Читать книгу Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War - Patrick Bishop - Страница 7

HMS Invincible edged away from the quayside shortly before 10 a.m. on Monday, 5 April, tugs and small chase boats buzzing around her like impatient flies (writes John Witherow). She moved grandly down the Portsmouth Channel, exchanging salutes with ships and acknowledging the cheers of thousands of people lining the rooftops, quays and beaches in the crisp spring sunshine. Union flags skipped and curled above blurred heads and caps were doffed in extravagant gestures. From the Admiral’s bridge we could see the lone Sea Harrier fixed to the ‘ski jump’, its nose pointing skywards. At the stern, helicopters squatted on the flight deck, their blades strapped back. The order for ‘Invincible’s Attention’ to the 500 men lining the deck in their best rig was swept away by the wind and they ‘came to’ like a group of conscripts on their first day’s drill. We moved away from the small boats, past the old sea forts and into the Channel. Behind us came HMS Hermes, the old warhorse, already looking stained and weatherbeaten. A small group of men, for once not caught up in the urgency of departure, stood staring back at ‘Pompey’, others gazed towards the horizon. It had been a long time since the country sailed to war.

The speed of developments since Argentina invaded the Falklands three days earlier had been breathtaking. Crewmen, called back at short notice from their winter sports, had clambered aboard carrying skis while others arrived with rucksacks from hiking holidays. Every available Sea Harrier had been grabbed and warehouses emptied of spares and food.

The departure, however, gave the men a chance to collect their thoughts. There was a slight sense of the absurd; of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta with the might of the Royal Navy off to bloody the noses of who they referred to as ‘a bunch of bean-eaters’. But the tears in the eyes of the young man on the bridge were real enough and there was no doubt on board that we had to avenge a wrong and restore national pride. Alongside pictures of the ships in the Task Force someone had put up a notice: ‘The Empire Strikes Back’.

But would it come to a fight? We were confident we were off on a cruise, a piece of sabre-rattling to concentrate General Galtieri’s mind and hasten a diplomatic solution. The days of gunboat diplomacy were over and surely no one would be foolish enough to fight over some far-flung islands at the bottom of the world? Not everyone on board, however, was so convinced. Captain Jeremy Black said on the second day, while we were still within sight of land, that war was likely. He had to say this to prepare the crew for the worst, but he also identified the issue of sovereignty over the islands as the stumbling block to a peaceful settlement. In the end he was proved right.

Gradually the rather jolly outing began to appear less jolly and hearing a rating sing ‘Don’t cry for me Argentina’ lost its charm. The only two board games in the wardroom were Risk and Diplomacy. The latter was rarely played. Even the notice in the flying room which said ‘Due to the untimely death of Mae West all life preservers will be known as Dolly Partons’, became less amusing. We were simply more concerned with getting a life jacket. As the mood of the ship darkened the closer we moved to the Falklands, so the British bulldog spirit of affronted pride gave way to a greater degree of realism and apprehension.

The officers, and especially the pilots, though, remained pugnacious throughout. ‘I’ve been dying for ages to have a limited war,’ commented Lt.-Com. ‘Sharky’ Ward. ‘It enables us to sort out the chaff and cut through the red tape.’ A helicopter pilot, Lieutenant Darryl Whitehead, married two days before we sailed, added in a surprising aside: ‘I know it sounds a bit bloodthirsty, but I would like to drop a real depth charge on a real target.’

The ratings demonstrated a more understandable desire to stay alive. Officers would speak of them getting ‘the jitters on the lower decks’ and at times they looked distinctly nervous. The crew were careful to express their doubts out of earshot of the officers. On a visit to the frigate, HMS Broadsword, we asked junior ratings in their tiny mess in the bowels of the ship, ‘What do you think of it so far?’ ‘Rubbish,’ came the stock reply. ‘Do you want to go home?’ ‘Not ’alf,’ they said, more seriously. An officer stuck his head round the door. ‘Do you think we ought to kick the Argies off the Falklands, lads?’ he enquired encouragingly. ‘Yeah, they orta be taught a lesson,’ was the response. As we filed from the room one of the boys, no older than eighteen, winked.

But however nervous we became at times, the men were touched by that Portsmouth send-off and the mass of mail and the young girls demanding to be pen pals. They knew the country was united behind them and their tattoos ‘Made in Britain’ (or ‘Brewed in Essex’ on their beer guts) displayed their nationalism.

The pulse of the ship was taken daily by the Captain, like a caring family GP. Much later in the voyage, after the Belgrano and Sheffield were sunk, the question of morale was raised when he doubted the veracity of two pieces we had written. One hack had seen a rating sitting on the floor during the threat of an Exocet attack, tears rolling down his cheeks as he looked at a picture of his girlfriend, and another had told me that until Argentina fired that first missile all he knew about the country was that they ate corned beef and played football. Now he rated them. The captain found it hard to believe his men could behave or speak in such a way. In the cramped confines of a ship, where men lived cheek by jowl for months on end, discipline was essential; especially during a push-button war where seconds matter. By writing about the crew’s doubts the Captain thought discipline and morale would be undermined. One thousand men were crammed together on Invincible, from Prince Andrew, then second in line to the throne, to the lowliest rating from the Gorbals. Although there was interplay between the different ranks, their boundaries were jealously guarded. Most preferred it that way. Morale was certainly mercurial. It could ebb and flow according to ship ‘buzzes’, the internal word-of-mouth system that got messages around almost as fast as the tannoy. It was widely believed, for instance, there would be R and R (rest and recreation) at Mombasa then Rio de Janeiro. Spirits soared. When the speciousness of these rumours was exposed they plummeted. Such buzzes frequently seemed to originate from the cooks’ galley, inhabited by large red-faced chefs who dreamed up mischief as they stirred their pots.

As the Task Force moved south, Operation Corporate, as it was now known, became increasingly secretive. Naval ships with their supply vessels had been leaving Britain and Gibraltar over a period of days bound for the rendezvous point at Ascension Island. Radio silence was observed and vessels were darkened at night. The crew was told it could not mention the ship’s position, speed and accompanying vessels in letters home. Invincible, in fact, was travelling south on only one propeller at about fifteen knots. Almost as soon as we left Portsmouth one of the gear couplings of the giant engines had shattered and teams of engineers worked round the clock for two weeks to replace it by the time we reached Ascension. It was a remarkable effort that went unreported due to the Navy’s desire to keep everything from the Argentinians that could prove useful. For the first few days we hardly caught a glimpse of any other ships and we imagined a lonely voyage for 8,000 miles with empty horizons. Then Hermes moved closer and for the remainder of the journey we could see at least four or five vessels, their dull, grey shapes discernible against the skyline. It was not quite like scenes from The Cruel Sea, with warships hammering along with only a few cables between them, but it was oddly reassuring.

The secrecy reflected not only the Navy’s obsession with stealth but also the growing state of readiness for war. Harriers were flying more or less continually; rocketing a ‘splash target’ dragged behind the ship, firing a Sidewinder heat-seeking missile at a phosphorus flare, dropping bombs and feigning attacks on other ships to test their responses. Sea King helicopters flew endless missions, probing the oceans with their active sonars like huge insects dipping their probosces into the sea. They would look for unidentified shipping, throwing the £5m. machine around the sky. Besides searching for hostile submarines they acted as scouts for missile-carrying ships, doing ‘over the horizon targeting’ which involved popping up for a look and then getting out of radar contact, very fast. I was just recovering from a bout of sea-sickness in the Bay of Biscay (the first and last time) and could scarcely take my eyes off a fixed point three feet in front of me as the helicopter dropped from 400 feet to just above the waves in seconds. They had a favourite trick of allowing a guest to take the controls and then switching off the stabilizer. The aircraft would plunge wildly before the co-pilot took over. Outings would turn into sing-songs, with the four-man crew going through 820 Squadron’s repertory over their internal radios. Every flight ended with a return to ‘mother’, the pilots’ term for Invincible. The helicopter crewmen tended to be younger than the Harrier pilots, many of whom were in their mid-thirties and had years of experience flying Buccaneers and Phantom jets. The Sea King crews were wilder, liable to stand round the wardroom piano singing lewd songs and play fearsome games before crawling to bed.

One of the junior pilots was Sub-Lieutenant Prince Andrew, who had joined 820 Ringbolt Squadron (motto: Shield and Avenge) the previous October. The other pilots were fiercely protective, thinking it poor form to talk about him behind his back. The most one of his friends would say was that he had improved since his training days at Dartmouth, when he had appeared rather standoffish. At first he had avoided the journalists in the wardroom, slightly ill-at-ease with having the press at such close proximity, especially newspapers like the Sun and Daily Star which had hardly endeared themselves to the Royal family We had been told not to make the first move and after a while he approached us, curious about the working of the press and telling us how he had evaded the paparazzi with tricks ‘the length of his arm’, none of which he would disclose. Another of his friends said he actually liked appearing in the papers, and became slightly irritated if there was no photograph or harmless story about ‘Randy Andy’.

For a twenty-two-year-old he was a curious mixture of maturity and youth. His voice and mannerisms were strikingly similar to those of Prince Charles, although his sense of humour, always just below the surface, was more direct than Charles’s satirical approach. One one occasion he took great delight in telling the man from the Sun that he relaxed by playing snooker on a gyro-stabilized table – an age old joke in the Navy which none the less continues to find victims.

You could tell Andrew was in the wardroom when a film was being shown by the guffaws of laughter from the ‘stalls’. Not everything pleased him though. He walked out of the film The Rose starring Bette Midler as a drugged-up rock star muttering ‘silly cow’. He neither drank nor smoked, at least in public, and while looking relaxed among his fellow pilots was perhaps inevitably conscious of his position. It is hard to feel one of the boys when your flying overalls sport the name ‘HRH Prince Andrew’. He was known to his colleagues simply as ‘H’ and was delighted weeks later when he came ashore in Port Stanley and I referred to him as ‘H’. ‘I’ve been trying for ages to get you journalists to call me that,’ he laughed. From the interviews he gave in Stanley after the fighting had finished, it almost seemed as if a different character had emerged. He was more articulate than before and less self-conscious. Perhaps the endless flying, the responsibility and the danger had matured him.

Andrew was always smartly dressed. His clothes seemed that bit crisper than the rest of the officers’, and his hair was always well cut and the same length. We wondered if there was a hairdresser on board by Royal Appointment. The first day on board we were told that, ‘As far as we are concerned he is like anyone else. He is just another officer.’ It became apparent over a period of time that this was true. He flew dangerous missions to rescue a pilot from a ditched helicopter off Hermes and the survivors of the Atlantic Conveyor after she was hit by an Exocet. He was also apt to be called on to be ‘Exocet decoy’, flying his helicopter alongside Invincible to distract the missile and draw it away beneath the aircraft. It was a hazardous exercise that required a cool nerve, hovering twenty feet above the waves, ready to rise up above the missile’s (allegedly) maximum height of twenty-seven feet as it fizzed over the horizon just below the speed of sound. On the day Sheffield was hit, Invincible fired chaff from near the bridge that almost brought down the Prince’s helicopter as he flew alongside. Piloting a helicopter in the South Atlantic was a dangerous operation and twenty were lost, including four Sea Kings which ditched in the ocean. But there was never any suggestion that Andrew did any more or less than the other pilots. To have treated him differently would have undermined his confidence and alienated the rest of the squadron.

On Good Friday, just four days after we sailed from Portsmouth, we heard for the first time the harsh, rasping note of the klaxon calling the ship to action stations. Men rushed down passages, dragging anti-flash hoods over their heads and putting on white elbow-length gloves. The urgency that the klaxon conveyed was contagious and you would find yourself running, slamming down hatches as a disembodied voice kept repeating, ‘Action stations, action stations. Assume NBCD state one. Condition Zulu.’ The initials referred to nuclear, biological and chemical defences, which meant making the ship airtight from attack. Condition Zulu meant all the hatches and doors had to be sealed, a higher state of alert than ‘yankee’. Sealing up Invincible could take anything between ten to twenty-five minutes, depending on the training of the crew. Once completed it was rather like being locked in a vast tomb, knowing escape would be hindered by sealed decks with scores of men competing to get through the ‘kidney hatches’. At first we found ourselves assigned to the Damage Control Centre of the ship during action stations. This was presided over by Lt.-Com. Andy Holland, known to everyone as ‘Damage’, who gaily chattered about Invincible being able to take five Exocet hits before sinking. After some thought this seemed a bad place to be. It was right in the centre of the ship and at Exocet height. Discussing the safest position during threat of attack became a pastime, rather in the manner that overweight people discuss the merits of diets. The press wandered around the ship debating the chief targets, sometimes watching what was going on from the Admiral’s bridge and at other times seeking refuge in the Captain’s day cabin, lying on the carpets and staring at the bulkhead.

But at least we could move around in search of safety. Most of the crew had no choice but to stay in their assigned positions sweating it out. Many would try and sleep. Others would just lie there, write letters, read girlie magazines or play cards. Some were distinguishable only by their names written across the forehead of their white anti-flash hood, disguising all but their eyes. It was possible to go for days, even weeks, without tasting the salt on your lips or feeling the wind. The weather throughout continued to belie all predictions. Instead of raging seas we had fog and instead of sleet we had crisp sunny days. There were one or two gales but down in the bowels of Invincible, fitted with stabilizers, the roll was barely discernible. Steaming along in a large British warship had as much to do with the sea as flying has with travel in a jumbo jet. At times, it seemed, we might as well have been in a submarine. The sense of vulnerability, even claustrophobia, was impossible to avoid. Modern warships have abandoned armour plating, taking the view that the money is better spent on missile defences. One hair-raising theory that ‘Damage’ told us about the light construction of Invincible, was that an Exocet could pass right through without exploding. No one seemed keen to test the theory.

I had acquired a small cabin at the stern of the ship, just above the waterline. The escape routes from this cubicle were negligible. You had to move down a passage, through several sealed doors and then up ladders. ‘It’s not worth it,’ one sub-lieutenant told me. ‘All the doors will buckle if we’re hit and you’ll never get out.’ At the outset the hacks had been placed in the Admiral’s offices. This was rather like sleeping in a canning factory during an earth tremor. The rooms were full of filing cabinets and as the ship vibrated the files reverberated, as in an outlandish and off-key tintinnabulation. I tried sleeping with ear-defenders and then with cotton wool ear plugs. Neither was effective. We tried to locate the root of the noises, sticking sheets of paper between the cabinets – also with no success. Gareth Parry of the Guardian struggled naked over desk tops in the middle of the night, tapping the ceiling in a futile attempt to pinpoint a particularly irritating rattle. He retired to his camp bed muttering, ‘Sleep is release. The nightmare starts when we wake up.’

Apart from the calls to action stations, training exercises were given greater verisimilitude with the addition of smoke canisters, thunderflashes and one pound scare charges dropped alongside the ship. ‘We’ve got to give the men the smell of cordite,’ the captain said. The mood of impending struggle was heightened with notices recommending the crew to make out their wills and ensure the name of their next of kin was up-to-date on official documents. We were issued with identity discs which gave rank, name and blood group. Later on we had to carry at all times a life jacket at our waist and a bright orange survival suit. Anti-flash hoods were worn relaxed around necks, like grubby cravats.

Many crewmen received brief courses in first aid. The ship’s surgeon, Bob Clarke, gave a humorous account on television of how to shove morphine injections into your leg, ending the programme with a smile and saying ‘have a good war’. Although extra supplies of plasma, morphine, antibiotics, plaster of pans and intravenous fluids were on board, Clarke said cheerfully: ‘We’ll decide those people who are worth saving, and make it as comfortable as possible for those who are not.’ Potential hazards from whiplash, such as mirrors, glasses, and loose objects, were removed and flammable material like curtains and cushions were stowed away. Invincible was gradually transformed from a relatively luxurious craft, certainly far more luxurious than we had been led to expect, into an austere fighting unit, prepared for the worst.

I remember sitting in the wardroom at the end of April watching the closed-circuit television churn out a more or less continual diet of soap opera, war films, Tom and Jerry cartoons and extracts from comedy shows. Pilots, wearing their green one-piece overalls or rubber ‘goon suits’ to protect them against the freezing South Atlantic, lounged casually in armchairs. Some carried 9mm Browning pistols in shoulder holsters. Around them coffee tables had been piled together and tied to pillars with string. The landscape watercolours had gone from the walls and the crests above the bar removed. The cabinet case which had displayed relics of the triumphs of former HMS Invincible’s (including the victory off the Falklands in 1914) was now covered with brown paper on which cartoons and new trophies had been drawn, including a whale for 820 Squadron which had depth-charged one in mistake for a hostile submarine. Television programmes started with a picture of a topless girl accompanied by a Welsh male-voice choir. Someone said they used to show extracts of Emmanuelle before senior officers addressed the crew to ensure there was an audience.

But as we moved south to Ascension life remained good. There were drinks in the evening before dinner, a good wine list, and a four-course meal invariably followed by port. Films were shown three times a week on the screen in the dining room or wardroom. There were cocktails on the quarterdeck as the sun dipped over the horizon and sing-songs. What a way to go to war, we all thought, without actually thinking we would.

Invincible, like most large naval ships, was a self-contained world. It had its own doctors, dentists, library, television, bars, shop and entertainment. There was even a Chinese cobbler, tailor and laundry, which the fourteen Chinese on board adopted as their action station. There were hundreds of Hong Kong Chinese in the Task Force, mainly in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships, which sailed alongside, supplying the warships with food and fuel. On one, Sir Geraint, we were served meals by a nervous Chinese steward wearing a tin helmet, his own protest at being thrust into such a war.

Different ranks would be divided into their own messes. One night with the petty officers the journalists became the butt of all the good-humoured jokes, staggering out without our ties which joined an already impressive array of trophies. Even though they were rationed to three cans of beer a day, they would not allow us to buy a drink. Whenever a glass of lager appeared someone would produce a small bottle and pour a substance into it with a grin. They cursed the officers as incompetent, the ship as badly designed and their fate as grim. None of them really wanted to fight but if they had to they would.

At the Equator we were summoned to meet King Neptune and his court, who arrived on the flight deck on the hydraulic lift used for the Harriers and Sea Kings. Several were sentenced to have a foul substance smeared on their faces and dumped backwards into a canvas swimming pool. Among the victims were the Captain, Prince Andrew, the pressmen and their ‘minder’, the Ministry of Defence press officer who had taken to the bridge in the futile hope of escaping the ‘policemen’ who roamed the ship.

On 16 April Ascension emerged from the Atlantic, a barren volcanic rock basking in the tropical sun. Instead of the Task Force fleet anchored offshore as we had expected, there were only a few ships, including HMS Fearless, the home of Commodore Michael Clapp and the future base of Maj.-Gen. Jeremy Moore. The rest of the fleet, it later emerged, had moved on at speed when it appeared that a diplomatic settlement was likely. The government wanted to get as many ships as far south as possible in case an agreement ruled they could move no closer to the Falklands. There was certainly a sense of urgency. Before we had anchored, helicopters were ferrying out supplies, slung beneath the aircraft like huge shopping bags. In the distance Hercules could be seen taking off and landing at Wideawake airfield. Crewmen took the opportunity to drop a line over the stern and sat up all night, catching fish, including a shark which broke a rod in three places. The only excitement came when two chefs from a supply ship who were taking the air spotted what they thought was a periscope and for a couple of hours threw the fleet into pandemonium. Hermes and other ships went to action stations as frigates and helicopters pursued a solid sonar contact travelling at fifteen knots. ‘At that speed it’s got to be nuclear-powered,’ one officer said authoritatively. We all wondered if we had found a Russian submarine sneaking in for a close-up. Their Tupolev aircraft, after all, had for some time been brazenly buzzing the fleet taking photographs. But after some heavy ‘pinging’ with sonar it was decided the underwater object was a whale and the two chefs had been hallucinating. Whales, in fact, got a pretty hard time all the way down. They were always being mistaken for submarines and being depth-charged and torpedoed. It became so common to detect them that one of the first and few jokes of the war was ‘It’s all over lads. The whales have surrendered.’

Instead of spending several days at Ascension, as planned, Invincible suddenly upped anchor and set off south on 18 April. Captain J.J. Black had said there was no Rubicon in the operation, but it suddenly seemed we had passed the point of no return and war appeared likely. The Captain was a master of the colourful, pithy phrase. Although at the outset he said ‘we’ll piss it’ he was undoubtedly concerned and had pinpointed the Super Etendards carrying Exocets as a major threat. A large, slightly balding man with sharp blue eyes, he had an American-style baseball cap with J.J. Black emblazoned across the back, which he sometimes wore on top of his white anti-flash hood, and drank tea from a mug with ‘Boss’ on the side. He was a thoughtful seaman who had seen service in Korea, Malaya and Borneo and had drawn up the rules of engagement for war. Apart from speaking German and French, he was teaching himself Spanish. Like many military men he saw the value of the press to help the war effort but was not happy if that press freedom strayed into sensitive areas. On one occasion he described us as one of his weapons systems in the fight against Argentina.

The Captain said that Brilliant, Glasgow, Sheffield and Coventry had been waiting for us at Ascension but had moved south at speed ‘to stake out a line’ in case of a diplomatic settlement. We then sailed with Hermes, which Admiral Sandy Woodward had joined from Glamorgan, Broadsword, Alacrity and several supply vessels. The Task Force was moving south towards the Falklands to establish air and sea superiority before the amphibious forces followed, lessening the risk to unprotected troops.

Many crewmen were surprised to find the journalists still on board after Ascension. Apart from the general assumption that we would abandon ship before things became dangerous, the most common question, always delivered with a note of incredulity, was if we had volunteered for the operation or had been ‘press-ganged’. When we replied we had not declined the offer, they treated us either as deranged or warmongers. The next question would be along the lines of ‘I suppose you blokes are being paid a fucking fortune to be out here?’ To deny it merely provoked disbelief.

Soon after leaving Ascension we had our first encounter with Argentina. A Boeing 707 in military colours located the fleet before being intercepted by an armed Harrier. The early surveillance came as a surprise to the Task Force so far north and it was only the government warning that ‘appropriate action’ would be taken that stopped them after a few days. The tempo was now quickening and it seemed the government was ready for a full-scale attack if diplomatic talks failed. For some time the Captain had said there was concern about the Task Force having their hands tied but we saw no sign of this; only of resolution from the government or, perhaps more accurately, Mrs Thatcher.

The fleet transferred to battle formation as we moved through the Roaring Forties, with three frigates and destroyers forming the spearhead or ‘picket’. In the centre of a defensive screen, the two carriers, dogged by their ‘goalkeepers’, Brilliant and Broadsword, sat like queen bees. On 25 April we picked up the first news of the retaking of South Georgia and learnt that the SAS and the SBS had landed on the island days earlier but had lost two helicopters in a blizzard. It was here that the SAS had called for extra hand-grenades and a box was flown in. When the soldier opened it he found tea cups.

The SAS operation on South Georgia very nearly came unstuck. They had joined the Task Force at Ascension, D Squadron boarding the supply ship Fort Austin. They were followed by G Squadron, officered and manned almost entirely by members of the Household Division. In all 126 men were sent. The SAS headquarters stayed at the planning centre of the operation aboard HMS Fearless, even though until the landing several thousand miles separated the ship from the rest of the unit.

On 18 April, fifteen men left a warship in five Gemini rubber boats to land on Grass Island within sight of one of the Argentine bases on South Georgia. The Geminis were powered by Johnson 40 outboard motors. They were considered notoriously unreliable and the SAS had complained about them for years. Three of the engines broke down on the journey ashore. One of the Geminis was swept away into the darkness by gale force winds and the three-man crew spent the night adrift before being rescued the following day by helicopter. The second Gemini crew managed to drag themselves on to the last piece of South Georgia before Antarctica and lay low for five days until they were sure the island was taken before they radioed for help. The third boat was towed ashore by the others and the nine men lay up signalling reports to the fleet. The intelligence the SAS provided persuaded them to go for a surprise attack on the Argentinian positions.

The special services were to continue to play a vital role in the war. On 1 May, the first SAS and SBS patrols went on to the Falklands to test the lie of the land in advance of the Task Force assault. ‘Getting on the islands was a real psychological barrier,’ one of them recalled later. ‘No one knew how good they were or whether there wouldn’t be a reception party to scarf you up when you arrived. It was like being the first people on the moon. You didn’t know whether you were going to disappear into thirty feet of dust or find some hard standing.’

Three patrols concentrated on Port Stanley. The remainder reconnoitred around Port Howard, Fox Bay, Goose Green and Bluff Cove. They hid during the day and at night moved in close to study the Argentinian defences coming within a hundred yards of their troops.

Back on the ships, the daily intelligence briefs grew fatter as the SAS reports filtered back. Some of them were remarkably accurate, especially the picture they built up of the Argentine garrison at Stanley. Troop positions, artillery and armour were all exactly described. But there were also morale-boosting reports of dysentery, food shortages and near mutiny among the conscripts that were subsequently shown to be wide of the mark.

For the SAS, the Falklands war was a return to the role that they were originally designed for by Colonel David Stirling in the Second World War – long-range operations behind enemy lines, and a diversion from the anti-terrorist operations and training of Third World armies that had preoccupied them for the preceding decade. At Pebble Island they showed they were still masters at it. The island had been identified by naval radar and Harriers as the main diversionary airfield for Argentine planes flying to Port Stanley from the mainland. Rear Admiral Woodward’s enthusiasm for the raid was only lukewarm at first, as he was preoccupied with the battle in the air. The first operation to put a patrol on the island was stood down shortly before the helicopter carrying the men was due to take off.

The six-man patrol that landed on West Falkland on 7 May had to make a slow approach to avoid detection. The SAS commander was on the point of aborting the mission as the men were needed for pre-landing recces on East Falkland. Then at four o’clock on the afternoon of 12 May the patrol radioed through to say they had found the Argentinians. That night the rest of D Squadron was flown in. They marched for two hours across the island while a warship shelled the defenders’ positions. When they left, eleven planes had been destroyed and two SAS men wounded – apart from Captain John Hamilton, the unit’s only combat casualties of the war. Hamilton was killed charging an Argentine machine gun post on West Falkland just before the ceasefire. Much more tragically, the SAS had lost nineteen men from G Squadron when a helicopter crashed into the sea the day before the landings.

On Friday, 30 April, we were told the Task Force would launch attacks the next day on the Falklands and that three frigates would start a naval bombardment. The carriers would stay in the northeastern corner of the 200 mile zone, the farthest point for land-based Argentine aircraft to reach. ‘I’m sure we’ll hit them very much harder than they’ve expected and we’ll soon have them back at the negotiating table keen for a diplomatic solution,’ Commander Tony Provest, the second-in-command, said.

For us, the war started the next morning, at 7.44 a.m. GMT, about three hours before dawn. (Throughout the voyage the Task Force had used ‘Zulu time’ or GMT, and as a result we were getting up at about 3 a.m. local time and going to bed at about 9 p.m. local.) A Vulcan bomber, codenamed ‘Black Buck’ and flying all the way from Ascension Island refuelled by Victor tankers, dropped twenty-one 1,000 pound bombs on Stanley airfield. Only one hit the runway and the raids were repeated later in the war, with no more success. From the bridge you could see the Harriers being prepared for battle, the yellow tip on the Sidewinder missiles beneath the wings showing they were armed. At 8.15 the flight controller told a helicopter pilot: ‘The Vulcan has gone in. We are now at war.’ At that moment the departure from Portsmouth more than three weeks earlier belonged to another existence. At 9.05 four Harriers took off, their jets burning brightly against the clear, starry sky. They were to fly CAP (combat air patrol) while the Harriers from Hermes, who were expecting to lose three planes, would hit Port Stanley airfield with high explosives and cluster bombs. Others would attack Goose Green, thought to be the main base for the Pucara, the dangerous counter-insurgency aircraft.

The pilots from the first excursion looked tense although they had seen no enemy planes. The dawn came up slowly, its pink fingers curling over the horizon revealing a calm sea. Soon afterwards we had our first air raid warning and were told that Argentine Mirages had been ‘splashed’. The announcements throughout that long and tense day tended to paint a rather more serious picture of events, with reports of Super Etendards unleashing Exocets at incredible ranges of 140 miles. (This later turned out to be missiles fired at one of the Harriers.) On the bridge we wore our anti-flash and scanned the horizon for enemy planes, chewing toffees. An officer held up a picture of a Mirage so we would know what they looked like. There were continual games of cat and mouse over the horizon as the Argentine jets tested the fleet’s responses, veering away when they were intercepted by Harriers. We were frequently warned: ‘There is a possible air raid building in the west. On anti-flash.’ After long minutes we were told, ‘It’s all right. The Harriers have chased them away.’ In the meantime the bombardment of Stanley airfield continued. Crewmen broke off for ‘action snacks’, drank their tea from ‘action mugs’ and then headed for ‘action messing’. The word had become something of a joke and they now looked forward to an ‘action smoke’ with their ‘action pint’.

It was a day of confusion. At 5.45 p.m. with a weak winter sun washing over the ship, we were told our Harriers had attacked a submarine close to the Falklands. Moments later we were informed it was a rock formation which looked like a submarine.

It was also a day of some success. It had shown the Argentinians what the Task Force was capable of and only one Harrier from Hermes got a bullet through its tail. The rest returned undamaged. In the evening Paul Barton, an RAF pilot attached to 801 Squadron, shot down a Mirage with a Sidewinder missile and a Canberra with three men on board was also splashed by Alan Curtis, who a few days later died in an air collision. The Argentinians said they had destroyed eleven Harriers, two helicopters and had damaged several ships and an aircraft carrier. In fact only two ships were slightly damaged by bombs and cannons. A Lynx helicopter, which was directing naval guns, was hit by machine gun fire. The main Task Force came under attack from three Canberras which were driven off, one shot down and another limping home.