“The architect who survived the sinking of the Belgrano”, Buenos Aires Herald
By Adrián Olstein, For the Herald, May 5, 2017
35 years ago this week, 323 people lost their lives when the ARA General Belgrano was sunk by the Royal Navy submarine Conqueror
In the extreme south of the Atlantic Ocean, in the closing hours of a chilly Autumn day, a torpedo fired by a submarine hit a warship. The explosion woke up some crewmen, alerted others and killed many.
“(The torpedo) ripped through four decks, leaving big holes in its wake and destroying men and machines,” Captain Héctor Bonzo, the ship’s commander, would narrate years later in a dispassionately military tone.
Less than an hour after being hit, the ARA General Belgrano went down, with over 300 hands aboard.
It all happened 35 years ago last Tuesday (May 2, 1982) in the midst of the conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom, known variously as the Malvinas War, the Falklands War and the South Atlantic War. Most of the crew were 18-year-old conscripts sleeping in bunks between narrow corridors and below the Plimsoll line.
One survivor was a recently graduated architect who had not wanted to go to war. His way of whiling away the hours of boredom below deck had been to memorise with precision the stairs and corridors separating him from the surface. In the darkness he grabbed the keys of his house, his bag and his naval identity card and made his way through the labyrinth leading up to deck.
His name is Marcelo Soteras. Now 61, today he remains an architect and also a university teacher in Bahía Blanca.
“From that moment on, I drew a line. I told myself repeatedly: “I’m not a veteran, I’m an architect who went to war and nothing else.”
He turned these axioms into a philosophy of silence, which his family, friends and colleagues have respected until today.
In 1982, the last military dictatorship was already onto its third junta. Unlike previous coups, that of 1976 was staged by all three Armed Forces, each of which had a representative in the junta. The third junta, since late 1981, had been headed by Army lieutenant-general Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri. The political and economic situation was increasingly critical and in that context Galtieri took the secret decision to reconquer by military force the Malvinas (Falklands) Islands, which had been under British rule since 1833.
This last desperate act of the dictatorship had a successful beginning. Mass demonstrations throughout the country offered support to the Argentine soldiers placing their lives on the line in order to regain sovereignty over the islands.
Soteras, then a 25-year-old architect, was one of those men placed aboard a ship bound for the islands.
“I decided to get my conscription out of the way once I had graduated. I finished university in 1980 and was just starting to work when I was called up for my compulsory military service. They took us to La Plata. Those with a professional education were offered the choice between a military career in the Navy and joining the ranks. I returned to Bahía Blanca to become a simple rating at the Puerto Belgrano naval base.”
There Soteras worked in the “Fixed Installations” section, the tasks closest to his profession. In peacetime, everything was routine and without major conflicts. But from the start of 1982 the situation grew more complicated.
“I knew something was going on. Those of us who knew English were called in for interviews. Then the Malvinas were taken and I started to worry — I was doing my military service in the Navy at Puerto Belgrano, on the brink of a possible war.”
He was not wrong. The recovery of the Malvinas was underway and Puerto Belgrano was the base from where the fleet would set sail toward a war without precedent in modern Argentine history.
The cruiser ARA General Belgrano was a vessel which had been sailing in Argentine waters for over 30 years. She had been built in the United States and was commissioned in 1938. Her original name was USS Phoenix and she measured 185 metres long and 25 metres wide.
She first saw action in World War II. She survived the attack on Pearl Harbor intact and participated in search-and-destroy missions against Japanese warships, patrolling the Indian Ocean. She bombarded Japanese positions at Cape Gloucester, New Guinea, was attacked by kamikaze planes, dodged three torpedoes heading her way, sunk two battleships and joined the attack on four other Japanese destroyers.
When the war ended, the options were either to scrap her or sell her. The Argentine Navy stepped in, buying the vessel in 1951 and inducting her into its fleet under the name ARA 17 de Octubre (the date of the popular movement which gave birth to Peronism). But the military government, as from 1955, intent on eradicating every trace of Peronism in Argentina, renamed the cruiser ARA General Belgrano.
Some 27 years later, when the military reconquest of the Malvinas was being prepared at the Puerto Belgrano naval base, the vessel was stationed there awaiting an overhaul.
“Every day we’d get the call and in the end the ship would never sail because it had an engine or something broken. I was desperate because I could not think of how I could get off. I did not belong in that place — I had studied to build, not to destroy,” recalls Soteras.
On April 1, 1982 a fleet of eight vessels set sail from the naval base, including an aircraft carrier, two destroyers, an ice-breaker, two missile-bearing corvettes and a submarine. The next day they disembarked on Isla Soledad, the larger of the two main Malvinas islands.
After a brief clash and the first Argentine casualty, the Argentine forces took over the islands. The Belgrano did not sail away until April 16 after various frustrated attempts. The British forces were already crossing the ocean in order to regain their overseas possessions.
All of this the young Soteras would learn after the event.
“Our destination was said to be the Malvinas but they put us on board the ship without our knowing where we were going. During a war the information is very unclear. It’s not real life.”
According to the navigational documents, the official mission of the Belgrano was: “Sail to the theatre of operations to be stationed at the Isla de los Estados. Keep to the coast and try to conceal your intentions. Guard the southern accesses to the theatre of operations. Intercept enemy units. Dissuasive action in a regional context. Avoid tactical contact with enemy units equipped with missiles.”
By then the Royal Navy had already taken its first unilateral decision a fortnight previously — to define a radius of 200 kilometres around the Malvinas Islands, inside which any vessel would be considered hostile and therefore attacked. The nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror was one of the vessels entrusted with patrolling this so-called “exclusion zone.”
On April 28, the first British attacks commenced. Firstly, frigates bombarded Stanley and then there were successive landing attempts repelled by the Argentine Air Force. As the intensity of the attacks escalated, the Conqueror pursued the General Belgrano for two days without being detected.
In a 2003 National Geographic documentary, when the only attempt to salvage the vessel from the bottom of the sea was made, British submarine crewman Bill Budding relates: “We saw the Belgrano, its two escorts and two supply ships like ducks in a row. I turned to my commanding officer and told him: ‘My torpedoes are loaded, we could sink them in one go.’”
But all Royal Navy vessels were bound by combat rules which did not permit them to take such a decision. That could only come from higher up.
The ship’s crew was composed of officers, career sailors and young conscripts aged between 18 and 25. Its original strength was 750 but for its Malvinas mission it was necessary to increase that number. Therefore troops from other areas and forces, many of whom had no experience on board a ship, were also called up.
Marcelo formed part of this last group and was stationed at the ship’s central gun turret. On April 19, while en route to the port of Ushuaia to restock, they carried out shooting exercises at Isla de los Estados, near the coast of Tierra del Fuego.
“We did not hit anything, of course,” he admits.
That is because he did not know how, besides which his head was somewhere else — foreseeing the tragedy. His tragedy.
“The only thing I was really interested in learning was how to abandon ship. I practised it and became a person who knew how to get off the boat. They taught us that we had to go slowly and very carefully because if you rush, you can bang your head and knock yourself out. Easy does it, you have to climb the necessary stairs and await orders.”
On May 2, 1982, Comunicado N° 16 of the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff was transmitted via nationwide broadcast, preceded by a blare of trumpets and the old ATC logo:
“The Joint Chiefs-of-Staff communicate that as the result of an attack suffered by the cruiser ARA General Belgrano, at a point estimated as 55° 24 latitude South and 61° 32 longitude West (as informed in Comunicado N° 15), there are indications which make us presume that she has sunk.”
That day the Belgrano was sailing outside the exclusion zone with no suspicion that she was in the Conqueror’s sights. Two of the three missiles fired were on target. The explosion from the first impact knocked out the engines and the ship was plunged into darkness.
“I will never forget the acrid smell of gunpowder. I was in the middle of the ship below everything,” recalls Soteras.
His crewmate Claudio Giménez adds: “It looked like fireflies shooting past at 1,000 kilometres per hour. Afterwards, I found out that it was incandescent shrapnel from the missile.”
“I saw fire behind me. The power was cut. I turned round to look and saw an intense glow. It was the main part of the ship’s mess (canteen) which was all ablaze,” recounts Jorge Páez.
Each one of the stories of the 770 survivors found a common denominator in the moment of explosion. That ties up all their loose ends which are otherwise different and processed both individually and collectively in different ways.
After a few seconds of silence, what for many was total despair, for Soteras was the moment of truth. He had studied every step, every passage. Those few seconds were, perhaps, strangely, his personal triumph in this story.
“You have to construct your own salvation because nobody is going to do it for you,” says the architect, who refuses to recognise himself as a veteran. That is why he describes his escape with pride.
“I didn’t know if I was going to be able to save myself but nobody was going to leave me aboard that ship. I climbed narrow stairwells and passed through corridors chock-a-block with people. At that moment I was absolutely cold and rational. I walked with my bag, my diary, the key to my house and my naval identity card. I did not miss a thing. My head was working at top speed.”
Thanks to his training, Marcelo Soteras reached the deck. But he was still a long way from safety: “When they hit us, the ships accompanying us were off in a flash. We were sinking and we saw the ships which could have saved us heading off at top speed. It’s terrible seeing the guy who could save you making his escape — it’s like a betrayal.”
The ships sailing alongside the General Belgrano were ARA Bouchard and ARA Piedrabuena, two destroyers both smaller than the Belgrano, which had also been dug up from the US Navy.
A petty officer from the Piedrabuena explained the manoeuvre in a 2002 documentary: “When a ship is attacked by a submarine and the other vessels have no contact, it is vital to sail as far away as possible as fast as possible since the other boats could also be a target of that submarine.”
An hour later the destroyer Piedrabuena received the order to return to the scene of the attack. Night was falling and the weather conditions were deteriorating. They did not find either the ship or the lifeboats. But the search-and-rescue operation was already underway.
In those agitated southern waters jumping onto a raft from a ship whose deck was 15 metres above the water was a complex task. In the mixture of training and improvisation which was defining the chaos, the 770 survivors abandoned ship and distributed themselves among the dozens of rafts with 20-30 sailors on each one. From those rafts they witnessed the sinking of their gigantic ship which bore on one of its turrets the inscription: “Go down rather than lower the flag.”
“The time on the rafts was terrible, I prayed for 26 hours. At night our raft deflated. We were going up and down in waves 10 metres high. It was six or seven o’clock in the morning, still nighttime, when a light beamed in on us and I understood that we’d been saved,” recalls Marcelo.
Four vessels participated in the search-and-rescue operation —the destroyers Piedrabuena and Bouchard, the transport vessel Gurruchaga and the ice-breaker Bahía Paraiso.
Two ships picked the stranded up — the Gurruchaga and the Piedrabuena. For many hours the rescue ships had been searching in vain. The first clue came when a plane spotted a huge petrol stain in the water. Hours later they spotted the first in a field of rafts, about four kilometres in diameter.
In a 2002 interview, Vice-Admiral Álvaro Vázquez — who commanded the Gurruchaga — recalled: “It was almost night, we had picked up two or three rafts and we saw the whole horizon full of rafts.” Once again, the difference in height between the hulls of the ship and the rafts, along with the movement of the water, made things difficult.
“You had to climb up from the raft onto the ship in a terrible storm. We went up 15 metres, then down 15 metres, we came 20 metres closer, then 20 metres further away and bounced against the hull of the ship,” remembers Soteras.
The work in high seas lasted three days until there were no more rafts drifting. The history of that rescue has been repeated in various testimonies. Men with their legs half-frozen unable to walk who needed ropes to pass from the raft to the ship.
“When they lifted us onto the ship, they told me not to walk. I thought I was OK but I took one step and fell to the ground. My legs were numb,” says Soteras.
Once the rescue operation was over, they took the survivors to the port of Ushuaia and from there they were flown back to their point of departure: Puerto Belgrano naval base.
“I had my family nearby and they did not know if I was OK. They didn’t let me go out or communicate. It was 2am and I paced around the sheds where they put the sailors, cursing everybody, because I couldn’t understand why they would not let me inform my family that I was alive.”
More than once his form of evoking that story takes place by alluding to imaginary facts — via fiction, not reality. That is the line he seems to have traced with the past.
He remembers that when he emerged from the darkness of the ship after the explosion to the sunshine of the deck, the first thing he thought, with everybody soaked in petrol, was that he was in Africa.
The mentors of war do not live in reality, he says. Reality is constructed by the men who wake up to work every day.
Marcelo Soteras works today as an architect heading up a construction team in Bahía Blanca. He teaches architecture and civil engineering within the architecture course of the Universidad Nacional del Sur. Asked what his hobbies are, he replies: “My family, my job, travel, my friends, Monte Hermoso and a plot in the country which I enjoy.”
“I was never a soldier and nor am I a veteran. I’m an architect who was sent to war.
“You get very annoyed, you try to protect yourself, you draw a line and you forget the past. But these things remain engraved. I have an anger and a force which helps me build,” he concludes.
And so it was. Marcelo tells his story from a building which he constructed himself and which looks out upon the same sea from which he survived. Yet this time he is 2,000 kilometres to the north, without any warships or submarines on the horizon.