8 Bells Lecture | Rear Adm. Chris Parry: Falklands War and the Importance of Naval Corporate Memory

one of them can like which is a way of saying that some of you are listening in your second language I'm actually speaking in my second language because I'm Welsh and very proud of it we have a saying in Wales that old friends are like gold new friends are like silver so I'm very glad to be here today and I'd also like to thank the Naval War College and the archive here where I'm working for a month on leadership in World War two and everybody's been immensely friendly and helpful in my quest to find out what made American naval officers tick in World War two and one of the things I've discovered is Admiral Spruance is calm imperturbability was caused not by religious faith he was asked by the fleet medical officer a chap called dr. Wilke it's how it was that he managed to keep so calm and he said it's quite it's quite straightforward he said I'm a Presbyterian and unless your time is up you're never going to be in danger and dr. Walcott said that's all very well for you Admiral but I'm a Quaker super-super so there we go but more of Spruance later anyway so what I'd like to do is talk about my own personal experience in the Falklands there's a few lessons I think that I'd like to share with you and there'll be some time for questions after it's and please feel free to wander all over the landscape of my career or my part in the Falklands and I said whoopsie-daisy there is a book that goes with it it's been a best-seller I'm glad to say it is actually a diary if you do read this book please remember it was written by a 28 year old not a 62 year old today okay so there are some things in it that a 28 year old would think was important like the next time you would get sex and I'm still thinking about it actually I have to tell you but but some things never change over time okay right there we go okay so there's the book it is it is a diary it is not a book so everything written in it was written at the time okay this is what I'd like to share with you initially and I hope you can see it at the back guys okay and the reason I produce my diary which was only for my own benefit I was never going to publish it was because of this statement here because every time I read a book on the falklands written by somebody who hadn't been there I read the bits that I was involved in and they weren't true and so I lost faith in about 95% of the books on the falklands that I picked up and when the 30th anniversary of the Falklands came up and my captain happily or unhappily had died so I could actually release comments about him that were not entirely shall we say supportive in my diary because he wasn't entirely to my satisfaction as a leftenant but that sounds a bit bumptious doesn't it but the problem is that after many years people's memories do fade and oddly enough when I shared my diary with officers who had been in the ship they said crikey I'd forgotten all about that this is another thing as well Sir Ian Hamilton who was in the russo-japanese war as an observer as you can see on the left hand side also he was the military commander at Gallipoli said this and I think it's really important is that the facts on the day of battle actually evaporate as soon as the battle is over and we have to be very careful about what is recorded about what we do okay I'm going to take you back to about August 1981 just before the Falklands and in the British Navy we were going to be hit by a thing called a knot review and it was a massive reduction of the Royal Navy that was being proposed to take our carriers around fibia ships and probably also the Marines out of the order of battle and it has been proposed by the Secretary of State John naught and approved by mrs. Thatcher and I've been in my ship at a thing called Navy days where we open the ship to the public until about four o'clock in the afternoon and then spend the rest of the a getting children out of various bits of the ship and back to their parents and we were sitting in the water at the time saying look this is dreadful what you know what are we going to do about this political process whereby the Navy is going to be gutted and we were going around the world thinking it'd be really good to take on a country and just demonstrate how useful the Navy is as you do as a naval officer and we discuss various options Iran came up too early probably remember it's 81 Libya we could do Libya probably too easy Russia hmm save them for the final probably a bit too difficult and we worked our way around the world and amazingly we came upon Argentina as being the likely person that we needed to take on and less than six months later of course we were at war with Argentina and make no doubt it saved the Royal Navy to this day politically now when I was going through some files in the Ministry of Defense in 1990 I came across a letter from Williams and Glynn's Bank and these two warships here the Santissima Trinidad and the Hercules have been sold to Argentina by Britain in 1979 and 1980 and they're the exact equivalent of HMS Sheffield at first of our type 42 destroyer x' and this letter from the managing director of williams england's bank said we note when it was 1982 said that you may be going to war with Argentina Peregrin of - could you please avoid sinking these two ships because the loan of 50 million dollars is still outstanding and we have no insurance well we didn't sink them but in fact that was because they stayed alongside rather than come out and fight us but anyway there we go okay the first thing I'd like to tell you is how big the Falklands is everybody thinks the Falklands are a bunch of rocks in the South Atlantic not much bigger than perhaps the bit of Rhode Island that we're sitting on now they are very big indeed if you look at the scale at the bottom that's a hundred kilometers but in fact that statute Mars 60 is the length of that line at the bottom and there quite difficult to get across if you're on foot because the landscape is rather like Scotland on a bad day in fact Scotland on a day like today in Rhode Island to area truth it's not very hospitable and for seven months the year it's covered in snow and various ice and one in three days you have hurricane-force winds so that's the nature of the environment in which you sit now I have to tell you when the Argentinians invaded in 1982 most politicians didn't know where the Falklands were they had this vague impression that there was somewhere between the Orkneys that's top of Scotland and Norway and the story is told that when Sir Henry leach our first cielo went to see the Prime Minister to say look the Navy can help here she said I want you to get there within three days and Sandra Lee said well we can't Prime Minister and mrs. Thatcher said firstly Lord you can't say can't to the Prime Minister why not he said well it's eight thousand miles away and then she said in that case I want you to send the Ark Royal which was our aircraft carrier in the late 70s and he said you can't Prime Minister you've said it again First Sea Lord you can't say can't to a Prime Minister why can't you send it while you scrapped it three years ago Prime Minister somebody so that was the political climate in which we're we're talking about now so there were you okay so it is a long way as you can see and I thought as we were going down that when we got to South Africa rough latitude of South Africa maybe we're almost there not at all it's about another 20 degrees of latitude further south than that and as you know it's just off Argentina about 420 miles off Argentina and on the edge of Antarctica as well not somewhere we had expected to operate and there are two places I want to mention one is I've got to use the pointer here we go okay good instructional technique okay the Falkland Islands themselves as you can see that city of Argentina Chile here and South Georgia a thousand miles to the southeast where the weather is infinitely worse than it is in the Falklands but key for us were remnants of our empire okay one Ascension Island they're occupied mostly by had to say listening stations and a very good airfield which your country uses for transiting to in between continental United States and Africa and of course Gibraltar um and without those two we probably couldn't have sustained this logistically throughout and I had to say with the Chilean officer here we're very grateful to the passive assistance that we got from Chile we weren't allowed to base anything there but if I say that one's enemy's enemy was one's friend then that worked very well for us in terms of surveillance and intelligence and also getting one of our Special Forces groups out as well okay that's my ship HMS Antrim account II class destroyer it was built originally to take on Sverdlovsk lass cruisers in the North Atlantic good luck with that and it also had a helicopter that was older than I was it's a were six one sikorsky s 15 single-engine anti-submarine aircraft with a radar on the back with a hump you can see that's why it's called Humphrey and it also had a dipping sonar that came out of the bottom here an anti-submarine aircraft it had and the ship itself had twin 4.5 inch guns you can see on the fo'c'sle for Exocet mm 38 missiles short-range sea cat massage and on the quarterdeck it had sea slug okay and the clue is in the title okay sea slug although a very accurate missile needed the active cooperation of the target to achieve a successful engagement it went at mark 2 and was a frightening sort of missile only if you like to the seagulls but more of that later okay the helicopter there it is on the flight deck but to get it into the hangar and I guess you can't see the hangar because it's here you had to manhandle it round the side here and park it like any Pontiac that doesn't want to be parked okay and you had to push it in manually so in a sorce way was very difficult just here you can see the short-range CCAP missiles radar command guided out to about three and a half miles again not a great missile for that time when I complained on the way down that I thought these missiles were useless as junior officers do the weapon engineering officer said but what you've got to remember is they're designed against first and second generation Jets I said that's what the Argentinians have he said are we may have a problem then so that was the sort of confidence we went down but as you can see this is quite old technology this radar here resumes developed during the second world wars called 965 good air search radar but it had gaps unfortunately okay there's the aircraft a much better close up the crew basically two pilots and observer my role and Petty Officer air crewmen as well okay there's the team okay the maintain is at the back aircrew the only time in my career that I've had a beard because I noticed very early on that no Admirals in the Royal Navy have beards at the time so it wasn't a good career move to have a beard but we just had a big growing competition in Gibraltar in a de charity and as we went south I got very superstitious about shaving it off so I spent the whole war with a beard and so that's what you'll see okay South Georgia I'd like to introduce you to now okay this is a long island 100 miles long it's got a huge range of mountains here it's got one port really grip ficken okay capsule of South Georgia population 3 and also boosted by the British Antarctic Survey who lived there as well probably up to 16 to 20 but all around here you had whaling stations from the 19th century an early 20th century mostly scandinavian swedish and norwegian they were unoccupied but they still existed and this is grip vic in here this is called King Edward point and you can see our Arctic patrol ship endurance alongside and this will be relevant in a minute but these whaling stations when we went there were almost like museums they have been left in the 1950s as if the people had just locked the doors and gone away again so there were piles and piles that stores supplies harpoon heads and all sorts of things when I took a destroyer back there in 1989 it had all been trashed by fishermen and soldiers and a good example you see some of the dials that you have on the bridges of ships around the museum here somebody just go along and smashed everyone just for the hell of it and the afraid as a historian I found it heartbreaking okay that's what grip victim was like in 1923 you can see all these things going on here breaking down the whales this ship was still in the bay it had been sunk by soldiers using Carl Gustav anti-tank because they were bored in the summer after the Falklands so these fantastic historical artifacts were destroyed there it is again as you can see the sort of place it was and that's essentially what it looked like probably a year after the Falklands crisis because it's gone downhill a bit that's what it's like today they've cleared quite a lot of the buildings but the whaling station is still there but that's the capital of South Georgia now that's what South Georgia looks like on a nice day okay you can see quite clearly what's going on and this basically the clouds are not there but also you can see the snow is lying fairly happily okay it was decided to capture South Georgia first because on the north side by grip Vic is probably the finest harbour in the South Atlantic Bar None and had we continued the campaign into the Antarctic winter because everything's reversed of course in the southern hemisphere we would have needed a fleet base and that deepwater Harbor on both sides of the peninsula on Griphook and six was going to be our fleet base in case we had to overwinter in the South Atlantic and I cannot stress enough that one of the biggest problems for us in the South Atlantic was one in three days we had wind speeds of more than 70 knots on some days ninety to a hundred so it was quite difficult to sustain the operational tempo so we needed that harbour if if we could the other thing was we wanted to capture something back to show we could do it test out our forces now the Argentinians had put about a hundred Marines onto the island they had done it under the guise of actually scrap dealing which wasn't very credible but they were there and we were going to take them off now the ships that were sent down there initially where Antrim Plymouth an oiler with 120 Marines on board and endurance which was our ice patrol ship that was already down there and had run away when the Argentinians had invaded now I should say that we all started at Gibraltar because we were involved in a fleet exercise at the time we didn't start from the UK we started from Gibraltar and we went all the way down to the South Atlantic in radio and radar silence so that they wouldn't know we were down there and on the way down there obviously we went from yellow and blue to full combat blue we also exercise with wasp helicopters a tiny torpedo carrying and missile carrying helicopters that were in Plymouth and if you think it looks like a lawnmower with a rotor on the top you'd be right ok that not a very high powered we also had two Wessex five troop carriers and they carried about ten troops each we were SW of course okay so if I say to you that we took about ten days to get down to the period of South Georgia here we're really pleased with ourselves because we got there unannounced on the 22nd of April and we would also embarked at ascension some very scruffy odd-looking people who spoke with Irish accents and they came on board and they subsequently transpired they were the Special Air Service regiment now we're very used to operating with Special Forces today I can tell you in 1982 the only thing we knew about the Special Forces in the United Kingdom with the previous year they distorted the Iranian embassy and got rid of some terrorists in a very famous TV incident as you remember anyway these chaps are operating in Northern Ireland so there are still in role if you like long-haired had not talked to us at all on the way down to the South Atlantic they had shot themselves away in the Admirals cabin the food was passed through a hatch and everybody went who do you think they are then we didn't know and as soon as we arrived off here we heard on the BBC World Service that armchair pundits had said well if I were in command of the British fleet now I'd be looking at South Georgia and I think there should be ships off there by now so having gone all the way down there in radio silence had escaped attention the BBC very happily told our opponents that we might be off South Georgia the second piece of good news was that one of our members of parliament who shall remain nameless because I'm on their YouTube had got up in the House of Commons and said well I do hope the government is handling this crisis well because of course we're reading the Argentinian coding and he had been privy as a member of the House of Commons defense committee to that sort of information he used the privilege of Parliament to give away that we were reading the Argentinian cryptographic material and they promptly changed their codes so we weren't able to read it so democracy is a wonderful thing anyway so we arrived off South Georgia about 100 miles offshore and we were also shielded by HMS Conqueror one of our nuclear submarines to the northwest to make sure there was no interference by the rest of the Argentinian surface fleet and the quotation there if you can't read Spanish is from a report by the Argentinians who said in particular the British nuclear submarines were a force that the Argentinians couldn't actually cope with and I think that's true and on the way down one of our signals actually said the good thing about nuclear submarines is it frightens the third world and they do there's no question about that and as we'll see later the nuclear submarines were a significant deterrent to operations by the Argentinian fleet but anyway Conqueror was there out to the northwest looking out for us and conquer of course is the one that sunk the General Belgrano very controversially but actually if you look at the legal aspects it wasn't controversial incidentally in passing this is the USS Phoenix one of the few major ships to escape Pearl Harbor and as a general belgrano we've got it for you in the end but there we go okay so the SAS having not spoken to anybody at all about operations decided what they wanted to do was land on this glassier here go all the way here to where the main Argentinian remember where those whaling stations were up here grit vikins over here and they wanted to go across this glass here down here and across to here well why don't you just land about 500 meters away at night because that's what we wanted to do no they wanted to do across here and when my second pilot Stuart Cooper who was a Dewar Scotsman said why do you want to do that the SAS said because they won't expect us to come from that direction and good old Stuart he wasn't fazed at all he said well they won't expect you to come by Polaris missle either but there's no good reason to do it and he was right and I'll show you some of the terrain but essentially what the Argentinians were not going to expect us to do because it was a silly idea was we were put 16 SAS men here with the three helicopters coming in from the west and up onto the glacier the distance between there and there okay in some of the most inhospitable terrain I've ever seen is four miles and every hundred metres there was deep crevasse in in the glacier so everything was going to be a bridge across it anyway that's what the SAS wanted to do the captain said not on your Nelly are we going to do that the SAS used their SATCOM to get in touch with the prime minister who said get on with it so here we go okay that's fortunate lasya which is which is where they wanted to go okay it's on a nice day all right you can see it shelving there that's what it looks like look at the crevice thing though it's actually quite significant okay on the 22nd of April we manned up in the helicopter for SAS in in my aircraft six each in the two Wessex five s and that was the weather on the day and that is a 42,000 ton tanker and as you can see it's bobbing around a bit like a cork that was actually taken on the day that particular picture and there is fortuna glass here again taken from the aircraft okay ahead of us if I tell you the glacier face is a thousand feet above there you enter the cloud about there and it's minus 30 you'll see that flying conditions dodge just a little bit exaggerated and I didn't tell you the wind speed is about 70 knots so we're coming in over there with the SAS okay we're going up this glass here I have never ever in my life flown in cloud below the level of mountains before but we did on that day why on earth I'm not sure I was doing a stopwatch navigation in the back saying 10 seconds to turn not actually believing anything I was saying but the pilots did so that counted and we were very lucky not to get killed if I tell you it took us seven times to get up to the landing site that day you'll see how difficult it was and the result was we put the SAS up there 16 of them a two o'clock in the morning they radioed saying their position was untenable they were being frostbitten they'd gone a hundred yards they'd gone across two crevasses could we go and get them again so the following day the conditions were quite interesting because overnight they were so bad that we couldn't get our aircraft into the hangar the ship was rolling around so much a force 11 came through and we thought that our aircraft would have been trashed on the flight deck by that stage we went down and the good old thing actually was okay tied down it was sulking a bit I have to say but we got told up went up onto the glass here it took us three attempts the following day to get up there and when we got up there we found the SAS and unfortunately one of the aircraft decided that it would take off now if I just look at this picture here can you see any features completely white so you have a white background you're in cloud you have the white glass here and one of the aircraft took off because he thought he saw a gap we call it a suckers gap by the way because it always falls you he crashed and you can see SAS men from the second where six five going out to rescue their chums the pictures taken from our aircraft now what happened subsequently is that we took off pretty overloaded because we took six in our aircraft remember we're just a four-man air stubble your aircraft we're not designed to take troops so we had ten the rest sort of spread in this aircraft here we went down the glacier in these visibility conditions arrived over the sea and it was just us just a second aircraft clipped a ridge on the way down and also crashed and we went back to the ship and this is the scene on the ship with us trying to unload our SAS men they're the ones in white and saying we just lost our two hair craft bit of a problem we went back tried to find them couldn't get up on the glass here because of the conditions remember the winds pretty serious and in the end just before sunset we had a last attempt and this time we went up really high to see if we could look down it was minus 45 the whole front of the aircraft was covered in ice none of our instruments were working so we had to look down and we saw happily this life raft here which they got out here's a very happy pilot god knows why okay and here they are making themselves at home in their winter wonderland as you can see around we went down into the into the gap it was a sucker's gap which closed just as we got there and we found that we were going to have to take 16 people back in an aircraft that is designed for four and so we just poured everybody in the SES had to leave their armor lights that they take into Northern Ireland their beloved armor lights anything that we couldn't take with us we were a ton overweight we then tried to take off and we couldn't because we're so overweight so we had to wait for the wind to get up to 80 knots so we actually had the wind to give us a lift and took off and as you read in the diary I'm looking out of the window to this side and just as we took off the ice bridge on which we were sitting collapsed and we shunted down into the glass er about ten and I can tell you the inside of a glass here is deep blue in color I didn't bother telling the pilots about that and then we went back to the ship and because we were a ton overweight we couldn't do what we normally do and that is hover alongside and come over we had to do a running landing over the back of the flight deck and put the brakes on and that the aircraft literally did this but all 16 of us got back and I have to tell you it's the squeakiest day in my service life but that's what happens next thing okay I won't tell you about another episode because we don't have the time but the SES got us into trouble again by doing something they wanted to do next thing we heard was a transmission which we couldn't account for there not many ships in the South Atlantic but it was a teletype teletype message and we didn't know where it came from and so we started thinking well what could it be well it could be a submarine because that's the sort of message that it is of course couldn't read the codes because of our labour MP you've given the game away so we thought well if it is a submarine what's it what's it doing over here it can't have been in response to us because we've over been here a couple of days it would had to assail from Mar del Plata about ten days ago we think we think maybe it's resupplying the garrison either with troops or with ammunition or supplies so let's work on that principle and it's the ex USS catfish the Santa Fe that was going to haul over our horizon we didn't know this but this is what we suspected okay next thing we saw was a Boeing 707 flew over the top of us identified all the ships that were there we wanted to take them down but of course we went to war at this stage but he had a good look at us took pictures and of course the word wars we can't shoot it down in case it's a normal 707 full of pregnant nuns or something like that in which case they're not innocent civilians are they so there we go so that was followed very rapidly by Hercules so we're clearly under surveillance at this point there's a submarine in the offing and what we were trying to do is convinced our political masters and Mistress that you know you've got targeting you've got a submarine you know surely this adds up to us being in danger no we couldn't actually go near it we were joined at that stage by HMS brilliant because we've lost two helicopters so he pitched up with two Lynx helicopters not great for troop-carrying but would add to our muscle in terms of surface search and also anti-submarine work and so we got to thinking what's going on here then and I have to tell you can read about it in a diary I risked my career by saying I think he's coming to reinforce and if I were the submarine captain okay I would go in after dark but I would come out the following day at first light because I don't want to hit all the icebergs and other things that are floating around then I would submerge I was then told I wrote I quote I read too many World War two comics and I said nope that's what I think you'll do I'm your anti-submarine guy are you going to listen to me and I convinced the captain that instead of going out to 200 miles to the exclusion zone because people are pretty twitch by the submarine by this stage that we were coming to 80 miles launch the aircraft had the other aircraft on standby and see if he was going to be there the following morning on a Sunday at nine o'clock when the Sun came up because I was convinced that the submarine would be there in fact a layer break all night thinking you would be there hoping that I could make it happen wish fulfillment anyway we took off at 9 o'clock with two depth charges world war two depth charges just in case he was on the surface and we were thinking he'd be around here heading out so we went in we didn't use the radar we just did Debb reckoning navigation when we got there there were lots of icebergs and things like that and I'd spent the previous couple of days plotting the icebergs and I gave them names like Edward George Henry and if they split into two they became Henry the second Henry the third all that sudden so that was my way that was my way as it historian of keeping it interesting and anyway so there was nothing going on the visibility was about half a mile and I'm thinking I've got to go back to the ship not having found a submarine so I said to the flight commander I said I'll tell you what I'll do I'll do one sweep on the radar and we'll see if he's there because one sweep if you're listening you'll think okay that might have been an anomaly two sweeps you know that there's an aircraft in the air and somewhere in there Henry the third there was a blip that I hadn't identified I thought it might be Henry the fourth appearing but I said look we've got something just over there and we flew over and with half a mile to go the flight commander said it's a submarine yippee do i fused everything he said but it might be conqueror I said okay the submarine is going to get it and and he said you're not serious I said let me have a look at it anyway what did we see okay we saw a submarine diving with the conning tower still visible all his masks up going down I said it's the argentinean it's no way that's nuclear submarine so what we did is we went over the top and you can see where it says number six that's where he was okay heading Northwest and with the depth charges on the side there's one there and this mobile here we hit him and in fact that's an artistic impression it's wrong the visibility was was not quite like that but about half a mile and you could see that not the submarine itself but we rattled him with two depth charges blew the stern out one of his props fell off split in the after oil tank and ballast tank and he started sinking from the stern heading back towards grit Vic and which was about five miles away we then brought a links in with a torpedo just in case he decided he was going to dive and the flight commander from brilliant said to me I'll drop it anyway and I said no the Mach 46 doesn't attack surface contact cease I'm going to drop it anyway so he dropped it and then nothing happened so there's a tremendous problem when you first get into action that people want to get their names on the score sheet and I'm afraid that happened here and then we launched this anti-tank missile firing aircraft from Plymouth this wasp but he nearly got shot down by two was from endurance who launched totally without orders and started firing at the submarine with these missiles as well so it became a bit of a bean feast those of you who've been in the Navy will know that the classic line I am the scene of action commander is the one that most frequently gets ignored by everybody trying to get in on the game and it became I'm afraid of complete free-for-all this thing the submarine made it alongside and beached itself the crew ran off and at this point we said well okay let's follow up the attack unfortunately our tanker with all the Marines was 200 miles away so the invasion wasn't looking great so we scraped together as many sailors who fancied a bit of a fight and as many Marines as we could find around the fleet we put on a gunnery demonstration for the Argentineans area we're bombarding something just opposite the Argentineans there didn't want to kill them and in fact the shells were landing here and the Argentine's had actually gone in there you can just see the submarine there aground if you look very carefully okay and that was taken by the SAS when they landed alongside this sort of scratch force that we had I have to tell you that the SAS is first action was to take out a bunker here which they were concerned about there was no way it was going to be the Argentineans on that side of the bay it turned out to be a colony of elephant seals who met I'm afraid of Mille an anti-tank missile as a means of actually so there we go so the longer the shorter it was we took the argentinian surrender they weren't up for much of a fight I'm afraid sang the national anthem on channel 16 and led us in and that look at the weather that is the same day and the one thing about South Georgia is you get all four seasons in the same day and look how nice the weather is having been so really awful the previous time and there again there it is there's the submarine alongside not looking very happy for itself unfortunately the following day the captain of a ship as brilliant decided he was going to move it and we had to shoot an Argentinean chief petty officer who's trying to scuttle it there it is looking very sorry for itself as you can see it's been shot up by the anti-tank missiles there's us offloading in the bay and there's a wasp doing a victory roll you know great at the end of it the end of the wall we towed it out and sank it because all the port torpedoes and munitions were getting so unstable that we couldn't deal with it okay those of you familiar with the TV at the time will know that mrs. Thatcher came out in front of number 10 and said rejoice you know you could thank the Marines and all that sort of thing but one thing I notice about this picture is there's obviously a very happy policeman here there's one with Argentinian relatives obviously on this side of mrs. Thatcher who's obviously not as pleased with the incident as you can see okay back to the Falklands and so South Georgia very good dealt with that we then had to go across the Falklands we then took our prisoners North gave them over to HMS antelope who took them back to ascension and we came down with the amphibious group we were the air defence destroyer for the amphibious group and what we had to do are to go back one of course was land our troops here in San Carlos water a really sheltered anchorage that shielded us from Argentina air attack to an extent there's the objective Port Stanley there but also a number of Argentine Garrison's around so on the basis you go where your enemy doesn't expect you to we were going to land there and one of the things that we were doing once we got down there was taking SAS ashore to kill Argentinian patrols that was the intention we couldn't find any why because the Argentinian officers decided they weren't going to patrol with their men so what do you think the men did they went 100 dart yards down the road in the freezing weather sat behind a wall and radioed in they were doing all sorts of good patrols they never did one of the story officers share what the men have okay so here's the lay down for San Carlos water and what it was the amphibs and the transports were going into san carlos water the escorts were going to be outside for two reasons one was to provide air and anti-submarine defense secondly to attract the argentine air force that second bit was never told to us we were actually there to attract attention now the thing that I don't think the plan has ever realized because the carriers of course spent their time nearly 120 miles offshore just providing cap over the the islands is this is about six miles wide so the Argentinian air force could come in and the Navy could come in over the West Falkland totally clear because in those days we didn't have moving target indicators on our radars so very difficult to detect could get down really low and attack us here and it was a bit of a problem for us I have to say night before the landings we had to take out an Argentinian company that was sitting on Fanning head myself and a West 6/5 went in with the SBS this time didn't trust the SAS by now the SBS a special boat service and what happened was they surrounded this Argentinian company Antrim gave naval gunfire support as they scattered the SBS dealt with them so we took out the 1a reconnaissance team that was actually sitting in Fanning head there don't worry about that chat okay there they are there's the West 65 in ourselves you're not designed to take two helicopters but in war you improvise and there they are sitting either side of an shrimp's flight deck that's taken on the day of San Carlos water 21st of May we prayed and my colleagues who were with me at the time that the weather would be really nasty on the 21st of May but if I tell you it was rather like the weekend weekend whether you had here at Newport crystal clear day fantastic for flying but the upside was that on the previous day when we cross the exclusion zone it's been an absolute peace super you couldn't see a thing so we cross the exclusion zone in absolute security but we woke up to a fantastic day and we knew that move might be in for a bit of a problem and the idea was that we would attract the attention as I said we have brilliant and broad sword both with Seawolf missiles automatic missiles that would fire at aircraft that came within range our rather substandard anti-air missiles and a couple of other frigates as well but remember we're also doing anti-submarine work as well so we couldn't exclusively concentrate on that now if I tell you that we were the anti-air coordinator here sitting here I'm just trying to read now we have one of our type 22s here and another one here but all day we had about sixty two air raids that's what was going on all day long that's HMS ardent that was hit and you can see various sort of things taken on the day that's us trying to shoot down aircraft with our gun and that is Argentinian a force coming in on the task force you can see how low they are how difficult it is to pick them up coming across the water and we're firing practically everything at them that's what happens when a 30 mil cannon actually hits the side of your ship and that's a piece of the ship and we got hit fairly severely early on by an a4 firing cannon and if you look down the side of Paul Wayne's picture here you'll see where we took quite a lot of hits on the side of the ship we also got hit in the aircraft and the aircraft put fuel across the whole of the upper deck here as you can see that's me and anti-flash but you can see we've had to put a foam blanket across the flight deck because of all the fuel that's drained out of the aircraft the aircraft basically with splinters and everything had over 200 holes in it we flew it again five days later it's extraordinary okay finally a group of Mirage 5 daggers that came over and we had a technique with our sea slug missile because we knew it was useless what we would do is fire it down the bearing of any incoming aircraft and it is frightening because it had wraparound rockets to boost it into the air so they fly off and this v2 rocket would go mark two down the bearing and if you've seen Thompson's gazelle in Africa when it's confronted by a lion you they bounce around a bit like this saying look I'm a really fit lot I'm a really fit thing you run off to me you're going to get knackered it's not worth it that was our principle anyway we fired it down the bearing this chap out of five decided that he wasn't worried about the missile that just flew past him and he put a bomb just near our sea slug launcher now this is a Smith Norfolk but the bomb went with the launcher pointing this way out towards you right in between the launcher and the flash doors into the magazine went through eight bulkheads and ended up in the after heads and smashed all the porcelain in the after heads now if I tell you that the bomb had been made in Derby in England okay we were very grateful that it didn't go off and whenever I went to Derby afterwards I would always say thank you for the shoddy workmanship if it wasn't entirely true it's being unfair because at the back there was a rotor that drives the fuse into the bomb and it has to turn 13 times this one had turned 11 and a half times because he dropped it too low and of course the air defence it actually sort of forced it down to low so we were lucky but it went in through as you can see okay that bit there that bit there and I think one or two degrees either way it would have taken out the missiles on the launcher or gone into the magazine itself so we were very lucky indeed that that happened but that mother ruined our day in terms of air defence because we're rather pleased about bird scarer okay that's the visitor that we got and that's sort of chapter derived and that's the damage that a 500-pound bomb does on a modern warship okay so a thousand pounds and I have to tell you that our magazine with those sea slugs ran the whole length of the ship so how'd it detonate it we would have vaporized there's no question about that but so we're very lucky longer the short of it was we had to lift the bomb out through a hole that we cut in the flight deck and pull it over the side later that night but it spent the whole day being cushioned by mattresses and two mechanician x' to make sure it didn't roll around while we were judging all the other air attacks as well but after dark we lowered it over the side within five minutes we had a signal from our commander-in-chief saying on no account our bombs to be removed from ships so right so there we go just see there's that there's Canberra which was one of the liners that we used during our time down there after that we spent our time as air defense and escort around the islands we went across to escort Queen Elizabeth the two that came down with another brigade in South Georgia and we came happily home after that there's battle honours submarine two rescues two special force missions and things like that underneath there's the flight and I'm glad to say that one of the things we did we heard that the air crabs is going to be cannibalized when it came home because it had been damaged we arranged for it to be picked up immediately by the Fleet Air Arm Museum and you can now see the aircraft in the museum at Yelton if you go that way in Britain then given a bill for the thing because we'd written it off okay so luckily I had a great career after that and very grateful to my shipmates and to the Argentinians for being less competent than we were okay very quickly wrapping up what were the strategic implications of the Falklands well it led to the political survival of mrs. Thatcher who probably would have fallen with her government had we not done it it enhanced our national reputation and our military reputation such that the Navy of course was able to survive and thrive subsequently it was really the start of the idea that we would have an expeditionary capability that would go beyond the NATO area it led to democracy in Argentina and of course those of you have been down to the Falklands will know it's led to an economic Renaissance for the islands there are over 15 millionaires in the Falklands on fish licensing and other things as well okay one of the lessons well you need a balanced fleet if you're going to do that sort of thing you need your carriers you need your amphibs you need your SS ends if you don't have them you can't do the range of that are needed when you go up against another state and in particular you need your own previous task group in order to take land where you can't actually seize it with your army logistics and support debt today we couldn't do the Falklands again we don't have the tankers the amphibious ships all the support infrastructure because in the words of our politicians we need to cut more of the tail well if you cut too much of the tail eventually your teeth fall out because the gums get eroded it's as simple as that US support had to say extremely grateful we had a lot of intelligence we had a lot of infrastructure above all we had munitions particularly the a m9l missile that we used on the sea harrier lots and lots of that diplomacy I think you probably came a bit late to say you supported us we'd already captured South Georgia and we're well into the fight by the time that President Reagan very grateful said that they would support us rather than the Argentinians but I'm afraid the shilly-shallying that was going on between the invasion and the time when President Reagan said they supported us I'm afraid gave the Argentinians some encouragement that they could actually take us on nuclear submarines I repeat the point at the bottom they were absolutely decisive once the Belgrano had been sunk the Argentinian Navy stayed at home apart from their Air Arm we didn't see any of their ships after that totally terrified and talking to Argentinians afterwards it's because their Admiral wanted to have a political basis for power on completion of the war so without any ships as an admiral you have no political leverage at all intelligence GCHQ our SIGINT headquarters and also your good selves gave us invaluable intelligence about political intentions tactical intelligence I'm afraid wasn't very good why because we insisted on destroying their communications facilities so if you destroy their communications facilities there's nothing to pick up because they're not operating their radios so very difficult indeed but intelligence absolutely critical to everything and the carrier's the carriers were kept well out of arms Way and there's a lesson here carriers are not for going into combat and you know from the Coral Sea Midway onwards that the carriers have to stay clear of main combat if they don't there's a real problem and of course that comes forward into the modern era who's going to do the fighting in the modern era certainly not your super carriers they're going to be standing well off and I suspect as I've been discussing this week that most of your street fighting will be done by your Jeep carriers your amphibs with f-35 B's on with long-range air UAVs coming in from the supercarriers you do not want to put your priceless assets anywhere near where they can get hurt as I said the Sea Harrier in the Sidewinder a m9l were absolutely critical in gaining superiority but please don't think that we had any sort of air superiority over the Falklands we chose time windows when we would have air superiority such as the landing such as the advance of the troops but we could never sustain it with just 24 sea Harriers some of which were lost of course for the whole time we were there so we chose the points at which we would have air superiority and then exploited it helicopters you never have enough helicopters and and we lost we lost over 16 in Atlantic conveyor which was sunk including five Chinooks so our powers and our Marines had to walk the whole way because we lost those helicopters not a problem they can do it but when five Infantry Brigade who want Paris and not Marines came down they weren't able to walk they weren't trained they weren't trained in this is--there environment ships taken up from trade we could not have done this operation without the 62 ships taken up from trade particularly the tankers that we took on it wasn't within our national all bat to be able to do it on our own it's not the second world war and if for example the Argentinians had hired all those ships on the Baltic exchange the day before the war we wouldn't have had access to them it's as simple as that mentioned earlier on Gibraltar and Ascension Island absolutely critical to actually getting the supply south and dare I say at the British Way of warfare one of the biggest problems we had was actually saying to our people this is a real wall none of us really thought we were going to water we got down there by the way there was an assumption that oh yeah we're always going to go - no we weren't until we fired the first shots okay we weren't sure whether it be a diplomatic on pass but I have to say the fact that the Argentinians had never really been in a serious war and our people had actually made a critical difference on the ground one of the problems I think I should highlight is we weren't expecting to fight the Argentinians we were expected to fight the Russians so all our electronics our sensors and our weapons were geared against a Soviet threat so low-flying missiles like EXO set were not really on the menu high flying Celt kangaroo missiles from the bear certainly were but not these low-level stuff so everything had to be improvised and adapted - as we went through the campaign and that included putting lots of these sort of things around our upper decks anti-aircraft weapons that we never thought we'd use we had to put transponders into these into these that we could control them around and things like that and here's something and this is where the corporate memory comes in we wouldn't have had any problems around San Carlos if we'd have got a hundred of the barrage balloons that were being stored at Abingdon Airport and everybody forgotten about barrage balloons and that we had them similarly when did you last see a ship make smoke obscuring the battlefield we forgot about it and many many things from our forebears we didn't actually incorporate into what we did critical deficiencies we didn't have any airborne early-warning so when when the aircraft pitched up that's when they pitched up our literal senses and weapons were absolutely appalling the design for North Atlantic not close in we're extremely vulnerable to low-flying missiles because we didn't think we faced them shortage of naval guns our use of Special Forces was really quite rudimentary they did what they wanted to do they weren't integrated with the main force and therefore we had the problems that you've seen and we didn't have compatible joint communications at all you know talk to the army we had to send our helicopter up with an army radio set in the back to to them training I have to say there is no substitute for training in adapting to the sort of conditions that you have today I think the damage control that we did was entirely down to our ability to practice it in peacetime so we could do it in wartime with as close to wartime conditions as you can so summing up okay some issues the Argentine's never thought of interdicting logistic fragility the route down from ascension I'd have put my submarines up track the Argentinian aircraft actually quite range limited even with refueling they could only hang around for about 20 minutes over the combat area I think the Argentinians have very patchy intelligence as well our communications in situ were not perfect there was limited control of our forces while we were down there day night we were fairly safe by night because the Argentinians wouldn't fly or operate at night but during the day we had to be action stations all the time the role of a leat troops and I think we found this over the subsequent years is elite troops have an impact out of all proportion to their numbers we were very short of ammunition another three days we would not have been able to catch a port Stanley it's the same lesson from Singapore if you remember the Japanese were running out of ammunition joint integration you need Argentinians are quite resourceful we bomb the runway we thought we've missed it but there the following day we saw huge craters on the runway they weren't they were piles of Earth they've been put on canvas to fool us they had dummy aircraft sitting on some of the landing strips and things like that and again I've got to stress this corporate memory what things can you get from your corporate memory that you can use again I've mentioned smoke I've mentioned barrage balloons but there are many other things as well in the corporate memory that we forget at our at our peril as a result we improved quite a lot of our equipments in the Navy we got airborne early-warning with all guns on our ships as you can see but I'm afraid the same old things rolled through and the one thing that we did that we shouldn't have done is we replaced like with like legacy replacement I'm afraid is the thing that we must avoid this this ship here in and fibia ship Albion is a direct replacement for fearless and intrepid it should have been in LHD a flat-topped ship but because the Marines always go to war in LP Dee's we had to have more LP Dee's okay so key lessons okay you plan for war and you adapt for peace not the other way round because today that seems to me the way it is you have to win the virtual as well as the real battle you have to be seen to be winning it as well as actually winning it on the ground don't go fishing with a golden hook that means don't risk your carriers because you're not going to get an accrual amount of military value out of it but time and time again we threatened to go fishing with a golden hook if it's not impossible it's possible one of the things that we never ever took into account is the Argentinians would do one-way trips with their aircraft and we know at least four aircraft did that safe in the knowledge they would eject and get captured by us we nearly got unstuck as a result of that train as you intend to fight this is just so important and the training ground is the battleground if you expect to fight in the South China Sea that's where you should be training just as if you expect to fight in the Antarctic you need to be down there occasionally you always need twice as what many weapons as you thought you did particularly as W ones because of all the force targets and there is a real problem culturally between those that go to war and those that don't particularly when they get into the higher ranks of the Navy because some of them resent it for not having been there and I've seen senior officers exclude officers from the Falklands at presentations and study groups because they don't want to be put in the shade and secondly those who've been to war actually know the consequences of some of the decisions they get made in peacetime and I say that management risk is risk that is taken by managers who know they're never going to have to face the risk and that is all over the Pentagon and all over a Ministry of Defence today I have to tell you okay and the final lesson is you have to expect the unexpected if you if you don't expect the unexpected you're going to be in serious trouble but the key lesson oddly enough oddly enough is one I've learnt in the last week it had never occurred to me before and this is what Admiral Spruance said and it's absolutely vital to every military operation and that had never occurred to me and in the Falklands we had that commitment to the offensive all the way from mrs. Thatcher downwards we spoke unlimited belligerents now how often do you hear that today anyway so if I hope that's been educational but I have to tell you that the Brits in spite of all these lessons have a philosophy which I'll now share with you and I'm afraid to say it's particularly associated with this service so there we go sorry about that there we go ok ok so later but I've gone on a bit longer than I thought I hope it's entertained you if you have any questions then I'd be delighted to answer

Channel: U.S. Naval War College

Views: 86,029

Rating: 4.8632812 out of 5

Keywords: Falklands War, Naval War College, Wales, USS Catfish, San Carlos Water, Falkland Islands, Royal Navy, Britain, Argentina, UK, United Kingdom

Id: yLn2TJZqR_o

Length: 85min 26sec (5126 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2016