CHAPTER TEN
After his surprise phone call and a few more snatched hours of sleep, Captain Jeremy Black headed into Portsmouth and his ship. A huge operation was getting under way to prepare Invincible for action. And the same scene was being repeated around the dockyard, on Hermes and a number of other ships. All sorts of health and safety regulations were broken in order to get Invincible fuelled and loaded with ammunition at the same time. Sailors from other ships and dockyard workers were all lending a hand.
Jeremy Black was having various meetings with his admiral and fellow commanders. It looked for a while as if Invincible would be made flagship for the task force. But, after some discussion, it was agreed that Hermes – which had had a recent upgrade of her communications equipment, and had more accommodation for an admiral’s staff – would have the flagship role. Jeremy Black, secretly, was relieved. Quite apart from the thought of any admiral breathing down his neck, he had known Sandy Woodward all his professional life. They had been at Dartmouth together. Black knew the admiral had a fearsome intelligence, but he knew his prickly side as well.
In the thick of all the preParations was the ship’s second-in-command, Dermot Rhodes. But he faced a terrible dilemma. He had been selected for promotion to captain and had been assigned to a NATO staff job in Naples. He was due to leave, and his relief to take over in Invincible, on the Monday. But it rapidly became apparent that the ship would be sailing for the Falklands on that day. What should he do?
Rhodes had a meeting with the captain. The ship was fully worked-up. And Rhodes did not think it would come to war. After all, 8, 000 miles is a very long way. There would be plenty of time for the politicians to sort things out. And he had had the experience, in the 1970s, of rushing to get a frigate out of reserve with a scratch crew to help maintain the Royal Navy operation to support British trawlers against Icelandic gunboats in the Cod War, only for the dispute to be settled just as his ship was ready to sail. He knew, on this occasion, that his relief was fully trained and ready. So he and the captain decided that the changeover would go ahead.
As part of the preParations, a strengthened Sea Harrier squadron of eight aircraft had come aboard on Sunday afternoon, under the command of Sharkey Ward. Hermes, with her bigger hangar and flight deck, would take twelve. But that was still only twenty aircraft in all.
On the Monday morning, last-minute stores were still being loaded, and would continue to be landed by helicopter even after the ship sailed. Departure was set for 10. 15. Jeremy Black woke up and was working in his cabin until about five minutes before Invincible was due to slip her moorings. That was his normal routine for leaving harbour. It was only when he left his cabin for the bridge, and caught glimpses out of the portholes and passageway openings in the side of the ship, that he began to appreciate the scene all around. He had made many departures from Portsmouth in his career. But this was something quite different. There were the crowds, the flags, the sailors lining the decks of the other ships in harbour.
It was a magnificent sailing, with a Sea Harrier perched theatrically at the end of the Ski-jump ramp, Sea Kings on prominent display aft, and the ship’s company lining the decks. If ever there was a modern-day example of gunboat diplomacy, designed to stir a nation and the let the other side know what it had got itself into, this dramatic, highly-choreographed departure was it, with first Invincible and then Hermes groaning even more under the weight of the aircraft on her flight deck.
Dermot Rhodes, who had been such an integral part of turning Invincible into the ship that she had become, left her in the morning just before she departed. He walked out on to Southsea beach to watch her sail off. It was, he later realized, the worst decision that he ever made.
Most of that first band of officers, the first ‘Invincibles’, who had seen her through her final stages of construction and early life were now well and truly dispersed to other jobs in the Navy. Their reactions to what was now unfolding took different forms. Tony Hallett had been promoted and was now serving at the Fleet headquarters at Northwood. With his intimate knowledge of the ship, he called and asked if he could be reassigned to her. The answer was ‘no’.
Tony Wolstenholme, the first weapons engineer officer, had been close at hand and heavily involved in getting her and the other ships ready to sail south. He was now on the staff of the flag officer at Portsmouth. Helping Invincible’s preParations was a daunting task in itself. Hermes, the future flagship, had just taken a battering in gruelling NATO exercises in the Norwegian Sea, and was really in no fit state to sail. Her superstructure was covered in scaffolding. But she had to be ready, and she was.
And yet, as he watched those departures, so charged with emotion, he was filled with apprehension. His had been among the voices raising doubts about Invincible’s ability in her present state to look after herself in a fight.
Another witness to those events, standing on the opposite shore on the Isle of Wight, was another man filled with a mixture of emotions. Captain Jock Slater had been appointed as the first commanding officer of the second Invincible-class ship, HMS Illustrious, which was still being completed at the Swan Hunter yard on the Tyne. She was due to be commissioned in October, and to become operational some time in the following year. Captain Slater had been spending a weekend on the Isle of Wight with his wife and two sons as the momentous events were unfolding, and the feverish activity was taking place across the water. He stood and watched the great ships sail. And he felt awful. But he knew that he would do everything possible – and he knew that the pressure would be on – to get Illustrious ready as quickly as possible. At that stage, nobody really knew what would happen, and she might be desperately needed.
Jeremy Black soon had a problem on his hands. It was just two o’clock in the afternoon following departure, still not far off the Isle of Wight, when the marine engineering officer came to him to say that a gearbox coupling would need changing, work that would normally dictate a period in the dockyard. The commanding officer’s heart sank. Frantic signals were despatched. Would the ship have to turn back? In fact, Invincible continued slowly on her way on just one of her two propeller shafts, as the desperate search began for a replacement three-ton coupling, and the operation got under way to get it to the ship. Eventually, the new coupling was delivered aboard somewhere in the Western Approaches by an RAF Chinook helicopter, with a Navy Sea King to guide it through the fog which had descended. The task then was to get it down to the machinery space, and to carry out the changeover – something that had never been done before at sea. Invincible crept along with one shaft locked and between ten and twelve degrees of rudder on as the delicate surgery was completed.
At the same time, her squadrons and crew had already begun the business of practising for war. Easter Sunday, 11 April, found Invincible off the West African coast, and there was a lull in the operational activity to give the crew time to relax with some deck hockey and sunbathing. Captain Black reflected that it seemed difficult to believe, in such an atmosphere, that they were sailing potentially towards hostilities. ‘Having said that,’ he recorded in his journal, ‘there is an air of apprehension abroad, hardly a soul has seen any form of action, and no-one has seen the type of action which could be before us, replete with missile-armed aircraft and ships, and modern submarines’. 1
Still, Invincible made quite a sight when she steamed into view off Ascension Island on a bright morning on 16 April to join the advance group of task force ships which had been waiting. One member of the task force who was impressed was Ian Forbes, operations officer on the destroyer HMS Glamorgan. Like many in the Fleet, Forbes had heard a lot about Invincible, but had never seen her before, since she had been off on trials so much of the time. He knew that much rested on how effective a role she would be able to play in whatever transpired further south. It was reassuring to see her Sea Harriers screaming overhead.
There were two days off Ascension Island, re-storing and regrouping, and the passage south continued. The preParations, tensions, and anticipation began to mount. The task force now comprised the ships that had left from the United Kingdom and the group of ships from Gibraltar, with Admiral Woodward as the task force commander. Jeremy Black was designated anti-air warfare commander for the group. One thing he and his team focused on as they approached the Falklands was how to decoy Exocet anti-ship missiles using chaff.
The fact was that the Royal Navy and the other services were about to attempt something which more than fifteen years of official policy had decreed the country would never again undertake: an opposed landing, outside the range of land-based air cover, without allies. As Jeremy Black had noted, nobody really had any experience in modern naval warfare of this type. Some in the task force may have had a complacent faith in the abilities of some of their weapons, like the new Sea Wolf missiles on a handful of the ships. Supposedly, it could shoot down a 4. 5-in shell in flight. Others in the Navy, though, were acutely aware of the shortcomings in the task force’s capabilities. The questions were how effective would they be in papering over those gaps, and how skilful would the opposition be in finding them?
As Invincible prepared to enter the total exclusion zone (TEZ) declared by Britain around the Falklands, she practised ‘goalkeeper’drill with the Sea Wolf-armed frigate HMS Brilliant – the escort would stay close to the carrier, and between her and the expected direction of any threat, in the hope that the frigate’s weapons would be able to intercept any low-level attack, since Invincible had no actual weapons of her own to defeat such an attack. It was, perhaps, a sobering exercise. And yet Jeremy Black noted at the time: ‘no-one on board is in any doubt that we will have to fight, and now that doubt is removed, they are calm, relaxed, cheerful, and ready’. 2
Jeremy Black had, in the commander of 801 Naval Air Squadron, Sharkey Ward, perhaps the most forceful and experienced exponent of the Sea Harrier’s abilities that there was. He was constantly trying to impress on anyone who would listen the real potential of the aircraft, which went far beyond simply ‘hacking the shad’. And yet it remained an untried weapon. As the ships sailed deeper into those remote, inhospitable seas, a lot of people on the task force were feeling exposed and vulnerable.
HMS Invincible entered the TEZ on 1 May, and hostilities commenced. As he braced himself for what lay ahead, Jeremy Black confessed to himself that he had no idea whether he would have any aircraft left by nightfall.
In fact, the early skirmishes favoured the British. And, on 2 May, news came in to the task force that the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano had been sunk by the SSN, HMS Conqueror. There was cheering in Invincible’s wardroom. But Argentina quickly exacted revenge, when an air-launched Exocet missile devastated the destroyer, HMS Sheffield, two days later. It was a huge shock. Captain Black had just been sitting down to write about how his confidence in the task force’s ability to deal with the air threat had been growing, when it was shattered again.
The reverberations reached all the way back to the United Kingdom. Henry Leach watched the news sweep through Whitehall like a hurricane. For the first time, it seemed, people realized that the country was truly at war, and lives were being lost. There was, Leach thought, something close to panic. Leach, like the Chief of the Defence Staff, Terence Lewin, was a naval officer whose experience stretched back to the Second World War. They understood about, and had witnessed, the sacrifices that had to be made to achieve ends in war. The First Sea Lord had estimated that the Navy could lose up to half-a-dozen destroyers and frigates, and was prepared to accept up to double that number. Destroyers and frigates could be replaced, albeit at a cost, including in lives. The key was the carriers, and the calculations were complicated. They depended on the stage at which the war had reached when one or both of them might have been put out of action or sunk. But it was clear to Leach that, if both were taken out before the landing, that would have involved having to call off the entire operation.
The shockwaves from Sheffield spread much further, indeed around the world, reigniting the whole debate about the vulnerability of surface ships in the age of precision anti-ship missiles. Beyond Britain, the effects were felt nowhere more so than in Washington. There the Reagan administration was in the early stages of its planned naval build-up, with a lot of emphasis on big surface ships, and was facing considerable scepticism in the US Congress.
The US Navy Secretary, John Lehman, the chief architect of the build-up, had actually just arrived on a visit to London, and saw at first-hand the fallout in Whitehall from the disabling of HMS Sheffield. He and his boss, the US Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, had received pessimistic Pentagon briefings about the chances of British success in the South Atlantic. For him, though he dearly loved the Royal Navy, the events off the Falklands had a clear-cut message. The British, he believed, had come ‘face-to-face with the limitations of their fleet and the consequences of their anti-naval budget-cutting of the previous fifteen years … no big carriers, AEW, supersonic interceptors, cruise missile defences, 3-D radars’.
As far as John Lehman was concerned, this all added up to a vindication of his 600-ship, carrier-based plan. The critics drew very different conclusions. The Royal Navy may not be the US Navy, but the Exocet was a ‘firecracker’ compared to the weaponry that the Soviet forces had at their disposal. US Navy carrier task forces would be just as vulnerable as the British in an East-West confrontation in the north Norwegian Sea.
Despite the pessimism in the Pentagon over Britain’s chances, and the overall ambivalence early on in the Reagan administration over what was going on, both Weinberger and Lehman were hugely supportive of the British. The early despatch of US stocks of the latest version of the Sidewinder missile, the AIM-9L, to equip the Sea Harrier, was one example. Weinberger even offered the British an American carrier, although the British never really pursued the option, not believing it to be either operationally viable or likely to get past the White House itself.
There was one glaring, and well-known, defensive handicap with which the Royal Navy was having to contend. As in many other fields, it had been one of the pioneers of AEW, the ability to put a long-range radar aloft in an aircraft, to give extra warning-time of an attack, and then to direct defences to take care of it. It was far ahead of the RAF in this area, for example. The decision to phase out the conventional carriers left a question-mark over how and whether that capability could be provided. The need was not forgotten. The studies of the Future Fleet Working Party, in the immediate wake of CVA-01’s cancellation, made regular references to a requirement for an AEW helicopter as part of the Fleet. There were design studies. The Naval Staff was also aware that the United States had actually experimented with a Sea King helicopter carrying a radar in a collapsible installation beneath its fuselage. But, with the concentration on NATO, and the assumption that land-based AEW would be available, the requirement slipped down the list of priorities. With the battles to get Invincible herself, then the Sea Harrier, and then a major new programme for a replacement for the Sea King helicopter, it never seemed to be the right time to press for an AEW helicopter.
Suddenly, the need was urgent. And the race was on to turn those previous studies into a reality as quickly as possible. In the meantime, the Navy improvised. It deployed the SSNs that it had in the South Atlantic in a screen just outside the twelve-mile limit of Argentina’s territorial waters. From there, they observed and reported when air raids took off from the mainland. It was rudimentary and imprecise, but it provided a valuable forty-five minutes of warning.
The other major concern for the British regarding the air threat was the lack of options to go on the offensive. There were serious worries that air superiority was far from being achieved ahead of the landing that was planned actually to retake the Falklands. And part of the problem was that the Argentines were not joining the air battle on the scale that had been hoped, so that the British were not achieving the levels of attrition with their Sea Harriers and missile defences that they had planned. The question was what else could be done to force the issue.
Attacking Argentina’s mainland air bases might have been an option, albeit with huge political sensitivity attached. But the British did not have the wherewithal to pursue that option. For all their exploits, Invincible, Hermes, and their Sea Harriers could not substitute for the lack of a real strike carrier and mount long-range bombing missions against the mainland. The RAF had, with great effort, launched raids on the Falklands with a couple of antique Vulcan bombers that were themselves about to be retired. But it did not seem viable to use them against the mainland either.
As for the Vulcan raids on the Falklands itself, some in the Royal Navy felt that they were the RAF trying to muscle in on the operation. The likes of Sharkey Ward argued that the Sea Harriers could have done the job much more effectively. The vast resources that were expended on the Vulcan missions in terms of air-to-air refuelling tankers and other support compared to the actual damage caused – just one bomb on Stanley runway – seemed to some in the Fleet Air Arm to vindicate all their doubts about how realistic the RAF’s claims were in the 1960s about what it could and could not do to project air power around the world and protect the Fleet, the claims that had put paid to CVA-01. Still, the Vulcan attacks were a considerable propaganda coup as well as great feats of flying, and they probably did make the Argentine Air Force wonder and worry whether its home bases might themselves be attacked.
As another initiative, Jeremy Black and those with him aboard Invincible suggested moving further west, with escort ships to act as pickets, operating among the many smaller islands to try to reduce the threat from Exocet attack. But Admiral Woodward turned the idea down on the grounds that it would represent too high a risk. His decision to try to keep the carriers as far as possible out of harm’s way would come to be resented by some others in the task force, not least troops ashore, and would lead to some frictions and awkwardness among the crew on Invincible. But the carriers were so crucial that the decision was understandable.
In the event, Invincible did make a dash west to launch a helicopter for a reconnaissance mission on the mainland for a planned special forces raid. But bad weather intervened, and the helicopter came down in Chile short of its target, with some embarrassing subsequent publicity. The raid itself never took place. Later, after the landing, and under cover of darkness, Invincible made another push west, launching Sea Harriers to probe the Argentines’ mainland air defences. But they did not respond.
On 21 May, the Royal Navy and the assembled landing force ran a gauntlet in San Carlos Water to get the troops ashore. The escort ships suffered badly. The land campaign would also be a grim, gruelling, and hard-fought campaign. There would be tragic setbacks, the deadliest being the Bluff Cove bombing of the two landing ships carrying Welsh Guards. But, once the British forces had established themselves ashore, the balance of power shifted crucially in their favour.
Invincible herself had a number of particular alarms. Early on, two Sea Harriers were lost, apparently in a mid-air collision in cloud. As well as a blow to the ship, it was a significant reduction in the task force’s air defences at the time. After the landing, on 25 May, the Argentines mounted a determined attack on the carrier force with air-launched Exocet missiles. Ian Forbes watched in mounting alarm on a radar screen in HMS Glamorgan’s operation room as the raid unfolded. The ship was just two miles from Invincible at the time. He watched the two Exocets veer away from the carrier towards the frigate Ambuscade, but they were decoyed by her chaff, only to slam into and destroy the large container ship Atlantic Conveyor. That was damaging enough, since she was still loaded with vital stores, including Chinook transport helicopters, for the landing force. Twelve crew died, including the ship’s revered master, Captain Ian North. But at least she had offloaded her cargo of Harrier reinforcements. And her loss was not as grave as the sinking of one of the carriers would have been.
During that attack, Invincible had fired a spectacular salvo of Sea Dart missiles. In the ship’s operation room, the missile controller saw a contact moving on his radar screen which he thought was an enemy aircraft. He called the commanding officer. Black rushed over and watched the contact himself over the missile controller’s shoulder, and agreed that it was a potential contact. So the ship unleashed six missiles in quick succession. But, whatever it was, it seems to have been a spurious contact. It may have been the radar echo from the cloud of chaff fired by Hermes to divert the incoming Exocets.
Five days later, the Argentines mounted a last air-launched Exocet attack on the task force. Based on estimates of the group’s position using tracks of Harrier movements from radars based on the Falklands, the Argentines pressed home the attack. In fact, the Sea Harrier pilots had been deliberately employing deception tactics, flying at low level after launching from the carriers, and only climbing into the view of the Argentines’ radar some time after that. So the estimated position of the task force was some thirty miles out. The attackers identified a target, but it was the frigate Avenger, and the Exocet was decoyed away and was either shot down or flew into the sea. Four more aircraft followed up to attack with conventional bombs, two were brought down, and the other two missed their target. This was all a great relief to Jeremy Black as, at just that moment, and for the only time in the war, both the missile control radars for his Sea Dart system failed. He was also, for once, without his ‘goalkeeper’ frigate. He would have been defenceless. In fact, the Argentines believed that they had hit Invincible, and continued to claim so for some time after the incident.
But perhaps the most hair-raising moment for Captain Black was when he believed he had been fired on with torpedoes by an Argentine submarine. He took furious evasive action, and then launched his helicopters to try to locate the suspected submarine. They found nothing, and the incident was dismissed by the rest of the task force. But he would later read a newspaper report that claimed a submarine attack on the task force on the day the episode took place.
All the while, as the battle took its course in the South Atlantic, back in the United Kingdom, as well as looking on anxiously as a nation, great efforts were under way to support the war effort, and if necessary to sustain it over a long period. Reinforcements of weapons and warships were on their way. And, critically, every effort was being made to accelerate the completion of HMS Illustrious.
Jock Slater had been thrilled when he got the news that he had been appointed to command Illustrious. Apart from the fact that she had a hugely evocative and famous name, synonymous with heroic carrier action in the Second World War, there was also a family connection. Slater’s great-uncle was Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, who had been Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet at the time when slow, antiquated Swordfish torpedo bi-planes – ‘Stringbags’ as they were affectionately known since they were held together with wire and canvas – had launched the first-ever attack of its type from the flight deck of the previous Illustrious against the Italian fleet in harbour at Taranto in November 1940. It was a devastating blow against Italy’s battleships, which changed the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean at a stroke, and was the precursor to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour.
Having watched the task force sail away, Slater got quickly back to work. The efforts by the workers on the Tyne, spurred by a tide of patriotism, had been remarkable. Just a couple of weeks after the task force’s departure, Captain Slater got in touch with Fleet headquarters at Northwood and suggested that the ship could be sent south with the planned Harrier and helicopter reinforcements. But Admiral Fieldhouse turned him down. It was not clear how long the conflict would last and, if it stretched into the southern Atlantic winter, Illustrious would be needed at full strength to relieve either Invincible or Hermes. So, her preParations continued, and the reinforcements were sent south in the ill-fated Atlantic Conveyor.
Illustrious did suffer some serious problems with equipment. But she was accepted into Royal Navy service on 18 June, just three days after the Argentine surrender, but well ahead of the original timetable. As evidence of the haste involved, a workman was still painting the centre line of the flight deck runway as the handover took place. But still the pressure was on. It was not clear if the ceasefire would hold. Uniquely, two days later, the ship’s company held a commissioning ceremony on the way to Portsmouth and her accelerated acceptance trials and operational work-up.
Illustrious had to borrow RAF Harriers for her work-up, as there were no Sea Harriers to spare. As well as being a new ship, she had received some rush modifications as a result of the early lessons from the south Atlantic. Among the most significant of these were two of the new Vulcan-Phalanx radar-controlled Gatling guns, hurriedly purchased from the United States. Captain Slater knew nothing about these until he returned to the Swan Hunter yard one Monday morning and found two holes drilled in his new flight deck and forecastle. When he enquired, he was told they were for the Vulcan-Phalanx guns.
Originally, the installations were going to be fully automatic. But the captain insisted on having a fail-safe switch in the operations room. He did not want these new, untried weapons spraying hundreds of shells across the flight deck with loaded Sea Harriers parked there. Still, he was impressed enough with the first trials in the Western Approaches. The first towed target, at sea level to simulate an Exocet, was obliterated. Captain Slater, on the bridge to observe the test, saw bits of it flying over his head to land in the sea beyond. He was certainly satisfied. It gave him great confidence as he contemplated the voyage south, although this did highlight one criticism of the Vulcan-Phalanx – that debris from a destroyed incoming missile could still have enough forward momentum to fly on and do damage to the target ship.
The other great advantage that Illustrious would have as she sailed south was the result of that crash programme to fill the AEW gap. Within days of Sheffield’s destruction, work had begun to convert two Sea King helicopters to carry the powerful Searchwater radar, a version of which was already fitted to the RAF’s Nimrod patrol aircraft. Some of the earlier studies were dusted off and by early August – in other words, in less than three months – the two aircraft were ready. Some shook their heads at the ungainly appearance of these machines – with the radar in an inflatable and retractable dome attached to the starboard side of the fuselage, they looked a bit like old ladies with handbags under their arms. But they would become indispensable, and they were ready to embark on Illustrious.
Even so, Captain Slater knew that he had a considerable challenge ahead. Many of his ship’s company were disappointed that they would be too late to see action. In fact, it was less certain than that. There had been a surrender and ceasefire. But was that really the end of it? So Jock Slater had the job of motivating his crew and preparing his ship for war, when apparently the war was over.
For Jeremy Black on Invincible, the task was subtly different. In the aftermath of the surrender, there was a respite for Invincible. She sailed north for some maintenance and rest for her crew. There was not much relief for the engine room staff, however, as they performed another first – changing one of Invincible’s main Olympus engines while still at sea.
And soon she was heading south again. As the rest of the task force, including the carrier Hermes, rust-streaked and betraying both her age and her origins in the Second World War, sailed for home, Invincible faced another two months on station until Illustrious arrived to relieve her, and longer still before she got home herself. ‘We face a great challenge,’ Black wrote in his journal, ‘to keep this ship efficient and its morale high with a further three months before we return to the United Kingdom, and without the impetus of war, but with the awful weather of the southern winter’. 4
One thing that helped was that, quite soon, rumours began to circulate that the ship’s sale to Australia was going to be cancelled. The very first HMS Invincible was a prize captured from the French. Steeped as he was in the traditions of his service, Jeremy Black reflected in his journal on 17 July: ‘It would be a great achievement to have won a ship in battle’. 5 Two days later, he had. Confirmation came through: the sale of Invincible was off.