Scram! (48 page)

43
. HMS
Coventry
© John Ryall

44
. 847 Squadron rescue © Press Association Images

45
. Sea King and RFA
Sir Galahad
© Press Association Images

46
. RFA
Sir Galahad
© Tim Stanning

47
. HMS
Plymouth
© Rick Jolly

48
. Forward Operating Base at San Carlos © John Ryall

49
. End of the war © Harry Benson

50
. Pucara © Harry Benson

51
. Formation fly past © Harry Benson

52
. Arriving home © Jamie Guise

53
. Lieutenant Benson RN © Harry Benson

While every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, the author and publisher would be grateful for information about any material where they have been unable to trace the source, and would be glad to make amendments in further editions.

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a real labour of love. I started interviewing former colleagues in the summer of 2009. I am indebted to all who put up with my digging into ancient memories that many may have preferred to be left alone. Most said they would remember little. All remembered a lot. I am grateful for their cooperation and hope they will be proud of the end product. It's our story.

Thank you so much to my
junglie
and other aircrew friends and colleagues for generously allowing me to interview you and revisit 1982 together: Splash Ashdown, Arthur Balls, David Baston, Andy Berryman, Mike Booth, Mark Brickell, Chris Clayton, Stewart Cooper, Al Doughty, Mark Evans, Rob Flexman, Nick Foster, Ric Fox, Ian Georgeson, Sparky Harden, Willie Harrower, Paul Heathcote, Tim Hughes, Trevor Jackson, Dave Knight, Steve Larsen, Jack Lomas, Jan Lomas, Pete Manley, Paul McIntosh, Ralph Miles, Richard Morton, Nigel North, Dave Ockleton, Bill Pollock, Mark Salter, Reg Sharland, Pete Skinner, Jerry Spence, Ian Stanley, Tim Stanning, Simon Thornewill, Mike Tidd, Bill Tuttey, Ian Tyrrell, Peter Vowles, Roger Warden. Also a huge thank you to some key characters who gave me their valuable insights: Ed
Featherstone
, Rick Jolly, Julian Thompson. Thank you too to Georgina Reed for transcribing many hours of recordings.

I spent ages trying to work out how to take a load of interviews and make a story out of it. I am very grateful to Rowland White, author of
Vulcan
, who allowed me to grill him for an afternoon on the technical side of writing. I also had to work out how to organise telling my own first-person story alongside the third-person stories of my colleagues. What I hope I have produced is a book with the personal feel of what it was like to be a young Royal Navy
junglie
pilot at war.

Without a war diary to work with, and with very fallible memories of events nearly thirty years ago, I've had to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of individual stories and reconcile them with the available records. Oddly, the least useful have been the official squadron records, only some of which were available, but which provided only the barest outline of events. Perhaps this was because they were written by squadron junior officers like me. I am grateful to Anna Clark at the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeovilton, for providing me with a great starting point. More accurate and interesting were the few official reports of proceedings submitted by commanding officers. These gave a good flavour and some fascinating details. Thank you especially to Mike Booth for lending me his report of Wessex squadron activities and to Bill Pollock for his report of the incredible Sea King night-flying missions. And to those who dusted off their old action photos for the book, especially Arthur Balls, Mark Brickell, Stewart Cooper, Rick Jolly, Pete Manley, Jerry Spence, Tim Stanning and Simon Thornewill.

Pilots' log books were generally a very accurate source for dating particular sorties. Yet even these had
inconsistencies
. Two pilots flew their first sortie together in the Falklands but recorded it on different days. Another pilot managed to record the wrong airframe number for much of the war. By far the best written record is the extraordinary book
The Falklands Air War
by Rodney Burden et al (1986). It is dripping with details of the squadrons and individual aircraft on both sides. Without this resource I would have found it much harder to put together a timeline of events. By comparing this secondary source, official records and log books, I have been able to turn forty-five interviews and literally hundreds of vignettes into the story of the helicopter war in the Falklands.

I've also drawn from the following excellent works: Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins's still fresh and gripping
Battle for the Falklands;
Richard Hutchings's highly recommended personal account of the 846 Squadron night-flyers
Special Forces Pilot;
Rick Jolly's story of the
Red and Green Life Machine
; Nick van der Bijl's insightful view of the land campaign,
Victory in the Falklands
; Max Arthur's collection of heroic deeds,
Above All Courage
; and Roger Perkins's detailed account of
Operation Paraquat: The Battle for South Georgia
.

There are many more terrific
junglie
stories in John Beattie's wonderful collection
The View from a Junglie Cockpit
, published by and available from the Fleet Air Arm Museum. All of the interviews, records, spreadsheets, timelines, aircraft and combat details used for this book are now preserved in the Fleet Air Arm Museum's archives. If you visit the Museum – and you should – you will see half of the Wessex that I flew in the war (painted Zulu Mike on the side, it was coded X-Ray Lima in the Falklands). Pete Manley, Ric Fox and Dave Greet's Wessex, Yankee Sierra, is still intact and gets wheeled out on display
at
the Museum from time to time. It was the second Wessex to arrive in the Falklands.

A few final but crucial thankyous: to my agent Annabel Merullo for finding me a publisher; to Trevor Dolby at Random House who thought it good enough and then covered it in post-it notes telling me how to do it better; to Kate Johnson who edited the manuscript; to Nicola Taplin for putting it all together and finally to my family, for putting up with my erratic moods. It's been emotionally exhausting spending so much time with half of my brain stuck in 1982 revisiting my own and everybody else's experiences. I hope you enjoy reading our stories.

Harry Benson, March 2012

On my way to the Falklands as a newly qualified Wessex pilot. Twenty-one-year-old ‘Acting' Sub Lieutenant Harry Benson RN of the newly formed 847 Naval Air Squadron.

Half of my squadron sailed to the Falklands on the flat bottomed helicopter support ship RFA
Engadine
. The sea wasn't always as calm as this, just south of Ascension Island. At a painfully slow twelve knots, it took us four weeks to get from Plymouth to San Carlos. We could have swum faster.

Bill Pollock's ‘night flyers' were one of the keys to the British success in the Falklands. A last minute acquisition of seven sets of night vision goggles allowed four specially-adapted Sea Kings of 846 Squadron to fly SAS and SBS patrols in and out of the islands at night completely undetected.

Until early May, few of us thought the Falklands war would actually take place. What changed was the sinking of two ships. For the Argentines, it was the torpedoing of the
Belgrano
. For the British, it was the Exocet strike on HMS
Sheffield
, seen here with HMS
Arrow
bravely alongside.

My colleagues in Yankee Charlie were the only Wessex crew to take part in the D-Day landings. Their first task was to collect a paratrooper who had damaged his back. But within hours, they had attended to two shot-down helicopters, watched most of the air attacks by the Argentine air force, been strafed by a Mirage and finished their day with a dramatic rescue of two sailors from the icy sea next to the burning HMS
Ardent
.

On the day of the San Carlos landings, Simon Thornewill and his seven ‘day' Sea Kings of 846 Squadron disembarked over 900,000 pounds of stores and equipment and over 500 men. These two Sea Kings are operating from the rear of the two specially built flight decks on the liner SS
Canberra
.