One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  David Pentreath ordered her hard to port, as they replied with everything they had. They got a Seacat away which damaged one of the Daggers and they blasted at the raiders with 20mm shells and machine guns, but there was no stopping all five. Four thousand-pounders hit Plymouth, not one going off, though the last blew up a depth charge being prepared for loading into a helicopter and started a major fire. It all happened terribly quickly and, as the Daggers made off, now pursued by a couple of 801 Squadron’s Harriers, they left behind five men injured and a frigate smoking spectacularly, but not by any means fatally damaged.

  The pity was that Plymouth had not had time to turn right around, because she was fitted with the new laser equipment known locally to us as ‘Flasher’ – which could well have stopped the attack in its tracks, because it literally forces any incoming pilot to pull up sharply during the forty-second period in which he cannot see. But still, Captain Pentreath, in his ageing twenty-one-year-old Type 12 frigate, did all that could reasonably have been expected. It was of course Plymouth’s last battle and, if I may, I will recall a rather crisp description of her war mentioned to me by Captain John Coward. His words were as follows: ‘Of course Plymouth was always going to cop it. She did not really have the right kit to fight these kinds of action. But I’ll never forget her in Carlos Water when we were under such serious attack – she just steamed round and round the other ships in a gesture to the Args of total defiance. She had comparatively little to fight with, just guns and an old Sea Cat – but she gave it everything. Pentreath? Bravest chap I’ve ever seen. Of course, I knew that one day we’d steam into Carlos Water and Plymouth would be not much more than a cloud of black smoke. And one day she was.’

  After the raid the Daggers headed home and there were now just five Skyhawks left, flying very low off the coast of Lafonia, heading north up the eastern coast, looking for the ships’ masts so plainly visible from the ground to the north in the afternoon sun. Shortly after 1610 the Argentinian lead pilot spotted them, ordered two Skyhawks to follow him in and they swung on to a westerly course, racing low up Port Pleasant towards the two British LSLs. I suppose it was a ground-attack pilot’s dream – two sitting ducks with none of the risk of missile, shell and bullet defences to face. They even had time to climb to a correct height to give their bombs a better chance of exploding. They dropped two, possibly three five-hundred-pounders straight into Sir Galahad, strafing her as they came in. The other two, bringing up the rear, went for Sir Tristram anchored just over a quarter of a mile away, delivered two bombs which did not explode into her stern and another, which did explode, under her stern, blowing off the ramp.

  Fortunately Sir Tristram was not full of soldiers, but Sir Galahad was, and at least one of the bombs detonated deep inside the ship causing dreadful carnage among the Guardsmen. The fires were quickly out of control and ammunition kept exploding making the situation more ghastly by the minute. Luckily there was much rescue equipment on hand – four Sea Kings, a Wessex helicopter, the LCU, a floating freight raft called a Mexeflote, two lifeboats from Sir Tristram’s and Sir Galahad’s own life boats and life rafts. It took only half an hour or so to remove those who could walk and within an hour, thanks to some extremely efficient winching-up of the stretchered wounded by the chopper crews, everyone had been evacuated from the blazing LSL.

  In the end fifty men were either killed or officially listed as missing; another fifty-seven were wounded, almost all of them badly burned. Of these, thirty-nine of the dead and twenty-eight of the wounded were from the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards, a regiment which has traditionally recruited heavily from the old coal-mining heartland of South Wales, from Cardiff and Newport, along to Llanelli and up the valleys to villages in the Rhondda – Maesteg, Bridgend, Pontypridd. None of those little communities are strangers to sadness, but the bombing of Sir Galahad will be with them all for a very long time.

  The Royal Navy lost seven dead and eleven wounded in the action and there was much gallantry during the rescue. I was particularly moved by the posthumous George Medal awarded to Sir Galahad’s Second Engineer Officer Paul Henry of Berwick-on-Tweed, who handed over the only breathing apparatus in the burning engine room to enable a junior officer to escape.

  The one mildly bright spot during the whole hideous day came shortly afterwards when yet another formation of Skyhawks came in to attack the Fitzroy base, but was caught over Choiseul Sound by the Harriers, who took three of them out with Sidewinders.

  It took a few days before most of the facts became known, but the moment I was told that two LSLs were at Bluff Cove – early on that awful day – I was extremely upset. However, I was mostly upset at myself. Because I could have stopped it. Should have stopped it. Didn’t stop it. I was supposed to be the Senior Task Group Commander down here, I had seen threatening danger, and, in a sense, turned away. My handwritten diary provides incontrovertible evidence of this. But I feared that any landing was trouble. My entry for 4 June is a page I never wish to read again.

  I must have asked myself a thousand times why I did not insist on stopping it. All I had to do was to say flatly, ‘Forget it. I will not permit our ships to undertake the mission. Find another way.’ Instead I had said nothing, at least not to those who were in command ashore. I’m fairly certain I said a few things to close colleagues out in the Battle Group and, when I get right down to some serious soul-searching, I am pretty sure I know, now, what rested at the root of my reluctance to interfere. It was I who had been urging speed, I who had been making it quite plain that the land forces must go soon and get this war over by mid-to-late June. Now that they were getting on with it, who was I to start complaining about the risks they were taking? If that was indeed the reason for my reluctance to intervene – then I am not proud of it. It is not my job to worry that I may seem to blow hot and then cold. I should have just told Commodore Mike Clapp and Major General Jeremy Moore that I was not having it and the hell with their reactions.

  In so many ways, when I look back at that campaign, I realize that quite often I am a stranger to myself. Was that really me making those decisions? I suppose the only factor that brings us together, me and my other self, is a shared conscience. That, as for all of us, is omnipresent; the echoing, lonely and hopefully truthful voice of our own soul.

  On the night of 8 June I let off steam, as usual, on the pages of my diary:

  My worries for the LSLs all too well justified. I could strangle that COMAW. After being told not to plan on putting Intrepid and the LSLs into Fitzroy, even with a frigate in daylight (but possibly given to understand he might consider one LSL a reasonable bet to get by unnoticed – see remarks 4 June). And what does he do but fire the troops in by two LSLs in broad daylight with predicted good flying weather.

  My concern and frustration urged me on: ‘I should have stopped him of course [i.e. on 4 June]. And it’s my own fault – if only I’d seen it coming in time. I just had not realized the two LSLs were out on their own until mid-afternoon, when, almost without thinking, I decided not to countermand; and hope they’d get away with it.’

  In my own defence I reasoned that even if I had countermanded it it would not have helped much, as the LSLs ‘would still have been exposed – albeit somewhere else [that is, between Carlos and Fitzroy] with more kit/people on board, and a good deal further to swim’. I suppose in the end history may judge that the dramatic change in the weather was the single most significant cause of the tragedy. And I later found out that the prediction of a marked change for the ‘better’ had not reached COMAW or CLFFI before the operation was fully committed. After working for so many days under the cover of mist and low cloud, suddenly everyone was unexpectedly out in the bright sunlight again, with the amazing visibility you get in those latitudes. That, as we know only too well, changes things.

  As for ‘strangling that COMAW’, how many times have I said, ‘I could strangle that cat,’ when it knocks something over, or doesn’t quite make it to the garden in time after being giv
en too much to eat? I feel better when I have said it, without necessarily blaming the cat for what has happened and certainly with no intention of taking one of its nine lives.

  One of my deep regrets about the ‘Bluff Cove Disaster’ is that it will always remain some people’s abiding memory of the Falklands War – because television was there, filming horrific live pictures of burnt and badly injured soldiers. As a military disaster it was not, in context, so earth-shakingly dreadful. The losses of Sheffield, Coventry and Ardent were individually not quite so serious in terms of dead and wounded, but collectively they were considerably worse. Belgrano was of course worse than all of them. Indeed, a few days previously I heard that a flood in Indonesia had killed more than two hundred people. I suspect we all have to learn to live with the fact that television magnifies drastically what is already awful and somehow diminishes in importance that which it does not see.

  Later that night I heard of yet another delay by the land troops and yet again returned to my diary to write, somewhat helplessly:

  I now hear CLFFI is going to delay an extra twenty-four hours on top of the last seventy-two. His people will soon run out of steam, I’m afraid – the cold front is due in tonight. And there seems to be stuff-all I can do, except hope the Army get on with it and succeed before the Args nibble too much of our naval strength away. It is only a matter of time before they find some way to get at us effectively – be it by submarine, A4s plus Etendards for attack direction, Canberra or whatever. Attrition is very difficult to cope with when your assets are both finite and critical to the operation…

  I still see no likely end to this war and the only comfort is that the Args possibly don’t either.

  The night passed quietly, too quietly, I thought, and was followed by a cold bright day. The C-in-C, clearly less than happy about Bluff Cove, was on the phone-link to me in the morning. I am proud to confirm that we both managed to avoid saying to the land force commander ‘I told you so’. But then neither of us had really told him so in the first case: he had been told that a full-scale landing was not on, but then we had got away with one LSL at Teal – two more at Fitzroy were not totally unreasonable, if the bad weather had held. Anyway, we didn’t linger on it as the main topic of the conversation emerged: Fleet was clearly no longer planning to replace me down here with the Flag Officer of the Third Flotilla. ‘Won’t be coming as soon as we thought,’ was Admiral Fieldhouse’s throwaway last remark. It sounded like a life sentence to me. That’s the main trouble with being more or less trusted by your superiors.

  On a total digression, I learned from Mike Clapp’s book in 1992 that it was at about this time that he received a signal from my callsign, recommending that we should send the LSL’s straight into Port Stanley to bring the war to an early close. He sensibly ignored it, mentally filing it as either some kind of tasteless joke or more ‘crass meddling’ from offshore. Had I received such a signal from him, I would have felt much the same no doubt. I still wonder where on earth it actually originated from bearing in mind my clearly stated views on sending even one LSL forward on its own, and knowledge that this was no time, nor was it any subject, for joking.

  Joke or no joke, by whoever, wherever, on 10 June Yarmouth battered the mountains, we flew forty-four CAPs, sometimes with as many as sixteen aircraft over the island and Active went in to the southern gun line in company with Arrow. Out in the Battle Group we waited and I spent much time alone in the cabin – writing ill-tempered little essays in my diary.

  This waiting is awful. I believe even the Args are getting fed up with it and threatening to attack. If CLFFI gets to hear about that, he’ll no doubt have to completely re-organize and delay for several more weeks. If I had behaved like the land forces, we’d never have bloody well landed! I just don’t understand, and therefore can’t accept, these interminable delays: the Navy gets prepared and goes in within a day [of our planned date]. These ceremonious duffers take two weeks for a recce. There seems to be no room for improvisation, initiative, or even real skill. It’s straight ‘left, right, left, right’. And most of it spent marking time. To my mind the idea of ‘mobile forces’ has been completely lost…and we must be as vulnerable to ‘blitzkrieg’ as we were last time…Absolutely appalling – they’re even waiting for the NAAFI packs now, with cigarettes, soap and razors. The mind boggles…

  The tide is setting in our direction as strongly now as it ever will. This may, or may not be, strong enough, but it’s the best we’ll ever get. Therefore go now and accept the risks.

  Years later, as I began to prepare my records for the creation of this book, I was moved to write the following retraction in the space beneath:

  Plainly not ‘ceremonious duffers’ as Brigadier Julian Thompson’s book No Picnic makes abundantly clear to me now. Though no complaint was heard from ashore at the time, the loss of Atlantic Conveyor’s Chinook and WX5 helicopters (which could well be laid at my door) had a major effect on land-force mobility.

  My impatience stemmed from chilling consciousness that the Battle Group was running out of steam and from substantial ignorance of conditions ashore. This kind of comment is an excellent example of reading too much into a contemporary diary. Having written it, I felt a bit better and avoided sending an offensive and probably counter-productive message to CLFFI thereby.

  I thus present both passages for your perusal and trust that Jeremy Moore will understand my reasons for revealing my lack of insight into his problems, but be gracious enough to forgive me for so doing.

  As it was the troops began their final main offensive the following day, 12 June at 0100. By the time they began to push forward we had seen Active, Commander Canter’s Type 21 frigate, blow up an Arg ammunition dump on Mount Harriet, to the delight of the British troops. The Harriers had attacked the Port Stanley garrison strongly, the Args had blown up one of their own helicopters and more Harriers had peppered the Arg positions up on the hills with bombs.

  I assigned four warships to support the British land forces in the following way:

  a) Captain Hugo White’s Avenger to provide back-up bombardment to 3 Para in their grim and bloody struggle for Mount Longdon;

  b) Captain Mike Barrow’s Glamorgan to assist 45 Commando attacking the twin peaks of Two Sisters;

  c) Commander Tony Morton’s Yarmouth to help 42 Commando take Mount Harriet ridge and then push on to Tumbledown;

  d) Commander Paul Bootherstone’s Arrow to be on hand for the Special Forces, should the need arise.

  Between them my ships had nearly fifteen hundred shells for the night’s work: Avenger alone fired one hundred and fifty-six of them with her 4.5-inch gun but the Paras nonetheless had to fight all night on Mount Longdon, losing among their eighteen dead the extraordinarily gallant Sergeant Ian Mackay who would be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

  Glamorgan had been detached inshore as usual at about 1700 to go to her gun line south of Port Stanley by 2330 – this meant making twenty-six knots, just to get there. As usual, the ship’s company went to Action Stations before entering the threat area, on this occasion at 2315, and remained at full alert throughout the night. The ship was operating very close inshore, with Yarmouth and Avenger in company, providing artillery support for the various actions being undertaken by the land forces that night. Her guns were being directed from the high ground by a naval ‘spotter’ until he was wounded, and then by a bombardier. She fired fairly continuously as the Commandos went forward to Two Sisters. The guided-missile destroyer and Yarmouth between them sent in over four hundred shells before the ships began their withdrawal at 0515. They were, in fact, a bit late in leaving because the Commandos were having a tough time on the mountain. The ship’s company of Glamorgan were stood down from Action Stations at 0530, conscious of a good night’s work.

  When finally they did break away from the Stanley gun line, I thought at the time that Glamorgan just miscalculated the edge of the ‘envelope’ we had designated as being within range of the shore-based
Exocet launcher on the road at the back of Port Harriet. But it is likely that the Argentinians had managed to move their mobile launchers a shade further east along the coast. Either way, at 0536 the Args fired one. Avenger saw it ten miles out, sounding an alarm shortly after it had been sighted visually in Glamorgan. The helm was put hard over to turn away from the missile, quite possibly saving the ship by doing so. At one-mile range they fired Seacat and, with Glamorgan still heeling to her turn, the missile clipped the upper deck exactly where it joins the hull on the port side and blew up just short of the hangar.

  It killed eight men instantly and wiped out the Wessex helicopter. Burning fuel poured through the hole in the deck and started a fire in the galley. Four cooks and a steward were killed in here and there were several other injuries. Smoke was sucked into the gas turbine room, but these engines were only temporarily put out of action by the blast effect of the Exocet explosion and by the water used for fire-fighting draining down through splinter holes, causing flooding. Glamorgan was, rather remarkably, still well able to steam and, after sorting out the immediate problems, soon worked up to twenty knots to rejoin the Battle Group. I expect the British troops on the mountains watched her go with some sadness. Mike Barrow’s ship had been an exceptionally good friend to them that night and for many, many nights before.

  My opinion at the time was that the ships had probably relaxed at just the wrong moment, and my diary note read: ‘Glamorgan, in a hurry to get back before dawn, cut the corner of the Exocet danger area – and paid the price…they were unlucky to be shot at and lucky to be hit as they were. Meanwhile we feel we know a lot more about the opposition.’