2. The Task Force sails
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Hello and welcome to episode two of the Battleground podcast with me, Saul David. And me, Patrick Bishop. This week, as part of our Falklands War series told in real time, we're concentrating on the main event of the first week of the war, which was, of course, the departure from Portsmouth of the Task Force.

So what exactly was the task force? Well, it was a mixed fleet of two aircraft carriers, 11 destroyers and frigates, three submarines, the assault ship Fearless, which is going to, of course, be vital for the landings, and numerous naval auxiliaries. And they're joined at various stages by merchant ships of all kinds taken up from trade, including the P&O cruise liner Canberra, which was carrying the 3,000 ground troops of 3 Commando Brigade.

Eventually, as troop numbers increased, more than 100 ships carrying 25,000 men would be sent to the Falklands. And as much as anything for a country in supposedly terminal decline, it was an astonishing logistical achievement. Okay, so let's remind everyone of a few key dates. You've got the actual invasion, Friday the 2nd of April.

Argentine forces go ashore on the Falklands. The following day, the Saturday, a much smaller group goes and establishes a proper military garrison on South Georgia, 800 miles away to the east.

Now, Monday, Monday the 5th, the first big chunk of the task force set sail. That's the carrier group, the two carriers, Hermes and Invincible, who will be absolutely vital in the whole operation. They set off from Portsmouth.

The following day, the amphibious assault ship Fearless leaves as well. Then finally, bringing up the rear, but obviously very important, Friday the 9th of April, the Canberra, the troop ship Canberra, sails off from Southampton with me on board.

Yes, but it's not all about you, Patrick, is it? And this week, we'll also be talking to not one, but two of the key participants in the story. Major General Julian Thompson, then a brigadier in command of 3 Commando Brigade, and Rear Admiral Jeremy Larkin, who in 1982 was the captain of HMS Fearless, the assault ship.

But before that, it might be useful to set the scene a little bit, I think, by reading a quick extract from the book that Patrick and his fellow journalist, John Witherow, now editor of The Times, wrote about the departure of the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible from Portsmouth on the 5th, because I think it will give listeners a little bit of a flavour of the drama of that day. Patrick, please, would you do the honours?

Thank you, Saul. Well, this is this chapter. The first chapter of the book is entitled The Empire Strikes Back. This is very much a cliche, became a cliche very quickly, but it seemed to encapsulate the flavor of the times. And it goes HMS Invincible edged away from the quayside shortly before 10 a.m. on Monday, the 5th of April. Tugs and small chase boats buzzing around her like impatient flies.

She moved grandly down the Portsmouth Channel, exchanging salutes with ships and acknowledging the cheers of thousands of people lining the rooftops, quays and beaches in the crisp spring sunshine. Union Jacks skipped and curled above blurred heads and caps were doffed in extravagant gestures. From the Admiral's Bridge we could see the lone sea harrier fixed to the ski jump, its nose pointing skywards.

At the stern, helicopters squatted on the flight deck, their blades strapped back like broken insects. The order to come to attention to the 500 men lining the deck in their best rig was swept away by the wind, and they came to like a group of conscripts on the first day's drill. We moved away from the small boats, past the old sea forts, and into the channel. Behind us came HMS Hermes, the old warhorse, already looking stained and weather-beaten.

A small group of men, for once not caught up in the urgency of departure, stood staring back at Pompey. Others gazed towards the horizon.

It had been a long time since the country sailed to war. Okay, that of course was the departure on the 5th. You weren't on that boat, Patrick. You left on the Canberra on the 9th, but we're going to come to that in a minute. But I think it's worth mentioning at this stage, actually, in the light of the images we had recently from Westminster Abbey, when the Queen's second son escorted her into the memorial service for

his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, that the Duke of York, then His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, was actually on HMS Invincible. And this is interesting because it's kind of principle of the royal family that second sons should be allowed to go to war. The Queen apparently actually makes it clear that the prince should

who was, of course, then serving on Invincible as a Sea King helicopter pilot, would be going with the task force. His grandfather, King George VI, had fought at Jutland, and she was absolutely determined that there would be no question that a member of the royal family would be treated any differently from other servicemen. Andrew Stock, of course, has fallen in recent times, but it's worth acknowledging, I think, in the interest of fairness, his service for his country in 1982. More of that later.

Okay, now back to you, Patrick. You leave on Canberra on the Friday the 9th of April as the correspondent for the Observer newspaper. How on earth did you, just 29 years old at the time, get that gig? Well, I think that's partially because it was by no means clear this was going to end in a shooting war. It was, I think, widely regarded as an enormous exercise in saber rattling at that stage and that with any luck,

diplomacy would do the job and there wouldn't be any need to actually land on the Falklands. For us hacks, there were about...

30 of us on board. Most of us were, like me, kind of fairly junior. There were a couple of grandees, Max Hastings among them. But by and large, as someone sneeringly put it, they'd sent the second division on this one. We certainly didn't know much about the military. I mean, we'd all done a bit of Northern Ireland, but that's very much not the same sort of exercise that we were undertaking initially.

on this day. So there's a little bit of kind of mutual incomprehension and indeed a little bit of mutual suspicion between the military and the media. But that very quickly changed. We'd been fed a kind of rather negative image of certainly the army because of Northern Ireland. It was our own kind of, I wouldn't say dirty war, but it certainly was a quite grubby war.

at times. Two things struck us about the soldiers we came across. We were living cheek by jowls. They were in very close proximity. One was their incredible enthusiasm and cheerfulness. And the second was their thoughtfulness and their efficiency. We'd sort of imagined they wouldn't really give a great deal of contemplation to what was going on, but we found it to be very intelligent and also very up for what they were doing. I never heard anyone, uh,

really at any point express any dismay of what was going on. There were certain doubts about the feasibility of it, but everyone was absolutely up for it. And I think that was, you know, from our point of view, from our morale point of view, it was great to be surrounded by these terrifically positive people. But one thing was certain was that there was a great challenge lying ahead and we didn't know whether we really had the wherewithal to pull it off.

Okay, before we get to the challenge, I just want to ask you a quick question, Patrick. You know, this is a great opportunity for you professionally, isn't it? But you must have been in two minds about whether if it was going to be a shooting war, whether you wanted to be involved. Yes, there were career opportunities, but also there's your health to consider, isn't there? Yeah, so there is this seesaw of emotions. You've got the lust for glory, for journalistic glory tips you one way and then fear for your own life another.

tips you the other so that that was a constant throughout the whole war i have to say of course it was going to be an extraordinary challenge uh for the task force uh going down to the south atlantic where frankly all the military odds are going to be stacked in favor of the argentinians but first we need to find out how the task force has even put together and to do that we're going to be talking to two of the key participants in part two see you then welcome back to part two

We're now going to speak to two of the key players in the story of the task force, Rear Admiral Jeremy Larkin, who was then skipper of the amphibious assault ship HMS Fearless, and Major General Julian Thompson, who was then commanding the main strike force heading down to the Falklands, 3 Commando Brigade. Thompson was one of three British commanders heading south, all of roughly equivalent status.

The others were Commodore Mike Clapp, commanding the amphibious landing force, and Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, the Naval Task Force commander, and, in effect, Primus Inter pares, or first among equals. The overall commander, based at Northwood in London, was Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, Commander-in-Chief Fleet. So that's the background. We spoke first to Rear Admiral Jeremy Larkin, who remembered when he first realised they might be called into action.

We literally just got back a week before, or 10 days before, from our final exercising on recommissioning the ship in Norway, which meant we got pretty well together with the Royal Marines and the aviation, our road-fuelling aviation. And it was a Thursday evening, and I heard that there was some concern the Argentines might be going to invade the Falklands. And I was invited to have a drink in my wardroom where we all said, well, you know, Britain will never think about that. It'll be some kind of foreign office fix.

And I went home the next morning, Friday. My second-in-command, John Kelly, rang me up and said, "Look, you better get in because we've put on a priority of store second only to the deterrent. So you better come in." And frantic four days followed because we sailed the following Tuesday. And we were at a state actually when we were in maintenance and everything had been taken to bits and I'd been put together again. So we threw everything together again.

and embarked an extraordinary load of people and equipment. And meanwhile, I was busy trying to get my brain around what this was going to involve. Lots of interesting meetings, listening to an extraordinary day in the House of Commons, which Alan Clarke in his memoir said was the most intense day in the House of Commons he recalled or thought of since 1916.

1940, a bit extreme perhaps, and lots of meetings with people who were trying to give advice, what we're going to do, what the command structure is going to be, and chats with people like Jeremy Black, who I knew well, Captain of the Invincible. He said, hmm, XZ versus XZ, that's not going to be too funny, is it? Sort of thing.

And a wonderful man, Admiral Jim Eberle, who was then Commander-in-Chief Nav Holm, a great role model of mine, said, well, any advice I've got to give Jeremy, I've never actually been in a war. Amazing, I thought. And by the way, he said, someone told me that if...

If people get hurt, by the way, do make sure that people don't drop the weapons because the medical people will get on with it and you can't lose that sort of time. Just as one of those little asides that you gather in a

in amazing times like that. Tell us a bit about your ship. It's getting on a bit, isn't it, at this stage, but it's still absolutely configured to do the job ahead of you. She developed a bit. She was originally built as a lorry carrier, would you believe it, at the behest of the army, and we fitted her with a few other things, a flight deck and so on,

And she gradually evolved into an extraordinary polyglot sort of ship, really, with two complete command centers, my guests being, as it turned out, the

amphibious commanders, Commodore Michael Clapp, who was the maritime commander and brigadier, he was then Julian Thompson, who was the land force commander, and all their staffs. My own ship staff, of course, by the custom in the Navy, as a captain of the command ship or the flagship, you are the chief of staff to the flag officer or the Commodore.

And I practiced that before. I'd actually done that previously for Sir John Fieldhouse in a previous incarnation. So I'd really practiced the role. But the ship is fitted with these two command centers.

Also equipped to carry about 300 fully equipped troops and their support arms. And the back end is a mixture between a swimming pool when you dock the ship down and open the stern gate and a railroad ferry, as it were, except everything comes in at the back end with decks, waves, vehicles, guns.

tanks even, if you wish, and four big landing craft which docked in the back area, in the stern area, and four more landing craft which dangled on David's at the side of the ship, which obviously was smaller, and a flight dock on which we were equipped ready to carry two helicopters of the Sea King variety, troop carrying variety, but we managed to stuff four in and a great deal else for the event, including the Blues and Royals with some light tanks, for instance.

and lots and lots of food, including Argentine bully beef, which calls amusement snacking the next.

If that gives us a reasonable feel. Fairly ancient, 19 years old then, although she survived another 20 as long as she lived. Reasonable communications equipment, good satellite communications, recently fitted. Air defence, not very good. Some ancient single 40mm Bofors and four CCAT missile systems, which were at the back end of effective life.

Jeremy, tell us a little bit about the actual day of departure. So this is Tuesday, the 6th of April. You're leaving Portsmouth. And I gather you actually have to pick up some of the landing ships outside the main harbour. Is that correct? Well, we couldn't dock down sufficiently. Obviously, when the ship docks down, the stern sinks. And Portsmouth Harbour isn't deep enough for that. So we always would embark and disembark the landing craft, big landing craft, outside the harbour. It's a bit at anchorages. And yes, we left harbour with our four landing craft coming in.

a stern of us, we then dropped anchor at Spithead, one of the anchorages and embarked on landing craft. Also quite spooky really because we passed what's known as the Round Tower at Portsmouth Harbour entrance where many families have gathered in quite emotional scenes. There we sat at Spithead with the radios on the local media

interviewing wives and loved ones, all in some considerable state of excitement and in some cases distress. And I reflected on this, not the ideal thing to be around the ship on the day of departure as it were. And then that evening, as I recall, we set sail accompanied by an Oracle landing ship logistics, the Sir Galahad, Sir Tristram and that lot.

Of course, both had some petty bad and sad experiences later in the campaign. Tell me about your thoughts about the enterprise itself. I mean, you're obviously very busy on the minutiae of your departure, but did it strike you that you were taking on a huge challenge at that moment?

Well, it did. We were, of course, trained for it. And I spent my life mainly in the submarine service as a deterrent against war. And I thought that was all fairly successful Cold War stuff. But suddenly to be thrust into it was, shall we say, something of a surprise. And my job, obviously, and my excellent team's job was to accustom everyone to what we were likely to be in for.

We were obviously not pleased with Galtieri for invading the Falklands. We felt pretty strongly about that. We were also pretty confident that something might be achieved in a diplomatic area, but nevertheless, it was very important to sail the task force and at the very least as a major deterrent element to improve the strength of negotiations.

And everyone, I think, felt pretty much that way about it. Very positive view, albeit one of apprehension, and rather hoping that something would be resolved before it actually came to something unpleasant.

Now, you mentioned the two commanders you had on board, Thompson and Clapp. How did you get on with the two of them? Because it's a strange relationship, of course, isn't it? You're captain of the ship, but technically they're your superiors. It was one I was very familiar with and very comfortable with a number of previous incarnations. I knew Michael Clapp quite well. I knew Julian Thompson little. We'd all been together in Norway at the previous month.

I was very comfortable with the concept. My ship was fitted to do this. It was its job. My job was to make sure that we'd rise them with the utmost support. As I said, I was also integral to the staff. I wasn't just a distant host. I was integral to the staff and in a very realistic way. I wasn't just playing at it. I was Michael Capp's chief of staff.

And as is the custom, a number of the ship's officers were also served as staff officers. It was a pre-organized relationship. You were in the fortunate position of having served under two key Navy commanders, John Fieldhouse at the very top and then Zandy Woodward, who's one of these three in-theater commanders. Yes.

Can you tell us a bit about the personalities of those two? And then we'll come on, if you don't mind, to talking about the slightly unwieldy command structure that perhaps understandably, given the urgency of the situation, had been put together for the operation.

Well, I'll start with Admiral Sandy Woodward, who I knew very well, and I think of all the people then, and certainly alive now, I know him better than anyone. He'd been my first lieutenant when we built the first all-British nuclear-powered submarine, the Badland. He was my first lieutenant, and I was the navigator. Subsequently, I was very fortunate that he was my teacher on the parish of the Submarine Command qualifying course.

a course which he fundamentally reformed from being something of an alcoholic marathon to something which was really rather carefully thought out and orchestrated. And I subsequently then be in his second in command running the submarine sea training organization where

We qualified submarines or oversaw the qualifications of submarines emerging from refit or new build, the first safety effectiveness and then operational effectiveness. Finally, he'd been my boss briefly in the Naval Plans Division, Minister of Defense. I reckon I knew Sandy pretty well. He's an extraordinary character.

A very private man, seen in public to be austere and impetuous, but he was very thoughtful, extremely bright. And actually, privately, he's one of these people who couldn't talk without being entertaining. He couldn't put a sentence together without there being a double entendre of some sort. He did have a weakness. We all have weaknesses. And he wasn't really terribly good with people who weren't at a reasonably...

in terms of interchange on a comparable intellectual level. So, sailors found him completely incomprehensible. And in war spite, which he commanded a nuclear powered submarine, he was known as Dr. Spock, for instance. But he was eminently well prepared to be the aircraft carrier commander.

And I think did that superbly well. As Max Hastings said, he got all the big issues right. And subsequently, we became quite close personal friends and he helped us with our company more recently. But not everyone's cup of tea, though. I mean, I think Will attested that.

stories of both Julian Thompson and Mike Clapp finding his manner quite difficult to deal with now. Yes, it was unfortunate the way all that turned out. And I did do my utmost to try and anticipate it because I knew things were going to be tricky. Well, Sandy was someone who would fire out 10 ideas a day, many of which were quite deliberately, completely over the top.

And as his chief of staff, which I'd been in Submarine 3 train, for instance, it was very important to make sure the staff didn't get busy on any but more than the two of 10 that were worth pursuing. Otherwise, it would work their hearts out for a week and say, oh, I didn't expect you to do any work on that. I knew that was going to be the way it would go. And when we had a critical meeting, which we can get on to, but I'll cover it now if you wish, at Ascension Island on, I think, the 17th of April, thereabouts,

As soon as Sialis got within reach of Ascension, where Sandy already was in the carrier Hermes, a helicopter was newly approaching with Sandy on board, I did try to prepare Michael and Julian for what I knew was going to be a sparky eventuality.

Sandy was very much focused on some major issues, of course, with dealing with London in a way that Michael and Julian did later, but weren't doing so to the same degree then. Of course, he came on board with firing off ideas in all directions and was, I have to say, a little tactless, which was Sandy's way. It just didn't go well. I was very sad, both Julian and Michael.

and Michael were to some degree offended. And it did set that relationship off in an unfortunate way, which we all got through. And after all, we did win. And people, I think, make too much of it because I can't think of major command events of this sort when there were tensions between the commanders. But they were on the whole constructive tensions. And when things went wrong, it was because the information each side had of the other was not sufficiently complete. Well, that's typical.

Can we also talk a little bit about John Fieldhouse? And when you've given us a bit of a character sketch, can we then move on to that crucial meeting, which you mentioned the earlier meeting. I think that was actually the 15th of April. So if we move on a couple of days to the meeting on the 17th of April that Fieldhouse himself participated in. Well, John Fieldhouse is a very different personality and it's wrong to assume that

that it was the whole command structure was suddenly stitched up because actually John Fieldhouse and Sandy Woodwell, they knew each other well and respected each other. They had quite different views on various matters. But John Fieldhouse, I first knew him when he was captain of the Dreadnought, which was the first British nuclear power pusher. I mean, both American back end. It wasn't all British. It was...

sort of IKEA job really in terms of submarine construction. A very sage, balanced, steady person. He had great presence as did Sandy in his quite different way. He arose very quickly through a variety of posts to be a major rear admiral young and

And I really got to know him quite well when he was first appointed as a rare admiral, the flag officer, second statilla, as it was called, flying his flag in HMS Glamorgan, a guided missile destroyer, which by extraordinary series of coincidences, I happened to be commanding as rather junior in the rank of commander at the age of 35, which is extraordinary for one of those vessels, but it was extraordinary.

Because my captain got ill and agreed I should run it through. So I was John Field as a flag captain for six weeks in some very operational situations and got to know him well as a man I greatly respected and with a deep understanding of really all aspects of maritime warfare and beyond. He then was flag officer of submarines when I myself was driving HMS Valiant, which I'd commissioned as the navigator 10 years before. And again, he was a great support, very steady.

and a highly perceptive man. I knew him subsequently, finally, as Chief of Defence Staff. I worked for him in that capacity too. And I think he had a very good, broad and steady understanding of defence overall. He was, of course, the four-star commander northward for the campaign. And there's lots of controversy about how that was organised and delivered, and I know little about elements of that.

on the whole have the conclusion that deficiencies tend to be on the whole exaggerated because I think we did manage the extraordinary circumstances. I mean the circumstances of this war were absolutely remarkable in the speed with which it developed. And what I think distinguishes it from other wars in a number of respects, well, one particular respect is that it did actually go extraordinarily well given the speed of development. Look what's happened to the Russians now in Ukraine.

It's been a complete disaster. We managed out of the blue sky with the Navy trained to deal with anti-submarine warfare in the Atlantic in support of principally the American carrier groups to actually conduct this extraordinary campaign 8,000 miles from home and succeed.

I think what's fascinating about that, Patrick, if you think about the beginning of the interview, is how chaotic it all was. How suddenly he was faced having effectively decommissioned his ship, having returned from Norway, to suddenly getting it up to speed again. And how quickly they had to do that. I mean, just literally a matter of days, four or five days to do that in. And yet, no panic, calmly went about his business, went to an awful lot of meetings, and then slowly but surely,

put the show back on the road. And, you know, I think it sums up really, doesn't it? That kind of phlegmatic calmness of British servicemen, even in a crisis. Luck was very much on their side. If this had happened a couple of weeks later or a couple of months later, there'd be no fearless for people to get on to, to head off to the South Atlantic. This was a kind of surplus requirements, as was the sister ship Intrepid. These were designed for wars that no one expected to fight against. So it was an incredible stroke of luck.

for the British that they hadn't actually headed off to the scrapyard or wherever else they were destined for. Timing plays a big part in this story, doesn't it? But the other thing that fascinated me, not knowing much about amphibious assault ships, is really how the whole ship is structured. You know, he talked in detail, didn't he, about how it worked,

the sort of number of people that they would generally be on it, you know, up to 300 extra troops, 600 total in all. And yet for pretty much the whole of the Falklands war, he had 1400 people, uh, constantly changing people coming on board and going, uh,

in one go. And it's pretty amazing to think that this, you know, this ship that was built to carry lorries originally and then effectively been adapted, but adapted very well, it seems, because as we'll discover, it was, you know, it was designed to do a job amphibious assault. And it does that very well. Yeah, it also acted as a kind of R&R centre. If you managed to get off the island, as I did once or twice during the

conflict and onto Jeremy's ship. You eat, despite the huge strain on the resources of the ship, you've still got a very warm welcome there. If you were lucky, you might actually get a bunk bed for a few hours. But the kitchen staff were really, they deserved a South Atlantic medal and they should have had a bar attached to it for their incredible efforts they made to keep everyone fed, but not just with, you know, stuff to provide some comfort.

and keep them going. It was really high-class equipment

including, if my memory is correct, some really Chinese chefs aboard. And they served us some really good Chinese nosh. So good on them. Yeah. The other interesting thing he mentioned is, of course, no one knew exactly what was going to happen next, but he's very clear that it was necessary for the task force to sail. I mean, this was a knife-edge decision, as we've already heard. Leach really convincing the prime minister that it can be done. And his point was, yes, of course, yes,

We don't know what's going to happen next, but you can't let something like this, you know, this unprovoked assault on the Falklands go unchallenged, frankly. They felt fear, apprehension, as he put it, but hoping that something would be resolved before it gets to a proper shooting war.

Yeah, interesting that he actually comes out and says he doesn't want a war. I found that among quite a lot of the senior commanders, they were much more apprehensive about what war meant than their men, perhaps because they knew a lot more about it. I was also interested in him standing up for Sandy Woodward, a controversial figure. And I must admit, you know, from what the word at the time was, that he was a difficult guy. This was filtering down to us as journalists.

And I must admit, everything I've heard about Sandy Woodward since makes me think that I wouldn't like to be dealing with him in a command situation. I mean, there's a time and place for everything. And I think being a sort of super clever or rather regarding yourself as super clever and wanting the rest of the world to know it by firing off all these impractical suggestions, it's all very well in a kind of...

non-war situation, non-lethal situation. But I think in a crisis, you want somebody who just tells you what they want you to do or to have a kind of discussion within very tight parameters about what the possibilities are, not to have some kind of brainstorming session. Yes, you're right. It was almost like a sort of Oxbridge tutorial, wasn't it, where you throw out ideas and nothing is discounted. But you can see quite clearly that Jeremy Larkin has an

has had a long and close professional relationship with him. And that obviously made a difference. And yet at the same time, he understands him. And I think this is part of the problem in life as in war, miscommunication, basically, and a sense that, you know, feathers get ruffled because people say the wrong thing at the wrong time, which quite clearly was the case.

as we are going to hear, actually, I feel, from Jeremy Thompson when they have that first crucial meeting. That's right. But to be fair to Woodward, and we must be fair, he did, I think, by general consent, get all the major decisions right. So despite his rather kind of challenging demeanour, he sort of knew what he was doing at the end of the day. I love the quote, the description of him when he was on HMS Warspite, Dr Spock, saying,

known by his uh his his men i mean it's lovely isn't it um the other interesting thing uh we heard of course was was the pen portrait of fieldhouse uh the commander again a character who has divided opinion really uh in terms of his his control of the campaign from northwood he was of course commander-in-chief fleet back in back in the uk um and again it

pretty positive portrait of him coming from Jeremy Larkin and an interesting portrait. And in some ways, you get the sense that he was more level-headed and was able to see through the fog of war, I suppose, a little bit more effectively than Woodward. Yeah, I mean, I think distance...

cuts both ways. It can mean that you're very remote from events on the ground, but it can also give you a bit of perspective, and that might have been the case with Fieldhouse. I think one thing that strikes me is perhaps generalisation, but I wonder whether Royal Navy personnel aren't more loyal to their superiors than their army counterparts, because the army certainly don't, as we'll be hearing again, don't hold back when it comes to criticising their superiors.

Anyway, I think the one thing that everyone agrees could have been done better is that instead of having these three commanders in the field or in the battle zone, if you like, who sort of hold equal rank, although strangely enough, Woodward is meant to be primus into parity, he's meant to be first among equals, it causes a lot of confusion and I think...

In hindsight, a lot of people and people were even saying it at the time, it would have been better to have one operational commander who could then convey everything straight up to Fieldhouse without having three competing narratives reaching him back in Northwood. Well, they're saying, of course, the same thing, aren't they now, Patrick, about the Russians in Ukraine, the suspicion that there is...

Not a single operational commander. Well, anyway, let's hear the slightly different perspective from the Royal Marines now from Major General Julian Thompson, who in 1982 was commanding 3 Commando Brigade. And we asked him where he was when the crisis blew up and what was the situation with his brigade? Yeah.

Well, I knew a bit of the political background because Royal Marines had served in the Falklands Islands quite a lot. I'd never had. And I was particularly friendly with Ewan Southby Taylor, who was to play a very important part in this campaign. And he and I were great chums. I used to sail his yacht and so he used to tell me about the Falkland Islands and what a strange place it was.

And I also knew that he carried out a personal recce of all the best beaches, pretending that he was looking to see where the Argentines would land, but actually with the name of writing a pilot book for chaps sailing yachts down in the South Atlantic. And he handed this in to the Navy in the Admiralty some two years earlier, in 1980. And a hydrographer wrote back and said, these are the amateur jottings of an itinerant yachtsman who are of no interest to this department.

So anyway, he then joined me and came south and was able to tell us a huge amount about the place we had heard about but knew very little indeed.

This is very fortuitous, isn't it? There's a lot of luck involved in this story. But your kind of outlook on future scenarios, the whole of the entire military, British military, was very much pointing in the opposite direction, wasn't it? It was still very much a sort of NATO mindset, Cold War mindset. Can you describe what the sort of general mindset

situation and posture was of the military at this time. I think we ought to remind listeners that even though this was a tall order you were being given,

The British military was in a much better place than it is now in terms of numbers, in terms of ships, in terms of lift capability than we are today. Well, the position was that we expected to go to war against the Soviet Union, either in North Norway, South Norway or in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein.

So that's what we rehearsed for. And of course, it was actually very good training for fighting in the Falklands because we were Arctic trained. And of course, a lot of the time there isn't any snow in the Arctic. It's just pissing with rain and bogs and peat bogs, rather likely Falkland Islands. So we were used to operating in extremely unpleasant conditions, which was a useful starter for what we were about to face.

But the problem really arose and Saul put his finger on it. It was time. We had two big problems. One was time and one was distance. We were going to go 1,000 miles further than Tokyo is from London to carry out an amphibious operation further from its home base than any other amphibious operation in recent history other than the attack on the French colony that it was in the Indian Ocean. So...

We were doing something that had not been done before with very little time. And of course, without contingency plans, which were very useful, even if they don't actually fit the operation you're going to do, you take them off the shelf and dust them down and change them to what you want to do. So we did actually that. We got hold of our reinforcement for Norway plan. And of course, it soon became totally out of date, but it gave us an idea of the sort of scale of shipping we would need.

And my brigade was getting bigger and bigger by the minute. I mean, normally we went to Norway with two commando groups, which is not very many people. We eventually ended up with 5,500 guys with guns and all the rest of the paraphernalia. And something like 27,000 tons of stores, which had to be offloaded from the depots.

into ships and ships had to be taken up from trade. So the cry at the time was get stuffed, stuff standing for ships taken up from trade. And, and,

They were hauled in from various places around the United Kingdom. So you might look up in the book which told you what ships you were entitled to have. So I'd like that one. They said, Terry, sorry, it's off California at the moment. We can't have it for another 10 days. So they just sailed the nearest ships to the nearest ports.

And then the stuff from the various depots around the UK, ammunition, fuel, defense stores, mines, food, etc., were just taken from the depot to the nearest port, which could be Liverpool or Bristol or wherever, hurled into the nearest ship, which was then sailed.

And the whole lot did get to see, as told, as ordered. And of course, it was the right thing to do. It was totally chaotic because the decision was made to sail the task force. It's easier to keep going once you're going and tied up alongside when people say, oh, shall we sail or shall we not? It's much easier to sort of get your foot out and get cracking and signal that to the opposition.

Julian, can you tell us a little bit about the day of departure? For you, I think it was the 5th. That's Tuesday the 5th in HMS Fearless. How did you get to Fearless and what was that departure day like? Well, it was a claggy... We flew to Fearless from a football pitch at Stonehouse Barracks, which is in Plymouth. And it was quite a foggy day. And I remember Julian South Italy was there and his wife was there with their children to come and wave us goodbye. And I remember

and we leapt on board this helicopter. Mike Rose was there as well, and Ewan and one or two other people from the staff officers. And we coasted along the Devon and Dorset coast to meet the ship, which was coming out of Lime Bay at the time. And we were below the level of the cliffs because the tops were covered in mist. And as the thought went through my head, it would be a pity to crash into the cliffs just at this stage of the battle before we can get there.

These thoughts never stopped going through my head when I'm riding in a helicopter, thousands of hours that I've done. And eventually looked out of the side and we saw the

wake of fearless the white wake and we caught her up and she was pitching quite badly she was outside the safety limits for landing apparently we weren't told that we landed and it was getting dark and we went up into the back end of fearless up the ladder inside and met by jeremy larkin who was the captain who was a submariner and the red lights were on inside the um

the ship. And I'm not a very tall chap, and I couldn't understand why my head was brushing against the deckhead or the ceiling. And the reason was we were walking on three layers of Compey rations because Jeremy had stocked his ship like a submarine on a patrol. And Mike Clapp, who was with me at the time, the commodore said, oh, we're in a submarine, are we? And he said, yes. So until we'd eaten down through the rations, we'd walked around double,

So that was our arrival in Fairleys. And it was actually wonderful to get going. And really, we were then committed and one felt this was it. And I never allowed myself to think it ain't going to happen. Nor did I encourage talk like that from anyone else. I said, we're going to go to war. So get down to it and start thinking about it.

Now, you don't actually get to hear about what you're supposed to be doing until you meet up with Sandy Woodward, one of the three Primus Inter Pares commanders. We'll come on to the command structure a bit later on. But tell us about that first meeting with him, which I believe was on the 15th of April. Is that right? Yes. The first time I met, what happened was it was actually quite interesting. It was on our way down. We were sort of saying what are we meant to be doing?

So we decided what we would do is work out what we could do. So in case we were asked, at that stage, there was all sorts of talk about blockading the place, raiding it, standing off, threatening. So we went through all the options and said, we can do this, we can do that, and these would be the penalties if we try this. For God's sake, we always came, don't land on any other island other than the main one because otherwise we're going to have to carry out another amphibious operation. Anyway. Yeah.

But as I understand it, initially, that was quite a big option. Indeed, it was the favoured option, it seemed to be, when you met... Just to get the sequence of events right, I think...

There's an initial meeting you have with Sandy Woodward, I think on the 16th or the 15th or the 16th on Fearless. And then two days later, the Sink Fleet, i.e. the Royal Naval Admiral who's going to be in charge of the whole operation, comes down and there's a meeting on Hermes with you.

and the guy who ends up in the overall land forces, Commander Jeremy, when these issues are actually hashed out. But before we met Sandy, we'd worked out in our head what we could do. So we had our clear minds. We then had a signal.

saying, Woodward is about to descend on you without any warning whatsoever. And so he then leapt into an antrim, I think, from Hermes, came back towards us. We were still on our way south to Central and appeared. And he unrolled a chart and came up with it. He said, I want to know whether we could land on West Falkland and construct an airstrip on that bit of land that juts out on the left of the map. I can't remember the name of the place.

and build an airfield that will take high-performance jets, which at those days were Phantoms. And I said, look, it'll take about six weeks, six months to build. We need a whole airfield squadron. And we'd be sitting there as close as it's possible to get to Argentina without being in the sea, which means we'd be under air attack all the time. So building an airfield is a complete waste of time.

So he then said, well, I shall want ammunition to back up your statements. I sent Roddy McDonald my sapper and said, dream up, not dream up, but think of a way of killing this ridiculous plan at once.

So he did. And we then presented our findings at the meeting, which we allude to when Fieldhouse came and held a meeting in Hermes, which Jeremy Moore was also president, incidentally, and Mike Clapp was there and Woodward was there. And that killed that idea dead, I'm glad to say. But there was still talk about landing on West Falkland. And I think it was all this sort of, how can we get away without fighting syndrome? Well,

We'll seize a bit of their land and then say we'll bargain it for Stanley. It's crap. Actually, when you work out what all the Argentines had to do was sit in Stanley. And they'd also worked that out, that all they had to do was to hold Stanley. And they held the Falkland Islands.

Julian, what was your preference at this stage? Again, you're working out things as you go down there and there is no sort of definite plan, as you're explaining. But what was your instinct? What was your preference at this stage? Our preference at this stage, we hadn't selected where we'd land. We had to land somewhere where they weren't in any strength because they did not have the firepower and the sort of stuff that they had in Normandy, like swimming tanks and swimming guns and things like that, to do a head-on job.

straight up the middle, hey, diddle, diddle type landing. It had to be somewhere where they weren't in any great strength. So we get our foot on the shore, then use our wits in order to get to the final objective. So we hadn't come up with a plan at that stage. It was then that Fieldhouse said to Mike Clapp and me, I want you to make a plan to select the beach and tell me, and I will then decide whether you can do it.

At that stage, that gave us the cue to get cracking and not then, obviously, at that meeting, but to go away and start working out how we do it. Yeah, well, thank heavens that it was Julian and Mike Clapp who had that decision, which was a strictly military one. I think all the talk of West Falklands was basically political, trying to buy time for some sort of negotiated deal.

Something we'll be coming on to in great detail in the next episode. Yeah, and it's fair to say, of course, that at this stage, the person who was under pressure from the politicians were not the guys on Fearless, of course. It was Woodward himself. So he was getting a fair bit of political pressure. And I'm sure you're absolutely right, Patrick. I mean, some fascinating stuff from Julian Thompson. You know, the sheer quantity of kit and people he had to get together, 5,500 soldiers together.

And that number would expand, of course, as the campaign went on and 27,000 tons of stores, all in a very short space of time. Amazing stuff. OK, well, we'll be hearing about how things develop in the next episode, the diplomacy and the politics, but also the first military action of the whole campaign, the retaking of South Georgia. Join us.