Harrier

by Jonathan Glancey

  On his seventh sortie from Hermes, Squadron Leader ‘Big Bob’ Iveson, the handle-bar mustachioed son of the celebrated Second World War Bomber Command pilot, Group Captain Douglas Iveson DSO DFC & bar who later flew Vulcans from RAF Waddington, was shot down over Goose Green, again most probably by a 35 mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft gun. Ejecting safely – although unconscious for a few seconds – and avoiding an Argentine Army patrol, Iveson holed up in an abandoned house for two days. He switched on his personal locator beacon after a storm, and a gunfight, died down and was winched aboard a British helicopter.

  The last of the RAF Harrier pilots to be brought down was Squadron Leader Jerry Pook DFC on Sunday 30 May. On a sortie, with Flight Lieutenant John Rochfort, to take out an Argentine artillery position that was not where it should have been south of Mount Kent, Pook’s Harrier was hit by small-arms fire. The Harriers were able to find and attack their target using traditional ‘map-and-stopwatch’ navigation, but by this time Pook’s aircraft was leaking fuel at a rate that meant there was no possibility of his flying back to Hermes, 180 miles from Port Stanley. His radio worked only intermittently – a problem with many Harriers during the conflict – and one of his understandable fears was that he would be blasted out of the sky by a guided missile from a British warship. Luckily, Rochfort found him and was able to radio ahead for helicopter assistance. Pook ejected at 10,000 feet: ‘My first Harrier ejection was extremely violent, and I clearly remember my head being forced down between my knees by the 3,000 lb thrust of the rocket seat.’

  Despite fears that he would be unable to detach himself from his parachute as he hit the sea and struggled into his inflatable dinghy, Pook was picked up quickly by an anti-submarine Sea King. He arrived on board Hermes, bloodied with cuts to his face, very shortly after Bob Iveson. ‘We shook hands warmly,’ Pook recalled, ‘and the conversation went something like this: “Jerry, you’re all wet – been for a swim?” “Something like that. I understand you’ve been taking a few days off in the country – you lazy sod!”’ It was an exchange that could have taken place in the summer of 1940, although RAF pilots in the South Atlantic played a very different role from their predecessors in the Battle of Britain. They were flying from an RN carrier 8,000 miles from home, and their missions were ground-attack sorties rather than duels in high skies with enemy fighters. Furthermore, the weather, unlike that forty years before, was generally appalling. It is, perhaps, becoming harder, especially now that GPS, computers and digital technology have transformed the way so many of us communicate today, to envisage the conditions in which combat pilots like Iveson and Pook were flying. Imagine skimming the tussocky hills of the cold, dark, rain-soaked and wind-lashed Falklands in poor visibility, while being targeted and fired at from the ground, with nothing but your eyes, training, intelligence and reactions to guide you. These, and the nimbleness of the Harrier.

  As we’ve seen, the mutual respect between RAF and RN Harrier pilots didn’t preclude a degree of animosity. As Pook himself put it when the clouds broke as he returned to Hermes one evening and he had a moment to enjoy the view as he listened to controllers ‘giving their laconic instructions’ to Sea Harriers directed to intercept an incoming raid:

  Not for the first time did I feel a twinge of envy at the Sea Harriers’ cushy job, now that they had given up Ground Attack on the Admiral’s orders. No interminable hassling with an idiotic Air Task organisation for them, and no sordid grovelling about in the weeds to attack unseen targets while their aircraft were shot full of holes by every man and his dog. No: it would be an air defender’s life for me in the next war – if I survived this one. Plenty of hanging about admiring the scenery from a safe height, punctuated by the very occasional burst of excitement when you were directed on to a ‘bogey’ – usually some panicky attack pilot running for his life after a desperate attempt to hit the target. After a brief stern chase just a press of the trigger was enough. No map reading at zero feet, and no return fire. Just the roaring smoke trail of your American-built ‘Lima’ as it sped unerringly on its way to its speeding target. Finally the animal thrill of elation as the brief fireball smashed your enemy into the sea. Shoot down and back home you would be sure of the medals and adulation of the girls – after all, only real fighter pilots get to shoot down planes, don’t they? Those GR.3 pilots just moved dirt around – anyone can do that.

  The situation was hardly helped when on 28 May a formation of three GR.3s flying low over Falkland Sound were set upon by a pair of patrolling Sea Harriers flown by Sharkey Ward and Flight Lieutenant Ian Mortimer. The ‘Shars’ had dived in behind the GR.3s, their missile switches set, before ‘Morts’ realized their mistake and, alerting Ward, called off the attack.

  The RAF pilots were certainly hard pressed. After just eleven days in action, five of their six Harriers had been lost or severely damaged, and when 1(F) Squadron’s CO, Wing Commander Peter Squire DFC, went to see Captain Linley Middleton, the skipper of the Hermes, to discuss the possibility of replacement aircraft being shipped to the carrier, he recalled that the reply had been: ‘No. I think it’s a waste of time: it’s just the RAF trying to lay on a publicity stunt.’ Middleton, a veteran Fleet Air Arm pilot who had seen action at Suez in 1956 and flown 2,643 hours in Hawker Sea Furies and Sea Hawks as well as Supermarine Scimitars and Blackburn Buccaneers, was overruled by the Admiralty; the replacement Harriers were duly flown the nine gruelling hours from Ascension Island just as the first six had been shortly before.

  Wing Commander Squire’s experience commanding 1(F) Squadron during the Falklands conflict was to stand him, the Harrier and the RAF in good stead in Iraq and Afghanistan in years to come. Like his fellow pilots, he was forced to learn the hard way, and very quickly indeed. The ‘light blue’ Harriers had flown from RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall to Ascension Island in the equatorial South Atlantic on 3 May shortly after a transatlantic training flight to Goose Bay, Labrador and back to practise air-to-air refuelling. Together with eight Sea Harriers of 809 NAS, they were then loaded on board the Atlantic Conveyor, a 14,950-ton Cunard roll-on, roll-off container ferry requisitioned by the MoD. Shortly after the Harriers arrived safely – the Navy aircraft were split equally between Hermes and Invincible – the Atlantic Conveyor was hit by two Exocets launched from Super Étendards flown by Captain Roberto Curilovic and Lieutenant Julio Barraza. The ship sank, becoming the first British merchant vessel to be lost at sea to enemy fire since the Second World War, and with her went the six Wessex and five Chinook helicopters that had been scheduled to carry men and materiel across to the main island. Now the troops had no alternative but to make their famous, and ankle-wrenching, ‘yomp’ over sodden heaths and through treacherous bogs to Port Stanley.

  In the thick of the action, Squire flew unscathed until late into the conflict before having to eject, after engine failure. Squire’s father, Wing Commander Frank Squire DFC, had flown Consolidated Catalinas on maritime patrols with 210 Squadron during the Second World War. Squire himself had flown Hunters from Singapore and Harriers in Germany before the Falklands, and went on to become Air Chief Marshal Sir Peter Squire and Chief of the Air Staff from 2000 to 2003. His input into the development of later-model Harriers was to prove invaluable. Meanwhile, during the Falklands conflict itself, the design team at Kingston had been kept busy working on instant improvements to the jump jets; these included the provision of chaff and flare dispensers, which the Harrier had previously lacked, to fox enemy radar and heat-seeking missiles. The dispensers were rushed into production and dropped from the air to the Task Force by an RAF Hercules transport aircraft.

  Squire, Pook and others had voiced concerns at the time about particular faults with the Harrier – that lack of chaff, those intermittently functional radios, faults with the navigation system and, as always, a fundamental lack of power: Harrier pilots always wanted more thrust than the Pegasus was able to deliver. Over and above all this, they felt, quite rightly, that they were being asked to fight a dirty low-level, gro
und-attack war without the latest weaponry. It was only in the very last days of the conflict that the GR.3s were finally fitted with laser-guided bombs that allowed the aircraft to keep back just far enough away from their targets to avoid being shot down. The RAF pilots had every reason to want to do their duty and get home safely: unlike in the Battle of Britain, most GR.3 pilots were married men with children, and some were approaching forty. They were not flying for old lies – dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – much less for hatred of the enemy, or certainly not the enemy they encountered; they were too grownup, too professional and sometimes simply too cynical to believe in ‘sabre-rattling’ of any kind. They were certainly not aided in their arduous task by the attitude of some senior Royal Navy officers, and yet the Harriers of the two services still shared a victory fly-past over Port Stanley on 2 July.

  The RAF pilots flew from Hermes to Port Stanley for the last time soon afterwards on a day when heavy snow was being driven across the carrier’s deck by lacerating and freezing winds. Here was a moment to reflect, as Pook did:

  After the long-delayed launch we joined up into a loose tactical formation and headed west for the last time towards the islands that had so nearly claimed our lives. En route we weaved through majestic halls of towering cumulus, which spewed dirty great snow showers into a sea glistening blue-black in the winter sunshine. From the air our erstwhile target, Port Stanley Airfield, looked serene and virginal under a light dusting of the first winter snow, the hand of Nature trying to atone for the violence done to it and its defenders.

  The snow might have made take-off difficult for the Hercules that was to take the pilots back to Ascension Island and on home from there in the comfort of an RAF VC-10; here, though, the Harrier came into its own again. One of the newly arrived relief pilots from 3(F) Squadron hovered a Harrier up and down the runway, clearing snow with its powerful downblast. Even then, it was not all over for the exhausted pilots of 1(F) Squadron. They were ordered to return, with their GR.3s, from England to the Falklands for a spell from late August until Port Stanley Airfield was made ready for the fixed-wing jets that would guard the islands from then on.

  From the beginning, the Sea Harrier had been designed as an interceptor, just as the RAF’s Harriers had been designed primarily as ground-attack aircraft. In combat exercises made in the short period between their being placed in service and sent to the South Atlantic, Sea Harriers took on and won against US Navy Grumman F-14 Tomcats, USAF McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagles and Northrop F-5E Tiger IIs, as well as RAF GR.3 Harriers. Meanwhile, in the hands of the energetic, and outspoken, Sharkey Ward, the Sea Harrier had been making a public impact from early on. In September 1979, after the RAF had turned down the offer on safety grounds, Ward had landed a brand-new Sea Harrier – vertically, of course – on the football pitch alongside BBC’s Pebble Mill at One studio in central Birmingham. Pebble Mill at One was a popular daytime television magazine show and the stunt was undoubtedly good PR for the Navy’s latest fighter. Ward’s landing was accompanied by the band of the Royal Marines, and while still in the cockpit he was given a kiss by the young cockney model Lorraine Chase, something of a latter day forces sweetheart at the time for her part in a television and cinema advert for Campari. ‘Were you truly wafted here from Paradise?’ asked a well-groomed chap as a dolled-up Chaise sipped a Campari in a ‘posh’ setting. ‘Nah,’ she replied, ‘Luton Airport.’ Ward had wafted in from RNAS Yeovilton, and had done so in just fifteen minutes from take-off as he followed the route of the M5.

  As CO of 801 RNAS, Ward was appointed senior Sea Harrier adviser to Naval Command when HMS Hermes and Invincible set sail from Portsmouth with twenty Sea Harriers between them. Then thirty-eight years old, Ward had begun his naval flying career with Phantoms of 892 RNAS from the deck of HMS Ark Royal. He had been an air warfare instructor at RAF Lossiemouth and a NATO nuclear planning and intelligence officer at Kolsas, Ohio, before being asked to fly a desk as Sea Harrier project officer at the MoD in Whitehall. This was, says Ward, ‘my first exposure to the “armchair” military and the devious and arguably dysfunctional senior echelons of that organisation’. Such an assessment was typical of Ward, a pilot and commander whose swashbuckling spirit, undoubted skill and courage, and sharp tongue popularized the myth and reality of the heroic, gung-ho fighter pilot into the beginning of the digital age when the very future of fighter pilots was in doubt. He did so, complete with a black Labrador – Jet – at his side, although at the time, as a family man, he drove a Volvo to Yeovilton rather than an MG, or the Lotus Cortina he had rolled in South Wales years before after a heavy drinking session at RNAS Brawdy.

  After the sheer power of the Phantom, Ward took immediately to the subsonic Sea Harrier. It might not have been nearly as fast, nor with its high wing could it pull such tight turns as the big American fighter, but Ward was impressed with the aircraft. He liked its ability to fly so well at very low speeds, to get out of stalls and spins with a minimum of fuss, and to brake to a halt in the air; he also appreciated its low fuel consumption. And yet when the Invincible slipped anchor at Portsmouth, with Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’ lilting from speakers along the quay, Ward was only too aware of the dangers ahead. It was not just that the Sea Harrier was untried in combat, but intelligence was not all it might have been. Performance data for the Mirage IIIA, for example, was gathered at sea from Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Aircraft, as was the number of Exocet missiles supplied to the Argentine navy. Of more concern was the fact that, following the Fairey Gannet’s retirement in 1978, there would be no Airborne Early Warning (AEW) aircraft accompanying the fleet, even though later in the conflict missions would be flown by RAF Nimrods from Ascension Island. As a result, since the Harrier’s Blue Fox radar would only detect an enemy aircraft at a distance of fifteen miles – or less than two minutes’ flying time if that enemy happened to be a Mirage IIIA or Dagger – pilots would be dependent on information relayed from ships’ radar and, at close range, by what Ward and Co. knew as the ‘Mk 1 Eyeball’. Furthermore, Blue Fox, although good in certain ways, was unable to look down and search for small targets over land or a rough sea, and the Sea Harrier’s Sidewinder missiles could not ‘see’ over the horizon: they had to be fired in visual range of their targets.

  The crews, whatever their fears, took a typically bloody-minded British approach to the situation. In the evening as they drank, they sang, if slightly ungrammatically and to the tune of ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1978 hit musical:

  On your bike Argentina,

  The front line are getting airborne;

  You’ve gone too far now, we’ve left the bar now

  And soon the Falklands will be in our hands.

  But not, thought Ward, if the Sea Harriers were in any way prevented from doing their best. And yet in some ways they were. Ward and his 801 Squadron colleagues were convinced that patrols to protect British ships were best flown at low level: this would ‘put the frighteners’ on incoming aircraft and ensure the Sea Harriers could respond very rapidly. In contrast, 800 Squadron pilots, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Andy Auld, were ordered to patrol at 8,000 feet and above to avoid the approaching enemy and save their Harriers. But this was tempting fate. By the time they had dived into action, a ship might already have been successfully attacked and the aircraft responsible would be racing back to base.

  Ward was proved right when, after the conflict, the Argentinians admitted their fear of the Sea Harriers. So if the two RNAS squadrons had co-operated more fully, it is conceivable that fewer British ships would have been damaged or sunk. The fact that their tactics differed, or were allowed to differ, still seems puzzling: the two units had, after all, been formed together in 1933 after a reorganization of the structure of the Fleet Air Arm, with 800 flying Hawker Nimrod fighters and Hawker Ospreys as navigation leaders, or ‘pathfinders’, from HMS Courageous, and 801 flying Nimrods and Fairey Flycatchers from HMS Hermes.

  S
omething similar had happened, albeit on a larger scale, in 1940, during the Battle of Britain. Air Vice Marshal Keith Park, the astute commander of No. 11 Group RAF in the south-east of England, was naturally disposed to get his Spitfires and Hurricanes up from their airfields and to altitude as quickly as possible to intercept the Luftwaffe. Others, the famously legless Douglas Bader among them, advocated the Big Wing, an arrangement by which fighters of several squadrons took their time to formate and then attack, theoretically in overwhelming force. There was something to be said for both tactics, although on balance Park’s system proved more flexible, and more effective. The dispute caused much undignified acrimony, however, and almost certainly contributed to Park’s subsequent removal from his command. Even today, Sharkey Ward believes that he had been fighting two battles in the South Atlantic, one against the enemy and one against the ‘Flag’, or Naval Command. He was not alone: many Sea Harrier pilots had the feeling that they were somehow only with the fleet on sufferance.

  After the war, Ward, now promoted Commander, was appointed to be Air War Adviser to the Naval Staff and the First Sea Lord. ‘But,’ as he wrote in his thrilling and scathing book Sea Harrier over the Falklands, ‘the brotherhood of fish-heads [Royal Navy] denied me the opportunity of ever commanding a carrier, and the brotherhood of crabs [RAF] continued to deny the Senior Service adequate organic air resources at sea. I, and many other fighter pilots, became tired of fighting donkeys and soon decided to leave Her Majesty’s Service.’ In 2001, Commander Ward flew in a Sea Harrier once again, but this time on the cushions of a two-seat trainer piloted by his son, Kris. It was Lieutenant Commander Kris Ward who in October 2010 was to confront David Cameron, the British prime minister, with the words: ‘I am a Harrier pilot and I have flown 140-odd missions in Afghanistan, and I am now potentially facing unemployment. How am I supposed to feel about that, please, sir?’ Cameron thanked Ward, adding that the decision to retire the Harrier was ‘right’ at a time of ‘difficult decisions’. All too often, politicians simply don’t get it, and they simply don’t understand military matters. After all, who needs a new generation of Trident submarines when you can still have Harriers?