One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  Personally, I ended the day with a smile of relief. As you will by now have realized, I try to deal only in ‘facts’ and my facts looked good to me. The Args started this game with five Exocets – five aces – and they had now, incontrovertibly, played them all, on 4, 25 and 30 May. Each time they let them loose at the first radar blip they saw – a set of three incompetent blunders which may very well cost them this war.

  17

  Port Unpleasant

  During the course of my ‘cruise’ I had watched the ice and frost of winter fall away behind us as we worked our way down to Gibraltar. Spring was a season I had not often witnessed on land since my school days. It may seem surprisingly unobservant of me but I actually was never sure which bloomed first, the blossom of the pear or the apple, until my first staff appointment ashore at the age of thirty-nine. But there was no time for either this year. Running south, with the seasons cascading one upon the other, my spring gave way to a brief equatorial summer in April and then we hurried immediately into a southern autumn, as April turned to May.

  Now, still staring out over Hermes‘s busy flight deck at the cold, shifting grey-green waters, I saw May turn at last into flaming June, the summer season back home – of the Derby, of Wimbledon, of Royal Ascot, with the Round the Island Race and Cowes Week to follow. I felt more than a little deprived. On the black night of 31 May I wrote, rather plaintively in my diary: ‘Oh, for the peace of the Isle of Wight on a summer evening.’ But realities, as ever, pressed. With Goose Green and Darwin back in British hands, after a bitter and dogged action fought by the Paras, the land-force commander was preparing to break out of our Carlos Water beach-head and establish two new operational areas from which to launch the main assault on the Argentinian positions around Port Stanley.

  The first was Teal Inlet, a huge area of open country broken by many inter-connecting stretches of open water, with its twisting, narrow entrance leading in off the long northern coast of East Falkland – fifteen miles deep from northern entrance to southern shallows (and early on rejected as a possible landing site because the Arg Navy could too easily have bottled us up in there). The second area was that of Bluff Cove, which sits on the Atlantic side of East Falkland, about fourteen miles west-south-west of Port Stanley, in a small bay reaching north off Port Fitzroy.

  The general plan was that the land forces could advance from both of these operational areas simultaneously, thus forcing the Args to defend their Port Stanley stronghold almost on two fronts. For the land forces this would mean splitting their advance and forcing an added element of confusion upon the enemy when they realized we were coming at them from two directions. For the Royal Navy it meant a period of unprecedented activity which was going to need a masterpiece of planning and compliance. For a start, we would be trying to cope with five different areas of operation, each with its own special requirements, yet each related to the others:

  a) the Battle Group area itself, ‘home’ to the total of thirty-five warships fighting this campaign and positioned in the eastern sector of the TEZ;

  b) the TRALA (tug, repair and logistics area), the mobile ‘home’ for any damaged warships making final preparations for the long voyage back north; and ‘home’ also for the Royal Fleet Auxiliaries not required to stay up with the Battle Group and for all amphibious and merchant ships not required inshore – it was a sea-bound base camp for fuel, stores and the not-so-fit, positioned outside and east of the TEZ;

  c) Carlos Water itself, still the highly dangerous main land-force base and main ‘harbour’ into which the warships led the supply convoys every night and which we had to defend with frigates/ destroyers at all times – renamed on 1 June ‘TA’ (transport area) as opposed to the old AOA (amphibious operating area);

  d) Teal Inlet, our new base, into which we had to send at least one of the LSLs, packed with supplies for 3 Commando Brigade, and which would be a major build-up because this base took twenty-five miles off the sixty-mile overland journey from San Carlos to Port Stanley. In the coming week the Navy would make numerous journeys into Teal;

  e) Bluff Cove, our second new base, would contain the troops of the Scots and Welsh Guards and General Moore’s Headquarters – as at Teal, we had to get LSLs into the deep bay and protect them from air attack, but it was a much longer journey from the TA.

  So there was no chance to stop and draw breath. Ships and tankers, laden with thousands of tons of fuel, stores and ammunition were arriving down the Atlantic almost daily and reporting to the TRALA. From there they awaited their warship escorts before being shepherded along the hundred-and-twenty-mile seaway into the TA for unloading. In addition, frigates steamed in from the Battle Group every night to form the now-familiar gun lines off the coast, pouring harassing fire into known Argentinian positions, in direct support of land operations.

  Out in the Battle Group, it was the big City that never sleeps. The ceaseless hum of activity rendered the night hours little different from those of day, save for the roar of the Harriers, to and from the decks of Hermes and Invincible, which tended to die out at dusk and begin again at dawn. Those who worked in the tense gloom of the Ops Rooms, among the screens and the flickering lights of the computers, were of course cocooned from the cutting winds and rising seas of the southern ocean outside. But it was difficult, on a personal level, for any of them to keep track of the days of the week, never mind night and day. The bustle and babel of the watch-changes were about all that marked their calendar.

  The loss of the Atlantic Conveyor also had its effect, for this ship had been, at the time of the missile strike, on station in the heart of the Battle Group. She was the first British ship to be so destroyed (Sheffield, when hit, had been a front-line picket ship positioned far out on the Group’s most remote outpost). The double-Exocet hit which had sent the big freighter to the bottom of the Atlantic had shown all of us that the Args could actually get deep in among us with that confounded missile and it served to focus the minds ever more sharply.

  It made me, if anything, rather crustier. I suppose I was, as often as not, trying to juggle and separate about two hundred different thoughts. One of them, however, represented my mainstream opinion: that if the land forces do not get their skates on, the Args are going to get in here again and it is a matter of time before they find a way to hit the British carriers and remove half our air force at a stroke. That preoccupied me above all else. Subconsciously it lurked behind all of my other considerations and I suppose it was magnified in my own mind by the fact that I felt I ought not to interfere with the tasks of the land commanders, least of all by carelessly halving their fixed-wing air support as well as half their helicopter force in Conveyor. We had, after all, landed a sizeable force on the beaches of the Falkland Islands, barely twenty-four hours late on a six-week crash programme. There had been no casualties during the landing and before achieving it we had frightened the entire Argentinian Navy back into their home ports. No one should be left in much doubt that the land forces were expected to perform with equal dispatch despite the difficulties. The trouble was, as we entered the month of June, I was having to live with the tyranny of that little bar-chart drawn up so long ago at Ascension. As forecast, the Battle Group was now well on its way to falling apart: aside from the losses, we were coping with daily breakdowns in equipment and, as the land forces prepared for the break-out from Carlos, we faced an almost overwhelming workload.

  ‘The Glorious First of June’ is a celebratory day in the Royal Navy when we are all invited to recall the famous victory over the French in the North Atlantic in 1794 by the sixty-eight-year-old British admiral, Lord Howe, known (I am told, affectionately) as ‘Black Dick’. Students of naval history will know that the old boy battered the French battle fleet from dawn till dusk, sank one ship and captured six others as prizes. However, as that rather awkward-minded schoolboy back at Dartmouth I had wondered about the fact that Admiral Howe was actually supposed to be preventing a big consignment of American grain reaching Fran
ce. For all the blood and thunder of British victory, that French convoy still got through. The failure to achieve the aim, in my youthful opinion, had been completely obscured by the glory of the battle.

  Well, here we were again, at war, a hundred and eighty-eight years later, in a similar sort of situation, albeit with the roles a bit muddled up. I had a sort of ‘grain convoy’ to get through, in the form of the continued support of the land forces, and there could be no battles, glorious or inglorious, which put that at risk. The date 1 June 1982 saw everyone as jumpy in the Ops Room of Hermes as they doubtless had been in Howe’s Flagship Queen Charlotte on this very day so long ago. A spurious call to ‘Action stations’ saw everyone tearing around in a collective frenzy before the admiral had even finished his breakfast. A short while later we heard one of the Harriers had splashed a big Argentinian C130 transport aircraft near Carlos, which made us all feel much better. We’d been after them for weeks now.

  Then I began to worry about the horrendous volume of signals required to keep the whole act together, not just locally in the south, but between the task groups and the UK. The whole communications system was already grossly overloaded and could come to a grinding halt if we had a major operational problem. Meanwhile the ever-present threat of Exocet was at the back of my mind. The weather was sometimes quite good enough for the Etendards and I could not get away from the fact that ‘my frigates’ were ‘literally all over the bloody place’, as my diary reminds me.

  As a matter of fact 1 June was very like 2 June, and 3 June, and 4 June. We kept at it night and day, through varying degrees of fog, cold, wind and cloud. Fixed-wing flying was occasionally curtailed, but the ships, of course, kept going. Active, Ambuscade and Cardiff valiantly tried to keep up a nightly bombardment of East Falkland. Avenger had a go at deterring any return of Arg aircraft to Pebble Island, while the ever-aggressive Plymouth blitzed Port Howard on her way home from escort duties. Hugh Balfour’s Exeter had the uncomfortable task of standing ‘missile trap’ off Stanley. Brilliant, Avenger, Broadsword and Minerva also undertook escort duties bringing the convoys inshore, and Yarmouth took care of Sir Galahad and Sir Bedivere on the back-up runs to Teal from the TA. Sir Percivale had paved the way through these tricky, hemmed-in waters, unloading three hundred tons on the first day. Her sister ship Sir Tristram began the opening up of Port Fitzroy and Intrepid transported 5 Brigade from the TRALA to the beaches. Somehow we brought Canberra, the Great White Whale, back into Carlos Water for the first time since 21 May and, more impressively, after one hundred chopper-unloadings, we got her safely back out again, escorted by Plymouth and Minerva. Argonaut, repaired as well as she could be, transferred her stores and left for home on 4 June.

  During these long and busy days I had made several rather telling notes in my diary, some of them concerned with my other preoccupation about getting a landing strip for the Harriers organized in the TA in order to take the endless pressure off the flight decks of the carriers. Also I recorded formally that in my opinion the intelligence people were moving into a total ‘decline’, forecasting ‘last desperate efforts by the Argentinians’. I allowed myself the indulgence of adding:

  Am very impatient for the FOB (Forward Operating Base, Landing Strip) to come on to service for the SHARs [Sea Harriers] – then I should be able to unhook myself from this too-well-trodden patch of water.

  For myself, these days are not so easy. Some of the pressure – in terms of innovation and involvement – is off. We are faced with the need to act in an almost entirely defensive/supportive role, with little control of events. It is becoming more difficult to hold the act together as a result. While in no way wishing for a major upsurge in activity, we are not well adjusted to this phoney phase and probably need to be replaced soon by a new team, which can start afresh with new ideas.

  During these quiet-ish few days I also took note of a piece of intelligence that suggested the Args had set up a land-based Exocet battery in the Stanley area and, not wishing to find out the hard way, I pulled the naval gunfire ships off early on the very first morning we had the information. I wrote in my diary: ‘No doubt CLFFI [Commander Land Forces Falkland Islands] will be unhappy, but so would I be at the loss of another frigate or destroyer.’

  Every few days we received bundles of newspaper clippings – a couple of weeks late – which I thought showed a remarkable breadth of support for this military action, resisted only by the more left-wing leaders. Even the trade unions seemed solid behind us. I nevertheless suspected that if, with typical British understatement, it was all made to look too easy – though exactly how that was to be done was not very obvious to me – the ‘typically British’ audience might start to see us as ‘bullies’. Perhaps with this in mind I wrote on the night of 3 June: ‘It is an extraordinary world. I am left more than ever convinced that this has been “nip and tuck” all the way, mostly on account of the Exocet threat and the poor showing of our missile systems, and the extremely determined attacks of the Argentinian Air Force.’

  By now, the runs to Teal Inlet were becoming fairly routine. It seemed that only I was a bit edgy about it. I understood that we had only one LSL in there at a time and that the chances of detection by the Args were not high. So the achievements justified the risk. And yet…I could never be entirely happy with this sort of thing. Single ships in the middle of nowhere, particularly with no defence at all against air attack, were bound eventually to catch it – as both sides knew well enough from bitter experience now. I think I had it in my mind that CLFFI, who had only arrived in the Falklands after the actual landing, might not have fully taken in how thunderously lucky we had been on D-Day, putting the land forces ashore without loss to them and without even taking an attack of any sort on the troopships and supply ships.

  CLFFI might, I feared, have missed the important point that the Args had gone for the wrong targets, attacking the escorts instead of the landing force. I knew of no guarantee that they would do the same if they found a heavily laden LSL sitting calmly in the still waters of Teal Inlet. Anyhow, landings were not my job and the smoother things went at Teal, the more confident we would all become. My concerns had to remain unvoiced – not least because the very last thing I wanted to do was to slow up the advance by being over-cautious.

  As the days passed, the relatively peaceful build-up at Teal did indeed inspire CLFFI to want to repeat the dose on the southern flank, somewhere in the Fitzroy/Bluff Cove area. I was asked for my view on the possibility of taking in an LPD, Fearless or Intrepid, and several LSLs rather than having 5 Brigade walk from the TA or Darwin the forty-odd miles overland. The land force commander was, not without reason, concluding that to take the troops round by ship would take five hours, whereas to walk would take at least two days. They knew well that speed was essential, if not ‘at all costs’. They had been left in no doubt of that before they even landed.

  But, despite this, their plan did not seem worth while. I knew that the prospect of an operation involving several amphibious ships, and their frigate and destroyer escorts, effectively another complete landing well clear of Carlos Water and its air defences, would hold little appeal back at Headquarters in Northwood. I recognized my own position in all this as ‘on the fringe’ and, though I could of course have stopped it, I did not really wish to do that – after all I had already done my utmost to get the land forces to press on. It was no use blowing ‘hot and cold’. So I cravenly decided to allow Northwood to do it for me. Which they did.

  In my diary, on the night of 4 June, I wrote the following:

  And CLFFI is proposing a mini D-Day all over again at Bluff Cove on the 6th. Perhaps they still do not understand how fortunate we were on D-Day when the Args went for the wrong targets, and perhaps they have forgotten that, when the Args finally corrected their mistake on D+3 and 4 [24 and 25 May], the Rapier batteries were in action. Above all they appear to have forgotten that Bluff Cove is in open country and not a bit like Carlos Water.

  It seems daft
to take this size of risk for the sake of a two-day march. [You could] send the War Maintenance Reserve by LSL – probably get away with that, if the weather is bad. But don’t put two battalions back into such hazard, just because the opposition seems to have taken a day off. [This is] all very difficult. I don’t want to cramp CLFFI’s style, nor do I want to slow him up. Nor yet do I wish to be seen to tell him his business. But…!

  The essence of the problem is that such a move could blow the entire operation. Unless it is essential to success, it should not be undertaken.

  1600. It emerges that Fleet also don’t much like the idea…so it probably won’t happen.

  Underlying this whole calculation was a strange bit of misinformation. I had been told by my experts in such matters that land forces could ‘move at two miles an hour’ – I should have been more sceptical. Unlike ships which at two knots will cover twenty-four miles in twenty-four hours, what they actually meant but failed to mention, was ‘two miles an hour for five hours a day if you’re lucky, and less if there’s any opposition’. Nevertheless, a four-day march would have been better than what finally happened. But how was anyone to know? And I had recommended the land force went ‘high risk’ even if they didn’t like being told their own business.

  The following morning, 5 June, things looked rather better all round. The thick fog was now only patchy, so we got the combat air patrol up early and it landed, at last, on the new strip on shore, which had been named HMS Sheathbill in the Navy’s tradition of naming such areas after sea-birds. This new ‘airfield’ did not solve all our problems at a stroke, but it was going to be a considerable help. As my diary said that day: