Falklands: Voyage to War: The true story of one young naval officer's journey towards war

By James Barrington

The true story of one young naval officer’s journey to war.

Spring, 1982. The government of Argentina seizes control of an obscure group of islands in the South Atlantic. And the Falklands War, the last great naval conflict of the 20th century, is about to begin.

On board HMS Illustrious a young naval officer, James Barrington, started keeping a diary - the story of a young man embarking on a terrifying adventure from which he couldn't know if he would return alive.

A fascinating glimpse into the psychology of going into battle for the first time, the anxiety, anticipation and excitement are captured in brilliant detail, as is the intense preparation that went into recapturing the islands.

Falklands: Voyage To War is a must-read for fans of real-life military stories such as Sniper One, 3 Para or Apache Down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canelo
• Release date: Jun 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781788631808

James Barrington

James Barrington is a trained military pilot who has worked in covert operations and espionage. He has subsequently built a reputation as a writer of high-class, authentic and action-packed thrillers. He lives in Andorra, but travels widely. He also writes conspiracy thrillers under the pseudonym James Becker.

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Falklands: Voyage to War by James BarringtonCanelo

A Diary of a Warship

In the spring of 1982, the government of Argentina commenced a series of military operations against a handful of isolated British territories in the South Atlantic: South Georgia and the Falkland Islands. In response, the British government ordered its military leaders to assemble a task force of ships, aircraft and men to conduct an operation to counter this illegal invasion and reclaim the territories for the British Crown, under the code name OPERATION CORPORATE. The two aircraft carriers HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible, both carrying Sea Harrier fighter jets, were the principal capital ships, and the Harriers the main offensive weapon, of the fleet.

It was clear from the first that a third aircraft carrier would be absolutely essential to ensure the success of the mission and to maintain air superiority in the South Atlantic. At the time, the second CVS-class carrier, to be named HMS Illustrious, was approaching completion in the Swan Hunter shipyard in Newcastle, and orders were issued to complete the building work as quickly as possible, to rush through the sea and acceptance trials and the workup phase, in order to get the vessel down to the South Atlantic in the shortest possible time.

This is the story of that ship, and that frantic six-month period, as viewed from the perspective of the Air Staff Officer/Senior Air Traffic Control Officer on board.

Monday 14 June 1982

An ending and a beginning – Victory

The date: Monday, 14 June 1982

The place: Not ‘Puerto Rivero,’ ‘Puerto de las Islas Malvinas’ or ‘Puerto Argentina’ but

Port Stanley, Falkland Islands

The event: Surrender of all Argentine forces in the Islands

The following message reached Prime Minister Thatcher in the early hours of Tuesday, 15 June 1982:

‘HQ Land Forces Falkland Islands, Port Stanley

In Port Stanley at 9 o’clock pm Falkland Islands’ time tonight 14 June 1982, Major General Menendez surrendered to me all the Argentine Armed Forces in East and West Falkland, together with their impediments.

Arrangements are in hand to assemble the men for return to Argentina, to gather their arms and equipment, and to make safe their munitions.

The Falkland Islands are once again under the government desired by their inhabitants. God save the Queen.’

Signed by J J Moore

The shooting war around the Falkland Islands had stopped, but that had no effect upon the preparations being frantically undertaken to send the Royal Navy’s only other capital ship, HMS Illustrious, still in build at the Swan Hunter Yard on Tyneside, down to the South Atlantic, just in case…

Four days later – Friday 18 June 1982

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Yesterday was particularly hectic, even by the somewhat revised standards to which I have become accustomed over the last few weeks. Last evening, following a final inspection by the Commodore Naval Ship Acceptance, the doors to the ship were thrown open, metaphorically speaking, and over 17,000 shipyard workers and their families visited the vessel, an astonishing number, and a clear reflection of the enthusiasm with which the Swan Hunter workers and the people of Newcastle have embraced the greatly accelerated completion programme.

On the last day here in Newcastle the work on the ship was still going on with furious intensity, and the number of jobs filtering down to me, as part of one particular chain of command, was quite enormous, and visibly increasing, virtually by the hour.

I spent the night on the ship for the first time, and it proved very comfortable. I am up on 2 deck, starboard side and right aft, in cabin 2U35, with one of the folding bunks I was warned about – and in fact experienced – on Invincible. Because of the restricted cabin space, it is necessary for the bunk to double up as a sofa or daybed, and this flexibility has been achieved by fitting the upright section of the daybed, the back, in other words, with a central hinge. To convert the day bed into a bunk, you simply pull on the top of the upright section and the whole thing swivels forward into a horizontal position to reveal the mattress and bedding of the bunk itself. The idea is that you then push it firmly backwards, into the bulkhead, as it were, until it clicks firmly into place.

That, as I say, is the idea. When I was on the Invincible earlier this year to familiarize myself with the ship’s operations, I found that the bunk in my cabin had the irritating habit of unlatching itself whenever the sea was even remotely choppy, and would then attempt to turn itself back into a daybed, turning through ninety degrees extraordinarily quickly and then folding itself, with me still in it, back into the bulkhead.

It’s a clever piece of equipment, only marred by the apparent inability of the designer to see that it’s a fail-unsafe system. What the idiot should have done was to ensure that the linkage would tend to keep the bunk in place, so that even if it did unlatch, it would stay horizontal. But obviously he decided it was much more important for the back of the daybed to remain vertical – something of no consequence whatsoever – than to keep the occupant of the bunk safe.

I’ve always slept well, and once asleep can normally remain unconscious despite most external stimuli, but I very quickly found that the highly distinctive click the latch made as it came undone was capable of awaking me instantly from even the deepest sleep. And not just waking me. As a basic means of self-preservation, and to avoid the snapping jaws of the self-closing bunk, I invariably not only wake up, but wake up and immediately thrust out both my arms, left and right, into a kind of horizontal crucifix position, as if I’m doing some bizarre sort of exercise, because that is the only position which will stop the bunk instantly slamming closed.

Once I’ve done that, then I can get out of the bunk cautiously, stand beside it and then slam it firmly back into the bulkhead again as if I’m trying to drive it through the steel plate itself, and into the cabin which backs onto mine. Then I climb cautiously back in, equally cautiously, and attempt to get back to sleep again, while all around I can hear the nearby thumping sound as other suddenly awakened officers attempt to perform precisely the same manoeuvre with their own accommodation.

There is a trick to it, I discovered whilst on board the Invincible, and that is to take a single sock – or indeed any other piece of material of approximately the same size – and insert that firmly into the mechanism before attempting to lock the bunk into place. This eliminates the satisfying click as the bunk slides home, replacing this noise with a kind of dull thud, but the important thing is that the sock jams the catch so effectively that it almost never releases even in the roughest of seas.

It doesn’t, in fairness, do the sock much good, but frankly that’s hardly a matter of much concern.

Getting trapped in the folded bunk, however, certainly is. Again whilst I was on Invincible, at one point we lost the padre. He was not in the Wardroom, or his cabin or any of the other locations where you would reasonably expect to find a man of God on board a warship. Neither did he respond to tannoy broadcasts, and for a short time there was concern that he might have fallen overboard or have met with some accident. Or even, bearing in mind his chosen profession, had been spirited away to heaven to chat with his ultimate boss.

It was only when a further search of the accommodation section was mounted that a muffled cry was heard from inside his cabin and a couple of feebly fluttering fingers were spotted at the top of his folded bunk. Perhaps he slept more soundly than the rest of us – the sleep of the righteous, perhaps – but for whatever reason he had failed to react in time when his bunk unlatched in the middle of the night, and he had been instantly slammed into the opening behind it. He had then been quite unable to move because there is simply no way of getting enough leverage in that position to shift the bunk even a fraction of an inch.

He was, seriously, in quite a state when he was finally pulled out.

Contrary to expectations, my bunk didn’t attempt to fold itself up around me overnight, but of course the ship is still tied firmly to the harbour wall, which might be why. The magic lock-sock will make its appearance the moment we sail, I can assure you. We have a new departure in bedding as well – we have been issued with sleeping bags fitted with a kind of sheet inner liner, and which proved satisfactory, though the material is a little chilly on any patch of exposed skin when you get into it, but it quickly warms up.

As far as work is concerned, it doesn’t look as if I am going to be spending much time in the Operations Room, as the Air Office looks like claiming me for most of most days. The difficulty at present is that everything – the ship, the equipment and most of the personnel – are all brand-new, and we are still trying to get some sort of routine worked out. Once we’ve achieved that, things should get a hell of a lot easier. I will end up on the Air Officer Of The Day’s roster, which means I won’t be involved in ship’s duties, fortunately, and my only secondary duty so far, apart from being the Divisional Officer for my barely house trained naval airman when he finally arrives, is Newspaper Officer for the Wardroom. I’m clearly the ideal man for that particular job because I never read newspapers and have sod all idea why anybody else would want to. The good news is that it shouldn’t prove to be terribly strenuous, though I’m quite certain it’ll attract a lot of crap if things turn to worms at any time. Which it probably will.

The big event of the day, obviously, was actually kicking the tyres, lighting the fires and pointing Illustrious out to sea, but before that happened we still had to accept it from the shipyard. The Acceptance Ceremony was held on the aft end of the Flight Deck at 1000 in dull but dry weather, and with a good deal of pomp and circumstance the Captain formally accepted the ship from Swan Hunter – presumably they will now get handed a substantial cheque by the Queen or whoever handles the finance side of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy.

I declined to attend owing to the usual pressure of work in the Air Office. I’m still trying to make some kind of sense of what happens down there, as opposed to what is supposed to happen down there, so I saw little of the proceedings, but apparently it all went well enough. We then slipped and proceeded at 1150, flying White Ensign for the first time, in Procedure Alpha, which meant almost the entire ship’s company (that’s the blighters, or non-officers, rather than us chaps) lining the edge of the Flight Deck and other carefully-selected vantage points in their best bibs and tuckers, all facing outwards and looking, we hope, good. We had extensive press coverage, both on the ship and from chartered boats which followed us, so no doubt there will be a good spread in the local rags about our departure this evening, and we gather that the national press and TV are also taking an interest, so most of Britain probably saw a lot more of the whole evolution than I did.

Once out of the Tyne and with the bow of the ship pointing more or less south, a Wessex 5 helicopter arrived, and will be with us for some time, acting as our taxi/utility vehicle. He took a few piccys as we headed south, so altogether we should feature in numerous publications in glorious technicolour (or rather glorious grey, this being a warship) over the next few days. We also had a Sea Harrier which popped up to pose alongside us, with a chase Hunter taking photies of him. The general clicking of shutters must have been quite deafening.

We have already had a couple of minor casualties in the Air World, though neither, we hope, serious. Commander (Air), was whisked off to hospital (or, to be absolutely accurate about it, he whisked himself off to Haslar down at Portsmouth by train having declared himself unimpressed by the services offered by the National Health Service in general and Newcastle Hospital in particular) with an eye infection. And Jack Cant, the Flight Deck Officer, is presently confined to the Sick Bay with food poisoning, which doesn’t auger too well for the future if his condition was caused by something he ate on board – he isn’t sure where he got the bug from.

The ship is now steaming (or rather turbining, as it’s powered by precisely the same set of engines as Concorde: four Olympus gas-turbines, which drive the propellers through two simply massive David Brown gearboxes) up and down just off Whitley Bay to the north of Newcastle, trying to miss all the sharp rocky bits sticking out, while the Fish-heads get their act together and find out how it all works. This weekend has been cancelled, to all intents and purposes, and we are all likely to be working more or less flat out for the next two months, despite the latest reasonably good news from the South Atlantic, ready to relieve Invincible in mid-August.

On a brighter note, my portable (if you’re pretty strong, that is) stereo is working well in my cabin, and we are even able to receive decent radio signals as there is an aerial socket on the amenities panel. True, I can only get Radio 2 at the moment, but that’s better than nothing, and nothing is probably a lot better than Radio 1.

There was quite a good science fiction film on Beeb 1 tonight – ‘Dark Star’ – and I got a half-way decent picture on the massive Wardroom projection TV thingy. I’m not entirely sure why, but for some reason the rest of the officers seem to think that I know what I’m doing when it comes to televisions and the like, and so I have a kind of unofficial secondary duty as OICOCWTVS (Officer In Charge Of Crap Wardroom TV System). It’s not exactly an acronym that rolls off the tongue, but it is entirely descriptive of the job.

But the sound on the film was awful – it sounded as if they were speaking from the depths of a lavatory bowl, while being slowly strangled, so after an hour or so I gave up any pretence of even trying to get it right, and hit the hay just after midnight.

Saturday, 19 June 1982

At sea

Most of today was spent doing trials of the Daleks – the Vulcan/Phalanx CIWS (Close In Weapon System) – which are intended to blast the crap out of anything remotely like a missile which they see heading in our direction. There have been numerous teething troubles with them, as is only to be expected with a brand new piece of kit (new to us, that is: the Yanks have had them for a while), but the maintainers now seem to be getting on top of it.

It’s perhaps worth saying a few words about these nifty items. One of the reasons that I chose the cabin that I did it because it’s about as close as I can possibly get to the aft Vulcan/Phalanx, working on what seemed to me to be irrefutable common-sense: as these weapons are designed to be a completely autonomous last-ditch defence system, logically speaking absolutely the last place on the ship which is ever likely to be hit by anything is one of these two units.

We call them the Daleks because that’s pretty much what they look like. They have a white metal dome on top like a kind of elongated tube with a rounded top, which contains the radar and projectile tracking system, and below that is the meat in the sandwich: a six barrel twenty millimetre Gatling gun, which fires depleted twelve millimetre uranium shells fitted with plastic sabots – much heavier than lead – and which deliver a massive dose of kinetic energy to anything they hit, at a rate of three thousand rounds a minute, which I promise you is eye-wateringly fast. We have one right aft, and right by my cabin as I’ve already said, and another one forward, and both are on the starboard side of the ship so that they’re well away from the flight deck.

There’s a fair amount of programming which goes on in their computer systems, because clearly under no circumstances would you want them to start firing their extremely heavy bullets through the deck or into the island superstructure, so both weapons have permanent no-fire zones specified. Once we start flying Harriers and helicopters, we will have to initiate temporary zones as well, so that they don’t blow our own aircraft out of the sky when they’re on recovery to the ship.

That’s the thing about these Daleks: they’re highly sophisticated and extremely good at identifying potential targets and then blowing the crap out of them, but they have no idea whether the fast moving object approaching the ship is a Harrier that’s short of fuel and needs to land like right now, or Exocet or some other sea-skimming nasty. So unless you take pretty firm charge of them, the result is much the same. Exterminate.

And in this case, that really is what they do.

We had a Hunter flying round us for most of the day (we are still not too far off the coast in the Newcastle area), pretending to be an Exocet, which meant he thoroughly enjoyed himself, hammering in towards us as low and as fast as he could make it go. I think we have more of the same tomorrow.

Talking to some of the people who were on deck yesterday, it seems that we had a very good send-off indeed when we left the Tyne. It wasn’t just thousands that turned up to say goodbye to us, it was hundreds of thousands. There was, according to one officer, an unbroken line of people eight miles long on the banks of the river. It must have been quite a sight. I suppose I should have expected that sort of response anyway – when we had our sort of open evening on the ship last week, as well as seventeen thousand-odd people who did come on board, according to the police there were another eight thousand or so in a queue outside the dockyard unable to get in. We certainly were popular here.

I spent the day in the Air Office, as usual, still trying to lick it into some sort of shape – I can now, I think, at least see the walls of the tunnel. Next week I hope to be able to see the light at the end of it.

I went down to the Sick Bay to see Jack Cant, the Flight Deck Officer (FDO), and discovered that he was being drip fed, and really didn’t look all that hot. It seems, however, that what he had was not food poisoning, but some sort of adhesion in his gut – probably because he had a perforated appendix removed only about six weeks ago, and is still not fully recovered from the operation. Anyway, the doc assured me he is on the mend.

On a Saturday night in the North Sea, there really is remarkably little to do, so I retired to bed at the (relatively) early hour of eleven, with a book and a couple of tapes in the stereo – we are now far out of range of radio or TV signals, so all entertainment has to be home-grown.

Sunday, 20 June 1982

At sea

A unique day in the annals of the Royal Navy, as at shortly after ten this morning the Commissioning Ceremony for HMS Illustrious was completed – the first time a vessel has ever (to the best of our knowledge) been commissioned at sea. The ceremony (a three line whip, naturally), lasted almost an hour, and was held in the hangar, with the entire ship’s company in attendance (except those actually on watch, of course). It was in many ways a bit like a Christening as the ship is now formally named and a part of the sea-going strength of the Royal Navy. As a point of interest, it means that the Captain can now call himself ‘The Captain, HMS Illustrious’, rather than ‘The Senior Officer, HMS Illustrious’, which he has had to do up to now.

The fact that today was Sunday had, predictably enough, no effect whatsoever on the work of the ship, and I personally left the Air Office for the last time at about seven thirty. I hadn’t finished, not by a long way, but I had quite definitely had enough for one day. The ship was making the best time it could down to Portsmouth, which meant that she was vibrating a good deal but nothing like as much as Invincible does at the same speed – we were trogging along at about 30 knots.

The Air Department is now functioning on a more or less complete basis once again, with the return late this afternoon of Commander (Air), and we are reliably informed that Jack Cant will be up and firing on most cylinders by tomorrow morning.

It was a particularly lovely evening, and I went up onto the Quarter Deck to watch the sunset. Very pretty – lots of reds and golds in the western sky, and a flat calm sea being churned to blue-white by our propellers. Gosh, that’s almost poetic!

Monday, 21 June 1982

At sea/Portsmouth

Another hard day at the office. The big problem as far as I am concerned is that there are simply not enough hours in the day to do all the things I’ve got to do. I have a deputy, Paul Harvey, a Sub Lieutenant from Portland, but he has his own jobs to do (he is doing both Photographic and Public Relations duties, both of which, obviously, are taking up a lot of his time, with a new ship in the present international climate). Things should get a bit easier once my Writer arrives – he has been doing a course on the Tail (a teleprinter that I have in the office) – but should be here soon. He will obviously be able to take a good deal of the routine work away from me, which will ease my load a great deal.

Ever since we left Newcastle, the ship has looked more like a hotel than a warship, as we are carrying vast numbers of Swan Hunter people, just in case anything important falls over that we couldn’t fix, and they’ve been hammering and welding and stuff all over the ship. They will be embarking into the tender care of British Rail for the return journey to Newcastle, once we touch dry land at Portsmouth, which should give us a lot more room, and a bit of a breathing space before the next lot (the Squadrons) arrive.

We sailed into Portsmouth at about lunchtime, once again in Procedure Alpha, and once again I saw none of it. There was apparently quite a reasonable crowd to see us arrive, though nothing like as big as that which saw us off from Newcastle. Work in the office continued, but we had problems all over the ship, as all the teleprinters seem to have fallen over at the same time, resulting in no signals being distributed, and nobody seems to know why. Not my problem, thankfully – the Air Office just distributes the signals. Somebody else has to get them to us first. So no signals means one less job for me.

Oddly enough, the lack of signals doesn’t seem to have the slightest effect on the way the ship runs and what we do, but perhaps that’s not too surprising. Having idly scanned the contents of most of them which have arrived in the Air Office, the vast majority seem to be completely pointless, an utter waste of paper and transmission facilities. And we get hundreds and hundreds of the blasted things every day. Entire forests must be felled to cope with this appalling volume of utter drivel.

The ship was full of visitors all evening, as it was our ‘Families’ Day’, the result of which was that there were no seats at all available in the Wardroom in the evening after dinner. I went up on deck and looked at the sunset, and resisted the temptation to go ashore. I resisted it quite easily, in fact, bearing in mind the distance I would have to walk to even get out of the dockyard, and further bearing in mind what there is outside the dockyard gates. There’s not a lot in Portsmouth, apart from the pubs (I don’t drink alcohol) and, probably, an eager bunch of tarts (on the other hand, it’s true that I do have some hobbies).

Tuesday, 22 June 1982

Portsmouth

Things seem to be getting a bit easier on the work side now – whether it’s because I’m getting on top of it or just getting used to it I wouldn’t know, but the change is very much for the better. I’m lucky, because I had those weeks on Invincible so I arrived on the ship knowing more or less the way things should work in my domain, but because the majority of the ship’s company are brand-new and have never served on board this class of ship before, their learning curve isn’t just steep: it’s almost vertical.

It was a lousy day as far as the weather was concerned, which was a bit unfortunate, as I had to make several phone calls. That may seem a bit of a non sequitur, but the telephone exchange on the ship (it is automatic, with neat little push­button phones, but requires an operator to get an outside line) was swamped with incoming calls, and so to do my telephone business I had to go ashore