Mick Cooper wasn’t sure about it all. He liked a glass of wine over dinner with his wife Sharon, but didn’t care for being a piss artist. It didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy a joke though.
As he sat reading the alarming-sounding headlines on 1 April, he couldn’t resist the temptation to make mischief. It was April Fools’ Day after all, and Argentine designs on British islands in the South Atlantic all seemed so far away and unlikely. Cooper phoned the station Medical Officer and told him he was going to ring around the squadron and ask who had 1,000lb conventional bombing experience and was fully jabbed up for the South Atlantic. Would the MO go along with it, he asked. The Doc agreed to and Cooper began asking for volunteers.
Two weeks later it would no longer seem so funny. And the joke would, in any case, be very firmly on Cooper himself.
‘This is the worst day of my life,’ wrote Captain Nick Barker as Endurance steamed impotently between South Georgia and the Falklands into a force ten gale. The bottom line was that he and his ship couldn’t be in two places at once. Barker had left South Georgia reluctantly, feeling that, lightly armed as she was, at least here Endurance and her Wasp helicopters could influence events – even stop any Argentine aggression in its tracks. Barker spoke to his tactical team aboard Endurance, his words reflecting the desperate frustration he felt: ‘There must be something we can do to zap these bastards.’
The options were limited. They could try to enter Stanley harbour in the face of the Argentine task force and stall an invasion that would already be well under way. Probably suicidal. Or they could try ramming the Argentine support tanker using Endurance’s reinforced, ice-breaking bow. Without fuel, the Argentine fleet might be vulnerable to his little Wasps with their AS12 wire-guided missiles. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than nothing. Endurance ploughed on west through the storm.
In London, despite Leach’s bravura performance, there was still unease about sending a task force. Because of the strength of feeling there had been over the Defence Review, John Nott couldn’t quite bring himself to accept Leach’s judgement at face value. Sir Michael Beetham, too, urged caution. If the fleet sailed it would be a minimum of three weeks before it arrived off the islands. Three weeks of inactivity with the world watching seemed to make them a hostage to fortune. Beetham also worried that, without being able to guarantee air superiority through what would be a comparatively tiny force of Sea Harriers, an amphibious landing might not even be practical. But in an atmosphere where a feeling that we must do something held sway, the reservations of both Beetham and the country’s senior soldier, Chief of the General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Edwin Bramall, were swept aside.
‘Look,’ said Margaret Thatcher, cutting across the debate to settle the matter, ‘we’re not committing anything, just sailing.’
Any decision to actually use the Task Force could be made later. Who could object to that?, Beetham thought, his mind already turning to the formidable problems the distances posed to the use of airpower.
Eighteen hours after she’d put in to Faslane, HMS Splendid sailed out of the Clyde and dived off the Isle of Arran. Not a single item of stores was outstanding and she carried a full load of torpedoes. As she headed south through the Irish Sea, the submarine’s crew tested everything, checking every bit of kit. By lunchtime they were at periscope depth between Fastnet and the Welsh coast. Roger Lane-Nott tuned in to Radio 4’s The World at One. As he listened, the new reality hit him. This was no longer some show of strength. An enemy would be trying to sink him and he would have to try to sink them.
Splendid dived deeper. As soon as she was clear of the continental shelf, Lane-Nott ordered maximum revolutions. Full-power state. They were on their way.
On the Falklands, the day before the invasion, there was an air of unreality. Everyone felt something terrible was just around the corner and yet nothing really tangible had happened. The previous day Gerald Cheek had been up at the airfield with one of the islands’ Cable and Wireless engineers when the regular LADE flight came. The engineer could tell from the boxes that it was Collins’ radio gear and went to take a closer look. The Argentinians wouldn’t let him near it.
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ he said to Cheek, ‘but they’ve brought in some very sophisticated equipment on that flight.’ What did that mean though? A member of the FIDF, the Falkland Islands Defence Force, Cheek found out at 4.30 p.m. the next day when he was summoned to Government House by Sir Rex Hunt, the Governor of the islands. A similar outfit to the Second World War’s Home Guard, the FIDF prepared themselves for the invasion. Along with six others, Cheek moved up to the racecourse. At 7 p.m., the FIGAS Islander landed there, approaching low over Stanley. They planned to fly a reconnaissance sortie at first light the next morning. Armed with standard British Army SLR assault rifles and general-purpose machine-guns (GPMGs), they had orders from Hunt to shoot down any Argentine helicopters that might try to land.
Peter Biggs, just six days into a new job as the Falkland Islands government taxation officer, was still in the dark. He left his pregnant wife Fran at home to go for a run. On his way back as he jogged down Sapper’s Hill, he passed a marine, carrying an SLR, who seemed to jump several feet in the air as Biggs ran up behind him and passed him. Why so jumpy?, he wondered.
Half an hour later, it all became clear.
With the decision to send the Task Force made, Beetham focused on the possible contribution the RAF could make to the islands’ recapture. But with the distances involved, the use of air power was going to be, he thought, bloody difficult. The Falklands were as far from London as Hawaii.
He consulted his closest adviser, Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Operations), Air Vice-Marshal Ken Hayr. An intellectually acute New Zealander with a carefully groomed moustache and dapper appearance, Hayr could have passed for David Niven’s brother. The two of them chewed over the difficulties and spoke with other senior staff to discuss the options, continually asking themselves the questions: How can we help? What can we do? At such extreme range there were simply no easy answers. In fact, on the day of the invasion there was only one aircraft in the entire Air Force fleet that even had the ability to fly to the Falklands and back from a friendly base: the Handley Page Victor K2. Along with the Vulcan and a third bomber, the Vickers Valiant, the Victor had made up the RAF’s V-bomber force. For the last ten years, though, the remaining Victors had served exclusively as air-to-air refuelling tankers. It was this ability to transfer fuel while airborne that now made them so crucial. The Navy were on their way though, and Beetham asked Leach what the Air Force could do to support their efforts. Leach had seized the opportunity for the Navy to show its value and, consequently, demonstrate the wrong-headedness of Nott’s proposed cuts. He asked Beetham for just three C-130 Hercules transports to provide logistical support for the fleet. Trying to anticipate events, Beetham thought that such a small number would be inadequate – if not absurd – and told Hayr: ‘Get the whole of the transport fleet on standby, recall them from wherever they are, we’re going to need a big effort!’
One other thing was also immediately clear. If the RAF was going to contribute anything at all beyond ferrying kit around for the Navy, that effort was going to involve the sleepy little mid-Atlantic outpost of Ascension Island. Many people were now discovering its existence for the first time. Almost exactly equidistant between Britain and the Falklands, this tiny little volcanic island with its very long runway was, at the very least, Beetham thought, bloody convenient.