The first FRS.1 to fly was XZ450 on 20 August 1978. The following month, the new Sea Harrier was thrilling the public at the Farnborough Air Show, taking off in spectacular style from a ski-ramp. Pioneered by Lieutenant Commander Doug Taylor while he researched a doctoral thesis at Southampton University in the early 1970s – although Ralph Hooper at Hawker had been thinking along the same lines – the ski-ramps were incorporated into the curved deck design of the new Royal Navy light carriers. Launching the Harriers on a semi-ballistic trajectory, they enabled the aircraft to take off within a very short distance, and at just 70 mph, with the heaviest permitted payloads. And, just as importantly, they ensured that the aircraft was always pointing skywards when taking off; this was not always the case on conventional flat-deck carriers as the swell of the sea could see pilots lifting off just as a ship’s prow end dipped.
The Sea Harrier went into Royal Navy service on 18 June 1979 with the training squadron 700A at the same time as HMS Invincible was undergoing sea trials, and after tests and flight training from Yeovilton and RAF Wittering, with three ocean-going squadrons, 800, 801 and 802. No one could have seen the Falklands episode coming, and yet even before these Harriers could be fitted and tested with Sidewinders – this was to be done at sea – they were off south, across the Equator and down to a turbulent South Atlantic. In the event, Sea Harriers shot down twenty Argentine aircraft in air-to-air combat; none were lost in return, although two were destroyed by ground fire and four lost through accidents. Given the suddenness of the mission and the fact that war zone, weaponry and even the aircraft themselves were all new and unfamiliar, it was an exemplary performance.
The Task Force, setting sail under Operation Corporate from Portsmouth and the Mediterranean in April 1982, was certainly a shot in the dark. The cockiness of the Argentine military had been reinforced by their belief that the British would take no action once they had invaded the ‘Malvinas’, along with South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands. Not only had the junta been in discussion with London during 1981 over potential sales of an aircraft carrier – possibly Hermes – and Sea Harriers, and perhaps Vulcans and more Canberras too, but in his defence review of that year, John Nott, Mrs Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Defence, had planned the withdrawal of the Royal Navy ice patrol ship HMS Endurance on 15 April 1982; there would be no replacement. It was the skipper of the Endurance, Captain Nicholas Barker, however, who made the point to Whitehall that the withdrawal of the one and only Royal Navy surface ship for thousands of miles would send the wrong signals to Buenos Aires: Britain would effectively be abandoning its territories in the South Atlantic and ensuring that it would be unable to respond if Argentina decided to invade the islands.
Captain Barker and his ship in fact went on to play a key role in the retaking of South Georgia, with Argentine troops there surrendering eleven days before Endurance, launched in 1956 as the Anita Dan in Denmark and acquired by the Royal Navy in 1967, had been scheduled for retirement. The 1981 government defence review, however, had gone even further to encourage the Argentine military. The Invincible, which was to take Sharkey Ward and his fellow Sea Harrier pilots to war in April 1982, was to have been sold to Australia, while Intrepid and Fearless, two assault ships that played vital roles in the landing of British troops on the Falkland Islands, were also to have been sold; Fearless – the Royal Navy’s last steamship and a maritime star in the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me – was destined for the scrapheap and Intrepid sold to – yes – the Argentine Navy. Both ships carried Royal Marines – a corps Nott had also seriously considered disbanding – to the South Atlantic islands and the formal surrender of the Argentine military was to be signed on board Intrepid. Replacements for both ships have since been placed in service.
To his credit, Nott handed in his resignation at the outbreak of what indeed had looked to be the ‘Guerras de las Malvinas’, but this was refused. In the early 1950s, Nott had served with the 2nd Gurkha Rifles in Malaysia. No one doubted his personal courage, yet he had become blinkered and was thinking only in the short term. ‘Expect the unexpected’ is a motto all politicians should take to heart. Indeed, when Harold Macmillan, whose own Conservative administration had been rocked by a number of scandals, was asked by Jack Hardiman Scott, the BBC’s political editor and part-time writer of thrillers, what was most likely to blow governments off course, he is supposed to have replied with the famous words: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’
As it was, Margaret Thatcher’s government did react very quickly to the events of 2 April 1982. Military preparations were made, and diplomatic overtures brought the United States and Chile on side. President Ronald Reagan agreed to the Royal Navy borrowing USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship that normally carried a complement of up to twenty-five helicopters, if either of the Harrier-carrying Hermes or Invincible got into trouble. The US also provided surveillance, as did General Augusto Pinochet’s unpleasant military regime in Santiago de Chile, along with missiles and submarine detectors. The French government, under the presidency of François Mitterrand, nominally supported Britain, although an ‘intelligence-gathering’ team of French technicians remained in Argentina for the duration of the Falklands War to ensure that French-built Super Étendards could launch French-built Exocet missiles at British ships. And Israeli advisers in Argentina looked after the IAI Daggers. It is said that such was the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin’s hatred of the British that he condoned further sales of Israeli military hardware to Argentina during the Falklands War. Such behaviour was surely unforgiveable: here was a Jewish politician supporting an extreme right-wing military regime that had tortured, terrorized and killed thousands of its own people, given shelter to the Nazis, including the nastiest concentration camp commandants, doctors and theoreticians, and which was hell-bent on appropriating territory beyond its borders because it believed such ‘living space’ was Argentine.
Hernan Dobry, the Argentine journalist who revealed the extent of Israel’s aid to Argentina in his 2011 book Operation Israel: The Arming of Argentina during the Dictatorship, 1967–83, believes that sales of, among other equipment, anti-tank mines, machine guns, mortars, air-to-air missiles, missile radar alert systems and long-range fuel tanks for Dagger bombers was agreed at this top level as a form of revenge for the hanging of Dov Gruner, a personal friend of Begin who was sentenced to death by the British Mandatory Authorities in 1947 for his part in an attack on a police station. According to Israel Lotersztain, a salesman for the Israeli defence company Isrex Argentina, a meeting was set up between representatives of his company and Prime Minister Begin. ‘You’ve come to talk badly about the British?’ asked Begin. ‘Is this going to be used to kill the English? Go ahead! Dov up there is going to be perfectly happy with the decision. Obviously, it must all be done perfectly.’
An Aerolineas Argentina Boeing 707 appears to have made five flights from Tel Aviv via Lima, with the collaboration of the Peruvian government, to Buenos Aires, and four further flights to and from Tripoli to collect weapons from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s ruthless regime in Libya. Even more audacious, claims Dobry, was Argentina’s attempt to buy twenty-three Mirage IIIB and C aircraft from Isrex. They were to have been delivered flying in the colours of the Peruvian Air Force, but the war proved short-lived, the junta in Buenos Aires collapsed and there was no longer need for second-hand Mirages.
Could all this be true? After the publication of Dobry’s book, an unnamed ‘senior official’ from the Israeli Defence Ministry told the London Jewish Chronicle that it was ‘highly unlikely that in the months of the Falklands War, when Israel was preparing the invasion of Lebanon, anyone in the defence establishment, and certainly not the prime minister, would have the time or resources to organize emergency arms supplies for faraway Argentina’. Herzl Makov, director of the Begin Heritage Centre in Jerusalem, told the paper that the book was ‘a distortion of historical reality’, and that ‘Mr Begin’s relations with British prime ministers James Ca
llaghan and Margaret Thatcher were excellent and warm’.
Whatever the truth, this conspiracy-style story reveals the complexities of warfare, and the arms trade, in the decades following the Second World War. While the Falklands conflict might appear straightforward enough to anyone who believes in a people’s – in this case, the Falkland Islanders’ – right to self-determination and that it is entirely proper to stand up to a vicious military regime that has no respect for its own people, let alone others, it was also a battleground between the old and new worlds and a case of old scores being settled by proxy. In the early 1950s, the United States had fought China and, by implication, the Soviet Union, in Korea. The USA and the USSR clashed again at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, while China, the Soviet Union and Cuba backed, and fought, wars in Central and Latin America, Africa and Asia against the United States and the West. The battlegrounds had shifted from central Europe to developing countries and, as has often been said, the Third World War, although never declared, is still being fought in the Third World. Indeed, when Washington learned of Margaret Thatcher’s intention to launch a flotilla to retake the South Atlantic islands, the US Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, tried at first to deter the British; the fear in Washington was that Buenos Aires might ask for, and be given, military and other aid by Moscow. The US had been fearful of ‘Reds’ in its back yard throughout the 1950s, toppling left-wing regimes, from that of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 to Salvador Allende’s Marxist government in Chile in 1973, and ostracizing Fidel Castro’s Cuba, a country that sought an ever closer relationship with the Soviet Union as US sanctions hit ever harder after the Missile Crisis.
These nominally local wars, fought almost continuously somewhere in the world from 1945 to the present day, have also been test beds for new weapons designed and manufactured by the superpowers – the United States, the Soviet Union and China – and other leading nations, notably Great Britain and France. And, of course, there have been more minor, yet highly effective, players in these conflicts like Israel, South Africa and Germany, which as both the Federal Republic and a reunified state has been very busy exporting weapons, mainly Leopard tanks, small naval vessels and coastal submarines. Even so, there had been no British intention to fight in the South Atlantic against a Latin American power; London’s response to events in the Falkland Islands was more or less spontaneous. This was demonstrated, most graphically, by the composition of the truly extraordinary British Task Force that set sail for the South Atlantic from early April to mid-May. The nuclear submarine Conqueror was underway from France on 4 April, followed by the carriers Hermes and Invincible, and their Sea Harriers, the following day from Portsmouth. The majority of the warships joined the carriers mid-ocean from Gibraltar, while the main body of troops set sail from Southampton on 9 April on board the elegant 45,000-ton P&O ocean liner SS Canberra, and on 15 May aboard the last traditional transatlantic liner, Cunard’s 70,300-ton RMS Queen Elizabeth 2, better known as the QE2. How on earth the Canberra, so distinct in her white livery, survived seemed a mystery at the time; after the war, Argentine pilots would explain that they thought she was a hospital ship. It was certainly good to see this superb example of late 1950s design return home some weeks later, although later very sad to learn that she was cut up in Pakistan in 1997. But one way or another, 127 ships sailed south. As did thousands of troops, and a very small number of combat aircraft: a grand total of twenty-eight Sea Harriers, joined, as we will see, by ten RAF GR.3 Harriers from 1(F) Squadron and accompanied by 127 Fleet Air Arm Wessex, Lynx, Wasp and Sea King helicopters.
The British established a Total Exclusion Zone with a radius of 200 nautical miles around the Falklands. Any Argentine ship or aircraft entering this circle of fire would be a ‘legitimate’ target. The sinking of the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano on 2 May by HMS Conqueror outside the exclusion zone proved to be highly controversial. British politicians and commentators keen to score points against Margaret Thatcher denounced the attack as a war crime. With the benefit of hindsight, and newly released Whitehall files, it appears that the Belgrano was sailing towards the British exclusion zone, accompanied by the 2,200-ton destroyers Piedra Buena (formerly USS Collett, launched in 1944) and Hipolito Bouchard (formerly USS Borie, also launched in 1944) and with orders to attack the British aircraft carriers that day. Whatever the facts, the Argentine fleet returned to port after the Belgrano’s loss and remained there for the duration of the conflict. Henceforth, the aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo’s Skyhawk attack aircraft would have to fly the hundreds of miles from mainland Argentina to the ‘Malvinas’ and back. Indeed, all Argentine aircraft had to fly these great distances – a minimum return journey of 700 miles – allowing them little time over targets, and precious little fuel to expend either tackling or evading Sea Harriers.
The wonder of it is that the Fuerza Aérea Argentina and Comando de Aviación Naval Argentina did so well in their fight against the British. On paper, the Argentinians appeared to be far superior in terms of air power. Theoretically, the Argentine Air Force (AAF) could muster some fifty Skyhawks, although the number ready for action at the beginning of May appears to have been thirty-two: fourteen A-4Cs from Grupo 4 de Caza Escuadrón III at San Julián and eighteen A-4Bs from Group V’s IV and V Squadrons at Río Gallegos. The same air bases were home to thirty Daggers, but only twenty-four were combat-ready. Eight Mirages out of a total of seventeen flew from Río Gallegos and Comodoro Rivadavia. Six out of eight Canberra B.62 bombers were in service at Terlew, and there were at least twenty-five locally made FMA (Fábrica Militar de Aviones) IA 58 Pucarás, twin-engined turboprop ground-attack and counter-insurgency strike aircraft, dotted about various airfields. Meanwhile, the Argentine Navy listed four Dassault Super Étendards and the eight Skyhawks on board Veinticinco de Mayo on 1 May.
The reality was, though, that many of these aircraft were not in the best shape, and although the air force did have two aerial tankers, few Argentine aircraft were able to refuel in the air. In addition, the landing strip at Port Stanley was too short for Skyhawks and Mirages, the Super Étendards had just five Exocet missiles between them, and their pilots had never been in combat. The AAF did have a number of F-86 Sabres at the time, too, but these had neither the range nor, in all probability, the wherewithal to take on modern jets, still less the ability to avoid heat-seeking missiles. They were instead employed along the border with Chile, just in case General Pinochet decided to attack Argentina, or the generals in Buenos Aires decided to attack Chile.
Watching footage of AAF Skyhawks flying low into the attack on British ships and knowing that these jets were equipped with unguided bombs made, as it happens, in Britain and the United States, lacked missiles or any form of electronic self-defence, and were fitted with unreliable ejector seats, it is impossible not to admire the bravery and what proved to be the skill of Argentine pilots. As Admiral Woodward said, ‘The Argentine Air Force fought extremely well and we felt great admiration for what they did.’ The air force A-4B and A-4C Skyhawks flew 219 sorties, the Daggers 153, Mirage IIIAs fifty-eight, the Canberras forty-six, and the Pucarás a large number of reconnaissance and ground-attack missions.
Skyhawks sank the destroyer HMS Coventry and frigate Antelope and damaged the destroyer Glasgow and the frigates Argonaut and Broadsword as well as the landing ships RFA (Royal Fleet Auxiliary) Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram as they brought light tanks, vehicles, fuel and ammunition to shore. The Argentine Navy Skyhawk A4-Qs, flying from Río Grande naval air station in Tierra del Fuego, destroyed the frigate HMS Ardent. Nineteen AAF and three Navy Skyhawks were lost, the majority to surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft fire, others to accidents and eight to Sea Harriers. Israel attempted to make up the loss in 1983, but Washington vetoed the sale of these twenty-four Skyhawks that had previously been owned and operated by the US.
Other ships damaged by Skyhawks and Daggers included the frigates HMS Brilliant, which shot down three o
f its attackers with Sea Wolf missiles, Alacrity, Arrow and Plymouth, the destroyer Antrim and the landing ships Sir Bedivere, Sir Lancelot and Stromness. Five Daggers attacked HMS Plymouth; their 1,000 lb bombs hit the 2,150-ton ship, but failed to explode. On deck, Able Seaman Phil Orr destroyed two of the attackers with Sea Cat missiles. The most famous Royal Navy casualty was HMS Sheffield, a guided-missile destroyer sunk by an Exocet launched from a Super Étendard on 4 May.
Eleven Daggers were destroyed, nine by Sea Harriers. The Royal Navy jets also took out a Mirage IIIA, a Canberra, a Pucará and a C-130E Hercules transport plane. Sea Harriers flew a total of 1,435 sorties and Harrier GR.3s 126 ground-attack missions, but not a single one was lost in aerial combat. Altogether, the Argentinians lost 100 aircraft including helicopters, the British twenty-four helicopters, six Sea Harriers and four GR.3s. The Argentine Air Force lost fifty-five men, thirty-six of them pilots. Four Sea Harrier pilots were killed. Lieutenant Nick Taylor of 800 NAS (Naval Air Squadron) was shot down, in XZ450, the first Sea Harrier to fly, over Goose Green by radio-controlled twin 35 mm Swiss Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns. He had transferred to Harriers weeks before the Task Force sailed; his body was recovered by local residents and given a proper military burial, recorded on film by the Argentine military. Investigating an unidentified blip on radar screens, Lieutenant ‘Al’ Curtis and Lieutenant Commander ‘E-J’ Eyton-Jones of 801 NAS disappeared into fog, rain and low cloud close to the wreck of HMS Sheffield, their deaths a mystery, although it seems likely that they collided in what was truly foul weather. Lieutenant Commander ‘Gordy’ Batt DSC of 800 NAS died when his aircraft exploded, without explanation, almost as soon as he lifted off from the deck of HMS Hermes.
The RAF lost no Harrier pilots, although Flight Lieutenant Grant Hawkins, working with the SAS, was one of many British servicemen killed when their Sea King helicopter flying from Hermes crashed into the sea north-east of the Falklands on 19 May. Three days later, Flight Lieutenant Jeff Glover of 1(F) Squadron flew a lone reconnaissance mission from Hermes and was shot down by the enemy over Port Howard by what is believed to have been a Blowpipe, a hand-held and British-made surface-to-air missile. Brigadier Julian Thompson, commander of 3 Commando Brigade, compared using the weapon to ‘trying to shoot pheasants with a drainpipe’. Some pheasant, some drainpipe: one side of the Harrier’s wing was blown clean off. Glover ejected, injuring his shoulder as he disappeared deep under water; picked up by a rowing boat, he was taken to Argentina and held there, starting with a spell in the military hospital at Comodoro Rivadavia, until the end of the conflict.
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