ON SATURDAY MORNING, Tim Gedge took a call from a payphone in Southampton. At the other end of the line, standing on the jetty shoving ten-pence pieces into the slot, was an AEO Gedge had known a few years earlier during his tour as SPLOT on 764 Squadron. The AEO needed to speak to a helicopter expert. But with much of the FOF3 aviation staff already on its way to join the lead elements of the Task Force in Gibraltar, Gedge was on his own. He listened as his former colleague explained that he’d been tasked with constructing two flight decks for P&O’s flagship, the SS Canberra.
Looking around the empty office, Gedge told him, ‘I’m the helicopter expert,’ before the engineer began to run out of change. After they’d tried and failed to organize a reverse charge call, Gedge called him back in his phone box. An hour later, Gedge had chinagraph drawings of Canberra’s layout spread over his desk. But there was a problem.
Less than twenty-four hours after the invasion, the government had in place the legal instruments it needed to requisition merchant ships in support of the Task Force. In a process labelled STUFT – ships taken up from trade – ferries, container ships, tugs, oil-rig support ships, trawlers, refrigerated cargo ships, tankers and cruiseliners were pressed into action as troopships, hospital ships, minesweepers, repair ships and helicopter carriers. In total, fifty-two ships from thirty-three different companies joined the STUFT programme. The most spectacular of these, and the first on the MoD’s shopping list, was the Canberra. On 1 April, before the Argentinians had even set foot on the Falklands, representatives from P&O had been asked to attend a meeting ‘within the hour’. They were questioned in detail about the ship, already earmarked to transport 3 Commando Brigade south. And about whether or not she might be converted to operate helicopters. Now the man given the job of ensuring she could was struggling.
‘I can’t make the flight deck forward,’ his old colleague told him.
Building a flight deck amidships on top of Canberra’s swimming pool was going to be easy enough, but because the deck immediately forward of the ship’s bridge wasn’t flat, it would have to be built up with scaffolding. The half-moon-shaped landing pad could be made level, but only using greater lengths of scaffolding, which would mean they were insufficiently strong. He was going round in circles. Flat or level, but not both.
‘What angle can you make it?’ Gedge asked him.
‘I can make it flat, but it’s going to have a slope of about five degrees.’
Gedge approved it without hesitation. During his tour with the Royal Marines, he’d learned to fly a Wessex V helicopter. As part of the conversion course he’d practised landings in sloping fields. ‘If I can land a helicopter on a five-degree slope, then any frontline pilot can do it.’
Gedge wasn’t the only one winging it. The Navy was improvising too. There was much more at stake for the Senior Service than just the fate of the Falkland Islands.
Invincible and Hermes were all that was left of the Royal Navy’s once mighty fleet of aircraft carriers. After announcing Britain’s withdrawal from East of Suez, in 1966 Defence Secretary Denis Healey also cancelled the Navy’s plans for the first of a new generation of carriers called CVA-01. At the same time, recognizing that even a reduced fleet needed more substantial command and control and helicopter capability than that which was on offer from mere frigates and destroyers, Healey supported plans for a new class of ship. These quickly evolved into a design for an 18,000-ton through-deck cruiser. Although not, at the time, labelled an aircraft carrier, the proposed new cruiser looked very like one. A flight deck ran the full length of the ship. From the outset, provision was made to operate ‘Kestrel’ vertical take-off jets. Three of the new ships were ordered, but by 1982 only Invincible had been delivered. And her sale to the Royal Australian Navy at a knockdown price had already been agreed.
A crimson flag striped with white flew above Semaphore Tower. ‘Clear the Channel’, it warned mariners, ‘big ship in movement’. At 1010Z on Monday, 5 April, Captain JJ Black reached the bridge of HMS Invincible and was told that all his ship’s departments had reported ‘Ready for Sea’. Five minutes later the 20,000-ton carrier slipped her moorings and turned to leave the harbour. Ahead of him, perched on the ramp like the figurehead of a square-rigged man-o’-war, was one of 801’s Sea Harriers. For such a large warship, Invincible looked svelte, clean and modern; less bruising than Hermes, which half an hour later followed Invincible out to sea.
The Southsea front was packed with wellwishers cheering and waving banners. Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’, a song forever connected to the Royal Navy after being used to introduce a landmark BBC documentary series about HMS Ark Royal, played over the ship’s broadcast. Black swallowed hard, deeply moved by the public’s support and the faith that they placed in him, his ship and her crew. But he had little inkling of the task that lay ahead or even of the Navy’s ability to succeed. The burden of responsibility weighed heavy on him.
After the shock and outrage caused by the invasion, the government’s forceful reaction and the almost impossibly rapid despatch of a Carrier Battle Group seemed to have galvanized the country. The occupation of the islands was a setback for sure, but it was now time to teach the Argentinians a lesson. And, intoxicated by the spectacle of the Navy’s departure, the public seemed to feel that the job was as good as done. If, just a week earlier, few people had heard of the Falkland Islands, there was even less understanding of the scale of the military challenge now facing British forces. The MoD’s own planning, however, spelled it out.
In the mid-seventies, when fears of Argentine aggression prompted the despatch of HMS Dreadnought as part of Operation JOURNEYMAN, other options and potential threats were examined, from the possibility of Argentina organizing a ‘Green March’ and overtaking the islands, as Morocco had done in Spanish Sahara, through an unarmed civilian invasion to the deployment of an SAS team. But, as the Defence Operational Planning Staff pointed out in 1976, if diplomacy and deterrence failed, distance, the probable denial of South American airfields, a lack of diversion airfields, the quality of the Port Stanley airstrip and lack of in-flight weather updates ruled out rapid reinforcement by air and made it impossible to mount long-range maritime reconnaissance. Even if a C-130 Hercules were to attempt the journey from Ascension, the closest British airfield nearly 4,000 miles away, the distance was such that it could only do so carrying just thirty troops. There would be no fuel for a return journey. ‘The only way,’ the planners reported, ‘of providing combat aircraft capability in the Falkland Islands would be either deploying HMS Ark Royal or by using Harrier aircraft transported by sea.’ Faced with an invasion, the task of recapturing the islands would ‘require a major amphibious operation involving all our amphibious forces, a task force escort including HMS Ark Royal and substantial logistic support’.
By the summer of 1981, with Ark Royal and her powerful air group of Phantoms and Buccaneers no longer at the Navy’s disposal, the MoD’s options were more limited. If Argentina mounted a full-scale military occupation of the Falklands and a large naval task force led by an Invincible class carrier was sent in response, ‘there could be no certainty that such a force could retake the Dependency’. Retaking the islands after an Argentine invasion, the paper concluded, ‘is barely militarily viable and would present formidable problems’.
Following the invasion, British planners once again considered the possibilities. These ranged from the prospect of blockading Argentine ports by scuttling ships in the approaches to launching Vulcan raids against mainland targets. Perhaps most radical of all was the notion of an operation to seize and occupy land in Tierra del Fuego. It would undoubtedly, the Defence Policy Staff document argued, be a ‘severe blow for Junta’ but at the same time would also ‘greatly reduce capacity for subsequent operations against Argentine Forces on Falkland Islands’. Every option other than sending a naval task force to blockade the islands, then evict the occupying force, looked likely either to be ineffective or to pose greater problems than it solved.
Like Sharkey Ward, the Admiralty realized that the Argentine invasion of the Falklands might present an opportunity to prove a point. From the onset of the crisis, the Navy had been the driving force behind the bullish British response. Still reeling from John Nott’s 1981 Defence Review, feeling misunderstood and undervalued, this was a situation almost uniquely constructed to ensure that only the Navy could offer a solution. And in the days before the Argentine landing, with the Cabinet still at odds over how to respond, when the Prime Minister asked the First Sea Lord ‘Could we really recapture the islands if they were invaded?’, Admiral Sir Henry Leach had left her in no doubt at all and departed the meeting with the authority needed to assemble the Task Force.
The Argentine invasion of the Falklands couldn’t have offered a better opportunity for the Navy to demonstrate its value. Eight thousand miles away from the UK, and just 300 miles from southern Argentina, they were beyond the range of the Royal Air Force to intervene and, without the Air Force as a means of delivery, the Army too.
Many still thought that, after witnessing a sufficiently impressive show of strength, the Argentinians would back down. But not all. During a brief trip home on Sunday, the day before they sailed, JJ Black had told his wife Pam that the positions of the leaders of both countries were already too entrenched. He was certain his ship would fight.
Tim Gedge, too, was sure it was war. Watching from Portsdown Hill, standing in front of Fort Southwick, he saw both carriers sail, but from his high vantage point it was a distant spectacle. Away from the cheering crowds and thronging intensity of Old Portsmouth, he was alone with his thoughts. His boss, Rear Admiral Derek Reffell, had been the last to leave Invincible before she sailed. Both the carriers and the amphibious assault ships upon which the success of Operation CORPORATE was dependent were Reffell’s responsibility as FOF3. It made little sense to Gedge, or indeed many others inside Fort Southwick, that he hadn’t been given command of the Task Force itself.
But Gedge’s mixed feelings about the departure of the carriers were more personal and immediate. As he watched the ships pass the Hard, South Parade Pier and the Round Tower and disappear out to sea, it was impossible not to linger on the thought that he was the only member of his squadron who’d been left behind.
At a recommissioning ceremony in 1980, attended by the First Sea Lord, senior Admirals, the Captains of both Invincible and Hermes and sixteen former Commanding Officers of 800 NAS, Tim Gedge had become the first Commanding Officer of a frontline Sea Harrier FRS.1 unit. He’d conducted the first embarkation on HMS Invincible when his embryonic unit was just two jets strong. The following year, 800 was the first squadron to operate from Hermes after she emerged from a refit with the striking new ski-jump used to help launch the new jump jets. Under his leadership 800 NAS had displayed the SHAR at Farnborough, strafed and bombed the ranges, kept tabs on the Soviet Navy, and been tested in mock dogfights against the best the USAF had to offer. And Gedge had come to understand just what a remarkable aeroplane the Harrier had become.
The Hawker Harrier was unique. And by the time Gedge first climbed into the cockpit of a Harrier T.4 at 233 Operational Conversion Unit at RAF Wittering, it was already famous the world over. Of scores of efforts around the world to build a practical fixed-wing vertical take-off and landing aeroplane, only the Harrier had been successful. There were aeroplanes with banks of lift jets buried in the fuselage, powerful turboprop tailsitters that required their pilots to descend to earth backwards like a rocket returning to the launch pad, swivelling wings and tilting engine pods, but nothing that matched the essential simplicity of the Harrier.
It was the last machine to emerge from under the watchful eye of Hawker boss Sir Sydney Camm, who had previously been responsible for an illustrious line of fighter aircraft that included the Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest, Sea Fury, Sea Hawk and Hunter. Evidence of a family resemblance between the Harrier and the Hunter could be seen in the profile of the two aeroplanes’ vertical tails. Camm wasn’t inclined to change anything unless he had to. It’s ironic, therefore, that Hawker’s last great design before it became subsumed within British Aerospace was a machine as revolutionary as the Harrier. It wasn’t at all how the legendary designer had planned it.
Instead he had had his hopes pinned on a large supersonic fighter design labelled the P.1121 – a successor to the Hunter, then in full production and being sold to air forces around the world. But when, in 1957, ‘Statement on Defence’, a White Paper produced by Defence Secretary Duncan Sandys, announced that the RAF would require no new manned fighters and that Britain’s air defence would instead be provided by missiles, it was clear that the P.1121 was dead in the water. Without a domestic order from the RAF, there was no hope of export success. Work on the prototype, funded privately by the company, was abandoned.
Without the P.1121, Ralph Hooper, one of Hawker’s young engineers, was at something of a loose end until a brochure for a new jet engine crossed his desk and fired his imagination.
A sort of Frankenstein-like cobbling together of the front of the big Olympus engine with the rear of a smaller Orpheus, the Bristol Engine Company’s BE53 was inspired by the work of a Frenchman, Michel Wibault, on a vertical take-off fighter concept he called Le Gyroptère. Wibault’s design was complicated, but another giant of the British aviation industry, Sir Stanley Hooker, whose career had taken him from the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine that powered the Spitfire, Hurricane and Lancaster to the mighty Bristol Olympus engine that powered the Avro Vulcan, saw its potential. By using a pair of swivelling nozzles to direct compressed air from the fan of the Olympus engine, Hooker’s BE53 could produce lift to supplement that produced by the wing. He labelled the principle vectored thrust.
To Ralph Hooper’s eyes, that looked as if it could create a shorttake-off aircraft. But in discussions with his colleague John Fozard, they realized that if they also directed the thrust from the rear of the engine through another pair of nozzles, they then had an engine that, by producing four columns of jet thrust, might power a vertical take-off and landing aircraft.
Hooper designed an aircraft around the modified engine and labelled it the P.1127. It was already identifiably the same machine as the Harrier that followed. Camm invited Hooker to see the drawings and told him he’d persuaded the Hawker board to finance a flying prototype. A year later, as they planned the first flight, Hooker had to confess to Camm that his engine, now christened the Pegasus, was producing less thrust than required for a vertical take-off. Camm flew into a rage, while Hooker tried to placate him with the possibility that, for the first flight at least, the P.1127 might simply use the runway like any other aeroplane.
‘Why should we want to do that?’ Camm barked.
‘To prove that the P.1127 has good handling qualities as a conventional aircraft?’
‘All Hawker aircraft handle perfectly,’ Camm insisted. ‘There’s no need to waste time on that. The first flight will be vertical take-off!’
Of the machine that evolved over the next twenty years into the Sea Harrier, Gedge could vouch for Sir Sydney’s appraisal of its handling. But at a farewell ceremony at the end of January he’d been towed around Yeovilton sitting astride a 1,000lb bomb and been saluted with a six-strong flypast by the squadron’s Sea Harriers, then handed over the reins of 800 NAS to Andy Auld. Gedge’s landing aboard Hermes on 30 December 1981, following two months of exercises with the US Navy, would be his last – ‘subject’, noted the Squadron Record Book, ‘to the intervention of fate’.
With Invincible and Hermes gone, Gedge swallowed his disappointment and returned to his desk in Fort Southwick. At the insistence of the First Sea Lord, the fleet, come hell or high water, had been ready to sail on Monday morning. But with the Carrier Battle Group on its way, the job of making sure it was also capable of winning a war against an enemy who was not well understood began in earnest.