by Pete Scholey
Next, Captain Hamilton deployed with his Squadron to a position 40 miles behind the enemy lines overlooking the main enemy defensive positions in Port Stanley. Again, his leadership and courage proved to be instrumental over the next seven days of continuous operations in seizing this vital ground from which the attack on Port Stanley was ultimately launched.
On 27th May he identified an enemy probe into the squadron position and in the ensuing battle captured a prisoner of war.
The next night, he and his Troop successfully held off another enemy attack and by doing so enabled 42 Commando to fly in as planned to re-inforce the position – an important step in the repossession of the Falklands. On the following day he ambushed another enemy patrol wounding three and capturing all five members of the patrol.
Four days after he was relieved on Mount Kent, Hamilton was inserted by helicopter with three of his men onto West Falkland. Their job was to set up an OP to establish the strength of the Argentine garrison at Port Howard. They made their way through the darkness to another bleak and miserable mountainside, heading to where they believed they would be able to establish an LUP that would be safe from the prying eyes of daytime patrols. This they did and, during the daylight hours, they were able to keep watch on Port Howard, sending back reports about enemy movements. It was a monotonous business that avoided being utterly tedious only because they knew that they had to be constantly on their guard against discovery by the enemy. They were on hard routine and could have no fires to warm them or to heat up their drinks or rations. All they could do was lie in their hide and keep watch on the town below.
After a while, Hamilton identified a better position for clearer observation. He decided to move forward to the new position with his signaller under cover of darkness. From there they could watch the port during the day and then move back to the main hide when darkness fell, returning to the forward position again before dawn. The spot he chose was just a little over 1.5 miles (2.4km) from the target and he could send reports that were more precise, more detailed.
Five days after they first arrived on the mountainside, Hamilton made his way through the darkness to the OP with his signaller as usual. It was bitterly cold and he doubted if the temperature would improve much, even when the sun came up. It was now early June and well into the southern hemisphere winter, so the cold was to be expected. It still wasn’t as cold as it had been on the Fortuna Glacier six weeks ago. That had been spectacularly cold, even for the men of his troop, who were all well-used to sub-zero mountain temperatures. He slid down into the mossy slit behind the rock where they had set up their OP. His signaller slithered in behind him. There was only half an hour until sunrise, then they could take a look at what Galtieri’s boys were up to today.
Hamilton rubbed his eyes as the feeble rays of the sun crept over the mountains far away across the Falkland Sound on East Falkland. Over there most of the island was already back in British hands. Surely it wouldn’t be long now before the Paras or the Marines kicked the Argies out of Port Stanley? He stared down towards his own port – Port Howard – to see if anyone was awake down there yet. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he picked up a slight movement on the hillside far off to his left. What was it? A rabbit, perhaps, or a deer? He lifted his binoculars to his eyes to take a closer look. At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary, but then there was another flicker of movement, and another. And they were no deer or rabbits – not unless deer and rabbits had started carrying rifles to shoot back; those were men. He glanced urgently at his signaller and nodded in the direction of the enemy soldiers. The other man confirmed the sighting, but Hamilton was already scouring the hillside to their right. It could be a patrol creeping around over to the left. They might be able to let them pass by if they stayed put and stayed hidden. If there was movement on their other flank, however, it could only mean one thing – they’d been rumbled.
Hamilton caught his breath. Sure enough, over to the right, he could see soldiers closing on them. They knew the hide was there. How had they spotted them? A glint of sun on the field glasses, just as always happened in old movies maybe? He thought he had been more careful than that. Perhaps an Argie night patrol, listening in the darkness somewhere on the mountainside, had heard them moving about one night and been able to take a covert look during the daytime? Whatever had happened, they’d been spotted. The signaller was now staring apprehensively off to the right as well. He’d seen them, too.
‘Bug out,’ said Hamilton, ‘before they’ve got us surrounded. You go first, I’ll cover you.’
He snatched up his M16 and took aim at the closer group to their left. He’d drop a target if he could, but if none presented itself then he would send a couple of shots over to keep their heads down.
‘Go!’ Hamilton yelled. The signaller launched himself out of the depression and started sprinting up the hillside, hearing Hamilton snap off a couple of shots as he did so. The return fire did not come immediately. The signaller had enough time to reach a rocky buttress and dive behind it. Then he brought his rifle to bear on the platoon of soldiers approaching from the right and gave them a short burst. Hamilton came thundering up the slope towards him and flung himself down on the damp heather. He twisted himself round to bring his rifle to bear on the left-hand group and the signaller made another run as he squeezed off a few more rounds. And so they continued up the hill, sometimes leapfrogging each other, sometimes finding different scrapes of cover, but ducking and wincing as the incoming rounds whistled in ever closer and the figures in their rifle sights grew ever larger.
Hamilton reasoned that by now the other two men in his patrol would, if they had any sense, have legged it for the emergency RV, having heard the gunfire and assessed the situation. There were no reinforcements that would come charging over the ridge. They were too isolated out here for anyone to be able to reach them quickly enough. They were on their own. They had to fight their way out. There was no other option. He sprayed another burst, ejected his magazine and slotted another one into its place. From his cover position the signaller opened fire and Hamilton scrambled to his feet. That was when it caught him – a hammer blow in his back. Damn! He hadn’t presented a target for them, he’d just got up at the wrong time. He’d caught a round that would have gone whistling over his head if he’d waited another split second. He staggered up the slope and collapsed into cover.
His friend looked across at him from his position a few yards away. He could see that the boss was wounded. He reached for a field dressing, but Hamilton waved him away. He knew now he wasn’t going to make it off the mountainside.
‘You go,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep them busy.’
Raising his rifle, Hamilton fired off a burst and the signaller dashed for another scraping of cover. He could see the boss continuing to fire, saw him rise up for a better vantage and take another round. Still he went on firing.
John Hamilton fought to the bitter end, as the citation for his posthumous Military Cross describes:
On 5th June, he was deployed in command of a four man observation patrol into a hazardous position again behind enemy lines on West Falkland to carry out observation of enemy activities in Port Howard.
He managed to establish himself in a position only 2500m from the enemy, from where he sent detailed and accurate reports on the enemy. Shortly after dawn on 10th June he realised that he and his radio operator had been surrounded in a forward position.
Although heavily outnumbered, and with no reinforcements available, he gave the order to engage the enemy, telling his signaller that they should both attempt to fight their way out of the encirclement. Since the withdrawal route was completely exposed to enemy observation and fire, he initiated the fire fight in order to allow his signaller to move first.
After the resulting exchange of fire he was wounded in the back, and it became clear to his signaller that Captain Hamilton was only able to move with difficulty.
Nevertheless, he told his signaller that he would co
ntinue to hold off the enemy whilst the signaller made good his escape, and then he proceeded to give further covering fire. Shortly after that he was killed.
Captain Hamilton displayed outstanding determination and an extraordinary will to continue the fight in spite of being confronted by hopeless odds and being wounded. He furthermore showed supreme courage and sense of duty by his conscious decision to sacrifice himself on behalf of his signaller.
His final, brave and unselfish act will be an inspiration to all who follow in the SAS.
John Hamilton was an inspiration and a desperately sad loss to the Regiment. All of those who knew him appreciated his courage and dedication. Some who never knew him at all also understood something about the man. When the Argentine commander of Port Howard was interrogated after the surrender, he said that he wanted to recommend ‘the SAS captain’ for the highest military honour we could award him because he was ‘the most courageous man I have ever seen’.
Gavin John Hamilton was indeed an extraordinary man and a superb soldier.
SERGEANT VINCE PHILLIPS
Most people in the Western world had little knowledge of, and even less interest in, the political tension that had built up between the oil-rich Arab states of Iraq and neighbouring Kuwait over the summer of 1990. Those distant from the region were weary of hearing about its armed conflicts, of seeing images on TV news bulletins of bombed-out buildings and smoke-blackened, battle-damaged military hardware smouldering somewhere on a featureless desert plain. Iraq had fought an eight-year war against another of its neighbours, Iran, with battlefield images appearing almost nightly on our TV screens, yet most people living in the comfort and safety of the West would still have struggled accurately to pinpoint the exact locations of those countries on a map of the Middle East.
The same could not be said of the men of the SAS. Their regular briefings and bulletins about conflicts all over the world were staged for more than just satisfying an interest in current affairs. Any major confrontation, as well as plenty of minor ones, could represent a situation into which they might be drawn and thus became background ‘homework’, knowledge to be absorbed and stored away for future reference.
The problems between Iraq and Kuwait had arisen due to Iraq’s precarious financial situation. The war against Iran had cost billions of dollars and Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was utterly bankrupt. A huge part of Iraq’s war debt was owed to its neighbour Kuwait, which had helped to finance the conflict with Iran, and Kuwait was determined that Saddam should repay his debt. With his overdraft far outreaching the income generated by his oil sales, the simple answer for Saddam to balance his housekeeping budget was to raise the price of his oil. As a major supplier to the rest of the world, even a small increase in price would be enormously lucrative for him and, since Iraq was practically floating on a sea of the stuff, there were obvious long-term benefits.
The production and price of oil is, however, carefully controlled by the oil-producing nations through the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Fluctuations in oil prices can seriously affect the economies of countries all over the world and Kuwait opposed Saddam’s proposed price rises. Kuwait also increased its production of oil, threatening a price drop – just like every other commodity, when there is more oil in the marketplace, the price goes down. For Saddam, this meant draining more of his oil reserves simply to maintain the same level of income. He viewed the Kuwaiti move as an act of aggression against Iraq and the two countries went nose-to-nose.
Knowing that he couldn’t repay the cash he had borrowed from Kuwait during the war, a small matter of $14 billion or so, Saddam decided to try to deal Kuwait out of the diplomatic game by raising the stakes. He accused the Kuwaitis of stealing his oil. He wasn’t just saying that they were sneaking across the border in the dead of night to siphon fuel out of one of his many limos; he had them down for wholesale theft of millions of gallons. A major oil field straddles the border between Iraq and Kuwait. The Iraqis had always taken their oil from the northern deposits, while the Kuwaitis extracted the black stuff from their own side of the border. Saddam, however, accused them of ‘slant drilling’. He maintained that instead of drilling straight down to their own part of the oil field, the Kuwaitis had been boring at an angle that took them over the border, deep underground, to poach his supplies. It has been known to happen. Saddam claimed that Kuwait had filched $10 billion of oil over the preceding ten years and further demanded over $2 billion in compensation for the crime, taking the reparations remarkably close to the debt that he actually owed to Kuwait.
For Vince Phillips and the men of A Squadron, the bickering between Iraq and Kuwait was of passing interest, but little more than that. It was another potential hot spot that someone would be monitoring. They would hear quickly enough if they were to be dragged into it in any way. In the meantime the Regiment, although not committed to a major conflict, was as busy as ever with anti-terrorist duties and training exercises all over the world. Small teams had been at work in a training or advisory capacity in Liberia, Thailand, Ethiopia and Columbia and they continued to fulfil a demanding role in Northern Ireland.
It wasn’t until Saddam pulled his next move that the situation in that part of the Middle East became of serious interest to them. The Iraqi dictator amassed an army of 100,000 men on his southern border with Kuwait. This was seen as further sabre-rattling from Saddam, but there was a clear threat that he would launch an invasion of the far smaller Gulf state. Having convinced American and British diplomats that this was, indeed, just a show of force, he then took everyone by surprise, including the Kuwaitis, when his tanks rolled across the border in the early hours of 2 August 1990.
As they waited for the inevitable call to ‘stand by’ and so begin preparations for deployment somewhere in the Middle East, Vince Phillips and A Squadron could do little more than watch, like the rest of the Regiment and the rest of the world, as the drama unfolded in Kuwait. Vince was a highly experienced, highly proficient soldier with eight years’ exemplary service in the SAS, having attained the rank of sergeant. He had been in the army since 1972, having joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) at the age of 17. On completion of his basic training he was posted to Bicester, but within a year he had moved on to 16 Para Heavy Drop Company, completing his parachute course successfully towards the end of 1973. When that unit was disbanded in 1976, Vince volunteered for the All Arms Commando Course at Plymouth and passed with flying colours. He served with 3 Commando Brigade for seven years before applying for SAS Selection and passing the course in 1983. This achievement gave him the unusual distinction in the British Army of having earned the right to wear either the maroon beret of an airborne soldier, the green beret of a commando or the beige beret of the SAS. To attain any one of these requires phenomenal commitment and sacrifice, well above average intelligence and huge amounts of guts and determination. To attain all three demonstrated that Vince possessed all of these qualities in abundance.
Vince was posted to Boat Troop of B Squadron at first, then was seconded to the SBS for a year before returning to the Regiment as part of A Squadron’s Mountain Troop, where his fitness and endurance became legendary. Like the rest of the Regiment, he saw the events unfolding in the Gulf as a potential opportunity to put his training and experience into practice, but was forced simply to wait and watch as Kuwait fell before the weight of the Iraqi onslaught.
At the time, Saddam commanded one of the largest standing armies in the world and the forces that he unleashed on Kuwait included four divisions of his elite Republican Guard, as well as special forces units that amounted to another entire division. In the air he fielded a squadron of Soviet-supplied Mil Mi-25 helicopter gunships – the ‘Hind’ – armed with anti-tank missiles, rocket pods and a four-barrel 12.7mm cannon mounted in the nose. Helicopter troop transports raced commandos ahead of the advancing army to capture Kuwait City, and his MiG jet fighters and bombers were deployed to supply ground support and disable the tw
o main Kuwaiti air bases.
Although they had been caught on the hop, Kuwaiti Mirage and Skyhawk fighter jets were scrambled to engage the invaders. They suffered heavy losses, with 20 per cent of the Kuwait Air Force (KAF) destroyed or captured before they were ordered to evacuate to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Some of the jets took off from motorways adjacent to the air bases while Iraqi tanks trundled down the runways. In central Kuwait, the 35th Armoured Brigade deployed its Chieftain tanks in a delaying action against the advancing Iraqis at Jahra to the west of Kuwait City, but they could do little against Saddam’s vastly superior forces. Other elements of Kuwait’s heavy armour that were in a position to do so were ordered, like the air force, to evacuate to Saudi Arabia. Of the small Kuwait Naval Force (KNF), only two missile ships managed to escape capture or destruction, one engaging at least three Iraqi vessels before fleeing.
By the end of the morning of 2 August, Iraqi tanks were in Kuwait City and it was clear that Saddam’s Blitzkrieg had succeeded. Tanks were advancing on the royal residence at the Dasman Palace, although the emir had already been evacuated to Saudi Arabia. His younger half-brother, however, remained in the palace with a cadre of guards to mount a last-ditch defence. He was shot dead, his body then laid in front of a tank and crushed. Kuwait was now in Saddam’s hands.
Over the next few days, Iraqi soldiers stripped Kuwait of anything of value that could be shipped home to Iraq. Shops and houses were looted and the population of Kuwait City lived in terror of the brutal soldiers who rampaged through their streets and homes. The UN was quick to condemn the invasion and instigate sanctions against Saddam. The US was equally quick to begin a build-up of forces in the area, shipping men and equipment into Saudi Arabia, ostensibly to prevent Saddam now turning his army against the Saudis, too. US men and equipment began arriving in Saudi Arabia just four days after the invasion, as the international coalition that would make up Operation Desert Shield and ultimately Desert Storm began to assemble.
