They were worried at home, and all of my conversations with Northwood reinforced this anxiety – not so much at the remaining few Exocets, but at the prospect that they might very shortly have more. While the French assurance that they would not supply additional missiles was a considerable comfort, we feared there were other less reliable sources about, not least Libya.
I am not sure who came up with the idea, but I imagine it originated at Headquarters, if only because political clearance would have been fundamental. However, over several long conversations with David Hallifax, it all gained momentum. There was no military choice other than to catch the Etendards at their home base of Rio Grande, on the island of Tierra del Fuego, and destroy them on the ground. I am sure the overnight success of our SAS raid on Pebble Island did much to encourage the powers-that-be of the feasibility of a second such operation. As a matter of fact I thought it sounded pretty good too.
We were very aware that a British attack on the Argentinian mainland might well have its detractors in the political arena. There are always people who cannot recognise the difference between a barren, treeless island like Tierra del Fuego, and the teeming Plaza de Mayo nearly 1500 miles north in the middle of the city of Buenos Aires. There was, of course, an enormous difference. The Rio Grande base of Argentina’s 2nd Naval Fighter and Attack Squadron was the home of the Etendards, the only type of aircraft which could fire Exocet at us. It was a purely military base. Everyone who worked there was engaged in some way in the single objective of defeating the British Task Force. The most junior aircraft mechanic was as much a part of this battle as I was, and we were clear enough that it was a proper and fair target for us. The Etendards could not claim ‘sanctuary’ in Rio Grande, any more than the Belgrano could, outside the TEZ.
Also we had no intention of wasting our time blowing up buildings, much less killing people, unless, of course, they got in the way. Our aim was very specific – to take out those Etendards, all of them, with the same efficiency we had demonstrated at Pebble Island.
Nevertheless, this operation was always going to be a political minefield. Prior covert reconnaissance was essential and okay. But the overt destruction of Etendards on the Argentinian mainland, coupled with subsequent possible embarrassment for Chile was quite a different matter. Whatever the political arguments, I was eventually asked to consider how we might get a reconnaissance team in, and make my recommendations to Northwood. As it happened, the planning took place over the next several days, but for clarity, I shall recount it as a single event. In reality it was rather more disjointed than that.
For all the reasons rehearsed before the raid on Pebble Island, the first assumption was, naturally enough, that this was another job for the SAS. But just to get such a team to the Battle Group, we would have to fly them all the way from the UK and then have them parachute into the ocean to be picked up by one of my destroyers or frigates. This was not a route I would have been crazy about myself, but the SAS treat it, more or less, on a par with ‘going to the office’.
It seemed to us that it called for a fairly small team. We would take them in, part of the way by ship – no closer to mainland Argentina than absolutely necessary – and then fly them on in a Sea King 4, landing a few miles up the coast from Rio Grande.
The recce team would go in, ascertain the lie of the land, and report back. Because the journey would have to be one-way (not enough fuel for the helicopter to get back to the launching ship – not enough time for the launching ship to get back to the Battle Group before dawn), they would have to burn or ditch the chopper, or even give it to the Chileans. Burning it seemed less politically awkward, if militarily wasteful. Then the three man aircrew would have to give themselves up to the Chileans.
The recce team had a different problem. Whether or not their surveillance report was favourable, and we subsequently obtained political permission for direct action, they might face a one-hundred-mile walk to the comparative safety, we hoped, of Chile – possibly with some very angry Argentinians in hot pursuit. Alternatively they might be taken off by submarine from a point along the coast. Either way, it was not a comfortable prospect.
That was more or less my Plan A, and, of several fairly desperate possibilities, I reckoned it was easily the best. Or perhaps I should say it was easily the least bad. It did seem to offer the maximum eventual gain (the Etendard force) for the minimum risk (the SAS team, three aircrew and one Sea King).
However, my views were not received with instant acclaim. For a start the Royal Marines took a remarkably poor view of the entire thing, on the basis that they laid claim of ownership to the Sea King 4’s, along with their special lighting and equipment geared for this kind of operation. The Marines are of course apt to forget that they are actually a part of the Royal Navy and that we provide them with their aircraft. They are also apt to forget the old aphorism that: ‘He that giveth, may also taketh away.’
I am told, although I confess it to be only hearsay, that a ‘very senior Marine’, on hearing of my plan, expostulated: ‘Has Woodward finally gone out of his mind? Our lovely brand new helicopters cost over £8,000,000 each, and he wants to send one on a one-way ride to Chile and set it on fire? Well, tell him that if he really wants to burn a helicopter, he can burn one of his own b*****ds!’
I was quite surprised to be told from Northwood, by Admiral Hallifax himself, that Plan A was a non-starter. ‘Let’s have your second option, Sandy’, he said. So, with all the frustrations of the twenty-four-hour time loop it took to get a decision through Head Office, I settled down to refine the infinitely inferior Plan B.
For this option I proposed to send the 22,000-ton fleet replenishment ship Fort Austin, under the command of Commodore Sam Dunlop, in company with two frigates, south, and then west along the Antarctic Circle, to creep into Chilean waters on the Pacific side of Tierra del Fuego.
From here they could slide through into the wide channel at the end of the Magellan Straits, and a helicopter could ferry the SAS swiftly to the Rio Grande area, drop them, and then return to pick them up, much as we had done at Pebble Island.
What was the balance of advantage? We posed the same threat to the Etendards at Rio Grande, but we increased our ’forces at substantial risk’ factor by two frigates and a large replenishment ship. Also it would require a very ‘blind eye’ on the part of the Chileans. The prospect of British military operations on this sort of scale (or indeed any sort of scale), from inside Chilean waters, was probably another political non-starter. Also, Fort Austin was an extremely valuable ship, which as well as being crammed with food, ammunition and mechanical spares, carried nearly all our stock of replacement Sea Dart missiles. Whichever way we played this one, she was going to have go out and come back in daylight. If she was caught anywhere near the Argentinian air bases, her loss would become all too likely. I still very much preferred Plan A.
Despite this, I spoke to Northwood and laid out Plan B. Several hours went by, and back came David Hallifax’s reply: ‘Sorry. Don’t like it.’ Not surprisingly, I thought, but if you don’t like stealth and burning helicopters, and neither do you want to risk Fort Austin, which is the only kind of ship, apart from the Carriers, from which you can operate a Sea King 4, well, I suppose you are going to have to go for a full-scale battle. So I suggested they may prefer to send in Hermes, with two Type 42s and two Type 22s in company, and try a strike using as many Harriers as we’d got, hoping to hit the Etendards before the Args sank one, some, or all of us.
Northwood did not think much of that either. And so, in some exasperation, I suggested an even bigger sally, for which we would take the entire Battle Group and try to flatten the place. I had gone from quiet, proven SAS economy of effort to mindless desperation on the grandest possible scale – albeit still not all that grand. And of course, they did not think much of that either.
So I got on the line to Northwood once more and told them as politely as I could that I was unsurprised they did not like Plans B, C and D. N
either did I, much; they were after all my second, third and fourth choices. Plan A remained my preference out of a collection of not very cheerful possibilities. I was pretty sure it also had to be theirs, so what was the problem?
‘The Ministry keeps on turning us down,’ said David. ‘I’ll do some checking to see what’s going on up there.’
Twenty-four hours later, Plan A was approved, now some four days after it was originally put forward. I asked David how on earth this could have come about. He told me – at length. In essence, it turned out that my first signal had been misread, and/or badly drafted at my end. A sentence within it which said that the SAS team would be dropped several miles from Rio Grande had been taken by the Director SAS (then Brigadier, later General Sir Peter de la Billiere – our Commander in the Gulf Operation against Iraq in 1991), to mean that they would be dropped in the water several miles off shore and invited to swim in! He had, understandably not approved the plan therefore.
Inwardly I groaned the groan of the deeply misunderstood. Maybe my signal had been unclear and understandable probably only to myself? Even if this were so, what I found slightly irritating was that the SAS were somehow able to remain outside the full military chain of command, allowing a relatively simple misunderstanding to go unquestioned for four whole days. But their Director, who had the ear of certain people in high political places, was able to murmur his disapproval very quietly, and very privately, without having to face the full searching questioning that befalls the rest of us wartime commanders. I resolved that sometime, some day, I would put a stop to that. And did, but not until 1986.
The revelation that I was not planning to unload the SAS men into the freezing South Atlantic and then make them swim for it, solved our impasse. ‘Plan A accepted’, I was told. And so, after four long days of time-wasting, I was told to proceed.
At the end of 15 May I filled in my diary for both of the two preceding days – and since the lines form a kind of bridge from one SAS raid to the next, I shall reproduce them here:
May 14th: Then it started, a gale from the west…spent evening speeding into the teeth of it for a Direct Action job on what looks like a very ripe plum – 11 aircraft plus all the stores for a major ‘Nasty’ against us on D-Day. And most of the spare time organizing a ’blind-eye’ operation on the mainland. It will probably come to nothing, but, if it goes wrong, will have me court-martialled: if it goes right, no one is going to know.
Very quiet in filthy weather until Pebble Island raid late pm [in fact early am 15th]. Absolute cliff-hanger. And delays, due to Force Nine gale and minor incompetence, lost us 55 minutes in a tight programme. We were within five minutes of cancelling the whole thing. Eleven Arg aircraft destroyed on ground, no casualties, back out of main Arg air threat by midday (15th).
Continuing saga over Rio Grande looking a bit more settled now. I can do as I please!
May 15th: Fairly busy air day for us. Args not in evidence at all. It is weekend of course, and they’re either saving up for the ‘Big Push’ or just wrapping their hand in. Rio Grande saga re-opened with further illogical/incompletely-thought-out plan from Northwood. Not doing so well, and making it very difficult to do what is actually needed. If only they would just leave it alone. By very late, it began to transpire that the Brigadier of SAS had interpreted ‘Ditching SK4’ [as in getting rid of it] as dropping the whole lot into the water, off the target, and expecting everyone to swim ashore. What an utter twit the man must be!
I hope it’s sorted out now, anyway. Still getting half-assed suggestions from people at home – more now, what with this SAS bit, Flag Officer Submarines inventing new capabilities but refusing to change his stereotyped operating patterns – and even C-in-C starting to make suggestions as to how to do my business – none of which we hadn’t already considered and discarded.
I was getting more than a bit ratty, as you can tell. Of course the Director, SAS, wasn’t a ‘twit’ – we should have spoken directly to each other four days ago, but he was not in the chain of command.
I pressed on with the myriad of tasks which kept the Battle Group buzzing away like a big mobile city out here in the Atlantic, our main propulsion turbines running twenty-four hours a day, the generators driving without rest to give us light and heat and hot food, and the incessant twinkling dials and screens of the Ops Rooms doing their best to tell us what was going on around us.
The morning of 15 May dawned brighter, with the wind now much decreased and the sea blue and calm under sunny skies. We had two arrivals scheduled for today – that of my old nuclear-powered submarine, the 3,500-ton HMS Valiant, which was of course largely indifferent to the weather, and the SAS teams for Rio Grande, who were due to parachute into the ocean beside us during the late afternoon, and whose entire mission depended on reasonably calm sea for their splashdown.
I was thus in the Ops Room very early to check the forecast and did not especially like what I was told. There was a big front heading right towards us, slowly, but nonetheless likely to be over the island of Tierra del Fuego within thirty-six hours, doubtless covering it with a thick damp blanket of fog and rain and low cloud.
I quietly allowed myself an expletive and then tried to find a way around the tiresome fact that I was going to have to fish the SAS out of the sea, dry them off, feed them and fire them straight on in to the mainland that night. That would be, I surmised, a request not absolutely guaranteed to enhance any popularity I might still enjoy with either the men or their commanders. But I was just as sure that Hermes should start moving towards the mainland immediately they arrived on board, because the approaching bad weather would otherwise abort the mission. It’s bad enough flying over a dark, unknown, and hostile coastline in clear conditions, but to attempt to do so through thick fog, cloud, strong winds and without radar would practically assure the pilots of getting thoroughly lost, while running out of fuel by the minute. I muttered ‘Oh dear!’ – or words to that effect – to myself once more, not looking forward one bit to the inevitable forthcoming argument with the SAS Commander.
Meanwhile I ordered Fort Austin to detach from the Group to rendezvous with the RAF Hercules which was due very soon, and to organise the recovery of the airdrop of SAS men, and their equipment, from the ocean.
While this was happening we sent Brilliant and Alacrity back into Falkland Sound to sweep the area once more for mines and/or Argentinian ships. And just to keep the Args’ minds focussed throughout the night, we sent Glamorgan back into her old familiar position in the gun-line off Port Stanley to launch yet another long bombardment of the area around the airstrip. We also sent up Harriers to photo-recce the areas of Darwin, Camilla Creek, Moody Brook and, once more, the Stanley airfield. Throughout all of this I was conducting some kind of a running debate with the SAS management as to whether the Rio Grande operation was on or not.
Basically these well-armed chaps were going to land on a deserted shore from an expensive helicopter, and then make their way across virtually empty countryside for a couple of days and then, if militarily viable and politically acceptable, quietly set about estimating the feasibility of blowing up a few aircraft with state-of-the-art British military equipment. We all thought the job could be done. We were not agreed as to when to set off.
The Royal Marines continued their custodial concern over the Sea King 4’s, causing my temper to shorten further. Echoing his general, one colonel RM again suggested using ‘A naval SK5 rather than one of our valuable SK4’s for the job’, and tried such comments as ‘Have you considered working from a landing site in West Falkland’, as if we hadn’t been thinking this operation through, over and over again for the best part of a week.
I reminded him, reasonably politely, that we had no landing site anywhere on the Falklands yet, and that Sea King 5’s cost a good deal more than Sea King 4’s, quite apart from being markedly less well suited for the task. My diary simply said in reference to our discussion – ‘I could have strangled him!’
Finally
, reason prevailed and the SAS management accepted, with much reluctance, that the original plan – adapted incidentally from an idea of several days ago from Lin Middleton, Captain of HMS Hermes – should now proceed.
Late that afternoon the RAF Hercules made contact with Fort Austin which guided it down into the area we had selected for the airdrop – about a hundred yards off her port beam – and the SAS men, zipped into their survival suits, parachuted into the freezing Atlantic and were picked up very quickly by the Navy helicopters. We were getting rather good at this type of thing, and we were blessed with a perfect day for it – blue skies, westerly zephyrs and no swell, which was a good augury for a difficult task.
In my opinion it also accentuated the need to go now, while the weather held, rather than wait for it to deteriorate into the kind of clag which can shut down modern airports like Heathrow, London, or JFK, New York, never mind some blasted rock on Tierra del Fuego.
The SAS team, led by a major, finally assembled on board Fort Austin, and she turned south-west to join us. This new team of ‘Talking Trees’ would have been better described as a smallish, cold, wet forest. Their equipment was also soaked; they were very tired after a twenty-eight-hour flight from England, and they had had little sleep.
When they arrived in Hermes it was already dark, and I told the major I wanted them to get dry, get rested, get a sandwich, get briefed, get ready and then get going. I told them that Hermes was already running in towards the mainland and that I intended to launch the night-flying specialist SK4 at 0300 the following morning. ‘It won’t be easy but we should be able to put them down in the right place,’ I said. ‘They can then rest, before they walk in to begin their detailed observations and assess the feasibility of taking out the Etendards.’ The major told me he understood, but that they were not quite ready to go yet. They were all still much too travel-weary. I pointed out that they still had five or six hours to get into a hot shower, and after eating and briefing, still grab three hours of sleep, adding: ‘As far as I can see, it’s now or never.’
One Hundred Days Page 32