Eddie Whitaker was leading radio operator on the HMS Sheffield when it was sunk by enemy fire in 1982 during the Falklands War. A timely trip to the toilet may have saved his life...

An emotional homecoming for Eddie Whitaker as his entire street come out to greet him

Eddie remembers what a shock going to war had been in the first place. In May 1982 the HMS Sheffield had been in the Gulf and the Middle East for four months and they were 4 days away from being homeward bound."One of the lads actually had been running abit of a saucy catalogue after Christmas, so alot of the lads had various items of sexy lingerie stuffed in our lockers to give to girlfriends etc".

The crew were told that they weren't in fact going home at all, but were heading for the Falklands instead. At that point in time Eddie thought, along with a good deal of other people, that the Falklands were in Scotland, so he was pretty shocked to discover that they were 8,000 miles away near Argentina. "The atmosphere, from being one of great excitement and happiness, changed to one of anger and frustration and great sadness. It was the last place we wanted to go. I'd been away for four and a half months, I'd just turned twenty-three. I didn't want to do down and start any fights with people. We'd been away for four months, done our job, we said 'there's fifty or sixty other ships in the fleet - send some of them".

A couple of days later the crew were given a piece of paper and ordered to make out their last Will and Testament, which brought home to them all the seriousness of what could happen to them. They'd been listening to the World Service to keep up with the news, and the general consensus was that a political solution would be found. Of course, as we now know, that didn't happen.

May 4th 1982, recalls Eddie, was a lovely flat calm day. They were at what was called 'relaxed action stations'. They'd been in the war zone for about a week, and there'd been a couple of incursions by the Argentine Air Force and a few air battles. The atmosphere aboard ship was quite subdued, partly because the day before had seen the sinking of the Belgrano. "Although initially when the news came over that the Belgrano had gone down there was general happiness and cheering - yeah, we'd got one of them - but then it transpired that many, many young sailors had been killed. There is a common bond amongst sailors of any nationality, so we were pretty subdued that day".

Around lunchtime Eddie was in the main communications office, between the galley and the operations room. Eddie's colleague Tiny went to the toilet first, and Eddie went abit later. The toilet was at the stern of the ship, which meant walking down the starboard passageway. He remembers looking in the galley and seeing the chefs and Chinese laundrymen getting the meals ready. Eddie remembers coming out of the toilet and hearing an almighty bang. "I can only equate it to someone putting a metal bucket over your head and smacking with a metal hammer - that came close to describing the sound".

Everything came to a dead stop. Eddie didn't know what had happened, and thought perhaps that one of the engines had blown. He intended to make his way back to the communication office, but smoke coming down both the passageways made that impossible. Alot of the accommodation was at the back of the ship, so people woken up by the noise were very confused about what was happening. After an hour or so it had become apparent that the Sheffield had been hit by a missile, and another British ship had come alongside to help fight the fires that were raging inside the ship. This went on for four hours.

Eddie was pretty helpless where he was in the ship, because he was away from the scene of the incident. Eventually the order was given to abandon ship and all the able-bodied men were transferred off the ship. It was only later that day that Eddie found out the true extent of the injuries that had occurred - that, in fact, an Exocet missile weighing almost a ton had smashed into the ship on the starboard side at 650 miles per hour. It went in just above the water line, crashed through the starboard passageway, into the galley and then down into the engine room and, amazingly, didn't explode. "If that missile had exploded, I wouldn't be here telling you this because it would have ripped the ship apart". Tragically, all the chefs and the Chinese laundrymen died, and several officers and men in the engineroom and computer room also perished. Everyone in the communications room where Eddie had been was injured, though none were killed.

Eddie considers himself to have been very lucky. "If Tiny hadn't been late coming back from the toilet, at best I would have been in the office and would have been injured, and at worst I would have been walking down the passageway when the missile came in and that would have been it for me". As he recalls it now, the whole experience had a very unreal quality which has stayed with him. Eddie hasn't seen several of the lads from the office since that day. There have been several reunions but they have been very poorly attended. Eddie is looking forward to this, the 20th anniversary reunion, because almost everyone will be there and a few toasts will be drunk to the men who were killed.