LONDON — A newly surfaced account of one of the Cold War’s most extraordinary naval chases has revealed how Britain came within hours of sinking an Argentine aircraft carrier that had once sailed under the Royal Navy’s own flag, a mission that could have decisively shortened the 1982 Falklands War and that hinged on a handful of torpedoes, a broken turbocharger and the vagaries of the South Atlantic wind.
The vessel at the center of the hunt was the ARA Veinticinco de Mayo, a Colossus-class carrier originally built for the Royal Navy as HMS Venerable and launched in 1943. She served Britain in the Pacific in 1945, was sold to the Netherlands in 1948 as the Karel Doorman, and was eventually acquired by Argentina in 1968. By 1982 she was the only aircraft carrier in the Argentine fleet and the spearhead of its naval power.
When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and South Georgia on April 2, 1982, Britain dispatched a task force of more than 100 ships to retake the islands. The Argentine Navy posed the single greatest threat to that force, and its two surface task groups were quickly identified as the most dangerous elements of the enemy order of battle.
The Veinticinco de Mayo, carrying A-4Q Skyhawk attack aircraft, S-2E Tracker anti-submarine planes and Sea King helicopters, was stationed north of the Falklands with three escorts, two British-built Type 42 destroyers and a World War II-era ex-U. S. Navy destroyer.
To the south lurked a second task force built around the ex-U. S. Navy light cruiser General Belgrano, which as the USS Phoenix had survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, screened by two ex-U.
S. destroyers.
British planners saw the two formations as the jaws of a pincer closing around the South Atlantic. Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, commanding the British task force built around the carriers HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible, had only 22 Sea Harriers with which to defend his ships and establish air superiority. Between them, the Argentine Air Force and Navy possessed roughly ten times as many aircraft, operating close to home while the British fought 8,000 miles from the United Kingdom at the end of a fragile logistics chain.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government concluded that the Argentine Navy had to be removed from the equation before any amphibious landing could be attempted. Three nuclear-powered submarines, HMS Conqueror, HMS Splendid and HMS Spartan, had already been sent south in advance of the task force to deal with the twin threats.
Conqueror, a Churchill-class hunter-killer commanded by Commander Chris Wreford-Brown, displaced 4,900 tons submerged and carried a crew of 103. She was armed with six torpedo tubes firing the new Mark 24 Tigerfish acoustic homing torpedo and the World War II-vintage Mark 8. Splendid and Spartan, both Swiftsure-class boats, carried five tubes each.
All three could exceed 28 knots underwater.
British intelligence, aided by the breaking of Argentine naval codes, knew roughly where the enemy carrier was operating. Conqueror hunted south of the Falklands, Splendid patrolled the northwest quadrant and Spartan the northeast. It was Argentina that drew first blood, however, when a Tracker flying from the Veinticinco de Mayo on May 1 located the British carriers and the main task force.
The Argentine carrier prepared to launch her Skyhawks against the British carriers, an attack that could have changed the course of the war. But the launch failed. The Skyhawks, catapulted by steam, needed to fly into a headwind to get airborne when fully fuelled and bombed up, and unusually for the South Atlantic there was insufficient wind.
The strike was scrubbed.
That same night a patrolling Royal Navy Sea Harrier found the Veinticinco de Mayo. Meanwhile Conqueror, operating south of the islands, had located the Belgrano group. Permission to attack was granted by Thatcher, and on May 2 Conqueror fired three Mark 8 torpedoes.
Two struck the old cruiser, which sank in about 20 minutes with the loss of 323 crew. Survivors were rescued by the escorting destroyers, and Conqueror withdrew, later depth-charged and hunted by Argentine aircraft.
One arm of the Argentine trap had been destroyed. The commander of the Veinticinco de Mayo understood immediately that the same fate could befall his carrier, with more British submarines known to be in the area. The Argentine submarine Santa Fe had already been crippled by depth charges and missiles from British helicopters during the recapture of South Georgia and sank at her moorings.
The German-built San Luis remained at large and would launch several unsuccessful torpedo attacks on British warships in the following weeks, but she could not change the strategic picture.
The loss of the Belgrano ordered the Argentine Navy to withdraw. The Veinticinco de Mayo and her destroyers were directed to make for home. She turned west, but boiler problems cut her speed to between 18 and 20 knots.
Splendid and Spartan raced to intercept. Splendid, commanded by Commander Roger Lane-Nott, was closest. Spartan was ordered to hold station.
As the carrier entered shallow waters she began zigzagging, forcing Splendid to slow to avoid underwater obstacles. The carrier’s three escorts took up positions five miles off her bow and quarters to guard against submarine and air attack. The Veinticinco de Mayo was well equipped to defend herself: her four Trackers could fly six-hour anti-submarine patrols using parachute-dropped Jezebel sonobuoys, submarine-hunting surface search radar and electronic detectors able to pick up radio and radar emissions.
The British submarines, though capable of remaining submerged for weeks, had to come to periscope depth regularly for visual searches and to communicate with London by radio. If a Tracker found a possible submarine it would make a visual inspection and use its magnetic anomaly detector to pinpoint the target before attacking with Mark 44 lightweight homing torpedoes or Mark 54 depth charges. The carrier’s Sea King helicopters, fitted with dipping sonar of three-mile range, depth charges and acoustic homing torpedoes, provided close-in protection while the Trackers patrolled up to 100 miles out.
On May 3 Splendid closed the gap enough for Lane-Nott to get a visual on the carrier’s escorts, but not the carrier herself. At 05:30 the next morning Splendid was detected by a Tracker. She went deep and the aircraft lost contact, but the Argentine force was now badly rattled: a British submarine was very close and clearly hunting the carrier.
At 06:30 Splendid surfaced to periscope depth again, acquiring the escorts and the carrier herself. She closed the distance and began to maneuver for a shot, but by the time she was in range the Veinticinco de Mayo and her escorts had crossed into Argentine territorial waters. Under the rules of engagement Splendid was forbidden to attack so close to the mainland.
The carrier headed north, dipping in and out of territorial waters under her Tracker umbrella. At 07:43 on May 5 a Tracker acquired a visual on a possible submarine and dropped an acoustic torpedo. The contact disappeared.
Sea Kings were scrambled, dipping sonar picked up mechanical signals, and a second Tracker dropped three sonobuoys an hour later. A second acoustic torpedo was dropped, but it too vanished. Splendid was by then 130 miles south of the carrier, and the contact was probably a Soviet, Chilean or American submarine.
On May 7 Splendid abandoned the hunt after suffering damage to one of her turbochargers. Spartan moved in to try to find the Veinticinco de Mayo along the Argentine coast, but the carrier’s use of shallow water slowed the submarine too much. On May 9 the carrier reached the safety of the port of Puerto Belgrano.
She did not put to sea again for the remainder of the war.
In the words attributed to the Duke of Wellington, it had been a close-run thing. Splendid had almost caught the Veinticinco de Mayo, and had she done so she would have sunk her. Analysts are equally clear about the reverse scenario: had the carrier launched her Skyhawks on May 1, even a single bomb hit on either British carrier could have altered the entire outcome of the conflict.
Two of the Argentine carrier’s escorts carried the feared MM38 Exocet anti-ship missile, and given the near-suicidal bravery Argentine pilots displayed against British ships later in May, some of the ten Skyhawks might well have penetrated the defensive screen and struck Hermes or Invincible.
Argentina surrendered on June 14, 1982, after ten weeks of fighting. Argentine aircraft sank two Royal Navy destroyers and two frigates, plus three other major vessels, and damaged many more. The toll would almost certainly have been worse had the Veinticinco de Mayo played a larger part.
The old carrier was eventually stripped of spares to supply another World War II British Colossus-class carrier in South American service, the Brazilian Navy’s Minas Gerais, and was scrapped in 2000. HMS Splendid was decommissioned in 2004 and HMS Spartan in 2006; both are among some 20 ex-Royal Navy nuclear-powered submarines currently held in long-term storage.
The episode remains one of the least celebrated and most consequential submarine operations of the postwar era, a reminder that the Falklands campaign was decided as much by wind, boiler pressure and a damaged turbocharger as by the courage of the men who fought it.