One Hundred Days Page 6

  At the time, I had too much on my mind to feel sadness. In fact I was too busy to indulge in any psychological luxuries at all, emotions such as sentimentality, shock or awkward feelings about a ship which had once been my ‘home’. She was now, as far as I was concerned, just a statistic. I did of course realize that her loss would have far-reaching effects on those directly involved, and also on how the rest of us would conduct our anti-aircraft warfare in the future.

  Deep down I feared it should not have happened and, harshly perhaps, told Sam Salt so. We were going to have to get seriously sharper if we were to survive. Sheffield had already taught us some hard lessons, and we had better start absorbing them in short order. Sudden death in these cold, wind-swept southern seas was unappealing to say the least, wherever one’s duty lay, particularly given the years and years of training we had undergone to avoid such an unpleasant eventuality.

  And so I worked quietly, alone in my little steel cell in Hermes’s ‘Island’, supported by a first-class team of staff officers, but nevertheless alone. I drew up my lists of what we must all learn from the Exocet attack. This would form the basis of an immediate operational analysis of the event. What actually happened? Where did the Etendards come from? How did they get here? Can we get at them sooner? What happened to Sheffield’s chaff? Can we catch them after an attack? Is our formation correct? Are our procedures slick enough? Plenty of questions – not too many answers yet, but all of them urgently needed.

  That evening, with Sheffield still ablaze, we returned to some semblance of routine. The recce insertion went ahead as planned, the Special Forces men landing on schedule, all helicopters returning on time. All of the mundane business of running the Battle Group continued – everyone more alert now to the possibility of another Exocet attack. I could start to plan ahead, not least because I was satisfied that the Battle Group was back in balance and that the Sheffield situation was being properly managed.

  So ended that extraordinary day in the front line. What was happening in London is better known to others, and for this information one tends to hear the most from one’s own family. As it happened mine was gathered in some strength at the Cavalry Club in London, where my brother-in-law had taken my sister and wife, Charlotte, to dine. It was apparently a rather joyous occasion. News from the battle front was good, and as far as they could see I would be home quite soon. However, halfway through dinner my wife noticed the waiter moving quietly from table to table imparting what appeared to be quite serious news. When he finally arrived at their table he just said: ‘I am very sorry to tell you that HMS Sheffield has been sunk off the Falkland Islands.’ It was nothing short of an enormous shock, and it brought home to everyone in that dining room – many of them with strong military connections – that the Argentinians were indeed real, and well equipped to hurt us. ‘As from that moment,’ declared Char, ‘I rather stopped regarding the Argentinian Navy as something out of Gilbert and Sullivan.’

  So much then for the extremes of up-front and back-home. I stood somewhere in the middle. My strange position in all this is best revealed by viewing these two accounts alongside the entry in my diary for that day. It reads as follows: ‘A dull forenoon with little happening, until 1415 when an Exocet from an Etendard blew my old ship Sheffield away. As I write ten hours later she’s still burning out there and I’m hoping to entice the Args to go and have a look, and then chop them when they do.’

  That, actually, was all I wrote that night. Almost. There were, however, before I ended, a further five lines, on the over-excited behaviour of Yarmouth and her nine torpedoes; a most improbable sequence of events. ‘Nothing hit anyone,’ I wrote. ‘Had to send a very ratty signal…I hope he’s learning.’ The three lines I have left out were letting off steam, which made me feel quite a lot better at the time, but have no relevance today.

  After midnight now and I walked out on to my little open bridge on the Island above the flight deck for a breath of cold air. I looked into the night sky to the south-west, the direction from which the Etendards had come that afternoon. Far beyond it lay their home base, on the great barren island of Tierra del Fuego, the most southerly point of all the Americas, where the rocky mountains of the Andes finally peter out into the roughest ocean waters of the world, the cemetery of seamen, landmarked by the haunted face of Cape Horn. A little over 430 miles from where I was standing.

  I was, I felt, ready for this battle. My job as the on-scene commander was clear-cut. I must stand back and observe; measure the odds, the gains, the losses and how to make them move in our favour. I must not get too close to the detail, and I certainly must not be pushed into hasty decisions based on inadequate evidence. I believed there might be an element, perhaps among the younger officers, that would wish to hit back at the Argentinians straight away, somehow, with anything we had. But I was not in that game. Under the main directive of ‘Operation Corporate’ I had to achieve three objectives – to neutralize the enemy navy and air force, to put our landing force ashore safely, and then to give all the support I could – air, gunfire, and logistic supplies – in order to give our land forces the best chance of forcing an unconditional surrender of all Argentinian forces in the islands. This to be achieved by mid to late June, with minimum loss to ourselves, of course. That all done, I would still have the long-term defence of the islands to cover.

  I reminded myself of the principles of war, in particular the one called ‘Maintaining the Initiative’. This decrees, very broadly, that if you can inflict happenings upon your opponent which cause him to take a series of decisions he has not planned for, with insufficient time to think them through properly, the probability is that he will get a good half of them wrong. If you only force decisions on him for which he is already prepared, the chances are that he will get most of them right; push him, worry him, harry him, and hurry him.

  Equally, in defensive mode, if he hits you, as he had just hit Sheffield, you must not allow yourself to be thrown by it. His initiative must not be allowed to affect you. Write off Sheffield, yes, but don’t write off two more ships because you have jumped in the wrong direction as a gut-reaction to a sudden setback.

  And now I must try to sleep, which may be difficult, even tired as I am, since our next moves must be planned with care. The key word is control: control of our attacks; control of our defence; and control of ourselves in the face of disaster.

  Whichever way you look at it, I had been training for this or something like it for most of my life, albeit in hopes it would never happen. This day, however, was elbowing its way into military and naval folklore. British warship hit by enemy missile. First major attack on the White Ensign for decades. I kept asking myself how I came to be in the middle of all this. I had never asked for a place in anyone’s history book. Neither had the Ship’s Company of Sheffield. And twenty of them were dead.

  2

  The Submariner

  Ambition has never been a particularly strong suit in the Woodward family. My late father, Tom, the son of a Naval Ordnance Lieutenant, certainly had little. He ended his modest banking career happily enough, as Head Cashier in the Launceston Branch of Barclays Bank. As far as I was ever able to make out, this was his own personal preference perhaps not unconnected with a love for the West Country. My mother was prepared to go along with that.

  Maybe my father’s three years in the trenches of the First World War had something to do with it. But in all the (only vaguely) traceable history of my family, there is but one personage of any real substance – one of the eighteenth-century allies of Bonnie Prince Charlie, a General Forster, whose surname I bear between the ‘John’ and the ‘Woodward’. That relationship comes via my father’s mother, and is, I have to admit, fairly tenuous, not least because the General never married!

  I am relatively sure that the General was of no great military stature – certainly he never won a battle. He was just one of those largely cosmetic warriors fashionable in early Georgian England, and his main talent was to hav
e been hovering in the opportune spot at exactly the time Prince Charlie decided he needed a Protestant military figure on his team. And though it did neither of them much good at the merciless defeat of the Jacobites at the battle of Culloden, I am in no position to scoff at the career of any officer who happened to find himself in the right place at the right time.

  I too was born with the reluctance of the Woodwards to push forward, and indeed, right up until my appointment as a rear admiral in 1981 I was essentially just another naval officer, and, like so many Cornishmen before me, perfectly content to be so. I never really thought beyond my next promotion, by which I mean that as a lieutenant I thought it would be sensible to become a lieutenant-commander, and as a commander, I hoped to become a captain. But I never once, in all my career, spent one moment plotting or planning the best way of being appointed to the Board of the Admiralty. Which was just as well, since I never made it.

  How then, you might wonder – and I’m sure most of my peers did wonder – did I, Sandy Woodward, of the Royal Borough of Kingston, come to be standing on that fateful night, on the bridge of HMS Hermes, in the South Atlantic, in command of billions of pounds worth of naval hardware and several thousand sailors, with the entire nation looking over my shoulder? At the time, I never gave it a great deal of thought. And since then I’ve put it down to luck, really. Pressure of circumstances, and several rather unlikely events falling into place. Unfortunate for some. Fortuitous for me. Which, you may think, is an odd way to run a navy.

  Nonetheless, the truth rests at least in that vicinity; with one important factor standing alongside it – the traditions, the training, the technical grounding, and the principles of leadership which have been taught and refined by the Royal Navy for centuries. The general policy of having a ‘pool’ of well-trained senior officers, any of whom could assume command of a British Naval Task Group at very short notice, has been a requirement of Admiralty since the time of Drake. There were, for instance, two other sea-going admirals who could certainly have commanded the Falkland Task Groups as well, probably better, than I. There were also several higher ranking admirals who were more experienced and knew at least as much as any of us. But when Her Majesty’s Navy is told to move, it does so remarkably quickly, and I, conducting at the time a fleet exercise off Gibraltar, was simply and solely the closest of the sea-going commanders to the South Atlantic.

  The process by which the Senior Service transforms a schoolboy in short trousers into a commander capable, in its judgement, of leading the biggest battle fleet to sail from Britain since the Second World War is, as such processes go, found by most people to be fairly rigorous. Of course, when the management at home decided to send me south, they were not dealing with a total stranger. I had been among them in various capacities for thirty-six years. Indeed, I was one of a dying breed of officers who had effectively been in dark blue uniform since leaving preparatory school at the age of thirteen. In my case, since 1946.

  For me it was, as usual, a bit of an accident. My parents had privately educated my tough, independent elder brother Jim and equally tough and, in her own way, independent sister Liz, but they were running out of cash as a result. They had only just managed to send me to Stubbington House, a prep school with a strong reputation as a naval ‘crammer’, having produced several admirals and a couple of vcs down the years. I finished there in reasonably auspicious circumstances as Head Boy, albeit a very moderate one, having also developed an abiding enjoyment of fairly basic mathematics, thanks to the patience and inspiration of my quite exceptional maths master, Mr Wood.

  So it was agreed that the best way of being privately educated at little cost, was to win a scholarship to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, known as HMS Britannia, which stood in Edwardian splendour some forty-five south-easterly miles across Dartmoor, on the south Devon coast. In those days, they offered about thirty scholarship places a year, requiring a pass mark of eighty per cent in the Public Schools Common Entrance examination. I just made it, I think to the last place available, and was invited to attend the Navy’s further requirements for a medical examination and a greatly dreaded interview. That dread was in no way alleviated by the appearance of a huge ‘potato’ in the heel of my sock on the way there, to the Old Admiralty Building in Whitehall.

  I sat before the stone-faced group of officers, very nearly paralysed with worry over my state of undress. No doubt the Interview Board were doing their best to be friendly but I was barely able to give a sensible answer to anything. When finally I took my leave, I took care to back out of the room in order to hide the bare heel. It seemed a mile and a half to the door to me, and probably appropriately servile to them. I long thought that the interviewers must have nodded knowingly to each other, saying, ‘Now there’s a nice well-mannered boy…knows his place…didn’t want to turn his back on his elders and betters…could do with a few more like that these days…we’ll have him.’

  So, in the very first days of the New Year of 1946, I took my place as a ‘first-termer’ at the Britannia Royal Naval College. In this great institution are the very roots of Britain’s Royal Navy of the twentieth century. Even the name ‘Britannia’ has an imperial ring to it, though the college is in fact named after the big old three-decker ship of the line of the same name that served for half a century as the Navy’s principal training ship, moored in the estuary of the River Dart. In 1905, King Edward VII conducted the opening of the college, a huge red brick and white stone building designed by Sir Aston Webb, creator of the façade of Buckingham Palace. On the lawn was placed the mighty, painted, wooden figure-head of the old HMS Britannia, and the chimes from the clock tower sounded not the hours of the day but the bells of the watch, never more than eight except on New Year’s Eve at midnight.

  The college bespoke all the highest traditions of the Navy, in war and in peace. Each one of the cadets was expected to absorb the broad spectrum of naval history as well as a general learning in geography, maths, the sciences, English literature, foreign languages and so on. They also taught us seamanship, basic craft skills in engineering, how to march and do rifle drill, how to sail and drive motor-boats, to swim and to shoot, to read signals by lamp and semaphore and the myriad things a young officer is going to find useful. ‘Oily Qs’ was the expression for Officer-like Qualities, not taught as a subject, but fundamental to all else that went on, and acquired by a sort of osmotic process. Or not, as in my case.

  It was built not only as a place of learning and training, but also as a symbol of British sea power. Its position was carefully chosen, high on a bluff, looming over the estuary of the river, beyond which are the waters of the English Channel – the waters of Jervis and Hood, of Hawke and Rodney, of Howe and Nelson, of Fisher and Jellicoe, of Pound and Cunningham. We were not taught, perhaps as were our peers in the other world of public schools and grammar schools, that such men should be treated as heroes. Our instruction was more on the lines of: ‘These are the kinds of men who have always commanded the Fleets of the Royal Navy, and the kind of men you should try to emulate.’

  I do not recall being over-excited by any of this but, nonetheless, odd bits stuck in the memory. That Admiral Lord Howe roundly defeated the French in the Atlantic on the ‘Glorious First of June’ in 1794; that Admiral Codrington, Captain of HMS Orion at Trafalgar, had given the Turks a bad time; that Admiral John Jervis, the mentor of Nelson and the man who promoted him to commodore, was created the first Earl St Vincent after his famous victory over the Spanish in the Atlantic off the south-western tip of Portugal in 1797. I was also taught some of the folklore of the RN – of the words of Admiral Lord Hawke before the Battle of Quiberon Bay, when he was warned by one of his officers of the extreme danger of the stormy shallow waters which protected the French fleet: ’I thank you for doing your duty in warning me of the danger. And now face me towards the enemy.’ I knew of the exploits of Admiral Viscount Hood in the West Indies, of Admiral Sir George Rodney’s great victory off Dominica in 1782. I knew of t
he savage stalemate that Admirals Jellicoe and Beatty had fought against the German High Seas Fleet at the Battle of Jutland in the First World War. And I knew of the amazing exploits of Admiral Cunningham at Matapan and Taranto during the Second World War. The death of Admiral Nelson, and his parting words – ‘Thank God I have done my duty’ – were impressed upon us. But I was always rather taken with the letter Nelson sent to his former boss, Admiral Jervis, before his final battle: ‘Without you, I am nothing,’ he wrote. And so it is, for all of us.

  While attentive to all the fine traditions, I remember well having, from the very first, a rather personal viewpoint – this was that the very first thing you should do when you see a tradition is to ask what relevance it may have today, to query it, to ask why, to wonder whether the good reasons of two centuries ago still apply now. This bad habit, for it was not viewed with favour, also extended to the edicts of the last week as well as the last century. However, I kept my own counsel just sufficiently to get by – and it remains my way of looking at the world today.

  As well as holding to tradition, much of the way of life in the Services is conducted on the basis that ‘This is how we have always done things, and we have usually been correct’. To stray from this party line is also frowned upon. I call it the ‘Nanny wouldn’t like it’ syndrome. Nevertheless Nanny too must be questioned, because although she is probably right, she might not be on a particular occasion. I dislike assertions of infallibility, even from myself, and like many psychiatrists, believe that a total absence of self-doubt is the first sign of insanity. Those have always been my instincts, and in later years my considered opinions. Something cannot be copper-bottomed, guaranteed one hundred per cent right just because ‘Nanny says so’. And I object most strongly to that assumption. I find it intellectually idle. Whenever we talked about history and tradition in my years at Dartmouth, I was often the cadet to ask the slightly awkward question, to demand to know why this particular tradition was still applicable and, if it wasn’t, why we were bothering to discuss it. That is, I would have been if I had had the courage of my youthful convictions: as it was I just tended to mutter a bit.