Scram! (46 page)

A couple of miles to their west, his namesake Aircrewman Jan Lomas was on the ground hauling what seemed like an endless pile of bergens up into the cabin of Yankee Bravo. Above him in the cockpit, Hector Heathcote could hear the breathlessness in his voice through the distortion of the throat mike: ‘Bloody hell, there are dozens of these things. I'm sweating like a pig.' They were both well aware of the importance of their task, of reuniting kit, equipment and men. Soldiers who had survived the war might easily not survive another freezing night out in the hills. Getting their sleeping bags to them was vital.

The Wessex had a spare lift capacity of some 3,000 pounds. The urgency of the task meant that Lomas crammed in far more than he should. He had counted seventy-eight bergens into the cabin weighing around 5,000 pounds. The Wessex was now horribly overweight. Even if they could achieve enough power to get off the ground, the gearbox might quite simply crack up under the excess load. ‘Oh well,' thought Heathcote, ‘let's suck it and see.'

Amazingly, with full power applied, the Wessex rose gingerly upwards and wallowed uncomfortably off the edge of the mountainside, helped by the cold air and light breeze. The helicopter felt unstable and vulnerable. Heathcote hung onto the cyclic stick with an unnecessarily strong grip, as if letting go would cause the aircraft to topple over. He could just about see where he needed to go, having already completed several runs to the drop-off point in daylight. But it was now almost pitch black. He still had to get the aircraft down safely in one piece. With such an overweight aircraft, there was not enough power
for
an overshoot if they got it wrong. Once the aircraft was in the descent and slowing down, that was it. They would have one shot.

The landing, as it turned out, was fine. But Heathcote and Lomas both knew they had seriously overstepped their own and their aircraft's capabilities. ‘That was frightening,' said Heathcote.

‘Too right,' echoed Lomas. ‘Best we go home. I've had enough now, thank you very much.'

For the first time since leaving Yeovilton ten weeks earlier, the decision about whether to use navigation lights was an easy one. With all their lights flashing, Yankee Bravo headed back to find FOB Fitzroy. ‘Mountain flying in an overweight Wessex,' a very relieved Heathcote said as they shut down. ‘That was ridiculously, stupidly dangerous.'

It was still dark on Tuesday 15 June, the first morning after the surrender, when Ric Fox flashed up X-Ray Yankee at FOB Teal. His brief was to get himself back to Port San Carlos as soon as possible and report to the ops tent. Half an hour later he was at his second briefing of the morning. He was to go with Dave Greet, a handful of Royal Marines and medics, and take the Argentine surrender at Pebble Island.

Fox and Greet grinned nervously at one another, hiding their apprehension. It was an extraordinary responsibility for a young sub-lieutenant. The war was over. But would the Argentine troops out on West Falkland know?

The thirty-mile transit across Falkland Sound towards Pebble Island seemed painfully slow because of a stiff breeze blowing in from the west. The settlement houses were clearly visible from a long way off. A few miles short of the houses two Argentine soldiers stood by a parked Mercedes jeep.

‘Let's get those guys first,' said Greet. ‘We're quite a target.'

As Fox began his approach towards them, the two soldiers dropped to their knees behind the Mercedes.

‘Shit they don't know about the surrender,' warned Fox.

It felt like a Mexican stand-off. Fox brought the big helicopter into a hover fifty yards away, with the nose skewed off to the left so that Greet could train his cabin machine gun on to the soldiers. The Argentines remained hidden, crouching down behind the vehicle. After a couple of very tense minutes, one of them stood up with his hands in the air. ‘Phew,' said a relieved Fox, side-slipping the Wessex closer in to pick up the Argentines.

The Marines escorted the two soldiers on board. Soon afterwards, Greet casually told Fox what they had been doing: ‘We'd better not hang around here. They were picking up mines.'

Fox needed no further encouragement to get airborne with the two prisoners. Quickly covering the short distance at low level, he put the aircraft down on the ground within the settlement itself. The grassy Pebble Island airstrip, scene of the SAS raid just a month earlier, lay beyond them beneath a skyline of rocky hills. Damaged Argentine aircraft, mostly Mentors and Pucaras, were dotted around the strip with their cockpits open, exposed to the recent snow flurries.

‘Shit,' said Fox again as he shut the aircraft down. From the cockpit of X-Ray Bravo, his attention was drawn back from the aircraft to a huge number of soldiers. It was quite a sight: the eight Royal Marines and medics were hugely outnumbered as they walked forward to take the surrender of over a hundred Argentines.

The Argentines had imprisoned the islanders since occupying Pebble Island in April. Now their roles were reversed. East and West Falkland were back in British hands.

Epilogue

OVER THE NEXT
few days, the Sea King crews returned home to the UK as squadrons on aircraft carriers and the larger ships. My Wessex colleagues of 845 Squadron returned in dribs and drabs, with some flights sailing back on supply ships and others flying back via Ascension Island in a C-130 Hercules.

The fragmented nature of the Wessex squadrons meant that few received an organised welcome. Ric Fox arrived back exhausted at Yeovilton wearing a mix of combats and Argentine clothing, only to receive a reprimand from the duty officer for being in the wrong rig. He told the duty officer what to do with his reprimand.

Hector Heathcote found himself wandering around Tesco in Yeovil in a daze. Just hours earlier he had been in a war zone. A few short weeks later, he was posted back down to Ascension Island for three months to relieve his commanding officer. It seemed a huge injustice to be sent away so soon.

The rest of us – the 847 Squadron Wessex crews – having arrived late in the war, became garrison squadron. We moved our base from Port San Carlos to Navy Point, just across the harbour from Port Stanley. The flying
was
sensational. Over the next three months I flew 220 hours, rarely venturing more than thirty feet above the ground.

This is my colleague Jerry Spence refuelling his Wessex on the runway at Stanley airport soon after the war ended. Mount Kent and the other infamous final hills are out in the distance to the west. The runway looks in pretty good condition considering the overblown claims of the Vulcan missions.

Most of the work was the big clean up from the war: moving people and equipment, stores and ammunition. We flew bomb squad and mine clearers out into the surrounding hills to deal with unexploded ordnance, and burial parties to deal with unburied bodies. Much of it was pretty gruesome. We also provided search-and-rescue cover for all of the British forces on the islands.

Having a dozen or so helicopters gave us extraordinary bartering power. My lovely late mentor Ray Colborne quickly became known as the squadron grocer. Like a character out of the novel
Catch-22
, he used his contacts on the RFA supply ships to acquire all manner of stores.
He
cornered the entire Falklands market in eggs. Our squadron maintenance area was piled high with boxes and boxes of them. Somebody calculated that we had 96,000 eggs. We also acquired 100,000 Duracell batteries, this time through administrative error. The engineers had ordered 100 batteries for our torches. I remember lifting the 3,000-pound load marked for our squadron from a nearby supply ship and wondering what on earth it was.

We used our good fortune to be especially sympathetic to the Rapier air defence crews, still dug in on the hilltops, and to the generous islanders with whom we occasionally stayed overnight. We ate well and slept well on these trips. There was even the occasional bath. We did as much for them as we could in return. I remember one of our Wessex flying out to a remote settlement, known locally as ‘camp', with a cow dangling underneath in a net. It was a classic British hearts and minds campaign.

I visited the Falklands capital just once. Hector gave me a lift there in his Wessex three days after the Argentine surrender. I wandered around Port Stanley as a naval sub-lieutenant in my wellies, green combats and blue beret, armed with a 9mm Browning pistol, but not much of a clue otherwise. The place was a mess. There were Argentine gun emplacements, wrecked helicopters and battered vehicles lying open to the elements, as well as all sorts of debris – endless rounds of ammunition, helmets, clothing, ration packs and boxes – scattered everywhere.

I spent a while looking around an abandoned Puma helicopter parked on Port Stanley seafront. I should have been wary of booby-traps but I didn't think. I walked brazenly into Government House, amongst the Paras and Royal Marines who were milling around. I was amused to bump into one of our own MAOT Marines unashamedly heating up a mess tin of food on the floor of one of the
colonial
rooms. In the backstreets further into the capital, I passed hundreds of Argentine prisoners and giant piles of discarded rifles and other weaponry.

With the war over, I was able to enjoy the remote beauty of the Falkland Islands. I flew a group of us out to look at a colony of over a thousand king penguins at Volunteer Point. We were able to walk right up to them and their grey fluffy offspring. The noise and smell was overwhelming: it was an extraordinary experience. In between ferrying people and stores, I also messed around, nearly overdoing it one day at Goose Green chasing a rabbit in my Wessex. Startled by the prospect of a vast aerial aggressor, the rabbit fled across the grassy strip until suddenly it stopped and backtracked underneath the helicopter. I flared rather too sharply, suddenly realising that I was now pointing up towards the sky at zero speed and was about to slide backwards into the ground. It wouldn't have looked good on the accident form. Luckily I got away with it.

Failing to heed my near miss, I then hovered over the top of a nearby damaged Argentine Pucara. Looking down from the open cockpit window, I eased my right wheel neatly onto the tail of the enemy aircraft. A little downward pressure and I was pushing the Pucara's tail down, rotating the nose nicely upwards. I then realised I was stuck. Worrying how to get out of the situation, I decided to move the Wessex sideways as quickly I could. The Pucara tail sprang back up, releasing the Wessex but missing the explosive flotation canister on my wheel by a whisker.

So what did happen to all those Pucaras? Altogether twenty-four made it to the Falklands. The Sea Harriers destroyed three in their first attack on Goose Green; the SAS blew up six in their raid on Pebble Island; three more were shot down, one by Sea Harrier and two by ground
fire
; and another crashed into the mountains. Of the remaining eleven only three were flyable by the end of the war. Bombing runs by Sea Harriers and ground-attack Harriers did some of the damage. The damp weather also played its part making it hard to keep the aircraft electrics working.

After the battle of Goose Green, the Pucaras flew three more sorties. All of them happened in the last few days while I was there. Thank God I never saw them, nor did any of my colleagues. Seeing a formation of three Pucaras would have been the most frightening experience imaginable for a helicopter pilot. I remain forever grateful to our Sea Harrier pilots who proved an even more frightening threat to the Pucara pilots, as well as being a whole lot more effective. The Sea Harriers were spectacularly successful in air-to-air combat, shooting down eighteen Mirage and Skyhawks and three other aircraft, whilst not being beaten once. Why did we ever get rid of them?

Interestingly, one of the Pucaras was shipped back from the Falklands to the test pilot school at Boscombe Down. The following summer, Simon Thornewill managed to fly the Pucara twice, discovering a little secret that dispelled some – but only some – of its mystique. At slow speed (below ninety knots) the Pucara handling was not half as manoeuvrable as we'd feared. It would have been nice to have known this during the war.

I have three emotional memories of life at Navy Point. The first was the Falklands wind. It blew through my ears and knocked me off balance so much that I felt physically sick. The second was the showers on board the RFA
Sir Tristram
. After the attack at Port Pleasant a few weeks earlier, the half-burnt, half-intact ship was towed around to Navy Point. I had mixed feelings every time I walked
on
board. I would come out clean on the outside but with the terrible smell of burning seared inside my head. The smell still lingers with me today, decades later.