With much of the Advanced Group on its way to the Falklands, the main effort in the UK was directed towards the deployment of the main Carrier Battle Group (CVBG) which, through an almost unbelievable effort by military personnel, civil servants and dockyard workers, was pretty much formed up and following in the wake of the Advanced Group by Easter weekend in 1982.
Amongst the first to leave, on Monday 5 April from Portsmouth, were aircraft carriers HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible, with tanker RFA Pearleaf providing heavy fuel oil for the older Hermes.
On the same day Type 21 frigates HMS Alacrity and HMS Antelope sailed from Devonport with RFA fleet tanker Olmeda, while RFA replenishment ship Resource sailed from Rosyth to supply the carriers with Naval stores.
The first objective of many vessels involved in Operation Corporate was a rendezvous at Ascension Island, which became a crucial staging post for traffic heading south to or north from the Falklands, and allowed ships to sail quickly from the UK and beyond while plans and logistics were finalised, in the knowledge that equipment and personnel could be adjusted in mid-Atlantic.
The island is no more than the tip of an undersea volcanic feature which sits close to the Equator some 1,000 miles off the west coast of Africa and 1,400 miles from the east coast of South America.
The 35 square miles of the main island consists mainly of a barren, pitted expanse of lava flows and cinder – it is said to resemble the surface of the moon, with little vegetation or water to be found.
The surrounding Atlantic breaks on the island’s coast in a heavy swell, and there is no natural harbour of any significance, just a single small jetty in the main anchorage of Clarence Bay in the west and a small landing cove at English Bay to the north, capable of taking landing craft.
But in 1982 its position – 4,200 miles from the UK and 3,800 miles from the Falklands – made it an ideal stepping stone for British forces involved in the conflict.
Discovered by Portuguese explorer Joao da Nova on Ascension day in 1501, Ascension Island was thought to be of little significance and was not claimed by the Portuguese.
Mariners from many nations occasionally called in to replenish food supplies by hunting seabirds or the large green turtles that breed on the island, while goats were introduced by the Portuguese to supply meat.
There was no indigenous population, but man’s ability to survive in this hot, desert environment was proven when the worm-eaten, leaky Royal Navy frigate Roebuck, under the command of explorer, naturalist and privateer William Dampier, sprang a major leak off Ascension in February 1701 while on its way home from exploring Australia.
Unable to save her, Roebuck’s crew grounded the ship and salvaged what they could before settling in to their new, inhospitable home.
Fortunately, a freshwater spring was discovered inland, and the 60 or so sailors survived – though suffering many hardships – for two months until April, when ships of the East India Company discovered them and transported them back to England.
Formal settlement of the island by the British began in 1815 when a garrison was set up as insurance against an attempt to release Napoleon, who was imprisoned on St Helena, 800 miles to the south-east.
The island was formally claimed in October that year when brig-sloops HMS Zenobia and HMS Peruvian declared the territory belonged to King George III, and the Royal Navy designated the island a ‘stone frigate’ – HMS Ascension – with the classification ‘sloop-of-war of the smaller class’.
Royal Marines were stationed there from 1823 onwards.
The next major chapter in the island’s story was in the fields of science and technology. In 1877 astronomer Sir David Gill and his wife Isobel spent six months making (very accurate) observations of Mars – the beach where their observational equipment was transported to is still called Mars Bay.
And in 1899 the Eastern Telegraph Company – later Cable and Wireless – installed the first submarine communications cable from the island, connecting the UK and South Africa at the time of the Boer Wars. 23 years later control of Ascension passed from the Admiralty to the Eastern Telegraph Company.
Military infrastructure on the island was significantly upgraded during World War 2 when the United States built an air base to support anti-submarine patrols – it was, and still is, known as Wideawake, so named because of the nearby colony of sooty terns, locally referred to as ‘wideawake birds’ because of their loud, round-the-clock racket.
Although an important halfway house for American warplanes en route to Africa and Europe, there was only one wartime incident of note, in December 1941, when German submarine U-124 sailed close in to attack any ships at anchor or shell the cable station. A handful of shots from the shore battery on Cross Hill sent the U-boat packing.
In the 1960s the Wideawake runway was extended and widened, making it the longest runway in the world at that time – it later served as an emergency diversion runway for the NASA Space Shuttle, though it was never used as such. At this point the facility was controlled by the Americans (and operated by Pan Am Airways)
The island also hosted a GCHQ and American signals intercept station during the Cold War, and was a BBC signal relay station.
Ascension has no permanent residents – there is no ‘right to abode’ – and the population in the 1960s and 1970s tended to hover around 1,000, some of them coming from St Helena to find work on the island, and a fair proportion being American contractors, with families making up some of that number.
RAF Ascension Island, as Wideawake is formally known, was a relatively quiet airfield, run by fewer than 20 personnel, but when fully staffed at the height of the Falklands Conflict in 1982 Wideawake was for a period the busiest airfield in the world in terms of daily aircraft movements, and up to 1,500 British service personnel attended to the needs of the Task Force.
Amongst the vital cargo handled at Ascension during the conflict was mail, both official and private (the latter being so important to sustain morale) – the Royal Engineers Postal and Courier Service handled up to two tons of airmail daily, along with1,000 bags of parcels each week.
* 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 naval-history.net at https://www.naval-history.net/NAVAL1982FALKLANDS.htm
Today’s image from the Imperial War Museum collection (© IWM FKD 2206) shows helicopters at Wideawake airfield on Ascension during the Falklands campaign.
