Scram! (15 page)

Skimpy shorts were very much the fashion in the 1980s. When we weren't flying, my colleagues on 847 Squadron and I played endless games of deck hockey on the flight deck of RFA
Engadine
.

The air and sea temperature rose noticeably as we approached the equator. It was a delight and a distraction to lean over the guard rail and watch the flying fish darting out from the side of the ship. Every now and then we would spot a shark or giant stingray from the air. Passing through the equator inevitably meant paying our
traditional
dues to King Neptune for first-timers like me. This involved a thoroughly unpleasant and humiliating ‘crossing the line' ceremony on the flight deck. Our duty was to bow down before Neptune, the bearded Neil Anstis wearing blue paint, long dangly hair and a thoroughly unattractive dress-like garment. We were then made to drink a foul brown concoction that included alcohol, chocolate and pepper, and were then sprayed with a disgusting fluid of origin unknown.

Heavy drinking on this day, and throughout the entire journey south, was almost inevitable. The party stopped only when Mike Booth decided to close the bar a few days before we reached the Total Exclusion Zone (TEZ) around the Falklands.

During the second week of May, Sea Harrier operations in the TEZ were constrained by persistent poor visibility, low cloud, rain and fog. In the early hours of Thursday 6 May, two Sea Harriers on night patrol from
Invincible
were vectored to investigate a fast-moving low-level contact. Having descended toward sea level, nothing was heard or seen of them again. It was presumed that they had collided. Following the death of Nick Taylor and the Exocet attack on
Sheffield
, the loss of two more Sea Harrier pilots, John Eyton-Jones and Al Curtis, was a terrible blow.

On 9 May, Sea Harriers crippled an Argentine fishing trawler, the
Narwhal
, suspected of intelligence gathering. Cannon fire from both jets ripped great holes in the trawler above and below the waterline. Two bombs were dropped but failed to arm. Had they done so, the trawler would have blown apart. Two
junglie
Sea Kings were launched from
Hermes
along with a radar-fitted anti-submarine Sea King as guide. They stopped by
Invincible
to pick up a boarding party of SBS troops along the way.

After a 150-mile transit directly towards the Falklands, Bill Pollock and his co-pilot Lieutenant Dick Hutchings RM in the lead Sea King arrived to a scene of desolation. The trawler was stopped in the water; there was nobody on deck. The ship looked lifeless. After a quick circuit, Pollock hovered over the apparently empty craft, despatching their SBS troops onto the deck by rope. It soon became clear that there would be no resistance from the ship's crew. They were hiding below decks, clearly in fear for their lives. One crew member had been killed.

With the ship slowly sinking, the Sea Kings began to winch the surviving crew, body bag and SBS troops on board. The first two Sea Kings set off straight away while Pollock, Hutchings and aircrewman Doc Love were still winching their mix of British and Argentine passengers on board. After such a long time getting there and then hanging around, fuel in Pollock's Sea King was becoming very tight indeed. Worse, an anxious radio discussion with
Invincible
revealed that the carrier was fifty miles further away than expected. The aircraft was simply not going to make it back. In all there were twenty people on board. One way or another, they were going to need rescuing.

The Type-42 destroyer, HMS
Glasgow
, sister ship of the
Sheffield
, was instructed to head at high speed towards the Sea King. Pollock ran through his calculations again, realising that it was still unlikely to be enough. They would be swimming. There was one radical solution that might help. Pollock remembered an incident from a few years back when he was flying a Wessex. He had been caught out a long way from his ship with a diminishing supply of fuel. The aircraft manual claimed that, in an emergency, shutting down one engine would use up less fuel. The working engine would compensate by taking up the strain, but it wouldn't be double. There was no real problem
flying
on one engine. But if you have two engines, you should use them. This was very definitely an emergency. It had worked in the Wessex. Now it was time to see if it would work in the Sea King.

Holding their collective breath, Pollock and Hutchings went through the procedure for shutting down an engine in flight. Miles from anywhere and with so many lives at stake, it was a nerve-racking experience. The crew watched in awe as the working engine took up the slack. Overall fuel consumption dropped by a quarter, exactly as promised. It just might give them the extra miles they needed.

As the needles on the fuel gauges edged their way remorselessly towards zero, HMS
Glasgow
came into sight, steaming straight at them. Pollock turned the helicopter onto final approach while the other engine was restarted to give them the extra power they needed for landing. The flight deck of a Type-42 destroyer is designed for the much smaller Lynx. Sea Kings are not cleared for landing for several reasons: there's not enough room on the deck; there's no margin for error to prevent the helicopter blades from smashing into the ship's hangar; and the deck is not stressed for the extra weight of a Sea King. But far out in the South Atlantic with just seconds of fuel remaining, the options were to attempt an unorthodox landing on
Glasgow
or ditch in the sea and hope to survive.

The ship was pitching around in the swell. With guidance from the flight-deck crew, Pollock lowered the Sea King onto the deck, holding power on in a ‘wheels-light hover' so as not to put its full weight on the deck. From the cockpit it looked awfully tight. And it was. The wheels just held on the outer edges. The blades were just feet from the hangar.

The flight-deck crew now rushed in with the fuel hose and plugged into the side of the Sea King. Pollock lifted
back
off the deck into a hover to continue the refuel. With huge relief, the two pilots watched the fuel needle creep slowly upwards. The passengers never even knew how close it had been.

On board
Fearless
there had been considerable debate as to whether to make an amphibious assault on East Falkland or establish a beachhead and airfield on West Falkland. San Carlos was chosen mainly because the surrounding hills provided protection for the landing ships against air attack. However, several threats and obstacles needed to be overcome before the landings could take place. The Sea Harrier attacks on Goose Green had the unintended consequence that the surviving Argentine Pucara aircraft had been moved across to the grass airstrip at Pebble Island on the north side of West Falkland. Just minutes flying time from San Carlos, these aircraft from Pebble Island had the capacity to seriously disrupt a successful landing.

On the night of Tuesday 11 May, Nigel North and his crew took off from
Hermes
in a solo Sea King. It was pitch black and overcast. In the cabin of the aircraft was an eight-man SAS observation team and their canoes. Using instruments and night vision goggles, the Sea King flew low over the sea towards Pebble Island on West Falkland. Without modern satellites or beacons, the on-board equipment inevitably drifted off a little during flight. This time the pilots used the promontory of Cape Dolphin on East Falkland as their reference point to update their navigation equipment. The Sea King flew onward across Falkland Sound dropping to wave-top height in the darkness.

In order to avoid alerting the Argentine troops at Pebble Island with the sound of the helicopter, the SAS team were to be dropped off ten miles away. The team had brought
two
canoes with them in order to cross a narrow strait onto the island itself. But once on the ground, it became obvious that the size of the crashing waves at the planned crossing point would make launching the canoes impossible. The Sea King lifted them quickly on to their alternate drop-off point before covertly flying back to
Hermes
in the blackness. Bad weather caused further delays and it was only forty-eight hours later that the SAS managed to report back to
Hermes
the presence of eleven enemy aircraft on Pebble Island.

On board
Hermes
, it was a nervous time for the Sea King crews waiting for their first active encounter with the enemy. All of the previous night-time missions onto the Falkland Islands had been for reconnaissance. The next mission would be to fly into battle.

On Friday 14 May, after a false start the previous night,
Hermes
and her two escorts,
Broadsword
and
Glamorgan
, closed to just forty miles from Pebble Island in order to give the heavily loaded Sea Kings as much flying time as possible in the strong winds and heavy seas. The huge amount of day-flying done at Ascension and night-flying on the islands ought to have taken its toll on the Sea Kings. Frankly it was amazing that all four night-flying aircraft were able to fly at all.

To save space on the flight deck of
Hermes
, already crammed with Sea Harriers, the Sea Kings remained beneath in the hangar with their rotor blades folded back. Spreading the blades back out again would have to be done carefully to avoid damaging them. High winds lashing the carrier's flight deck now made this impossible. Yet the mission had to go ahead somehow. Three of the four Sea Kings started their engines and spread their blades unconventionally inside the hangar before being taken up on the flight-deck lift one by one.

Timings for the SAS attack on Pebble Island were non-negotiable.
Hermes
and its priceless load of Sea Harriers needed time to withdraw well away to the east of the islands before dawn. Getting caught in daylight close to the islands by the Argentine air force was simply not an option. The agonising forty-minute delay before the Sea Kings could finally launch now put huge pressure on the SAS to get in and out as quickly as possible. The new timings would give them just ten minutes on the airstrip.

Three of the four aircraft, again led by Nigel North, launched into the darkness and out towards Pebble Island. Strong headwinds made progress slow. But the actual insertion went well. Up until then, the Sea Kings had done plenty of night-flying in formation using night vision goggles. This was the first time the aircrews had done a night landing in formation.

They were just a few miles short of the Pebble Island airstrip. The assault group of fifty-eight SAS troops were out of the three helicopters within a minute. The only hitch was that they were supposed to bring back the original recce party's canoes, which were nowhere in sight. As the other two helicopters lifted off behind him, North stayed on a little longer for a brief but fruitless search. For all of the helicopters, the return journey to
Hermes
was over quickly, sped up by the wind now coming from behind them.

By the time the SAS had covered the three-mile march to the airstrip, through the darkness, they were already running late. They elected to open fire from the edge of the grassy airstrip to disable the enemy aircraft. Seeing no response from Argentine troops, the SAS attackers then ran onto the strip and, climbing directly up onto each aircraft, used grenades and explosive charges to sabotage them.

Meanwhile the original three Sea Kings launched once again from
Hermes
into a strong headwind. First to launch were Pete Rainey and Dick Hutchings. They had to complete a complicated resupply mission of food and equipment to SAS troops hidden in the hills to the west of Mount Kent on East Falkland. Only then could they turn and head north-west towards Pebble Island.

Two hours later, the next two aircraft launched with Nigel North and Wiggy Bennett in the lead and Bob Horton and Paul Humphreys behind them. A fourth aircraft followed another ten minutes later. The extra aircraft was needed to take out the original eight-man observation team dropped three days earlier.

In a remarkable piece of well-timed coordination in the darkness, Rainey's Sea King joined up with North's formation at Cape Dolphin on their final low-level run-in to the pick-up point. It was a team effort, the result of superb navigation by North's co-pilot Wiggy Bennett and the usual rigorous preparation from Bill Pollock. Tonight was another rare chance for Pollock to get airborne. With the night vision goggles in short supply, he and his co-pilot John ‘Stumpy' Middleton had just one set between them in the fourth back-up Sea King, ten minutes behind the main formation. While Pollock flew the aircraft on instruments as if for a normal night flight, Middleton wore the goggles and gave him instructions.

As the formation of three Sea Kings approached the pick-up point, all the crews could see through the green light were the flares of explosions at the airstrip beyond the landing point. They had no idea how many men would return from the attack.

The SAS team were already arriving back at the pick-up point as the first Sea Kings landed. Only two men had been injured, the result of a land mine set off by the
Argentines
. The first two Sea Kings filled with men and lifted away into the night. North found himself with five troops more than he expected, forcing him to ditch fuel directly onto the ground to reduce weight. He then lifted the heavy aircraft and flew across to the original drop-off point to locate the missing canoes and backpacks for the fourth Sea King. Pollock and Middleton made their approach to the spot where North was now flashing his navigation lights.