Stephen Barraclough 🇺🇦

The Royal Navy switched its sailors from cotton to polyester two years before the Falklands, and the sea put the two fabrics to the test on the afternoon of 4 May 1982. HMS Sheffield was hit by an Exocet 70 miles off the islands. The warhead did not go off. It did not need to: the rocket fuel did, and the ship filled with fire and black smoke in seconds. Twenty men died. Many more came out of her with burns, and the burns had a feature the surgeons at Ajax Bay and the Uganda had not been trained for. The shirts had melted. The new working rig was polyester, lighter and cheaper and quicker to dry than the old cotton, and in a flash fire it did what polyester does at 250 degrees, which is turn to liquid and bond to whatever it is touching. Men were brought off with their uniform fused into their skin, and the first job in the burns tent was peeling plastic out of flesh. Nylon socks did the same thing to feet. Anti-flash hoods and gloves, the white cotton gear every sailor still wears at action stations, had saved the faces and hands they covered and left a line where the plastic began. The lesson was learned at the Sir Galahad too, at Bluff Cove a month later, where the Welsh Guards were caught below decks and the burns ward at Ajax Bay found the same thing. Afterwards the Navy went back to natural fibres. Cotton action working dress, cotton socks, the wool jumper that had never left. The US Navy took the same lesson from the Falklands and again from the USS Stark in 1987 and banned polyester and Corfam shoes aboard ship. Then, in 2012, it issued a new blue camouflage working uniform, tested it, and had to announce to its own sailors that it would burn robustly and melt into a sticky molten material. The uniform was nylon and cotton. It had been in service for four years. Every navy that has ever had a fire has arrived at the same answer and then forgotten it as soon as the accountants came back. Natural fibre does not melt. A sheep's wool will not catch at a temperature a ship fire reaches, and when it chars it stops. Cotton burns, but it burns off, it does not become part of you. The shirt that went into a man's skin on the Sheffield is the same fabric as the school polo shirt, the fleece, the gym top, the sofa cover and the sheet on the bed. The Navy had to be shown it once. You are wearing it now.