Scram!

by Harry Benson

  At 3 Commando Brigade headquarters near Mount Kent, Major General Jeremy Moore was in the middle of briefing his commanders. The first group of Skyhawks took the British by surprise from the rear. Taking cover in trenches as the jets screamed overhead, the ground forces were quick to fire back, damaging at least one Skyhawk with small-arms fire and light rockets. Bombs exploded near two Army Air Corps helicopters, badly damaging both cockpit canopies and tail booms. There was nobody in the Scout and Gazelle helicopters; their crews were in at brigade headquarters being briefed on the next mission.

  Further along the valley to the north-east, my colleague Lieutenant Paul McIntosh was gently easing X-Ray Bravo into the hover by 29 Commando’s artillery position, with fresh supplies of ammunition for their guns. Dangling underneath his Wessex was a cargo net and pallet full of shells. McIntosh watched as the gunner on the ground marshalled them into position. The ridgeline of Mount Longdon lay ahead. He wasn’t sure whether the ridge was occupied by British or Argentine forces. McIntosh was aware that the visibility was incredible and that the sun was probably glinting on his rotors, making them an easy target. But at least he was outside the range of small-arms fire.

  As Petty Officer aircrewman Jed Clamp calmly gave a steady talk down to the landing point, McIntosh switched his gaze back to the gun emplacement out to his right. Suddenly the gunner pointed excitedly and grabbed his machine gun, swivelling it up towards the hills. Through the front of the cockpit windscreen, McIntosh saw a pair of Skyhawks just clearing the ridge, silhouetted against the skyline for a moment. The lead Skyhawk was heading straight at the Wessex. The number two was attacking to his left, flying in strike formation.

  McIntosh knew instantly that he was personally marking the target for the Skyhawks. He also knew he was a sitting duck. Reacting quickly, but calmly, he told his crewman: ‘We need to release the load. Now!’ The urgency in his voice was obvious.

  Clamp reacted quickly: ‘All clear!’

  McIntosh pressed the release button and the net fell away safely to the ground. His instinct now was to break right straight away, keeping the ground in view below him and putting the two big Gnome engines between him and the likely incoming blast. As he pushed the helicopters nose forward to accelerate directly across the firing line of the gunner, the gunner looked straight up at him even as he opened fire. ‘Man the gimpy,’ McIntosh shouted at Clamp, telling him to use the cabin machine gun. He already knew there would be little chance to fire it in the few moments available.

  The Wessex and Skyhawks were now heading directly at each other. McIntosh watched their weapons release as two 1,000-pound bombs came off the rails. Now that the helicopter had begun to accelerate forwards, he yanked the cyclic control hard to the right. Achieving a crossing rate was standard fighter-evasion tactics. ‘This is never going to work,’ he thought as the Wessex rolled onto its side. The two jets roared past as they broke to their left, passing behind X-Ray Bravo and turning to the west.

  The bombs landed the length of a cricket pitch away. There was no chance of escaping the blast. McIntosh braced himself. None came. There was no explosion. Both the artillery positions and the Wessex escaped wholly unscathed. The bombs had been dropped too close to their target and the fuses had failed to unwind. It wasn’t just the ships that were being spared by the failure of Argentine bombs to arm.

  As the first flight of Skyhawks completed their run over 3 Brigade headquarters, they turned to the west to escape. Right in front of them was a commando Sea King. Victor Alpha was on its way down from the top of Mount Kent where it had been dropping off ammunition. It was an opportunity target for the Skyhawks.

  This really captures the feel of what it was like flying near the front line during the last few days. It’s the kind of view my colleague Paul McIntosh had just before two Skyhawks steamed over the ridgeline directly at him and dropped two 1,000-pound bombs right underneath his Wessex. Mercifully, they failed to detonate. Here, the hillside is smoking from enemy artillery fire as a Wessex comes in to land next to a regimental first aid post. A Scout helicopter waits with a stretcher strapped outside: the teeny weenies were far braver than us.

  At the controls of Victor Alpha were Simon Thornewill and Dave Lord – both experienced instructors who had taught me on the Wessex training squadron just a few months earlier. Their senses were already heightened having just sat in the hover while the big guns next to them were still firing. The two aircrew in the rear cabin, Alfie Tupper and John Sheldon, spotted the Skyhawks through the bubble windows: ‘Enemy A-4s astern of us!’

  Thornewill was well versed in fighter-evasion techniques. He knew that the key was to change direction and height to make it as hard as possible for the jet pilot to get a clear shot. Making the break just as the pilot was ready to fire was crucial. Thornewill’s response was automatic. Almost instantly, he had made up his mind to break down and to the left into the hillside. Going down was the only option because the Sea King doesn’t have the power to climb rapidly. The narrow ravines running uphill might provide some sort of refuge. Thornewill now waited for one of his crewmen to make the call to break.

  With the first pair of Skyhawks about 800 yards from them, Tupper gave the call: ‘Break!’

  It all happened in seconds. Thornewill rolled the Sea King into a tight left-hand turn and pushed the nose down to descend, snatching full power at the same time. The suddenness of the encounter and change of direction by the Sea King gave little time for the Skyhawks. As the two jets shot over the top, the second pair appeared behind them almost simultaneously.

  The Sea King was now dropping fast into a ravine. But the tightness of the turn had also caused the big helicopter to slow down. They were a sitting duck for the lead Skyhawk. The crew heard the rattle of cannon fire from behind them and to their left as they disappeared into one of the ravines. There was no time to think. A mild thud came from somewhere on the Sea King’s rotors. They had been hit.

  As the second pair of jets sped on past, Thornewill continued manoeuvring the Sea King violently uphill through the narrow valley just feet above the ground. The aircraft was handling well. But watching the hillside flash past perilously close to his cabin doorway Tupper was convinced that the tail rotor was about to hit. It was equally unnerving for Dave Lord, having to watch as a front-seat pilot but without his hands on the controls.

  After continuing the evasion uphill, Thornewill soon found a Sea King-sized gulley in which to hide and shut down. The crew got out to find out what had been hit; it wasn’t obvious at first. A cannon shell had passed through the main spar of one of the rotor blades. Otherwise they were undamaged. Within hours, Victor Alpha was repaired with a new blade and back on task. It was another astonishing escape.

  A beautiful day for war. I was flying just about the only helicopter back at San Carlos while this junglie Sea King was unloading 5 Brigade troops thirty-five miles away on the front line ready for the final assault. Later this morning, a flight of Argentine Skyhawks attacked our nearby gun positions, damaged a couple of teeny weenies with bombs, and put a bullet through a Sea King blade. It was the last air raid of the war.

  As the Skyhawks sped off across East Falkland, the same way they had come, the fleeing Argentine pilots jettisoned their empty external fuel tanks. Whether deliberate or not, two of the jets appeared to lob theirs directly into the line of two Wessex helicopters beneath them. In one of the Wessex, Willie Harrower watched the drop tanks fall harmlessly nearby as the jets sped past him. In the other, Paul McIntosh had his second escape of the day. He could see the jets approaching fast from eight o’clock. There was no need for violent manoeuvre as the falling drop tanks were clearly going to miss by a matter of fifty yards. McIntosh and his aircrewman Jed Clamp kept a wary eye on the Skyhawks as they passed low overhead and on into the distance. He felt frustrated at being so defenceless: a pod of rockets would have been very handy for fighter evasion.

  Nonchalantly recounting his calmness under pressure later that evening,
another pilot told him: ‘Mackers, you are such a steely bastard.’ It was one of his proudest moments of the war.

  My own encounter with the Skyhawks definitely disqualified me for the steely bastard award. Sitting on the deck of Uganda, after depositing further casualties from Ajax Bay, I was waiting for Al Doughty to finish talking to the deck crew. Facing south, I could see the Sussex Mountains off to my left gently sloping away down to the flat landscape of Goose Green and down into Lafonia. Directly ahead was dark blue sea and light blue sky.

  I saw the two jets straight away as they skylined from behind the Sussex Mountains. My recognition was pretty good. But at about five miles away I couldn’t tell for sure whether they were Harriers or Skyhawks. Nor was I completely sure whether the Geneva Convention would provide the same protection for my large green combat helicopter as it did for the large white hospital ship underneath me. I wasn’t about to hang around and find out. ‘Are we clear?’ I asked Doughty.

  ‘Yes boss,’ he replied.

  I called ‘Lifting’ as I pulled in power and cleared the deck with urgency. The two jets were now coasting out over Falkland Sound right in front of me. I hauled the Wessex round in a sharp turn to the left and came to a low hover over the sea directly behind the ship. If the jets happened to turn north, they would no longer be able to see me. I was using the hospital ship as a shield. There was nowhere else to go. I had rather mixed feelings about this game of hide and seek, feeling clever, stupid, brave, and cowardly all at the same time. Anything but steely.

  I was sitting in the cockpit of my Wessex on the deck of the hospital ship SS Uganda out in Falkland Sound. I had just been handed a sausage sarnie and a cup of delicious fresh coffee when I saw the two Skyhawks crossing the coastline a couple of miles ahead of me. I quickly lifted off the deck and hovered behind the ship to hide from them, feeling both clever and stupid at the same time.

  The Skyhawk attack on Mount Kent turned out to be the final Argentine mission of the war from the mainland. Grupo 5 had been the most impressive of the Argentine air units. They had accounted for the losses of Ardent, Coventry and Sir Galahad and inflicted serious damage to Argonaut, Tristram and the supply depot at Ajax Bay. Their final mission could have been spectacularly successful, destroying British headquarters and an artillery position. All they achieved this time was to put a couple of Army Air Corps helicopters out of action for a few days and a Sea King for just a few hours.

  It had been a harrowing day for Jerry Spence and Mark Brickell also, flying what seemed like a constant stream of wounded soldiers back to Ajax Bay. There was a brief pause in the day’s activity as the crew shut down their aircraft and joined the Paras in burying their dead from the battle at Mount Longdon. A digger had prepared the ground. Body bag after body bag was lowered into the grave with as much dignity as could be mustered. The commanding officer of 3 Para said a few words and that was that. Back to business, boys. There would be time to mourn later.

  Coming face to face with the wounded men who had been lifted out of battle also made a big impression on Rob Flexman as he took the opportunity to wander around the field hospital set up at Fitzroy. Moving from bed to bed, being introduced by the doctor, explaining each patient’s injuries, and chatting with the soldiers, it was a moving experience.

  So when he was asked to fly three seriously wounded men to Ajax Bay in the dark – not an appealing prospect – he had all the motivation he needed for the risky transit. Flying with Mike Crabtree with navigation lights switched off, it was hard to make out anything at all outside the aircraft. It was certainly impossible to estimate their height by eye. The temptation to stay low to the ground was huge. British air defences might easily assume an aircraft popping up on radar flying east to west was an Argentine Hercules flying re-supply missions in and out of Stanley. Indeed later that evening, an Argentine Canberra bomber escorted by Mirage jets, bombed British positions in the hills from high level. HMS Exeter’s formidable Sea Dart claimed its fourth victim of the war. The Canberra navigator was killed. The pilot ejected into the sea near Fitzroy and scrambled ashore.

  For Flexman and Crabtree, the Sussex Mountains were still invisible somewhere off to the right in the pitch-blackness. If they flew low, they would almost certainly fly into the ground. There was no real choice but to fly at 1,500 feet, their height above sea level shown on the barometric altimeter. The radio altimeter, measuring their actual height above ground, told them they had chosen wisely. The radalt needle dipped dramatically to a few hundred feet as they crossed the unseen ridgeline and headed north into San Carlos.

  Landing in the darkness was going to be a problem. Within the bay area, there was just enough contrast with the shoreline below them to allow a descent. They could only hope that the warships Plymouth and Andromeda would gamble on them being a British helicopter. As their height reduced, Flexman and Crabtree began to make out the outline of ships in the water and buildings dotted around the shore. They moved their eyes constantly to make use of their peripheral vision. Not wishing to illuminate the entire field hospital with their bright landing lights – unlike us who had no such inhibitions on the previous night, or the Chinook a few nights previously – they cautiously switched on the much less bright downward identification light for the final landing. It was enough. The wounded soldiers were offloaded to Ajax Bay, and Flipper Hughes and Chris Eke took them on to the SS Uganda the next morning in X-Ray Bravo.

  With 5 Brigade troops now settled in and artillery support resupplied, the Scots Guards set off from Goat Ridge on the evening of Sunday 13 June. Earlier, ground-attack Harriers had bombed and destroyed what they thought was the Argentine headquarters on Mount Tumbledown.

  The open slopes to the south of Mount Tumbledown contained Argentine defensive positions, some of which I had gazed at unknowingly the previous day. This was the target of the diversionary attack. The diversion group comprised a twelve-man assault team and support that included Scorpion and Scimitar light tanks. With only minutes to go before the main force set off from Goat Ridge, the assault team engaged the Argentine defences, fighting from position to position for two hours. Leaving two dead men behind, they eventually withdrew through a minefield under enemy mortar fire.

  The Scots Guards were lucky to get to the action at all. They were very nearly wiped out in their landing craft by naval gunfire as they approached Fitzroy. Here they are about to get their chance as they prepare to attack Mount Tumbledown, supported by a junglie Sea King.

  The diversion was a success. Advancing across the high ground, the Scots Guards captured the abandoned western end of Tumbledown without a shot being fired. Argentine flares announced the beginning of the battle proper. The first assault by the Guards was repulsed with losses on both sides. For the next three hours, there was stalemate with neither side able to gain the advantage. The slow attrition of wounded men hit the Argentines hardest. But it was another act of individual bravery that broke the deadlock. After salvoes of artillery fire, Major John Kiszely took the initiative and led a solo charge up the hill. His men followed and in the following hour skirmished their way to the top, fighting hand-to-hand. For this action Kiszely was awarded the Military Cross.

  With the summit of Mount Tumbledown held by just four soldiers, the British were vulnerable to counterattack. A sustained assault through fierce but sporadic resistance completed the advance to the eastern end of Tumbledown. Eight Scots Guards and one Royal Engineer were killed and forty-three Guardsmen wounded. In early light the next morning, an Army Air Corps Scout helicopter piloted by Captain Sam Drennan flew back and forth across the hillside of Mount Tumbledown, taking out casualties under sniper and artillery fire. For his rescue of sixteen wounded soldiers under fire Drennan received the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  A heavily laden SAS soldier watches as an Army Scout, fitted for missile firing, prepares for a casevac mission. The Scout crews were extraordinarily brave, coming in again and again under fire to pick up the wounded.

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  While the battle for Tumbledown was coming to an end, Gurkha soldiers made their way towards Mount William. As they edged their way around a minefield, underneath the northern cliff face of Tumbledown, they came under artillery fire that wounded eight of their men. They found themselves thwarted in their attempt to engage the enemy. Maybe it was their fearsome reputation, willingly exaggerated by the British; maybe it was simply the state of the battle. But by the time the Gurkhas had rounded the eastern end of Tumbledown and turned south for their attack on Mount William, the Argentine defenders had fled. Mount William was captured unopposed.

  Overnight, two further battles had taken place to secure the hills to their north. The special forces, keen not to miss out, had been given approval to attack Cortley Hill, the ridgeline immediately opposite Stanley on the north side of the harbour. The attack began from the sea, with four rigid raiding craft crossing to Port William. Using the Argentine hospital ship Almirante Irizar to screen their approach turned out to be an expensive strategy. A soldier on board turned a searchlight on the raiders as they motored past. When the raiders beached, the soldiers came under heavy fire from the ridgeline, wounding three SBS and SAS soldiers. Under covering artillery fire that diverted assets from the main assaults, the British force withdrew onto their boats under heavy fire. It was an adventure that could easily have ended in disaster.

  After their expensive victory at Goose Green, 2 Para made relatively light work of their series of assaults on Wireless Ridge, also from the north. In the face of withering fire from four accompanying Scorpion and Scimitar light tanks, the Argentines fled from their defensive positions. However, resistance was fierce on the eastern edge of the ridge, delaying completion of the battle until dawn on 14 June. A brief and brave counterattack was repulsed. An Army Scout helicopter fired four SS11 anti-tank missiles into a gun position at Moody Brook. The battle left three British and twenty-five Argentines dead.