Scram! (35 page)

Forty-five minutes later, a further attempt by a flight of three more Skyhawks was also driven off by small-arms fire in the Fitzroy and Mount Kent areas. All three aircraft were damaged and fortunate to return safely to the mainland.

Amidst the drama of the situation, pilots still needed to make a stream of complex practical judgments and decisions about how to manage their mission. Aviators call this ‘captaincy'. Captaincy includes managing aircraft capabilities, mission priorities, route planning, fuel and payload. Hughes, Boughton, Miller, Sheldon, Clark and the other aircraft captains involved with the
Galahad
rescue showed exceptional captaincy on this day.

In the extreme situation of war, there is often a fine line between great captaincy and cock-up. For example, most
junglie
pilots bent the rules by squeezing one or more wheels of a large helicopter onto a small flight deck for which they were not
officially
cleared. You looked
great
if you got away with it. You looked a prat if you left your rotor tips behind, or worse. Managing fuel was where pilots most frequently came close to the fine line. McIntosh was already concerned about fuel before he set off from San Carlos for his second run. He reckoned he should have just about enough for the return journey. After starting his rotors again at Fitzroy with more terribly wounded soldiers in the cabin, he asked other helos if there was a ‘bollock' – a massive fuel container – anywhere, as there was at Teal. No luck. The journey back was going to be very tight indeed.

McIntosh knew the Wessex manual said the aircraft uses less fuel with one engine shut down. Bill Pollock had already applied the theory years before in a Wessex and now in a Sea King on the way back from the Argentine fishing trawler
Narwhal
. On both occasions, it had kept him airborne long enough to avoid ditching into the sea.

Unsure whether he would make it back to San Carlos, McIntosh bravely tested the theory for himself on the Wessex. But, as a single pilot, there was nobody to double-check his move. He would have to do it on his own. He very carefully pulled back the speed select lever for the port engine and closed the fuel cock. As the port engine stopped, the starboard engine took the strain. His fuel flow gauges confirmed that he was using less fuel. It might give him the valuable few more minutes in the air that he needed. He flew low over the ridge of the Sussex Mountains and down towards the heavily armed warships below in San Carlos Water. These were nervous moments at the best of times, wondering whether he would be shot down or caught in crossfire. Seeing that
Fearless
was a mile nearer than the facilities at Ajax Bay, he requested an urgent refuel. That extra mile could be one too many.

Sod's law intervened at exactly the wrong moment with
the
final ‘Air raid warning red' of the day. As McIntosh approached the big assault ship, the flight-deck officer waved him off, refusing permission to land. No way! He gingerly brought X-Ray Tango into a hover alongside the flyco control room and insisted on landing ‘Now'. Meanwhile, Moreby frantically pointed out the bandages and wounded soldiers inside the cabin. The flight-deck officer immediately waved the aircraft across, ignoring the apoplectic senior officer in flyco. Safely on deck and very relieved to be taking on fuel, flyco asked for the pilot's name. McIntosh replied that he would get back to them later.

The rescue and casualty evacuation from
Sir Galahad
continued on after dark with other aircraft. Both Sea King squadron commanding officers were involved, each flying back to San Carlos from Fitzroy at low level at dusk.

Eight-four-six Squadron boss Simon Thornewill's day had started with a surreal early morning assault operation to land troops near a suspected Argentine stronghold at Cape Dolphin, the remote tip of East Falkland fifteen miles to the north of Fanning Head. Intelligence had warned that it was a possible site for land-based Exocet missile launchers, a deadly threat to the ships entering Falkland Sound. As his formation of three Sea Kings drew closer to the obvious activity ahead of them on the beach, the situation turned to one of hilarity. The activity was neither Argentines nor Exocets, but penguins.

Now loaded with badly burned men in Victor Alpha, Thornewill looked up from the valley and thought to himself: ‘I'm glad we're down here and not up on that high ground.' He had no idea that he was looking at exactly the area where the Gazelle had been shot down two days earlier.

It was where his opposite number, 825 Squadron boss Hugh Clark was now heading in Sea King 507. Tim Stanning reminded him to stop and pick up Mike Cudmore, the engineer abandoned there earlier in the day. Clambering into the back of the Sea King, Cudmore was taken aback by the gruesome scene that confronted him; it was like something out of
M*A*S*H
. There was blood everywhere and crewmen holding drips to wounded men. Stanning wrote a quick note and held it up: ‘
GALAHAD
hit, on fire. Other LSL being abandoned.'

Imagine being an air engineering officer dropped off on a remote hillside to investigate the scene of a crash. When your helicopter returns to pick you up later in the day, the scene that confronts you inside the cabin is straight out of
M*A*S*H
, full of horribly burnt and wounded men. This is the note Tim Stanning wrote to try to explain what was going on.

Altogether it had been a disastrous day for both sides. Fifty-one British lives were lost at Port Pleasant and a further six at Choiseul Sound. Forty-six wounded soldiers and crew had been evacuated to Ajax Bay. The British had also lost two landing ships, one landing craft and suffered damage to HMS
Plymouth
. The great leap forward by 5 Brigade had turned into a nightmare.

Had the Argentines left it at that, it would have been
their
day. Instead they lost three pilots and aircraft in ill-advised follow-up missions to Port Pleasant, with several more aircraft badly damaged. It turned out to be the last attack on British shipping by Argentine jets from the mainland.

Images of the dramatic
Sir Galahad
rescue reached British TV news screens several days later. To the public, the helicopter crews were heroic. Medals were later awarded to some pilots and crewmen, yet not to others doing an identical job. None were begrudged.

Chapter 14

Dash and panache: 9–11 June 1982

ALTHOUGH THE BOMBING
of
Galahad
and
Tristram
on 8 June had appalling consequences in terms of human suffering, its strategic effect was only to delay the final build-up of troops by a day
.

The arrival of RFA
Engadine
boosted the Wessex contingent to twenty-five helicopters, adding to the twenty Sea Kings and one Chinook. This modest helicopter force would have to support the thousands of troops preparing for the assault on the hills surrounding Port Stanley. Frontline helicopter operations now moved up to Fitzroy on the southern flank and Teal Inlet to the north, from where a daring attack on the Argentine high command was about to be launched
.

At 3 a.m. local time, I was woken and told to get to the briefing room with my kit. All the aircrew were gathering there. The boss, Mike Booth, briefed us that the last few hours' delay meant we would not arrive in San Carlos until well after dawn. So
Engadine
had now
turned
around rather than risk being exposed as we entered San Carlos past Fanning Head. Intelligence had predicted a major Argentine air strike. But the need for pilots and aircrew on the islands remained urgent. Some of our own aircraft were sitting idle on board
Atlantic Causeway
. Ray Colborne, Chris Eke and I were told to get airborne and winch all aircrew onto our escort ship HMS
Penelope
, which was now steaming in as we were steaming out.

The prospect of a night winch to a frigate was exciting, even if I was going to miss out on a day's action. But the plan was abandoned almost immediately. It quickly became obvious that the sheer logistics of transferring twenty aircrew over an ever-increasing distance between the ships was impossible.
Penelope
wasn't stopping for anyone. Several of the aircrew went up on deck to watch the eerie glow of naval gunfire exploding in the Port Stanley area forty miles away.

Turning back was the right decision. We would have been an easy target, sailing through Falkland Sound at about the same time
Plymouth
was attacked. We spent the following day frustrated but comfortable, checking our kit and thinking about what was to come, while the Welsh Guards were dealing with their hell of Port Pleasant.
Engadine
never even made it as far as the battle group. Late afternoon, we simply turned around and headed back in towards San Carlos.

The following morning, Wednesday 9 June, we were all up well before dawn. I took good advantage of the last home comforts I expected to see for a while: breakfast, warm shower, comfortable loo. As the sun rose,
Engadine
finally slid quietly into San Carlos Water and the relative protection of other warships. I went up on deck to have
my
first view of the grassy Falkland hills rolling past in the early morning sunshine. Deep rumbling noises from the flight deck announced that the first aircraft were off, disembarking the squadron around the headland to our forward operating base at Port San Carlos. As I was due to fly on the second wave, I hung around with my bergen packed and my gas mask around my belt.

Within a few hours, Lieutenant ‘Spiny' Norman Lees and I were standing inside the hangar watching X-Ray Juliett land for our planned crew change. It's always a slightly unnerving experience approaching seven tons of noisy machinery: the whirling blades above one's head, the low growl of the gearboxes, the high-pitch whine of the engines, the hot blast of the exhausts. There is a real knack to climbing up a Wessex, dodging the explosive flotation can on the wheel, getting your feet into the right footholds, ducking under the exhaust without getting burnt, swinging your leg into the cockpit without knocking the flying controls.

I strapped in for my first flight. As aircraft captain, Lees took the controls and lifted the Wessex clear of the deck. The Falklands were mostly what I had expected: a cross between the barrenness of Dartmoor and the beauty of northern Scotland. My excitement quickly dissipated as we concentrated on the job. After a straightforward few loads lifted from ship to shore, I decided to jump out back on
Engadine
in order to reduce the payload and wait my turn to replace Lees as solo pilot.

Almost as soon as I reached the hangar, I was already regretting not waiting on land at Port San Carlos. The welcome sound of helicopters buzzing low around all the ships in the bay was interrupted by the repeated blasts of sirens and the dreaded words ‘Hands to action stations'. I was now stuck on deck without my anti-flash gear for
some
reason worrying that I was the only person not carrying a gas mask. Once again I felt horribly exposed, sitting in a tin can, waiting to be attacked. But with Ray Colborne's stern warning ringing in my ears, I kept my cool. As the all-clear sounded, I put on my helmet, lifejacket and bergen and ran out to the next Wessex that landed.

It was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. I sat in the back with some of our maintainers and loads of squadron kit as we lifted off and headed round the coast. The next thing I knew was that we were rolling into a tight turn and darting into a valley on the headland. Leading Aircrewman Smudge Smyth mouthed the words ‘Air raid warning red' to me. As we landed, all of us jumped out and ran. This was good stuff. I ran up a hill just above the Wessex and lay down with my pistol cocked and ready to fire. I shouted at some of the lads nearby: ‘If a jet comes over, fire well in front of it.'

After lying in the wet grass for a few seconds, I looked down at my Browning. I was horrified to see that there was no magazine. The release catch must have caught on something as I jumped out of the helicopter. Back in Northern Ireland we'd been warned that losing a single bullet would result in an £80 fine. Here in the Falklands I'd just lost an entire magazine and thirteen bullets. ‘Bloody hell,' I thought. I immediately reloaded my second magazine and wondered what on earth to do. Smyth waved at us to go. I ran back and shouted that I needed to find my magazine. The Wessex rose into the air leaving me alone on my own little piece of the Falklands. I searched fruitlessly for fifteen minutes until X-Ray Juliett returned. Smyth calmly got out, bent down and picked up the lost magazine from the grass. My relief was huge and I patted him gratefully on the shoulder.

Lees dropped us all off at Port San Carlos near a pile of bergens and other equipment. I tried in vain to find my own bergen that had been dumped there while I was still wandering around the opposite hillside. No luck. Almost immediately, X-Ray Juliett was back again and Lees waved me in for a crew change.