One Hundred Days Page 4

  The British Battle Group’s Commanding Officers were fully aware of our situation. All were agreed that air strikes against us were imminent, given that the sinking of the Arg cruiser was probably being viewed in Buenos Aires as a bit embarrassing, particularly in the absence of any countervailing good news for the Argentinian public.

  That morning I had spoken to three or four of my captains on ‘encrypted voice’ UHF radio. This circuit was given the appropriate code-name ‘Cackle’ (as in ‘Captain, sir, the Admiral wants to speak to you on Cackle’). Our feeling of expectation of attack was not specific – more a matter of heightened alertness for whatever the next minute might bring. This was only the fourth day of the war for us and the Royal Navy had not experienced conflict at sea on this scale since the Second World War.

  Basically, we all thought we might be facing up to an attack from the Etendards, each armed with one Exocet. ‘Still,’ I noted in my diary, ‘they have only about five of them altogether. Let’s just hope that one is unserviceable, two of them miss, and the others don’t hit anything vital.’ This is what is known in my trade as ‘Threat Reduction’, a mental process which usually makes you feel better while you wait to see how it actually turns out for real. In general terms we assessed that the Argentinian pilots would come in low, ‘pop up’ (climb from 50 feet to about 200), take a very short radar look, and then, if they got nothing, dive back down under our radar again. We then assumed they would come in a bit further and ‘pop up’ for another look – taking the risk that we might intercept their attack radar on our direction-finding equipment or get a couple of sweeps on them on our own radar before they could get down again. This should give us the four-minute warning we need for the deployment of our defensive radar decoys, called ‘Chaff’.

  The trouble with that whole scenario is, however, that on a day such as this, when we all actively expect an attack, everything that finds its way on to our radar screens, a flock of seagulls, an albatross, even a whale blowing, can start to look like a missile launch to anxious radar operators. Two single flocks of sea birds, totally unrelated, seen on separate sweeps, can look like an air track coming at you at 500 knots. And every other squeak of radar intercepted on an unexpected bearing can sound like the one you fear. In war, you cannot afford to ignore such things in case it really is a missile.

  And all that morning, since before first light, we had a stream of reports of contacts of various kinds. Over in Invincible the brains that deal with our Force Air Defence system were becoming understandably sceptical of these warnings of attacks which did not materialize. ‘Confirm’. ‘Say again’. ‘Check’. ‘Verify’. ‘Disregard’. It was the staccato language of uncertainty.

  Every couple of minutes, something. Every half hour, something of concern. Every hour, something to make the chaff-button finger twitch. War, particularly in the early stages, has this effect on its participants. But nothing, absolutely nothing happened all morning in the way of enemy action. As far as we could tell, the skies, bright and sunny over a calm sea, were also clear of threat.

  Bedacarratz and Mayora climbed to a cruising height of fifteen thousand feet for their first rendezvous. This was with a KC-130 Hercules tanker, a converted transport aircraft, to refuel them 150 miles out from home. Still in radio silence themselves, they were talked into position by radio from the navigator of an old Argentine Air Force Neptune maritime patrol aircraft, which was also trying to locate the British fleet.

  Without a lot of practice, air-to-air refuelling is a difficult manoeuvre, as the planes try to match speeds precisely, and to hold position closely while the long fuel line locks in from above. The last Argentinian long-range mission, two days previously, had been aborted at exactly this stage of the proceedings. But today it was successful.

  Bedacarratz and Mayora pressed on to the east, towards HMS Hermes, the 29,000-ton British aircraft carrier, from which I was attempting to conduct the local war, and which I regarded as indispensable. It had already been agreed between Northwood and myself that major damage to Hermes or to Invincible (our equally vital, but slightly smaller, ‘second deck’), would probably cause us to abandon the entire Falkland Islands operation.

  The two Argentinians began their gradual descent for the final approach and attack. They were two hundred and eighty miles from the British Battle Group and every five minutes brought them thirty-three miles closer to our radar cover. They were, as they say on the golf course, ‘there for nothing’, with full tanks and still in tight formation, heading down into the clouds and rain, trying their hardest to level off just fifty feet above the waves. There they could gain the protection of the curvature of the earth from the line-of-sight sweep of our forward radars. At that speed and height, nearly all of their concentration was devoted to avoiding flying into the sea; while they sometimes caught a glimpse of each other, mostly they were entirely out of contact, never daring to open up on their own radios. I have no doubt it was a tough, nerve-wracking and lonely flight.

  There are other kinds of loneliness, however, and one in particular, known to warship commanders only, is that of the captain of a ‘Picket Ship’, one of the three or four warships that form the first line of defence, well up-threat from the main force. Out there, you really are on your own. It is quiet: deceptively peaceful. You are not covered by the main weapons systems of the rest of the force, other than a Combat Air Patrol (CAP), if you are lucky. And you find much time to contemplate the likely fate of your ship, your crew and your friends. No one has ever enjoyed picket duty very much, principally because history tells us they tend to be the first to get sunk by the opposition, because they are deliberately placed in harm’s way. The classic anti-carrier tactic is to hit the picket with a few aircraft and then push the main raid through the hole you have just made in the defences. And should attack come from the sea, any picket is a sitting duck to a well-handled submarine. Single ships usually are especially vulnerable. Groups of two or three are much more effective in weight and variety of defensive systems and particularly in subsequent counter-attack. All submarine commanding officers know this. As a breed, whatever their nationality or training, they are bound to prefer a single-ship target.

  In our case, on that morning, we fielded a picket line of three Type 42 guided-missile destroyers, quite small ships each displacing 4000 tons. Far to my right, was the tall, rather patrician Captain David Hart-Dyke’s HMS Coventry. Out to my left was HMS Sheffield, commanded by Captain Sam Salt, at five feet four inches physically the opposite of Hart-Dyke but another experienced officer whom I had known, liked and respected for many years. In the centre was HMS Glasgow, placed to ensure the three ships presented a very wide surface-to-air missile defensive front. Glasgow was commanded by Captain Paul Hoddinott, the forty-year-old former Commander of the Polaris submarine HMS Revenge, and a man likely to make as few mistakes as any.

  I trusted all three of them implicitly. I knew them all personally and professionally, and I knew what was involved in their unenviable task from my own time in command of the Sheffield five years before. I spoke to each of them, individually, every now and then on Cackle. Paul subsequently told me cheerfully that it gave his Operations Room staff great comfort – to see that he had a direct line to the boss. They even drew cartoons showing him on the line in conference with me: ‘Speak up, sir!’ someone is calling, and the ears of all his Ops Room team are drawn about four times natural size, two men hanging upside down from the overhead electric cabling above Paul’s desk.

  In fact, I spoke to several of the commanders on a daily basis, particularly those in highly vulnerable positions, and while it did not really occur to me that in doing so I would be, somehow, boosting morale in various ships, it always boosted mine to hear the crisp, confident tones of the man at the other end. Crisp, confident – whatever he may actually have been feeling.

  Paul Hoddinott was typical of them. In a way, he was a real sea-dog, going back generations, and he believes some branches of the family served in t
he Spanish Main. To this day one their most treasured possessions is a grandfather clock which still shows the times of high and low water at Plymouth Hoe. His father was an engineering commander in destroyers in the Mediterranean during the Second World War. One of his grandfathers had been a naval lieutenant in the First World War, and the other, Lieutenant Kent DSC, RNR, a submarine officer, was lost at sea in 1917 when the troopship Otranto sank in a gale off Islay on the west coast of Scotland.

  I knew that he would rarely, if ever, leave his Operations Room if our group was under any form of threat whatsoever and if he did, he would only leave it if his most experienced Warfare Officer remained down there, firmly in charge in his place. I had spoken to him earlier that morning, and it was his opinion that the Argentinians would attack from the air, with Exocet, on this day. I couldn’t disagree although it was just one option amongst several. But it was a view he took the trouble to record in his diary that very morning ‘…we can expect an all-out retaliatory attack today. The most worrying from our point of view and the most attractive from theirs is a Super Etendard with Exocet’. Paul, with typical care, wrote afterwards: ‘The above words were written before dawn on 4 May 1982 at 1055Z.’ He had already banned the daytime use of his satellite communications system (SCOT) which could block out his detection of the Etendard radar.

  All three of those picket commanders knew the risks they had to take. They knew that if the incoming enemy aircraft ’popped up’ and got a contact, the chances were that the Argentinian pilots would release their missiles at the first blip they caught on their radar screen. Coventry, Glasgow and Sheffield had been carefully placed, and left to trust in their missile and self-defence systems almost alone. The only comfort in such a situation is to keep telling yourself that the chaff will work or, if not, that there are two other ships in the same position, and to hope fervently that it will be one of them that catches it.

  But they knew, all three of them, Hart-Dyke, Hoddinott and Salt, that their situation was very exposed. It remained to be seen how effective the Type 42 destroyer would prove in this situation. Stay alert; that’s all they could do and all I could ask.

  Some eighteen miles to the east of the pickets lay my second line of defence; the frigates Arrow, Yarmouth and Alacrity and the big, but older, destroyer Glamorgan. Behind them, were three Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships, Olmeda, Resource and Fort Austin – placed as a further confusion factor for any enemy radar. Only beyond them could the Etendards hope to find their proper targets, the carriers Hermes and Invincible, each with her own ‘Goalkeeper’ in the form of a Type 22 frigate. Invincible had, close beside, Brilliant, commanded by the dynamic and voluble Captain John Coward; Hermes had Broadsword, with Captain Bill Canning, an old and trusted friend, in command. These two 4400-ton warships, primarily designed for anti-submarine work, had the remarkable anti-missile system Sea Wolf fitted. This was new in service and its reputation was high. It had, in trials, actually hit the high-velocity 4.5-inch shell being used as the target. It was a short-range system, but with this performance we hoped it would find the bigger and slower Exocet relatively easy to deal with.

  All that may seem a complicated, carefully thought-out line of battle for a carrier group under threat. And so it was (culled from accepted practice in the Royal Navy and now modified to meet the particular requirements of the occasion in the South Atlantic). It was a classic anti-air attack formation, which any good staff officer could lay out in five minutes on a bar chit. But this one had a couple of refinements that I hoped would set it apart and do something to compensate for the lack of Airborne Early Warning. The big difference now was that this was for real. All eyes were open. Every item of sensory equipment throughout the Group was watching, waiting, for the strike most of us believed inevitable, today, tomorrow, whenever.

  The two Argentinian Etendards were about 150 miles west of us when I left the Flag Operations Room on board Hermes for a quick lunch. Bedacarratz and Mayora were just entering the clear air that surrounded us, and finding it not quite so difficult to fly right down at wave-top height. A few hundred feet above them, the sweeping beams of the British long-range radars were apparently blind to the Etendards’ high-speed approach.

  The Argentinians’ own search-radar fitted to the Etendards was French-made, like the planes, and was code-named by us ’Handbrake’. If we were quick enough we could locate and recognize it. We could also deal with the subsequent missiles. If we were quick enough.

  The Etendards had now left the old Neptune far behind, but their final course had been decided. They knew that if they took a chance and ‘popped up’ to 120 feet, one hundred miles from now, their own radar would almost certainly paint a large contact signifying a big ship within Exocet range. They could also be reasonably sure that it would be a British ship. But there would be no time for any positive identification before they released their missiles, if they were to survive themselves.

  By 1350, I was back in my Ops Room. Over in Glasgow, still the foremost of our pickets, Captain Hoddinott was sitting in his high swivel seat at the centre of his. Like all his team, he was wearing his yellowish cotton anti-flash hood and gloves, to prevent serious flash burns to the face, head and hands, should a missile get through and explode. The Battle Group, at this time, was on ‘Air Raid Warning White’ – which was effectively the ‘All Clear’ of the Second World War days. We had no positive evidence that a raid was on its way. The next warning up is ‘Air Raid Warning Yellow’ which means that we do have indications of a raid developing. ‘Red’ means ‘Action Stations now. It’s happening’.

  The Ops Room of a modern warship, with everyone at their computers and controls is, to any visiting stranger, one of the weirdest places on earth. No sun ever shines in there. Actually there are very few lights at all, just the curious surreal amber glow of the screens, the red points of the many indicators and keyboards, and the occasional yellow back-lighting of information boards. The room somehow begs silence and respect, giving an atmosphere of intense concentration, rather like a library; but every figure is hooded with only the eyes showing, expressionless and shaded. Each man has a communications headset on like a civilian airline pilot’s, with a slim, space-age microphone in front of his hidden lips. Each operator is connected somewhere, the quiet murmur of his reports going perhaps to the navigation area, or to his fellows in the team on board, or via radio to other ships and their Ops Rooms.

  On the internal nets, the Captain can switch in to the Principal Warfare Officer talking to the Sonar Controller, or the Link Operator briefing the Surface Picture Compiler, or the Missile/Gun Director talking to the Surface Detector; perhaps the Yeoman of Signals talking to his young signalman on the bridge. He may hear the Officer of the Watch on the bridge, voice rising, call, ‘Aircraft, Red nine-zero, low, unidentified.’ It never stops in the strange nether world of the Ops Room. The communications networks are a sort of ‘underground’ tower of Babel, a mass of words and headsets, microphones and strange jargon-language. The room itself is a kaleidoscope of illuminated information, a scatter of fingers tapping on keys and buttons: a place of ‘moon men’ in hoods, where you see no lips move, but where disembodied voices seem never to rest.

  And near the centre of it all stands the Advanced (or Air) Warfare Officer, assisted by the Principal Warfare Officer. In the Captain’s absence from the Ops Room, it is their job to co-ordinate all the information and act appropriately on it. To decide whether to let a set of circumstances drive a call to ‘Action Stations’, which has a complete life of its own, with a succession of people all automatically taking carefully rehearsed steps. Each of which can only be stopped by a sharp command from the Captain.

  It is now 1356. The two Etendards pop up to 120 feet above the sea. They level out and Bedacarratz glances down to see a blip on his radar screen. His gloved hand moves less than a foot to the Exocet activate button. Mayora does the same.

  Glasgow’s Ops Room, like any other in the force, is packed with people sweatin
g beneath their hoods. It is 1356 and 30 seconds. The air is hot, and the darkness seems to add to it. The Battle Group is still only on ‘White Alert’ when young Able Seaman Rose blows his whistle and calls the words which, Paul Hoddinott later said, ‘caused the hair on the back of my neck to stand on end.’

  ‘Agave radar!’ snaps Rose.

  Glasgow’s AWO, Lieutenant-Commander Nick Hawkyard reacts instantly: ‘CONFIDENCE level?’

  ‘CERTAIN!‘ says Rose. ‘I have three sweeps, followed by a short Lock On. Bearing…two-three-eight. Search mode.’

  Hoddinott swings round to stare at the big UAA 1 console. Both he and Hawkyard can see that the bearing line on Rose’s screen correlates with two Long Range Air Warning radar contacts forty-five miles out on the AWO’s display.

  ‘Transmission ceased,’ reports Rose.

  Hawkyard calls into the Command Open Line: ‘AWO to Officer of the Watch – go to Action Stations, right now!’

  And up on the Bridge, Lieutenant David Goddard hits the intercom button broadcasting ‘ACTION STATIONS!’ throughout the ship.

  Hawkyard, staring at the picture on his big, flat table screen, switches to the UHF radio announcing to all ships: ‘Flash! This is Glasgow, Agave…bearing two three eight…correlates track one two three four…bearing two three eight…range four zero…Invincible, over.’

  Invincible: ‘Roger, out.’

  Then Rose calls again: ‘Agave regained – bearing two three eight.’

  His Electronic Warfare Supervisor, sitting next to him, confirms the second detection. The ship’s radar operators, watching their air and surface warning radar screens, also confirm contact: ‘Two bogeys. Bearing two three eight. Range three eight miles. Tracking zero seven zero. Four-fifty knots.’