In November 1975, Britain sent a detachment of six GR.3 Harriers from 1 Squadron to Belize. The Guatemalan Air Force had been making threatening noises since 1970, when the whining turbojet of one of its Lockheed T-33 Shooting Stars could be heard as it flew over Belize City on an intimidating reconnaissance mission. At the same time, Guatemalan World War Two-vintage F-51D Mustangs were moved up to a base at Tikal close to the Honduran border. With an attack presumed imminent, in January 1972 two Royal Navy Blackburn Buccaneers of 892 Squadron were launched from the deck of HMS Ark Royal, the 38,000-ton British carrier that had sailed, hurriedly and in turbulent seas, from the North Atlantic to Bermuda to meet the challenge. The Buccaneers made a six-hour round trip to make their very determined presence felt over Belize and Guatemala. The Guatemalan Air Force decided not to take up the challenge, although it remains anyone’s guess quite what would have happened if Guatemalan Mustang pilots had taken on the Buccaneers at close quarters. One modern jet that could dogfight, though, was the Harrier, and when Guatemala began its next round of sabre-rattling three years later, the RAF’s jump jets were in Belize to take up the challenge. Wisely, as events in the South Atlantic were to prove within just a few years, the Guatemalans decided not to mix their Shooting Stars and Mustangs with the RAF’s Harriers.
The Harriers were to stay in Belize until 1993. Although they were never called into combat, the exercises they conducted were invaluable and most of those posted to Central America enjoyed their spell in the tropical sun. The pilots made impressive showings at the 1990 and 1991 air shows held at La Aurora International Airport, Guatemala City, by which time relations with Guatemala were somewhat improved. Indeed, watching Harriers, close-up, may well have helped to encourage the Guatemalan government to give up its historic claim on Belize. As for the Harrier, XV788, hit by a vulture, it was repaired and later went to war in the Falklands in 1982. The Belize mission also assured the Harrier’s place in the RAF of the future. Even in the mid-1970s, a number of influential senior RAF officers wanted a conventional replacement for the Harrier; the sheer versatility of the GR.3s in Belize proved just what an irreplaceable machine the jump jet was. More GR.3s were ordered, and these were the aircraft the RAF was to fly over the Falklands. Alongside them would be a new, naval version of the Harrier, a machine that would make its mark – and history – suddenly and very dramatically indeed.
CHAPTER 4
BAPTISM AT SEA
What an unlikely pair of antagonists! The British have always fought, to be sure. No nation on Earth can be taken seriously in historical circles unless it has had at least one war with the British; it’s like not having an American Express card. And yet the very idea of Britain in a contemporary war is a shock. Britain, one feels, fights in history books and not on TV.
Gene Wolfe, ‘A Few Points about Knife Throwing’, 1983 (from Fantasy Newsletter)
Brian Hanrahan should have been counting in the last of the Joint Force Harriers as they landed at RAF Cottesmore just before Christmas in 2010. Instead he was dying of cancer in a hospital ward. The Harrier crews sent him a get-well card, but this was one mission they lost: the veteran BBC reporter they greatly respected, and whose name will forever be associated with the Falklands War and the Harrier, died as the aircraft were retired prematurely from service, a victim of government cuts. It seemed somehow sadly poetic that Hanrahan, who bowed out prematurely too – he was sixty-one – did so with the remarkable aircraft that had made him a household name.
On 1 May 1982, Hanrahan had been on the bridge of HMS Hermes, flagship of the British Task Force assigned to recapture the Falkland Islands from the Argentinians, who had invaded this remote South Atlantic outpost the previous month. Under looming skies the colour of dull pewter, Hanrahan watched nine Sea Harriers roar off from the decks of Hermes and HMS Invincible on missions to attack the airfield at Port Stanley, the Falkland’s capital, and Argentine jets at Goose Green. Hanrahan saved his best shot for the moment the Sea Harriers returned: ‘I’m not allowed to say how many planes joined the raid, but I counted them all out and I counted them all back.’
It was a clever and memorable phrase that, while getting around understandable wartime reporting restrictions on sensitive military operations, also gave television viewers in Britain a sense that all was well at the beginning of a campaign that proved to be, in the words of Vice Admiral ‘Sandy’ Woodward, commander of the British Naval Force, a ‘close run thing’. Woodward borrowed the words from the Duke of Wellington, who had said the same thing of the Battle of Waterloo; but the Falklands War had been a remarkable affair. It was the first war – although this was never declared formally – between two Western powers since 1945, and, at 8,000 miles, the supply line Britain needed to rescue the Falklands was the longest in the history of warfare.
To those at home in Britain, it had all seemed surreal and remote until reporters like Brian Hanrahan brought words and images back under the tightest of security blankets. Looking for all the world like a kind and knowledgeable geography teacher on a wet and windy field trip, Hanrahan worked tirelessly, under fire and without body armour, with cameraman Bernard Hesketh and sound recordist John Jockell, to tell us what on earth was happening in this largely unexpected and sudden war on the other side of the world.
Official news from the MoD was channelled through press conferences filmed for television. These introduced us to an unfamiliar litany of ‘exclusion zones’, Exocets, Super Étendards and, of course, Harriers, the British aircraft that were to steal the show. These press conferences were fronted by the extraordinary figure of Ian MacDonald, the MoD’s deputy head of press relations. Sitting rigid behind a big desk, and behind an enormous pair of thick-framed black glasses, MacDonald intoned the news the government wanted the press to hear like some sepulchral Dalek. At each session he would say, ‘I will not answer any questions afterwards.’ MacDonald’s delivery was so strange that this reticent son of a Glasgow fish merchant became a celebrity of sorts. When it was suggested that he should be replaced by a more genial spokesperson, the nation rallied around him. If not as soothing, or as poetic, as the BBC’s Shipping Forecast, MacDonald’s press conferences were a national fixture, their matter-of-fact calmness a riposte perhaps to the rantings of the loathsome military regime in Buenos Aires that had started this unnecessary fight, and that would lie about its progress as if it had graduated from a journalism course taught by Lord Haw-Haw or Joseph Goebbels himself.
The facts of the Falklands War are fairly well known. In brief, an Argentine military junta fronted by General Leopoldo Galtieri and faced, in 1981, with an inflation rate of 600 per cent, 22.9 per cent unemployment, an 11.4 per cent drop in GDP and general unrest, aimed to divert public attention and appease the masses with a promising little war. Whenever an Argentine government appeared to be in trouble at home, many of us believed at the time, and not necessarily wrongly, the shout went up, ‘Malvinas!’ This is the Latin American name for the Falklands, a remote, craggy and wind-blasted home, in 1982, to about 400,000 sheep, five species of penguin, the black-browed albatross and some 1,800 people of long-established British stock. This raw if wildly beautiful archipelago lies several hundred miles off the Argentine coast. Essentially self-governing today, it came under regular British rule from 1833.
From a historical point of view, all claims to the islands are spurious. From the sixteenth century, they had been visited by European mariners seeking refuge from fierce South Atlantic storms. There was no indigenous human population, although then as now there were very many penguins. The French were first to settle on the islands, arriving on East Falkland in 1764 and declaring it a colony but ceding their claim to Spain three years later. The British, meanwhile, arrived in 1765, creating a settlement in West Falkland and claiming the archipelago for King George III. The British left in 1774, although they maintained their claim, and the Spanish left in 1806, also maintaining theirs.
When what is now Argentina declared independence from Spain in 1
816, the new republic also declared its ownership of former Spanish territories, including the Malvinas. The British recognized the Republic of Argentina in 1825, and an Argentine settlement was established on the islands three years later with British approval. This proved to be a squally affair. In November 1832, Buenos Aires sent a Commander Mestivier to the islands with orders to create a penal colony. A mutiny ensued, Mestivier was killed within four days of his arrival, and in January 1833 the British returned with two warships, the twenty-eight-gun HMS Tyne and the eighteen-gun HMS Clio, under the command of Captain James Onslow. This time, the British stayed. Within two months, the ten-gun brig-sloop HMS Beagle arrived, charged with conducting a South American Survey and on its way to Tierra del Fuego and the Galápagos Islands. On board the Beagle was a young gentleman planning his future life as a clergyman. He wrote:
The first news we received was to our astonishment, that England had taken possession of the Falklands islands & that the Flag was now flying. These islands have been for some time uninhabited, until the Buenos Ayres Government a few years since claimed them & sent some colonists. Our government remonstrated against this, & last month the Clio arrived here with orders to take possession of the place. A Buenos Ayrean man of war was here, at the time, with some fresh colonists. Both they & the vessel returned to the Rio Plata. The present inhabitants consist of one Englishman, who has resided here for some years, & has now the charge of the British flag, 20 Spaniards & three women, two of whom are negresses. The island is abundantly stocked with animals: there are about 5,000 wild oxen, many horses, & pigs. Wild fowl, rabbits, & fish in the greatest plenty. European vegetables will grow. And as there is an abundance of water & good anchorage, it is most surprising that it has not been long ago colonized, in order to afford provisions for Ships going round the Horn. At present it is only frequented by Whalers, one of which is here now.
That young gentleman was Charles Darwin. One hundred and fifty years later, the population of the Falkland Islands remained tiny. Indeed, few people in Britain had even heard of the Falklands Islands, much less Las Malvinas, when news arrived that Port Stanley had been taken by Argentine marines and that the governor, Rex Hunt, a former RAF officer who had flown Spitfires in India with 5 Squadron, had surrendered to the Argentine commander, Vice Admiral Carlos Busser. In his No. 1 (Fighter) Squadron Operation Corporate Diary for Friday 2 April 1982, Wing Commander Peter Squire records:
The Squadron is… committed to play in a five-a-side football competition that afternoon at 1415hrs. Needless to say, however, the crew room conversation is dominated by news of the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands. The GLO [Ground Liaison Officer], Major John Moseley, is asked to look out a map in order to confirm the exact whereabouts of the islands.
With just sixty-eight Royal Marines under Major Mike Norman to protect the islands, Hunt had little choice in the matter, although holed up in Government House, governor and soldiers staged a three-hour fire-fight, shooting off 6,450 small-arms rounds and twelve rockets. When, finally, Hunt went to meet Busser, he did so in full dress uniform, complete with feathered hat, telling the admiral, ‘You have landed unlawfully on British territory and I order you to remove yourself and your troops forthwith.’
Twenty-seven years after the war ended, Vice Admiral Busser was arrested. He was alleged to have taken part in the torture and disappearance of three men at the Argentine naval base Puerto Belgrano. Although he was not convicted, Busser was placed under house arrest until his death in 2012. Busser, however, was just one of the many members of the Argentine armed forces who led what was an undeclared and savage war against their own people between 1976 and 1983. In those years, up to thirty thousand Argentinians viewed as subversives of one kind or another were ‘disappeared’, many hurled, drugged and naked, to their deaths in the Atlantic Ocean and Río de la Plata from ‘death flights’ organized by Admiral Luis Maria Mendia, later sentenced to 640 years in prison in Spain. Before they were herded into the aircraft, prisoners were told that they were going to be ‘released’ and made to dance for joy, accompanied by upbeat music.
Apocryphal stories have long been told of Adolf Hitler, among other senior Nazis, escaping to Argentina in 1945 and settling there. How they would have applauded the mendacious Mendia and the other vicious and puerile military popinjays who plunged Argentina into political and economic hell and sported rows of medals on their chests despite never having fought in anything other than ‘dirty’ wars against unarmed and innocent men, women and children. Although this had not been Margaret Thatcher’s intention when she launched Operation Corporate – the retaking of the Falklands – almost immediately after news of the invasion reached London, the ending of military rule in Argentina was one of the finest things for which this most controversial of British prime ministers was responsible. The British lanced a singularly nasty boil.
It seems somehow significant that the Harrier was to be known as the jet-age Spitfire, not least because of the role it played in the Falklands War as the plucky little British fighter flown by dashing young men against apparently overwhelming odds, and winning through. There is, though, another reason why the Harrier deserves to be associated with the Spitfire: R. J. Mitchell’s superb piston-engined fighter came to be seen as the very spirit of the fight for freedom put up by the British against the odious Nazi regime. If only by default, as far as British politicians were concerned in 1982, the Harrier became a potent symbol of a fight against a nasty tyranny that had very many connections with Hitler, his technicians and minions, as well as an empathy with the Führer’s aberrant views on democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law.
The charismatic General Juan Perón, three times president of Argentina between 1946 and 1974, had been excited by fascism. At the end of the Second World War, his government is said to have sold ten thousand blank passports to Odessa, the shadowy organization established to protect former members of the SS. What we know for certain, from official records in Buenos Aires, is that five thousand former Nazis, many of them war criminals, escaped or emigrated to Argentina in the five years following the German surrender. They included such prize specimens as Joseph Mengele, Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie. Conspiracy theorists say that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun came too. But even if Hitler did not arrive in person, his spirit was never far away. German emigrants had, in fact, flocked to Argentina since the 1870s. What Nazis would have found decidedly odd, though, is the fact that they would share their new-found land with an ever-increasing number of Jews. General Perón might have been pro-Hitler in many ways, but he was no anti-Semite and today Argentina has one of the world’s largest Jewish populations.
What Perón wanted, above all, was German know-how, technology and military hardware. One of his prized German immigrants shortly after the Second World War was Kurt Tank, the former technical director of Focke-Wulf. A brilliant aircraft designer and seasoned test pilot, Tank had been responsible for the superb Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter and its successor, the Ta 152. In the guise of ‘Dr Professor Pedro Matthies’, he brought sixty-two former Focke-Wulf employees with him to Córdoba, where at what was to become the Fábrica Militar de Aviones he produced the Pulqui (Arrow) II, a jet fighter based on the Ta 183, one of the many advanced designs on drawing boards in German factories in 1945. The unsuccessful Pulqui I, the first jet aircraft built in Latin America, pre-dated Tank’s fighter by three years; it had been designed by a team led by the French aircraft engineer Émile Dewoitine, who had slipped off to Argentina via Spain when faced with post-war accusations of collaborating with the enemy. French engineers were to have better luck in years to come when Argentine Dassault Mirage IIIs and Vs, and Dassault Breguet Super Étendards equipped with Exocet anti-ship missiles, took on the Falklands Task Force.
Four prototype Pulqui IIs were built from 1950 and flew, the fourth in anger against Perón during a coup in 1955. But the project proved to be too expensive for an Argentina weakened by unstable military governments; eventually, the
Fuerza Aérea Argentina was supplied with North American F-86 Sabres. Tank went on to India to develop the country’s first jet aircraft, the HF-24 Marut (Tempest) fighter, based on the design for what was to have been the Pulqui III. The Marut flew with the Indian Air Force until 1990. In the 1970s, Tank moved back to Germany, where, as if turning full circle, he became a valued consultant to MBB, or Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm. Messerschmitt had once, of course, mass-produced the many variants of the Spitfire’s duelling partner and the Fw 190’s great rival, the Bf 109.
So the Harrier went into action for the first time twenty-one years after Bill Bedford’s first tentative hover in XP831 at Dunsfold, and against an enemy with regrettable connections to Nazi Germany. ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, announced the cover of Newsweek as FRS.1 Sea Harriers of the ‘Dark Blues’ (Royal Navy) and GR.3 Harriers of the ‘Light Blues’ (RAF) practised attack techniques from the decks of Hermes and Invincible as these great grey ships ploughed through the Atlantic. Here they were joined by a fleet of British warships that, days earlier, had been taking part in a NATO exercise in the Mediterranean and by surreptitious submarines including the nuclear-powered HMS Conqueror.
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