Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  It was miserably uncomfortable, but we’d had plenty of practice at being uncomfortable. We lay there, very still, until last light, then moved out. We were very stiff and cold, but we had to find a place where we could dig in, so that we could watch the enemy positions without being compromised. Eventually, just as the darkness closed in, we found a sloping bank – it must have been the only sloping bank for miles – and we began to dig a two-man trench. A half moon came up and we dug like demented badgers all through that Sunday night, camouflaging the OP with nets and tufts of grass. I went into the trench with Patrick, and Bugsy and Dash, with the radio, hid themselves in a natural dip in the ground in front of our position.

  When dawn broke next morning we realized that the Argentinians were only about two hundred metres away. We were right on the edge of the forward line of their defensive position. And the beauty of it was that they had no idea that we were there. I thought, Hell, a few more feet and we’d have been sharing their trenches. I was surprised, too, that they hadn’t seen or heard us digging, although we had been pretty quiet about it. Presumably they were too busy getting their heads down to notice us, and no doubt it never crossed their minds that there were any British soldiers within thirty kilometres of them.

  From the OP we had a clear view of Fox Bay. The area was bristling with enemy soldiers and their gear. They were at least a battalion strong – perhaps as many as 1,000 men – supported by artillery pieces and plenty of vehicles. There was also a lot of movement among the troops and their supporting arms. They were in defensive positions, holding Fox Bay for whatever reason they thought it was of value, and had taken over the islanders’ settlement. This was the size of a small village, and the Argentinians had requisitioned the houses for accommodation and cooking. They had also dug long trenches for the infantry, and had positioned three 105mm field guns as part of the defences.

  The enemy sent out foot patrols throughout the day, and one morning we spotted one heading straight for our positions. We kept our heads down – and then one of them suddenly fired a round. Alarmed, we couldn’t work out what they were doing, for they clearly weren’t firing at us. Then there were a few more shots, and we realized that they were shooting sheep for the larder. We watched as they carried the carcasses back to their cookhouse.

  They didn’t know that we were within spitting distance of their lines, and that we were radioing their positions and strength, as well as details of their equipment and movements, back to Intrepid. Indeed, they could hardly use the latrines without our knowing about it. Mind you, not having latrines ourselves, we had problems of our own. All we could do was roll quietly into position, crap, and then just roll away from it and live with the smell.

  One night we received a radio message telling us that the enemy had surveillance equipment that could pinpoint our position by picking up and monitoring our movements. If that happened, things were going to get very interesting for us at Fox Bay. Nevertheless, we stayed in our location until Thursday night – five days in all without the enemy having discovered that we were there – and then I decided that we were overplaying our hand, taking unnecessary risks by remaining. The longer we stayed the greater the odds that we should be compromised. It could only be a matter of time before our presence was discovered by an Argentinian patrol. Since we had radioed back all the useful information that we could gather from our OP, I reckoned it was time to move out.

  We left, as we had come, like thieves in the night, and walked back westwards about eight kilometres until we found a small area that was slightly higher than the surrounding land. It wasn’t big enough to accommodate the four of us in one location so we split two and two in the same formation as before – I remained with Patrick, while Dash and Bugsy took the other OP fifty metres or so away. Each night I crept forward to speak with them, listening to their reports of enemy movements, telling Dash what to send on the radio and reading any messages that had come in for me. We were carrying a Swift Scope, a powerful telescopic single-lens monocular. Through it, though we were now a fair distance away, we could still see almost every movement the enemy at Fox Bay made.

  It was during this time that we heard over the radio that John Hamilton, the troop commander, had been killed at Port Howard, where he had been doing the same sort of job as ourselves. He had taken three men to establish an OP near the settlement, where there was another substantial Argentinian garrison, and report back any information they could gather. Because of the nature of the ground, they could not establish a position large enough to accommodate them all, and so, like us, they opted for the two-man split. Unlike us, however, instead of remaining in their positions, they rotated each two-man team at night to give people a break.

  It was while they were in the OP that John Hamilton and a trooper named Ron were compromised by an Argentinian patrol consisting of approximately twenty men. Realizing they’d been spotted, and despite being outnumbered, they made a break for it to give the two men in the other location a chance. But in this heroic attempt to draw the enemy’s attention from their friends, John Hamilton was shot and wounded. They continued to fire back, until the troop commander told Ron to make a dash for it. Hamilton was shot again and killed, and Ron was eventually captured when he ran out of ammunition. He was taken back to Port Howard, where he was stripped and questioned. Quite what the Argentinians made of him isn’t known, but he was apparently well looked after, and was repatriated soon after the Argentinian surrender. Eventually, he joined us aboard the RFA landing ship Sir Lancelot. He was the only British soldier to be captured during the war after the Argentinian seizure of the Falklands and South Georgia. The other members of the Port Howard patrol managed to get away. John Hamilton was awarded a posthumous Military Cross.

  Meanwhile, away to the south-west, the cold was getting to us. It was particularly bad for Dash, the radio operator. He had to encode the messages and then tap them out in Morse. This is a tricky enough task when your fingers are warm, but when they are freezing it becomes extremely difficult, and on several occasions I took over from Dash. You have to rub your fingers together inside your gloves to stop them from freezing, but the real worry is that if you make a mistake while decoding, you have to start all over again. Encoding and transmitting messages is also very time consuming, and more so when you’re freezing. If a message became garbled in transmission, we had to spend hours trying to get it right.

  By Saturday, 12 June, our seven-day mission was up and we received a message which read, ‘Stay in your location. Helicopter arrival to be advised soon.’ We waited and waited, listening out for the flap-flap sound of the Sea King coming for us. I liked their idea of ‘soon’. We lay there for another five days, by which time the rations we’d brought to last us for seven days were all but exhausted.

  We were down to eating the stuff in our belt-kit emergency packs – a bar of chocolate, powdered soup and tea bags – which was supposed to be enough to last for a couple of days. These and the leftovers from our original rations – boiled sweets, apple flakes and foul-tasting packet soup – had to last us five days. Patrick and I had almost come to blows over the apple flakes even before we ran out of rations. He had wanted to put them in rice pudding, but I objected because I can’t stand the horrible things. And since I was the boss, that ought to have been that – end of argument.

  Actually, I bribed him not to put the apple flakes into the rice pudding. It happened to be his birthday, and I just happened to be carrying a hip flask full of rum. So I gave him a tot for his birthday, which not only made him happy, but at the same time resolved the problem over the apple flakes.

  We received good news over the radio, when we were informed on 14 June that the Argentinian forces on East Falklands had surrendered that day, just before the final British assault on Port Stanley. Nevertheless, we were ordered to stay in position and to continue observing the enemy, since at the time it was not known what the Argentinian forces on West Falkland would do, and there was a chance that they might dete
rmine to go on fighting.

  By 16 June our seven-day stint had stretched to twelve days, and the helicopter still hadn’t arrived. That day, however, we received a radio signal that we would be picked up at 1200 hours the following day at the landing site designated in our orders. Since it was only about a kilometre away we didn’t leave our location until 1100, arriving at 1145. Then we sat on our bergens, awaiting pick-up. Noon came and went, but still no helicopter, and by 1300 hours we were freezing. The wind-chill factor meant the temperature was around minus 10 degrees Celsius, so I told the others to get out their sleeping bags and wrap themselves up against the wind. We were chilled to the bone, and our hands felt cold enough to drop off. Much more exposure to that icy wind and we might easily have had frostnip problems.

  We were a little weak from having had no proper food for at least five days and the cold saps your energy like nothing else. At 1400 hours, with still neither sight nor sound of the helicopter, I told Dash to get on the radio and ask where the helicopter was. Back came the reply, ‘To you shortly.’ Apparently the pilot had been given the grid reference for the landing site, but no one had told him it was on West Falkland. Since almost all the British land forces were on East Falkland, he’d been searching for us there.

  The helicopter finally arrived at 1600 hours, by which time we had been waiting for four and a quarter hours and were almost frozen stiff. We saw the Sea King flying in at low level when it was still about ten kilometres away, and I told the lads to stow their sleeping bags in their bergens and Dash to put away the radio. The chopper landed, but because of the extreme cold we were stiff-limbed and movement was very difficult. After a real struggle, we managed to throw our kit on board and climbed in after it.

  I asked the RAF load master, who sits at the rear of the helicopter during flights, if he had any food, and without a word he threw me a tin of corned beef. To open it, we had to break a metal key off the lid and use it to unwind a strip of metal running round the tin. Sounds easy – after all, thousands of people do it every day – but not with frozen fingers. After a struggle we eventually managed it and wolfed the cold, fatty meat down. You’d have thought the load master would have offered to help, but he just sat there with his headset on, looking at us. Mind you, after nearly two weeks in the open without washing, we must have stunk like nothing on God’s earth.

  We landed not on Intrepid, which we’d left twelve days earlier, but on Sir Lancelot, an LSL (landing ship logistic) manned by an RFA crew. She had been struck by two Argentinian bombs on 24 May, and though they had not exploded, she had been abandoned until they had been made safe and removed. Even then, the damage to her was such that she was now being used solely for military accommodation. In the last week of the war SAS troops had been stationed aboard her as a rapid-reaction force, to be deployed at a moment’s notice when and where they might be required.

  I dragged my kit out of the Sea King and trudged below. The circulation was coming back into my numb fingers, a feeling like having pins-and-needles, and I sat at a table and cleaned my M16 before handing it in to the armoury. What I really wanted, though, was to stand under a hot shower for hours. I had been thinking about that shower for days and days, so I stripped off my filthy clothes, wrapped a towel around my middle, pulled on a pair of flip-flops, and found the shower room.

  There was no hot water. There was no lukewarm water, either. In fact, if the water had been any colder, it would have come out of the showerhead as snowflakes. They must have pumped it straight out of the South Atlantic, and you would have needed a survival suit to stand it for any length of time. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice, for I needed more than a few minutes to wash away the grime and fifth I’d accumulated on West Falkland. That done, it took me hours to get warm afterwards, but eventually we managed to get some food inside ourselves, which helped. By now some of the other members of the squadron were trickling back from whatever operations they’d been tasked with. One team had a hilarious story to tell of what had happened to them while patrolling a few miles from Mount Kent before the Argentinian surrender.

  While on patrol they had come across a hut that they thought might be occupied by the enemy. The squadron commander decided that this was a mission for Mobility Troop and, never one to miss a bit of action, he went with them. After lying low and watching the target for some time, they decided to go in fast and grab whoever was inside. So they silently surrounded the place and then smashed the door in with a sledgehammer and threw themselves through it. The door burst inwards with such violence that it flew off its hinges. But the only living thing in the room was a single Argentinian soldier, and he was in bed. It was so cold in the hut that, under the bedclothes, he was wearing a quilted duvet jacket, denim trousers and a pair of thick woollen socks.

  When the guys charged into the room with their weapons ready to blast anyone who offered the slightest resistance, the terrified enemy soldier sat bolt upright in the bed. They dragged him out, and at once a terrible smell filled the hut. The poor sod was crying and was so scared that he’d fouled himself.

  On the floor by the bed was a well-thumbed pile of dog-eared porn magazines. One of the patrol sat on the floor, leafing through the magazines, while another took off the captured soldier’s socks and put them on his own feet. Then someone else took the prisoner’s quilted jacket. Just then the OC walked in. He looked at the Argentinian, who was still sobbing – by now he only had his shitty trousers left on, because nobody wanted those – and shook his head in amazement.

  ‘Give the poor lad his kit back,’ he said. So the guys handed the terrified soldier his gear and sat him down on a chair. The OC then told Jock, one of the patrol members who spoke Spanish, ‘Ask him where the barracks are.’

  Jock looked down at the Argentinian and demanded, ‘Donde esta la estación?’ At this the soldier, who turned out to be a cook, cried and sniffled even more, and said, ‘No se, no se.’

  ‘Donde esta la estación, you lying dago fuckwit,’ said Jock. The question was repeated again and again, with Jock getting increasingly irate, shaking the cook and shouting at him. And still the Argentinian, by now almost gibbering with terror, said that he did not know.

  Things might have got completely out of hand if somebody hadn’t suddenly realized that Jock’s Spanish wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. He had been demanding to be told where the railway station was – not the barracks. It was little wonder that their prisoner didn’t know the answer, because there wasn’t a station anywhere between there and South America.

  Since he clearly had no information, and was equally clearly no threat to anyone, the cook was taken away to a helipad. When the chopper arrived, however, he had to be physically dragged on board. Later we learned that he thought he was going to be taken up a few thousand feet and then thrown out. Nevertheless, he was delivered safe and sound, although still smelling strongly of shit, to the JSIW – Joint Services Intelligence Wing – where he was debriefed.

  Having willingly given up what little information he possessed, he was given a job behind the hotplate in the galley aboard Intrepid until he could be repatriated to Argentina. When he wasn’t serving food he washed pans, and whenever anyone walked in whom he recognized from the raid, he would wave and smile. He was good at his job and worked hard; what was more, he was living in better conditions than he had been in that hut near Mount Kent. All things considered, he seemed a good deal happier as a PoW than he had been as a soldier.

  It was a further twenty-four hours before all the squadron was back together again. Then, during lengthy debriefing sessions aboard Sir Lancelot, we stood up and spoke of what had happened during our various missions exactly as it had happened, warts and all. If there had been a cock-up, then we said so, with the result that we all learned from the experience, and with a very good chance that our mistakes would not be repeated. The same went for a successful mission, in that everyone learned something from it that might be of help in future operations.

  Th
at June also saw the start of the 1982 World Cup with England’s first game against France. We listened to the match on a big radio with the commentary relayed from Spain on the BBC World Service. I remember Bryan Robson scoring the first goal in the opening forty seconds of the match, which cheered us all greatly. England won 3:1, which was poetic justice on a country that had supplied Argentina with Exocet missiles.

  Although it was some days since the formal surrender of all Argentinian forces in the islands, we didn’t go ashore. We had seen enough of the Falklands to last us a lifetime. I had made friends with the Chinese cooks aboard Sir Lancelot, and every night, myself and a pal called Geordie would eat Chinese food with them, instead of the lousy navy slop. They were a good lot, those cooks, especially considering that they were civilians who had sailed into a war zone and been put in considerable danger.

  On 25 June, nine days after we returned from Fox Bay and eleven after the enemy surrender, Rex Hunt, the Governor of the Falkland Islands, returned to Port Stanley from London, to which he had been repatriated by the Argentinians after their invasion, just eighty-four days earlier. Our CO, Mike Rose, was adamant that D and G Squadrons were not going to have their time wasted on a long sea voyage back to the UK. Instead we would wait for RAF C-130s to airlift us back. The aircraft that had brought in the Governor took the first wave of thirty men.

  On the following morning, Saturday 26 June, another RAF C-130 flew in to Port Stanley airport. Long-range fuel tanks had been fitted in the rear and a few hours later it took off again, carrying thirty SAS men on the fourteen-hour flight to Ascension Island. This was the second SAS flight out to Ascension, and I was on it. A party of logistic support personnel from Hereford met us on arrival and gave us a proper English breakfast. There was time for a mug of tea and a shower before we boarded another C-130 homeward bound for RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire. The aircraft touched down for refuelling only once, in West Africa, and then it was non-stop all the way home. We landed at Lyneham at around 0500 hours on 28 June, and three hours later I was back in Hereford.