Alberto Deluchi was on board the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano when the ship was attacked by the British submarine Conqueror.
And he says he survived by accident.
Just before the first torpedo hit the ship, it had left the mess, which was eventually destroyed, killing dozens of men.
“If I talked another half minute I probably wouldn’t be here,” Deluchi told BBC News Mundo, the BBC’s Spanishlanguage news service.
It was 4 p.m. on May 2, 1982. Only a month had passed since the Argentine military landed in the Falkland Islands, or the Falklands, to claim their sovereignty, an action that sparked a bloody war with the United Kingdom.
323 Argentines died in the attack on Belgrano, almost half of the 649 casualties the South American country suffered in the war, which also claimed the lives of 255 British soldiers and three islanders.
It was a crucial moment in the conflict. And also one of the most controversial.
40 years later, the BBC tells you what the decisive attack looked like, the consequences it had and the human drama the episode unleashed.
A ship with history:
the ARA General Belgrano
The last ARA General Belgrano mission sailed on April 16, 1982 from the Puerto Belgrano naval base towards Ilha dos Estados in the South Atlantic. She had 1,093 crew members on board, including officers, subordinates and young people doing their compulsory military service.
Built by the US in 1938, she was sold to the Argentine Navy in 1951 after surviving the attack on Pearl Harbor, in which she took part under the name USS Phoenix.
It was a ship with high firepower, it had five turrets with three 152 mm 47 caliber guns each, eight 127 mm guns on the sides and antiaircraft artillery.
But it lacked sonar to detect underwater objects.
Its protection was assumed by two destroyers (destroyers), the ARA Piedrabuena and the ARA Bouchard, which had this technology.
A British nuclear submarine:
the HMS Conqueror
HMS Conqueror was a nuclearpowered submarine of the British Royal Navy that sailed from Faslane Naval Base in Scotland bound for the South Atlantic on 3 April 1982, a day after the Argentinean landings in the Falkland or Falkland Islands.
It had entered service in 1971 and its nuclear reactor propulsion enabled it to travel longer distances in the ocean depths than conventional submarines.
However, it had no nuclear weapons it had six tubes to launch torpedoes of two types: Mark 8 and Mark 24, also known as “Tigerfish”.
On April 12, 1982, ten days after the start of the war, the United Kingdom established a maritime exclusion zone of 200 nautical miles around the islands. And at the end of that month, he turned it into a total restricted zone, indicating he could open fire on any enemy ship or aircraft that crossed the outlined border.
There is consensus that Belgrano was attacked outside of this zone.
However, the UK claims that it warned Argentina on April 23 that it would respond to any vessel that posed a threat to British forces in the South Atlantic (although there would be no specific restrictions).
The following maps recreate what has happened since the British submarine intercepted the Belgrano, based on testimonies from former crew members of each of the ships. Belgrano is identified with the color yellow and Conqueror with the color green.
Pedro Luis Galazi
He was deputy commander of the Belgrano and was 44 years old at the time. He was born on the same day the cruiser was launched.
Jonathan Powis
He was navigating officer on the Conqueror and was 26 years old at the time.