Thirteen of Glamorgan’s gallant company died, nearly as many as 3 Para in their grim fight for Mount Longdon. And so, while they built a small memorial to Sergeant Mackay up on the frozen heights of Mount Longdon – just his rifle, a Para’s helmet and a small jam jar of daffodils on the spot where he fell – we once more buried our dead at sea. Among the Royal Navy coffins which slid into the endless silence of the Atlantic depths one hundred and sixty miles east of the Falkland Islands that evening, was that of twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant David Tinker, who was killed in the hangar. He was a sensitive, intelligent young officer, with a love of literature and poetry and for this he will be remembered, for his father published a truly poignant book of his letters and writings later that year.
Essentially, this widely read book is a hymn against war and all that it stands for and in subsequent years has been recognized as a kind of cry, from beyond the grave, of a young man who understood the wickedness of it all. Almost with each letter he grew more certain of the foolishness of the conflict. He felt that Margaret Thatcher had Churchillian delusions of ‘defying Hitler’, that John Nott did not understand what war was like, that I ‘seem to have no compunction about casualties at all’. He wrote of ‘the military fiasco’, the ‘political disgrace’, and wondered ‘if I am totally odd in that I utterly oppose all this killing that is going on over a flag’. He even mentioned the rate of fuel consumption perpetrated by his own ship Glamorgan as she made her escape from the waters around Pebble Island on 14 May…33,000 gallons, six yards a gallon, was his assessment.
Nonetheless his was a voice which ought not to be ignored. It presents a point of view far removed from mine, but it was still a valid point of view. A well-written one too. Indeed some of his assertions – for instance, that the British government had been planning to ‘leave the islands totally undefended and take away the islanders’ British citizenship’ – were a bit too close for comfort. And what, you might ask, was a chap like this doing on the flight deck of a 6000-ton British destroyer in the middle of a war? It’s a good question. The truth is that David Tinker was what is known as a VOLRET, a man who had applied to resign his commission in the Royal Navy (voluntary retirement). He had made his application some time before the Falklands problem arose. He was not a chap who was just trying to get out, at the prospect of having to go and fight. I think he was sincere in his belief that a career in Her Majesty’s armed forces was not for him and that having been married for a couple of years he wished to lead a more settled life ashore. There is nothing wrong with that. Indeed the whole sad story of David Tinker has always caused me to recall my own position back in the 1950s.
I was serving as first lieutenant to Captain Brian Hutchings in the 2300-ton newly designed patrol submarine Porpoise. Suddenly, with some major crisis looming before us, we were ordered to return to port from our deep-water exercises off Iceland and ‘store for war’. Remember that was only just over ten years on from the end of the Second World War and war was still very real to us, even if I hadn’t actually experienced fighting in one. I vividly remember thinking to myself, ‘Now, wait a minute. Is this what I joined the Royal Navy for? To go to war? Over the question of who owns what, a long way from home? Start blowing people up? Maybe get killed myself? Now, hold on a moment.’ It wasn’t difficult for me to realize that this was indeed what the Navy had been training me for, that I might indeed have to face action one day, and, having thought carefully about it, I found no quarrel with the idea of military action in such a cause, nor with my involvement in it. At the time I was twenty-seven, two years older than David Tinker, and I had just realized that a career in dark blue was not merely one of comfort, adventure and good company. It may be fraught with great danger, we may all be called to account, should deterrence fail.
Thus, at a similar age, David and I had both looked at what was involved and made our own decisions. We simply arrived at different conclusions about our careers…mine under the pressure of impending war, his under no such pressure. The trouble was, for David, that it takes about eighteen months to get out of the Royal Navy and the Falklands crisis blew up during his spell in that no man’s land of being a naval officer whose heart was elsewhere. I would like to repeat that there was nothing wrong with his decision – only with his timing.
With Glamorgan effectively out of action, and a lull in activity off-shore, I had time to do some homework. I wrote up this attrition list: ‘Two destroyers sunk, three seriously damaged; two frigates sunk, two seriously damaged; one container ship sunk; two LSLs sunk, one seriously damaged.’ That night we planned to send in four frigates for the night-bombardment programme, but two of them, Yarmouth and Ambuscade, had to be recalled with mechanical defects. That left Active and Arrow to batter away at the Arg positions on Sapper Hill and Moody Brook. The fact that Arrow was still there, still firing shells, was a bit of a miracle really – very early in the campaign, we had had serious worries about cracks in her hull. Now there were only two warships from the original group of escorts which had escaped damage: she was one, Yarmouth was the other.
You may remember that I mentioned that Commander Tony Morton, new to command of a ship, was a bit hyperactive in the early engagements, raising alarms when I thought no real danger threatened. Well, he had learned fast and by the end of the conflict had a truly outstanding record. To have brought Yarmouth through, thus far unscathed, was a memorable achievement. Tony had been in the thick of it for a long time. By now they had patched up Plymouth and she steamed back to join the Battle Group, while battered Glamorgan took charge of all the ships in the TRALA, safely further out to the east.
It was Sunday 13 June, yet another bright clear day, which eventually gave way to the most unbelievably lovely sunset, and you could see all the way to the clouds on the horizon, over one hundred miles I would guess. There was no swell on the ocean, a soft six knots of breeze, with the sky and the sea dissolving into a harmony of brilliant purples, oranges, blues and Payne’s grey. The ships were starkly silhouetted, like bits of black cardboard on the flaring western skyline.
With some reluctance I turned my back on this wondrous evening seascape and fired off a short signal to CLFFI relating the Task Force’s tale of woe. This was recorded, at greater length in the diary.
We are now on the cliff edge of our capability, with only three ships lacking a major OPDEF [Operational Defect] (Hermes, Yarmouth and Exeter). Of the destroyer/frigate force, forty-five per cent are reduced to near zero capability. Of the ‘goalkeepers’, Andromeda’s Sea Wolf is u/s; Brilliant’s entire systems are hanging by a variety of Coward-type threads; Broadsword has one and a half [weapons] systems, but one [propeller] shaft fairly permanently locked. None of the Type 21s are fit: Avenger has a screw off; Arrow is cracked and has an OLY [Olympus gas turbine] down – you name it. They’re all falling apart.
This afternoon, I was left on this most beautiful day for Etendards with one channel of Sea Dart fire. The convoys I run in/out nightly are ‘escorted’ by one half-crippled frigate (doesn’t need to go faster than his charges, does he?). The gun line started with four ships and reduced to two from defects. The TRALA is ‘protected’ by poor old crippled Glamorgan and South Georgia is valiantly defended by poor old crippled Antrim and the redoubtable battleship Endurance.
Frankly, if the Args could only breathe on us, we’d fall over! Perhaps they’re the same way: can only trust so, otherwise we’re in for a carve-up.
In the small hours of the following morning several Arg aircraft were spotted along the southern coastline of the islands, most of them heading north. One of them, however, a Canberra bomber, being tracked by Cardiff, began to head across the land to the north of Port Stanley and as it did so was struck by the Type 42’s Sea Dart missile. The troops on the high ground waiting to begin their dawn attack watched it spiral in.
Shortly thereafter, the British land forces began to move forward. A massive bombardment from Yarmouth and Ambuscade preceded 2 Para as they pushed the Args o
ff Wireless Ridge sometime around 0300. Avenger and Yarmouth then set about the Arg AA guns – capable of use against ground forces – on Port Stanley racecourse, while Active pounded Mount Tumbledown in support of the Scots Guards. Here on this ridge the Guards were pinned down for three hours by a well-trained battalion of Argentinian marines, but they were eventually softened up by the infantry’s mortars and by a renewed shelling bombardment from Active and Avenger.
By the time the frigates made their escape before first light they had, between the three of them, poured over five hundred shells into the Args’ entrenched positions. The only casualty was one of Avenger’s propeller blades, which had sheared off, but this was no time to try to find out why.
A little later in the morning we sent the RAF Harriers up from Hermes for one final laser-targeted bomb strike on an Argentinian artillery battery on the Stanley side of Tumbledown and thereafter things began to crumble for General Galtieri’s men. With the big Sea King 4s now flying reinforcements from 40 Commando up to Sapper Hill, General Menendez was faced with many hundreds of his beaten troops pouring back off their vital positions in the icy hills surrounding Port Stanley. General Galtieri, their Commander-in-Chief, ordered them to fight on, but, true to form, his timing was hopeless. At 1405 General Menendez very sensibly sent a message to General Moore asking for terms for a ceasefire.
We heard the news out in the Battle Group pretty much in the form of rumours at first, and I have to admit that I hardly dared believe it. But, as the news hardened, we felt it would not be tempting providence too much to accept it.
And so ended the war. But really, only for the land forces, not the rest of us. Out here in the Battle Group, the electronic City still cannot sleep: the nightwatchmen remain alert. The combat air patrols are still required. The eyes and ears of the Fleet must continue to be tireless, indefinitely. I have no guarantee the Args won’t come back at us tomorrow by air or sea. It is Menendez who has surrendered, not Galtieri. I don’t trust dictators.
18
Welcome Home
I am fairly sure it was Napoleon who originally named him, the terrible Old Warrior who drove the Grande Armée of France from the gates of Moscow. ‘I was not beaten by the Russians,’ growled Bonaparte. ‘I was beaten by General Winter.’ And I have no doubt that one hundred and thirty years later, Adolf Hitler, perhaps with slightly less sang-froid, thought much the same when the tide turned on the German armies at Moscow and Stalingrad. But for us, down in the Falklands, the General was late. He turned up, sure enough, just as we had known he would, but he missed the six-week action by about seven hours, arriving on the evening of the surrender of the Argentine land forces.
The wind had been building from the Antarctic all afternoon, an icy chill cutting across the waves. It had started in the middle of the day, around the time General Menendez was asking for terms. By 2200Z, General Winter was in full cry with his opening blizzard. The wind by now was gusting one hundred miles per hour – the Falkland Islands were being swept white with slashing snow and hail. I could actually hear the sleet pelting against the side of my cabin up in the island of Hermes. The sea was rough, the night was moonless, and the cold across the deck was nearly unbearable, with a wind-chill factor reducing the temperature to something like sixteen degrees below freezing. These are not the kind of conditions you meet nearer the Poles, where the waves break over the bow and freeze instantly on the ship’s upperworks. This is the kind of cold inflicted mainly by the wind and which produces a rawness which would make the Scottish lochs in January seem like Honolulu.
But the sleet against my cabin bulkhead couldn’t much distract me from tonight’s main problem: how on earth to deal with the immediate problem of the thirteen thousand Argentinian prisoners of war, many ill-dressed for such conditions and many ill-fed, we believed. I thought then, for the first time, about the arrival of General Winter. If he had been here ten days ago, he would not have been much of a help to the Args, dug in on the heights with no chance of their High Command getting their air force into the skies. But I think he would have finished us. Ships are just as vulnerable as the marching armies of Napoleon and Hitler were in Russia. Everything goes wrong more often at sea when the weather is especially bad. In particular, the salt spray attacks electrical circuits and the salt crystals clog mechanical systems. Ice and snow don’t help either. These difficulties had been forecast since mid-April, putting the pressure on us all to get on with it before the bad weather arrived. But now, seeing it right before me for the first time, the stark reality of a howling winter gale in the South Atlantic was no less formidable.
As it happened, we had been rather lucky with the weather throughout the war. It was nothing like as bad as we had expected, and certainly not as bad as certain sections of the Press kept saying it was. They of course have a rather overdeveloped sense of amateur dramatics. Indeed we had been working in cold, bright sunlight for almost the whole of the last nine days. Naturally, we had had our moments – a few storms and some ferocious seas – but nothing like that which arrived on the night of the capitulation of the Args’ land forces. For the record, we logged that storm at Force Twelve at around midnight (that’s a gale of 120mph), which was a bit draughty on the flight deck of Hermes, but much more unpleasant if you are bouncing about in a small frigate.
Still, I would far rather have been in my steel home out at sea than huddled ashore with not much cover, as so many of the soldiers of both sides must have been on that wild night. I found myself thinking of problems of hypothermia, trench foot and pneumonia, and how on earth we were going to cope with the colossal administrative problem of clearing up the tattered remnants of Galtieri’s beaten army.
What I was not considering was the possibility of any serious celebration of victory, though I did allow myself the luxury of my first cigarette in eight months. As a matter of fact I did not really believe we had a victory yet – even though there were reports of white flags in Port Stanley and that the Union Jack was flying once more above Government House. I was by no means certain that we had beaten their air force, which could perfectly well reappear at four minutes’ notice, in exactly the same way they had when they sank the Sheffield. And though their navy did seem to be staying firmly in harbour, it was still physically capable of coming out to fight.
What was clear was that the Arg soldiers in the Falkland Islands had had enough and that their commander was surrendering. But that could only be taken as a ‘local surrender’, no more. No one had said anything about surrender from Buenos Aires, no one was telling me the entire Argentinian military machine was surrendering unconditionally to us and that the war was over. And the specious argument that because war had never been declared, there was no way it could be ‘undeclared’, did nothing to convince me that we could drop our guard. For all I knew they could be waiting for Hermes to enter Port Stanley harbour in triumph before they came again, this time in real force, with their Skyhawks, and turned the balance of power upside down by lunchtime.
I was being advised that the Arg commander had signed something – but that gave no guarantees. A piece of paper is still only a piece of paper (as in Neville Chamberlain) – and what’s more, it was only a local piece of paper. For all I knew General Galtieri was demanding some last desperate effort, along with the resignation of Menendez. There were some pressing reasons, on that first evening of ‘peacetime’, encouraging me to take Hermes right inshore tonight. For a start, her flight deck would provide a vastly better helicopter operating base than Navy Point in Port Stanley – a single deserted, bare house and a few bits of concrete hard-standing for non-existent Nissen huts. But there was absolutely no chance that I would do it – without Hermes and the Harriers, the Task Force would have been virtually defenceless and we were eight thousand miles from home. I did not trust the Args so much as half an inch.
So Hermes remained hove-to out in the TEZ while I played it safe and worried. We were facing what was essentially a ‘disaster relief’ operation invol
ving the repatriation of thousands of Argentinians, but this one had to be conducted under immediate threat of major attack. I even asked Northwood to approach the BBC to air the problem in international circles so that we might avoid too much blame for the inevitable casualties of this far-from-orderly take-over of the Falkland Islands.
Like so many things in this world, it proved less difficult than we had feared. And on the morning of 17 June I felt I could leave my Flagship, the centre of all operations at sea, for a day ashore. I was very keen to have a look around these islands for which we had sacrificed the lives of eighty-seven men of the Royal Navy, including thirteen officers. I flew the eighty miles inshore by helicopter and landed on the deck of Fearless, anchored in Port William, shortly after dawn. There, over a quick cup of coffee, we settled the plans for the day. In passing, I was asked if I would like to meet General Menendez, who was being held on board. I chose not to. My reasons were simple: I was so bloody angry with him, I could not trust myself to observe the full requirements of the Geneva Convention.
The way I felt that day, he seemed to have caused us more damned trouble than any enemy commander since Erwin Rommel; in terms of obstinacy, that is, not military talent. I really felt the man should have packed it in the day he found out the British had landed. It is quite remarkable how clear I am in my mind about my feelings that morning. All these years later, however, I am not quite so certain of the accuracy of my assessments. Perhaps I should have simply been grateful for the incompetence of his defence, along with his lack of perseverance. It would not have taken much effort on his part to spin the land campaign out another ten days – and that would have finished us, not him.
One Hundred Days Page 46