Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  By South Georgia standards, the night was quite mild, so the troop commander and I put up a two-man tent on a little beach. Suddenly we heard what sounded like people singing, albeit out of tune. We could scarcely believe our eyes for, coming towards us over the hill was a gaggle of men all singing and carrying blazing torches of rags soaked in pitch tied to lengths of wood. They were making a tremendous row, and we watched them suspiciously as they approached, weapons at the ready. When they got a bit closer we realized that these were the Argentinian scrap-metal men who had been put ashore to salvage the old whaling ironmongery, thus helping to precipitate the whole crisis.

  With the imminent threat of bombardment by naval gunfire and an all-out infantry assault, Captain Astiz had ordered the civilians to get themselves out of harm’s way, telling them to carry torches and make a lot of noise so that the British would know they were not combatants sneaking up on them.

  Moving forward, I counted thirty-nine men in all. They were a scruffy-looking bunch, and clearly both confused and frightened. Since there was nowhere for them to shelter on ‘our’ beach, I told them to walk round the bay to Stromness and wait there in the cookhouse of the abandoned whaling station, adding that they would be picked up next morning and taken to a British ship. My final words to them were, ‘Don’t worry. There is no one there and you’ll be quite safe.’ They were very relieved, and shouted ‘Muchas gracias’ as they walked off into the darkness.

  We waited in our tent on the beach. About an hour after the scrap-metal merchants left us, there came the sound of gunfire and tracer bullets lit up the sky over Stromness. There were rounds flying all over the place. What the hell was going on?

  Shortly afterwards, HMS Plymouth entered the bay and lowered a boat, which brought in the rest of our troop. As we greeted them, Bob, the troop sergeant, asked me, ‘Where’s Terry?’

  ‘Terry who?’ I replied, adding that I didn’t know who he was talking about. He told me the man’s surname and said that he’d come ashore with a patrol hours ago in a helicopter from Plymouth. I hadn’t seen this Terry, who was a corporal, but I suddenly realized what all the firing had been about. Terry and his patrol had shot up the scrap-metal workers – the civilians whom I’d promised would be safe. The poor workmen, already frightened and bewildered enough, must have wondered what kind of soldiers we were to fire on innocent non-combatants.

  Being nominally a Spanish speaker, next morning I went forward with the Boat Troop commander to meet Captain Astiz. He had considered the British ultimatum and obviously had not fancied being hammered by a naval bombardment and attacked by British soldiers and marines. As a result he and the remaining Argentinians at Leith agreed to the surrender terms.

  Dressed in full naval uniform, Astiz came across as an arrogant piece of work. Haughty and dismissive, he looked at us from beneath the peak of his cap as though we were pieces of dirt. He refused to acknowledge the troop commander, an SAS captain, simply saying that he had come to surrender himself and his men. There were ten minutes left before the ultimatum ran out and our naval bombardment would start up again.

  I had prepared a little speech for him in Spanish, which I had put together from my phrase book. I had been going to say ‘Para usted, mi amigo, la guerra se un sobre.’ As it turned out, however, Astiz spoke perfect English, so I didn’t get the chance to air my skill as a linguist. Still behaving as though it were he accepting our capitulation, he was taken aboard Antrim to sign the official surrender document. He was later repatriated to Argentina, without being questioned about his activities either by the British or by any of the countries whose nationals had disappeared after allegedly having fallen into his hands. As for me, it was just as well that I didn’t have to try out my linguistic abilities, for it turned out that the sentence I had prepared in my limited Spanish meant, ‘For you, my friend, the war is in an envelope.’ I was unmercifully ragged by my friends in Mobility Troop when I foolishly told them of my mistranslation.

  Back on board HMS Plymouth, I pieced together what had happened to the scrap-metal workers. After I had sent them on their way to the safety, as I believed, of the old whaling station, Corporal Terry, an ex-Royal Marine with a tendency to think he was God’s gift to soldiering, saw them walking towards him, carrying their burning torches and still singing away. I have no idea why, but when they were about a hundred yards away in the darkness Terry shouted, ‘Halt! Billy Ratcliffe?’ He repeated my name a couple more times, to the bemusement of the scrap-metal men, who didn’t know what he was talking about. They had never heard of me, and I had not given them my name when I had told them to make for the abandoned whaling station. Failing to get what he took to be a satisfactory answer, Terry and the rest of his patrol opened fire; nor did they aim over the heads of the workmen, but directly at them. Mercifully, not a single one of the Argentinians was wounded, despite having been fired on by an SAS corporal and the rest of this patrol.

  Afterwards, on Plymouth, the three troop ‘headsheds’ – headshed is an SAS term for people in charge – held a debriefing with Terry about the incident. I asked Terry what he had been doing challenging civilians with my name, to which he replied that he thought the people were being led by me. ‘And if they were not, then what were they supposed to say?’ I continued. Not unnaturally, he had no answer to that, so I asked him how many times he’d been in action.

  ‘You challenged in my name, you opened fire, and you missed every one of those Argies. Thank God you can’t shoot straight,’ I said, as quietly as I could, although I was seething with anger. ‘You go around boasting about how good you are,’ I went on, ‘and there you were shooting at innocent civilians. What you did could have resulted in a major incident. Anyone would think we’re a gang of psychopaths.’

  Disgusted I may have been, but this was the Regiment, with its own code and its own way of handling matters. As a result, the four of us agreed that what had been said would stay within the confines of that room. Minutes later, however, while I was drinking a cup of tea, one of the other members of Terry’s patrol suddenly came up and began to tear into me, asking me what right I had to call him a psychopath.

  I told him to shut his mouth, grabbed Terry and shepherded him into a room. The troop commander and staff sergeant, anxious to know what was going on, saw us and followed. With the door closed I turned to them and, indicating Terry, said furiously, ‘This guy has just repeated to another member of his patrol what we’d said to him in private. What’s more, he twisted my words to make out that I’d accused all the troop of being psychopaths.’ Then I told Terry, ‘After my stint at the TA, I’m coming back as troop sergeant. And when I do get back, make sure you’re not there. Because, if you are, I’ll get rid of you. And that’s not a threat. It’s a promise.’

  As things settled back down board we were fed and watered, and I went off for a shower. It was pretty primitive – we were allowed three pulls of a chain that released a measured amount of water through the shower head – but it was adequate. It was a pity, though, that the navy hadn’t allowed the Argentinian scrap-metal workers a shower when they were brought aboard Plymouth. I went to practise my Spanish on them, and the stink from body odour and filth and unwashed clothing was so bad that it caught like ammonia at the back of my throat. When I told them that a big force was coming from Britain to take back the Malvinas, they stared at me for a few moments, dumbstruck. They simply could not believe that the British would come so far for a fight over some small and barren islands. When I reminded them of what had just happened on South Georgia they got the message, though.

  Twenty-four hours later we were ordered to move across to HMS Antrim in helicopters, which ferried nine men at a time. Then the kit had to be shifted in cargo nets slung beneath the choppers. Other troops had moved across from the Antarctic survey vessel Endurance, with the result that, that night, all of D Squadron was aboard the South Georgia Task Force command ship.

  It was on Antrim that we watched a satellite video of the Prime Mini
ster, Margaret Thatcher, walking to a microphone outside Number 10 Downing Street and telling the nation, ‘Rejoice, just rejoice. South Georgia has been liberated.’ We didn’t bother to cheer. We knew it was all political bullshit – good for morale at home, but also a good vote-catcher for politicians.

  Before we left South Georgia, one of the guys in the troop came up with an idea which, he said, would make them all some money. He reckoned that if some of them got into the post office at Grytviken (which was maintained as a working post office because of the British Antarctic Survey base there) and found some first-day issue envelopes, they could postmark them with the date South Georgia was recaptured. Provided they didn’t produce too many, these souvenirs would surely come to be worth quite a lot of money, especially given the interest in the campaign that was growing daily back in the UK.

  Getting into the post office was not a problem – a crowbar took care of that. But though they found loads of first-day issue envelopes, no matter how many drawers they rummaged in they couldn’t find an official rubber stamp. Finally they discovered a stamp which read, ‘British Antarctic Survey, King Edward Point, South Georgia.’ They set the date to 25 April 1982, to mark the day we’d taken back South Georgia, franked a whole batch of first-day issue envelopes and stuffed their pockets with them. I was given one – I don’t know what they are worth today, for I’ve never tried selling it. But, because of a disaster that was to come, their rarity value was tragically increased.

  Although recapturing South Georgia had proved no big deal in the end, it had been accomplished without the loss of a single British life, and despite initial, and potentially very damaging, disasters at the Fortuna Glacier and with the patrols sent in by Gemini inflatables. It had also achieved one very important objective: Britain now had a safe haven for the liner QE2, then making her way south with the Task Force. She had been requisitioned by the government from her owners, Cunard, and turned into a troop ship. Rather than put the great liner at risk from submarine and air attack nearer the Falklands, she was able to anchor in South Georgia’s Stromness Bay and offload the troops she was carrying into landing ships, which took them on to the Falklands. As a result, QE2 was never put in harm’s way. Given that the loss of such a prestigious vessel to enemy action would have been a propaganda disaster of the first magnitude, quite apart from the loss of life that would have inevitably attended her sinking, the fact that she was able to anchor in safety in South Georgia was itself of inestimable value.

  So far, we had achieved our objective and had lost no one. Morale was high. Ahead of us, however, disaster waited.

  Chapter Ten

  AFTER two days aboard Antrim we cross-decked by helicopter to HMS Brilliant, a new Type 22 frigate built mainly from aluminium. Cross-decking was not just a matter of picking up your own personal kit and weapons. Each time we switched ships we moved the equipment of the whole squadron. And I’m talking about vast amounts of ammunition, heavy weapons, rations, signals equipment and other kit, enough gear – about 15 tons of it – to have filled a C-130 or a giant sea container crammed to maximum capacity.

  After being cooped up in Plymouth, life aboard the much larger Brilliant seemed like sheer luxury. She had full standing headroom and the companionways were wide and high. It was the difference between staying in a cramped seaside bed-and-breakfast and living in a five-star hotel. Even so, bed space was still the problem, so we bunked wherever we could, often having to wait until a sailor went on watch so that we could grab his berth for a few hours.

  Unfortunately we were only in Brilliant for a little over twenty-four hours before we were ordered to cross-deck again. This time we were sent to join the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, the flagship of the main Task Force, which had now reached striking distance of the Falklands. As a result, Plymouth and Brilliant had left South Georgia and steamed at full speed to join the main battle group under the Task Force’s overall commander, Rear-Admiral John ‘Sandy’ Woodward.

  On board Hermes, D Squadron was quartered wherever its soldiers could find a bed, with the officers going into the naval officers’ quarters, and the NCOs joining the petty officers. Even on a massive aircraft carrier, there wasn’t adequate room for another squad of men. I spent most of my time aboard the carrier sleeping, crammed between some pipework beneath the ship’s low deckheads. The stench of human beings confined at close quarters was dreadful. We couldn’t go on to the open decks because it was freezing cold and the ship was rolling around in the almost constant gale-force winds that scourge the South Atlantic. Amazingly, of the eighty-four days the SAS was engaged in the Falklands War, fifty-four were spent on ships and just thirty on land.

  For soldiers forced on to ships, it was difficult to understand what was happening, and we were given very little information about the Task Force’s intentions. We seemed to be sailing aimlessly, although I imagine that Admiral Woodward knew exactly what he was about. Nevertheless, the lack of information and our apparently aimless course, coupled with the fact that we were cooped up in restricted quarters most of the time, added to an overall sense of disorientation.

  We combated this by trying to keep busy, and especially by making plans for the kind of operation at which the SAS excels. Every day we had headshed meetings with officers and the troop sergeants. The OC, Major Delves, gave us hypothetical scenarios involving various Falklands locations, and we had to come up with viable plans of attack. The idea was to get us thinking of any possible eventualities that might arise in the weeks to come.

  At some time at the beginning of May I was taken to one side by the OC, who told me that he had a job for me. And what a job …

  As a prelude to one of the most daring operations of the war, six members of B Squadron, SAS, were going to parachute into the South Atlantic and come aboard Hermes. From the carrier, they were to be taken aboard a Sea King helicopter and flown into Argentina. Their role was to locate the main airfield on Tierra del Fuego from which Argentinian aircraft would fly to attack British ships and, once we had actually landed in the Falklands, British soldiers. All I was told by the OC, since the plan was highly secret and details were given out strictly on a need-to-know basis, was that once they had landed in Argentina, the six men, one of them an officer who had command, would leave the helicopter and walk to their objective. Despite the secrecy, it didn’t take much to work out that the overall plan was for the patrol to locate the airfield and destroy the Argentinian aircraft on the ground, or to guide in a Special Forces C-130 with B Squadron aboard to carry out a raid similar to the hostage rescue carried out by the Israelis at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. It was an operation tailor-made for the SAS – exactly the kind of hit-and-run warfare for which the Regiment was founded and at which it has always excelled. And every man I knew in the squadron would have given his right arm to have had a part in it.

  My role was to go with them. Once the six-man patrol under their officer had been dropped off, however, I was to stay aboard with the pilot and co-pilot, who were then to fly the Sea King to a nearby lake and deliberately sink it, since the distance to Tierra del Fuego from the Task Force was at the very limit of the aircraft’s range. If we were successful in landing the patrol and then concealing the chopper, I was to report by radio directly to Hermes that everything had gone smoothly. After that I was to take the Royal Navy pilots, evading capture, along an escape route from Argentina, which I was to work out, and into Chile, where we were to be met by other members of the Regiment who would be waiting in hiding. Chile, which had long-standing bad relations with Argentina because of disputes over territorial waters, maintained close links with Britain throughout the war, and secretly provided material aid in a number of ways. General Augusto Pinochet, the President of Chile at the time of the Falklands War, encouraged his country’s friendly assistance to Britain, which does much to explain the disgust of Lady Thatcher, as well as many British veterans of the Falklands, at the ageing general’s treatment recently at the hands of the British government.
/>   Aboard the flagship, I was weighed – as was everyone else who would be on the flight – and the Sea King helicopter was stripped down almost to the bare bones. Everything that was not required to fly the aircraft was stripped out of the fuselage – padding, soundproofing, seats, superfluous wiring and equipment – because the weight factor was critical if the helicopter was to carry sufficient fuel to fly from Hermes the massive distance to Argentina.

  The plan was for me to spend up to two weeks ensuring the safety of the Sea King pilots, and I accordingly drew field rations for that amount of time for the three of us. Checking, for the hundredth time, my own weapons, ammunition and survival equipment, I was thoroughly geared up for the mission – although, if I’d had the chance, I would rather have been with the locate-and-destroy team. By then the selected members of B Squadron had parachuted into the sea and been picked up by and lodged aboard another warship. Early in May they were brought aboard Hermes and everything was made ready for take-off that night. Then Sod’s Law took over, for at the very last minute I was pulled off the mission. Apparently Admiral Woodward had decided that I would not be needed; the pilots could escape to Chile without an escort, and one man less on the Sea King would mean that it could carry more fuel.

  I watched the laden helicopter lift-off the flight deck and, within moments, vanish into the darkness. To say that I was miserable does not even come close to describing my overwhelming disappointment.

  Some months later, we, and the rest of the world, learned that a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter had landed in the extreme south of Argentina – it had been discovered on 16 May – but had been found abandoned. Of its crew and passengers, if there were any passengers, there was no sign. The official line was that it had been making for Chile, but had mistaken its landing point. It was not until six years later, however, that I discovered what had really happened on that top-secret mission into Argentina.