One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  Back in the computer room and up on the missile launcher the weapons engineers work under quite extraordinary pressure to re-arm their stricken warship. Inside thirty minutes they have the gun freed, the Sea Dart working and the computer system back on line. We offer to increase the combat air patrol above them in order to get them back safely, but Captain Coward declined, saying he is now confident his Sea Wolf system will do the job.

  Fifteen minutes after this, the Argentinians come in for their third attack. Brilliant locates four aircraft circling out to the west but, hearing perhaps what has happened to the first four, they seem to think better of it and withdraw. They may also have observed another sight to make them think twice: the pilot who had pressed home his attack on Glasgow, and been hit by the machine gunners on the deck, had been shot down and killed by his own men as he limped in over Goose Green.

  And so Captain Paul Hoddinott and his men narrowly cheated disaster on that rough and windy afternoon. I was absolutely delighted of course to learn in the early part of that evening that they had all survived. Their only casualty was in fact one man who went into shock, a reaction for which he could scarcely be blamed. I spoke in some detail to both captains, not only about the damage, but about re-programming the systems to cope with this kind of air attack. The problem with the gun was also trying, but I was used to the fact that the Mark 8 4.5-inch gun had a tendency to shake itself to bits, until it jammed. It had happened all too often when I had been captain of Sheffield five years before.

  Meanwhile Glasgow, in company with Brilliant, limped back slowly towards to the Task Force – battered and leaking – and I ordered her to remain sixty miles inshore of us, out of the worst of the big seas, while she effected her repairs. Her fighting spirit was perhaps best illustrated by the words of her captain. ‘Don’t worry, sir,’ said Paul Hoddinott. ‘We’ll be patched up in a couple of days, and back out there.’ He was too.

  The verdict on the 42/22 defensive combination? Well, you would have to say that if Sea Dart had not failed, it was likely that Glasgow would have splashed at least one, possibly two, of the Argentinian attack aircraft. I am assuming they would have launched two salvos in the short time available. That would have meant, I suppose, that none of the A4s would have made it through to drop their bombs. If they had repeated the process in dealing with the next four, I imagine the third group would have lost their nerve even quicker than they did with just three of their colleagues dead. Thus in principle the 42/22 combo would have to be given the green light, as would the advice to remain beam on. Although the implications of the fact that the one bomb that actually hit Glasgow hadn’t gone off were not conclusive – it began to look as if their bomb fusing might be seriously wrong. The problem remained Sea Dart and its reliability, and the hiccup on Sea Wolf’s homing system. We immediately got talking to the manufacturers’ representatives on board Brilliant to try to iron out both faults. But I still fear there is a Sod’s Law involved here: today it was a salt-encrusted switch; tomorrow it will be something else; and the day afterwards something else again.

  I wrote in my diary that night a rather cold assessment of the day’s activities.

  Weather finally cleared so started high bombing Port Stanley airfield. Probably very inaccurate. By late pm the Args (midday their time) had obviously decided to ‘do’ Brilliant and Glasgow with three lots of A4s. First lot, two taken by Sea Wolf, one spun in, one escaped. Second lot, Sea Wolf went to reset just before moment to open fire and so all four came through unharmed, and one bomb went right through Glasgow’s after engine room. Third lot were probably deterred by high CAP up-threat by then (previous policy had been to hold them back) or, possibly, by news of the mauling the first four got.

  2100. Glasgow has got it under control, but I expect she’ll have to go home. Fleet Trial [the 42/22 combination] has made progress, but still needs its final test. Meanwhile Sea Dart, as an anti-low-level system, is looking to be fairly useless, because it does not always fly.

  Aside from the fact that we also lost a Sea King that day – it ditched in the sea, but the crew were all rescued – it had been a rather bleak few hours really. At this moment I was down to only one immediately available Type 42, Coventry, which meant I would be obliged to cut out all daylight bombardment of the Arg positions on the islands.

  It may be surprising that I have written all this about Glasgow, but I want you to follow the life of the Type 42 destroyers, the pickets, with whom we started this story. And I want to show you, once more, the enormous difference between what the commander has to think about and what the unfortunate in the front line must actually cope with. And now I would have to abandon my 42/22 ‘Trials’ and my air blockade of the Port Stanley strip since I dared not risk losing my only remaining forward long-range radar and long-range anti-aircraft missile ship. Two other Type 42s were on their way to join us, but HMS Exeter, under the command of Captain Hugh Balfour, having cleared the port of Belize in the far west of the Caribbean, was still two days north-west of Ascension, while Cardiff, commanded by Captain Mike Harris, had cleared Gibraltar only hours previously.

  News over on the coast facing Pebble Island was not so good either – the terrible weather and sea conditions meant that the SAS could not make the crossing and had elected to stay hidden for another day on the mainland, in the hope that the weather would improve sufficiently tomorrow to let them get in for the recce.

  In fact the only positive thing that happened all day was that we did receive the alteration in our General Directive regarding the basic objective of the Task Force. The dangerously vague words ‘with a view to repossessing’ were struck out. ‘Enclave’ had finally dropped off of the political ‘worry’ list and off my ‘worst case’ list too, thankfully. West Falkland and Lafonia dropped out with it. The new wording instructed us simply to land and repossess the islands. Only now, on the 12 May, with the northern entrance to the Falkland Sound cleared for mines by Alacrity as best she could, and the overall directive itself changed, did Carlos Bay become the definite and commonly-agreed objective for the beach head. No further discussion was required unless new evidence came to light. I found out much later that COMAW had been greatly exercised by my persistent ‘going-on’ about the advantages of Low Bay as a landing area, but then he hadn’t been briefed from home to consider any of the politically-driven, and militarily highly undesirable suggestions short of ‘landing to repossess’. Our CTF probably thought COMAW didn’t need to be worried by such matters, though it naturally didn’t help COMAW to understand my concerns and, in the particular case of ‘enclave’ much angst could have been avoided between us.

  Anyway, I retired for the night and while I slept the gale died away to be replaced by fog, which was excellent for the SAS and for Glasgow’s repair crews, a day off for the Harrier pilots, and a bit dull for the rest of us. Glasgow spent much of the day racing round in tight circles, literally, trying to keep one side up out of the water while the welders went to work patching the plates. But at the end of all this she was still not fully watertight. She was going to be a dockyard job.

  I spent a few minutes writing in my diary in the early afternoon:

  Glasgow seems to have it under control, but the thread has to be thin. Bloody lucky the bomb didn’t go off or we’d be another 42 down. The essential question is whether to keep her here or send her home. Sent for Salvageman [tug] anyway. Meanwhile thick fog again brings the entire war (I hope) to a standstill.

  Final analysis of the second raid: really we were both very unlucky and very lucky. Glasgow’s Sea Dart went defective right from the start, and her gun jammed on the sixth round; Brilliant’s Sea Wolf switched off completely. So defensive fire was two 20mm and two 40mm only.

  To have received just one non-exploding bomb out of some eight or twelve is just bloody lucky…but this is now just the weather we want for the landing.

  So far we had received no recce reports from Pebble Island and were not altogether sure whether the SAS had even
reached the airstrip. Thus we had something of a timing problem: if we just waited there for them to contact us by radio with the information we would be too late to go.

  I pondered the situation, working as ever from one of my personal little bar-charts much as we had needed back at Ascension when we were trying to fix the landing date. For this evening’s expedition I again had to work back from the finish line. Hermes, the deck from which the SAS Direct Action (DA) force will leave, must be well off shore by dawn, if we are to avoid unacceptably increased risk of attack from the air. That means we ought to be on our way ‘home’ by 0600. The operation of wrecking the Argentinian aircraft should take five hours, in addition we should allow a couple of hours’ general foul-up time, like helicopters not starting or having to sink an Arg patrol boat. We should therefore be in position off the coast of Pebble Island by 2300. So we must start by 1800 since it is a five-hour journey. Thus, if we stay out here waiting around for the radio report from the SAS recce crew, we will be starting too late. Therefore we leave on time and keep pushing forward, hoping to hear from the advance party during the journey.

  At 1755 Hermes, Broadsword and Glamorgan detached from the main Task Force, at a speed of twenty knots, to insert our DA team into Pebble Island off the north-east coast of West Falkland, with the objective of destroying a significant part of Argentina’s local air force on the ground. Broadly our tasks were as follows: the four Sea Kings with the SAS men were in Hermes and we would take them in as close as was sensible, about seventy-five miles from the landing zone. Broadsword would be Hermes’s ‘goalkeeper’ with her Sea Wolf in case we came under air attack. Glamorgan would move inshore and open up a diversionary 4.5-inch gun and Sea Slug missile bombardment to take the Args’ eye off the ball while the DA teams went in and did their business.

  We headed in for two and a half hours, but we still heard nothing from the recce party and shortly thereafter the SAS commanders called the mission off for the night on the basis of insufficient information. I ordered the ships to come about and return ‘home’, rather grimly mentioning to anyone prepared to listen that this mission must be carried out tomorrow night, no matter what.

  We had a brief meeting that night on the way back and retired to bed, beneath the safety blanket of fog, to await, during the night, the recce report. By the following morning we had it. I sent two Harriers in to bomb Port Stanley and the rest of the afternoon was spent in preparation for the Pebble Island raid.

  At 1800 sharp we set off. There were four Sea King 4s on board, to land forty-five men of D Squadron SAS, plus a naval gunfire support team (spotters), on Pebble Island. I delegated Invincible to assume command of the remainder of the Task Force in my absence. The weather by now was filthy, the fog having been replaced during the late afternoon by a southerly gale. Big frigate though she is, Broadsword had to give up the struggle to stay with Hermes, and dropped back to a more reasonable pace. Glamorgan and Hermes were able to push on though. Two hours into the journey I ordered Glamorgan to detach and make for Pebble Island on her own: ‘Proceed in accordance with previous orders’ is the stock phrase.

  So now we had Broadsword making only twelve knots some fifteen miles behind Hermes; Hermes, Britain’s main airfield in all of the South Atlantic, entirely unescorted, with no air defence to speak of; and Glamorgan somewhere up ahead. This was something less than tight control, mutual support and concentration of force – three of the basic rules of warfare. We ended up bringing Hermes within forty miles of Pebble Island, since we needed to find a way to reduce the fuel requirements of the Sea Kings on this nearly one-hundred-mile round trip in really awful weather.

  This was not our only problem. As we slowed down to launch the helicopters, it rapidly became apparent that there was going to be difficulty getting them away. We had one helicopter on deck, but the wind was so strong they were unable to ‘spread’ its rotor blades. This is a very critical decision because if you do spread them in too high a wind, and a gust gets underneath them, it will whip the blade up and rip it straight out of its mountings. Finally after half an hour there seemed to be some kind of lull. They moved swiftly, spread the blades and got them safely rotating. The familiar roar of the Sea King 4 could now be heard above the gale and the crews dived for the second chopper. This one could not be spread – the lull had passed. So it was decided to get the remaining three back below into the hangar, put them one by one on the elevator, spread their rotors, get them rotating and only then take them up to flight deck level for launch. This is not a recommended process but seemed to be the only way of doing the job.

  The elevator transported them down and the crews pushed them all back, started one, then another. But it all took time and by now the first one they had started did not have enough fuel to complete the mission. So that had to be refuelled. I can easily still remember standing on Hermes’s bridge that night, wondering if they’d ever be ready. Finally, however, it worked and off they went, much later than I had hoped, but still just inside the two hour ‘imbuggerance’ factor.

  The forty-five men were landed on the gale-swept north coast of Pebble Island, a little over three miles from the Argentinian airstrip, and silently they picked their meticulous path across the dark, deserted island and placed their explosives on the eleven assorted aircraft they found there. Several weeks later, when I finally landed personally on the Falkland Islands, I went up to Pebble in a helicopter to take a look for myself at the remnants of the operation. It really was rather spooky, like a surreal landscape. All of the eleven aircraft were still there; at first glance, unharmed, ready for take-off. Then I became aware of a strange noise, an almost ghostly rattling in the wind, and I noticed that close to the cockpit of each aircraft there were just a very few broken bits dangling from electrical wires, which occasionally swung in desultory submission against the fuselage. It was the only sign that these aircraft would never fly again. It was also the only sign that the British SAS can, when the need arises, move very fast indeed.

  12

  Talking Trees and Etendards

  The gale never abated all the way back from Pebble Island. It varied in strength from Force Five to Force Nine, but fortunately it shifted direction, veering south-west from our starboard quarter, enabling us to make very good time out of the danger zone, now, of course, in broad daylight. Slightly to my surprise, the Args made no attempt to counter-attack us as we cleared the northern waters off East Falkland. We decided, anyway, to send in a Harrier group to bomb the Port Stanley airstrip and to take advantage of the broken cloud to acquire some new recce photographs of Fox Bay, Goose Green and Pebble.

  Upon our return to the main Battle Group we heard that, amazingly, the stricken Glasgow was back in business, patched up with full power on two turbines, all weapons working and computers back in good shape, with only marginal manoeuvring restrictions at low speed. That was rather a weight off my mind because it restored some of our long-range radar capabilities around the Battle Group and brought (hopefully) another Sea Dart system back into our defensive network. We all knew Argentina’s Navy Day was on 17 May – forty-eight hours hence – and our general belief was that they would strike against us from the air on that day, if not sooner. I was now just beginning to believe their ships really had gone home for good.

  I retired to my cabin for a while that afternoon, having been up most of the night, and tried to sleep. But I ended up instead wrestling with the guided missile problem, the now dreaded Exocet. The air-to-surface Exocet, that is, the one they fire from the French Etendards, the one that finished Sheffield. I endeavoured, as I always do, to deal with inescapable facts and with regard to this particular missile, I had only very limited information:

  a) the Args had fired two of them at us;

  b) one of them had missed us completely;

  c) despite all of our defensive systems, one had got through and demolished one of my three Type 42 destroyers without even exploding;

  d) the Exocet’s remaining fuel had ignited t
he most terrible fire, with burning electrical cables causing dense smoke as it spread through the ship, slowly turning a very bad situation into a fatal one, in which twenty men died;

  e) the Ops Room crew of the departed Sheffield had been unable to do anything about it, not even fire their chaff.

  Those were the facts. Which meant that Exocet was achieving a fifty per cent success rate. I understood that Exocet might not do as well next time, and that we might do better, but I was not there to act as a bookmaker, watching the odds and awaiting the outcome. I was there to do something about it.

  Now, our intelligence said that the Args had started this war with about five of these particular missiles, which meant that, if they fired the other three, on form to date I would lose one, perhaps two more ships. What would prove much worse was the possibility that they might manage to find another supply of missiles – indeed there were rumours abroad in London that they were negotiating for as many as forty more. With an arsenal such as that, even if their success rate dropped by a half, it could rapidly prove fatal to this entire operation. The fact was, we had to stop them. The question was, how?

  Well, there are only a few ways to tackle such a problem (in the absence of an inexhaustible supply of utterly foolproof chaff). The best course of action is, naturally, to catch and kill the incoming Etendards which carry the missile. For this we really only had Sea Dart, which had not yet proved itself to be even reliable, far less infallible. What’s more, the way the Argentinians seemed to fly their Etendards, Sea Dart was not all that likely to catch them even when it was working well. There just wasn’t the necessary warning – only AEW aircraft could give that and we had none.

  In sum, you will agree, we faced a considerable challenge, since we plainly could not just sit there, waiting for them to attack, hoping for their known strike rate to decrease, praying that our (as yet) unproven chaff procedures work, and trusting that Sea Dart would suddenly become reliable for no obvious reason. Generally speaking, those are fairly sound ways of getting a lot more ships sunk and people killed. But there really did not seem to be much choice.