Having joined the Navy first as an engineer, then as a Seaman Officer, Malcolm had reached the position of Lieutenant Commander Staff Officer and was incredibly busy on the HMS Antrim taking part in Exercise Spring Train by Gibraltar when they starting to hear rumblings about what was happening in the South Atlantic. It then came as no surprise when they were mobilised to head south. Malcolm recalls that there was initially a degree of making things up as they went along as they didn’t know what to expect and nobody, except one Royal Marines Officer, had ever been to the Falklands. One of Malcolm’s jobs was to work on deception tactics such as laying chaff around this ships to appear a larger flotilla and charting a course which looked like they might actually be heading for Argentina. At Ascension, Malcolm transfers to HMS Hermes where he recalls a frenzied race for better sleeping conditions when the Admiral said the officers could share his cabin which included the luxury of a double bed and shower. During this time, Malcolm had two main responsibilities. When on watch he was the Anti-Submarine Warfare Screen Coordinator and when not on watch he managed communications, including highly classified messages. He vividly recalls hearing the tragedy of the Sheffield directly through his headphones but that they only had a brief time to reflect before pushing on with their jobs. Malcolm describes some of their biggest challenges being rudimentary communication, lack of advance warning about airborne attacks and confusion which could arise from the three services not really having collaborated since WWII. He also remembers the tragedies of helicopter crashes and a Harrier exploding, he thinks it was often luck that meant things weren’t worse. Malcolm says it was difficult readjusting to life at home and is grateful to the public who offered members of the task group free holidays. It was a week in Wales with his family, away from home and work, that finally helped him decompress. He reflects that the Falklands will probably have been the last time the Royal Navy will fight a fleet action in that way.

With a long-held ambition to join the Navy, Fred Estall keenly awaited the arrival of his call-up papers, which sent him first to Pwllheli in north Wales for initial sea training and then to HMS Wellesley in Liverpool for gun training. He passed out as a DEMS gunner (Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship) and went to Nova Scotia – via HMS Belfast and RMS Queen Mary – to join the crew of a Merchant Navy oil tanker. Fred talks about life on board, describing the extra work available to anyone willing to get his hands dirty – which he always was, not only because he could earn more money, but also because keeping busy helped him keep his mind off the U-boats. He explains the stark difference between the atmosphere of camaraderie in the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy, and talks about the distinct lack of entertainment onboard a merchant ship. Recalling heavy seas, storms and the huge expanse of ocean, Fred’s memories bring vividly to life what it was like to move from tanker to tanker while the world was at war, keeping allied ships fuelled from 1940 – 1944.

When Joe Pitcher was called up into the Royal Navy in 1941, his military career began at HMS Glendower, a training facility preparing sailors for service on defensively equipped merchant ships (DEMS). Throughout his ensuing service, Joe sailed on the coastal, Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific convoys. He shares his memories of how it felt each time he changed ship and had to get used to working with a completely new crew, and adapting to the ship’s life and rules. He also remembers with wry humour a number of near misses along the way, including a scramble to find an ammunition locker stopcock, dodging a bullet from a round accidentally fired off by a young sailor in the mess, and surviving two separate torpedo hits on the same ship. Joe’s service ended in Singapore where the true horrors of war were brought into sharp focus when the hospital ship he was on took aboard countless near-to-death POWs. With great modesty, Joe says he was glad to have been able to do his bit, and shares with deep emotion his gratitude for surviving the war when so many others weren’t so lucky.