The censors reviewing John Witherow’s dispatches from HMS Invincible forbade any mention of the Task Force’s strengths, destinations, of the capability of the onboard armoury or even the weather. In London, the Vulcan bombing raid on Stanley’s airfield was portrayed as a success (despite Argentine film footage that showed the airstrip was still useable). Witherow spoke to one of the personnel in the flight control room who told him the raid had been a disastrous flop. Witherow filed his copy to this effect, only to have the censor change it to read that the mission had been a success. This, however, was an extreme and rare example. Generally, as at Gray’s Inn Road, self-censorship helped ensure that little of substance was actually excised from Witherow’s copy.31 Yet, this did not make relations on board Invincible easy. Unlike the Army, which had learned through long (and occasionally bitter) experience as a consequence of the Troubles in Ulster, the Navy was not used to dealing with the press at such close quarters. There was also the question over whether naval procedures applied to the journalists on board. It did not go down well that during the first ‘Action Stations’ Witherow went onto the bridge of Invincible protesting that ‘as he represented The Times, he could go where he liked’.32 As the Task Force steamed closer to the Total Exclusion Zone around the Falklands, relations between the press corps and their MoD ‘minder’ broke down completely. Recognizing the problem, the Invincible’s captain, Jeremy Black, did his best to help and assigned his secretary, Richard Aylard (later the Prince of Wales’s private secretary), to smooth things over with the journalists. Nonetheless, Witherow’s copy was vetted four times before it reached Gray’s Inn Road. Once the MoD press officer, Aylard and Black had vetted it on the Invincible, it was transmitted to Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse’s Command HQ at Northwood, Middlesex, where the MoD censors vetted it again. Despite Captain Black’s request that, after they had cleared it, Northwood should release the journalists’ dispatches at the same time as its own statements, this frequently did not happen.33
Transmitting copy from ship to shore was a major problem. Understandably, the journalists’ dispatches were the lowest priority of all the information punched out by the Invincible’s messenger centre. It took half an hour for the operator to transfer a journalist’s dispatch onto tape. Further delays took place trying to transmit it by satellite and the copy frequently got lost in the process, requiring it to be sent again. The whole process frequently took two to three hours – just to send one dispatch. And there were five Fleet Street journalists, all sending in their handiwork. It was hardly surprising that Black objected to 30 per cent of his outgoing traffic being taken up by press copy when he had far more important operational detail to convey. At one stage, there was a backlog of one thousand signals waiting to be cleared. Eventually Black demanded that press copy could only be transmitted at night, when there was usually less operational messaging needing to be sent. This ensured that copy was appearing in The Times around two days after it was written. A seven-hundred-word limit was also imposed.34
It had been decided that dispatches would be ‘pooled’ so that all the news media would have access to them. In any case, it proved almost impossible for any of the Fleet Street editors to make contact with their journalists on board ship. Witherow managed to get a brief call through to Fred Emery on 18 May, but this was a rare exception.35 ‘Those of us without experience of war would have done better,’ Witherow later reflected, ‘if we’d had the office saying “give us 2000 words on how the Harrier pilots spend their time” – we didn’t know what they wanted and were just firing into a void all the time.’ By the time newspapers were flown on board ship for the journalists to analyse, they were two to three weeks out of date. Witherow concluded that the failure to provide the embedded reporters with better communication channels ended up harming the Task Force’s own publicity: ‘if they had allowed it, they would have got much better and less spasmodic, coverage’.36
Witherow did not find the crew to be particularly pugnacious. ‘They knew the ships were hopelessly defended,’ he recalled; ‘this became apparent when I saw them strapping machine guns to the railings of Invincible to shoot down low flying planes.’37 On 1 May, the Fleet came under air attack. In London, the War Cabinet was concerned about the strike range of the carrier Veinticinco de Mayo and the cruiser General Belgrano. Although the latter was an aged survivor of Pearl Harbor, it was fitted with anti-ship Exocet missiles and was escorted by two destroyers. The Task Force’s commander, Admiral Woodward, feared the carrier and the cruiser were attempting a pincer movement against his ships. On Sunday 2 May the War Cabinet gave to the submarine HMS Conqueror the order to torpedo the Belgrano. Three hundred and twenty-one members of its crew went down with her.
The Belgrano’s sinking was to be the most controversial action of the conflict. But, at first, it was very difficult to establish much information about it. Such was the paucity of information from the MoD, it did not make the newspapers until Tuesday 4 May editions. Even then, The Times had to rely on its US correspondent, Nicholas Ashford, for the news that ‘authoritative sources in Washington’ had confirmed the cruiser had sunk and that as many as seven hundred of its crew might have drowned. Filing from Buenos Aires, Christopher Thomas backed up Washington’s claims. All the MoD in London could offer was that they were ‘not in a position to confirm or deny Argentine reports’. Witherow, however, did manage to get a dispatch out that concentrated on the Navy’s ‘compassion’ in sparing the Belgrano’s escort ships and in searching for survivors. The best the picture desk could procure was a tiny image with the caption ‘The General Belgrano in a photograph taken 40 years ago’.38 A further sixteen days would pass before the dramatic photograph of the ship – listing heavily and surrounded by life rafts – would make it into the paper, halfway down page six.
News that the Belgrano had been hit had prompted the infamous ‘Gotcha!’ headline in the Sun. The NUJ had called an eleven day strike and the paper was being brought out by only a handful of editorial staff on whom the excitement and stress were clearly beginning to have a deleterious effect. The paper’s combative editor Kelvin MacKenzie pulled the crude headline after the first edition once news of serious loss of life began to permeate the Bouverie Street newsroom, but by the time ‘Gotcha!’ had been replaced by the more contrite (though less factually accurate) headline ‘Did 1200 Argies drown?’ the damage had been done.39 Reacting to the anti-war stance of its rival, the Daily Mirror, the Sun’s reporting of the conflict was not only stridently patriotic but also frequently couched in language that suggested the war was some sort of game show. In particular, the ‘Gotcha!’ front page brought the Sun considerable opprobrium, but The Times, while opting for the lower-case headline ‘Cruiser torpedoed by Royal Navy sinks’, was equally certain of the need to send her to the bottom of the ocean. Those who pointed out the ship had been torpedoed outside the Total Exclusion Zone were slapped down, the leader column declaiming, ‘it is fanciful to imagine that any Argentine warship can put to sea – let alone sail some three hundred miles eastward towards the Falkland Islands – without having hostile intentions towards the British task force’.40
The press and political recriminations over the Belgrano had only just begun when the news broke that HMS Sheffield had been hit – the first British warship to be lost in battle since the Second World War. Witherow’s dispatch from Invincible led the coverage, describing how the Sheffield ‘was completely blotted out by the smoke which formed a solid column from the sea to the clouds’. The sea was ‘full