Scram!

by Harry Benson

  In the final days of the war, we flew our commando helicopters right up to the front line, often coming under artillery or mortar fire, taking ammunition in and casualties out. This is one of our Wessex on Two Sisters, which had just been captured by the Royal Marines of 45 Commando.

  * * *

  From the moment Coryton had radioed his request to Short, there was never any doubt that the rescue mission should go ahead. X-Ray Juliett had already changed course when Short asked Doughty: ‘Are you happy to fly into the battle area?’

  It was not really a question.

  Now high up on the northern side of Mount Longdon, the two Wessex were hovering just below the skyline and a matter of yards from the battle over the hill. Doughty was talking to his pilots, Short and Ric Fox. The angle of the slope made it impossible to put three, or even two, wheels down. Short lowered the aircraft so that only the starboard wheel was in contact with the ground. The rest of X-Ray Juliett now hung suspended above the slope. Doughty jumped down from the cabin that was higher off the ground than normal. Two soldiers rushed in under the hovering helicopter with the first stretcher containing a wounded paratrooper. Doughty could hear the occasional shouted words picked up by Short’s throat mike. ‘No fucking stiffs,’ he bellowed down. The situation was incredibly tense. They needed to get out of there as soon as possible.

  Sitting next to Short in the cockpit of X-Ray Juliett, Fox was doing the same job of co-pilot as I was behind him in the cockpit of X-Ray Tango. His eyes frantically scanned the horizon on all sides for Pucaras. It barely occurred that the more immediate threat was from the Argentine artillery. Yet the roar of the two Wessex presented a very obvious target. Short and Fox watched the first round explode into the soil a few hundred yards out in front. As an artillery man, Short knew exactly what was coming at them. ‘Look at that Foxy,’ he said gleefully, ‘that’s a 155. It must be Argie as we don’t have any of those.’

  It was taking longer than usual to get the wounded on board because Doughty had to strain to lift the casualties an extra few feet above the ground. Two Paras were trying to lift up an injured Argentine soldier who was shaking with terror. He refused to board. There was no time for polite discussion. Doughty grabbed his lapels and gave him a full-blooded head butt, hard enough to crack his own helmet visor. The soldier was knocked out and bundled into the cabin.

  The next round was far too close. The ground erupted with a puff of smoke just yards in front of X-Ray Juliett’s cockpit window, sending clods of earth up through the rotor blades. ‘Definitely a 155,’ said Short excitedly.

  ‘I think we need to go,’ urged Fox.

  ‘One more,’ shouted Doughty as two Paras dragged another Argentine soldier down the hillside in a poncho. His legs flapped over the rocks; it looked as if his spine was broken. He was hauled unceremoniously on board. ‘Go now,’ shouted Doughty as he manned the machine gun. It seemed they had been on the hillside for an eternity. In reality, it was little over a minute.

  The Wessex in front of us called ‘Lifting’ and sped away at low level to our left. We lifted off and edged forward to take our position next to the first-aid post. More puffs of smoke exploded directly in front of us, further away than the round that nearly took out X-Ray Juliett, but still much too close for comfort. The artillery fire seemed less of a concern than the possibility that we would be caught out in the open by a Pucara.

  Our situation remained extremely precarious. X-Ray Tango was now balanced on one wheel on the front line of the battle, under artillery fire and with Argentine soldiers just a few hundred yards away behind the cliff face of Mount Longdon. I looked across the cockpit past Pulford at the few soldiers and medics sheltering from the violence of our downdraft. A medical officer dressed in combats accompanied a wounded Para on a stretcher into the back of our aircraft. One of the soldier’s legs had been blown off, but he was smiling. With only one casualty on board, the doctor waved us off. We didn’t need a second invitation. Pulford eased up on the collective lever and, as the helicopter rose from the ground, executed a classic over-the-shoulder take-off. I looked behind me out of my window and called ‘Clear’ as we pirouetted around our tail wheel. Adrenalin was flooding through us as X-Ray Tango sped away down the hill.

  From the cabin beneath, Jan Lomas started to give graphic and gruesome details of the field dressings and bloodstains on our passenger who was still smiling and awake, though clearly in shock. In the cockpit we concentrated on the task in hand. We hugged the ground and stayed in whatever valleys we could find until we were completely clear from the battle area to the north of Mount Kent. The cockpit banter became overexcited and immodest as we headed back east toward Ajax Bay. Lomas and I both congratulated Pulford on a fabulous piece of flying. We all congratulated each other on our teamwork.

  Our Wessex was still required for lifting and shifting in the forward area. So we deposited our wounded friend back at Teal Inlet for transfer to the field hospital at San Carlos.

  After refuelling, we moved our aircraft into position to pick up an underslung load. Flying a little higher this time, we made our way up toward the artillery position on the top of Mount Kent and brought our load in to a flat area at the top of the peak – taking care to approach behind the array of 105mm artillery guns and shells. As we dropped off our load there was an almighty blast from one of the guns; it ripped through the huge noise of the Wessex and almost caused me to jump out of my seat.

  A few lifts later and we were back at FOB Teal, shut down and waiting for new instructions. As we waited in the hall outside the ops room, a tall man dressed in combats wandered in smoking an enormous cigar. After the adrenalin rush of the morning, it was an incongruous sight that made me laugh for quite some time afterwards. I assumed he must be a special forces officer. In fact it was the journalist Max Hastings.

  While we continued our assignments on the northern flank, a lot more helicopter activity was taking place on the southern flank. The last time I had seen my squadron boss was two days earlier, somewhere between Goose Green and Fitzroy, as he swept past and told me to get on with it. Mike Booth then stationed himself at the new FOB in Fitzroy in order to take charge of Wessex operations in support of 5 Brigade. At least four units were now closing in on the Argentines. The two thousand or so men of 2 Para, the Scots Guards, Gurkhas and Welsh Guards all needed helicopter support and constant resupply. With the final phase of the war approaching, Major General Jeremy Moore had also moved his headquarters forward, from San Carlos to Fitzroy.

  There was an awful lot of flying to do. Wessex and Sea Kings flew almost continuously for two days. On Friday 11 June, the day of Pete Manley’s AS12 attack, Hector Heathcote and Leading Aircrewman Jock McKie put in eight and a half hours. Over the Friday and Saturday, Mike Booth and Ian Georgeson flew almost continuously. On the Saturday, Jack Lomas, Oily Knight and Smudge Smyth put in a mammoth twelve-hour day, finishing in the dark. Peter Manley and Andy Berryman, back in his day job after a stint as South Georgia prison guard, were airborne for four hours.

  Life and death decisions put huge pressure on the pilots. At FOB Teal, Adrian Short had succumbed twice to the desperate pleas for casevac from Mount Kent and then Mount Longdon. At Fitzroy, Mike Booth was trying to catch some sleep in a corner of a shed after an exhausting day. A head popped round the door saying there was an urgent need for casevac from the hills. Booth scrambled to his feet and went outside to be briefed further. ‘Have they got a MAOT team out there? Any lights? Anyone to help us get in?’ asked Booth. A Mobile Air Ops Team would know how to set up the torches for a night-time landing site.

  The answer was no.

  ‘You’ll have to ask the Sea King guys. We just can’t fly around the mountains in the pitch black.’

  It was a terrible choice but the right one. Two hours after the original request, Booth was woken again in his shed and asked to do a casevac back to San Carlos. As if to make amends, he agreed. Two stretchers were loaded into the cabin of X-Ray X-Ray which lifted off
into the darkness. The only way back was to stay just south of the ridgeline and then nip over the top into San Carlos.

  In the darkness, Booth and Georgeson never even saw the snowstorm until the flakes started pelting the windscreen. ‘Shit, we’re going to die if we don’t get this right,’ thought Booth, switching his attention instantly to his illuminated instrument panel and hauling the Wessex into a tight left-hand turn. Because the storm had only just hit, he knew they could backtrack 180 degrees and descend without running into a mountain. Nevertheless, the thirty seconds or so before the Wessex was spat back out of the storm and heading back to Fitzroy was an alarming experience. The two wounded soldiers were taken back to Ajax Bay a few hours later at first light.

  Turning down one casevac and turning back on the next played on Booth’s mind all of the next day. In two days, he and Georgeson spent over twenty hours airborne. He recorded the marathon in his logbook as his ‘Fitzroy bender’.

  After another trip back to Ajax Bay with wounded from Teal, we were frustrated to be told to land back at Teal and await further tasking. Our mission onto Longdon had given us a taste for adventure and we wanted more. Pulford and I spent much of our time in the ops room badgering our MAOT team to send us back up into the hills. Eventually, they relented and we were back in the air, off to shift the kit left behind by 42 Commando Royal Marines as they moved forward to attack Mount Harriet. As we flew on up to Mount Wall, we made contact with a Royal Marine Gazelle that radioed grid references and descriptions of the pick-up and drop-off points to us.

  An army Gazelle approaches Goat Ridge, between Two Sisters and Mount Harrier, the day after their capture by the Royal Marines of 42 and 45 Commando. The Wessex is Yankee Hotel, the gunship that fired two AS12 missiles into Port Stanley two days earlier, now back in the role of troop carrier.

  I was puzzled by the description of our landing site given by the Gazelle pilot. Adrian Short had been clear in his brief that the final phase of assaults on the hills around Stanley was expected to take several days. A quick glance at my map told me that a landing on the south-west corner of Mount Harriet, as intended, would put us in full view of nearby enemy forces on Mount Tumbledown. As far as I was aware, our troops weren’t due to have a go at Tumbledown until the following night.

  Pulford radioed back to the Gazelle with our concerns. ‘No probs, it’s safe,’ replied the Gazelle pilot.

  ‘Confirm with him whether the next set of hills has been taken,’ I asked Pulford, worried. The reply was again positive. We had no choice but to continue and hope that Tumbledown had indeed been taken.

  After landing on Mount Wall, Jan Lomas loaded the back of the Wessex with as many bergens as he could cram in. It was an exhausting and time-consuming task. I could, and should, have climbed down to help. But I was completely focused on preparing a mental image of what the route and landing site might look like from the information on the map. Junglie pilots pride themselves on being the best navigators. We had to be. Operating so close to enemy forces, there was no scope for navigational error.

  The Gazelle waited on the ground until we called that we were ready. We lifted off and followed closely behind the Gazelle at a few feet above the ground in the direction of Mount Harriet. As I had predicted from the map, there was little or no cover at the foot of Mount Harriet where the Gazelle indicated we should land. It was a wide-open area in full view of Mount Tumbledown. This time a couple of Royal Marines ran in to help Lomas throw the bergens out of the cabin.

  Out in front of us, probably a mile or more away, although it seemed like a matter of yards, we could see trenches dug into the side of the hill. Heads moved about and we could clearly see weapons. But the heads didn’t stay up for long. Puffs of smoke revealed the result of artillery fire. Our soldiers were being fired on by the Argentines right in front of our eyes. We were probably on the ground for little more than a minute, but it seemed like an eternity. I felt incredibly exposed. It was with considerable relief when we heard Lomas’s voice: ‘Right, we’re clear to go and, by the way, I’ve got you some Argie helmets as souvenirs.’ Another over-the-shoulder take-off and we were soon exiting at low level just above the grass to collect our next load.

  Back at Mount Wall we heard the Gazelle pilot ask another passing Wessex to help out. A familiar Irish tone filled the airwaves with a ‘Hello there boys’. My 847 Squadron colleague Jerry Spence had been suckered in to help us out with his Royal Marine crewman Corporal Mark Brickell. Our two Wessex loaded up once again to complete our task and headed back at low level to the base of Mount Harriet. For the second time, the open position in flat ground felt horribly exposed as we watched the artillery shells exploding on Mount Tumbledown. It all seemed far too close.

  The light was fading as we left Spence and Brickell to finish the final load. After the nerve-racking casevac under fire from Mount Longdon in the morning, the sorties to the base of Mount Harriet felt strangely subdued. By now, we were grateful to head back to Port San Carlos. Although the skies were clear, the complete absence of lighting throughout East Falkland meant that we could see little on the way back. We entered the San Carlos area from the north with our downward identification light switched on – code to inform the anchored warships that we were a friendly aircraft. As we approached our base at Port San Carlos we saw the vague outlines of several Wessex safely on the ground. Trying to land without lights was now extremely dangerous. We had no hesitation in switching on the bright landing light to make sure we were well clear of other aircraft and telegraph wires, and landed safely.

  I looked across to Pulford and we shook hands. There was no one to meet us in the darkness so we traipsed back quietly through the grass and mud in our wellies to debrief. Back in the briefing tent, I told Mike Spencer how surprised I was that our troops were so far ahead of schedule. ‘They’re not,’ came the shocking reply. We were stunned.

  It wasn’t our guys we’d been watching moving around in the trenches away to our front on the edge of Mount Tumbledown; it wasn’t Argentine artillery fire raining down on them. Instead we’d been in full, unobstructed line of sight of the Argentine front-line soldiers. We’d been watching a British artillery bombardment, fired over the top of our heads from the mountain-top base we had just resupplied at Mount Kent. The teeny-weeny Gazelle and two much larger Wessex had spent several minutes right on the front line in full view of enemy soldiers. We were huge, prime, stationary targets. If it had been our guys, artillery or not, somebody could easily have had more than just a pot shot at us. We wondered if we’d ever get a chance to ‘Rembrandt’ the Gazelle pilot – to put him in the picture – for so badly misleading us.

  Still out in the hills were Spence and Brickell. Just as we had been shifting bergens for the Royal Marines of 42 Commando, they were doing the same job for the Royal Marines of 45 Commando. Along with another Wessex, they were to take the bergens from 45 Commando’s lying-up position on Mount Kent to the new forward dump on the slopes of Two Sisters, two miles north of Mount Harriet. Mark Brickell was not big but he was a tough and wiry Royal Marine. Somehow he managed to haul the huge dead weights up into the back of the Wessex cabin on his own.

  The relationship between junglie pilots and aircrewmen was almost always thoroughly professional. But there were varying degrees of formality. Some of this boiled down to friendship and personal chemistry. First names were often used by pilots when talking to their crewmen, especially if of equivalent experience. If in doubt, the pilot would usually call the crewman by his surname and the crewmen called the pilot ‘boss’ or very occasionally ‘sir’. A senior crewman might use first names with a junior pilot if they got along especially well. Because there was never an issue of competence to muddy the picture, rank was always respected. The exception to the rule was for Royal Marine aircrewmen, who were invariably – but by no means always – referred to by their rank. Somehow the formality seemed more appropriate.

  From the slopes of Mount Kent, Spence raised the collective lever to ma
ximum torque in order to ease the heavy Wessex off the ground and towards their destination of Two Sisters. Even for two excellent navigators, finding a six-figure grid reference in featureless terrain was not an exact science. Dusk was now falling, making the task even more difficult. Flying as low as he dared, just a few feet above the moorland, Spence manoeuvred his Wessex up over a ridgeline and along a flat saddle leading to a second higher ridge on the west face of Two Sisters. Unable to do much more than glance down at his map in the dull light, he started to wonder if this was where they should be going. ‘Corporal Brickell, do you reckon we’ve got the right place?’ he asked.

  ‘Just a bit further boss,’ replied Brickell. ‘It’s here.’

  Spence flared the Wessex into a low hover above the rocky ground. There was nowhere to land and appeared to be nobody about. Just as Brickell started to manhandle the first few bergens out of the cabin, Spence watched three or four explosions of enemy mortar or artillery a few hundred yards in front of him beyond the ridgeline. ‘Corporal Brickell, get them bloody out, let’s get out of here.’

  The prospect of a second run to the same drop-off point was becoming less appealing by the minute. By the time the Wessex was loaded up with more bergens, dusk had turned to near darkness. During the daytime, Spence had been using his green and red navigation lights to help avoid collisions with other aircraft. Now in darkness, flashing lights would simply make them a nice big target for enemy artillery spotters. Finally he resolved the dilemma. ‘Fuck it, I’m switching them off.’