The demolition teams darted forward to deal with the Pucaras; the aircraft’s wings stood so high that the SAS-men had to climb on each other’s shoulders to get at them. Troop officer John Hamilton and demo-man Tpr. Ray ‘Paddy’ Ryan, ex-Royal Green Jackets, accounted for two of the aircraft. Ryan, who earned the nickname ‘Pucara Paddy’ on the raid, would be lost when the Sea King went down.
Delves had given Hamilton only fifteen minutes to complete the task, but by the time forty-five minutes had elapsed, he was beginning to think he would never get the men back. Suddenly they came hurtling off the airstrip with the aircraft crepitating gas and flame behind them. A final shot from Glamorgan smashed into the ammo-dump, convulsing in a shock-wave. One of the men was hit in the leg by shrapnel. As Staff Sgt. Currass, an ex-RAMC medic, knelt to slap a field-dressing on the wound, the enemy set off a landmine that splatted turf and stones, hurling Cpl. Paul Bunker, ex-Royal Army Ordnance Corps, three metres into the air. Bunker hit the deck with only concussion, and was dragged off by his mates. Both Currass and Bunker would go down with the Sea King.
The squadron regrouped at the mortar-pit in all-round defence, then withdrew back to the LZ. At nine-thirty four Sea Kings chattered out of the night, and the raiders were aboard within half a minute. They were back on Hermes ten minutes after first light. The SAS had destroyed six Pucaras and five other aircraft. ‘There was now nothing left to interfere with the British landings at San Carlos Bay,’ Ratcliffe commented. ‘The mission had been an enormous success.’4
89. ‘Long nosed kamikazes’
On 21 May two battalions of the Parachute Regiment and three Royal Marine Commandos waded ashore at two beach-heads on San Carlos Bay. The previous night, D Squadron 22 SAS had tabbed across East Falkland to launch a barrage on the Argentine garrison at Darwin, to distract them from the landings next morning. Once in position, the SAS laid down so much flak from rifles, GP machine guns, Milan anti-tank missiles and three-inch mortars that the Argentines were convinced they were under attack by a full battalion, rather than just forty men.1
Next morning, while the Commandos and Paras were establishing their beach-heads, D Squadron was preparing to withdraw when an enemy Pucara came in low over the sea in a strafing run. As the aircraft roared overhead, Tpr. ‘Kel’, ex-New Zealand SAS, sighted up with a Stinger missile-launcher and let rip. The missile streaked after the aircraft, pierced her through the tail, and emerged the other side. The pilot ejected. The Pucara exploded in mid-air. As the troop watched the remains of the plane whiplash into the hills and disintegrate in smoke and debris, the men cheered. This was the first time any of them had seen a Stinger in action. A US-made heat-seeker missile, its existence was still classified. It had been acquired for the Regiment by a couple of SAS NCOs, through their contacts with Delta Force. The missiles had been parachuted into the sea with one of only two SAS-men trained to operate them, Staff Sgt. Paddy O’Connor, Irish Guards. O’Connor had been lost in the Sea King crash.
Unfortunately the current operator, ‘Kel’, hadn’t been trained to use the system. He’d picked up the basics from the manual but had forgotten that after firing, the launcher had to be recharged with compressed gas. When more Pucaras honed in over the squadron, he sighted up again. His next two rounds flew only twenty metres, blowing up so near to the SAS-men that they had to dive for cover. The Stinger missiles were worth fifty thousand pounds apiece, and Kel’s troop officer quickly ordered him to stop shooting.
Later that day, while D Squadron was tramping back to San Carlos Bay, one troop of B Squadron parachuted from Hercules C130s into the Atlantic, in dry-suits. Picked up in Gemini inflatables and transferred to Intrepid, they were destined to replace the D Squadron men lost in the Sea King accident. The rest of B were still on Ascension, awaiting the order to embark on Op Mikado. They’d become so frustrated with their on-off orders that some of them had taken to wearing false noses and headbands with the words ‘long nosed kamikazes’, inscribed in Japanese. Eventually, though, Mikado was scrapped, either because of the discovery of the ditched Sea King or because the RAF considered it impossible: it is known that one RAF pilot assigned to the mission suffered a nervous breakdown. In any case, much of the feared damage had already been done. By 25 May the Task Force had lost four more ships to the Argentine Air Force – battleships Ardent, Antelope and Coventry, and the cargo-ship Atlantic Conveyor.
G Squadron patrols had taken a low-profile but immensely important part in the campaign, observing enemy movements from covert locations on the islands. One patrol, led by Sgt. Scott Graham, who had been involved in the Ballysillan operation in Belfast, moved their observation-post every night, carrying fifty kilos of equipment, rations and ammunition.
The main problem was finding cover on the bleak moors of East Falkland, where there were no trees, bushes or natural depressions, and where under the soggy surface turf the ground was as hard as rock. Moving into position before first light, they dug fifteen-inch-deep shell-scrapes and covered them with chicken-wire, camouflaged with grass and heather. Inside these ‘coffins’ they could hardly move for fear of upsetting their camouflage – any disturbance in the ground might be spotted by enemy helicopters. They ate dry rations, and hardly spoke, even in whispers. The ground was freezing, and as their food became depleted, the men began to suffer from hypothermia and trench foot.
Scott’s patrol finally took up a position on a rise three miles from the main Argentine garrison at Goose Green. They dug a lying-up place on the lee-side of the hill, and a camouflaged OP on the crest, from where they could watch the base. They worked in twelve-hour stags, estimating enemy strengths, logging their activities, pinpointing the positions of storage-tanks, clocking the movements of vehicles and helicopters. By night, they would transmit the intel back to SAS Battle HQ on Fearless, in encoded messages. The data proved vital to the coming battle.
Another G patrol reported that the high ground covering the approaches to Port Stanley was poorly defended. This included a fourteen-hundred-foot hill called Mount Kent, on the route from the British beach-head to the capital. On Fearless, Mike Rose relayed the report to 42 Commando boss Lt. Col. Nick Vaux, and suggested that the Marines should take the hill. Vaux agreed. The SAS would go in ahead of them and secure the area.
Rose already had a D Squadron advance-party on the ground. When the rest of the squadron was flown in by Sea King two days later, though, they were mistakenly landed over twelve miles from the target. They had to be extracted, and were dropped in the Mount Kent area on 28 May, just as 2 Para were going into action at Goose Green, winning their legendary victory against the Argentine garrison.
On reaching the summit of the hill, the SAS party found that the defenders had cleared out in a hurry. They had dumped all their equipment, apart from weapons and ammunition. One company of 42 Commando was landed by Chinook helicopter three days later, with a 105mm field-gun. They secured the heights overlooking Port Stanley, for the main assault-force’s advance.
A fortnight later, on 13 June, the SAS launched its last major operation: a seaborne assault on Port Stanley harbour by troops from D and G Squadrons and half a dozen SBS-men, headed by Delves. The attack, in four rigid raider boats, was intended as a diversion for an assault by 2 Para on Wireless Ridge, overlooking the bay. It went wrong when the boats were caught in searchlights from an Argentine hospital-ship in the harbour and were hit by a massive volume of fire from the shore. The raiders turned tail and zipped off into the darkness. They took only three slight casualties, but all the boats were written off.
The following day, Mike Rose received a signal from the headquarters of the Argentine commander, General Menendez. He was ready to discuss surrender terms. Rose flew to Port Stanley in a Gazelle helicopter with his signaller and interpreter, but the pilot landed them in the wrong place. The three men were obliged to make their way through a quarter of a mile of Argentine defences, manned by nervous enemy troops, before reaching Government House. That night, though, Menende
z signed the surrender in the presence of British Commander, Land Forces, Major-General Jeremy Moore, Royal Marines.
By the end of June, the squadrons had returned to Bradbury Lines, in a mood curiously devoid of jubilation. The loss of so many men in the Sea King disaster had affected everyone, and for the Regiment, the worst of it was that they hadn’t died in action. ‘It seemed so cruel that they should have been killed in a helicopter crash,’ Scott Graham commented. ‘We all expect to lose one or two men on active service, but not twenty, snatched like that, their lives somehow wasted.’2
The dismal homecoming was made worse by an aura of recrimination. B Squadron felt they hadn’t been properly deployed, and had spent most of their time hanging around. The patrol sent to Tierra del Fuego had achieved nothing but the loss of a helicopter. The patrol-boss, Captain ‘M’, had resigned his commission after being hauled in front of a board of inquiry. Though most of the men didn’t know the full story, some felt his performance had been tantamount to cowardice.
D Squadron was criticized for its attempt to land on the Fortuna glacier on South Georgia, despite warnings about weather conditions – an action that resulted in the loss of two helicopters. D was also condemned for attempting a seaborne landing in Gemini inflatables, during which the engines of three of the craft failed. Two of the boats had been washed away, and the SAS-men had survived only by the skin of their teeth. The Gemini engines were known to be unreliable, but the unit’s real mistake, it was alleged, had been in trying to show off their boat-skills, when the Royal Navy could have landed them directly. The aborted raid on Port Stanley was also condemned for exposing the men to risk without any strategic advantage.
The SAS was lionized in the press, but underneath the media hype the Regiment knew that things hadn’t gone as smoothly as they should have done. Apart from the G Squadron surveillance ops, this war had been a reversal in the trend that had taken them away from the ‘traditional’ SAS role and increasingly into counter-insurgency and anti-terrorist operations. Hardly anyone currently serving in the SAS had fought this kind of war previously. They’d become unaccustomed to the turmoil and chaos that is an inevitable outcome of conflict on such a scale. Units had got lost, had been landed in the wrong place, had suffered a horrific air accident, had been swept away to sea in unreliable boats, had shot-up civilians, had made some poor decisions over the execution of operations; senior NCOs had indulged in fisticuffs in sight of the enemy. These were the realities of war, but they didn’t correspond to the conduct of the imaginary, idealized SAS that had been created in public consciousness.
Another factor that made the Falklands different was that there was no Regimental debrief. ‘The debrief is a crucial relief valve,’ wrote Ken Connor. ‘Once all the problems have been aired, you can put them behind you and get on with improving, evolving and changing your training to prevent any repetition of mistakes in the future.’3 The Regiment had scored some outstanding victories: the raid on Pebble Island, the capture of South Georgia, the diversionary attack on Darwin and the G Squadron surveillance patrols. A number of decorations had been awarded: a DSO for D Squadron OC Cedric Delves, two MMs, and three MCs – including a posthumous one for Captain John Hamilton, who had led the Pebble Island raid but had been killed on 10 June.
The feeling of gloom reached its nadir at a Regimental get-together at the Pal-Udr-Inn Club – the NAAFI – at Bradbury Lines, when Brigadier Peter de la Billière rose to deliver his final address to 22 SAS. He was stepping down as Director, and wanted to make some observations on the conduct of the recent campaign. After going over the Regiment’s successes, and cracking a few jokes no one laughed at, he turned to the subject that had evidently been preoccupying him: B Squadron’s ‘quasi-mutiny’. ‘He roundly denounced us,’ said Robin Horsfall, ‘as unwilling to do the job he had asked us to do.’4
There was dead silence in the room. The effect on men who had just gone through the most extensive conflict the British army had fought since Korea was not dissimilar to that of Jock Lewes’s notorious ‘yellow streak a yard wide’ speech to L Detachment, forty years earlier. ‘The hatred in the room was tangible,’ Horsfall recalled. ‘… I wanted to stand up and tell him to piss off: we had been willing to go from day one … We had tried to improve a ridiculous plan and had been denied by an arrogance that bordered on stupidity.’5
De la Billière then proceded to relate to the assembled Regiment the parable of Major Ian Fenwick, who had been killed driving into an ambush he’d been warned about, on Operation Gain in 1944. It was a singularly ill-chosen example: Fenwick’s action had not only been suicidal, it had also been influenced by faulty intelligence. It had gone against the very core of the Regiment’s values. Paddy Mayne had talked about ‘courage without rashness’: David Stirling himself had said that to be a casualty was ‘a disgrace’.
De la Billière’s tale was an astonishing display of condescension for an officer who’d spent much of his career in the Regiment, to men selected for their ability to think for themselves. They started to wonder if it was a joke. Some began to titter. The laughter grew in volume, and by the time he’d reached the part where Fenwick said, ‘Thank you, Madame, but I intend to attack them,’ and was shot in the head as he drove through the ambush, the whole Regiment was roaring with mirth. ‘Here was this man,’ said Horsfall, ‘trying to convince us that we too should have been that stupid.’6 Despite orders from the RSM to desist, they continued to hoot with laughter until de la Billière left the rostrum. He stalked out of the room, with derision ringing in his ears. ‘We’d had our moment,’ Horsfall commented. ‘The SAS had laughed DLB out of the door.’7
90. ‘A bloody milestone in the struggle for freedom’
For almost a decade after the Falklands conflict, the main concerns of 22 SAS were anti-terrorist duties, and operations in Northern Ireland. In 1987 the Regiment scored the British army’s greatest ever triumph against the Provisional IRA, at Loughgall in County Armagh.
Loughgall had the reputation of being the best-kept village in the Province. The birthplace of the Orange order, it had a population of only three hundred and fifty and was centred on a single main street, at the base of a steep hill that ran down from the Church of St Luke’s. One side of the main street was bordered by a football field, opposite which there was an RUC station – a single two-storey building ringed by a high mortar-fence. The police-post was operated on a part-time basis by a sergeant and five constables, who on Friday evenings closed up shop at 1840 hours.
At forty minutes past closing-time on Friday 8 May it was still light, and the village was full of the scent of apple blossom from the acres of orchards that surrounded it. Twenty-one-year-old Declan Arthurs, the son of a mechanical-plant contractor, drove a JCB excavator down the main street. Next to the driver rode twenty-nine-year-old Gerard O’Callaghan and twenty-four-year-old Tony Gormley, both of them hefting firearms. On the JCB’s bucket lay an oil drum containing two hundred pounds of Semtex, wired with two forty-second fuses.
The JCB was shadowed by a blue Toyota Hiace van carrying five other men, armed with assault-rifles. All eight were volunteers of the Provisional IRA’s crack East Tyrone unit. Their intention was to drive the excavator into the fence surrounding the RUC station, and detonate the charge.
The East Tyrone Brigade had been active against the security forces for a decade, and had been so successful it was nicknamed the ‘A Team’. Two years back it had captured the RUC station at Ballygawley, shooting dead two RUC constables and demolishing the place with a bomb. A year ago it had blown up the police-post at the Birches, Armagh, with an explosive-charge carried in the shovel of a digger. The strike on Loughgall would be a carbon copy of the Birches attack.
They had hijacked the JCB from a farmer named Peter Mackle earlier that evening, and a group of them was still holding his family hostage to prevent them from informing the police. They didn’t know that the police were already aware of the operation, from a source very close to them, an
d were waiting in ambush. With them were twenty men of 22 SAS.
For the SAS, this op was a crucial chance to make a ‘clean kill’. No attempt would be made to arrest the subjects. The SAS boss – one of the two staff-sergeants who ran the Ulster Troop – had even stationed men inside the vacant police-station together with police personnel from the HQ Mobile Support Unit, so that it could be claimed that the terrorists were threatening life, thus satisfying the rules of engagement. Other SAS-men were concealed around the building, and in a copse of trees at an oblique angle on the opposite side of the road. There were SAS ‘cut-off’ groups at both ends of the village, but no attempt had been made to seal off the tactical area, in case PIRA got wind of the trap.
The Ulster Troop had been reinforced by fifteen men of G Squadron, currently assigned anti-terrorist duties at Hereford. They were armed with two 7.62mm GP machine guns, Armalite M16s and Heckler & Koch G3 assault-rifles. They had been lying silently in cover for the past two days.
At the controls of the JCB, Arthurs noticed nothing amiss. He made one pass through the village. Everything seemed quiet. Behind a hedge, fifty metres away, Sgt. Scott Graham eased forward the safety-catch on his GPMG. ‘I could see the driver,’ he remembered, ‘… and standing either side of him were two men dressed in dark boiler-suits, their faces covered with masks. They were both carrying what I presumed were rifles.’1
On his second run, Arthurs rammed the vehicle into the fence. There was a crash of tangled steel – the fence buckled but didn’t break. The digger failed to break through, but the charge was powerful enough to damage the target even from this distance. As the three men leapt down, the Toyota Hiace van overtook them and jerked to a halt in front. Three IRA-men jumped out of the back doors and sighted-up their assault-rifles on the station. Among them was the operation commander, thirty-year-old Patrick Kelly, from Dungannon.
The Regiment Page 51