argentine fleet doesnt retreat

[juanml82]

Originally Posted by herricks

well i know the british would still prolly win but how much bigger could the sea war be because of it

i wasn't sure if the indepencia could hold A-4's like the Venticinco de Mayo

I guess the more complex naval battle could go like this:
IIRC
The RN had two task forces, one escorting Invincible (north of the islands) and the other escorting Hermes, south of the Islands.
Argentina had three: one SW, escorting Belgrano, one SE composed of corvettes (including a couple of A-69 missile corvettes, and too far to intervene) and one NW escorting 25 de Mayo.

Let's say the day after Belgrano is sunk, the rest of the Argentine fleet remains. A British nuclear sub spots 25 de Mayo during the day (that's, May 3rd) and, for the purposes of keeping this longer, attacks her with guided torpedoes, which fail. Chased by helicopters and destroyers, the sub pulls back to avoid detection and reengage. The carrier rush to the nearest swallow waters around and, knowing her position is compromised, deploys CAPs of Skyhawks to prevent a helicopter attack. Harriers attempt to intercept, but pull back once the A4s retreat within SAM cover of the escorting destroyers. Night falls and the Argentine fighters, lacking night fighting capabilities, land in the carrier. Skimming over the waves, RN helicopters approach the 25 de Mayo and attack her with sea skuas. The British sub, in the meantime, reengages and attack with old, non guided, reliable torpedoes. That's it.
At the very most, you could get a ship to ship battle, with exocets, if the sub can't reengage (or attempts to use guided torpedoes again) or the sea skuas don't seem to cause enough damage to the fleet. You could get fighters involved, during the day, but it's unlikely. The Harriers are few and only carry one 500kg bomb, while the Argentine fighters, even if we include fighters attacking from the mainland, need to spot the British surface ships with the Mark I Eyeball and don't have much time to look for them. And the British ships are unlikely to need closing in the Argentine carrier - the nuclear submarines can do it.

[BlondieBC]

If you want to use the carrier, the best use would probably be to send the planes to the Falkland Islands and use the unsinkable aircraft carrier concept. Running around the carrier without good ASW is just a waste of metal and men. I am not even sure how you justify buying a carrier, when you don't even have the good ships and land based naval aviation needed to defend your coastline. Maybe it makes sense in war with Chile or Brazil. I don't think this idea really works, but better than a suicide run. And if you could have figure out how to move the surface to surface missiles from the surface ships to the Islands, this would be a better use. Maybe you can pick off a few more British ships.

Argentina need a better plan that we can take these undefended Islands and we just figure the other side will not bother to retake them. It was a political move designed to help the domestic situation. And the end result showed. A little more planning by Argentina a few years in advance would have helped a lot. A few more exocets. Maybe some silkworms (or whatever the equivalent was back then) to help with island defense. Actually having the airforce practice under realistic naval scenarios. In reality, the bulk of Argentina defense was by 3 planes and handful of exocets. The rest of the air force and navy might as well have not existed.
And if we are doing a better plan, how about a plan to get enough food and supplies to the Islands before the UK cuts the naval supply lines with submarines and later the air resupply with the surface navy and carriers.

And from a rule of war perspective, Argentina should be faulted for not moving the civilians out of the war zone in the early days of the war. If you can't even feed your army properly, you can't take care of the civilians. It would have been trivially easy to have flow the settlers to the mainland, and then arrange for proper internment, well away from danger. There is no excuse for digging in around a city and leaving civilians there. And it might even help with the diplomacy if you release the civilians through a neutral third country (Brazil) before the main battle starts. If you can get them to safety beforehand, you may be able to improve the diplomatic situation.

[Bureaucromancer]

The interesting question to me is what might have happened if the navy had made a serious attempt to stop supplies somewhere north quite far north of OTL's combat area. The RN would certainly catch on pretty quickly and had the capacity to react, but it really wouldn't take much destruction of transport capacity to force the task force, or at least the amphibious component thereof to pull back, and once that happens they are realistically going to have to wait until spring. Ultimately the question isn't the RN's capacity to defeat the Argentine, but the reality that the ground operation was quite precarious and had very little room for losses at sea. If for example Atlantic Conveyor AND Canberra were lost I have very hard time imagining immediate landings going ahead, let alone succeeding (and honestly Canberra would probably NOT be close to the worst case strategically, very high causalities would be involved, but infantry can be replaced a lot quicker than equipment in most cases).

[sparky42]

Originally Posted by Bureaucromancer

The interesting question to me is what might have happened if the navy had made a serious attempt to stop supplies somewhere north quite far north of OTL's combat area. The RN would certainly catch on pretty quickly and had the capacity to react, but it really wouldn't take much destruction of transport capacity to force the task force, or at least the amphibious component thereof to pull back, and once that happens they are realistically going to have to wait until spring. Ultimately the question isn't the RN's capacity to defeat the Argentine, but the reality that the ground operation was quite precarious and had very little room for losses at sea. If for example Atlantic Conveyor AND Canberra were lost I have very hard time imagining immediate landings going ahead, let alone succeeding (and honestly Canberra would probably NOT be close to the worst case strategically, very high causalities would be involved, but infantry can be replaced a lot quicker than equipment in most cases).

Weren't Nimrods deployed to Ascension, in which case slipping warships into the supply line might have been a problem. Even if there wasn't an attack could the British just reroute the ships?

At that time how well trained were the Argentinian fleet for a long deployment like that? Would they need supplyships to support it?

[DD951]

Hmm... from various discussions here & over at NavWeps, had the Argentinian fleet continued onwards after the sinking of Belgrano, it's pretty likely that they would have lost their carrier in very short order, as there was another RN SSN in the area (might have been Splendid, IIRC) tracking the carrier TF, & had a firing solution dialed in on the carrier. IOTL, about half an hour before that TF crossed into the exclusion zone & thus could be engaged under the ROE then in effect, it suddenly turned around, having received orders to abort in response to Belgrano being sunk. Reportedly, the skipper of that sub was rather put out about losing the opportunity to bag a carrier.

[The Oncoming Storm]

I actually think it was HMS Spartan that had contact on the 25de Mayo but otherwise you're right.

Admiral Woodward's original recommendation to Whitehall was that both the Belgrano and the 25 de Mayo should be sunk. But by the time the time the approval came through Spartan had lost contact. In hindsight very fortuitous for her crew as they were spared the fate of the Belgrano's

[CalBear]

Nucs don't run away, they kill. If their Spearfish miss, which is about as unlikely as things get, wire guided torpedoes with superb on board active sonar don't miss, especially when the target doesn't have torpedo decoys clever enough to spoof them deployed.

What happens is simple. The SSN makes a hard turn, leave a noisemaker in the knuckle that the turn creates, and either kills the destroyers if the are actually stupid enough to close, or just ignores them completely. Neither of the Argentine Type 42 had towed sonar arrays, meaning all they had to work with was the ship's hull mounted (and thus compromised by engine noise and flow from the hull, especially at speed), they had about the same chance of detecting a SSN as somebody holding an empty glass against the hull and putting an ear to it. The S-61D-4 Sea King variant lacked a passive dipping sonar (they were, IIRC equipped with the ASQ-10 Active only pinging system).

The boat goes below the thermocline to avoid any sort of dipping sonar, cuts the carrier off at the pass (being faster than anything else in the fight), and kills her.

A modern SSN is the deadliest anti-ship platform ever deployed. The late 70s versions were damned close to the same, especially against the sensors of the era. Fighting one with 15 year old tech was an automatic loser.

Originally Posted by juanml82

I guess the more complex naval battle could go like this:
IIRC
The RN had two task forces, one escorting Invincible (north of the islands) and the other escorting Hermes, south of the Islands.
Argentina had three: one SW, escorting Belgrano, one SE composed of corvettes (including a couple of A-69 missile corvettes, and too far to intervene) and one NW escorting 25 de Mayo.

Let's say the day after Belgrano is sunk, the rest of the Argentine fleet remains. A British nuclear sub spots 25 de Mayo during the day (that's, May 3rd) and, for the purposes of keeping this longer, attacks her with guided torpedoes, which fail. Chased by helicopters and destroyers, the sub pulls back to avoid detection and reengage. The carrier rush to the nearest swallow waters around and, knowing her position is compromised, deploys CAPs of Skyhawks to prevent a helicopter attack. Harriers attempt to intercept, but pull back once the A4s retreat within SAM cover of the escorting destroyers. Night falls and the Argentine fighters, lacking night fighting capabilities, land in the carrier. Skimming over the waves, RN helicopters approach the 25 de Mayo and attack her with sea skuas. The British sub, in the meantime, reengages and attack with old, non guided, reliable torpedoes. That's it.
At the very most, you could get a ship to ship battle, with exocets, if the sub can't reengage (or attempts to use guided torpedoes again) or the sea skuas don't seem to cause enough damage to the fleet. You could get fighters involved, during the day, but it's unlikely. The Harriers are few and only carry one 500kg bomb, while the Argentine fighters, even if we include fighters attacking from the mainland, need to spot the British surface ships with the Mark I Eyeball and don't have much time to look for them. And the British ships are unlikely to need closing in the Argentine carrier - the nuclear submarines can do it.

[Bureaucromancer]

Originally Posted by CalBear

If their Spearfish miss, which is about as unlikely as things get, wire guided torpedoes with superb on board active sonar don't miss, especially when the target doesn't have torpedo decoys clever enough to spoof them deployed.

Maybe now, but their performance immediately after the war indicates that the Spearfish deployed to the South Atlantic basically didn't work. At all. As you say, this isn't going to save any target for long, but any captain trying to rely on them in 1982 is likely in for a nasty surprise.

On Sparky's note about Argentine capabilities in terms of long range deployment I think they were pretty limited, but you have to remember that Argentina does have a lot of coast and was able to get out to South Georgia early on without too much trouble. To make at least a credible attempt to intercept supplies coming south doesn't require them to be farther from home (much anyway) than South Georgia, and while the British certainly can re-route around any threat I tend to think that if the Atlantic Conveyor is anything to go by it could well be too late if there were as few as one or two successful strikes on supply vessels (the big ones anyway, sinking some RFA tanker probably isn't going to mean all that much).

[sharlin]

The spearfish worked but the Conqueror's skipper used the old WW2 torpedoes because they had a bigger warhead than the very new Spearfish and he felt the bigger warhead was needed to kill an armoured vessel, a Spearfish would do great against a modern ship as they basically are not built to take much in the way of damage but he might have not been as successful with say one spearfish hit over a dumbfire torp.

[Flubber]

Originally Posted by Bureaucromancer

Maybe now, but their performance immediately after the war indicates that the Spearfish deployed to the South Atlantic basically didn't work. At all.

I think everyone is confusing Spearfish with Tigerfish. The latter was a complete dog while the former is top notch. The RN SSNs were carrying Tigerfish during the war along with other types.

As you say, this isn't going to save any target for long, but any captain trying to rely on them in 1982 is likely in for a nasty surprise.

Which is why Conqueror didn't use them. Wreford-Brown correctly chose to use Mark 8 torpedoes instead.

Whatever torpedoes get used, CalBear's points about SSNs still stand. The ARA had and still has nothing which even can locate RN submarines. Argentina's ASW capabilities were so poor during the war that Belgrano's two escorts didn't even realize the cruiser had been torpedoed and blithely steamed off as she sank.

[Bureaucromancer]

Originally Posted by Flubber

I think everyone is confusing Spearfish with Tigerfish. The latter was a complete dog while the former is top notch. The RN SSNs were carrying Tigerfish during the war along with other types.

Quite right about Tigerfish vs Spearfish, but the point does stand that the Tigerfish carried to the Falklands were essentially no better than the torpedos fired by Argentina. I'm certainly not going to disagree with any assertion about how completely the SSNs could have destroyed the Argentine forces. Realistically the Tigerfish problems could have been devastating in an ASW context, but against surface targets there wasn't that much of a problem as long as the Mk VIII's were still around.

[HARRY]

The Falklands becomes to the South Atlantic what the Solomon Islands is to the Pacific for wreck diving.

[herricks]

Originally Posted by BlondieBC

If you want to use the carrier, the best use would probably be to send the planes to the Falkland Islands and use the unsinkable aircraft carrier concept.

i have wonder about that too. what if the Argentines made the runway longer & stations as many fighters as they could there so flying time around the islands is much longer

[StevoJH]

Originally Posted by herricks

i have wonder about that too. what if the Argentines made the runway longer & stations as many fighters as they could there so flying time around the islands is much longer

Can the Argentines get enough fuel to the islands to operate their aircraft from them?

[The Oncoming Storm]

Originally Posted by herricks

i have wonder about that too. what if the Argentines made the runway longer & stations as many fighters as they could there so flying time around the islands is much longer

Originally Posted by StevoJH

Can the Argentines get enough fuel to the islands to operate their aircraft from them?

This underlines the biggest single failure the Argentineans made, they didn't expect Britain to try and retake the islands so they never made any plans for their defence. They also had planned to invade in December 1982 after Nott's cuts were complete but political necessities pushed the invasion forward. They also believed that as with the Indian takeover of Goa 20 years earlier the idea of retaking a colonial posession would be unpalatable to the international community and Britain would be diplomatically constrained from invading. Wrong on both counts.

What they should have done was have construction teams ready to deploy to Stanley to lengthen the runway so it could operate Mirages and Super Etendards, as well as establishing all the support infrastructure such as fuel storage. By the time the penny dropped that Britain was going to fight it was too late to do any of these things.

[GarethC]

Originally Posted by sparky42

Weren't Nimrods deployed to Ascension, in which case slipping warships into the supply line might have been a problem. Even if there wasn't an attack could the British just reroute the ships?

Yes, there were Nimrods with (in a fit of optimism) a jury-rigged AIM-9 fit for the purpose of engaging Argentine MPA that might be trying to shadow the supply, along with Black Buck Vulcans and Victor tankers.

I think it would be very rash for the ANA to to threaten the SLOC from Ascension, given that AAW-fit Phantoms and Martel-armed Buccaneers could be tanker-supported from Ascension to counter that threat.

Also, on the evening of 2nd May 1982, a Sea Harrier recce flight painted an ARA task force and was illuminated in turn by their air defence radars, including that mounted on a Type 42 destroyer, which the RN took to mean that this was the Veinticinco de Mayo group, although I haven't run into an Argentine source that confirms or denies this.

Given that the RN had satellite comms from the Corporate task force to Northwood, and ELF to the SSNs, if the 25 de Mayo doesn't reverse course in the night after that sighting, then even if the Swiftsure-class has lost contact it can regain it.

As neither Sea Eagle nor Martel had been fit to Sea Harrier, any air attack on the ANA CV would have probably have been with rockets (to let the aircraft stay below the Sea Dart envelope), but frankly that sounds like no fun at all. Even the A-4Qs would be capable against such a strike.

Woodward, former submariner, is likely to leave it to the SSN(s), possibly even withdrawing southeastward to maintain distance.

As Calbear mentioned here, the ANA was at best barely capable of self-defence against modern submarines, and was likely to suffer severe losses against sucn an opposition.

[Lord Wyclif]

I remember the SSN was trailing the 25th May for ten hours while Whitehall dithered to make a decision. In the end permission to sink her was refused so as not to upset the American peace mission. During these ten hours the SSN was totally undetected by the target. This was before the Belgrano was sunk.
Political incompetence let the carrier escape. The PM wasn't going to let that happen a second time.

[SunilTanna]

Political incompetence let the carrier escape.

I believe John Nott claims credit for that in his autobiography.

For me, one of the unanswered questions of the Falklands War is exactly whose side the British Defence Secretary was on.

It needs to be remembered that while Britain was dithering about whether to sink Belgrano, or 25 de Mayo, the Argentines would have been more than happy to sink any British ships they encountered in the exact same time period, and even planned to use a Skyhawk strike to do it (until prevented by lack of winds combined with poor maintenance of the carrier). It is only Argentine military incompetence that prevented them succeeding.

[GarethC]

Originally Posted by Lord Wyclif

I remember the SSN was trailing the 25th May for ten hours while Whitehall dithered to make a decision. In the end permission to sink her was refused so as not to upset the American peace mission. During these ten hours the SSN was totally undetected by the target. This was before the Belgrano was sunk.
Political incompetence let the carrier escape. The PM wasn't going to let that happen a second time.

Are the SSN's logs declassified? Be interesting to find out how much of the time there was a firing solution on the carrier, when she changed course back for port, what communications there were from where (MoD, Admiralty, Cabinet Office, etc).

Edit - to answer my own question, it does appear that submarine logs up to 30 years ago are public records, and are available from The National Archives if anyone happens to live near Kew, which, alas, I do not.

Edit the Second - whoops, wrong there - the MoD and Admiralty files for the Falklands have not yet been released.

[alspug]

I would recomend looking up the Argentinian airforce C130 conversion into a bomber . it made an attack of a tanker . it is currently the largest ship sunk as a result of a war .British Wye was the name of the tanker .