Royal Navy Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, Naval commander of the Normandy operations, and US Navy Rear Admiral John L. Hall, Jr., commander of amphibious operations, aboard AGC-4 USS Ancon, 25 May 1944, the day King George VI visited the ship

44 years ago today, HMS Coventry made herself bait. She was a Type 42 destroyer, paired with the frigate HMS Broadsword, stationed alone north of Pebble Island in the freezing South Atlantic. Their job had a name. "The missile trap." Stand off the coast. Light up the radar. Pull Argentine jets away from the amphibious force unloading at San Carlos Water. Shoot them down if you can. Take the hits if you can't. It was May 25, 1982. Argentina's national day. By late afternoon Coventry had already killed. Her Sea Dart missiles had brought down two Skyhawks earlier in the day. Captain David Hart-Dyke could feel the pattern. The Argentines knew where they were. They would come again before sunset. They came at 1815. Four A-4 Skyhawks from Grupo 5, flying so low across West Falkland that sheep scattered in front of them. They had crossed the islands at fifty feet, threading the valleys, climbing only at the last second to see the ships. Below the radar horizon. Invisible until they were already on top of you. The first pair attacked Broadsword. A 1,000-pound bomb struck the sea, skipped like a stone, smashed up through the frigate's flight deck, and took the nose off her Lynx helicopter without exploding. It punched out the other side and into the water beyond. Broadsword survived. Sea Wolf locked onto the second pair as they ran in on Coventry. Then Coventry turned to port. She turned to bring her own Sea Dart launcher onto the incoming jets. The maneuver took seconds. In those seconds, her hull crossed directly into Broadsword's line of fire. The Sea Wolf system, looking at two fast targets behind her and a friendly ship between, went into confusion and dumped the tracks. The Skyhawks pressed the attack home unmolested. Three bombs hit. All three detonated. The forward engine room went first. Then the computer room. Then the operations room, where most of the air defence crew were standing watch. The lights died. The ship lurched. The captain, on the bridge above, felt his face on fire and could not see. Coventry began to list within a minute. Within five minutes she was at thirty degrees. Within twenty minutes she had rolled completely onto her side, and the men still climbing up through the dark were climbing sideways, then upward, then through hatches that had become ceilings. Nineteen sailors died. Several were teenagers. Hart-Dyke kept giving orders with his face burned. He was among the last men off, sliding down the upturned hull into a life raft while his ship slipped under the water behind him. He would survive. (His daughter, decades later, would become the comedian Miranda Hart. She has spoken about growing up with the scars on her father's hands.) The same afternoon, twelve miles north, four Exocet missiles found the container ship Atlantic Conveyor. She was carrying the Chinook helicopters that were supposed to fly the British army across East Falkland. Three Chinooks went to the bottom. The fourth, "Bravo November," flew off the deck minutes before the missiles arrived. It carried the war on its back to the end. May 25, 1982 was the worst day of the war for the Royal Navy. It was also the day the trap worked. While Coventry was burning, the troopships at San Carlos finished unloading. The bridgehead held. The men got ashore. Three weeks later, Argentine forces surrendered at Port Stanley. Hart-Dyke wrote, years afterward, that he sometimes thought about the young sailors who never came home, and what they would have made of the lives the rest of them got to live. He could not quite reconcile it. He did not try to. Today, 44 years on, a wreath goes into the water above her grave.