LED BY THE assault ship HMS Fearless, the flotilla gathered strength as it steamed south; her sister ship, HMS Intrepid, sailed from Ascension a day later. The Royal Marines’ 3 Commando Brigade and 3 PARA travelled aboard P&O’s 45,000-ton flagship SS Canberra. With 2 PARA, these were the troops who would spearhead Britain’s mission to recapture the Falklands. Another North Atlantic ferry, the MV Europic Ferry, was taken up from trade just to carry their heavy equipment and ammunition. Five landing ships named after King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table – Sir Galahad, Geraint, Lancelot, Percivale and Tristram – were joined en route. And there were Royal Fleet Auxiliary oilers and stores ships in company too. Three frigates, Antelope, Ardent and Argonaut, escorted them.
And while Sandy Woodward’s Carrier Battle Group blockading the Total Exclusion Zone could, if they succumbed to the Argentine air threat, certainly lose the war before their arrival, only the 5,000-strong force of troops sailing south with the Amphibious Task Group could actually win it.
The battle lines were drawn. To have any chance of victory, Argentina now had to do two things: remove or destroy one or both of the British aircraft carriers; and prevent the British from landing ground forces on the Malvinas. Once the Royal Marines and Paras were ashore in strength, the game was up for the Junta as surely as it had been for Nazi Germany after it turned on the Soviet Union and declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor.
The British, by contrast, had to protect Invincible and Hermes at any cost, and then, once TF 317.0 was in theatre, successfully mount a difficult, high-risk opposed amphibious landing, codenamed Operation SUTTON.
Both sides, though, had already had their wings clipped by their opponent. Following the sinking of the Belgrano, and the retreat of the Armada Nacional Argentina to coastal waters, the Royal Navy had largely won the war at sea. Outclassed by the Sea Harriers on day one, and anxious about the threat posed by RAF Vulcans to the mainland, the Fuerza Aérea Argentina abandoned any hopes of further depleting the small British fast jet force in aerial combat.
But after Nick Taylor was shot down over Goose Green, the Royal Navy decided it could no longer hazard its precious, shrinking force of Sea Harriers on low-level ground attack and reconnaissance missions which put them within reach of demonstrably lethal Argentine air defences. And with that, any hope of mounting an effective, systematic counter air campaign to degrade the capabilities of the occupying forces was lost. The SHARs could do no more than harass them with the occasional thousand-pounder lobbed from a distance or dropped from altitude.
More importantly, the Exocet attack on the Sheffield had sent shockwaves throughout the fleet.
For JJ Black, Invincible’s apparently unflappable Captain, existence was distilled into three irreducible concerns: Will I be alive tonight? Have I provided for my family? Am I prosecuting this war as best I can? His heart froze at the prospect of losing men or aeroplanes to enemy action, but he had to project confidence. Any sign of weakness, the slightest hint of concern, he thought, could be infectious. Black auditioned for an officer to broadcast details of incoming raids before settling on one who seemed able to convey news of an air attack with no more excitement than an airline pilot warning of a little turbulence ahead. And he made sure that whenever he was visited in his cabin, he always appeared to be sufficiently underwhelmed by it all to be relaxing in the company of a good paperback. His people drew strength from it.
Aboard Hermes, Task Force Commander Sandy Woodward was content to be a good deal more abrasive. But he could do little more than urge his Captains to up their game, while he tried to balance the need to position his carriers out of harm’s way, while still sufficiently close to the islands for the SHARs to mount meaningful combat air patrols. That was assuming they could get airborne at all. The fog had barely lifted since it had claimed the lives of two of his pilots three days earlier.
Rather unexpectedly, it looked as if 809 Squadron might be the next SHAR unit to make contact with the enemy.
To the dismay of those within it, TF 317.0’s departure was announced by Defence Secretary John Nott and subsequently reported by the BBC World Service. It therefore came as no surprise when, a day out of Ascension, HMS Argonaut picked up a high-flying contact on her Type 965 radar. The bogey’s behaviour suggested that, after being warned off the Carrier Battle Group two weeks earlier, the Burglar was back. Now the shooting had started, that had the potential to be a good deal more significant than its earlier incursions.
‘The whole war depends on the survival of [the Amphibious Task Group] main body,’ signalled Argonaut’s Captain to the TF 317.0 Commander. ‘The enemy,’ he continued, could be expected to ‘make extraordinary efforts to attack the undefended Task Group.’ Their ability to do anything about it, he pointed out, was limited by what he described as ‘a complete lack of air defence assets’. But that wasn’t quite true. While the short-range Seacat missiles carried by the frigates may have been no use in the circumstances, they had Conveyor. And she had 809 Squadron. Mike Layard was asked whether there might be a way of putting one of the SHARs to work.
In the summer of 1940, as Fighter Command’s Spitfires and Hurricanes diced with Messerschmitts in the skies over eastern England, Britain was engaged in another campaign upon which her survival was equally dependent. Unlike the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic was fought far from view. And while Winston Churchill was lavish in his well-earned praise of the Few, it was the war at sea that concerned him even more greatly. ‘If we fail in this,’ he told the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Air Staff in November, ‘then we lose the war.’
His concern was well founded. It was barely four months since the Luftwaffe first introduced the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor into service and this long-range four-engined maritime bomber had dramatically exposed the vulnerability of the convoys when out of range of land-based fighter cover.
Flying from their base in Bordeaux-Mérignac, KG40, the first squadron flying the new aircraft, could reach as far as the Azores in the southwest or Iceland to the north. In their first two and a half months of operations they’d sunk nearly 90,000 tons of Allied shipping. Operating in conjunction with the U-boats, the Condors quickly earned a reputation as the ‘Scourge of the Atlantic’.
In response, Britain improvised. And by the end of the year, a plan to fire knackered, battle-scarred Hawker Hurricanes and Fairey Fulmars from merchant ships using catapults or batteries of 3-inch rockets was approved. But for the pilots of the RAF’s Merchant Ship Fighter Unit and 804 Naval Air Squadron it was often a one-way mission. If out of range of land when they launched, the pilots had no choice but to bail out or ditch and hope to be fished out of the water.
On 3 August 1941, a former Grand National-winning jockey, turned Royal Navy Reserve pilot, Bob Everett scored the Hurricats’ first kill, when he shot down a Condor in defence of a convoy returning from Sierra Leone before ditching. The 804 Squadron pilot was awarded the DSO for his achievement.
The Fw 200 Condor had been designed in the late 1930s as an airliner for Deutsche Lufthansa before its military potential was realized after the outbreak of the Second World War. Now, a little over forty years since Everett splashed his Condor over the Bay of Biscay, the Fleet Air Arm was hoping to repeat the trick. 809 wanted to launch a single-seat interceptor from a merchant ship to shoot down other airliners that had been pressed into military service: the three Boeing 707s being used by the Fuerza Aérea Argentina to track British ships. It was a prospect that the squadron boss and his Senior Pilot both relished. Each of them had a number of Sea Harrier firsts to their credit, but Tim Gedge and Dave Braithwaite both wanted this one on their CVs.
This, thought Gedge, is a real opportunity.
After leaving Ascension, all the jets had been washed down with fresh water and liberally covered in WD-40 then cocooned in tailor-made green polybags to protect them from the elements. It was of particular importance to sheathe the RAF Harriers. In developing the Sea Harrier for the Navy, BAe had marinized the airframe. Not so the GR.3. Salt water corroded the Air Force jet’s magnesium components. Maintainers noticed that if you listened carefully you could hear it fizzing. While the 1(F) Squadron jets were left lashed down on the starboard side of the deck, a single Sea Harrier was debagged and prepared for action. The Sidewinders and 30mm ammunition liberated from Wideawake were going to come in handy.
The Victor tankers had been in the thick of it from the beginning. Until the revival of the Vulcan’s in-flight refuelling capability they had been the only aircraft in the RAF’s inventory capable of reaching the theatre of war from Ascension. After mounting long-range maritime reconnaissance missions, facilitating the BLACK BUCK raids and supporting the Harrier and Sea Harrier deployments, they’d now added the newly AAR-capable Nimrods and C-130s to their growing clientele list. Back home, an American agreement to provide USAF KC-135 tankers for Op TANSOR, the refuelling support required by the RAF Phantoms and Lightnings defending UK airspace, freed another two Victors to leave Marham in Norfolk for the mid-Atlantic. By mid-May, thirteen of the big former V-bombers were squeezed on to the hardstanding at Wideawake. That at any given time a number of them were likely to be airborne made the job of finding space to park them all a little easier. A request from the Amphibious Task Group for tankers to support their plans to scramble a Sea Harrier in pursuit of the Burglar would make it easier still.
Borrowing the language used by the Fleet Air Arm for the mission, the Victor crews labelled their plan ‘Hack the Shad’. It was soon given the official codename Operation GRAMMERIAN. And, of everything they’d so far been required to do in support of the South Atlantic war, this was the task that had most in common with their most frequent Cold War tasking of keeping the fighters flying.
Conveyor’s port bridge wing quickly assumed the mantle of Flyco on a ship that seemed to be evolving, with each further mile south, into a third aircraft carrier. In the makeshift military spaces made available to NP 1840, the effort to establish a SHAR on Quick Reaction Alert took shape. Along with Mike Layard, Gedge and Braithwaite established the tactical approach to making the interception. Using fuel and performance tables, the two SHAR pilots worked out a flight plan, testing different weapons configurations against the need to carry as much fuel as possible.
Without a full-length flight deck, the need for a vertical take-off was a given. But relying solely on the 21,500lb of thrust provided by the Pegasus engine to get airborne would limit the weight of fuel and stores that could be carried. At least now, though, as the ship steamed away from the equator, the air and sea temperature was cooling down. They could extract more performance from the engine as a result. The whole mission, Gedge thought, was another chance to challenge a few misconceptions about the Harrier. And they died hard.
Gedge remembered the occasion in 1980 when, as boss of 800 Squadron, he’d taken five SHARs down to the French Aéronavale air station at Hyères as guests of the Etendard squadron there. After rolling out charts of the south of France during a briefing, the French CO had asked him, ‘How far can your aeroplane go?’
‘We can go as far as you can,’ Gedge told him.
And, after the 17 Flottille boss had drawn a derisory-looking radius on to the map, Gedge sketched a low-level route that took them north towards Grenoble and returning across the Alps before flying out to sea and switching back to Hyères. Five or six hundred miles. Gedge’s counterpart muttered, frowned and shook his head, but agreed to lead the way. After a couple of the Aéronavale jets had returned to base en route, Gedge rubbed it in by squeezing in a quick 2 v 2 practice air combat before landing.
A vertical take-off wouldn’t require excessive amounts of fuel. The issue was simply weight. With clean wings and a full internal fuel load of 4,400lb, Gedge and Braithwaite calculated that the greatest distance they could reach and return to the ship was 183 miles. Add a pair of Sidewinders and loaded ADEN gun pods then a reduced fuel load of 2,500lb, and that radius of action came down to 100 miles. That was still, though, equivalent to launching from London and making an intercept in Salisbury. More than enough, given that new Rules of Engagement from Northwood decreed that any Argentine shadower had to close within 30 to 40 miles of the British ships before 809 were authorized to shoot it down.
On the forward pad, 809’s maintainers prepared the jet for action, testing the systems and reattaching the refuelling probe that had been removed prior to bagging her up for the journey. They removed the 100-gallon drop tank from each of the two inboard pylons. No point in carrying the empty, dead weight.
Colin Burton and the rest of the squadron’s armourers loaded the gun pods with chain-linked 30mm ammunition. Then they unlocked the white shipping container on the starboard deck behind the pad and removed a pair of Sidewinders. After bolting them on to the outboard pylons they tested the seeker heads using infrared torches. And, just as it had done at China Lake during the missile’s development, the AIM-9’s heatseeking electronic eye tracked them as unerringly as a predator choosing its prey.
As the Fleet Air Arm prepared to counter the enemy’s intelligence-gathering effort, the RAF were already engaged in a little aerial espionage of their own.