make some kind of a fist at salvage. This meant waiting for the fires to die down, and for the hull to cool. Of course it might never happen, in which case she’d sink and cease to be a problem anyway.

  I managed to get a letter off to Char, a part of which read: ‘Just had your letter of the 15th April today when a steamer came in from wherever it was; and glad of it, though you all seem very, very far away, indeed in a totally different world. I saw the bit of shrapnel that went through our first casualty yesterday (a young able seaman in the Arrow). He’s OK – it was only a piece of 20mm shell the size of my little fingernail, but it went right across his chest and into his liver. That’s nice. I do not think I shall ever be quite the same again, and I am not very happy about it – it’s getting to be very lonely, but Andy B continues to be a real blessing.’

  The sixth day of May was a lousy day for about four hundred and twenty-eight reasons, the main one being the loss of two of our precious Sea Harriers, and two good pilots in them. Lieutenant-Commander Eyton-Jones and Lieutenant Curtis – the same Curtis who had shot down an Argentinian Canberra five days before. They took off from Invincible on a routine combat air patrol, in not very good visibility with patchy low and middle-level cloud. There was a possible low altitude aircraft radar contact south of the Battle Group and the two Harriers dived towards it.

  But they were never seen again. At 1125 Invincible reported she had lost contact with them. Within minutes we had set up a search centre to investigate but we found nothing. Professional opinion was that they had collided in cloud on their way down to investigate the radar contact, and gone straight into the sea. Apart from the awful personal tragedies, I felt it had been so unnecessary and could find no comfort in the thought that accidents will happen. They bloody well should not and we bloody well could not afford them. Ten per cent of my present Harrier force gone at a stroke.

  If that wasn’t enough, the weather remained murky all day, and it highlighted my mounting frustration with several aspects of my life at the time. I will not try to reconstruct it all, but rather will quote from my diary which, written that evening, conveys more than I ever could, writing eight years later.

  An Invincible helicopter, by getting his navigation thirty miles out, managed to keep me and three Lynx helicopters up for two hours chasing a rock off Port Stanley!

  It’s morning. And while the weather is good enough for Sea King helicopters, it’s too variably thick for Sea Harriers. This sort of thing makes air planning nearly hopeless and crew fatigue a pressing problem.

  The Junglies seem to have mislaid a couple of blokes. And the rest of the day went no better. The [covert] search [for a submarine] around Sheffield failed to produce ‘trade’, and neither did the Dippers [anti-submarine helicopters using active sonar] behind them.

  Two Harriers fell out of the sky for no apparent reason, chasing a report of a ‘contact trackin
g 250, fast’. This was patently a surface/helicopter contact and probably spurious – not one for the Combat Air Patrol – all so bloody unnecessary.

  Then, as it became clear that there was no aircraft contact about, people started seeing surface contacts, and getting fire control radars locked on to them. And so on. And so on. Very nervous lot here! And so we move on through another very frustrating day.

  I’m getting very upset about the stalemate position I have been strapped in. I can only fiddle about in the Total Exclusion Zone, which is now topping up with fishermen, and the whole thing is getting totally out of hand. I can’t hit anyone outside the TEZ. I can’t take risks. The Harriers can’t fly for the weather and, if I’m not careful, I shall be picked apart. Feeling very hassled and suspicious of Cabinet. If we’re not allowed to take any risks, and not allowed to go to war in any but the most limited area, if we have to live in an area into which the enemy can strike from safe havens, the strength we came with will be whittled away. I might as well leave the area.

  Made a long signal to Commander-in-Chief giving a list of the riskier possibilities for the next week or so, but really pointing to the need for me to know whether the Cabinet will actually decide to land, on the day. If not, then it’s silly to get our people’s heads blown off now (though I can see why it may be thought a good idea). If they do intend to land, then there are several things we ought to do to test the water and impose some attrition on the Arg forces beforehand.

  To cap it all, the submarines have been stopped from doing anything nasty in the area of the main Arg surface force. It looks very much as though Hercules [an Arg Type 42 destroyer] is to be let go for the second time. It’s unbelievable: you just can’t expect to be given two bites, much less three, at the cherry. The SSN force is becoming a laughing stock: joining the rest of us!

  Months later, I reread my entry for that day, 6 May, and shuddered a bit. I wrote below it the following words: ‘In this day’s log it is quite obvious that the general nervousness was shared by the Task Group Commander [me]. These moods come and go – and keeping the log did much to help me through them. It was, by any standards, a bad time for everyone. Sailors hate fog. Sheffield had been hit. We had lost two Sea Harriers. The Arg carrier was still an unknown factor. And my surface and air surveillance around the Battle Group was anything but leak-proof.’

  The tiresome aspect of 7 May was that it was very much like 6 May. We sat out on the eastern edge of the TEZ in the fog; ‘prosecuted’ (as we call it), a submarine contact with enthusiasm until it proved to be another whale, persecuted rather than prosecuted; visited Sheffield, still burning, blistering but upright and not settling noticeably in the water. The evening almost saw us lose two more Sea Harriers. In the dense but patchy fog, we had declined to launch our routine CAPs on the basis that if we couldn’t see anything, neither could the enemy. But at 1807 we received convincing indications of an air raid. Whether by Canberras, Mirages, Skyhawks, Etendards – we knew not. Neither could we figure out how they could attack us in this fog.

  Invincible orders two Harriers up immediately, through a chance clear hole in the fog, and tells them to head out to the north-west. Half an hour later, the Anti-Air Warfare Commander (AAWC) in Invincible reassesses the raid as a false alarm, just as the hole in the fog (known as a ‘sucker hole’ to the wiser aviators), closed, plunging the two carriers back into dense fog again.

  Wonderful. Now I have two Harriers trapped up there, unable to see the carriers’ decks below. Indeed, they are unable to see any ships at all. We can only look for another hole, and hope the Harriers don’t run out of fuel before we find one. At least we know where they are and should be able to save the pilots if they finally have to eject. But another two Harriers lost unnecessarily? Like yesterday? This is definitely not my day. But then, suddenly another ‘sucker hole’ appeared in the gloom and the visibility improved just long enough to allow Invincible to recover them, very quickly indeed. Which was just as well, because, moments later, she ghosted back into the murk.

  An uneasy peace then broke out over the Group as we slipped along under our thick grey blanket. Until suppertime, that is, when Broadsword came perilously close to being rammed by Hermes, still in fog. This was a really close one. Though we never saw the frigate herself, I shan’t forget seeing her wake right under our bows, still swirling, green and fresh and frothy. There can only have been a matter of tens of feet in it.

  Then, three hours later, as Yarmouth brought a small group of RFAs back into the force, the surface plot got into a fearsome muddle, with unidentified contacts coming up on the screens like measles and everyone getting in each other’s way as they tried to sort it out before a real ‘hostile’ could get in among us. I actually went to bed just after midnight as usual, after talking to Northwood on DSSS, reading the day’s signals and taking a quiet glass of whisky ‘to settle the tum’.

  For a day in which absolutely nothing of importance had actually happened, it had been amazingly busy.

  The fog cleared on 8 May and with it, my mind. I decided we were getting absolutely nowhere with aviation and that I was going to have to get on with my war largely without it for a while, the best way I knew how. At the staff meeting that morning, I made plans to harass and attack the Argentinian positions on the Falkland Islands. I think I was influenced, perhaps needled, into a new sense of urgency by the latest reports coming in early that morning on the state of some of the ships. For a start, Hermes herself had locked her port shaft while seeing to a lub oil problem. Invincible reported trouble with the leading edges of 820 Squadron’s helicopter rotor blades. Glamorgan reported a 992 radar problem, which we certainly did not need. Then Glasgow checked in with a 965 radar problem with short-pulse and target-indication difficulties. This is just terrific, I thought. We’re on half power in the flagship, the helicopters are falling apart, Glamorgan can’t see straight, and Glasgow can’t shoot straight. Come on, Woodward, let’s get going before we are all dead in the water.

  Brilliant was to go to Falkland Sound north end to terrorize anything that moved, or anything that seemed likely to move. This was just the sort of free-range directive that Captain John Coward liked best. Commander Christopher Craig’s Alacrity was to be sent to the ‘gun line’ off Port Stanley to bombard Arg positions. This was firstly to keep them awake ashore, and secondly to help maintain the fiction that we would eventually land in the Port Stanley area. Yarmouth was to tow Sheffield out that night, and we formed a plan to send in Broadsword and Coventry in the small hours of the morning to shoot at any aircraft trying to land or take off from Port Stanley airstrip.

  I would say now, though I didn’t know it at the time, that this day was another turning point for me personally. Sheffield had been, undoubtedly, a shock for all of us, including me. Perhaps I was lucky that the weather had allowed me this recovery period, a bit of time to steady up. I remember well enough, though, telling myself not to be shocked. Trying to convince myself that Sheffield was nothing more than a statistic. Inconvenient, yes; worrying, yes; but not shocking. But I wasn’t very good at it. A ship was broken. My old ship. Men had died. My men. People on board had been burnt, some very badly. My people. Down in Hermes’s sickbay, the surgeons were facing reality on a scale not met before. And in the quiet retreat of my cabin I had to tell myself to put it all away, that this could not be allowed to dominate my actions.

  Three days later, it seems I was able to get back into the game, quicker than some. But all around me there was no shortage of nervous cries of ‘Wolf’; too many Ops Rooms were over-reacting to a flock of seagulls. But that’s entirely understandable. We will get better, I said to myself. And hopefully we will turn Sheffield’s disaster to our advantage in the end – by improving our performance when we come under threat next time and learning from the unfortunate mistakes inevitable in any human enterprise.

  10

  The End of the Trail for Narwal

  All through the small hours of Sunday 9 May, while I slep
t, Alacrity pumped 4.5-inch shells from the gun line off Port Stanley into the Argentinian entrenched positions around the local racecourse. They fired over ninety rounds, each shell whistling in from nowhere and making sure that our general policy was fully implemented: ‘While we don’t expect to do much damage, we want to keep the buggers awake all night, keep them worried and keep them busy.’

  In turn I intended to have a more peaceful, cerebral morning in a full staff meeting immediately after breakfast. We would attempt to clarify our plans for putting the land forces safely ashore somewhere suitable to their business, and providing air, sea and logistic support for such time as might be needed for the prosecution of any land battle – whatever form that might take. While obviously critical to the whole operation to recover the Falklands, it was still only one of my prime tasks as the off-shore commander. I was also required to neutralise the Argentine navy and air force, preferably, but not necessarily, beforehand and to keep them neutralised indefinitely, long after any land battle might be successfully concluded.