ON PAPER, THE Fuerza Aérea Argentina was a potent force. With a frontline over 200 combat aircraft strong, they were acknowledged by the MoD to be a professional, well-equipped fighting force. Supersonic Dassault Mirage III fighters, Israeli-built IAI Daggers and American Douglas A-4 Skyhawks might no longer have been at the cutting edge of fighter design, but all were battle-proven machines, having earned their spurs in convincing fashion in the Middle East and Vietnam. Supplementing the fast jets were long-ranged but long-in-the-tooth British-built Canberra bombers and Argentina’s own FMA IA-58 Pucará, a rugged twin-turboprop ground attack aircraft.
Ranged against them were the twenty SHARs aboard Hermes and Invincible. It looked like a very thin line. Eight thousand miles from home, the safety of the carriers was paramount. The most immediate threat to them came not from the Air Force but from the Comando de Aviación Naval Argentina (COAN), the Argentine naval air arm. They were the trained shipkillers. Compounding the threat, they were also capable of operating from an aircraft carrier.
In 1967, the Armada Nacional Argentina (ANA) – the Argentine Navy – had even asked the British about the possibility of acquiring HMS Hermes. As London tied itself in knots over whether, if they sold an aircraft carrier to Argentina, they should also sell one to Chile, the ANA bought HMNLS Karel Doorman from the Dutch. A former British light fleet carrier, HMS Venerable, that had seen service in the Pacific during the Second World War, she was refitted and renamed ARA 25 de Mayo, after the country’s independence day. As the 16,000-ton ship steamed through the Channel on her journey to her new home, Hawker test pilot John Farley took advantage of the opportunity to land a Harrier on her flight deck. It was very much hoped in other departments that the Argentine Navy might like to buy jump jets to fly from their new ship. At the same time, British officials thought they could persuade the Fuerza Aérea Argentina to buy BAC Lightning jet fighters. British industry was to be disappointed on both fronts.
While it was believed in London that Argentine naval aviators wanted the Harrier, the Armada’s Admirals opted for second-hand McDonnell Douglas A-4 Skyhawks from the United States. That the American jets cost about 10% of the price of the Harrier ‘could well’, noted a British Minister with admirable understatement, ‘have been decisive’.
During their conversations over ships and aircraft, the Argentine Navy’s Chief of Staff asked his British counterpart whether he could think of any way in which the two navies could solve the Falklands problem. That now looked as if it was on the cards – but not, of course, in quite the way that Admiral Benigno Varela had imagined.
When, in the 1950s, the possibility that Argentina might acquire an aircraft carrier had first been explored, there were concerns in Whitehall that it might be detrimental to British interests in the region. ‘We cannot pretend,’ acknowledged one exchange between the Admiralty and the Colonial Office, ‘that the addition of a light fleet carrier to the Argentine Navy is particularly welcome.’ That view remained unchanged thirty years later, not least because the COAN had recently added to its arsenal the French Dassault Super Etendard. The SuE itself, a warmed-over version of a design originally rejected by the Armée de l’Air in the mid-fifties, was a relatively unspectacular machine. But it didn’t need searing flight performance to be a danger. Fitted with modern avionics and armed with the sea-skimming AM.39 Exocet missile, the SuE posed a potentially lethal threat to British ships. The first five jets were accepted into frontline service with 2 Escuadrilla Aeronaval de Caza y Ataque (Fighter and Attack Squadron) in November 1981. Whether they were yet capable of operating from 25 de Mayo or carrying the Exocet anti-ship missile remained uncertain. A report by British Defence Intelligence classified TOP SECRET UMBRA believed both were possibilities.
During the First World War, Germany became the first country to pursue the development of guided missiles. In the end, hopes of launching biplane gliding bombs from the Imperial German Navy’s Zeppelins were curtailed by the Armistice, but in the late 1930s the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (the German Air Ministry) sponsored a number of new projects. The most successful of these was the Fritz X. Within ten days of becoming operational at the end of August 1943 two direct hits from the new missile sank the 45,000-ton Italian flagship, Roma, preventing the battleship from joining the Allied fleet. A few months later Fritz X attacks put the British battleship HMS Warspite out of action for a year. But it was the sinking of another British-built warship over twenty years later that alerted navies around the world to the deadly threat from a new generation of guided missiles.
HMS Zealous served with the Royal Navy during the Second World War before being sold to the Israeli Navy in 1955 and being renamed INS Eilat. She was sunk in 1967 after being hit by three Soviet-made SS-N-2 Styx missiles fired from Egyptian fast attack boats. This triggered a revolution in naval doctrine and a scramble for similar weapons.
In France, Nord Aviation combined elements of two existing air-to-surface missiles to quickly develop a new sea-skimming anti-ship missile, the MM.38 Exocet (‘flying fish’). Although initially developed as a ship-launched weapon, an air-launched version, the AM.39, soon followed.
The Royal Navy had to assume the worst about the new Argentine capability. In London, it was up to the Director of Naval Air Warfare, Captain Ben Bathurst, and his small team based at MoD Main Building to ensure that the Fleet Air Arm was best equipped to face it. Years earlier, during a previous stint in DNAW, Bathurst had been in the department when the Navy won its fight to acquire the Sea Harrier in the first place. There’d been celebration, but mainly relief.
Faced with the retirement of Ark Royal and her air group, the Navy began to make the case for a ‘Maritime Harrier’ that, operating from their new Invincible class helicopter carriers, might provide a measure of organic air defence for the fleet. In doing so they were walking on eggshells. With Ark gone, responsibility for providing air cover for the fleet was vested in the RAF, while the Fleet Air Arm concentrated on flying helicopters. With that decision taken, the Navy couldn’t be seen to be trying to undo it. They made their case by stressing the Harrier’s insignificance. ‘The project is a modest one,’ they argued. The cost of just twenty-five aircraft would amount to under 1% of the naval budget over ten years. ‘It is,’ they purred, ‘an admittedly limited aircraft, but it has only a limited – though vital – job to do.’ They meant only to complement the efforts of the RAF and help them husband their precious resources. The Maritime Harrier was merely a way of keeping Soviet reconnaissance aircraft at bay; the job of actually shooting down the bombers and missile carriers would remain that of the Royal Air Force. In 1975, the Admiralty’s determinedly self-deprecating pitch for the Harrier was successful. An order for twenty-four Sea Harriers was placed with Hawker Siddeley.
So unimpressed were the Fleet Air Arm’s frontline pilots by the prospect of seeing their Phantoms and Buccaneers replaced by the little jump jet that John Farley, Hawker Siddeley’s Chief Test Pilot, was asked to try to placate them. Heckled and barracked from the outset, he quickly lost his temper. ‘I am sorry,’ he told them. ‘I’m sure you’d like a big boat; I am sure you’d like more modern aeroplanes, but you can’t have them. Nobody’s going to let you have them, so shut up and listen to me telling you what you will have and you may be quite surprised at how useful it will be.’
Now, as the fleet sailed south towards a potential conflict that was nothing like any scenario envisioned at the time the jet was acquired, the Sea Harrier was all the Navy had.
And one thing was abundantly clear: Bathurst had to send south as many SHARs as he could lay his hands on. And find pilots to fly them. With the two frontline squadrons deployed and 899 HQ Squadron reduced to a rump, he thought the most effective vehicle for doing so would be to form a brand-new squadron. He told Yeovilton to make it so.
Rear Admiral Ted Anson was known as Mr Buccaneer. A veteran of the Korean War and Suez campaign, he more than any other pilot in the Fleet Air Arm had ushered Blackburn’s world-beating low-level strike jet into frontline service. As the last Captain of HMS Ark Royal, he’d flagged the Buccaneers off the flight deck for the last time. Now Flag Officer Naval Air Command headquartered at RNAS Yeovilton, responsibility for commissioning new squadrons was vested in him. And while there may have been much spirited debate back in DNAW about the number plate of the new Sea Harrier squadron, the final decision was Anson’s. There was only ever really one possibility: 809.
The squadron’s motto, ‘Immortal’, seemed auspicious.
More so, perhaps, than the unit’s combat debut in 1941. It arrived less than two years after formal control of the Fleet Air Arm had, after twenty years of wrangling following the formation of the RAF in 1918, returned to the Royal Navy, in May 1939. And it simply hadn’t been enough time to repair two decades of neglect and underinvestment in naval aviation. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Fleet Air Arm had just four frontline fighter squadrons equipped with woefully inadequate machines like the Blackburn Skua and biplane Gloster Sea Gladiator.
809 NAS was formed in January 1941 as part of the Fleet Air Arm’s rapid expansion and sent to war in the Arctic aboard HMS Victorious in July. But flying the Fairey Fulmar II, a slow, underarmed two-seat fleet interceptor, 809 found itself worryingly outclassed by the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt Bf-109s and Bf-110s. It was 1943 before the squadron finally re-equipped with the Supermarine Seafires it flew successfully from the deck of HMS Stalker until the end of the war. The squadron once again distinguished itself during the ill-fated 1956 Suez campaign flying the De Havilland Sea Venom, but in 1966 it re-formed as a Buccaneer squadron. Three years later, 809 was flying Buccs from the deck of HMS Hermes under the command of Lieutenant Commander Lin Middleton, the carrier’s future Captain, but it was the Immortals’ next incarnation that cemented its future.
809 had flown Ted Anson’s beloved Buccaneers from the deck of Ark Royal from 1970 until the carrier’s retirement under his command in 1978, their tails emblazoned with the squadron’s emblem: a phoenix rising from the flames. It was time for their resurrection.
The Admiral’s staff put him through to Fort Southwick, Extension 277.
‘Tim,’ began the Admiral, ‘how would you like to come back to Yeovilton to form another squadron?’
A broad grin broke out across Gedge’s face as he processed what, in his characteristically charming way, Ted Anson had just asked him. He was so busy thanking him – practically saluting down the phoneline – that he nearly forgot to ask when he was required.
‘Tomorrow at eight a.m. would be fine,’ Anson told him.
In less than twenty minutes, after signing back in all the various documents he’d been working on, Gedge was out of Fort Southwick and speeding away from his desk job as fast as his Mini would carry him. Fate had intervened big time. His wife, Monika, couldn’t understand what he was so excited about.
‘Gentlemen,’ Capitán de Corbeta Rodolfo Castro Fox told his pilots, ‘the time has come to start working.’ The mood on board ARA 25 de Mayo was euphoric, but the Commanding Officer of 3 Escuadrilla Aeronaval de Caza y Ataque was under no illusions about what lay ahead.
Castro Fox had stayed up through the night during the operation to seize the islands. Up in Flyco high on the carrier’s island, they had tuned in to Port Stanley’s local radio station. Islanders phoned in to update their countrymen on the latest developments. Then, after Argentine forces took over the studio, the broadcasts came in English and Spanish.
The Skyhawk squadron boss had one question of his Commander: ‘How do you think the English will react?’
‘It’ll be fixed through negotiations,’ he was told. The English wouldn’t be able to deal with it any other way.
They both now knew that assumption to be wrong.
The three 3 Escuadrilla A-4Q Skyhawks on board hadn’t been required to intervene during the invasion. But with the British fleet now steaming south there was an urgent need to return to their home base at Comandante Espora near Bahía Blanca and begin intensive training for a war they were hardly prepared for. Not least among causes for concern was the squadron boss’s own fitness. Castro Fox hadn’t been in the cockpit of a Skyhawk for eight months.
Not since the accident that had nearly killed him.
3 Escuadrilla had been ashore for four months, but on 9 August 1981 six jets took off from Comandante Espora to embark aboard 25 de Mayo for the Armada’s participation in Exercise OCEAN VENTURE alongside the US Navy.
As he joined the landing circuit after a routine flight out to the ship, Castro Fox was thinking about the time away from his wife and four children. A short while later, the mainwheels slammed on to the carrier’s flight deck and he felt the familiar, violent deceleration as the hook lowered from the back of his Skyhawk caught one of the six arrestor wires stretched across the deck. As it slowed, the jet bowed forward, compressing the long nosewheel oleo. He could see the edge of angled deck ahead of him. Then it all suddenly let go. Whiplashing viciously around the deck, the arrestor wire failed. As the Skyhawk reared to port, Castro Fox knew instantly that he had too much speed to stop and too little to have any chance of taking to the air again.
‘Eject! Eject! Eject!’ screamed the Landing Officer, watching the disaster from Flyco.
Castro Fox reached between his legs and pulled hard at the yellow handle of his ESCAPAC ejection seat.
Nothing.
With its pilot trapped in the cockpit, the jet careened over the edge of the ship and fell 50 feet, nose first, into the South Atlantic. The impact with the sea was the last thing Castro Fox remembered.
The seat eventually activated underwater, firing the pilot through the sea like a torpedo, before releasing him and sinking to the ocean floor along with the aircraft. Unconscious, Castro Fox floated to the surface, made buoyant by air trapped in his thick rubber immersion suit.
Lungs full of water, he suffered his first cardiac arrest before they managed to get him to the ship’s infirmary. His heart stopped again as they tried to medevac him ashore to Puerto Belgrano naval base near Buenos Aires.
On top of that there was concussion, a dislocated shoulder, a smashed left arm and broken ribs, but after several days in intensive care Castro Fox began to recover from his injuries. When the cast first came off his left arm, though, the shattered bones carefully reassembled with metal pins, he could barely move it.
After the accident, Castro Fox took command of 3 Escuadrilla in December 1981. By April he was still yet to fly. The material state of the squadron’s jets was hardly more encouraging than his own. When he took over, just three of the unit’s A-4Q Skyhawks were airworthy; the other seven were grounded after cracks had been discovered in the wings. Nor had the failure of his ejection seat been a one-off, but an indication of a problem that was fleetwide. By the end of 1981, all but three of the rocket cartridges that fired the seats were time-expired. With the country under the control of the military Junta, the United States had refused to supply replacements. 3 Escuadrilla had had no choice but to arbitrarily extend the life of the cartridges. It no more made them safe than changing the sell-by date of a banana stopped it from turning black. It is like, thought Castro Fox, flying without a parachute. Of the seven Skyhawks with cracks in the wings, the squadron’s engineers selected the five least damaged to return to flight, bringing the frontline strength to eight aeroplanes.
3 Escuadrilla really would be going into battle on a wing and a prayer.
At the same airfield, their fellow naval aviators, the Super Etendard pilots of 2 Escuadrilla, faced challenges born not of old age, but youth. The SuE was so fresh into COAN service that it was not yet fully operational. Under the leadership of Capitán de Fragata Jorge Colombo, the squadron’s engineers began tuning the SuE’s radar, and testing the inertial navigation system and its ability to talk to the weapons computer. Colombo divided his eight pilots into pairs. None had any detailed training in how to mount an Exocet attack. The principle of it, Colombo understood, is more or less known, but there was a gulf between having a broad appreciation of the technique and launching an operational mission against one of the world’s most powerful navies. Between them they studied tactics, flight profiles and radii of action, and performed take-off and landing tests on marked runways to determine whether or not they might be able to launch attacks against the British fleet from Puerto Argentino, the newly rechristened airfield at Port Stanley.
A team of twenty-five technicians from Aérospatiale, the French manufacturer of the five Exocet missiles already delivered to the squadron, was expected to fly into Argentina in a week’s time. With their assistance, the complicated job of integrating the big 1,500lb anti-ship missile with its launch aircraft would become a lot easier. Colombo and his engineers looked forward to their arrival.
With difficult decisions made regarding the jets’ serviceability, Rodolfo Castro Fox turned his mind to the pilots he required to fly them. He needed experienced operators in the cockpits, not young nuggets fresh out of flight school. Former Skyhawk pilots were brought back to Comandante Espora from staff jobs and from conversion training in France for the SuE.
To master the weapons system and tactics of a high performance combat aircraft like the A-4Q, he believed, requires at least a year of practice.