Hugh McManners - Falklands Commando

The New Orleans pilot was slumped in the Officer of the Watch’s chair, baseball hat on the back of his head, drinking coffee. It seemed nothing could be done – until Captain Hugo lost patience and ordered full ahead, using both his engines alternately to jink past the tanker while avoiding leaving the channel or ramming the bow into the bank. The tankers’ bridge watchkeeper was astonished to be overtaken by a British warship going much too fast for water skiing, hammering past with bow in the air and stern digging deep into the wake. Crossing the Admiral’s line was achieved to the second, the Navigator squinting along his compass sight and counting down the yards.

When the difficulty of our present situation was put to him, Captain Hugo agreed that we should not go in that night but wait 24 hours. It was a very great help to have his backing in going against our orders, and, although not required, he offered to countermand our instructions himself.

Our many movements from ship to ship, with no notice and very often without knowing where our ultimate destination might be, were confusing to us, and certainly impossible for anyone else to follow. There were many other lost souls like ourselves being shuttled round the fleet, leaving a trail of belongings behind them. Even sailors of the ship’s companies, who crewed the ships and had sailed them down to the South Atlantic, although remaining on the one ship, on any one day could be on another ship collecting documents or stores, and so on. Thus when a ship was bombed or sunk, it was extraordinarily difficult to get a definitive list of the casualties, and determine who was missing and killed.

With this problem in mind, each 24 hours, every ship was obliged to send a ‘Souls on Board’ signal to Fearless saying exactly who was on the ship at a particular time. If you left the ship five minutes after the signal was sent you’d be on the casualty list if that ship was sunk during the next 24-hour period. You might even end up being listed on more than one ‘Souls on Board’ signal.

The long pauses that occurred after sinkings and disasters like Bluff Cove, before the names of casualties were released by the MoD, were caused by the desperate tracing of everyone who had, like us, been moving around the Fleet, to ensure that only those who were actually killed, injured or lost were named in the casualty list. It’s amazing really under the circumstances, that more people safe and sound elsewhere, were not reported lost.

In spite of very bad weather and Avenger rolling heavily and quite sickeningly, I managed to write this letter home, which I posted on the ship before we were flown ashore:

Nothing particular to report – I’ve been on several different ships and life continues in its now normal way. I’m on Avenger at present, which was the ship I went to Belize and New Orleans in last Christmas. There are many friendly faces on board, including the Captain who is a particularly cool and capable customer. He greeted me on his bridge as one of his more unusual lieutenant-commanders (remembering the masquerading in naval uniforms I’d done at several of his ship’s cocktail parties, having only combat kit of my own to wear).

The World Service has just announced the surrender of Goose Green – following a fairly canny pause by the MoD. I am really hoping that this will be the start of a ‘house of cards’ collapse by the Argentinians. I say this because the prisoners we have taken are all convinced that we were about to murder them and so had been fighting for their lives. Their misinformation system drums it into them that although we are signatories to the Geneva Convention we don’t abide by it and don’t take prisoners. Hopefully the public surrender ceremony etc at Goose Green, will remove this barrier to surrenders and make our job a lot easier.

I have the feeling that this will be the last letter I will write before this entire nausea is over – I am optimistic, but with the time it takes the get mail back to the UK and also because I will be out of contact for a while, I am hoping that my next letter will be in a relaxed post-crisis mood and that even by the time you receive this – in several weeks’ time probably – it will have come to a conclusion. Now that these idiots have decided that their pseudo-Prussian military code does allow them to surrender they might start being sensible.

Wars certainly are different but really they are something one can do without… Not even the astonishingly helpful mask that quartermasters wear in war-time justifies all the nausea. I suppose as soon as the dust settles they will revert back to normal and ask pointed questions like ‘Where exactly did you lose this or that’, and ‘No, you cannot walk in here and help yourself’ even though you did so yesterday.

I had an excellent fillet steak on HMS Plymouth last night. [This refers to events that were in fact four nights previous. I deliberately wrote vague letters.] Apparently, so their supply officer was telling me, they acquired half a ton of the stuff and are having steak sandwiches as snacks and getting fed up of it. He was also telling me that when carrying some [SAS] troops to South Georgia they’d said jokingly they wanted a reindeer. The next day a helicopter arrived and dumped one, gutted but otherwise intact, onto the flight deck. They hung it for a while then ate it. The head and skin were a nuisance though, on the upper deck. At night in the dark an unexpected cold, wet, gory nose is most unpleasant.

Hope all goes well and that the nice summery things are going well. I hope you don’t run out of summer before I get back.

30 May was a very bad day, and sharing it with the crew of HMS Avenger was just about the only good thing about it. It was rough weather, and narrow Type 21 frigates move very sharply up, down, and side to side. I was seasick and spent most of the time horizontal on a spare bunk.

Throughout the day, there were the usual air-raid warnings ‘Red’, and as we’d left our lifejackets, anti-flash gear and once-only suits on Intrepid because of the operation, we felt very vulnerable. We were out in the Total Exclusion Zone with the Hermes-Invincible group and would leave them after dark to make our way to East Falkland and south to our fly-off point.

In the afternoon, after several air raids, we went to ‘Air Raid Red’ yet again. This time the navigator Peter Hatch (whom Captain Hugo laconically referred to as ‘Pilot’) said calmly over the tannoy that they’d picked up the signature of a Super Etendard doing a single sweep on his radar. This needed no further explanation, as by now we recognised the textbook indication of an Exocet missile about to be launched; the single sweep being to acquire a target while not offering a signal for radar-homing missiles.

The next pipe announced that the radars had detected an Exocet launch on a bearing heading for us. By this stage Andy Ebbens and I were face down on the wardroom carpet along with the emergency medical team who had their action station there.

Immediately the ship swung violently into a series of dodging manoeuvres, and the guns pumped off round after round of silver foil ‘chaff’ to confuse the incoming missiles’ radar. This is a carefully practised drill calculated to ‘convince’ the Exocet that the image of the chaff is the ship, and to attack that instead.

The Super Entendard had launched its Exocet at 28 miles range then turned for home. There were, however, what seemed to be two A4 Skyhawks in front of the missile ‘riding’ it in, adding to the confusion.

At Mach 1.2 it doesn’t take long to travel 28 miles and so the next pipe was the horrifying:

“Impact imminent 12 seconds. Brace, brace, brace.”