Rear-Admiral 'Sam' Salt - HMS Sheffield - Falklands War

Rear-Admiral ‘Sam’ Salt

Dec 8 2009 by William Leece, Liverpool Daily Post
Rear-Admiral ‘Sam’ Salt

WITH a surname like his, Sam Salt could hardly have been anything else but a sailor, and a veteran one at that.
The son of a submariner who was lost on war service when he was a baby, Sam Salt followed the family tradition into the Royal Navy when he was 18, straight from Wellington School into Dartmouth Naval College in 1958.
After a decade or so on surface vessels, he followed his father once again into the submarine service, taking command of the Finwhale diesel-electric sub and eventually the nuclear submarine Dreadnought, in 1978.
By the early 1980s, he was back on the surface in command of HMS Sheffield, a Type 42 Guided Missile Destroyer.
Sheffield and her crew were sent to the South Atlantic for the brief Falklands War in 1982, where she was destined to be the first Royal Navy ship lost to enemy action since 1945.
Sheffield was hit amidships by an Exocet missile launched from an Argentinian warplane, and, although the warhead did not explode, the impact was enough to trigger a fierce fire and also to cripple the ship’s firefighting systems.
With the ship filling up with poisonous black smoke, her effectiveness as a fighting vessel was zero. After four hours of desperate but futile attempts to quell the blaze, Salt gave the order to abandon ship, a “necessary, brave and right” decision, the official report into the loss declared. Twenty officers and men died, and the burned-out hulk eventually sank four days later as she was being towed away from the scene.
Back in the UK, Salt was given command of another Type 42, HMS Southampton, before moving to Fleet Headquarters at Northwood, in Middlesex.
After a spell in naval intelligence, he was Assistant Chief of Naval staff as a Rear-Admiral in the first Gulf War, and then military deputy in Defence Export Services until his retirement in 1997, after which he pursued a business career up to 2005.
James Frederick Thomas George Salt, naval officer; born, April 19, 1940, died, December 3, 2009
Liverpool Daily Post.co.uk - Views & Blogs - Obituaries - Obituary: Rear-Admiral ‘Sam’ Salt

Additional news article
Rear-Admiral Sam Salt - Telegraph

 

RIP Admiral. May your seas be calm and your winds fair.

 

one of the very few ship commanders not to receive the usual dso in the conflict..a quaint brit way at pointing fingers.. ..rip..will be toasted at shiney shef reunions im sure