For centuries the Royal Navy was the hallmark of naval power. Two years ago Britain celebrated the 200th anniversary of Horatio Lord Nelson’s stunning victory at Trafalgar. Sea power was the glue that held together the far-flung British Empire, upon which, as the saying went, the sun never set. More recently that navy was a major contributor in winning two world wars. Alas, those glory days are well in the past, and the future appears even dimmer. The sun has long since set on the empire, and the Royal Navy has become evanescent as well. Earlier this year the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Tony Blair announced its intention to make dramatic reductions in the size of the fleet and to place a five-year moratorium on officer promotions.
Even so, history tells us it was Great Britain that fought the only true naval war in the more than 60 years since the conclusion of World War II. That was 25 years ago when it battled the Argentine Navy in the Falklands. The war included air strikes, ship sinkings by missiles, bombing by naval aircraft, fire overwhelming warships, amphibious assaults, carrier operations, and the sinking of a cruiser by torpedoes fired from a nuclear-powered submarine. The Royal Navy was fighting on blue water, thousands of miles from the British home islands.
That war was also something of a parable on the value of deterrence. We never know the cost of wars that aren’t fought because potential enemies conclude that the price for their aggression would be too great. In the spring of 1982 both Britain and Argentina learned the price when deterrence fails. At the time, Admiral Harry Train was commander-in-chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Speaking at a conference held shortly after the war’s end, Train made a perceptive observation. He remarked on the reduction in the size and reach of the Royal Navy in the years leading up to the Falklands War. Train recounted Great Britain’s decision in the 1960s to withdraw its forces from east of the Suez Canal and to decommission its aircraft carriers. As a result of that decline, he said, Argentina’s leaders concluded that Britain no longer had the stomach to fight for its overseas interests and thus embarked on its venture to seize and occupy the Falklands, known to Argentina as the Malvinas.
What Argentina had not counted on was the iron will of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was determined that the Falklands were indeed worth fighting for. That included the mobilization of thousands of personnel and the requisitioning of a great many vessels (known at the time as STUFF— ships taken up from trade) to bridge the thousands of miles to the South Atlantic. Train concluded that the cost Britain paid to fight that war was far more than it would have paid to have maintained its forces east of the Suez in the intervening years and thus to deter Argentina.
In his Naval Institute oral history, Admiral Train discussed the Falklands War at some length. He revealed that the Argentine exchange naval officer on his staff gave him no forewarning of his country’s plans to make an attack, probably because he hadn’t been tipped off himself. A U.S. naval officer was serving on board the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano in a liaison role. When the cruiser sailed on what would prove to be her final sortie—the one in which she was torpedoed and sunk—the U.S. officer was put ashore and went to his home in Argentina. In the interests of neutrality, he sent no reports to the United States at the time.
But, as Admiral Train recalled, American neutrality was not really neutral. One day Train received a huge surprise at his morning briefing. A member of his staff was discussing the available supplies of various weapons. When he came to air-to-air Sidewinder missiles, the briefer reported that there were none on hand in Atlantic Fleet weapon stations. Train thus learned that Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Hayward had transferred all the spare Sidewinders to the British without consulting him. What the Americans couldn’t supply were aircraft carriers. Instead, the British operated with through-deck cruisers and Harrier short- takeoff aircraft.
As it was, one of the through-deck cruisers, the Invincible, might have been done in but wasn’t. The Argentines launched an air strike with Exocet missiles against the Invincible, but the containership Atlantic Conveyor, which was carrying helicopters, was in the path, took the missile instead, and sank. The Argentine submarine San Luis hit a British combatant, perhaps the Invincible, with a torpedo, but it didn’t explode— fortunes of war. Iron bombs launched by Argentine A-4 Skyhawks sank the destroyer Coventry and frigates Antelope and Ardent. Super Etendards fired Exocets that sank the destroyer Sheffield. This was a kind of at-sea fighting not seen since then.
In making a case study of the Falklands War, Admiral Train talked afterward with leaders from both sides. Included were discussions with Argentine leaders who had been jailed, essentially for losing the war. He learned of the miscalculations both nations had made in the incremental steps that led to the conflict. And, as we now know from the vantage of a quarter century, he was examining what was probably Britain’s last major use of naval and maritime power on behalf of its national interests.