Sea Control - Sea Control 176 - Down South with Rear Admiral (ret) Dr. Chris Parry, CBE

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Link: Down South by Rear Admiral (ret) Dr. Chris Parry, CBE

Hey folks, it's Jared and it is Sea Story time. We've got Rear Admiral Retired Dr. Chris Perry, CBE, recounting his experiences as a Royal Navy aviator in the Falklands War. It's an incredible series of events starting with the recapture of South Georgia, the attack on the Argentine submarine Santa Fe, and the Battle of San Carlos Water. I also want to highlight SimSec's Project Trident. If you don't follow SimSec on Twitter, go do so now or visit the website at simsec.org. If you're interested in shaping the future of international maritime security, this is your opportunity. Time on our first call for essays is running out. We've partnered with Marine Corps University's Brute-Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity to address strategic choke points and littorals.

Deadline for submissions is May 25th. Additionally, we have just announced our second collaboration with Stable Seas on ocean governance. More information on questions and content can be found on our website, simsec.org. Submissions can be emailed to content at simsec.org. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Our guest today is the Royal Navy's Rear Admiral Retired, Dr. Chris Perry,

and we'll be discussing some of the events that he's chronicled in his book, Down South, A Falcon's War Diary. Admiral, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure. So you retired from the Royal Navy. What do you do now? Well, I retired in 2008. I now run a strategic forecasting company that gives advice about the future out to about five to ten years to major banks, companies, governments, if they ask, and other clients as well.

And everything depends on us being accurate. And so far, we've been pretty accurate with various elections, referendums, presidential elections, and actually from about 10 years ago, the coming strategic competition between the U.S. and China. I'm also an academic at Cambridge University. I've got a doctorate in psychology and history, and I intend to keep busy. So we'll hop in the, I don't want to say way back machine, but we'll go back to where you were before you joined the Royal Navy. Where are you from in the U.K.? Okay, I was actually born in Kent, which is one of our more easterly counties, but my father was in the Navy, so he was stationed there.

My family heritage is from Wales. Everybody knows England is part of the United Kingdom, but everybody forgets about Wales. In fact, I was flying between Hawaii and LAX, Los Angeles, once, and they had an advertisement on the TV screen, And the guy sitting next to me turned out to be the guy who was the host of Wheel of Fortune. And he just said to me, he said, hey, you're a Brit. And I said, yeah, I'm a Brit.

He said, do you know who I am? And I said, no, I don't. Do you know who I am? But he turned out to be the host of the Wheel of Fortune. And he said to me, he said, oh, Wales, he said. Is that part of Scotland? Which, yeah, I'd be very brave to say that to a Welshman, I have to tell you. But, yeah, we're part of the United Kingdom.

And we're proud of it. We've got our own language. It's the oldest living language in the world, and we've been fighting off the English for nearly 700 years now. So what's your family history and what made you decide to join the Royal Navy? Well, to tell you the truth, I come from a humanities background. So I was at university at Oxford, and I had read history, and I realized I didn't really have that much of a technological background. And I thought the best way of balancing that up would be to join a profession that actually has quite a lot of technology. You have to get to grips with it, and you have to understand it.

My attention was just to stay for five years and then go and do something else. In fact, they kept on giving me reasons for getting up in the morning and saying, yippee, I'm going to work. And so I stayed for 35 years in the end, and I was really glad that I did. So which year did you come in, and then what had you done prior to the Falklands campaign? So I joined the Royal Navy in 1975. And in the Royal Navy, what you tend to do is you qualify in a specialization. We don't bounce around like you do in the United States Navy. So it's not possible for a person like me to be, for example, a warfare officer.

And then in my next job being an engineer, you have to stream. So I was a warfare officer to start off with. And it gets even more complicated because if you want to be an aviator and you want to be a career officer, you then sub-specialize in aviation. So you go to sea first. You get your watchkeeping tickets. You learn how to avoid hitting other ships and bits of granite. You do your ocean navigation certificates. And you then do one full tour as a primary bridge watchkeeper, and then you qualify as an aviator. And the idea is you do some aviation jobs, and then you come back in, and you become a regular line warfare officer again after that. And that was the pattern of my career.

So beforehand, I served as a watchkeeper and a destroyer. I then subspecialized as an observer, which is the, I guess it's the non-pilot officer member of an aircrew. I then served on a Seaking H-3 squadron fighting against the Soviet peril for two years. and then I went to a destroyer flight Wessex 3 which is a very old aircraft but in fact in the back had the same equipment as an H3 has it just had less endurance and here's the key point it only had one engine and its endurance was about two hours but you know it was the anti-submarine helicopter on the back of a destroyer and I moved there in late 81 so no middle of 81 and so by April 82, when the Falklands happened, I'd been there for about eight months. So you were assigned to HMS Antrim, I believe, at the time. Where was Antrim when the word came down that the Argentinians had invaded, and what was your initial response?

Well, every year in those days in the 1980s, the Royal Navy used to take a proportion of its fleet down to Gibraltar to do an annual exercise called Spring Train. and what we used to do is go and do open ocean missile firings and and things like that and we were there from about say the 20th of march and indeed we were doing combined exercises with some of our nato allies as well um and i had just done an anti-submarine uh excise the night before and part of the um the team that were chasing this submarine was the samuel elliot morrison US ship. And I remember we were doing that. I turned in on the night of the 1st of April. And at the time, we had the admiral staff on board, the admiral staff that subsequently fought the Falklands campaign for Admiral Woodward. And they had disappeared for about four days to do a

contingency exercise. And we said, what's going on? Is this related to what's going on down south? The other spooky thing was that four days before the Argentines invaded, our nuclear submarines disappeared they just didn't turn up for the exercise and we said well where are they gone and people say oh you can't talk about that and uh everybody assumed they'd gone up north into the barrens because it's the height of the cold war i think people forget that but anyway they disappeared i was asleep overnight first of seconds and i got a shake about five o'clock in the morning by the captain's secretary and he said hey is it true you speak spanish and I said yeah have they invaded oh he said I can't tell you that I said come on have they

invaded he said I can't tell you that so I got up I went down to the operations room and of course the senior people on the ship were having a chat you do whatever your junior officer does you sort of be a wig and you move a bit closer and you listen and sure enough they'd invaded but the really odd thing I have to tell you is that the admiral staff sort of came along after breakfast that morning and said do you know what by coincidence the scenario we're using for this paper exercise guess who the enemy was it was argentina and we said yeah right okay so it's quite interesting the official inquiry after the falkland said oh we had no no intimation at all the argentinians were going to invade well i know that's not true but you know what official

inquiries are like they're not there to establish the truth they're there to um should we say minimize the inconvenience for politicians and everybody else. So once that word has come out, how does word get to you that now we're heading south? And what was the reaction? What were the war room discussions like on the way down? Well, I think we have to bear in mind that this is in the middle of the Cold War, where nobody expected us to play Russia in the final at that point. And so the idea of a war against somebody who was nominally on our side in the Cold

war, even though they were a fairly atrocious military dictatorship. They might be not the right sort of people, but they were not the right sort of people. So that was okay. So that was the first thing. The second thing was that we didn't actually think we're going to go to war. At that point, we thought, oh, well, you know, we'll probably go down to the equator, touch the wall and come back again, because the Argentinians won't want to really have a fight, or something political will happen there was a degree of excitement you know actually it's rather like you know it's like being in the navy if you never get into combat it's like being a doctor who never makes a diagnosis you just never know whether a you're up to it or secondly you know you're

really doing your job properly just by deterring aggression so mixed feelings i think uh on the way down but the clear indication was that uh as soon as we knew that the argentines had invaded We went alongside another ship and we completely emptied that ship of ammunition and stores. And I never in my life have taken shells across in a netted load that just lands in a jumble on a shop mat on a flight deck. And we were transferring torpedoes and everything in conditions that I have never seen since. But, hey, you've got to do it. And the ship next to us, Frigate, was about three feet lighter in the water after we finished it. All of our passageways were covered in crates of tin food and all sorts of things, and we just headed south.

Simple as that. The interesting discussion was, I wonder how many ships of us they'll send. We hope we get to go. Well, they sent everybody. So there wasn't any question of actually who was going to go. The only ones that went back to the UK were those that needed refit or maintenance, and those were the ships we drained the stores and ammunition from. And did you have anyone aboard who had seen combat at that point? Most likely not naval combat, but something in a contingency operation somewhere? Well, of course, yeah. I mean, most people in the Navy, particularly the aviators, had served in Northern Ireland, which was semi-hostile. There's no question about that.

And so I'd done four tours in Northern Ireland, which is quite a lot in the short time I'd been flying. And that was probably the nearest that most people had got to combat conditions at that point. But I think we have to bear in mind that we were pretty highly trained against a Russian-Soviet threat at that time. And some of the problems we had down south were that we were geared against that threat, not against a threat that was predominantly Western, particularly in relation to sea skimming rather than air-launched high-flying missiles. And so the degree of professionalism was very high. And of course, as I said, we were geared against First Division opposition. So we thought, okay, this is going to be a reasonable call. I need to tell you a really strange story. The year before the Falklands, there had been a major defense review, which had proposed cutting quite a lot of the surface fleet and really relying on nuclear submarines and aircraft to deal with the Russians. And the carriers were going to go, the amphibious fleet was going to go. And I remember being at Navy Days, which is where we open our ships to the public for a day or so over a holiday period. And on one of those days, Antrim was in Plymouth. And at the end of the day, when we got rid of the public and we pulled all the children out of all the various apertures in the ship, we were sitting in the wardroom having a beer together. there and of course in our ships we can have a beer and we were saying look this review it's

called the not review you know what can we do to overturn it in a democratic sort of way and somebody said look we need a war we really do and we went around the world thinking you know who would be sort of okay to have a war with you know not too difficult not too easy and we went Iran No, too early. Gaddafi in Libya? Nah, too easy. Russia? Too difficult. We'll save them for the final. Which country we actually landed on? I'm going to guess Argentina. Yeah, yeah, we thought that's about right, you know, and absolutely bizarre. And it was a joke at the time. And everybody had a good laugh about it, because we knew the Argentinians pretty well. They bought two destroyers off us, the Hercules and the Santissima Trinidad. And we thought, but as a sort of benchmark against the sort of country or regime that we needed to prove ourselves, that was the country we came up with. We didn't mention the United States, though. Yeah, I would imagine they would also be in the final there with Russia in that instance. We do recall, though, of course, that part of the treaty in 1783 said you shouldn't build any warships on the Great Lakes.

And I couldn't help noticing recently that one of your literal combat ship types was built on the Great Lakes. Yeah, the Freedom Class is built up there as well as our new frigates are going to be built up there now. Yeah, it breaches the Treaty of London in 1783. nobody's nobody's noticed that i'm gonna edit this part out um but now uh you mentioned being geared toward a first-line threat in the soviet threat but it was not just a western threat that you're facing from the other direction it was really they had the same gear as you they were operating type 42 destroyers uh with exocet missiles so what was that like to as you're doing sort of the the comparison of i think the army would call it relative combat power comparison

and looking at what is on the other side, just in discussions around the war room, we had, oh, these are Type 42s. We may have an issue here. Well, believe it or not, we, yeah, I mean, the key thing is that if you look at a balanced fleet capability that has nuclear submarines in it, carriers, amphibious, mine hunters,

and obviously the regular frigates and destroyers, you're quite confident that you've got a range of combat capabilities. We're also pretty highly trained. The first thing that struck us, of course, is that Argentina had only ever had a war against Paraguay in the 19th century. So given the combat sort of experience, the overwhelming thing was, in my ship, was we're dwarves on giant shoulders here. So if we mess this up, what would Nelson, Blake, Drake, Rodney, and all these other heroes think of us if we actually messed up here? And I'll tell you, a naval heritage, most countries will give their right arms for. And the United States is lucky in that respect as well, all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

And so I think people tend to underestimate the real value of a maritime military tradition. They shouldn't. It actually is vital when you go into these things. And so the idea that we would lose it under any circumstances really didn't actually cross our minds. We didn't actually think we'd see much of their surface fleet, to tell you the truth. And if we did, we thought our nuclear submarines would deal with that, as indeed they did. We were more worried about the aviation threat. We looked at the combat radius of quite a lot of their aircraft. We looked at the sort of missiles that we had at the time, which weren't great.

I mean, some of our missiles needed the active cooperation of the target to achieve a successful engagement in many cases. And so, yeah, we weren't too happy about that. We also weren't very happy about the initial plan, because the initial plan that came out was that we were going to go down the coast of Argentina, draw out their aviation and their surface ships, defeat them and then go into the Falklands. That was very quickly overridden by the commander in chief back in the UK, I'm glad to say, because we had gone in with Jane's All the World's Aircraft and said to the Admiral's staff, look at these combat radars. They can put quite a lot of aviation over us. Can we cope with that? And I must say, at first, we had a real difficulty convincing olders and betters that actually this wasn't a good idea. But in fact, the plan that was put together in the end was a good one because it applied quite a lot of pressure on the Argentinians as we were going south.

It gave them an end date by which they had to come to negotiations. If they didn't, then we were going to go ahead and do it. I mean, I can tell you, until we actually got into operations at South Georgia, nobody believed that at the last minute there wouldn't be a diplomatic arrangement whereby we wouldn't have to deploy, we wouldn't have to use force. So let's talk about that operation as Antrim was tasked to lead, and you may have to help me with the pronunciation here, Operation Pariquet? Yeah, Pariquet. Yeah, it's actually named after a parakeet, a parrot. But it soon became Operation Pariquet, which was a well-known proprietary brand of weed and rat killer, which the sailors preferred to Pariquet. And it just became Pariquet after all the signals and everything. So yeah, Antrim was told to put the Admiral into HMS Glamorgan, and he would then go to Hermes, one of our carriers with his staff. Antrim was told to lead the operation to recover South Georgia. And we took along a tanker with a company of Royal Marines Special Forces, HMS Plymouth, which was a frigate. And we were to meet up with HMS Endurance, which was our ice patrol ship. And the reason we wanted South Georgia was you've probably got the finest harbour in the South Atlantic, King Edward Bay. And if we had to overwinter in the South Atlantic, we would need it as a base really to pull all our ships in.

It's about a thousand miles to the southeast of the Falklands. The weather is always atrocious there. But this King Edward Bay, Cumberland Bay, is a fantastic access harbour where we could have put all our fleet and overwintered there if we had to and taken repair ships down to deal with any damage. And I think one thing I would stress to your listeners who probably haven't served in the South Atlantic is the fact that one day in three, you're dealing probably a force eight upwards. And that has a tremendous toll on ships and people. And we had to take that into account as we went south. The other issue is you're into the ice zone as well at that time of year. And this was sort of April, as you know.

So the further south we got, the more we got into the ice fields, icebergs and things like that. A lot of force contacts and, of course, inherent danger, especially when you have radio silent and radar silent running into these things at night. So how much planning for the operation took place on board and what was your role? Well, you know, I'm just a humble member of the air crew. The interesting thing was that we took on board a planning cell for the land force, which essentially was a company plus of Royal Marines in the tanker Tidespring. And also these special forces, we had the special air service squadron there. And we also had some of our special boat service. So essentially, the planning was done with them. And I have to say, in those days, we didn't know much about our special forces. You never really saw them on a day-to-day basis, not even in exercises. And the Special Air Service, the SAS, were famous for the previous year of having broken the Iranian embassy siege. Pretty famous, I think people know about it. That's all we knew about them. And they served in Northern Ireland. We always thought they obviously were something completely different to the rest of us in the armed forces. And the planning was done, believe it or not, in the Admiral's cabin.

And they totally shut themselves off from the rest of the ship. It was all incredibly close hold and secret and things like that. The final orders were delivered by a Nimrod Maritime Patrol aircraft deep into the South Atlantic. And we got off at South Georgia and the special forces commanders came out and said, hi this is what we're doing tomorrow and we said and who you and it involved us with the helicopters but you know it sounds a bit trite nowadays because special forces well integrated to the armed forces it wasn't like that in 1982 and although we seen these guys eating and obviously drinking in the wardroom they hadn't actually discussed anything with us and then they told

us tomorrow we're going to do this and it was an interesting plan i have to tell you Yeah, I think we're going to get into that now because your first mission there was inserting these SAS troopers onto a glacier with two other helicopters. So what was the mission you were assigned to execute? Okay, so Tidespring had two six helicopters. They're troop-carrying helicopters. They take about 12 maximum. My aircraft's an ASW aircraft. We can probably put two people in the back along with the rest of us, but it's not club class, that's for sure.

And the plan with the SAS was that what they wanted to do was insert some observation patrols. But they didn't want the Argentines to know that they were there. And so the plan was that instead of actually putting them in somewhere behind a mountain about half a mile away, they wanted to go up on Fortuna Glacier. And indeed, my junior pilot, Stuart, said at the planning meeting, why are you going there? And they said, well, they won't expect us to come from that direction. And Stuart said, very bravely, he said, but they won't expect you to come by Polaris Missile either,

but there's no good reason to do it. So anyway, the plan was to go up on top of this glacier and the guys were going to make their way across this glacier four miles to where the Argentinians were. And we said to them, would you like to do a reconnaissance first? We'll just take you up there and have a look. And if I tell you that we're 2,000 feet up, the icing level starts at sea level, and it's solid fog or driving snow up to 80 knots. Those were the conditions.

And once we got into those conditions, I can tell you it was like when the snow and the fog were around, it was like flying down the streets of Manhattan in fog with all the mountains either side. So we thought that was quite dangerous. And we weren't even at war yet. And so we said that. But extraordinarily, the SAS, being very powerful in military terms, wanted to go ahead with it. So we piled up 16 troopers in the two Wessex 5s and our own aircraft, headed off, and spent most of the day trying to get the guys up there

in those conditions. And we eventually succeeded in mid-afternoon, having nearly killed ourselves and frightened ourselves silly. Got back to the ship and went, thank goodness for that. And overnight, we had a Force 11 hurricane come through, and the ships were absolutely buffeted. And I think, apart from one time in the Pacific, I've never been in seas like that.

And first thing in the morning, the SAS guys said, we need rescuing. And so really pleased about that. So we briefed, we went back again, and the conditions again were atrocious. And we were still about 70 knots winds and all the other stuff. And we spent the best part of the full noon trying to get up on this glacier. Nothing worked.

We eventually managed it, having refueled a couple of times, got up on there, loaded them on board. And one of the Wessex Fives guys said, look, I really need to go now. You know, I can see a gap. I want to fly through it. And we said, OK, but, you know, we'd rather you stayed with us. But he went anyway and flew into a very violent snow squall and crashed. Happily, soft snow, and we divided the troopers between our aircraft and the surviving Wessex Five. We started going down the glacier, a lot of buffeting, and we flew over a white crest, white fog, white mountains.

And when we came out the other side of a squall line, we were the only helicopter. the other one and just hadn't made it he'd hit the ridge line on the way through uh completely taken by the wind katabatic winds couldn't go back we were overweight so back to the ship told him what had happened came back straight away to try and rescue them absolutely impossible conditions in fact we lost tail rotor control and dropped about spiraled about a thousand feet before we recovered and uh went back to the ship and by this stage the guys on glacier in a really bad way so about half past four about half an hour before sunset we decided to have a last go but this time we we thought we're going to try a different attack this time and we we went up to 5 000 feet

above the glacier well 5 000 feet above sea level uh into the clear air in fact but what was rather alarming is we had about an inch of ice on the front of the the aircraft where we'd gone through the cloud and it just frozen more and then we're really lucky because the the guys from the crash site that put an orange day glow dinghy up and we're sitting in that obviously to insulate themselves and we went straight through the cloud the cloud closed as we went through it we call it a sucker's gap in in the navy and we found ourselves on the glacier with 12 guys in the back four of us and we just piled people on it was like a jungle house in the back i had to sit on a guy to actually operate these systems and we were a ton overweight we couldn't actually

take off so we had to wait for a wind of 70 80 knots and we pulled power into that which gave us the lift back to the ship and we had to instead of hovering by the side and coming over the side of the ship we actually had to run it in over the fan tail as you call it and put the brakes on it was just a controlled crash yep and we got away with it you know and yep that that's the story Fortuna Glacier and I'm so grateful to that aircraft, Humphrey we called it

Were there any additional mishaps with the SAS? Yeah, that's a loaded question because the SAS not to be thwarted said okay well we've we've trashed two of your helos I think we'll go in by rubber boat this time

now this is really a job for the special boat service, not the SAS but hey, you know they're ruffy toffees and they're special so they managed to convince the captain to go very close inshore on the argentinians very close too close i think in the middle of the night and the problem is when you take outboard engines from a very warm environment to a very cold one they don't like it very much and so for about 20 minutes all you could hear is we're thinking well if we can hear this surely the argentinians can well they didn't i mean

One of the interesting things is that we were on Zulu time, which meant that we were doing things four hours ahead of the Argentinians all the time. So for us, it was midnight. For them, it was half past four in the morning. So that's great. They're still in bed. Anyway, they eventually got three of these five boats engines running. And so they decided to tow the other two. Great.

They're off. And we went back out to sea again. Now, breakfast for us was beginning, starting to be into being a bit of a trial for us because something would happen. So we're at breakfast the following morning and the SAS commander comes in and says, guys, we've got a problem.

And I remember thinking at the time, when you say we've got a problem, who's we here? Yeah, right. So they'd lost two of the boats. And so they wanted us to go and look for them without getting the Argentinians aroused. So I worked out the tide and the wind

and all that sort of thing. And we did an expanding square search, really based on where we thought they would have drifted. And after two hours, we found one of these boats with three yetis in, really frozen, a bit like, you know, abominable snowmen. And they were 62 miles from South Georgia, well on their way to South Africa. The other one had just lost radio contact. But we picked these guys up, but they could barely move. they were so stiff with with ice and cold sank the sank the boat and brought them back to the ship and i said happily you know the other boat had basically just lost radio contact but these

guys you know 62 miles a long way offshore no doubt about yeah yeah speaks to the strength of the wind and the tide too wow yeah you also detected and disabled the argentinian submarine in Santa Fe what was your ASW experience like prior to this yeah basically I had um I had one tour on an ASW squadron H3s before that as I said the Wessex 3 was a bit like a smaller frigate sort of size H3 so but I would also say I read a lot as a historian about submariners and I really do believe to be a good anti-submarine operator you need to know how submarines operate and I knew a lot. There was a very good book by Edward Young. It's called One of Our Submarines. And it was about conventional submarine operations in World War II. Since then, I've read loads of books on

American operations in the Pacific. And so I sort of thought that actually I'd get lucky with a submarine one day, simply because I sort of knew, I thought, how he operated. The problem in my ship was that as long as there was a thought of a submarine around, it was going to stop us getting on shore. Because the minute we started doing something in shore, then the submarine turned up we'd be in trouble. So it rather inhibited the operations. How it happened was that we detected a teletype transmission from some platform in the South Atlantic. And we worked out that the only thing that really could be transmitting a teletype, and this is old technology, it was probably a warship or a submarine. And we didn't have any satellite

intelligence or signals intelligence on any of their surface ships. So we thought, hmm, submarine on the way. And that caused the captain of my ship to take everybody out to 200 miles away outside the exclusion zone that we put in place. And, of course, the younger ones amongst us were going, come on, we're going to go after the submarine. We've got to do this. Come on, come on, come on. So what had happened was overnight,

HMS Brilliant had arrived from the main task group with two Lynx helicopters, and they carried anti-submarine torpedoes, depth charges, good radar, anti-ship missiles as well. And Brilliant had a very good ducted sonar, but ducted sonar conditions in the South Atlantic weren't great. you had lots of layers you obviously had a very cold water layer near the surface not very good at all so helicopters were probably the best to deal with that anyway brilliant arrived and we

were saying to our senior warfare team and to the command team look let's go after it we can't just sit back and helos are good at this this is what we do and in the wessex 3 we had a very good variable depth sonar that went down to 235 feet so you could penetrate the layers and that sort of thing. And we eventually convinced the captain that it couldn't possibly be there to counter us because it would have had to have left its base nine days before. So its mission had to be something else. So we said, look, what he's here to do is reinforce the garrison, probably bring some more troops and resupply because South Georgia is not a great place unless you like seal meat, you know, endless amounts of seal meat. And so we said, look, here's the thing.

if he's going in, he'll go in probably during daylight because of the icebergs and various things. He'll unload overnight where he can't be seen. And then he'll come out on the surface and dive once he's clear of Cumberland Bay. And we said, look, can we go into 80 miles? We'll launch from 80 miles. We won't transmit on anything. We'll just do dead reckoning navigation. We'll take two depth charges with us and we'll just see if he's there. And I have to tell you, I got a lot of abuse from some of the senior warfare people saying i i read too many world war ii comics that was what they said comics okay and i said no no you know i feel lucky today and um we got permission we launched the following morning about eight o'clock so eight o'clock was good

an hour after sunrise transited in usual lousy weather and of course when you're dead reckoning navigation in those days no gps and you're trying to work it out you're thinking any minute now we're going to run into the cumulogranite but anyway we arrived off cumberland bay the visibility is about half a mile and there's nothing around except icebergs and i'm thinking i've got to go back to the ship not having found anything this is dreadful now interestingly enough what i've done over the last few days that we've been off south georgia is when i i saw an iceberg i plotted it on my radar overlay and i used to give them names like arthur english kings So you'd have Edward I, Edward II, Henry VIII, all this sort of thing.

And so I had a whole load of sort of things on my display that had the names of English kings and queens. And it's the only way you can really relate. Track numbers really don't do it for you. Don't do it for me anyway. And I thought, OK, here we are. There's nothing going on. It's a half a mile visibility. I think he's here.

And I said to my flight commander, look, I'm just going to give one sweep on radar. And any intercept operator will think, oh, it's Spurious. Two, you know you've got an airborne radar. So I put a one squirt of radar into the air. And right next to Edward III, there was a surface contact shouldn't be there. Now, to the Brit, everybody knows Edward III's son is called the Black Prince. So we were heading for the Black Prince, about seven miles to go. It's still pretty foggy.

With about half a mile to go, the second pilot, it's a submarine. And I can tell you, I had fused my depth charges within 10 seconds. And then the flight commander said, oh, it might be one of ours. I said, I don't care. It's a submarine. It's getting it. And anyway, we had a look at it, and it was definitely the ex-USS Catfish, ex-Cuppie class, definitely the Santa Fe.

I worked out the ballistic corrections. We ran in, dropped the depth charges, and one of them hit the back end of the casing. the other one dropped in just forward of his port fin both exploded back into the submarine blew out of the water looked like there's a lot of damage aft we saw the damage once it got alongside and we then started machine gunning the sonars and things like that we then called the lynx helicopter in that we'd also had flying around up to the northwest and he had a mark 46 torpedo i also scrambled a WASP helicopter which is really like a large lawnmower with a rotor from Plymouth and he came in with an anti-surface ship missile called the AS-12 wire guided just in case now

when the Lynx arrived we couldn't work out whether the submarine was going to dive or not in fact he was so gravely damaged he had to go back into Grypvik and South Georgia because he was sinking basically we didn't know that at the time so what we had to do was keep him on the surface now the mark 46 in those days didn't attack surface ships it had a upper ceiling but just to encourage the guy we put the torpedo in the water and that rather dissuaded him from diving i have to tell you and so the long and the short of it was that he went into gritvick and he grounded himself alongside one of the jetties all the crew sort of fled and all the way in the wasp helicopters with these anti-surface ship missiles they're small missiles wire guided from

Plymouth and from Endurance were sort of taking pot shots at him no real significance really but but he was out of the game we then basically assembled a scratch force of special forces together raw marine companies from the ships and then we realized that all our assault force was 200 miles away in the tanker tight spring that had been left out of 200 meters out of 200 so we put together put together this scratch force of about 100 uh we used the guns of plymouth and antrim to shell the land opposite the argentinian garrison and of course the submarine crew and then they surrendered and frankly you know if you're seeing two batteries of four four by five inch guns pummeling what's going on opposite with you you're going to surrender the funniest

line i heard then was i came back to the ship having flown and our chief communications yeoman said to our navigating officer there's a white flag over there sir and the navigator said where he said on the flagpole sir general sort of laughter all around on the bridge but yeah that's it they surrendered yeah and we're very happy with that nobody nobody got killed that was a good thing i've read a number of counts of the quantity of torpedoes that were expended by the task force as everybody headed south just dropping uh mark 46s on every possible load that you encountered how concerned were you about the submarine threat this is kind of your primary focus is the helo commander yeah the one aspect that could really ruin our day was losing one of

our big ships the carriers or one of the big amphibious ships so we worked on the principle that actually torpedoes are cheap ships are quite expensive and when you're 8 000 miles away from home it's actually quite difficult to replace stuff at short notice and so we were yeah very much taken with the anti-submarine threat at any one time once the santa fe had gone we thought maybe they had one perhaps two more that they could bring into the fight so a big concern about it i think it's fair to say that people did expend torpedoes on possum highs rather than lows the problem is there's so much in the south atlantic that looks like a good submarine you can get really good doppler on a whale there's no question about it and the shape of course is very similar

and in those days we really didn't have good passive acoustic sensors able to differentiate between a really hard submarine contact and marine life and you got some very strange anomalies you also had submerged ice which was the other issue you pick up quite a lot of semi-buoyant ice as well reverberations included so it's a difficult environment but at the end of the day as i said torpedoes are cheap the the only torpedo that i dropped i i put against a what was classified afterwards as a non-argentine submarine so somebody somebody was there believe me doing 28 knots by the time the torpedo so after the south georgia operation antrim among other tasks took part in the landings at San Carlos Water.

What were your air missions in support of that landing? Yeah, San Carlos had a headland called Fanning Head that overlooked the entrance to San Carlos. And we had a real problem because we had an Argentinian company there with recordless rifles, and we thought they would be a serious problem. So the night before the landings, we were tasked to put special forces onto Fanning Head, and I had to control by radar another helicopter six times in to take troops in while we were doing our own operation that's

actually quite difficult i'd never even thought of doing that sort of thing before and it's the days before night vision goggles and all these other things but hey at south georgia they they'd abused us so they're going to do it again um but the mission basically was put the special forces in surround this company uh the ship antrim would then engage with its main armament it's 4.5 inch guns. And as the Argentine company dispersed, the ESF would kill them. We'd also spent some time leading up to the landings, taking special forces in at night in order to deal with Argentinian patrols. And we found that after a while, the Argentinians just didn't patrol after that. The officers wouldn't patrol with the men. And of course, if the officers aren't patrolling with

the men, then the guys are just going to walk 100 yards down the road and say, hey, we're three miles away we're at this point and the fact that we managed to deter and dissuade the argentinians from patrolling meant that uh landing of course wasn't even noticed when we did it uh apart from this company uh on fanning head so we did that overnight and then the following morning we were ready for anti-submarine warfare uh in and around san carlos and what people forget about san carlos and falkland sound is it's a deep water area where a submarine can operate at the same time as you're trying to fight an anti-air battle inshore and with radars that not really in those days optimized for over the land there was no moving target indicator or anything like that

you had a lot of returns and essentially most of the aircraft in san carlos coming from argentina popped up very very short distances away and we had to deal with that and the idea of the frigates and destroyers that were there were really to provide a distraction both in firepower and visual terms for the Argentinian pilots so they wouldn't attack transports and our supply ships and our amphibious ships that were actually in San Carlos itself. And that worked really well. I mean, you know, we lost HMS Ardent.

We had several unexploded bombs in some of our ships. But in the end of the day, no amphibious or supply ship was actually hit on day one. And, of course, that's what you want to achieve on day one of amphibious landing. One of the things I skipped over here was the loss of the Sheffield. It was kind of the first loss of a warship in quite some time. What was the reaction on board Antrim like when you heard that the Sheffield had been hit?

Well, there are a couple of things. One is some people were genuinely shocked. How could this happen to us? Other people were more reflective and said, well, look, it's Exocet. It's a missile we know. We know it's quite capable, so it shouldn't be any surprise. I think more to the point was we got very early indications that Sheffield, in many ways, wasn't ready as the upthreat ship to face a counterattack by the Argentinians just after we've sunk their cruiser, the Belgrano. You know, almost all of us thought, well, you know, being Argentinians, they're going to want to get us back for that very quickly.

And we were anticipating that. Now, a lot of us at the time, a lot of us subsequently feel that Sheffield wasn't as prepared for combat as perhaps the other ships were. She wasn't even prepared, as we say, for a major training exercise in the United Kingdom. If you're not prepared even to that level, then you're going to get hit by somebody. i don't want to offend your listeners but i've always thought that a naval anti-ship missile has normally three modes it has the radar seeker it normally has a home on jam and it's got an inefficiency detector as well and it finds the ship it is the most inefficient and it will hit it that's what happened and despite the tragedy of the 20 people that lost their lives and other people got injured and here was a ship that wasn't at action stations captain was in his cabin the anti-air warfare officer actually was reading signals in the communications office this is

half past two in an afternoon after we've sunk their second biggest unit hms glasgow hms coventry the other type 42s were prepared for it they weren't you know it just tells you time and again if you want to play these games you have to play at a very serious level all the time so as you You brought Antrim in then to San Carlos Water, knowing the losses that the task force has already suffered. What was the mood like on board, knowing that you're now passing inside of the air envelope or the reach for travel? What is the word I'm looking for here? The window? Yeah, inside the range from land-based air.

Yeah, everybody appreciated what the threat was. We weren't sure how many sorties they could generate. And the day we crossed the exclusion zone, the 20th of May, was perfect. It was a thick fog day. It was great. There was no way anybody was going to fly. So it was fantastic. So the following morning, we thought, oh, this would be great. If there's another foggy day, it'd be fantastic. I remember getting up, you know, going to action stations on the flight day, all ready to fly, looking up and thinking, this is probably the bluest sky I've seen in a long time. And I have to tell you, it was perfect flying conditions for everybody. And we knew that it was going to be difficult. As I said, the real problem for us was we were there partly as a distraction, I think, but also as a barrier to obviously take as many aircraft as we could. And it was difficult because we had to exclude our Sea Harriers from the amphibious objective area because the blue-on-blue potential was huge. No question about that. uh c dart from the destroyers wasn't great inside san carlos or in and around c cat which is a very old missile our close range missile as i said probably needed the active engagement active cooperation of the target to achieve a successful kill we had a thing called c slug the clues in the

title um and it was great up to 38 000 yards against what i would call high flying bear Foxtrots in the North Atlantic. You could take those easily. And it was actually a good missile if you wanted to do that with it. We decided it was best used as a bird scarer. If we saw a formation of aircraft coming in, we'd fire one off. It was a V2 rocket going Mark II, basically, and boy, did it scare them off. That worked. We also used it later to remove OP positions on the top of mountains. That was quite good at that, but it wasn't great at close-in air defence. We didn't have Vulcan phalanx. We had a few Erlikon guns.

We weren't really prepared for it. The best thing we had was a thing called Seawolf, which was only in two of our frigates, broad-stored and brilliant. And frankly, if they locked up to you, you were going to get hit. In fact, we didn't call it a missile. We called it a hitter for that reason.

And the Argentinians knew about Seawolf. And out to about five kilometers, something flew inside, automatic engagement. It took it and did very well indeed. and that was the sort of missouri we needed down there along with a lot of lead in the air from small arms and this is a lesson you learn from the pacific war you've got to put a wall of lead up to deal with this sort of thing and we just didn't have that we weren't used to that sort of conflict we weren't prepared for that sort of war and so we did the best we could i mean i i had a general

purpose machine gun on the flight deck on a rotating office chair that was my contribution to our air defense so when i wasn't flying i was i had my rotating chair and i had machine gun that was that was it so that's the sort of thing we were doing and and later on of course we learned that lesson and our ships were reconfigured to reflect that but we never expected to have to fight close in on a rocky shore when you got these pop-up aircraft from about two miles away and had to deal with that quite difficult were you on board for the bomb hit on antrim or Were you flying at that point? No, because we, earlier in the morning, we had trapped with rockets and also, yeah, just

rockets actually that had splintered along the side of the ship and actually had put over 100 holes in the helicopter. So we weren't going to be flying that anytime soon. So we, as I said, we got as much firepower onto the flight deck as we could while the guys tried to repair the aircraft. And I have to tell you that aircraft was flying five days later. Brilliant. and um anyway so we did that and we got attacked four mirage fives i think no threes four mirage

threes and one of them decided not to come near us because of the sea slug that we fired in their direction the other three attacked us we we got about half a dozen bombs alongside us and it's like being hit by a sledgehammer the ship actually goes physically sideways and they fell in the water about probably anything between 50 and 100 feet away one one was on a parachute got deflected by one of our radar aerials when the parachute got snagged around it and then another one we lost sight of and then after the attack we we noticed that there was a rather large bump in the flight deck we thought oh there must be a fire down there so we put our hands on it and it wasn't hot so we then went and had a look down below and we suddenly found in the after heads

which had been totally smashed, I have to tell you. A £1,000 bomb, which basically was in pretty good shape. We looked at it and it had been made in the United Kingdom. The Argentinians had delivered us a bomb that we had made and we tagged up the arming vane at the back to make sure it didn't misbehave itself. And it had turned 11 1⁄2 screws in the back to arm and you need 14 of turns.

So if the guy had dropped it just a little bit higher, it would have exploded. Now, the thing was that it had gone through the arming bay of our magazine. So there were two missiles in that bay waiting to come onto the launcher. It had missed those missiles by about a foot, had gone through eight bulkheads, and as I said, ended up in the afterheads. So what we did was we put loads of mattresses and things around it, and we spent a whole day maneuvering very hard with this thing sitting inside it. And another 1,000-pound bomb, desperate to meet its buddy. But we managed to avoid that.

And then after dark, we cut a hole in the flight deck and down into the ship, put some sheer legs up and hoisted it out and put it over the side. And we got a signal 15 minutes later from Commander-in-Chief back in Northwood who said, do not on any account move the bomb. Thanks for that. So we got rid of it. And then we went out and got ourselves repaired with one of our repair ships. We'd taken up from trade some North Sea oil repair ships.

And this one was called Stannis Seaspread. Went alongside her and she patched us up, helped us get the aircraft back together. We were back in the fight straight away. Two days later. So the bomb went into the flight deck. You were on the flight deck. How close did that bomb come to the position that you were occupying during the fighting there? About eight feet.

it's slightly different because it was um the flight deck ended and then went down onto the quarter deck where the missile launcher was i i tell you i was actually a much greater danger from an unannounced launching of the uh the sea slug missile because when we firing so this normally it used to strip the paint off the whole back end of the ship so and so i was a bit more worried about that going off and in fact one of them did go off and our chinese laundryman stayed with us throughout this and the chinese laundry was below the quarter deck and he decided to arrive um just after this missile had gone and he arrived on the flight deck and you know what the cat looks like in tom and jerry when it's been frazzled yes cartoon yeah this is what our

poor guy looked like and there's the smoke cleared you know he's totally naked because his clothes have gone he's in he's got a lot of effluent over him and he said just before he fell over and he was okay he just before he fell over he said this is going to be worth british empire medal well over he was fine he got his british empire medal as well i'm glad to say this is good uh yeah so what was the reception like when antrim returned home were you part of the uh the armada that steamed back into fortunate then no we tended to come back in in single ships actually we um we we came back on our own really and we stayed down for about six weeks after the surrender of the argentines and then we then we came back and generally these ships we didn't

come back together i mean the carriers came back with one escort but because the way we wanted to cycle over their release we never really came back as a group we came back as i said individually so we actually got to come into Portsmouth that's the original Portsmouth by the way on our own and what's really fantastic at Portsmouth is that you come down the side of the city a long long approach through the channel I remember coming in and thinking crikey there's a lot of people that's a lot of people and I thought there must be somebody else coming in behind us like homies and something like that but in fact everybody had turned out to see it so the one thing this country does really well is it's warships home from war and

there must have been a hundred thousand people and one of the things i used to remember when i come on in my own ships is that every time we entered or left harbor i'd say to my people look just remember when you're on the upper deck uh that there's probably 50 000 pairs of eyes watching this at some stage or another and you need to remember that and basically they're paying for this ship and you so so make it worth their while we've got to look good or look smart we've got to look efficient but yeah i remember in fact you know this is going to sound terribly sort of up a lip of me but probably the only time i've ever welled up in my life is actually standing on the upper deck coming back into portsmouth at the end of the falklands war uh it was just staggering

um the welcome we got back uh to this day it's uh and it's it's emotional yeah so i've experienced a little bit of this next question myself but how did the royal navy internalize the lessons of the falklands this is a really interesting one because um on the way down we had a really realistic view of what our weapons and systems could do and i think war has a way of catalyzing really good analysis but i found as the latitude increased coming north again And the sort of truce that we had down in the South Atlantic sort of evaporated. And the sort of missiles that were no good down south suddenly went, they're OK, they're OK, it's all right. And you could see the political fog descending on, political with a small p, descending on some of the people.

There was also another distinct difference between those people who'd been down there and those people who hadn't. and what was quite interesting is that half of the navy when they heard well in the Falklands it was like this would say oh that's a special case doesn't apply and the other half would say look this is what happens in this sort of situation we insist and I have to say throughout the whole of my career there was a constant tension between those who've been in the Falklands and those who hadn't simple as that and it really sort of introduced an interesting element into these things however where did what happened with the lessons well they started getting into training and what you have to realize about a war like this is it totally disempowers the trainers

because the latest experience of course has come from the front line and again this is something the United States Navy learned in World War II it took it frontline aviators out on regular intervals to train the next guys coming through whereas as you know the Japanese kept their best guys in the front line they died placements but yeah so essentially we had to have a complete revolution in the way we did training our damage control in particular dealing with smoke dealing with isolating fire mains having generators online and all this sort of thing that had to change overnight the biggest change is we were going for all missile ships before the falklands suddenly the guns reappeared and to have a royal navy ship without a gun that could bombard

land targets and also do pretty well against surface ships um you know it was unthinkable after that so you look at our type 22 class of um frigate they started off without guns the bachelories all have guns um we also have vulcan phalanx fitted to all our frigates and destroyers so close in stuff and there was a lot more effort went into the sort of literal operations that we experienced in San Carlos. We were quite a good open ocean Navy. You know, we sort of congruent with the United States Navy in that sense, particularly in open ocean warfare.

But the biggest lessons were all about fighting close inshore. And I don't think, to tell you the truth, those lessons have been learned fully today. Having said that, you know, when I was a one-star, that's a rear admiral lower grade, I commanded a group in the Western Isles that comprised my amphibious group. three arleigh burke destroyers and the anzio and we just held down the whole west coast of scotland with that capability and if it flew it died it's as simple as that and they were really good and once we've managed to convince the the ceos of those ships that i would take the rap for them operating in less than a meter of water um and if anything happens um they were brilliant i have to

say your COs when they led off the leash were absolutely brilliant and I personally rang second fleet and said look if anything happens it's my fault please blame me but I do want them to operate close in short I do want them to surprise the enemy to do that we've got to do stuff that you see a master and commander and once they were into that I tell you they were good and I'll tell you their names now it was the Abraham it was the Arlie Burke itself it was the Winston Churchill it was the Porter and the Anzio and they were great they were really good but when they were let off the leash was this part of a joint warrior it's what you would call a joint warrior now yeah we used to call it a joint maritime course but you know if I tell you

that you know we we had the Anzio raid the Duke of Buccleuch Castle as part of that I've still got the video We actually cut out the Op 4 small boats While the crews were ashore We actually Took the Arleigh Burke straight into Really close inshore We stole the Op 4 boats

Yeah this is This is what you do Guys this is how you get to leave as a two star Not as a four star No no But my point is They were great Yes, sir. I'd like to thank my guest, Rear Admiral Retired, Dr. Chris Perry. His book is Down South. We'll have a link to it in our show notes, as well as a link to some of the other items that we mentioned here. Sir, where can we find you online and what's next for you?

Okay, so I've got all the social media stuff. If you look for Chris Parry on LinkedIn, and I'm on Twitter, and all that sort of thing. I tend to operate in the shadows very much in terms of consultancy and my academic work, but you can find me. All of us have got such a great data exhaust now, everybody can pick that up. What's next for me? I just carry on doing what I do. I like to operate at high revs. I'm not retiring anytime soon. So I'll come and darken everybody's doorstep at some stage. So best of luck and God bless America, actually. Thank you, sir. And thank you again for coming on. And for our listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 We'll be right back.