Eye of the Storm (21 page)

Our aircraft taxied over to some grey and white prefabricated control buildings. There was no one there to meet us, and we did not know what we were meant to do now we’d arrived. There were no ships in the harbour, and neither had we spotted any out at sea as the VC10 had made its final approach to landing. We had arrived well ahead of the Task Force, and without direction from the overall command of that force there was precious little useful that we could do. In the absence of any orders, or anyone to tell us what to do, we established ourselves in an empty school hall at the US Air Force base on that Tuesday morning. The Americans fed us, which suited us fine since they really know how to eat, and how to keep their servicemen well supplied. That afternoon we went down to the beach, zeroed our weapons, and swam with the wild sea turtles that breed on the island. Some of the guys went for a run, despite the sun and the heat. There wasn’t much to see, apart from sea birds and a few wild goats chomping on rain-starved scrub.

Our American hosts were friendly, but left us to ourselves. Nobody knew who we were, and nobody asked – which was also fine by us. For nearly three days we waited for something to happen, our boredom lessened slightly by the kindness of the Americans, who gave us quantities of beer each evening.

It was not until Thursday afternoon, 8 April, that the Royal Fleet Auxiliary
Fort Austin
, a fleet replenishment ship, came into the harbour. She had sailed as the crisis deepened on 29 March to provide support for HMS
Endurance
, and thereafter had been ordered to remain on station in the South Atlantic to resupply Royal Navy ships of the Task Force on their way to the Falklands. Our squadron commander, Major Delves, realized at once that getting us aboard the
Fort Austin
would be a good way of hitching a lift in the direction we were headed. He therefore went to see
Fort Austin
’s captain, Commodore Dunlop, and asked if we could bum a ride south until such time as Royal Navy ships of the Task Force should catch up and we could transfer to one of them. The commodore agreed, and we were ordered to gather up all our kit and go aboard. It was less than a week since the Argentinians had taken over the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.

‘Bumming a ride’ turned out to be an unfortunate phrase. Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships have Royal Navy officers, but the crews are primarily civilian, and of the crewmen aboard
Fort Austin
a large number were homosexuals. We, however, didn’t know that when we boarded the ship on that Thursday afternoon. The effect of a squadron of SAS going aboard a ship with a collection of fairly overt gays giving them the eye was extraordinary, and occasionally extremely funny. We trained while at sea, running round the decks and around the edge of a massive lift shaft, which was used to bring cargo from the lower decks. The weather was glorious, and we ran in just our shorts and trainers. As we did so, gay crew members would line up to ogle us – jokily – so that above our gasps for breath we could hear them making comments like, ‘Ooh, I do like him!’ They thought all their Christmases had come at once. Eventually Commodore Dunlop had to ask our OC to order us all to wear tops and trousers when we trained, because his men were getting ‘over-excited’.

One night during the voyage south, several of us were playing cards in the ship’s bar when a civilian member of the crew walked up to the table. He was wearing a pair of pink hot pants with purple love hearts stitched across the seat of them, and he was clearly a man with a mission. The object of his desire was one of our guys, Al, whose lean face, aquiline nose and cropped hair, as well as the fact that he was very muscular and extremely fit, apparently made him a gay’s dream of heaven. It turned out that two crewmen had been arguing over who had seen Al first, and the fellow in the pink hot pants had won. Tonight he was going to try his luck.

‘Hiya, Al,’ he said, at which Al looked up, said non-committally, ‘All right,’ and carried on playing cards. Whereupon Hot Pants said, ‘I’ll give you a blank cheque!’ Al stared at him, hard. ‘Listen, sunshine. You’re starting to annoy me. I’ve been in the Merchant Navy. So fuck off.’

‘
Ooh
, you animal!’ said Hot Pants, not a bit perturbed, and wiggled away. He had not given up, however. After a few beers, Al went to the heads – which is what sailors call toilets – and Hot Pants followed him. Observing the SAS man as he relieved himself, Hot Pants remarked, ‘Al, you piss like a gangster, and I want to be your moll.’ Luckily for him, Al thought this was so funny that he just reached over and ruffled his hair. Hot Pants must have lived off that gesture for a week.

We were five days aboard the
Fort Austin
before meeting the advanced element of the Task Force, which was made up of the destroyer HMS
Antrim
, the frigate HMS
Plymouth
, and HMS
Endurance
. As luck would have it, the two former had been on exercise with the First Flotilla in mid-Atlantic when the Falklands crisis broke, and had been ordered to join
Endurance
. They had put in at Gibraltar to refuel and resupply, and had then steamed southwards at full speed. They called at Ascension, and were joined by the RFA tanker
Tidespring
, before all three ships sailed on for their RV with
Endurance
.

With our virtue still intact, the whole squadron was airlifted by helicopter from the deck of
Fort Austin
and split between the three warships. Squadron HQ, Boat Troop and Mountain Troop went aboard
Antrim
; Air Troop, the parachuting specialists, went to
Endurance
; and Mobility Troop, of which I was still a member, went aboard
Plymouth
. During the fighting that was to come, she was bombed three times by the Argentinian Air Force, on the last occasion being hit by no fewer than three 1,000-pound bombs, which caused severe damage, although her crew eventually managed to put out the fires and patch her up so that she was at least still seaworthy.

There was little for us to do aboard
Plymouth
except eat, play cards and drink beer. Much smaller than the RFA
Fort Austin
, but with a larger crew, there simply wasn’t the room for us to run round decks, and there was even less space below. The hardest problem was finding a bed. Since
Plymouth
had no room for us, we used the petty officers’ bunks while they were on watch; when they came off duty they would tap us on the shoulder and say, ‘Please can I have my bunk back?’ We would then wander around until each of us had found another empty berth.

Most of the ship’s crew were extremely young, many of them eighteen-year-olds, and the highlight of each day was when the tannoy screamed, ‘Action nutty! Action nutty!’ the announcement that the NAAFI shop was open so that the young sailors could go and buy their daily ration of one bar of chocolate. When the time came to fight, however, they proved as brave and enduring as veterans of more than twice their age. By contrast, all of us in D Squadron were much older than the crew. Our average age was thirty-three, which clearly must have surprised the captain of HMS
Plymouth
, Captain Pentreath, because he kept looking at us and saying, ‘I had no idea.’ He was very decent, and treated us as equals.

At that time, our Royal Navy ‘mini-task force’ was sailing two days south followed by one day north, in order to hold position within striking distance of the territories now occupied by the Argentinians. The force’s commanders had no direct orders as yet, beyond holding station, although the general idea was that we were supposed to retake South Georgia before the main Task Force arrived to engage the principal enemy forces on the Falkland Islands. Our group, now grandly named the South Georgia Task Force and under the overall command of
Antrim
’s captain, Captain Brian Young, also now included M Company of 42 Commando, Royal Marines, which, like us, had flown out to Ascension, arriving on 10 April. M Company had then embarked in
Tidespring
, although its HQ and support elements went into
Antrim
, as did a section from the Special Boat Squadron (SBS, the Royal Marines’ maritime equivalent of the SAS, now the Special Boat Service) which had also come aboard at Ascension. So it had been a very mixed military force that was crammed aboard the four ships when they had rendezvoused with
Fort Austin
on 12 April, and our squadron had come aboard. There were other problems apart from overcrowding, too. Both Captain Young and the Royal Marines’ commander, Major Guy Sheridan, 2IC of 42 Commando, had expected an SAS troop to join from
Fort Austin
. Instead they got an entire SAS squadron, and with it our OC, Cedric Delves, also a major. The presence of a second major, unsurprisingly, raised uncertainties over the command structure, although Sheridan was later confirmed as having overall command of the group’s ‘Military Force’.

During what proved to be a ten-day voyage, the seas became rougher and the weather progressively colder as we sailed further south. South Georgia lies some eight hundred miles east, and one hundred or so south, of the Falklands, placing it that much closer to Antarctica and with a wickedly cold climate to match. We couldn’t go outside because the wind-chill factor sent the temperatures plunging well below zero. We played cards or read or watched porn videos, of which there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply but which at times bored me to tears, to the extent that I often nodded off to sleep in the middle of watching one. Still, sleeping helped to pass the time, an advantage since our greatest enemy so far was boredom.

On 21 April we came in sight of South Georgia and its attendant icebergs, and that day our formal orders came to retake the island from its illegal occupiers, using whatever force was necessary to do the job. D Squadron, 22 SAS, was to get the first close look at the enemy in the Falklands War.

Under Sheridan’s command, the combat group was made up of ourselves, No. 2 Special Boat Squadron, Royal Marines, and M Company, 42 Commando. We would be supported by the guns and helicopters of
Antrim, Plymouth
and
Endurance
, the whole operation remaining under the overall command of Captain Young.

Unfortunately, however, although we had a rough idea of their numbers, no one knew exactly where the Argentinians were on South Georgia, or what they were up to. So, rather than risk sending his men blind into an amphibious operation, Sheridan decided, after discussing the problem with our OC, Delves, to put in a covert SAS troop to report on the enemy. At the same time, 2 SBS, which was to form the main advance party, would go ashore in Gemini inflatables to the south-west of the abandoned settlement of Grytviken, although how abandoned it was now, given the Argentinian presence on the island, was anyone’s guess. However, if these reconnaissances showed that conditions were favourable for the operation to retake the island, D Squadron and the SBS would launch diversionary raids as the main amphibious invasion came ashore at Grytviken.

Where the recce by D Squadron was concerned, the idea was for Mountain Troop to be inserted by helicopter on to South Georgia’s Fortuna Glacier, on the northern coast of the island some miles west of Grytviken. It was a wild and inaccessible place, but that meant that the Argentinians were most unlikely to see or hear the helicopters going in, or subsequently to spot the patrol. From there they were to march over the mountains and establish observation posts from which to watch and report the enemy’s strength and movements in the derelict settlements of Leith and Stromness, which also lay on the island’s north coast, between the glacier and Grytviken. We had no idea what was going on in these settlements, although the British Antarctic Survey people had, amazingly, furnished us with plans of them. These were so detailed that they even included room-by-room descriptions of the houses where the occupying force of Argentinians were thought to be living.

The weather was atrocious, but the use of poor conditions to screen the insertion formed part of the plan. At noon on 21 April, therefore, fifteen members of Mountain Troop under their troop commander, Captain John Hamilton, lifted off the deck of the command ship, HMS
Antrim
, in Wessex helicopters to be flown to the west of the settlement at Leith.

I have seen some terrible weather during my service, but nothing as bad as that on South Georgia – and I didn’t even go to the glacier. Whiteouts – sudden swirling blizzards that reduce visibility to no more than a couple of feet – made the first two helicopter attempts to land the men impossible. Three times the naval pilots flew between the ships and the shore, before finally succeeding in setting down on the Fortuna Glacier at the third attempt.

Within minutes, however, the whiteout was back as gale-force winds whipped the glacier. Carrying their bergens, each weighing 77 pounds, and dragging four pulks (sledges) each weighing 200 pounds, in five hours Mountain Troop had covered about half a mile – and these men were the cream of mountain-warfare experts.

With the light fading fast, they tried erecting two-man Arctic tents behind an outcrop of ice in order to provide some shelter. But savage winds, by now gusting in excess of 100 mph, blew one tent away like a paper handkerchief and snapped the tent poles of the others. Five men crawled into one tent while the rest huddled for shelter under the pulks in sub-zero temperatures as winds that had now reached storm force clawed at the glacier. Next morning, 22 April, knowing that they could not possibly get through another night without the very real probability of some or even all of them dying of exposure, Captain Hamilton radioed
Antrim
to ask for an evacuation.

Three Wessex helicopters set out for the glacier, but couldn’t find the SAS patrol and returned to refuel. On their second attempt they reached the men through a fifteen-minute, clear-weather window at 1330 hours, and embarked them and their equipment. But minutes after lift-off one of them crashed in a blinding whiteout, although, miraculously, of the seven men aboard only one was injured. They and the crew of the crashed aircraft were split between the two remaining helicopters, but in whiteout conditions one hit an ice ridge and also crashed, luckily again without serious injury. In one of the greatest single feats of the entire war the pilot of the third helicopter, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Stanley, embarked all the SAS and aircrew aboard his aircraft and managed to lift off the glacier, although most of the patrol’s equipment had to be abandoned with the two wrecked Wessex. With himself and fifteen men and their weapons aboard, as well as the pilots and other aircrew from the two crashed machines, Stanley’s helicopter was seriously overloaded. Because of the weight, he was unable to hover over
Antrim
’s deck, and he therefore decided to crash-land instead, slamming the aircraft down with the rotors at full power to slow the descent. For his skill and courage in bringing back the troop and the other airmen intact, and for his later actions, Ian Stanley was awarded the DSO, the only one awarded to a pilot in the campaign.