One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  The analysis showed another rather depressing feature. The warships had hit only two incoming aircraft with their missiles. I did not of course know how many missiles they had fired, but I was fairly sure our success rate was somewhere between dead-moderate and bloody awful. John Coward was particularly disappointed with Sea Wolf and its flat refusal to attack an enemy aircraft which was not coming straight at the launcher: the damned thing would not even recognize it as a possible target. In addition Captain Coward, in our newest ship, found out the hard way that his surveillance radar was nothing like as effective in the tight mountainous surroundings which bordered Carlos Water. Finally his forward Sea Wolf system had been damaged by enemy action.

  By nightfall he realized that it would have been much better if he had stationed Brilliant just a little further out in the open water to give his radar a better chance. Knowing John he was privately berating himself for this ill-fortune, but, as ever, he had a plan. By some remarkable piece of chicanery, he still had on board Brilliant the specialist computer engineer from Marconi, the British company that made the Sea Wolf radar. He had not quite kidnapped him – the chap had been working on Brilliant’s electronics in Gibraltar before we set off to the south and then went home to England, but somehow, by the time we cleared Ascension on that April night, Mr David Brean – whom John describes as a ‘deep expert’ in missile computer technology – was ensconced in none other than Brilliant. ‘A key player in my team,’ said Coward briskly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a Royal Navy frigate to be heading into battle with various civilian technologists wandering around their Ops Rooms. Unusual, I thought, but not half a bad idea.

  On this dark night, with the weather getting up, David Brean was wrestling with the problem of Brilliant’s Sea Wolf and the extensive damage to its wiring. The captain had ordered her out of the Sound by 2030 to go round to King George Bay, West Falkland, and insert SAS reconnaissance teams. As he did so, David Brean re-wired and re-programmed.

  ‘The trouble is,’ he said to Captain Coward, sometime after midnight, ‘we have a problem with the radar antenna up the mast.’

  Without a thought for the knifing wind and the cold rain, not to mention that Mr Brean was not even in the Navy, John Coward replied: ‘Better get up there then.’

  David Brean, I am reliably informed, gulped. Then he said, ‘Okay, sir,’ and proceeded to go up the mast in the middle of the night to fix the antenna. ‘First class man,’ confirmed Coward. ‘Best after-sales service you can imagine.’

  The following morning, Brilliant reported one of her Sea Wolf systems was completely operable again, improved on yesterday’s model, and that the man from Marconi was working on the other.

  That day, 21 May, was a day which by any standards had tested once more the courage, the will to fight and the years of training of the Royal Navy. I reflected as I looked at the signals now coming in from Carlos Water that little had changed since the eighteenth century, except of course for the hardware and the speed of the conflict: the people were just the same, the spirit in the ships was just the same, the courage of the men was just the same. Was not the performance of Argonaut facing the incoming Skyhawks comparable with the best of Britain’s naval traditions? What difference between Ardent, crippled and burning, still fighting and Sir Richard Grenville’s Revenge all those centuries ago. Or between this and that October day off Cape Trafalgar as Nelson and Hardy walked the quarter deck of the Victory shortly after noon, her tiller ropes cut, her mizzen topmast on the deck and her sails in tatters, their casualty count very much the same as that of Ardent, twenty men killed and thirty wounded.

  As I said, far back in my early training days in this book, we have all been taught that one day we may be asked to emulate the actions of the captains of Jervis Bay or Glowworm, to go on fighting the ship until the bitter end. You may have thought you joined the Navy in order to attend courses and to make yourself a comfortable career. But, whether you knew it or not, you actually joined for this day, the day of reckoning. And if that should be today – then go do it.

  It was perfectly clear that on the opening day of our battle in San Carlos Water, the people had conducted themselves in the great traditions of the Navy with the highest possible professionalism. I was sure there would be many stories of heroism to come out of it and, of them all, I remain most impressed by the conduct of John Leake who manned the machine gun in Ardent. He was not really in the Navy, but, as we say, we are all of one company, the captain and the NAAFI man. And we all go together.

  It is interesting to note how many of the officers came from Royal Navy families, whose forebears had fought such actions too. In addition to the First Sea Lord himself, Henry Leach, there were captains like Paul Hoddinott and Kit Layman. But there were also many, many others. Lieutenant-Commander John Sephton who died on the flight deck of Ardent was from such a family – his uncle Petty Officer Alfred Sephton vc was killed on another May afternoon, forty-one years previously just south of the island of Crete. Mortally wounded, the thirty-year-old gun director was credited with saving, ‘very nearly single-handedly’, a previous HMS Coventry from certain destruction by the Luftwaffe. Both of the gallant Sephtons were buried at sea. Yet another English family had paid yet another dreadful price.

  But my job is in the price-control section and during the evening of 21 May I had a long conversation with Mike Clapp via the satellite to discuss the new placement of the warships in Carlos Bay. Clearly, with all the damage sustained we could not risk the troop and logistics carriers in there during daylight hours, and perhaps the initial dispersion of the frigates and destroyers needed a careful look too. We quickly came to a meeting of minds and I was careful to follow up our strangulated conversation with a hard copy signal as usual – a lesson I had already learned from experience, but not COMAW. He rather uncharitably put it down as ‘yard-arm squaring’ but it was perhaps my fault, I suppose, I should have told him about the dangers of DSSS. Anyway, I was very glad of the opportunity to do something constructive because, aside from the constant comings and goings of the priceless Harriers, all day long I had in my mind been rather kicking my heels out here on this otherwise historic day. My diary betrays my restlessness. Reading it now, it shows I was obviously filling it in, on and off, hour after hour. It is self-explanatory and gives some insight into my thoughts. I reproduce it thus, with just a little sharpening of the hasty punctuation:

  0930. Dawn still an hour away and little sign of Arg activity from any source. The weather is fine and clear – not what I wanted for Day One at all, but at least it’s fairly calm for the soldiers and the transfers. Today should therefore be critical not only for the land forces but also for the air forces. If the Args are going to fight, today is their best opportunity. We shall see.

  Meanwhile we are ready to put up as much Sea Harrier air defence as we can through the daylight hours, clear of the AOA itself, so that our ground-missile defence has a free hand against fixed wing.

  I am already finding that no longer being the core of the activity – and the reversion to ‘support force commander’ – is a bit irksome this morning. No doubt I’ll be too busy to think about this later.

  1115. First indication that Args know we’re in. Some local disturbance in the AOA. Can’t be long now.

  1300. They’re beginning to come. So it wasn’t ‘long now’. Fairly continuous air attacks in near perfect weather have given us the punishment we were bound to have. Ardent sinking. Argonaut stopped. Antrim with no effective weapons. But at least the two Type 22s and the two Type 12s are fit. So the Args have hit the wrong ships.

  Unfortunately the weather tomorrow will be no better, at least until the evening, if then. So until the army have their own AD [Air Defence] set up, I can’t leave them to their own devices, not least because there are all the LSLs to unload yet.

  Later. It turns out that the 22s are by no means fit. Indeed Brilliant has one end only, and radar and propulsion. By 2300 it seems that Arden
t is sinking, Argonaut is stopped but has her weapons systems working. Antrim is floating and moving, but has no weapons and an unexploded bomb in her backside. Broadsword minor damage. Plymouth and Yarmouth unscathed. All the AW ships untouched, as yet.

  I put down my pen sometime well after midnight but, unknown to me, there was one other Royal Naval officer still writing – Commander Alan West. Alone now in the vast dining room of Canberra, he sat with a legal tablet before him, wracking his brains to recall every last detail of the action which had finished his ship. He wrote the heading: Lessons Learned/ Re-Learned. Beneath this he listed in order of importance each aspect of the battle in which his own experiences might, possibly, in the coming days, help others to avoid the devastation he now felt. He pointed out yet again the great value of the anti-flash gear, how the hoods and gloves had saved men’s hands and faces from burning when the bombs had exploded in Ardent. He outlined the fact that a ship which maintains heavy fire against incoming aircraft, as his had done, will have a very detrimental effect on the enemy’s accuracy – ‘Keep firing, no matter what,’ was his message. And he pointed out that the closer to the shore a ship was positioned the harder it was for enemy aircraft to maintain low altitude, because the shoreline forced them to climb. Then, in the small hours, still trembling from his ordeal, Commander Alan West went to the Radio Room and sent his signal to me personally. After all he had gone through, with his ship still blazing out in the Sound, with one-third of his crew killed or wounded, he was still trying to help.

  I doubt he slept that night. What captain who has lost his ship ever does? The events of that day had been too traumatic and I’m sure they live with him still. But, like so many others, and perhaps once more in response to the most famous Royal Navy battle signal of all, Alan West had done his duty, as was only to be expected.

  15

  Calamity For Coventry

  It would be futile even to suggest that I was not worried by the events of 21 May. We had been attacked fiercely by Argentinian fighter aircraft – sporadically during the morning and almost continuously throughout the afternoon. You might say we were entering the very heart of this treacherous chess game. Of the seven warship escorts I had sent in with the Amphibious Group the previous night, only Plymouth and Yarmouth had escaped scot free. Our most modern short-range defensive system, Sea Wolf, was showing distinct signs of temperament and both of the ships that carried it – Brilliant and Broadsword – were damaged. Of our probable ‘kills’, nine had been achieved by the Harriers.

  The war of attrition was laid out before me as follows. Firstly, on the first day of the landings, they have sunk one escort, put two others more or less out of action and, further, knocked another two about. If the Args can go on like this just for another two days, my destroyer and frigate force will be wiped out. Question: can we live with that? Answer: obviously not, because if it went on for a few days after that, at the same rate of destruction, we’d lose all the early reinforcements as well – there would be no protection for the amphibious ships, or for the carriers, and the rest of the Royal Navy is weeks away. Secondly, our pilots and gunners are claiming some twenty Argentinian planes knocked out – by Second World War rules that will probably mean about fourteen, perhaps another seven seriously damaged. Question: for how long can the Args put up with that? Answer: I’m not sure, but if this goes on for another week I do not think they can tolerate the loss of another hundred-odd aircraft. That kind of attrition would cause even the Russians to take a pull.

  In addition – including Pebble Island – we had already taken out some twenty-seven of their aircraft prior to the landing. Plus of course the massive volume of small arms fire from the British ships must also have taken its toll of enemy aircraft damaged or out of action more or less permanently. The only intelligence we had, suggested they started with some one hundred and ninety fixed-wing combat aircraft, and a rule of thumb says a country like Argentina would have only about one half of those immediately ready for modern combat. That means they really started with some eighty-five aircraft ready to go. We had removed about forty, and probably irreparably damaged another ten. That left them with forty-odd, plus whatever they could bring forward – perhaps thirty – plus a dwindling group of highly skilled pilots. In my view they were going to have to be bloody careful.

  Not, however, as bloody careful as we had to be, since we already had less than twenty Sea Harriers, which, apart from providing air cover now, were going to have to provide air defence for the islands for months after the land battle completed. It was going to take a considerable while to get the Port Stanley runway up to the length and standards required to operate RAF Phantoms from it. We were also heavily reliant on our two battered Sea Wolf Type 22 frigates because with only one more Type 22 as yet in service in the whole Fleet, there were far too few replacements available.

  The pattern was now clear. The war had developed, at this stage, into a prize fight between the Royal Navy and General Galtieri’s Air Forces. Who’s winning right at that moment? Not us, I fear. However, unlike the Args, I was about to send one of our pawns into their back line to give me a new Queen. Its name was of course Rapier, the land-forces’ guided-missile system which I had been led to believe was well able to provide a real anti-aircraft ‘umbrella’ over the whole San Carlos area. Though only what was called a ‘point defence system’, it was similar in range and visual-guidance capability to Sea Wolf – pretty effective in a confined area like Carlos Water, I might reasonably hope. COMAW and I were relying on this to take some of the weight off the destroyers and frigates within three days of the first landing. All day, on the twenty-first, the soldiers had been battling to ready the launchers, as the helicopters ferried in the big heavy components and the lethal (I hoped) missiles themselves. It seemed to me that as the Rapier batteries were set up, the relative attrition rate would move dramatically in our favour. If the Args were to send in another fifty sorties today, we might expect to be more successful than we were yesterday. By Day Three we should have a safe haven for the ships in Carlos Water, or at least a ‘death trap’ for the opposition.

  Which leads us to the question I had to ask myself, and answer, on a daily basis: can I recommend that we continue to fight this war, that our losses are militarily acceptable? Right now the answer was, yes. But the outcome is as yet undecided, and the future contains reasonable hope of significant improvement, courtesy of Rapier. The Harriers are performing superbly, by any standards, and our technique of vectoring them in, guiding them on to the fleeing Args’ aircraft from the Ops Rooms of the frigates, is also working very well, as long as the ships stay afloat – though I do wish that Sea Wolf would strike home more often. Our entire performance is rather hanging upon that of the Harriers, which have so far been excellent only because the Args do not seem to have sent in any high-level escorts to take them on while their bombers do their business below. Also we are fortunate that the Harriers ‘airfields’ are still unharmed. I still have to worry that the Args must soon come after Hermes and Invincible in a more determined way; and remember that the consequence of that could be the loss of half our fixed wing air force at a stroke – I am under the clearest instructions from my CTF not to put either carrier at serious risk of major damage. I also have to worry that they must surely soon wake up to the fact that fighter escorts engaging the Sea Harriers up above will cut down the losses being inflicted upon their bombers.

  On Day Two, 22 May, COMAW and I had resolved to minimize the number of transport ships in the inshore area and to range our warships into a tighter defensive pattern concentrated in San Carlos Water itself. This was specifically to protect the landing beaches and such amphibious ships as had to remain. With plenty of conflicting advice, I also decided to send Coventry up front to form a 42/22 missile trap with Broadsword off the north coast of West Falkland. I edged the Battle Group further forward, trying to balance the risk of putting Hermes and Invincible well within range of Argentinian Etendard/Exocet attack against t
he advantage of gaining extra time for the Harriers on CAP over the AOA.

  By now I was making notes in my diary for most of the day, rather than filling it out at night, and on 22 May I began as follows:

  Dispositions made and another critical day lies ahead. The Args lost fifteen or so aircraft yesterday, by having no escorts for their attacks. That policy [of theirs] could change today. Bearing in mind that their max effort [yesterday]…may have set them back at least for a day or so.

  Equally it may cause them to [start sending] escort against our Combat Air Patrols, which scored most of our successes. Brilliant and Broadsword accounting for two, possibly three, only, despite being frequently ‘surrounded’ by circling attackers. Meanwhile HMS Exeter [the Type 42 guided-missile destroyer under the command of Captain Hugh Balfour] will be with us before dawn.

  By 0700 we had received word of an Argentinian shadower coming within eight miles of Coventry. Captain Hart-Dyke’s Ops Room had not fired their missile, which confirmed once more that we could never really count on the effectiveness of this weapon. When we heard that Coventry had been unable to fire, I was moved to write in the diary the words, ‘I despair. The GWS 30 [Sea Dart] system appears to be totally unreliable. Altogether we are in a fairly desperate situation until Rapier comes good. After yesterday’s dusting we do have the capability and the will to continue. No vital part of our capability has been lost (yet). But we still have a very long way to go before we can be sure the back of the Arg air force is broken.’

  A short while afterwards it did become apparent that Coventry’s Ops Room had spotted the Argentinian Boeing and had indeed ‘locked on’ efficiently, but disaster struck as the Sea Dart missiles were coming up from the magazine to the launcher: the flash doors jammed, crusted up with salt from the heavy sea which had been breaking over the destroyer’s bow for most of the night. You will remember that when I recounted the saga of Glasgow being hit ten days previously, Captain Hoddinott’s Sea Dart had failed because a micro-switch was crusted over with salt after a night in a big sea. You may also recall I said that tomorrow if not the switch, then it will be something else. Well, tomorrow it was…a flash door crusted up. Why? That’s what I wanted to know. Type 42s cost close to £200 million to build. How come whenever they went out in a big sea for a period of several hours their main weapons system crashed immediately afterwards because water is rushing in where it plainly ought not to be? I knew from my own time in Sheffield that the 42s were not as fast as they should be, that they were unreasonably slow in a short swell, with their bows slamming into the waves rather than splitting them to each side cleanly. Even in those days, it had seemed to me the waves were landing on the foredeck too steeply and too short, breaking downwards, on to the top of the Sea Dart launcher system. But the consequences had not been obvious then – now they were. (I resolved to look into this further, if and when we got home. It transpired much as I feared: the bow had ‘happened’ rather than been designed – and the problem was eventually cured for future T42s with a completely new shape.)