It is quite hard to know what to do about men who are obviously suffering from stress. Of course the real cases, where a man is obviously not able to do his job, are easy: they must be sent home by whatever means available. But there are others for whom trauma is not sudden or obvious, men who do not betray the classically obvious symptom of just not absorbing any new information. These are men who just go on doing that for which their brain has been programmed and can, by self-protective means, hide for a very long time the real truth that, in any emergency, they will fail to react in a relevant or effective manner. This is not because they don’t want to, or are too lazy, but because their mind has just shut down at a certain point. I have often thought that at least a few medals for gallantry may have been won in this way – by men who were so banged out, they just kept on going, or firing, or defending a position, despite the obvious hopelessness of it, because their minds had nothing else to tell them. The transmission centre of their brains had simply jammed – just shut down because of mental trauma. I resolved to remain watchful and observant for such behaviour in myself, just as I was trying to remain watchful and observant towards the stress cases among the ships.
At our staff meeting, convened specifically to finalize our plans for the landings, everything seemed to be going more smoothly than I had anticipated. We all agreed that the amphibious objective area should be in weather-proof waters and that Carlos Bay was as good as we could hope to find unless the ‘enclave’ requirement re-surfaced. We agreed that the waiters – that is, the ships waiting to go in to Carlos – should remain to the east of the Battle Group which would stay roughly where it had been for the previous few weeks, well offshore, providing air cover on a long-term, reasonably assured basis. We believed that the Commodore Amphibious Warfare (COMAW) should proceed inshore with an escort including the two Type 22s Broadsword and Brilliant, the big county class guided-missile destroyer Antrim, the two Type 12 frigates Plymouth and Yarmouth, plus Argonaut, and the two Type 21s Antelope and Ardent. No one disputed that we should send the landing ships in and out, at night, as required, making the sea passage from Battle Group to Carlos Water as small convoys, in the comparative safety of darkness. We also considered that the priorities for the landing force were, beyond question, a secure beach head, the establishment of local defence against air attack (Rapier) to relieve pressure on the escorts, and a smooth build-up for the land-force advance towards Stanley. I had another important need: to get ourselves a small airstrip ashore as a forward base from which to operate Harriers – firstly, to ease the pressure on my carriers and secondly, for the same sort of reasons, in reverse, that I had needed the Argentinian aircraft on Pebble Island removed, permanently.
By 1700 the weather front was closing in on us fast, with the winds and sea building. The eight-man SAS team was ready to go for Pebble Island, but it was clearly going to be a difficult journey. The ‘Junglies’ took them in, flying over the pitch-black ocean, praying for starlight above the shore line, in order to utilize their passive night goggles. By the time they left they were flying in a forty-knot cross wind out of the north-west.
The sea below was pretty fierce, but the starlight was right, and in the small hours they landed the men and their boats in the hills behind the beach, and made it safely back. The SAS men planned to lie low for the remainder of the morning and prepare to make their crossing to Pebble Island the following night. By the time they had sorted themselves out, Glasgow and Brilliant were back on the gun line off Port Stanley, the dull thump of Glasgow’s shells being whipped away by the now gale-force wind.
It was a routine sort of night, allowing me plenty of rest – enough anyway for me to take the Royal Air Force to task the following morning. Plainly, I’d not had enough rest, you may say, to make my judgement reliable. I went to the Ops Room early and proceeded to draft a rude signal, indeed it set a new benchmark for rudeness, but fortuitously I cannot recall, nor do I have a record of, its exact wording. A failure to keep a perfect log of everything is perhaps as well. My basic annoyance with the Light Blue involved their expeditions down to the war zone in the big RAF Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft with its excellent Searchwater radar. The idea had always been that they would fly over the area at a suitable height and report anything they found to us. This they did with whole heart, tireless effort and great enthusiasm. The trouble was they kept getting it wrong, which may not matter too much in peacetime but can be disastrous in war, because we had to react…just in case they were correct. My ‘battle for information’ was made much more difficult if the information provided was positively misleading, as opposed to merely inadequate.
For instance, in mid-April they signalled that they had located a group of fishing vessels in the precise spot I knew the forward Brilliant group was sailing. They reported the ships as fishing vessels, I imagine, because they were fairly close together, milling about on different courses, going nowhere in particular. The trouble with this was that the RAF did not know they were fishing vessels by positive identification. It was only their best guess. But they hadn’t said it was only a guess. In this case, however, it hadn’t mattered much because I had better information than they; but it was hardly confidence inspiring.
So I had ignored that error, but they kept happening. Then more recently they had alerted us urgently to the Argentinian aircraft carrier which they pin-pointed for us, well out to sea. Fortunately, I knew perfectly well that it could not possibly have been the carrier, and in fact it turned out to be a large, harmless container ship, which can look very like a carrier to a Searchwater radar at times. ‘But that’s not my problem,’ I was saying to myself. ‘It’s theirs. All I am insisting on is that when I am given positive information like, “Argentinian carrier at a certain latitude and longitude,” that the information is guaranteed. Otherwise don’t give it to me. Or at least, if you insist, preface and conclude the signal with the words, “I am not altogether certain about this, but it could be…and this is based on the following limited evidence only.” And above all stop trying to interpret. Leave that to us. We are the unfortunates who have to cope with the detailed consequences. Thank goodness,’ I thought at the time, ‘the Args appear to be doing nothing aggressive at all at the moment.’
Having fired off my signal to Northwood, I waited for a response, which was not long in coming. Northwood hit the direct satellite line to Hermes and informed me coldly that I appeared to have upset the entire High Command of the Royal Air Force. My reply was impolite. I intimated that I did not give a **** how upset they were, they had better start concentrating on accurate factual reporting. I also ventured the opinion that their pettiness in being so upset was childlike in the extreme. I ended my retort with something like, ‘They would do a great deal better to listen carefully to what I say, and learn.’ Then I stumped along to my cabin and made an entry in my diary which it is as well to omit from this book. It was, I suppose, all part of the therapy, along with the original rude signal itself.
Meanwhile, out on the Sedgemoor gun line, off Port Stanley, patrolled Glasgow and Brilliant, now in broad daylight. This would have to be described as a very high-risk position, because the Argentinians could not just ignore the 42/22 combination situated in such plain view of their positions ashore. To help focus their attention, Glasgow’s gun continued to bombard them, using her Lynx helicopter as a further irritant while it clattered around marking the fall of shot. It’s worth mentioning here that an army Lieutenant Colonel had gone with Captain Hoddinott to help select targets and manage the bombardment. Various excitements ensued, not least when the Args opened fire on the Lynx. The pilot reported he was under heavy fire and was pulling back.
At this point, the colonel called down the line, in all seriousness: ‘Report the calibre of the shells! Report the calibre!’ It was, I imagine, about the last thing on the minds of the helicopter crew as they dodged away from the ground fire. And the Ops Room crew fell about laughing, as they will on such occasions. There was, of course, no
way the air crew could have reported the calibre of the shells – you don’t see them that clearly as they pass. Hence the hilarity. But the information was important: the next enemy shells might be from guns big enough to reach Glasgow.
This was only a brief moment’s levity. They all knew that Glasgow and Brilliant were involved in the test to see if the 42/22 combination would actually work. They were plainly vulnerable to attack; the question was, how vulnerable. I felt that the long-range Sea Dart system and the short-range Sea Wolf system made a pretty good package and I expected them to more than hold their own. But whatever the outcome, we still had to know before the landing force was sent in. We did not have to wait long to find out.
Shortly after lunch, Glasgow and Brilliant were just turning back out to sea when a British Harrier, returning unannounced from a bombing run on Port Stanley, suddenly pitched up on the surveillance radar, which pulled their minds back from bombardment and excited helicopters, to the air warfare problem, sharply. Everyone’s thoughts began to lock on to the drills for dealing with a very low-level bomb attack. The advice from the aviation experts was divided as to whether it was best to present your ship beam or end on to the approaching bombers – there were good arguments for either, until we started to observe that the Argentinian bombs were tending to bounce when they hit the water. That new fact, unnoticed by COMAW, changed the whole scene. It is, of course, a nearly overwhelming instinct to present your enemy with what you think of as the smallest possible target, like your bow or your stern, if there is time. But you have to remember that bombs from very low aircraft, doing four or five hundred knots, do not ‘fall’, they ‘come in’ on a very shallow angle, almost like a missile, and may even bounce on the water if incorrectly delivered and/or fused. The pilot finds it hard enough to line his aircraft up on an evasive ship target; his harder task is to judge the precise split second at which to release his bombs. If the ship target is end-on, he has at least eight times as long to judge it. The additional and critical new factor in favour of presenting the ship beam-on is the fighting chance that the bombs the Argentinians seemed to be using so far would bounce right over the top, perhaps even through a low part of the superstructure. But if you are end-on, it is most unlikely to bounce the full length and the full height of the ship.
Furthermore, if you stay beam on, all your defensive systems can be brought to bear – end on, about half of them are not working for you. And finally, if the ‘making-it-too-easy-for-line’ worriers were still unconvinced, going full astern in these gas-turbine driven escorts would change the crossing rate just as much as a major alteration of course, without being as obvious to the attacking pilot.
Paul Hoddinott and Nick Hawkyard knew the drills backwards, as did John Coward and his AWO, and now they were surprised to see their ‘enemy’ – the Harrier – correct its mistake and disappear away to the north-east without firing a shot or anything else. Relief again. But then Brilliant’s Ops Room spotted them…four incoming aircraft, Argentinian A4 Skyhawks they turned out to be, single-seater American-built five-hundred-knot low-altitude bombers, carrying either four five-hundred-pounders, or two thousand-pounders, neither option holding much appeal. Brilliant, riding shot-gun, informed Glasgow immediately. The trouble was his radar operators could not pull up the picture on either their 965 or their 992 screens. Hoddinott’s command computer remained blank.
Hawkyard spoke quickly to Brilliant, who transferred their picture, on the link, back to Glasgow, and now the AWO could see the four tiny paints hurtling towards them, still coming across the land, some eighteen miles away. Three minutes’ distance. Tension in the Ops Room is not yet being recorded on the Richter Scale, but that’s the next step.
The Air Picture Compiler calls the track number and Hawkyard knows there is no need to interrogate. These are hostile. ’Get ready!’ he snaps. ‘Missile Gun Director, take them with Sea Dart!’
Chief Petty Officer Jan Ames hits the buttons to get his 909 Fire Control Radar to search for the A4s as they approach the open sea, where the radar should work better.
Hawkyard again calls range and bearing. Chief Ames confirms, ‘Roger, gottit on the bearing. Tracking.’
Now Hawkyard and Ames are in a kind of trance, watching the radar, waiting for the indicator on the MGD’s tote screen to flash ‘VALID TARGET’. Seconds tick by.
‘Valid target – fifteen miles,’ says Chief Ames.
‘Take it!’ replies Hawkyard.
And the veteran MGD presses the buttons for a Sea Dart salvo, the agreed method of dealing with a close-packed attack of four aircraft, as this most certainly was.
Up on the foredeck the missiles come smoothly up out of the magazine, on to the launcher, which swings round to the firing bearing. But there is no ‘Launcher Ready’ indication. They didn’t know it but the little micro-switch on the launcher has become encrusted with salt and is malfunctioning, as a result of hours out there in a big sea with waves breaking over the bow. Hawkyard nonetheless thinks the missile will still launch. It is in place, but the computer does not recognize this fact. Chief Ames hits the buttons to over-ride the computer – nothing happens. So they hit the ‘Launch’ button.
‘Please work,’ mutters Hawkyard. ‘Please work.’
But it did not work. Instead the screen flashed the dreaded words, ‘Port beam malfunction.’
‘It was’, recalled Hawkyard later, ‘the biggest silence I had ever heard in my life.’
He orders Chief Ames to try the other launcher, but the computer has been told to fire a salvo, not a single missile, and it does not recognize the command.
‘JESUS CHRIST!’ shouts someone, as the captain, realizing it is now almost too late for Sea Dart anyway, orders the Mark 8 gun into action.
Over in Brilliant John Coward’s men have Sea Wolf locked on and tracking. The incoming aircraft are now under five miles away. Both ships are turned beam-on: Glasgow’s gunnery crew blazing away as best they can with their single Mark 8 gun; at 1644, Captain Coward’s AWO orders his missiles away. The first one blows the Argentinian lead bomber out of the sky. The second one blows the second Argentinian bomber out of the sky. The third incoming bomber tries to turn away, misjudges it and hits the sea at four hundred knots still heading towards Glasgow.
‘Christ, Chief!’ exclaims a certain Leading Seaman Duffy Chambers talking to Jan Ames from up on the Gun Direction Platform. ‘It’s like a ****ing war film up here!’
The fourth bomber gets through and, as he does so, Glasgow’s gun jams. The pilot releases his bombs and they appear to tumble through the sky. One of them goes into the water fifty yards short of Glasgow, but the other bounces off a big wave and shoots through the sky, passing in an arc about thirty feet above Glasgow’s upper deck, just missing the mast. It crashes into the water harmlessly on the far side of the beleaguered Type 42 destroyer.
Everyone breathes again, but within five minutes Brilliant detects a second wave of four more incoming bombers and alerts Glasgow, whose weapons engineers are working frantically to free up the Sea Dart system and unjam the gun. They fix the gun, but have no time to deal with Sea Dart. Then the entire command computer system crashes and Paul Hoddinott, calm and understated in the face of an Ops Room nightmare, orders the Mark 8 to open fire once more, as soon as the raiders are in range. Then he orders everyone who can fire a gun to the upper decks, to man the machine guns. Glasgow might go down, but her captain and his crew will ensure she goes down fighting.
Brilliant carries on tracking and requests Glasgow to shut down her Mark 8 because the shells are coming up with tracks on the radar. Now Glasgow is almost defenceless, save for her little army of machine gunners on the decks. ‘Never’, said Chief Ames later, ‘had I felt so utterly helpless.’ Seven miles out the Args pilots begin to weave and zig-zag to confuse the Sea Wolf system, and they are successful. Captain Coward’s men this time cannot ‘lock on’ with the short-range guided missile which served them so well in the opening raid. Now the Args are th
rough.
Brilliant fires at them with every gun she has, two bombs bounce off the water and sail over her decks, just missing the British frigate. Glasgow’s gunners, crouching on the upper decks, unleash a desperate volley of small-calibre fire, pumping bullets into the only A4 still coming at them. But they were too late. The bomb hits Glasgow amidships just three feet above the waterline on the starboard side. In the Ops Room they feel their ship shudder and hear the ‘WHOOMMFFF’ of the bomb as it crashes through the hull and travels clean out of the other side without exploding, causing much damage in the after auxiliary machinery room and the after engine room but, miraculously, injuring no one.
Captain Hoddinott hears someone shout, ‘What the bloody hell was that?’
Almost simultaneously his damage-control team is on the line from deep in the ship, reporting two gaping holes into which tons of freezing sea water are pouring. The gale outside has not abated and the ship, with both cruising turbines completely knocked out, is rolling heavily. Each time she heels to port the sea gushes into one hole and, as she rolls back, it gushes in the other. The damage-control parties are already standing waist deep into the extremely cold water stuffing mattresses into the holes, fixing heavy wooden beams, especially provided for this very emergency, into place, slamming them tight with sledgehammers.
Lighting is a problem: Glasgow already has one generator out, with another jury-rigged, and now she has another badly damaged. The fire-main has gone, as have the high-pressure air compressors. The diesel fuel supply system is damaged. By any standards, Glasgow’s life is hanging by a thread as the men struggle to rig pipes and hoses to suck out the water.
One Hundred Days Page 30