by Harry Benson
There were no explosions as they hovered over the Two Sisters peaks this time. But the darkness was fast becoming an even worse enemy. ‘This is getting too dangerous,’ said Spence. ‘I’ve had enough.’ Turning to the north-west and climbing slightly, to what would still have been considered low flying under normal conditions, Spence and Brickell headed back to Teal for the night.
‘Being shot at, that’s no problem!’ said Spence to Brickell as they finally shut the Wessex down. ‘Flying around the mountains in the dark, that’s what’s dangerous.’
As night fell at the southern forward operating base at Fitzroy, Lomas, Evans and some of the other aircrew had found a corner of a hayloft in which to try to rest after their own mammoth sorties. They had been tasked in support of the heroic medical teams of RAMC Field Ambulance who had been working at full tilt for days on end. The young medics had been faced with an appalling stream of burns victims from Sir Galahad. On top of that they were now treating horrifically injured British and Argentine soldiers from the battles in the hills just a few miles to the north-east. In the back of the casevac aircraft, Wessex and Sea King crewmen had done similarly heroic work keeping soldiers alive until they made it to the hospital ship SS Uganda in Falkland Sound.
Whilst casualties were being offloaded on deck of Uganda, a finger jabbed several times towards a mouth by a member of the aircrew would produce brown paper bags full of sandwiches, fruit, chocolate bars and occasionally a message of goodwill.
Back in their hayloft at FOB Fitzroy, Lomas and Evans were tucking in to their brown paper bags when a shattered young RAMC doctor walked in.
‘I’m so knackered,’ he told them, ‘that if I were captured by the enemy, I’d tell them absolutely anything for an orange and a Mars bar.’
Evans and Lomas looked at each other. They each delved into their bags and handed over the named items. Overwhelmed, the young medic burst into sobs of uncontrollable tears. It was an appropriate reaction to a momentous day.
Chapter 16
White flags: 13–15 June 1982
EVEN WITH THE British forces poised for their final strike, the assault on Port Stanley, victory was far from a foregone conclusion.
While the troops on the ground were involved in acts of exceptional bravery, the helicopter crews were stretched to the limit in support of them. Flying in the mountains in darkness without modern navigation aids was especially challenging. On the front line, almost all helicopters came under mortar fire.
One question continued to dominate every moment of every mission. Where were the Pucaras? The Argentine air force may have been depleted, but they certainly weren’t finished.
Now that 3 Brigade had captured the outer ring of hills around Stanley, it was vital to keep the momentum going. The Argentines were on the run but delays in the advance would give them time to regroup. Four-five Commando Royal Marines at Two Sisters were particularly keen to continue the advance through to Mount Tumbledown, just a few miles ahead of them to the south-east.
This Wessex has been taking underslung loads of ammunition in support of the British troops who are about to fight the last battles of the war. The end of the war may have seemed inevitable. It wasn’t for the men on the ground.
It was important also to make use of the fresh troops of 5 Brigade. The initial plan had been to lift the Scots Guards, Welsh Guards and Gurkhas forward to holding areas on the outer ring by helicopter and attack the remaining hills late on Saturday 12 June. But the reality was that much of the helicopter force, Sea Kings and Wessex, were needed to ferry ammunition to the artillery positions. The big guns were not just running low on shells, artillery crews were also having to dig themselves out after continually sinking into the soft ground every time they fired. The problem would only get worse with the guns firing at longer range and the deteriorating weather conditions. The alternative was to move the guns forward. Either option required large amounts of helicopter lift.
The other problem was that 5 Brigade would have to be sent into battle without adequate artillery support or time for proper reconnaissance and briefing in position beforehand. Reluctantly, Brigadier Tony Wilson decided to delay the final phases of the attack by one day, until Sunday 13 June. It was not popular with the troops of 3 Brigade, exposed to worsening weather overnight on the hills and under artillery fire from the enemy. The Paras on Mount Longdon suffered especially badly from the extra wait. But it was the right decision.
Soon after making a shattered medic happy by sharing his orange and Mars bar, Mark Evans had been called out for another night casevac mission on the night of 12 June. Argentine shelling was targetting Two Sisters as well as Longdon. The night-vision capable Sea Kings were ideally suited to this sort of task, but command was deliberately keeping them aside for special operations. Once again, a Wessex crew was faced with the terrible dilemma: whether to try and fly out visually in the darkness and risk crashing, or refuse a task that might leave wounded soldiers dying in the field? Grabbing Noddy Morton and Kev Gleeson, Evans decided they would have a go.
The sky was clear and there was just the barest hint of ambient light. If they were careful, with the Wessex windows wide open, with all lights switched off, and with their eyesight fully adjusted to the darkness, they just might be able to see enough to find their way up into the hills and back.
Pulling in that first armful of collective lever is not much fun on a dark night. The ground is your friend while you’re safely attached to it. But as the helicopter goes light on its wheels and begins to lift away, you realise the ground is trying to kill you. The temptation is to want to climb away as quickly as possible. On this night the two pilots would have to fight their instincts and stay low. That meant relying on their eyesight much more than their instruments. It would be like day-flying but with the daylight switched off.
Departing Fitzroy was straightforward enough. The two inlets of Port Pleasant to the south and Port Fitzroy to the north gave a distinctive outline between water and land. Morton used the first few minutes of the flight to get his eyes used to the conditions. While he flew the aircraft from the right-hand seat, Evans beside him in the left seat and Gleeson behind in the cabin focused on navigation.
‘Right, you two,’ said Gleeson, ‘make sure you don’t hit anything. Crashing out here will ruin my day.’
Passing the settlement at Bluff Cove, Morton made a cautious descent to low level and followed the track that would take them up towards the battle area. The mountainside of Mount Challenger loomed large to their left. Ahead of them, it was easy enough to make out the separate outlines of Two Sisters and Mount Harriet and the higher ground just before them. Approaching the grid reference they had been given, the track gave way to rough grass. They were now going so slowly that they were almost hover-taxiing. In the darkness, it became harder and harder to distinguish any features. ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ said Morton. ‘We’re no use to anyone if we don’t get there. I’m going to need lights.’
There was just enough contrast between hillside and sky to keep the helicopter the right way up. But unable to distinguish anything closer in to the aircraft, there was a real risk of hitting the ground. By their reckoning, they only had a few hundred yards to go. The medics would identify the landing position with torches arranged in the shape of a ‘T’. But without help, they weren’t going to get there at all.
Morton switched on the landing light. It completely changed the perspective from the cockpit. Now he could only see the ground that was lit up immediately ahead of him. It was as if the land beyond ceased to exist. But the sudden blaze of light on a distant hillside also alerted the Argentine gunners to British activity. They were now a target. ‘Someone’s putting flares up for us,’ said Morton.
Just outside of their bubble of light, a handful of dark splashes were visible in front of them.
‘They’re not flares, Noddy,’ said Evans. ‘We’re being mortared.’
Morton switched off the light, pitching the Wessex
back into blackness. The T-pattern of torchlight materialised out of the gloom in the nick of time. Landing at the first-aid post, two stretchers were quickly loaded into the back. With a thumbs-up and thanks mouthed from the medics, Morton lifted the Wessex into the air, accelerating for a few yards to gain speed before turning sharply back to the south-west and the surgeons at Fitzroy.
Soon after, the crew were back at Two Sisters for a second casevac. This time they kept the landing light off.
The twenty-five strong Wessex fleet was now operating from three different locations: the forward bases at Fitzroy on the south side and Teal on the north side, and Port San Carlos at the rear. Much the same was true for the twenty 846 and 825 Sea Kings. Only the Sea King night-flyers remained permanently based in the San Carlos area, along with the Chinook, lone representative of the RAF. A further handful of Wessex crews and aircraft were dotted around ships within the Total Exclusion Zone. Lieutenant Ralph Miles and his flight were sent to the damaged HMS Glamorgan to replace their Wessex 3, destroyed by the land-based Exocet launched from Stanley. But on their first night, one of their blades broke on the exposed deck during a severe storm, putting them out of action as well. Eight other aircraft of varying serviceability remained as a reserve on board Atlantic Causeway.
Throughout the morning of 13 June, the main role for the helicopters based at Fitzroy was to airlift 5 Brigade troops forward to their holding positions in the outer ring of hills. Between the Wessex, Sea Kings and Chinook, and the Scouts and Gazelles, there were now as many as forty helicopters operating between the forward operating bases and the front line. Air activity was frenetic.
Pete Manley was teamed up with Andy Berryman, another of Mike Tidd’s new arrivals. They were flying Yankee Victor, one of several helicopters assigned to move the Gurkhas onto Goat Ridge, between Harriet and Two Sisters. The crew had already spent much of the previous day lifting troops and equipment forward. Their adrenalin levels were consistently high as the Wessex raced low over the grassland. The ground they covered in daytime was almost exactly the same as covered by Evans and Morton on the previous night.
It was as important to keep a good lookout for other friendly aircraft as it was to keep a constant search of the horizon for Pucaras. They were expecting to rendezvous with a Gazelle that would lead them into their exact drop-off point. The plan was to take several Wessex in at once, much as we had done on Longdon two days earlier. What Manley was not expecting, as he moved the Gurkhas forward to the outer hills, was the distraction of something being waved around inside the cockpit down by his feet. ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’ he asked.
‘I’m trying to give you this kukri, boss,’ said the crewman. ‘It’s the first time they’ve been taken into battle in years. The Gurkha officer asked me to give it to the mission commander.’
The brief moment of pride wasn’t to last long. Manley’s concentration was soon back on the mission as the Gazelle appeared and turned to lead the formation of helicopters in to land. Once on the ground, the Gurkhas were quick to deploy outwards and begin digging themselves in. They would need to. Not for the first time, Manley found himself under artillery fire. Puffs of smoke marked the fall of shells a few hundred yards away. ‘Have a nice time boys,’ he mouthed to them as he pulled in power to leave. ‘Right, we’d better leg it,’ he said to co-pilot Berryman as he headed Yankee Victor back towards Fitzroy for another pick-up.
Out at sea to the south of Falkland Sound, Lieutenant Chris Clayton and his observer Lieutenant Peter Hullett were returning to their ship HMS Cardiff in a Lynx at around midday. They had been out looking for Argentine ships and were now flying at 1,000 feet above the sea. Suddenly vibrations rippled through their cockpit. It was like losing teeth off a gearbox. Clayton’s immediate reaction was that there was something badly wrong with the aircraft. He instantly dumped the aircraft into autorotation and flared to reduce speed – it was the classic pilot’s response to a potentially catastrophic failure.
At that moment an Argentine Dagger broke past on his port side, revealing its distinctive delta shape. ‘Fuck me, Mirage!’ said Clayton, just as a second Dagger shot past on the starboard side. Realising the vibration had come from being strafed by cannon fire and not from his aircraft, Clayton pulled in full power and pushed the helicopter’s nose down. The Lynx accelerated as they dived down to 150 feet above the sea.
Both Daggers were now trying to line themselves up for an attack. As the first Dagger turned, Clayton headed straight at him trying to keep inside the turn, making it impossible for the jet to get him in his sights. Splashes appeared in the water from cannon fire a hundred yards short of the Lynx. The plan was working. Clayton pulled up to see where the next attack was coming from as the second Dagger turned in. Again the jet overshot, missing the Lynx.
The jet pilots must have realised they were too close. One of the Daggers turned in the distance for a head-on attack. This time there was nowhere for the Lynx to run. Clayton could see the jet lined up and heading straight at them in a shallow dive. ‘Let’s go for it,’ he said, tipping the aircraft nose down and pulling full power.
Hullett pressed the transmit button on his radio: ‘466, we’ve been bounced, two Mirage, we need help.’
The Dagger and the Lynx were now pointing directly at each other. It was a game of chicken which only the jet could win. Clayton accelerated to 140 knots, putting the Argentine jet in the middle of his windscreen. Keeping his Lynx just above sea level forced the attacking Dagger to steepen his dive. Cannon shells shot over the top of the helicopter as the Lynx managed to stay underneath the line of fire. The Dagger was barely a hundred yards away, almost filling Clayton’s windscreen, when it broke.
A fourth attack followed the pattern of the first two, but the jet failed to get properly lined up and Clayton again managed to stay inside the turn. The two Daggers then disappeared as abruptly as they had arrived. Clayton and Hullett now turned back for their ship, Cardiff, giggling with adrenalin and excitement.
For his exceptional airmanship that day, which had saved both their lives, Clayton was awarded a Mention in Despatches.
Back in the relative safety of Port San Carlos, Al Doughty and I had been tasked as casevac helicopter at Ajax Bay for the day. Once again flying the unwanted battle-scarred Yankee Tango, we felt frustrated that we were to spend time away from the front line. But it still felt good that our superiors trusted a baby pilot and junior aircrewman enough to operate in a war zone on our own.
It was a beautiful clear and bright day as we passed between the handful of ships at anchor in the dark waters of San Carlos Bay. As we flew past the refuelling ship RFA Olna, with its huge gantries and high flight deck, neither of us had any idea that two more Wessex lay idle, locked away within Olna’s hangar. Our frustration was as nothing compared to that felt by Lieutenant Mark Salter, my main Wessex instructor from a few months previously. Despite a stream of increasingly heated requests to Fearless, and personal contact with two passing 847 Squadron pilots, his team of three pilots and two aircrewmen had been given no tasking whatsoever and told to keep their deck clear for refuelling. It was an inexplicable omission of two serviceable assets during the crucial last few stages of the war.
I set my Wessex on a long curving turn to bring us in to land next to the refrigeration plant that was the Ajax Bay field hospital. The words ‘Welcome to the Red and Green Life Machine’ stood out in red letters on the long sidewall. We were quickly greeted by the jovial figure of Surgeon Commander Rick ‘Doc’ Jolly. It wasn’t often that a sub-lieutenant was addressed by a senior officer, especially in such polite and enthusiastic terms. Jolly was a huge fan of the many junglie crews, both Sea King and Wessex, who were consistently quick to offer their unofficial services as casevac helicopters throughout the war when official requests for helicopters had been turned down. We were unwitting recipients of this goodwill. Doughty and I were generously given a personalised tour of the impromptu operating theatres inside the plant. Jolly took
special pleasure in taking us around a corner and pointing out his unexploded bomb. At this point I suggested it might be a good idea for him to tell us what flying he wanted us to do.
After parking my Wessex next to the main field hospital at Ajax Bay, nicknamed ‘the red and green life machine’, Surgeon Commander Rick Jolly took great pleasure in showing me the unexploded bomb that dangled next to his operating theatre. At this point, I thought it best to get airborne as quickly as possible.
After flashing up, we waved in the stretcher bearers to take our first patient out to SS Uganda, parked over the hill in Falkland Sound. As I pushed the nose of the Wessex over the top of the Sussex Mountain hillside and down towards the sea I suddenly became very aware that I wasn’t wearing my goon suit. Combats and wellies wouldn’t quite do the trick if I had to ditch in the freezing cold of the South Atlantic. We had no idea that we were passing over almost exactly the spot where Rick Jolly had voluntarily immersed himself twice, whilst going to the aid of survivors from the burning HMS Ardent.
The converted cruise ship Uganda stood out brightly against the very blue sea. My landing had to be at right angles to the deck, with the aircraft pointing out to the port side of the ship. So with Uganda sailing slowly into wind, I kicked the aircraft around to the left as we came to the hover just to the stern. It felt good to be capable of flying a non-standard approach. The deck landing didn’t faze me.
On deck, Al Doughty asked me if I fancied anything to eat or drink. Definitely. A deckhand then ran in under the rotor disc clutching a cup of fresh coffee and a paper bag containing a sausage sandwich. It was the perfect gift to set me up for a long day’s flying.
Ten miles to our north, a flight of seven Argentine A-4 Skyhawks from Grupo 5 swept low across Falkland Sound ignoring a British helicopter as they flashed past. An eighth Skyhawk had turned back soon after launch. The remaining aircraft continued on at low level over land towards the line of hills that led towards Port Stanley.