Scram!

by Harry Benson

  The fragmented nature of the Wessex squadrons meant that few received an organised welcome. Ric Fox arrived back exhausted at Yeovilton wearing a mix of combats and Argentine clothing, only to receive a reprimand from the duty officer for being in the wrong rig. He told the duty officer what to do with his reprimand.

  Hector Heathcote found himself wandering around Tesco in Yeovil in a daze. Just hours earlier he had been in a war zone. A few short weeks later, he was posted back down to Ascension Island for three months to relieve his commanding officer. It seemed a huge injustice to be sent away so soon.

  The rest of us – the 847 Squadron Wessex crews – having arrived late in the war, became garrison squadron. We moved our base from Port San Carlos to Navy Point, just across the harbour from Port Stanley. The flying was sensational. Over the next three months I flew 220 hours, rarely venturing more than thirty feet above the ground.

  This is my colleague Jerry Spence refuelling his Wessex on the runway at Stanley airport soon after the war ended. Mount Kent and the other infamous final hills are out in the distance to the west. The runway looks in pretty good condition considering the overblown claims of the Vulcan missions.

  Most of the work was the big clean up from the war: moving people and equipment, stores and ammunition. We flew bomb squad and mine clearers out into the surrounding hills to deal with unexploded ordnance, and burial parties to deal with unburied bodies. Much of it was pretty gruesome. We also provided search-and-rescue cover for all of the British forces on the islands.

  Having a dozen or so helicopters gave us extraordinary bartering power. My lovely late mentor Ray Colborne quickly became known as the squadron grocer. Like a character out of the novel Catch-22, he used his contacts on the RFA supply ships to acquire all manner of stores. He cornered the entire Falklands market in eggs. Our squadron maintenance area was piled high with boxes and boxes of them. Somebody calculated that we had 96,000 eggs. We also acquired 100,000 Duracell batteries, this time through administrative error. The engineers had ordered 100 batteries for our torches. I remember lifting the 3,000-pound load marked for our squadron from a nearby supply ship and wondering what on earth it was.

  We used our good fortune to be especially sympathetic to the Rapier air defence crews, still dug in on the hilltops, and to the generous islanders with whom we occasionally stayed overnight. We ate well and slept well on these trips. There was even the occasional bath. We did as much for them as we could in return. I remember one of our Wessex flying out to a remote settlement, known locally as ‘camp’, with a cow dangling underneath in a net. It was a classic British hearts and minds campaign.

  I visited the Falklands capital just once. Hector gave me a lift there in his Wessex three days after the Argentine surrender. I wandered around Port Stanley as a naval sub-lieutenant in my wellies, green combats and blue beret, armed with a 9mm Browning pistol, but not much of a clue otherwise. The place was a mess. There were Argentine gun emplacements, wrecked helicopters and battered vehicles lying open to the elements, as well as all sorts of debris – endless rounds of ammunition, helmets, clothing, ration packs and boxes – scattered everywhere.

  I spent a while looking around an abandoned Puma helicopter parked on Port Stanley seafront. I should have been wary of booby-traps but I didn’t think. I walked brazenly into Government House, amongst the Paras and Royal Marines who were milling around. I was amused to bump into one of our own MAOT Marines unashamedly heating up a mess tin of food on the floor of one of the colonial rooms. In the backstreets further into the capital, I passed hundreds of Argentine prisoners and giant piles of discarded rifles and other weaponry.

  With the war over, I was able to enjoy the remote beauty of the Falkland Islands. I flew a group of us out to look at a colony of over a thousand king penguins at Volunteer Point. We were able to walk right up to them and their grey fluffy offspring. The noise and smell was overwhelming: it was an extraordinary experience. In between ferrying people and stores, I also messed around, nearly overdoing it one day at Goose Green chasing a rabbit in my Wessex. Startled by the prospect of a vast aerial aggressor, the rabbit fled across the grassy strip until suddenly it stopped and backtracked underneath the helicopter. I flared rather too sharply, suddenly realising that I was now pointing up towards the sky at zero speed and was about to slide backwards into the ground. It wouldn’t have looked good on the accident form. Luckily I got away with it.

  Failing to heed my near miss, I then hovered over the top of a nearby damaged Argentine Pucara. Looking down from the open cockpit window, I eased my right wheel neatly onto the tail of the enemy aircraft. A little downward pressure and I was pushing the Pucara’s tail down, rotating the nose nicely upwards. I then realised I was stuck. Worrying how to get out of the situation, I decided to move the Wessex sideways as quickly I could. The Pucara tail sprang back up, releasing the Wessex but missing the explosive flotation canister on my wheel by a whisker.

  So what did happen to all those Pucaras? Altogether twenty-four made it to the Falklands. The Sea Harriers destroyed three in their first attack on Goose Green; the SAS blew up six in their raid on Pebble Island; three more were shot down, one by Sea Harrier and two by ground fire; and another crashed into the mountains. Of the remaining eleven only three were flyable by the end of the war. Bombing runs by Sea Harriers and ground-attack Harriers did some of the damage. The damp weather also played its part making it hard to keep the aircraft electrics working.

  After the battle of Goose Green, the Pucaras flew three more sorties. All of them happened in the last few days while I was there. Thank God I never saw them, nor did any of my colleagues. Seeing a formation of three Pucaras would have been the most frightening experience imaginable for a helicopter pilot. I remain forever grateful to our Sea Harrier pilots who proved an even more frightening threat to the Pucara pilots, as well as being a whole lot more effective. The Sea Harriers were spectacularly successful in air-to-air combat, shooting down eighteen Mirage and Skyhawks and three other aircraft, whilst not being beaten once. Why did we ever get rid of them?

  Interestingly, one of the Pucaras was shipped back from the Falklands to the test pilot school at Boscombe Down. The following summer, Simon Thornewill managed to fly the Pucara twice, discovering a little secret that dispelled some – but only some – of its mystique. At slow speed (below ninety knots) the Pucara handling was not half as manoeuvrable as we’d feared. It would have been nice to have known this during the war.

  I have three emotional memories of life at Navy Point. The first was the Falklands wind. It blew through my ears and knocked me off balance so much that I felt physically sick. The second was the showers on board the RFA Sir Tristram. After the attack at Port Pleasant a few weeks earlier, the half-burnt, half-intact ship was towed around to Navy Point. I had mixed feelings every time I walked on board. I would come out clean on the outside but with the terrible smell of burning seared inside my head. The smell still lingers with me today, decades later.

  After the war, we moved our base from Port San Carlos to Navy Point, opposite Port Stanley. I spent three months there. The bombed-out ship Sir Tristram had been towed around from Port Pleasant. Wandering onboard for a shower posed a real dilemma. The showers were brilliant but the smell of burning was sickening.

  The third and worst memory concerned an appalling accident at Port Stanley airport a month after the war. A group of Welsh Guards were clearing snow from the airfield when a taxiing Harrier inadvertently released two Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. Sidewinder has only a small explosive charge in its head; it’s the expanding wire, designed to cut through the controls of the target aircraft, that does the damage. The missile flew straight at the Guardsmen, causing terrible injuries to eleven. Within minutes my colleagues were casevacing the dreadfully wounded soldiers to field hospitals and hospital ships, our aircrewmen trying to staunch the flow of blood en route.

  The following day I was sitting in my cockpit on the deck of SS Uganda. A stretc
her was brought out with one of the casualties, a healthy-looking Welsh Guardsman, wrapped under a silver survival blanket. I was about to take him to the airport to be flown home in a Hercules. The downdraft from my Wessex lifted his blanket to reveal that both his legs had been amputated. The war had finished and I had relaxed my guard. I simply wasn’t ready for the shock. I retched.

  On my final day in the Falklands, I flew gratefully out to the troopship MV Norland, which had brought my 845 Squadron colleagues to relieve us. As I sat in the hover alongside the ship in San Carlos Water, my air-speed indicator read fifty-five knots of wind. I was very pleased indeed to be going home. Three months after the war ended, I flew the 8,000 miles back to UK via Hercules to Ascension and VC-10 to Brize Norton and a wonderful but small family reception.

  After a few weeks leave, most of my colleagues rejoined 845 Squadron, having discovered that 847 Squadron had been disbanded. We were promptly despatched to Northern Norway for Arctic training. It would be my third winter in a row. At least Hector had returned to the warmth of Ascension. But if you can’t take a joke, went the well-known military refrain, you shouldn’t have joined.

  June 2007. A bunch of us arranged to meet up in a Whitehall pub the night before the twenty-fifth anniversary parade down the Mall. I was looking forward to it but also felt apprehensive. I had been out of the junglie loop since completing my first tour on 845 and 847 Squadrons at the end of 1983. I’d spent my second tour as flight commander of the frigate HMS Apollo flying an 829 Squadron Wasp. It was a responsible job for a young pilot. But it put me totally out of contact with the rest of the Fleet Air Arm.

  After flying a Wessex, my second job was flying this Wasp helicopter from the frigate HMS Apollo. The Wasp is the naval version of the Army Scout. During the Falklands War, three Wasps like this one fired several AS12 missiles in a vain effort to sink the Argentine submarine Santa Fe in South Georgia. Unfortunately the fin of a submarine is hollow.

  After these two tours, I left the Royal Navy altogether to pursue a career in business in the Far East. Now I was back in the UK running a charity. I’d only kept in touch with a few former junglies who told me about the parade and the meet. I felt a little unsure of my welcome. As I walked in, I could see someone at the far side of the pub wearing a baseball cap. ‘Sparky?’

  ‘Harry!’

  It was bloody brilliant to see an old friend. He’d been even more apprehensive than I was about meeting up again. Having been court-martialled and kicked out of the Navy after his crash in Norway, he thought he might be shunned. No chance.

  In walked some of the other guys. I wasn’t sure if anyone recognised him. ‘Do you know who this is, Hector?’ He shook his head. ‘It’s Sparky.’ Tears welled up for all of us. The three of us had been in the same house at Dartmouth together. It was a great moment. Then the beer flowed and we were off, sharing an extraordinary array of war stories.

  I suddenly realised that between us we’d been involved with almost every major incident of the war, barring the Belgrano sinking. Pete Manley told us about his AS12 strike on the police station with Arthur Balls. Whatever happened to Arthur, we asked? Another lovely man. No one knew. I was astonished to hear Hector’s amazing story about his Mirage strafing and Ardent rescue on D-Day. I had no idea. Jack Lomas reminisced about the FOB at San Carlos and Oily Knight’s brush with two Tigercat missiles and a bullet through the windscreen. So that was what happened to Yankee Tango, I thought. We laughed until it hurt when we heard that Oily had got his comeuppance just before going home. He lost the very last game of ‘spoof’ at Port San Carlos and was made to eat a giant ration pack tin of greasy cold steak-and-kidney pudding, charmingly known to all as ‘baby’s heads’.

  I told my own story about coming under fire on Mount Longdon with Andy Pulford. I learnt that he was now Air Vice-Marshal Pulford RAF – Wow! Everyone agreed with Jerry Spence when he admitted he had found flying in the hills at night far worse than being shot at. And Mike Tidd talked about his amazing crash and rescue on Fortuna Glacier.

  The war seems to have affected us all in different ways. Most of us are fine about it. I think either the long journey home by sea or the long stint as garrison in the Falklands gave us time to process what we had seen and done. Several found it harder than they expected being interviewed for this book.

  A few colleagues still feel aggrieved about management. Even if Jack Lomas did a great job as senior flight commander, there was no Wessex squadron commanding officer or senior pilot on the ground in the Falklands until a week from the end, when Engadine turned up. Even if we did a huge amount of useful work, Wessex tasking was impromptu to non-existent at times. We often arrived for an assigned task only to discover some other cab was already on it. On occasion, valuable crews and aircraft sat unused and frustrated in San Carlos Water. Some of the early operating practices, such as routinely exceeding power limits, were questionable. Had the burnt-out remains of a Wessex and its crew been found some distance from its rotors and gearbox, these practices would not have seemed so wise.

  Amongst the junglie Wessex crews, Jack Lomas and Mike Booth were each awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for their leadership of 845 and 847 Squadrons respectively, to a large extent on our behalf. Apart from Pete Manley and Arthur Balls, who especially deserved their Mentions in Despatches – an oak leaf to go on top of their Falklands campaign medal and rosette – no other Wessex crews or maintainers received bravery awards.

  The Sir Galahad incident still sparks discussion. Flipper Hughes and Bill Tuttey missed out where other helicopter crews who did near-enough identical work were recognised for their courage. I and most other Wessex colleagues are pretty sanguine about this and unreservedly congratulate the 825 and 846 Squadron Sea King aircrews, who did receive awards. The prevailing view at the time was that we were just doing our job. Frankly the troops on the ground were vastly more heroic.

  I wear my own Falklands campaign medal and rosette with great pride. My award ceremony was unexpectedly informal. It was a shout down the corridor from the 845 Squadron staff office at Yeovilton. ‘Oi, Benson! Come and get your gong. It’s in your pigeon hole.’ I awarded my medal to myself.

  After satisfying the immediate interest in the war when I returned home, I found I didn’t want to talk about it to anyone again for many years. I buried the whole subject away until the twentieth anniversary, when I suddenly felt compelled to revisit it all. I watched TV documentaries and read books. I cried a few times, all in private. What was that all about? I really don’t know. Maybe it was what I’d done: the strange paradox of the exhilaration of flying in a war as a young man, doing a job I was really good at, and the shocking fact of facilitating violence between my fellow men. Maybe it was what I’d seen, the explosions and bodies and wounds. Loud bangs still scare the living daylights out of me. Others experienced far worse. I rang up a former colleague to talk it all through because he would understand. He didn’t at first. He told me years later he felt bemused about the whole thing. Five years later, he rang me in a flood of tears himself, desperately needing to talk. It had finally hit him.

  After almost all of the forty-five interviews I did for this book, I heard similar views expressed. Telling the story felt cathartic. For many it was the first time they had let it all out. As I arrived at one colleague’s house, his wife told me she would leave us alone; after all she’d heard all his war stories before. After three hours of being interviewed, he told me this was the first time he’d ever told anyone the whole story. Some of the individual stories have never been told to anyone at all. I felt privileged to hear them for the first time.

  My job today is far removed from flying a Royal Navy junglie helicopter. I teach couples and new parents how to stay together. I’ve run hundreds of relationship courses. I get to read a great many research papers. One of the most striking findings from research into military families is that it’s not the long periods of separation that make couples more likely to split up. It’s the experience of
combat. If you’ve been in battle, you’re far more likely to split up than other comparable families. I can well understand why.

  It makes me wonder how the troops on the ground have coped. They experienced battle at close quarters. Our aircrewmen also came face to face with appalling wounds and human suffering. But we pilots just acted as glorified taxi-drivers. I wonder what kind of mental health time-bombs we have in store from our vastly more shocking forays into Iraq and Afghanistan. They used to be called honourable wounds.

  Nobody talks. That’s why I wanted to tell our story.

  List of Illustrations

  1. Harry Benson after the war © Harry Benson

  2. Fortuna Glacier crash © Stewart Cooper

  3. Gazelle © Harry Benson

  4. Wessex 5 © Stewart Cooper

  5. HMS Antrim © Stewart Cooper

  6. Flight deck of HMS Antrim © Stewart Cooper

  7. 847 Squadron badge © Harry Benson

  8. Deck hockey © Harry Benson

  9. Argentine Pucara aircraft © Mark Brickell

  10. Arthur Balls © John Ryall

  11. Bravo November © Graham Colbeck, courtesy of Imperial War Museum (FKD 2753)

  12. 845 Squadron © John Ryall

  13. QE2 © Stewart Cooper

  14. Wessex at Port San Carlos © Imperial War Museum (FKD 1291)

  15. 5 Brigade troops at San Carlos, Crown Copyright © 1982 / Soldier Magazine / Paul Haley

  16. Scouts, Crown Copyright © 1982 / Soldier Magazine / Paul Haley

  17. Note from Tim Stanning © Tim Stanning

  18. Pucara © Harry Benson

  19. Port Stanley raid © Jerry Spence

  20. Wessex on Two Sisters © Imperial War Museum (FKD 117)

  21. Gazelle and Wessex, Crown Copyright © 1982 / Soldier Magazine / Paul Haley