Britain WAS right to sink the Belgrano: Newly released intelligence proves the Argentine ship had been ordered to attack our Task Force



About one minute before the first torpedo hit, Seaman Marcelo Pozzo had lain down on his bunk and was looking forward to some sleep.



He had been on duty for most of the day at the Damage Control Station in the heart of the light cruiser the General Belgrano as it pushed through the 15m waves of the South Atlantic, and he was due back on at midnight.



As soon as Pozzo closed his eyes, he felt a ‘hammer blow’ that propelled him into the air with such force that he hit the upper bunk.



The Belgrano's last moments. It now emerges the ship had been ordered to proceed into the Exclusion Zone at the time it was attacked

‘When I fell down, a heatwave engulfed me,’ he later recalled, ‘it felt as if the door of a huge blazing oven had suddenly opened.’



Pozzo rushed out of his berth, and saw his fellow sailors coming up from the lower decks.



He asked a friend what had happened, who answered him in no uncertain terms: ‘We’ve been torpedoed, you idiot!’



It was only then that Pozzo noticed that the skin on both his legs had been lacerated below the knees. In addition, his right forearm was completely burned, but because he was in shock, he felt no pain.

Dutifully, Pozzo made his way to Damage Control Station, but when he arrived, an officer told him to go to the sickbay.



Pozzo would never reach it, because the order was soon given to abandon ship.



A second torpedo had hit the Belgrano, and the captain, Hector Bonzo, knew that there was no chance of saving the 44-year-old vessel.



With the ship now listing severely to port, Pozzo made his way to the starboard side. He started to shin down a rope towards a raft.



Above him, comrades urged him to hurry up and jump, as the ship was rapidly sinking.



‘I calculated the trajectory,’ Pozzo later recalled, ‘and jumped.’



He was lucky, and landed squarely on the raft. Others were not so fortunate, and ended up in the freezing South Atlantic, where they perished within a few minutes.

The Belgrano (pictured) and two destroyers carried deadly Exocet missiles

Just then, Pozzo remembered, ‘from below the surface came several muffled explosions. That was the end. The General Belgrano would never come back.’



Since that fateful afternoon on May 2, 1982, the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser Belgrano by the British nuclear-powered submarine Conqueror has been regarded as one of the most controversial events of the Falklands War.



Many British critics of the action, which resulted in the deaths of 323 Argentinian sailors, see the sinking as a war crime.



These critics, who are invariably on the far Left, and include the former Labour MP Sir Tam Dalyell and the former Ministry of Defence civil servant Clive Ponting, argue that the Belgrano represented no threat, and was actually sailing away from the 200-mile Total Exclusion Zone declared by the British around the Falkland Islands.



In their eyes, the action was a disgraceful act of provocation by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher designed to escalate the conflict.



However, a new book reveals that these critics have been wrong all along, and the Belgrano was indeed a fair target, not least because — it now emerges — it had been ordered to proceed into the Exclusion Zone at the time it was attacked.



In The Silent Listener, the book’s author Major David Thorp recounts how in 1984 he was ordered by Mrs Thatcher to carry out an investigation — never published — into the circumstances of the sinking.



Given access to every document related to the Belgrano, Thorp, a member of a highly-secret signals-intercept unit during the Falklands War, describes in his book how he found an Argentinian signal intercepted by the British in which the Belgrano was ordered to rendezvous with other Argentinian warships at a location east of the islands, and well inside the Exclusion Zone.



This crucial new evidence flies in the face of what is often claimed by many Argentinians and their useful idiots among the British Left — that the Belgrano was heading back to her home port when she was sunk, and that she did not represent a threat to the British Task Force.



Nearly three decades later, it is now possible to tell the full story of the General Belgrano, and to show that the sinking, although horrific, was a justifiable act of war that probably saved more lives than it claimed.

HMS Conqueror returns home. It was commanded by 36-year-old Commander Christopher Wreford-Brown. Built in 1971, it carried a crew of more than 100

The Falklands were invaded by Argentina on April 2, 1982, and within three days the first ships of a British Task Force had set sail to the South Atlantic.



Commanded by the 49-year-old Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, the force eventually consisted of two aircraft carriers — Hermes and Invincible — and some 50 other warships and numerous support vessels.



Beneath the waves and sailing in secret, the Task Force also included a complement of nuclear-powered submarines.



Among them was Conqueror, commanded by 36-year-old Commander Christopher Wreford-Brown. Built in 1971, it carried a crew of more than 100.



As the Task Force sailed south, on April 12 the UK announced it was imposing a 200-mile Total Exclusion Zone around the Falkland Islands.

Any Argentinian vessel found inside the Zone would be attacked in order to stop the invaders from supplying their troops on the Islands.



However, the British soon realised the Zone would be too small, and on April 23, the Swiss government was asked to convey to the Argentinians a cable that declared ‘any approach on the part of Argentine warships, including submarines, naval auxiliaries or military aircraft, which could amount to a threat to interfere with the mission of the British Forces in the South Atlantic will encounter the appropriate response’.



The significance of this cable was appreciated by both sides, as it effectively turned the whole of the South Atlantic into a combat area.

As a result, it mattered little whether a ship was inside or outside the Exclusion Zone, or in which direction it was heading — any craft anywhere had been ruled ‘fair game’, and the Argentinians knew it.



What they could not know were the British Rules of Engagement, which dictated that British commanders still had to seek permission from the highest level in London to launch attacks on Argentinian craft which were outside the Exclusion Zone.



By April 29, the British Task Force arrived within 200 miles of the Falklands. Rear Admiral Woodward was concerned that his fleet would be caught in a pincer movement.



To the north lay the Argentinian aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo, along with an escort of around five ships, including two destroyers.



To the south-west of the Falklands, meanwhile, and just outside the Exclusion Zone, was the Belgrano and two destroyers which carried deadly Exocet missiles.

Minister of Defence, Sir John Nott (pictured with Margaret Thatcher in 1982), later observed of the attack: 'It was one of the easiest decisions of the whole war'

Woodward was desperate to attack the carrier, as she represented the greater threat, but the British submarines shadowing the ship had lost contact with her.

As a result, Woodward turned his attention to the Belgrano, which was being stalked by the Conqueror.



‘I had to take one claw out of the pincer,’ he later wrote. ‘So it would have to be the Belgrano and her destroyers.’



Woodward acknowledged that although the Belgrano was ‘not that big a threat’, she was unlikely to be a ‘push-over’.

In a previous life, the 608ft ship had been the Phoenix, and had belonged to the U.S. Navy, even surviving the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

‘I was rather afraid this venerable armoured veteran was approaching the end of her journey,’ Woodward drily noted.



Because of the Rules of Engagement, Woodward was not supposed to issue a direct order to the Conqueror to attack the Belgrano because she was outside the Exclusion Zone.



But knowing that asking for permission from London could take several hours, if not days, Woodward decided he had to shake things up back in Britain by disobeying orders and ordering the submarine’s commander, Wreford-Brown, to attack.



Woodward knew that if he breached Naval discipline in this way, the top brass back in London would assume that he had either gone mad, or that he was in a great hurry.



Because the cable to the Conqueror had to be routed via a communication system in London, the order was intercepted and, instead of being passed to the submarine, it was taken to Margaret Thatcher’s War Cabinet, which had assembled at 10am on May 2 at Chequers.



The PM was her typically decisive self.



‘It was clear to me what must be done to protect our Forces,’ Lady Thatcher later wrote.



As her Minister of Defence, Sir John Nott, later observed: ‘It was one of the easiest decisions of the whole war.’



At 1.30 that afternoon, the order conveying the permission to attack was sent directly to Conqueror.



As soon as he received the signal, Wreford-Brown started his attack. He chose to use three 21in Mark 8 torpedoes, each of which was equipped with an 805lb warhead containing high explosives.



Although he had more sophisticated torpedoes, only the older Mk 8s, a design which had been in use since 1927, packed the necessary punch to penetrate the thick armour plating of the Belgrano.



After spending two hours working his way into an attack position, Wreford-Brown ordered the torpedoes to be fired at a range of 1,400 yards.



The submarine’s crew could hear the whine of the torpedoes’ motors as they accelerated towards their target.



For a while, there was silence, save for the chuffing sound of the Belgrano’s engines.



Wreford-Brown watched calmly through his periscope. Then, 55 seconds later, just after 4pm at local time — 7pm GMT — he saw an orange fireball explode near the ship’s mainmast.

‘Explosion’ reported the sonar operator of the Conqueror, impassively. A few seconds later, he said: ‘Second explosion.’



According to Woodward, it appeared the Belgrano’s captain, Hector Bonzo, had not been aware of the danger his ship was in, despite the British warning of April 23.



In total, 770 men, including Bonzo, survived the sinking.



But the attack utterly demoralised the Argentinian Navy, whose surface warships — including its aircraft carrier — would not venture more than a few miles away from Argentina’s coastline for the duration of the conflict.



Although the action was a military success, the sinking was political dynamite.

The great loss of life was unsettling, and, coupled with the fact that the Belgrano was observed by the Conqueror heading away from the Falklands when she was hit, meant that many opponents of the war regarded it as murder.



During a BBC interview, Mrs Thatcher was famously grilled by Diana Gould, a 56-year-old teacher from Cirencester, who accused the PM of ‘sabotaging any possibility of any peace plan succeeding’.



Mrs Thatcher vehemently denied the charge, and stressed that she was proud of giving the order, and that ‘one day, all of the facts, in about 30 years’ time, will be published’.



In saying so, she was referring to the 30-year rule which forbids the publication of private government papers for three decades.



Thus, the official files on the Falklands War will be released in 2012, the same year as Major Thorp’s book.



What Mrs Thatcher failed to make clear to Mrs Gould (who died earlier this month at the age of 85) was that the direction in which the Belgrano was heading was irrelevant.



As John Nott later wrote: ‘I remain astonished . . . that anyone should consider the momentary compass bearing of Belgrano’s passage to be of any consequence whatever. Any ship can turn in an instant.’



Nevertheless, the likes of Tam Dalyell would never be satisfied, despite the fact that even members of the Argentinian Navy agreed the sinking was a legitimate act of war.



‘It was absolutely not a war crime,’ said the Belgrano’s captain, Hector Bonzo, in an interview two years before his death in 2009.



‘It was an act of war, lamentably legal.’



Meanwhile, the Argentine admiral Enrique Molina Pico later admitted the location of the Belgrano outside the Exclusion Zone ‘did not mean it was withdrawn from the war’.



‘The integrated naval force had been deployed to carry out an attack on the British fleet in a co-ordinated operation with other naval groups,’ he wrote.



‘The heading away from the enemy fleet was only momentary, as the commander saw fit to wait for a more convenient time (to attack).



'The Belgrano and the other ships were a threat and a danger to the British.’



These admissions tally with the signals intercepts revealed by Major Thorp, which show that the Argentinian vessels had been ordered to engage in a pincer attack.



There is a final irony. Major Thorp discovered in his investigation in 1984 that the intercepted signal which ordered the Belgrano to the rendezvous point had been ignored by the British duty intelligence analysts at the time.



‘Somehow, the significance of this intelligence had been overlooked, misread or perhaps not read at all,’ Thorp writes, blaming the oversight on the ‘fog of war’.



Had Mrs Thatcher been armed with the knowledge of this signal in 1982 — and minded to reveal our abilities to intercept Argentinian intelligence — she could have silenced her critics.



Thanks to Major Thorp, it should be obvious even to Tam Dalyell that it is finally time to stop using the tragic deaths of so many sailors as a political football.



The sinking of the Belgrano was a tragedy, but it was no war crime.

