Scram!

by Harry Benson

  In the flight-deck hangar of Broadsword were two Lynx helicopters, one previously damaged in rough seas, the other the victim of cannon damage from a Dagger attack in San Carlos Bay three days earlier. Outside on the flight deck itself was ranged a third Lynx, borrowed from Broadsword’s sister ship HMS Brilliant, and the only one of the three in good working order. Just inside the hangar stood Sub-Lieutenant Ray Middleton, another twenty-one-year-old contemporary of mine who had been fast-tracked through training onto the Lynx. His father was Lyn Middleton, captain of the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, some 200 miles to the east.

  The flight deck of Broadsword was not a good place to be on this day. Middleton Junior watched open-mouthed as bombs left the fast approaching Skyhawk. The jet was so low that the first bomb didn’t even enter the water. It just bounced back off the sea with a giant splash and straight through the front of the Lynx, taking the helicopter nose with it. Middleton picked up the hangar telephone to report to the bridge. He found himself completely unable to speak due to shock.

  Apart from destroying the front of the Lynx helicopter, the attack by the first two Skyhawks was wholly unsuccessful. Three of the remaining four bombs had missed altogether. The second Skyhawk attack swept in behind them moments later. The frustrated Sea Harriers above now turned their attention to this second pair, only to be ordered once again to break off their intercept.

  This time Broadsword picked up the attacking jets with her radar and was ready to fire her Seawolf missiles. Usually, the best way to operate the combination of Coventry’s long-range Sea Dart missiles and Broadsword’s Seawolf missiles was to keep both ships as close together as possible. Both ships were manoeuvring hard from side to side. However, to Broadsword’s dismay, Coventry’s manoeuvre took her straight across the bows of Broadsword and broke the Seawolf radar’s missile lock. Coventry was now horribly exposed, firing off Sea Dart in desperation. This time three of the four bombs smashed into Coventry’s port side, exploding deep within the ship and killing several of the ship’s company. Coventry was instantly crippled by the huge explosions, which cut off all power supplies and communication within the ship and filled it with thick black smoke.

  Coventry began to list badly as water filled the holes in her port side. There was no need for any announcement. The crew began to abandon ship into their liferafts. Every helicopter operating in the San Carlos area was immediately instructed to head north-east to assist in the rescue. Anti-submarine Sea Kings from nearby Fort Grange were also sent to help. Even some of the night-flying Sea Kings were woken up and scrambled, at subsequent cost to that night’s planned special forces insertions.

  Simon Thornewill in Victor Alpha was soon leading a gaggle of five Sea Kings past Fanning Head and out to the north-west over the sea. Away from the protection of the San Carlos hills, he was very aware of how exposed they were. A further air strike would make them sitting ducks. Worse, none of the crews were wearing immersion dry suits to protect them if they were shot down and went into the water.

  The first Sea Kings on site were confronted by the shocking sight of a large British warship lying at an acute angle, smoke pouring from her superstructure. Orange rafts and men in orange once-only survival suits bobbed up and down in the water, drawn into the ship’s side and unable to escape. Helicopters began to gather on the scene. Chief Aircrewman Alf Tupper was lowered down from his Sea King into one liferaft to help winch the survivors up into the helicopter. The rafts were full of very frightened sailors, most of whom were soaking wet and frozen from their unexpected swim in the icy South Atlantic. Some crew members were also burned or wounded. The same sorry story was encountered by other Sea King aircrews dropped into other liferafts. As the survivors were winched up into the aircraft one by one, so much water drained into the Sea Kings’ cabins from the once-only suits that pilots could feel it sloshing around and destabilising the aircraft.

  Each Sea King took on board twenty or so survivors before heading back to San Carlos, or transferring them to the nearby Broadsword. With Broadsword’s flight deck out of action, blocked by the bomb-damaged Lynx, a clear area was urgently needed onto which to offload some of Coventry’s survivors. The hangar roof now became an impromptu flight deck, too small for landing but big enough for winching.

  The round trip, from San Carlos to the stricken Coventry and back, was forty minutes. For a Sea King this posed no problem. For a Wessex, the reduced endurance meant thinking very hard about fuel. Heathcote and Gleeson had been transferring tents and other maintenance equipment from Tidepool to their new forward operating base when they heard the call on the radio. Heathcote was flying alone because simple operations within the San Carlos made much more sense to fly single pilot, allowing the aircraft to lift a further 200 pounds of fuel or load. With a little over an hour’s fuel remaining, they agreed they should ‘leg it’. Within a few minutes, they had second thoughts and turned round for a quick refuel on Tidepool before setting course for HMS Coventry.

  Oily Knight and his aircrewman Arthur Balls had also been doing an offload in San Carlos. They had broken off as soon as they heard the request for further aircraft over the radio. Not knowing exactly where to go, they followed the direction taken by the Sea Kings ahead of them in the distance.

  By the time they arrived, Coventry was floating on its side with Broadsword still in attendance, its Lynx sitting forlornly on the flight deck with serious damage to the aircraft nose; it was clear the Lynx wasn’t going anywhere. Two other Sea Kings were winching survivors from the water. A few people in their orange lifesuits were trapped right up against the side of the upturned hull, unable to get away. Although there was now no sign of smoke, Balls warned Knight that the ship might go up at any moment.

  Transferring people to and from any ship without a serviceable flight deck requires quick thinking from all of the crews. This was especially true when the ship is listing at an angle. Because of the direction of the wind, it seemed best to position the Wessex over the hull of the ship and actually land both front wheels on the upturned hull, leaving the tail suspended over the water behind the survivors. Knight reckoned he could claim this as a deck landing for his pilot’s log book.

  Balls left Knight to get on with his unorthodox deck landing and concentrated on winching survivors up from the liferaft below him which had become trapped between the bridge front and the foc’sle. The first man to be winched up was being manhandled into the dangling orange strop. But it had been put on the wrong way round, across his chest instead of around his back. Despite shouting and waving at the survivors below to turn the strop around, Balls eventually thought sod it and winched him up as it was. Facing inwards instead of outwards made it far harder to get the passenger through the doorway. But there was a reason why the strop had been put on the other way. Viewed from the front, the sailor looked fully dressed and normal. But from the back, it took Balls’s breath away. There was nothing. No clothing, no skin. Just a mess of burnt flesh. Even above the roar of the hovering Wessex, Balls could hear the man screaming in agony. He had never felt so helpless. But he had to get on with winching the others. Many other casualties also had burns or broken limbs. The cabin quickly became a scene of mayhem. ‘I need to ease the crowding. Let’s get some of these guys onto the other ship,’ he told Knight.

  Knight eased the Wessex away towards Broadsword, waved in by the Lynx aircrew who were now making themselves useful on the hangar roof. Time was pressing because of their lack of fuel and the urgent need to get the wounded back to the field hospital at Ajax Bay. It would be much quicker if they didn’t have to winch anyone down. Parking one wheel on Broadsword’s hangar roof for added stability, Knight skilfully swivelled the Wessex around in the hover so that the less seriously injured survivors could simply jump out onto the roof. The other two wheels were suspended in mid-air. ‘Another deck landing,’ concluded Knight, before clearing away and accelerating towards San Carlos.

  Heathcote and Gleeson arrived just in time to watch the other Wesse
x balancing precariously on the side of Broadsword’s hangar. After D-Day in San Carlos, where he had the impression of seeing very few helicopters at all, Heathcote was surprised to see so many Sea Kings now buzzing around HMS Coventry. Hands waving from a liferaft showed them their immediate task. It was just a few days after the rescue from Ardent, where hovering fifteen feet over a glassy sea had proved so difficult. This time the surface choppiness and bubbles gave Heathcote a lot more to use as visual references, making hovering above the liferafts a little easier. Gleeson kept up a constant chatter of instructions as he winched survivors into the aircraft. In all the urgency to recover people from the sea and liferafts, Heathcote barely noticed that Coventry had rolled slowly over, and was completely inverted.

  It was almost one hour since the attack by the Skyhawks. With the additional fuel giving them more time in the air, Heathcote and Gleeson filled their cabin several times, winching survivors down to the hangar roof of Broadsword. Making a final sweep of the area, eventually they returned to Tidepool back in San Carlos Bay, lost in their own thoughts of what they had just witnessed. Far from receiving a hero’s welcome on return, Heathcote received a bollocking from Crabtree for pushing his luck and heading too far out into the unknown on his own.

  Nineteen men died in the attack on HMS Coventry. A disastrous afternoon for the British forces was about to get a whole lot worse.

  Out to the north-east of the Falklands, the battle group positioned itself to despatch Atlantic Conveyor into San Carlos to offload the vital helicopters and huge volume of stores. All of the Harriers had left the ship noisily several days earlier and were now operating from the carriers Hermes and Invincible. Two of Conveyor’s helicopters – one of the heavy-lift twin-rotor Chinooks and Yankee Delta, one of the Wessex that had transferred from RFA Fort Austin via Hermes – were now airborne on check test-flights

  In the cabin of the Wessex sat Royal Marine aircrewman Corporal Ian ‘Gus’ Tyrrell. He had spent most of the morning wandering around Hermes in search of a spare part that was common to both Sea King and Wessex. Somehow finding his way through the maze of corridors, the Sea King engineers told him that they couldn’t help after all. The search was in vain. As he wandered empty-handed back up to the flight deck to hitch a lift back to Conveyor, his mind switched to the exciting prospect of landing on the Falklands timetabled for the following day. Almost without thinking he paused by the ship’s main notice board. Amongst various bits of paper was one headed ‘Casualty List’.

  He didn’t really expect to see any names that he knew. So it took a while to filter in. The name at the top of the list was Corporal M. Love, 846 Squadron. Michael ‘Doc’ Love had been killed in the terrible Sea King accident a week earlier. The news had been kept from Gus Tyrrell deliberately, though it was inevitable that he would find out somehow. Love and Tyrell were not only best friends and fellow Royal Marine aircrew, but Love was engaged to the twin sister of Tyrrell’s wife. They were about to become brothers-in-law.

  Back on board Conveyor, Tyrell spent most of the afternoon in a daze, writing a letter to his wife’s twin sister. Maybe he was sent up for the early evening test flight to get his mind back onto the job. Maybe, more prosaically, it was just that the duty crew who should have been airborne had pulled rank and sent him and pilot Kim Slowe up in their place. The flight clashed with dinner time and the free beers on offer as a farewell from the Atlantic Conveyor officers.

  That evening, David Baston and Nick Foster and most of the embarked aircrew were enjoying the hospitality of the Cunard ship’s officers, excited in anticipation of testing their skills in action in San Carlos. It was still light as Nick Foster wandered out onto the bridge wing and chatted with merchant seaman Ian North, captain of Conveyor, and universally known to all as Captain Birdseye, due to his bushy white beard.

  ‘Don’t you worry about it, lad,’ said North, detecting some nervousness from Foster about going ashore the next day, ‘I was sunk twice in the last lot. You’ll be OK.’

  An announcement over the ship’s tannoy reminded of the final opportunity to take unwanted kit to the ‘op baggage’ store by 19:45 hours. Foster finished his beer in order to ensure his officers’ whites and other non-combat clothing would be returned to the UK. A voice behind him said: ‘Come on Foster, have another beer. Are you man or mouse?’

  ‘No, no. I’ve only got five minutes to get all the way down.’

  But Foster needed little encouragement to stay for a fresh tin. The extra Double Diamond probably saved his life.

  Thirty-five miles away, two newly refuelled Super Etendards of the Argentine air force had picked up radar returns indicating they had a big target in front of them. It must have looked like one of the British carriers. Just ten minutes after Coventry had capsized, Argentine jets had another British ship in their sights. The Argentines only had five Exocet missiles. They had sunk HMS Sheffield with one of the first two. The Super Etendards were now heading inbound towards the British task force with two of the remaining three.

  Dropping down to low level, the pilots released their load. The missiles looped away from the jets in a cloud of white smoke before settling down to skim over the water towards the British ships at supersonic speed. The Super Etendards wheeled away, their job done.

  It was the Type-21 frigate HMS Ambuscade, sister of Ardent and Antelope, that first detected fast-moving inbound targets, flashing an immediate ‘handbrake’ warning to the rest of the fleet. On the bridge of Conveyor, the action-stations warning bell sounded. Officers and senior ratings dropped their drinks and ran out to the bridge wings in time to see nearby helicopters and ships excitedly firing off rockets and chaff. The Exocets bore on remorselessly, perhaps deflected through the chaff cloud decoys, but then immediately scanning the horizon to acquire a new target.

  On board the Wessex Yankee Delta, Tyrrell and Slowe had finished their test flight. They heard the shrill warning ‘Air raid warning red’ over the radio as they began their final approach to Conveyor. The sky was overcast, the sea choppy with a low swell, not especially rough.

  Tyrrell sat in the doorway of the Wessex with his camera in hand. He was pleased that he now had good snaps of some of the warships. He was getting ready to take one more of the forward flight deck of Conveyor as the Wessex came in to land. A thin dark shape hurtled low towards him across the water, flame jetting from its rear. It was going to pass directly beneath them. His camera was already in hand. All he had to do was point it at the missile and flash off a couple of quick photos as the missile sped below and out of sight.

  Out on the port wing high up on Conveyor’s superstructure, Lieutenant Ian ‘Lapse’ Chapman, another of the Wessex pilots, watched helplessly as the brown and red shape screamed in towards the ship. There was a huge whump! as the missile struck the port quarter of the ship about ten feet above the waterline and just forty feet below the mess where the officers had been drinking beer. They all looked at one another in shock. A second massive bang followed immediately after the first. Maybe it was the second Exocet. Maybe it was an echo of the first explosion within the giant hold. Nobody could tell.

  To Nick Foster, now flat on his face on the floor, the sound was like a 4.5-inch gun firing from a frigate. The impact made the ship shudder horribly. Within seconds, the sharp smell of cordite filled the air, making Foster wince as if he’d swallowed lemon juice. It was now obvious what had happened. Exocet. Over the ship’s tannoy came the urgent but redundant warning ‘Hit the deck, hit the deck.’

  The immediate effects of the blast were more apparent inside the ship than out. Within the ship, smoke spread throughout the ventilation system with extraordinary speed. In meeting rooms near the lower end of the island, thick dark smoke shut out all of the daylight. Even high up on the bridge, smoke quickly filled the air.

  From outside, it was hard for Slowe and Tyrrell in their Wessex to believe what they were witnessing as they approached the port side of the ship. There was initially very little smoke coming from
the missile strike, but hovering alongside the ship, the gaping hole just above the waterline was very obvious. From the Wessex doorway Tyrrell snapped more photos.

  They heard the radio report of a man overboard at the same time as figures on the flight deck started waving down into the water near the missile’s entry hole. In the swell, it was hard to spot the casualty. But a quick-thinking serviceman had thrown a liquid oxygen container into the freezing water to mark the position. Tyrrell immediately began to talk Slowe across to a hover over the floundering man, at the same time lowering the orange rescue strop down on the winch wire. In the freezing South Atlantic water, the man struggled to fit the strop properly over his head and around his back. The first attempt ended frustratingly with his body lifted halfway out of the water, only to drop straight back through into the sea. The lightweight strop flitted about in the downdraft. The second attempt was better, if unorthodox, as the man finally grabbed the strop and wrapped it around himself. He hung suspended like a rag doll as he was winched up into the cabin.

  Tyrrell hauled the soaking body into the cabin and slid the door shut. The man, an RAF sergeant, was suffering from the onset of hypothermia. He quickly folded up the troop seats and shoved the man up against the cabin heaters that Slowe had switched to full blast, as the helicopter headed off in the direction of Hermes.

  Making his way to the bridge, David Baston found Atlantic Conveyor’s attached senior naval officer, Captain Mike Layard. They looked down onto the huge forward deck spread out in front of them. A Wessex stood ranged between the stacked containers pointing aft and ready to go. They briefly discussed the possibility of getting the Wessex airborne. But with smoke and flames billowing from below and to their left, the ship’s company had been split in two, one forward on the flight deck and one aft from the superstructure. It would be extremely dangerous for any pilot up on the island to get forward to the helicopter.