Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  Despite the mood of the last few weeks, Smith greeted the news with disbelief. People never really thought they’d be crazy enough to do it. John and Ileen’s sons, Jeremy and Martyn – both members of FIDF – changed into combat gear and left for the drill hall. The trifle was forgotten.

  Across town, Stanley residents made what preparations they could. Joe King hid the ammunition for his rifle under the public jetty. He’d always kept the old gun as a souvenir of his target-shooting days, but it too had to go. On Davis Street in the east of town, Elizabeth Goss, a 23-year-old mother of two, went round the house gathering up photos of her children, Karina and Roger, and put them in a little bag. She didn’t know what lay ahead, but if she had to leave, the one material possession she wanted to hold on to was her collection of family photos.

  Jeremy and Martyn Smith returned home to Sparrowhawk House to pick up sandwiches and tea to keep them going through the night. The second farewell to the boys, while quick, hit harder. They were going off to fight alongside the Royal Marines. Once they’d gone, their parents prayed for them.

  ‘Oi! What do you think you’re doing?’ At 2.30 a.m., Joe King sneaked out of his house to check one last time on his aunt who lived down the road. He’d offered to look after her in his own home, but she wasn’t having any of it. ‘I’m not leaving my house,’ she’d told him, not open to debate. Now he’d been rumbled. As he crept along the grass verge he was spotted by the police. They’d been told to enforce Sir Rex Hunt’s request that people stay inside.

  ‘If you’re not careful, we’ll arrest you and you’ll spend the night in gaol!’ they threatened.

  King knew them both, explained what he was up to and their tone softened.

  ‘There don’t seem to be any lights on, so I expect she’s all right. You’d better get yourself under cover.’

  With that King scuttled back.

  As he was welcomed home by his wife, ninety-two Argentine Marines of the Amphibious Commando Company had already been ashore for three hours. They’d split into two groups and were making slow progress towards the Royal Marines’ Moody Brook barracks at the far west of Stanley harbour. And towards Government House.

  Chapter 7

  2 April 1982

  Claudette Mozley was on her porch on Friday morning when a Royal Marine crawled out of the undergrowth in her garden. These were the same Marines who would play Santa for the children at Christmas time. They were friendly, familiar faces.

  ‘Is that you Figgy?’ she asked. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘Get on the bloody floor, you silly bitch!’ came the urgent reply. ‘There’s an invasion on.’

  At a quarter to six, the firing had started. As dawn broke, John Smith picked out the threatening shape of the Argentine Type 42 destroyer Santisima Trinidad steaming off the Cape Pembroke lighthouse. As the gunfire intensified, he and Ileen worried terribly about their two sons.

  In Port William, outside the harbour, the Argentine landing ship Cabo San Antonio disgorged her cargo of twenty Amtrac amphibious APCs – armoured personnel carriers. By 6.30 the first of them was driving up the beach. They quickly secured the undefended airfield and a vanguard unit of three continued into the capital.

  On the outskirts of Stanley, a hundred yards or so back from the waterfront, Government House watched over the harbour. Surrounded by more than its fair share of Stanley’s few trees, it was a tangle of extensions and conservatories covered with an olive green corrugated roof. On the eastern side of the Falkland Islands’ grandest property was a flagpole, supported by cables against the strong winds. Inside, alongside the Governor’s family and staff, were thirty-one Royal Marines and eleven sailors from Endurance. At 6.15, the Argentine attack began. At first, the assault from the ridge behind the building appeared to be a shot across the bows, designed to coerce, not to kill and destroy. But that changed when six Argentine Commandos came over the back wall and tried to reach the house. Three of them were cut down by semi-automatic fire from defending Royal Marines. The other three took cover in the maids’ quarters. For the next fifteen minutes there were fierce but inconclusive exchanges of fire. Sunrise was still an hour away and the British Commandos had difficulty in picking out the Argentine muzzle flashes. Then, just before seven o’clock, the shooting stopped. Instead, the Argentinians called for Governor Hunt to surrender. Hunt let the Marines speak on his behalf: Fuck off, you spic bastards.

  But the unsuccessful end to the initial Argentine efforts to capture the British residence could only delay the inevitable.

  On Davis Street, the only road connecting Stanley to the airport, Elizabeth Goss heard a horrendous rumbling sound. The brutal-looking Argentine Amtracs were going to have to come right past her house. Each APC had three forward hatches manned by the commander, its driver and a gunner. Along their sides there were long horizontal hatches through which the vehicle’s occupants could fire their weapons. She looked out of the window to see a column of them grinding along, their guns pointing straight at her.

  Goss grabbed Karina and Roger. If she could take them into town to her in-laws on Ross Road, they’d be safer there. Not so exposed. At the moment she put her hand on the door handle, gunshots rang out close by. She and the kids were going nowhere. Bullets were sniping around the house from all directions. She took Karina and Roger back into the bedroom, where she pulled the mattresses off the bed and piled them up against the wall. Then they huddled there in the corner. At five years old, Karina didn’t really understand what was going on, but at least she could be reasoned with. The toddler, Roger, just sixteen months old, was more of a handful. He was into everything. Liz gave him her little alarm clock, which he pulled to bits, keeping him distracted until the firing stopped.

  That took just over an hour. At 8.30, with Argentine reinforcements rolling into town, Major Norman, the British officer commanding the defence of Government House, advised the Governor that their position was untenable. By 10.30 Governor Hunt had ordered his outgunned, outnumbered Marines to surrender and the Union Jack over Government House had been replaced by the sky blue and white of Argentina. The Royal Marines had always had an impossible task on their hands. But the spirit of their resistance to the invasion provided an indication of the British reaction to it. They’d sunk a landing craft, destroyed an Amtrac APC and killed as many as five Argentine soldiers in the defence of Government House.

  ‘We came second,’ admitted Major Norman, ‘but we won the body count.’

  Shrapnel littered Liz Goss’s backyard. The brick wall that stood between her house and her neighbour’s was pitted with bullet scars. As she and her kids had huddled inside their wooden house they’d been just beyond the protection afforded by the wall. She shuddered at the thought of how close it had been.

  Her house was searched three times. Each time the soldiers ordered the family outside and held them at gunpoint – their weapons trained on the children. Liz found it almost unbearable. Later in the day, as she and the children moved into town to stay with her husband’s parents, she felt overcome by a feeling of utter hopelessness.

  At 8.30 in the morning local time, Lieutenant Colonel William Bryden, USAF, commander of Ascension Auxiliary Air Force Base, had a call put through.

  ‘What support’, asked the reporter from the London Evening Standard, ‘is Ascension Island going to provide for the British fleet being prepared to sail for the Falkland Islands?’

  Bryden didn’t have a clue what the man was talking about. He’d heard of the Falklands, but knew little about them – he’d certainly heard nothing about any threat of an invasion. As the two men spoke, the Argentine Amphibious Commando Company were using tear gas to clear the buildings of the Royal Marines’ Moody Brook barracks.

  The reporter persisted. ‘How far is it from Ascension to the Falklands?’

  Again, Bryden didn’t know, but he wanted to help. ‘If you hold on a minute, I’ll take a look,’ he offered and got up to check the map pinned to his office wall. He quickly ga
uged the distance and got back to the phone. ‘About 4,000 miles?’ he told the reporter but, from the reaction, knew that he was helping rather less than had been hoped for. The reporter carried on as if Bryden were trying to keep something from him.

  Bryden had been on Ascension for nearly a year, and he and his wife loved it. A navigator who’d seen combat flying AC-119-K gunships in Vietnam – a vital mission in a bad aeroplane that the crews labelled ‘The Flying Coffin’ – Bryden had twisted people’s arms to get a posting that had proved to be every bit as unique and satisfying as he’d hoped.

  Just 34 square miles in area, the British colony of Ascension is an extinct volcano stranded in the mid-Atlantic 1,200 miles from Brazil to the west and northern Angola to the east. Rising sharply out of the sea towards the 2,817-foot summit of Green Mountain, she’s part of a sub-oceanic ridge that also broaches the surface further south in the shape of St Helena and Tristan da Cunha. The British first established a settlement there in 1815, when a garrison was stationed to guard against any attempt by the French to rescue Napoleon, imprisoned on St Helena, 700 miles away to the south-east.

  Now, though, she was home to little more than an airfield, radars, listening posts and relay stations for NASA, Cable and Wireless and the BBC, who for a brief period had even been responsible for the island’s administration. The routine work of sending and receiving data from orbiting spacecraft was punctuated by intercontinental ballistic missile tests from submarines sitting off the coast of Florida. By day the missiles were too fast to see. At night, though, you could trace them coming in as you heard the sonic boom following re-entry. The missile’s impact, as close as six miles away, was all the excitement Ascension needed.

  Although the island was British, Wideawake airfield – named after a seabird, also known as the sooty tern, that returns to Ascension every eight months to lay and hatch its eggs – was leased to the Americans. Under the terms of the lease, the British could use the airhead and expect ‘logistical support’. The arrangement worked well. The British simply never used Wideawake. Perhaps it was hardly surprising, after the reception given to the first British visitors from the air.

  On 29 March 1942, over 1,000 officers and men from the US Corps of Engineers came ashore, unimpressed by Ascension’s barren volcanic appearance. They carried with them the road-building machinery and supplies necessary to build an airfield that would be an important stepping stone to Europe. Both the Stars and Stripes and Union Flag flew above the capital, Georgetown, and a draft agreement formalizing the status of the new American base was drawn up. By 12 June their commander, Colonel Robert E. Coughlin, was able to telegraph Washington to tell them their runway was ready.

  Three days later, a Royal Navy Swordfish torpedo bomber from the escort carrier HMS Archer approached the island. Her crew, the pilot Lieutenant E. Dixon Child, RN, Sub-Lieutenant Shaw, RN, and Petty Officer Townson bore grim news. A merchantman, the SS Lyle Park, had been sunk near St Helena by a German raider and her survivors machine-gunned in their rafts. Archer’s Captain realized it would be suicidal to break radio silence and instead sent his Senior Pilot to drop a message bag with a raider warning for the Cable and Wireless office in Georgetown. Dixon Child was unaware of the US presence but saw no reason not to use the unexpected and by now nearly complete runway. He fired a recognition signal and began his approach. As he descended to 400 feet US engineers blocked the runway and opened fire on his unfamiliar biplane. Dixon Child felt a hard thump on his shoulder as he dived out to sea, his swearing ringing in his Observer’s ears. Out of range, the crew tried to decide whether they were thought to be German or Japanese. They decided to give it another go. Making sure to fire a second recognition signal out to sea to avoid making things worse, he was relieved to see them clear the runway of vehicles. Dixon Child managed to get his ‘Stringbag’ down without casualties. As he jumped down off the wing, a bullet, stopped by the buckle of his Sutton harness, fell to the ground.

  But if, since that first visit, British aircraft had not visited Ascension as often as they might have done, forty years later they were about to make up for lost time.

  By midday on 2 April, Bryden had received a message from the Eastern Range Headquarters at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. He was brought up to speed about the international situation. Soon afterwards, at lunch with the heads of all the island’s various organizations – including the British administrator – what information they had was shared. It was clear that Ascension was going to be involved. Bryden had already been asked if he could support three RAF C-130s over the next five days. There was an embassy support flight due in from the US imminently. It’s going to be cramped, Bryden thought, but we can handle it. None of them really had the slightest inkling of what was about to hit them.

  Bryden usually asked for three days’ notice of any incoming flights. That luxury was the first thing sacrificed to necessity. The first British Hercules was already on her way. Loaded with stores, she’d left RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire hours earlier. Sir Michael Beetham’s ‘big effort’ was under way. And, unlikely as it seemed at lunchtime on 2 April, Ascension Auxiliary Air Force Base was about to displace Chicago O’Hare as the busiest airfield in the world.

  Flight Lieutenant Jim Vinales and his wife Jean were in the kitchen of their new house in the picturesque Lincolnshire village of Colby when they heard news of the invasion on the radio. Vinales joined the Royal Air Force as a Navigator in 1965 after hitch-hiking through Europe from his Gibraltar home to demonstrate initiative to the recruiting officers. His Spanish mother hadn’t approved. Growing up, on the Rock, English hadn’t been Vinales’ first language, but he spoke it now with the fruity vowels and precise diction of a Shakespearean actor. Now bilingual, he couldn’t help but take an interest in Latin-American affairs, and the mess Argentina was getting herself into concerned him greatly. The couple watched what news they could on television and, on Saturday the 3rd, tuned in to the emergency parliamentary debate called to discuss the invasion. They heard the Prime Minister tell a febrile House that something would be done, but it wasn’t clear to him what, exactly, could be done. It certainly never occurred to him that he might be involved. A full-blown war seemed unlikely and a possible role for his Vulcan squadron even more remote.

  The entire Vulcan force came under the command of the RAF’s 1 Group, which in turn reported to Strike Command. The Air Officer Commanding, or AOC 1 Group, was Air Vice-Marshal Michael Knight. A no-nonsense, popular figure, the ruddy-faced Knight had split loyalties. He loved the Air Force, but he also loved rugby. Today, though, he was able to combine the two. As one of two RAF members of the RFU committee he was going to watch the RAF play the Army at Twickenham. He was looking forward to it. After the game he planned to drive straight on to north Devon on leave. Driving south from HQ 1 Group at RAF Bawtry in Lincolnshire, he tuned into the parliamentary debate on the car radio. As the debate raged, he realized that he wouldn’t be going any further than Twickenham.

  On South Georgia, Lieutenant Keith Mills weighed up his options. For the last two and a half hours his outgunned contingent of twenty-two Royal Marines had held King Edward’s Point. They’d mined the beach, dug defensive trenches and kept their attackers at bay, but without heavier weaponry there was little more they could do. While they rattled machine-gun fire at their attackers, 100mm high-explosive shells whistled in on a flat trajectory from the Argentine frigate Guerrico. They were beginning to find their range and only one needed to be accurate to potentially decimate the small British force. Behind them, cutting off their escape route, Argentine commandos were already ashore. One of Mills’s men had already taken two bullets in the arm. If they fought on, the casualty list was sure to grow. Then there was the safety of the British Antarctic Survey scientists to consider. The twenty-two-year-old officer had made up his mind.

  ‘That’s it. We’ve made our point, that’s enough. I’ve decided to surrender. Does anyone have any violent objection?’ No one spoke. But forced to give th
emselves up after the one-sided contest for Grytviken, Mills’s men had, at least, made the enemy’s eyes water. They’d brought down a troop-carrying Puma helicopter and blown a hole in the side of the frigate Guerrico with a Carl Gustav anti-tank missile as well as peppering her with 1,275 rounds of small-arms fire. But the Argentine flag now flew above the island that had been the trigger for it all. The Argentinians now had their Georgias del Sur, a place even the commander of the Argentine soldiers on the island, Teniente de Navio Alfredo Astiz, regarded as ‘the end of the world’.

  By the end of the day, the only piece of good news for Britain was winning Security Council Resolution 502 at the UN. Pushed through quickly, it demanded the immediate withdrawal of all Argentine forces from the Falkland Islands.

  In Argentina, people crowded the streets of Buenos Aires to celebrate the nation’s triumph. There hadn’t been scenes of euphoria like this since Argentina had won the World Cup in 1978. The country’s new hero, General Leopoldo Galtieri, drank up the adulation from the balcony of the presidential palace. The country’s delicate economic position, the brutal repression of the previous week’s anti-junta demonstrations, the ‘disappeared’ – all had, for the moment, been put to one side. A withdrawal was the last thing on Galtieri’s mind.