One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  Within minutes the great heaving freighter had sucked in the life rafts which were squashing the men against the ship’s side, a terrifying experience, especially for the several non-swimmers who found it difficult enough just to breathe. But Mike Layard hung on to Ian North until finally he got a hand on a life raft. He summoned all of his remaining strength and shoved the old captain in the small of the back, straight at the raft, but the sea broke over them. Captain Layard went under, grabbing for Ian North, but when the Royal Navy officer came up there was no sign of the Master of the Conveyor. With frantic courage Captain Layard dived after him.

  But Ian North was gone, claimed by the great sea he had been plying all of his working life. Mike Layard surfaced again half drowned, grabbed at another man in trouble and swam with him to the raft, from which hands reached down and heaved them aboard. The captain passed out after that and it was several minutes before they could revive him. When he did regain consciousness he could only see the bright orange glow of the burning Cunarder and he sat with his head in his hands and wept for his friend, Captain Ian North. The trauma stayed with him for a long time too. Thirteen days later when he arrived back in England they had arranged a press conference, but it had to be delayed for half an hour because Captain Layard couldn’t bear it, unable to speak for the lump in his throat. It’s often that way with the bravest of men.

  Meanwhile there was still enormous danger in the life rafts as the rising stern kept sucking them in towards her, then, falling again, threatening to squash them. Not for the first time completely regardless of his own safety, Commander Christopher Craig, minesweeper extraordinary, brought Alacrity right up to the floating time-bomb which was the Conveyor – she would surely have taken them both to the bottom if she had exploded – and fired lifelines over to the rafts. Then gently, he backed his ship away and towed them all clear.

  By now I was back out on my bridge and I could see the Atlantic Conveyor burning on the horizon. I watched her, on and off, until she disappeared in the dark distance and wondered, without much genuine optimism, if they could save anything, if we could get a salvage party on board and reclaim some of her precious equipment. But the following morning she was just a dangerous, drifting hulk as another internal explosion blew her bow off. Her war had lasted exactly thirty days and, even without her final mission accomplished, we still owed her a considerable debt. Not least, I suppose, because she was in a dead line between Hermes and Ambuscade. If the Conveyor had possessed a chaff system and decoyed the missiles, they might have come straight on for the carrier. We may, or may not, have been able to divert them yet again.

  Conveyor’s loss left the Land Forces very badly placed for any means of transport other than walking to get from Carlos to Stanley. And it left me assailed by guilt – again. Was it all my fault? Had I just made a horrendous mistake? Should I have left her safely to the east of the Battle Group until dark? Who knows? I suppose if I had waited and let her go in late and the Args had blown her apart with bombs the following morning, everyone would have assumed automatically that I was off my head for not getting her in there earlier and on her way home by dawn. You can’t win, as ever. Sad and troubled as I was, I resolved once more to put it behind me and to press on.

  I sat down to finish my diary, and saw that it was still not quite midnight. ‘Sod it!’ I said to myself bitterly. ‘It’s still 25 May. Will this bloody day ever end?’ In the late afternoon I had felt fairly certain this was the worst day of my life. Now I was sure of it. My diary paragraph, as always, reflected my despondency by being as dry as dust, as if I were trying to write the emotion out of it. ‘Half an hour later two Etendards got in amongst the Battle Group – actually detected on radar in good time, like at twenty-four miles from Ambuscade, twenty-eight miles by Brilliant, and even in Hermes, visually by all. Seduced by Ambuscade’s chaff and went for Atlantic Conveyor – both hit, well aft. Conveyor a total loss, but eighty per cent of crew saved and one Chinook and one Wessex 5. Down goes another £100 million worth. The Etendards got away, having fired at the first thing they saw.’

  As if my half-morbid, half-furious mood were not enough, there was yet another serious cause for anger circulating the Ops Rooms of Operation Corporate. You will doubtless recall that several of the bombs which hit the British ships in Carlos Water had, happily for us, not exploded, thus saving a considerable number of lives. Well, on the evening of 23 May – forty-eight hours ago – the BBC, in the light of information from the MOD, announced this. Not content with broadcasting it locally in London, for the ears of any Argentinian diplomat or military attaché, they actually put it out on the World Service for the entire South Atlantic to hear. Some of my officers were outraged and their anger was fuelled by the inescapable coincidence that all three bombs which had hit Coventry had exploded. Of course the Args may have sorted out the fusing problems on their own, but that could not stop much hostile comment about ‘shallow, smug, half-educated morons who work at the BBC’. As you can imagine, since the BBC World Service was the sole source of media information to us, we were less than delighted.

  I realized their self-appointed task as ‘Fearless Seekers After Truth’ was, to them, sacrosanct. But their ‘ratings’ that week just may have been paid for with the blood of Captain Hart-Dyke’s people. This ought to have upset me too, but I couldn’t allow myself to be put off balance by this sort of thing – for me, it could only be classified as ‘spilt milk’. And, as the BBC told me years later, the information had been given to them by the MOD anyway. While it was clear that something must be done by someone about this sort of carelessness, it was unlikely to be me.

  Finally, 25 May ended. The new early morning saw me, as I had been so often, sitting by myself in my cabin, putting yesterday behind me and trying to formulate my thoughts for the immediate future. I began by revising my ‘Lessons’ – they were fairly rough notes, so I have added occasional words for clarification here.

  Radar will detect and track aircraft and missiles at reasonable range.

  Chaff can seduce [Exocet], off small ships [Ambuscade] anyway.

  Using merchant vessels as spare targets probably not such a good idea – unless they [also] have chaff.

  Remember UAA1 distribution for the screen [picket line]. OK this time, but more by accident […than design].

  Keep escorts fairly well forward for early warning.

  Do not have too many ships, in depth, down Anti-Air Warfare axis otherwise missile [Exocet] has too many chances to get it right.

  Stay outside 460-mile circles [from Arg mainland air bases]; we’d had to creep inside for CAP [over AOA].

  Turn towards [incoming missiles]. At least you present the strongest part of the ship that way.

  [To find the escaping Etendards] Fire [send] CAP straight out along the initial bearing [of Handbrake warning]. Opposition will be scampering low out along it.

  Cross fingers.

  Beneath these notes I wrote the words: ‘And so the war will go on. Setbacks, yes. Defeat, no. But we are very much in need of a decent airfield ashore.’

  In terms of actual air-sea combat, the following four days passed relatively quietly, in variously bad weather, fog, gales and big seas. The Args launched very few attacks at us. No ships were hit, although we did lose an RAF Harrier and a Royal Marine Scout over Goose Green – and a Sea Harrier slid off the wet deck of Invincible, as the ship heeled in a turn. We bombed the Mount Kent area and wiped out an army Puma, and Fearless and Intrepid downed a Skyhawk with gunfire in Carlos Water. The troops on land knocked out a couple of Pucaras, a naval Macchi 339 and a Dagger with Blowpipe and Rapier, and one Arg pilot drove into a hillside by mistake in yet another Pucara.

  I was feeling a bit depressed on Wednesday morning 26 May, probably a bout of post-Coventry blues, exaggerated by continued strain and worry, which is never very easy to live with. As much as anything it was the waiting that sometimes got me down. Once it all started happening I often felt almost a sense of release, hopin
g somehow that it could all be decided soon – although I knew it would not, short of our suffering a really frightful disaster.

  By now I was also beginning to experience a symptom which has afflicted just about every Navy commander involved in an amphibious landing in the history of the world – that of an unreasonable, obdurate, barely controlled feeling of frustration with your own forces ashore! What the hell are they doing? Digging bloody holes? Cleaning their little rifles? Looking at maps? Waiting for their nutty rations? My ships have now unloaded five thousand tons of kit for five and a half thousand troops – that’s nearly a ton each! What more do they want? All these short-tempered thoughts were constantly in my mind. I wrote in my diary: ‘The land force will probably bog down (because they always do)’. On another separate piece of paper I actually wrote the words in block capitals: ‘THEY’VE BEEN HERE FOR FIVE DAYS AND DONE F*** ALL!’ Thankfully that particular piece of paper no longer exists but I thought it worth recording as an illustration of Royal Naval irritation with their less-mobile land-bound colleagues. To us they always seem to act so slowly.

  However, I was determined not to try to run the land-force commander’s battle for him and hence resolved to confine myself merely to keeping him informed of our rapidly dwindling support capability. I wrote, to wrap it all up, in my diary, ‘Conclusion: the battle is high risk at sea and in the air. It must now go high risk on land.’ I felt strongly enough to pass this thought directly to the land-force commander together with a reminder that mid-June was the end date I had in mind. I got it wrong again – though he certainly did need to be kept informed what my situation was, the last sentence was interpreted as trying to run his battle for him. Having just lost most of his air transport force for him, it was not exactly well-timed.

  The other thought that preoccupied me was the old and vexed problem of trying to stop Exocet. I did not yet know whether the missiles which hit and sank Atlantic Conveyor had been fired from an Etendard which had been refuelled. My opinion was that it had not – that it was at the maximum extent of its range – but that I could expect them to solve the refuelling problem soon enough. I was entirely wrong, as it happened. They had already solved the problem. It was also beginning to occur to me that they might yet find a way to refuel the Etendards twice, permitting them to come all the way round and in behind the Battle Group from the east, avoiding my carefully placed pickets twenty miles up-threat to the west of the carriers.

  All the above thoughts were made worse by the realization that the Args might also find a way to replenish their supplies of Exocet. As it was we thought they had one, possibly two left, and that the Etendard range was still around four hundred to four hundred and forty miles. It would be extremely bad news if they improved both their supplies and their range, and I thought once more, just as I had done a couple of weeks ago, that we, somehow, had to remove the Etendards from the Arg Order of Battle.

  Between my machinations over this ever-present threat, I did some careful stocktaking and that was not the happiest read you have ever seen either. British losses: Harriers (five); several SK4s and 5s; Chinooks (three); Wessex (five); Ardent, Antelope, Sheffield, Coventry and Atlantic Conveyor. Badly damaged: Argonaut, Antrim and Glasgow; LSLs (two); Arrow (defective). In return we had put something like seventy Argentinian aircraft out of action, destroyed or otherwise written off; we’d sunk their only cruiser, captured one very broken submarine and removed a few auxiliaries/fishing vessels. Both navies had taken a fairly comprehensive hammering, but the weather had been generally against us and helpful to the Args. But we had established our beach-head, firmly.

  However, with the elements of surprise and manoeuvre by this time largely lost, we were into a strictly attritive war, but one where you have to ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’ – ships for aircraft, aircraft for soldiers, soldiers for time, and time for ships. And we were rapidly approaching the point where our biggest enemy was time. Just as that little bar-chart had insisted back at Ascension Island, failure by the land-force commander to win the land battle by mid to late June will cause him to lose it because the Battle Group will lose it for him. We will simply be unable to support and protect him. We will be unable to go on fighting. There’ll be nothing much left out here to fight with.

  During these four days, up until the night of the twenty-ninth, the Args did launch one serious raid, for the first time hitting targets on the land around Carlos Water. They blew up an ammunition dump and damaged a temporary field hospital in Ajax Bay. We in turn hit them with a diversionary cover of over sixteen tons of shells from five ships while the Paras took Goose Green. This was of course that amazing battle in which the troops in red berets ran into a surprisingly strong Arg defence, unhappily thought at the time to be a result of the BBC World Service announcement that ‘the Paras are moving towards Darwin’. At least the soldiers thought so. I doubt if the Parachute Regiment will ever entirely forgive the BBC despite the BBC’s best attempts to set the record straight.

  But, again, I digress. By now we had been reinforced by HMS Cardiff, a three-year-old Type 42 guided-missile destroyer under the command of another ex-submarine officer Captain Mike Harris. Two elderly sister ships to our battered Leander Class frigate Argonaut had also arrived – HMS Minerva and HMS Penelope. Every night we sent our small supply convoys in to the AOA shepherded by the warships and every night we battered away at Arg positions on the islands, their bases and their airstrips.

  On 30 May, however, the scene changed. The Argentinian High Command decided to fire what was their last remaining Exocet and again they made a firm decision to try to aim it at Hermes or Invincible. At their present Exocet strike rate they had an even-money chance of hitting something, but longish odds against hitting a carrier.

  In our favour, apart from the lessons of the last two Exocet attacks, we now had the very latest version of the Sea Dart system in the Royal Navy – the one in Exeter, the Type 42 commanded by Hugh Balfour. He was a rather smooth chap really, a bit of a dandy, but a very modern thinker and, as a communications officer, he was an expert in satellites and electronic warfare. He was the type of man you associate with clean white handkerchiefs in the breast pocket, a bit upmarket, perhaps even a dilettante, and quite the opposite of the traditionally ’grimy submariner’. That said, however, Hugh Balfour was also the precise opposite of a dilettante – he was a sharp, professional warfare specialist and the master of that brand-new Sea Dart system in Exeter. It actually saved about fifteen vital seconds in engagement time compared with the best that Glasgow and Coventry could do due to brilliant new software.

  Anyway, the Args elected to send up two Etendards, one with the missile, another for additional radar assistance. They would be accompanied by four Skyhawks of 4th Air Brigade, each armed with two five-hundred-pound bombs. Their brief was to use the Exocet as their guide to the carrier while the Etendards turned away for home. I of course was entirely ignorant of this ‘Good night, Woodward’ scenario of theirs. I was also unaware of the route they planned, which was to run due east for four hundred miles from Rio Grande and then turn north-west, hoping to catch us in the rear. As a serious attack mission, it was not badly thought out, even though it did require a very long round trip.

  They took off and made their air refuelling rendezvous and then headed on in towards the British Battle Group, in which Cardiff and Exeter were out on the westerly picket line, with Captain Hugo White’s Type 21 frigate Avenger, largely by chance, steaming twelve miles south-south-east of them. Twenty miles further back to the east were ranged the fleet auxiliaries and three and a half miles behind them were the two carriers, Hermes seven miles due north of Invincible. The Argentinians flew as usual below the radar, until they ‘popped up’ at 1631Z for the Etendards to scan the sea with their radars, looking for the British Fleet.

  As they did so, the most attention-getting Ops Room call in the South Atlantic was broadcast from Exeter: ‘Handbrake! Two-Two-Five.’

  Within seconds Exeter had a warning on
the networks and Cardiff, Avenger and Exeter all swung around to face the attack from the south-west. The two Etendards ‘popped up’ once more three minutes later. All three British ships saw them on their radar screens and they all knew that an Exocet missile, fired at twenty-one miles range, was on its way – and that there were four aircraft coming in right behind it.

  Captain Balfour ordered his first Sea Dart away. The missile travelled close past Avenger and, five miles later, obliterated the lead Skyhawk, killing the pilot Primer Teniente Vazquez. The other three pilots pressed on, but either Exeter’s second Sea Dart or Avenger’s 4.5-inch gun blew another of them away, killing that pilot too.

  Meanwhile the Exocet, either poorly aimed or unserviceable, passed harmlessly mid-way between Exeter and Avenger, with several miles to spare on either side. With immense gallantry, the other two Argentinian pilots, feeling extremely lonely by now, continued to race forward, determined to press home their attack. They went for Avenger, now surrounded by smoke from the gun which was still blazing away at the Skyhawks. Their bombs, however, missed as they overflew the frigate and they shot through the smoke at over four hundred knots, banking away for home, the hair on the back of their necks doubtless standing on end as they imagined the Sea Harriers lancing down from the rear, Sidewinders at the ready. As it happened they made it home safely, to regale their commanders with just about the least accurate story of the whole war: that they had bombed Invincible, which had already been struck and set on fire by the Exocet, that they had seen the smoke, witnessed the damage.

  Still, young men as brave as that deserve their fantasies and in the coming days I did not even begrudge them the frontpage picture, deftly dressed up by an artist, in the Arg newspapers which showed Invincible burning fiercely in the South Atlantic. Actually she was a good twenty miles from the action and nearly as pristine and spotless as Captain Balfour’s white handkerchief.