by Harry Benson
The effect was dramatic. Huge explosions in the water blew the rear half of the submarine completely out of the water, its tail hanging suspended in the air before crashing back down into the sea. Amazingly the submarine remained afloat, although it had turned, zigzagging its way back towards land. From the Wessex 3 cabin, Fitz Fitzgerald fired his entire supply of machine-gun ammunition into the conning tower of the submarine. Shortly afterwards, HMS Brilliant’s Lynx arrived on the scene, dropping a Mark 46 torpedo into the water alongside the surfaced submarine without effect. They followed up with their own burst of machine-gun fire, steering away when fire was returned at them from the tower of the submarine.
Next on the scene was Tony Ellerbeck in HMS Endurance’s Wasp helicopter. Sighting the submarine’s fin from two miles away, the Wasp launched one of its AS12 anti-ship missiles. From the left seat, aimer David Wells directed the wire-guided missile directly into the fin. The missile passed straight through the thin skin exploding in the sea on the other side. The impact was enough to blow the Argentine machine gunner off his firing position and down into the control room below. The second missile was not as successful.
In the air, the attack threatened to degenerate into chaos. The two Endurance Wasps couldn’t talk to anyone else because they had a different radio fit. Their first missile attack had therefore taken the Lynx crew completely by surprise. Brilliant’s second Lynx now appeared, circling overhead whilst firing her machine gun into the submarine hull. Meanwhile Tony Ellerbeck’s Wasp returned to Endurance and rearmed with two more missiles, launching both in quick succession. This time the first missile flew into the sea whilst the second went through the submarine fin.
A second Wasp, flown by John Dransfield from HMS Plymouth, now had a crack with its single AS12 missile. Aimer Joe Harper guided his missile right onto the submarine itself, exploding so close that it caused further damage to the hull.
By now the submarine was approaching the jetty at Grytviken. Machine-gun tracer fire was streaking in all directions, coming up from the Argentine ground forces and down from the helicopters. A third Wasp, also from Endurance and flown by Tim Finding, now lined up for the attack. His aimer, Bob Nadin, achieved a miss with his first missile and a hit with his second on Santa Fe’s fin.
Six helicopters were now competing exuberantly for the prize of sinking the Argentine submarine. As it became obvious that the sub was limping back to the pier at King Edward Point, the helicopters began to withdraw away from the ground fire. Santa Fe and her sixty-man crew were going nowhere. However, Tony Ellerbeck wasn’t finished, having rearmed and returned for his third attack. The first missile failed to fire, but the second hit the fin, this time exploding noisily. Eight missiles, one torpedo and a whole load of machine-gun bullets had now been fired at the Santa Fe. But it was the original two depth charges that did the damage.
In order to sustain the momentum of this attack, it was decided to begin the land assault straight away. The main body of troops had been held off in RFA Tidespring to avoid the submarine threat. So a hastily assembled landing force combining SAS, SBS and Royal Marines was flown in by the Antrim Wessex and both of Brilliant’s Lynx. Mike Tidd and Ian Georgeson organised the flow of troops to the flight deck in order to free up extra Royal Marines. The Royal Navy warships sailed towards Grytviken firing their guns and with their huge battle ensigns flying. It was a stirring sight, even if Antrim’s ensign did wrap itself around the radar mast.
The destroyer HMS Antrim sails towards Mount Paget in South Georgia. In this bay, Antrim’s Wessex 3 blew the Argentine submarine Santa Fe out of the water with two depth charges. Various Wasp helicopters then followed up with an enthusiastic, but largely futile, volley of AS12 missiles.
Demoralised by the intensity of the naval gunfire barrage and the reappearance of their damaged submarine, the Argentine garrison surrendered as the landing force approached. Shortly afterwards, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was able to stand on the steps of 10 Downing Street and read out the emotive signal sent by HMS Antrim’s Captain Brian Young. ‘Be pleased to inform Her Majesty that the White Ensign flies alongside the Union Flag in Grytviken South Georgia. God save the Queen.’
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Having run out of helicopters, Mike Tidd realised that his team were the obvious choice to look after the Argentine prisoners from the garrison and Santa Fe. Young was grateful for the offer. The junglies could make themselves useful again.
Some very rapid planning was now called for. Back on RFA Tidespring, with help from Ian Georgeson, Andy Pulford and Andy Berryman, Mike Tidd set about organising a system of prisoner management and accommodation. Within just eighteen hours, the ship’s team banged together shelves and cushions as sleeping accommodation, and makeshift toilets using forty-gallon drums cut in half with wooden seats fitted.
With help from a detachment of nine Royal Marines from Antrim, a total of 260 prisoners were processed through Tidespring’s flight deck and down into allocated compartments below. Argentine special forces troops were assigned one magazine, the crew of the Santa Fe the other; the scrap merchants from the original invasion were sent to the now-empty aircraft hangar, and the remaining force of Argentine marines were housed in the hold.
By Saturday 1 May, the force was sailing north toward warmer waters, ultimately to offload the prisoners using the two Wessex that were based at Ascension Island for onward repatriation to Argentina. Altogether the prisoners were on board for two weeks, testing the initiative and patience of Tidd and his team throughout. Problems included how to keep the huge holds warm in the freezing Antarctic waters; how to make sure young naval engineers didn’t shoot one another or themselves with their unfamiliar SMG sub-machine guns; how to apply the more obscure aspects of the Geneva Convention, which had been written for the confines of land and not sea; and how to dissuade the friskier prisoners from causing trouble.
One of those prisoners included the especially troublesome Lieutenant Alfredo Astiz, an army officer known internationally as El Ángel Rubio de la Muerte (‘The Blond Angel of Death’) who was wanted for the forced disappearances, torture and murder of thousands of political prisoners in Argentina in the 1970s. He was eventually segregated from his compatriots and taken north on board Antrim. Although questioned by British police, he was repatriated to Argentina a few weeks later. French and Swedish governments continue to seek his extradition and legal action was renewed against him in Argentina.
Argentine officers in general treated their conscripts like dirt. After observing officers pushing their men out of the way when food was served in the ship’s hold, Tidd caused dismay when he informed the Argentines that, whilst in his care, they would follow the British tradition of feeding the men first and officers second. The prisoners included many Argentines with British connections. One Argentine marine officer commented on the irony that his father was decorated as an RAF Spitfire pilot during the Second World War and now he, the son, was a prisoner of the British. Another was greatly saddened that he was unlikely to be able to take up his place at Oxford University that summer. Several of the submariners had been part of a naval contingent that collected two Type-42 destroyers from shipyards on the Tyne for service in the Argentine navy. Some of the 845 Squadron engineers had joked with the Argentines that they were being taken to a prisoner of war camp in England. ‘Excellent. Could we go to Newcastle? We like Newcastle,’ they asked.
As the prisoners were offloaded from Tidespring at Ascension, Mike Tidd and his team were touched that several Argentine officers came over to shake hands and thank them for the way they had been looked after. In different circumstances, they might have been friends.
Chapter 5
Kicking off: 1–6 May 1982
THE TASK FORCE had sailed from Britain in indecent haste. A huge volume of stores had been piled into ships and needed reorganising, while helicopters and crews were dotted around the fleet unable to contact one another.
Yet an excellent plan was beginni
ng to emerge. The fleet would assemble at Ascension Island, halfway to the Falklands, and use the helicopters to ‘cross-deck’ stores between ships and bring new stores from the air base. The carrier group was to set off and win the naval battle around the Falklands before the amphibious group left the safety of Ascension Island to land the troops on the islands. Throughout the journey south, soldiers, sailors and airmen trained for an assault on the Falklands. Still nobody really thought it would come to all-out war.
Within hours of the carrier group’s arrival off the coast of the Falklands, Britain’s dispute with Argentina was about to get very serious indeed.
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With the demise of Britain’s empire abroad and a tightening of the political purse strings at home, the savage defence cuts announced by Secretary of State John Nott in 1981 called an end to the need for expensive naval aircraft carriers and outdated amphibious landing ships. Britain’s interests would now be focused on her contribution to NATO and the defence of Northern Europe from an expanding Soviet Union. Thus when Argentina invaded the Falklands, Britain’s ageing helicopter carrier, HMS Hermes, was heading for the scrapyard; the first of three new through-deck cruisers, HMS Invincible, had already been sold to the Australians; the commando assault ship HMS Intrepid was in mothballs, and several Royal Fleet Auxiliary supply ships were en route to other navies around the world. Had the Argentines timed their invasion a matter of weeks later, there would not have been enough ships to make up a task force, let alone retake the Falklands.
The task force that sailed from Portsmouth on Monday 5 April amidst much fanfare and razzamatazz had been thrown together with great speed, enthusiasm and ingenuity. National pride was at stake. The two big carriers Hermes and Invincible were earmarked for Sea Harrier operations. With just twenty Sea Harriers initially, the task force was utterly reliant for air defence on this tiny group of vertical and short take-off and landing jets and their two mobile airfields out at sea. Any kind of amphibious landing would be led by the venerable assault ship Fearless, backed by a handful of landing ships logistic. On Friday 9 April, 3 Commando Brigade’s force of Royal Marines (known to all as either ‘royal’ or ‘bootnecks’) and 2 and 3 Para, followed on the requisitioned cruise ship SS Canberra from Southampton. Fearless’s sister ship HMS Intrepid was rapidly extracted from mothballs and sailed for the South Atlantic on 26 April after a work-up at Portland.
From Fearless, helicopter tasking commander Tim Stanning wondered what kit had made it on board in the mad rush to depart from Portsmouth. Prior to arriving at Ascension, his job would be to put together the immense list of tasks that enabled the helicopter crews to cross-deck stores, troops and equipment from the wrong ships to the right ships. Furthermore, he was also to construct the Helicopter Assault Landing Task sheet, the ‘HEALT’. The plan was to conduct a full-scale rehearsal of an amphibious assault on the Falklands whilst the fleet was at Ascension waiting for events to unfold.
Although Oily Knight and Jack Lomas in their Wessex claimed the prize for being the first junglies to leave Yeovilton, the junglie Sea Kings were the first squadron to leave en masse soon afterwards. Nine aircraft had embarked with Hermes, while three more sailed with Fearless. One other had followed by air with the fourteenth and final Sea King following later on HMS Intrepid along with Mike Crabtree’s Wessex flight.
Even if they were slightly more ungainly and less manoeuvrable, the new Sea Kings were far more powerful than the Wessex they had replaced. Because of their extra size and power, they would be expected to do much of the cross-decking in Ascension and also much of the subsequent offload of ammunition and stores when the time came for an amphibious landing in the Falklands. They had one other remarkable advantage, as yet untested, in the shape of the seven sets of night vision goggles that would allow them to fly at extremely low levels in the dark. All this lay in the future.
Eleven days after setting off from Portsmouth, the first few British ships arrived off the coast of Ascension Island. Having tasked his flight to get on with their contribution to the cross-decking operation, Jack Lomas went ashore to try to track down spare batteries for his Wessex. Landing at Wideawake airfield, he was delighted to see 845 Squadron’s Mobile Air Ops Team (MAOT), led by Lieutenant Brad Reynoldson, marching up and down the huge dispersal area amongst a mass of loads with large green A43 radios strapped to their backs and hooking-up loads. Inbound helicopter crews called up ‘helicom’, on the radio frequency 258.8 megahertz, whereupon Reynoldson and his team would tell them which load needing taking to which ship. ‘MAOT’s running the place. Everything’s going to be fine!’ thought Lomas.
For Sea King and Wessex helicopter crews alike, the biggest problem during cross-decking was finding the destination ship amongst the widely scattered fleet. Armed with a list of ships’ names and the daily changing alphanumeric codes, the pilot would see, for example, that ‘Hotel Three Alpha One’ was the landing ship RFA Sir Galahad. With six identical-looking ships of this type to choose from, and all ships’ names painted over for security, crews resorted to the use of blackboards in the back of the helicopter. Coming to a hover alongside the flight deck, the crewman would hold up the board, ‘Are you Sir Galahad?’ – a question which invariably prompted a burst of laughter between pilot and crewman. The more serious reply from the flight deck would either be a thumbs-up or a frantic pointing at another nearby ship. Aircrew recognition of RN and RFA ships was already generally excellent. After two hours of load-lifting, crews had worked out where pretty well all the ships were parked.
As well as reorganising stores, the stop at Ascension was an opportunity to reorganise the helicopters. Five of the original junglie Sea Kings remained on Hermes, freeing up more space for Sea Harrier operations. This group included four night-flying Sea Kings.
During the journey south, the cockpits of these four aircraft had to be specially adapted by the squadron engineers so they could be flown with the night vision goggles. The dim red lighting that normally lit the Sea King’s cockpit instruments at night-time would look like dazzling bright sunshine when viewed through the ultra-sensitive goggles. The other four Sea Kings from Hermes were spread between the roll-on, roll-off ferry MV Elk and the P&O cruise liner Canberra. The new arrival from Ascension replaced Mike Crabtree’s two Wessex on HMS Intrepid, which then made their way to the fuel ship RFA Tidepool. Bill Pollock and Simon Thornewill swapped ships so that Pollock could take charge of the special forces night-flying programme from Hermes, and Thornewill, as squadron commanding officer, could liaise with the landing force commanders on Fearless.
Just two days after arriving at Ascension, the carrier group led by HMS Hermes departed south, leaving behind the amphibious group to continue cross-decking and preparing for the eventual landings. The amphibious ships and landing forces weren’t to set off until the naval battle was won.
On board RFA Resource, news of the two Wessex crashes on South Georgia was beginning to filter through via the BBC World Service. ‘Fuck me,’ said Jack Lomas. ‘Thank God Tiddles and his boys didn’t get themselves killed. But two Wessex lost. What a start!’
The following day the atmosphere became decidedly sombre with news that one of the Sea Kings on Hermes had flown into the sea at dusk, killing Petty Officer Aircrewman Kevin ‘Ben’ Casey, the first British fatality of war. As if it were needed after the fiasco on Fortuna, the tragic accident was an unpleasant reminder that conditions in the South Atlantic would pose every bit as much of a threat to aircrew as direct action by the Argentine enemy.
As the fleet sailed further south, they left behind the balmy tropical weather of Ascension and entered the wildly changing conditions of the South Atlantic. On some days the sea would be completely flat calm and the surface almost oily. On others, the wind would whip up heavy seas making conditions for take-off and landing terrible. Often visibility was appalling. Finding ships out in the fleet in such weather, and getting back safely, required skill, ingenuity, and a healthy dose of self-preservation.
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Without radar to guide, Wessex 5 crews mostly relied on a method of navigation called ‘dead reckoning’. It didn’t matter exactly where the aircraft was over the sea. What mattered was where the aircraft was in relation to each ship. Dead reckoning meant applying a mental combination of wind and ship direction. The big assumption of course was that the ship’s heading didn’t change. Hence there was always a need to add a large margin for error. All naval aircrew have experienced the unnerving situation of returning to where ‘mother’ should be only to find a vast expanse of sea and no sign of a ship.
The only navigation aid for the Wessex crew was a direction-finding needle on the cockpit panel that swung left or right in response to a radio signal, should the ship be generous enough to use its radio. But with radio silence the norm in the fleet, relying on wits and caution was usually the best strategy for avoiding a cold swim. In especially poor visibility, pilots would deliberately offset the return journey in order to cross a mile or two behind the ship and find the wake. It was then a simple matter of flying up the wake and hoping you then arrived at the right ship.
Along the way, the floating bomb that was RFA Resource regularly transferred ammunition to other ships. Some of this was done by ‘replenishment at sea’, an impressive manoeuvre whereby both ships would sail close alongside one another. Lines would be shot from one ship to the other, followed by heavier lines. Stores could then be hauled across by lines of sailors while the ship transferred fuel by hose suspended from a separate line. The two Wessex helicopters were used extensively to assist in the ammunition transfer by underslung load. However, the containers used to hold the 4.5-inch shells for ships’ guns were in limited supply. Under threat of attack during action stations, some of these boxes were simply despatched off the back of the flight deck, making the shortage even worse.