THE WEATHER ON 4 May was foul. Typical for the time of year. Jorge Colombo still wished that he was in the cockpit of one of the two Super Etendards as they taxied out. But the 2 Escuadrilla boss had set the rules: each pair of his pilots would get their turn. After his aborted mission on the first day of the fighting he would have to wait until his name came up again. So, braced against the squalling winds and showers in a leather flying jacket adorned with unit patches, he watched the jets, each weighed down with fuel and a single 1,500lb AM.39 Exocet missile beneath the starboard wing, accelerate away from the runway, tuck up their undercarriage and climb away into the mist. Their anti-collision beacons blushed the cloud until they were gone. He had his doubts about the Junta’s wisdom in provoking a war with the world’s third largest navy. But, after the shock of being ordered to prepare the SuE for war, he’d been immensely proud of what his squadron had achieved. He offered a silent prayer for his pilots. The weather, he thought, would lend them a measure of protection against the British Sea Harriers.
It was 0945 in Río Grande.
Three-quarters of an hour later, the crew of a Lockheed SP-2H Neptune from the Armada’s Escuadrilla Aeronaval de Exploración detected three surface contacts 60 miles to the northwest on radar. They’d tried to mask the true purpose of their mission by flying a search pattern, suggesting that they were looking for survivors of the Belgrano, but they were acutely vulnerable to the British air defences. After plotting the position of the potential targets, the old piston-engined maritime patrol aircraft descended to low level and turned away to the west. As they made their escape, the Neptune’s pilot, Capitán de Corbeta Proni Leston, pressed the RT button on his control yoke.
‘Gaucho?’ he enquired.
‘Vasco,’ confirmed the reply.
And Leston transmitted the targeting coordinates to the pilots of the incoming Super Etendards.
52°48S/57°31W. Flight Leader Capitán de Corbeta Augusto Bedacarratz punched the numbers into the SuE’s Sagem UAT-40 attack computer. Flying through volleys of rain, he and his wingman, Teniente de Fragata Armando Mayora, continued in radio silence, descending to a height of less than 100 feet. Sandwiched between the dark sea surface and a moving ceiling of low grey cloud, they pushed their throttle levers forward and accelerated to a speed of 500 knots.
At 1104 local time, after a small course correction to starboard, Bedacarratz flew into another squall of rain and pushed the button to launch the missile.
As his Flight Leader’s jet emerged from the shower, Mayora saw the fire of the Exocet’s exhaust burn bright through the gloom, trailing a fierce white rope of smoke as it raced away.
‘You launched?’
‘Sí.’
Mayora immediately punched the launch button in the cockpit of his own jet. A second and a half later the big missile dropped from the Super Etendard’s wing and accelerated ahead, disappearing into the fog.
The missile struck HMS Sheffield amidships two minutes later with the kinetic energy of a 75-ton railway locomotive travelling at 60mph. The impact alone ripped a 15-foot-long gash into the destroyer’s starboard side 8 feet above the waterline. Then the Exocet’s 370lb high-explosive fragmentation warhead detonated.
The blast tore through the ship’s galley, severely damaging nearby compartments including the machinery spaces below. The ship’s main generators, internal communications and water supply were lost immediately. With unspent solid rocket fuel from the missile acting as an accelerant, the spread of fire quickly outstripped the ship’s company’s ability to fight it.
As darkness began to fall after a valiant four-hour battle to save his ship, at 1751Z Captain Sam Salt reluctantly gave the order to abandon her. Less than three-quarters of an hour later, the 266 survivors of the attack were off the ship. Of them, twenty-four were injured, four seriously.
Twenty men had lost their lives.
Bedacarratz and Mayora were back in the crewroom at Río Grande when, at 1716 local time, the BBC World Service reported that HMS Sheffield had been hit and abandoned. Until that point all they’d been able to tell the squadron was that the missiles had launched successfully. Now they had confirmation that at least one had struck home. With that came pride and satisfaction that in mounting a successful Exocet attack against a modern warship 2 Escuadrilla Aeronaval de Caza y Ataque had ushered in a new era of naval warfare.
Amid the congratulations, the pilots admitted to a brief moment of alarm when, early in the hour-long flight back to the mainland, Bedacarratz thought he’d been painted by the Blue Fox radar of a Sea Harrier and shouted a warning to Mayora. But the SHARs, vectored in from their CAP station to a dead reckoning position based on brief radar contact by HMS Glasgow, found nothing. Glasgow’s single-sweep glimpse of the SuE was assessed as spurious.
Bedacarratz’s scare turned out to be no more than his embarrassed wingman, who, after his Flight Leader’s rattled RT call, remembered that he’d forgotten to shut down the Agave radar in the nose of his own jet.
If you English had early-warning aircraft, thought Mayora, then you might have caught us.
But they did not. And, with the loss of the Sheffield, their absence had been tragically hammered home.
Atlantic Conveyor was now less than a day out of Ascension. Two days earlier, anchored off Freetown’s Deep Water Quay to refuel in the fetid heat of a Sierra Leone summer, they’d conducted a fire and lifeboat drill. The lucky ones had been lowered to the water inside the boats by davits. The rest, a pick and mix of merchant sailors, stewards, cooks, Chinese laundrymen and military personnel from Layard’s own Naval Party 1840, had to scramble down nets and ropes to the lifeboats. At the same time, local traders, approaching in canoes filled with goods and trinkets from fruit to local arts and crafts, tried to climb up the ropes to sell their wares to the visitors.
After exchanging a couple of plastic water containers for a striking pair of antelope horns mounted on a plinth, Bob Gellett, one of the advance party of 809 Squadron engineers, emerged from it all with a smile on his face. He was already wondering how his new trophy might colour his eventual arrival aboard HMS Hermes.
By contrast, after his lifeboat’s shambolic efforts at any kind of useful rowing, Conveyor’s Third Officer, Martin Stenzel, just prayed they weren’t going to have to take to the boats again any time soon.
There were some concessions to the freighter’s new role as an ersatz aircraft carrier. The ship’s expansive bridge had become a rudimentary operations centre, equipped with a VHF, HF and SATCOM communications suite. A new ship’s broadcast system was installed for the benefit of the aviation department – 809’s engineers, flight deck handlers and the twelve-strong battle damage repair team from MARTSU, the Navy’s Mobile Aircraft Repair, Transport and Salvage Unit. A naval watch system had been set up and three damage control teams established, manned jointly by the Navy and Merchant Marine. And there were regular emergency and Action Stations drills. With the help of the ship’s Master, Ian North, Layard trained Conveyor’s officers of the watch in how to manoeuvre the ship in response to torpedo, bomb or missile attack. The heavy steel of the rear-loading ramp was thought to offer the greatest protection. Unarmoured and unarmed, Conveyor’s best defence was simply to present her backside to any threat.
A day after leaving Sierra Leone, Atlantic Conveyor had sailed into southern waters. On crossing the equator her Merchant Navy crew all qualified for a war bonus: a 150% pay increase for every week they spent in what their paymasters at Cunard deemed to be the war zone. But Layard knew that for all the changes to their routine, and even following the campaign’s opening shots, they were struggling to get to grips with the prospect of violence that lay ahead.
That innocence came to an end on 4 May when, during his nightly broadcast to the ship’s company, Layard cleared the lower decks with the news that HMS Sheffield had been ‘mortally damaged’ by an Exocet missile.
In the ship’s bar, Third Engineer Charles Drought was enjoying a Happy Hour beer with friends before dinner. The three men listened in stunned silence as Layard described the fires and loss of life.
‘What in God’s name is an Exocet missile?’ Drought asked his colleagues.
None of them could answer him. But they were agreed that Sheffield was supposedly a state-of-the-art warship with every defensive aid. What chance did they have?
‘We’re bloody sitting ducks,’ concluded the Chief Engineer.
No longer thirsty, they left their half-finished drinks and walked through to the dining saloon. But they’d lost their appetites too.
The shock, Layard recognized, was palpable. Sheffield’s destruction came as a terrible wake-up call to Conveyor’s civilian crew. But he now had their attention, and that was a good thing. From here on, their reaction to the Action Stations siren was electric.
Loosing off a ten-round clip of 9mm ammunition from a Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic offered a welcome distraction to the 809 pilots still smarting from news of Nick Taylor’s death. Under the watchful eye of a Royal Marine Staff Sergeant and the squadron AWI, Bill Covington, the eight flyers had taken to the ranges. An hour and fifteen minutes’ worth of training on the Hi-Power was just one of the items on the 809 ground training programme drawn up by Tim Gedge and his Senior Pilot, Dave Braithwaite. The game of baseball the squadron subsequently lost against Wideawake airfield’s American contingent after throwing down the gauntlet over lunch in the American mess was not.
Neither activity was on the list of the twelve things one was supposed to do to pass the time while on Ascension. From sitting on the beach watching green turtle hatchlings make their way to the sea for the first time, to climbing Green Mountain to see the cloud forest that resulted from former Kew Gardens director Joseph Hooker’s planting of the island in the nineteenth century, Gedge figured they could squeeze in two a day before embarking on Atlantic Conveyor to go to war. But it was pretty slim pickings. And after ticking off the museum in Georgetown with its collection of communications ephemera, medical equipment and ship’s bells, the lure of the Exiles Club got stronger. When the news that HMS Sheffield had been lost reached the Ascension squadron, the place became irresistible.
On a good day, the sight of the Royal Marines band Beating Retreat at sundown was enough to stir the soul. But, a few pints down, watching from the Exiles Club balcony against the strange, alien backdrop of Ascension on a day of such emotional intensity it was almost unbearably moving. Along with the rest of the Royal Navy contingent in the bar, 809 leaned into the drinking in commiseration and defiance over the first loss of a British warship in combat since the Second World War.
By the time the RAF Harrier pilots of 1(F) Squadron arrived for a drink, finally reunited after what had been an eventful, uncomfortable flight to Ascension, the Exiles Club was in the throes of what one of them could only describe as a ‘monster piss-up’. The evening didn’t stop at that. After opening their wallets in Georgetown, 809 Squadron hosted an RPC back at Two Boats, an invitation that was taken up by a substantial number of revellers.
Tim Gedge’s evening ended with a visit to the island’s hospital to retrieve Al Craig. 809’s QFI had been booked into the small medical centre by his Senior Pilot with some desperately serious but entirely fictitious illness.
Meanwhile, Brave himself was last seen lying fully clothed in a bath, enthusiastically tucking into a late-night egg banjo.
Back in London, inside MoD Main Building, Ben Bathurst’s response to the sinking of the Sheffield was rather more practical. And it was immediate.