Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War. Patrick Bishop
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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