One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  I have taken Hermes out of the front line to do her boiler cleaning in order to have that out of the way before Invincible departs for her SMP/AMP. All this is necessary in case she never comes back. However, rather than retire 100 miles or so to go right down for maintenance, we need to keep flying to back up Invincible aircrew and provide GR3’s. So it’s OUT OF THE FRONT LINE, BUT ONLY JUST. The aim is quite simply to reduce the threat while we have a whole boiler room OOA [out of action].

  Convoys were unloading in Carlos Water and during the morning the Scots Guards began to embark in Intrepid, bound overnight for Fitzroy. They did not get away until shortly before midnight and when they did David Pentreath’s Plymouth sailed with them as close escort. Captain Hugo White’s Avenger steamed in front of them to Fox Bay, West Falkland, into which she began a bombardment designed to avert Argentinian attention from the 12,000-ton British assault ship.

  We had Arrow on picket duty at the north end of the Sound, with Exeter to the south in Grantham Sound, her Sea Dart system giving area air defence. Cardiff and Yarmouth were on their way in from the Battle Group to bombard the Port Stanley area. The sea was rising and a gale was beginning to build to the south-west. It was, to use an old Royal Navy colloquialism, coming on to blow.

  I remember it all too clearly. At 0100 I was standing out on the wing of my bridge in full moonlight, thinking about the ships and their activities this night. Below me I could see the deserted flight deck, with a row of Sea Harriers silently waiting. Occasionally I heard the sound of a wave breaking as fitful cold gusts whistled around the island. There was nothing else, except the strange tiny clattering of the Harriers’ little plastic wind vanes as they turned with the puffs. I even remember thinking what a very odd kind of a war we were fighting, after all we had been trained for – no real submarine threat, no serious air threat at night, little enough air threat by day now we have HMS Sheathbill. And no surface threat.

  As the night wore on, the weather rapidly grew worse. Intrepid finally made Lively Island – the disembarking point some way out from Fitzroy at the mouth of the Choiseul Sound. She dropped her LCUs before heading rather too quickly back for the relative safety of Carlos Water. Some five hundred and sixty Guardsmen set off in Intrepid’s four LCUs on the thirty-five-mile one-way trip inshore. It was to be a horrendous journey, one which should have taken under three hours but in fact was to take seven, with many of the troops very seasick and all of them soaked through to the skin.

  As Intrepid left them, strangely far short of their destination, to fight the waves in their little landing craft, Cardiff and Yarmouth arrived nearby to take up station for the nightly bombardment and the air ‘blockade’. Intrepid’s Ops Room was especially worried about a possible threat to the LCUs from an Arg air strike at night, but Cardiff and Yarmouth, under the direct control of the Battle Group, did not know about the LCUs’ activities, for the landing craft packed with the drenched Guardsmen were under the direct control of COMAW. And communications between the two groups had become heavily overloaded.

  At 0400, Cardiff‘s Ops Room was suddenly jolted into action when one of the radar operators detected an unidentified air contact moving slowly east across East Falkland.

  Urgent voices were immediately heard rising in the gloom of Cardiff’s sleepless nerve-centre: ‘What is it?’…’An Arg Hercules heading into Port Stanley?’…‘Perhaps an Arg special forces helicopter coming back in?’…‘Or could it be one of ours?’

  Captain Mike Harris’s staff raced through their signals for the night. There was nothing to indicate the presence of any British air movement in that spot, no special signal to make any exception for any British aircraft doing anything that night. This contact had come out of the box unannounced – if it was one of ours, then it had broken the golden rule, which had been designed to prevent a ‘Blue-on-Blue’ in these precise circumstances.

  With very little time to think, it had to be an Arg flying towards Port Stanley, or Fitzroy, or even out to sea. Mike Harris made the only possible decision open to him: he ordered his missile director to take the intruder out with Sea Dart. Moments later, away went the missiles, one of them knocking down the target at a range of eleven miles, a couple of miles short of Mount Pleasant. No one knew precisely what had been hit, simply an air target, detected on radar, which should have been Argentinian. Mike Harris told me the circumstances that very morning and mentioned his worry that it just could have been one of ours.

  It was very soon known that one of our Gazelle helicopters was missing, though its final resting place was not discovered for days. Only when the wreckage was found was it revealed that all four of the crew and passengers had been killed and that the wreckage was very close to the spot that Cardiff’s missile engagement had taken place. As soon as practicable, after the war was over, a full-scale investigation was made. The forensic team, with no axe to grind, stated positively that no bits of a Sea Dart missile could be found among the wreckage or even near it. This exonerated Cardiff.

  Continued pressure, apparently from the families but possibly with some political connection, eventually caused a second investigation to be started. This new forensic team reported, some three years on, that they were positive the wreckage included fragments which could only have come from a Sea Dart missile.

  There was immense consternation in very high places. We were dealing with completely contradictory reports, after all this time. Could no one be trusted to get it right? I was there, in 1985, when the Ministry of Defence had to decide between letting that particular sleeping dog lie or telling the world. The basic arguments were that it made no difference in terms of compensation payments and pensions to the families, but that it would reopen, for them, all of the old heartbreak and trauma. The brand-new, now certain knowledge that your brother/husband/son was in fact killed by his own side is no comfort to anyone. But the pressure continued and, since the letters were signed by one of the parents, we ultimately accepted that these families did, indeed, really want to know. So, the information was released and widely criticized for its tardiness.

  If, however, I were permitted to re-live the whole situation all over again, I would always be sure that Captain Harris had absolutely no alternative to the action he took in the small hours of 6 June 1982. And I would again try to protect the families from further heartbreak.

  It is important to understand that this ‘Blue-on-Blue’ was the only one between British air and sea forces throughout the entire war – which, however ghastly for relatives and friends of the dead, is nevertheless some kind of a world-record for safety, care and organization. Nonetheless, I regret it deeply and have often wondered in the still of other dark, sleepless nights whether it was not somehow my fault, as the designer of the Box. And, while on the subject of home truths, I may as well record formally that, with my usual need to consider the worst case as well as the most probable, I wrote in my diary immediately after the incident the words: ‘Horrid feeling it was a Blue/Blue, but no clues yet.’

  To return once more to that night, Cardiff‘s activity was not over even after the missiles were fired. An hour later her Ops Room located several unexpected small surface contacts well offshore, at long range, coming up from the south-west. With the real possibility of these being Arg patrol craft making a bid for the history books, Captain Harris approached with sensible caution to within 4.5-inch-gun range. A few star-shell finally illuminated, in that doom-light they give, the unhappy Guardsmen in their four struggling little LCUs battering their way towards Bluff Cove. Cardiff was still working to the rule book, but here Captain Harris had both the time and the means to check before shooting.

  Surprised and considerably relieved, Cardiff identified herself with a light signal and went about her business. I expect the poor, wretched Guardsmen had been wondering how soon the star-shell might be followed by high explosive. Rarely can there have been more heartfelt sighs of ‘Thank God’ than there were in those storm-tossed little landing craft – the age old ph
rase of the fighting soldier, ‘Phew! It’s one of ours.’ As for the enemy ashore, they would have seen nothing more than a few starshell way out to the south and assumed we were up to our usual deceptive tricks. Another potential disaster avoided by quick thinking on the part of a sharp destroyer captain.

  By the time dawn broke on 6 June, the LCUs were safe. Sir Geraint was loading for a journey to Teal, Sir Tristram was loading for Fitzroy, and the Welsh Guards were beginning to embark in Fearless which would sail at dusk for Lively Island. Exeter remained in the middle of the Sound, while Invincible and Brilliant went to the south to discourage Arg reinforcements. Commodore Sam Dunlop turned his gallant fighting workhorse Fort Austin north up the Atlantic, bound for home at last.

  Out in Hermes our engineers were taking bets as to when our boilers would pack up altogether. They had been pressing me to take the ship out of the immediate front line to do essential and overdue maintenance for some while. We had been going without any discernible service for some twenty thousand miles and we had to have them at least cleaned. I had been resisting the engineers for over two weeks, since the pressure of events suggested strongly I should do so. Now, with the critically important FOB fully operational ashore, CAP effort increased, and response time considerably improved, I could give more serious thought to the longer-term pressures of the carrier roulement problem.

  My first move was to get Hermes in best available condition before releasing Invincible for her own essential maintenance in turn. We would need to move about fifty miles further east into slightly less dangerous waters for the work to be undertaken. CAP and ground support effort from the carriers would not be significantly affected, since Hermes aircraft could be ferried through to the FOB via Invincible – meanwhile Hermes, presently with little more than half speed available, could quickly return to full operational mobility for the last few days/weeks of the land battle.

  Successful completion of the land battle and the possession of two airstrips ashore should allow us to reduce to one carrier on station. Then Invincible could immediately go well clear of the area to do a three-week extended maintenance period (at sea) before relieving Hermes for a full base maintenance period back home before taking Invincible’s place again. In view of her comparative newness, Invincible was thought much the better bet to keep going for four or five months with only three weeks sea maintenance in the middle.

  Successful completion of major work to make Port Stanley airstrip into an operational Phantom interceptor base should in turn, allow us to remove the single carrier altogether. That could take months, not helped by the onset of winter, and providing we had no further arguments from Argentina.

  Illustrious was the ‘joker’ in this pack. Her accelerated building programme was by no means certain to hold, but if it did, it would greatly ease the pressures on this dangerously tight schedule for our two existing carriers. But in June, the roulement plan could not depend on her.

  I have deliberately simplified a long, complicated bit of staffwork designed to guarantee a single carrier in support of the Islands for however long it might take to get Port Stanley airstrip upgraded to take the Phantoms. But none of it seemed a matter for my colleagues inshore to worry about, it wouldn’t affect my sea/air support of their battle and they had more than enough problems of their own. Decision made, I wrote a few philosophical notes in my diary, pondering on the behaviour of people now that we have more time to ourselves. I might have mentioned my own, since my diary entries seem to have become longer and longer as I slipped into my support role. None of the old ‘They blew my old ship Sheffield away last night’…end of note. I was now becoming a kind of Samuel Pepys of the Deep.

  I am beginning to find that the ‘ageing Lieutenant-Commander’ syndrome is making itself felt. People are beginning to find they have some time to spare and are busy organizing themselves to a complete standstill. At a certain stage, it remains my belief that the degree of organization and pre-planning has to be carefully balanced. Too little and there is chaos; too much and there is inflexibility.

  The principle of ‘Command by Negation’ [let your trusted men get on with it until they screw it up] should cope…provided they are kept fully informed of the situation as it changes. It will occasionally crumble. But these crumbles should not usually outbalance the very real advantages of flexibility, quick reaction, initiative and surprise that we gain. The essentially bureaucratic peacetime mind will, for the sake of avoiding a single Blue-on-Blue, cause Blue-on-Red [hitting the enemy] to cease!

  So, while they cleaned the boilers, I put the world to rights.

  Meanwhile, around 0300 on the seventh, Fearless, in company with Avenger and Penelope, arrived off Lively Island to discover, scarcely surprisingly, that the LCUs which had taken the Guardsmen in the previous night had not yet arrived back. So they floated out their own two LCUs to take in some of the troops – yet another ghastly journey – and went back to Carlos with the remainder.

  The morning essentially belonged to us. The Args sent out a photo-reconnaissance mission to fly very high over East Falkland in a Lear jet. Hugh Balfour’s Ops Room in Exeter was, as usual, bang on target, blowing it out of the sky with Sea Dart, killing all five occupants. While the Welsh Guardsmen embarked in Sir Galahad for the second attempt at making Fitzroy/Bluff Cove, I had a good-natured altercation with Commander Chris Craig of Alacrity, in which the 4.5-inch gun now kept going wrong. Basically its barrel was worn out and the gist of our discussion went like this:

  ‘Well,’ I reasoned, ‘I think you’d better potter off home and get it fixed.’

  Commander Craig’s predictable response being, ‘No, it’s all right, sir. I am proposing to stay here and fight until the bloody barrel drops off.’

  ‘No, Christopher,’ I continued patiently. ‘Alacrity has done well and is wearing out. Go and get her back in top-shape and then get back down here.’

  ‘Well, sir, we could certainly fight a bit longer, for the next week or so,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think so. Transfer your stores, and off you go,’ I said and falling helplessly into that rather stiff, formal tone which overtakes me when I attempt to speak from the heart, I added, ‘Christopher…thank you very much for all you have done.’ It was a pretty inadequate ‘Goodbye’ to a particularly courageous officer who had fought with us since the first day. I never have been much good at goodbyes.

  That night Sir Galahad cleared Carlos Water, bound for Port Pleasant, that particularly wind-blasted stretch of Atlantic coastline. Port Pleasant is, essentially, one large jagged bay, five miles wide by six miles deep, except that right down the middle of it is a peninsula, five miles long, shaped like a great crocodile with his jaws open to the ocean. The bay thus formed to the north of the reptile is Port Fitzroy, with Bluff Cove tucked into an inlet on the north shore. The settlement of Fitzroy sits at the end of the crocodile’s tail, mainly on the south bay, which is known as Port Pleasant.

  COMAW’s objective was to send Sir Galahad up into Port Pleasant to join Sir Tristram, disembark the Guardsmen at Fitzroy, where we now had a base, and have them walk north to Bluff Cove. They believed that the ships would be hidden from Arg eyes – which were in any case a long way off to the north-east – firstly by the weather, which was still very nasty, and by the shallow cliff at Fitzroy. This had my approval to the extent that I disliked it (as recorded in my diary entry of 4 June), but not enough to have insisted that it be stopped. I remember thinking they would probably get away with it, as long as they were swift, spent as little time as possible in unloading the LSL and the weather stayed favourable. This, by the way, did not require any colossal mental effort on my part: it is standard procedure to get any amphibious ship into an anchorage, unload it and get it out as fast as possible – preferably under the cover of darkness, fog, cloud or rain, but, in the absence of the above, certainly under full-power. Never, says the Royal Navy’s rule book, hang around in your most vulnerable position.

  With Cardiff and Yarmouth
still bombarding over to the north-east, Sir Galahad steamed on, anchoring in Port Pleasant close to Sir Tristram (still there from yesterday’s ammunition deliveries) shortly before 1000. By midday, the weather cleared. It became a bright sunny day, finally, and the two LSLs sat under brilliant blue skies in calm waters. A Sea King unloaded the Rapier troop and the Welsh Guardsmen stayed on board, waiting for the LCUs. There was some discussion between the Army commanders and Sir Galahad’s officers about the time factor and it was not until 1530 that one LCU arrived. It did, however, have a damaged ramp and at 1600 the Guards were still there, waiting under the mid-afternoon sun, which was glinting off the high point of their mast.

  There was, I believe, further discussion, about the walk to Bluff Cove. The soldiers thought it was a sixteen-mile hike, because of a damaged bridge over the creek at the end of the bay – apparently they had not been told the Paras had repaired it. One way or another they preferred to wait in the ships for further LCUs to ferry them round, directly to their destination.

  The afternoon wore on, painstakingly slowly for the unloading crews in Port Fitzroy. But a great deal quicker for the Argentinian troops dug in on the high ground up to the north-east, now enjoying a clear view of the activity around General Moore’s headquarters and of the sun-lit masts of the LSLs, stark against a darker background, with the sun now almost due north. They reported the presence of the British ships to the Arg command centre at Port Stanley. Soon after, the message was received by Southern Air Command on the mainland and altogether the Args put up six Daggers loaded with thousand-pound bombs, plus a formation of eight Skyhawks. I have no doubt they could scarcely believe their luck: ‘Bluff Cove – no hills, no cliffs, no escorts, no Rapier – no problem. Excelente.’

  They hoped to get fourteen attack aircraft in, but various fuelling and technical problems reduced this to ten. The two Argentinian formations made the journey separately with the five Daggers running north up the western side of Falkland Sound prior to making a hard right turn and coming in overland to Port Pleasant. However, as they adjusted their course, flying very fast at wave-top height they suddenly saw HMS Plymouth steaming out of Carlos Water, close off Chancho Point. The Args chose to attack the warship.