One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  I need to bring you more fully into the military process which decides matters such as working out the best place to put five thousand British soldiers and all of their supplies, ammunition and equipment, without getting wiped out by the enemy either during the sea approach or while the actual landing is taking place. Any army faced with crossing a beach – either arriving or departing, as most famously at Normandy or Dunkirk respectively – is in a situation which A. A. Milne might have described as not what ‘Tiggers like best’. Especially if the enemy has a reasonably effective air force still in operation. Even more so, should the enemy have substantial land forces in the area too.

  We, in the South Atlantic, with our original air force of twenty-odd Sea Harriers, and perhaps another eight on the way, were up against a two hundred-odd strong Argentinian air force, most of it land-based. We were obviously going to have to be even more careful than the historical norm. The landing force was going to be, for a short while at least, immensely vulnerable, and it was up to us to ensure that this danger was reduced to the absolute minimum.

  On this Sunday morning we were still feeling our way, because our General Directive, issued when we left Ascension Island in mid-April, was, still less than crystal clear. Its wording was thus: ‘…to land…with a view to repossessing the Falkland Islands’. Delightfully vague, were the subject not so serious. To me it seemed to mean: ‘Get into position, be ready to land and then be ready to go forward only when, and if, we say so.’ The key words were ‘with a view to repossessing’. They did not mean ‘do it’ – and we might, conceivably, have to wait indefinitely. We had quickly cast aside any possibility of a fully effective blockade because: a) we were not a big enough force to seal the Falklands off; and b) we could not stay out at sea long enough to enforce a starve-them-out programme, even if such a scheme could be made to avoid, somehow, starving out the islanders at the same time.

  We would have to land where we could establish a forward-operating base, from which we could attack the Argentinians if we were ordered to do so. But at this stage, the choice of landing site was greatly complicated by a further political requirement from home, passed on DSSS, forcefully to me but not to COMAW, as I eventually discovered. Back in the UK, there was still serious fear of a United Nations resolution ordering an immediate ‘freeze’ on military operations by both sides. If this occurred before we could defeat the Argentinian land forces and regain the use of Port Stanley airstrip, we would have a major problem. We of course, would still have our forward operating base but it would then have to become a long-term, defensively-sustainable military base, sited well clear of Port Stanley, but from which we could nevertheless attack should circumstances change again. And so our landing objectives, in those early seemingly far-off days of only three weeks ago, were becoming a bit clearer, if still well short of settled. We would need to create not a only a beachhead from which to mount our attacks – we would also need an air-head. For some readers, this should not be taken to cast aspersions on the quality of local commanders. It means merely a place ashore from which our fighter and supply aircraft can both take-off and land. That is, we needed to build an airstrip, as soon as possible. The envisaged airstrip needed to be perhaps only eight hundred yards long at first, because the big Hercules C-130 transports have a fairly short take-off, and while Harriers of course can go straight up in a vertical take-off, they can carry far more fuel and weapon load if they have a short run and/or a ski jump. But both types of aircraft are vital for an enclave: the Harriers to defend both troops and airstrip; the transports to bring urgent supplies (men and matériel) without, as at present, having to drop them in the sea for the ships to pick up! But, if we were ‘frozen’ in the enclave for any substantial period we would have to extend it for use by the RAF Phantoms before we ran out of Sea Harriers. This would be a much more difficult and time-consuming job.

  An enclave also requires a harbour, deep enough to bring in almost all of our ships at various times for resupplying and repairs and maintenance. Like the airstrip, this too must be carefully chosen, and very defendable against attack from Argentinian land, sea and air forces. Of course the classic way to defend against a land force counter-attack is to select a place as far away from the Args as might be reasonably possible – preferably forcing them to cross water to come at us – but always bearing in mind that we, in turn, may wish to get at them in due course. There were thus various options open to us, the first being West Falkland (possibly the Steveley Bay area) which might just be far enough away for us to build an airstrip without coming under attack from land forces, though it would be closer to Argentinian mainland airfields and further away from the support of the Battle Group. But it would also mean, should we eventually be told to repossess the islands, a second, dangerous landing in East Falkland. The more favoured selection in my mind was Lafonia, the vast inhospitable southern part of East Falkland, with its indented coastline and huge bays with adequate depth of water. The most suitable here was Low Bay, some forty miles directly along the seaboard running due south-west of Port Stanley. This sheltered inlet washes into the much deeper fifteen-mile-long Adventure Bay, both protected from the Atlantic by the flat, almost featureless, boomerang-shaped Bleaker Island, deserted at the time, but now home to one man, one woman and two thousand three hundred sheep. No piece of land upon this planet was ever more accurately named.

  Low Bay and the area around looked promising, because it had some major advantages:

  a) it was very nearly impregnable from the sea:

  b) its waters were deep and clear and adequately surveyed, so that it would probably offer us a navigationally safe harbour, reasonably protected against weather;

  c) the surrounding land was at least flat, which would facilitate the building of an airstrip, though its firmness was an unknown factor;

  d) it was one of the furthest easterly ‘safe’ areas of the Falklands and almost as far away from their mainland air force as it is possible to get without getting your feet wet;

  e) while Low Bay had no surrounding hills, no cover behind which either men or ships could hide from enemy aircraft, this also had its ‘up’ side – in that it would make life a great deal easier for operators of the British anti-aircraft guided missile system Rapier, which was, if given half a chance, an extremely accurate weapon, well capable of knocking either fighter-planes or bombers out of the sky, but possibly less effective if hemmed in by cliffs or hills;

  f) it would surely provide a very long and difficult overland journey for the Argentinian ground forces if they attempted to counter-attack us, for they would have to fight their way over the low ground on the narrow strip of land which forms the ‘bridge’ joining Darwin to the Goose Green settlement. But that same strip of land would be equally difficult for us to advance over, should that become the requirement, instead ‘Be prepared to wait, indefinitely’. Provided it offered reasonable beaches, it was possibly the right place for an enclave, but not for any advance to re-possess.

  We also gave some thought to Cow Bay, which sits in the extreme north-east, in a rather exposed position, to the north of Berkeley Sound. Its forty square miles of deep water would have separated us from the guns of Port Stanley, but our artillery experts assured us that an enclave in Cow Bay might very well put us within range of the Argentinian’s 155mm shells, which we considered more trouble than the proposed site was worth and we dismissed it without great difficulty.

  Another consideration was Teal Inlet, a deep penetrating bay with a narrow entrance off the straight northern coastline from MacBride Head, leading into a huge inland sea ‘lake’. We assessed we would be completely safe in there from submarine attack, but hopelessly vulnerable if the Args decided to block the narrow entrance and bottle us up for days, maybe weeks. Teal Inlet: bad news.

  The other site we considered was of course Carlos Water, well protected as it was by hills, but very moderate as a place to build a major airstrip, and potentially vulnerable to an overland counter-attack by
the Argentinian army. As a place to establish an enclave it was, in my view, not the prime choice. But as a place from which to advance and repossess, it had plain advantages for the land forces over just about anywhere else.

  All of these areas were considered and discussed. I was very much in favour of building the airstrip, because it would take the pressure off my carriers. In the longer run, it would even allow the carriers to go home – which they eventually must do – when we set up the long-term defence of the islands. Two carriers are not enough to keep one permanently on station, 8,000 miles from their base and the accelerated building programme for Illustrious was still highly dubious. Generally speaking I would say the Battle Group at this stage would have voted first for Lafonia for a defensive policy, Carlos for an offensive policy and for West Falkland as a poor third.

  But in the early days of May, it was beginning to seem likely that our Directive from the C-in-C would be altered to one which would order us to land a force ‘to repossess the Falkland Islands’…deleting the words ‘with a view to’ and with them any requirement for us to establish an enclave and build a sizeable airstrip within it. At that point we would be free to go on in and take theirs, the old British one they had borrowed from us on 2 April, the one at Port Stanley. We all knew that Admiral Fieldhouse was not in favour of the ‘with a view to’ wording and had himself always considered we should just land and repossess the islands and have done with it. The Ministry of Defence and the politicians had, up till now, always favoured the more cautious approach, but now they were losing the argument in London. My own land force adviser on board Hermes in succession to Colonel Richard Preston was the Royal Marine Colonel John Fisher and he was fairly sure we would see our Directive changed in the next few days.

  Colonel John was a highly intelligent Marine, whose keen, acerbic wit was not entirely beyond a few quiet jests from time to time at the expense of his own Regiment – an idiosyncrasy fellow Marine officers for some reason are apt to consider a form of low treason. But Colonel John, who suited me perfectly, unfailingly had his ear to the ground, and his opinion was that the mobilization of the Army’s Fifth Infantry Brigade and the requisitioning of the Queen Elizabeth II to bring them to the South Atlantic clearly and undeniably inferred the creation of a much bigger land force. ‘Five Brigade’ now contained troops from the Scots Guards, the Welsh Guards, the Gurkha Rifles and the Royal Artillery. Their addition could really only mean one thing: the enclave theory had the skids under it, and Northwood was already planning a straight landing, advance and repossession strategy. Which was fine by me. ‘Enclave’ had never looked too cheerful and I would be glad to be off that ‘hook’.

  This was the reason why now, on the morning of 9 May, the minds of my staff, plus those of the Commander Amphibious Warfare Mike Clapp, Brigadier Julian Thompson and the other senior land force commanders far away up the Atlantic, and indeed those at Northwood, were converging on a single solution. However, at that time I still only had the original Official Directive from my C-in-C, and my training had taught me that I probably ought not to dump it in the waste-paper basket too hastily. I therefore continued to consider all of the problems in the widest sense, but to concentrate, too, on the likely conclusion that if the Directive did indeed change, we would unanimously go for a landing in Carlos Bay.

  From our short list of West Falkland, Lafonia and Carlos, we would obviously have to discard the first one because it was much too far away and it involved a second landing, with all its attendant risks. And, for the same reasons that the narrow neck of land at Darwin made Lafonia a good place to defend against an Argentinian counter-attack, it was a poor place for us to attack them from. That left Carlos Water very clearly at the top of the heap. All of the planners now favoured that area, tucked behind the great jutting mound of Fanning Head, the eastern sentinel commanding the northern approach into the Falkland Sound. Its advantages were several:

  a) its beaches were partially protected against air attack, both by the hills which run south-east from Fanning Head and by the Sussex Mountains to the south;

  b) the Navy were happy with the depth of the water and with the quality of the ‘holding ground’ for our anchors, so it was navigationally ‘safe’ though a bit tight for space;

  c) it had two main entrances from open ocean because you could run through Falkland Sound easily enough from the north or from the south, and both these entrances were wide enough to make the use of blockships ineffective (unlike Teal Inlet) and the existence of two entrances made it doubly hard for the Argentinians to cover them both with submarines and/or mines;

  d) it gave good shelter against wind and bad weather.

  So we continued in the Ops Room of Hermes, around the General Operations Plot, to go over the intricacies of the total problem. But it was not for me to calculate the details of the tide’s rise and fall, the effects of wind, sea and swell, or note the best landing points from the ships. Not for me to search for the thick black mud any naval captain will prefer for his anchor holding ground. Nor did I fuss about where we might find sand, weed, clay, shingle and shells, or about the beach gradient and how this would be affected by a swiftly falling tide – discussing, for example, whether the beach would allow the landing craft to get in close enough or whether it would go shallow so gently that the troops would find themselves saddled with huge packs of equipment and ammunition, wading through freezing water perhaps four or five hundred yards from the actual beach, making the distance too far, too tiring, too hazardous. These were the tasks of the dozens of Royal Navy and Royal Marine experts to whom these problems are not much short of a way of life. No mistakes, Woodward, I told myself. This thing has to be done dead right, first time. But I must continue to rely on the experts.

  So, at a higher level, we asked ourselves: is this prospective beachhead defensible against a determined land force attack? And, is it defensible, in the short and long term, against air attacks with bombs or missiles? Can we defend it against attack from the sea? From the surface or from a submarine? How can we know it has not been mined? At which point does the sea bed slope upwards to a depth of less than about sixty feet, the minimum water a small submarine requires to approach submerged? Can we get the ships in fairly tightly against those hills to shelter from incoming air attacks? Can we minimize the Argentinian offensive capability, and maximize our defensive capability? This was a difficult one – the hills were very much a mixed blessing, because they ensured we had no clear arcs to see our enemy approaching early, in time to get our weapons locked on to him. Two hundred miles offshore we had maximized our capability of seeing him early, but in turn our position had maximized his capability of hitting us with ‘standoff’ missiles, like Exocet. Inshore, beneath those hills, we minimized his capability to strike us, but also minimized our own chances of catching him. I think it was the late John Paul Getty who said that for every plus there is somewhere, somehow, a minus. The tight-fisted old oil billionaire was right.

  Of course, the skill lies in getting the balance right. And this we eventually did, whether by luck or good management. What sometimes still surprises me is that the Argentinians didn’t come to similar conclusions. But at this stage, no final decision could be taken and so our staffwork continued. By now Alacrity had returned from the gun line, Brilliant was back from North Falkland, and Yarmouth had placed a tow on board the stricken hulk of Sheffield. Coventry and Broadsword were on their way to try to impose the ‘air blockade’ of Stanley, and, for a change, life seemed relatively peaceful here in Hermes. Not, however, for long.

  At 1150 two of our Harriers, armed with 1000-pound bombs, under the control of Captain David Hart-Dyke’s Coventry, detected a surface contact fifty miles south-south-east of Port Stanley which they were now investigating. This would normally have caused an instant broadcast ‘Admiral to the Ops room!’ Unnecessary this time because I was already in there.

  Thoughts raced through my mind. It couldn’t be the Argentinian carrier: they had no need to
place it so far forward, and anyway it surely wouldn’t be on its own. Indeed, I did not think it could have been any of the Argentinian warships since they all appeared to have gone home. And yet…in the eastern side of the TEZ, I did not at all want to get within Exocet range of an Argentinian warship – and there had to be a five per cent chance that Anaya’s fleet could make a comeback.

  From across the room, my General Warfare Officer Captain Peter Woodhead said, ‘It’s that bloody fishing trawler again, sir. They just identified it. The Narwal, the same one we warned off ten days ago, the night before we arrived in the Zone.’

  My emotions said, ‘Damn it. The last thing I need is that little toad reporting our exact position, night and day, back to his bloody air force.’ But my logic, grinding smaller, was saying: ’Careful, Woodward. This is the same kind of situation as the Brazilian airliner. This boat is full of fishermen – civilians. Be sure of your ground before you blot them out. There’ll be hell to pay if they’re innocent.’ The fact was I was still not allowed to attack any fishing boat, Argentinian or not. My Rules of Engagement expressly forbade it. I was only empowered to hit warships. ‘The Harriers might be able to get her to stop with some 30mm cannon shots across her bows,’ I thought, ‘but there are only minutes before the Harriers must leave the Narwal for lack of fuel – then she is free to proceed and disappear again. There’s no way I can get anyone else there in time to look more closely, so she may get away to continue her business – whatever it may be. Where has she been these last few days? Why haven’t we tripped over her before this? What is she up to?’ My thoughts kept racing with the question, ‘Is this the same as the Brazilian airliner? Do I now face identical circumstances?’ I pulled back at that. After further thought I tried to buy myself some time, asking out loud, ‘Are we quite sure of her identity?’