Bomb Alley

Falkland Islands 1982: Aboard HMS Antrim at War

David Yates

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Maritime
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781473812567
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This is the untold story of the Falklands War as experienced by a below-decks seaman on one of the most important ships to be despatched to the South Atlantic. It is a no-holds-barred account as seen through the eyes of a Royal Navy matelot who shared the terror of the first encounter with Argentinean forces when South Georgia was retaken from the invaders in Operation Paraquat. Then HMS Antrim lead the first attack into the North Falklands Sound where she destroyed enemy defences and later became part of the main force anti-aircraft defences in the infamous 'Bomb Alley' or San Carlos Water. During one of the many air attacks the ship was struck by a bomb that destroyed her defensive missile system, but through pure chance the bomb did not explode and remained aboard wedged in the aft 'heads'. All around the stricken ship other RN vessels were taking extreme punishment from the almost continuous onslaught from low-flying Argentinean jets. HMS Antelope, HMS Coventry and the Atlantic Conveyer were all lost within a short period whilst the army was trying to establish a bridgehead.

Contents

	Acknowledgements
	Foreword
1	The Laughing Sailor
2	Where The Hell Are The Falklands?
3	HMS Antrim
4	The Last Runs Ashore
5	Off To War
6	Crossing The Line
7	Heading South
8	The Tank
9	South Georgia
10	Black Day at Grytviken
11	The ‘Three Bears’
12	Total Exclusion Zone
13	Fanning Head
14	Bomb Alley Day
15	Licking our Wounds and Losing More Ships
16	Task Force Ferry Boat
17	South Georgia Guard Ship
18	We Want to Go Home
19	Homeward Bound
20	Lucky Antrim’s Homecoming
21	Home Again
	Glossary
	Naval Cook’s Glossary
	Naval Nicknames
	Index

Acknowledgements

I should like to express my sincerest thanks to all those people who knowingly or unknowingly inspired or helped me to write this book. To those closest to me: my children, Adam, Elizabeth and Daisy, my mother and Michael, my brother Martin and my sisters, Helen and Brenda, and my late father and grandparents. I should also like to offer my greatest thanks to all those who so painstakingly critiqued every word: Martha Bottrell, Mike Morgan, Mark Palethorpe, Brian Humphries, Andy Findlay, Eric Paterson, Eve Townsend and Jane Baker, and last but not least my publishers, Pen and Sword.

Finally, I wish to dedicate this book to the immortal memory of my old boss and dearest shipmate on HMS Antrim, ‘Whisky’ Dave Osborne. Cheers to you all.

Foreword

David Yates was born on the banks of the Thames at Taplow in September 1957 and was raised a son of Berkshire in the leafy village of Waltham St Lawrence, in the Thames Valley between Windsor, Ascot, Henley and Maidenhead.

Bored with country life and yearning for global travel, at eighteen, David joined the Royal Navy at HMS Ganges in March 1976. In a first stint of service, as ‘Rowdy’ Yates he served on HMS Salisbury and then HMS Antrim, where he saw active service during the Falklands War of 1982. He left the Navy in March 1985 to pursue a career as a Catering Manager, but when invited to return, rejoined in 1987.

He again visited the Falklands on HMS Nottingham in 1988, and saw further active service on HMS Exeter in the Gulf War of 1991. Suffering from ill-health resultant from this conflict, he eventually left the Royal Navy for a second and final time in 2000.

David’s autobiographical account covers the period from his birth right up to his return from the Falklands War in 1982, where his earliest and last naval recollections were of fairground Laughing Sailors. The book draws heavily upon the diary he maintained before and at the time of the war, the letters he wrote home, and the three large scrapbooks he produced on his return.

Most of the characters described in this book have been granted anonymity through the use of the enormous range of traditional ancient and modern nicknames used in the Royal Navy, a loose index of which is included. However, not all names have been fictionalized. After all, who ever heard of a female British Prime Minister called ‘Baggy Snatcher’, or an American president named ‘Ronnie Raygun’?

Apologies to anyone I offend in this book, but I had to record our actual feelings and sayings at the time.

The strong language used between the men on the lower deck on board was discouraged when ashore, and certainly never used in the presence of women – at least not in the Royal Navy in 1982. An extensive glossary is also included so that civvies can understand what we matelots were on about.

CHAPTER ONE

The Laughing Sailor

Three nightmares disturbed my sweeter childhood dreams. The first two were based on the unknown fears of falling from a high-sided ship into the sea, and being buried alive in a dark metal coffin. My third however, was based on a real experience as a curly-haired three year old, when I had a terrifying confrontation with a coin-operated ‘laughing sailor’ in an amusement arcade on the Isle of Wight. It did not make me laugh – no sooner had I dropped my old blackened copper penny into the slot than the hideous puppet burst into a barrage of hideous laughter. I screamed in terror, wet myself and ran towards my mother. I was not to know then that one day I would become a laughing sailor myself and that in the Falklands War, my first two nightmares would almost come true.

I first heard of the place they called the Falkland Islands on Friday, 2 April 1982. I had climbed into bed as normal at 0815 after finishing my night watch in HMS Antrim’s main galley. I was so tired that I skipped my usual shower, and just stripped off my boots and my flour-encrusted chef’s whites, grabbed hold of the thick overhead bar, and slung my tired carcass up into my pit. Hopefully I would sleep away the remaining daytime hours until my next shift. I felt much better now than I had on 29 March when we had sailed from Gibraltar. Then, my body had been full of booze from the weekend runs ashore. A terrible hangover racked my brain. In the choppy conditions that lay just outside the breakwater, my usual bout of first-day seasickness had soon followed.

Now I felt thankful the seasickness was behind me. After reading several pages of Sven Hassle’s March Battalion, I flicked off the yellow-glazed bunk light and drew the cotton sleeping-bag liner over my head. Thoughts of Jackie, the naughty hairdresser I had seen on my last night ashore in Portsmouth ran through my mind. I would see her again when we were back in our base port in six days’ time and I wondered if we would reach the same intimate climax together.

Suddenly my attempts to drift off were disturbed by the muffled sound of the commander making an announcement over the ship’s radio broadcast. Half asleep, and with my head nestled deep in my sleeping bag, I could not make out the content of the ‘pipe’, so I just yawned and buried my head even further. Then the door started repeatedly opening and shutting – each time louder and noisier than before. Another ‘pipe’. This time I could just about make out the captain’s voice – but my left ear was still too tightly clamped below my armpit to make out what he was saying, so again I tried hard to switch off. Then the lights were turned on, and a voice yelled out, ‘Keep the bloody noise down. Get that fuckin’ light off.’

No one responded. There was more opening and closing of doors and more clumping feet, the sound of steamy boots being hurled into the pile by the door, and people noisily wrenching open metal locker doors. I was about to call out myself, when the voice I could now recognize as Paddy Flynn’s, boomed out, ‘KEEP THE BLOODY NOISE DOWN, AND GET THAT FUCKIN’ LIGHT OFF.’

This time there was a response, and I was conscious of my curtains being swished open before someone shook my shoulder, and I recognized Barry Big Ball’s voice mouthing something at me. I could not take in what he was saying, so I moved his hand from my shoulder and groaned, ‘Barry – bugger off and leave me alone. Get that light off – I’m a nightworker and I’m trying to get some bloody sleep here.’

Barry ignored my protests. ‘Come on Rowdy. Up you get, mate. You heard the skipper’s pipe. You’ve got to get out of bed right now.’

‘What are you on about? What skipper’s pipe? What’s happening?’

‘Come on Rowdy. Out of bed. We’re going down the Falklands, mate.’

‘I’m not going anywhere. I’m a bloody nightworker and I’m staying right here.’

‘No Rowdy, you don’t understand mate. We’re going down the Falkland Islands to fight a war and you’ve got to get up and write home and make your will out.’

The mention of making my will out was chilling enough, but the thought of writing home made me think of my family in Waltham St Lawrence.

I arrived in the world on 29 September 1957 in the small Thames-side village of Taplow on the Berkshire-Buckinghamshire border. David William Yates shared the birthday of Lord Horatio Nelson, who had been safely delivered exactly 199 years before, without the aid of a whiff of gas and air for the mother or father – but no doubt aided by a tot of rum or two!

The eventual oldest of four children, I started life in a caravan and large wooden shed at the back of a great aunt’s house in the sleepy village of Waltham St Lawrence, 6 miles from Taplow on the old back road between Maidenhead and Reading. Our ‘outback’ homestead had been acquired the year before for Mum and Dad’s wedding and remained our cosy little home until we were allocated a local council house when I was two.

Other than my early encounter with the laughing sailor, I knew nothing of the navy, although as I grew older I learned that when I joined the armed forces I would be continuing a family tradition going back several decades.

We stayed in our first proper house until my father’s mother died in 1962, when we moved across the village to stay next door to my grandfather, who shared the same name as myself. Grandad David Yates had not been well for some time, suffering from leukemia – the strain of which probably put paid to my poor grandmother. He was not expected to live much longer himself, so we moved in next door to care for him in his final days. But Grandad was a tough old Scottish boot, who defied all the odds to live a further eleven years.

My earliest recollections of him were of his strange-sounding tongue and the missing little finger on his right hand. He used to play games with us, pretending to lose the finger in his pocket or behind his back. In reality, as he told us from a very early age, he had lost it during the First World War when he had been shot by a sniper at the Battle of Loos in France on 25 September 1915. The German bullet hit him in the shoulder and knocked him clean out on the battlefield, and when he came to, he just managed to crawl back to his own lines. The wound somehow damaged the tendons in his hand and the removal of his right ‘pinky’ resulted in an honourable discharge from the Army in 1916. Thereafter, he received a weekly war pension for his injury, but often told us how he could have got an even bigger award had he also had the next finger removed. However, although it was almost entirely useless, he did not want the look of his hand to be spoilt too much – besides, he said, it would have looked a bit funny when waving to people with only two fingers!

Despite his injury, a lifetime of hardship and his later severe illness, Grandad always came across to me as a bit of a joker. I remember one of the earliest tales he told about his life in the trenches. A Scottish soldier had single-handedly attacked a trench full of Germans, shooting and stabbing all of them bar the last one, whom he wildly slashed at from a distance with his bayonet. ‘Ha ha, Tommy, you mizzed,’ said the German.

‘Oh yeah?’ said Jock ‘Just wait until ye shake yer heed!’ Playing war games at school, minus the bayonet, I always used that gag to win ‘you’re dead’ arguments in the dry shallow ditches that we used at the bottom of the large, green, school playing-field.

Grandad also showed us his old army photographs and told us many other stories of his life before, during and after the war. He had left school at fourteen to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps in the Lanarkshire coal mines. At sixteen he joined the Territorials of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, so that he could get an annual holiday away with his pals – which he could not get from the pit.

After returning from the war with his ‘Blighty wound’ he was billeted and then discharged from the army at Brighton, where he obtained a rehabilitation job suitable for someone with his disability, as a diamond polisher at the local Oppenheimer diamond works. Romantically, he met my grandmother whilst sheltering from the rain in a shop doorway overlooking Brighton pier, and later they moved back to a small hamlet called Ash Gill near Larkhall in Lanarkshire, Scotland, where my father was born at the start of the great depression in September 1922.

From all his old army stories and pictures, I learned at a very early age that the Great War must have been terrible, but that there had also been some funny moments too. I never forgot the tales he told me, and the memories proved inspirational when I eventually came to fight my own battles. He and his brother survived the First World War and my father and his brother later survived the Second, so I always hoped that family luck would be on my side.

My father was seventeen on 6 September 1939, three days after war broke out. Whilst he did not actually see any hand-to-hand fighting, he did lose his formative years in the defence of his country, serving as an armourer in the Royal Air Force almost continuously throughout the long conflict.

His father-in-law, Bert Wilkinson, had also served in the Se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright Page
• Contents