Just over 40 years ago, on 2 April 1982, Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands and repeated the action on South Georgia the following day. Luckily for the Falkland Islanders, at that time Britain had a Prime Minister with a bigger set of balls than any of the men who came after her. Margaret Thatcher took advice from her senior military advisers and came to the conclusion that it would be possible for her armed forces to recover the islands, one of the most remote British outposts in the world.
The facts of the conflict are well established and quite well-known by most people who lived through this period. What this book does is explore some secondary, but still extremely important, aspects of this event.
The reality is that Britain was extremely lucky to win. Our warships were ill-equipped to combat the modern weaponry, and in particular the sea-skimming missiles, with which the Argentine air force was equipped, as is confirmed by the number of vessels that we lost during the conflict. Our two capital ships, the Invincible and the Hermes, possessed no form of close-in weapon system that could engage such missiles, and nor did any other vessel that we could deploy. It was rather as if the architects who were responsible for designing Royal Navy warships were building them to fight the kind of battle that was being fought thirty years ago and had no clue about the type of combat scenarios likely to be encountered in more modern times.
Against this backdrop, work on the second of the CVS-class aircraft carriers – HMS Illustrious – was being carried out at a frenzied pace at the Swan Hunter yard in Newcastle, work which included the provision of proper defensive systems, the CIWS, colloquially known as ‘the Dalek,’ that was suitable for modern warfare, the first time such weapons had ever been fitted on a Royal Navy vessel.
Even before the ship sailed from Newcastle there were problems caused almost entirely by the naval architects. One of the most laughable was, of all things, the seating in the two aircrew briefing rooms. The ship was carrying a squadron of Harriers, and for those briefings the seating – wide and comfortable individual chairs – were ideal because of the number of people involved. For a typical CAP – combat air patrol – sortie, there would be four pilots (the two flying the first Harriers and their relief crews); the briefing officer; the met officer; a couple of fighter controllers and perhaps the squadron CO, senior pilot, Commander (Air) or Lieutenant Commander (Flying) might pop in, so about a dozen people in all. No problem.
But in the identical-sized briefing room next door it was a very different story. That was where the rotary wing briefings took place. The ship was carrying a full squadron of Sea King ASW (anti-submarine warfare) helicopters and the most typical way of providing a proper screen was to do a Ripple Three. This required the launch of three Sea Kings, each with two pilots, an observer and a crewman, which would be replaced on task one at a time by a further three Sea Kings on a rotation basis. The first six crews would normally be briefed at exactly the same time, meaning 24 aircrew had to somehow fit into a briefing room designed for half that many people. Plus, of course, all the other people involved: the briefing and met officers, helicopter controllers, warfare officers and the like.
We identified the problem straight away and the ship’s staff contacted the naval architects to tell them they had to do something to fix the problem. The response was predictably bureaucratic and unhelpful: the seats had been paid for, they said, and they would be staying. We decided but that wasn’t going to happen so they were unceremoniously stripped out of the briefing room and dumped on the quayside at the Swan Hunter yard while our chippies set to work making bench seats able to accommodate everybody. I have no idea what happened to the expensive seats but I doubt they stayed on the quayside for very long.
Two other design idiocies involved the Harriers. To assist the aircraft in doing a visual recovery in marginal weather conditions, the ship had a device called a DAP, a deck approach projector sight, designed to indicate when the Harrier was on the correct glide slope. The architects had positioned that directly behind Flyco – the location behind the bridge from which all aircraft operations were controlled – in such a way that the stern of the ship, and hence the approaching Harrier, were completely invisible. We had that changed at Portsmouth.
The other problem was rather more intractable. The ship had no radar that would actually display a Harrier as a primary return. Nor did it have any precision radar to allow a controller to talk down the aircraft if the weather was too bad for the pilot to see the ship. In fact, the only radar the air traffic controllers, meaning yours truly and my deputy, could use was the aft 1006 navigation radar. So when we were recovering Harriers we took over a console in the Operations Room, moved the origin over to one side and drew a theoretical approach path on the glass of the console using a chinagraph pencil. Then we would talk down the Harrier by passing the pilot the distance to run as accurately as possible and telling him what height he should be passing in descent. Not ideal, by a long way, but it did work.
The problem came in marginal weather conditions because of the primary return problem. Every Harrier that took off when the weather was forecast to deteriorate had first to carry out a visual circuit around the ship with its secondary surveillance radar transponder switched on, and if it was not visible on the Operations Room radar, the pilot had to stay visual, burn off fuel and then land back on again. The crass stupidity involved in the choice of radar fits is difficult to excuse, because the CVS carriers had been designed almost from the first to carry fixed wing aircraft, but it apparently not occurred to any of the architects involved in the ship’s design that it might be necessary to see or control them on radar.
Anyway, the book is the diary of the first six months in the life of that ship, beginning with the day she sailed from Newcastle, carrying a large number of Swan Hunter staff who were essentially still building the vessel, through the work-up and sea trials phase carried out in the Portsmouth and Portland sea areas. And then it describes the voyage down to the South Atlantic to relieve Invincible on station in the Falkland Islands, and the various operations carried out during that time.
With hindsight we can see that tactical errors were made during the conflict itself, and our forces were finally victorious largely through sheer determination and a dogged commitment to reclaim a tiny part of the world for the United Kingdom, rather than through inspired leadership or superiority in weaponry.
It all took place a long time ago, but I’m pleased to say that at that time I had a proper job in the Royal Navy and I was involved in the campaign, albeit in a small way. More pertinently, I kept a diary of what happened and some time ago it was published as a Kindle download, entitled Falklands: Voyage to War, if you’d like to find out more about this chapter of British history.
You may also have noticed that Channel 5 is currently showing a series of programmes about the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. I’ll be particularly interested to see what conclusion they come to, because I wrote a book called MH370: By Accident or Design shortly after the aircraft vanished because I got increasingly irritated by the misinformation and inaccurate assumptions being broadcast by the mainstream media, and particularly by Sky which seemed to have a monopoly on alleged experts who had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
I approached the mystery using a strictly fact-based approach and drawing on my experience as both a pilot and military air traffic controller. I did a two-year tour at what was then called LATCC(Mil) – the London Air Traffic Control Centre (Military) – located right next to our civil counterparts so I became very familiar with civil air traffic control operations. In fact, in the days before Concorde went operational, I was one of the LATCC(Mil) controllers who used to routinely control Concorde when it was flying outside the normal civil air route system, down the Bristol Channel and out into Oceanic airspace.
Blimey, that’s plugs for two books in only one blog! Not what I usually do, and I promise that the next blog post will be as plug-free as possible.
But if you are interested, here are the links for the two books I mentioned:
Falklands: Voyage to War
MH370: By Accident or Design
