Scram! (29 page)

Back at the camp after dark, Jack Lomas grabbed a bottle of whisky and wandered over to the aircrew's tent. ‘Drink and talk?' he said, handing over the bottle. It was the other main way of coping, when black humour just wasn't enough.

* * *

The flight out to the British hospital ship
Uganda
was to become a regular trip for the Wessex and Sea King crews throughout the war. But in a strange turn of events, Steve Judd, Ric Fox and Arthur Balls found themselves heading towards a very different hospital ship on the morning of Monday 31 May.

This time it was
Bahia Paraiso
, one of three hospital ships operated by the Argentines. Since the sinking of the
Belgrano
, they were the only Argentine ships anywhere near the Falklands. The British were keen to ensure that they were not breaching the neutrality given to them under the Geneva Convention and being used to bring in arms. During the war there were at least two unarmed inspections of Argentine hospital ships using British Lynx and Wasp helicopters, while the Argentines insisted on a reciprocal (though armed) inspection of
Uganda
.

Judd, Fox and Balls began the trip by taking Yankee Tango over to the assault ship HMS
Fearless
to collect an inspection team comprising a Royal Navy commander and six Royal Marines. The brief was to fly at low level down to the far south of East Falkland, across Goose Green and over the flat boggy land known as Lafonia, board the Argentine ship and conduct the inspection. It was a fifty-mile transit over land still occupied by the Argentine forces who had been helicoptered in to the south of Goose Green towards the end of the battle.

There was a very real risk of bumping into a Pucara. It was only three days since Pucaras had shot down the Royal Marine Scout. The British were still uncertain whether Pucara were operating or not from other airfields. In fact they were now only operating from Stanley. But the risk and the fear remained real. Pucaras dominated
conversations
in the aircrew camps each evening. Mark Evans had already escaped one head-on encounter. An encounter over the open terrain of Lafonia would be unlikely to turn out so well.

My 845 Squadron colleagues – Arthur Balls (left), Ric Fox (middle) and Steve Judd (right) – look rather more relaxed than they felt after taking an inspection team on board the Argentine hospital ship
Bahia Paraiso
. They had no choice but to shut down because their Wessex was chained to the deck as soon as they landed.

White with a large red cross painted on it, the
Bahia Paraiso
was easy enough to spot from a long way off in the sea beyond the flat Lafonia landscape. The ship appeared to be a converted icebreaker, capable of carrying two Puma helicopters on its large flight deck. Judd hovered alongside the ship until a flight-deck director came out to
wave
him across. As soon as Yankee Tango landed, the Argentine flight-deck crew rushed out to lash the helicopter to the deck with chains. It was a completely normal procedure, but it gave Judd no choice but to shut down. Uncertain what to do next, Judd, Fox and Balls got down from the aircraft and asked a flight-deck crew member to take a photo of the unusual scene. They were then ushered into a crew room.

For over an hour, they sat on one side of the room face to face with their Argentine hosts, waiting for the inspection team to complete their tour. The young Argentine junior officers were dressed in smart naval whites; the
junglies
were in their well-worn and well-flavoured green combats, armed with loaded 9mm Browning pistols. The welcome they received was civil and the coffee was good. The only interruption was the need to wave to a passing Sea King sent to check they were alright.

As soon as the inspection team returned, the crew climbed back into their Wessex and flashed up. It was exactly as if they were starting up on a British ship: once the rotors were going, the flight-deck crew ran in to remove the lashings; Judd signalled that he wanted to take off; the flight-deck officer waved his arms upwards and the Wessex lifted away.

On the way back, the risk of attack by a Pucara remained the same. Yet somehow the crew felt immune. They had landed on an Argentine ship and it was completely normal. The whole episode had felt surreal. The team leader plugged in to chat to them on the intercom. He had found some large boxes in the ship's hold that his team hadn't been able to shift. Otherwise they had found nothing that shouldn't be there. He didn't say as much, but it was clear they had been looking for Exocet.

Chapter 12

Reinforcements: 1–7 June 1982

THE BATTLE FOR
Goose Green may have been instigated by politicians in Britain worried by losses and impatient for success, but the victory by 2 Para against such a weight of Argentine opposition was good for morale. What it also showed was that Argentine forces would be no pushover. Even if they had failed to counterattack against the British landings at San Carlos, they had defended their own positions with courage and vigour. The same could be expected of their defences, dug into the hills to the west of Stanley
.

For the British forces, the overwhelming problem was how to advance sufficient troops and equipment over fifty miles of inhospitable Falkland terrain between San Carlos and Stanley without a significant proportion of the anticipated helicopter support. The sixteen helicopters currently available were never going to prove adequate. A further thirty helicopters were due to arrive imminently in
Atlantic Causeway,
along with the additional troops of 5 Brigade brought south on the
QE2.
Reinforcements were on their way. The question was whether the Argentines could do
to
Causeway
what they had just done to her sister ship
, Conveyor.

For the week after the landings, the commando helicopters had been used almost exclusively for two main roles: building up supplies at San Carlos by day, and inserting special forces teams around the islands by night. There was little or no spare capacity to move any of the 3 Brigade units or their heavy equipment forward, let alone build up the supplies of ammunition and food they would need for the final attack. The loss of
Atlantic Conveyor
had forced the decision to send 3 Para and 45 Commando off eastwards towards Stanley and to send 2 Para off southwards to fight at Goose Green – all of which had to be done on foot.

The relatively benign weather of the first week had proved a double-edged sword. For the troops in San Carlos, conditions were cold and wet, much like Dartmoor in February, but manageable. The flip side was that frequent clear skies exposed the landings to fearsome attacks from the air. Keeping most of the supply ships out of harm's way during the day meant shuttling them in and out of the anchorage at night, thus slowing the process of unloading.

For Jack Lomas, now in charge of the Wessex FOB Whale at Old Creek House, the way his helicopters were being directed was causing him to lose sleep. His aircrew were becoming deeply frustrated watching the Royal Marines and other troops below them marching across the rough Falklands terrain with heavily laden bergens, yet unable to give them a lift. The troops in turn were similarly frustrated hearing the sounds of helicopters all around and yet getting little or no support. Surely some of the air assets could be released from unloading ships.
The
Exocet attack on
Atlantic Conveyor
had cast a long shadow over the land campaign.

Still 2,000 miles north of the Falklands, my own journey south on RFA
Engadine
with the rest of 847 Squadron remained painfully slow. At least my deck-landing skills had improved dramatically. I no longer bounced from wheel to wheel in ground resonance on landing. And my personal fitness was ensured by days of flight-deck hockey, hundreds of press-ups and sickening star jumps, and miles of running around the outside deck of the ship. I had even given up smoking.

Being a merchant ship, we had no fixed-weapon systems on board. However, we had a load of machine guns, rifles and rocket launchers. Air raid warning drill meant spreading our most valuable cargo – the twenty-eight pilots and aircrew – around the ship while the rest of the crew and engineers pointed as many weapons as possible outwards at any incoming threat. It still seemed more of an irritant than anything else when the alarm was sounded during lunch. They hadn't even waited until we finished our apple crumble.

The siren went off, followed by the dramatic announcement ‘Hands to action stations. Hands to action stations. Assume NBCD State One Condition Zulu'. NBCD stood for Nuclear Biological Chemical and Damage Control. My adrenalin flowed as we all rushed down corridors, bolting watertight doors behind us to get to our assigned stations. I waited for the call ‘This is for exercise'. It never came. This time it was for real.

My action station was in a briefing room with Lieutenant Ray Colborne, a lovely man and experienced Wessex pilot who had done everything and been everywhere. If there was anything a junior officer like me ever needed to know
about
matters Wessex or matters Navy, the first person to ask was ‘Uncle Ray'. Despite being immensely professional and skilled in the air, he had a very relaxed view of naval life on the ground. Amongst the least physically fit of all
junglie
pilots, and a heavy smoker, passing his annual medical check was always touch and go. ‘You see Doc,' he'd say, ‘we only have a limited number of heartbeats in our life. I just don't want to use mine up too quickly.' Humour, popularity and experience usually saved the day. A bottle of whisky left on the table undoubtedly helped.

A dozen other senior and junior ratings were stationed with us. As Colborne and I sat in the corner, I became increasingly scared. My worries escalated and I told him what I was thinking: ‘This is bloody great. We are stuck in a tin can. Bombs or missiles will just come straight through the sides. We can't see anything. We can't fire back. We've got no chance.'

Very surreptitiously and quietly, Colborne leaned over to me and spoke through gritted teeth: ‘You listen to me. Everybody in here is shitting themselves. There are sailors younger than you – eighteen, nineteen – who are looking at you. You're an officer. So get a grip. Be a man. Live with the fear and show some gumption.'

Colborne's wise words would ring in my ears for the whole of the war. It was a powerful lesson that I have never forgotten.

Mike Booth's action station, as squadron boss, was on the upper deck. He got outside just in time to see an Argentine air force Boeing 707 pulling away at low level, having overflown and identified
Engadine
at less than 500 feet. Booth could clearly see the light blue Argentine air force markings down the side. It was an astonishing sight in the middle of nowhere. The Boeing jet then peeled away and disappeared over the horizon.

One of our Royal Marines was on duty manning a machine gun, mounted on the upper-deck railings. Booth was annoyed. Nobody had thought to fire at the big airliner, yet they could have been rolling bombs out of the back. ‘Why didn't you shoot at it?' he berated the gunner unfairly. Although it would have been nice to have bagged a 707, the rules of engagement were less than clear. London never answered Booth's subsequent request for clarification.

Recovering from the surprise and shock, Booth went straight to the bridge of
Engadine
. ‘Look,' he asked Captain Freeman, the master, ‘could I suggest as an initial reaction we do about a twenty-degree detour on our way down to the TEZ just to open our range from the Argentine coastline?'

‘Yes,' Freeman replied, ‘that's sensible.'

Two hours later,
Engadine
received a flash signal suggesting that the ship alter course by twenty degrees. ‘Not bad for a little aviator,' thought Booth.

While the Paras were fighting it out at Goose Green on 27 May, the Scots and Welsh Guards had been in the relative calm of Grytviken harbour in South Georgia, transferring from the luxury of the
QE2
to the merely comfortable
Canberra
and
Norland
. Along with the 1/7th Gurkha Rifles, these were the reinforcements of 5 Brigade. Their arrival in the Falklands was now only days away.

On the same day, other reinforcements were arriving in the Total Exclusion Zone, much closer to the Falklands. Following their misadventures on Fortuna Glacier and as prison guards, Mike Tidd's flight had taken two replacement Wessex from Ascension and sailed south once again on RFA
Tidespring
. Having got within sight of the Falklands, it seemed extraordinary to Tidd that their badly
needed
commando helicopters weren't being sent into San Carlos straight away. Although much of the tasking was undoubtedly vital – such as transferring weapons from the RFA supply ships to HMS
Hermes
and other warships – anti-submarine Sea King helicopters were available, even if they too were operating around the clock. The fact was that managing limited British air assets was a tricky balancing act.