MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands “cover-up” denied.TV focus on HMS Sheffield exocet attack.

Hints that there has been an official cover-up over failure of the frigate HMS Sheffield to take action against incoming Argentine exocet missiles in the 1982 Falklands Conflict have been denied by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) in London.
An MOD statement declared: “There has been no tampering with evidence and no cover-up. We regard this matter as closed”..

In fact, the loss of the Sheffield has been re-opened by a BBC television documentary called "Exocet", which questions why there was no one in authority in the war operations room to order avoiding action. The documentary relies on the recollections of two members of the crew of what happened in the vital seconds between the time the incoming Argentine exocet missiles were detected and one of them striking the warship causing a fire which killed 20 British sailors. The loss of this warship in the forward-line of defence exposed the vulnerability of the Task Force and raised the prospect that its commanders could be forced into abandoning the whole operation. Exocet attacks sank other ships including the Atlantic Conveyor carrying Chinook helicopters and other vital supplies, but Argentina's limited stocks of the missile were soon used up.

The attack on Sheffield came two days after the British submarine Conqueror torpedoed and sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, with the loss of more than 300 sailors.

After several days on alert, virtually without sleep, Sheffield's commander, Captain Sam Salt, was resting in his cabin, exhausted, when a radar screen operator, Simon Westbrook, spotted the tell-tale blips of Argentine Super Etendard aircraft about 60 miles (96 kilometres) away, and again when they were only 30 miles (nearly 50 kilometres) distant, about to launch their missiles. "From start to finish", Westbook recalls," we had about three minutes before being hit". Members of the crew claim that the absence from the operations room of Air Warfare Officer (AWO), Lieutenant Commander Nicholas Batho, meant there was no one in authority to give the order to fire chaff, the aluminium strips that form a decoy to deflect incoming missiles.

The main reason Sheffield was caught unawares on a clear day with good visibility was because the ship was using its communications system which interfered with its surveillance-measuring equipment which should otherwise have detected the Etendards' radar transmission.

Another destroyer nearer the incoming planes, HMS Glasgow, reacted, launched chaff, and escaped unharmed. In Sheffield, Westbrook says: "The scream went up for the AWO to be in the ops room bec