Hero of the Month - October 2025
Published in Britain at War - October 2025
Petty Officer Graham John Robert Libby, DSM
HMS Submarine Conqueror is best known for sinking the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, in an incident that is still controversial more than 40 years on. Yet for crew member Petty Officer Graham Libby, his greatest test came not at the actual time of the sinking but less than a month later when he showed outstanding courage as a diver to solve a major problem faced by his submarine.
Graham John Robert Libby was born on December 2 1958 in Portsmouth, Hampshire. The son of a Royal Navy diver, he was brought up and educated in the city before leaving school at 16. As a boy, he had initially wanted to join the Fire Brigade but he eventually enlisted in the Royal Navy instead in 1975, aged 16. Two years later he transferred to the Submarine Service and, like his father before him, he was also one of the ship’s divers.
By the spring of 1982, when war broke, out, Libby had been serving in the Conqueror, arguably the most famous British submarine ever launched, for three years. Some 285 feet long, with a beam of 32 feet, the Conqueror was commissioned on November 9 1971. She was a Churchill-class nuclear-powered submarine with a complement of more than 100 officers and crew.
By late March 1982, after completing a three-month overseas deployment, the Conqueror was back at her home base of Faslane, situated on the eastern side of Gare Loch, Scotland, home to the 3rd Submarine Squadron. With the submarine in need of some repair work, her crew was given leave.
However, just two days before the invasion of the Falkland Islands, and with diplomatic alarm bells ringing loud and clear, officers and men were ordered to return to the boat – and to prepare for war. Libby was one of those on leave at his home in Portsmouth on April 1 1982. He told Mike Rossiter, the author of the book Sink the Belgrano, “I had only been there a few days when there was a knock on the door and there was this policeman stood there saying, ‘You’ve been recalled. Make your way to the boat.’ It was the morning of April the first he knocked on the door and, and I thought, this is a wind-up, April fool!” However, the policeman was deadly serious and Libby was soon back on duty. Under the command of the newly-appointed Commander Christopher Wreford-Brown, the Conqueror was soon sailing for the South Atlantic but with many of the crew convinced that the dispute would be settled by diplomacy not military conflict.
Libby was the submarine’s “scratcher”, the crewman responsible for the maintenance of the outer casing. Part of his role was to ensure that the capstans, winches and cables were all properly secured and that they made no noise when the boat was underway: in war, such noises could give away the submarines position resulting in it being torpedoed or bombed and all lives on board being lost. Finally, Libby was the most senior diver on board.
After nearly three weeks at sea, the Conqueror was approaching South Georgia, 900 miles south-east of the Falklands. By this point, the British Government had decided to retake South Georgia prior to mounting an attack on the Falkland Island. At one point Conqueror resurfaced so that some SBS men on board could be picked up by helicopter and transferred to HMS Antrim, the Navy’s county-class destroyer. However, just at the worst possible moment one of the SBS men and Petty Officer Libby were hit by a huge wave that swept them into the bitterly-cold sea.
Both men were eventually rescued by helicopter and taken to HMS Antrim, where they were placed in a cold bath while their circulation slowly improved. Libby spent six hours in recovery before later being returned to his submarine, which had remained on the surface as engineers tried to repair its communications problems.
Once in the war zone, the Conqueror was on the look out for potential targets.
On April 23 1982, the British Government made a statement that said Argentine ships might be a target “if they could amount to a threat to interfere with the mission of British Forces in the South Atlantic”. This went further than the Government’s early statement which had restricted targets to inside the 200-mile Total Exclusion Zone.
Soon British intelligence passed on information to Commander Wreford-Brown that a four-ship Argentine convoy, made up of the Belgrano, two destroyers and an oiler, was in his vicinity. On April 30, after detecting the Belgrano, the captain decided to go closer, strongly suspecting that his target would eventually come within firing range. On May 1 and, although the captains of both the Conqueror and the Belgrano were initially unaware of it, the fighting for the Falklands started in earnest.
The final order to “sink the Belgrano” came on May 2 and was issued by the British War Cabinet. Soon afterwards, the Conqueror fired three Mark 8 torpedoes, at three-second intervals, at the Belgrano and two hit their target. Soon the ship began to list to port and to sink towards the bow. Twenty minutes after the attack, at 16:24, Captain Hector Bonzo ordered the crew to abandon ship. Inflatable life rafts were deployed and the evacuation began. A total of 323 men lost their lives, many killed in the two initial explosions. At the time of the attack, there were 1,052 men on board.
In the two days after the attack, the Conqueror patrolled the area close by when she was a target for the Argentine air force seeking revenge for the Belgrano’s sinking. After one near miss from an enemy attack, the Conqueror experienced a series of communication problems and, as part of an effort to repair the situation, an aerial wire had been released into the water. However, this appeared to have become entangled around the propeller and so, rather than solve the problem, the wayward aerial had created another more serious one.
By May 25, and with the submarine patrolling north of the Falkland Islands, there was only one thing for it; the submarine would have to surface – dangerous in itself with enemy aircraft in the area – and a diver, backed up by other crew, would be released into the water. His task was to investigate the problem and try to dislodge the wire.
This sea was, however, was both bitterly cold and rough – this was the South Atlantic after all. There was a real danger that the diver might be washed away. Even worse, if an enemy aircraft was sighted the submarine would have to dive at once with the diver unable to get back into the submarine in time. The abandoned diver would have no chance of survival – either freezing to death or drowning as it would be hours before it was safe for the submarine to re-emerge.
Petty Officer Libby volunteered for the task of trying to solve the submarine’s problem, later recalling: “I was a single man, I was quite happy to go out there because I was all pumped up. We had just sunk a blooming great warship – this could be the icing on the cake, you know? It’s just something exciting that I might never ever get a chance to do.”
In his book Secrets of the Conqueror, Stuart Prebble takes up the story, “Libby and Tim McClement [First Lieutenant] climbed out onto the submarine casing, with five other divers for support and back-up. All of the men were attached to the boat by life-lines, but straight away a wave swept Libby and John Coulthard [Lieutenant] into the water.”
Coulthard was pulled back to safety but Libby disappeared from sight, soon afterwards appearing at the stern of the boat. Prebble wrote: “Clanking around his body as he was buffeted by the waves was a range of tools and hacksaws which he thought he might need for the task. He found that the aerial wire was indeed wrapped tightly around the shaft and blades. Worse still, even though the engines were of course stopped, the propellers were still turning gently, and in danger of severing the diver’s life-line back into the boat. Libby worked away with hacksaws, as speedily as he could, cutting off the wire in sections. The need for dexterity meant that he could not wear gloves, and gradually he felt his hands seize up and his entire body being penetrated by cold.”
McClement was constantly scanning the horizon for any sign of an enemy aircraft, knowing that there would be no way of getting Libby back if the submarine was forced to dive. After 20 minutes, however, and just when Libby’s stamina was on the point of giving out, he declared the propeller clear and was hauled back inside the submarine.
Wreford-Brown later said of the action: “I think he [Libby] was outstandingly brave.” This incident took place three weeks and two days after the controversial sinking of the Belgrano.
As the Conqueror continued to patrol close to the Argentine coast, the Royal Navy continued to suffer losses due to attacks from enemy aircraft. However, slowly Britain gained the upper hand. With their Armed Forced weakened and demoralised, General Mario Menendez, the Argentine commanding officer in the Falklands, surrendered on June 14.
There were celebratory scenes on board the Conqueror and 24 hours later she was ordered home. Conqueror arrived at Faslane to a triumphant reception on July 13, proudly flying the white ensign at the stern and the Jolly Roger, embellished with her achievements, at the mast above the fin.
Libby’s Distinguished Service Medal (DSM) was announced in The London Gazette on October 11 1982 when his citation concluded: “Acting Petty Officer (Sonar) (SM) Libby demonstrated a degree of cold, calculated courage and willingness to risk his life for the benefit of the ship far beyond any call of duty.”
Commander Wreford-Brown was decorated with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and two other members of the company were Mentioned in Despatches for their efforts to repair the radio mast.
Libby received his decoration in an investiture at Buckingham Palace on February 8 1983. In an interview for my book Falklands War Heroes, he told me: “It was a brilliant day out. I received my medal from the Queen and I remember she called me by my first name. She had been incredibly well briefed because she knew I was on a course and she asked me how it was going. She had definitely done her homework and from what I could see she had not notes or prompts from a projector or anything else. She was very impressive – quite remarkable.”
After leaving the Royal Navy in 1984, Libby worked for Hampshire Fire Brigade at their headquarters in Eastleigh. As part of his role with the fire service, Libby began to specialise in rescue techniques used following natural disasters.
He finally retired from the fire service in 2016 after 31 years’ service. Today, Libby, who has three grown-up children and six grandchildren, lives in the Portsmouth area. Reflecting on the war and the sinking of the Belgrano, he said: “I have no qualms about what we did. I think we did the right thing. We’d have lost quite a lot more lives on our side without it.”