 flowing into your carry. 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, am very proud of it. We have a saying in Wales that all friends are like gold new friends 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. ac mae ymlaen nhw yn arweinydd i gael amser ymlaen nhw'n gweithio am y gwlad yn ddoch i gael yma yma yma yma yma y mhreid y ddaeth Unig-Main-Naforol. Cymru yma yw'r sgwrdd yma, yw amlwgwrs. Cymru yw ymlaen nhw yn cyfnodd. Mae ymlaen nhw'n gweithio i'r ffaith oedd. Mae'r drwg gyfnodd yma ymlaen nhw'n gymryd yma, ychydig gyda drwy'n cyffredinol. ac yn yr holl yn ei gwneud ac yn ymddangos yn ffordd o'r ysbryddiad ac yn y mwyaf yn ym Nghymru, yr holl yn ei wleoliad a roedd yn yngyr reloadol â'r ysbryddiad, y byddai'n Behind mewn ymddangos yn ymddangos yn ymddangos, ond roedd yn cael ei wneud i mi wneud i'r bydd. Llyfr ddych chi'n gennym gan ymddangos i gyffredin nhw, uch yn cael ei wneud i'n cael ei gwneud i'r byddai chi eieich lleol, a hynny fyddai iaith o'r llesiad ganerddych yn ymddangos, a'r bydd ag i ffrwy i ddiwedd ar y llanio'r cyfrwyr o'r ffart yn y Ffwrdd. Roeddwn i'n ffrwy i ddim, Ac mae'n ystod yn y bwysig. Fy hefyd yn oed i'r lleidio'r lleidio, mae'n ddiwrdd. Roeddwn i'n ddweud i'r bwysig, fe gweld rhywbeth ar unig ar y 28-yr-old, mae'n mynd i'r 62-yreol o'r ddiwrnod oedd. Rhai felly mae hi'n ddigonwyr ar hyn y 28-yreol yn y ddigonwyr, nhw'n ddigonwyr fel y gallu y cenderddol yn yn ddigonwyr. Mae hynny'n ddigonwyr ar y dyfynol ac mae'n ddigonwyr ar y dyfynol, dwi'n ddigonwyr. Mae'n ddigonwyr nid yw dyfynol oedd y wneud yn ddigonwyr. Rha, a'i ddigonwyr. Ac mae'n ddigonwyr. Mae'n ddigonwyr. ac mae'r bwysig yw'r tyfnwys i gwybod eich bod yn ei bod yn gweithio ar y cyfrifio, ac nid yw'n gweithio'n ni'n gweithio'n gweithio'n dwylo'r hyffordd o'i gweithio'n ymddangos, i'n nodi'r cyfrifio sy'n hyffordd i'r stylu ar y ffordd o'r hyffordd. Roeddwch chi'n meddwl i'r bobl o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o fewn ymddangos, I read the bits that I was involved in and they weren't true. So I lost faith in about 95% of the books on the Falklands that I picked up. 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, should we say, supportive in my diary because he wasn't entirely to my satisfaction as a lieutenant, 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 had been proposed by the Secretary of State, John Knot, and approved by Mrs Thatcher. I'd been in my ship at a thing called Navy Days where we opened the ship to the public until about four o'clock in the afternoon and then spend the rest of the day 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, this is dreadful 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 would 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 discussed various options. Iran came up too early probably, remember it's 81, Libya, we could do Libya, probably too easy, Russia saved 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 Defence in 1990 I came across a letter from Williams and Glyn'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 are the exact equivalent of HMS Sheffield, the first of our Type 42 destroyers and this letter from the managing director of Williams and Glyn's Bank said we note when it was 1982 said that you may be going to war with Argentina. Paragraph 2, could you please avoid sinking these two ships because the loan of $50 million 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 100 kilometres but in fact that Statute Mars 60 is the length of that line at the bottom and they're 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 the truth. It's not very hospitable and for seven months of 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 they were somewhere between the Orkneys that's top of Scotland and Norway. The story is told that when Sir Henry Leach, our first sea lord 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 Sir Henry Leach said well we can't Prime Minister and Mrs Thatcher said first sea lord you can't say can't to the Prime Minister why not? He said well it's 8,000 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 well you scrapped it three years ago Prime Minister so that was the political climate in which we're talking about now so there we go. 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 maybe we were 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 there we go good instructional technique okay the Falkland Islands themselves as you can see that's it of Argentina and 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 there occupied mostly by I have to say listening stations and a very good airfield which your country uses for transiting between continental United States and Africa and of course Gibraltar and without those two we probably couldn't have sustained this logistically throughout and I have to say with the Chilean officer here we're very grateful to the passive assistants 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, ATMS Antrim, a county class destroyer it was built originally to take on Sferdloff class cruisers in the North Atlantic, good luck with that and it also had a helicopter that was older than I was it's a Wessex-1, Sikorsky S-59, single engine anti-submarine aircraft with a radar on the back with a hump you can see, that's why it's called hump-free and it also had a dipping sonar that came out of the bottom here an anti-submarine aircraft and the ship itself had twin 4.5 inch guns you can see on the folksall four Exocet MM38 missiles short range C-cat missiles and on the quarter deck it had C-slug and the clue is in the title C-slug although a very accurate missile needed the active cooperation of the target to achieve a successful engagement it went at Mach 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 and you had to push it in manually so in any sort of seaway it was very difficult just here you can see the short range C-cat missiles radar command guided out to about 3.5 miles again not a great missile for that time when I complained on the way down that I thought these missiles were useless but what the junior officers do the weapon engineer officers 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 and he said ah 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 originally was developed during the second world war it's called 965 good air search radar but it had gaps unfortunately okay there's the aircraft air crew basically two pilots an observer my role and a petty officer air crewman as well okay there's the team okay the maintainers at the back air crew 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 had beards at the time so it wasn't a good career move to have a beard but we just had a beard growing competition in Gibraltar in Aida charity and as we went south I got very superstitious about shaving it off so I spent the whole war with a beard 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 Vicken okay capital of South Georgia population three 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 wailing stations from the 19th century and early 20th century mostly Scandinavian, Swedish and Norwegian they were unoccupied but they still existed and this is Grip Vicken 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 wailing stations when we went there were almost like museums they had been left in the 1950s as if the people had just locked the doors and gone away again so there were piles and piles of 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 given example you see some of the dials that you have on the bridges of ships around the museum here somebody had just gone along and smashed everyone just for the hell of it as a historian I found it heartbreaking ok that's what Grip Vicken 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 Gustaf anti-tank because they were bored in the summer after the Falklands so these fantastic historical artefacts 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 ok you can see quite clearly what's going on and basically the clouds are not there but also you can see the snow is lying fairly happily ok it was decided to capture South Georgia first because on the north side by Grip Vicken it's 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 deep water harbour on both sides of the peninsula on Grip Vicken 6 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 and on some days 90 to 100 so it was quite difficult to sustain the operational tempo so we needed that harbour 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 100 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 were Antrim, Plymouth and Euler 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 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 exercised with wasp helicopters, tiny torpedo carrying and missile carrying helicopters that were in Plymouth and if you think it looks like a lawn mower with a rotor on the top you'd be right, that's not a very high-powered we also had two Wessex V troop carriers and they carried about 10 troops each we were ASW of course so if I say to you that we took about 10 days to get down to the period off of South Georgia here because we got there unannounced on the 22nd of April and we had 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 was that the previous year they'd assorted the Iranian embassy and got rid of some terrorists in a very famous TV incident as you remember anyway these chaps were operating in Northern Ireland so they were still in roll if you like long head they had not talked to us at all on the way down to the South Atlantic they had shot themselves away in the Admiral's 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 an 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 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 defence 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 Concolar 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, Concolar was there out to the northwest looking out for us and Concolar 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 the general Belgrano we got it for you in the end but there we go OK, so the SES having not spoken to anybody at all about operations decided what they wanted to do was land on this glacier here go all the way here to where the main Argentinian remember where those whaling stations were up here Grip Vicans over here and they wanted to go across this glacier down here and across to here but why don't you just land about 500 metres away at night cos that's what we wanted to do no, they wanted to do across here and when my second pilot Stuart Cooper who was a doer Scotsman said why do you want to do that the SES said because they won't expect us to come from that direction and good old Stuart he wasn't phased at all, he said well they won't expect you to come by Polaris missile 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 cos it was a silly idea was we would 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 some of the most inhospitable terrain I've ever seen is four miles and every hundred metres there was deep crevicing 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 Nellie 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 ok that's Fortuna Glacier which is where they wanted to go it's on a nice day you can see it shelving there look at the crevicing though it's actually quite significant on the 22nd of April we manned up in the helicopter four SAS in my aircraft six each in the two west six fives 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 Glacier again taken from the aircraft ok ahead of us if I tell you that 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 are 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 ok we're going up this glacier 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 7 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 at 2 o'clock in the morning they radioed saying that their position was untenable they were being frostbitten they'd gone 100 yards they'd gone across two crevices 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 ok tied down it was sulking a bit I have to say but we got tooled up went up onto the glacier it took us three attempts the following day 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 glacier 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 on the second WSX-5 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 stuff 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 two 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 aircraft bit of a problem we went back tried to find them couldn't get up on the glacier 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 suckers 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 was designed for four and so we just piled everybody in the SAS had to leave their armour lights that they take into Northern Ireland their beloved armour 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 were 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'll 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 glacier about 10 feet and I can tell you that the inside of a glacier is deep blue in colour 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 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 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 happened next thing I won't tell you about another episode because we don't have the time but the SAS got us into trouble again and we wanted to do next thing we heard was a transmission which we couldn't account for there are 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 who have given the game away so what are we doing over here it can't be in response to us because we've been here a couple of days it would have to have sailed from Mildell Plata about 10 days ago 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 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 weren't at war at this stage but he had a good look at us, took pictures and of course the word was 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 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 was convinced our political masters and mistress that you've got Targsy, you've got a submarine 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'd 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've got to thinking what's going on here then and I have to tell you 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 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 2 comics and I said no 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 twitched by the submarine by this stage that we would come into 80 miles launch the aircraft have 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 I lay a rake all night thinking he would be there hoping that I could make it happen wish fulfilment anyway we took off at nine o'clock with two depth charges World War 2 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 and we used the radar we just did dead reckoning navigation when we got there there were lots of icebergs and things like that and I had 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 II, Henry III all that sort of thing that was my way as a historian of keeping it interesting anyway so there was nothing going on the visibility was about half a mile so I 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 there's an aircraft in the air and somewhere near Henry III there was a blip that I hadn't identified and I thought it might be Henry IV 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 yp he do I fused everything he said but it might be conqueror I said I don't care he's a submarine he's going to get it 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 a conning tower still visible all his masks up going down I said it's the Argentinian it's no way that's a 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 north west and with the depth charges on the side there's one there in this model here we hit him and in fact that's an artistic impression it's wrong the visibility was not quite like that it was about half a mile and you could see that not the submarine itself the 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 but heading back towards Gripvicken which was about five miles away we then brought a link 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 mark 46 doesn't attack surface so I'm going to drop it anyway so he dropped it and nothing happens 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 wasps 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 have 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 a 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 Argentinians we are bombarding something just opposite the Argentinians there didn't want to kill them and in fact the shells were landing here and the Argentines 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's first action was to take out a bunker here which they were concerned about there was no way it was going to be the Argentinians on that side of the bay it turned out to be a colony of elephant seals who met I'm afraid a Milan anti-tank missile as a means of actually so there we go so the long and short 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 let 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 there again there it is there's the submarine alongside not looking very happy for itself unfortunately the following day the captain of Asia was brilliant decided he was going to move it and we had to shoot an Argentinian chief body officer who was 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 great the end of it the end of the war 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 who are familiar with the TV at the time will know that Mrs Thatcher came out in front of number 10 and said rejoice you could thank the marines and all that sort of thing but the one thing I noticed about this picture is there's obviously a very happy policeman here but there's one with Argentinian relatives obviously on this side of Mrs Thatcher is obviously not as pleased with the incident as you can see okay back to the Falklands so South Georgia very good dealt with that we then had to go across to 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 let's go back one of course was land our troops here in San Carlos water a really sheltered anchorage that shielded us from Argentine air attack to an extent there's the objective port Stanley there but also a number of Argentine garrisons around so on the basis you go where your enemy doesn't expect you to we were going to land there one of the things that we were doing once we got down there was taking SAS assure 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 yards down the road in the freezing weather sat behind a wall and radiated in they were doing all sorts of good patrols they never did moral 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 defence 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 realised because the carriers of course spent their time nearly 120 miles offshore just providing cap over 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 the night before the landings we had to take out an Argentinian company that was sitting on Fanning Head myself and a West 65 went in with the SBS this time we didn't trust the SAS by now the SBS, the 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 one reconnaissance team that was actually sitting in Fanning Head there don't worry about that chap okay there they are there's the West 65 and ourselves but in war you improvise and there they are sitting either side of Antrim's flight deck that's taken on the day of San Carlos water 21 May we prayed and my colleagues who were with me at the time that the weather would be really nasty on the 21 May but if I tell you it was rather like the weekend whether you had here at Newport crystal clear day fantastic for flying but the upside was that on the previous day when we crossed the exclusion zone it had been an absolute peace super you couldn't see a thing so we crossed the exclusion zone in absolute security but we woke up to a fantastic day and we knew that we might be in for a bit of a problem and the idea was that we would attract the attention as I said we had brilliant and broad saw 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 were 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 62 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 A4s 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 30mm 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 in the aircraft put fuel across the whole of the upper deck here as you can see that's me in anti flash but you can see we've had to put a phone blanket across the flight deck because of all the fuel that's drained out of the aircraft the aircraft with splinters and everything had over 200 holes in it we flew it again 5 days later which is extraordinary 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 was 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 at Mach 2 down the bearing and if you've seen Thompson's Gazelle in Africa when it's confronted by a lion they bounce around a bit like this saying look I'm a really fit thing you run after 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 5 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 HMS 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 8 bulkheads and ended up in the after heads and smashed all the porcelin in the after heads now if I tell you that the bomb had been made in Derby in England 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 in fact it wasn't entirely true it was 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 defences had actually sort of forced it down too 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 rather ruined our day in terms of air defence because we were rather pleased with our bird skirra okay that's the visitor that we got and that's the sort of chap that arrived and that's the damage that a 500 pound bomb does on a modern warship okay so a 1000 pounds and I have to tell you that our magazine with those sea slugs ran the whole length of the ship so had it detonated we would have vaporised there's no question about that but so we were very lucky long and short it was we had to lift the bomb out through a hole that we cut in the flight deck and put it over the side later that night but it spent the whole day being cushioned by mattresses and two mechanitions to make sure it didn't roll around while we were dodging all the other air attacks as well but after dark we lowered it over the side but in five minutes we had a signal from our commander in chief saying on no account are bombs to be removed from ships so right so there we go just see 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 defence and escort around the islands we went across to escort Queen Elizabeth II that came down with another brigade in South Georgia and we came happily home after that there's our 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 aircraft was going to be cannibalised 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 Yowalton if you go that way in Britain we were 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 and the 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 who've 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 what are the lessons well you need a balance fleet if you're going to do that sort of thing you need your carriers, you need your amphibs you need your SSNs if you don't have them you can't do the range of tasks that are needed when you go up against another state and in particular you need your amphibious task group in order to take land and use it with your army logistics and support depth 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 I have to say extremely grateful we had a lot of intelligence but above all we had munitions particularly the AM9L 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 were 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 chilly shelling that was going on between the invasion and the time when they 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 Belgrana 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 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 carriers the carriers were kept well out of harm's 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 supercarriers 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 F35Bs 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 and the Sidewinder AM9L 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 parrhas 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 aren't parrhas and not marines came down they weren't able to walk they weren't trained in this austere 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 these supplies south and dare I say it the British way of warfare one of the biggest problems we had was actually saying to our people this is a real war none of us really thought we were going to war till we got down there by the way there was an assumption that oh yeah we're always going to go to war no we weren't until we fired the first shots okay we weren't sure whether it would 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 expecting to fight the Russians so all our electronics our sensors and our weapons were geared against a Soviet threat so low flying missiles like Exocet were not really on the menu high flying kelts kangaroo missiles from the bear certainly were but not these low level stuff so everything had to be improvised and adapted to 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 so 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 100 of the barrage balloons that were being stored at Abingdon airport and everybody had 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 the aircraft pitched up that's when they pitched up our literal sensors and weapons were absolutely appalling north Atlantic not close in we were extremely vulnerable to low flying missiles because we didn't think we'd face 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 want to talk to the army we had to send a helicopter up with an army radio set in the back to talk 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 some issues the Argentineis never thought of interdicting our logistic fragility the route down from Ascension I would have put my submarines up track the Argentinian aircraft actually quite range limited even with refuelling 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 and C2 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 we had to be at action stations all the time the role of elite 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 capture Port Stanley it's the same lesson from Singapore if you remember the Japanese were running out of ammunition joint integration you need Argentinians were quite resourceful we bombed the runway we missed it but the following day we saw huge craters on the runway they weren't they were piles of earth that had 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 peril as a result we improved quite a lot of our equipment in the Navy we've got airborne early warning we put 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 replaced like with like legacy replacement I'm afraid is the thing that we must avoid this ship here an amphibious ship Albion is a direct replacement for Phyllis and Intrepid it should have been an LHD a flat topped ship but because the Marines always go to war in LPDs we had to have more LPDs okay so key lessons okay you plan for war and you adapt for peace not the other way around because today that seems to be 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 equivalent amount of military value out of it but time and time again we threaten 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 that at least four aircraft did that safe in the knowledge that 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 battle ground 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 many weapons as you thought you did particularly ASW 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 that 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 our Ministry of Defence today okay and the final lesson is you have to expect the unexpected if you don't 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 Spruant said and it's absolutely vital to every military operation 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 belligerence now how often do you hear that today anyway so 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 okay so ladies and gentlemen 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 them