17 May: Argentine Navy Day passes without incident

On 17 May 1814 a fledgling Argentine Navy fleet under the command of Irish-born William Brown defeated a Spanish force in the young nation’s fight for freedom from the European colonial power.

 

Argentina continues to celebrate Navy Day on 17 May – and on that day in 1982, a Monday, British forces in the South Atlantic were expecting an Argentine attack to mark the occasion.

 

According to Battle Group Commander Admiral Sandy Woodward, in his book One Hundred Days, Argentine pilots did indeed venture out looking for the carrier Battle Group and its two prize targets, aircraft carriers HMS Hermes, the flagship of the British maritime force, and HMS Invincible.

 

The loss of either ship would have put the Operation Corporate – the campaign to retake the Falkland Islands – in jeopardy, so Admiral Woodward was careful to keep the carriers as far away from the danger of air attacks as possible, far out in the Atlantic to the east of the Falklands.

 

On 17 May brief contacts were spotted, and Sea Harriers sent up to find the Etendards, but neither side came close to engaging with the enemy.

 

On the same morning destroyer HMS Glamorgan rejoined the battle group having been sailing around Choiseul Sound in East Falkland and the Stanley area, maintaining the deception that a British landing could happen close to the Islands’ capital.

 

Sea Harrier reconnaissance missions in a number of locations around East Falkland also kept the Argentine defence guessing.

 

In the evening of 17 May the two carriers, along with supply ships RFA Fort Austin and RFA Resource, steamed away to the north-east, heading out of the Total Exclusion Zone into the open ocean to rendezvous with the Amphibious Group, led by assault ships HMS Fearless and HMS Intrepid.

 

On 17 May one of the commercial oil tankers taken up from trade by the MOD sailed from Gibraltar for Ascension Island  for the second time in the conflict.

 

British Tamar, a BP River-class ship, had been fitted with replenishment-at-sea (RAS) equipment in Portsmouth in early April to allow the transfer of fuel while under way.

 

She had then loaded up at Milford Haven and sailed for Ascension on 14 April, reaching the island via Madeira two weeks later.

 

British Tamar was then positioned in an area of ocean to the south-west of to refuel task force ships, which included a record-breaking RAS with RFA Plumleaf which lasted almost 53 hours.

 

After returning to Ascension she sailed to Gibraltar to refill her tanks, arriving at the Rock on 14 May and sailing again on 17 May.

 

Other tankers were just as busy as maritime forces converged on the Falklands; RFA Pearleaf transferred 700 tons of furnace fuel oil over the course of four hours in a RAS with liner-turned-troopship SS Canberra, and also refuelled HMS Fearless and HMS Intrepid.

 

Further south, another Leaf-class tanker, RFA Appleleaf, RASed with both Royal Navy carriers and with two frigates.

 

And while there was no sign of any progress on the diplomatic front, the European nations continued to support the British position as they renewed a package of sanctions against Argentina for a further week.

 

Today’s image from the Imperial War Museum collection (© IWM SFPU-N-1084B-25) shows Sea Harriers of 801 Naval Air Squadron operating from aircraft carrier HMS Invincible in the South Atlantic.

 

* These posts can only give a brief sense of what was a complex and fast-moving situation 40 years ago, and cannot cover the involvement of every ship, squadron and unit in detail – for a much more comprehensive account see the Falklands section of naval-history.net at https://www.naval-history.net/NAVAL1982FALKLANDS.htm

 

May 17 Sea Harriers