Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  ‘Ooh, you animal!’ said Hot Pants, not a bit perturbed, and wiggled away. He had not given up, however. After a few beers, Al went to the heads – which is what sailors call toilets – and Hot Pants followed him. Observing the SAS man as he relieved himself, Hot Pants remarked, ‘Al, you piss like a gangster, and I want to be your moll.’ Luckily for him, Al thought this was so funny that he just reached over and ruffled his hair. Hot Pants must have lived off that gesture for a week.

  We were five days aboard the Fort Austin before meeting the advanced element of the Task Force, which was made up of the destroyer HMS Antrim, the frigate HMS Plymouth, and HMS Endurance. As luck would have it, the two former had been on exercise with the First Flotilla in mid-Atlantic when the Falklands crisis broke, and had been ordered to join Endurance. They had put in at Gibraltar to refuel and resupply, and had then steamed southwards at full speed. They called at Ascension, and were joined by the RFA tanker Tidespring, before all three ships sailed on for their RV with Endurance.

  With our virtue still intact, the whole squadron was airlifted by helicopter from the deck of Fort Austin and split between the three warships. Squadron HQ, Boat Troop and Mountain Troop went aboard Antrim; Air Troop, the parachuting specialists, went to Endurance; and Mobility Troop, of which I was still a member, went aboard Plymouth. During the fighting that was to come, she was bombed three times by the Argentinian Air Force, on the last occasion being hit by no fewer than three 1,000-pound bombs, which caused severe damage, although her crew eventually managed to put out the fires and patch her up so that she was at least still seaworthy.

  There was little for us to do aboard Plymouth except eat, play cards and drink beer. Much smaller than the RFA Fort Austin, but with a larger crew, there simply wasn’t the room for us to run round decks, and there was even less space below. The hardest problem was finding a bed. Since Plymouth had no room for us, we used the petty officers’ bunks while they were on watch; when they came off duty they would tap us on the shoulder and say, ‘Please can I have my bunk back?’ We would then wander around until each of us had found another empty berth.

  Most of the ship’s crew were extremely young, many of them eighteen-year-olds, and the highlight of each day was when the tannoy screamed, ‘Action nutty! Action nutty!’ the announcement that the NAAFI shop was open so that the young sailors could go and buy their daily ration of one bar of chocolate. When the time came to fight, however, they proved as brave and enduring as veterans of more than twice their age. By contrast, all of us in D Squadron were much older than the crew. Our average age was thirty-three, which clearly must have surprised the captain of HMS Plymouth, Captain Pentreath, because he kept looking at us and saying, ‘I had no idea.’ He was very decent, and treated us as equals.

  At that time, our Royal Navy ‘mini-task force’ was sailing two days south followed by one day north, in order to hold position within striking distance of the territories now occupied by the Argentinians. The force’s commanders had no direct orders as yet, beyond holding station, although the general idea was that we were supposed to retake South Georgia before the main Task Force arrived to engage the principal enemy forces on the Falkland Islands. Our group, now grandly named the South Georgia Task Force and under the overall command of Antrim’s captain, Captain Brian Young, also now included M Company of 42 Commando, Royal Marines, which, like us, had flown out to Ascension, arriving on 10 April. M Company had then embarked in Tidespring, although its HQ and support elements went into Antrim, as did a section from the Special Boat Squadron (SBS, the Royal Marines’ maritime equivalent of the SAS, now the Special Boat Service) which had also come aboard at Ascension. So it had been a very mixed military force that was crammed aboard the four ships when they had rendezvoused with Fort Austin on 12 April, and our squadron had come aboard. There were other problems apart from overcrowding, too. Both Captain Young and the Royal Marines’ commander, Major Guy Sheridan, 2IC of 42 Commando, had expected an SAS troop to join from Fort Austin. Instead they got an entire SAS squadron, and with it our OC, Cedric Delves, also a major. The presence of a second major, unsurprisingly, raised uncertainties over the command structure, although Sheridan was later confirmed as having overall command of the group’s ‘Military Force’.

  During what proved to be a ten-day voyage, the seas became rougher and the weather progressively colder as we sailed further south. South Georgia lies some eight hundred miles east, and one hundred or so south, of the Falklands, placing it that much closer to Antarctica and with a wickedly cold climate to match. We couldn’t go outside because the wind-chill factor sent the temperatures plunging well below zero. We played cards or read or watched porn videos, of which there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply but which at times bored me to tears, to the extent that I often nodded off to sleep in the middle of watching one. Still, sleeping helped to pass the time, an advantage since our greatest enemy so far was boredom.

  On 21 April we came in sight of South Georgia and its attendant icebergs, and that day our formal orders came to retake the island from its illegal occupiers, using whatever force was necessary to do the job. D Squadron, 22 SAS, was to get the first close look at the enemy in the Falklands War.

  Under Sheridan’s command, the combat group was made up of ourselves, No. 2 Special Boat Squadron, Royal Marines, and M Company, 42 Commando. We would be supported by the guns and helicopters of Antrim, Plymouth and Endurance, the whole operation remaining under the overall command of Captain Young.

  Unfortunately, however, although we had a rough idea of their numbers, no one knew exactly where the Argentinians were on South Georgia, or what they were up to. So, rather than risk sending his men blind into an amphibious operation, Sheridan decided, after discussing the problem with our OC, Delves, to put in a covert SAS troop to report on the enemy. At the same time, 2 SBS, which was to form the main advance party, would go ashore in Gemini inflatables to the south-west of the abandoned settlement of Grytviken, although how abandoned it was now, given the Argentinian presence on the island, was anyone’s guess. However, if these reconnaissances showed that conditions were favourable for the operation to retake the island, D Squadron and the SBS would launch diversionary raids as the main amphibious invasion came ashore at Grytviken.

  Where the recce by D Squadron was concerned, the idea was for Mountain Troop to be inserted by helicopter on to South Georgia’s Fortuna Glacier, on the northern coast of the island some miles west of Grytviken. It was a wild and inaccessible place, but that meant that the Argentinians were most unlikely to see or hear the helicopters going in, or subsequently to spot the patrol. From there they were to march over the mountains and establish observation posts from which to watch and report the enemy’s strength and movements in the derelict settlements of Leith and Stromness, which also lay on the island’s north coast, between the glacier and Grytviken. We had no idea what was going on in these settlements, although the British Antarctic Survey people had, amazingly, furnished us with plans of them. These were so detailed that they even included room-by-room descriptions of the houses where the occupying force of Argentinians were thought to be living.

  The weather was atrocious, but the use of poor conditions to screen the insertion formed part of the plan. At noon on 21 April, therefore, fifteen members of Mountain Troop under their troop commander, Captain John Hamilton, lifted off the deck of the command ship, HMS Antrim, in Wessex helicopters to be flown to the west of the settlement at Leith.

  I have seen some terrible weather during my service, but nothing as bad as that on South Georgia – and I didn’t even go to the glacier. Whiteouts – sudden swirling blizzards that reduce visibility to no more than a couple of feet – made the first two helicopter attempts to land the men impossible. Three times the naval pilots flew between the ships and the shore, before finally succeeding in setting down on the Fortuna Glacier at the third attempt.

  Within minutes, however, the whiteout was back as gale-force winds whipped the glacier. Car
rying their bergens, each weighing 77 pounds, and dragging four pulks (sledges) each weighing 200 pounds, in five hours Mountain Troop had covered about half a mile – and these men were the cream of mountain-warfare experts.

  With the light fading fast, they tried erecting two-man Arctic tents behind an outcrop of ice in order to provide some shelter. But savage winds, by now gusting in excess of 100 mph, blew one tent away like a paper handkerchief and snapped the tent poles of the others. Five men crawled into one tent while the rest huddled for shelter under the pulks in sub-zero temperatures as winds that had now reached storm force clawed at the glacier. Next morning, 22 April, knowing that they could not possibly get through another night without the very real probability of some or even all of them dying of exposure, Captain Hamilton radioed Antrim to ask for an evacuation.

  Three Wessex helicopters set out for the glacier, but couldn’t find the SAS patrol and returned to refuel. On their second attempt they reached the men through a fifteen-minute, clear-weather window at 1330 hours, and embarked them and their equipment. But minutes after lift-off one of them crashed in a blinding whiteout, although, miraculously, of the seven men aboard only one was injured. They and the crew of the crashed aircraft were split between the two remaining helicopters, but in whiteout conditions one hit an ice ridge and also crashed, luckily again without serious injury. In one of the greatest single feats of the entire war the pilot of the third helicopter, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Stanley, embarked all the SAS and aircrew aboard his aircraft and managed to lift off the glacier, although most of the patrol’s equipment had to be abandoned with the two wrecked Wessex. With himself and fifteen men and their weapons aboard, as well as the pilots and other aircrew from the two crashed machines, Stanley’s helicopter was seriously overloaded. Because of the weight, he was unable to hover over Antrim’s deck, and he therefore decided to crash-land instead, slamming the aircraft down with the rotors at full power to slow the descent. For his skill and courage in bringing back the troop and the other airmen intact, and for his later actions, Ian Stanley was awarded the DSO, the only one awarded to a pilot in the campaign.

  Unsurprisingly, any plans for further landings on the Fortuna Glacier were immediately abandoned. New schemes had to be hatched, and it was now decided to send in the whole of D Squadron, although Boat Troop and the SBS would make the initial recces. Next morning, under cover of the pre-dawn darkness, Boat Troop lowered five Gemini inflatables over the side of HMS Antrim into the waters of Stromness Bay. There was little wind and the sea was fairly calm. Each inflatable carried a three-man team, whose orders were to land on Grass Island in Stromness Bay, from where they were covertly to watch Leith and other areas around the bay and report enemy strengths and movements back by radio.

  The specially silenced outboard motors had been warmed up in a tank on board Antrim only half an hour before the boats were launched. Nevertheless, once in the water, two of the engines wouldn’t start. At the time it didn’t seem any great setback, since the other boats could easily tow the unpowered craft to Grass Island – or so we thought. Once Antrim had departed, however, there was a swift and astonishing change in the weather. The wind that had, until then, been little more than a breeze rose to gale force in seconds. White-capped waves smashed over the Geminis and the troop was scattered in the Antarctic darkness all over Stromness Bay.

  The two towed Geminis broke loose and were swept away. The crew of one paddled with their mess tins, but even so were in danger of being swept far out to sea when, next morning, Ian Stanley picked up the signal from their emergency beacon and winched them aboard his Wessex. The three troopers on the other drifting Gemini managed to paddle ashore on a headland, where they dug themselves in and remained concealed for several days to avoid being spotted by the enemy and compromising the operation. The others made it to Grass Island, where they set up camouflaged OPs from which to watch the settlements.

  Launched at the same time, the Royal Marines SBS teams had also been hit by the severe weather. One section got ashore, but had then to be picked up by helicopter and reinserted at a different location. Another, using Geminis to infiltrate Cumberland Bay, at the head of which lies Grytviken, reported back that jagged ice had cut holes in their inflatables and that they were beginning to sink. They too were eventually picked up and taken to their observation points by helicopter, once more flown by the indefatigable Lieutenant-Commander Stanley.

  By now, however, the odds against a successful amphibious invasion of South Georgia had lengthened considerably. On the evening of 24 April, Captain Young received intelligence from CINCFLEET HQ at Northwood, back in Britain, that an enemy submarine was approaching the area where the South Georgia Task Force was operating. Young immediately ordered Tidespring and Endurance to withdraw out of the danger area; with them went many of the Royal Marines whom Sheridan needed for his assault.

  Then the British luck turned again. On the morning of the 25th, while he was on his way back from dropping off the SBS section, Ian Stanley spotted the Argentinian submarine Santa Fe on the surface off Cumberland Bay. He immediately attacked and succeeded in damaging her. Landing on the deck of HMS Endurance, he refuelled and returned to the fray. Three times he attacked the submarine, now supported by other helicopters from Endurance, Plymouth and the frigate HMS Brilliant, which had joined the task force the night before. This aerial assault by depth charges, missiles and guns proved devastating. Her hull plates buckled, critically damaged and unable to submerge, Santa Fe limped into Grytviken, where the Argentinians must have wondered where this powerful British force had come from.

  With the submarine danger over, the ships carrying the bulk of the assault party could safely return to South Georgia. But the element of surprise had now gone out of the window, and it would be some time before Tidespring could come up with the warships – time in which the Argentinians would be able to strengthen their defences and make their dispositions against a British attack. In the light of this, there was nothing for it but to attack at once, while the enemy was still surprised at the British presence and demoralized by the attacks on the Santa Fe – before most of the Royal Marines could arrive to take a hand.

  Thus, because the main assault force from 42 Commando’s M Company was still miles out at sea aboard Tidespring, it fell to D Squadron, 22 SAS, to assault Grytviken in company with a composite force of SBS and those marines who had been aboard the warships, rather than the tanker. They would be supported by naval gunfire from the two destroyers. At 1445 that afternoon, therefore, the assault force of around seventy-five men under the overall command of Major Sheridan was ferried ashore by helicopters, landing about half a mile south of Grytviken. They immediately began to advance on the settlement.

  At Sandhurst, officers are taught that, ideally, for an assault against defended positions to succeed, the attacking force should always outnumber the defenders by at least three to one. Not in my book, however, for success often depends on who’s doing the attacking, as well as factors like surprise and the enemy’s morale – as was proved in the retaking of South Georgia.

  As the first of the assault force began to land near Grytviken, Antrim and Plymouth commenced the naval bombardment, directed by a fire controller in a Wasp helicopter. The noise was ear-splitting as they carefully directed their shells to land near the defenders without hitting them. Gradually they shifted their aim to drop their shells closer to the settlement, giving the Argentinians a fair idea of what they were up against. A naval gunner told me later that this was the first time that Royal Navy ships had fired in anger since the Korean War.

  Meanwhile the warships’ Lynx and Wessex helicopters were ferrying the assault party ashore, landing each group of men behind a ridge that screened them from the enemy’s view. They took the men from HMS Antrim first, and we aboard Plymouth were to go in last. If there was going to be a big battle we wanted a lump of the action, but even while we were waiting to be picked up from Plymouth and ferried ashore the Argentinian garrison
surrendered.

  When Major Sheridan and his composite force reached Grytviken, the Argentinians were lined up in three ranks. Their national flag was flying over them and they were singing their national anthem, but white bedsheets of surrender hung from the windows of the houses. They gave in without putting up a fight and before the SAS and Royal Marines had even come within small-arms range, and without a single one of their side having been injured. Even as Sheridan was accepting the enemy’s surrender, D Squadron’s SSM, Lawrence Gallagher, ripped down the blue-and-white flag of Argentina and quickly ran up the Union flag in its place.

  At the time, I was leaning on the rail of HMS Plymouth with our troop commander, Captain Paul. As we looked out towards Grytviken, wishing that we’d had a part in the action, he suddenly suggested that we get a Wasp helicopter to take us ashore, so that we could at least claim to have been in South Georgia. The choppers were flying to and fro between the island and the warships continually, and we had no difficulty in cadging a lift on a Wasp, which set us down at Stromness Bay. About half a mile along the coast we met members of Boat Troop who had gone in aboard their Gemini inflatables. The troop sergeant told us that the Captain Alfredo Astiz, the commander of the Argentinian garrison still at Leith, which we had not yet approached, had refused to surrender.

  Back home in Buenos Aires, Captain Astiz was known as the ‘Butcher of Argentina’ for his part in atrocities against supposed dissidents during the military dictatorship; he was also wanted for questioning by several European countries over the disappearance of numbers of their citizens in Argentina some years earlier. In the light of his defiance and that of his troops still at large, Astiz was issued with an ultimatum by Captain Young: if he and the garrison at Leith had not surrendered by nine o’clock the next morning, then we would be ordered in to enforce their surrender, using maximum force, if necessary.