by Harry Benson
By mid-April all of the junglie Sea Kings had left the UK. But there were plenty more Wessex. For a while there was talk of expanding 845 Squadron into one giant monster squadron, incorporating the training squadron and anyone else available. Instead, on Monday 19 April, the training squadron instructors and their aircraft were recommissioned with front-line status at Yeovilton.
The first new squadron, 848, was formed mostly from the aircraft and crews of the Wessex training squadron from which I had emerged just a couple of months earlier. It was a proud moment for commanding officer Lieutenant Commander David Baston to reclaim the name of the original junglies with the motto ‘Accipe Hoc’ – ‘Take that!’
Most of the pilots and aircrew were either highly skilled instructors or pilots taken from the course following my own – that is, still technically in training – to make up numbers. The first two Wessex of the newly formed squadron, led by Lieutenant Commander Chris Blight, had already been despatched to the supply ship RFA Regent which was embarking in Plymouth Sound the same day. Another two were to be despatched to the fuel tanker RFA Olna. But most of the aircraft and crews were to sail south on the giant roll-on roll-off container ship the SS Atlantic Conveyor, one of six similar ships owned by Cunard, two of which, Conveyor and Atlantic Causeway, had been requisitioned by the MOD.
David Baston and several of the aircrew took an aircraft down to Plymouth dockyard to have a look at their new ship. Looming over them at the dockside, Atlantic Conveyor was simply massive. A giant bridge superstructure towered over a vast forward deck that stretched out several football-field lengths in front. Behind the high bridge was a smaller deck, still comfortably big enough to take at least one helicopter. The forward decking appeared to be awash with men brandishing angle grinders. Containers were being lifted into place by a giant crane and were being stacked one on top of each other to line the sides of the deck as protection from the South Atlantic weather. Men were moving around levelling the new deck structure in preparation for the Harriers and helicopters that were to operate from it. Trailing behind them was a man carrying the biggest paint roller any of them had ever seen. The colour of the paint was the ubiquitous ‘pussers’ grey.
There were several false starts before the squadron was able to embark for the first time. Two of the Wessex became unserviceable while waiting at the Royal Marine base in Plymouth and needed replacement from Yeovilton. Last-minute modifications to the ship meant more delays. On Sunday 25 April, the six Wessex helicopters finally embarked on Atlantic Conveyor, underway in Plymouth Sound. Lieutenant Pete Manley conducted a first-of-class load-lifting trial.
The safe arrival of Atlantic Conveyor in the Falklands was crucial. In the giant holds underneath the flight deck was a huge volume of stores. This included an entire tent city for 10,000 people, sufficient to house both 3 Brigade, already en route on Canberra and Norland, and 5 Brigade due to head off shortly on the Queen Elizabeth II. There was also a portable runway, JCB diggers to build it, and all the ancillary equipment needed to operate Harriers ashore, including giant plastic fuel pillows. There was even a squadron of black raiding craft, presumably belonging to special forces. Conveyor’s holds were so vast that even this huge volume of kit and equipment failed to fill them.
The container ship arrived at Ascension on Wednesday 5 May. As well as the six Wessex, Conveyor also carried other valuable aircraft including replacement Chinook and Lynx helicopters. They were joined at Ascension by six RAF Harriers and eight Royal Navy Sea Harriers, each landing vertically on the huge forward flight-deck area of the ship. Helicopters and jets were then parked in rows between the walls of containers and wrapped in plastic for further protection. In the rush to get aircrew south, a further flight of four Wessex pilots and three crewmen also embarked on the troop carrier MV Norland at Ascension, with the intent of being allocated aircraft later.
Behind Conveyor’s bridge was the smaller deck jutting out to the stern of the ship. A ramp, used for access to the huge spaces underneath, folded up behind the deck. During a brief stop at Ascension Island, Pete Manley had paid an unofficial visit to the local golf club to acquire important stores. In calm weather, Manley figured that the ramp would be the obvious place for a South Atlantic cocktail party on a balmy evening. With a plentiful supply of hundreds of beer barrels on board Conveyor, obtained by clambering over the reserve supply of cluster bombs, all that was needed was a handle, some gas and a suitable umbrella. The golf club generously obliged with the beer equipment but no umbrella.
With all of the Wessex and Sea Kings either despatched to the Falklands or on detachment to Northern Ireland, 845 Squadron senior pilot Mike Booth was now virtually the only junglie left at Yeovilton. To meet the demand for more troop-carrying helicopters, he was asked to form a new squadron out of the detachment in Northern Ireland plus various extra aircraft and aircrew engaged with search-and-rescue duties, plus the odd test pilot and those ‘flying desks’. It was a huge relief to all of us stuck out in Northern Ireland. We were increasingly worried that we had been forgotten.
848 Squadron show how to squeeze several Wessex onto the stern deck of Atlantic Conveyor. The pilot of this Wessex will have felt very uneasy watching his blades whirling so close to the other helicopters. This is where you really have to trust the white lines.
This second new squadron, 847, was assigned to embark in Atlantic Causeway, twin of Atlantic Conveyor, and in RFA Engadine, a flat-bottomed training and support ship. Because of problems trying to find sleeping space for everybody, the new squadron had to be split disproportionately. It was not an ideal solution. Four of the aircraft and fifteen pilots embarked on Engadine. The remaining twenty aircraft embarked on Atlantic Causeway with just four pilots.
On Sunday 9 May, Major Adrian Short and I flew X-Ray Mike down to Plymouth and landed on Engadine which lay alongside the dock. I was assigned a cabin with one of the Engadine junior officers and my fellow Sub-Lieutenant Dave Kelly. As we dumped our kit bags on our bunks, Kelly peered out through the scuttle. ‘Oh look,’ he said smiling, ‘our cabin is about nine feet above the waterline. What flies at nine feet, Harry?’ He then smiled again as he informed me that Engadine’s sister ship had reportedly rolled over and sunk in the Irish Sea. Not surprisingly, Engadine and its flat bottom had never been south of the equator.
Having contemplated this happy news, the fear of missing out once again became our number one concern when we learned that Engadine’s maximum speed was twelve knots. It would take forever to reach the Falklands. We quickly calculated that the earliest we could get there would be by Saturday 5 June, twenty-six days hence. It could all be over by then. We could swim faster.
Three days after Engadine sailed, the four pilots of 847 ‘B’ flight led by Lieutenant Commander Peter Hails shuttled their twenty aircraft the short journey across from where they had been dropped off in Plymouth by ‘A’ flight onto Atlantic Causeway. Causeway also embarked 825 Squadron, whose Sea Kings had their anti-submarine pinging kit stripped out in order to convert them to troop carriers. The very much faster Causeway set off on Friday 14 May and quickly overtook the plodding Engadine. There were further frustrations as we were forced to divert to Gibraltar overnight for engine repairs.
Now that the task force’s additional aircraft had set off, the QE2 sailed from Southampton on 12 May with the task force’s additional soldiers of 5 Brigade, comprising Scots Guards, Welsh Guards and Gurkhas.
For all squadrons and flights heading south, the long journey was an opportunity to practise deck landings, load-lifting, winching, cabin gunning, formation flying, instrument approaches, and navigation over the sea.
847 was the newly formed Wessex squadron with which I went to war. This badge was sewn onto the sleeve of my flying suit. The squadron motto Ex alto concutimus translates roughly as ‘We zap them from on high’!
Our new senior pilot, Lieutenant Commander Rob Flexman, was pleased to be going; he had only just returned from an exchange tour with the French navy fly
ing Super Frelon helicopters. However, with such a top-heavy squadron, he was concerned that there might be friction with some of his more experienced colleagues who might feel they should have been appointed number two in his place. He also wondered how he would perform individually in action. His first task back in the Wessex saddle was to get up to speed with deck landings.
Some of my colleagues found it hard to conceal their glee after watching the senior pilot bouncing wildly across the flight deck in ground resonance a couple of times. For me, it simply diluted the embarrassment when, on my own first sortie at sea, six out of eight attempts at deck landing resulted in the same ground resonance and the need to take off again in a hurry. Coached and generously encouraged by my experienced senior colleagues, Lieutenant Commanders Neil Anstis, Mike Spencer and Mike Booth, I learnt how to do it properly. On most days and a handful of nights, I got airborne for short sessions of deck-landing practice. These flights felt fantastic. My confidence grew as my landings on the moving flight deck got better and better. I began to feel more like a Royal Navy pilot. Over the next two years as a front-line Wessex pilot, I would complete over 400 deck landings at sea, both at day and night.
The highlight of my trip south was the 847 Squadron flying competition. The challenge was to spill the least amount of water whilst dangling a bucket from the winch, navigate the most accurate triangle pattern to end up exactly overhead the ship, and land most precisely on the required spot on the flight deck. The squadron was divided into teams of two, one pilot, one aircrewman. Petty Officer Aircrewman Chris Eke and I were pitched against the formidably experienced opposition. We won. I accepted congratulations with all the modesty and reserve that I didn’t feel. I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
Our progress south remained painfully slow. Different kinds of training helped to fill the long hours. I worked on my physical fitness. All of us did. I wanted to go into battle at the peak of health in case I got shot down. We did sit-ups and push-ups and squat thrusts and star jumps and ran laps round the ship until we felt physically sick. Wearing incredibly short shorts – very much the fashion of the 1980s – we played a relentless amount of deck hockey. We did military training, firing machine guns, rifles, pistols and light rockets – usually at the few seagulls trailing behind the ship. The lowlight of my trip south was my embarrassing failure to wake up one morning in time for a training session on the handheld 30mm Light Anti-tank Weapon. My well-deserved punishment was to be handed the manual and told I was to brief all of the pilots after lunch on the use of the LAW weapon. I didn’t miss any training after that.
Skimpy shorts were very much the fashion in the 1980s. When we weren’t flying, my colleagues on 847 Squadron and I played endless games of deck hockey on the flight deck of RFA Engadine.
The air and sea temperature rose noticeably as we approached the equator. It was a delight and a distraction to lean over the guard rail and watch the flying fish darting out from the side of the ship. Every now and then we would spot a shark or giant stingray from the air. Passing through the equator inevitably meant paying our traditional dues to King Neptune for first-timers like me. This involved a thoroughly unpleasant and humiliating ‘crossing the line’ ceremony on the flight deck. Our duty was to bow down before Neptune, the bearded Neil Anstis wearing blue paint, long dangly hair and a thoroughly unattractive dress-like garment. We were then made to drink a foul brown concoction that included alcohol, chocolate and pepper, and were then sprayed with a disgusting fluid of origin unknown.
Heavy drinking on this day, and throughout the entire journey south, was almost inevitable. The party stopped only when Mike Booth decided to close the bar a few days before we reached the Total Exclusion Zone (TEZ) around the Falklands.
During the second week of May, Sea Harrier operations in the TEZ were constrained by persistent poor visibility, low cloud, rain and fog. In the early hours of Thursday 6 May, two Sea Harriers on night patrol from Invincible were vectored to investigate a fast-moving low-level contact. Having descended toward sea level, nothing was heard or seen of them again. It was presumed that they had collided. Following the death of Nick Taylor and the Exocet attack on Sheffield, the loss of two more Sea Harrier pilots, John Eyton-Jones and Al Curtis, was a terrible blow.
On 9 May, Sea Harriers crippled an Argentine fishing trawler, the Narwhal, suspected of intelligence gathering. Cannon fire from both jets ripped great holes in the trawler above and below the waterline. Two bombs were dropped but failed to arm. Had they done so, the trawler would have blown apart. Two junglie Sea Kings were launched from Hermes along with a radar-fitted anti-submarine Sea King as guide. They stopped by Invincible to pick up a boarding party of SBS troops along the way.
After a 150-mile transit directly towards the Falklands, Bill Pollock and his co-pilot Lieutenant Dick Hutchings RM in the lead Sea King arrived to a scene of desolation. The trawler was stopped in the water; there was nobody on deck. The ship looked lifeless. After a quick circuit, Pollock hovered over the apparently empty craft, despatching their SBS troops onto the deck by rope. It soon became clear that there would be no resistance from the ship’s crew. They were hiding below decks, clearly in fear for their lives. One crew member had been killed.
With the ship slowly sinking, the Sea Kings began to winch the surviving crew, body bag and SBS troops on board. The first two Sea Kings set off straight away while Pollock, Hutchings and aircrewman Doc Love were still winching their mix of British and Argentine passengers on board. After such a long time getting there and then hanging around, fuel in Pollock’s Sea King was becoming very tight indeed. Worse, an anxious radio discussion with Invincible revealed that the carrier was fifty miles further away than expected. The aircraft was simply not going to make it back. In all there were twenty people on board. One way or another, they were going to need rescuing.
The Type-42 destroyer, HMS Glasgow, sister ship of the Sheffield, was instructed to head at high speed towards the Sea King. Pollock ran through his calculations again, realising that it was still unlikely to be enough. They would be swimming. There was one radical solution that might help. Pollock remembered an incident from a few years back when he was flying a Wessex. He had been caught out a long way from his ship with a diminishing supply of fuel. The aircraft manual claimed that, in an emergency, shutting down one engine would use up less fuel. The working engine would compensate by taking up the strain, but it wouldn’t be double. There was no real problem flying on one engine. But if you have two engines, you should use them. This was very definitely an emergency. It had worked in the Wessex. Now it was time to see if it would work in the Sea King.
Holding their collective breath, Pollock and Hutchings went through the procedure for shutting down an engine in flight. Miles from anywhere and with so many lives at stake, it was a nerve-racking experience. The crew watched in awe as the working engine took up the slack. Overall fuel consumption dropped by a quarter, exactly as promised. It just might give them the extra miles they needed.
As the needles on the fuel gauges edged their way remorselessly towards zero, HMS Glasgow came into sight, steaming straight at them. Pollock turned the helicopter onto final approach while the other engine was restarted to give them the extra power they needed for landing. The flight deck of a Type-42 destroyer is designed for the much smaller Lynx. Sea Kings are not cleared for landing for several reasons: there’s not enough room on the deck; there’s no margin for error to prevent the helicopter blades from smashing into the ship’s hangar; and the deck is not stressed for the extra weight of a Sea King. But far out in the South Atlantic with just seconds of fuel remaining, the options were to attempt an unorthodox landing on Glasgow or ditch in the sea and hope to survive.
The ship was pitching around in the swell. With guidance from the flight-deck crew, Pollock lowered the Sea King onto the deck, holding power on in a ‘wheels-light hover’ so as not to put its full weight on the deck. From the cockpit it looked awfully tight. And it was. The wheels jus
t held on the outer edges. The blades were just feet from the hangar.
The flight-deck crew now rushed in with the fuel hose and plugged into the side of the Sea King. Pollock lifted back off the deck into a hover to continue the refuel. With huge relief, the two pilots watched the fuel needle creep slowly upwards. The passengers never even knew how close it had been.
On board Fearless there had been considerable debate as to whether to make an amphibious assault on East Falkland or establish a beachhead and airfield on West Falkland. San Carlos was chosen mainly because the surrounding hills provided protection for the landing ships against air attack. However, several threats and obstacles needed to be overcome before the landings could take place. The Sea Harrier attacks on Goose Green had the unintended consequence that the surviving Argentine Pucara aircraft had been moved across to the grass airstrip at Pebble Island on the north side of West Falkland. Just minutes flying time from San Carlos, these aircraft from Pebble Island had the capacity to seriously disrupt a successful landing.
On the night of Tuesday 11 May, Nigel North and his crew took off from Hermes in a solo Sea King. It was pitch black and overcast. In the cabin of the aircraft was an eight-man SAS observation team and their canoes. Using instruments and night vision goggles, the Sea King flew low over the sea towards Pebble Island on West Falkland. Without modern satellites or beacons, the on-board equipment inevitably drifted off a little during flight. This time the pilots used the promontory of Cape Dolphin on East Falkland as their reference point to update their navigation equipment. The Sea King flew onward across Falkland Sound dropping to wave-top height in the darkness.
In order to avoid alerting the Argentine troops at Pebble Island with the sound of the helicopter, the SAS team were to be dropped off ten miles away. The team had brought two canoes with them in order to cross a narrow strait onto the island itself. But once on the ground, it became obvious that the size of the crashing waves at the planned crossing point would make launching the canoes impossible. The Sea King lifted them quickly on to their alternate drop-off point before covertly flying back to Hermes in the blackness. Bad weather caused further delays and it was only forty-eight hours later that the SAS managed to report back to Hermes the presence of eleven enemy aircraft on Pebble Island.