On board Canberra the troops of 42 Commando made ready for the landing. In Norland Colonel H. Jones spoke quietly to the men of 2 Para, whose task it would be to hit the beach, climb six hundred feet to the uppermost ridge of the Sussex Mountains and fight to take them if necessary. In Stromness, 45 Commando, the last of the units of the reinforced 3 Commando Brigade, prepared to embark in the landing craft.
With Fort Austin now anchored inshore, half a mile south of Chancho Point in the Sound, and Yarmouth positioned south of Brilliant, bang in the middle of Falkland Sound, there was a total of eleven British ships now deployed around the north-western shores of East Falkland. It is still well-nigh unbelievable that the Argentinians appeared to be utterly unaware of this large force, the rightful proprietors of the place – especially as the Args also had a second high look-out position on Mount Rosalie which stares out across the Sound from the north-east corner of West Falkland. How could they possibly have missed seeing or hearing something?
But miss it they did and, incredibly, by 0330 it was still all quiet in the Sound, as Antrim waited silently over to the east, near Cat Island. In her Ops Room, radio signals from the SBS spotters six miles north, up on the freezing heights of Fanning Head, were being logged and recorded, the men in charge of her 4.5-inch guns making final adjustments. At 0350 they were ready. Captain Brian Young quietly ordered his operation to commence and the guns of HMS Antrim opened fire, thudding dully above the black waters, the shells screaming into the granite headland far above them. I expect the barrage finally awakened the Args, as they crouched in the freezing wind at the top of the cliff. Antrim plastered the area with more than two hundred and fifty shells in less than thirty minutes – sufficient, probably, to flatten something the size of Windsor Castle.
On the landward side of Fanning Head the SBS men kept their heads down until Captain Young’s gunners had done their work. Then they stormed the Argentinian position and found twenty-one dead or wounded, with at least that number having fled down the hill to safety – yet another chance of war had run in our favour. The entrance to the Sound was safely in British hands, clear for the rest of our convoy of the five smaller landing ships and their escorts Argonaut and Broadsword. These were all scheduled to enter Carlos Water at around 0600.
By now the LCUs from Fearless were heading south down Carlos Water, packed with the men of 40 Commando. The landing craft of Intrepid moved away empty, running south down Carlos Water to the Norland, the thirteen-thousand-ton P&O roll-on-roll-off ferry in which 2 Para waited quietly in the dark. Colonel Jones had his men ready and they clambered aboard, dragging their heavy packs with them, crammed tightly into the confined utilitarian space of the landing craft. This was the landing we had come eight thousand miles to achieve. We were, if you judged us harshly, a day late. I had hoped very much to get in on 20 May, but the bright weather and the need to get all the ‘cross-decking’ done had ruled that out. In my cabin in Hermes I opened my diary and wrote gratefully, ‘0740 – still a deathly hush – extraordinary.’ For all these hours we had waited offshore for bad news and, incredibly, there was none.
What I also did not know was that exactly ten minutes ago, the LCUs which carried 2 Para to the south end of Carlos Water had surged into the shallows and that, even as I wrote, H. Jones’s men were splashing their way forward on to the beaches of the Falkland Islands. Minutes later the troops of 40 Commando hit the beaches slightly to the north, wading ashore and, soon after, running up the flag in San Carlos Settlement, which was, I suppose, sound thinking, even if you couldn’t see it in the dark – this was, after all, more or less what we were here for.
Within half an hour the moon would rise out of the Atlantic to deliver cold judgement upon us all. We saw it, out in the Battle Group, as we prepared to launch the supporting Harriers. It was odd, really, but ever since we arrived here that moon had seemed to me to be strange, somehow alien, maybe Argentinian, but very different from the one seen through the street lights of Kingston-upon-Thames. But this morning, after the landings, with the Union Jack flying in the cold breeze in San Carlos Settlement, that seemed to have changed. Somehow, the moon was, once again, friendly. And we could still see it, quite pale and very high, long after the sun had risen.
14
The Battle of ‘Bomb Alley’
I suppose I knew that on the morning of 21 May 1982 the Royal Navy would be required to fight its first major action since the end of the Second World War. I do not often admit this, because my reply to any formal question on the subject is always, ‘We did not have the slightest idea what was going to happen.’ Nonetheless one pretty simple fact dominated my thoughts: on this day the Argentinians are going to have to fight. They cannot simply sit there, wait for the British forces to get organized and trust that they will win the inevitable land battle some time later. No commander in his right mind – particularly an Argentinian, on their record to date – will choose to fight a well-organized enemy later if he can catch him off-balance now.
So, today the Args had no option but to come out and make some kind of a fight of it, unless they should choose to take this as an opportunity to give in gracefully, which, sadly, did not look very likely, not least because they seemed to have little idea what was happening. Indeed, by dawn, they had already proved to be so profoundly slack that the entire British landing force, eleven ships plus escorts, had sailed straight past their ‘guards’ apparently unnoticed and was in the process of establishing a firm beach-head ashore in the Carlos Water area.
But now it was light. They still had a navy and a substantial air force, which had not tried to come at us in any strength since 1 May, when they last thought we were landing. They, at least, must surely come again. It was inconceivable to any person of normal learning that they would not attack the amphibious ships while there were still so many men and so much material to go ashore. So it had to be done, from the air, sometime today, starting very soon.
Out in the Ops Room of Hermes we waited, largely cut off from the Amphibious Group. We were much too far away to pick up their short-wave radio signals, which were effectively only ‘line-of-sight’ and well over the horizon. Long-haul communications, of course, remained available, but these are not much used for detailed battle management. Any communications between the inshore forces and Hermes would have to be by the less immediate process of satellite link or the HF circuits, which would be of pretty variable strength from among the hills of the Falklands.
Today they would fight without me. My job was to ensure they had as much protection from the air as we could possibly provide and we were ready to back them up in any way which might become necessary with supplies or reinforcements. But on this morning, with the Army and the Marines not yet ready for combat, and the Rapier missile systems not yet in place, the battle was going to have to be fought by the ships and aircraft of the Navy alone.
It was curious how relaxed I was, but I reckoned I knew how they would fight, how resolute they would be under fire and what gallantry they could be relied on to show under pressure. They would fight as the Royal Navy has always fought, down all the years, and it never crossed my mind, nor, I am certain, the minds of any of my commanders, that today’s men would be much different from those of the often glorious past. The big difference was, that unlike Jervis, Nelson, Hawke, Hood, Jellicoe, Beatty and Cunningham, we would have to defeat an air force as well as a rival navy, and the Navy’s record at surviving concentrated air attack was not one to inspire confidence.
I had had to surrender my ringside seat for one at the back of the arena. The battle itself would rest in the capable hands of COMAW and Captains Layman, Coward, Young, Canning and Pentreath, Commanders Morton and West, and, most critical as it was to turn out, the Sea Harrier pilots.
The story of 21 May has been told many times, by others who were there and by many more who were not. I don’t much enjoy being yet another of the latter group, but this book would clearly be incomplete if I did not relate to you yet anoth
er version, from the point of view of the Royal Navy, even though I was a satellite signal away from the action. In the years since, opinions and assessments have been considerably refined, and some ‘facts’ have been cast in stone when they probably should have been cast on the rubbish tip. I can only do my best to tell our story as I understand the facts to be, as they have been told to me, by my colleagues and friends, who fought with such high courage on that frightful day. Throughout this book I have endeavoured to stay as close as possible to those situations in which I was directly involved. In this way I hope I have been able, thus far, to acquaint you with the interior workings of the mind of a battle commander. However, it is essential that I keep the events not only in context, but also in perspective. As such you ought to understand the full ferocity of the air-sea battle that was fought on this day in order to follow my thoughts and actions in the tense and sometimes dreadful days that followed.
I have tried to reconcile my own records, particularly the assessments of losses we had inflicted on the Argentinians, with those of other chroniclers of this war. But they are usually slightly different; I tended to err on the side of scepticism at the naturally enthusiastic claims of aircraft shot down. It was the same during the Battle of Britain; optimism often getting the better of harsh truth. But I am also trained not to exaggerate. I am trained, if such a thing is possible, to be accurate, to accept only hard facts and to distinguish folklore from reality. I am also trained to avoid becoming too involved with individuals and their problems. I have to count the attrition of both sides, to assess how much longer we can reasonably go on before I call home and tell them we are coming out on the wrong side of this particular conflict – and that in my judgement we had better either pack it in or get heavy reinforcements. To some, this could seem like ‘bureaucratic book-keeping’ from the comparative safety of the Battle Group – for me, it was simply an essential part of overall battle management. In any event, I will spend the rest of this chapter recording my analysis of what went on on the real opening day of the air-sea war.
D-Day, 21 May, did not start terribly well for either side. After weeks of watching for them, two of our Harrier pilots finally discovered an Argentinian helicopter area on Mount Kent – probably only because they now needed to come out of their ‘hides’ – and very quickly wiped out three of them on the ground: believed to be two army Pumas, and a big army Chinook. Forty-five minutes later Flight Lieutenant Jeremy Glover’s GR3 Harrier was shot down by ground fire from Port Howard and at about the same time we lost two of the Royal Marines’ Gazelle choppers just east of the landing area.
The early combat air patrols of the day came under the control of Antrim, who stationed herself roughly in the middle of the AOA, on the eastern side of the Falkland Sound. Most of them would be back on board the carriers before anything much happened, for it remained uncannily quiet, in terms of Argentinian attack, for more than two hours after sunrise. Then it began. An Argentinian light attack two-seater jet aircraft, the Italian-built Naval Macchi 339, flying at wave-top height along the northern coast, swung suddenly into the narrow entrance to Falkland Sound, going as fast as he could. The first ship he saw was Kit Layman’s Argonaut and he fired all eight of his five-inch rockets at the frigate, coming on in low and raking the decks with 30mm cannon shells. One rocket hit the Seacat missile deck area and injured three men – one of whom lost an eye; another, the Master-at-Arms, took a piece of shrapnel one inch above his heart.
The attack had been so swift and sudden that the raider was making his escape away to the south-east before any kind of hardware could be aimed at him. As it was, they had a shot at him with a Blowpipe missile from the deck of Canberra; Intrepid launched a Seacat missile and David Pentreath opened up with the 4.5-inch guns of Plymouth. But the Macchi got away doubtless to stagger his High Command with the tale of what he had just seen spread out below him in Carlos Water.
Five minutes later we evened the score when the SAS, with a Stinger missile, hit a turbo-prop Pucara which had made the error of flying too close to their mountain lair. Then a couple more of these same light attack aircraft managed to dodge the bombardment of Ardent and got off the ground from Goose Green.
Commander West’s Ops Room moved quickly. His two young Principal Warfare Officers, Lieutenants Mike Knowles and Tom Williams, were about to become used to switching from attack to defence in their very exposed position far south of the other ships. But their Captain, himself a former frigate PWO, had coached them both personally and now they ordered Ardent’s 4.5-inch gun into action, firing at the raiders and launching a Seacat missile, which went close and drove the Arg pilots away without achieving anything.
The first major attack of the day swept in about half an hour later at 1235. Three Israeli-built Daggers, capable of supersonic speed, came in over West Falkland behind the cover of Mount Rosalie. They dropped to a height of only fifty feet above the water and raced across the Sound, flying straight for the gap between Fanning Head and Chancho Point, no doubt intending to attack the many amphibious ships beyond.
This time we were ready. Argonaut and Intrepid had their Seacat missiles away before the incoming Args were within two miles of Carlos Bay. But it was Plymouth which scored the first hit, blowing the aircraft on the far right of the trio out of the sky with a Seacat. The pilot never had a chance. The second Dagger swerved right, away from the missiles now flying through the gap, and the next ship he saw was Bill Canning’s Type 22 Broadsword. He pressed home his attack, coming in close and strafing the frigate with 30mm cannon shell – and hitting with twenty-nine in all. He wounded fourteen men in the hangar area and damaged the two Lynx helicopters, but missed with both of his bombs, thankfully.
The third Dagger swung to the south, making a bee-line for Brian Young’s Antrim which was positioned less than a mile off the rocky shore of Cat Island, three and half miles down the coast from Chancho Point. The Argentinian bomb, a thousand-pounder it later transpired, hit Antrim’s flight deck, bounced through the flash doors at the aft end of the Seaslug missile magazine, catching two of these big missiles a glancing blow, and ended up, appropriately enough, in a lavatory space – known as the ‘heads’ in naval jargon. Miraculously, neither the bomb nor the two missiles went off. A major explosion in Antrim’s missile magazine would almost certainly have finished the ship. As it was, several fires broke out and Antrim’s crew were hard-pressed to contain them. Captain Young made all speed to the north, to join Broadsword, for both cover and assistance. But she didn’t get there before the next Argentinian raid was on its way in, only six minutes later.
This was another wave of three Daggers, flying on an almost identical course to the first group, fast and low over West Falkland. They were coming straight for the battered Antrim, whose crew was now trying to jettison the Seaslug missiles in case the fire reached them. In desperation, Antrim fired a Seaslug missile, completely unguided, in the general direction of the Daggers, hoping to put them off a bit. Their Seacat system was already out of action, but they had the 4.5-inch guns working and every machine gun they had was blazing away at the attackers.
One, however, made it through and strafed the burning destroyer with cannon shells, wounding seven men and causing further fires to break out. The situation in Antrim was now serious. The second Dagger elected to go for Fort Austin which was very bad news for us, since the big supply ship was almost defenceless against this type of attack, but Commodore Sam Dunlop ordered his two machine guns into action and there was a volley of small-arms fire from the twenty-four riflemen on the upper deck. But it was not going to be enough and Sam must have braced himself for the impact of a bomb when, to his amazement, the Dagger blew apart one thousand yards out, hit by a critically timed Sea Wolf missile from Broadsword. But the last one came on in, strafing Broadsword once again and just missing Bill Canning’s frigate with a one-thousand-pound bomb.
The guns of Ardent were still firing as the surviving Daggers made their getaway and it was now becoming
clear that Antrim, quite badly damaged, was in no condition to direct the Harriers on to their targets from their waiting positions high overhead. At this point in the battle, Captain John Coward of Brilliant, informed of the plight of Brian Young’s ship, immediately took over the task of fighter director for the CAP. He assumed command, as I would expect any Royal Navy officer to do, without so much as a ‘by your leave’, reacting instantly to the changing situation. We could hear them on the high-frequency nets in Hermes, suddenly directing the Harriers.
Our aviation controllers interrupted and advised Brilliant: ‘Now you be very careful with our aircraft.’
To which they replied, ‘Of course we’ll be very careful. Don’t worry.’ And, fairly typically for that ship, they finished with a flourish – ‘We know what we’re bloody doing.’
And, of course, they did know what they were bloody doing. Coward had in his Ops Room a first lieutenant who was a real expert in this field, a former instructor in the Navy’s Aircraft Direction School. They evolved a plan combining two radar systems which would enable them to ‘see’ over the land, clearer than most others, both the Harriers and the incoming raiders. In their brand-new Type 22 they had the latest radars and were rapidly learning new ways of using them. John Coward swung Brilliant around and hurried north-east into Carlos Water where he seemed most needed. Coward had already come to the conclusion that our defences were too spread out and now he was proposing to concentrate them, on his own. His basic plan was to position Brilliant bang in the middle of the entrance to the bay and treat the entire operation like a pheasant shoot, blasting the Argentinian raiders out of the sky with his trusty Sea Wolf as they came in.
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