Themes

Cyril explains how his ship. HMS Antrim, and other ships on exercise in Gibraltar were called to war in the Falklands and how they prepared for war.

'After the exercise we… all the ships went in to Gibraltar, the Sheffield, the Coventry, everyone, we all met in Gibraltar, we had had a good time there.

Then on the way back home we were meant to come in on the Tuesday and we stopped in the middle of the Med, took ammunition from HMS Plymouth, you know all the live ammunition they had, and we got a message from the Captain saying that Argentina has invaded the British territory and it was called the Falkland Islands and we thought it was a joke because we’re all thinking, the Falkland Islands? We’d never heard of it, it must be one of those obscure islands off the tip of Scotland somewhere and this is just a joke…
but it didn’t turn out to be that at all.

We departed… there was three of us departed for this end, then they told we are now going to the South Atlantic and that’s where it is and that’s when we departed. I was on the Antrim then and it took us about two weeks to get there, because it’s a long way. But on the way down we did practice a lot of exercise, you know, a lot of gun re-practice, a lot of quick loading and things like that as well, just to get you up to speed, on the way there.

And I always remember the Captain said that if we could do 22 rounds in a minute, yeah, which is the pulse rate of the gun, yeah, says, “We’ll buy you all a crate of beer,” the mess, you know. And we all said, “Okay, we shall have a go at it,” and we actually did it. But we didn’t do it just the once it was like three times and it was brilliant, great feeling.'

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