CHAPTER ELEVEN
Invincible had survived, in more ways than one. Other ships had not, nor many members of their crews. Very few of the warships had emerged from the conflict in the South Atlantic completely unscathed.
As hostilities ended, TonyWolstenholme flew down to Ascension Island to meet and survey some of these battered task force vessels on their way home. It would be his job to start patching them up when they returned to Portsmouth. It was a sobering experience, as he contemplated what might have been.
There was HMS Glasgow, which had seen a 1,000-lb bomb smash into her side amidships, crash right across the engine room, and emerge the other side without exploding. And HMS Antrim, under fierce attack in San Carlos Water on the first day of the landing to retake the Falklands, had been hit by another bomb which had crashed into the stern by the flash doors for her Sea Slug missile magazine, and into the magazine itself. But, again, it did not explode. The magazine complex for the large, ungainly missiles ran right along the centre of the ship. Had that bomb gone off, Wolstenholme thought, it would have been like HMS Hood in the Second World War, when her main magazines ignited and blew her to pieces virtually in an instant.
Down south, after a remarkable and – since the Second World War – probably unique few weeks since leaving the builder’s yard, HMS Illustrious finally arrived on 27 August to relieve her elder sister. Jock Slater had already been enjoying the advantages of his new and improved ship and her aircraft. With one of the new AEW Sea Kings aloft, he had first spotted Invincible over 200 miles away. Indeed, Illustrious was crammed with aircraft – ten Sea Harriers in all, and eleven Sea King helicopters, including the two new AEW machines, Sea King ‘Whiskeys’ as they came to be known. Slater had the new Vulcan-Phalanx as well. His ship represented what many, including Tony Wolstenholme, felt that the Invincibles should have been like from the outset– with more weapons, more aircraft, and that crucial AEW capability. He certainly had a range of new abilities that Jeremy Black and the rest of the task force would dearly have loved back at the beginning of May.
Maybe it was that thought that prompted a moment of exuberance as Jock Slater bid farewell to Jeremy Black and Invincible. In the Navy’s best traditions of bold seamanship, with a flourish – and with the admiral in charge sailing off at a safe distance towards the horizon – Slater steered Illustrious on a high-speed steam-past of Invincible with both ships’companies waving and cheering. It certainly raised Jeremy Black’s eyebrows on Invincible’s bridge. For its part, again in true Navy style, the crew of Invincible had a little jab back at the new arrival, brandishing a banner on the flight deck which read: “Welcome back Hermes, nice paint job”.
It would still be nearly three more weeks, on 17 September, before Invincible made her triumphant return to Portsmouth. The Queen embarked by barge, to renew her association with the ship, and for a private reunion with her second son, Prince Andrew, who had been a Sea King pilot on board during the conflict. The First Sea Lord, Henry Leach, was aboard as well. Invincible had been at sea continuously for 166 days, then a record for an aircraft carrier. Illustrious would also notch up 100 days herself.
The joyous homecomings, and the national euphoria and relief over the victory, added an extra layer of emotion as the debates got under way over the lessons to be learned. Many people were still coming to terms with the fact that they had seen pictures that they had not expected, of Royal Navy warships burning and sinking. In fact, the arguments over the Nott review had been reopened while the fighting was still going on. In so many different ways, it had been a damned close-run thing. But what did that tell people about the significance of what had taken place?
There were many heroes among the sailors, aircrew, and troops. The inanimate heroes without which the operation could probably never even have been contemplated were undoubtedly the Sea Harrier, the AIM-9L Sidewinder missile which it carried, and the Ski-jump ramp from which it was launched. Some seasoned Fleet Air Arm pilots would concede in whispered tones that, even if the old Ark Royal and her Phantoms and Buccaneers had still been available, she might have struggled to fly her aircraft in the kinds of conditions with which the Sea Harriers were often confronted in those bleak South Atlantic waters.
Invincible was at one point operating ten Sea Harriers – twice her normal complement – as well as her helicopters. But dear old Hermes ended up with more than double that number of Sea Harriers and RAF Harriers, a tribute to her greater appetite as a pure carrier both for more aircraft and their weapons. It was something of an irony given that, for all those battling years in the 1960s, she was the weak link in the Navy’s carrier case, because of her relatively small size and supposedly limited aircraft capacity.
It was significant that the two glaring gaps in the task force’s defences, the presence of which might have made a very considerable difference to the scale of the damage and casualties suffered by the Fleet, were very specific. And they were quite easy and not very expensive to remedy. They were the lack of AEW, and of sophisticated close-in gun systems. The former could be excused to a large extent because, in the NATO context, AEW cover would have been available from US carriers or land-based aircraft. But it was still an omission, given that the Navy and the government had supposedly planned for and endorsed a fleet that could operate out of area. The absence of close-in guns was another matter, and even more relevant for the Alliance battle as any beyond the NATO region.
John Nott had already bowed to the new political mood. He had quietly dropped the sale of Invincible. The more detailed official conclusions about the significance of the Falklands campaign were still being debated when Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach bid an emotional farewell to the Ministry of Defence in early December 1982, with a mass of dark blue uniforms at the North Door to give him a rousing send-off. It was a measure of the affection that the Navy felt for Leach that, years later, in 2004, it would name its new Fleet headquarters building in Portsmouth the Sir Henry Leach Building.
In the middle of the month, the government’s post-Falklands defence white paper was published. The Defence Secretary would continue to insist that his basic analysis remained sound. ‘The many useful lessons we have learned from the Falklands Campaign,’the document said, ‘do not invalidate the policy we have adopted following last year’s defence programme review’. 1
The white paper also rather pointedly observed that, following the conflict, ‘we shall now be devoting substantially more resources to defence than had been previously planned’. 2 In other words, if there were to be any changes of plans, it was only because the pot of money had got bigger and changed the equation.
Dropping the sale of Invincible meant that the Navy would be able to look forward to keeping three such ships after all. So there would be a good chance that it would have two rather than just one operational most of the time, which had been the argument all along for the cost-effectiveness of the three-ship programme. Each of the carriers would be equipped with three of the new AEW helicopters. They would also all get the new close-in gun defences, as would the Type 42 destroyers.
The Navy’s radars would be improved. The plan was still that the overall number of destroyers and frigates would drop to fifty, but the idea that eight of them would be kept in reserve was forgotten. What was more, the Navy was allowed to replace the warships which had been sunk with much-improved, bigger versions of its new Type 22 frigates. The final batch of these would be the first Royal Navy warships in a very long time that would begin to look as if they were really bristling with weapons. They would take on something of the appearance, and be able to mirror in modern times some of the capabilities of the cruisers of old, just as the ship that had been described as a cruiser for so long had turned out to make a passable impression of an aircraft carrier.
The white paper was right in a sense, there was no sea change in attitudes in Whitehall. In terms of resources, there was rebalancing for a while. Out-of-area operations acquired a new and permanent focus, and the Navy was the chief beneficiary of that. But the extra money from the Falklands war chest, and from the pledge to NATO to increase annual spending, would run out in the middle of the decade. Worries and questions about the numbers of destroyers and frigates would be back by the end of the 1980s. It was a further breathing space for the Navy, and perhaps the most that could have been expected.
But beneath the surface, something more had changed. The way in which, and the speed with which, the Navy in particular had responded to the Falklands, and how it had fought and prevailed in a modern missile-age encounter, helped reconnect it with the public consciousness. Here was a real and vivid demonstration of what the possession of maritime power was all about, that was not just confined to the particulars of a single, seemingly anomalous colonial dispute in the far-off South Atlantic. It was simply a reminder of what a navy, and particularly the Royal Navy, could do, even when its main job was meant to be hunting Soviet submarines in the northeast Atlantic.
It was also a display of naval determination that was surely not lost on other observers, and for that reason probably had an unquantifiable ripple effect on the wider strategic picture at what was a crucial period of transition in East-West tensions. Two years previously Sandy Woodward, when he was Director of Naval Plans, had written of the demonstrative effect on the potential adversary of maintaining and even bolstering the West’s maritime defence, and by implication the risks of economizing on the naval front. At the time, such thoughts may have been discounted too far in other parts of the Ministry of Defence, where the preoccupation was worrying about the reaction of Britain’s own allies to making economies anywhere else. Perhaps, in worrying about the impact on NATO cohesion of cuts to Britain’s continental commitment, insufficient weight was given to the impact of cuts in naval forces, on either General Galtieri or the Kremlin.
The conflict also came at a critical time for Britain, and was a vital boost to national morale, almost a return from the dead in terms of self-esteem and international standing. It had seemed to slay some of the ghosts of Suez, whether that was a good thing or not. The services generally, but most visibly the Navy, had played a part in cementing Margaret Thatcher’s place in history. But for the springboard of victory in the South Atlantic, economic traumas at home might well have seen her government voted out of office after just one term. For better or worse, but for the Navy, the world might not still be talking about Thatcherism.
The Falklands was a reminder of how useful maritime power could be when crises erupt far away. But it was also a display of how effective the Royal Navy could be closer to home. The deficiencies in the south Atlantic were plain to see, but so too the remedies. Neither side in the Whitehall battle over the Navy’s future the year before had got it right. But, then, without experience of a war at sea for thirty-five years, lessons needed to be re-learned.
Britain probably ended up with a navy closer to the one that it should have had.
The Falklands additions in equipment and weapons would make a critical difference to the credibility and effectiveness of the Fleet both in the NATO domain and further afield. Ironically, given how crucial it was to the success of the campaign, the one area which was to remain relatively weak, and would steadily get more so over the years, was that of amphibious shipping. John Nott had reprieved the two assault ships, Fearless and Intrepid, before the Falklands crisis erupted. But there was only a promise, and no concrete sign, of any replacements.
In this connection, the retention of Invincible was doubly significant, since that meant an extra carrier which could play the part of a Commando ship if needed. And that fact was about to take on greater importance, as the protection and reinforcement of NATO’s northern flank by amphibious forces was about to take on an increased significance in the Alliance’s evolving maritime strategy.
On her return from the Falklands, Invincible herself spent a much-deserved break of nearly four months in dockyard hands in Portsmouth. Among other things, she received two of the same Vulcan-Phalanx gun systems that had been fitted to Illustrious.
After that, it was a return to a more normal routine. There were trials, and then it was across the Atlantic for exercises and a deployment to the Caribbean. It was while there in February 1983 that Jeremy Black’s promotion to Rear Admiral came through, and he left the ship in Barbados. She sailed back across the Atlantic for more manoeuvres off Gibraltar – the very same series of exercises that had, the year before, been the launching pad for many of the warships that sailed south to the Falklands. And then it was north for more exercises which tested her secondary role as a Commando carrier once again.
Meanwhile, the Navy’s two other carriers – Hermes and Illustrious – were also gearing up for major NATO exercises that would practise exactly those scenarios of naval warfare in the North Atlantic that had been so contentious two years earlier. At the end of May, Hermes would set off from the sprawling US naval base at Norfolk, Virginia. This time she was not the main flagship, but a supporting act in a multinational task force headed by the 87,000-ton carrier USS John F Kennedy. They were rehearsing the manoeuvre that would, in a time of East-West crisis, bring the US Navy’s carrier battle groups across the Atlantic, to take up a holding position near the Azores, before heading north.
As the ships moved round to the southeast of the Azores, another assembly of warships set sail from Portugal’s ancient port capital of Lisbon. This was the group that included HMS Illustrious, but again she was playing junior partner to – and chief anti-submarine cover for – the French aircraft carrier Foch. The two groups would rendezvous and then spread out northeast into the Bay of Biscay and towards the Western Approaches, to carry out exercises in the protection of shipping, while aircraft from the USS John F Kennedy carried out simulated strike missions deep into southern Germany.
Already, in the wake of the Falklands, and with a new dynamic force in Washington, NATO’s naval thinking was shifting. When John Lehman took office as US Navy Secretary under Ronald Reagan in February 1981, he came face-to-face with what he regarded as an ‘entrenched anti-naval orthodoxy’ in the Pentagon, especially among the civilian staff. He came to be associated with the implementation of the new US maritime strategy, for which he was such a strident advocate, but which had been forming in the minds of senior US Navy officers and in naval staff studies for some time.
Most controversially, it was envisaged as a forward strategy, and a key focus was the new emphasis on pushing US and NATO naval forces north beyond the GIUK Gap into the teeth of the Soviet maritime defences, to take them on in their bases and bastions in and around the Kola Peninsula.
It was an expensive proposition. There was the banner headline of a 600-ship navy, as the means to fulfil the strategy. More specifically, it would require more investment in the priciest items of US maritime power, the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and the hugely-capable Aegis air defence system aboard escorting cruisers that provided a radar and missile umbrella for the US carrier battle groups. The critics would argue that the United States was playing into the Soviets’ hands, and that not only was it risky but also potentially provocative and destabilizing. It was in fact pushing against a Soviet military, economic, and political façade that was beginning to show the first signs of crumbling.
HMS Hermes was now rapidly approaching her retirement from the Royal Navy. Invincible, on the other hand, had had a new lease of life. And she also found her way into the headlines again.
In the Falklands Campaign, HMS Invincible had been one of a number of warships to sail to the South Atlantic with nuclear depth charges aboard. When ministers became aware of this, there were considerable alarms, but it was felt that trying to remove them would mean unacceptable delays to the deployment of the task force. They were eventually returned to the United Kingdom, but some only after the fighting had finished.
The Falklands effect and the renewed interest in out-of-area operations saw the resumption of Far East deployments, to practise the ability to project power and influence. On 1 September 1983, Invincible set off from Portsmouth on her first such deployment, with her old captain, Jeremy Black, embarked as the flag officer. Indeed, it was the most significant Far East deployment by the Royal Navy for some time. Invincible, however, had to make do with a minimum air group of five Sea Harriers and eight Sea King ASW helicopters
– there were no extra jets available, or any of the Sea King AEW machines.
By November, the ship was heading to Australia. It was always going to be a poignant series of port calls there. In other circumstances, it would have been at about this time that Invincible would have been arriving under another name and other colours as the latest addition to the Royal Australian Navy.
The ship had got as far as Sydney when strange noises on one of the shafts started to cause concern. Admiral Black was not unfamiliar with the problem of mechanical grumblings from the ship’s machinery spaces. But he was less familiar with the political grumblings which ensued. The Australian Government said that it could not allow the ship to go into dry-dock to investigate the problem unless it received an assurance that there were no nuclear weapons aboard.
In fact, after the experience of the Falklands, Invincible had left her nuclear depth charges behind before she sailed from Portsmouth. But Britain operated a ‘neither confirm nor deny’ policy. So there was an impasse. It was decided that Invincible would head to Singapore for dry-docking. Although there seemed to be a late change of heart by the Australians, the British stuck to the Singapore option. But media interest in the ship’s predicament in the Far East was increased when the Japanese Government decided that it could not accept a visit from a British warship which might be carrying nuclear weapons, so that planned part of the itinerary was also scrapped. Moreover, the work in Singapore clearly had not cured the shaft problem, so she returned home early for more investigations and repairs to be carried out.
By now, the last of the Invincibles was nearing completion, and with it a plan that the Naval Staff had been clinging to for nearly fifteen years. Ark Royal would have a somewhat different appearance to her two elder sisters. The working group which had looked into improvements in her design early on had rejected most of them on the grounds that they would delay the ship too much. The Falklands changed the equation. There was the improved, much more prominent twelve-degree Ski-jump ramp, which was also extended forward in order not to interfere with the Sea Dart missile and so as not to encroach on the available parking and helicopter operating space on the flight deck. She would receive three instead of two of the new Vulcan-Phalanx guns, and they would be fitted in special emplacements at the bow and stern, and on a platform added to the side of the island superstructure.
Invincible and Ark Royal would meet at sea for the first time in October 1984, when the latter sailed out of the Tyne at the start of her builder’s sea trials. Ark Royal made her debut in Portsmouth to quite a fanfare of attention on 1 July 1985. Completing the triumvirate of first commanding officers for the class was Captain James Weatherall. On her flight deck as she eased in towards her berth at the Middle Slip Jetty were a Sea Harrier and, near the stern, an ancient Swordfish torpedo plane, as flown by her predecessor but one, the third Ark Royal, which had performed heroically in the early part of the Second World War before being sunk off Gibraltar in November 1941.
Another faint echo of the past was that, with her various modifications, and the extra platforms and sponsons for new weapons, she had lost some of the clean, uncluttered character that Invincible had had when she first appeared. She looked just a little bit more like the carriers of old. And, to some of the traditionalists, she was the better for it. But she still had her Royal Navy acceptance trials ahead, and it would be nearly another year before all her extra weaponry was fitted.
The other sister, Illustrious, then hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. At the beginning of April 1986, she left Portsmouth at the head of the most ambitious deployment – with the exception of the Falklands task force – for over a decade. The group would be away for eight months, and would circle the globe. But Illustrious was only a day out of port when disaster struck. There was an explosion, the sound of alarms throughout the ship, and a sudden inferno in one of the starboard machinery spaces. A sheet of flame belched from one of the ship’s funnels. The fire was brought under control, but Illustrious had to limp back to port. It would be more than two months before she could rejoin the deployment.
While this was going on, Invincible bowed out for what was going to be her first major refit at Devonport Dockyard. The price of the refit would be more than two-thirds the original building cost of the ship, 120 million pounds. It would last two-and-a-half years. But she would emerge with a major improvement in her capabilities.
Invincible arrived at Devonport in May 1986. For a year, she languished almost dormant, with little work being carried out, as the dockyard concentrated on refurbishing her old task force fleet-mate, HMS Hermes, for sale to and service in the Indian Navy as the INS Viraat. In May 1987, the formal handover and renaming ceremony took place. And, in July, the INS Viraat finally sailed away.
So the dockyard set to the task in earnest of transforming Invincible. There was a massive effort to service and repair her equipment and machinery. But, more importantly, there were very considerable changes to be made, many mirroring those already seen in Ark Royal. The old Ski-jump ramp was dismantled, and a new, larger, extended one was built, with a twelve-degree incline like Ark Royal’s. She was given a new 3-D radar, and much more advanced sonar, again as in Ark Royal. There were three new radar-controlled, close-in gun systems, but this time they were the Dutch Goalkeeper design, as opposed to the Vulcan-Phalanx. The operations room was upgraded.
But, most significantly, there was another big step on the path to making her a more effective aircraft carrier. Many of the changes were the result of experience from the Falklands. Invincible would emerge with the ability, routinely, to operate a force of twenty-one aircraft or more – a far cry now from that initial target of nine helicopters. Some of the ship’s fuel tanks were converted to be able to carry more aviation fuel. At last, Invincible’s magazine capacity was increased, and provision was made for her to be able to handle the new Sea Eagle anti-ship missile, which could be carried by the Sea Harriers, and which greatly improved her firepower.
By now, the Navy had also set in train development of a Mark Two version of the Sea Harrier, to make up for the deficiencies of the original aircraft that were exposed in the Falklands. There would be a new, more advanced radar, and longer range, radar-guided missiles in place of the short-range, heat-seeking Sidewinders. The Navy saw it as a vital programme, to try to push out that outer layer of defence as the likely air threat increased. To the huge satisfaction of Fleet Air Arm pilots, it was also taking the Sea Harrier even further away from that rudimentary ‘hack the shad’ role that was its origin.
Still, the Sea Harrier FRS. 2, as it was being called, was a long time coming. It had been announced in the year after the Falklands. It would not see service until the 1990s.
All the changes to Invincible meant the need to find room for more people aboard – an extra 120 places in all. So a new mess deck was squeezed into the space under the new ramp, rather unfortunately for those who would be occupying it. And a mezzanine deck with more officer accommodation was built out into the aft end of the hangar. Life would definitely feel more crowded aboard.
Other navies were by now following the Royal Navy’s example in taking V/STOL aircraft to sea in a new generation of mini-carriers. The Italian Navy commissioned the 14,000-ton Giuseppe Garibaldi in September 1985, although she would not get her own Harriers for another four years. The Spanish Navy adapted the US sea control ship design to produce the Principe de Asturias, with a twelve-degree Ski-jump ramp. She had been laid down in 1979 but would not actually enter service until 1988. The Italians and the Spanish would buy US versions of the Harrier for their ships. The Indian Navy became the only export customer for the Sea Harrier, to operate from the newly-acquired Viraat.
Invincible finally went to sea again near the end of 1988. And, all the time that she had been in dockyard hands, the world beyond had been changing.
The services, and in particular the Navy, continued to enjoy a certain Falklands afterglow. But, by the late 1980s, the questions about overstretch and under-funding were resurfacing. There were complaints of a ‘defence review by stealth’. Specifically, the Government’s commitment to maintain a destroyer and frigate of ‘about fifty’ was wearing thinner and thinner. It was looking more like ‘about forty-six or forty-seven’. The Navy was still thinking about a new Commando carrier, but getting nowhere. The idea of a new cheap frigate, or an even more modest corvette, had typically been squeezed out of consideration to preserve the Type 23 programme. The gathering pace of the Trident programme was adding to the stresses on the defence budget.
These facts were all adding to the strain on the Royal Navy as it got to grips with the implications of the new US-led forward maritime strategy. It was still expected to try to take the lead in ‘holding the ring’, until the US carrier battle groups could arrive, and to push north into the Norwegian Sea into the teeth of Soviet forces. The NATO plan would be to take on the Soviet Navy in its northern bastions and bases, and seek bastions of its own among Norway’s fjords.
On the face of it, the adversary hardly looked any less daunting; new ships and new submarines armed with formidable weapons like the SS-N-19 anti-ship missile, which gloried in the NATO codename ‘Shipwreck’. The sceptics ashore, and some of the gloomier intelligence assessments, questioned whether the Royal Navy had any weaponry that could touch these opponents, and wondered whether all that it was practising was a futile if heroic headlong rush to destruction.
But, for some of the practitioners, out in the grey expanse of the Atlantic and the icy waters north of the British Isles, the perspective was perhaps rather different, as they grappled with their task. One of those taking a leading role in this developing drama was Julian Oswald, who by the mid 1980s was the Flag Officer Third Flotilla, the commander at sea of the Navy’s main anti-submarine force, based on one or more of the Invincibles. In the new, more determined jargon of the forward maritime strategy, this would be known as the NATO ASW Strike Force.
The first task was getting the main Striking Fleet, the US carrier battle groups, across from the United States. That presented its own problems just in terms of natural hazards. The route went through some of the most challenging waters from an acoustic and anti-submarine point of view. It is known as the north wall of the Gulf Stream, where warm waters meet the cold water of the Atlantic. But it was the job of Oswald and his force to move ahead of the US carriers to try to ensure that, as they came through, they were not going to be troubled by Soviet submarines.
It was certainly hard work in conditions that tended to favour the attacker. But, as the exercises progressed over the years, the Royal Navy learned more about the acoustics and the environment, and how to use its new towed-array escort ships. And Julian Oswald realized that the West was beginning to spot cracks in the Soviets’ capabilities, of which the catastrophic losses of a couple of their nuclear-powered submarines in accidents during this time were only the most visible sign. He would later be stunned by the hollowness of most of the Soviet Union’s naval forces on a visit to the Black Sea as First Sea Lord in 1991. He witnessed the shambles of a gunnery exercise and wondered how the West had frightened itself to such an extent for so long, and not spotted the weaknesses.
Still, in the mid 1980s, there was no doubt in Oswald’s mind that the Navy was putting its head in the Soviet noose. Or that it would need the support of those American carriers as they thundered north. But the other thought in Oswald’s mind was, what impact was all this having on the Soviet mind? He felt that perhaps the Soviet forces would have been impressed.
The culmination of these manoeuvres probably came with Exercise Teamwork 88. By then, Admiral Oswald was C-in-C Fleet. The British flagship was HMS Illustrious. And, on the staff of the new flag officer aboard the carrier was Ian Forbes.
Those on board Illustrious as they headed north in the opening stages of Teamwork 88 were fully conscious of how exposed they would be in a real crisis. Even when the American carriers arrived and moved north themselves, it would be Illustrious’ job and that of the force around to stay 150 miles ahead, screening the carriers, which were meant to be part of the air umbrella in their turn. But they would still feel very remote.
But, as the exercise took Illustrious and the American carriers in amongst the fjords of Norway at NATO’s northern tip, there was a strong sense that the pendulum in the arguments – and the balance of pressures on the opposing sides – had finally swung.
Forbes and his colleagues still worried that they did not have as many ships as they would have liked. But this was now the era of ‘area’ASW operations, with the whole network of towed arrays, submarines, aircraft, and carrier-borne helicopters.
There would undoubtedly have been losses. But, as Forbes considered the Soviet Northern Fleet forces, they looked to him to be very much a one-shot system, with little recourse to reloading their batteries of anti-ship missiles once they were at sea and in action.
That could be deadly enough, of course, in this guided-missile era. But the situation presented serious dilemmas to Soviet commanders. Should they use their main batteries against the likes of Illustrious and her escorts? Or should they hold their fire, until the American carrier battle groups were properly in the cross-hairs? But how effective would that be against what would be at least three carriers, their massed air groups and escorts? Would that be too late? And what should be kept in reserve to defend their bastions and home bases if the NATO forces should survive and break through to continue the fight? To Forbes, it seemed to be NATO that was finally posing the critical questions to its opponents.
Even as the exercise planners pored over the results and digested the lessons of Teamwork 88, events on the broader political and diplomatic stage were beginning to move in a significant way. The arrival on the scene of Mikhail Gorbachov as Soviet leader, the first hints and suggestions that there was the possibility once more of accommodation and compromise, and the first breakthroughs since the era of détente on the arms control front, had in some ways only sharpened the arguments in NATO on how to respond, how far to go and how flexible to be in dealing with Moscow.
Suddenly, though, as 1989 unfolded, the prospect of the imminent collapse of the communist system began to seem very real. The Solidarity movement won elections in Poland. Hungary opened its borders to Austria. A tide of refugees from East Germany began to flow. Almost unthinkably, mounting protests in East Germany saw the fall of the long-time leader, Erich Honecker.
On 10 November 1989, people began to pull down the Berlin Wall. It was the real start of the unravelling of a system, and of the Cold War.
The arguments have been endless as to what the key catalysts were in this process. Was it a growing realisation in Moscow that the economic system there was approaching breaking-point? Was it the stridency and apparent inflexibility of the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in their dealings with the Soviet Union during the early 1980s? How much did the way the nuclear debates in Europe resolved themselves convince the Kremlin of the need to find a different way? Did the Reagan bombshell in 1983 of beginning work on a missile defence shield, the Strategic Defence Initiative or ‘Star Wars’, finally convince the Soviet leadership that it could no longer afford to compete with the US military-industrial complex?
Did the lessons from the South Atlantic reach all the way back to the Kremlin? And how much did the gauntlet that was thrown down by the new US maritime strategy, and the way NATO sought to put it into effect, add to the growing burdens of the Soviet military establishment? There must be a plausible case that they did have a significant effect, and that the cascade of events throughout the 1980s provided further evidence of the enduring strategic impact of maritime forces and capabilities.