Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  IT has often seemed to me that Fate puts a price on moments of triumph. Sometimes this can mean men paying with their lives in the final minutes before victory; at others, Fate’s charge for having earlier smiled upon some venture comes a few days later. But whether it comes within hours or days, there is always a payback time.

  We didn’t have to wait long before Fate delivered her bill after our highly successful raid on Pebble Island. On 18 May, three days after the raid, the ships carrying the main British invasion group – known as the amphibious force – linked up with the aircraft carriers and their escorts. It became clear that the attempt to land in the Falklands was imminent. What emerged from the planning directives was that the SAS was tasked with four separate attacks designed to make the Argentinians believe that a much bigger force had landed, and to draw them away from San Carlos, where the real landings were to go in.

  The role of my squadron, D, was to be offensive action, while G Squadron, which had arrived with the Task Force, via Ascension, some time after us, was to report information on enemy positions, strengths and movements from observation posts set up behind, and even in, the enemy lines. In preparation for these operations, the two squadrons were ordered later that day to cross-deck from Hermes to HMS Intrepid, an assault ship specifically equipped for amphibious warfare.

  Cross-decking a squadron involves shifting a vast amount of kit. Cross-decking two is like moving a circus. Hermes and Intrepid were steaming about a mile apart, so we initially sent a lot of the guys over to the assault ship to act as movers for all the equipment as it arrived. The rest of the men were to stay on the carrier and load the gear into nets, which were then slung beneath the bellies of Sea King helicopters and ferried across.

  There was the usual howling wind, and the sea was fairly choppy. When there were only two helicopter loads left on Hermes, I leapt aboard one of the aircraft as it completed loading. I figured that the last helicopter would be very crowded, and that there would be more elbow room in the one I had chosen.

  As we hovered above Intrepid with the cargo net slung beneath us, I could see our equipment piled high on the deck. There seemed to be a miniature mountain of the stuff. I jumped on to the deck after the helicopter had dropped its pallet, and walked from the flight deck into the ship through open landing doors rather like those on cross-Channel ferries. I looked at my watch. It was 2130 hours Zulu, just after last light.

  There was so much stuff aboard the last Sea King that the remaining men simply piled their gear in and sat on top of it. None of them were wearing survival suits because they wanted to get the job over with as soon as possible; besides, the flight between the ships only took about five minutes.

  Waiting to come in, the last chopper was hovering about seventy-five metres away from Intrepid when one of our guys on deck suddenly shouted, ‘She’s gone down!’ In the gathering dark he saw the Sea King plunge into the sea. Immediately klaxons began to blare all through the ship, and from the Tannoy came the shouted order, ‘Crash teams, action stations! … Crash teams, actions stations!’

  The Sea King hit the waves and capsized. Damaged from the impact, it rapidly filled with water, but for a few moments it stayed on the surface with the sea pouring in on the men inside. The pilot and his co-pilot punched their doors clear and climbed straight into their rubber dinghy, which had automatically inflated when the machine hit the sea. One of our guys inside the downed helicopter was wearing a lifejacket, but he couldn’t find his way out. Finally, in sheer desperation, he pulled the tags on his self-inflating lifejacket. Suddenly buoyant, it shot him straight out of the hole where the Sea King’s tail had snapped off on impact. He got out alive to find men clinging to the sides of the pilots’ rubber dinghy. As the stricken helicopter slowly slipped beneath the waves, the survivors could only think of their mates on the inside of the aircraft. It was a horrible way to die, and it affected us all pretty deeply.

  There were thirty men on board that Sea King, including the pilot, co-pilot and a crewman. Twenty-two of them died that night in the freezing waters of the South Atlantic, all but two of them members of D and G Squadrons. We lost good friends in that terrible accident. They lie at the bottom of the South Atlantic, for their bodies were never recovered. Their wives back in Hereford were not told of the deaths until three or four days later, after the landings at San Carlos had taken place. Nor were the public. I suppose that, had the bad news been known back home in Britain before the success of the landings had been announced, then it would have dealt a body blow to public morale.

  The deaths of twenty members of the Regiment hindered us, but the disaster didn’t jeopardize our mission. It would have been much worse had the men all been from the same squadron, but as the losses were split between two squadrons, in practical terms the soldiers who died were easier to replace. Put bluntly, the show had to go on regardless of the deaths of so many good men.

  In emotional terms, and while it might sound callous, we very quickly got over the disaster. The reason was simple: on the following night we ourselves were going into action, something which really concentrates the mind. Nevertheless, I had lost many friends in the crash. One of them had been among those who raided the post office at Grytviken. His stamped covers went with him to the bottom. How much they were worth didn’t matter any longer.

  The following morning, I was pulled aside by the squadron OC and told, ‘Look, we want you to take over as troop sergeant of Mountain Troop.’ It was promotion of a kind, although it was a very depleted troop that I now joined. Because of the crash, there were only eight of us in the troop: Captain John Hamilton, who had led the mission to the Fortuna Glacier on South Georgia and the demolition party on Pebble Island, myself and six others. Putting the Sea King crash to the backs of our minds, we immediately began to prepare for the task ahead of us, since there were just forty-eight hours to go before the main landings were to go in at Port San Carlos. We were to go ashore twenty-four hours earlier at Darwin, fifteen miles or so south of the actual landing areas, to make the Argentinians think that the invasion was taking place there instead of at the main beachhead.

  Aboard Intrepid on the night before our diversionary attacks, I bumped into an old friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in ten years. I had known and soldiered with Sergeant Ian McKay when he was with Support Company in 1 Para. Ian was a thoroughly nice guy and a good soldier, but I was surprised to see him, since 1 Para hadn’t come out with the Task Force. So I asked him what he was doing there on the assault ship with 3 Para, and he told me his story. Apparently he had been in Berlin with 1 Para some years earlier, and had become involved with another man’s wife. When the affair was discovered, he was given twenty-four hours to get out of Germany. He went back to the Para depot in Aldershot and became an instructor, after which he was posted to 3 Para as a platoon sergeant. We sat having a mug of tea together and talking until it was time for me to gather my kit and go. As we shook hands I told him, ‘Best of luck. I’ll see you again.’

  And, sadly, I did – one Saturday morning back in Hereford, after the war was over. A picture of him suddenly came up on the television screen in my bedroom. The sound was down and when I turned up the volume it was to hear the announcer say that Sergeant Ian McKay of 3 Para had been posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, one of only two awarded for the campaign. He had been killed on Mount Longdon, one of the final battles of the campaign, single-handedly storming an Argentinian machine-gun post. He was a very brave man, and it seemed a double shame that he should have died just three days before the enemy surrendered.

  That night, D Squadron was landed on East Falkland, and made a forced march, weighed down with extra ammunition and mortar rounds, until we were able to take up our positions around the settlement of Darwin, where there was a strong Argentinian force that might be deployed to counter-attack the main British landings. We put a lot of fire down on the enemy in our diversionary raid, hitting them with mortars, Milan AT missiles and GP machine-guns, as well as sma
ll-arms fire. At the time, I wondered if we had achieved much, but it later turned out that the Argentinians in the settlement had radioed their main HQ that they were being attacked by a full battalion – 600 men, rather than the 40 or so we actually numbered. Since this had been the purpose of our raid from the first, we had obviously achieved what we’d set out to do.

  By morning, however, the Argentinians knew exactly where the real landings had taken place. From 0400 hours on 21 May, 3 Para and 42 Commando, Royal Marines had come ashore in landing craft launched from the ships in San Carlos Water, and established themselves at Port San Carlos. A few miles to the south, 2 Para and 40 and 45 Commandos had safely landed at San Carlos, and all were now working frantically to consolidate the beachhead. In response, the enemy had their Pucara ground-attack aircraft sweeping the landscape and, as we prepared to move off, one of them headed straight for our position near Darwin, dropping down low and opening up with its 20mm cannon.

  Unlike the other units, which were equipped with a largely ineffective hand-held anti-aircraft missile called Blowpipe, we were carrying with us a Stinger missile launcher which had been given to us on the quiet by the US government. The American-built surface-air missile was then virtually unknown and untried in the Regiment; indeed, none of us had even seen a Stinger before, let alone fired one. Nevertheless, as the Pucara flew overhead Kel, who had been in the New Zealand SAS before joining us, got the Stinger launcher to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

  The missile streaked after the aircraft and whacked it straight up the tail. There was a huge explosion. The pilot ejected and we watched his parachute coming down as the Pucara exploded into a hillside. The sight made us all feel good, and Kel was whooping with delight. Then, minutes later, another Pucara came over and Kel, full of his success, decided to have another crack. Once more he put the Stinger launcher to his shoulder and aimed it at the aircraft.

  Unfortunately, the Stinger expert had been killed in the Sea King crash. Of the rest of the squadron, only a handful had seen the instruction book for the weapon. Kel had slotted a new missile into the launcher, but forgot that the weapon should have been recharged with compressed gas before it could be successfully fired again. All unaware, he took aim at the Pucara and pressed the trigger. The rocket ignited, flew about twenty yards and then nosedived on to the ridge we were following, twisting and turning as it hurtled along the ground with smoke and flames pouring out of it. We threw ourselves out of the way as it went past like a rattlesnake on fire. Then it went off with an almighty bang, luckily without hitting anyone. Kel put that down to a faulty missile, and at once reloaded and fired again. We all dived for cover once more, everyone shouting expletives at him in a good-natured way. At this point the OC called a halt to Kel’s brief career downing Pucaras

  Stingers are expensive bits of kit. We had just watched more than fifty thousand quid’s worth of missile go up in a puff of smoke. But apart from the waste, it was a pity Kel had forgotten to recharge the gas, for he might have downed a few other enemy aircraft – certainly more than the British-built Blowpipes managed to get. Still, he had done well to bring down that first Pucara.

  The whole squadron was now together, tabbing north to San Carlos. We covered nearly twenty miles that morning and we were all pretty exhausted by the time we linked up with the main force. By then the Paras and Marines were all off the ships and on to the surrounding hills, so we sat on a slope overlooking San Carlos Water and had a brew, knowing that the beachhead was secure.

  Or secure against enemy land forces, at least, for sitting on that hill was like being in the front row of a cinema showing a war movie. From the hillside, we watched as wave after wave of Argentinian Air Force Skyhawks and Mirages bombed and strafed British ships. The trouble was, there was not a thing we could do about it.

  From the first, the enemy targeted the warships in San Carlos Water, and several were hit and damaged. Then, as we sat there, helpless, HMS Ardent, a Type 21 frigate, was hit. That afternoon, in what mercifully proved to be the day’s last air attack, a wave of Skyhawks came over and one of them sent two bombs into her stern. The little ship simply disappeared under a great mushroom of smoke. We all thought she was a goner, but five minutes later she limped out of the obscuring cloud, trailing smoke from her superstructure.

  It was a false hope. Two minutes later a Mirage came over and hit her again with another bomb. It was a direct hit, striking her in the middle of her superstructure. Engulfed in flames and smoke, she began to sink. It was a desperately sad sight, made worse by the fact that we could only sit there and watch a warship die.

  The Argentinian pilots were incredibly skilful and desperately brave. They always came in at low level, screaming over the hills before dropping down to hug the surface of the sea as they streaked towards their targets, pursued by missiles and fire from every ship’s gun that could be brought to bear, as well as hundreds of hastily mounted machine-guns. Luckily, many of their bombs failed to go off – Plymouth, for instance, the frigate we had been aboard in South Georgia, was hit by three 500-pound bombs, of which only one detonated.

  It had been a day of triumph, but also one that gave us much to worry about. As for us, from the settlement at San Carlos the whole squadron was airlifted in dribs and drabs back to HMS Intrepid as soon as Lynx helicopters became available. It took a long time and we were all extremely weary by the time we were back on the assault ship in the late afternoon.

  The two assault ships, or landing platform docks (LPDs), that accompanied the Task Force, Fearless and Intrepid, were large vessels of some 12,000 tons and with crews of nearly 600 men. They were equipped to take four large and four smaller landing craft as well as four Sea King or five Wessex helicopters, and had a dock within them that could be flooded to act as a floating harbour for the landing craft; they could also accommodate 400 men for an extended period or 700 for a shorter time. Yet despite their size, once back on board I couldn’t find anywhere to sleep. As usual … I did have a camp bed, but I’d nowhere to put it, so in the end I dragged it into the ship’s chapel and set it up there. As I lay there, just beginning to doze off, a naval padre came in through the chapel’s sliding doors. When he saw me there he went berserk.

  ‘You can’t sleep in a church!’ he bellowed. I blinked up at him from my camp bed and said, ‘Why not? It’s a place of worship and I’ll start praying while I’m sleeping.’

  He didn’t like my answer one little bit. ‘Get out,’ he ordered, and I realized that I wasn’t going to get any rest here. I was so dog tired that I could hardly keep my eyes open, but I picked up my camp bed and stumbled out into the companionway.

  As one of the ship’s officers, the padre had his own bed in his own cabin. Yet on an overcrowded ship he was not going to allow an exhausted soldier to bed down in the chapel. One of the things I learned during the time we spent on warships was that there is still a good deal of snobbery in the Royal Navy. That padre, I realized, despite his Holy Orders, was a fairly typical immature naval officer.

  I was wandering around the ship trying to find somewhere else to put my camp bed when I bumped into the OC, who asked me what I was doing dragging the bed around. When I told him that I’d been turfed out of the chapel he said, ‘I’m going for a drink. Use my bunk and put that camp bed on the floor in my cabin.’ I didn’t need further encouragement, and within minutes I was dead to the world.

  A couple of hours later, I was woken when the metal door slid open and in walked a lieutenant-commander, a naval rank equivalent to that of an army major. He asked for Major Delves, and when I told him that the OC had gone to the wardroom, he looked at me as if I was something unpleasant that he’d brought in on the sole of his shoe.

  Then he demanded to know what I was doing in the Boss’s bed. He was completely flummoxed when I told him, ‘I’m having a kip,’ because the idea that an officer would allow a senior NCO to sleep in his bed while he wasn’t using it was totally alien to most naval officers’ way of thinking. Eve
n when I told him that Major Delves knew all about my being there – had suggested it, in fact – he still looked at me as though I’d come from the moon. The situation seemed to be beyond anything his class-conscious mind could grasp.

  ‘And where is Major Delves going to sleep?’ he asked. When I replied, ‘On the camp bed,’ he just looked blank. Without another word he walked out, sliding the door to behind him.

  In my experience the Royal Navy – with the honourable exception of the Fleet Air Arm – is to a large extent officered by snobs. There is a much greater divide between officers and men than there is in the army or the Royal Air Force. Even the food the sailors eat doesn’t begin to compare with the food the officers get in the wardroom. It’s not like that in the army or the RAF, where the officers take a great interest in the food served to the men in the mess halls, and are constantly striving to raise the quality. And almost as though to rub it in, the décor of the seamen’s mess is atrocious when compared to that of the wardroom.

  The same them-and-us attitude applies to naval discipline, even today. The lash may have gone, and with it the rum ration, but many of the officers are still living in Nelson’s time, which perhaps explains why the Royal Navy is always court-martialling men, and women, too, nowadays, for the most trivial offences. Its officers don’t know anything about modern man-management, but cling instead to an outmoded notion of the ‘Senior Service’ that vanished for ever after the First World War. The stooge who had walked into the OC’s cabin clearly couldn’t get his institutionalized mind around the idea that a commissioned officer might lend his bed to an NCO.

  With the land force safely ashore and plans well advanced for the operations that would defeat the Argentinians, headshed meetings aboard Intrepid sought more work and more targets for the SAS. The G Squadron OPs ashore – some of which had been in place for three weeks – were keeping a sharp eye on enemy strengths and movements, and soon reported that despite the fact that the Argentinians had invaded the islands some six weeks earlier, they had failed to occupy some of the high ground that guarded the landward approaches to Port Stanley. As a result, D Squadron was tasked to go to Mount Kent, set up an OP there and then secure the ground for the arrival of the Royal Marines and the artillery, whose gun position was to be established below the mountain.