Rum Ration
the Navy Network

“.. impossible .. the Navy do not know the word ..”
General Carton de Wiart VC, Norway, 1940

1n 1982 Rear Admiral Chris Parry was the Observer of Humphrey, HMS Antrim’s Wessex helicopter. In that capacity he became the only Fleet Air Arm Observer to incapacitate an enemy submarine since 1945, and he helped first insert and then rescue the SAS from a misguided attempt to enter South Georgia via the Fortuna Glacier, and experienced many other helicopter operations well beyond the safety parameters of normal peacetime practice. Every night he wrote, for himself, a detailed account of his and his ship’s activities and his thoughts regarding them; for, as a graduate historian, he recognised that all other accounts would be informed by hindsight and rationalisation; his would be unvarnished actuality. He demonstrates this at the end where, the war over, he has to correct the ship’s Report of Proceedings where some matters have been incorrectly recorded and some remembered ‘with advantages’ as Shakespeare says.

In 2009 while sorting out for a house move the author rediscovered in a forgotten trunk this loose-leaf diary of the Falklands War, which is now presented to the general reader. We are assured that it is unedited except for the deletion of some items that would cause distress. Given the tart nature of some of his immediate (and apparently justifiable) comments on such targets as John Nott (I never have understood why he was knighted, that seemed to me to be on a par with Caligula making his horse a consul), Admiral Woodward, HMS Endurance and her captain, Cindy Buxton and her father, and unsurprisingly the BBC World Service, one can only regret losing what has been excised.
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The Merchant Navy in the Falklands War

“ … Without the ships taken up from trade the operation could not have been undertaken…”

The nation has always called on its merchantmen in war; their memorial on Tower Hill bears twelve thousand names from the First World War and twice as many again from the Second, of British merchant sailors who are still beneath the waves. It is because of their (and others’) sacrifice that I as a little boy never went short of food during that last conflict. Our earliest battles from Sluys to the Armada used merchantmen as a platform for war; my great great great grandfather’s Indiaman was driven ashore and wrecked off Grenada in 1796 after being requisitioned for an expedition to the West Indies (and her wreck was proposed for a dive this year).
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And that's the problem with Yank book titles: they turn a benign little sentence or clause into something completely out of control: also, they have to have an amplifying clause to avoid Wal-Mart livestock having to think. Anyway, on with the review.

This one did not sound at all promising, and I only took it to get back in credit with Ageing Gracefully. However, I finished it overnight. It's flawed and hasty, but it's also very, very good. It has the ring of authenticity (the writer is a former member of 6 so I suppose that makes him their Cyril Clunge. His views on OPSEC are that it has been violated for political gain by everybody in the command chain, so he is recycling stuff that is already open source) insofar as it ties in with a lot of the other history on the subject, written by the likes of Richard Marcinko, Eric Haney and Charlie Beckwith.
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