James Barrington - 11 Jun

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.

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 oclock 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 Navys only other capital ship, HMS Illustrious, still in build at the Swan Hunter Yard on Tyneside, down to the South Atlantic, just in case

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 ships 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.

Its a clever piece of equipment, only marred by the apparent inability of the designer to see that its 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.

Ive 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 Im doing some bizarre sort of exercise, because that is the only position which will stop the bunk instantly slamming closed.

Once Ive 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 Im 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 doesnt, in fairness, do the sock much good, but frankly thats 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.