FOLLOWING HER BRIEF check flight, Wessex Whisky Delta had returned to land on Conveyor’s forward flight deck at the moment the missiles struck. After fishing from the sea a near hypothermic RAF Sergeant who’d been thrown overboard by the impact, they flew him to Hermes before returning to the stricken ship to help pick up other members of the crew. Those forward of the fire had been cut off by it, unable either to communicate with those aft or to join them.
At first the Wessex crew lowered the winch, then thought better of it. Putting the cab down on the forward pad, they signalled for ten men to climb aboard. Then another three. As the pilot, Lieutenant Kim Lowe, pulled on the collective he realized he still had a little excess power. He let the helicopter’s weight settle back on the undercarriage and told his aircrewman to wave two more on board.
His helicopter overloaded with survivors, Lowe radioed ahead to Hermes to warn them of Whisky Delta’s impending arrival. The landing back aboard the carrier was going to be more than a little sporty. They’d need to clear the deck. He was coming in hot.
Alacrity’s slender hull crashed against the looming bulk of the container ship with the sickening grind and groan of scraping metal. The Type 21 frigate was standing by within fifteen minutes of the attack, providing reports of Conveyor’s material condition to Layard and North as she pumped gallons of freezing sea water over the freighter in a doomed effort to cool the hull. But thrown repeatedly against Conveyor by the swell, her Captain pulled her back from the burning ship’s starboard side to a safer distance. After a month’s pounding in the rough waters of the South Atlantic he wasn’t sure his own ship was in any condition to survive collisions like that without sustaining lasting damage. With no hope of extinguishing the fires he needed to refocus his effort on saving Conveyor’s crew. In the fading cold grey-blue light, he ordered Alacrity’s duty diver into the water to help survivors.
Life rafts were thrown over the side of Conveyor’s starboard quarter, dangling from painters too short for them to settle in the water. And men were beginning to stream down the side of the ship’s dark hull and drop into the sea.
Ian North insisted on being last off his ship. Mike Layard could hardly begrudge him that. They left the bridge together, forced to climb down on external ladders because of the smoke clogging the internal stairs.
On the upper deck, Layard looked out to starboard. Alacrity was there, still hosing the ship in a hopeless effort to provide boundary cooling. The frigate also fired Coston lines over the life rafts so that they could be hauled away from Conveyor’s heaving stern. Her divers were in the water, helping freezing survivors to rafts or up the scramble nets draped over her sides.
The choking smoke stung his nose and throat. Behind him, the auxiliary power unit used to start the Chinook turboshaft engines whined, apparently ignited by the heat convecting off the blistered steel flight deck beneath. It was over the heart of the furnace in the C Deck Cathedral area.
Ian North stood beside him in an orange one-time survival suit. He’d never looked more like Father Christmas. A vast column of black and grey smoke rose above them and blew south in the wind as Layard looked at his friend before grabbing the rope ladder and climbing over the gunwale.
As Layard scrambled down the ladder he could see the starboard side of the ship glowing red in places, her navy blue paint flaking and peeling from the searing heat. The rattle and clang of the ammunition cooking off on C Deck grew in volume, firing lethal shrapnel which punched through the ship’s hull. Hot metal singed past his ears as he continued his progress, encumbered by the bulk of his survival suit.
She’s going to blow up any second, he feared.
Above him, he saw the ship’s Master struggling down the ladder. He was worried for his friend. North was neither in the first flush of youth nor fit. He’d wheeze going up and down a deck or two on Conveyor’s companionways, but somehow he was still hauling himself down.
Likely sheared off during Alacrity’s close manoeuvring, the ladder no longer extended all the way to the black sea below. With a sense of relief, on reaching its limit the Senior Naval Officer let go and fell the final 10 feet into the freezing South Atlantic. North soon dropped into the water next to him, disappearing beneath the waves before his lifejacket forced him back up to the surface. Layard quickly realized that any thought that they were through the worst of it might be premature. North looked like he was in trouble.
Seems to be floating lower in the water than is good for him, thought Layard as he kicked through the swell towards his friend. The hard clamber down the ship’s side had exhausted the old mariner. Layard wrapped his arms around him and tried to hold him up out of the icy water.
To aid her fast passage through the sea, Conveyor had been designed with a hydrodynamically efficient cruiser stern. But the same elegant shape that reduced the drag of the water proved far less appealing from underneath. The smooth curve sucked at the water as the ship rolled in the swell, dragging rafts and swimmers in towards the hull with each upstroke. Then, inexorably, the massive stern would settle back down on top of those dragged beneath, forcing them underwater before the buoyancy of their survival gear pulled them back to the surface.
What do you do, wondered Layard after suffering one such dunking, when you’re pushed underwater like that? The trick, he realized, was to kick away and carefully anticipate the moment you had to take a deep breath. But for the weaker swimmers it was impossible. And Ian North, already exhausted, was not a strong swimmer.
Time’s running out, thought Layard. He had to try to get Conveyor’s Master into one of the rafts. After enduring two or three more dunkings together, he managed to push North towards a full life raft, surrounded by men clinging to the ropes around it. He hoped they’d help their Captain round to the entrance. Then, once again, Layard was dragged beneath the surface by that cruiser stern.
This time he wasn’t sure he was going to make it. The plunge underwater seemed interminable, but when the dark sea finally released him to the surface, the view greeting him was very different. After gasping for air, he looked around but there was no sign of Ian North, nor the full raft he’d steered him towards; just an empty life raft and another body, not that of his friend, floating face down in the water.
Mike Layard possessed only what he was standing up in. Conveyor’s cold and bedraggled Senior Naval Officer was welcomed aboard Alacrity by the frigate’s Captain, an old friend.
‘Come on, sir,’ he said gently, ‘let’s get you out of your wet clothes and into a shower.’
Alacrity took aboard seventy-four survivors and three bodies. In total, twelve of Atlantic Conveyor’s crew lost their lives. One of them was the ship’s beloved Master, Ian North. On the verge of being rescued, it was thought that his heart had just packed up and that his body had drifted away in the late twilight.
He was never found.
Five miles away, Tim Gedge was still strapped into the cockpit of the Sea Harrier. He’d heard the air raid warning and watched in fascination as the carrier fired chaff rockets and scrambled the ECM-equipped Lynx decoy helicopter. Then, before Invincible turned to face the Handbrake threat, the two SHARs waiting on the centreline roared past him and off the ski-jump into the air. They were ordered to hold station to the north in order to avoid any possibility of suffering a blue-on-blue attack at the hands of the Battle Group. And there was no point in sending them after the SuEs.
With a head start of 30 miles on the SHARs at the point they’d launched their missiles and reversed their course, they were long gone. By now, even one of Ark’s much-missed F-4 Phantoms armed with medium-range AIM-7 Sparrow missiles would have struggled to overhaul them as they made their escape. With every passing minute the Argentine jets were 7 or 8 miles further away. In the slower Sea Harrier, with its short-range Sidewinders, there was no chance.
Instead, Gedge enjoyed a grandstand view of Invincible’s own Sea Dart system ripple-firing six missiles in quick succession, so fast away from the launcher that they appeared almost to score a solid straight white line of smoke away from the bow of the ship. It was an impressive display of firepower, but it was nothing more than that. Invincible’s radar operators believed they’d detected a low, fast contact at 20 miles. The Hermes Ops Room was under the impression that they’d locked on to her Lynx, or at least her chaff patterns. There was a detonation off the flagship’s port quarter, another overhead and a third salvo that airburst nearby. All the Sea Darts detonated on contact with chaff.
Invincible had been shooting at shadows.
Gedge launched alongside Sharkey Ward at 2010Z. As they flew past the grim column of smoke rising from Conveyor towards their CAP station over Pebble Island, there were men jumping into the sea. In a night approach to the carrier an hour and fifteen minutes later, they saw only the glow of fires burning in the dark.
The following morning, Mike Layard gathered the survivors aboard Alacrity in the frigate’s senior rates mess. He explained the sequence of events as he now understood it, describing the Argentine naval air arm’s determined effort to strike at one of the aircraft carriers, and how the Conveyor’s 18,000-ton bulk must have looked, through the radar scope in the Super Etendard’s cockpit, as if they’d had one of the British capital ships in their sights.
‘This error has reduced the number of these deadly weapons held by the Argentine Navy to one, but that’s not much of a consolation to us, is it?’ Layard reached for a mug of tea and took a sip. ‘It’s dry work all this talking,’ he said with a gentle smile. ‘I wish it was something stronger.
‘I am sad and angry,’ he continued, ‘that we were not able to complete our allotted task and land all our equipment. You are not gladiators, you are not trained for war, you are not trained to kill, but you all adapted to the rigours of wartime service with commendable ease. The shipmates who died bravely, doing their duty, upheld the best traditions of the Merchant Navy for which it is renowned. In times of war you have never been known to shirk your duty and let your country down and you all have been as loyal. I am full of admiration for you all and it has been a great privilege to serve with you.’ He paused for a moment before continuing, ‘That is all. May God be with you as you journey safely home to your loved ones.’
Atlantic Conveyor’s Senior Naval Officer saluted them and left the men in the mess to their own thoughts.
The loss of the ship and her incomparable old skipper, he reflected later, left an ache in the hearts of all who’d been involved in her astonishing metamorphosis.
At 1500Z that afternoon, the three dead who’d been brought aboard Alacrity were committed to the sea. Charles Drought, the Third Engineer, assisted in the ceremony.
‘Victory,’ wrote Winston Churchill, ‘is the beautiful, bright-coloured flower. Transport is the stem without which it could never have blossomed.’ He could have been referring to Atlantic Conveyor. She may have been, as Layard acknowledged, prevented from delivering all of her cargo, but in getting fourteen SHARs and GR.3s and their pilots to the TEZ the ship he described as the ‘Thirty Day Wonder’ – the total extent of her operational life – had substantially revised the odds in Britain’s favour.
Before the end of the conflict, the single Chinook that had escaped the attack, Bravo November, had carried 1,500 troops, 95 casualties, 650 POWs and 550 tons of cargo. On one occasion eighty-one paratroopers were crammed into her hold and redeployed from Goose Green to Fitzroy, saving days of tabbing on foot. Kept flying without spares and specialist equipment for the duration of the war by a small 18 Squadron contingent of two crews and nine technicians, her nickname ‘The Survivor’ was stencilled on the side of the fuselage.
But on 25 May, Atlantic Conveyor delivered something more critical than desperately needed aircraft. The chaff fired upthreat from Ambuscade’s 4.5-inch gun had the unintended effect of nudging the Exocets in the direction of Hermes, steaming 9 miles behind her. Conveyor had been near equidistant between them. Had she not drawn the SuEs’ fire, Hermes’ own chaff patterns might have protected her. So too might Brilliant’s Seawolf missiles have kept her safe, but as the Coventry’s destruction had already demonstrated, they were not, despite shooting down Exocet missiles in trials, infallible.
No one had imagined that, in the end, it would be Conveyor herself and not just her cargo that would help absorb the Exocet threat to the carriers. Twelve men died in the COAN attack. Their sacrifice, and that of their ship, guaranteed the safety of the flagship and Britain’s continued participation in the war.
As Mike Layard spoke to the crew aboard Alacrity, in Washington DC the CIA were distributing their latest assessment of this distant South Atlantic war. In it, they concluded, ‘the British are in a strong position and should achieve victory in the next ten days’.