AT 1415Z, THREE-QUARTERS of an hour before midday local time, the Amphibious Task Group broke away from the carriers to begin their run in to Falkland Sound. Cloaked beneath leaden skies, the convoy steamed in at a steady 12½ knots.
Shared between the assault ships HMS Fearless and HMS Intrepid, RFA Stromness and the cross-Channel ferry MV Norland were the spearhead troops of 40 Commando Royal Marines, 2 PARA, 3 PARA and 45 Commando RM. 42 Commando were aboard P&O’s flagship SS Canberra, while the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Fort Austin, MV Europic Ferry and the smaller RFA Landing Ships Logistics (LSL) Galahad, Geraint, Lancelot, Tristram and Percivale brought in the support elements: battlefield helicopters, engineers, artillery and medical facilities. And there were the Rapier missile batteries of 12 Air Defence Regiment, Royal Artillery which, once ashore, could augment the protection from air attack provided by the escorting frigates and destroyers, chief among them the two Seawolf-armed Type 22s Brilliant and Broadsword. Fighter Controllers aboard the guided missile destroyer HMS Antrim would be responsible for coordinating the air battle.
With the Argentine Navy confined to territorial waters and the weight of the occupiers’ ground defences deployed in and around Port Stanley, it was, as ever, defence against attack from the air that preoccupied the Task Force Commander.
Sandy Woodward’s day cabin was located in Hermes’ island behind the Admiral’s Bridge, a short walk from the Flag Operations Room. Shorn of pictures, comfortable chairs and other creature comforts before he’d joined the ship at Ascension, the cream-painted 9 by 9-foot steel box provided him with a 3-foot-wide desk, a bunk, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and an upright chair. To the side there was a small shower and head. Exposed pipes and electrical cables were the only other visual distraction. The Admiral was sanguine about the sparseness of his surroundings, though. Concentrates the mind, he reckoned, and there were few in the Navy that were sharper. Alone in the confines of his quarters, Woodward put it to work, thinking, processing, calculating, reflecting and making notes, sometimes privately unburdening himself of views that even he regarded as too caustic for wider consumption.
There had been different opinions on how best to protect the ships in Falkland Sound during the landings and the securing of the beachhead. JJ Black had wanted to take the fight to the enemy. Charged with responsibility for leading the air defence of the fleet, Invincible’s captain argued that by moving the carriers upthreat he could take out the Argentine raids before they got near the islands. With the two remaining Type 42s, HMS Sheffield’s sister ships Coventry and Glasgow, positioned among the islets west of West Falkland, the Sidewinder-armed Sea Harrier CAP could provide an outer ring of protection, supported by the Sea Dart screen supplied by the destroyers.
To conserve fuel, the Argentine raids cruised in at high level before dropping down low over the islands to make their attacks. Without ingressing at altitude, the Fuerza Aérea Argentina’s Daggers simply didn’t have the range to be a threat, but scanning for raiders silhouetted against the sky, away from the clutter generated by land and sea, the SHAR’s Blue Fox radar started to become a genuinely effective piece of kit. For the same reason Sea Dart became a lethal, dependable proposition.
Furthermore, by reducing the distance between the British carriers and the Amphibious Operations Area – the AOA – Black would be able to guarantee real strength in depth in defence of the landings. Without a long transit from Hermes or Invincible, SHARs would be able to spend useful time on CAP before bingo fuel forced them to return to Mother. They’d have combat persistence. And in any engagement with a fuel-starved enemy jet, that offered a clear advantage.
Woodward was tempted. I can’t help feeling I ought to do it, he thought. But he’d be putting all his eggs in one basket. The plan to push the air defence screen west, he felt, smacks of all or nothing.
It wasn’t that the Admiral was unwilling to hazard his ships to achieve his objectives.
After arriving at Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth on a scholarship at the age of thirteen, Woodward was marinated in the names and achievements of legendary figures such as Nelson, Hawke, Codrington, Hood, Fisher and Jellicoe. And there was ABC, too.
Operating without air cover during the 1941 evacuation of Crete, Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet suffered terribly at the hands of the Luftwaffe’s Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers. In response to Army concerns that the loss of ships would force him to abandon the operation, Cunningham replied: ‘It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue.’
The Royal Navy had always been prepared to lose ships in pursuit of victory, and Woodward was bloodless about the likelihood that he would sustain losses. But not all ships were equal. Things could go wrong at any time and it was his job to respond; but contained within all the ifs and buts there seemed one irreducible and overriding consideration: the safety of the two carriers.
If he moved them west within unrefuelled range of the land-based Daggers and Skyhawks he was taking a huge risk. What if they make a really determined effort of, say, fifty aircraft in a major strike? he asked himself. What if they are prepared to lose twenty or thirty aircraft in an all-out attempt to sink one of our carriers? The answer was inescapable. The Argentinians had already shown themselves to be capable of breaching the defences. He had to position the carriers far enough east to protect them. The weather forecast clinched it. A low-pressure centre southeast of Tierra del Fuego brought with it a frontal system extending north as far as Buenos Aires. Behind this, thick cloud would smother the islands, covering the landings until morning. Beyond that, two days of clear skies would have precluded them. But with the forecast improvement in the weather he knew to expect a furious Argentine response.
In the melee that would follow, he knew there was a terrible danger of the SHARs falling prey to his own air defences. To try to avoid the possibility of a tragic blue-on-blue, his solution was straightforward: he would create an imaginary box in the sky above the landings, roughly 10 miles across and 10,000 feet high. The Sea Harriers were forbidden to enter under any circumstances. That guaranteed that any fast jet inside the box was fair game for the missiles and guns of the warships.
A bit primitive, thought Woodward, but simplicity is the only sensible policy. It was also unconventional. When one of his officers pointed this out, expounding on how the Navy normally set up its air defence, the Admiral, after a brief attempt to explain his thinking, made his position clear.
‘I don’t give a damn about your bloody rules,’ he said, ‘this is how it’s going to be done.’
After sunset, a few decks below Woodward’s day cabin, the Sea Harrier pilots congregated in the wardroom bar. Two days earlier, the new arrivals from 809 and 1(F) had been excited to be reunited with old friends. Bill Covington and Hugh Slade were back among many of the pilots who’d flown the heavies aboard Ark during their own days on the Gannet squadron – experienced operators like Andy Auld, Neill Thomas, Clive Morrell, Fred Frederiksen and Tony Ogilvy. John Leeming and Steve Brown caught up with Dave Morgan, a former squadron mate from Gütersloh, now on exchange with 800 Naval Air Squadron. Although fresh from Sea Harrier training, Morgan still had more hours on the clock than Leeming and Brown. Many knew the 1(F) crews too. The Harrier community was tight-knit. Every single one of the jump jet pilots on board, Fleet Air Arm or RAF, had first been introduced to the aeroplane’s unique capabilities on the conversion course at RAF Wittering.
Tonight, though, the Courage CSB ale was flowing a little more slowly. The mood was more subdued as the pilots considered the responsibility heaped on their shoulders. Instead of leaving whirls of smoke from expansive hand gestures, short drags punctuating animated conversation, smokers inhaled a little harder. When, like a church bell ringing in a minute’s silence, the BBC’s ‘Lilliburlero’ played over the ship’s broadcast to announce the latest World Service report, the words of the MoD’s spokesman, Ian McDonald, provoked a little more thoughtfulness and reflection.
In the midst of their earlier happy reunion, Morgan had been struck by what a motley collection they really were. A very odd bunch of individuals, he thought, each with his own particular skills and background but very few with any meaningful experience of fighting the aircraft. Now, as he contemplated what tomorrow would bring, his deliberations were more pointed. Which of us, he wondered, will survive and who will not be going home?
Just after 2300Z, HMS Ardent sailed past Dolphin Point and on into Falkland Sound. An hour and a half later she was joined by HMS Antrim. Forty miles to the northeast, HMS Glamorgan steamed close to MacBride Head. All three were to support diversionary operations designed to deceive Argentine commanders into believing the landings were underway somewhere other than San Carlos. Operation TORNADO, the son et lumière show of starshells, chaff delta, radio traffic and a series of feints from Glamorgan’s Wessex helicopter, suggested Berkeley Sound. Ardent’s gunfire, in support of a similarly loud and attention-seeking SAS raid, said Darwin. But Glamorgan had been moving up and down the east coast night after night shelling different targets ashore. When the first reports of British activity in San Carlos reached Stanley early on Friday morning, 21 May, it was impossible to be certain that they carried any more significance than any of the other attacks.
Ardent and Antrim were followed into the Sound by the assault ships, troop carriers and their escort of frigates and destroyers. Sandy Woodward could do little more than wait, and hope that the Amphibious Task Group would succeed in their task. Fingers crossed, he thought, aware of the inadequacy of the sentiment.
On board Hermes, it seemed people had lowered their voices, as if speaking in whispers might somehow conceal the night’s intent from the enemy. But the time for stealth was over.
At 0350Z, as landing craft loaded with Royal Marines and Paras motored into San Carlos Water from the two assault ships, HMS Antrim’s twin 4.5-inch guns opened fire, delivering a barrage of 250 high-explosive rounds over the next half hour. Employed constantly since the recapture of South Georgia in April, the grey paint had long ago flaked and peeled off their barrels.
At 0730Z, as Woodward finally retired to his cabin, astonished and grateful that as yet there had been no Argentine response to the landings, 2 PARA hit the beaches. Ten minutes later, as 40 Commando waded ashore at San Carlos settlement, a little to the north of the Paras, the Admiral recorded his surprise in his diary: ‘0740 – still a deathly hush – extraordinary.’
While elements of 40 Commando pushed out from the settlement to set up a defensive perimeter around their position, others knocked on doors to reassure the residents. As one of the Royal Marines of Naval Party 8901, the small garrison that had tried in vain to forestall the Argentine invasion, was shepherded aboard a C-130 to be flown off the islands, he’d offered a little friendly advice. ‘Don’t get too comfy, mate,’ he’d told the Argentine occupier, ‘we’ll be back.’ Making good on that promise, the Bootnecks ran up the Union Flag on the Falkland Islands for the first time since 1 April.
And on Hermes, as the flight deck came alive in preparation to launch the dawn’s first Harrier sorties, Sandy Woodward braced himself for D-Day. Win or lose.
On this day, he thought, the Argentinians are going to have to fight. And, he felt sure, the Royal Navy will be required to fight its first major action since the end of the Second World War.
Around the hinterland of San Carlos Water the Royals and Paras consolidated their positions ashore. Above them, instead of a ceiling of low cloud, there was a roof of sparkling stars. Aboard Brilliant, darkened since her approach to the Sound, it seemed as if they could see every star in the sky. The weather that had covered their approach had deserted them.
And with Broadsword and Brilliant defending the AOA in Falkland Sound, the carriers were operating without the goalkeepers that had been such a reassuring presence since the arrival of the Task Force in theatre.