History David Horspool

Could the Navy save the Falklands today?

Forty years after the victory, we don’t rule the waves any more david horspool

Britain’s relations with France are supposed to be at their lowest ebb since Waterloo, or maybe Agincourt.

So we should be grateful that a recent ceremony between the Royal Navy and their French counterparts went off peacefully. On 11th January, in the sort of thick Channel fog that used to get headlinewriters informing us that the continent is ‘cut off’, command of the NATO Maritime High Readiness Force passed from France to Britain for the next 12 months.

The ship on which the flag-raising took place – below decks, so the able seamen could see one another – was the relatively new Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales, whose active career the Navy projects will last 50 years or more. That’s about £62 million a year if the reported up-front costs for two carriers of £6.2 billion is accurate.

It’s a lot. But though the Navy has never been cheap, it has usually proved good value for money. For centuries, it has protected Britain and projected British power in ways the British Army has very rarely been able to do. The current Prince of Wales is the seventh of that name, and the fates of some of her predecessors illustrate how Britain’s history has been entwined with her naval fortunes.

The first Prince of Wales was a third-rate ship of the line – a technical term, not a disparagement – equipped with 74 guns and launched in 1765. In the pivotal American Revolutionary year of 1777, the Prince of Wales captured an American ship, a feat she improved on the following year by capturing two ships in two days in the Atlantic.

The second Prince of Wales was rather less glorious, missing the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) after Admiral Robert Calder’s command aboard her at the Battle of Cape Finisterre was publicly questioned. The most distinguished of the subsequent Prince of Wales ships was the present vessel’s predecessor, which

Action stations: HMS Ardent fires during the Falklands War, 1982

saw action numerous times in the Second World War. She was responsible for curtailing the activities of the notorious Bismarck in 1941, scoring three direct hits and forcing the German battleship back to harbour. The British ship’s short career came to a disastrous end, however, when she was sunk off the coast of Malaya by Japanese bombers, two days after the raid on Pearl Harbor.

That Prince of Wales provides a direct link to Britain’s most recent naval victory, the campaign to retake the Falkland Islands 40 years ago.

As Charles Moore relates in his biography of Margaret Thatcher, the son of Prince of Wales’s Captain John Leach, who had gone down with his ship in 1941, was Sir Henry Leach (1923-2011), the First Sea Lord. In March 1982, soon after the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands, he barged his way into a Commons meeting with the Prime Minister. He told her that what Whitehall had called the ‘almost impossible task’ of retaking the Falkland Islands could – and should – be done: ‘We can, Prime Minister, and though it’s not my place to say this, we must.’

Mrs Thatcher replied, ‘Why?’

Leach said, ‘Because if we do not, or if we pussyfoot in our actions and do not achieve complete success, in another few months we shall be living in a different country whose word counts for little.’

Once the timetable of naval operations had been confirmed to her – when Leach told her the task force would take three weeks to steam to the South Atlantic, she at first thought he must have meant three days – Thatcher and her cabinet gave the fleet their full backing.

Readers will have their own recollections of an event which for many has not quite receded beyond memory and into history. I was a lucky schoolboy, whose Mediterranean ‘educational cruise’ was cut short when our ship, SS Uganda, was requisitioned as a hospital vessel. Don’t Cry for Me Argentina was played over the Tannoy before the captain – with all the lugubriousness of Neville Chamberlain in 1939 – announced the news that we were returning to port, in Naples. I don’t remember my shipmates singing Rule, Britannia!, as was reported, when we docked.

Back in England, I learnt that my mother’s cousin was actually part of the task force, flying Lynx helicopters, including an action against the submarine Santa Fe off South Georgia – part of the first successful recapture of British territory from the Argentinians.

The ship from which he and his comrades flew was one of 15 frigates in the task force, to go with the two aircraft carriers, eight destroyers, two amphibious landing platform docks, six submarines and more that took back the islands from the Argentinian junta.

One reason Leach had barged into that meeting was that he was upset about cuts to the Navy. One shudders to think what he would make of today’s top-heavy fleet. The two aircraft carriers are impressive icing on a bitesize cake. The whole Navy boasts only six destroyers, three of which are not available for service.

Unless something changes, Britain’s days of naval glory are definitely in the past, even if that past is more recent than you might think.