One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  I explained that the pressures to go were very great. This recce was absolutely critical, what with the landing likely in a few days time and the prospect that the weather front coming in from the west would be right over their target area by late tomorrow afternoon. I told him that in my opinion it would be damned nearly impossible to get the helicopter down at all, never mind with any geographical accuracy, in the kind of weather the forecasters were giving for the Rio Grande coastal area tomorrow night.

  The major replied that as far as he and his men were concerned we could forget about the meteorologists. ‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘that we must delay for twenty-four hours while the men recover from their journey.’ I had no alternative but to agree, I hope with adequate good grace. I ordered Hermes to be brought about and to return to the main group. As the carrier made her turn, I felt somehow the success of the project was making an about turn with us. Unfortunately, I was correct.

  I told them they would have to go in the following night from Invincible as both I and Hermes would be otherwise engaged. And this in fact was what they did. However the bad weather came in and they had to ditch the helicopter, eventually landing on a sand spit ten miles to the east of Punta Arenas, some fifty miles from the selected landing site. For all I know, they had got hopelessly lost in the fog and were lucky not to have been drowned.

  They presumably then set fire to their Sea King, because it was found on 20 May by the Chileans, burned out and mysteriously abandoned. The aircrew walked out and found their way to the local authorities, who interrogated them and permitted the press to interview them.

  The two pilots said, for all I know perfectly truthfully, that they had got lost while conducting a recce up the coast and had put down through lack of fuel. But since then there has been a great deal of speculation as to what they might have been doing, clattering around in the dead of night in Chilean airspace.

  The three aircrew were deported from Chile to the UK, where they had a few days off before re-joining their squadron in the South Atlantic.

  My diary’s last mention of the whole event was: ‘Hermes set off for the launch area. But the operation was cancelled – the Trees are wilting after their journey and all their kit got soaked in the water. So we turned back. Invincible will have to try tomorrow…’

  I did receive a letter from the Argentinian CO of Rio Grande in 1994 to say that they were ready at all times for an attack by us – but even that doesn’t tell me anything much about how successful an SAS raid might actually have been, nor whether it would ever have received political approval.

  As for the SAS team, I know absolutely nothing whatsoever. But that’s the way they work. We never got so much as a short report. And in 2002 the Ministry of Defence wished me to add that nothing here written represents their own views – they quite properly and sensibly maintain a policy of ‘Neither Confirm nor Deny’ on such matters.

  The following day, 17 May, was, as I mentioned, Argentina Navy Day and the weather suited Etendard operations. The Argentinians did try but failed to find the Battle Group – understandably enough since we had taken a variety of measures to suggest that we were somewhere other than where we actually were. We did get a sniff of them, but it was only a sniff and our best efforts to catch them with the CAP came to nothing. Glamorgan arrived home right after breakfast having done her deceptive bit along Choiseul Sound to the south-east of Port Stanley and we sent out a stream of Harriers to take recce photographs of key locations all over the islands. The landings (D-Day) were now just four days away and I was attempting to eliminate all surprises.

  During the course of the day my involvement with the planning for the landing and the days that immediately followed it just about ceased. The plans were as near complete as they could be and, though they had to be reasonably flexible, we now had a simple lay-out. Firstly, a long supply line, which did not appear to be under great threat. We planned to minimize the air threat by only transiting in and out at night; to minimize the danger of submarine attack by steering well clear of the Port Stanley area and its environs; and to minimize the risk of attack by surface ships by judicious placement of the SSNs. Secondly, an easterly offshore assembly and operations area, from which we could mount missions for combat air patrol and close air support for ground forces, and from which we could despatch convoys and troops and supplies inshore. This area must of course be well outside the range of unrefuelled Mirage, Skyhawk and Etendard attack and east of the Battle Group, which would hopefully double the Argentinians’ problems. And thirdly, the amphibious operating area (AOA), where the land battle would start from. In the very early stages this would lack good air defence and might cost us ships until the Rapier umbrella became effective.

  I did believe that we could win this battle, but I also knew there were no guarantees, because so much can turn on chance, luck and the fortunes of war – as the Brilliant/Glasgow action had so starkly revealed just a few days ago. We had so little in reserve.

  That evening I wrote home to Char. It was quite a long letter, so I have had to edit it a bit:

  The Sheffield survivors have, I am afraid, set off for home without this. But Sam Salt has promised to give you a ring when he gets back, so you’ll hear from him before me.

  A copy of the Daily Mail, with pictures of you in it, fell out of the sky yesterday – I notice they caught you in your West End best beside the dustbins outside the garage, clearly about to nip round to the corporation rubbish dump! Seems a long way off from here.

  We have just had our first beautiful Indian summer day since arriving (and it was a Sunday, so the Args didn’t come out). I could actually see one of our Harriers at thirty-five miles through the binoculars – that’s the sort of visibility you get in these latitudes, clear as crystal and no warmer.

  We had a busy night doing the Pebble Island operation, which I was rather pleased with – removed about a fifth of their army air force at a go, which can’t be bad.

  But time will tell. I worry that the landing will go terribly wrong, but then I comfort myself that I worry that everything will go wrong. That, actually, is my job – to arrange things, carry them through and take the consequences. Hence, the more I worry, the better chance there is that we will have thought of everything. But, of course, you can’t do much about luck, and there is a good deal more luck in this business than I care to think about.

  As for the dangers, I think most of us have had to face up to a rather different set of values, with a lot of previously important things now seeming fairly trivial. For those who are looking particularly worried I say: it’s all a matter of percentages really. You have about as much chance of snuffing it out here as you have of dying of lung cancer if you are a smoker. The only difference is that out here it will be quicker and less painful. So count your blessings!

  For those of us who have already given up smoking for fear of lung cancer, it can all begin to seem a bit much! But I haven’t restarted anyway – and feel no need to.

  Meanwhile, and this is why I am writing, most plans for the landing are made and, barring accidents, there’s little left for me to do except aft the sheets and pick up speed for the starting line – hoping to catch the opposition on a port tack.

  This analogy is not that good when you realize that the last thirty seconds before the start gun in a yacht race takes two days out here. And I have to judge the weather two days ahead…and we have to rely on South American weather reports…Well, fingers crossed and all the other platitudes…

  I finished my letter, sealed it and went back to the Ops Room. At 2340Z Captain Middleton turned Hermes on to an east-north-east course and, in company with Fort Austin and the 23,000-ton Royal Naval stores ship Resource, we set off into the night, leaving Captain Mike Barrow in Glamorgan in charge.

  As we moved away from the TEZ there was, steaming towards us from out of the dark north-east, the British Amphibious Group of twenty-one ships. It was headed by the two 12,000-tonners Fearless and Intrepid, the vital har
d-core of the group carrying the Brigade Headquarters. They would lead the rest in, packed with about six hundred and fifty Royal Marines each, ready to go ashore in their eight landing craft – four of which were small ones to be lowered over the side, four were larger LCUs to be floated out of the big ships’ stern docks once they had flooded down. Behind them steamed fifteen Royal Fleet Auxiliaries and ships taken up from trade (STUFT). These included the 44,000-ton P&O passenger liner Canberra, now with two thousand men of the (reinforced) 3 Commando Brigade. She carried a Royal Marine Commando, the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment, the Commando Regiment of the Royal Artillery, the Commando Squadron of the Royal Engineers, the Navy’s Surgical Support Teams, the 19th Field Ambulance, and the Blues and Royals (Royal Horse Guards and First Dragoons). Canberra was loaded to capacity with men, kit and supplies, a volume of such unprecedented weight that they had to shore up the sun-deck down aft to prevent the whole lot from collapsing under the weight of stores.

  Escorting the heavily burdened little fleet to the Falkland Islands was Antrim, my old flagship from Springtrain, under the command of Captain Brian Young, plus three frigates, the Type 12 Plymouth under Captain David Pentreath, the Leander Class Argonaut under Captain Kit Layman, and the Type 21 Ardent under Commander Alan West. All four of them would be damaged in the forthcoming conflict, three of them would be bombed, and one of them would never leave the waters which surround the Falklands.

  Within the first hour of our journey that night we nearly came to grief – one of our Sea King 5s, patrolling as a part of our anti-submarine screen, suddenly ditched. Captain Middleton took Hermes over to have a look at the floating helicopter while the crew was being picked up. The reason for the crash was a failure of the radio altimeter while in automatic hover close to the water and the pilot took the right action as per the manual. I could not quite see why he could not have got it up off the water, but then I wasn’t driving the bloody thing. So there we stood high up in Hermes staring down at this nice shiny new aircraft worth millions of pounds, floating the right way up in calm water, apparently unharmed.

  The temptation was too great. Lin Middleton thought we ought to try and lift it out with our crane, an unorthodox but possibly effective course of action. I agreed with his proposal. He nosed Hermes up to it until we were just yards away when the thought occurred to us that the Sea King had been on an anti-submarine patrol, and that it must be loaded with depth-charges in case they found what they were looking for. There was a very slight possibility that if any of those depth charges had been primed, it might go off, probably taking with it a fair proportion of Hermes’s bow. This would not have looked good on any of our records. Indeed, it could have ended Britain’s war in the South Atlantic. Very, very gently we backed away and sent for Brilliant to come over and sink the Sea King. As it sank, now a couple of miles away from us, the depth-charges went off. It remains, to this day, a subject Lin and I do not discuss.

  We made our rendezvous with the Amphibious Group in the desolation of the black South Atlantic night at 1100. There were fourteen Harriers, brought down by Cunard’s massive transatlantic container ship the Atlantic Conveyor, and all of them had to be transferred to Hermes. There were also additional Royal Navy Wessex helicopters and four of the huge RAF Chinooks. They needed to get the Harriers off the Conveyor before there was room to start the long job of preparing the helicopters for flight ashore after the landings at Carlos. And, because we were now getting very crowded, some of the Harriers had to be flown off Hermes and away to Invincible back in the TEZ. The complexities of such an operation, being conducted in the middle of the ocean, are, I promise you, considerable.

  At 1230 the Commodore Amphibious Warfare, Commodore Mike Clapp and his staff flew from Fearless over to Hermes. I had known Mike Clapp for over thirty years, since we had been in the training cruiser HMS Devonshire together, and I had great faith in his judgement and steadiness. I personally believed that our ‘partnership’ was very well defined: I would have the final say as to when we go, where we go and indeed how we go; but once inshore, the landings would become his business, and the AOA his patch.

  It was readily apparent that we could not land before the evening of Thursday 20 May and that we would want to land as soon as possible after that if we were to keep to the timetable. Right now, on a slightly overcast 18 May, in fairly calm seas, we were clearly not ready. Not least among our problems was the very lately arrived requirement (from the UK) to move all but one of the land force units out of Canberra and spread them around the rest of the force in case she was sunk. Tomorrow, if the fairly clear, calm conditions persisted, we should be able to complete the necessary cross-decking. Only then would we be ready to go.

  I went on to explain to Mike and to the commander of the embarked troops, Brigadier Julian Thompson, that the Args had never yet attacked from the air at night and therefore I believed we could safely discount that possibility. We all agreed that the earlier we could get in the better.

  The only altercation we had was a mild one: the land commanders would have preferred to get the men ashore in the early part of the evening in order to give themselves as many hours of darkness as possible for their troops to establish their beach-head. My own view was slightly different. First of all, I knew that the Args Air Force would pack up around dusk. I also knew that they would surely attack, with absolutely everything they had, any large group of British ships sighted steaming towards the northern entrance to the Falkland Sound in the late afternoon. Such a group, they would realize, would have to be the amphibious force. Thus, I reasoned, the critical time for this landing is in the few hours prior to sunset. Where the amphibians do not want to be during that time is in sight of any Argentinians. While I can’t do much about a chance, patrolling aircraft, I can at least keep the amphibians well out of sight from observation posts on the shore. So the first landings needed to be delayed a few hours into the night, so that the final approach could be done entirely in darkness.

  I realized that this course of action would lessen the hours of darkness the troops had to get ashore – but at least they would be ashore rather than on board ships fighting their way in. And was not Carlos Bay recommended inter alia for its good mountain cover against air attacks? I think I made my position clear to Mike Clapp and Julian Thompson, and I did so without having to remind them of the experiences of Sheffield and Glasgow. I did not have to utter the phrase ‘Gentlemen, do you have any idea what it is actually like when a warship gets hit by a bomb or a guided missile?’ And they in turn did not have to articulate the thought that must have been on their minds ‘Well, we thought the Battle Group was supposed to have destroyed the Args Air Force in its entirety by now. What have you been doing these last three weeks, for ****’s sake?’ There are times when I am very grateful for the well-mannered rituals of discussion with which we, in Her Majesty’s armed forces, settle our differences.

  Nonetheless they accepted my point of view about the landing times – and I think they also accepted the extreme difficulty we had had in fooling the Argentine Air Force into coming out to fight before they really needed to. Including Pebble Island, we had removed over a dozen aircraft from their inventory, but their formidable fighter/ground attack force was still more or less intact. On paper, they still had air superiority and for all we knew had been saving themselves up for the day when the British finally moved in to re-take the Falkland Islands. I did not know that to be a fact, but it seemed a reasonable explanation of their apparent reluctance so far in coming out to attack us.

  But our destiny would also be governed by the great drifting weather fronts which stream across those unfriendly southern oceans. Mike knew as well as I did that all landings depend enormously on the weather. You have only to think of 1944 and the terrible problems General Eisenhower’s armada encountered – the one month’s delay and choice of the only few days that gave any chance of success in that dreadful June.

  Even as we conferred in the Ops Room of Hermes I had
still not been given the final word from my C-in-C to proceed with the landing – or ‘Operation Sutton’ to give it its trade name. We knew of course that there were still political forces urging the British Government to wait a little longer, to strive for the diplomatic solution that did not look much of a starter from down this end of the world. In Margaret Thatcher, however, Britain had a Prime Minister who was not going to allow peripheral circumstances to get in the way of grim reality. She knew she had the support of her High Command, she knew she had the support of the House of Commons, and indeed the House of Lords. And she knew she had the support of the British people, thousands of whom were writing sackloads of mail to the Task Force to wish us well. Each and every one of those letters meant a great deal to all of us.

  Margaret Thatcher also understood the tyranny of our timetable, the fact that the Royal Navy would be effectively out of action in the South Atlantic winter of late June. She understood with total clarity that our deadline to land was 25 May. And she knew perfectly well that every day’s delay thereafter was a day in favour of General Galtieri. Now she also knew the earliest time that we could be ready. She was faced with making the final, historically momentous decision to permit us to go in and establish the beach-head. Whatever may have been said about the irrevocability of the sailing of the Task Force back in April, and whatever she thought herself, I am clear that this was easily the biggest single military decision she had to take. A landing is likely to be expensive enough in men and equipment. But if it fails later, an evacuation is usually a disaster. There may have been a few politicians, ministers or even servicemen who still doubted her resolve. But Margaret Thatcher never shirked a hard decision. And when asked for her verdict, just a few hours from now, she would not falter.