Falklands casualties

I have at my elbow a warning. An English magazine – as far as I'm concerned, the fairest in judgement, the best informed without being cocky or show-offy about it, something that even the most knowledgeable people find hard not to be – in this magazine, there are seven pieces about the Falklands, all of them informative and thoughtful.

Alas, the magazine was published one day, three days later it was available here. During those three days, the news came in first of the torpedoing of the Argentine's only cruiser and then of the successful attack by an Argentine jet fighter on the British destroyer, HMS Sheffield. Five of the pieces I was about to read were, I won't say no longer relevant, their thinking was based on certain assumptions that the history of naval warfare has led us to accept.

I recalled at once a passage in Winston Churchill's memoirs of the Second World War. It's his comment on the sinking of the two battleships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse by Japanese bombing planes off Singapore on 10 December 1941. Incidentally, the Admiral Phillips who's named was the commander of a newly formed British eastern fleet based on Singapore and this is the passage:

'In judging the actions of Admiral Phillips during these calamitous days, it should be emphasised that there were sound reasons for his belief that his intended attack at Kuantan would be outside the effective range of enemy shore-based torpedo bombers, which were his chief anxiety and that he would have only to deal with hastily organised strikes by ordinary long-range bombers during his retirement. The distance from the Saigon airfields to Kuantan was 400 miles and at that date no attacks by torpedo bombers had been attempted at anything approaching this range. The efficiency of the Japanese in air warfare was, at this time, greatly underestimated both by ourselves and by the Americans.'

Two phrases in that comment are bound to re-echo today. 'His intended attack would be outside the effective range of enemy shore-based torpedo bombers' and 'the efficiency of the enemy in air warfare was, at this time, greatly underestimated both by ourselves and by the Americans'. Now compare this with what a little less than a week ago read as a sensible and reassuring passage in my magazine.

Quote: 'The immediate battle is most likely to be in the air. Individual British ships would be hard for Argentina's airmen to locate. On the other hand, the British ships' radars could detect fighter-bombers approaching from the mainland and the Sea Harriers from the aircraft carriers could intercept most of them before they could get to the ships.'

Nothing was written here about attacking fighter-bombers able, with refuelling in the air, to stay well within their safe flying range but able to fire missiles that evade ships' radar by skimming a few feet above the water and hitting their programmed target from 20 miles away.

A week ago, I heard an American retired admiral, a lifelong sailor and at one time the commander of the American Pacific fleet. When he was asked, before last weekend, what sort of strategy he expected, he replied that he thought the body of the British fleet would be immune to air attack, that a not very long blockade would be enough to force the surrender of the Argentines shivering in their pup tents on the freezing Falklands and that he gave Argentina about a week to give in. This week, he's not been heard from.

As I talk, there's much to-ing and fro-ing between officials and the Secretary-General of the United Nations and in spite of the impotence of the United Nations in being able to enforce withdrawals, surrenders, truces, in the many recent invasions and conflicts around the world, the United Nations does seem to offer the safest haven in which both sides might save face.

Certainly, unless one side or the other can be clearly seen to be the winner, if more lives are lost, if the battle stays even into the ferocious winter weather, then it seems to me the United Nations would look more and more like a place of sanctuary.

In the meantime, the sinking of the Sheffield has changed the stress of a debate that is going on in Washington and will soon come to a full dress hearing before a sub-committee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the sub-committee on sea power. Now since Mr Reagan started to run for the presidency, he's been advocating an expansion of the American navy and I remarked the other week on the new, or revised, respect being given by the administration to battleships.

Let me remind you of the relevant argument. The Reagan administration, much to the astonishment of even old battle hands, is bringing out of the mothballs and making shipshape four battleships that saw famous service in the Second War. Of course, this was not, it can not be, in the American system a personal decision of the president, even though he is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Unlike General Galtieri, however, he must, through his Secretary of the Navy and other top advisers, make his case before Congress and I hope it's not snide to throw in here the reminder that the impressive national Congress building in Buenos Aires has been empty and its Congress in suspension for the past eight years.

So, the appropriate committees are favourable considering the administration's plans to revive the battleship. Their chief persuader is a former air force pilot, of all people, who has spent the last few years studying tactical warfare. He has convinced the administration that in a situation not unlike that which would ultimately confront the British fleet off the Falklands, in a situation of what navy men call 'forcible entry' – that's to say, landing combat troops in hostile territory – nothing we know about so far can guarantee them essential continuous protection like long-range naval gunfire.

Well, as you can imagine, the sinking of the Sheffield, more even than the sinking of the General Belgrano, has enlivened the debate in the Senate and given new fuel to opponents of the president's plan. What it has quickly come to is a debate about the effectiveness or the vulnerability of naval forces in the new age of guided missiles and torpedoes. Everybody is suddenly talking about the French-built Exocet, or as pedants say 'Exo-say', the surface-skimming, radar-guided missile that exploded on the Sheffield.

This naval debate is, of course, part of the larger debate on the 1983 budget – and I ought to say here, to counter a misapprehension that is as widespread here as it is overseas that the 1983 budget is the first of President Reagan's independent budgets. This year's spending, on everything, is a revision of the last of President Carter's budgets. The 1982 budget provides for a total outlay of $725.3 billion. Next year, the Reagan budget proposes to spend $757 billions and this includes spending on social services and the like that is more, not much more as some people would like, but more than it was for this year. A year, by the way, in which inflation has fallen dramatically.

Also, it's become part of the grudging popular wisdom to say that Mr Reagan's stubborn determination to slash income taxes will produce a drastic slump in revenues. Once again, if you look at the document, you can see that whereas the total budget receipts for 1982 will be $626 billion, the 1983 estimate is 661 billions, almost 40 billion more.

I had to bring this in because it will be used to weight the argument against expanding the navy, for which, by the way, the 1983 budget allows. So, now, the debate over the vital uses of the navy has been, as I say, heightened by the Falklands sinkings. The battleship argument has, for the moment, gone into mothballs.

The Secretary of the Navy himself believes the sinkings buttress his contention that the navy needs two more giant aircraft carriers and he's supported by another former naval man on the committee who said that the choice is now plain and blunt: retire to our own shores or build a superior navy.

The main opponent of the administration's plan is an old war hero from Colorado. Maybe I ought to remind you that most of the senators on the numerous specialised sub-committees are themselves experts of one sort or another in the specialty they watch over. The Coloradan says that the success of the Exocet has proved that surface ships are now more vulnerable than most of us had expected. He wants to amend the pending bill to plump for two smaller and faster aircraft carriers and dump the idea of another giant.

There's been a good deal of bandying about of figures and technical talk among the members of this sub-committee on sea power. It's all new and it's all highly relevant. The two Mark-24 torpedoes, guided acoustically, that sank the General Belgrano, the Sea Skua missiles flying from a helicopter that sank the Argentine patrol boat and the deadly threat from now on of the Exocet and its no doubt more sophisticated children.

It's worth remembering that the Exocet cost $200,000. The Sheffield cost $50 million. This simple equation caused one senator to conclude that the seas have shrunk, that there is no place to hide and that there is a quite new threat, even from the Third World.

Knowing laymen – know-alls – like to lament that generals always plan to fight the last war. It's a sad fact that it takes something like the Sheffield to rouse us to fight a present one. It's a tragic fact when the lesson is learned at the expense of our own families.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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