Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ wanted to get as many ships as far south as possible in case an agreement ruled they could move no closer to the Falklands. There was certainly a sense of urgency. Before we had anchored, helicopters were ferrying out supplies, slung beneath the aircraft like huge shopping bags. In the distance Hercules could be seen taking off and landing at Wideawake airfield. Crewmen took the opportunity to drop a line over the stern and sat up all night, catching fish, including a shark which broke a rod in three places. The only excitement came when two chefs from a supply ship who were taking the air spotted what they thought was a periscope and for a couple of hours threw the fleet into pandemonium. Hermes and other ships went to action stations as frigates and helicopters pursued a solid sonar contact travelling at fifteen knots. ‘At that speed it’s got to be nuclear-powered,’ one officer said authoritatively. We all wondered if we had found a Russian submarine sneaking in for a close-up. Their Tupolev aircraft, after all, had for some time been brazenly buzzing the fleet taking photographs. But after some heavy ‘pinging’ with sonar it was decided the underwater object was a whale and the two chefs had been hallucinating. Whales, in fact, got a pretty hard time all the way down. They were always being mistaken for submarines and being depth-charged and torpedoed. It became so common to detect them that one of the first and few jokes of the war was ‘It’s all over lads. The whales have surrendered.’

      Instead of spending several days at Ascension, as planned, Invincible suddenly upped anchor and set off south on 18 April. Captain J.J. Black had said there was no Rubicon in the operation, but it suddenly seemed we had passed the point of no return and war appeared likely. The Captain was a master of the colourful, pithy phrase. Although at the outset he said ‘we’ll piss it’ he was undoubtedly concerned and had pinpointed the Super Etendards carrying Exocets as a major threat. A large, slightly balding man with sharp blue eyes, he had an American-style baseball cap with J.J. Black emblazoned across the back, which he sometimes wore on top of his white anti-flash hood, and drank tea from a mug with ‘Boss’ on the side. He was a thoughtful seaman who had seen service in Korea, Malaya and Borneo and had drawn up the rules of engagement for war. Apart from speaking German and French, he was teaching himself Spanish. Like many military men he saw the value of the press to help the war effort but was not happy if that press freedom strayed into sensitive areas. On one occasion he described us as one of his weapons systems in the fight against Argentina.

      The Captain said that Brilliant, Glasgow, Sheffield and Coventry had been waiting for us at Ascension but had moved south at speed ‘to stake out a line’ in case of a diplomatic settlement. We then sailed with Hermes, which Admiral Sandy Woodward had joined from Glamorgan, Broadsword, Alacrity and several supply vessels. The Task Force was moving south towards the Falklands to establish air and sea superiority before the amphibious forces followed, lessening the risk to unprotected troops.

      Many crewmen were surprised to find the journalists still on board after Ascension. Apart from the general assumption that we would abandon ship before things became dangerous, the most common question, always delivered with a note of incredulity, was if we had volunteered for the operation or had been ‘press-ganged’. When we replied we had not declined the offer, they treated us either as deranged or warmongers. The next question would be along the lines of ‘I suppose you blokes are being paid a fucking fortune to be out here?’ To deny it merely provoked disbelief.

      Soon after leaving Ascension we had our first encounter with Argentina. A Boeing 707 in military colours located the fleet before being intercepted by an armed Harrier. The early surveillance came as a surprise to the Task Force so far north and it was only the government warning that ‘appropriate action’ would be taken that stopped them after a few days. The tempo was now quickening and it seemed the government was ready for a full-scale attack if diplomatic talks failed. For some time the Captain had said there was concern about the Task Force having their hands tied but we saw no sign of this; only of resolution from the government or, perhaps more accurately, Mrs Thatcher.

      The fleet transferred to battle formation as we moved through the Roaring Forties, with three frigates and destroyers forming the spearhead or ‘picket’. In the centre of a defensive screen, the two carriers, dogged by their ‘goalkeepers’, Brilliant and Broadsword, sat like queen bees. On 25 April we picked up the first news of the retaking of South Georgia and learnt that the SAS and the SBS had landed on the island days earlier but had lost two helicopters in a blizzard. It was here that the SAS had called for extra hand-grenades and a box was flown in. When the soldier opened it he found tea cups.

      The SAS operation on South Georgia very nearly came unstuck. They had joined the Task Force at Ascension, D Squadron boarding the supply ship Fort Austin. They were followed by G Squadron, officered and manned almost entirely by members of the Household Division. In all 126 men were sent. The SAS headquarters stayed at the planning centre of the operation aboard HMS Fearless, even though until the landing several thousand miles separated the ship from the rest of the unit.

      On 18 April, fifteen men left a warship in five Gemini rubber boats to land on Grass Island within sight of one of the Argentine bases on South Georgia. The Geminis were powered by Johnson 40 outboard motors. They were considered notoriously unreliable and the SAS had complained about them for years. Three of the engines broke down on the journey ashore. One of the Geminis was swept away into the darkness by gale force winds and the three-man crew spent the night adrift before being rescued the following day by helicopter. The second Gemini crew managed to drag themselves on to the last piece of South Georgia before Antarctica and lay low for five days until they were sure the island was taken before they radioed for help. The third boat was towed ashore by the others and the nine men lay up signalling reports to the fleet. The intelligence the SAS provided persuaded them to go for a surprise attack on the Argentinian positions.

      The special services were to continue to play a vital role in the war. On 1 May, the first SAS and SBS patrols went on to the Falklands to test the lie of the land in advance of the Task Force assault. ‘Getting on the islands was a real psychological barrier,’ one of them recalled later. ‘No one knew how good they were or whether there wouldn’t be a reception party to scarf you up when you arrived. It was like being the first people on the moon. You didn’t know whether you were going to disappear into thirty feet of dust or find some hard standing.’

      Three patrols concentrated on Port Stanley. The remainder reconnoitred around Port Howard, Fox Bay, Goose Green and Bluff Cove. They hid during the day and at night moved in close to study the Argentinian defences coming within a hundred yards of their troops.

      Back on the ships, the daily intelligence briefs grew fatter as the SAS reports filtered back. Some of them were remarkably accurate, especially the picture they built up of the Argentine garrison at Stanley. Troop positions, artillery and armour were all exactly described. But there were also morale-boosting reports of dysentery, food shortages and near mutiny among the conscripts that were subsequently shown to be wide of the mark.

      For the SAS, the Falklands war was a return to the role that they were originally designed for by Colonel David Stirling in the Second World War – long-range operations behind enemy lines, and a diversion from the anti-terrorist operations and training of Third World armies that had preoccupied them for the preceding decade. At Pebble Island they showed they were still masters at it. The island had been identified by naval radar and Harriers as the main diversionary airfield for Argentine planes flying to Port Stanley from the mainland. Rear Admiral Woodward’s enthusiasm for the raid was only lukewarm at first, as he was preoccupied with the battle in the air. The first operation to put a patrol on the island was stood down shortly before the helicopter carrying the men was due to take off.

      The six-man patrol that landed on West Falkland on 7 May had to make a slow approach to avoid detection. The SAS commander was on the point of aborting the mission as the men were needed for pre-landing recces on East Falkland. Then at four o’clock on the afternoon of 12 May the patrol radioed through to say they had found the Argentinians. That night the rest of D Squadron was flown in. They marched for two hours across the island while a warship shelled the defenders’ positions. СКАЧАТЬ