Scram!

by Harry Benson

  It didn’t always work out. Sub-Lieutenant Steve Judd later tried this trick on HMS Arrow only to misjudge the distances and strip the tips off all four rotor blades on the ship’s aerials. To the great amusement of the other helicopter crews operating in San Carlos, Arrow’s flight-deck director then casually announced over the emergency frequency: ‘Would the Wessex pilot who has left his rotor tips on our deck care to check his aircraft and come back and collect them.’

  As punishment for his indiscretion, Jack Lomas sent Steve Judd onto Fearless to find a way of bringing back four new blades from the spare Wessex in the ship’s hold. To his credit, Judd persuaded the engineers on board to unbolt the blades, and a passing helicopter to carry them over. The Wessex was back up and running by the following morning.

  Having landed at FOB Whale, their new base south-east of most of the ships, Lomas needed to change seats in order to sort things out on the ground. Not wanting to shut down, he and Knight left the aircraft running completely on its own without anybody in the cockpit. Just over the bay, they could clearly see their mother ship Resource. At another time it would have been a glorious sight on a beautiful day. But any such thoughts were broken by an urgent voice on the UHF radio: ‘Air raid warning red, air raid warning red, SCRAM, SCRAM!’

  On board Fearless, the aviation staff had noticed that helicopters were either ignoring the air raid warnings and going to ground too late, or assuming attack was imminent and going to ground too early. Lieutenant Commander Ed Featherstone had invented a brilliant warning system that kept time on the ground waiting for a raid to pass to a minimum. Early warnings were coming from a range of sources. British submarines west of the Falklands could detect Argentine jets as they flew out from the mainland. As they coasted in over West Falkland, they could be heard or seen by the SBS patrols which had been inserted by the night-flying Sea Kings and were now hidden in the barren terrain. Sometimes the Royal Navy warships posted to the north and south of the islands could also detect the raids on their radar. Closest of all, look-outs on the Sussex Hills above San Carlos could see the jets as they approached.

  The earliest warning on the radio net, transmitted as ‘Air raid warning yellow’, meant that enemy jets were some fifty miles from San Carlos. These transmissions had little effect on operations other than as a general warning. Once the intruders were closer to fifteen miles and an attack was imminent, ‘Air raid warning red’ would be called. Helicopter pilots would then know they had to make a quick decision about whether to break off what they were doing and head for a gulley or shut down on a flight deck. As the attack materialised, ‘Air raid warning red, SCRAM!’ told crews that jets were coming over the hills. Being airborne when you heard the words ‘SCRAM, SCRAM!’ meant you were at serious risk of being shot down by your own side. There was one more important protection to prevent confusion. It was only ever Ed Featherstone’s voice on the radio.

  With Yankee Tango on the ground in the gulley, Knight climbed out of the left seat and ran around the front of the aircraft, up into the right seat vacated by Lomas. At least the helicopter had not tried to fly itself away with the sole passenger, aircrewman Petty Officer Arthur Balls, in the rear cabin. Even above the huge noise of the rotor disc and two Rolls-Royce engines, Lomas clearly heard the roar of the first of five Skyhawks screaming overhead. The underside of the jet was a beautiful duck egg blue against the dark blue sky. But where were the Harriers?

  Up in the cockpit, Knight had just finished strapping himself in as a Skyhawk flew over. Almost immediately, there was a sudden loud bang to his left. The windscreen imploded. Knight looked down to see a flattened bullet sitting innocently on the left seat. ‘I’ve just been shot!’ he called down to his aircrewman.

  ‘What, what? Don’t be so stupid,’ cried Balls.

  ‘No, not me, we’ve just been shot. I’ve got a big hole in the windscreen. Poke your head up and see.’

  As soon as Balls pushed upwards on the left cockpit seat, glass tinkled down into the cabin by his feet. The bullet had smacked into a metal spar just by Knight’s left shoulder. Had he remained in the left seat, the bullet would have hit him. Looking out towards Resource across the bay, they both realised they’d been shot by their own side. ‘It’s our bloody ship!’

  The main reason for the machine gun in the cabin of a Wessex was to shoot back at an attacking jet. But since the arc of fire was limited, so that the bullets didn’t go up through the rotor blades, it was never used in anger. This is 845 Squadron aircrewman Arthur Balls.

  Over on the other side of the bay, just a few hundred yards away behind the Ajax Bay warehouse, Manley and his crew had responded to the cry of ‘Air raid warning red, SCRAM!’ by shutting down Yankee Sierra to one engine. As they ran from the aircraft, a Skyhawk flashed down the gulley heading straight towards them. ‘Ric, check your three o’clock,’ shouted Manley.

  Caught out in the open, Fox just had time to look out to his right as the jet passed no more than twenty feet above their heads going flat out. The pressure wave blew both of them to the ground and the noise was deafening. Almost immediately they heard cannon fire from the ships splitting the air above their heads, followed by a huge bang as a Seacat missile exploded having missed its target. Fragments of the missile crashed down fifty yards away, perilously close to the Wessex, whining away on one engine on its own.

  Back on Resource, Knight shut down the damaged Yankee Tango and asked the engineers for some sort of battle damage repair to the windscreen. He wandered off to find a very apologetic bosun’s mate who had been operating the offending gun on the starboard side of the ship: ‘I’m really sorry, it won’t happen again.’

  Having smoothed things over, Knight returned to the aircraft after grabbing a sandwich and cup of tea. He was surprised to find that instead of replacing the shattered windscreen, the screen had simply been covered on both sides in fablon, a sticky-back plastic sheeting normally used to protect maps from the rain. Yankee Tango’s windscreen had certainly been repaired. It was just impossible to see anything through it.

  Knight’s colleague, Sub-Lieutenant Noddy Morton, was expecting to take the aircraft for the afternoon. ‘I’ll wait for the other one if you don’t mind, Oily,’ he said. For the rest of the war, Yankee Tango became the aircraft nobody wanted to fly.

  There was to be one further air strike on this day by a flight of three Skyhawks. Avoiding interception by the Sea Harriers, the flight swept up San Carlos Water chased by a wall of lead and missiles from the British ships. Two of the Skyhawks managed to release their bombs into the landing ships logistic, RFA Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot. Both ships had already unloaded much of their stores. However, the attack put them temporarily out of action. Some of the crew were evacuated while the unexploded 500-pound bombs were defused or hauled overboard.

  After their twenty-one-hour marathon adventure before and during D-Day, a shattered Crabtree, Heathcote and Gleeson were relieved to park Yankee Charlie for the night high up on the helicopter deck of Canberra and get some rest. However, naval command insisted that the ‘great white whale’ Canberra withdraw from the immediate danger zone of San Carlos as soon as possible. As the crew of Yankee Charlie woke up early the following morning, expecting to continue tasking around the beachhead, it was somewhat disconcerting to find themselves steaming back out to sea and away from the action. Unable to establish any kind of authorisation to move on, they were forced to spend a frustrating two days twiddling their thumbs on board.

  Heathcote made good use of his time chatting to Lieutenant Bob Horton, pilot of the Sea King that had crashed into the sea two days earlier with such appalling loss of life after reportedly hitting an albatross. Horton was convalescing with a broken ankle, the result of kicking out his cockpit window underwater in a desperate bid to escape from his rapidly sinking helicopter.

  Eventually, after a frustrating two days, Crabtree finally managed to get authorisation to return to their parent ship RFA Tidepool, where the other half of his flight
and their maintenance crew awaited. Although there was some uncertainty about the exact location, they needed no encouragement to set off. Without any means of refuelling from Canberra, they would have to make do with the little over an hour of fuel available on board, equivalent to some 120 miles range. It should be more than enough.

  Visibility was poor as they set off, almost immediately switching to instrument flying whereby the pilot relies entirely on his cockpit instruments. They skimmed in and out of wispy cloud at 400 feet above the sea, beginning to wonder whether this was such a great idea after all. The odds of hitting Tidepool without radio contact were almost nil. The fuel gauges wound slowly down as they passed the point of no return. They were now committed to continuing. They had to find Tidepool.

  Crabtree broke radio silence: ‘Nine Delta Alpha Four, this is Yankee Charlie, inbound and requesting urgent vector.’ One or two short replies from Tidepool would do the trick. The crew could then use their ADF direction-finder needle to home the aircraft onto the source of the radio signal and find the ship. But there was only silence. Two further calls produced no reply. The situation was beginning to look critical. Heathcote felt down for the connectors between his lifejacket and the liferaft contained in his detachable seat.

  ‘Nine Delta Alpha Four, Yankee Charlie, you can tell us where you are, or you can come and collect us when we ditch.’

  They were now down to twenty minutes of fuel. There was a collective outtake of breath as Tidepool replied giving them a closing vector. Minutes later – a wonderful sight – the huge shape of the ship with its high bridge and refuelling gantries, emerged out of the gloom.

  Chapter 9

  Coventry and Conveyor: 25 May 1982

  ARGENTINA’S NATIONAL DAY, Tuesday 25 May. The war of attrition was putting pressure on both sides to act decisively. The British were losing ships. The Argentines were losing aircraft. The beachhead at San Carlos was well established, but still needed significant strengthening. The giant container ship Atlantic Conveyor was due to offload its stores and helicopters next. Its arrival was the key to an early break-out.

  The British knew the Argentines would want to use their National Day to inflict a mortal blow to the task force. The British had already lost three out of only twenty-three available frigates and destroyers. Several more warships were badly damaged. Since the landings, they had lost another Sea Harrier to an accident at sea, an RAF Harrier shot down during a ground attack on Port Howard in West Falkland. By way of reply, the Sea Harriers had knocked down thirteen Argentine air force and navy attack aircraft, with a further four brought down by ground fire, Rapier and Broadsword’s Seawolf missiles.

  * * *

  Around San Carlos, the troops of 3 Brigade were well entrenched on the ground: 3 Para at Port San Carlos green beach, 45 Commando at Ajax Bay red beach, 40 Commando at San Carlos blue beach, and 2 Para up in the Sussex Mountains to the south of San Carlos. To break out from the San Carlos area and head the thirty miles or so east toward Stanley, the British needed additional support. But their supplies, stores, ammunition and equipment were still being unloaded, and all too slowly, inhibited by the ferocity of the daytime air raids from the mainland. A huge volume of stores and helicopters awaited out at sea on Atlantic Conveyor, while the second wave of troops from 5 Brigade was still several days away, southbound on the cruise ship QE2.

  The fuel tanker Tidepool sailed into San Carlos Water on the morning of 25 May, bringing Mike Crabtree and his flight of two more Wessex. The five Wessex of 845 Squadron were still outnumbered by the ten more powerful Sea Kings of 846 Squadron. After losing three Sea Kings to crashes and the Chile mission, now another was grounded following a misjudged landing near Fanning Head that had broken off the tail. Six were employed lifting endless loads from ship to shore. The other four continued their night-flying role in support of the special forces patrols around the Falkland Islands.

  Either way, more helicopters were urgently needed to speed up the advance out of the beachhead, across East Falkland, and on towards the capital Port Stanley. Six more Wessex and four heavy-lift Chinooks were expected to arrive the next day with Atlantic Conveyor. The ground forces were relying on them.

  Argentine National Day had started well for the British. Defence against air attacks had relied heavily on three continuous and overlapping Sea Harrier patrols to the north, south and centre of West Falkland. The major limitation was the ninety-minute endurance of the Sea Harriers, which included transit time to and from the aircraft carriers Hermes and Invincible. The Royal Navy was understandably nervous of bringing the carriers in too close to the islands. Sink one or both carriers and the British air defence would be in disarray, rendering the task force impotent.

  As the outer layer of the Navy’s strategy of defence in depth, the Sea Harriers were extraordinarily effective. The Argentine air force pilots were well aware of the stunning success of Lieutenant Commander Sharkey Ward’s Sea Harrier trials unit in aerial dog fights against American F-5 Freedom Fighter and F-15 Eagle jets back in the UK. This fearsome reputation caused dozens of Argentine attackers to turn back simply on detecting the sweep of Sea Harrier’s Blue Fox radar. Those prepared to ignore this deterrent ran the gauntlet of the lethal Sidewinder missiles and cannon carried by the ‘black death’. The problem was that the long transit to and from patrol left the Sea Harriers with little time on task and the landing force with holes in the outer defence.

  Local air defence around San Carlos relied on the ‘goalkeeper’ ships, sitting bravely exposed out in Falkland Sound as bait, inviting attack. In the role of goalkeeper, Broadsword had already notched up one Dagger on the first morning and a possible Skyhawk two days later, claimed jointly with the land-based Rapier. Rapier’s own performance had been far less impressive than advertised.

  The Royal Navy were also applying their strategy of positioning a Type 22–42 combo as a missile trap way out to the east, at worst to provide early warning and at best to lure and destroy the incoming attack altogether. Attacking jets would first have to avoid the Sea Dart missiles fired at them from the Type-42 destroyer forty miles away. Any that survived would then have to get past the Seawolf missiles fired at them from the Type-22 frigate at close range. Seawolf had already knocked down four Argentine jets. Sea Dart was yet to have its first success.

  That morning, the Type-22 HMS Broadsword, and Type-42, HMS Coventry, were positioned on picket duty north of East Falkland. It was most likely an Argentine Hercules transport plane that first spotted the two ships on radar and reported their position back to the mainland. Soon afterwards three Argentine Skyhawks took the bait. The first Sea Dart launched from Coventry at long range knocked out one of the jets. The other two jets turned and fled. The 22–42 combo plan was working.

  It was three hours before the next air strike appeared, this time heading for the San Carlos area. Sparky Harden, one of my twenty-one-year-old contemporaries, along with Hector Heathcote, had just arrived on Tidepool. It was his first air raid. Hearing the cry: ‘Air raid warning red, air raid warning red, SCRAM, SCRAM!’ during tasking, he needed no further invitation to roll his Wessex steeply onto its side and flare into a fast-stop landing. Lowering the nose of the aircraft carefully down onto the boggy Falkland soil, he pulled the throttles and started unstrapping. What seemed like seconds later, he was lying on the damp grass next to his Geordie aircrewman ‘Smiler’ Smiles, listening to the distant screech of jets crossing behind the hills. He watched the flash as a Rapier missile threaded its way across the sky. Four Skyhawks sped through San Carlos Bay out of sight. He couldn’t see the Skyhawk that was hit, whether by cannon fire from the ships or Rapier or both. The pilot ejected into the water to be picked up by one of the Royal Marine boats.

  The other three aircraft fled to the north, making the mistake of passing within range of the two ships out to the north of Pebble Island. A second Skyhawk was destroyed by a Sea Dart missile from Coventry. Opportunistic, it was their second of the day.

  Mean
while Ric Fox, Pete Manley and Dave Greet had been looking for an opportunity to get on board one of the supply ships for a shower after four days of sleeping rough. During a lull in the tasking they parked Yankee Sierra on a spare flight deck and headed down below. The Chinese laundrymen promised to return their combat clothing clean within the hour. After a well-earned hot shower, they were heading into the galley area when the ship’s alarm sounded: ‘Action stations, air raid warning red’. Awaiting the return of their clothes, there was little they could do as the ship’s crew disappeared to man their posts but help themselves to curry.

  It was early afternoon when the next Argentine strike came in. This time the bait was well and truly taken. This strike directly targeted the ships Coventry and Broadsword, which had been responsible for despatching two of their aircraft that morning.

  The first flight of two Argentine Skyhawks sped low out of the distant horizon of Pebble Island, fifteen miles to the south of the ships. High above them, two Sea Harriers on Combat Air Patrol were given directions to intercept them. The leading Sea Harrier was just three miles behind the Skyhawks when he was ordered to break off the attack and leave it to the ship’s own missiles. Coventry, steaming ahead of Broadsword, was the better placed to acquire the low-flying jets. But the radar for her Sea Dart missile failed to get a lock. It was Broadsword’s turn. Her radar now locked on to the approaching jets. Just as Seawolf seemed ready to claim its fifth and sixth victims, the computer system inexplicably froze, leaving both ships with only cannon and small-arms fire for defence. The Skyhawks swept towards Broadsword and released their bombs.