‘Chilly! It’s fucking freezing,’ Taff Evans replied.
The patrol was finally dropped on the tundra about twenty miles west of the Chile–Argentine border. They set up their bashas, and tapped out a message reporting the mission aborted. Less than an hour later, Hutchings ditched the Sea King in a coastal lake, ten miles south of the Chilean town of Punta Arenas. The plan had been to submerge the heli to escape detection, but though the crew punched holes in her fuselage, she refused to sink. They had to leave her half-submerged, and head for civilization.
Nine thousand miles away, in Hereford, John Moss was dismayed to learn that the recce mission had failed. This meant that his main party would be going in blind. If the op had been compromised, it could also mean that the Argentines would be on the alert for a raid. The chances of success, already slim, would be much reduced.
The proposed op was balanced on a political tightrope. It would be the first British operation against mainland Argentina, and if the Argentinian government got wind of it, it would provide rich propaganda capital. US President Ronald Reagan had warned Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher not to extend the war to the continent itself. The suspicion that this caveat had been ignored might be enough to rob her of the fragile support of both the USA and the European Community. The mission would require the tacit agreement of Chile, which wasn’t keen on being accused by its Argentine neighbour of assisting the United Kingdom.
The Falkland Islands had been occupied by a two-and-a-half-thousand-man group of Argentine marines and special forces on 2 April, in an attempt by Argentina’s dictator, General Leopoldo Galtieri, to boost the popularity of his military junta. A British dependency since 1833, the country consisted of two main islands – East and West Falkland – and a hundred smaller ones. Treeless, windswept moorlands, the islands were inhabited by about two thousand Britons, mostly sheep-farmers, and defended by a Royal Marines detachment seventy-nine strong. The Marines made a heroic stand at Government House in Port Stanley, but after twelve hours the Governor, Rex Hunt, ordered them to surrender. Galtieri moved in a ten-thousand-man garrison, equipped with heavy artillery, helicopters, light armoured vehicles and Pucara ground-attack aircraft. The following day, Argentine forces occupied South Georgia, another British dependency about eight hundred miles south of east.
The SAS hadn’t fought regular forces on this scale since the Second World War. For the unit that had just become famous as the counter-terrorist force par excellence, a return to ‘Green Ops’ was something of a surprise. Commanding officer Mike Rose had put D Squadron and half of G on standby as soon as news of the invasion had come through. They joined the British Task Force in mid-Atlantic on 13 April.
The plan for the Rio Grande raid was seen as a way of short-circuiting the war by taking out the Argentines’ most deadly weapons. In early May, a single Exocet strike had reduced the Type 42 air-defence destroyer Sheffield to a smouldering wreck, with the loss of twenty men killed and two dozen injured – the first Royal Navy destroyer sunk in action since the Second World War. Although it was thought that the Argentines had only three Exocets left, it was enough to take out the Task Force’s vital carriers, Hermes and Invincible. The plan also caused disagreement within the Regiment.
The Rio Grande target was defended by at least thirteen hundred crack Argentine marines, as well equipped as the SAS. It was guarded by advanced radar systems, and its ground defences included SAMs – surface-to-air missiles. The transports would be operating at the extreme limit of their range, and would have to be dumped during the mission. Since there would be only two aircraft, a single strike by an enemy missile would knock out half the raiding force in one go. There was no real deception plan, apart from the idea that the pilots would talk to Argentine air-controllers in Spanish.
The day he received the ‘mission aborted’ signal from Tierra del Fuego, John Moss mustered B Squadron in the Interest Room at Bradbury Lines. He told them that if Mikado was successful, it could save the Task Force hundreds of casualties. ‘Blind or not, we’re going in,’ he said. ‘Our country is at war and we’re needed.’1
Not everyone was convinced. The SAS had always had a healthy regard for probability curves, and a week of rehearsals on remote airfields in the UK had suggested that the chances of succeeding were less than fifty-fifty. Enemy radar pickets would give their air defences at least a six-minute warning. So in their view, with the element of surprise missing, the odds were that the two Hercules would be taken down before they got anywhere near the target, and the squadron totalled. Apart from being contrary to every principle in the SAS book, and a sheer waste of its expertise, such coup de main raids were the province of shock troops like the Paras.
Many members of the squadron felt that there was a better way of doing it. The whole weight of SAS tradition was against rigidly imposed ‘do-or-die’ schemes. The Regiment had always encouraged lateral thinking. After the abort signal had come in, John Moss had attempted to switch the plan to a long-range infiltration across the Chilean border, or at least to insert a second recce party, but his idea was vetoed.
Some of the Regiment – and not all of them enlisted men – were strongly critical of the plan which had the approval of de la Billière.
Part of the problem may have been that, after the embassy job had rocketed the SAS to stardom, two distinct Regiments had emerged – the ‘real’ SAS, and the SAS of the public imagination. This schizophrenia was a common experience for media celebrities, but for a military unit it was a double-edged sword. The ‘mythological’ SAS was peopled with gods and heroes, the real SAS with flesh-and-blood human beings. While the Regiment’s super-hero image was a valuable psychological weapon, no SAS-man – and especially no SAS commander – could afford to confuse the Regiment’s imaginary capacities with its actual ones. Therein lay the road to disaster. ‘The important thing to remember,’ wrote Peter Ratcliffe sagely, ‘is that the Regiment is not infallible … its soldiers are not immune to getting things wrong, especially in the confusion of war.’2
On the night of 19 May Robin Horsfall said goodbye to his eight-months-pregnant wife, Heather, on the steps of their Hereford home, knowing that there was a more-than-even chance that he’d never see her again. When he arrived at Bradbury Lines to help load the kit on the three-tonners, he discovered that one of the squadron’s most respected NCOs, Staff Sergeant Jake W. – a veteran of Aden, Borneo and Dhofar – had already resigned over the Mikado issue. Jake had advised Moss that the best-case scenario would be high casualties, the worst, obliteration. Failure would mean more than the loss of good men: it would be a huge propaganda victory for the enemy.
The news of Jake’s resignation spread like wildfire. When de la Billière turned up to see the squadron off, he was astonished to find the atmosphere cool. ‘I had never known such a lack of enthusiasm,’ he wrote. ‘Throughout my career the SAS had invariably reacted like hounds to a fox the moment they scented conflict.’3 De la Billière was exasperated. Due to misleading staff reports, he’d been under the impression that the squadron was delighted with the job. He’d stuck his neck out persuading the Cabinet Office and the Task Force command to allow the SAS this opportunity. A change of plan or a cancellation now would be highly embarrassing. He divined – or thought he divined – that the unit’s lack of zeal was down to OC John Moss.
At RAF Lyneham, waiting for the VC-10s that would take the unit on the first leg of their journey – to Ascension Island in the Atlantic – the squadron heard that Moss wouldn’t be coming with them. At midnight, de la Billière had summarily RTU’d him for his negative attitude, and replaced him with the Regiment’s 2IC, Major Ian Crooke, the ex-KOSB officer who’d served under Tony Jeapes during the first tour in Dhofar.
Moss had always intended to carry out his orders. He had simply contested the effectiveness of de la Billière’s plan.
Though de la Billière later harangued B Squadron over their attitude, and suggested obliquely that it had been ‘a near mutiny’, there wa
s never any question of insubordination. A call by one NCO to support Jake by offering to resign was ignored by the rest of the boys, even those who sympathized. Some called Jake a ‘coward’. Others, like Horsfall, appreciated that he’d shown great moral courage, but weren’t prepared to emulate him. ‘It wasn’t the Army, or Queen and country, or even my mates I went for,’ he wrote, ‘it was for me … to prove I was every bit as good as the rest of them.’4
On 20 May the ditched Sea King helicopter, half sunk in the lake near Punta Arenas, was discovered by a local forester, who reported it to the Chilean carabineiros. They promptly buried the evidence, but located the crew, who were flown to Santiago. In a press conference there at the British Embassy, Hutchings declared that the heli had been on a routine reconnaissance flight when she experienced engine trouble, and was unable to return to her ship. He had therefore sought refuge in the nearest neutral country.
In fact, the Argentine forces in Rio Grande had detected her approach, recognized her as hostile, and suspected that she had dropped an SAS team. The following day, twelve hundred Marines had swept the area on foot and in armoured personnel carriers. Meanwhile, Captain ‘M”s patrol had managed to make the escape rendezvous, from where they were flown to Santiago and hidden in safe-houses until the end of the war.
88. ‘Eleven, repeat eleven aircraft. Believed real’
The day before B Squadron arrived on Ascension, Sgt. Peter Ratcliffe jumped off a Sea King on to the deck of the assault-ship Intrepid, sailing with the British Task Force off the Falkland Islands. It was 2130 hours, and darkness was falling. A withering icy wind blasted across the heaving, ash-grey sea. The previous day, the Royal Navy assault force had steamed in from Ascension to link up with the carrier group. With them, on the landing-ship Fearless, came Lt. Col. Mike Rose and the 22 SAS Battle HQ. Most of the G Squadron personnel were holed up in covert hides on shore, observing enemy movements. The rest, with the bulk of D Squadron, had spent the afternoon trans-shipping equipment from the carrier Hermes, in preparation for the planned landing by the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marine Commandos at San Carlos Bay on East Falkland, due to kick off in three days. Ratcliffe’s D Squadron had been earmarked for a diversionary attack on the Argentine garrison at Darwin and Goose Green, to precede the landings.
The two ships were about a mile apart, and the Sea Kings, cross-decking men and stores, took about five minutes to make the trip. Most of the kit had already been transferred and stood like a mini-mountain range on Intrepid’s deck. Ratcliffe had chosen to take the penultimate flight, as he guessed the last one would be crowded. When his chopper cleared the deck, the last flight was hovering about seventy-five metres away. Suddenly, Ratcliffe heard one of his mates yell, ‘She’s gone down!’ Instantly, alarm klaxons wailed and the ship’s tannoy blared, ‘Crash teams, action stations!’
It was said later that the Sea King had been hit by a big seabird – possibly a storm-petrel, with a six-foot wing-span. Survivors remembered hearing a bang before the heli ditched. There were thirty men on board when she smashed into the waves, and only eight of them got out alive. The Sea King crumpled on impact, and the tail-section sheared off. The pilot and co-pilot punched out the cockpit doors and pitched themselves into an automatically inflated dinghy. In the hold, most of the SAS-men were trapped as the freezing water gushed in. One managed to inflate his life-jacket, which shot him out through the jagged gap where the tail had been. A few others got out through the main door, bursting up through the surface to cling on to the pilot’s dinghy.
The water was only one degree above freezing – so cold that by the time they were picked up, they were already slipping away with hypothermia. The Sea King had long since vanished into the deeps of the South Atlantic, taking with her twenty-two men, including twenty members of D and G Squadrons, and support elements. The death-toll included eight senior NCOs, with years of accumulated experience, among them two squadron sergeants-major. In one blow, more SAS-men had been killed than in Borneo and Dhofar put together – the most devastating single loss the Regiment had sustained since the Second World War. ‘It was,’ commented Ratcliffe, ‘a horrible way to die.’1
D Squadron had been the first SAS unit to go into action in the Falklands conflict, on Operation ‘Paraquat’ – the re-taking of South Georgia. On 21 April Capt. John Hamilton’s 19 Troop had been inserted on the island’s Fortuna glacier, but ran into a fifty-mile-an-hour blizzard. After taking five hours to cover half a klick, Hamilton had to request extraction. Of the three Wessex helicopters sent to lift them out, two crashed in the appalling conditions.
Four days later, though, a seventy-five-man assault force of SAS, SBS and Royal Marines landed on South Georgia, at Grytviken, a British Antarctic Survey station of white-walled houses and tin-roofed stores, nestling under vast granite tors veined in ice and snow. Backed up by a naval barrage from Antrim and Plymouth, they captured the base without a single casualty on either side. D Squadron SSM Lawrence Gallagher tore down the Argentinian flag and raised the Union Jack. Gallagher would be lost in the Sea King crash.
Now, as the frozen survivors were ferried on board Hermes, Ratcliffe saw the accident as divine retribution for the startling coup they’d brought off only three days before. ‘Whether it comes within hours or days,’ he wrote, ‘there is always a payback time.’2 The victory was the D Squadron raid on Pebble Island off the northern coast of West Falkland, the base for a squadron of Argentine ground-attack Pucara aircraft. The Pucaras would present a serious threat to British forces during the planned landing at San Carlos Bay.
The first phase of the op was an infiltration by two four-man patrols of D Squadron’s Boat Troop, dropped by Sea King choppers on West Falkland on the night of 11/12 May. Equipped with collapsible seventeen-and-a-half-foot Klepper canoes – a modern rubber-skinned version of the folbot – they trekked by night to the point nearest to Pebble Island, assembled the canoes, and paddled across the straits. While one patrol remained with the boats, four men led by troop-officer Captain ‘Ted’ crawled across boggy turf and through elephant grass to within sight of the airstrip. The patrol lay almost motionless in the grass for two days. At 1100 hours on 15 May, SAS battle HQ on Fearless copped a coded message from Boat Troop’s signaller. ‘Eleven, repeat eleven aircraft. Believed real. Squadron attack tonight.’3
When the Sea Kings ferrying the forty-five-man D Squadron raiding party touched down on Pebble Island, Captain ‘Ted’ was there to guide them to the target. Mobility Troop was to execute the raid, while Air Troop would hold off the Argentine garrison and Mountain Troop would stay in reserve. The original plan had been to wipe out the one-hundred-and-fourteen-strong enemy force in the area, as well as taking out the aircraft. The insertion had gone in late, though, due to weather conditions, and there was only time to hit the airfield.
The operation was commanded personally by D Squadron boss Major Cedric Delves, an introverted officer of the Devons & Dorsets. With the raiders was a team of forward fire-controllers from 29 Commando Regiment, Royal Artillery, whose task was to direct the twin 115mm naval guns on the destroyer Glamorgan, standing offshore. Glamorgan was covered from air-attack by the frigate Broadsword, and Hermes carried the helis that would make the extraction.
The SAS-men were cammed up and raring to go. They toted M-16 rifles, with three spare mags taped to the stock, and up to four hundred 7.62mm rounds apiece for the GPMGs. The commando gunners carried a three-inch mortar, and every SAS-man lugged two mortar-bombs, one high explosive, one white phosphorus. A few had with them LAW 66mm rocket-launchers, and the demolitions men had plastic explosives charges, modern equivalents of the Second World War Lewes bombs. As they set off across the bleak moorland, adrenalin surged through them.
For Ratcliffe’s Mobility Troop, the adrenalin rush quickly began to cool when they lost contact with Mountain Troop ahead of them. Instead of moving tactically, Delves had set up a cracking pace, at times breaking into a run, leaping over walls and obstacles. The raid
was deadlined for 0700 hours. If the squadron failed to make it back to the RV on time, they’d be stranded – the Sea Kings wouldn’t be able to extract them, because carrier Hermes would have steamed out of range.
When Mobility Troop reached the target area they discovered that, because of the delay, their prominent role had been usurped by Mountain Troop under Captain John Hamilton. Navigation was the most basic of SAS skills: members of the troop were disgusted with themselves for having got lost on a small island.
The aircraft were dispersed widely across the runway. At seven o’clock precisely, directed by Captain Chris Brown of the commando artillery, the guns of Glamorgan grumbled out of the darkness. 115mm shells caterwauled, guzzled air, scranched into the Argentine positions, spasmed apart in dazzling strokes. One shell scored a direct hit on the fuel-dump – thousands of litres of aviation-fuel blastwaved out in crimson and orange shrouds.
The commandos’ mortar popped, sowing the sky with spurts of white phosphorus that illuminated the area like a son et lumière show. Dark figures scurried in among the planes, two teams of seven men, spattering fuselage with Gimpie bursts, crouching to loose off 66mm LAW missiles that zonked into wings and tail-planes, or gouged slabs of tarmac off the runway. There was little return fire – the enemy seemed to be keeping their heads down. Two plucky Argentine soldiers took pot-shots at the raiders, but were cut down by Gimpie fire. In the eerie light of the white phos, one of the raiders was astonished to see two SAS sergeants lamping into each other with their fists – a long-standing feud had finally erupted in the least apposite of places.
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