Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  In 1988 we were on Arctic-warfare exercises in Norway when I happened to meet the pilot of the Sea King helicopter again. We recognized each other straight away, and it quickly became clear that he was a man with a grievance to air. When we got a chance to talk alone, he told me that he was still disgusted by events of that long-ago morning. He had flown for hundreds of miles with the aircraft blacked out, and at low level to dodge the enemy radar. Having arrived safely and undetected over the landing point in Argentina, after an epic flight by anyone’s standards, he had called the troop commander forward to tell him that they had reached their destination.

  The officer, however, had refused to accept the location and demanded that they fly round again to get another positive fix on the ground. Once more the Sea King’s pilot told him, ‘Yes, this is definitely it. You are here,’ emphasizing his point by indicating their position on the map. Yet the troop commander had again refused to believe it. ‘Well, this is it,’ the pilot told him, thoroughly exasperated. ‘You’ve got to get out here – like it or not – because I’m running out of fuel.’ And he set the chopper down.

  So far as I know, the SAS patrol then simply took a compass bearing and headed due west – towards the safety of Chile, from where they were eventually repatriated to the UK. They didn’t make the slightest attempt to locate the enemy airfield.

  As for the pilot and co-pilot, they had ditched the helicopter, as ordered, in a nearby lake, where it was intended to sink and remain undetected for all time.

  ‘But that’s not the way it happened,’ the pilot told me. ‘Despite punching holes in it, the aircraft simply would not sink, so we left it half-submerged.’ Then, having tried to destroy the evidence of their clandestine mission, he and the co-pilot had legged it into Chile, from where they too were repatriated to Britain. The SAS patrol had not even hung around long enough to help destroy the chopper and guide the two navy pilots to safety.

  When the wreckage of the Sea King was discovered, there was immediate speculation about a covert raid into Argentina by British Special Forces.

  But the government denied it totally, saying that the helicopter pilot had developed engine trouble with the result that its crew had become disorientated and had crash-landed in Argentina, mistaking it for Chile. Since Tierra del Fuego is divided roughly in half, and roughly north-south, between Chile and Argentina, this seemed plausible enough – even if the helicopter was an astonishingly large distance from any Task Force ships.

  Six years later, that helicopter pilot was still not just angry, but absolutely disgusted by what had happened. Nor do I blame him for feeling that way. He and his copilot risked their lives to get the patrol into Argentina – and were then badly let down by men from the Regiment.

  For a long time I have thought that while SAS Selection might be the toughest in the world, it doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about a man. Only what he does in battle will ever show you what he’s really like. The men of that B Squadron patrol threw away the chance of a lifetime. Here was an opportunity, not only to lessen British losses and perhaps shorten the war by severely hitting the Argentinian Air Force on the ground, but to go down in history as having pulled off the most daring exploit in modern warfare. Which is what the SAS is all about – or should be.

  But that patrol blew it. Instead of heading for the enemy airfield, they hightailed it for Chile. They didn’t even bother to look at the target and judge how difficult it would be to achieve a successful mission, deciding to call the operation off without taking a single pace towards the danger area. Anyone reading this can be forgiven for asking, whatever happened to ‘Who Dares Wins’? Above all, can you hope to win if you are not prepared to dare at all?

  In the aftermath and inevitable inquiry into what went wrong, the officer commanding the patrol quite rightly resigned his commission. The troop sergeant, who was nearing the end of his army career, was quietly sidelined until his time expired. To my mind, though, the damage to the Regiment was much more severe than the loss of two of its members.

  I had overheard people talking about this operation – which was the brainchild of Brigadier de la Billière – saying it was suicidal, total madness. As it happens, I think just the opposite was the case, for we know the flight – the most difficult and dangerous part – was successful, and even a limited strike would have had a profoundly demoralizing effect on the Argentinians.

  Over the years, I have watched too many people take the inflated pay and the even more inflated kudos of being part of the SAS mystique without trying to live up to its ideals and expectations. In the end, they simply didn’t have what it takes and were not prepared to pay their dues, although many of them managed to complete their service with the Regiment. I believe that the command in that patrol in Argentina was made up of just such people.

  I would have given absolutely anything to have led that patrol, and so would many of the guys I worked with. The winning was well worth the dare.

  It was an incredibly expensive mission just in terms of the sacrificed helicopter. It also effectively took two very brave and skilful pilots, and an SAS patrol, out of the war, since they were in Chile as the Task Force prepared to invade the Falklands and eject its illegal occupiers. And who knows how many Argentine aircraft got through to damage or sink Task Force ships because the patrol was aborted, aircraft that might otherwise have been destroyed on the ground? Above and beyond all that, however, the lost initiative and the effect on morale was, in my opinion, far more costly to the Regiment.

  In Argentina, if a man could not become a racing driver, then as likely as not the next thing on his wish list was to be a fighter pilot. As events were to prove, they were the cream of the Argentinian crop, very brave men whose courage and flying skill were to inflict terrible damage on the Task Force.

  It was a lesson we were shortly to learn – the hard way.

  Chapter Eleven

  FROM a signalling position high above the flight deck of HMS Hermes, I watched the Sea Harriers come in to land after pounding the Argentinian positions at Port Stanley. They are magnificent machines, one moment hurtling at speed towards the ship and then suddenly slowing in mid-air, their jets swivelled downwards, to hover like helicopters before setting down on the deck with a kind of ungainly delicacy.

  One of the Harriers had been crippled by enemy groundfire, which had shredded its tail fin. On the carrier, the flight controller ordered its pilot to come in last, so that if he crashed and burned, the wreckage on the flight deck would not prevent the other aircraft from landing. I kept my fingers crossed for the poor pilot as he slowed to hover alongside Hermes. Having crabbed sideways until he was over the flight deck, he brought his wounded plane down with a thump that shook the deck plates. But he’d made it. He climbed wearily out of his cockpit, shaken but not stirred.

  It was then that the BBC’s Brian Hanrahan made his famous radio broadcast from the observer’s platform above the flight deck. For security reasons, Hanrahan was not allowed to tell his listeners how many aircraft had taken part in the raid on Port Stanley. Instead, he kept both the military censors and his audience happy with the remark, ‘I counted them all out and I counted them all back.’ It was a brilliant way of reassuring people in Britain that all our aircraft had returned safely.

  The date was 1 May 1982, and the Task Force was still nearly three weeks away from launching the landings which, it was hoped, would liberate the Falklands. For the SAS, perhaps even more so than for the rest of the troops cooped up in ships, there was precious little for us to do. In the mornings we practised map reading, or worked out insertion points for use in forward aircraft control. We trained with our weapons and discussed anything we thought we might be tasked with carrying out. Every noon aboard HMS Hermes, D Squadron met in an enclosed area below decks in the stern of the ship. The place was known as ‘2 Sierra Flats’, because that was what was stencilled on the steel walls, and it was just large enough to house the squadron if everyone stood. Our meeting
s lasted about thirty minutes, and once they were finished we were free for the rest of the day, which we would spend playing chess or scrabble or a few hands at cards, or trying to get our heads down somewhere.

  In the evenings we always wound up in the bar of the Chief Petty Officers’ Mess. In the Royal Navy drink is rationed and each CPO was only allowed two pints of beer or three shorts per day. As guests of the mess, however, squadron members could drink as much as they liked. So every night was party night, with us buying drinks and passing them on to our naval friends. We would pack up at three or four in the morning, completely smashed, having finished the night having a good laugh and a drink in somebody’s cabin. Then we’d trundle off to bed. Bear in mind that the Task Force was operating on Zulu time – that is, Greenwich mean time. Deep in the South Atlantic, this meant that first light was not until eleven or eleven-thirty in the morning – by our clocks. And as most of us didn’t have a regular bed, we were in no hurry to go off and find one. Indeed, I don’t remember getting into a cold bed during that time. As on Plymouth and Antrim during the South Georgia operations, most often the bunk I chose had been vacated by its regular occupant only minutes before I climbed in. When its owner came back off watch, he would tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Can I have my bed back, mate?’ and out I’d get and stumble off, half asleep, to find another place to kip.

  The aircraft carrier was no floating Hilton and, as any confined area will when crammed with men, it always stank of rancid sweat, stale food, and wet socks drying on pipes. The sailors kept themselves clean, but with so many human beings jammed into what was really just a series of poorly ventilated steel boxes, often with condensation running down the walls, the atmosphere below decks had a cheesy ripeness to it. We could accept these discomforts, but most of the time, just as in Dhofar or Northern Ireland, we were bored, forced to wait until Intelligence had enough information to give us our next target – something for us to do.

  In the event, we didn’t have long to wait.

  On the evening of Sunday, 2 May, we were drinking in the CPOs’ Mess, as usual, when over the Tannoy came a metallic, disembodied voice from the control room telling everyone that the submarine HMS Conqueror had launched a torpedo against the Argentinian heavy cruiser General Belgrano. The place instantly erupted as all the navy guys began shouting and cheering. They were quite euphoric for a while, but when, about an hour later, there came a further announcement that Belgrano had been sunk, their din almost lifted the deckhead. The news was the cue for a tremendous party, with the ship’s crew singing the praises of the Royal Navy to the high heavens. Everybody was in high spirits, and confidence about what lay ahead had never seemed stronger.

  This Cloud-Nine high continued through Monday, but on the following day, 4 May, while we were halfway through our midday squadron meeting in 2 Sierra Flats, the Tannoy suddenly blared ‘Hit the deck! … Hit the deck!’

  We didn’t know what the hell was going on, but everyone lay flat – difficult, in that cramped area. Seconds later, we heard the thumps of salvos of chaff and magnesium flares being fired from the carrier’s launchers. (Chaff consists of thousands of strips of thin metal foil designed to deflect and confuse the homing devices on incoming radar-guided missiles, since the strips show up as countless images on any radar. The magnesium flares give off intense heat, and are fired to lure heat-seeking missiles away from their real targets.) We waited anxiously. Being trapped in a steel room below decks is not something any SAS soldier favours, but not knowing what was happening, and not being able to do anything about it, were the worst part of it. Yet after the first command there was total silence from the control room. Gradually everyone relaxed, although the ship remained at full action stations. It wasn’t until an hour or more later that the Tannoy squawked into life again with a message from operations control saying that an Argentinian Super Etendard bomber had launched an Exocet, and that the missile was heading our way.

  Once more we waited. After what seemed another endless hour a voice from the Tannoy told us that the Type 42 destroyer HMS Sheffield had been hit and that her crew were being evacuated to other ships. Our meeting broke up and, with nothing much to do, I pulled from inside my jacket a paperback thriller – oddly, I remember that it was Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett. Squatting on the floor of 2 Sierra Flats, I leaned against the grey-painted steel bulkhead, avoiding the iron rivets that were trying to put dents in my back, and settled down to read.

  After an hour or so, a balding, stocky man of about forty came into the compartment and sat down opposite me. A forlorn figure in a white woollen pullover, denims and dark blue plimsolls, he said not a word but simply sat staring at the floor. I couldn’t help glancing at him curiously from time to time. Even though he didn’t volunteer anything, I knew that the clothes he was wearing were the standard issue given to survivors, and that his own must have been saturated by the sea – perhaps from having had to abandon a ship.

  Later, one of the carrier’s crew members told me that the man in the survivor’s issue clothing was Captain Sam Salt, the captain of HMS Sheffield. As he sat there silently, his head bowed, he looked more like a beaten man than the captain of a Royal Navy warship. But by then, his command, a modern air-defence destroyer, one of only five Type 42s with the Task Force, was drifting and abandoned, smoke still pouring from the gaping hole in her port side.

  Yet while I was with him, not a single one of the Royal Navy officers aboard Hermes came to where he sat silently brooding. Not one arrived to offer his condolences, or to say ‘Sorry about your ship, Sam. You did your best.’ Perhaps Captain Salt had found his way to 2 Sierra Flats because he wanted solitude. I don’t know. To this day I find it strange, however, that none of the naval officers had any words of comfort for him during that hour and more while he was sitting opposite me, that not one of them put a friendly hand on his shoulder. It must have been the lowest point in that man’s life. Yet the naval officers on Hermes simply ignored him. I remember reading that there was once a time when a Royal Navy captain who lost his ship could expect no mercy from the Admiralty. That was a long time ago, but maybe the Royal Navy still suffers from that kind of antiquated thinking.

  Sheffield was the first ship the Royal Navy had lost to enemy action since the Second World War. In the Chief Petty Officers’ Mess aboard Hermes that night the story of her tragic loss began to unfold.

  During our time on Hermes, the carrier was in ‘Zulu’ state, which meant that all watertight doors and hatches were secured. When any of us, seamen or soldiers, passed through a door in a bulkhead we screwed or clamped it shut behind us. The idea was that if the ship was hit and the sea came in, the water would only get through to certain compartments, rather than flood the ship to such a degree as to threaten to sink her.

  I was told that Sheffield had been on air-defence duty at the south-west corner of the Task Force, then lying some forty miles off the south-eastern tip of East Falkland. At the time, however, she had been at a state known as ‘Yankee’, which meant that, unlike state ‘Zulu’ on Hermes, doors and hatches were open. When the Exocet hit the destroyer, a ball of fire had instantly swept along the ship’s ‘Burma Road’.

  Many ships have a Burma Road – a corridor which stretches the length of the ship from bow to stern. Clamped on brackets on the steel walls of Sheffield’s Burma Road was the ship’s firefighting equipment. The super-heated fireball engulfed the corridor from end to end, immediately destroying all the firefighting equipment and making it all but impossible for the crew to fight the blaze. Within minutes, the fire had roared through the ship like a blast furnace, effectively ending the destroyer’s life. After four hours spent trying to control the blaze, Captain Salt reluctantly gave the order to abandon ship as the flames threatened to engulf the magazine for the Sea Dart missiles. Twenty-one men were dead, and many more were injured, some with terrible burns. The Type 21 frigate HMS Arrow came alongside and took off most of the crew; others, including Salt, were winched off by Sea Ki
ng helicopters.

  In the CPOs’ Mess on Hermes that night, one petty officer was walking about dramatically exclaiming, ‘A ball of fire … a ball of fire …’ It may be that he was in a state of shock, although I don’t know why, since he was just a member of the carrier’s crew and certainly hadn’t been aboard Sheffield when she was hit. The squadron 2IC and I were drinking together at the bar as the ball-of-fire merchant walked up and down repeating his lines. We laughed – simply chortled into our glasses, and even mimicked him. This may seem callous, but the fact was that imminent death was nothing new to us. We’d lost men in action, and seen aircraft crash with friends and comrades aboard. To us, sudden, often violent death was simply a matter of occurrence.

  In our business, we recognize that we can’t deal in death without being able to accept the consequences. To the navy guys it was different, however, almost as though they couldn’t understand how the Argentinians could have had the audacity to wipe out one of our ships. And this despite the sinking, two days earlier, of the General Belgrano, with the loss of more than 350 Argentinian lives. Now everyone in the Task Force had been made to realize that we were a fair target, and that the Argentinians had a sting in their tail. They had the assets, and they had the firepower; they also had the determination.

  The loss of the Sheffield had brought home to us how vulnerable we were to enemy air or submarine attacks while floating about in the South Atlantic. We also all now knew it wasn’t going to become any easier, and that the Argentinians were not going to go away.

  If the sinking of HMS Sheffield was Argentina’s revenge for the reconquest of South Georgia and the loss of the General Belgrano, the Task Force’s response was robust, effective, and not slow in coming. Quite early after the arrival of the Task Force in the theatre of operations, the pilot of a Sea Harrier, returning from a sortie over Goose Green, had reported that a radar lock had registered on his avionics as he had flown over Pebble Island, a barren place off the north coast of West Falkland. There was a small civilian settlement there, and it was known that the enemy had established a substantial outpost in and around it. Thinking that the signal might be coming from a ground-radar installation, he went for a closer look, and discovered that there was a grass airstrip on the island which the Argentinians were extending.