The Full Story of the Air and Sea Battles of the Falklands War

280 pages

Andrew Livsey

This is a frustrating book because it combines moments of useful analysis and occasionally well used detail with repeated errors and unclear language. Your reviewer stopped noting which pages contained major mistakes after getting to 25 by about a third of the way in. A highlight was being told that the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible had only one gearbox, and that the eight auxiliary diesel engines, which enabled the generation of electricity, could be used for propulsion to achieve “increased fuel economy at lower speeds.” Sea Dart in the Type 42s, we are told, had a “manual hoist” for reloading, which would be an interesting challenge, and the loss of a single Tyne cruise gas turbine would apparently reduce the top speed of a Type 42 to 10 knots, which is strange for a combined gas or gas (COGOG) set up in which a larger Olympus gas turbine could presumably have been used on the relevant shaft. The difference would presumably have been fuel efficiency at moderate speeds.

Confidence is further reduced by strange judgements on some equipment. The Royal Navy’s type 182 towed torpedo decoy is described as “sophisticated” despite having been in service since the 1950s and simply putting out undifferentiated noise. Sheffield’s being lost to an Exocet missile but Glamorgan surviving is put down to British ship construction having been poorer in the 1970s than the 1950s, though the issues were somewhat different: our author should read Paul Brown’s Abandon Ship.

Lack of clarity elsewhere means that it is often difficult to know whether the author understands an issue such as what doppler can and can’t do for radar detection of contacts over land, and what the radars of the period could manage without doppler. It seems unlikely that the author understands how chaff fired by a warship works, for the result he describes of a “plume” being created over a ship is neither what usually happens nor to be desired. The difference between distraction and seduction of a missile seeker head is not mentioned, despite attempts at close analysis of what happened with each Exocet missile. Nor is the difference in point defence missile ranges between a closing and a crossing target apparently appreciated, which leads to some perfectly reasonable decisions being criticised. At one point airborne early warning (AEW) is confused with electronic warfare (EW) and the description of how anomalous radar propagation works is unclear at best. There are innumerable other examples.

Any one of those points would be excusable on its own, but repeatedly being told things that strain credibility undermines one’s faith in the whole. It is particularly a problem for a book such as this which, instead of providing an overview, is intended to explain the detail of what happened and why.

These weaknesses are a pity, for besides the repeated errors there are gems of information and some sensible juxtaposition of British and Argentine contemporary understanding of individual events. The author has also taken the time to map out the precise position of ships at critical moments, which too many omit, created useful lists of attacks and losses, sometimes carefully balances competing pieces of evidence, and reminds us of incidents beyond the usually recounted ones. He also provides an entirely sensible defence of the decision to torpedo the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano and does some useful photo analysis of the results of the Black Buck Vulcan raids on Stanley airfield.

Ibbotson is a professor of neuroscience and biomedical engineering at the University of Melbourne. He has published articles in his field. Yet in tackling the Falklands War he has been let down by a lack of background knowledge that would help him put the detail into context. He also lacks the historian’s instinct on where to find further sources. Ibbotson has been to the National Archives at Kew, but it seems has not used the footnotes in works such as Ed Hampshire’s The Royal Navy in the Cold War Years, or other works that came out longer ago, to guide him in where to look. Indeed, based on the titling in the bibliography he does not understand the difference between primary and secondary sources. It is a further minor annoyance that he has not footnoted his work, so one often does not know where he has got a particular fact or idea.

This is not a suggestion that the writing of naval history should be restricted to a small, cadre. People outside university history and strategic studies departments have written excellent works, with the Australian naval officer James Goldrick being among the exemplars. But it is to argue that possessing a core set of skills is useful, that initially putting ideas forward in articles which are peer reviewed is a useful discipline and that being able to talk things through with other scholars in the same field, and ideally having some read a draft, can resolve many issues before a text goes to publication.

In the meantime, this book is frustrating. There are moments of genuinely useful analysis, but the frequent and pervasive errors make it difficult to distinguish between those and implausible misunderstandings. If the author could overcome the book’s current problems by producing a radically re-written second edition, then we might have a valuable contribution to our understanding of the conflict. Unless that happens, this work is not recommended.