Chapter Five

Passage South

Once clear of Spithead, HMS Hermes embarked her twelfth Sea Harrier and, like the Invincible, began a steady shuttle with her helicopters to the various Naval Air Stations – Lee-on-Solent, Portland, Yeovilton and Culdrose – to which last-minute stores items and modification kits were being delivered. Their progress down-Channel, in company with their attendant RFAs, was quite leisurely so that when, on 6 April, the Invincible’s Engineering Department noticed that the starboard main gear box coupling was making suspicious noises, the dockyard equipment needed to change the unit could be flown to Culdrose, on the Lizard Peninsula, and then brought on board by helicopter.

The gear box change was the first of a number of engineering problems which would normally have been undertaken in a dockyard but which had to be accomplished at sea by the ships’ staffs. It also showed the need for a repair facility in the forward area, to provide material and technical assistance and advice. The Royal Navy had had no repair ship since the decommissioning of HMS Triumph in 1972 and so a North Sea support vessel, the Siena Seaspread, was chartered (involving a change of registry from Swedish to British) and fitted out at Portsmouth between 12 and 16 April to carry a Fleet Maintenance Group with workshops, spares and basic materials, much of which had to be stowed in standard containers welded to the upper deck at Portsmouth. After practising an Olympus main engine change in HMS Nottingham – an evolution never intended to be carried out away from a dockyard – the FMG embarked and the Stena Seaspread sailed on 16 April, the day the carriers arrived at Ascension.

The eleven days on passage were fully employed in exercises and drills for all on board and in preparing the ships and aircraft for war. The times taken to bring the ships to ‘Action Stations’ were reduced by frequent practice until most could achieve a fully-closed-up state in about four minutes. Such a state could not be sustained indefinitely and an intermediate state, with just enough men closed up to fight all systems and steam the ship in ‘Defence Watches’, was adopted. Everyone became accustomed to doing their work encumbered by protective clothing and survival kit – anti-flash gear, gas-mask case, lifejacket and ‘once-only survival suit’, a lightweight waterproof cover-all intended to protect survivors in the water from exposure.

Inevitably, the carriers’ main concern was working up their aircrew. While the command evolved tactics to deal with the Exocet, conventional air attack and ships, the individual pilots practised interceptions by day and night, air combat manoeuvres, the post-Vietnam name for ‘dog-fighting’, and delivering the assorted weapons which the Sea Harrier could carry. In fact, few of these had actually been fired or released by the Sea Harrier and the ‘clearances’ for safe carriage and delivery were obtained by Invincible’s 801 Squadron for the 2in rocket projectile, the ‘Lepus’ flare and the 1,000lb air-burst bomb. 801 also fired the first live Sidewinder missile to be launched by a front-line Sea Harrier squadron: this, like the cluster-bomb release by 800 Squadron, was seen in one of the earliest television reports to reach the United Kingdom.

The anti-submarine and Commando helicopter crews also flew intensively. Live depth-charges and homing torpedoes were dropped and rear-cabin machine-guns were fired, while the ‘dippers’ practised their intricate pattern of ‘jumps’ to box-in imaginary fast submarines and the ‘junglies’ rehearsed assault troop drills. The latter, the Sea King 4s of 846 Squadron, also had to train in the use of a new piece of equipment which was to give the squadron a true night operating capability. The ASW squadrons had had such a capability since the introduction in 1961 of the Wessex 1, whose accurate and reliable auto-pilot could be trusted to bring the helicopter into the hover, in the desired position, even on the darkest, nastiest night; radar had been added to produce the Wessex 3* in 1967 and the Sea King, in its ASW versions, further refined the all-weather system. The Sea King 4 had neither the auto-pilot nor the radar, which would not have been of any great use for overland operations and would have reduced the available cargo volume and weight, and the pilots’ visual judgement was in any case the best available for terrain clearance and selection of approach. Hitherto, for night operations, only flares dropped by the helicopters or lights laid by ground parties had been available; it was envisaged that in the Falklands there would be a requirement for more covert operations and passive night-viewing goggles were provided for a proportion of the pilots of 846 Squadron. Using ‘image intensification’ techniques, the goggles amplified whatever natural light was available to provide a view which may not have been ‘as clear as day’ but was certainly sufficient for most night operations below cloud or clear of mist. No opportunity for practice with the ‘PNG’ was found before the ships sailed and the selected pilots of 846 Squadron had therefore to learn how to make the most of the cumbersome goggles while flying at night from the Hermes.

As well as the existing and specially-procured equipment, there was a large measure of self-help and improvisation throughout the task force, aided by the civilians who were accompanying the ships as manufacturers’ technical representatives. Prominent among the latter were the Ferranti experts who accompanied the Sea Harrier squadrons to tune the fighters’ radar and computer system, writing new programmes to improve the performance and flexibility of the latter. A Squadron modification, devised by 800 Squadron’s engineers, gave the Sea Harrier a simple self-protection against radar-controlled missiles or guns: small bundles of ‘chaff’ (once known as ‘Window’) were stowed in the air-brake recess under the rear fuselage. A pilot, warned by his passive radar warning receiver that a radar was locked on to his aircraft, could dispense a cloud of metallized plastic foil to confuse or distract the fire-control radar, simply by opening the air-brake briefly. Helicopters, which had no difficulty in dispensing the bundles by hand through open doors or windows, were supplied with chaff as the situation required.

As the ships became more efficient and the carriers began to exercise against one another, two major areas of weakness were recognized. It was likely that the Argentine Air Force and naval air arm would both employ a low-level approach for strike missions, to take advantage of the gap ‘under the radar’, where the earth’s surface curves down and away from the straight line of the radar’s ‘pulses’. Even the high-mounted antennae on the bigger ships could not look down sufficiently to detect a low-flying aircraft much outside twenty-five miles. Between 1951 and 1978 the Royal Navy had been able to cope with the low-flyer by putting a high-powered radar into an aircraft to look down and extend the radar horizon. These Airborne Early Warning (AEW) aircraft had been able to direct fighters to intercept incoming strikes at long range, well clear of the Fleet’s missile and gun defences and before hostile aircraft could launch anti-ship missiles. The withdrawal of the fixed-wing strike carrier HMS Ark Royal meant the end of AEW in British naval service and although the RAF was operating a few old Shackleton aircraft equipped with AEW radar (and was expecting the AEW Nimrod to enter service later in 1982), these would not be able to provide any service to the task groups in the South Atlantic. Admiral Woodward would have to rely upon a distant barrier of radar picket ships which would themselves be exposed to sudden attack while providing a small extension to the warning time available to the ‘High Value Units’. The other hope for early warning was the interception of the strike aircraft’s radar transmissions by the ships’ warning receivers; against this had to be weighed the universal knowledge of the need for ‘radar silence’. The Argentine Forces were as aware as the Royal Navy that even a brief burst of radar would be detected and would therefore minimize its use.

The other problem concerned close-in defence against low-flying aircraft and sea-skimmers like Exocet. Area anti-aircraft weapons such as the Sea Dart in the Invincible and the Type 42 destroyers and the Seaslug in the two ‘Counties’ were effective against high- and medium-level targets but less so against wave-top targets; the 20-year-old Seacat was widely fitted, in most frigates, the amphibious assault ships and Hermes, but it was relatively slow, was ineffective against Exocet and only one missile could be controlled per mounting. The only missile system which was likely to be able to deal with the short-range enemy was the Sea Wolf. Matched with a tracking system which could follow a 4.5in shell in flight, Sea Wolf was the only genuine anti-missile missile in service at sea anywhere in the world but was fitted in only two of the ships now on their way south, the Type 22 frigates Broadsword and Brilliant. The gun had given way to the missile as an anti-aircraft weapon (although the 4.5 in in its automatic single-barrelled Mark 8 and semi-automatic twin Mark 6 versions was exercised against medium-level targets in training) and was regarded primarily as an anti-surface weapon, the 4.5in for bombardment of shore targets and the venerable automatic light-calibre automatic guns, the 40mm Bofors and 20mm Oerlikon, for use in stopping craft too small to be worth a 4.5in shell or an Exocet. The Bofors and Oerlikons were fitted in all destroyers and frigates, two of the former in ships with no other gun armament and two of the latter in ships with a 4.5in. Effective in the hands of the fathers of the men now manning identical guns, they were now too few to be sure of any ship having the firepower to defend herself against a determined attack. No supplementary weapons of similar power could be provided within the time available and so all ships, from the converted trawlers, through the RFAs to the carriers, contrived to draw, borrow or ‘half-hitch’ as many General-Purpose Machine Guns (GPMG) or Light Machine Guns (LMG – an updated version of the well-known Bren Gun) which were then fixed to improvised mountings around the upper deck.

The aircraft were ‘camouflaged’ during the passage to Ascension. Initially, this took the form of painting over all the white and yellow markings – the white individual numbers were repainted black, the blue of the national roundel markings was extended to meet the red centre circle and warning markings were largely obliterated. Shortly before arrival at Ascension, it was decided to paint out the white undersides of the Sea Harriers with the dark grey used on the upper surfaces: the Hermes’ aircraft were all completed, but the Invincible ran out of grey paint and had to await the delivery of additional supplies to complete the last three aircraft.

* The Flights embarked in Glamorgan and Antrim were still equipped with the Wessex 3 as the guided-missile destroyers’ hangar and difficult access design could not cope with the larger Sea King.