by Admiral Sandy Woodward with Patrick Robinson
Our next pair of authors is led by Admiral Sir John Forster “Sandy” Woodward, GBE, KCB, who is, quite simply, a sailor’s sailor. Born in 1932, he joined the Royal Navy at age thirteen, right after World War II. He became a submariner, and received his first command, the Valiant-class nuclear hunter-killer submarine Warspite, in 1969. In 1978 he was appointed to the Ministry of Defence. Promoted to Rear Admiral, in 1981 he was appointed Flag Officer First Flotilla. In 1982 he commanded the South Atlantic Task Groups in the Falklands War. Woodward was later knighted for his efforts during the war. In 1983 Woodward was appointed Flag Officer Submarines and NATO Commander Submarines Eastern Atlantic. In 1984 he was promoted to Vice Admiral, and in 1985 he was a Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff. Before retirement in 1989 he also served as Commander-in-Chief Naval Home Command and Flag Aide-de-Camp to the Queen. Along the way, he also showed an amazing knack for strategy and tactics, as in the time he defeated the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea during war games by disguising his destroyer as an Indian cruise liner and sneaking up to within range of his anti-ship Exocet missiles and simulating a launch, destroying the other ship and winning the exercise. Retired from the Royal Navy, he currently lives in England.
Patrick Robinson is a British novelist and former newspaper columnist. His recent books are naval thrillers Hunter Killer and Ghost Force, each about a crisis facing the world at the start of the twenty-first century. His earlier works include four nonfiction books about thoroughbred horses; True Blue, the story of the 1987 Oxford Boat Race mutiny for which he and coauthor Dan Topolski won the inaugural William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 1989; and of course One Hundred Days, the biography of Admiral Sandy Woodward.
One Hundred Days, describing Admiral Woodward’s Falklands experiences, is possibly the most candid account ever of the pressures of high command in war time and the impact on an individual commander. Told completely from his point of view, it is a masterly look inside the mind of a superb strategist as he embarks on his campaign. The following excerpt is from the beginning of the hostilities, when the two forces are about to meet for the first time, and what follows is the careful circle, feint, and thrust only when the attacker is as sure as he can be of achieving victory.
We established, I believe, several thousand miles back, that while truth is generally recognized to be the first casualty of war, the second is almost certainly politeness. After just one day in battle, I now know the third. Sleep. A commodity rapidly becoming as rare as the first two. I replaced it, largely, with adrenaline. Having retired to bed in the small hours of 2 May—the first night of my second half-century on this earth—I was awakened about one hour later at 0320 with the message: “Possible Arg Tracker (recce aircraft) to the north. Harrier despatched to investigate.”
I got up, went to the ops room, asked a few questions, and returned to bed, preoccupied with the careful advance of their surface fleet, and wondering how to deal with it. Sleep was just about impossible and anyway, within the hour, they called me again, when one of our probing Harriers reported several surface contacts on his radar out to the northwest, range two hundred miles. My feet hit the floor before they had finished telling me.
As I walked quickly along the short corridor to the ops room it was becoming all too clear what we were up against. The contacts were just about where we expected them to be—northwest of the Battle Group and north of the islands. They represented, almost certainly, the Argentinian Carrier Battle Group: the 20,000-ton Veintecinco de Mayo, pride of Admiral Anaya’s Fleet, and her escort of perhaps five ships. Two of them, I suspected, might be the Type 42 anti-aircraft destroyers Santissima Trinidad and Hercules, sister ships to Coventry, Glasgow, and Sheffield.
The moment I entered the ops room this was confirmed in my mind. The Harrier pilot’s report said he had been “illuminated” by a Type 909 Sea Dart tracking radar—and that had to be from one of the Args’ Type 42s. It took only a very short meeting with my staff to assess the situation and to conclude that they were about to attempt a dawn strike, launched against us from the deck of the carrier. Since she could carry ten A-4Q Skyhawks, each armed with three five-hundred-pound bombs, we could expect a swift thirty-bomb attack on Hermes and Invincible at first light—around 1100Z for us. She might also have Exocet-armed Super Etendards to add to our problems.
And in the middle of that rather sombre night, out near the edge of the British Total Exclusion Zone, we prepared to “form Line of Battle” for the first set piece of the war, the Royal Navy versus the naval and air forces of Argentina. Actually this entails anything but a “Line of Battle,” since modern tactics require formations which look completely haphazard at first sight, and anything but a “set piece.” The commander who so indulges himself makes it altogether too easy for his opponent.
I elected to finalize my arrangements two hours from that staff meeting, at around 0700, when the Glamorgan and Brilliant groups returned. For the moment we had a great deal more thinking to do, because Veintecinco de Mayo represented exactly one half of our problem. The other was situated two hundred miles to the southwest of me and to the south of the islands—the General Belgrano and her two destroyers. In addition to all of the above Argentinian ships, there were three frigates in the area, plus their only tanker.
Rear Admiral Gualter Allara, their Commander at Sea, was in the carrier, and it all looked to me very like a classic pincer movement attack on the British Battle Group. To take the worst possible case, Belgrano and her escorts could now set off towards us and, steaming through the dark, launch an Exocet attack on us from one direction just as we Were preparing to receive a missile and bomb strike from the other. Our choices of action were varied, but limited.
We could of course take immediate evasive action and head away from our position to the south east, making it more difficult for the bombers to find us, and possibly placing ourselves beyond their effective range, for lack of fuel or useful weapon load. But we had worked specifically towards bringing their fleet to action, and I did not want to be squeezed out of our own Total Exclusion Zone like a pip from an orange. That would have given added complications to the ROE, it would scarcely have been in the traditions of the Royal Navy, and anyway I had work to do inshore tomorrow night too. No, I could not allow that. But equally I could not just stay there and do nothing. I had to make a move, and since we were in contact with the Belgrano group, but no longer so with the carrier group, my thoughts began to center on the cruiser.
The Belgrano, on her own, was not that big a threat, but neither was she likely to be a push-over. A cruiser of 13,500 tons, and over six hundred feet long, she carried fifteen six-inch guns, and eight five-inch guns—all bigger than any guns in my entire Force. She was old, built in the United States in the mid-1930s as the “Brooklyn” Class light cruiser Phoenix, and had seen active service in the Pacific during the Second World War, having survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. In the American naval archives there is a picture of her coming out of the Harbor under her own steam, past the enormous wreck of the Arizona. A year later she became the flagship of General MacArthur’s navy commander Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, and for extended periods MacArthur himself was on board, conducting the Pacific campaign. Phoenix saw service in exalted company for many months as MacArthur and Kinkaid drove the Japanese back, all through the southern islands. She was purchased by the Argentine Navy in 1951 and, five years later, re-named the General Belgrano, immediately after the overthrow of President Perón.
Now she was ranged against us and, in a sense, against America, whose total support we now had. Commanded in this war by Captain Hector Bonzo, she was an historic ship with a thousand tales to tell. But I was rather afraid this venerable armoured veteran was approaching the end of her journey. I simply could not risk her group launching an attack on us with ship-to-ship guided missiles—the same Exocets with which we in Glamorgan could so very easily have eliminated the USS Coral Sea six months ago. And should it come to the point where I considered ourselves in danger of attack, when it may be us or them, my choice was simple enough—them.
So now I and my team, gathered high in the “Island” of Hermes, had to “Appreciate the Situation,” that rather grand military colloquialism for “thinking it through,” in short order. Both of the Argentinian surface groups could now be less than two hundred miles away, north and south of the Falklands, outside the TEZ. The aircraft of the one, and the Exocet-carrying destroyers of the other, could both get in close to us very quickly in the present calm weather. The long southern nights gave them fifteen hours of darkness, and between now and first light there was still six hours, during which either Bel-grano or Veintecinco de Mayo, or both, could have moved comfortably within range for a decisive battle which would give them, tactically, all the advantages. We assessed that we could probably shoot down five or six of the incoming Skyhawks—but that it would be very bad news if sixteen Exocets arrived from the southeast at more or less the same time. Also we wished fervently we knew a little more about the strength of the Argentinian warships in the inshore waters around East Falkland, which might have been waiting their chance to slip out and join in with the other attacks.
It was clear enough that unless we were extraordinarily lucky we could find ourselves in major trouble here, attacked from different directions, by different weapons requiring different responses, all in the half-light of a dawn which would be silhouetting us. At the very least, it was going to be a two-pronged strike, a straightforward pincer movement on us, from the southwest and the northwest. Coral Sea had failed to deal with a much lesser threat, with a far greater capability.
There was but one fast solution. I had to take out one claw of the pincer. It could not be the carrier, because our SSNs Spartan and Superb up there were still not in contact with her. So it would have to be the Belgrano and her destroyers. I am obliged to say that if Spartan had still been in touch with Veintecinco de Mayo I would have recommended in the strongest possible terms to the C-in-C that we take them both out this night. But as things were I had no right hand, just a left, and the best I could do would be to use it with as much force as I could manage.
The situation in the south west was fairly clear. Conqueror, commanded by Commander Christopher Wreford-Brown, had been tracking Belgrano throughout the night, having picked up her tanker more or less by accident late on Friday afternoon, and had stayed close until Belgrano turned up to refuel. Christopher, a thirty-six-year-old former pupil of Rugby School, was married with three children and had served as my correspondence officer in Warspite. I knew him quite well and took some pride in the fact that I may have influenced his career in one or two minor ways during our time together. In manner he was rather shy and very restrained even in his delivery of important information. But he was very steady in controlling a situation, thoughtful, and correct. There was, I always thought, rather more to him than his obvious intelligence and courteous, rather droll manner. I could be sure enough that in battle, should it ever come to that, he would be coolly effective, even though he had only taken command of Conqueror a few weeks ago.
On this night, as we conferred in Hermes, he had come to precisely the same conclusions as we had. Remarkable, you may think, given our vastly different perspectives. But remember, we both had the same picture of what was going on, we both had the same training, and we both had the same operational doctrine. So it’s hardly surprising that Commander W reford-Brown was accurately tuned in to the mind of his old boss. I may be an ex-submariner but in spirit I am always a member of that strange brotherhood which fights its battles from underwater. Having already put in an enormous amount of work in finding and tracking Belgrano this far, Christopher privately considered it would be a bit of a waste to do absolutely nothing. Thus he was hoping for a signal changing his Rules of Engagement, giving him permission to attack, outside the Total Exclusion Zone but inside the general warning area announced back in April, giving him permission to attack any Argentinian warship, giving him permission to sink the General Belgrano and her Exocet-carrying destroyers.
He also had to ponder the intricacies of torpedoes. He had two types, the first being the old Mark 8** of Second World War vintage, with a fairly accurate and very reliable close-range capability, plus a sizeable warhead, amply powerful to penetrate the hull of the big Argentinian cruiser and do great damage. This is a pretty basic torpedo which travels at a pre-set depth and on a pre-set course with no “ears” or “eyes” in the front. Basically, it is dead stupid and runs straight until it either hits something or runs out of fuel. It is nothing more intelligent or subtle than a large, motorized lump of TNT, which will do about forty knots in whatever direction you fire it. It is called a “salvo” weapon because we usually fire at least two and possibly as many as six at a go. This is done because, although it is necessary to aim as correctly as possible, all sorts of errors can creep in to ruin your “solution” to the torpedo attack problem: you may have misjudged the target’s course or speed or range marginally; the target may alter course or speed after the torpedoes have left the submarine; the torpedoes themselves may not run entirely accurately. The “salvo” is also used because you may want more than one torpedo to hit the target, particularly if you are trying to sink a large warship, and submariners do not relish having to go back for a second attempt against heavily armed and now alert opponents. Conqueror also carried the wire-guided Tigerfish torpedo, a “single-shot” weapon with a longer range and the ability to be guided from the submarine all the way to the target, but which had become a cause for concern due to its rather doubtful reliability at the time. To use the Mark 8** Christopher was going to have to get in close, to less than a mile. If the attention of the two destroyers and their depth charges should be too great, he would have to give it a shot with the Tigerfish from farther out. The trick was to stay undetected, as I had taught so many of my “Perishers.”
Back in Hermes my own view of the situation was more simple: The relatively heavy armour plating on the cruiser was such that I had only two weapons that could put her out of action—thousand-pound bombs, which would be nearly impossible to deliver, or Christopher’s torpedoes. The decision was obvious. However, we had to face the added problem of the Burdwood Bank, a large area of fairly shallow water which sits on the edge of the South American continental shelf. It runs over two hundred miles from east to west, passing some hundred miles to the south of East Falkland, at which point it is about sixty miles across, north to south. Farther south, the Atlantic is more than two miles deep, but around the Falkland Islands and inshore to the continent, the sea-bed slopes up to the continental shelf, giving a general depth of about three hundred feet. On the Bank, however, the bottom rises to shallows just one hundred and fifty feet below the surface. These shoals are quite well charted, but they can be a lethal place for a submerged submarine trying to stay with a cruiser making more than twenty-five knots through the water. To do that speed in a nuclear-powered submarine, it is necessary to run at a minimum depth of two hundred feet to avoid leaving a clear wake of disturbed water on the surface. At one hundred feet, which is where they would have to be as they crossed the shoals, they would leave a marked wake which would be fairly obvious to the hurrying surface ships.
There is then of course the additional problem of tracking an enemy: At high speed you cannot hear or see because the sonar is drowned out by the noise of the water rushing past your hull, which means you have to slow right down to listen, or come up to periscope depth to look every so often, to check your quarry has not altered course. It’s a sort of Grandmother’s Footsteps, with lethal consequences if you’re caught. The additional problem here is time: the moment you head to the surface and your periscope breaks clear of the water, like a big broomstick, you are immediately vulnerable to detection, either by the look-outs who are trained to spot a submarine or by the enemy’s radar. Thus you put a periscope up for the shortest possible time for a very quick look, and a few seconds’ gulp of information. The man who looks through the periscope needs a photographic memory, and he needs to use every bit of his training in the Perisher. Each time the submarine conducts this time-pressured manoeuvre she loses precious speed and distance. Thus the submariner’s rule of thumb is that you need a thirty per cent speed advantage to trail an enemy successfully, because you have to keep stopping. Under c alm-surface conditions Belgrano could probably outrun a submerged Conqueror without working up too much of a sweat. In a race across the Bank I was afraid the Argentinian would be a heavy favourite.
If the three Argentinian captains were clever they might decide to split up and rendezvous later, closer to the Falkland Islands, in which case we would have little chance of locating them accurately. Perhaps more likely was the possibility of all three of them making a dash for it, across the Bank, deep into the TEZ, knowing the near-impossibility of a submarine tracking them among the shoals. (And remember, when we caught the USS Coral Sea in Glamorgan, we achieved it by means of a high-speed run, at night, from outside her T EZ—even if we were wearing turbans.)
My conclusion: I cannot let that cruiser even stay where she is, regardless of her present course or speed. Whether she is inside or outside the TEZ is irrelevant. She will have to go.
Even now, in the hours before dawn, both the General Belgrano and her escorts are heading eastwards at about thirteen knots, which may not sound very much, but it is a speed which would give her a lead of well over a mile on any of the upwind legs in the old America’s Cup races for twelve-metre yachts. She is staying about twenty or thirty miles outside the TEZ, moving, apparently, around the perimeter, towards us. Even at her present low speed, she and her escorts could turn up right behind us, at a range of about fifty miles, some fifteen hours from now. And under my present Rules of Engagement I can do nothing about it. As they say in New York, thanks, but no thanks.
However, deep down, I believe she would continue to creep along the back of the Bank, and then when she is informed that the carrier is ready to launch her air strike, she will angle in, on a northeasterly course, and make straight for us, the Exocets on her destroyers trained on us as soon as they are within striking range. I badly need Conqueror to sink her before she turns away from her present course, because if we wait for her to enter the Zone, we may well lose her, very quickly.
As we all sat in the ops room of Hermes that morning, I knew I had to find a way of getting the Rules of Engagement changed in order to allow Christopher Wreford-Brown to attack the Belgrano group as soon as possible. This, actually, was a bit of problem because the proper procedures were inclined to be rather slow and, in theory, Belgrano could already have changed course without my yet knowing, and five hours from now, still just before dawn, she would be in a position to attack us. The correct, formal process for any commander to alter his ROE is as follows: sit down and draft a written signal, in hard copy, which says, at length, “Here is my tactical and strategic situation. I wish to do this and that, and I am faced with this, that, and the other. My conclusion is that I need a change in my Rules of Engagement, namely permission to attack Belgrano group before she enters the Exclusion Zone. That is, as soon as possible. Like, now.” And preferably an hour ago. Actually three hours ago by the time you get this. And eight hours ago by the time Conqueror gets your answer.
Of course, it all takes time: time to write, carefully and lucidly, and then, because it would be rather better if no one else heard it, the signal must go in encrypted code on to the satellite to Northwood. It will then be read by the duty officer on this quiet Sunday morning in the western suburbs of London. He will then inform the Chief of Staff, who will take it to the C-in-C, who will ring up the Ministry, and they will brief the Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin. When they have all read it, all understood it, and are all quite clear why Woodward wants to proceed with this major change in the plan, Sir Terence will then take it to the War Cabinet, for Mrs. Thatcher’s final approval. Only then can the process of sending the reply start. And that can take just as long again. And then it might not be the reply I wanted and needed. All of which was largely hopeless from my point of view, since it could not take much less than the best part of five or six hours, by which time (unless I blatantly exceeded my ROE), we could all be swimming around in the South Atlantic, getting a bit cold, and wondering where the hell those sixteen Exocets just came from.
I thus clearly have no time to hang about writing a formal assessment. Nor yet can I risk getting the “wrong” answer. As far as I know, Belgrano and her escorts may already be on their way to us and, if they are, Conqueror is going to be so busy trying to chase her over the Bank, there is never going to be time for him to slow down, come to periscope depth, whistle up the satellite, and start exchanging formal messages to Northwood. The general drift of such a signal would have to be something like this: “Belgrano has changed course to the northeast. Am attempting to maintain contact. Does the change of course affect my ROE? Am I permitted to attack? Urgent advice needed.” All of which would have been quite hopeless. With such a delay Conqueror would probably lose the cruiser altogether, just while sending the signal. Therefore the question is: How can I startle everyone at home into the required and early action? I have to get those ROEs changed exceedingly fast and to do so I instituted the formal process by getting Jeremy Sanders to get on to DSSS and spell out to the Duty Officer at Northwood precisely what my feelings were. Meanwhile I immediately put on to the satellite my permission toConqueror to attack immediately. The signal read: “From CTG [Commander Task Group] 317.8, to Conqueror, text priority flash—attack Belgrano group.”
Now, I knew that the captain of Conqueror would know that I was not empowered to give him that order—you will recall that the submarines were being run from London (against my advice). Thus I could expect a very definite set of circumstances to break out upon receipt of my signal. For a start Northwood would read it. Having then seen what I had done, the flag officer submarines, Admiral Sir Peter Herbert, my old boss in Valiant, would know beyond any shadow of a doubt that I must be deadly serious. It would serve as the strongest possible reinforcement of the formal request being prepared now by Jeremy Sanders in readiness for his phone call home. What is more, my signal will be in London in the next twenty minutes, which should provide them all with an interesting jolt at six o’clock in the morning.
As it happened Peter Herbert’s staff read my signal and immediately took it off the satellite, in order that Conqueror should not receive it, which indeed she didn’t. I had quite clearly exceeded my authority by altering the ROE of a British submarine to allow it to attack an Argentinian ship well outside the TEZ. Such a breach of naval discipline can imply only two things—either Woodward has gone off his head, or Woodward knows exactly what he is doing and is in a very great hurry. I rather hoped they would trust my sanity, particularly because there is always another aspect to such a set of circumstances—that is, should the politicians consider it impossible for the international community to approve the sinking of a big cruiser, with possible subsequent great loss of life, I had given them the opportunity to let it run and then blame me, should that prove convenient. I quite understood it might be extremely difficult for them to give what some were bound to see as a ruthless order. Indeed I am keenly aware that there are some things politicians simply cannot do, no matter what the extenuating circumstances may be. But now they could do it. And if it went wrong, I was there to be blamed. But if it went right, they could take the credit.
Actually I had intended the signal to get as far as the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John Fieldhouse, and I had rather expected he would personally recommend that it should run, given the urgency of my message. FOSM had pre-empted me a bit, by pulling the order off the satellite. Nonetheless I imagine they immediately went to the C-in-C and said: “Look what Woodward’s done.” This, I am quite sure, would have gingered him up, and caused him to go to Admiral Lewin and tell him, “Look, Woodward means this. They need a change in the Rules of Engagement out there. Fast.”
Whatever the true process back home actually turned out to be, this was how I saw it happening. Suffice it to say, by the time the War Cabinet met at ten o’clock in the morning at Chequers everyone was apprised of the situation. After quick but careful consideration of the military advice, the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet authorized changes to the ROE which would permit Conqueror to attack the Belgrano group. I do not suppose it occurred to Mrs. Thatcher for one moment, certainly it did not occur to me, that in a very few months from then a certain section of the House of Commons would endeavour to prove that this was a decision which could only have been perpetrated by a callous warmonger, or at least a group of callous warmongers, of which I was very much one. But political thinking and military thinking are often diverse, even when both sets of executives are on the same side, with overwhelming public support. And, by necessity, the military commander under the threat of missile attack is required to be more crisp than someone thinking the matter over some weeks later in front of the fire in a country house in the south of Scotland.
My own case is simply stated, because it comes from the same folklore as that followed by Admiral Nelson, Admiral Jervis, Admiral Hood, Admiral Jellicoe, and Admiral Cunningham. The speed and direction of an enemy ship can be irrelevant, because both can change quickly. What counts is his position, his capability, and what I believe to be his intention.
At O745Z on 2 May my signal had gone and Jeremy Sanders had talked very succinctly to the duty officer at Northwood. There was little more to be done about the Belgrano except await the outcome. By now the anti-submarine group were back, as were Glamorgan and her group. I felt we were a bit less exposed, but I was still irked by the fact that the other submarines—not Conqueror—were somehow unable to find the Argentinian carrier.
We were positioned some eighty miles east of Port Stanley and as prepared as we could be to receive a dawn strike by the aircraft from the deck of the Veintecinco de Mayo. I deployed the three Type 42s Sheffield, Coventry, and Glasgow some thirty miles up-threat as our front-line defence, the picket line. Much, I thought, would depend on the speed of the reactions of their ops rooms. The bigger “County” Class destroyer Glamorgan, her guns only just cooled from the night bombardment, was positioned in an inner anti-aircraft screen—and if necessary, an anti-submarine screen—with the frigates Yarmouth, Alacrity, and Arrow. They would form the second line of defence in front of the two Royal Fleet Auxiliaries Olmeda and Resource, which would take up a position near Hermes and Invincible. Each of the carriers would operate in company with a “goalkeeper,” one of the Type 22 frigates. Ours would be Captain Bill Canning’s Broadsword, while Invincible would operate with John Coward’s Brilliant. The latter combination packed enormous punch, because Coward was likely to be extremely quick off the mark with his Sea Wolf missile system, and Invincible carried a Sea Dart system. We did not have any airborne early warning radars to assist the pickets, which meant our maximum radar range against low-fliers, from the Type 42s, was about forty-five miles out from Hermes. We would of course fly constant combat air patrols from the decks of both carriers, but with the Sky-hawks coming in very fast, at wave-top height, I thought we might have our work cut out to down all ten of them.
And so we waited, all of us very much alert for a coordinated air and sea attack from almost any direction. But, to our surprise and relief, it never materialized. Sea Harrier probes to the northwest found nothing.
Out here in the notoriously windswept South Atlantic, what we had not even considered had happened: with winter approaching, the air was absolutely still. And the Args could not get their fully laden aircraft off the deck without at least some natural wind, regardless of their own speed through the water into the breeze. With daylight approaching, the constant threat of our SSNs finally catching up with them and the slowly growing realization that we were not in fact about to put the Royal Marines on the beach at Port Stanley, they wisely turned for home and safety, though of course, we did not know it.
By 1130, however, we were fairly sure the carrier group had in some way withdrawn, simply because no air attack had arrived. We regrouped after a quick lunch to decide what time we should once more head west towards the islands for our second night of recce insertion, and at that time the scene switched very decisively to Conqueror. I should mention here that I knew nothing more about the subsequent activities of the submarine for many hours. In the ensuing months and years since the war, I have pieced together from the people most closely concerned what happened on that chill but windless Sunday afternoon. I cannot, as a submariner myself, resist providing some detail of one of the more riveting days in the history of the submarine service.
We now know that at 0810Z Belgrano and her escorts reversed course, and were in fact on their way home. But they headed back to the west on a gentle zigzag, not apparently in any great hurry or with any obvious purpose. When I became aware of their westerly course that afternoon, I still had no reliable evidence as to their intentions. For all I knew they might have received a signal telling them to return to base; but perhaps they had only been told to wait and come back tonight; perhaps they hadn’t been told anything. But if I had been told to return to base, I wouldn’t hang about, that was for sure. I’d get on with it, PDQ. Either way, Conqueror trailed her all morning. At 1330Z, she accessed the satellite and received the signal from North-wood changing her Rules of Engagement. Commander Wreford-Brown had, apart from self-defence, thus far been permitted to attack the Argentinian aircraft carrier and, within the TEZ only, other Argentine combat ships. The change said quite clearly he may now attack the Belgrano, outside the TEZ.
Actually the significance of this change was clear to all the British ships except poor old Conqueror, the only one that really needed to know it. They had, unfortunately, a very dicky radio mast that kept going wrong, and they could not make sense of the signal. Neither could they hang around indefinitely, at slow speed with masts up, trying to re-access the satellite. The danger of losing the Belgrano was too great. Commander Wreford-Brown went deep and fast again to continue the pursuit and all afternoon they tried to fix the mast, as they trailed the Argentinians, furtively, through the depths of those grey seas, south of the Burdwood Bank. At 1730 Conqueror came up again, accessed the satellite once more to get a re-run of their signal, and this time they could read it.
The captain took a careful look at the Belgrano and the two destroyers before going deep to try to catch them up from his position some seven miles astern of the cruiser and her escorts. The Argentinians were steaming in a V-formation, Belgrano to the south, with one destroyer positioned about half a mile off her starboard bow, the other one a mile off her starboard beam. As an anti-submarine formation the British captain considered it “pretty pathetic, especially as the ships were largely obsolete, and the crews were displaying a fairly minimal amount of skill.” They did not, in fact, even have their sonars switched on.
In retrospect I am inclined to go along with Christopher’s assessment: had I been the captain of the General Belgrano, I would have been doing many things differently at this time. For a start I would have had my two escorts positioned on my port and starboard quarters using intermittent active sonar, rather than have them both, passively, to my north. Also I would never have been dawdling along at thirteen knots for hours on end, if my fuel state remotely allowed it. Rather I would have been zigzagging determinedly and varying my speed quite dramatically, occasionally speeding up to twenty-five or more knots, making it much more difficult for a shadowing submarine to stay with me. At other times I would have slowed right down, making it equally hard for a shadowing submarine to hear me, but allowing me perhaps to hear him charging along in the rear making a noise like an express train. Finally, I would have edged up towards the Burdwood Bank, thereby making it less likely that an SSN would approach from that direction and enabling me to put my escorts in a better place.
Captain Hector Bonzo was doing none of this. He was no submariner, nor had he any experience of what SSNs could or could not do. He had not thought it through, and all the while, right on his stern, there was Conqueror, following in a standard sprint-and-drift pursuit—running deep at eighteen knots for fifteen or twenty minutes, then coming up for a few minutes to get another visual setup to update the operations plot for the fire-control officer. Every time they came up, they reduced speed to five knots or so, which of course lost them ground as they “drifted,” but they made it up again in the eighteen-knot “sprint.”
It was approaching 1830 when the British submarine captain judged they were close enough for the final approach, at a range of just over two miles. He went deep at high speed to take a long left-hand swing so as to come up on the port side of the Argentinian cruiser. He wanted to fire his torpedoes from a position just forward of her beam, at a range of about two thousand yards. Having had plenty of time for solid thought, Christopher had decided to use the Mark 8** direct, straight-running torpedoes. The tubes were loaded with three of them, but he had also taken the precaution of loading three Tigerfish just in case it should prove impossible to get in close enough.
By 1857, Conqueror’s captain estimated he could turn in for the firing position, and come to periscope depth for the final fire-control setup. Up forward, in the torpedo space, they were making ready to fire three Mark 8** torpedoes in the standard fan formation, with each of them aimed off, ahead of the Belgrano sufficiently to ensure that torpedo and ship would meet in the identical patch of water.
The tension throughout the submarine was high, as the sonar operators listened carefully to the continuing steady beat of Belgrano’s three-bladed propellers… “Chuff-chuff-chuff… chuff-chuff-chuff”… rising and falling in the long Atlantic swells, slightly fainter as the stern ploughed deeper. In the control room, Commander Wreford-Brown ordered Conqueror to periscope depth—and, as the “eyes” of the submarine came up out of the floor with that familiar “Whoosh!,” his hands grabbed for the handles before they reached knee level, ducking down to use every precious second of sight. (Remember the manhole in Piccadilly Circus I told you about during the Perisher Course? Commander Wreford-Brown was now in it.) Time was running out for the big, grey, American-built veteran of Pearl Harbor.
He called out bearing, then the range—“Three-three-five… Thirteen-eighty yards”—then under his breath he said, “Damn. Too close.” But there was no time to correct that. He hesitated for a few more seconds, as Conqueror slid forward, now on a perfect ninety-degree angle to the Argentinian ship. Then he called out the final order to his fire controller: “Shoot.”
The sonar recorded the double-thump as the first torpedo was discharged from its tube and then the high-pitched whine as the torpedo’s engine started up and it accelerated away at forty knots. Conqueror shuddered. Seven seconds later there was another, then another. As the whine of the third torpedo died away there was again silence, save for the “Chuff-chuff-chuff… chuff-chuff-chuff” which had been with the British sonar operators for so long.
The seconds ticked by, and the big cruiser steamed on, still at thirteen knots, moving ever closer to the fatal patch of water the British captain had selected. Fifty-five seconds after the first launch, number one Mark 8** smashed into the port bow of the General Belgrano, aft of the anchor but forward of her first gun turret. Very nearly blew the entire bow of the ship off. Through the periscope, Christopher Wreford-Brown was astonished to see a big flash light up the sky.
Conqueror’s sonar operator matter-of-factly reported in the same tone of voice you might count sheep, “Explosion…” Then came, “… Second explosion…” Three more reverberating explosions combined the sound of the “echoes” with the two torpedoes which struck home, the second one hitting below the after superstructure. The last of the explosions sounded different, more distant, more metallic, lighter. One of the escorts, the destroyer Bouchard, said later that she had been hit a glancing blow by a torpedo which had not gone off.
It had been, by any standards, a textbook operation by Christopher Wreford-Brown and his team, which is probably why it all sounds so simple, almost as if anyone could have done it. The best military actions always do. As the young commander said rather dryly some months later, “The Royal Navy spent thirteen years preparing me for such an occasion. It would have been regarded as extremely dreary if I had fouled it up.”
Back in Conqueror they all heard the unforgettable impact of the strike and knew their torpedoes had hit something. Then, as the noise subsided, for the first time for twenty-four hours the “Chuff-chuff-chuff” of the enemy’s propellers had gone. There was only silence, save for an eerie tinkling sound on the sonar, like breaking glass or metal, echoing back through the water, like the far-lost chiming of the bells of hell. So sounds the noise of a big ship breaking apart on a modern sonar.
Every Argentinian account since has reported a “fireball” rushing through the ship, in which three hundred and twenty-one men Were lost. Which suggests the cruiser was ill-prepared for war. If the blast did travel so quickly in this way it must have been because too many bulkhead doors and hatches had been left open, rather than kept tight shut, with their clips on, in readiness to hold back both fire and water. Keeping hatches and doors properly shut is domestically inconvenient because it can then take about fifteen minutes to get from one end of the ship to the other, unlocking, unclipping every door to get through, then clipping up behind you. Captain Hector Bonzo learned to his cost that if you are in the process of invading another country’s islands, and they are, in turn, not pleased with you, it is probably best to remain in a fairly efficient defensive position. But he was acting in a way which suggested he believed he was in no real danger, despite receiving a warning a few days before, from the British government, that Argentinian ships posing any threat to the business of the British Fleet would be sunk, provided only that they chose to go outside the mainland twelve-mile limit. Here, perhaps, was a man who had not yet quite accepted the reality of the situation we were now all in, and of course he was not alone in his attitude.
On board Belgrano the flames, the heat, and the damage were merciless, beyond control, and totally ill-contained. Sea water flooding in quickly shut down all power, a combination of fire and water shut down the auxiliary generators, which in sequence shut down the anti-flooding pumps and the fire-fighting emergency equipment. All the lights failed, and the communications systems crashed simultaneously. The captain and eight hundred and seventy-nine of his company managed to abandon the now darkened ship, and it took half an hour for them all to find their way into the inflatable life rafts. A quarter of an hour after Captain Bonzo left the deck, the General Belgrano rolled over on her port side and her stern rose high into the air as she pitched forward and sank. Packed into the surrounding life rafts, almost nine hundred of her crew, some of whom would not survive this freezing night, sang the Argentinian National Anthem as she went. I am always startled by the emotions the Malvinas can stir in the breast of an Argentinian. For us this campaign was a tough and demanding job on behalf of our government. For them it was something close to a holy war.
Commander Wreford-Brown, whose nearest experience to such an event had been on exercises from Faslane, was almost overcome by an immediate instinct to wipe the sweat from his brow, pack up, and have a cup of tea, before setting about collecting all the copious records required to establish whether his “attack” had been successful or not. But that lasted for all of a split second, as reality returned. There were a few urgent tasks to accomplish: first, avoid the destroyers, get clear—fast. That means deep, too. Rudder hard over, down they went and away to the southeast, away from the chaos that always surrounds a stricken warship, away from the retribution the surviving ships will hope to exact.
Within a few minutes the sonar operators heard three explosions which the captain assessed to be depth charges from the Argentinian destroyers. They sounded fairly close. Your first one always does. But this was no time to be curious, so he ran on, still deep, for four or five more miles until the Argentinians faded astern. He wondered, perhaps warming to his new task, whether to go back and have another shot, perhaps sink the other two. However, discretion proved the better part of valour and he elected to ensure that Conqueror stayed in one piece rather than engage in further heroics on this particular day. In the intervening years he has refined that view yet further. “In retrospect,” he told me recently, “I do not suppose Mrs. Thatcher would have thanked me all that much if I had reloaded and hit the other two ships.” An opinion I would have assessed as more or less faultless because, as far as I knew, he only had permission to fire at the Belgrano anyway. I have to add that Christopher is equally sure that he had received permission to attack any Argentinian warship anywhere up to the twelve-mile limit of her shores. I am always amazed at how two trained observers can harbour totally opposed views on a “simple fact”! And even more so if it turns out that I am the one who is wrong.
Indeed Commander Wreford-Brown did return on the following day and saw the two destroyers, quite a way southeast by now, because of the wind and current, helping with the search and rescue of the many Argentinian survivors. But they were engaged on a mission of mercy now, not war, and Christopher W reford-Brown turned Conqueror away, and left them to their unenviable task.
From my own perspective, it was rather a disjointed sort of day. Of course we were unaware of the activities of Conqueror, just as they knew nothing of our preoccupation with the possible attack from the Argentinian carrier. In turn neither of us knew, at that time, what was in the minds of the Argentinian High Command. In fact, by 0900 Argentinian time it was clear to them that the wind would not return in the next few hours and the dawn strike against us, which was very definitely planned, was called off. Veintecinco de Mayo and her escorts were ordered back to the mainland. At more or less the same time, the General Belgrano was also ordered to return to base. She was already steaming west and she was merely ordered to keep on going. Admiral Anaya, faced with the non-functioning of one of his “pincers,” quite reasonably decided to cancel the whole operation.
We of course knew nothing of this. Thus, as that Sunday morning wore on, we continued to search to the north and northwest for signs of an incoming attack, trusting that Conqueror would deal with the threat from the south. I kept the Group in a high state of anti-air warfare readiness, at least until the afternoon when we began to head west in preparation for the recce insertion that night. At 2200 I once more detached Glamorgan and her group to bombard the Argentinian positions around Port Stanley, with the intention of maintaining their belief that we were about to land in the Port Stanley area and still in hopes of defeating their Fleet, now on the following day.
It was not until 2245 that we received a signal from Northwood to tell us that HMS Conqueror had sunk the General Belgrano. We received the news without excitement. There was only temporary relief that the threat from the southwest had, for the moment, diminished. I did, however, realize that this news would make all kinds of headlines back home and that it would be im mensely good for morale. Not wishing to rain on this particular parade, Northwood recommended that I recall Glamorgan and the two frigates, in case one of them should be lost. I agreed. Probably just as well too. On the face of it, it had been another moderately successful day for us: we were still more or less intact, and we had reduced the sea threat to the Battle Group by one cruiser. We were not to know for weeks that the effects of Belgrano’s sinking would be so all-embracing. Even as we planned our next activities, late that night, the entire Argentinian fleet was on the move. The two destroyers in the south were on their way back to Porto Belgrano, the carrier and her Type 42s were heading back towards the River Plate, and the three other frigates had also made an about-turn and were heading west for home.
What no one knew then was that Christopher Wreford-Brown’s old Mark 8∗∗ torpedoes, appropriately as old in design as the Belgrano herself, had sent the navy of Argentina home for good. Unwittingly we had achieved at least half of what we had set out to do from those days at Ascension: we had made the Argentinians send out their fleet and a single sinking by a British SSN had then defeated it. We would never see any of their big warships again.