Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War. Patrick Bishop
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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