Hugh McManners - Falklands Commando

“As promised, your faithful correspondent has braved the hungry waves and made the perilous journey by winch and Sea King to HMS Fearless in order to be able to report the true situation there.

Firstly the rumours you have heard about food shortages are not true. Every fourth man is not having his left arm amputated above the elbow for the pot, but I do understand that the officers in the wardroom get swan sandwiches for tea only every other day. The passages are paved with 10-man compo boxes and tinned tomatoes and you feel like Alice in Wonderland having taken the pill (the one to make her grow taller, but not one that stops her having babies when the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party turns out to be a gang-bang).

There are an awful lot of people rushing round on Fearless looking ‘Terribly Important’ and ‘Very Busy’. They all have briefcases and go to Conferences. I have, however, made a discovery, which may explain everything. At night Fearless is completely empty, like the Marie Celeste, not a soul on board.

You see what happens is that they all go home. It was partly because they discovered that there were no sheets on board, only nasty scratchy sleeping bags. But mostly because somebody discovered a hatchway that wasn’t on the blueprints and didn’t seem to go anywhere. I tried it and found myself getting ‘filled-in’ after the Man United game, so I came straight back. Anyway, at 6 p.m. they all get their little briefcases and when they think no one is looking they slink off home. I thought you’d all like to know.”

My Buenos Aires comic opera character Capitano Speedy Gonzales had been promoted and interviewed by Señor Costa Mendez and Admiral Enrico Frigorifico with a view to taking a naval squadron to sea – an heroic role to which he was looking forward greatly, but then at the last minute could not perform due to some unspecified medical condition. I was running out of inspiration now, but luckily discovered that the Argentinians had bought the Veinticinco de Mayo – their aircraft carrier – from us, after the Second World War, when it had been called HMS Venerable, Hence, a new arrival in my ‘Don’t Get Pissed Off’ column, a very ancient able seaman called Ramsbottom:

“Meanwhile back in Buenos Aires, Admiralissimo Enrico Frigorifico has scored a major psychological victory in his campaign to destroy the entire Royal Navy. He has captured a British Matelot! Last night the prisoner of war was paraded before the world’s press and here is a transcript of the interview:

‘Okay you know. We of the Argentine Navy – the most powerful deadly and magnificent navy in the whole of southeast South America have captured, after a fierce but glorious struggle, this bottom-wiper of a son of a jellyfish whose mother cannot even cook runner beans for tea on Sundays. He is so stupid, this stupid little person, he cannot speak any language at all. I clear my rear passage very loudly so that you will know what I mean.’

‘My name is Stanthorpe from the Daily Torygraph . What is your British prisoner’s name and how old is he?’

‘We do not concern ourselves with such rabbit-ring questions. You can ask him if you want to know.’

‘Can you hear me, sir? What is your name?’

‘Eee, boot it’s right grand to hear another British voice after all these years. Ah’m called Ramsbottom, Arthur Ramsbottom, Able Seaman, and Ah’m aged about sixty-five.’

‘Mr Ramsbottom, can you explain how you happen to be here?’

‘Ay, lad ah can. I were a young’un on HMS Venerable in 1945 and I ’appened on the key to the wardroom booze and nutty locker. Woon day I got accidentally locked in there and spent – eee bloody years on the piss, reet grand it were. Then woon day eyes singin to meesen – a bit too loud like – and they kicks the bloody door down. Turns out to be these silly baskets. When they bought tut ship from Royal Navy they bought me too!’

‘Can you tell us how the ship has changed since 1945?’

‘Aye. They call it some bloody stupid name now. Summat like Vintichinkoo der Maya and put this powder-blue bloody flag at tut mast. In my day tut Captain were called Pumphery-Bandersnatch. Thought that were bloody stupid name until I heard Argentinean Captain’s name.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Sounds like cartoon character – has leg in plaster and goes round on crutches, medals all down ’is chest – called Speedy Gonzales.’

At this point Able Seaman Ramsbottom is hustled away by thirty-seven members of the special forces counter-terrorist squad armed with GPMGs and LAWs.”

On long voyages with little to do apart from fitness training, weapon drills and nightly mess-desk inspections, with an odd film thrown in, soldiers get bored. The difference between life in a barracks ashore and the extraordinarily odd life on board a warship is great, and those who have never been to sea have a lot to learn. The experienced people show the new hands the ropes… One of the usual tricks to be played upon the inexperienced is to run a ‘Splash-Target Coxswains course’.

Keen young commando lads on their first sea deployment are persuaded to volunteer for this fictitious course, and are trained up for as long as their credulity allows, to coxswain or ‘pilot’ a torpedo-like ‘splash-target’. ‘Splash-targets’ do exist, and are towed behind ships on a long cable to allow aircraft to practise bombing and strafing runs, or for the troops on board to fire their small arms. To want to pilot this target may seem like the most astonishing thing to be volunteering to do, but the young, newly fledged commando soldier is ready for anything, and he accepts that if there is a requirement and a training course then he’ll have a go. For everybody else, it helps relieves the boredom of a long voyage.

In this vein we managed to run a successful ‘Helo-casting’ course, in which a group of volunteers were trained to jump as if going into combat, from low-flying helicopters into the sea. Using our Lynx aircraft, they’d have to hang from the skids until all were festooned below, in order to all drop into the sea at the same time as a group, after which they’d swim ashore for undisclosed further activities. (Helo-casting is actually done by the US Marines. We taught them advanced first aid, weapon-handling drills on our Armalites, plus plenty of serious upper-body physical training, so it wasn’t a waste of time for them… We even managed to lure an officer into this charade, which culminated in a certificate-awarding ceremony with Captain Pitts on the rear flight deck. All our ‘subjects’ were very sporting about it, once they’d recovered from being so completely spoofed, even saying they’d learned quite a lot from it.

The outside world was becoming more complicated – and for us more worrying. The possibility of Soviet involvement (on behalf of Argentina) with orchestrated Cuban stirrings made uneasy listening. Mr Haig had left the UK to return to the US saying his peace-brokering efforts had been “inconclusive but both sides were pondering over some new ideas”. But a UK government spokesman reported ‘new and serious developments’, and that ‘optimism would be out of place’. Our morale took another dip.

Argentina announced that if Britain withdrew the Task Force, she’d withdraw her troops from the Falklands, but would no longer accept the relationship between the islands and Britain. London responded saying nothing short of an unconditional withdrawal by Argentina would be satisfactory. When eventually the UN weighed in, asking that Britain back-pedal to prevent bloodshed, Margaret Thatcher said firmly that Argentina must not profit from the use of force.

We were already anxious that the time we had for taking military action was very limited – just a few weeks before the antipodean winter set in. The Prime Minister sliced through the tangled web of obfuscation with this clear moral line. Additional offers to mediate by pro-Argentinian South American countries in the Organisation of American States, seemed to us another time-waster.