Eye of the Storm (20 page)

In the light of the Argentinian presence on South Georgia after 19 March, and of increased activity by the Argentinian Navy, the Falkland Islanders had become increasingly afraid of being invaded. By 1 April the Governor, Hunt, had been informed that what was almost certainly an Argentinian invasion force was on its way to the islands, and that day the officer commanding the Royal Marines in Port Stanley sent his men to guard key landing sites close to the capital and its airport. He was perfectly well aware, however, that in the event of an all-out invasion his men could not possibly hold back a large enemy force equipped with heavy weapons, helicopters and vehicles, and backed by air cover.

Nevertheless, when the Argentinians landed in the early hours of 2 April, the Royal Marines were waiting for them. Massively outnumbered, they had not the slightest chance of halting the heliborne and amphibious landings, which the Argentinians had codenamed ‘Rosario’. Yet for three hours the tiny detachment put up a tremendous fight around Government House until around 0800 hours, when the main enemy landing force bringing heavy support began disembarking in Port Stanley harbour. By 0830, as Argentinian guns and troop carriers began to come ashore, the Governor realized that further resistance could only result in heavy casualties among the Royal Marines, and possibly among civilians as well. He therefore ordered a surrender. The Marines had killed at least two of the enemy and damaged a landing craft, but had suffered no casualties themselves.

In Britain next day, the newspapers carried pictures of the Royal Marines who had defended Port Stanley lying face down beneath the weapons of their Argentinian captors. This marked the point at which the British people began to take Argentina’s disgraceful military adventure seriously. True, few of those people cared much for the Falklands Islands, but they cared a great deal that British subjects, and in particular British troops, should not be attacked and humiliated by the servants of a despicable foreign dictatorship. This failure to understand either British anger or British resolve was probably the greatest single error made by Galtieri and his fellow members of the junta. The Argentinian government also gambled on the fact that Britain was too far away to be able to do anything effective to reverse the takeover of the Falklands, and certainly too far to take military action. In this they had not only seriously overplayed their hand, but had seriously underestimated the determination of the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who felt keenly not only the national humiliation, but also the monstrous moral wrong done to British subjects and sovereign British territory. Finally, Argentina’s ruling junta also failed to comprehend that success in a manifestly just war could only strengthen politically Mrs Thatcher and her government of three years.

One of that government’s first actions, once the paralysis engendered by the shock of the Argentinian invasion had dissipated, was to agree to the immediate dispatch of a task force to retake the Falklands and South Georgia, something emphasized by the Prime Minister to the people of Britain and to the Falkland Islanders – indeed, to the whole world – in her statements on television. Galtieri had sown the storm; he was about to reap the whirlwind – or rather, his military forces were.

On 5 April, three days after the Argentinians had invaded the Falklands, the SAS was on its way to war. It had been decided to deploy two squadrons, D and G, with the former leaving immediately and G Squadron some time later, to join the Task Force at sea in the South Atlantic. As I sat trying to sleep the hours away aboard the RAF VC10 flight from Brize Norton in Oxfordshire to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, I couldn’t help grinning. I had good reason, for if it hadn’t been for British Army red tape and all the usual timeserving rubbish about having ‘to go through proper channels’, I would have been festering in a Birmingham drill hall, waiting to go back to Hereford in two years’ time, where I was due to take over as troop staff sergeant of Mobility Troop. Instead, I was flying out to war in the company of my fellow professionals.

When the Falklands crisis blew up, I was stationed in Birmingham on a two-year posting to 23 SAS, one of the Regiment’s two Territorial Army units, as a permanent staff instructor. It is a sad fact that the TA SAS tends to attract numbers of Walter Mittys: survivalists in camouflage gear, beer-bellied bouncers and muscle-bound thugs who think they are Kelly’s Heroes and Rambo all rolled into one. Some of these characters arrive carrying combat knives in their socks, and boast that they are kung-fu experts and all the rest of the macho rubbish. The TA has its own Selection, however, and these headbangers who turn up could not run around the block, let alone successfully complete SAS Selection. A part of my job with 23 SAS was to make sure that they never again came through the drill-hall doors. I can’t say that it was a job I was particularly happy in, but it would be two years before I could go back to Hereford and take over as a troop staff sergeant. There was nothing I could do about it.

On Friday, 2 April, the day when the Argentinians invaded the Falkland Islands, the 23 SAS unit I was with was on an exercise at Otterburn training camp in Northumberland. Back in the Birmingham drill hall on Sunday afternoon, I was having a shower when in walked the adjutant to tell me that D Squadron, 22 SAS – my squadron – was leaving for the Falklands on the Monday morning.

While we had been playing soldiers in Northumberland, the rest of my friends were being briefed by the commanding officer of the SAS, Lieutenant-Colonel Mike (now General Sir Michael) Rose. And next day an advance party was to fly out to Ascension, the equatorial island which was to become a halfway house and main base for the Task Force then being assembled. The really bad news, however, was that D Squadron had asked for Killer Denis, who was now the permanent staff instructor with the 23 SAS TA unit in Leeds, to be returned to Hereford so that he could go with the squadron to the Falklands. ‘What about me?’ I asked. ‘Why him and not me?’ The adjutant told me that D Squadron wanted Denis because of his Boat Troop experience. Ironically enough, he had only gained that experience because when he and I joined the Regiment, I persuaded the D Squadron commander to give me Denis’s place in Mobility Troop.

I phoned Hereford and spoke with SSM Lawrence Gallagher, a good soldier and an even better guy, who was later to be killed during the Falklands campaign. He passed me on to the squadron OC, Major Cedric Delves, who told me that he already had eighty-four names for eighty places on the VC10 that was leaving the next day. He would, though, he added, see what he could do. I knew that the OC was quietly fobbing me off in a nice sort of way, but I was still determined to go.

As it happened, I had offered to drive the training officer and the RSM back to Hereford that afternoon. While I was waiting for them, I chanced to overhear the CO of 23 SAS speaking on the phone in his office. He was talking to Denis, who had just told him that he was leaving Leeds and going back to Hereford to join D Squadron for the Falklands. Spluttering with rage, the CO told him, ‘You can’t do that. I’m a colonel and I’m in charge. You work for me. You stay where you are.’

I was waiting outside the CO’s office until he finished his telephone conversation with Killer Denis, at which point I was going to ask for my release from 23 SAS and to be returned to D Squadron. I was fairly confident that the answer would be ‘yes’, as I had established an excellent rapport with the CO. Then suddenly he charged out of his office, obviously seething with anger. Seeing me he exploded: ‘Billy, Billy, it’s not right. They shouldn’t treat me like this. I’m a colonel.’ To which I said, ‘Quite right, Boss,’ because I knew that it was neither the time nor the place to say what I wanted to say. Back in the office, the RSM had taken over the receiver and told Denis to stay put or he’d be in a whole bundle of trouble.

Once back in Hereford I went straight to the camp. By now Peter de la Billière, who was a brigadier at the time, had got wind of the squabble. He had found out from Birmingham that Denis had been directly ordered to Hereford, instead of the request going through the proper channels. What lay at the heart of this row over a piece of army bureaucracy was the fact that when a regular SAS soldier goes to the Territorial Army, he is actually posted to the TA unit. If he then goes to war, he goes with either 21 or 23 SAS, the respective TA regiments. Army formalities dictated that the CO, 22 SAS, should have approached the CO of 23 SAS and asked him if it was okay for them to get Denis back, because of his specialist expertise. If the squadron OC had then promised to send another man to replace Denis in Leeds in the morning, the CO of the TA regiment would certainly have agreed to let Denis go. However, when he learned from Denis himself about the transfer back to Hereford the CO of 23 SAS became extremely angry and called the Brigadier, de la Billière, who in turn had words with the CO of 22 SAS. As a result Denis’s departure was categorically countermanded. Which in turn meant that I still had a chance …

All the guys were in the D Squadron Interest Room waiting for the briefings when I arrived in camp on Sunday afternoon. They all asked if I was going with them, and I told them that I didn’t know. Then I happened to glance out of the window and saw Mike Rose talking to some of the men. So I went outside and just stood there, as close to him as I could get. Eventually he finished his discussion and, noticing me, turned and asked, ‘All right, Billy?’ I replied that I was, whereupon – because he knew I’d been posted to the TA – he said, ‘What the hell are you doing here, anyway? You should be in Birmingham.

‘Look,’ he added. ‘I’ve just had one rocketing over Denis and I’m not having another one over you. So just get into the aircraft tomorrow and go with your squadron.’

‘I can’t do that, Boss,’ I replied, looking, I hoped, suitably crestfallen. He looked at me rather oddly and asked, ‘Why not?’ To which I craftily answered, ‘Because I have to be approached and officially asked for by you.’

The CO looked at me for a moment. ‘Offer me something,’ he said, after a while.

‘I’m a Spanish speaker.’

‘Bollocks!’ he said in disbelief. And with that he marched off to the office and asked the squadron second-in-command if I spoke Spanish. When the 2IC confirmed that I did, Mike Rose told him to contact the Brigadier and ask if Ratcliffe could go with D Squadron because he spoke Spanish. De la Billière cleared it immediately. So that was how I came to be aboard the RAF VC10 that carried the squadron on that long flight to Ascension Island.

On Monday, before we left for Brize Norton, we were given a send-off briefing by Brigadier de la Billière. His final words were, ‘Don’t forget to keep your bergen weight below forty-five pounds.’ As it turned out, however, I was later to wish that I’d found some extra space, at least for food, because we were sometimes so hungry in the Falklands that I’d have eaten my leather belt. Furthermore, because of the atrocious weather conditions we had to face and the tasks we carried out, our kit seldom weighed less than 85 pounds, and more often than not 100.

There were eighty men aboard the flight to Ascension, sixty SAS and twenty support staff. In a sense it was a flight into the unknown, because we didn’t know at the time that we were off to a real scrap. We each had a bergen and a canvas holdall. In the bergen was a sleeping bag, webbing (belt kit) and spare clothing, and there was more kit in the holdall. Also loaded into the aircraft were weapons, ammunition, rations, stores, and all sorts of other equipment. We had been issued with everything we might need. Not for nothing is the SAS the best-clothed and best-equipped regiment in the world.

And there, among the rest of the squadron and the mass of stores, was I, quietly grinning at the fact that army red tape and my ability to speak Spanish had got me a seat on the plane. Meanwhile poor Denis was stuck in Leeds playing soldiers with the weekend warriors. I had good reason to grin, for the real irony of the situation was that, in 1980, Denis and I had attended the same Spanish course at a technical college. As the cliché has it, it’s a funny old life.

The last thing I remember before drifting off to sleep during that interminable flight was touching the top left-hand pocket of my camouflage jacket and feeling my rosary beads. The thread stringing them together had perished and finally broken, and I now kept the simple little black beads in a plastic packet. It didn’t matter. It was enough that I knew they were there.

Chapter Nine

H
ARD
tropical light lit up the inside of the VC10 as it dropped between puffballs of white cumulus to land on the seamless, black-tarmac runway the Americans had laid for the transports supplying their missile-and satellite-tracking station on Ascension Island. Outside, although it was early morning, the heat haze rose in shimmering lines from the rocks, and a covey of partridges whirred away to safety. It looked a barren, arid, miserable place.

The flight from RAF Brize Norton to Ascension, a 34-square-mile speck of volcanic rock in the South Atlantic, 1,400 miles off the coast of West Africa, had taken eight hours. The nearest land was St Helena, an island some 1,200 miles to the south-west which, with Ascension, Tristan da Cunha and several smaller, uninhabited islands, forms the British territory of ‘St Helena and dependencies’. It was on St Helena that Napoleon Bonaparte was kept in exile after his final defeat in 1815 until his death in 1821. I remember thinking that if St Helena was as lively as Ascension, then the late Emperor could not have had much to occupy his mind.