Dan Snow's History Hit - Falklands40: The Loss of HMS Ardent

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

Please note that this episode contains frank discussions of conflict, mental health and suicide.Admiral Lord West is the former First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff. In 1982, West commanded the frigate HMS Ardent which was deployed to the South Atlantic for the Falklands War. During the successful retaking of the islands, HMS Ardent was sunk in the Falkland Sound on May 21. West was the last to leave the sinking ship and was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his leadership.Alan West joins Dan on the podcast to mark the 40th anniversary of the Falklands War. In a very candid conversation, they discuss Alan’s memories of the conflict, the experiences faced by him and his comrades, and the mental impact of bearing witness to the theatre of war.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On the 21st of May 1982, 40 years ago, lying in Falkland Sound, supporting the British amphibious assault that had just begun in San Carlos water, the British frigate HMS Ardent was attacked by multiple Argentine aircraft, sustained terrible damage, caught fire and had to be abandoned. She sank the following day. 22 of the 200 men aboard lost their lives that day. To mark that day and the start of another chapter in the Falklands conflict, that of the ground war, I talked to Alan West, a retired admiral, Baron West of Spithead, highly decorated, a former first sea lord and chief of the naval staff, and the man who then joined Gordon Brown's government as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary

of State for Security and Counter-Terrorism. Alan joined the Navy in 1969. By 1980 he was promoted to commander and he became captain of HMS Ardent. I've worked with Alan several times, I've interviewed him for many programmes, but in this podcast I think he was more candid than at any other time when I've worked alongside him. He talked about his own mental health, that of friends and comrades, including one member of the ship's company who took his own life years later as a result of the trauma that he suffered that day. In particular he describes a moment when he didn't want to abandon ship, he tried to stay behind on the doomed vessel and men had to come and almost wrestle their captain off over the bows onto the

waiting rescue ship. As with all the veterans of the Falklands conflict, Argentine and British-like that I've talked to on this 40th anniversary, it is so eye-opening and so fascinating. I hope you all get something from it. If you wish to go back and listen to those other podcasts, the best place to do that without the ads is at History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for History. It's my own digital history channel. And you, for a very small subscription, less than the price of a pint of beer, much less now because beer is getting more expensive, you can get a monthly subscription

to the fastest growing and world's best history channel. You simply follow the link in the description of this podcast. You'll get taken there straight away. But before you do that, please have a listen to Lord West talking about the Falklands 40 years ago. Alan, great to talk to you. Thank you for coming on.

What's it like? You train all your life and you finally get that job. You're commanding your own ship. You receive news that Britain is going to war and it looks like you're going to join a task force heading south. What's that like for you as a professional? Well, I think it's something that you've trained for all your life. So, for example, I was in fact due just to be relieved because I'd commanded the ship for almost two years and my relief at Chackal Brian Perrone, who was from my year at Dartmouth, was due to replace me. But there was no way I was going to be relieved with a new captain just as we were about to go down south so I phoned him I said to him I said Brian you're definitely not taking over from me it doesn't make sense because you're not worked up with the ship's

company and I phoned the powers that be as well and said I'm staying I'm not going and so you know one was intent on being involved in what could possibly, as we sailed, could possibly have been a proper conflict of a type that we hadn't had really since the Korean War. Saying it could have been a war, it was very interesting. I think an awful lot of the task force that sailed didn't think they'd end up with fighting. And I know my ship's company didn't, even though I told them there would be. I thought there would because I'd been up to Northwood. I didn't sail with the first tranche because my gun was badly damaged. I'd been up in the Arctic exercising, doing this and that for almost two months.

And I'd been in some really, really bad weather and my gun was damaged. And I got back into Plymouth and the dockyard mateys came on board and sucked their teeth and said, well, 12 weeks to fix this, you know. And then four days later, the Argentinians invaded the Falklands and a team of dockyard mateys came on and said, five days to fix this. Amazing what the Brits can do when they have to, isn't it? But I couldn't sail straight away with the first group. So I went up to Northwood for briefings. And I realised when I was up there that Margaret Thatcher had released two and a half billion pounds you think this was an 82 from the reserve to pay for things now I knew enough about

life to know that if governments release that sort of money and looking at the Argentinians I knew I'd met them in fact we'd been alongside the type 42 they brought from us helping train them at one stage and they felt the Malvinas were theirs So I actually did think there might well be a fight, and I was the only person in my ship's company who'd ever actually been in action before. But the general feeling was that this will all be somehow they'll come to some agreement and it won't happen. You say you've been with the crew for two years, so you knew every single inch of that vessel, you knew every single person on that ship. it must have been satisfying heading south knowing that absolutely i knew the ship very very well i'd also served in another type 21 ardent was a type 21 forget i'd served in one before as well so i had a lot of

experience of those ships i was a very experienced ops officer when i was in the previous one so i knew the operations side and the gunnery side and everything of the ships and then I'd had almost two years I'd taken her out to the Indian Ocean we'd been the first Armilla patrol up in the mouth of the Gulf you know we'd had incidents there and then come back through the Mediterranean and then done a big work up at Portland and then gone right up into the Arctic Circle working amphibious forces. So I knew the ship very, very well and I knew all my people. I knew them extremely well. There's always a slight turnover, but I knew them very, very well indeed. Now the previous HMS Ardent had been sunk in 1940 by German battleships. You were heading south.

What was your job going to be in the Falklands? Well, I think you mentioned the previous Ardent had been sunk. I must say, when I went to Ardent, I did realise that the previous two had been sunk. One was sunk at Jutland, and one was sunk by the Sharnhorst and Gneisenau. And that was inside the Arctic Circle in 1940. I made a point, we went and laid a wreath on the position

where the Glorious and the Acasta and the Ardent had been sunk, because the captain of the Ardent, very, very brave, because the two destroyers had done torpedo attacks on the two German battlecruisers, was the father of the captain of HMS Endurance, who I knew down south. So I laid wreaths and had a service. Much later, I'd been sunk, and he sent a note that said, you'll be glad to hear that I've laid a wreath over your ship. So there was that joining up of things. We'll get to that big moment in a second, but what was your focus on that ship? Was it anti-submarine, anti-air, supporting the landings? What was the specialism of you and your crew? The Type 21s, they were a multi-purpose frigate. They were very good for surface warfare and we had the Mark 8 gun, which at that stage

was relatively new. There weren't many ships in the Royal Navy that had it. And that had a longer range and was extremely accurate. And so we knew that it would be very good for naval gunfire support. And as we went south, it was quite clear to me and I'm sure lots of others that the main threat would come from air, would be the Argentinian Air Force. The submarines were a sort of slightly unknown factor. What we did know is that down in those waters, sonar conditions are very bad, so they presented a risk. But the biggest threat, without a doubt, it was quite clear, was the air side. And what we also knew is that, of course, in a Type 21 and in most of the RN ships, they were not configured really for

carrying out anti-air warfare against fighter ground attack aircraft close to the shore because the radars were no good at actually picking up aircraft when you were close to shore apart from the Type 22 frigates with Seawolf and they were extremely good they were much newer and they were able to do it so that was the threat that was what worried us and when uh commodore clack told us all what our jobs were going to be where we were going there was this marvelous occasion when the amphibious force and the carrier battle group all joined the ocean was just covered in chips it looked rather like one remembered pictures of the second world war and there was cross-decking and commododore said what was going to happen. I was tasked to stand off Goose Green because there was a diversionary raid going to be carried out by Special Forces

and also there was an airfield there which had Pucara attack aircraft on and so my job was to rot up that airfield and to support the diversionary raid by the SAS so the small number of them could actually get away after they'd done this and that and the reason I was picked was because of the long range of my gun it meant that I could even when I got right in close and I had to go right into the kelp beds off the shore and I have to say navigationally one would never have done that apart from in wartime because the charts were so bad it was quite interesting that the

hydrographic service produced wonderful charts of Barbados and Antigua where they'd done an awful lot of charting and seemed to have pretty bad ones of the Falklands all changed now I hasten to add but it was almost you know dragons lurk here written on the chart rather than in depths so we went right into the kelp beds and then we led the whole amphibious group into the Falkland Sound and then at the appropriate time in the morning just before it got light we started our bombardment and we fired 170 salvos destroyed five precaras on the airfield destroyed a lot of the napalm they had there, which was illegal, of course, but would have been very unpleasant, being dropped on our troops, and allowed the special forces to do what they had to do and make a diversion and to escape. It was quite interesting listening to the spotter

saying at times, right, we've got a whole group after us now, quick, we need 10 rounds, fire for effect, and we boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That's kept all their heads down and they got clear so that was how we spent the first part of the day when you were there in the theater did you remember thinking to yourself that all of training and preparation we've done has really really prepared us this moment this feels very doable or did you feel that you were in uncharted sorry to use a bad pun but uncharted territory professionally no, I think the training had prepared. I mean, so for example, my main role initially, naval gunfire support, the team were very well trained, very, very accurate. The gun was accurate. That was all working very well.

Then the first of the air attacks started after the Argentinians had realised that this was going to be the landing and they started launching them from the Argentine and they arrived about an hour and a bit later and these first raids started and they were very very heavy raids and the weather was just exceptional it was absolutely crystal clear just what we didn't want beautiful clear sky and of course it's bizarre as I say there were the kelp beds there were the odd seals and sea lions heads popping up there were geese flying around it's just amazing for wildlife and yet there was this life and death struggle going on and we could hear in the radio that further north where the the main group were lying off san carlos at that stage and had started the landings the first

landing actually on the happened at 7 30 it was meant to start at 6 30 but you know the friction of war delayed all of that and then we could hear the attacks going in there and we could hear from various ships that they'd been hit and and damage was being done there we'd finished our task down south and i told the commodore that i finished the task what did he want me to do and he he said, go and split air raids coming up the Sound from the south. And we went out and that's when we had more attacks. We were straddled by a couple of bombs, which sort of knocked our top radar over effectively, knocked it off to one side. And then we were hit by the first one. One bomb went straight through us,

bounced in the water and went straight through. And then a series of bombs hit us. I steamed into the wind at full chat, because that's what you do with fighter ground attack aircraft coming in, because they have to eyeball it. And that's why the damage to my ship was aft of midships. It was mainly all down aft. My CCAT was blown off, which was the only anti-air system that actually had any hope of working

although because of the radar thing it had to be done visually but that was blown up in the air and landed on the flight deck killing one of my well a couple of people down there the aimer sort of staggered up was given a bit of morphine we had mirages coming in and firing cannon fire at us as they ran in and all we had really by then the gun my main arm and stopped working because of damage and all i had was 20 millimeter and gpmg general purpose machine guns one of which was being fired by the canteen manager who did very well and put a line of bullets into an a4s wing which it didn't shoot it down it went on but i found out later it had the fuel is kept in their wings and it was a bit short on fuel.

So it went to go and land at Stanley, where immediately it was shot down by the Argentinians. So I said to my canteen manager, that's effectively yours. So he got that. And the other thing was, of course, the A4s and the Mirages were dropping British bombs. One went straight through the Nafi. One of my team came up and said, they're dropping our own bombs on us sir he said british thousand pounder bombs but the ones that caused the most damage at the very end were snake eye 500 pounders dropped by american a4s they're an american bomb and they had a delay on them and so they were pretty accurate and they caused very severe damage and

i lost all my steering and power and was running towards the shore and so I said to drop the anchor because I didn't want to go aground then we had to work out what the hell was going on we were attacked a couple of times more and by then I was very badly on fire had some people in the water because they've been blown in the water and I talked to the heads of department to get a summary of what was going on and it was quite clear that we wouldn't be able to save the ship and in my assessment we were going to lose more people if we stayed there without any gain I didn't see how the ship could be saved and so I made the decision to abandon ship which was a very very difficult decision because I'd been there two

years I knew it really well and as was said in that Noel Coward film, you know, it's your grey mistress. It's very much your grey mistress. You spend more time with it than your wife and family. And so it was very hard. And the Master Arms went and checked with a couple of others to make sure Noel was alive. Most of the people managed to get off the bows onto Yarmouth,

onto her stern, because she couldn't really come alongside us because we were so badly on fire. And then once people were all clear, I went down to get off. And then at the very end, I couldn't really face getting off. And a couple of guys jumped back and grabbed me and sort of dragged me over there and dragged me onto her. And that was it. We sailed. That was the last I saw of her, which was a really heartbreaking and horrible moment, really, I have to say. which was a really heartbreaking and horrible moment, really, I have to say.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the loss of a ship in the Falklands. More coming up. Hello, I'm James Rogers, and over on the History Hit Warfare podcast, I bring you cutting-edge military histories from around the world. Why was Sitting Bull such a remarkable leader? What was Napoleon's greatest ever battle? How did the Cuban Missile Crisis almost turn the Cold War hot? And who dropped the world's largest nuclear bomb on the Arctic? Through interviews with world-leading

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By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. The idea that your heads of department are kind of reporting back, it says something about the training of the crew and the professionalism that whilst you're taking casualties on fire, there's bombs, there's holes open in the side, people were still doing their jobs. The machine was working. Absolutely. I mean, there were one or two people maybe didn't perform exactly as you'd have wanted them to,

but you can't blame them when you consider the situation they were in, in compartments or on fire and things like that. But pretty well everyone did their job and knew what they were meant to be doing. And that was remarkable. One of my sailors, who was a bit of a bad boy, really, I decided not to put him into detention quarters, but kept him and we took him down south with us. He was down aft in the area that was completely wiped out, effectively. And he came to, in amongst all this chaos and fire and twisted metal.

And there was a petty officer nearby who had lost some fingers and had a badly damaged head. And this man, Dylan, Able Seaman Dylan, sort of grabbed him and said, you know, what are we going to do? Because they couldn't see anything, just all smoke. And then the ship moved, swung on its anchor in the tide,

and air blew through the hole where the bomb had come through into the ship. And so there was a hole. So he started dragging Entignap across to get out of this hole. And at that stage, one of the tanks, which was a water tank, but had lots of oil on, was all on fire. And the ship rolled again, and he fell into that and got burned, but got out and dragged him to the side and realised Entignap didn't have a life jacket on

because it had been blown off him. So he took his own life jacket off, put it on Entignap, pushed him through the hole, and then he jumped through himself, and then actually both of them were rescued by Hugh Jolly. He always remembers it. He said he looked at my ship, he said it was like the fires of hell, and these two men suddenly splashed into water, and he went down, luckily he was very strong,

because there were no strops, and he held each one as they came up, the first one, then the second one. So they were rescued and they survived, but quite, quite remarkable. How about you? How easy was it for you to just keep making decisions and not just get overwhelmed by the entire thing? One of the things that struck me, and I remember mentioning, was the incredible noise.

There was the noise of the jets roaring over at a very, very low level because they didn't want to go any higher because if they went higher, they started getting in the missile envelopes for some of our ships. So they were very low. And, of course, the bombs going off, this huge explosion, and the ship shuddering and shaking when that happened but more annoying was all the bloody alarms because

the gyro alarm would off because we'd lost our gyro the alarms went off for power alarms went off for steering there were all these bloody alarms ringing and dinging the last thing i needed was someone to tell me there was a problem. So there was this incredible noise and you were trying to make decisions about running into the wind at max chat, altering course, looking at their raids coming in. It was quite a thing. And of course, the other thing is people were, for example, at one stage, a man run up the ladder and started shouting abandon ship

and I had to shake him and knock him and throw him back down the ladder. And he then performed very well thereafter. So things like that happening as well. So it was quite tense, yes. And what's amazing is the training prepares you for this. Your ship's on fire, it's chaos, you must have communication issues. And yet somehow you felt like all of that peacetime preparation was working. Well, one of my principal warfare officers, he actually said,

he said, this is just like Portland, isn't it? And Portland is where you did your work-up training. So clearly the training did actually work. The other thing is that really came over to me, when you're in a ship steaming around fighting and you haven't been damaged, unlike the army, you've got brilliant communications you can talk to everyone in the ship it all works like clockwork you know exactly how to talk what

your secondary mode of talking is all that's wonderful once you start getting hit it is way worse than the army because you've got fire you've got steel wreckage everywhere you can't get from one place you have to go down a ladder go go forward, then down. You know, trying to get anywhere was a nightmare. Trying to get a message from the engine room, once we'd been hit a few times, was a nightmare. You couldn't speak on any microphones. You had to send a runner down. When you send the runner down, suddenly, of course, he doesn't come back

because he's been injured or something. So the training is very realistic, but I don't think it had shown when it gets that bad because the training always had the fact you could actually talk but there were still some communication lines were open so for example one man is in the ops room and he's taking reports from the HQ1 which is the damage control headquarters well the damage control headquarters just there was one of the areas that got hit so there was sort of rather a lot of shouting and noise and everything. And this man who was taking these messages didn't sort of put that across really, but it had much more impact

on him than one thought. Because, you know, we have a reunion every year and the guys all get together and everything, which has been very good, I think, for people. But he seemed all right for 20 odd years and then suddenly got terrible PTSD from that time of hearing what terrible things were happening at the other end, with him just standing there listening to it. I mean, he was treated by specialists and things, but sadly, he committed suicide. Those are the sort of pressures that there are on people. You mentioned that you didn't want to get off the ship. You didn't want to climb off the bows, last man off. And why was that?

Was it like the Japanese carrier captains at Midway? Did you feel you'd rather go down with it, leaving those people behind on board, those sadly dead people behind on board? Or was it just the shame of losing your ship? What came over you at that moment? I think it was a mixture of a number of those things. I think the ship hadn't sunk,

and I didn't like the thought of leaving her when she still hadn't sunk. I mean, very firmly, the message was she was going to sink and going to explode. But I didn't like leaving her then and the shame of losing your ship and leaving 22 of my boys who are still lying there dead around the ship. So I i think all of those things not helped by my wife rosie of course when i got home who said aren't you meant to go down with your ship which i thought was which i thought was fairly hardcore i have to say although my youngest son apparently ran around the maripatch he was only what four saying my daddy's gone and lost his ship he was running around saying so uh but it shows even that four-year-old knew these things

were going on, you know. On this anniversary, 40 years on, how are you thinking about the events of that day? I think what's interesting is that all these things have a huge impact on people, but most people can deal with it themselves. We had a long board of inquiry. You always think, oh, my God, there's going to be a board of inquiry. I'm going to be court-martialed. At the end of which, they gave me a distinguished service cross. But it was still quite unpleasant and harrowing because every single sailor is talked to about what happened for the whole 48 hours up to that event.

That's quite a scrutiny of your ship. So there was all of that. But having got through that, I then went off to my next job and I thought I was fine much later my wife said to me she said you were very different for about three years and I didn't think I was but clearly I was and certainly for the first couple of years very often I would have nightmares mainly about what if I'd done this what if I'd done that you know why was I alive when he was dead those sort of things and those then become less frequent because most of us can deal with these things ourselves there are one or two who need help and we just started understanding

PTSD I think um but now 40 years on I had a nightmare the other night actually I hadn't had one for ages but I think it's because it's the 40th anniversary and it brings it up again. But basically, I'm through that and most people are through that. I think the fact we have our reunions and all the families and the next of kin. In fact, it's interesting, later this week on Thursday,

I'm meeting up with a Welshman who was a baby of only about nine months or 12 months old when his father was killed in my ship. And what I did, as well as writing letters to the parents and the partners or wives and family of people, for anyone who had children below the age of 16, I wrote a letter to be opened when they were 18. So this chap, of course, it was 18 years after 1982. So 2000 that he opened this letter. And apparently it meant a huge amount to him. And he's kept it close to him. And we'll meet for the first time. I've never met him before.

So that'll be quite a moving thing, I think. Lord Alan West, thank you very much indeed for coming on and talking about this anniversary. Thank you so much. Not at all. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Danston's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd

really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors, that's flying high in the charts. We've got our Medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods